Left Of Greg 030 Inattention Blindness

Everyone, thanks for tuning in. I'm Brian, I'm the host of The Human Behavior Podcast. You're going to be watching the video version of our audio podcast. Please, guys, if you like the video, like it, subscribe to the channel. There's going to be more content down there if you're already a subscriber and a better way for us to get you guys some more stuff. If you have any questions or comments, go ahead, leave them below. Check out our links down below to get a hold of us and to actually find out more places where you can get more information about this. Please like it, subscribe, follow us on Facebook at HBPR&A. Remember, all these cases that we discuss and all these discussions that we have are through the lenses of what we call human behavior pattern recognition and analysis. So please, like it, share it, tell your friends about it, and we hope you enjoy the show. Thanks.

All right, so it's just me and you again, Greg. Everyone listening out there today, like we said, we're going to talk about inattention blindness. So we're going to go over a few things and how we cover it and how it relates to human behavior pattern recognition and analysis, and how it affects your processing. When I say "yours," I mean, of course, all of us, because it's all humans. How we can mitigate some of it, but what it is and how it affects us, and how everything from, I guess, a street criminal pickpocketer to a magician, to anything else. People use this all the time against us sometimes, and because they have a better understanding, I guess that would be a good way to kind of introduce it.

Yeah, I love that. What you just said, Brian, I think, is critical to certain listeners. Everybody can take away, whether you're a law enforcement professional, just a soccer mom that's taking the kids out to the pizza, truly, when this can be used as a defensive strategy or offensive strategy, and like, the boardroom.

Well, that's the thing. You've got to know, it goes into knowing what your limitations and capabilities are, as well as someone that you're dealing with. Whether dealing with, that could be a customer service issue, that could be literally in a meeting, you're having a conversation with your kids when they're trying to get one over on you, whatever it is. You understand there's certain limiting factors. And when we're talking about inattention blindness, we talked a lot about things like change blindness, adaptation, channel capacity, sequencing. These are all things that affect your processing system in your brain, and we'll get into detail on some of them. But I know since we're calling this one "Inattention Blindness," Greg, why don't you start us off with kind of what a definition of what inattention blindness is and what that means and how that affects someone?

No, it's perfect. And if you'll allow me the luxury, Brian, I'd like to start off with a couple of examples, street-definition wise, and then we can go in perhaps to the clinical, so we'll go from 30,000 foot to boots on the ground.

No secret, Shelley and I own the Powderhorn Ranch. Beautiful place. 1.4 million acres, surrounded by even more millions of acres of primitive wilderness. Had people come up for the adventure out. Deer, moose, bear, bighorn sheep. Just a great thing. Whitewater rafting, ballooning, top of the pond, shit on the deck. We had an instance where this guy comes up, and he's the richest guy I had met to that point, and has his kids and grandkids there, and comes up to me and goes, "Hey, you know, my grandkid over there, Little Lord Fauntleroy—I don't know whatever his name was, I don't want to besmirch the kid, Marren—so whatever Little Lord Fauntleroy is doing on the front porch of one of the cabins." He says, "I can't get him involved in any of the reindeer games." And so what was, is he's got his little—and I'm dating myself—a little Game Boy. And just playing with it all the time. And so he said, "Greg, I'll tell you, if you could do something about that." And I said, "I could, but remember, I'm a tough love kid from the streets." And he goes, "Whatever it is, whatever, you go ahead and do it." So I went to the vehicle bay. I got a two-pound sledge. Totally true. Walked across, grabbed it, and there's a cement pad in front of each one of the cabins, right, the foundation thing. And I took it and I smashed the jabbers out of it and handed it to the kid and said, "A jeep tour leaves in 15 minutes." A week. He was on a jeep tour right now. That guy was clueless and very aggressive for some reason after. Things are expensive. But the idea was, look, if you have competing things competing for your attention, won't allow you to attend to the panacea of choices around you. And this thing, just like the modern iPhone or iPad or anything else, leads to that because now your brain is excited by the newest little dancing and things around there. And while it's focusing on that, it loses focus on the things around it. Why? Because we're not chased by pterodactyls. Why? Because we don't have to worry about a rhino killing us in our tent. So because the brain has learned to relax a little bit and its survival mode, it's inhibited; you drift away and you're not paying attention.

Real quick, the other one is a jeep tour story about seeing those gosh-darn bighorn sheep. I would come back and go, "Hey, we had the trifecta! We saw the elk, we saw the bear, we saw the bighorn sheep!" And Niko came up to me. And Niko was driving a big V8. We had two jeeps in succession that we'd drive up into these places in the mountains, and incredible views, again, amazing. And I was always agitated and excited, and saying, "Hey, look, all amped up" at what we saw. Niko comes up and says, "Some of the guests aren't seeing what you're seeing because they don't have a file folder for it." So the other half of the same coin that I just explained to you, for this kid having this thing that was drawing all of his attention like the windshield in the jeep being a television, is the fact that if you've never been trained what it is you're supposed to be looking for, then it's a nebulous concept. So what I had to do was I borrowed fur from different animals from the DNR (Department of Natural Resources), which is now CPW. Got footprints in clay that Shelley bought from the BLM office. Everything from coyote to bear to this. And what we did is before we even got in the jeep, we went through the hood of the jeep and had the photos of the animal, what their tracks and prints look like, what their hair was like, and we talked about their Latin name and what they looked like. You'd be amazed that when you walk on somebody now on the jeep tour and go, "Okay, look at the volcanic caldera. Okay, now look to the left of that pine tree, the beetle kill. Now, you see that big granite rock? That thing on top of it isn't a floor mat, that's a bear!" Then all of a sudden, the scales fall from the eyes and they can see it. So the concept of inattention blindness is that certain things will compete for your attention. Two, you only have a limited bandwidth of attention to begin. And emergencies or danger, warning Will Robinson, comes up much more than, "Oh, a piece of candy." So you have all of those things competing for your attention, and that's why humans fail to perform at optimal condition sometime.

Okay, so that, I mean, that's, how would that mean? So I like putting it to the listeners right now who are driving to work or driving home from work. How does inattention blindness affect them right now?

Great understatement of the century there. It was a great question, great question, great lead-in. And Brian, for you folks at home that are just listening, is trying to not slap you in the forehead with his two-pound sledgehammer. Here's the idea, folks: You're driving at 55 miles an hour to 65 miles an hour. You're on a stretch of road where there's other cars. Right now, your brain is calculating your speed, your speed to the ground, speed, your speed to the ground, speed, and the speed of the vehicles around you. If you blink or sneeze, you've gone 60 feet without having any idea of what occurred. So that could have been a child chasing their ball, that could have been a seagull flying in between, a lady. Exactly, your exit. You get what I'm trying to say? Now, if we complicate that by saying the weather, or the light, the ambient conditions, rain, lower light on dusk. Now we complicate it by saying it wasn't rain, but it's cool temperatures leading to black ice at some places, and it's heavier traffic or lighter traffic. Because remember, the brain functions worse when it's agitated and amped up and excited, or when it's completely bored. Those are the times when we're most at risk of making a cognitive mistake. So I just gave you like five or six factors, Brian. You can imagine, now add to the radio, add your cappuccino, add that, "Holy crap, I forgot to pick up my kids' costume for to play!" All of those sayings have a factor and each one competes for your attention.

Okay, so that kind of leads into, I guess, channel capacity, right? Because that's where you're also hitting on as well. So remember, and I'll just say stick with driving the car right now, right? Because it's what a lot of folks who listen to us are going to, and from work and stuff. So I have a set amount. I have a set channel capacity as a human being. Like there's a range, some people are better. And so my channel capacity being the number of polyphasic skills that I can do at a time, just that multitasking. And I love the car because I've been using the car example for years from one of my buddies growing up that I went back and visited long time ago, years ago. And so he picked me up and we were going out to meet some friends or whatever. But he's driving a vehicle, it was a manual transmission. So, he's using both feet and both hands. He's then also smoking a cigarette, he's taking a drink out of his Coke that he had in the cup holder. And then he's got to roll the window down first before he lights a cigarette, so the smoke can go out. And then he starts talking on the cell phone at one point. So to me, it was just hands and arms moving everywhere. Head back down to the shifter, got to hit the clutch, got to open the window, got it. So I'm sitting there in the passenger seat looking over like, "This is one of the greatest displays of human performance I've ever seen. You're going to kill both of us!" So that was the absolute, I would say, the limit of channel capacity. But these are normal conditions, right? There were normal driving conditions, nothing chaotic had happened. We were driving from Point A to Point B, and he was doing all this. So, you know, we all do this where we go, "Oh, no, I'm great, I can do this. I can talk on the phone, I can drive around, do all that stuff." When, in effect, what's actually happening is your brain, if your brain's operating a hundred percent and you're doing ten things at once, it's only doing each one of those things at 10 percent.

Precisely. And that math is critical. So I'll tell you that was the first math equation I ever got right, ever, ever, just so you know. So back in the days of the Detroit Grand Prix, my brother Brian, who's my mentor, my guide, just a great human being, set us up with some tickets. And the tickets were all access passes because Brian had worked for a number of organizations and done better than both Jeff and I, hands down. And so went down to Detroit, got to go to these before-parties, after-parties, inside, which is not me, I'm a street drag. And one of the things is I got to meet Jackie Stewart. And Jackie Stewart says, "Do you want to go for a drive, mate?" He sounds like Martin Wooley on helium. You get what I'm saying? If anybody knows what I'm talking about. Jackie Stewart's a racecar driver, and I got to meet a couple of great racecar drivers in my day, him being one of them, Joie Chitwood being another. And Jackie Stewart took us on the track and was driving in whatever type of car. It wasn't the cars that they were racing in the Grand Prix, it was a spec car, or whatever they called it that it's owned for it. So we're going about 140, 150 miles an hour, and he was weaving in and out of traffic, and it was highly illegal back in the day, and might, I think, that in most places, and my badging will have an ID on the dash. So after we cracked it up, they would be able to find it and peel me off the street, it goes, "A copper," right? And I was amazed because I thought I taught defensive driving, right? It was through driving, emergency vehicle operation. I was an instructor in high demand. I thought, "Hey, I'm the greatest driver. I know, fastest I'd ever been and navigated a closed course was 131 miles an hour." And he's trumping this right now. (Apologies, a busy day at the office.) Apparently, he's trumping the best speed that I ever got, ever, and amazing me as he's doing it. And I looked at him and I said, looking like this, and I said, "Jackie, how are you doing this?" And he says, "The problem with people is they're looking around them. He says, 'I've spotted all of those drivers way up there that I can barely see, and I'm conducting predictive analysis on what they're going to do next.'" And what it was, is he had so much training and experience at operating a vehicle at its limit, reading his brain at its limit, that he looked for patterns. And when he recognized those patterns, he drifted into those lanes predicting what those other cars and those other people were going to do. And guess what? He was right more than he was wrong. So let's take that analogy from the Grand Prix back to what we're talking about. You have only a limited set of attention, and unless you're training at the Jackie Stewart level for driving, or at your friend's level for just mow burritos, for doing all the things at once, you're going to fail in one of those things. When all of a sudden, one of those ten needs 11 percent, now all of a sudden, the kid comes out, right? And guess what? You're going to go to that bag, and that bag, that deficit bag, is going to be empty.

Well, and at the same time, too, he's out there showing one, he's an expert at what he does. The example he gave, and he's at 100 percent attention to driving, right?

Yeah. And later, when we went to Burger King, he dropped the mail in the ketchup on his polo. How was he able to do one and not the other? Because that one bandwidth, Brian, he operated in at peak human performance. Remember, like a javelin thrower, like whatever.

Yeah, but that didn't mean it was his whole life. It—

No, no.

And that's the thing, right? You can only do something like that for so long. And then those drivers who try, like that, that's obviously years of training, experience. So sticking on the driving concept, most people, even me, driving down the road, yeah, I've been a whole bunch of driving courses and it's fine, and you get to do all kinds of cool stuff with vehicles and you understand vehicle dynamics. But you still have this, you still have everything competing for your attention in your environment, right?

Yes.

So, but you have to take into account, because if you don't know and you don't train for that real event, you're likely going to fail.

Yeah.

And that's what I have to do out here, especially out driving in Southern California. I know that vehicles out here have blinkers, I just, no one knows. I haven't seen one yet, so I haven't seen it actually where I can check mine every once in a while just to make sure I know mine work, I'm pretty sure. But people don't, they just, they don't signal. And it's just, I always give—I've seen my friends do it before where they cut someone off. I'm like, "I'm like, man, if there was only, if there was some way that you could have let that guy know what you were going to do. Man, that would have been great. Why did somebody invent this thing that would warn other drivers?" Okay, so that, so we'll stick on the driving analogy and then continue on with it. So then what we like to do: What can I do to counter the effects of this, right? So if I have a channel capacity, what do I have to do to counter that? Right? If I know that I can only do one thing at a time really well, well, if I'm driving and the kids are screaming, or someone's called work, how do I process that? How do I make it easier for myself?

Yeah, well, again, I teach with photos in class and stories and examples. So I'll give you two. I'll give you a guy, J.G., that shall remain nameless, Warren, Michigan copper. I was going on to the Feds and said, "Hey, before I go, you do this Ford 180, this 360, this reverse 180, because you show me how to do a 520 Daffy with the..." I said, "I'll show you everything." So we had a career industrial park where there's nothing but big wide roads that look like landing strips. And we took the slide out and I taught him each one of them, speed critical window for speed, because if you outrun your headlights, you're out, dude. The performance of the car, the car will fail and kill you. So gave him all the warnings, took him out, showed him in, and was ready to do the first one where he was the driver and I was the driver. And we go down, and he gets this huge, wide cul-de-sac that's 500 feet and probably 100 yards long, and locks up the brakes. And we're in a four-power skid and a curb. And I'm trying to imagine something for the listeners that the curb, it's got to be 12 inches high, right? Blows out all four tires on the car and thousands of dollars of damage. I'm like, "What did you do?" He goes, "Well, I hesitated. I didn't know what to do." Listen, if you overrun the performance of the vehicle that you're in, and that means anything—that means your microwave at home, that means a channel changer, whatever you're going to exceed the capacity, and therefore failure is likely, not just imminent, or not imminent, but likely. Because if God, Buddha, Vishnu, Allah can come down and save you right now, if you do that same thing with your brain, if you only have a certain channel capacity and you exceed that channel capacity, you're going to make mistakes. So, Avon, Shelley, and I were working up in Avon, Colorado, and every year at the Avon Lake, there, in the center of all the car companies, Audi, BMW, all the American car companies, when it was iced over, they would do ice driving. Okay? And so what we would do for the LE (law enforcement) is we would do extreme ice driving. Man, we would be putting paces through the car. If the car was running at peak performance and the driver was running at peak performance, you could finish it and come out looking like a pro. If you hit the brakes or had much gas, or like being on a freeway and blowing a tire and hitting the brakes, or being on the ice and starting to skid and not knowing simple things like turning into the skid. So the answer your question with all those convoluted stories, Brian, is training. If you don't have A, training, and you don't have B, experience, what's going to happen is that file folder is going to come up and say, "You are now involved in an emergency." And there's either going to be writing on it or there's not. There's going to be a wrinkle in your gray matter and your pink, wonderful oxygenated brain that after you die turns gray, and hence the word, when they're putting all the drugs in there, or you're going to fail. So what is the difference between you and the person who can do it? Their channel capacity is no larger than yours, right? They've just rehearsed how to transition into a stress or a non-stress situation more fluidly than you have.

Yeah, okay, so that comes down to it. And I like the driving analogy because there's a lot more involved in it than most people even realize. But cars have gotten safer, roads have gotten safer, how we manage traffic has gotten better. In fact, it's now that most traffic jams and situations like that are actually not due to the lack and size of the freeway or so you can handle. It's actually more, now they're realizing, it's coming down to human performance, right? So it's actually human error that's getting in the way of or causing these different issues that we're seeing, versus, "Oh, man, we need to add another lane." Like, no, there's actually, for the given amount of cars, there's actually planning. So that being said, with channel capacity, I like, again, the driving example. One, because a lot of people are driving right now, but also because like we said, there's a lot of skill that's involved in that that we don't realize that we're doing. There's a lot of attention that needs to occur. Your brain's processing, like you said, how fast you're going, whether or not that car is moving forward or back, whether they hit the brakes or they're just coasting, they took their foot off the gas, and now you're gradually getting closer. And it has to do all of that stuff with every vehicle that is in your area, right? Every vehicle that you can see. And so what happens, a good thing to mention, just because we're on the topic, is if I take that time to look down and I read that text message on my phone, it's basically like, I give the analogy of the Etch A Sketch, right? We'd Etch A Sketch as a kid, and if you little knobs and you could turn and you're slowly trying to draw something, it takes a long time. Well, now if that's driving, that's what you're doing. So your brain is doing when you're driving down the road. So if I anytime I look over at that phone and I read that text message, it's literally like taking that Etch A Sketch and shaking it right up, right? It's no longer, I no longer have a picture and have to start over at zero. That's why we mess up. That's actually why we missed. That's why, "Oh, the kid came out of nowhere!" That's why the number one traffic collision, number one accident, is a rear-end collision because of that.

Precisely correct. Now, for the listeners, for the viewers, you've got to think about what Brian just said because it's gospel. Then you have to add to it, novelty. So if there's something novel, like, "Ooh, a piece of candy," your brain is forced every second of every day of its life to make order out of chaos. So if you see, like, for example, there was a TED Talk, and I hate the whole concept of TED Talk, but I was tuned into this one because it was on a topic I really enjoy. And the person after the TED Talk that commented in—and I don't know how that really works, but it was right there on the screen while I was watching—couldn't get over the asymmetrical blouse that the speaker had on for the 14 minutes that she was speaking. She's talking about this insanely important topic, and what a great job she was doing, but at the bottom of her blouse was off by a couple of inches. And that's all this person could listen to. Or like watching, liking it to listen. When you're out in public and you see something that's novel, your brain has to assimilate that. Think, "Is it going to kill me? Is it going to eat me? Can I sleep with it?" You know what I'm trying to say? And that process takes time. And even though it only takes nanoseconds, again, we've established that depending on how fast you are going, or how fast your vehicle is going, or how fast something is traveling towards you, for example, you may not be able to dodge that baseball coming at your head because you're competing, you're dividing your attention. And Brian, you brought it up about the number. Because there is a sheer number. If I was going to talk about channel capacity, the reason—and you bring it up in class all the time, you do a great job—the reason it's called "stop, drop, and roll," the reason it's called "say no, go, and tell," the reason that those are in threes is because the normal human channel capacity, with no stress, no external schema that's going on, no challenge for you, is three. Reason: 911 (as in the emergency number), if a certain amount of external stress, to remember those three things. Now, with no stress situations, maybe I'll be able to come up with more than three. But when it's a stressful thing, I'm getting bombarded, I can only do three. And so if you can only make three choices under stress, remember three things, or get a sequence that's going to be, "shoot, move, and communicate," then you're going to be way outclassed when you're going 60 miles an hour, or way outclassed when you're driving four-wheel drive from the airport in a snowstorm.

Okay, yeah, and I think that's a good kind of general explanation of some of the concepts that go into attention, right? And completing polyphasic skills or task multitasking. So that's driving, but this is also why that, if you touch on a number of things, why this affects me, of why I miss things in my environment, right? Why don't I see things? Why does it come out of nowhere? What is it that, "Oh, man, I missed this guy coming up to me who was going to try and mug me," or whatever? We miss those cues in our environment a lot. A lot of people miss. Even trained, or even people who are in a profession where you think they wouldn't miss those things are going to miss. They still do. Why? Expectation.

Okay, so do your homework. We always ask our viewers to do a little bit of the work on their own. There's a great series of videos out there about people, and if it's October and coming up on Halloween, there's easier to find them where people will have a display on their porch and the kids will come up, enjoy candy, and all of a sudden the person will move. That startle reflex. Why? Because your brain doesn't burn excess calories. Your brain goes into this remission, it goes through these patterns, it recognizes patterns, and they follow suit even if it's wrong. So it looks at the porch and it says, "Look at the beautiful casket! Look at the display! Hey, there's a Wolfman!" You know, his favorite song, "Werewolf." There it is. And you walk up to the front door, grab the candy, and before the person says "trick or treat," it's actually a guy in a mask. Those startled effects are because your brain has already decided what's most likely, and because of the situation, and because it didn't sense danger, there was no MDKOA (Most Dangerous Course of Action) file. And that's why you jump. And that's why television and advertisers have learned what those tricks are. And therefore, for example, it's easier to trick you if your visual field, your functional field of view, is tied up. So if I'm going to spend a lot of money, I'm going to have the red in my product line, and it's going to be at eye level in the store. And I'll pay more for them to put my box of soup or my bag of candy at that level because you're more likely to see it than at foot level. You get what I'm trying to say? So if I can fool—and you said it earlier, Brian, when we started the broadcast—if you see a pickpocketer or a street magician, they both share the same thing: the same street magic. Because all they've got to do is fill your six or eleven degree functional field of view. Your entire back of your skull is set up with your visual perception, and if I can exceed the amount of channels of information that you can pay attention to, then the trick is going to work. And everybody in the audience can watch it, right? And they won't laugh and they'll go, "Oh, that's great! It's in. It's left in." But you can't see it because your brain is too, it's overwhelmed by all of the events that it sees. And that's why it comes up with the six plus or minus one (Miller's Law). Under ideal circumstances, your brain can process only three in that emergency. And now when Siegfried and Roy are up in your face and he's saying, "Okay, think of a number between one and ten," flashing those cards, what happens is all he does is exceed your channel capacity. The minute he does that, you are now blind. Inattention blindness.

Right, and that can get us every time because what you're talking about is kind of different types of illusions, right? So you have physiological illusions, or then you have cognitive illusions, right? And those cognitive illusions, like that, are going to get you every time. Right? Once you learn the coin behind the ear, or whatever the magic trick is, you can never be, can't be fooled again. Once you've seen it, you can't be fooled again. But what you're getting into, and why something that's gotten—and magicians are great at it—is the cognitive illusions will fool you every time, even knowing about the science behind it. Right? So we know, but you can still watch those videos or see those guys talk about it. The magician, the one that, the guy who's like, "I was a pickpocketer for ten years and that's how I did it," and it works. So you're going to go, "There's no way this guy's going to fool me, 'cause I know what he's talking about, I know how this stuff works." And he still does something in there. Now, obviously, they're really good at it, but the whole point of it is, is you have limitations. You have—

Precisely.

And he knows what they are. She knows what they are.

Yeah. And all I have to do is get you to, I just have to divide your attention. So how do I use that as a weapon, Brian?

Exact defense.

So we traveled to Europe a lot, and one of the things that people told me is, "This guy's so slick, he'll steal your radio and leave you the music." So you've got to keep an eye out for this guy when you're going through there. And there's a lot of pickpockets, and they—okay, to pick my pocket, what they're going to do is they're going to have three or four people that are going to come at you. And the one old lady is going to ask you for directions while her son bumps into you. The other kid spills his Starbucks. The other person uses a knife or an X-Acto knife to cut your pocket and dump your wallet so you don't feel the hand go into your pocket, or whatever. What is that? They call those scams all the time. There just was one in Denver where the family came in and stole all the jewels in the jewelry exchange because the old woman came over and asked for something, and when the guy was looking one way, she dropped the kid, [unintelligible] on his hands and knees behind the counter and took all the diamonds. Listen, you only have a six or an eleven-degree functional field of view. Your brain is only going to trigger on an emergency signal if it's where an emergency is occurring. Yeah, what's happening is all they do is exceed your capacity, they exceed your bandwidth for attention. And once they do that, they're going to win. And that's also the same reason that you're going to crash your car. Well, you've exceeded that. And you have physical limitations. Maybe you're tired. Maybe you've had too much or not enough caffeine. Maybe you've had too much alcohol or marijuana. Whatever it is that you're doing. The idea is, "It'll getcha." Right? Who uses that term anymore? But oh, thank you. Thank you for making me feel really old. I'm from CoMa Central here in Colorado. I'm not in California, so I, you know, it's awfully cold here. But here, you know, and to go like, what you can learn to identify it, right? So you can learn to identify when someone is attempting to divide your attention.

Precisely. Your defense.

Right. Once it starts.

Yeah. And so, you know, it could be literally, like we always use the shopping mall examples. You're walking through the department store and they've got people out there selling cologne or makeup for the girls, or whatever the issue is. And they're trying to get your attention, they're trying to divide it just to sell you products. It's a very similar process, right? So therefore, it doesn't trigger the MDKOA.

Yeah, right, right.

But here, you'll go along with it, right? And that's why you always got to, we do the ML MDKOA on everyone. So in that situation, it's, I know, "Okay, yes, they're just trying to sell me something." But sometimes, when you think someone's just trying to sell me something, that might actually be the criminal or whatever. And I just had a story popped in my head because once you learn how to identify that someone's just trying to divide your attention, you know the gig's up. You know there's something going on. You're walking into it. Really, you know what? Yes, you're walking into an ambush. Now, that ambush may be someone trying to sell you a bottle of perfume, or that ambush might be trying to get you in to help, "Could you give me a hand, get this couch in the van?" You know, kind of situation. Right? Push it all the way up there. We know [the] Disney film. We can do every line from, "Oh, gosh!" So, but once you learn to identify, so I was at that place, whatever, a few weeks ago, that shall remain nameless, out on the East Coast where—

Prison?

Yeah. Oh, no, no, no, this was worse than prison where apparently you learn how to fight really well, but I just got my ass handed to me. But that was the whole thing. Was one of the scenarios is that, you know that already, "Take everything, Erastus!" Well, you take everything away, we're there. So, I know exactly what the guy's doing. It's clear because it's a scenario-based training that he's trying to divide my attention, and he's going, "Hey, this over here! Blah, blah, blah." And so I immediately start doing it right back. I go, "No, it's your buddy right over there! You look!" So I'm trying to divide his.

That's great!

He's trying to divide mine. So he now goes behind you. Well, now he hasn't seen that the training, et cetera. So he's thinking, but he can tell what I'm doing. So it ends up just the two of us yelling at each other, pointing in opposite directions, and they're just, "Okay, all right, we'll do a new one." But the point, the point of the story was, and then I just got my ass handed to me. But the point of the story was, I, at that point—

Yeah, yeah.

It's just I got beat up that day. But the same rules. You know what's happening. Shelley, Martin, and I are in Greece, and we're teaching at a facility called NMAITC for NATO. And so we go down to the waterfront to have some chow. And you know me, you've traveled with me how many times. We get together, we never get to go to Greece, right? But you know what, we're going to send you to Saudi Arabia. You're going to go to Irvine. We're going to send you to Irvine in a factory.

But Brian, you're exactly right. I'm sorry for that. But the idea is that here we are, and so we look before we leave. And we sit down and we watch all these restaurants before we decide which one to go to. And you know, Wooley. I love Martin Wooley. He's an ambassador, great, Brian. I know everybody in this restaurant. So she'll go, "See ya!" and everybody's waving to us already. But what it was is these two Greek brothers were magic. What would happen is they both stood in ambush positions and stayed very still. And remember, these are open-air cafes right on the water. And there's thousands of customers milling about, and you're competing for these customer dollars, right? And these are savvy travelers, right? So the people would come up and the one brother would step in front of them with his back facing them. So the person would move to walk around. And the other brother had this three-foot by five-foot card that held the menu items on it would stand in front of the person, say, "Hey, take a look at the menus." Now that person would turn to walk away. Now the brother who had his back on, he had another box, and he created the two sides of the hallway you were in now and said, "Welcome to our restaurant!" And the whole time, they were turning very slowly.

Adaptation and change blindness.

That's right. So you wouldn't get excited. And a minute later, you're having water with lemon in the restaurant. You're going, "How did I get here?" The idea was they did it so subtly, and they had it over and over. And people don't want to make a stink. They're like, "Yeah, okay, well, not now," and everything. And the brothers just kept moving them in like it was a production line. When you see it in action and you don't know it, you might fall for it. When you see it in action and you're savvy, you're in on the magic trick, you're not going to fall for it.

That's the same thing that happened. Some similar thing happened when we went down, Michaela and I went down to Cabo San Lucas down to Mexico. In a similar area, waterfront. They've got all the restaurants, and obviously they're trying to get all the tourists in there. So I always take that step back and just watch everything that's going on, see who's working. "Oh, let's do that," 'cause then you can see who those guys at the door are working with, how they're getting people to push people over there. You'll start to pick apart like, "Wow, they've got these kids out here playing in an area that blocks everyone's way. No one cares because it's a couple little kids playing, but then the direction, right, it directs you right in front of where they want you to go." So I obviously sit back, observant. Michaela is walking through, they're all trying to do it. And the other thing is that you'll see when you go into foreign countries, which is hilarious, or here at the US, but there they've got those people working the crowd as they're walking by, asking them if they want to eat there and show them. And you know, exactly what you were talking about right there. So I'm observant, I'm looking around. So there's another guy standing there, and he sees me, the fact that I'm now situationally aware and looking around, and he looks dead at me. He goes, "Do you want some drugs?" "No, man, I'm good." He's like, "Okay, let me know. I'll get you whatever you want." He's putting—

No, because he's got a 50/50.

Yeah, exactly. Because that's the only thing that he could tell you weren't a tourist at that point. You had to fall under one of the two zoning baskets. So it goes back to that criminal behavior, that criminal element. They're doing the same thing, right? And as I try to do, is, "Are you a cop or are you a customer?" Right? So that's—

So listen, you can harden yourself, and you're right on, Brian. Go to the back of the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog, or whatever those things are called when you're on the airplane. I don't know if they've got them in. Well, that's one of the brands. They said, "Wear that's best under your clothes when you're traveling." You know, and it's got snaps this way, Velcro this way, a chastity belt down this way out of Kevlar, and a monkey. You get what I'm saying? That alerts, I mean, when your shirt's open and they say, "Listen, it's only $750, and you will keep your passport safe." One, you will never get your passport out when you need it. And in places like, I say, when they ask for it, you need to come up with it, snap, snappy. The other thing is that's a physical tool with which to inhibit or slow down a bad guy. And then they'll probably choose somebody else. There's a way to do it even smarter than that. Be more situationally aware. If you're situationally aware, they will choose somebody else coming through the airport. And when you see that, you're in that. If you call somebody on it right away, "My pocket's being picked! I'm being robbed! I need help here!" You'll change the entire dynamic of that situation right away because most people want to go along to get along. Most people don't want to say or do something that's going to offend anybody. And guess what? You're right on the X. Now you're in a bubble in that ambush, and you're going, "How the hell did I get here?" But if you took that step back in Cancun or Cabo, and you stayed for just a few seconds and look, listen, smell, feel, and saw what's going on, you're not going to be fooled. Brian, do we go straight in? I talk about restaurants a lot, folks, because I'm hungry all the time, and because I weigh 480 pounds. But the idea, Brian, is we stop a lot for food, like a hobbit, six, eight times a day. You remember when we go with those idiots that would run in and get the coffee and we'd say, "I want a double gulp black," whatever else like that? You and I would park the cars after driving around the building three or four times. Then we would separate ourselves from the cars to watch the crowd so we could see what was going on. What did they do? They would walk from the car straight into the place, order their coffee, come straight back. And we'd say, "Hey, did you see the guy with the straw hat? Or this or that or the other?" They go, "No, we're buying coffee." And we're like, "Wait a minute, you idiots, you're supposed to be teaching people how to be more situationally aware." And what got you to your cognitive limit was, "Oh, it's a Starbucks!" Well, then Dunkin Donuts on my line.

No, and that's the thing. That's when it, that's when it happens, is when you get the happy, happy end. It's exactly, nothing, none of these crimes or anything ever occurs when you're like, "So there I was, watching my area, taking a look at everything." Exactly. So if you're not doing—but if you are doing that, and that's the thing. And it just, I think, I think the observant part is to defeat some of that inattention blindness, to defeat their basic street magic that any criminal is going to want to do is literally just being that more observant person. And then you've got to have, I know we've got all kinds of tricks up the sleeve. I had, but even me, I had a guy, like it was a non-standard observation for me a couple weeks ago. I was going to meet someone, we were meeting, grab coffee. And I'm walking down the street to get there, and I see the guy approaches. "Oh, I'm look at me!" Across the street, and there was no one else out. It was moms pushing kids and strollers, like 9 o'clock, this little beach town. And I'm like, "Hi, he's coming up. Here we go." So I usually have a few things ready. If someone's going to come up and ask for money, or before they'll ask, and I know they're going to, I'll walk up to them and go, "Hey man, you got a couple bucks I can have?" 'Cause they don't understand, they never see that coming because they're sitting there trying to ask.

You've changed their channels, amigo.

So they are immediately, now we talked about that Mobius loop before, and they're thrown off and they don't know what to do. So this guy comes up, and he's, of course, got the story and this, "Hey, I need you to, could you get me a pack of cigarettes?" And he's waving money at me. He's like, "They won't, you know, they check IDs." And he's going to the whole typical, which I know is all BS. But what threw me off is he had money in his hand that he's trying to give me. So I'm like, "I've got to play this out." I'm like, "All right, so now I'm talking."

Because you're curious.

Yeah, well, because I'm curious. But they're curious. Yeah, that's what we do for a living. And I've got plenty of other tricks, you know. I wasn't worried at this point that this guy was going to pull out a weapon and try and kill me.

Exactly.

So I go, "All right, I've got a couple of minutes." So I'm looking, I go, "So wait, what was it again?" "So they go in here?" He said, "Yeah." I go, "I go in there all the damn time, but they wouldn't take, they needed to see an ID for cigarettes?" He's like 45, been partying for a couple days, smells like ass. But he's wearing all this jewelry. Like, "I've got a half a million dollars worth of jewelry on!" So I'm trying to ask him questions to get in his loop. And I go, "Why wouldn't they do it?" Or I said something like, "Why would you do that?" He goes, "Why would I wear all this jewelry?" Like, no, I wouldn't. And so, but he's handing me his money. So I'm going, "All right." I go, "All right, what do you want, man?" So I take the money, I go in there, you know, it was a pack of no menthol Kools or whatever, whatever he wanted. And she told me the price, and he was like a dollar short. And I was like, "Oh, damn! That's his!" But he got you right up there.

He got you! He got you to buy in!

He now had the shirt. I was like, "So he got, do I come up with that extra buck for it?" So, "Oh, so that's what I loved about it!" Because I was like, "Man, he was good." Because when he—he got you to buy in. He gave you money. You're there. You're 99 percent there. You're at the finish line, you know, you're about to go walk into the end zone. And most people would just be like, "Whatever," throw it away. Yeah, I was just like, I was like, "Oh, I'm good, thanks." I walk out and I just wave to him all happy. I go, "Hey man, you're a dollar short! You got another one on you?" And he looked at me like, "Oh, no, I know!" And I got, "Sorry man, I got to go, I mean..." I gave his money back. But it was hilarious because I was like, "What, you learned a valuable lesson!"

That's what, folks that are listening, that's called an LOE (Limited Objective Experiment). And what Brian did is he changed the circumstances to be in his favor so he could play it out to see what was going on. No harm, no foul, no animals were injured in the taping of this episode. And so that's brilliant and that's great. And the idea was that you went in with your head on a swivel already. See, every time I hear these, "If you see something, say something." Keep those planted to hang on there. And then I watch the people. Like, I've got to call somebody out and I don't want to do it, but okay, and we're at a security event, and this is the bane of everybody's existence is cell phone security event. I could see all the security players that were working on this team because their face—you know Hollywood when they show a person driving at night, how the inside lights on their face is illuminated. So every few seconds, I could even tell who is likely communicating with each other, texting back and forth, because all of a sudden, I'd see the first security guard illuminated, then the next, then the next one, and then the next. So one up to their director and I go, and I want to be, you know, in technical terms, it's called a dick. I don't want to be a dick, but I see where your guys are positioned, and they're looking at their phones. And if they're looking at their phones, they're not looking at the people. And the guy says, "Oh, yeah, but, you know, those are messages that are coming across from central." Do you get what I'm saying? On high. And they're trying to educate guys. Right, what's the driver do? The driver's drive. And okay, so if you're the guy that's got the eye, the guy with the eye calls the ball. And you don't, you don't get distracted because you'll reach your capacity and you won't be watching, smelling, like we say, "Watch," because your visual field is so huge. But smelling your olfactory senses, sensing, feeling the heat. The reason you're supposed to touch the door in a fire with the back of your hand, because if you touch the hot doorknob, you're going to grip it, you're going to burn all your skin off. Those facts have been around. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, because they're triggers. They're human behavior and human performance triggers, right? That we've, we think we've grown. That listen, communication is an art form. And interpersonal communication is absolutely essential to be able to tell when the fix is in and you're being ambushed. And all this technology has taken away from the simple fact that communication is an art form, and we're leaving that art form on the table.

That's right. And I think today, just sticking with that kind of one concept of understanding when someone divides your attention and inattention blindness, so just understanding just that one concept alone is you can get better at actually identifying it and going, "Well, why is this person trying to divide my attention? What's going on here?" Maybe that's enough.

Yeah.

Maybe that's enough to sense that there's danger.

Yeah.

And those are some of the things that people kind of get into and they say, "Oh, well, I had a feeling," or "Something didn't seem right." Well, I'll go with that. Just you play that out, and then how to understand the situation.

History. Right, right. Brian, you don't have to understand the chemistry. The great thing about coming to our training is that you will understand it. You'll understand what your brain is doing and your eyes are doing, and you'll be more in tune with it. But just if you only read the lessons learned and watch the podcast, you can learn this. If your brain is screaming to you to pay attention to something, it's probably the real thing, and you need to slow your roll. You need to get out of that AO (Area of Operations). You need to get back in your car, or close the window, or lock the doors. Do you get what I'm trying to say? There's a commercial where the kids take cover behind the wall of chainsaws. That's a lack of situational awareness, and or a movie. Yeah, you need to give yourself the gift of time and distance. Say, "I believe the fix is in," and slow down. Maybe absent yourself from that situation. Maybe go to another restaurant. Maybe park in another parking garage. Because if you don't, you're gambling. And guess what? Gamblers lose. The house has the advantage. I know defenses do, 105 to 1 in urban, you know, any template code of Vegas. I do nothing like this. My thing is, "I always know it's the next roll."

Yeah.

Of course, that's a great thing for scientific principle and gas. Yeah, sunk cost theory, there's a whole bunch of them in there. What happens is the one-armed bandit doesn't let you win, it lets you almost win. Yeah, it's all the axons and dendrites, and now you want to play more, you want to close enough. I will, like everything with your life, Brian, that's all I'm saying.

Yeah, never bet with your life. And I think that's kind of a good, a good point to end on, just keeping it at that topic and understanding divided attention, how it affects your performance, and then how you can understand it and see it when someone's trying to do it to you, and know that you have physiological or psychological factors. You're on a battlefield. Know that you have limitations. Well, of course, like we always say, if anyone needs and wants any more information on this stuff, they can always reach out to us, follow any of the links, and get in touch with us. Other than that, everyone be safe, and training changes behavior.