L.O.G. 221 Seeing People with Chip Huth

All right, well, good morning, everyone, and good morning, listeners. Thanks for tuning in today. We have a very, very special guest on the show by the name of Mr. Chip Huth. Chip, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate you coming on the show.

Brian, thank you very much, and Greg, thank you as well for having me.

Yeah, so we've been excited to get you on because we talked a little bit for those listeners who've heard us talk about it before, a little bit about some of the stuff at folks at The Arbinger Institute. You know, we went out to, did some of their training with them in Salt Lake, and this whole outward mindset, and how you guys approach stuff. But I would love to kind of get the overview from you, Chip, because you know, this relates directly to what your role was in law enforcement, which you have an extensive law enforcement career, Metropolitan (Kansas City). So there's a lot that you had to deal with. And you guys kind of took this model that they have and really applied it in some unique ways.

And I've even gotten stories from people that know you that said it was pretty impressive, completely outside of this, that we weren't even talking about something like this, and said, "Hey, what these guys were able to do is really cool and fundamentally align with how we see things."

So for anyone listening, we talk about human behavior and how to articulate it. And one of the first parts of what you guys do with Arbinger and everything you're trying to do is literally called "See People." So right away, there was some overlap in what we do. So I'd love to kind of hear from you to give our listeners a little bit of background about what that is.

Yeah, you bet. So, as you mentioned, 30 years I spent in law enforcement, most of that time building, leading SWAT teams. I had the opportunity to serve in every leadership position in the SWAT team, from point man, the unit trainer, all the way to Special Operations Division Commander. Just a wonderful opportunity to work with some high-quality folks doing really special work.

And you know, as you said, I stumbled across Arbinger's work by happenstance. I was in an airport, Denver International Airport. We were grounded due to high winds, and I stumbled into a bookstore. I think it's called The Tattered Cover—I think it's still there, actually. And I saw this book, Leadership and Self-Deception.

And you know, at the time I was really struggling because I had taken over the busiest SWAT team in the nation, leading that as a tactical leader, and I was really failing miserably in terms of connecting with my troops and helping to do the things I was sent there to do, which was improve the relationship (with) the community. On top of that, my teenage boys wouldn't speak to me, and I was going through my second divorce.

So I saw this book, and I'm like, "Leadership and Self-Deception? Okay, well, it's been a bit autodidactical. I grew up around books as much as I could, and I recognized self-deception as a philosophical paradox. Didn't know that I really understood it that well, but I kind of knew generally that philosophers struggle with this for eons. And then I saw the term 'leadership,' and I was like, 'How do you smash these two things together in a book title?' And finally, the book was thin, so I was sold."

Yeah, there you go. There were some pictures in there, maybe some graphs.

But I did read it, but I totally misinterpreted it. I thought that this book told me what was wrong with all the people in my life that didn't see the world the way I did.

There you go.

Yeah, well, I kind of booked (it). Yeah, right. The exact opposite message that was probably intended. I went so far as to start prescribing it to people in my life that I found difficult. Disagree with me in a meeting, you get a book.

But eventually, my good friend, my brother, and future co-author, at the time, Jack Colwell. And I know you gentlemen are acquainted with Jack. Just a fine human being, he is. He is as advertised. He is a very genuine soul. And you know, he was kind of like the "Chip Whisperer." He could come to me and everybody else, and he had a way of pitching things to me, and he invited me to a two-day workshop. I understand you gentlemen attended a temporary version of it.

This sounds, the way he's approaching you, it sounds like the way he approached us, too.

Exactly. That's definitely his M.O. I like it because it works. It's very, very effective sneak attack, you know.

Very subtle.

You know, so he invited me. Back then, of course, there weren't PowerPoints or anything. We were drawing stick figures on butcher paper, and that's kind of how it was. And I just remember, like, halfway through that workshop, it hit me like, "Oh my, they're talking about me in this book!" Like, I like the one thing that hit me, and it's still to this day just rattles my cage, is that, you know, I was married to two very different women. They were different in every possible respect. I was the common denominator of both those failed marriages. And you know, it just rocks me when I think back about it, that, you know, I was so blind to that. That plays into the self-deception piece, you know. I can see what's going on with everybody else and what their problem is very clearly, but I'm on the wrong side of my eyeballs. I certainly can't see how I'm contributing to my failures.

And so, to shorten the story up a bit, I go through the workshop, and I think, "Wow, there are implications for this, not only in my leadership with my team," which was really, I really needed to prove that I wasn't seeing them as people that mattered. I was seeing them as pieces on a chessboard that I could manipulate to achieve an objective. And of course, they were building their resistance to me, into their obedience, right?

And there's that, but then there's also this community issue that we had. You know, it's like, "Why are we getting so many complaints?" Well, before I had written it off as, "Well, it's because we're doing kinetic work. You know, we're knocking down doors, we're flashbanging, we're shooting people's pets, occasionally we're shooting people occasionally." And, you know, all of those things, in my mind, complaints follow that type of work like nightfall's day. And I just thought that's a consequence of doing that work.

And I started thinking more deeply about it with Jack's help, and the other folks from Arbinger that kind of wrapped their arms around me, metaphorically speaking. I just thought, "Well, wait a minute, you know, maybe people aren't responding to what we're doing as much as they're responding to how they're feeling seen by us while we're doing it." And that turned out to be a very, very pivotal insight. Again, I don't take credit for it, that was illuminated for me.

But once we started changing the way that we were with people, not what we did tactically, it drastically changed the results that we got in terms of community engagement. And ironically and unforeseen, the amount of drugs, illicit currency, and felony arrests that we got. So those things go up, complaints disappear, and you're like, "How does this happen? It's the same people, same tactics, same equipment, you know, all of the things we typically would change, we didn't change any of that." Now, some things change at the tactical level by virtue of this new way of seeing. But I tell you, it was really unexpected.

And the last thing I'll say before I flip it back to you guys, who are really the experts in this domain, is that the type of curiosity that is occasioned by this first step of this iteration that we call "See People" actually helped us improve our threat detection. You know, the idea was, look, absolutely, I become curious. When I'm self-absorbed, this is my experience, you guys correct me if I mess any of this up, but in my experience, when I'm self-absorbed, I tend to force my paradigms onto everyone, and I tend to make unhelpful assumptions. When I'm more open to the reality of other people, what I tend to notice is anomalies, deviations from baseline in their behavior. Why is that guy wearing a coat in July that's that heavy and long? You know, I start asking questions. Why is he taking a shorter step with his right leg? You know, I mean, I start seeing things. It's really, like, I get excited about this, I apologize, but it's like a whole new world opening up. I'm looking at the world in a different way. It's like I'm inhabiting a different reality. So I'll pause there.

Chip, this is so refreshing because I had the occasion that nobody else that I know had, where the United States military came to me and said, "Hey, would you like to take part in this study?" Which turned into the study meeting a bunch of three and four stars and saying, "Hey, we want to change the way the DOD does it." And the Marine Corps saying, "We'll be lead, we want to do this," and giving me all these incredible opportunities.

And so every room that I went into, I was like, "Okay, how is it that all of these best of—how is it that all of these subject matter expert things that we learned on the street didn't translate over to these units going into combat? What did they miss? How was the institutional memory (that) didn't carry the best of series along?" And so I would say something that we do on the streets in Suburban Detroit, and they'd go, "Well, that's brilliant, we can use that here." And I'm like, "Wait a minute, all good cops in every city, everywhere, are doing this!" And they're like, "No," because we would see evidence of that.

So, and I'll focus on that in a second, but the idea is Jack Caldwell comes up to us and he starts talking about the outward mindset, because he wrote a bunch of our stuff, and says, "Hey, you have training that changes behavior, and we call it a change in mindset changes out." And I go, "Yeah, it's the same, it's principally the same. We're just 'left of bang' when we make most of those decisions." He goes, "Can you give me an example?" And you know how Jack is, so he's pulling the thread, pulling the thread.

Well, the same thing that the best of—and I'll credit Jim Mattis for being (General James Mattis) a very forward thinker, but he's not the only one. There was a whole bunch of people in that room, and they brought hundreds of people in to test out and say, "What would you do?" The first thing I said is, (meaning I'm being tested) just with all these other subject matter experts, "People are the same all over the world." And, "Well, that's not true at all." "Well, yeah, it absolutely is true. As a matter of fact, the very nuanced changes in culture or something like language can be overcome immediately. I mean, on the plane on the way in, you can fix those things."

And then the other thing was, "Look for the similarities in people, not the differences, because they're more like you than you think, and they want all the same things." And they're not talking about the trash that Maslow talks about, we're talking about real human engagement, humans talking to humans, that's the job. Yeah, okay, so you carry a gun, and so what?

What happened is the military morphed to this mindset and said, "Wait a minute, there's a better way we can engage. We don't have to boot doors, ram cars, blow people up. We can take a knee and talk to the same people." And you know what? In Iraq, those people were going, "Don't go down that street, there's a bomb." In Afghanistan, they were going, "Hey, be advised, in this next paddy dike you're going to go into, there's snipers everywhere." And it's like, "People were—how are you so affected?" Well, when you slow down long enough to talk to somebody, you'd be amazed at how magic those moments can be.

And I'll also credit Jack Caldwell for coming up and saying, "These are not the drones you're looking for," and doing the mind meld on (me). Yeah. And I, you know, when we're in Utah, and he introduced us to Chief Ken Wallenstein, another great forward thinker. And so, you know, and we know Brian Willis, and we were just on the phone with Dr. Black and John. What happens is you have this small group of innovative thinkers that understand how to reach 3,000 years back and reach upstream till tomorrow and get things done. And you're one of them.

The problem is that they don't coalesce. They're not covalent bonds. They're not, like, when do you come together? So I hate trade shows, Brian and I have only been to one, and I see what it is, and it's not for me, I can tell you that. We try to put out stuff, but who reads a white paper anymore of us? You know, we read yours, you read ours, we read Brian's, right? So the idea is that you're bringing to bear all of the fantastic stuff that sets you apart from other law enforcement, and there's others like us out there, but I would say out of 15,000 agencies, it's not in every agency. And I would say out of the hundreds of thousands of coppers, it didn't transcend to all of that. So how do you stay motivated and focused, knowing that a lot of the stuff that you're putting down in print and saying on podcasts like this is getting passed over? How do you equate that?

Well, it's not a very sexy answer, and it's a work in progress for me. I've gone through a journey over the years. My father was a clinical psychopath and a career criminal, and I inherited some of his psychology, and it's very hard for me to connect with people, very hard for me to employ empathy, good empathy, right? Distinct between that and empathy that's not so helpful, the predatory empathy, right?

I get that. We've all had similar upbringings, right?

Yeah, yeah. So I've been working for years to focus on loving people. And I know it sounds like, you know, sounds so soft, right? But this idea of employing compassion toward other people and trying to just, you know, I heard love once defined by a speaker as "the desire to see unnecessary suffering ameliorated." And I thought, you know, if I see someone as a human being, suffering is the price they pay for existence. I mean, the world is—there's a lot of it, a little bit of us, and we're going to bump up against it. We're going to, we're going to hurt. It's a matter of degree. But I don't want to see people suffer foolishly or needlessly. And so when I think about love that way, this is what I say to myself all the time when you talk about the frustration sets in: "Don't allow this person to deprive you of your opportunity to love them."

You know, they're going to test you. You know, that's good. I mean, I'm, I'm, I've been on the other side of that. If you talk to my wife, I probably tested her yesterday. You know, I mean, we're all, we're, as you, as you guys so eloquently pointed out in the tactical domain, at every, at a fundamental level of analysis, we are the same. Yeah, you know, we really are. And I think what keeps me coming back is every once in a while, you meet people like, you know, you gentlemen who get it. And then, you know, I'll meet people from different fields that get it. And I'm thinking, like, if all these different people with these different paradigms, perspectives, ideologies, and ideas, disciplines, if they, if we're converging on this concept, it's, you know, there's something really valuable there.

And I want to say one thing. It was funny when you were talking about people all over the world being the same. I like to watch people. I'll go to a movie theater, and I'll get there early, and I'll sit back, and I'll just watch people. And what I'm looking for, and you guys will probably appreciate this, I'm looking for baseline behavior in a movie theater. Yeah, what are people in that context doing? You know, they're checking their phone, they're looking at the menu, they're chit-chatting. And I'm trying to—I'm saying, "Where do I see an anomaly?" Like, every once in a while, you see a cop in line will be looking behind him. Yeah, okay. Or a criminal.

Yeah, yeah. We don't want to get into the similarities.

So, I was in Mexico last week working in Central Mexico. I was in León temporarily. I went to a Walmart to get some bottled water. Chevron, León, go to the Walmart, get bottled water. And I come out, and there's a little Dairy Queen there, and so I grabbed me a banana split. And I sat down with my back to the Dairy Queen, on (the) outside of the little patio area. I started watching people. And I speak second-grade Spanish, and so I really don't understand the language, but I'm sitting back, I'm just watching the people, right? I'm watching them interact with their kids. I'm watching them go in the store. I'm watching the couples walk by. And you know, if you were to mute the language, you could be anywhere in the world, and certain behaviors, the way they talk, I could literally intuit what was happening between a child and their mother based just on the facial expressions and the body language, not even knowing what—although I did understand the word "cállate." I think that means "shut up." I think. But the way she spoke it. So I just, when you said that about people and the commonalities between people, that was just one illustration in my recent past where I was like, "Oh my, like this keeps getting reinforced to me." Exactly. The question becomes, what are the implications? And I'll throw that back to you, gentlemen. Right?

No, and we, you know, because one of the sayings we like to use to really summarize is, you know, "You don't have to speak the language to read the writing on the wall," right? You don't have to know something to go, "I got it. I got the situation." This, "Yeah, I'm 5,000 miles from my home and where I grew up, but I get it. This is a world of different language and culture, but okay." And getting through that, it either takes some sort of training or some experience where you have exactly (a) light bulb kind of moment.

And what you talked about, you know, when you were in this bookstore, "I see this book," and then I love the reaction, it's like, "Oh God, I got to give this to some people to read because they could really..." That's the best. I love that. When I've had people do that too, where like, "Oh yeah, there's more people should really take your course," because they should. And then by the second day, they're like, "Hey, you know, I'm starting to realize that my own actions really had a negative influence in the situation." And they feel bad. And it's like, "Look, man, you didn't know that at the time. You were being trained to do what you did. You were mimicking those who trained you." Exactly. Now you, we have the recognition. Okay, good, that's the first step.

But what, one of the most difficult things for a lot of folks to do, which you kind of seem to do, which took you, it sounds like it took you some time, is when you have this, because you guys with Arbinger, it has a very simple, you know, it's boiled down to a simple thing of "See People, Adjust Efforts, Measure Impact." Which is phenomenal because you can boil it down to those three elements, but then you could spend the rest of your life really diving into what that is, right? Which I love stuff like that, where you boil it down to some simple message, but it has so much meaning behind it.

But what it took you a while, you realized, you know, you finally did what I call the "Taylor Swift," where you do the, "Hey, you know, it's me. I'm the problem, it's me." You know, you realize, like, you do the, "Oh, wait a minute, I'm the one here." And what you're—

I'm not sure she's actually genuine. She says, so, so I know you don't know this, but let's not go there. I'm a huge Taylor Swift fan, I am. But I pay real attention to her lyrics, and I'm pretty sure she's just kind of leading on these guys. I don't know. Maybe like they think they got a shot.

So funny. Well, yeah, exactly, exactly. So, but then when you did it, so you kind of took this model, you took this outward mindset of looking at things, but it's not you, you know, you personally is always, I say, the most difficult one. We teach a lot of external stuff because what we're really doing is talking about all human behavior, but if I get you, Chip, to go look at, "See those other people, this is how we articulate that." Eventually, over time, you're going to get to the point where you go, "Hey, wait a minute, it's not just about those people out there," right? You got to give people the breadcrumbs.

But what I love about what you did is you said, "Wow, this is how it affects me personally." Then organizationally, at the police agency, but then literally down to the tactical level. And where we go, it's like, "Look, your tactics, techniques, and procedures, they're probably good enough. They're going to change over time as you learn new methods and things, that's fine." But what aren't we focusing on? What aren't we doing here? You know, what? Because that's what we teach is we provide a "think" with a K, not a "thing" with a G, right? You got all the things on your uniform and vehicle, like, "Let's, let's provide this think."

And so, how did you finally, or was there something that led you to realize, like, "Wait a minute, this isn't just about this one thing. This has this universal approach to it that I can use literally in any situation, whether it's tactically, operationally, strategically, organizationally, looking at myself in the mirror?" How did you get to sort of that point, or when did you realize that?

Yeah, I think it was a kind of a process, actually. But at first, I thought of every step of that iteration—See People, Adjust Efforts, Measure Impact—as a tactic. And I had to really break out of that paradigm and understand that that first step, that "See People," is not a tactic. That's an actual way of being in the world, and a way of showing up with other people. And it's driven by curiosity, you know, and a desire to kind of get it right in my diagnosis. And then that then informs the tactics of what I, what adjustments I make. And how I measure impact is determined by what the adjustments were. Sometimes I can measure impact just by seeing the result, right?

I use the example of this morning in the weight pile. You know, "See people." Well, other people are going to come use this gym when I'm done. They're probably busy, they're trying to squeeze in a workout, you know, they're wanting a sanitary place to work out, they're not wanting to get sick, they're, you know what have you, right? "Well, you know what it'd be like to be those people and come in here and see that sweat on the bench I just left?" And then so that's once I consider identifying with the future, you know, those people that are the, the people that are going to be in there in the future, right? Now I can adjust efforts. I clean the bench, you know, and sanitize the bench. And then measure impact is there's no sweat on the bench, right? And the trash that I use to clean the bench is in the trash can, not the floor.

So like you mentioned, this is an iteration that I run numerous times a day, from eating out at restaurants, to observing people at movie theaters, to working out. And so it just occurred to me like, I thought, if I'm forcing my biases, prejudice, and loyalties onto other people in all these high-stress contexts, if I'm thinking, you know, like, "Well, these are the type of people that are armed," then I'm totally excluding all the other potential people that are armed.

And it hit me really hard. I was talking to a police officer, and he had responded to a traffic accident on Ward Parkway here in Kansas City. So Ward Parkway, if you haven't been here, is kind of a very rich area, a lot of mansions up and down Ward Parkway. When presidential candidates come to town, they'll hold fundraisers there. It's kind of like a Central Park West of Kansas City, right? And so he said, "You know, I responded to an accident on Ward Parkway. You get a lot of these because of the way the Parkway flows," and he's, you know, he admitted, he's a bit complacent about it. And so, "I got more complacent when I pulled up, and one of the guys that was in (the crash) was in a BMW. He's wearing a suit, and, you know, he's—I have a certain, I have a certain bias for people in BMWs wearing suits." And I admit, in retrospect, I kind of lowered my caution flag.

And I come up, and we're kind of getting some stuff together. My partner and I are talking to the guy. I go back to the car to get some cones. I hear gunshots. And he said, "At first, it was this disconnect where I'm just standing still thinking, like, 'Why would there be gunshots on Ward Parkway in the middle of the day at a traffic accident?'" He says, "And then when I looked around, this guy was shooting at my partner." And he said, "It took me a good—it felt like forever, you know, probably seconds—to engage." He goes, "And what I kept thinking was, 'This is not the kind of guy that shoots at the police.'" Yep. And he goes, "And I just couldn't break out of that. It was, you know, it felt like I was walking in muck. I couldn't break out of that for a second." And he goes, "And it scared me to death."

And, you know, it scared me to death because I thought, "You know, my situational awareness, based on my prejudices, my biases, just went away to the point that, as you know, seconds—seconds in a gunfight, are you kidding me? If I gave you two seconds in a gunfight, you'd take that in a heartbeat."

Yeah, yeah.

And so, things like that, to answer your question, started getting me really interested in going, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, there's something really powerful here that goes beyond just helping people feel seen in a leadership context, or helping them, helping people feel valued as human beings." There's something beyond that. There's actually this, like, if I see you as a person, then I appreciate the full range of your humanity. I appreciate your capacity within that full range, and then I can start being informed by the kind of things you gentlemen teach. You know, what your actual observable behaviors that I can filter independent of my biases actually helps me. I think you, you correct me here, but I think what you're doing helps me overcome my bias.

And Chip, first of all, your story is so poignant and so simple that everybody's got to replay this section. Our listeners, our viewers, go back to the section, listen to it again. Chip, I'll tell you, I try to be a humble guy, but I like me sometimes. And that's important to me. But I'll tell you the thing I'm most proud of, it occurred back in the late '70s, early '80s, when I developed "Baseline plus anomaly equals decision," based on my work on heuristics. Back then, people had no idea what heuristics were, and I was sparring with all the greatest in the world on it because I was just a street kid going, "No, you're getting it wrong. Heuristics are what's damning us into these inevitable decisions, and they're always bad. Why? Because they're all biased, and they're all leading down the path of least resistance because they're easy."

And so you can't look at a person and put your values on that person. And then when they differ from your values, you say, "That's an anomaly." That's not an anomaly. What you've got to do is you've got to have tabularized a baseline that's based on the environment and the situation and the timing and all these other factors. And what you do is then you start placing the stuff, like Barbie's Dream House, the furniture in, and then you see the way that it sets, and which room needs the carpet and everything. Now you take anybody and you put them in that Barbie Dream House. Now you've got a baseline. And we watch what normative, normal behavior is, clinically, right? And then the people that stick out are always one of two things: they're the best guy in the room, they're the copper because he's trying to keep, as a security guard, trying to keep people safe, right? The soldier. Or you've got the vicious criminal that's sizing up their next hit, "What I'm going to steal."

So if you can, and because remember, you, you said it perfectly, we've got to give people the gift of time and distance in a combat context, in a very kinetic world approaching the X. And it's not binary. You can't sit there and say, "Well, shoot, don't shoot." Well, in this situation, it's right and wrong. Well, these are all black and white decisions. None of that fits. So, you've got to fix you before you go into that situation.

And you know, I, I've spent 40 years trying to get people to listen to that, and people still don't listen. They're like, "Yeah, well, if that guy wouldn't have done that, if they weren't the proximate cause, and if these people..." And you know what? Now, guess what? All you're doing is living that script over and over and over on each new call. So that's another reason, I've got to be honest, one of the reasons we love your work is your work is self-aware. I swear, if I hear one more person talk about the imposter syndrome or create a new bias that hasn't been on the book just to talk about it. What you are is you're a genuine human that's—people sense the irony here. Everybody on this call has been divorced. Chip, I think you've got the record so far. But the idea is, why? Right? Because you were still searching because we're broken effing human beings that are trying to get through a very, sometimes tough world.

Chip, is it a fair assessment that you've eaten at a Salvation Army, or slept on the floor of a homeless center, or done this? I know I have, I know Brian has. The idea is that those experiences and interacting with humans, and specifically in extremis, which you've done for, you know, 35 years, what that does is that makes the focus, the onus, less on me and more on the community. And I think if people miss that, they need the slap of reality to bring them back around, because it's not about me, it's about everybody around me, you know? And I love your work because your work tends to show that. And I don't mean to misapply your work or to paraphrase what you say, but do you get where I'm going, Chip? Do you see what I'm trying to say there?

Yeah, I totally get where you're going. You made me think of one of my favorite philosophers, Mike Tyson, when he said, you know, "Everybody's got a fight plan until I punch him in the face," right? It's like the world—you're either going to be humble, the world's going to humble you. Yeah, and I think we've all experienced both of those to some degree.

I'm interested in so, I have an acquaintance, Dr. Gary Klein, and Gary, he's talked a bit about heuristics and things of that nature. I'm interested in getting you, your gentlemen's opinion on this. It sounded like you were a little anti-heuristic in the sense of, it's not the optimal, you know, I think, I think personally, by the way, like, I think that some of the people that I've read, like Jonathan Haidt and some of his contemporaries, will say we are intuitive creatures, we make decisions irrationally, and then try to justify them post-hoc. I see what they mean there, and I understand it. But I think we give rationality short shrift. I feel like we were, we developed this capacity to be rational and to think tactically for a reason. And I think we can train ourselves to be more reasoned and not reliant on these heuristics, intuition.

But Gary, Dr. Klein, I'm sorry, you know, Dr. Klein, in his work, suggests that there is a place, a time and a place for intuitive decision-making, especially when there's low discretion time. So I want to throw that back at you, gentlemen.

I'll start and I'll pass to Brian. So Gary Klein and I used to be very good friends. I'm sure that if you ask him, because you're his good friend, he won't remember me. But we worked together at the University of Central Florida on a project called TADMUS (Tactical Decision Making Under Stress). One of my dear friends, who's now on our board, Dr. Joan Johnson, was on that, a bunch of other critical thinkers. I was not the critical thinker. I was this self-taught, Gladwellian outsider that they brought in as part of the process.

And here's what I know about heuristics: you can study the rest of your life, and there's so many different heuristics, you can waste a lot of time on. There's template and prototypical matches. Template matches the exact same thing. A prototype is close enough, cognitively close enough, to spur you into a decision. So decisions in extremis—and I was on small unit decision-making and a bunch of other programs for DARPA and IRBY and for the DOD—all where Gary Klein was in that same orbit. Gary's work is brilliant. Gary's work goes on a shelf now with his shadow box and some of the new projects he's going out and reaching out and changing that. But all the stuff that was back then, I was in a combat zone, embedded with the US Army sniper team or with the United States Marine Corps on the ground going house to house in the streets. And so I kept coming back with information and saying, "Hey, these things are right, and these things are flawed."

I'll give you a very brief example: All humans respond to external stimulus the same exact way. If they don't, they've got a mental problem, or they're up to something, right? So in your environment, when things are occurring, and you see these heuristics start to line up, and they fit the situation, that's when you've got to do the mental "Etch A Sketch" and go, "Wait a minute, I have to make sure that this is actually what I'm reading," because bad guys, well, for example, earlier I was talking about the predatory empathy. People nowadays, and I came up with that term 35 years ago, now they call it grooming. Well, what's predatory empathy? My uncle was predatory empathy. He would come over, "Hey, hey, big guy, come on over this," and then and I would get molested. So, I've got to read that early on. So that became a prototypical match on a heuristic, where when I was on the street, and I saw it, I go, "But that looks a lot like what I had. That looks like my experience."

So what Gary Klein got right is that your tacit knowledge can feed forward and make a heuristic a powerful lens. But the problem is that we're trying to teach it as a check in the box. That's not how humans are. Not all humans have those same experiences. So what Brian and I try to do is train you on seeing the world through your lenses because if you see it through my lenses, the glasses don't fit, right? And maybe you don't understand, you get what I'm saying? So all we're doing is trying to change your perspective, open your eyes and your brain to what those things mean generally. Okay, I'm a generalist, and then what they mean specifically within a specificist. You see? Yeah, we love Klein. We've got nothing against Gary Klein. The problem is, though, that he, some people continue to think that their stuff is out of our orbit because we publish first or we came up with an idea or this or that. You know, I tell people, Left of Bang was the greatest after-action review any of my students ever wrote. Am I sure that somebody wrote a book on my theory? No. I'm proud of that. I'm humbled that they thought it was amazing enough, and a bunch of people bought that book. And that's the same way I feel about Klein. Klein's a critical thinker, but Klein's always trying to push stuff towards the decision point. What we're trying to say is that this decision point's going to be inevitable. How far before it can you influence a positive spin on that, you know?

And what you talked about, Greg, is what we do is, is rather than, "Here, learn this framework," in a sense, and learn what this is. It's, "You, here, here's the elements. Okay, here's what you have to figure out what those elements mean to you." So Chip, you have so much tacit knowledge, and I tell every law enforcement officer I'm ever in front of, "You have more tacit knowledge in your trigger finger than most people have in their whole body." You just don't know it because we haven't maybe put words to our experiences. We don't know how to articulate it. So we're still learning as we go. It's still almost discovery learning, right?

So what Greg was talking about, the template and prototype matches, you can tell a rookie officer coming up right now, Chip, and go, you can tell every one of your experiences, every one of your stories, it's not going to be real to them. So they're not going to recognize that in the moment. They have to develop their own. But what you can do is give them, "Here's the elements from that that I saw coalesce. So don't worry about the exact, 'This is the situation, there was this many people, this was the caliber of weapon, this was the type of vehicle.'" It's like, "No, no, these few elements start to coalesce, and that if I had known that then, I would have been able to mitigate this or it would enact sooner." So now what I do is, as a new guy going, "Okay, well, I have different experiences, so I have to make that real to me." So what we focus on in our training is, "Here's what that element means to you." So, "Here's what heuristics are. Give me an example of this. Here's what urban masking and social camouflage looks like. Do you have one?" "Oh yeah, I saw a guy, and one time he did this." Got it. So now you have a term, but it's your story, not my story and my definition of what it is. And that builds on that tacit knowledge and that subject matter expertise.

Because those heuristics that people develop, especially in law enforcement, they're really, they're essential, and they, and they will—if you don't develop them, you could die. I mean, really, you have to develop certain ones, and you just have to understand that there are certain cognitive biases that are going to affect our decision-making and our judgment. So I have to balance it. I can't do anything about it in the sense that, like, "There's no, there's no thing that you're going to get rid of that bias." You, that's not possible. But you can balance it with an understanding, a mindset like this, that, right? That's the whole outward mindset of, "Well, exactly, let me see this person. Let me take a step back." So the perfect story you gave earlier, right? You're in the rich neighborhood, guy fits the baseline for what you should expect to see, got the Beamer, got the suit. It never got to that issue of, "Man, this, this might be something. There might be something going on."

Now, changing the neighborhood, change the car, change the behavior slightly on that individual. Would those officers then go, like, "Hey, man, I wonder if this guy's got a gun in the car? I wonder if he's got this? Right? We should check that even though it's a traffic accident." But so I have to be able to balance that and go, "These are possible anywhere." It's why anyone is surprised at these situations everyone sees on the news constantly: gas stations getting robbed. And then when they go to a gas station, they're shocked that they got robbed. I mean, it's like the number one place where these things happen. And you always go there because why? Because you've been filling up your gas tank your whole entire life, and you never took a second to take a look around, and they came right up to you. So, it's like, even though they see it, you know, it's still not real to us until it actually—

It's so funny. It's so funny. They're building two new gas stations right down from my house. My wife and I never complain of having to drive to get gas because, you know, gas stations tend to attract trouble. They're building two right across the street of each other, just a block from me. But you know, it's, it's so that is so interesting. And I'm sorry, I didn't mean to, I didn't mean to actually—

Just before you start that, Chip, what I'm trying to say is this is what Brian and I felt when we went to Arbinger. First of all, we, you know, we're different than every client that went to Arbinger. Now, we weren't. We came in, you know, thinking there was a preconceived set. No, we didn't. We came in to observe, and Jack was great about it. He left us alone, didn't play with us, you know, didn't interview us in between everything. And we sat there and we said, "Well, this is our program, just from a different perspective," right? None of the stuff in Arbinger is a Jack-in-the-Box where all of a sudden there's the epiphany moment on the X. You can't do that. Life is not like that. It's so far behind it. A nanosecond in this type of environment matters.

So I want to give a shout out briefly, and then turn it back over to you, Chip, because Arbinger changed our outlook on some training. Because some training that we've attended blows, and it was horrible, like the trumpeter in the Army Band. And I take nothing away from it, and Brian Willis always says, "Well, there's always something you can take away from training." Yeah, that it's bad sometimes. Like, Chip, Brian and I held Arbinger in such high esteem because we could see the epiphany moment in the crowd. And we had all different experiences in that crowd, and everyone, the light bulb came out at a different thing, and we heard the little (sound of a light bulb). And it was fun.

So, I'm saying that transformative heuristic, seeing the gas station, can blind us that there's danger. I'm saying that seeing the suit can be a prototypical match that blinds you that this guy might have a gun. And your work, you, you approach it the same way. It's just you don't, you know, you don't sit there and pick out those different points. One of your stories, and Chip, if you don't mind, I think it's your story about the guy with the damage to his leg when you guys were in the house, and it was like, "Sit down." Right away, to me, I was in the class, that was my epiphany moment. I go, "Oh my God, I've been there." Now, nobody, nobody but Brian and I know that. Is that okay to share?

Yeah, it's perfectly okay to share. I'm going to come back around because I've got a question for you. Yeah, you're pulling this, this, the string. As a matter of fact, can we put a pin in that? Let me ask this question, I don't know where this is going to go. Yeah, yeah, I just really want your opinions on this. I'm so sorry.

You so, we talked about this idea of the Ward Parkway incident, that traffic crash where the officer's bias was, "People in suits don't shoot at the police." People in suits, with what it was, the environment, it was the type of vehicle, industry, time of day. So here's my, here's my question, I will see what you think of this, guys. I've been thinking about this myself. If we flip that, can that contribute to overreaction on the part of the officer? If I'm in a neighborhood where I'm like, "The neighborhood's classically dangerous. This gentleman fits the profile of who I think a criminal. He's driving the type of car I think criminals drive. He's, you know, carrying himself or dressed the way I think criminals dress." And then if that's my heuristic, if I can use that word, right?

Yeah, absolutely, that's what that is.

Can that lead to overreaction? That's the question I wanted to ask.

That's why cops are shooting people when they don't need to be shooting people. Listen, if you talk a cell phone into a cop or into a suspect's hand, it's a cell phone. There's a shooting this morning, yesterday, a subject named Cole that was killed a little while ago, but it's coming up for review now, and the young man, Cole, was having a problem and the officers came on the scene, and Cole had a black Magic Marker in his hand, but he was going, "This is on, it's on, let's go," and was coming up on the coppers. And the coppers felt that they were threatened. Okay, if we took that situation and we slow time down, and now we're behind cover, and we understand the totality of circumstances, those are great, but we're not going to be able to justify or go back in time.

So what we have to do is we have to change training. This is where we're talking about training in our realm all the time on our podcast, is because what, what it is in training is we have a dilemma, and we solve it at the end of a gun. So, are you surprised that all my thoughts when I roll up on an unknown trouble are about a gun? So the idea is what we have to do is understand that every situation is different, and it feeds us little bits of information along the way. But we're in such a hurry to get there as coppers, "Well, hey, dispatch, we're on the scene, let's handle this," that we shorten the time, distance, gap, space-time, literally space-time. And what happens now is we go with a poor decision, and we stick with it. And that's the difference. There's more of Klein's decision-making work right there. If you have more time and if you're in a position where the stakes are lower, you'll make better decisions.

So we as coppers have to force other coppers to think that way, too. Stop rushing into the scene. Stop going at the end of your knife, gun, or anything. So I would tell you this, I'm looking at that guy with the BMW Downtown Detroit, and he's on Woodward, pulled over to the side of the street, and he gets out of his car for a traffic accident. I'm going, "Okay, big-timer, where's the cocaine? Where's the gun? Where's?" That's not a fair assessment. So I've come to that, and every word out of my mouth and my stance and my way of handling that call is now going to be different.

But if you approach with tabula rasa, and you say, "This incident, it's all new, it's all fresh," and things start adding up to it, if you start with a baseline, you can never be wrong because baseline against what? You, you, any trip—I'm not teaching you anything, I'm hoping I'm talking to the viewers—you take the known, you take the unknown, and you have to compare them against something. The baseline is the perfect comparison. You'll be right more than you're wrong, because if you're measuring it against you and your personal experiences, and the way Uncle Paul acted, and the food that you ate last night that was bad, and you didn't get enough sleep, then you're going to give a shitty response, and that citizen and that community is going to hate the cops. We know that. We know that's the truth. You made a difference in Kansas City, Missouri. You made a difference, a palpable difference. People still talk. Brian and I had a guy in class last week that said, "I couldn't stop talking about you." That's fantastic to us. So we're not doing this to get a pat on the back. We're doing it at the time because it's the right thing to do. So, you're spot on. You changed just a few elementals (elements), and the entire situation changes. And that needs to be taught at the academy.

Yeah, I think it's worth saying, too, and this isn't false humility, but you know, I credit the team, the men, and they were all men at the time that were on that team, because yes, I introduced the concept clumsily, and I was still struggling with it, too. But they were the ones that put their faith in me and went against their instincts and said, "You know what? We're going to actually see what this is about. Let's talk, let's stay with this unconditional regard for people. Is (this) actually about?" That's so true. And they actually did. And with each other, and then with the community. So I always want to kind of shift credit back to them, because without them, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You know, I'd be one guy wandering around the woods, you know, with an idea that I picked up.

And you could have easily, Chip, you could have easily turned into Ted Kaczynski, you know what I'm saying? The Unabomber and been writing manifestos, right? But the idea that you didn't, you know, it was funny, I, I people like, I make this comment all the time, like, "I'm actually friends with my first wife now." We had dinner together when I was in Dallas, so she lives (there) now. We did (dinner) together a few weeks ago, and I was like, I told her, I said, "You know, it's amazing how much nicer you became when I quit being a jerk." Here we go again, right? You completely changed, right?

Yeah. So that story you were talking about, though, look, that story was the very first time that I ever attempted to use a framework that Arbinger taught me, called the "Influence Pyramid." And it's just basically a framework to help discipline your thinking around how to influence people productively, not a tactic necessarily, but it kind of undergirds the tactics, you know? So the idea being, I could be the best tactical communicator in the world. I could know all the right phrases, ask all the right questions, but if I have contempt or disregard for you, your humanity, you're going to pick up on that, yeah. And it's going to undermine everything I do right at the behavior level.

So the Influence Pyramid, I learn it in a workshop, and I'm out on a search warrant. And it was one of those things, we were hitting the house for homicide, and they had a couple guys they wanted us to scoop up, so they got a drug warrant. And we go into the house under the pretense of looking for drugs, which we find. And we also find one of the suspects. And I think it was a witness, I think, to the homicide. And so we, you know, we get—we get in there, we get everybody secured, and we're starting to process the scene, starting to exploit the scene, right? So we're in that phase two, where things are not kinetic.

And the suspect walked up to the house just to kind of see what was going on. And the, and the trailer team picked him up. They recognized him, and they stopped him, and they bring him into the house. And so I asked him to sit down on the couch. You know, we were going to detain him, obviously, we cuffed him. So we're going to sit on the couch and wait for the homicide detectives. He goes, "Yeah, I'm not sitting down on the couch." And you know, my instinct was, like, "You know, I don't, I don't know if you know who I am."

Sounds kind of in charge here.

Yeah, like, "And I'm thinking like, 'You're handcuffed, and I'm 235 pounds at the time, and, yeah, I'm pretty sure you're going to sit on the couch.'" Like, these things are running through my head, right? So I was brought up in the, or, you know, I became a cop in '91, right? Ask, Tell, Make. And that was the paradigm that I was—I was telling, "Ask, Tell, Make." I asked. And, you know, now the next step is to tell. And sometimes that gets smushed together with "make."

But I stopped for a second, I thought, "Well, I've got this framework I just learned. They didn't teach it dealing with a homicide suspect in a drug house. But, you know, let me, let me just think." One of the principles was, "If something you're doing at one level isn't working, the answer is generally at a lower level." And this framework is kind of built up in a pyramid, and the top level is "correct." And so I recognize, "I'm correcting him right now. He's doing something I want him to do. I'm trying to give him a correction. That ain't working." So I dropped down in my mind, and the next level below is "teach and communicate." Like, "If your correction isn't working, maybe you haven't clarified expectations, maybe you need to explain why you want what you want." Okay.

So I said, "Well, sir, let me explain to you. If you're, you know, if you're standing up, everyone's going to want to stand up. And we've got to be loading equipment in here—Pelican cases, all kinds of stuff. You'll be in the way. It'll be harder for us to get this job done, and, you know, it's just going to delay everything. It's going to take longer if you get downtown, talk to the detectives." You know, I really explained it. And I remember there were a couple of patrol officers looking at me like I was crazy, right? And but I explained to him, and then he looks at me and he says, "Yeah, whatever, man, I'm not sitting down." And I'm like, "Oh, well, this ain't working very well. Like, now I should just knock him down, right?" Like, I, I checked the box, I did my duty, you know? Now I can go back to knock him down, which if I'm honest with you, is what I really wanted to do anyway. Yeah. You know, that's, that's where I was at in my mind.

But I thought, "You know what? I'm here, you know what I mean? I'm here. This is like a laboratory at this point. I'm going to, I'm going to stay with this framework." So the next level down from "teach and communicate" is "listen and learn." So if your teaching and communicating isn't working, maybe you haven't properly diagnosed where you prescribed, right? So I just simply said to the guy, the only thing I could think of, I said, "Hey, man, why won't you sit down?" He says, "Well, I'll tell you why. I was shot a couple weeks ago. I had seven pins in my knee. If I sat down and bend my knee, the doctor said the pins are popping out. I'm going to have to have three more surgeries. I'm not doing that for anybody." And he peppered it in a couple (curse words). I'll clean that up. But when he said that, like, I can't explain the feeling that washed over me. Like some people might call it empathy, but I was kind of like, I was kind of like, "What would it be like, yeah, here comes the curiosity part, right?" To be shot up and would not want to sit down and be in that kind of pain?

And so I just simply was like, all of a sudden, new alternatives came to my mind at that "adjust efforts" level of that framework, right? Of the, of the same framework. They just kind of, those two frameworks kind of came together. And I was like, "Well, if we pull this, this like chair over here and put it next to the couch, we put your leg up on it." You know, we sat down and he goes, "Well, yeah, I'll do that." And so we pulled the chair over, he sits down, has his legs straight, and no problems. Yeah.

And then the coolest part about that story that you guys may not know is he goes down to talk to the detectives. First, he didn't go to the hospital. And we weren't accused of abusing him, and he didn't tell the neighbors a hundred different versions of, you know, how the cops beat him up and tore his knee up. And we didn't have to sit him at the hospital or face a lawsuit and all the things that could have happened if I would have just shoved him down. And I pointed out, I would have been within my right to do that, right? Legally, right? Yeah, lawful but awful.

And so, that doesn't happen. But then the detectives call me up. I won't say his last name, but Eric, and Eric calls me up and he says, "Hey, Chip," he goes, "that guy that we pulled down here, he, he, he flipped. He confessed and he actually implicated somebody else. And, you know, I just wanted to tell you, normally when we, when you guys bring people down for us, when you take them down, all they want to talk about is how bad you guys treated them. Like, we can't get past the fact that, you know, they were handcuffed to a radiator or they had to, they peed their pants or, you know, whatever it was." Right? He goes, "So whatever you guys are doing, it's working because this guy, you know, like, he didn't have anything bad to say about you guys." And I thought, "Man, this is a pretty cool outcome." That story has been pivotal to me and informing me of like, you know, again, this wasn't like we bust in the door and people are reaching for guns. There was plenty of time here to have a conversation with this gentleman. And, you know, just using that time, I think that story is instructive for a lot of reasons.

And you, you brought up something that kind of, and you brought up a couple times throughout, is something I'd love to kind of highlight, is, you know, we're not just talking about, "This is, you know, lovey-dovey, let's all be kind to each other." And, you know, and that's important and to have empathy. But, you know, when you're a lot of Type A type personalities, men and women who are military, law enforcement, whatever, you know, it can be kind of hard for them. But if you look at it, you know, you, this is something that benefits you operationally as well. I mean, not just in the sense that, yes, you're doing good for others, and that's building good relationships, and over time that's going to help. But I mean, literally, that, that helps with the case. That, that helps us see people in the situation where it's not just something that's catastrophic, but there's an opportunity because we always put it in the ways, you know, like literally our course, we'll call it "Navigating High-Risk Human Encounters: Identifying Event Indications of Danger or Opportunity." Because it's, it's the same thing. It doesn't, and you're creating, you, you gave so many examples of that, of what we call, you know, both sides of the coin. "Hey, here's what I'm doing, but here's what also I'm doing. It's helped me accomplish my job better, and it's long-term making goals." So it's that when you look at it from the same concept, it's not just, "Oh, I got to take back and I got to work on me." It's like, "Yeah, you do. That's, that's good. We could, we can all work on ourselves," you know, in different ways and identify what our weaknesses are.

But, for the most part, most people are doing the job that they're, you know, how they were trying to do it, and they're doing just fine at it. So it's not even that, it's just, look at it as beneficial, almost be selfish about it. It's like, "Well, you're going to gain a lot out of this personally."

I agree. Well, but because of our, because this is what I believe, because of the ways we are interconnected fundamentally, yeah, you know, we, we, I can't help you without helping me, and I really can't hurt you without hurting me. It's a matter of, it's a matter of degree and extent. And it, if the need is, is huge enough, I'll hurt you. And, and you know, and, and you know, what does that do to me? It changes me in some way. But, but the trade-off is worth it if it's a school shooter, right? You know, of course. But the trade-off isn't worth it if I'm just abusing people by virtue of having a position of power.

And you know, you mentioned, I got, you mentioned empathy. We've talked that a couple of times. I actually got invited to co-author an article on empathy. And I, I've been working on it on the plane, planes plural. And I've started over three times because the more I started writing about the importance of empathy, I was realizing, like, "Look, really what I want to write about is compassion," because empathy, right? There's a time and place where empathy can be a positive force. But, oh my, empathy is also what causes all the secondary trauma in law enforcement officers and paramedics and firefighters. Of course, you know, there's, there's a dark side to that. And I, I think, you know, what I'm really talking about, that's what you're talking about. It's just simply, simply compassion, being able to to have a desire here to help this human being that's in front of me experience the natural consequences of their decision, but in a way that doesn't cause unnecessary suffering, right? Yeah. I'm not trying to pile on. The natural consequence of him being arrested is he's got to go face whatever he's got to face. And the natural consequence, the natural consequence of putting his hands on me is he's gonna have four shoes on him. But, everything else being equal in that situation, what was called for was getting curious, getting closer, (to) what was actually going on, and responding compassionately.

And it's, it's one of those things that I think that when you try to talk to a lot of hardcore law enforcement or military folks about, they, I think—I mean, I'm going way outside of my depth here—but I think there's an inherent vulnerability people feel, like an insecurity, and it manifests in really tough people, which really baffles me. But I think about our lives, the lives that you, the three of us share, the way we were raised. I mean, I'm, I'm just like, "Man, we've had some of the same experiences." You mentioned Salvation Army's admission, like, "Oh my." You mentioned abuse, "Oh my." But I'm thinking, like, for some reason, we become formidable in the wake of all those things that happened to us, rather than shrivel up and hide in the corner or become perpetual victims. We decide instead to become formidable. It's formidable intellectually, physically, spiritually. And then I think lurking deep inside is some of that unresolved insecurity, and if you can't conquer that, you end up projecting it out to other people. And so I think, sure, I feel like compassion is something worth pursuing, understanding.

And the last point I'll make, and Brian, you said this, this is a lifelong project. This isn't like, "I reach it," and it's like working out. You don't work out, get in shape, and stop working out. Now, one day, right? Right? Yeah. So it's the same thing. The self-development, Greg, you mentioned self-awareness. This is something I think that is a, it's a moving target we're constantly pursuing and evolving in that direction. I, I probably said too much.

No, no, no, you're spot on. And this is why you're so much fun to talk to, and we've got to, at the end, show again because there's never going to be enough time to unpack everything we talked about. But I'll tell you this, folks that are listening, stop trying to rename that you already know. So what Chip has been talking about for the last five, six, seven minutes is resilience born from experience, okay? Which is also a way of fantastic knowledge. But now the word is "grit," he's got the grit, you know what I'm saying? So, I get it, but stop worrying about that.

What you did is you talked about consequences in that story, which is a compelling story, changed me. And you talked about being tactically sound in a situation, yet operationally you made a difference, and you met the strategic objectives of your agency. Why is that important? Because I come in at night, I'm going to be working Charlie 50, cartoon man car tonight. I'm excited. I want to hit the streets, and I want to make a difference in my district. Watch Commander comes up and goes, "Hey, you're watching this guy at the hospital." "What guy?" "Knee guy." "I'm watching knee guy? Why?" "That's who's caper you catch 'em, you clean 'em." That sounds familiar. Okay.

And so what you don't understand is what you do and what you don't do matters in your entire community and in your off-duty roll call and with your wife and kids. And I want to throw one more thing, and Brian, I'm going to turn it back over to you. I'm a person that likes to unpack quotes when I hear a good one, and I'm going to butcher your quote, but you made a quote in writing or in person at one time, and I dug it up, and it was, "You know, even a compliment can seem condescending when it's not genuine." There's your compassion and empathy right there. Because we're, we're coppers. We're on transmit. When we learn Spanish, it's command Spanish. When I come into your house, I'm not asking you, "Do you mind if I come in?" "Let's move away from the door." "You're not free to leave." And that authority overwhelms us sometimes, and we forget our humility, and we forget our compassion and empathy. You've got it in spades. You've got to keep doing what you're doing. I'm proud that we got you on the call. I, I mean, Brian, I'm looking, it's like an hour. I'm like, "Oh my God, where did the time go? I thought we just got introduced." So, great, great.

I've got a, you know, in full, full disclosure, I appreciate your compliments. I, I really, I struggle still with the basics of our work. I mean, I, there's still days when, you know, I slip up. I'm not as patient as I should be. You know, I try to force my opinions on people. You know, there's days when with my 16-year-old stepson, it's such a gift to have him in my life because he is, he is naturally resistant to feedback. And, you know, it's just an opportunity, you know? And I mean, he's taught me things when I've shut up and listened. Yeah. And, you know, it's like, I'm riding in the car with this kid and I'm like, "You know, the, the, the, the old, the old me says, 'What's the 16-year-old got to tell me?'" I mean, "I was this kid. No, he plays video games and baseball and, and..." But when I shut up and I'm just like, "Listen to this kid," you know, I mean, he's actually taught me.

But I want to be honest with your listeners and with you, too. Man, I some days I wake up in the box. Some days I wake up just totally self-absorbed in my own stuff, and I do the most inconsiderate things. And I think that what Arbinger's gifted me is the ability to recognize it more quickly and recover to be able to say, "That's great. That's pretty inward. Who do I need to apologize to? What do I need to do differently?" You know, I can start asking some of those questions. But I don't want to give you the impression, not that you would ever be fooled into thinking this, that I've arrived anywhere, because, you know, you know that mankind chart where they show like the fish and the monkey, then the bird, then the T-Rex, caveman (I think you did that in the right order), but then Homer Simpson. The idea is that we're all on that path. You're further along than a lot of the people I have to deal with every day.

And you, you brought up, you brought up a really good point there too, that I always try to use examples too, because, you know, we, especially if we're training like military, law enforcement, whatever, like, I'm like, "All right, well, I'm not going to use examples from that. I can tell you all kinds of Marine sniper stories, and that may be relevant, but like, what am I really trying to do?" So I call her the "insurgent." I got an 11-year-old here at home, 11 going on like 15. And so I'll use those stories because it's the same thing. You're just like, "Okay, it's, it's the most challenging because it's no different than dealing with someone through a different language." Like, I, I've used those experiences from trying to, you know, get through the little Gulf Arabic that I know in a hostile environment, talk to someone, and it's the same thing talking to the living room. Like, "What is she really trying to say to me? Like, of course, this is the worst thing." But, I have to figure out, is this the worst thing that's happened to her, or is this just in the moment right now? And I have to determine that because I had to learn that, because some things my wife had to be like, "Hey, you know, like you were, especially when she's younger, like, 'Hey, she's five, maybe we bring down that conversation a little bit.'" I was like, "Oh, I see what you're saying. She had no clue what I said." No, why don't we bring down a five-year-old?

And it's so funny. So I literally have to, like, get down on my knees and be like, "All right, now I see the world. Okay, here, here's where we're at here." And it's so funny because I tell people, just using, if you have children, that's the best way. You know, we even when we get into talking about body language and different stuff that everyone loves talking about, which we kind of, we do a little bit of just, just the stuff that you can tell. But like, you know, it's great with kids, or like, deception indicators. Like, they're not good at lying yet. So if you, you can learn, it's almost like watching an adult lie, but in slow motion. You're like, "Oh, now I see it. You're totally making this up." But with kids, you can see it right there. And it's the same thing, it's that constant, constant ego check when like, she just has that response to something, and you're like, "I'm, but I'm telling you to do this. Why aren't you doing it? Like, you're, you're supposed to listen to me. That's how this works. Like, what are you talking about?" And so you, that constant, and I just called that the ego check. And I'm just like, "All right, how do I get into this?" And, you know, especially if we're in here, we're dealing with a lot, and we, you know, have clients and we're on calls, I'm dealing with stressful stuff. We got this, we're booking travel, and so busy. And then like, when I walk outside this room and I go in that house, I cannot take this in there. Like, that's not fair to them, right? That, that's, that's my stuff. I signed up for that. That, that's my life. That's not my wife and my daughter's life and my son's life now. Like, that's different. So, having that sort of, you know, ability to do that is, is really, really important. It makes my life much better if I could check myself at that door before I walk back in, you know?

But my friend, my friend Mitch recommended a book to me by Sam Harris, called Lying. Sam Harris writes a lot of short books. And so, you know, if you like short books, but Lying, it's, it's an interesting little book. But there's a story in there about a kid, and you talked about not being good liars. And basically the, the parent, you know, meets this couple at the door that come to stay with him for the weekend. And they say, "Hey, we really appreciate you letting us stay there." And the kid's with the parent, and the parent's like, "Hey, absolutely, of course, and no problem." And the kid said, "Well, that's not what you said a while ago, Daddy. You said they would get a hotel." It goes down this whole, "No, no, you misunderstood me. No, no, you, no." And so everybody's, but it's, he's making (the point) is that the kids are watching us. What are we teaching them, right? And I think by your patience and your, your ability to, to do the things you're doing intentionally with them, I think it's a hallmark of a good parent. When the little emotional crises that you look at as being no big deal, they think it's the worst thing that ever happened because they think that is, you provided a very safe, loving environment for them. That probably is the worst.

Well, that's the thing. It's like you have to look at, it's like, you know, from my perspective, it's like, "Well, this isn't a big deal." And then it's like, "No, to that person, like, this is a big deal." And I mean, that's what I, I've always said, and that comes into everything. You know, it's like, "Look, man, like, I'm the guy, like, there's no one shooting at us right now. There's no bombs going off. Like, I'm, I'm good." You know, until we get to that point. So then it's like, "No, you have to, there's people there."

There are people climbing Kilimanjaro with no legs. You and I don't have a problem.

Yeah, exactly. What could possibly go wrong? But that other person is like, "No, they're in the moment." And that's the most important thing. And, and, and being like, "Oh yeah, okay, this is the most important thing to you." Yeah. I mean, where they're at, it's something. I mean, where they're at. Yeah. Yeah. And awesome. So, so yeah, the, the, but the kids one is, is always great to use if you're listening, you got them out there, because you just got, like, it's, it's, it's all, it's like it's in slow motion. So it's like practice. It's the best practice for adults and dealing with people. And, you know, it's always fun. I, I always, you know, hanging out with them and teaching her stuff is great. My wife's like, "Oh, you, it's like, 'Oh yeah, you teach.'" I was like, "Oh, kids, I'd rather teach kids all day. I got to teach adults, and they think they know everything, and they don't. At least kids know like that there's a, there's an experience level difference, you know? That's, that's assumed." Like, with adults, it's like, "Oh no, adults think they know everything." I'd rather teach kids all day long.

But, yeah, so I, I, I really appreciate you coming on, Chip, because sharing the experiences, and, you know, talk about how it affects you personally, organizationally, tactically. That, that's the whole thing. Is I love anything where you can apply (it) to the most amount of situations or all situations because it's the most utile thing that you use. And that's the whole point. And when it comes to even training, and you know how that is too, I don't care what you're training or learning. What do we typically do? We put, all right, we put the training hat on. Now we're training. And it's like, I get that for certain skills that you have to learn, but with this, this isn't about putting the hat on. This is, this is about, this is, this is always on. This is, this is something that you're taking the coat off, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's this is something that you're always carrying around with you. This is, right now we do this. Now we use it in this situation. It's, "How do I use this effectively all the time?" And then you start building, you know, those heuristics start building, those cognition biases to, to now you default to this positive way of looking at the situation, versus defaulting to, "Oh, you're not going to do what I say? Okay." You know, which is what we all want to do in those situations. Like, "I'm going to take you to the ground right now." It's like, "Oh, maybe I can wait a minute here and try a few other options." And, and that, that's, it's so, I, I just appreciate you sharing that from those multiple perspectives because it's really, really powerful. And Greg, I'll let you kind of get something.

I'd like to say one thing, and Brian, if it's okay, we'll give Chip the last word before you close out. Brian brought up something great that Chip has been alluding to during the entire episode. Look, folks, if you're listening and watching and you're still with us at this time, I carried three sets of cuffs on my gun belt all the time: two sets of Hiatts hinged and a Smith and Wesson chain. And every day before I went home, every day in my career, I went by the hospital and I put them in an autoclave to make sure that they were clean for the next time that I had to go out on the road. But every day I came home, I still wore my Danner Go-Devil boots into the house. That's how stupid I was because I didn't understand that I was still poisoning that environment. It took me over 30 years to look back on that and go, "Oh my gosh, I was saying, but I wasn't doing." So what we're talking about is aligning your thoughts and aligning your self-awareness and making it fit this environment through the baseline by looking up and out, and every once in a while down and in. But great stuff. I hope that made sense to some of the coppers in the crowd, and they learn it and it doesn't take them 30 years.

Yeah, yeah. Chip, I'll give you kind of the last, last words here before we wrap.

Yeah, you know, I, I, I'm, I, when there's so many things that you could say to wrap something up, but I guess if just talking to the audience, I would suggest that a lot of the, a lot of the people that I've worked with over the years that were resistant to the idea of being compassionate or seeing others (as) people or being curious, they were on the exterior, they appear to be very tough people, you know, really rough. They got the tats, you know, they got the gym muscles, they've done all that. You know, they've been downrange a few times. And, you know, I, I understand that. I understand that defensiveness. I understand that insecurity that sometimes causes us to project our, our, our attitudes, our, our domination out onto the world, right? But, the thing that I would leave the listeners with is, you know, looking tough is a 10-minute class. You know, being tough is a lifelong pursuit. And, the way we are tough, you know, that takes a lot of work, a lot of hours of training, a lot of skill building. It's not talking down to people, it's not demeaning them, and it's not, you know, running people over like a bulldozer. You know, the toughest people I know are the most compassionate people. They lead with the heart, you know, and if things go down, they are ready to roll, and they're perfectly equipped to do whatever they need to do. But, you know, my, my closing thought would just be, you know, what I wish for everyone is that we get in touch with, you know, with ourselves and recognize our limitations as humans, and that way we'll be able to more closely relate to the other people around us in helpful ways. And I really, I appreciate you gentlemen in the work you're doing, and you, you certainly won Jack over, and, and thanks.

Yeah, Jack has, Jack has been impressed. I've, I've looked now, he shared with me some diagrams, some things you guys were teaching. I'm like, "Wow, this makes so much sense." So, thank you for what you're doing. And yeah, if you'll ever have me back on, I'd love to chat some more.

I would throw this back at you, let's collaborate with something. We've always wanted to collaborate with Arbinger. We know that something might be in the works, we don't know. We, the same with Jack, Jack was coming to our training, it was great. We want to see him again. And Chip, like-minded people, birds of a feather, we want to see you again too. This is great.

Yep, we appreciate it. Thanks everyone for tuning in. We'll have all the links for Arbinger, some of the stuff we talked about, and to link up to reach out with Chip as well. And that'll all be in the episode details, so please check that out. And then if you have any other questions, of course, always reach out to us, thehumanbehaviorpodcast@gmail.com, and don't forget that training changes behavior.