Left Of Greg 096 Cryptids and Stereotypes

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Yeah, so we are live on Facebook, but we will go ahead and get started today, Greg. So today's topic: cryptids and stereotypes. Okay, so I want to just real quick define for everyone what a cryptid is. And a cryptid is any animal which is presumed by certain populations or number of people to exist, even though there isn't any actual or realistic evidence for their existence.

But I want to give because this was a topic I chose as my source for some of this material directly from Wikipedia, which is perfect, and boy, did I learn a lot, Greg! First of all, there's people—there's something called the "cryptozoology pseudoscientific subculture." Okay, so one, the term "pseudoscientific subculture" is just hilarious and amazing. And that's a topic maybe for another entire podcast. I would claim that we both can right now have PhDs in that, can't we? I think right now, yeah, we actually have tenure at their university.

But what they said, "They're the followers of the cryptozoology pseudoscientific subculture to exist on the basis of anecdotal or other evidence considered insufficient by mainstream science." So apparently, there's a mainstream science and then there's this pseudoscientific subculture. I just assumed, I thought there was just science.

But anyway, so just for anyone who's wondering, cryptids are things that would fall under like Bigfoot, Yeti, Loch Ness Monster, the Chupacabra, the Kraken, all of these different things. For our folks up in Canada that listen, that would be—I found one—the Manipogo, also known as Winnipogo, who is a lake monster up in Lake Manitoba. But the idea is these are—I mean, it's seen all over the world in different cultures. There's different ones in Africa, South America, North America, of these beings, these beasts that people have claimed to see, right? Even though there is no real evidence. So that's a general understanding of cryptids, right? And then did you want to jump right into your globsters, or do you want to talk about that?

So let's ease into that for a second. First of all, I want it to be evidence that you and I are both doing this one at night in the dark, even though it's live, it's still not daylight hours. It's before 7:00 AM my time, exactly, because we have to speak of cryptids. I think it's a perfect setting for it. And maybe as the sun rises, we will shed light on this topic.

Yeah, well, I'm going to shed any weight, so we might as well shed some light.

But Brian, I want to—I want to offer a correction to the audience.

Please do.

You said that there is no evidence. Well, remember, anecdotal evidence is a form of evidence.

Right.

But anecdotal evidence doesn't rise to empirical evidence, for example. But it does rise to usable evidence if there is such a volume of it that you can't look away, do you get what I'm saying? Where everybody saw this thing in Siberia, and it lasted for a period of time. And no longer than anecdotal, we have to look at it and say, "Hey, an event occurred there," but somebody just didn't record it in a way where science says, "Yeah, we'll accept it."

And what I mean by that is we haven't attained that, even in cryptology, even in this crypt—not cryptology, scriptedology, or whatever they want to call themselves, because it's a new word, I don't even know what the hell they're talking about. But the idea is that it all started when I was on a plane with somebody that claimed that that was their degree was in folklore and mystical beings, you know? "Okay, where did that degree come from?" "At the University of Dublin," remarkably.

No, but the idea is that he was talking complete, and there was a person that was sitting in the middle seat, you know that damned middle seat? This is before COVID, when life was a party all day long. So I'm sitting in a window seat, and so I'm doing the letter "C," and this guy's going, "Oh yeah, and there's this and that, and all this other." And he was talking about the oldest one in the world, the Himalayan skull. You know, when they talk about the Himalayas, and the guys obviously saw the footprints, and then they went to this temple, and there was this cone-shaped skull. And they said it looks orthognathic, it looks not unlike a mountain gorilla silverback.

And so, for years and years, as a kid growing up, that and Erich von Däniken—I'm reading all these things—and everybody thought that was a Bigfoot skull. And then a couple of years back, somebody stole some hairs and some skin sample from it and said it was a lacquered, gosh darn, coyote skull or whatever that had been there so many years that it had shaped and morphed. And it doesn't really matter what it was, Brian, but it was false. And that's exactly the nature of these cryptid sightings: somebody wasn't sure what they saw. Right? The story became bigger than the event itself.

And I'll give you one: did you see, there's a million television shows and hyperbole, of course, about supernatural, and all they are is fast-moving cameras. The scripts are weaker than Scooby-Doo, and, "No, it was old man so-and-so at the amusement park!" But what happens is they move, "Did you see that? Did you see that?" And how, for example, is the camera poised to watch the person's reaction? That always amazes me. So they just at the right time, and then we never see the ghost or the specter or whatever it is, but we see some expression on the person's face and then hear some far off sound. That's what they're banking on.

So imagine you and I having a conversation, and it's a spooky night around the campfire, and we're out, you know, outside some village, and so we can actually see the stars. Brian, you've got a great thing about being able to see the stars and not having the light pollution, right? So here we are sitting around the campfire, and I'm explaining it to you, "Hey, I just came back from this long trek in Africa." You're going, "Africa? Where the hell is Africa? I know, I only know Ohio." And I try to explain to you that there's a big river, and this river takes weeks across. And you're now thinking I'm full of crap, right? And so I said, "Well, I saw this big beast, and it had this huge horn, and you could ride on it, it had four legs and galloped along." And in your brain as I'm talking, you're going, "Holy crap, this unicorn!" It had one horn, it's beautiful, majestic Arabian stallion with the horn, and I'm seeing a rhino. Okay? But the idea is that it's close enough that your brain starts creating this stereotypical view of what's likely, and that's close enough, and your brain gloms onto that. So when it's low light, no light, when the campfire is flickering, all of a sudden these stories start coming out, and we try to make them true, and they're just not true.

No. And then, to anyone listening now, it's a good point to kind of highlight that, well, one, I know our good friend Eric Collier is smashing his phone right now listening to this, he hates us! "Bigfoot is real!" But honestly, if anyone knew Bigfoot, it would be Eric Collier, I feel like, so he's feeling squatchy all the time.

The reason why is, and I'm not trying just to make fun of everyone who believes this stuff or thinks they see it. It's actually the exact opposite. It's, we are all—we all fall into this, right? So, yeah, maybe you can sit here and go, "Yeah, I get it, the Bigfoot stuff doesn't exist," but you'll fall in the same exact trap that people who believe Bigfoot would on a different topic. So I don't want it to be like, "Oh, it's just this small segment of the population." That's why I was making fun of the pseudoscientific stuff, that's okay to make fun of.

Well, yeah, no, no, no, I mean, exactly. You're spot on. I don't want to come across as like, "Oh, you're just some dumb ass" who—we see extraordinary things sometimes, even when it's not extraordinary, even when it can be explained, and it's due to our different cognitive biases and how we perceive and see the world. I know we're getting into that, but I just don't want anyone to like, turn off right now and be like, "Oh, you know, f-these guys, they're just, I don't know." We all fall into that trap, and whether that's a sensational news story or it's a Bigfoot sighting or it's the Chupacabra or whatever, I put it all under the same category, right?

You're exactly right.

So, you, Brian, you know where Windsor is? Yeah, that's right across Detroit.

Detroit.

So, if you were looking at Detroit, if you went due south, you're in Canada, you get what I'm saying? Most people don't think about it like that because of the way it's set up. So one night, I'm driving the scout car on midnights. So if you're going to see something, it's going to be on midnights, of course. And all of a sudden, I see the horizon light up over the Detroit River, and I see a UFO, and it's burning in, Brian, and it's getting brighter and brighter and brighter. And all of a sudden, I see it just dissipates a few feet above the ground across the river. I mean, horizon-wise, I don't know where it was, but I know that it was people with what I saw as a visible horizon.

I get on call dispatch immediately. I was a copper at the time, and in full uniform, fully marked squad car on a midnight shift. And I call in and I go, "Hey, you better check with Windsor and see if they had a plane go down." Brian, it was that bright, it was remarkable. And when I use "remarkable," I'm using it in the clinical sense, it bears remarking.

We need, yeah, yeah, yeah, you need to talk about this.

Dispatch comes back and goes, "No, nothing. Windsor OPP (Ontario Provincial Police), they saw the same thing." All this stuff. I had an in-car camera. You got to remember, back then, the in-car cameras, I got nothing big enough to show you. He had a shoebox.

Yes, on your shoulder. Yeah.

Yeah, it was in front of your head, you had to watch it. It was bigger than your headrests, you know? And so I go, "Holy crap, maybe I have it!" So I drove in, and we had a young sergeant, gosh, can't think of his name, and I said, "Hey, you've got to—you have to unlock the box, you can't do it right there." Yeah, yeah, the supervisor has to get into the vault. And so, Petey Bells—and so Petey—now, Brian, this is Petey calling to tell me you can't use his name. So Petey Bells opens up the vault and he puts it on a big screen in his office, and sure enough, you can see the whole thing. So now we're thinking, "Do we call the news media? What do we do on it?"

Brian, we found out over the next three days that it was a pencil-lead-sized meteorite. And the meteor, when it burned in—and I might be using those terms backwards, but you know, one's in the atmosphere and one's once it burns in—that little pencil lead created that dissonance in the atmosphere that was seen for miles around and had a thousand people call it in. So listen to me, if you don't immediately understand it and your brain has to constantly make order out of chaos, it will glom onto something that might not be real by going through the Rolodex, right? The file folder, and going, "Well, damn, that might be this unexplained thing." And literally, by definition, Brian, it was unexplained. It was an Unexplained Flying Object.

Yeah, no, and that's with any observation, right? We have to—we have to attribute it to something that we know, and if we can't, it's really difficult for us. And I always look at a good example is like when you look at little kids, and they kind of stare a little bit longer at something, they do the head tilt. It's because they don't have the file folders we do. Everything in their environment is new and novel to them, so they have to look at it, and it takes longer to sense-make and problem-solve. And you have to tell them, "Oh, that's this. This is okay, that's not, or don't."

Right, right.

So, but as we grow in an adult, one, we have the answers to everything. "I already know everything, right? I don't need to." And I have to put it into the category. And we're very, very—this goes into work just in general—we're uncomfortable being ignorant, right? I don't want to feel like I don't know something. And that's the best, if you look at any, especially any scientist in their field for a really long time, a lot of them have this idea like you have to be comfortable not having all the answers if you want to do like—you have to be able to say, "I don't know. Here's what I think," or, "Here's how I can explain it, but there's some things I don't understand yet, and that's okay."

But just in general, as humans, right, we're very egocentric. I want an answer, and we need it simple, because I have to—but my brain needs an answer. I can't just go, "I wonder what that was?" I have to attribute it to something, so I'm going to draw on my own file folders, my own experiences. And if one of those is I just got done watching an episode of Ancient Aliens, right? And I got the—I love the guy on there, he's got this big head, his crazy hair, and he's a ufologist, and like the neck piece, he always has some different kind of necklace because they go, they do the, "Oh, could it be? Was it? Maybe? Were they?" It's—you're attributing this, like, "Okay, you're now—you don't have enough evidence to explain using what we know right now, or what you know, so you're at the limits of what you can articulate." So we often then jump to an unreasonable conclusion instead of just going, "Damn, I don't know. Can we find someone who does?" We go, "Oh, you know what? Maybe it was aliens, or maybe it was Bigfoot, or maybe it was this." And that's, you know, that corrupt file folder we call it, kind of jumping in there and clouding our perception and clouding our reality and actually making it more complicated, right?

So let's jump into science real quick, and we can bounce back and forth on this, but let's couch this in science for a minute. And again, Brian brought up a great point, if you're listening or watching us at home, we're not anti-Bigfoot, okay? No, I love it. I just don't—or ghost. I would love to see that stuff, and I'm as entertained, especially coming up on Halloween. Why don't ghosts come out during the day, by the way? But they don't. And why don't we ever have—look, do you remember all the sad people in Lebanon—still praying for you—the huge explosion in Lebanon, Brian, do you remember that at the time, within the first four hours, let's say, how many different photos and videos of that that you had? Every single one of them I could read license plates. I mean, I would see an ATM camera that could show me individual people blow up. You see a birthmark on someone's face from 50 minutes. Then all of a sudden somebody goes, "Look over there, there's the ghost right there!" Do you get what I'm trying to say? What is this cinéma vérité? What do you got, palsy? No offense to people with palsy, but it's always that kind of blurry crap.

And then there's always somebody that comes out and says that—to go back to the tamale incident—there was a doctor that's one person that's climbed Everest more than anybody else that's done it, makes Sir Edmund Hillary look like a monk. And this guy also did it without oxygen, Brian. And he says one day he was so tired, he was up there, he was seeing things, and all of a sudden he saw the Yeti. And what he described it as was a bear. And he goes he talked to some scientists, and there was a hybrid of a polar-type bear and a Kodiak-type bear. And that's what the foot—you know, you got to think of the foot impressions in the snow, then the sun hits them, and they get much larger, you know? And he had a logical explanation. All I'm asking our viewers and readers is to take a step back, give yourself the gift of time and distance, and sometimes things are more clear.

That's why I want to throw at you, you know, our good friend Gary Klein, Dr. Joan Johnson—love her to death—Carol Ross, it's Bill and Carol Ross, but Carol's the genius there. You know, that they spent years working on Recognition Primed Decision Making (RPDM). And everybody can look that up, and it's brilliant. My thing is, give us real quick, just give us a quick, yeah, yeah, definition of Gary.

So Gary Klein's Recognition Primed Decision Making is a good theoretical kind of model of it. It is, it's an architecture for theories: how do we make decisions? Yeah, we kind of, we like we covered the OODA Loop, right? And what Boyd was getting at with that mental model. Klein's very well known, I think it really got, even since like the 80s or 90s, right, really kind of came out. And then a lot of it was also geared towards—they're not geared towards, just found more home in like law enforcement, first responder type situations where it was maybe some type of emergency situation, or with the military as well. And you had to, same thing, go through those mental file folders, make decisions rapidly under stress, and how we arrive at conclusions. So just kind of a general idea, I guess.

Which was great. And I think, to caveat what Brian just said, is you have to remember at home that it was a great book on the shelf that if you wanted to figure out how your brain worked during these situations, you could read it, it didn't move the bubble, didn't help you in your human performance, you know, you get where I'm going, Brian?

Well, yeah, so I would say it's theoretically sound, and it makes real sense to understand the process, right? To understand, just like anytime you read a book, "Oh man, I want to learn about neuroscience, hey, that's really cool, I didn't know it." Exactly, this is another great one for that. It's just operationalizing that and using that in real time, or trying to read that book and then go, "All right, how do I use this?" That's where it gets...

Exactly. Because now we're talking about pioneers in the field, and not unlike Boyd, they're juggling the water balloon. They're not exactly sure what they have. All the answers.

Yeah, it comes out right.

They have a great explanation, yeah, they really do. So great stuff on the shoulders of giants. I would say that what we look at is primed recognition decision making. So under stress, your brain does crazy stuff, and specifically, if you think of the brain being lazy, the brain can't say, "Listen, I'm going to create a file folder for every nuanced thing that happens today," because we'd never get out of the cave, Brian, we'd never get out of the car, we'd never get anything done.

So what happens is situations prime us. Like, for example, if I sneeze, everybody else in the room sneezes. If I yawn, everybody else—scientifically, that's called priming. So just like priming sociologists would prime me, "I'm going to start yawning here in a second." You're saying, "But no, no, seriously." So like if we use terms over and over and over, like the aggressive terms, and we adopt an aggressive body posture, we know that mirror neurons pick up on that and they start repeating that behavior. So as much as Recognition Primed Decision Making means, "Hey, I've seen a prototypical match for this, so now I'm going to template match it," right? "I'm going to match the cards and go, 'Hey, I've got those.'" I say that your brain is primed for a decision before you enter the decision.

And if you look into what I'm talking about, it's an expectation. Expectations help us navigate these ambiguous environments that we encounter all the time, and it satisfies our brain's need to make order out of chaos. So if it's dark and I hear a bump in the night, do you get what I'm trying to say? And all my life I've learned that there was a closet monster or a monster under my bed, right? What the hell do you think I'm about to see? Do you get where I'm going? So now I'm going into a house searching for a suspect, and I hear a creaky floorboard. "Okay, oh my gosh, here he comes, it's going to be, you know, the Chainsaw Killer!" Those things are in our brain just below our conscious levels, and they're always acting to come up with a likely conclusion for what we're going to see. And guess what, Brian, when we stop on a blank page, dealer's choice, man, and whatever, you know?

And you basically, right, that's a good one too, because it goes right into what we're talking about with cryptids and different mythological creatures and how it moves, because you, I mean, you brought up a specific one that observer expectancy bias, right? So we—we have, we talk about different cognitive biases on this show all the time because it's important to understand, and it's not to confuse the matter or make it cloudier, it's actually to help understand like, "Hey, you're like you just talked about, primed to expect something when you observe an event." And based on your past experiences, is like we like to call them "file folders," that prototypical matching, right? You go, "Oh, okay, it must be this." And there's different ways to do that. Your brain does that prototypical matching, which just means if you've seen something like it before, it can—it can come up with a solution.

And I just actually give a really good one is like, you know, there's hundreds of different types of door handles or doorknobs or ways to open different types of doors that you've been through in your life. Once someone shows you how a doorknob or handle works, right, you don't need to learn what the difference between a push bar and a turn handle is. You understand the process your brain does, so then it can use prototypical matching and go, "All right, I've opened a door before, here's the ways I've used it," and then figure out the problem. You don't stand there and look at it and go, "I don't get this, someone come show me," right? So there's a million different types of examples, but that works into exactly how we observe something. So if I'm looking at an event unfolding, right, I have to expect to see certain things. And if I have those corrupt file folders or someone said, "Hey, there's a monster," or, "There's this..."

Exactly.

And especially when you look out tonight, be careful, right? You bring in, you know, it's nighttime, which naturally our body is already going, "Okay, the danger lurks at night. This is when we're supposed to be sleeping, why are we up right now? I can't see as well, I can't hear as well, I can't assimilate my environment very well, this is much more dangerous for me at a very primal level." Right? So we're already at that heightened state of alert.

So now that, you know, we've all heard it's like the fishing story or a war story. I always say, "You know, nothing ruins a war story like another witness." You know, because it goes from, "Hey, there was three people there," and then years later, "It was five, and then there was 10, there was 12, we were outnumbered seven to one," you know? And it's the same thing with a fishing story, "You know, how big was the fish? Oh, it was this big," you know what I mean? That—that grows over time. And so we have those kind of corrupt ways of looking at things. So that's why we always look sometimes to, if I can't know exactly what it is, I'm more likely to then say, "Hey, it's this. It's this supernatural beast, it's this." A globster turns into some prehistoric animal that's never been found before, and it's like, "Oh, it was a baby seal!"

You're spot on, Brian. And for our listeners, before we go to "globster," that gives you a chance to get ahead of us and run to your—and look it up, what Brian is saying. And let me "street" it for you: remember, non-science is conscience. So if you don't know it, you go and look it up, and knowledge is power, because if you name it, then you can understand what it is. What Brian was talking about in a really high level is what you on the street level call a stereotype. And stereotypes help us categorize information into usable chunks because our brain engages in chunks, called chunking, and it does it in hopes that we can predict the outcome of an upcoming situation without actually going through the caloric burn of investigating it. Our brain is lazy, we're lazy as humans, and we're always thinking that everything we're entering into is a survival situation because of our old programming. So stereotypes help us understand and put these information in these little ice cream trays—and these little ice cube trays, rather.

And so what happens is, going in, we already have an expectation of what's likely. The sun is up, alarm clock's going, expectation: it's a new day, we got to get to work. And so we start going through our routines, our patterns. So people think there's a malevolent side to stereotypes. Yeah, there is for racists that hate humans, right, what I'm trying to say. But guess what? They're always going to find some way, they're always, yeah, you see what I'm saying? They're going to follow like that guy's got an extra toe or whatever it is to decide to hate you or your beard, or, "I'm a big Indian and a little Indian," as Jonathan Swift said, remember the great thing to do with the homeless is to eat them. And Swift said that, and it's not unlike the coyote remark that came out a couple of days ago. What we're trying to say is that if your brain rushes to an unreasonable conclusion based on some external stimulus or schema or dissonance, you're likely going to be wrong. And this is where our ML and MD Cola (Most Likely and Most Dangerous) came from, Brian, when I was sitting around. "What's most likely, and what's most dangerous?" Right? I was thinking of stereotypical evidence and template and prototypical matches in our environment.

And you know why? Because as a martial artist, you have to out-think your opponent. And as a copper—listen, this is what, if somebody right now is wondering what happens with coppers, I want you to think about how stereotypes and how expectation management works. A subject called dispatch, dispatch writes down the information, then calls the radio car that's already gone through a couple of hands. Think about the misinformation that might be coming down the pike. Then, Brian, you hear, "Unknown trouble on Sage Drive." We got that, you get what I'm trying to say? Now your brain is working, "Unknown trouble, holy crap, what could that be?" Well, it might be a domestic in progress, we've had a lot of those, or, "You know what, it might be an elk that fell through a skylight!" We don't know what the hell it is, right? So that's what happened. So that's why I say instead of recognition primed, I say it's primed. Okay, the juices are flowing, recognition. And then when you get there and you see that person, listen, have you ever heard a person when a gun was pulled on them, how did they describe the weapon, Brian?

Oh, it's huge! I can see that barrel! That barrel is as big as a (quarter-dollar coin).

You know, which you know, all that, yeah, yeah, I love Grossman. Love, yeah, but Grossman's going to chalk it up to an electrochemical neurotransmitter and say the serotonin level and the adrenal cortex. There's a place in time for Grossman. But I'm saying instead of recognition prime, that was primed recognition. Your brain, your senses were primed, and then when it occurred, you said, "See there!" So and now we get a bias.

No, no, yeah, and that—that leads to it. And the, you know, because that would be the question is, are stereotypes good? And meaning, well, well, technically, they're originally meant to be helpful, right? And then what happens is it can be now negative, or that corrupt file folder, because, but that's—that's because of your bad information. Or as we say, like, "You're putting your finger on the scale at that point." Like you're, you're taking it to an extraordinary level. And you kind of talked about what they're for and why we use them, and they literally just can conserve calories, right? I don't want to have to overthink every single situation that I'm in, which is also why we miss a lot of small, subtle cues in our environment, right? So the idea is, you know, those—those are important to use and to have, but we have to be aware of them, right? There's no way to get around these different biases other than being conscious of the fact that you have them, and then saying, "Hey, that's going to change the story a little bit," right, I guess to say, right?

But here's the—here's what I want to get with all these, is that we have a tendency in those situations to jump towards something almost supernatural, which is kind of what you're talking about with the cryptids and everything here, right? That's how that, you know, bear who—bears can stand up on two legs and move around—that turns into a Bigfoot sighting in the middle of the night, right? And so that's kind of the thing is that why then do we jump to something extraordinary? You know, why does that fish become five pounds bigger than it actually was? Why does it become a Chupacabra, and why does it become wherever you're at? You know, why does it become the Loch Ness Monster versus, "Hey, I wonder..." You know, why do we always jump to that, Greg?

So it's all sense-based, and your sense-making and problem-solving skills are always turned to survival, whether you have evolved or not. So I want you to take a look at a situation: olfactory senses, okay? Our sense of smell. Decomposition smells in a very specific way. Our nose is close to our mouth to make sure that we don't eat fetid, decomposing things. That smell test, you know, passing the smell test means we won't accidentally ingest it. A decomposing elk out on the prairie, that warns us that a mountain lion might be near, and that's his killing field. And so that gives us an olfactory stimulation to keep moving, go away, go the different way. It triggers the blowfly to come and help break down the body so it can go back to the earth. Everything has a reason to be there.

So what happens is, in the event of surprise, your expectation management comes up with a tabula rasa, a white sheet. And so now those light and those shadows are a little spooky, so we're afraid of it, so we build a temporary file folder to keep us away from that until we can explain it, do you hear what I'm saying? So these cryptid people, they just want to say, "Oh, it's this mystery that'll never be explained! Could it be the ancient Loch Ness Monster?" "No, okay, it's not a Loch Ness Monster, it was a damn log floating," or whatever, right? So we create this to keep us at arm's length in a survival situation until our brain can gather enough information or we repeat the behaviors enough time to have an uncorrupted file folder. That's simply that.

Yeah, so I mean, that's a great explanation, Greg, but it's like, why again, it's—it's like, we still want to—we want it to be something. It's—I go back to The X-Files. Remember Mulder on The X-Files? "People want to believe." That was the whole saying. And that applies in so many different areas. I think it's funny, I still—I changed the quote out for something I was doing yesterday on the board, but I have it up here now, and it's: "Without cookies, he's just a monster." I think that's—I didn't plan that for this broadcast, but I think it's a perfect example.

So I'll give you—I'll give you just one more very briefly. There's a place down in New Mexico, and you know our good friend Jaeger, always going out, doing archaeological digs, paleontology, all that other stuff. So there's one place, and I can't think of it on that east-west road that goes right into Texas. And Shelly and I passed through there, and we had to see the dinosaur impressions that were left in the mud. If you believe in dinosaurs, and not Flintstone-y dinosaurs, like the real ones. What happened is part of the earth at this place, and I think it starts with a "C," I just can't think of it right now—Oronar—it turned up because the ground was heaving. And so some of them were on the side, and then some of them were up and upside down. So clearly, the people that were in that area said, "We had dragons! And you can see we had wagons because they could defy gravity and they hung upside down!" Well, we know that's not likely, Brian, but it's amazing. And that—that George R. R. Martin, or whatever his name is—how many billions of dollars did that freak show make on, you know, the Dungeons and Dragons real-life games?

Listen, we love the fantasy, we love to, you know, do you think that I want to go through the rest of my life going, "Oh, this overweight, balding piece of crap"? I want to envision myself as the hero of every story, so I tell you that plays into it too. So if you have your ego tugging, you have your chemical transmitters trying to say, "I'm not sure what that is, but it might be scary." We don't want to walk around scared all the time, we don't want to walk around hyper-alert. I do, I walk through, "I'm terrified!" Can you imagine if you did that constantly? You'd be in great shape, do you get what I'm trying to say?

Yeah, well, and that—man, there's a lot you can get into in terms of how people go around, and I think people are going around a little bit too scared sometimes. You know, we always like to remind people, it's—I know it's 2020 and it's a crazy year, but it is, you are now living in the safest time in the history of the world. And it's safer than it was 10 years ago, and 10 years ago it was safer than it was the 10 years before that. In 10 years, you know, you just keep going back. But we—we don't, this can get into a number of areas, meaning we often attribute more value to something scary or something I don't fully understand. Yes, or something that's sensational. We—we attribute more value to it than it really deserves sometimes. And I—I do that with everything. I do that with every, you know, half the news stories that come out, it's like, "Okay, what, this is another thing I have to care about? What? Why? Why is this so sensational?" But that it's all leads into exactly what we're talking about. And so sometimes when people say, "Oh, you know, it's like the media is always biased." It's like, "Well, no, yeah, all humans, we're all horribly biased." So let's—let's—let's learn how to learn a little bit better, right? Let's understand how to process information a little bit better. And these examples that you're giving of the cryptids, right, there's a whole society of people out there who really want it to be true. They want it to be true, and they're going to argue that it's going to be true, and they're going to get support for other people, and they're going to get everyone involved and, "Hey, look at this piece of information, look at how it ties over into here." But they're largely harmless.

Yeah, and I that—I would, well, I don't know, yeah, yes and no. What I mean is, they're—they're not out there trying to force me to believe what I'm trying to say.

No, but sometimes it's again, you know what is it when there's a large number of people who believe in something, we suddenly give it more value and think that it's—think that it's more true. I don't know, I don't know where you went there, Greg, if you're still good. You kind of went dark there, buddy, so hopefully you're okay. I guess I'll just continue.

So anyway, I attribute this stuff or I use it no matter what the topic or what the subject is. You can apply some of the things we're talking about and how we sensationalize to just—just remember that for a second and go, "Oh, wait a minute here, is this really something that's true or not, or is it something that's being overly sensationalized?"

And to go back to what Greg was talking about with stereotypes and what they're for and how they came about, it just—it's a survival mechanism for your brain, right? I want to burn as few calories as I possibly can, and so therefore, I'm going to get, you know, I'm—I'm going to not—I'm going to not overthink something just for the sake of—it's much easier just to chalk it up to some other belief.

If you recall, back in the 60s, late 50s, early 60s, absolutely every television show was western. I don't mean absolutely, but I mean the lion's share. Even cartoons were westerns, okay? Ricochet Rabbit, you get what I'm trying to say? You had the—the—the, what the heck was the one that was the old western fort with the Go Go Gophers? Why? Because during that period of our life, we all wanted to be that High Noon character. We all wanted to be able to have the white hats versus the black hats, the good versus evil.

As we adapt, there's sometimes that we want this supernatural, Brian. We want the space shows, we like the alien. We like to because we don't want to think this is all there is. We don't want to think that my life in this state has to remain this way. We want to think that we can champion something else. Even an anti-hero is a hero, do you get what I'm trying to say? We glom onto things that make us feel that there's something bigger and greater. For some, it's religion. And certain religions would say there is no such thing as a cryptid, there isn't space and other stuff. There's other people that go "wavy gravy chili palm," or whatever you want to believe, we'll go with and we'll believe that. And that's safe too. My thing is as long as it's not hurting anybody, I would say use the gift of time and distance. Most things are explicable.

But you still watch these shows where they exploit the people where the woman sits down with the guy and they say, "Listen, your children are in danger if you don't move out of this house." Brian, when was the last time in San Diego, where you are, was the last time that a ghost killed anybody? Remember those house killings, yeah? Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah, but we don't equate those and they're close enough. All you need to see is how many horror movies are out there to see what a popular genre it is. And the same thing with fantasy, and the same thing with fiction.

Well, and then that also—that also that's—that's what corrupts our file folders a lot, right? It's the whole when you have a presidential candidate talking about, "Maybe the police should shoot someone in the knee!" Like, you're—you're going, "You've watched way too many movies!" And you have, "Dude, I don't know what you're talking about!"

Yeah, I know.

But I—I think it's an important, you know, to understand how this effect, because now you look at all these different conspiracy theories and stuff that pop up now, and they—I mean, Greg, they're almost word for word a script from the HBO show of, I forget what it was called, like True Detective with Matthew McConaughey. And so, and I'm like, "This is almost this, they took that script!" So creepy.

Oh, yeah.

And that's what happens is everyone starts in form of like, "Oh my gosh, is that possible?" They watch something, they do such a good job on these shows of hooking people in, and you're watching it, but then some people go, "Oh my God, is that true?" Because one, it's called True Detective. Two, they use elements from history that actually occurred, right? And then so now you're down this path of, "Wait, are they—is this something, are they offering a possible explanation?" And going, "No, the guy who wrote it was just like, 'Hey, this would be a really cool story and make a great show!'" And then that's engaging.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good word to use, absolutely, because that's what happens with a lot of them. So my favorite horror movies—and it's Halloween, so for all intents and purposes, it's Halloween—and my favorite horror stories are Frankenstein, Werewolf, number one on top of that list, Creature from the Black Lagoon. Why? Because when I was a young kid and I was eating the popcorn, they occurred in daylight. Creature from the Black Lagoon, beautiful setting, cute girl, it's swimming around like a damn Olympian, it's on land. They didn't rely on what the later horror movies did: just gore, which isn't interesting to me in the least, I've seen enough of it in my life, or the monster has to be in the shadows. Why? Because their monster blew, they didn't spend a lot of money at it, it was CGI. So everything had to be at night in the dark.

Now, somebody will say, "Well, your primordial fear, that's where it comes from." Yeah, but I think that you're exactly right, what happened is we got soured because Hollywood constantly showed monsters in the dark. So guess what? It fed into that already existing fear of the dark, and now our expectations—we're back again—we'll hear a bump in the night, we don't think "burglar," we think "monster."

And also there's the other historical side of this is where some of these stories came from were—it wasn't because it actually happened, it was because, you know, as a parent or community leader, "We're going to come up with a story to tell the kids so they don't go do this thing we don't want them to do." And that's—that's, there's actually a ton of what you call like urban legends and stuff that started with that. It's like, "Hey, we don't want high school kids having unprotected sex in their cars out in this area," so it's the, "Hey, did you hear about the couple that was murdered and hung from a tree?" You know what I mean? It's like they sensationalize this stuff for the purposes of scaring people into not doing something. So there's a lot of stories that came from that. So that—that helps, that adds to it, meaning now all of a sudden it's, "Well, well, I've been told this my whole life," or, "I heard this story," and now I'm hearing this again, "Oh my gosh, look at it, I see it everywhere now, it must be!"

Is that a confirmation? Exactly.

Am I now getting enough anecdotal evidence again that it seems to be true? And we're not bashing—look, I won't bash a scientist, but when you see this, and I never know the names of the shows because I'm click-baiting through them—and that's not even the right term, don't even get me started because I don't even understand the TV remote—but there's some stupid show that shows people send in their videos of the unexplained, and then they have this bevy of scientists—they call themselves scientists.

Yeah, yeah, you hear what I'm saying? It's self-appointed.

And the guy will look at a video that I've just seen, and you can actually see the chair slide across the room, and he'll go, "This is the most remarkable evidence I've ever seen in my life!" And then the next person says, "Well, clearly there's a demonic force in the house." How do you get from A to Z on that, Brian? Where is that quantum leap of logic that allows you to believe that? Could you imagine if your lawyer or your doctor did that? A doctor comes in and, you know, you've got this abscess on your back, and he comes in and goes, "Here, lick this toad every day for a week and stand on a bar of soap." You—you would immediately call. But on those shows, Brian, we go, "Oh, well, that's boring. I could see that. I could see that happening. I could see that."

Well, and how do we do that? Because there's a lot of talk about especially when it comes to stereotypes because again, these terms, these words have meaning, and they often get lost over time of what. And that happens across the board, and I—I hate that now, you know, like we get—we invent new terms for things, but that's normal in any language, in any culture. There's always like, like slang terms, I'm okay with because it's—that's something that came from somewhere, and it, you actually can give you a lot of insight. But there's certain doctrinal terms almost that get lost over time and they get—they get hijacked, right? They kind of get hijacked to fit a certain area. So when you use them, and "stereotype" is one of them, right? Stereotype is definitely people go like, "Oh, you're stereotyping me!" Well, everyone stereotypes everything in their environment.

I would—I would put it that way, "Conscious imperative of all humans." Your ex—okay, "Unconscious imperative." That's a perfect way to describe it, because one, it's happening even when you don't know that it's happening, and it's imperative because it has to occur for your brain to make order out of chaos. So we, like you said, we use the ice cube tray ones, right? I got to put these in different bins just in order to get through the day, otherwise you—you wouldn't actually be able to process all of the information that your brain is taking in every second of the day, would be—it would be absolutely impossible, right? So I—I think that's a good place to understand is that am I stereotyping this situation in some way? And and the time and distance will—will prevent us from jumping to an unreasonable conclusion.

And you're exactly right. So gift of time and distance is one way. Yes, or we call, you know, the tactical patience, or taking that pause, taking that breath and going, "Wait, is this another thing that's just confirming my already—my already confirming my pre-existing beliefs?" And not—and being okay with questioning them. This is the big thing, especially when it comes to stuff like the cryptids, right? It's like you—you can—it's okay to question what you believe in, and the foundations and the tenets of your thoughts, because you know, it—it'll if they're true and what you're saying is really what's occurring, it'll actually make it a stronger case and you'll be able to understand it more. And if it's untrue, then you'll be able to, you know, "Maybe I was a little off on that," right? I think it's like a better self-correcting way to question those. And I don't—there's different ways to—to explain that or understand it, but I always, you know, try and tell people because confirmation bias is the biggest one, right? We just look for things that constantly confirm our own beliefs all day long. We're already—we're already doing that, our brain's already doing that for us, so it's easy to fall into that trap.

That's my fear with thinking of first responders in law enforcement. And we get it into our mind that what the dispatch told us is what's going on. "We have a domestic in progress, we have this, we have that." So now our primed recognition of the scene might lead us to a higher level or threshold of violence. We may be expecting to see a person shooting other people, and therefore, when we get there, we think that the only tool that we have is to use deadly force. That's much better than shooting somebody in a flipping knee, is offering training to people to say, "There's this panoply of decisions, and you should be primed before you get to the scene to make the right decision." How do we do that? Sense-make, problem-solve, gift of time and distance. That's it. Do you see what I'm saying? But do we teach that?

I—I don't think so. We do based on it, but do we teach that? That comes into like that—that being a good witness to whatever it is. I always start with, "I'm not sure, but here's what I think," because right there I'm already providing you, Greg, if you're getting the story from me, understand that there's a—there's a margin of error here, right? There's—there's very two, they're very different, you know, calling like your example of calling the police, right? It's—it's two different things to say, "There's a guy in the park with a gun," versus, "There's a guy in the park, I think he might have a gun because he's doing this." Like, those are two—the response to those very similar—the same observation, right? Just—but just describing it in two different manners is going to completely change the response of the person listening. And I don't care if it's just a conversation, Greg, you're exactly right, it doesn't matter where he's like, "Look, I'm not sure." I always start that off, and my wife, Michelle, she hates it. She's like, "You're always like, 'Well, I'm like, because I only know what I can—I can prove, I can't tell you so only so much, especially if it's from a news article. Like, look, there's—there's a margin of error in here.'"

But yeah, so watch this though, watch how—let's add a layer of complexity, Brian, because we're information scientists, so let's go here. And before we make that decision, let's add this. Now the call is, "We have an active shooter, we have people down, we're scrambling medical, all that stuff." And dispatcher gives you whatever information they know. Flash to bang is the time that you hear that and you accelerate to the time you get to the mall where the shooting is, or the school, or wherever else. That time in here, manifest file folders, your brain will autonomically start bringing up information to prepare you for the scene. That's primed recognition, do you hear what I'm trying to say? So you're making decisions before you ever get to the scene.

Now think of this, right? Some of them are going to be wrong, some aren't going to pass the test. It's like Plinko, some will fall out. "There's not seven of them, I don't have a cover car, I only have my pistol," you get what I'm trying to say? So those are falling like teardrops out, you know, raindrops out of the sky, and all of a sudden you have now these flashlight-size decisions that are available to you. That's normal, that's what's supposed to happen. Now, with training, those are going to follow a logical pattern, and then above and below those, just like the color spectrum, there's, you know, some that we can't see is going to be your own fears and biases, you get what I'm trying to say? And the unknown. But now you've got almost like this chart of possibilities. Through training and rehearsal, the untrained mind, Brian, is going to go in there and just have—it's going to look like snow on a county road at night, you get what I'm trying to say? And you hit the high-beam headlights and there's going to be too many choices. That's how people get analysis paralysis, that's how people get injured and died.

So what we're talking about is a function of that. We're talking about being so overwhelmed by the environment, you know, seeing that bright light in the woods or seeing that bear stand up on hind legs to get honey or whatever, and we immediately go to the worst-case scenario. Why? Because our brain hasn't been trained to assimilate what's logical, what's most likely. You know, what it could be. Am I saying that there's no gosh-darn Bigfoot? I'm saying, "Nope, but I'll change my opinion when somebody shows me one."

Yeah, no, that's what I'm trying to say. That's a good point. No, and that—that's the idea. It's not, "No, and there never will be." It's exactly, "There isn't until there's evidence of one." And that's—that's, then you can update, right? I can take in new information. Scientists do, Brian, update my—my hypothesis and update my file folders and—and kind of have another way to look at it. So no, that—that's a—that's actually a great point to kind of sort of bring it in for a landing, I guess, on this. And, you know, that—that's how I—I—I try to approach everything with some time and distance. Now, there's certain situations where you're just going to react, but if you're always reacting, you're going to fall on some sort of corrupt file folder pinball, or, you know, you're something that—that is going to—you're going to think is going to be true and exists and is happening, and it's very, very different from what's actually occurring. And that's difficult. We see that stuff all the time in different after-action reviews. "Well, I thought I saw this and then this happened." And then the camera is saying, "Well, that's not what it's showing here." And the guy's going, "No," or a girl's going, "No, no, you don't understand, he was doing!" And they're not—they're not lying necessarily, because in here, that's what they saw, felt, smelled, tasted.

You're exactly right.

It's, and—and you brought it up earlier, and it's a good point to reiterate: as long as something is cognitively close enough, that's all my brain needs to go, "Yep, that's what it is, that's what I saw," even if it's not the real thing, right? Even if it's not exactly what I think it is. So I think those are just good points to remember.

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