LOG 058 Why do people think the earth is flat

Hey 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, it was a better way for us to get you guys some more stuff. If you have any questions or comments, go ahead, leave it 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 and subscribe. Follow us on Facebook at HBP RNA. 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.

The great thing is Greta Thong Burgas is spinning at the playground this morning, just for you bringing that up, because to me it's ridiculous, but I understand the logic behind it, of why Flat Earthers...

Yeah, you want to get into that?

Yeah, I mean, I like your... who clearly liked that story. But your stories that you just brought up on the dichotomous news stories.

Yep.

Yeah, that's exactly. And then what they do is they go, "Well, which one did people click on more? Okay, they clicked on the 'he is guilty' one or 'he didn't.' Then let's just start running more stories about that." There's no logic behind that. Let me start with this, and anybody out there that wants to invest in Arcadia, please contact Brian. Because, first of all, there's a female on LinkedIn that's got really good advice every once in a while. And I'm not going to say her name because I'll butcher it and I want to make sure I get it right for a future broadcast. Oh, and by the way, Seiberling Hair Club for Men died.

Get out of here! No way! Oh, man, troll icon. Everybody knows him.

Everyone knows that. Because he wasn't... Mark Martin, will he sell the stock? He wasn't just the owner, he's also a client. That was a wonderful guy.

Two years of one guy to be... I liked his commercials!

Exactly, exactly! I wanted to be in that pool. You never had to clean that pool. There was no filter, hair full. You know, so this female on LinkedIn has this good, simple advice. And I'm scrolling through, just looking for something that has to do with what we do, you know? And all of a sudden, it comes up and it says, the first one was like a week ago, and it said, "Do you berate your coworkers?" And, "Is it a give and take, or is it all transmitted?" And I go, "Holy crap!" Then I wrote Brian. And some guy from Pakistan goes, "Who's Brian?" Because I was like apologizing, because I'm thinking everybody reads it, you know, because I'm not that bright.

And so this week it was another one and it was like, "Do you ask the opinion of somebody or you dictate," you know, "dictatorial stylism?" And I go, "Oh, here we're back to Brian again." So the funny thing is that I think about the internet being different, like it has this social conscious that it can read other things and put things together, which is so far from the truth with an algorithm. It's just a man.

Right. So that, well, that's the point of it, right? So it is a mathematical formula. So it's not as, it's much more rigid than actually human thought behavior. But it's getting it right. That's what they're trying to do. But that's the point behind it, is like, "Oh, you interacted with this, let me show you that," because based on what everyone else is doing. It's weird because that's why, if you watch my Netflix feed, what it recommends, it's all over the place. Because first, I want to beat the algorithm. Like, "I outgrew man as a person." Oh, Jesus, man. Like, "Did you see this guy? He is all..." "What do we send him? I don't know," like, "because his stuff isn't exactly..."

But now listen, imagine mine, okay? Because you know.

Oh, yeah, good, long time.

So for yesterday's instructor development that I pushed out, I could not remember who was murdered in June in Germany that was part of Merkel's Progressive Party, and that was a neo-Nazi, ultra right-wing faction and sympathizers. So can you imagine that, first of all, if I ever looked like, for Shelley, you know, "Get a pair of socks for a birthday." The next thing is, "Hey, socks near you and Gunnison, Colorado. Socks for sale." You know how your computer search engine, if you're on the internet, it's coming up with all of those.

Well, because you did neo-Nazi.

Yeah, Gunnison. "Hey, the, you know, the Black Panther movement near you." So I can imagine the vans circling around Denver, Kia, hidden for somebody to land. "Oh, yeah, we're headed to Gunnison now, sir." Because there's no rhyme or reason to it, and I do it simply for research.

Well, that, yeah, an algorithm can catch up to that. Do you... that stuff is kind of, it's just an ongoing process. All that stuff is a complete ongoing process of how things work and where it leads you to, and now they're trying to affect that so that it doesn't keep showing you the same. Because that's where people do like, "Oh, the," because since we're getting into Flat Earthers today, or you go down that self-radicalization. Like on YouTube, it's like you watch someone who's way out there on far right or far left, and then you watch that and it'll recommend other videos or articles that go along with that, or that other people who watch that video also watch. So you can...

So when I was telling you about the investors, my thing is this: I believe, and I think that you and I could do a study on this, and it goes along with the topic of being online and searching for different stuff, when you get news, the way news is broadcast today, whether it's on a television, on a Hulu, a YouTube, or whatever the hell you do, or on an article, I would make the proposition, I would challenge everybody, that your heart and your physiology change the same way that when you watch a horror movie. So when it is the way that they've learned, just like from advertising, to get you to get that emotional "I'm a little, oh, that's, that's, oh my gosh." And you know that they're even saying stuff like, "Look at your screen! Look at what's happening right now!"

Yeah. And I don't think it's fair. But I think humans need to know that.

I think, well, that's, then you need to know that you're going to go through physiological changes.

Yes.

And you can continue those physiological changes, right? So that if you're constantly searching for that, you're going to constantly find it. It's just like any, but that happens to researchers, right? "Hey, if I constantly try to look for things that reinforce my hypothesis or my theory, what am I going to find? I'm only going to find things that reinforce it. I'm never going to look at the opposite or what it couldn't be or what I'm missing." But that's a... but that, you know, we have to make it theatrical, make it exciting to get those viewers. And the news started doing that a long time ago. But now it's even worse, because it's got a phone.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's the thing. Is that, "You're not going to believe this! Oh my God, it's, you're not, you've got, you're going to want to stick around to this next segment, because you're not..." That's not delivering the news.

Hey, that's quick.

So today, listen, I, when I was a kid and getting a ride to high school, the first high school I went to that didn't work out for me. But they would, you know, at that high school, listen to the news on NPR, and they would deliver that flatline. "Today, bus rolls over and kills 37 children in Lahore, Pakistan." And you're like, "Oh my God, that's terrible." But they just deliver it in that monotone, so it lets you react to whatever the situation is. It lets you decide what your emotional register is going to be versus just forcing you. But this goes into another, you know, we talked a little bit there about confirmation bias. But this is Flat Earthers, right? So one of the top-ranked Google searches, I was looking at, if anyone's listening, go to Google Trends, you can find out all kinds of cool stuff about what people in the U.S. or the whole world are Googling. It's a place I will never go.

Yeah.

So it's, but you put all these different parameters and use the data and make little charts out of them. It's really, really cool stuff. But what you find on there, so one of the things I wrote, it was like, "Why do people...?" And then you just see what comes up, right? Funny. And one of the top ones was, "Why do people think the earth is flat?" Right? So that was a very high-ranked Google search, trending over the last few years or whatever it is. So it took me back to immediately this, I know the answer, well, a general idea about the answer, is this: Netflix did a documentary about these Flat Earthers. And all you need to do, I forget the name of it, I got to figure it out, I got to remember to look it up again, you just got to watch the first seven minutes, because the interview and talk to the guy, looking that up, is about this guy who's like the head guy in the Flat Earth movement. He's like their guy. And it's hilarious, because they're having a conversation, and he's going, "Well, you know, how did you stumble on this, or what did you come across, or what made you get into this?" And he goes, "Well, I was looking into a number of things. I was looking into some of the conspiracies at Area 51, the JFK assassination." And he went off like every possible conspiracy. And you're like, "Okay, that's all you need to know about that. That's all you need to know about this guy. He was looking for a conspiracy to believe, and he wanted to go on the fringe, and then would be fine. And then he ran with it." And it was so hilarious. That's all you need. You need the first seven minutes of the documentary and now you get it, because that's human behavior. So, I would ask you, Greg, is why do people think the earth is flat?

Okay, so can I tell the question, though? It is a loaded question, man. I'm used to it. I'm used to saying, "Hey, podcast today, to talk about the school bus safety in Irvine, California," and I tune in and get this. Yeah, but it's great. Okay, so here, let me tell you a story. Can I tell the story about Teacher? (Our call sign, Teacher.) We get on a plane and we got to fly to a place in New Mexico, then we got to pick up a sled and drive for hours through the night to another place in New Mexico. So we do this training gig for these people that are going elsewhere. And that's way back. You know, you know exactly where. You know the people that know, know.

And so on the way back, we are driving, and we're both dead tired because we were in bed and we were exhausted. So we're both coming back and Teach looks and goes, "Hey, we're right next to that Area 51 museum, all that other stuff." "No, it's Roswell." "You have your Roswell, New Mexico." And I go, "What's Roswell like?" Because I'm the village idiot. But I get the most death threats, folks, listen up, most death threats when I say there is no Bigfoot. And that there are folks, there are people that are willing to kill me. Sometimes it's the hat, you know what I'm saying? So I get... I go, "Teach, it's like 6:30 in the morning."

So we go to a place across the street that's the "Alien Inn" or something coffee house. We wait till the place opens. We go over and there's a doctor there, an "oh crap" doctor. And he goes, "Hey, welcome. What are your interests?" And I'm like, "Yeah, you're already asking too many questions." You do it. "Yeah, I'm paying my nine dollars to see this crappy museum." First of all, folks, it's an amazing museum. Second of all, the little town was wonderful and the people are great. So we go through and it takes us, I'm guessing, Brian, two and a half hours to get through the entire museum. And they're showing Leonard Nimoy used to do a series called In Search Of. And my thing from even being a little kid was if you're asking questions to your audience, that's the problem. So they go, "Could this be the lost, you know, whatever?" And then the next thing is, "Could this be a piece of the fabric from the actual ship?"

And so this is the entire thing. And they've got a library, and they got pictures, and they got the boot who had found the weather balloon. All of that stuff to the very end. And the last thing before you exit is this thing on, "Are aliens among us?" And if they are, what they look like. And there was this graph that showed from the big-headed aliens, to the, you know, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, alien, all the way to alligator people, aliens that are in Florida, and then the Bigfoot. So Bigfoot, they made the ipso facto, "If then, Bigfoot is an alien."

So I'm thinking about The Six Million Dollar Man. When I was growing up, there was an episode where Bigfoot was a robot that helped you... doo-doo-doo-doo-doo... (for all our listeners that are over like ninety, you'll get that). But the idea was that the very last thing, it says, "Hey, this film was a fake. This was a piece of my ass. I'm a weather balloon." This and this is a plaque that's eye-level on the door as you hit the exit to go out. Everything that you just spent the last two and a half hours seeing has been explained by science. But it's the smallest part of the entire thing. And by the time you get there, I was buying the Wookiee hat. You know what I'm trying to say? I bought the dash cam coffee mug that looked like a flying saucer.

When we can't explain things, what we want to do is we want to look for an explanation. So, listen, I had a good ride on my horse and my horse didn't kill me. Julie and I owned the Powderhorn Ranch for 13 years, and so we had people that were great riders, people that weren't great riders. And we'd take them out on a horse and we'd match. And Shelley's a genius at matching horse personalities to humans, right? But we're talking about anthropomorphism here. The answer would come back that was scared to death. And I'll tell you this, if you're ever going to take your kid out for a ride, go up to the horse, and people would push their kids at us and get them on a horse, get them on a horse. Do you know how much a horse weighs? Get it out of nowhere. Say, "You kneel, kneel in front of a horse and look up." That's what your kid sees.

Exactly. I have to de-escalate this.

Yeah, yeah. And the parents are like, "Ah!" So we'd come back from the ride and go, "How was your ride on Troy? How was it?" And they'd go, "Oh, it was amazing! It was like the horse knew my every move!" Do you think the horse knew their every move, or do you think the horse was being a horse? The idea is the horse was being a horse, but you attributed certain facets to those things to be able to have a story you could tell, like, to make sense. What's the most common thing that you hear when a person says, "Hey, a tornado is coming?" What do they always equate it to, Brian?

Train. Train.

Okay. So what is that? That's the part of your brain that looks for file folders and says, "If then..." So, "This is close to this and therefore now that becomes my new reality." Now, whether it sounds like that or not, it doesn't matter, because to the human. And then the first human says that, and the second one goes, "Hey, Jim, when he was talking about that in Iowa..." Do you see what I'm trying to say? It becomes an urban myth, an urban legend that is greater than the sum of all the parts.

So that, you know, we want to look for an explanation. And so you do like, and this is, this goes into like, if you've never really done good research before, right?

Yeah.

You're not always going to find the answer. Right? And you have to be comfortable not knowing everything and being able to say, "This is what I can prove." Because some of these have not. Why don't you know?

Yeah. What can you prove? You're exactly right.

That's, that's the thing. Is that, so why do we jump to that? All right? So if I can't understand it and go, "Hey, look, I don't know," my simple brain says, "I don't understand how this thing got here." Why do people then jump to, "Well, it's got to be from outer space"? How is it, why don't we go down a practical route? Let's see how do we make the puzzle piece fit before we go get a different puzzle? You know, anything like that? Why don't we do...? Do you know what the Fibonacci sequence is, Brian?

Hate the part. This is the part for our viewers that I want it up on the screen so they can refer to it when I'm about to say. Go on and explain that, please. Because here's the thing, I know you're bringing that up. Just recently, I brought it up randomly. I think I was having a stroke at the time. I think whatever I was thinking of some other algorithm. You know, it's like I was going, "9-1," and then the other person said, "1-9-1-1." No, no, Brian.

So the idea is this: egregiously insane connections come into your brain when your brain ends up on an empty Rolodex file folder. So I want you to think of the Rolodex, the old-time thing that would go around, with an index card on it. And you could come to it to look for a cockroach, cleaning, carpet, whatever, I'm done, a letter C. According to, when you come up on a novel experience, and remember how your brain takes things, all of a sudden there's all this imagery that's coming in, and you have a smell and a scent. And now it's right formulated. If it goes to a file and it doesn't have one for the file, then that's extraordinary, that's unusual, that's novel. And so your brain has one of two choices: either it's a fact, a bona fide thing, and you absolutely understand it, or it's this mythological beast that showed up.

And if you're watching television, don't ever watch... well, I'm going to get bad letters about that. There's these shows out there about, what do you call them, the parapsychologists, and all these people put together these things and they do interviews. And they had this guy, a shirtless Russian guy (not Putin, the younger guy), and he's laying on a couch, and he's talking to his phone. This is his interview about something that he saw that was earth-shattering. Remember, it's so important to him that he's got to post it, but he couldn't even put a shirt on! And he's talking about this gnome-like woman that came out of the woods when he and his horse were taking turnips to the barn. Okay? So the whole thing was grainy, crappy in the photographs, moving around, one. All lies. One, you will fixate. Your visual field was the entire back of your head. You will orient, you will lock onto this thing because you got to go friend or foe. You got to go, "Oh my God, thing. Am I going to eat it? Am I going to make love to it?" You get what I'm trying to say? So you're going through all these categories, and you will never forget it. Why? Because it's so novel. And you're likely to go off the map trying to explain it because you don't have a rational explanation. So what's the opposite of rational? Irrational.

Well, you know, when we're talking about a congruent signal, we talk about incongruent signals a lot. But we never talk about a congruent, is there a signal? Because they're normal. So normalized stuff goes by the wayside. But novel things go way over.

So, if that happens and like, I immediately jump to, "Okay, this is a Bigfoot or a garden gnome or something." Is that, you say, if I don't have a file folder for that, but I feel like maybe you can get file folders, corrupt file folders implanted, right?

Yes.

So, because everything your brain takes in a lot of times it doesn't understand the difference between reality and fiction. Right? So if you watch there many times, yes, you could watch a movie and you're basically implanting file folders. So your brain doesn't understand something, it will go to a memory or a scene or a sound bite that may have been completely fictional. Right? I mean, and you'll implant it. Is that what you're saying?

Like you can take, Brian, I saw a Marine run from a roof. We were doing top-down, bottom-up house clearing. It was a very kinetic environment. And I saw a Marine, and I think it was a... what did you guys have back there? The 240, because it was swinging from his neck, and he had extra ammo and everything, you know what I'm saying?

(M249?)

You're exactly right. M249. So he's running for the end of the building, and he took a dive off a building and fell what would be two stories, so that's 20 some feet. I would guess, I am no math magician. And almost died. And the other Marine was ready to pick up and jump that next building again. And I'm stymied. I'm like, "Whoa, what's going on?" Was he trying to, "No, don't worry, I can do it. I just wanted a dragon ride!" Yeah, what it is is we were going in the bottom of one building, clearing that, time the roof, going to the very other roof. You know, and these were further apart than any of the other ones. And so the idea was that these Marines had the superimposed image that, "Listen, I can do this! That's not that far away!" And now you've got the adrenaline, and you've got the, you know, hey, combat, and my life or death may hang in the balance, and now I got my buddies, I don't want to disappoint these Marines around. So this chemical cocktail is going through your brain and you believe you can do things. Now, you've heard of things where a person lifted a piano after an armadillo, or somebody moved the power from a baby, or whatever else. It's the same type of thing.

One, most of those are lies. Two, we have that extraordinary burst of energy and strength, but it never happened. It was some other thing that happened to shift their car. But we believe them. And why do we believe them? Because we have to have something to fill that space. We don't know what happened. The startle effect was there. We know that there was an effect, but we're not sure the cause. And so therefore, we have to create something that's at least realistic enough for the cause.

Now listen, I've never read anything about these Flat Earthers, but I can tell you how that starts. So if I came up to you and I said, "Listen, the reason that planes fly in an arc when you see a globe is because the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. So having a parabola doesn't make any sense. And the reason is that the Earth is flat. It's actually a square. And that, you know, jives with white space and stars. And if you turn it in this way, and you know what, if you do a good thing and you've got a band behind you and you've got India, and now this guy coming in, you're going to have a dozen people in that audience believe you." Yeah, and those people will want to send you money. And now you've got something in Hollywood going, "Holy crap, we should do a 20-minute show on this," you know, "and 10 minutes of commercials." I'm not saying it's fraudulent, Brian, I'm saying that there's gaps in our brain. And when we process information, it's just as likely we're going to take an unreasonable approach to it as we're going to take an okay approach. And the more brightly colored and flashy and crazy, the easier it is to remember. The apps, it's easier to remember.

So if that's the case, right? Because you brought up, it's funny, because you brought up the Area 51 Roswell. I think it was on The X-Files, didn't they always say that "people want to believe"? Something that was like their show tagline. Yeah, but it, but then why is it then when they come to that, why do they, why do we or anyone then resist any other contradictory information? To the point where it's not even, "I won't even listen to it," or "You won't even entertain something," or separate. Why do we just automatically just tune out any information that contradicts their thoughts?

One, we use terms like hero and expert and those type of things just colloquially. Okay? And a great friend of ours, a colleague, back in the day, very old and very Greek, said, "If everybody's a hero, nobody's a hero." And I want our folks to remember that. Because writing, were you used it? The more you try to define. So then I'll take something that happened in the East, I'm thinking like by Chappaquiddick, which is already famous for that Champy, which is the Loch Ness Monster that comes up in the lake. And some guy had been, he had seen the cell phone video.

Yeah, yeah.

So Loch Ness, but Chappaquiddick, it's Champy.

Okay, actually, I have one right. Oh, I didn't know they had... Look up Champy. There's our next podcast, people. Follow and now send us your photos.

But listen, Brian, this guy was out and he took a photo, and here was this serpentine creature swimming in the water. So what he did is he controlled the perspective of his cell phone video. And said this creature was moving in, and there's waves and everything else. And now you don't know scale. So it looks amazingly huge, and it's moving upriver right towards the camera. The guys that debunked him, the item was still there. It's a twig. And the twig is hanging off a bush, and there's a piece of plastic. And the wind and the water, and it's very small, it's maybe six inches long, is making it rise in the water, giving it the serpentine look. So when you saw it, and you didn't have the border, and you could determine the scale and the size, and you knew that it was an optical illusion, it was a... An optical illusion isn't as good as saying it's a cognitive illusion. You know what I'm trying to say? Because your brain says, "Well, that's close enough." And it locks onto that. And it's hard to come off of that. Why? Because I saw that zoomed-in image. Now people were shown these two videos next to each other, the actual and the other one. And they said, "It's a cover-up! There's actually that snake, but the government came in and they tried to cover it up."

Famous one in Russia, people were found, their faces were ripped off. And if it, and it was that deadly. And so all of the damage was consistent. Every single rational person that looked at it. But again, you've got different values in parts of the country with it, different intellect levels, different news media personalities that you trust or you don't. But you don't feed into it.

Yeah, right, right. They feed into confirmation bias, and we only want to... what we want to believe. But you want to tend to look for those pieces of evidence that only support our story. That's a big part of it, too, Brian. Because we don't want to consider your answer. We want to say, "Well, all of this information tends to show that I'm correct." And that's our ego system, too. Right? And that goes into, I mean, people, you know, false convictions on crimes, but more so just false conviction even without someone confessing and not looking at outside evidence. But that goes into the media, does that. The people, we as a society do that to people. We jump on it and bash people without seeing the full picture.

But you brought in, I just wanted, the term you said is because it was a literal perspective of video. But perspective is a big one. Yes. And people talk about it, and there's even, I saw a great one, actually, another one on LinkedIn yesterday. Your buddy, Gary Klein, a response to all kinds of genius. Anyway, because someone said, "Hey, you know, we did this meta-analysis, this study, and we talked about taking other people's perspective in this." And they were saying, "Hey, that's actually not," these people, these researchers saying, "Well, it's like, 'Well, that's actually not a really useful tool.'" And Klein got on there, was like, "Well, hang on a minute, you're not looking at the problem." So it's interesting how those things go back and forth and we, you have those platitudes, but it's a lot about perspective and our perspective can lead to that bias. Right?

Yes, yes. Oh, no, no, you're right on. And I think anybody listening to Brian right now, if you're at home, jot down on your yellow pad, "forced perspective." Because Brian was talking about forced perspective from your perspective, and then biased people telling you information that might not have scientific scrutiny behind it. But I'm telling you also that visually, because your visual field is such a large part of how you process, areas small... Has anybody seen a postcard where somebody was holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa? Well, what did they do? Some of the greatest filmmakers of all time used forced perspective. You have an object that's way in the back, and an object that's close. Those happen all the time. As a matter of fact, there was a ghost town that I went to, and I must have seen 10 museums in the ghost town, Calico Ghost Town.

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly it.

And do you know, when you're going through there, all of the photos that they show of the ghosts are a problem with one of two things: camera or the film. Okay, then I would add lighting. And I would say the final thing, perspective. And the fourth thing is if anybody's going to hold something up to you and go, "Look, look back there! Look by the drapes and look right in here! Now what do you see there?" If somebody's doing that to you, you're getting a huckster, you're getting the con man. Because they think they see it, now they're trying to get you on board. If it was a thing, do you think you'd see it? Do you think if there was a ghost and a ghost came into your house, you would experience it?

Now, I'm in Roadman or West, which is partially haunted, and there's a Kimball who will make himself known every once in a while. But I'm not sitting there going down to Lani, my neighbor, and going, "Lani, you got to come up and see this, you know, the vertical book stacking incident." The idea is that when we can't explain something, we create something. So a novel thing happened in the house, it's recurred a couple of times, and now it's Kimball, Kimball the Ghost of Christmas Past. And guess what? We know when the house was built, and we know all the people that lived there. And I've done the interviews with everybody that did all the construction here, and there's nothing there. So guess what? The only place it could have started is here. And the only person that can keep it alive is me. So I get Shelley to buy into it. And she goes, "What's up?" And I saw something out of my peripheral. Well, you see the amount of lighting that's in the room. And so the slightest thing, a bird flying by, snow falling on the roof, anything else that makes something, I have to account for. So now I have to attend to that item. And my brain doesn't want to burn calories, because my brain's already come to the decision, "It's not dangerous. I know it's not dangerous." I didn't orient. My catecholamine group didn't start pumping out, you know what I'm trying to say? So the idea is that those things would have been triggers that it's real. And now your answer is going to be, "Yeah, but when I was in the woods, I got scared because I heard a sound ahead."

What happened is now your sensory system opened up. And what do you think happens when my sensory system opens up? Things get bigger, time goes slower, and now my imagination picks... well, a perfect way, you're going to pick that bear and turn it into a Bigfoot. The worst call on the street, as a copper, I was a copper just under 30 years, folks. So I don't know much, but I'll tell you this: unknown trouble. You get a call, "unknown trouble." On the way to the unknown trouble, we bleep, you know, your trafficking, everything else. You're going, "Baby with machete has killed mother!" You're going paratrooping. You don't know what's going on. So, doo-doo-doo-doo, and you got the Jeopardy theme playing in the background, and you're ramping up. And you get there, and it's, you know, "Guy backed over himself." Had one of those, kid, guy was an Avon lady. The guy was going out the door. The kid was in the car, kid stood on the steering wheel and was holding it while the guy left the car running. Somehow the kid put the car in reverse, and as it was backing up, he tried to jump out and pinned himself under the car. So how do you think...? Truth is always stranger than fiction.

It is.

But I'm on the way to that call. And this was the guy's call on 911, B.O.D.O. So yeah, yeah. It sends it out as, "Okay, we need, you know, this and that." Well, guess what happens? Those gaps, those fractures, have to be filled in. And it doesn't mean that your brain is going to grab... Your brain is going to grab like instances or things you've seen. And you said it, if you read a lot of comic books, part of that's going to be coming. Read a lot of action movies, all it's going to be action stuff. Have you ever had a friend that spends a little too much time on the blue sites on the internet and every time you go to Denny's he goes, "Hey, that waitress is making eye contact with me." You know what I'm trying to say?

Are you mean the one with the lazy eye? Yeah.

You can turn that misinformation, or the lack of credible information, or just a lack of total information, you turn that into...

So then how do I, yeah? So how do I counter that? Because to me, on Flat Earthers, because it's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. I love it. Now, I may be now resolved to look at that, maybe not the dumbest thing I've ever heard, but certainly one of them today. And the great lengths that they go through to say, "Hey, this is, no, this is a legitimate way to look at the world." But, anyway, and I go to that, but I also, I bash on them knowing that we all are a Flat Earther in a way, right? With our own thoughts or beliefs, or you have something we can all do that. It can happen to all of us. So because you brought up a great one about truth being stranger than fiction.

Yeah.

It is. I mean, ask people that have traveled, even just traveled around the world. Or like, "Look, man, I've seen some weird, crazy stuff that happens and there's a logical explanation. And it's always more, it's, you know, it's always crazier than the Stephen King novel, actually a lot." You know what I'm saying? Like, you, when you see what happens in real life, yeah, that's where those stories come from. But how do I counter that? Right? How do I counter that, that falling into that trap of only looking at my own beliefs or reconfirming what my already suspicions were? How do I counter that? What's a way to balance that in my everyday life?

You throw this out, let me throw out something that we talked about in terms of self-defense and situation awareness and human behavior pattern recognition analysis a lot, but we don't really go into much detail in this type of analysis. If you think of the gift of time and distance, it will make you safer because you're going to make better critical thinking decisions at precise moments. So, very simple. Hold out your hand. Try to cover the incident with your thumb. Ramos's Rule of Thumb says that if you can cover the entire car on a traffic stop, people in the market, anything else, then you're going there, the chemical spill, you're going to give yourself enough time to analyze that and go, "It looks like this and I think it's this, but what else could it be?"

Now, I'm not saying that you have to create an explanatory storyline in the heat of battle. I'm talking about in situations where you have time. Like many of these that we're talking about, the ghosts and Mr. Chicken, the organ upstairs is playing in the haunted house. If you slow time down and if you take a look at it, there's likely a rational explanation. And I'll give you one, and it's always about stuff that scares us to our core. And it goes back to life and death decisions.

So I'm a supervisor on the road and I get a call. And it's an old Italian family, and I go there, and there's candles up all over the house. And it's like 2:00 in the morning. And the great-grandmother died. And it's a horrific event. And everybody's crying, everybody's wearing black. And she's been there all day. This is now the time they've called. So we have to make sure that there's no signs of foul play. Then the coroner comes. Then other things like the funeral home. So I go, and it's a very small bedroom in the north part of our town, not here, back in Michigan, it doesn't matter, I guess. And then I walked in and sat down. And so I do a couple of things that I do at a potential crime scene. And there's no indications that there's anything other than this poor old woman passed.

Do a couple of interviews of the people. They're all broken up, they say things. Take a couple of photos so I can remember it if I have to testify later. I go back in the room, and I'm catching up on my log waiting for the coroner to show up. We're going to drive and then call for the funeral home. As I'm there, the woman continues to move. Now, here we've got a mid-90s woman. She's laying on a bed. They've got her covered up to the waist with the heaviest blankets, you know, because she's a frail little thing. She's got her hands crossed on her stomach. They've got candles in the room. And she's laying back with her eyes closed. So, first one handles it, okay? Then both hands, no. Now both hands move down to her sides. And then all of a sudden onto the bed. And I'm sitting there and I'm going, "Okay, what's the first thing?" And I want to ask you what an elaborate set that they got all of these people in this room to buy into it, pick the house, and all my other fellow coppers are in on it. And I'm being filmed right now. So what I'm trying to do is hold it together, because inside I'm going, you know, "Should I stay or should I go?" First of all, do I have to shoot a demon? Because I saw this poor woman is now becoming this thing where I'm saying, and all of a sudden I can see the bed move and she's moving and the clothing's moving.

So I get up and I look around. And I go, "This is the most ridiculous thing." I walk out. I have to give myself the gift of time and distance. I have to change my perspective. So I go up to the one person that's standing closest to the door, watching my every move, thinking I'm going to look for these signs. And I said, "Hey, what gives?" And he goes, "Oh, you know what? We've been giving her baking soda all day long, because she has dyspepsia. She said that her stomach was bothering her." So when I go back in the room, I watch for just a minute. And her stomach is expanding. She's dead. And as she's deceased, her stomach acid and the gases in her body are building. Her mouth is still closed, everything is closed. And what's happening is her stomach is expanding. And guess what? That caused her hands to move, then fall down to her sides. That caused her clothing to move and the bedsheets to move. But Brian, oh yeah, here she was coming back to life and it was a zombie apocalypse. And you're doing that.

I knew it! I knew it! I've got to put another one in the birds that you're supposed to shoot.

I'm getting shivers thinking about that story in that small room, as quiet as it was, and nobody but crying and the candle smell and everything else. I still to this day, and that memory's 35 years old now, I still to this day can feel that and feel sorry for what I thought about that woman, because I was going to put two to the head and one to the chest. And Brian, I'm telling you, I think that life is full of experiences. I didn't have to see that's an irrational. But you get my idea is that sometimes we see things and our brain makes comparisons because it doesn't have the experience to draw on the scientific answer. I would tell you to wait just nanoseconds to a few seconds and consider alternative hypotheses, because one of them is probably much more likely. And I would also say that sometimes people do have fun. There are people that are members of your Flat Earth Society because they want to call another person in and this is the way to... Yeah, there are people that you're going to join, but there are people who have an amazing retreat every quarter. But there are those people who are like believers. Okay.

All right. So, you know, one, we talked about the feeling or need to explain things, right? And sometimes we go to the absurd. And it will implant those file folders and go, "Oh my God, don't rush to an unreasonable conclusion." Then, if that, if we have a tendency where people can do that or fall into that, well, why do we then still have a hard time, because you sent me an article earlier this week of the two off-duty police officers sitting in a diner eating, and a guy walked in with a gun and a mask and started robbing the place? And then it still took a minute to go... So why do they tie in? So why don't we then do that?

So here you got two coppers. First of all, what you got to do is you got to put a scale. This is the opposite end, right? We're talking the Raising Cane's scenario. Folks, there's a restaurant called Raising Cane's, and there's two married coppers that are off-duty having a dinner at Raising Cane's. Guy comes in, guy's wearing gloves, guy's wearing one of those masks that you wear because of the coronavirus. And walked straight up to the counter. And guess what, Brian, the reason I'm saying handling a scale, making sure that we look at it through a perspective lens, not a straw, is that nobody but the robber and the counter person were keyed in at that point.

Now, yeah, two coppers that weren't very close, but they saw what was going on. And they were ahead of everybody else. They had more...

Oh, absolutely. What I'm trying to say, and both of them were trying to talk themselves out of it. And I'm telling you, the conversation went like this, "Oh, this ain't happening. Oh, this guy ain't robbing the place." That's what we do. So anybody was experiencing, you know, "There's no way, because the next thing that's going to happen if this is a robbery, is he's going to do this." And there go the hands. "Well, I'll be a son!" Now you're talking across the counter. And Shelley and I would do this all the time. We did as many felonies off-duty as we did on-duty. You captured... I'd be going, "Okay, so you're going to follow them because they're not going to expect a woman. I'm going to call 911. Tell the person not to touch anything. So, Shel, when you go out, are you going to go right or left?" "Well, it depends on him." "Yeah, I got it. But are you going to go right or left?" "I'll go right." "I'll go left." "Okay, so if I say, 'Mr. Jones!' really loud, that means you kneel down." We have this whole running dialogue, going, and we would think afterwards that it took 15 minutes. Guess how long that takes? Boom! Because you have a plan.

So here's the one good thing, shout out to those coppers that, yeah, and here's the bad thing about that situation, it took till this and all that other stuff. Why? Because denial, denial comes into your brain and says, "I don't want to burn any calories on this situation unless it's absolutely dangerous to me." Why? Because we've evolved past the saber-tooth tiger biting your neighbor on the head and dragging him into a cave. So evolution has actually de-evolved our ability to sense danger and to say, "That's enough! You got to draw a line in the sand, Brian, and you got to say, 'At this point, it's likely that this is a robbery and it's a robbery in progress. So now we're going to split up and take different points.'"

Look, I love that they didn't contact the guy in the store, but I'm not sure I love the fact that they chased him down outside in the dark, in clothes. I mean, look, that's good, rushing into the attack. Our patience and everything was tested. But that's, so is it a form, would you call it, would it be fair to articulate it almost as a form of denial on both sides? Right? Meaning...

Yes.

Okay, "This must be Bigfoot. I can't see any other explanation." But where now, this was an example I brought up, but how many people in that restaurant didn't notice it, never thought, "Well, it must just be this," it must... read the article. But that's it, "Wait a minute, I was there that day." So some people go to the extreme, meaning, "Well, it must be something completely absurd or extraordinary."

Yep.

But then other people go to the, "No, it must just be what it seems. That person's only wearing that mask because they're sick." You get what I'm saying? It's almost, you see something strange and everything, you're always...

Okay, so you have to, you know, you got... why is it that, is it a form of denial on either side? Yes. But let's make sure we define that further. So let's go back to your Fibonacci sequence. There's a thing, and I don't know the name of it, and folks are going to hate me because if you look it up online you'll be able to find it in just a minute. But I'm not online other than doing podcasts and stuff. There's a thing where if you take, and it's a scientific fact, if you take all the number of stars that are likely in our universe and expand that, you go out and you say, "This is the amount of light." If that's here, you will come to a thing saying, "Well, there's probably life on this many planets elsewhere. Statistically speaking, there has to be some form of life somewhere else." Right? So that's in column one, due to the sheer number of Gallagher psychic. Okay, so put that study in number one.

Now number two is they use the term unidentified flying objects. And now there's a new one, unidentified underwater objects, or there's a couple, they call it something else now. But in Lake Granby, in Colorado, there's an entire UFO city that's down below there. There's one of the things that's happening, you hear what I'm trying to say? And it's there to make money to come and go, "Hey, is this where the UFOs start from?" Nothing, there's an airbase down the road, right? And they're testing stuff. But the idea is that that same logic that got us to number one, the unidentified flying objects, there's a statistician out there and the statistician says, "Listen, out of all of these things, this number, 170,000 reports of flying saucers, we were able to say 135,000 of them were definitely airplanes. We were able to say 25,000 of those were weather balloons. 10,000 were swamp gas brought on by excess cow methane and barometric pressure. But we can't account for 1311 of those." "Well, Greg, it's got to be..." My idea is, again, graph it out in your own brain. I don't give a damn what the numbers are. The idea is, at the end of the day, Brian, those ones that are unaccounted for, that person goes, "There you go, that's my proof!" So just logically to them, there's got to be some planets and damp, you know, ice with liquid water that has amoebic life. And that could form. Just as likely as that is the fact that you can't disprove the fact that these are unidentified. And that's what they rest their hat on, Brian.

And you're going to get people that do that. Listen, when I had to come to Colorado, and Colorado is different than Detroit, I know it doesn't seem as though it is. I had to come from mainstream Colorado to the middle of nowhere, Colorado. And I got to meet some people that live like there's whirling disease and chronic wasting disease. So sometimes I would have to go back to a ranch or a farm that had been there since the mid-1800s, talk to somebody about it. And they had a different way of explaining a lot. You know, it's like putting a mustard plaster on that. "Joe, you'll straighten right out here. Put some tobacco on it." Yeah, those things are still out there. And in the Information Age, because we're bombarded with the thought of these other things, sometimes we pick one. And I'm telling you, the brain will race to an unreasonable conclusion just because it's got to make order out of chaos and can't move forward without doing that. So filling that blank file folder is essential to humans. And so therefore, whatever is handy, even this egregiously wrong scenario with the Bigfoot, is going to fit that file folder. And guess what? I'll come back to it.

You ever see this thing with the repressed memories? There's a whole movie about it. People went to Alaska and everyone got through how much is in a human ass that all of them are ears. But I want you to think about it for a minute. If we were talking, and what is up there that's so important to alien cultures, it has something to do with time travel, I'm sure. You know what I'm saying? But Brian, that's what I'm telling you is I'm saying, be suspicious when there's no fact-based data set to follow it up. Be suspicious when people are asking questions and trying to point to what you should believe out of an argument. If an argument, I go to math. I can go to Germany, I can go to Japan and talk mathematically. Clearly, my number says, "No. The Fibonacci sequence is the same." We can go to a place and everybody understands the concepts of snow, or ice, or air, or water. So I say, stick with those common factors. It's likely that if it's something new, everybody will know it's new. And it'll be so novel that you won't get a shaky picture of it. Somebody will stand there even if they die, even if they die at the scene, to show the other thing. For example, it's novel in California, Brian, for those mudslides to take a house down. Right?

Yeah.

Who do or do not people stand for hours with their cameras to get that dead thing because it's so amazing to our brains? Or any of those cameras shaky footage? Think about the sinkholes. Think about a dam. People will stay there and wait till Godzilla steps on their head. No.

It's so yeah, you get, that's, those are the same concept between these people that are dying every year taking selfies because they've fallen off a cliff or something. It's so incredibly important to what they're doing and so enthralled by it. And when there's...

Well, yeah, when they're going down, probably.

But yeah, I mean, that's, it's interesting how, you know, we don't always, like we always, you have to use the terms likely or unlikely, even with that current project where people keep talking about intent, and we have to say, "Well, it's likely intent," because it may be something else. So you have factors tend to show that it's likely then...

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So, and I, but a lot, but a lot of people don't like that, right? We want a definitive answer. I want it to be black and white. I want yes, no. And when you have to get into and they articulate something, it's like, "This is what I saw, this is what I can prove, here's what I think is likely occurring," right?

Oh, it's this study physics. Because physics is the closest thing to HBP RNA that you can get. And I will tell you this, Brian, this is a great thing for anybody that was watching or listening to this episode to think about. How many times have we seen a parent on there going, "My son or daughter couldn't have done this"? There is no, "My son is responsible for this." We all know it. That ability to distance yourself from your own family member is emotional. It has nothing to do with science. It's chemical. It's oxytocin coming in and saying, "I love this person so much that I'm to believe all other alternatives other than the person is just..."

Sue Klebold is still getting paid going on speaking tours talking about she never thought her son would be the one to shoot up Columbine. "We did this, we asked him about guns, he knew he couldn't have guns in this house and we were not him." It was part... So she's still doing it, still getting paid. And people are going, "Oh, this is amazing!" But people listening are believing it. She would pass. Why did the walk? Because she believes it. And what did she say? What did she say when she heard the news reports? We know what she said. She said, "I am, and I hoped he killed himself before he killed more people." Okay, but now you're going around saying, "Well, no, we had these real look," and it's hardening. "You can't know, and we weren't, we weren't sure, and we had all these rules in place." And you're going that, never, you know, never accepting her part of responsibility. And I know that comes into it as humans might want acceptability. And she never will. And if she watches this episode, she'll get a lawyer and she'll say, "This is..." And she won't see the forest for the trees.

So Tobias R. in a small place outside of Frankfurt, Germany, yesterday killed a bunch of people. And the news media wants us to believe that this quiet loner that lived in an apartment with his mother gave no signs. And Brian, I will call horseshit right now in every such article. Why do we do that? We do that because we can't believe that Jeffrey Dahmer lived next to us. We cannot believe that Eric Harris spent two years planning Columbine right under our noses when we ate dinner with them. What you don't understand, folks, is they're not that same person in that environment. When their cup was full, they decided it was time and rage was going. But before that, they had good times. They went to a movie, they went bowling, they decided to have dinner. They didn't just turn into this maleficent human that hated everybody. Because then we would have known him, would've said, "That's the ass that lives above me." But here this guy had pages and pages of a manifesto that were posted. He had videos of him saying why he was going to do it. He told everybody how he hated it, and which countries and everything else. But guess what? Nobody puts the dots together, Brian. So here when we have evidence staring us in the face that this is the most likely person that's going to do it, and in Germany they had two other such incidents in the last year that were in the same vein, we failed to want to look at it. You know, we'll have a fire drill, Brian. Yeah, we don't want to have an active shooter drill. We'll pay for armored guards and armed guards, but we won't pay for a little bit of training to be able to see incongruent signals and determine danger.

No. And we'll teach a kid not to play with matches, but we won't teach him how to spot someone who's having difficulty in their social interaction with humans and not being efficient, or lash out.

Or lashes. Yeah.

And so that, that goes on. That's again, I know that's on the denial phase. And we don't want to believe it, but it is. So because you, you brought up a number of examples of those people, and I, because it always brings me back to, was it Kip Kinkel? Why do I keep forgetting? Or Elliot Rodger with the Starbucks photo, remember, it's in his car and he's going to Starbucks, and that... and that's the thing. It's like you, you're standing in a Starbucks, that person's sitting on their laptop writing the manifesto right next to you. This is how it works. They're not, you're not going... I mean, it's, it'd be difficult to detect, but not really if you're paying attention, right? So your brother can come up...

So it's important to talk about Kip Kinkel. Folks, for your... remember, we always assign homework, go back and look up Kip Kinkel. But Brian, Kip helped his mom carry the groceries upstairs from her parked car, then shot her in the head with a .22 and rolled her in a blanket. Waited until Dad came home. Dad was on the phone saying, "I'm at wit's end, don't know what to do with the kid, everything else." Waited till he came up the stairs, walked in the kitchen, and sat down, then shot him. Then went on with the date that he had planned, played video games until the next morning when he went to school to do the shooting. Once you have gone down that path, and there's some of the bells that you can't unring, are you telling me that his kids that were there with him didn't know a difference? They couldn't see that something later? The idea is denial. You don't want to see it. They were there to play a game. They weren't there to talk to Kip about his last arrest. They weren't there to say, "Hey, where's Mom and Dad?" You get what I'm trying to say? So the idea is you willfully absenting yourself from facts and knowledge is no excuse for you believing in stupid things. That's you acting in a stupid manner.

But that's similar to even someone who's, you know, that you've read a lot about, I don't know how much it's, you know, but when people go to decide to commit suicide, right? They're having a horrible time, everyone knows you're depressed, they're feeling down, right? If people are trying to help them or whatever, then all of a sudden one day they're just, "Hey, yes! How's it going?" You know, "Hey, how you doing? Happy as a..." You know, they're just happier than ever. Look like they're doing great. Because they made that decision. They have their plan and they're already going to initiate it, so I don't have a care in the world. Right? It's, and that can happen sometimes, it's just the opposite end of that, that Kip Kinkel precisely.

Right.

But it's that, so that that behavioral change, and what see, and incongruence. So somebody's going to tell you, "Hey, can you put that on a yellow pad for me? Can you laminate it so I have a check in the box?" No. Because humans are unique little snowflakes. And every one of us has our differences, and our peccadilloes, or our fantasies. So in other words, don't look for the individual signals in everybody. Look for the incongruent signals in the person right in front of you.

So, you brought up, and I don't remember if it's on a podcast or just when we're on the road the other week when we talked about, you gave the Krispy Kreme donut analogy, right? So at the end, we're driving, yeah, in horrible weather. And the base of it is that same basic donut that comes out, wouldn't you say everyone's the same? Then we put sprinkles on it, or we put chocolate or vanilla frosting. Take just a hole, or we put it on the shelf, or we put it on there, or they're day old, and there's a special category. It's not the same. Right? My point is with all these, we get wrapped, the media and society and all of us, we get wrapped in those details. "Look at what, look at what sprinkles you add on them. See that? I told you, those ones are bad ones. Those aren't good." Right? And it's deeper than that. That's all that seeks to get... that gets into the politics and religion and that's all after the fact. It's baseline and we're finding evidence to fit in each market rather than taking a look at just the big picture.

And Brian, I will tell you the words of a great, dear friend of mine, the VP of operations for Arcadia, Cagney Roddy, that says, "If you find me dead in my office, please delete my browser." So I know it's nothing to laugh about, but that's the first thing what a good friend would do. Don't scream!

Yeah. You don't, we don't want, I don't want the family finding out what was going on there. That wouldn't be good for anyone.

Well, what a note to kind of, great gut punch there, Brian. Really wrap it up on there. I thought maybe you were mistaken. And we all project and we transmit our intentions. Everybody telegraphs what they're going to do before they do it. If anybody tells you they don't, they're full of beans and they just haven't had the right amount of training. And you're not going to get it from reading a book, you're going to get it from going out and getting some in-person training and then doing the walkabout. You're going to have to go and do an urban training exercise where a mentor or a coach takes you through it and shows you how to do it. And then after a couple of times, scales fall from your eyes and you'll be able to do it on your own. Brian, those coppers that were in that gosh-darn restaurant, they knew something was up and nobody else did. And they did great stuff. And that's what I'm trying to say is their training helped them figure out that the guy coming in with the gloves and a mask on probably wasn't delivering the "Who Stole Lakisha?" He was probably going to rob the joint. And just that warning, Brian, gives us the gift of time and distance.

Yeah. Okay, well, I think that might be a good one to kind of, or good God only knows, I didn't know we were going to do the Flat Earth Society. They're probably going to sue us, too. And they should, I mean, thank you, Jack. I don't know what they're going to get out of it, man. There's nothing to sue us for. They're clearly in the wrong. So don't, don't buy into, don't, don't fight, folks. God, I just, I think it's sad that we have to, it's, we have to have serious, it's a lottery ticket as your retirement fund. Listen, you're going to believe a bunch of stuff that don't happen. But if we get to sit here and accept, "Oh, we don't have to accept certain principles," and then they're, "No," then anything's up for grabs, right? Then nothing matters or anything.

Delete the browser history. That's what I'm trying to say. That's how I was trying to make a correlative effect.

Thanks. Appreciate that. All right. Thanks to our listeners from... yeah, we lost everyone. Don't forget, training changes behavior. Okay.