L.O.G. 146 The What If Game

Hello and welcome to the video version of The Human Behavior Podcast. I'm Brian Marren, the host and creator of the show. As always, I will be joined by human behavior expert, Mr. Greg Williams, who the show is affectionately named after. On the show, we discuss different topics through the lenses of what we call human behavior pattern recognition analysis. If you'd like to find out more about what that is, please check the links in the episode details and go to our website to learn more. Please don't forget to follow us on social media. The links are also in the episode details, and hit the like and subscribe button to help support our work. Thanks for tuning in, and we hope you enjoy the show.

And on that note, Greg, we'll go ahead and get started. So, good morning. Today we're going to be talking about a topic that we haven't specifically discussed, even though we go over it in some form of it in most of the episodes. Finally, it took one of our listeners – thank you for reaching out and saying, "Hey, you guys keep saying this, and things go wrong. Why don't you just do an episode on it?" And I slapped my forehead and I said, "Yeah, that's right. That's a great idea."

So today is a discussion about the classic "what if" game. And what I mean by the "what if" game is, this is good. I know the military and sometimes law enforcement call tactical decision games, where I'm going to give you a scenario, Greg, or in this situation, and say, "What if this occurred? What could you do next, or how could you respond to that? What if this happens? I want to plan for it." It's good for planning purposes for operational games of how we use all the assets available. They're very simple and easy things to do.

In fact, a basic example: I do it with The Insurgent (Brian's daughter) all the time. "Okay, what if Mom or Mommy doesn't show up to pick you up? What should you do?" So it primes her to start thinking. And then I can give her examples of things that she can do and then quiz her later on that very simple. "Hey, what if the coach isn't there at practice? What should you do?" These are just basic things for teaching, for training, to get someone to have a solution or potential solution before the incident ever happens. Because, just like we talk about, anytime I see something new, novel, something I haven't experienced before, it's hard, especially if it's a stressful situation. It's hard to critically think through that, right? If I don't have an immediate response, muscle memory stuff is easy. But in the moment, how do I think critically? Well, if I play this "what if" game, it gives me options. It gives me what we call file folders or almost experiences. I'll share them, and then you'll go, "Oh, I remember Greg telling me about a situation where this occurred, and what he did was this," right? Because otherwise, my brain goes flipping through and goes, "We got nothing." And now I have to think. I have to think of an answer right now, and I don't have one. So the more I do this "what if" game, the better I can think in those moments because I'll have some idea or a concept.

So that's the idea. Now, we see good uses of it, bad uses of it. People come up with all kinds of crazy, like, "What if..." I see that with the military when they're talking about different base security stuff, and when you do red cell, then some guys will come in, "What if this happens?" And you come up with these elaborate and insane scenarios that are so unlikely it's ridiculous. It almost fills you with, it becomes the boogeyman, the Sasquatch. It becomes some ridiculous threat. Now that hinders my ability to problem-solve in those situations because, I mean, I used to do it too. "Does that might... okay, what if a van full of circus clowns comes out and they've got machetes taped to their hands, and they're running around on unicycles? What do you do then?" I mean, just to show how absurd.

Start filming, right?

Exactly, exactly. I always have some general considerations when playing this kind of "what if" game. These scenarios that I come up with, whether that's in a training scenario or just sitting around talking about it, they need to be realistic, they need to be logical, and they need to be based on likely events that you may encounter or that may occur, given the context of it. The solutions that you want, the answers to these kind of "what if" games, should be something that used your basic fundamentals, your basic tactics and procedures that are simple and available to you at the time. So, meaning, I don't want to have to come in, "Well, if that occurs, then I'm going to have to get in all these resources, then I'm going to call the FBI Hostage Rescue Team." It's like, "Okay, hang on." Whatever it is has to be simple and usable because if it becomes this elaborate thing, then I'm unlikely to remember that. So if I'm in that training center, it's going to be hard to think through that, and then I'm going to try and have to recall that at a later time. Whereas I like keeping it very simple and things that you can do, and then sort of some follow-up questions. But I wanted to just start with that as an introduction, Greg, and then kind of get your thoughts on it, and then we can get into maybe some examples and then follow-up questions, right? Testing your hypothesis, right? That's the big thing we'll talk about today. Is that a good way to frame the discussion?

I think it's a wonderful way. I came in loaded for bear because I thought the topic was "truth or dare." I had a whole bunch of things lined up that we would be...

We'll do that! We'll do that. We'll do that on the Patreon site, folks.

Exactly. And we'll have a couple of drinks before we go on. No, there's nothing better than that. No, Brian, as a matter of fact, I only took umbrage with one of the things that you said. You said "real" and "realistic" and another word that led me to believe that you were thinking that they had to be actual problems that could occur. And I would say to your brain, your brain doesn't know the difference between fantasy and reality. So I would think that as long as it's not absurd, that for example, how many times do I bring up a zombie apocalypse?

Right.

Right. Okay. And the reason is, the zombie apocalypse is a good idea of how to game this event, right?

Okay. I appreciate you giving me that because I just meant it can't be absurd, but I agree with you calling or refining my statement there because your "zompoc" example is a perfect thing that it's kind of absurd and ridiculous, but it's a game for planning and preparation purposes you can use to do it. I get what you're saying.

You, Teacher, and I, Shelly, we had to go down to a place – I don't want to get into a lot of detail, please – before an event that was a very important event that was going to happen outside the continental United States in a place where bad things were happening. We showed up, and our job was, we were flown down to first New Mexico and then further south, to take a look at this and comment on what we saw. We played the "what if" game with just the senior-most veterans, and they failed miserably. What I mean by that is, "How far can your vehicle run if the oil pan is shot up? What's the turning radius of the armored Suburban that you're driving in the village where this first event is going to happen?" They were like, "Well, the answers, if you remember, the answers were so disturbing because the answer is, 'Well, that's ridiculous. We'll see when we get there.' 'Hey, we're all experts in it.' Well, then give me the answer. What is the answer? Is it 36 feet? Is it 185 feet?" The thing is, we weren't trying to be adversarial.

I'll give you a "zompoc" one, Brian. "How long until basic unleaded fuel breaks down and no longer combusts?" Okay, well, there's a simple one. When I watch Hollywood try to do it, like Hollywood, "Well, we're going to run out of bullets." Do you have any idea how many bullets are out there? Right? So, these guys coming up with the hatchet, with the thing, that's Hollywood. They want to make it cool. It's Chin Wich Cook (likely a mispronunciation or reference to an obscure character/film). So the idea to me is that we're talking about sense-making, problem-solving at an executive level, at a graduate level. I'll give you two settings side by side that just popped into my head. You remember that gosh-darn sniper movie about Wahlberg where there's so much wrong with that film?

Yeah.

I watch it every time it comes on, just to go, "You know." You remember he gets shot, so he drives out of the village, not looking suspicious at all, in his stolen pickup truck, and he knocks the power grid out in this area so he can go to a place just before it closes and stand in the shadows and tell the woman, "Oh, can I get some pharmaceuticals? I know exactly what I need." It's so implausible. Then he gives himself a sucking chest wound drip, cuts away the tissue. Brian, do you know how unlikely that is? As a matter of fact, in 27 years of law enforcement with injured suspects, I've never seen that. As a matter of fact, I've seen them jeopardize their own capture by going to veterinarians or going to the emergency room under an assumed, "Oh, I fell while running with scissors." Why? Because humans will take the path of least resistance.

So, now let's play the "what if" game not in that specific incident, but a parallel incident: Ahmaud Arbery. You can't get on the news now without seeing what's the kid, Rittenhouse, or whatever that kid.

Rittenhouse.

Rittenhouse. Okay. Apparently, that's the most thing, and Arbery has been pushed back into the shadows. So I'm listening to Arbery, and I think, "What if Ahmaud Arbery was a thief? What if..." So, real, the two guys chased down Ahmaud Arbery in their neighborhood, ended up killing him because they said he was breaking into the house, and so they're on trial right now because it was completely unlawful, everything that they did.

Right.

Right. But that's it, Brian, what you did is just encapsulated my argument. But I will say, let's play the "what if" just briefly with Ahmaud Arbery. He is guilty. He is a thief. He was staging that house in progress for a future robbery. He had done things. But let's say all of those are true. I saw the shotgun blast wounds yesterday that they were putting in evidence when they were talking about the close-contact shotgun wounds, and the expert was saying, "Hey, these could have been from Ahmaud trying to push the shotgun away or from trying to take the shotgun." Either way, what we heard the defense say is that "here were these guys that were trained, and they were doing their job, and it was compelling evidence that they had to step in." No, it wasn't. It was street justice. In that case, the "what if" game was, even though Ahmaud Arbery was guilty, if he was, and was running from the scene, the level of force was not commensurate with the crime. And you don't have the right to do that. You don't have the right to tell a person, "Citizen's arrest." Barney Fife. You also have the right to attempt to detain them if it were a felony committed in your presence, and the suspect wouldn't be identifiable, and maybe he's running to a schoolhouse or a church that's just lighting out, and he's armed. But listen, you have to pile all those things on it.

So I go back to "zompoc." How long does unleaded last? Okay, what are the foods that you're most likely to get? Do you understand how to make fire or purify water? So the "what if" game for me has to be a series of logical questions that are passed around the room.

Yeah.

And the other people have to answer them with a degree of either scientific, logical, or legal certainty. You see what I'm trying to say? I mean, I would play that game then. I would because the way I've seen it played, I agree with you, where there's some NCO (Non-Commissioned Officer) when you were a rook (rookie), come into the room and go, "All right, what happened? All your beds are gone, and the ninjas are coming in." It was always some ridiculous standard that the outcome was already determined by the person posing the question, and it was at least as stupid as the question itself.

Yeah. And what you kind of got into would be my next point, right? So what if this was all true? You talk about the Ahmaud Arbery case, and where he was seen leaving a home that was under construction. There's even video of him in there looking around and then leaving, and then these two guys chased him down, ended up killing him. But, like you just said, the simple "what if" game, and that was, "Okay, what if everything they're accusing him that he did was true? Let's say he was in there doing that. What now? Were their actions justified?" Well, no, it didn't matter what he did in there.

Right.

Right. At that point, it doesn't matter if what they thought he did actually happened, their actions were untrue. So that's a good example of the "what if" game. You know, what you're talking about too is when you said you're playing this game and you're having these questions of, "What if this occurs?" is hypothesis testing. "Okay, well, if this happens, what will I see next? What should I see next? What other artifacts and evidence?" Because what I see a lot happening at a tactical and operational level is someone saying, "All right, you have this person pulled over, and what if they choose to run? What if they choose to flee in the vehicle or on foot?" Okay, if that's the question, "What if this occurs?" Well, what should I? First of all, what would I see, meaning what would actually have to occur for that to happen? If this person is going to flee from me, how are they going to demonstrate their intent, whether it's in a vehicle or on foot? What should I see? What should I see next? If that's their plan, what indicators am I going to see? If I start there, then again, it gets me thinking in the moment to go, "Okay, I either have to prove or disprove this hypothesis that he's going to run or she's going to run." So I either have to see artifacts and evidence to support that they will, or artifacts and evidence to support that they won't.

So, meaning, if I pull someone over, and they pull over and they put their car in park and they turn it off, are they likely going to flee in that vehicle? Well, not right now, right? Because they've already made the conscious decision to turn their vehicle off. Now, if that thing starts back up again, or if I pull over, they don't turn it off, and I notice their foot's still on the brake because they haven't put it in park, well, now that's a different explanatory storyline. So what you're doing with this "what if" game is, here's the situation. Okay, now I have to have my brain create an explanatory storyline for what I'm going to see and what I'm going to see next. Does that kind of make sense on how to do that, really?

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I'll give you an example I always like talking about when I skinned my knees when I fell down because that's the greatest learning experience in my life. I stitched those into the future stories every time that we go and train people, and they look back and they go, "Wow, if he can screw up, I can, and I don't have to screw up to learn from the event." So that's a part of the "what if." So every human being that encounters a SWAT member or a Green Beret, or any type of "tip of the spear" person, thinks that that person is excellent in every resource, no matter what they do. So they'll hand you a bow and arrow, a compound bow, and say, "Hey, do me a favor, print a group at 100 yards with that thing." It's like, "Dude, no idea about arrows and fletchings and strings and stuff." So I'll try. I have discipline. I can figure it out mathematically, right?

So the point is that I got out of the military and I'm in police work, and all of a sudden, they say "Eight Mile Chain" (likely referring to a crime trend or area). "Eight Mile Chain are here at roll call all the time, and they say, 'Oh man, they're just stealing cars and robbing places and everything else.'" So I said, "Okay, I'll play the 'what if' game. What if we put a hunting stand there and we stood in the hunting stand, camouflaged, and watched for a while? What would we find out?" So I enlisted the aid of Lootsinger and Pavlick, a couple of guys that we worked out martial arts with, and we found a place that allowed us to go up on a roof with a ladder. One of them was on one roof, and one was over at the Cinema City. I literally took the newspaper and cut a big rectangle out so I could sit in the parking lot and look through it, knowing full well, "I know human behavior."

Yeah, good luck. Close enough.

Close enough. They want to see close enough. So the very first Chevy Caprice Classic to get ripped out of the lot went like the telephone game. They go, "Okay, Groom is coming your way. It's going to be out the exit, loan, mail in the driver's side," this and that, any other. So I pull out of the lot following it, and I hit the red and blues (police lights and siren). All of a sudden, the vehicle's pulling away from me, and I see the big puff of smoke, that sort of surreal blue smoke that comes out of the exhaust system when somebody stands on it, and the carbon's burning out. I go, "Well, this is unusual." I look around. I make sure that my red and blues are... I'm going, "Whoop!" Hitting my siren. I'd never had a vehicle flee from. I mean, I had a ton of experiences, I knew all kinds of different things that were going to happen, but I had never seen a stolen vehicle actually pull away, and the guy's kicking it. So I started anticipating what the person was going to do next, and I was way behind the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act loop) because they were in charge of my time.

Right, right.

So I took my Caprice Classic, which was an equally matched vehicle at that time. Do you get what I'm saying? All this talk about police, this, that, any other, really look into what that means.

Right.

And so I'm flying up, and Eight Mile (Road in Michigan) is huge, and there's four lanes going and coming, then a turn lane on either side, then immediately another four lanes with a turn. So I'm going way too fast for conditions. I try to oversteer and I put it up on one of those huge two-post signs with the green thing in Michigan that says, "Westbound Eight Mile, Eastbound," and all that other stuff. I'm out of the game. My first shot at the title. I do all the information, I do all the intelligence, I plan everybody's position out perfectly. And you know what failed? I didn't have the training commensurate with the skill that I needed to follow this vehicle.

I learned a valuable lesson that day. With all the stuff that I did, I never was taught to push a scout car to its limits. This guy did what? All he wanted to do is get away. He had no fear, no risks, no management. It was a stolen car, wasn't even his car, so he didn't give a damn. So he pressed the skinny one on the right and, see where it takes him. And so thank God he got subsequently caught. I was very embarrassed because I did minimal damage to the vehicle, but I had to get it pulled off that huge sign and go back in. So I chose to dwell, Brian, on the fact that we caught a felon that was in charge of car theft, rather than the fact that I "bowled" (failed spectacularly) because I didn't anticipate, "What if this guy flees? What if he makes a sudden juke southbound on Eight Mile?" Listen, this is not unlike the PACE plan (Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency). You're supposed to think things out and have logical... We planned everything up until the "X," and then when we were on the bubble, I failed. I failed the team. So it's hard to talk about those things. I don't care if it's 40 years old, it's hard to go up and say that you, the legend on the street, "bowled" your first time out. But it's important to do that because that's why we're having this discussion. You can be experienced in every walk of life, and you walk into that domestic violence situation, or you walk into that 7-Eleven, Brian, and something's different. That's where the "what if" game is, I think, most potent, where it provides the best feedback and training.

No, I agree. And you know, using our own examples is always good and thinking through it like that because, you know, those follow-up questions that I was talking about is, "How did it get here? How did this happen?" Right? "How did it lead to this? What were all of the contributing factors?" So you can go back and do the "what if" game on your own experiences, right? So I can look back and say, "Well, what if I had taken that left instead of that right? What would have occurred, or how did this situation get here? What were those contributing factors?" And then you just spelled out in your specific example right there, "Well, wow, I didn't really plan on him taking off like this." Which again, you'd think, "Well, that's a simple thing." Right? "You're always thinking that." "Well, no, I wasn't at the time." Right? And then same thing, we had them...

That's it. That's what I mean. It's the contingency planning.

Now, it's easier, I would say, well, it's easier to do contingency planning and play that "what if" game prior to a specific operation like that, right? I mean, where you're going to do, "Hey, we have to plan this operation out. This is where we're going, this is what we're doing, this is who we're talking to. These are all the units we have," all that stuff. Then you could sit there and do the "what if" game and play that out. But it's often harder in that moment because, like you said, it's just fast forward to you sitting there like, "Holy cow, I haven't seen this before." It's harder in that moment. So playing the "what if" game is good, and that's why I expect to, in that moment, keep it to something simple. What are the solutions to this problem that I can have? And what will I see next? And how did this happen? So if I had to run down all of these things when I'm playing that "what if" game in my head, it's simple hypothesis testing, right? "If this is what I think is going to occur, what should I see next?" And that kind of allows me in that real-time to play that "what if" game. Because, you know, your story right there takes me back to now I have like three or four that popped in my head that I'm going, "Which one should I tell?" Because I don't want to get anyone else in trouble, or is there a statute of limitations or something? Little stuff like that. Even something as simple as using... it was immediately about using the wrong 203 round (40mm grenade launcher round). What was supposed to be a green star cluster for signal, and someone used a high-explosive dual projector. Let's just say that no communication procedure. That unit that lost comms, they got on the radio real quick. But things like that.

Yeah, and I want to make sure that we call it out. Look, we were newly minted right out of the academy. We wanted to make a name for ourselves. We didn't go to the detective bureau. We didn't go to the experienced vets and say, "Hey, this is what we're planning." So guess what? There was a hole in our bucket. When you go out there with a hole in your bucket, knowing that there's a number of seams where the sand or the water is leaking out of your bucket, you reap the whirlwind. So I knew full well that we didn't have a mature, experienced, veteran plan, but I knew we had a good plan. And that's what happens is we overemphasize our own skills or knowledge in the moment, thinking, "Listen, what's the worst that could happen?" And actually, "What's the worst that can happen?" should have been the question that we were asking. We should have been red-teaming our own plan.

Okay, yeah.

Before we went in, and it never happened because we were all patting ourselves on the back, "Hey, you got a ladder? Yeah, get up on the roof. I got my newspaper." We were so in the moment, Brian, that we couldn't project likely explanatory storylines that would go wrong. So the key is that not just "this is the way that we plan, and this is what should come out, and there's probably three little scenarios here that might occur." We never did that. We said, "Okay, in the moment, we've got this, and we'll make a couple of lockups, and we'll look like heroes." I bet every story starts that way. I bet every Darwin Award starts that way.

Yeah, and that's why you have to reign it back a little.

No, and you brought up a great point that would kind of lead into the next part: "Okay, well, what about during training?" Right? So I'm talking about in, you know, you're talking about real-time, in real-time events. "I never did this. I never did that." So how do I set that up as a good training scenario? Because what you just said, I think, encapsulates what I see a lot, and it's a good way to articulate it. It says, "We overemphasize our own skills, or we overemphasize the things that we're really good at, or our unknowns." Right? We stick with, "Well, yeah, I've got a lot of experience, but maybe that experience is only in this narrow bandwidth of area." Right? And we don't, and because I've continued to see that time and time again, I continue to expect to see that time and time again. And then that translates over into our "what if" scenario games. Like, you see a lot of that in different ways. People try to do this scenario-based training, which some is generally very well-intentioned, but often the outcomes or the training objectives aren't clearly met or defined because we're not doing this, and we overemphasize our own skills and our own past experiences and what we're good at, and what we have the resources to continually use. Right? We don't ever do that. It's either so extreme, "Hey, you're alone, and there's this chaotic event happening. It's the middle of the night," or it's, "Hey, we've got the whole team here, and everything's planned." It's like this middle ground often isn't covered, but that's typically where you see all of these things occur. That's typically what your most experience is going to be. But no one wants to work on the "what if" communication game, right? It's always got, "If we're on the range, and we're training firearms, it's going to be a shoot scenario."

I mean, we don't, we don't sometimes do that. So how do I...

I don't spend all day doing non-kinetic on a kinetic range when we've got the range flag up and the armorer has already delivered the ammo.

No, but how do I...

Part of our brain, right?

Well, part of that is, but then how do I build that into the realistic "what if" scenario when I'm doing that stuff? Because we've done, I mean, live-fire, force-on-force training with simunition stuff. I always love that the best because you get to prove what people can and can't do real quick, especially with the gun takeaways. So wear a mask if you're going to do those with sim rounds. I've proven a few people wrong on those. Yeah, I've proven some people wrong on those before. But the idea is, how do I build that in a proper engagement, like of my brain, for the "what if" game and create an explanatory storyline? How am I supposed to do that in a very simple manner? Right? Something I can do in the parking lot, right, Greg?

Right. And let's go further than the parking lot and then come back to the parking lot and why parking lots are such a great place. So, in the classroom, and just outside the hallway in the classroom. Years ago, look it up, folks, do your research and homework, I'm not going to do it for you. There was an incident in a state that looks like a mitten (Michigan) where the National Guard troops got together and said, "Hey, we're so close to the water, why don't we do something with water insertions?" Brian, you understand that the one-meter board at your local pool is different than hitting the water at altitude. Hitting water, folks, is like hitting concrete. There is no difference. And so the further up you are, the harder you get. This unit decided that what they were going to do is they had... I won't go into the detail, but it's a rotary wing (helicopter), and the unit got together and said, "We're going to pull in with the rotary wing. It's going to hover. We're going to drop in alternately, and then we're going to swim to shore, and we're going to do this. We're going to film everything." Prop blast wasn't taken into consideration. The difference between five meters and ten meters above what you are trained to do, with the prop blast and with waves and everything else combined, it was a horrific situation, and a number of the people broke their backs. There were very bad injuries. Now, you can't unring that bell. They had the best of intentions, right? All of them were trained, experienced veterans that passed the plan around. They didn't sneak on base and steal the helo (helicopter), Brian. They had to put in and say, "This was our plan. These are the things that we're going to do." Yet it failed. Why did it fail? Because nobody walked in and said, "Hey, what if this happens? What if there's a force that we didn't reckon with, and the wind speed changed the prop blast, and the mere change of the blade pushed harder than we expected, and we were five feet higher, not five meters higher?" You get where I'm going?

Yeah.

Now, listen, some people are going to look at you and go, "Well, that type of thinking is counterproductive." That's exactly the thinking that's why East, at a period of time, had the thinking. They were playing the "what if" game with, "We can't tell, we don't know, we can't project forward." And I got so pissed, I walked out because it's like, "Yeah, you can do those." "Okay, what if somebody slipped a live round into this ammunition? What if somebody wasn't wearing their mask during the training and got hit in the eye? What do we have right now to pick up a severed limb and take it with the person to the closest Level 1 trauma center?" Those, Brian, those are the right questions at the right time to ask and role-play in a scenario. So what I'm telling you is, you start thinking, "We got to get the helo. We got to get the water. We got to get everything." We can do that on the parking lot with chalk, that sidewalk chalk. You get what I'm trying to say? And a couple of MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected) or MRE (Meal, Ready-to-Eat) boxes, and line up. And we've done that before. Pull up the vehicles, chalk the vehicle, park the vehicle, walk through the roles. "I'm standing here at the door. Now the person drives off." Or, "Hey, listen, this person is coming out, and that thing in the bag is a gun, and they're going to walk into the 7-Eleven." Those are things you can do. And I refuse to think that you can't go to your local 7-Eleven and say, "Hey, for 15 minutes, do me a favor. In the middle of the night, when it's just you and the counterperson, we're going to set up a couple of vehicles and walk through what would happen in this scenario." Why can't you do that? Those scenarios, those live-action scenarios, will resonate with your personnel more than any other "what if" in a computer simulation.

No, and that's exactly kind of one of the things I want to hit on too is, with that, you know, that's why I brought up the parking lot example. You know, with three people, you know how much you can get done. So if I'm walking you through a scenario, Greg, I can prime you for that. "All right, what should we do if this person does this when he contacted them? Give me some ideas." And then you can talk it through, and I'm saying, "All right, I want you to go contact that person." You have your role-player who's already briefed up on what to do. Now they get to play out immediately what they just came up with in their head. Now, going out 10 minutes later, they now have a solution. They now have an answer for that problem. So walking it through it, and then literally, that's why I always bring up the lowest example with The Insurgent. I do that stuff with her. "Okay, we're in the shopping mall. Look, you want to go look over there, and you don't want to walk around with Mommy. Okay, well, what if this occurs? How can you see Mommy and still go? What if someone comes up and does this?" And walk through in that scenario. "Well, I can walk over there, and I can ask the person who works here for help. I can do..." And now she's got a solution. When that happens, she's not going to do anything but that because now that's all she knows what to do. All of those different solutions that we came up with. I think, like you just said, it doesn't have to be overly complex. Those little discussions with just a few people and maybe a vehicle, maybe a place that you have to go to. You can set up what you want the outcomes to be. And now that person, literally, leaving that parking lot that morning, now has three solutions to a problem that they didn't have before. Now you get one.

Yeah, you don't have to follow through. It can be part-task and still be great training. Yes. So let's use the 7-Eleven example and the three people that you assigned and said that, "Hey, we have three people available and a vehicle." So we drive to the 7-Eleven. We tell the clerk at two in the morning, three in the morning, when things are quiet and we're not going to involve the public, and we have an additional unit standing by to make sure they keep the looky-loos away in case there's something that's going wrong. And we tell the third person to go inside the store and walk out the doors at us. And we stand with the less experienced officer, and we say, "Okay, watch this." The person comes out, and then we say, "Okay, Tac freeze. Stop there for a second. If that person's going to run, what are the only options they've got available?" "Okay, well, they run that way." "Okay, what's that way?" "Well, it's a residential subdivision." "Okay, what's in that backyard?" "I don't know." "Okay, well, write down on your pad, we're going to find out what's in that backyard to the 7-Eleven so we don't jump into it at night and find out it's a pool with a cover and we drown, or whatever. Now, what other way?" "Well, that way." "Okay, what's that?" "Well, it's a major street." "Okay, what would they likely have to do?" "Well, cross that major street. It's not bad now, but what would that be like at noon? Who are we jeopardizing? Where would they have to park a vehicle running right now?" "What's another option?" "Well, they run back in the store." "Okay, that blows. Now we got to go get them." "So what are the considerations?" "And what's the final option?" "Well, they run at me." "Okay, well, if they run at me, what am I going to do? Am I going to club them? Am I going to tackle them? Am I going to spray them?" That five minutes that you spend standing there with that other officer in position, just feeling it in the moment at two in the morning, incredible cognitive training.

Yeah. And then right there, it takes five minutes, and then you go to, "Okay, you've got someone who's really got it, and they're on it. Okay, well, what's then the next step is, which one of those outcomes is best for everyone involved?" You know, "I'd rather have him run out of the suspect, including the Southpark Corporation" (likely a humorous placeholder for a stakeholder).

Yeah, I'd rather have him run out.

"Okay, can you manipulate the scene right now to force the best outcome?" "Oh, okay. So I know maybe standing over here when I come up, or pulling up from this direction, or placing myself here is going to force that person to run that way, which is better for us and the safety of everyone involved because they're not running out in the middle of traffic where cars are screaming by and now someone's going to get hit. They're going into this neighborhood, but actually that neighborhood in the middle of the night might be easier because it's lit up, or during the day it's better to go this way." I think those simple ones are what creates those file folders.

Right, I totally agree. So now we protract that out and we say, "Okay, where would the getaway car likely have to be parked if they ran through the subdivision? What about if they ran across the street? Where's the closest on-ramp to a freeway? Or would they sub-cut? Where would a person get lost if they were unfamiliar with the area? And what would the risk to the safety be if they did pull into that subdivision?" These are games that you can say, "Okay, we're going to do this one. Then let's go to lunch and circle back and have Tom park his car across the street idling and facing a different way. What do we think he's going to do? Could we call inside? What would we ask the clerk inside?" Brian, we could sit here and build on this one scenario about the 7-Eleven and make it amazing.

Yeah, and that's even protracted out on, remember, this was also down in, I forget what city, but near the border, and I forget what state, but one of them that borders. And it was, "Okay, well, typically they do this, and they have a guy come in and he just parks in a parking lot, and then they take it up to this direction." It's like, "Okay, well, it could be anywhere. It could be any one of these." "Yeah, they typically do it in the Walmart and Home Depot, but they didn't on this one." And it was like, "Well, they can only be so many because if they have to come in from here and they're going this direction, they're going to pick the simplest one. So I only need to put a unit at this Home Depot and this Walmart and this right here. I have them all covered." And sure enough, the guy's going to walk right in, and that's going to be the location that they have to use.

So Brian, that's a perfect example. And I can tell you to beware because not everybody likes "what if." I'll give you a perfect example: old guys that have been around don't like "what if" because they've seen it all, done it all. "This is ridiculous. Why am I standing here?" So, you recall it's on midnight, and it's a place like a Kroger or Albertsons or something like that, and the alarm's been triggered. So everybody drives around and leaves, but the alarm's still being triggered. So they drive around and leave. So about the third time the alarm's being triggered, I drive over and I talk to the old guys. They go, "Hey, old guys, there's not just the four sides to the building, there's a roof too. Have we checked the roof?" "Well, no." So we call the fire station that's closest and wake those bastards up. You know how firemen are? "We got to do work today." "I'm an oxygen thief and a fraud." So I'm sorry firemen that are out there, but you know how cops love them. Just kidding, fireman friends, and they know I'm not. So they bring over the ladder truck and we get up on a ladder truck. Surely somebody had kicked out the air conditioning vent, fallen down in through the drop ceiling and hit the floor. So there are actual signs now on the floor inside the building that somebody's injured. But that didn't dissuade them from the burglary. Generally, how those burglaries go, rather than leave through the roof, they just go out through the alarm door, which locks after they go out, the fire door, bust out a window, whatever else, and they're gone. So now everybody's like, "Wow, we really have a burglary!" So now units are showing up because they want to capture the felon. So they go through the entire building, and I'm out in the parking lot catching up on my law because I've done my "I hate firemen" joke. They all come out and they go, "Hey, we can't find this guy." And it's like, "Well, is there any sign that he got out?" "No." "Is he injured?" "Yeah, he's injured." "Well, how badly is he injured?" "Well, he's injured enough that he isn't going to be running from us when we catch him."

Right. Okay, so we walk inside. I go to the exact point that he fell through the roof, Brian, and I look around, and there are shelves, shelves everywhere. And I go, "Okay, well, where isn't he?" And they go, "Well, he's not there." And they point to the bottom row of shelves, which is about this high. You know what I'm trying to say? And I looked at the first guy, and I go, "Well, what if he is? What if that's as far as he could crawl, and he's right there waiting for us?" And sure enough, they leaned down with their SL20X (SureFire flashlight) and they shined it, and the guy, like a feral beast, had wedged himself all the way back. He was panting and was just waiting for them to leave. We all laughed, and I said, "Wait a minute, before we go, what if? Why don't you do that? Why don't you say, 'Listen, there's no way this guy could have got out of the house, but we can't find him.'" Brian, we found people between the mattress and the box spring hiding on a made bed. People under the bathroom sink, the vanity thing. Think of how big a vanity sink is. This is stuff right out of that, I would say, Las Vegas movie with Clooney, where he gets the... but the person was in there, holding onto the J-trap for dear life. So when you're convinced that you've done everything procedurally correct up to that point, and there's no logical answer, stop for a minute and go, "What if he's still in the ceiling? What if he's under the bed?" Brian, I tell you, it's refreshing. It's like a palate cleanser. Because then you can step back, because if not, what is your ego telling you constantly? "Hey, I'm the best cop here. I doubt this. I did. I'm the best soldier or marine on the scene. I know what's going on." And the idea is that our ego won't allow our ass to back up. And say, "Hey, maybe it's us. Maybe we did make a mistake." I could go on with those incidents, but what I'm trying to explain to you is that sometimes it's problematic because the people become more hardheaded the longer the scenario exists. So those practical scenarios in the parking lot of a Walmart are sometimes the best. Had I done something simple and said, "What if this guy flees? What's the likely turn he's going to make? Do we have a unit there to put on the lights at the right moment to make the person say, 'Hey, I'm overwhelmed. I'm going to give up'? When do we call a pursuit and when do we not throw the stop stick?" Those are all considerations, Brian, that you can do around a table in a classroom and act out in the parking lot without spending a bunch of money and taking a bunch of time.

No, and that's a good thing to build in. Even when we do a little practical application exercise, you just think about how many times we've done a walk around a mall or something with a group of people, and we think something about this person is going on. And we say, "Okay, well, if we're going to contact them, what if this? What if they're going to do this? What if they have that? Do I see anything that would..." Well, I can eliminate a few of these options because those are unlikely, but these over here that you're talking about still are likely. "Okay, well, then let's plan for that." I just remember walking up that last mall we were at, and you were with those group of students. So I immediately, you know me, I took all precautions by walking, "Hey, come on over here. We're going to cover as he moves up." And so we're in a position where the guy can't see us, but we can immediately intervene if necessary. But it's those little things is, "What if all of these are true?"

Go ahead.

Sorry.

No, in that exact situation that you're talking about, there was a high level of potential risk and danger. I mitigated the risk because I had operated with you so many times. I already knew that you were on the move. The second thing was, there was a time element. I thought the guy was going to split, so I tried to intervene before his likely exit. There was a set of escalators that were going away, and there was the parking lot. So I tried to get between him and those likely things. I knew that I was raising the element of risk, but I also knew, with the number of people we had, he wasn't going to flee. Now, if he came out with a weapon, I had two outs: the parking lot or the escalator. Those things, and, you know, I make it look like the random dumb panda that's just rolling around in my environment. But that was a "what if" as I was walking up on the guy. "Hey, what if he is armed? What if this does go sideways?" Brian, those things don't have to... You don't have to stop everything, go, "Okay, time out, pop yellow smoke, withdraw," and then talk about. Sometimes it can be in the moment. "What if this guy puts the car in drive and drives away? What if he does have a gun under the seat? Hey, what if this guy is stronger and faster than me and is going to beat my ass?" Those are things that you should consider at every aspect leading up to the actual moment of contact to make sure that you have the advantage. I'm not saying excluding other things. I'm saying be aware in the moment.

No, and this is good even with some of the private companies we've worked with, right? When they're doing operational stuff and they're rolling out something new, or they're trying to get a new training program, it's like you have to play this game at the tactical, operational, strategic level. Exactly. And that's sitting around that table is ideal if you have someone from each one of those levels, right? So if you've got the guy out on patrol, you've got the supervisor, then you've got the chief or someone in charge of policy and procedure, even the attorney, whoever. You sit around there, bat those back and forth. Those are the really constructive ones we see. And sometimes people don't do that part enough because that allows you to go, "Well, we're going to play this 'what if' game, and if you make this decision, this is what I'm going to be doing at this level." And then that top level goes, "Oh, holy cow, this is how that's going to impact us strategically." So having those three different perspectives when playing this game really allows you to do all those spirals. And you, at the tactical level, go, "Damn, I had no idea me choosing to chase this person in the middle of the day during traffic had all those second, third-order effects."

Exactly. And it allows that person at that strategic level to go, "Wow, I didn't know you had to make a split-second decision like that that impacted us so much up here. Maybe we should change our policies so that you don't get caught making a bad decision." You, I mean, now the prosecutor comes in and goes, "Hey, we've got to let the jury know that this happened in nanoseconds, not over a period of a minute." So the jury actually feels... That's the thing is that prosecutor now goes, "Oh, I see why you made that decision. Now I can paint that picture to a jury." Right? I can do my job there.

And I think having those three different levels or different perspectives is what adds that... I mean, it adds so much more fidelity to these "what if" games because people become, they become cognitively real because everyone's bought in at where their role would typically be. Does that kind of make sense?

It makes absolute sense. And let's go right back to Ahmaud Arbery. So we know the makeup of the jury. So during voir dire, do you think that judge and the prosecutor and the defense attorney ever considered, "Hey, what if we only have one Black guy on the jury?" They didn't, Brian. And so when it came up, guess what happened? The news media caught on it, everybody caught on it. Now it's, "Hey, it's sticking a mic in your face." "What do you think, Judge Brian?" Those are the type of things that we were to tabletop. You get what I'm trying to say? "Hey, listen, this is what we want to happen. We want to have a fair and impartial jury made up of the peers of the people that are represented." But listen, this one is a hot button. So do we want, if you predict that Kennedy, when he was killed, the basement, the shooting...

Ruby.

All right, Jack Ruby. Who would have not thought that, "Hey, wait a minute, this might end up in the suspect being killed?" So nowadays, what do they do when they do the perp walk? Everybody's wearing a helmet and a bullet-resistant vest. Brian, it wasn't so. Why? Because we allowed the bucket, which had a hole and a seam and a gap, to carry the sand away, and we didn't do anything about sticking our finger in that little hole. And that's what the "what if" is beautiful at. And guess what, Brian? It doesn't have to cost any money, it doesn't have to cost a lot of time, and you'll have fun doing it. It's not like this drudgery-filled task of pushing the car up the hill and dragging the dummy. It's thinking, it's cognitive skills put to the test.

No, and that's a great another "what if" question is, "Okay, well, what if someone happens to be recording you at this exact moment, starting from right now, to then? What is that going to look like?" Because you're seeing a lot of that too with the Arbery case, and then the Rittenhouse case too, about some of the stuff that the judge has done. Not that it was improper if you understood legal procedure, but what did it look like to people who have no idea? And that's the question. And that's the issue with a lot of these is that it's going to get broadcast out to a whole bunch of people who have no clue what they're talking about, but all get to have an opinion and have a say in it. So I think that's another good, logical "what if" question.

But I think we kind of hit on a lot. And I go back to, I do want to touch one more thing when you kind of helped clarify my own statement, I guess. Yeah, and I appreciate that. But when you said the zombie apocalypse scenario, it is a good one to use. "Okay, what if there is a big zombie apocalypse?" I didn't mean that it's so ridiculous that zombies aren't real, you shouldn't use that as a training scenario. But it's used to test our measures for something else. So, exactly, having those big, elaborate ones are good, or something crazy, because it does show our strengths and weaknesses, and maybe helps us figure out a better plan or course of action.

Can I bash on Maslow real quick?

Please do. You are...

Yeah, Maslow had 40 years before running when he died of a fatal heart attack. Abraham Maslow is a genius, don't ever get a different opinion. But the problem with Maslow is Maslow never did the "what if." Maslow never did the "chicken or the egg." Maslow never did the "13th person." So when they came up with this hierarchy, which is a pyramid, it's actually inverted, because it should start with the smallest and go to the biggest. And the other part is, it didn't account for humans interacting with humans. So you say, "Well, these things are the most essential." Yeah, if the tribe wants you as the baby to survive, this one might be more essential than that one. If you're going to work with a tribe to gather food or fresh water for survival, you better like the people that you're with, or you're not going to work together. And you better have already figured out how to battle the egos. So what I'm saying about Maslowians is that they make it too simple, just like Gladwellian thinking sometimes, by backing up and saying, "What if these things are true, or what if this doesn't hold water? What if this person is lying?" Then what you have is you have the ability to fall back on a logical metric and say, "I've considered it from the suspect's point of view, from the officer's point of view, from the law." Do you get what I'm trying to say? "And from physics, from space-time, which can come in and whip your ass because even though you didn't think it could happen, certain things have occurred that defy logic but are still true."

Yeah, yeah. I know, it's like the null hypothesis almost, right? "What if everything I believe to be true about this situation is actually wrong because it's predicated on some initial belief that I had that was actually the opposite is true?" And having that perspective, then can you go, "Oh, damn, I did. I can poke some holes in my own theory." Which you'd rather be the one to do that than someone else later on, right? You want to poke holes in your own theory first before someone else gets a chance to, right?

This is compelling because it didn't dawn on me until just now, but I just finished a chapter that I sent to you. And one of the points that I made in the chapter was the Germans in Kunduz. I believe it was 2006 or 2009. My numbers jumped around. So Taliban steals two fuel tankers. They try to escape. They're coming into Afghanistan from Tajikistan with the UN. The Taliban behead the drivers, make a big deal out of it. Middle of the night, flee and get stuck in water. Now there's mud in the water that there's never been mud in. Now they're going, "What the hell do we do?" So the Taliban guys bug out. Hundreds of people in the village go, "Hey, there are these vehicles idling down there, and they've got fuel." They take everything from kettles to pots to whatever else to get this fuel because they're poor and it's free. You would do the same thing. I would do the same thing, Brian. I would be there with a baking dish. Germans are in charge of this area, Kunduz, with the coalition forces. American B-1B comes over and says, "Hey, this is what I see on the ground. This is how many people." Germans call their confidential informant on the ground. He goes, "Yeah, Taliban all over the place. A lot of weapons. Weapons free." They hit it with two Strike Eagles, drop a couple of hundred pounds of ordnance and kill, at least from what we know, a hundred people on the ground that are civilians. How does that happen, Brian? We played the "what if" game. Now, right now, somebody in Germany is going, "Ah, good!" And they're waving their fists at the radio or the TV or the computer. But that's how it happened. Listen to somebody on the ground. Nobody took that one minute and said, "What if he's wrong? What if he's looking at the wrong intersection? What if they're all civilians? What if we wait four hours till first light and get a better look on this?" Or, "It doesn't work," right?

Did you see what I'm trying to say?

And Brian, we've both made mistakes at the strategic, operational, and tactical level. Thank God they didn't cause another person's life or loss of life or death, but they easily could have. And so that's why we're so serious about a topic like this. And that's why I would also say two things real quickly: one, thank you, because the people that write in and give us ideas and thank us for an episode, please don't stop doing it. And the second thing is, Brian, we could do whatever "what ifs" they propose easily.

On Patreon, you and I could sit across, yeah, coffee and go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." Three or five that there's specific ones that people want us to cover on something they have ongoing or something they've seen. We can absolutely do. But make it something like this.

Yeah, there's this German one, Brian. This had real consequences.

No, and that's another one when I kind of brought it up earlier about when you're doing an after-action review, looking back, even when things went well, doing the "well, what if this hadn't happened?" Because you and I both had plenty of situations where, okay, everything turned out okay, but it could have very, very easily gone... "We were so lucky."

Yeah, one aspect, right? Never want to rely on luck, right?

So I think that's, and that's an important thing too. And I know I told that story on the guy that I almost shot, who was celebrating a soccer, the Iraqi soccer team. Because I did the "what if?" "Well, wait a minute. What if this is not some guy who's about to, what else is going on here?" And I can realize, "Holy cow, this guy's just out doing celebratory gunfire. I could have just killed the governor's nephew or something like that and created an international incident." So, exactly, I think that's another one.

How many Afghan stories do we have where we were sitting in a modified vehicle and all of a sudden, the things started going sideways, and we were convinced it was one thing? But then we found out, "Wait a minute, something completely different. Everything's fine." And you walk out of there with your life and your head intact, and you go, "I'll never make that mistake again." So you add that to this bucket, right? We're walking around with this bucket of, "Hey, don't let that happen again." And again, remember to imagine your bucket has holes. And some of the holes are fine because you're still going to get most of the water or most of the sand or most of whatever that you're carrying in the bucket. But over time, if you don't address those, Brian, they become bigger and they become more compelling or dangerous. So this game, and the person that wrote in, this game is a great way to increase your odds of success over the long term.

Yeah. Okay, I think we kind of covered a lot on that one. And again, if anyone's listening, you want us to hit up a specific one, just reach out to Greg@gmail.com, or you can get a hold of us, and we'll cover something and do it just for you guys, or just on the Patreon site, which we have more. We've got some interview stuff on there as well from us and folks that are listeners. So if you are listening, you can check it out. It's only a few bucks a month, and it helps support the show. Again, if you have any ideas or things you want us to cover, we go to those first for those folks who are signed up there. So we do appreciate it, and thanks everyone else for tuning in. Any last words, Greg?

No. When are we going to do that episode on "Truth or Dare"?

So, let's maybe just after, over the holidays is perfect. You'll have a bottle of bourbon, I'll have a bottle of bourbon, and exactly, we'll do it on Zoom. Naked Zoom? I think we would be the ones having to pay people to watch that, not to get around. So, on that note, thanks everyone for tuning in. Don't forget, the training changes behavior.