The Human Behavior Podcast
Do you ever wonder why people act the way that they do? Join human behavior experts Brian Marren and Greg Williams as they discuss all things human behavior related. Their goal is to increase your Advanced Critical Thinking ability through a better understanding of HBPR&A (Human Behavior Pattern Recognition & Analysis.) What is HBPR&A? It's a scientific (and fun) way to understand and articulate human behavior cues so that you can predict likely outcomes and it works regardless of your race, religion, political ideology or culture!
The Human Behavior Podcast
"Darwin's People" by Brian Moon
When decisions can’t wait for perfect data, you need methods that actually work in the real world. We sit down with Brian Moon to pull naturalistic decision making out of journals and into the field where cops, medics, operators, and executives make consequential calls under stress, time pressure, and uncertainty. The conversation opens with a clear critique: elegant lab studies often miss the work. From there, we rebuild on stronger ground; agency, process, and the lived patterns of true expertise.
Brian traces why experience isn’t just hours served but exposure to hard problems, responsibility for outcomes, and honest feedback that reshapes judgment. We unpack how experts blend rapid recognition with deliberate checks, using counterfactuals to keep first interpretations from hardening too soon. If you lead training, you’ll get specific moves: design scenarios that force ownership of the whole problem; capture tacit cues through structured debriefs; and teach a shared language for uncertainty so teams can flexecute as conditions change. We also push into high-friction topics like use-of-force errors and pathways to violence, showing how process signals, not labels or post-hoc narratives, offer the best chance to prevent bad outcomes.
Across the hour, you’ll hear how to spot and grow real SMEs, why credentials alone fall short, and how to engineer environments where sensemaking becomes a habit instead of a hope. Whether you work a midnight shift or a corner office, you’ll leave with practical tools to clean up your decisions this week and a sharper lens for understanding human behavior where it actually happens: on the street, on the line, and in the moment. If this conversation helps, share it with a teammate, subscribe for more, and drop a review so others can find it.
Darwin's People: AMAZON
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Hello everyone and welcome to the Human Behavior Podcast. If you make consequential decisions on patrol and a command seat or in the C suite, this one's for you. Brian Moon joins us to translate naturalistic decision making into tactics you can use today. We get past lab tasks and online surveys, and we take it to the street. We dig into real expertise, why it comes from owning the whole problem, facing hard reps, and demanding honest feedback. You'll hear where many studies go wrong, a simple way to challenge your first interpretation before it hardens, and how to capture tacit expert know-how so rookies stop learning the hard way. Stick around, you'll leave with cleaner sense making and training moves you can run this week. Thank you so much for tuning in. We hope you enjoy the episode. Don't forget to check out our Patreon channel for additional content and subscriber only episodes. If you enjoy the podcast, please consider leaving us a review and more importantly, sharing it with a friend. Thank you for your time. And remember, training changes behavior. All right, everyone, thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the Human Behavior Podcast. I'm super excited about this one. A real quick shout out to all of our listeners who've been reaching out with some questions and potential topics for the podcast. We we very much appreciate it. And thank you, those who have been sharing the podcast with a lot of folks as it's starting to grow. And that's again something we we really appreciate. But today we have on a guest by the name of Brian Moon. I'll get to you, Brian, in a second. I just want to set up the episode here and everything. This is going to be a fun conversation because there's a lot of overlap in some of the stuff that he does and what he's written about and the world he's in, in a sense, and what you folks are are used to listening to here on the podcast. And so what I want to try to do for all of you listening is kind of just make this information today as accessible as possible. So we're going to try and keep this in the framework of like, okay, we're going to be talking about these sometimes complex subjects. Sometimes they get a little esoteric and almost academic, but we got Greg here for that to keep it, keep it on the keep it on the street uh level. Thank you. Um but you know, we want to give it uh uh some takeaways for you because uh this diverse audience that we have of trainers, police officers, you know, directors of risk management for organizations, strategic level thinkers, tactical operators, you know, just people who are interested in our approach to human behavior. We have we we we we appreciate all of you and then sort of that diverse backgrounds that you have. And I think there's gonna be a lot of takeaways from this one. And I think you're gonna be very interested in what Brian has to say. And I'm gonna be bringing up some of his work, and we're gonna have some good discussions. So I just want to, for you guys and Greg, let's keep it framed, you know, really, really for that, for that listener, you know, the person who might be driving into work right now, midnight shift at a police department, lunch break, and their role at some strategic C-suite, you know, level that they're at. Anyone who works has to make critical decisions in complex, uncertain environments, especially if there's an element of danger or time constraints in there. This is really gonna be for you, and which is why we have like having people like Brian on the show. So we're really trying to frame that conversation around what we always talk about the sense making, the problem solving, the decision making, and and how that process works, how we can get better at it, things we can focus on, things we don't have to worry about. There, there's gonna be a lot in here for for all of you. So so as Greg would would remind you, I hope you hope you got your yellow pad out. If you're sitting listening, if you're driving, don't don't don't have the yellow pad out. Uh, there's a transcript you can go look at on the site. So so please don't do that. But I want to get started off. And before I throw to you, Brian, um, uh Greg, I want you to kind of kind of open it up here because we've got some interesting uh background here.
SPEAKER_00:So Peabody Insurment, the Wayback Machine, it's hilarious. So I like to cover stuff, obviously from the intro. I'm the lowest common denominator, but I do understand words like context and relevance. So what's hilarious about this is all of a sudden we find ourselves, Brian and I, in Huntsville in an Uber on the way to yet another travel engagement. And I go, hey, I'm reading this book. And I said, I gotta, I gotta send it to you as soon as I'm done, because it's it sounds like I wrote it. And Marin goes, What are you talking about? I go, Well, you'll see. I'm not gonna spoil it for you, just like we're we're talking at the beginning. We don't want to spoil all these great things that are gonna come out. And then all of a sudden, go 20 years blast from the past, back during 2005, 2006, 2007, I was very new to audiences with human behavior pattern recognition analysis. So what was happening is that because of the Combat Hunter program, which was in its infancy, I was briefing at JFCOM and NATO and JAINO and CENTCOM and the DE Ring and the Pentagon, all these great places, I got to go and talk about human behavior profiling and how it works. And one time I'm writing on a napkin for a couple of doctors at a place called Monterey Bay Canners in Oceanside outside of Pendleton. And I wrote, think like an insurgent. This is the the model. And the doctor was one of my heroes who I had been introduced to was Dr. Carol Ross. And Carol Romas ran with Bill Romas, who tried to choke to death, and I had to give him the Heimmaneuver. And then Dr. I think she's a doctor now, Jennifer Phillips, all from Cognitive Performance Group. And then later in that same year, I'm briefing at JFCom and joined forces of command back then had a very different mission. It was a transformation laboratory. So the the it would develop new joint operational concepts and test them through rigorous experimentation. So I'm I'm briefing there, and Carol's there, and Bill is there. And guess who's sitting there too? Is our guest today, Brian Moon. So it's amazing how tight these concentric circles can be sometimes and how long that we've all been in and around the flame of good ideas. And so, Brian, when I was reading this, and and I told Marin, you know, this is so familiar. Now we know, now we all know why it's so familiar, because we've been both dabbling in the occult and this magic stuff for a good long time. So I know you knew Gary Klein for at least 25 years. And I bet we both have friends in the University of Central Florida and many other places that have done the research on this. And I go all the way back to Marty Seligman and his his learned helplessness, you know. So I I can't wait. This is a, you know, this is a fan moment for me, Maren, because it's like uh everything comes full circle, you know. We get to talk about my favorite topic in the whole world for an hour.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Well, and and on that, I guess finally, let's get to our our guest of the day, Brian Moon. And I want you to kind of give our listeners a sort of a street field definition of naturalistic decision making, you know, how that's different, and then kind of tell us like why why you reached out to us to come on the podcast. Oh, by the way, a little humble brag, but really a shout out to our listeners because I posted on LinkedIn that we had a recent benchmark of 250,000 downloads that we're proud of. I'm surprised by too. And then you do because of that is when he reached out. But tell us a little bit about you and natural decision making and then kind of why you wanted to come on the show.
SPEAKER_02:Well, the 250,000 downloads is the only reason that I wanted to come on the show. So here we go.
SPEAKER_01:I appreciate honesty. Exactly.
SPEAKER_03:I so I've known obviously Greg for of his work for for many years and seeing the great stuff that you guys have been doing over the years. And, you know, like all of us on these various social media platforms, we we see each other, we see the posts, we see the work, and we know we're all sort of on the same side of the fence. You mentioned the Cognitive Performance Group. I worked a lot with them when I first started my company. The further background there is we all came out of client associates, Gary's company that he had for many years. Side note, side note, you know, out of Gary's company of, you know, at the time in the early 2000s, we were 35, 36 people. Out of that company, 15 other companies were formed. Wow. That's incredible. Yeah, it's really I always like to tell people that because Gary has taught us, all who worked with him, not only a lot about cognition and and how people act and behave in the world, but also how to be entrepreneurs and figure out how to bring quality services to folks who are working in the kinds of domains that you talked about earlier. So my background, I academically, social science background, Miami University in Ohio for psychology and a couple of other minors, like religion and and sociology, went on to the London School of Economics primarily to study religious cults. And that was why I went there. And, you know, it was in London. So all all the big ones are there, and a couple small ones you've never heard of. But but it was a great sort of toss into the deep end of the pool in terms of not only what religion's about, but how people interact with each other, especially in circumstances that are outside the the everyday, if you will. They're not pedestrian. Uh, but also how to do naturalistic research, right? That's that's been a theme that I I picked up on and was interested in getting to LSE to sort of figure that piece out as well. And for me, the the bridge from studying cults naturalistically, that is getting out there where they are, going to their homes, going to their places of worship, out on the street, as they're proselytizing, interviewing them, talking in depth about how they think about the world and and what sort of rationale and reasons they have behind their behavior. That's what naturalism is all about. So for me, it was a it was a very short leap from doing that sort of thing to what I do today, which is in workplaces of various varieties where folks are facing those same kind of pressures, time pressures, resource pressures, uh danger in some cases. That's also true if you're in a new religious movement. And really, again, trying to get inside their head and understand the world from their perspective so that what they're doing and and what they're saying they do, we can start to explain it. We can start to account for it. So I went to work, actually did some legal work in between my degrees and working for Gary. I worked on defense team for folks who are facing capital murder charges. So again, it's all about let's understand from the perspective of the defendant and everybody else around them how that circumstance arose and how they brought themselves and how they made decisions to get to that point in their life. And so my role was to tell the jury after they had already been convicted of doing whatever horrible thing they did, my role was to try to contextualize their life for the jury and let the jury make the decision. So I did that for a couple of years, and again, you know, the another opportunity to be thrown in the deep end of the pool. I mean, I was 25 years old giving testimony in cases that would declare whether someone was going to be put to death by the state. So uh early on, lots of work going into the hollers of Kentucky and in the in the hills in in western western Virginia to get records, to have interviews, to talk to people who liked and who didn't like the defendant, right? So really sort of testing my ability and helping me to hone my ability and and and doing this kind of work. So by the time I got to client associates, actually, unlike a lot of other people who went there, I'd have been doing this stuff for a while. Right. And and it's funny because I mean, even Gary, when he back in the 80s, when he was trying to figure out how to study decision making and fireground commanders, still leaned on an anthropologist to try to understand the methods. And because he was an experimental psychologist, like so many other people who actually come to this natural decision making, I actually came through it pretty naturally, right? It just made sense that that's what you would do. If you're trying to study people in the workplace, you go do these naturalistic methods. So did that with Gary and and Jennifer and Carol and Bill for seven years. And then as Gary's company was acquired by another company, a bunch of us went out and set up our own shop. And so since 2007, uh I've mostly been on my own doing this kind of work.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so that's uh that's a incredible story here. And part of the reason why we're excited to talk to you. I mean, I you you you recount some of these experiences in your book, and they're they're fascinating to me because, you know, like you said, right, there's the way sometimes we're where the rubber meets the road, there's sort of like this gap in between what's coming out of the academic community, typical academic community, and then like, you know, like practitioners, because you work with a lot of people who would be considered subject matter experts, and you talk about that in your book about expertise. So it's like there's there seems to be always a gap there where you it's usually obviously the practitioners, the people out there doing are always farther ahead, but but then you know, later you come in and study and figure out, okay, well, it wasn't this, it was more this that you were doing that was so successful, or it was that. So can you kind of explain for everyone like the this this sort of difference, I guess, between this naturalistic way of doing things and then maybe like a typical like academic lab-focused research or study? Like how just explain why there's such a difference or what it is.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, it's a it's a methodological difference at the end of the day. It's deciding how you're going to go investigate a question or problem or how you're going to account for something. Right. So the standard way of doing it these days in the social sciences is come up with some sort of task for people to work on in some sort of setting, usually a classroom or lab setting and a college campus, and get a bunch of people, usually first or second year college students, that you're going to reward with credits, classroom credit or pizza money or whatever. Have them work on that task. That task is in many cases already manipulated in the sense that you're setting them up to fail because you already know what the answer should be and you want to manipulate the way that they go through that task in order to show that not everybody does it the optimal way. Right? That gets you enough data, data being typically some sort of quantitative measurement of what they did, how they did it, how long it took, all those sorts of things. And that gives you the ability to draw some sort of statistical power out of however many people did it. The more people, the better, and in that paradigm. So that's one way. Another way is you come up with a set of questions that just automatically from the jump limit the answers you can get, right? Surveys and questionnaires and that sort of thing. And then you dis distribute those in some way that you think makes sense. And then again, you're empowered by the quantitative data you have to make some sort of finding out of all those answers that people gave you. Assuming, of course, that they were honest. A lot of the stuff is online now. So assuming the person you gave it to is the person who actually there's a ton of assumptions there, right? But the bottom line is both of those approaches, and these are the paradigmatic approaches for social science. This is what passes these days for social science. Neither of those are actually concerned with what people are actually doing when they're living. Right. When they're out there in the world and they're trying to can complete a task, when they're trying to engage with other human beings, when they're trying to use machines, uh, when they're trying to solve problems, when they're trying to love and fight each other, right? Neither of those approaches is are even close to uh getting that view on the problems and the and the and the actions that people take. So that's what naturalism is. And it's not easy, right? You gotta figure out who you're gonna go. I mean, Gary tells a great story about his early studies. You know, I'm gonna go study fireground commanders, well, or I'm gonna go study military decision making. Well, let me pick a proxy because I can't go in the battlefield and just side saddle general, right? So let me pick fire ground commanders. Well, that's great. They're they're closer and they're easier to get to, but you gotta wait for a fire to happen, right? And so going to study in people in the natural world is pretty challenging. You gotta find the right people. And and what's really important to us in the NGM community is we wanna study people who across the spectrum of experience can give us different insights into what it's like to try to go do something. So, yes, we are typically very focused on the upper end of the proficient performance scale. We are very interested in experts and people who have a lot of experience doing something because we want to understand what they're doing. But we're also quite interested in people at the other end. We want to understand what it is that they're thinking about and how they're considering the problem because that gives us then a view of what it really takes to get to that high-level proficiency of performance. And so we we we know a lot about experts, but we actually know quite a bit about what it means to become an expert over time. And so those are all which again, you can't possibly get to with experiments or or surveys. Well, uh you can get to some of the expertise with a good experimental design if the people that you are giving those tasks to have the kinds of experience that that task is related to. Right. So you can have a mix of participants who are doing a task which is pretty close to the kinds of tasks they'll regularly work on. It's just that the majority of social science doesn't do that, right? They do the easy cheap uh way of uh of using college students, and it's all about numbers and getting data and enough people, and they're gonna draw some sort of inference from that. But we're we're interested in what goes on in the real world.
SPEAKER_01:So you you brought up sorry, go ahead, Greg.
SPEAKER_00:Look, for those of us that are listening, again, the the context of the chief of police or the training officer or the court bailiff or somebody else, I want you to understand, let's street this up for just a minute. It takes an expert to simplify the complicated. The more expertise you have, the easier your elevator pitch becomes because you know it. It it's the back of your hand, and you don't have a hard time explicating the types of things that you do. So that creates an expert model. And science isn't about having all the answers. Science is about asking the right questions at the right time. And and what happens is when we dumb that process down, then what passes for science is ruinous. It it creates a model that's unsupportable by science and every other metric that you measure. So to give you a very brief example of what folks that are listening, I only have LinkedIn as a social media. And often I see people saying, hey, we're conducting a study. And so here's the questionnaire for the study. And there's three or four questions that are already so biased. And when I mean biased, I mean angled in such a way as to garner or gain a certain response that they already anticipated. So if you're already anticipating the outcome and you're writing the process to that outcome, then that's not science. What you have to do is you have to go where the doors are open and discover what's being uncovered. And so to Brian Moon's point here, Brian, what I like is that he's saying that the two things that he didn't say about current is he didn't say robust or rigorous in any of those uh definitions. And we've all, everybody on this call has been involved in those scientific experiments that have lasted years and that have gone wherever the information would take you. And that's not what we're seeing now. So I want to make sure that the folks understand why we're being critical of that process.
SPEAKER_01:And you know, I see it a lot too, especially with social media, where you have very, you know, seemingly highly regarded folks with a big following and academics or researchers or scientists, and they're like putting out this information, and you're like, hang it, like you did a study of 12 people and asked them how they felt about this thing. Like, what do you how this isn't this isn't even good information? But and so it's kind of and then now people are saying, oh, well, do you have a study to support that? Do you have a study to this? And it's like, if you've ever been involved with a study, conducted one, or been the subject of one, I've been all three of those. It's like you kind of realize, like, all right, you're just you're just kind of that's not really what it's cracked up to be sometimes. And kind of like my first exposure to what you were talking about was I believe you were out there. We we we talked a couple weeks ago, was out at the infantry immersive trainer with the Marine Corps out on the West Coast. And there are people, I was one of the facilitators putting on the training, but you had different researchers coming and testing for stuff. And just like you said, like they were collecting information pre-post, you know, this evaluation exercise, this, and and they were getting it from everyone there in a sense. And right, and you even had like Marines who were like, Well, yeah, they don't need to fill that out. Don't worry about what that kid says. He's an idiot. And they're like, no, no, no. We we need to get this information, not just from people with the, you know, the brass on their collar, or we we want that that youngest, you know, guy here with the least amount of experience. We need to understand their perspective as well to get the full comprehensive view of what we're actually doing to see if we're meeting these objectives. And so it was like, that's what kind of originally fascinated me about this. And then as I progressed along, both on the academic side and then practitioner side, it was like, okay, like I've been, I like this approach. Obviously, we've fallen to that sort of the naturalistic approach because I mean, I spent a lot of time watching people. I've I was a sniper, I've done a lot of surveillance, I've done a lot of reconnaissance, I've done a lot of counter-surveillance, I've done all this stuff where you're watching people as they fly in the wall in a covert place where they don't know you're there. So you're getting a very accurate view, right, of what their behavior is. And now maybe that's for specific context. And I think what happens is a lot of people try to like then extrapolate that over an enormous population or over this is how people behave or this is why they do things. And it's just so, in my opinion, just like just so it becomes so oversimplified. It's like, oh, I take a personality test. Like, well, what if I take that right after I got some really bad news? What if I take that after I just had a great time at a comedy club? What if I just took that, you know, when I was hung over? Like, I think my answers are gonna, these questions are gonna be very different. So, how accurate is this assessment that you're doing? So that kind of what you were talking about and what I was bringing up kind of leads me to this part of it in your book called called Darwin's People, and and we'll have a link for everyone and we'll get into this. But yeah, I want to read a little bit of what you said because it is you got some powerful stuff in there. And, you know, and you included you had you had Gary Klein write an introduction. It was not exactly a flattering introduction, too. Well, I mean, he he he was not, you know, he didn't pull any punches, which is great, which is you you truly respect that, right? But here's why we're we're talking about this right now is because you said the study of people's behavior is prime for a Copernican Darwinian level revolution. The present state of explaining why and how people do what they do needs a full force roundhouse. I like that using my terminology there. I understand that. Fortunately, the pieces to deliver the blow are already in place, having been active in less traveled corners for quite some time. This should not be surprising. Threads in both Darwin's and Copernicus' explanations can be traced back to ancient Greece. Hey, Arcadia, right? The advancements lay in their contributions of explanatory pieces that collectively comprise a mostly coherent whole. Most importantly, they've checked their explanation through close inspection of the world. So, right off the bat, you're saying a Copernican-Darwinian level revolution. So if I'm going back to high school, I believe Copernicus was the one who said, Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute. The sun is at the center of the solar system. This is now how we have to measure everything, and this is what closes the loops, and this is why we can't explain certain things. If we change the model, wow, everything starts to fit. And then the same thing with Darwin, who obviously, you know, on the origin of species and in evolutionary biology, which is even other work in in sexual selection, not just natural selection, was even more profound, I think. But but that these are that's a big statement. So, what do you mean by by it's prime for that type of of revolution and in the study of human behavior?
SPEAKER_03:I I mean that uh from my perspective, this has to happen, right? So if you if you if you just take this at the highest level, yes, Copernicus is the guy who said, wait a minute, everybody. After, by the way, centuries and centuries of people trying to make predictions and and gather data using all sorts of workarounds and Willy Medoos and all sorts of weird stuff, just so they can make the prediction work, right? So, you know, epicycles and if you if you look at the Ptolemaic view, um it's just you know, I I think I use the term Winchester House in there. It's just all sorts of add-ons and right, so so that's kind of what's going on now, right? You've got an explanation of people, you've got, well, it's it's genes, but it's also culture, and it's got right. So you've got all these different ways that people are trying to explain how people behave without actually talking to the people themselves or observing the actual behavior that they're trying to uh trying to explain, right? So, so and Darwin would did the same thing. I mean, he what he did was was shift the focus to a process. This whole thing that we're seeing in terms of differentiation and and variation is a process, right? We need to get away from looking at everything as things and looking more at a process. So again, recentering on to people, that's sort of the Copernican lesson is get get back to the thing that uh that is actually at the center, right? The sun was always at the center.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:It's just our explanation now is what's being recentered. And then with Darwin, this is a process. It it it it some of it happens so slowly that it's really, really hard to see, or happens at levels that we're not used to looking at, but it's a process. So that's those two types of shifts are are are what I'm suggesting needs to happen in the social sciences because otherwise the the status quo is is failing us in spectacular ways, right? Our our explanations of people, they are so brittle, they they they just fall apart with the first counterfactual, right? And and we're not helping people who aren't professional explainers to see the process, to think in terms of change over time, right? Because we're just reinforcing with uh with the science that's out there, I should use scare quotes there. We're reinforcing lay understandings of of behavior with the science. And it's just this vicious cycle that seems to be happening, right? So we're not helping, we're not helping people and and you know, you guys, I mean you your work is in observing people over time, right? And you guys know that if you observe people over time, you see things that other people aren't gonna see, right? And we're not helping to build a generation, we're not helping to build systems, we're not helping to build institutions based on what we can see when we look at the right things over time, right? Instead, we're trying to make it quick and easy, and with AI trying to make it quick and easy and big and and all the rest of it. But so what I I'm suggesting with this with his roundhouse is we we've got to punch through all the nonsense and we've got to use language that explains things as a process that is not satisfied with substituting simple things in place of what are vastly complex and and enduring processes. You can actually we have really good explanations, and that was my other point was they're out there and they all can be sort of cobbled together, woven together because they're mutually reinforcing, right? I I I use kind of this analogy of a of a gymnastics team, right? The the kinds who the the the gymnasts who are putting together the routines with each other, right? One's at the base and they're holding up another one and they're kind of hanging off the side, right? That's the kind of gymnastics team that that to me is a good metaphor for what naturalism actually is. And so I I walk through then whether you're focused on the biological entities that we all are, or you're focused on how do we get the language that we use, or you're focused on, you know, what does it mean to have a self and and how does that develop in a human being, or how do we become proficient? Those are the kind of the the main pieces that I tried to weave together to say we've got great explanations and they all make coherent sense and they all mutually reinforce each other, and they're all totally on the other side of the fence from all these other explanations that are out there that to your point, Brian, have big followings and people can just spout off with new terms to sell new books, and it's it's just it's very frustrating for me professionally and personally, because I know there's really good explanations out there. So that's what we're trying to do.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and and Brian, that's such an excellent detailed uh description. So I'll I'll give you a case in point on that. So talking to uh ISAF and a bunch of commanders that are sitting around a table, and one of them challenged me immediately. And and you know what this is like being an anthropologist. Whenever you're science-based on anything, there's somebody sitting across the table that's about to rip you apart because they don't agree with whatever your methodology is or where you studied or a book that they read or whatever else. And so he's going like, Yeah, yeah, we get it. Uh situational awareness. If you see something, say something. And I'm like, okay, you want to play? Let's play. Well, first of all, sir, for situational awareness, you have to have anticipation. And then you have perception, observing to see anomalous behavior in that area. And then you have to recognize what it is that you're looking at and comprehend, knowing, in fact, that it is anomalous behavior and then interpreting its weight or significance based on everything that's happening within the area that you're watching. And then you have to measure that against an operational baseline, and that has to be fidelity filled, so you can determine the most likely and most dangerous course of action. And then project what's going to happen next. And the likelihood of what's going to happen next is measured against your continuous feedback loop to make sure that the things haven't changed while you were watching them. And everybody in the room, you could hear a pin drop, and the guy was like, oh, well, I didn't see it that way. Yeah, you didn't see it that way. Because what you're doing is you're reading the the, remember the when you used to buy gum and you unwrap the chewing gum and there used to be the little cartoon on it? That's what people are reading now. And they're quoting that. And they're quoting that stuff. And so what happens is the more people that you get on the side that want that quick answer, you know, and and and so therefore Ed determines everything that's going to come out of that. Shit time shit, pardon the vernacular, equals shit that's coming out of that computer. And we see that so much more now. And and AI, and I know nothing about AI, but I know that AI is based on models and all the information that's taken in. If it's a flawed model to start, I think we're right back to where we were again. So so when you're trying to explain something to something, somebody, something, I always try to use the street level, something that they all understand. And you're exactly right. We spend a lot of time on spotting scopes and on the glass and using UAV feeds to watch people in their natural element. And we always see so much more when they don't know they're being watched. And then we come into a room, another one back in a uh in the beltway, where I use the term atmospherics. And a guy challenged me that atmospherics are the layers of the stratosphere and how it creates weather for the planet. It's like, no, atmospherics are what you feel and sense and you know, just before an attack occurs. So so what I got tired of is trying to defend myself, which is what all we use in our science in our work is science. We all use science and we use human behavior, and we use human behavior over hours and days and weeks and months of watching people and determining what's likely to happen next, and then looking for evidence, artifacts, and evidence that support those reasonable conclusions. And you know what? How how you could fight that is beyond me. But there's still people out there that want to take that. Look, you're gonna get a government grant if you write a white paper and you already know the answer. All we aim to prove is these three things. So you have to find that too. So how do you stay sane running in and out of those circles all the time? You use the fence metaphor. You said we're on one side of the fence and they're on the other. Well, we encounter that daily as well. How do you stay sane knowing what you know?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I'm you're you're making an assumption that he's sane.
SPEAKER_03:Exactly. Yeah. I mean, look, I I I've professionally I've always been interested in trying to explain what people are doing, right? Explain behavior. I I went to, you know, when when you study something like religious cults, you're looking at effectively a microcosm on things that happen elsewhere. There's nothing really all that special about what goes on in religious cults. My dissertation was called Cops and Cults because I was mostly interested, this is right after Waco, I was mostly interested in the interaction between those two groups that are on the opposite sides of the fence sometimes. Right. So I I've always been interested in in this sort of thing. I've always been interested in really good explanations of behavior. So I guess my sanity is kept intact in part because uh I'm interested in it, but but I also know that what's passing right now for explanation is bad. And and and the another key piece that that I discuss a lot in the book is all of these other approaches and and models and and theories about people uh have a common understanding, which is effectively to deny agency to human beings. Right, right. Right. And it's all about something else is responsible for the actions that people take, whether it's genes or culture or society, or you know, pick one or another factor or variable. And and that's actually how people get government grants, is they just pick one of those factors or variables and they study it to the hilt, right? Because they assume that it's a real thing, a real thing, by the way. And notice I said thing, not a process, a real thing that you can go measure somehow with some instrument, and that once you get to a certain level of statistical significance, that real thing must exist, right? These are all correlations, they're all correlating around the idea that people effectively aren't responsible and don't have agency in their own behavior, right? And that is a lesson that has come through loud and clear through Gary's work and from NDM, right? It's not about doing this massive computation in your head, it's about managing yourself and those around you and the work such that all the things you just said, you recognize what seems familiar and and you recognize what's anomalous. But that is an active agent process, right? Right? That's somebody trying to do something in the world, like live, right? So so I'm all about replacing the roundhouse, if you will, replacing all these other explanations that basically deny people agency with the one explanation that I think is correct, which is that people decide what to do with themselves.
SPEAKER_01:So that's a perfect kind of lead-in to kind of what I wanted to to jump into next to get into the actual behavior and and some of the things that you're talking about. And and you know, it's funny because I I appreciate it in your book, how you you you several times you kind of start with, well, look, there's there's physics, there's chemistry, there's biology. Like these are things that we know that we can measure and that have been. And, you know, that's like how we start some of our stuff where people ask us questions or they come in with behavioral, like, well, hang on, like, do you know what entropy is? Like the like things are want to fall to the lowest order. So like these are things that are out there that we don't really know or experience or can't tell because sometimes it happens so slowly. But like there is a natural process and ordered things, and you're you're interacting with that, what you're doing right now. You can't just pick what you're doing is the most supreme thing without knowing all of this kind of underlying processes that are happening and that have been going on since before humans were here, right? So so it's like you gotta start in in that that that spot, and I appreciate that. And because even, you know, and you like one of the sayings we have is like, hey, look, you know, good ideas stand the test of time. Like ideas come and go, people come up with stuff and it goes away, but like the good ones send around. And so I just it just recalled during this, but you know, you we we're we every semester uh we teach a seminar out at Liberty University in in Virginia, and they're great part of their criminal justice program, the Helm School government, great relationship with them, and and they love it. But you know, when first going out there too, I'm like, all right, it's this is a Christian conservative school. Like, I don't know, what are they gonna say when I bring up Darwin or something? You know what I mean? Like you're kind of like you got to be mindful of your audience, but it's always been such a great, great course. And it's funny because I, you know, we were talking about some of the physiological reactions that we know humans have. Like you have certain ones when you get angry, certain things happen, and your hypothalamus kind of sends triggers things in your brain, and then you know, that'll cause certain reactions, and you know, maybe you'll get start to turn red in the face. And everyone's like, Yeah, these are general anger cues, and you know, that nose might, because you got silly hair-like fiber. You can get to the science of it, and this is why these things happen. And the greatest thing is one our shout out to our our friend Chris Rhodes out there, Professor Rhodes. He's like, you know, there's he's like, you know, this is I want to show you this YouTube video. He shows me this YouTube video, and it's it's a it's an explanation of an old testament story of they had a saying that people who did not anger easily, they were long in the nose, meaning it didn't buy, it took a lot to get to that point where they're getting angry and upset and could feel it in their nose. And I'm like, yeah, these are like so. Now we have all the science to explain something that was known, right, or identified in some way thousands and thousands of years ago. And and that's kind of what we get at is like, look, there's certain systems or certain processes of certain things people do. So I I want to jump into that sort of part of your book. Yeah. And, you know, in here you said, and uh, of course, I'm gonna use it. You said, if there's one most important takeaway from this book for you, I hope it's this one. In every situation and circumstance, people choose choose to act or not act. They make decisions based on their analysis of their needs and the perspective of others. This event may take a long time or it may happen in the blink of an eye. Our unique emergent ability to decide under both timescales has given us unparalleled capacities in the competition of life. In either case, people decide. Free agency is our key to social adaptation. We can change ourselves at any time. Sometimes the need to change is sprung upon us, as in the case of self-change, but we control the process, we decide whose attitudes matter to us. So I love this, and actually, this is this is like that's a lot to unpack in a single paragraph. We could do an entire episode maybe just on that paragraph, but there's some things that I I appreciate in here, and then also like some things I want you to explain in a little bit greater detail, because I I might have some fundamental disagreements with you on some of this, and I'll explain what I mean, but I want to get some clarity from you. But like I I like how you frame this as people having choices and making decisions. That's good, especially from us and the training and the interaction we do with people. When you when we when we sort of contextualize it or we prompt it, like these are decisions, these are choices. Again, it it brings that person into the situation as you have agency. Because I like to say, look, you can influence any situation that you're in. You know, maybe, you know, yeah, you've been kidnapped and blindfolded and handcuffed, but like you you don't have a lot that you can influence, but but there's still things you can do. And what it does is it puts those decisions back on people. So I I kind of like that how you frame it. I think I have a slightly more, I guess, deterministic viewpoint, you know, when it especially when it comes to high pressure situations that occur under time constraints that include some element of danger. So, first of all, for everyone, for our listeners too, and and for for me as well, can you first kind of start out? Give me like the difference between what what you mean by free agency and what people kind of call free will, and and so I can get a kind of better understanding. And I just kind of want to start there with that, because there's a like I said, a lot in this paragraph.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I uh I I think to get into that discussion would be splitting hairs. Yeah, okay. What I'm getting at here is uh at the end of the end of the day, if you will, we can all we all determine what we're gonna do in the next moment, right? And and when I say all, I am talking about adults. I do spend a little bit of time in the book helping people to understand that when we are born, we are there's not a whole lot to us, but there are some important things to us that enable us to become, you know, have a self and and become choose choosing adult behaviors, right? Choosing adult actors. So so I I don't think it's it's necessary to sort of go into to free will and agency and what the difference is. The book that I talk about a lot in my book, Kevin Mitchell's book, which is terrific, and Kevin is a neurogeneticist who just does not put up with nonsense and tells us as it as it is. His whole his book basically traces the idea that living things have agency and has been there since day one, whenever that was, right? And we are because we're living things just along the pathway of of life, we have agency just like everything else. And so that that's really the as far as I would want to sort of push that, you know, what's free will or free agency. Now, to to the point you made about uh being kidnapped and all the rest of that, you know, pe people often will jump to those kinds of circumstances. And and what's interesting is we we don't have a whole lot of naturalistic data about people in those situations, right?
SPEAKER_04:Right.
SPEAKER_03:And in fact, within the the literature on on cults and you know new religions, there's a bit of a split between one group of folks who uh who's uh who like to rely on uh research from uh one particular researcher who who studied people who were in concentration camps uh i in in in Asia, right? And so, yes, we do have a little bit of data about people who were kidnapped and held in those situations, right? But what happens is people then will generalize those very specific situations to oh, that's what it's like to be in a cult. And it is not the same thing, right? Being kidnapped, having a gun held to your head, you know, all those kinds of examples, people jump to them as a way to try to frame things, but it's possible to get data in those situations because they have existed. Yeah, right. And and how we would do it would would take a whole lot of care.
SPEAKER_01:But we could Well, you could kidnap some people, but that might be that might be going too far.
SPEAKER_00:I think your point holds water. The the the thing is the smaller the data set that you study, the less robust the data you're gonna the conclusions you're gonna make out of that. And that's why I was lucky because the uh all of the hypotheses that I put out for testing, not only did I do them on the streets of Detroit and the surrounding suburbs, but I was offered the rare opportunity to go to combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan repeatedly to conduct those limited objective experiments. And you know what? That was unprecedented. Um, and and so I know how lucky I am. And I also know what it's like beating my head up against the wall sometimes. I remember we were teaching in Fort Bragg, and a young lieutenant colonel came up and shoved a book into my into my ample stomach, and it was vintage Jesus. And he goes, You've got to get right with the Lord because you don't understand any of this. And and the the the about people, right? About human behavior. And and the statement that I had made before that break was that people are the same all over the world. They all have the same needs and wants. And, you know, once you identify that, then it the scales fall from your eyes, and now you can see the way you're supposed to see the world. Now, very recently, we had the same situation that arose where I was asked a loaded question by two people that that I really appreciate and admire. And they were talking about the the current A-Syrian leader with non-attribution, I gotta be careful because I don't want to crush their souls. But they asked uh uh with this current Syrian leader, you know, look at the things that he did, and he was, you know, responsible for the death of a number of Americans. And does someone truly have the capacity to change, to be on the side? And and my first knee-jerk was to send them. Do you understand that I worked in Iraq and Afghanistan to target leaders that lived in those countries whose families are still living in those countries today? So if I went over there to teach at their university, what would they say about me? Because now the rules have been reversed. Now the perspective has changed. And now Copernicus is saying, hey, where's that shadow coming from? And the idea is that you can't oversimplify it. You have to look for the the most logical scientific answer and then try to poke holes in that. You don't come up with a new name and then, you know, say, well, this is the blank effect. I'm not going to go there again, or or come up with, well, in the hierarchy of whatever. You know, that's what I find. The dumbing down of science has bothered me because the people think that there's a simple, there's an emotional answer to this. Well, that person just had a bad upbringing or they don't know what they're going on. And what you're saying about agency just fits. It just makes sense. And people do have those choices to decide. How hard was it for you to go and talk to those jurors when fully you understood that listen, these people made those choices. Now, they may have had a different upbringing than you and I had, but at the end of the day, they were the ones that were in that car. They were the ones at the other end of that gun. They were the ones that did that. So, you know, I I I tire of having to spar constantly with the windmills of anti-science that that I've been seeing probably the last 35 years out there. So I don't know if that was a question, but by God, I was pissed when I said it.
SPEAKER_03:Let me uh let me uh let me hone in on one thing you said and then get to the larger point. So I am all for small data sets, by the way. If those data sets are studying the actual problem in depth.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_03:So a lot of people will say, oh, well, how many, you know, how many participants is appropriate for a naturalistic decision-making study? I said, Well, if if you give me eight world-class experts in a given domain, that's probably enough. Right. Because there probably aren't that many more, first of all. And those are usually the kinds of folks that uh we're engaged with. But the other thing is whatever we find, whatever models we develop or what have you from those small data sets. And by the way, Gary's original data set for his recognition prime decision model was just a couple dozen.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_03:Darwin's finches were only a few dozen. Right. So small data sets are fine if you're actually studying the thing that you're purporting to study and you're doing it in depth. And you're putting whatever findings you have out there for everyone else to go say, do you see the same things that I saw when I was out there? Right. That's the essence of science is to put it out there and see if in the cases that other people can find, they see the same things or not. If they don't, if they don't see the same things you saw and the kinds of relationships you saw and the kind of accounting that you were able to do, if they see something different, well then you're wrong. And now we all have to come up with a different way to explain. So I'm I'm okay with small data sets. To to to the other sort of larger point, I mean, yes, uh, we're we're stuck in a place now where psychologizing is the primary means of of explaining people, right? And again, you are putting the responsibility, the agency of what someone did, the behavior, onto some element or aspect of that person that you're actively saying is their essence and is unchanging across context. And that's simply not true. It isn't like that's not what people are. We we we probably don't have enough time to get into depth on the discussion of the self, but that's another huge part of the book because if you don't understand what having a self is all about, um then you are going to be stuck in either explanations about what's inside people or what's outside those people. And or also there's a third category of perfectionism that I talk about, which is we're able to identify what the perfect state is and then get there somehow. But basically the explanations out there boil down to those three categories. It's either what's inside people, their genes or their emotions or what have you, or what's outside people. And the bottom line is human beings, like every other living thing, is under continuous management of both of those worlds.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. Right. Right.
SPEAKER_01:It it it is, and and the reason kind of why I brought that up as the free agency and free will, and and why I have a little bit more of a deterministic approach. It doesn't have to do about I I look at contextually within a situation, right? So let's say like the hostage one is uh that's an outlier, probably not the best example, but like, you know, a police officer use of force case where there's an officer involved shooting, you know, those really tough, tough situations where a lot of times when we see them go wrong, like we we kind of refer to them as like, well, these are these are errors in sense making. They they they they thought they were in a situation that they weren't actually in. And there's different reasons why they thought that part of it is their genes, their values, their beliefs, and their training sometimes. Sometimes their actual training kind of gave them, led them down the wrong path. And and so that's why we kind of try to stick to that sense-making, problem-solving phase. The decision will become evident based on these other things, based on your role, your goal, your policies, your procedures. But what I what I typically see is when people get to a certain point of arousal of uh whether, you know, and and we we just kind of generally call it OBE, where we say you're overwhelmed by events or overcome by emotion, you've got those time constraints, you've got divided attention, you've got too much cognitive load. What we see is like you have the default primal mode, and you're now in a survival situation, even though you're not actually in one, you're unconsciously think you're in one, therefore you're going to act like one and you're going to use an unnecessary amount of force. And it's almost like a simply put, like the less training, experience, intellect, everything you have, the the more likely you are to use violence to solve a situation. And so I look at it as almost primal when I mean deterministic. It's like when you reach a certain point, you've sort of in a sense lost that agency, and you're you you now are overcome where you know your your limbic system is is in full control and it's gonna do what it thinks is best without your sort of conscious input. Does that does that kind of make sense in in the way I explained it?
SPEAKER_03:Yes, but only because you added without training, without experience, right? Because because what we see is once people get exposure to enough of those situations, and that's kind of hard to do in your line of work, right? Is to get people the right kind of exposure. But once they get exposure, once they're able to make a decision and get some feedback on it, the right kinds of timely, direct, accurate feedback over time, all the primal stuff, if you will, uh becomes uh overcomable. Yeah, and you see that I mean, this is we see this not only with experts, but frankly, we see it in very violent people as well. Right? A lot of the explanations of of violent people is they snap and they their limbic system, you know, they're just being prime or whatever. Well, people who are really violent are actually pretty calm the whole time it's happening, right? They're actually pretty calculated about what they're doing now, what they're gonna do next, right? Serial killers don't snap, right? They've done it enough that they're anticipating, they're coming up with plans, they are flexicuting just like anybody else, right? And so, uh, so yeah, I I uh you know, everything you said is is applicable insofar as we're talking about people who don't have a lot of experience doing something, and that's that's the whole goal in my mind of training and education is to help people get to the point where, and to me, again, you know, this isn't a a reason or ration versus emotion thing either. There's no sense in separating those two uh phenomena because they are just a person doing something, they are people taking action, they are people behaving, they are people experiencing, they are people managing the internal and the external, right? And there's way too much emphasis on is this, you know, men are from Mars, women are from Venus kind of narrative, right? But that is is the separation of emotion versus reason, right? And that has plagued social science for for several centuries, if not more. But my my point is, yes, with experience and with again the right kinds of experience, with exposing people to the whole problem, with exposing people to a diversity of situations in which those problems might arise, with exposing people to other solutions that people have come up with to deal with those situations, all that primal limbic stuff, if you will, all can be overcome, right? And that's how you get to proficient performance.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that and that that's a big part that you talk about in your book that I wanted to wanted to hit on as well. And and you kind of you you when you get into the concept of expertise and what makes an expert and becoming a true expert. And you know, I love I I pulled a few things out and I'll give kind of the the summary in a sense, and you tell me if I got it right. But one, you you big hit on simply showing up like is is good. Like you you have to get in, do the reps, be there, like even talk about like simply going to class means you're more likely to get a better grade in that class, just sitting there in a sense. But like that's not good enough to develop expertise. You can you can develop proficiency, maybe you can get to a certain level. I pulled out like kind of the three main things that you talk about with with developing expertise, and you started hitting on that one. One, you face hard problems and you are responsible for the solution. So, like you just said, like you, you actually not just this one little part of this problem, you were part of the you you you kind of had to understand all of the parts that went into this problem. And then you also brought up you you gotta get feedback along the way, and and feedback can be good or bad, or how you accept feedback, but you received an accepted feedback. And then, you know, you you failed. You continue to fail, but but or you failed, but you continued to persevere past that point of failure. So these are sort of these like elements you were drawing out. And there's some great quotes and how you explain it in there, I just for the sake of time and to not read your whole book on the podcast. They can go buy it and read it. But but you know, you you you brought these elements up. So like why are these why are these the experiences that are important to becoming a subject matter expert? That's the first part of the question. Like, kind of how did you hone in on this? And then if I'm listening to this podcast right now, can I like reflect on my own experience and and gauge sort of where I'm at in that process of of attaining an SME? And then I guess the third part, like, how do how do I identify that this so-called SME in front of me has these things? How can I vet someone if that's possible to answer? That'd be great.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, uh, I'll try to remember those in order, but but I will I wanted to add to one of the major learnings for me in my career was actually exposure to the Hunter Warrior stuff early on, because it dawned on me that, well, of course, people who have spent their upbringing, their teen years out in the woods trying to hunt stuff are just gonna have those skills, right? Some of them, because that's what they do, and those are applicable to the kinds of Hunter Warrior tasks that they're gonna be assigned, right? So, yes, just showing up sort of gets you there. But but to the to the broader point of how do we help people and how do we identify people. Uh, this is key for me in thinking about things like motivation, which I talk about as well. Um, it's it's for any given ability uh or behavior that we want to understand, we have to look at people over time. We have to look at how uh situations presented themselves to those people, in particular the situations that other people create for them, and then what they did about them. Right. So whether you're trying to figure out is this person on the pathway to becoming an Olympic level field hockey player, which by the way, Liberty has a terrific field hockey team.
SPEAKER_04:Yes, they do.
SPEAKER_03:Um or you're trying to understand, you know, the the the has this person already been through those first few stages and have they uh brought themselves to a point where they are prepared to reach the next stage? And again, stage for me is they've they've been presented with a situation, they've made some decisions about what to do about that situation, they've gotten some feedback on it, and now they're in the process of figuring out, okay, well, how did I do? Am I still performing at a level that's comparable to what I see other people doing? And again, that this plays out in sports, it plays out in professional circles, it plays out in people becoming violent, by the way. Which again, I I I keep going back to just people and behavior because I'm thinking about this sort of thing across the spectrum. It makes no sense to me that we would try to explain how people become expert gum makers and have that explanation be different than how people become violent, right? It's all just life and people living. So we have to understand what that process looks like when people are presented with situations and they respond and they respond to them by making decisions and taking action and then getting feedback on that. So organizations are typically not set up for this kind of thing yet. I hope someday they will be and would like to help get there. But the point is they're not identifying people this way, right? And typically it's you show up, you got your credentials, and you're good to go. Well, nobody ever really talks about what sort of experiences you've had outside the pursuit of those credentials. And credentials these days are getting even sketchier because people are getting through credential programs without actually having ever been presented with a situation where they had to take action. Um so that's a challenge for organizations. But if the organization itself understands the process that people need to go to, go through in order to get to a level of proficiency, but if they understand that process, then they should be able to translate that into what they're looking for in people. And again, you're not necessarily you're you're looking for the experiences that people have had. All the extant theories about why people are violent, none of them, except the one that I talk about in the book, is at all interested in the experiences people have had. Right. They're all trying to pin violence on some genetic or social or or Or psychological factor, right? And and all of the response work that's out there in terms of how organizations should respond to violence are all about you know, so they'll say things like, Well, people don't just snap, right? They plan, they plan these things out, you know, mass shooters and that sort of thing. Well, which is all true, but uh what they're missing is that whole process before they plan for this specific event. How do they get to the point of being willing to go do this sort of thing? And we saw this with, you know, the recent assassinations. I mean, everybody's focusing on is it a left or a right thing? None of that matters. It's all silly. It's all just wasted airspace. What matters is whoever pulled that trigger went through a process that brought them to the point of being willing, again, this is agency, willing to go do that. And if you don't understand that process, then we're not going to make any progress.
SPEAKER_00:That's so true.
SPEAKER_01:I and I don't know. I thank you for explaining it in your words, because that's what we try to get people to focus on is that process, because those behaviors, they're they're they're observable, they're measurable, they're detectable, they're repeatable. You can learn, yeah, that you can like it's that process. If you identify someone in this process, that's now the thing you need to go do. Because they're not just talking and saying things and posting on social media, they're taking specific steps that tend to show this is what's going to happen. I mean, it it's to us, it's so self-evident and obvious, but to really get people to orient on what you're talking about, because we're bombarded with, oh, they were this and they were abused as a child, and then they were radicalized by this. None of that matters. You know, it was always because that because that changes. Remember, like when I was in high school, it was oh, this this trench coat mafia thing, and now it's oh it's a it's a transgender thing, or oh, now it's like so. We're we're we're facing the same problem. We're just renaming it like every every five, seven years because some study came out and someone wrote a book. Like, this is ridiculous. This is absolutely ridiculous. So I I I share in that. Sorry, Greg, I I cut you.
SPEAKER_03:No, no, no, no, no, no. One thing and one thing I try to do too in the book is go back to exactly what you just said, Brian, which was when I was in high school. Yeah, right. And you gotta get people to present their own counterfactuals to the nonsense that they're spewing out.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly.
SPEAKER_03:So you gotta get them to realize show me some examples from your own life where this theory that you're putting forward wasn't true.
SPEAKER_00:But that's the scientific method, okay? And what you're doing is you're forcing them to put rigor into their own argument. And Brian, you know, and I know that we're not in the cycle where that occurs. And and I said something to you last week when we spoke briefly. This is one of the few books, if you're listening still and you've got your yellow pad out, this is one of the few books that I've got dog eared pages and highlighted all over the place, largely because Brian did a great job of epitomizing what we all in this arena think is the right path. Okay. It's not that that Brian Moon came up with this stark out there, and nor did Klein. We're all on the shoulders of giants. Okay. And as a matter of fact, I think the only thing that you and and Brian Merrin didn't discuss is inevitability. So this book is a great de-escalation model. Why de-escalation model? Because when you get going too fast, too many RPMs with your engine, your break and your tires won't allow your vehicle to stop in time. So if you're exceeding your training threshold, if you're exceeding your experience threshold, then what's going to happen is you're going to rapidly approach the threshold of inevitability, and things are going to happen because of physics, because of mathematics, and you can't control them. So when you get into that and you're a copper or you're a supervisor and you allow that pursuit to play out, or that copper runs in there and doesn't use left lethal or accidentally grabs left lethal and when they need to grab the handgun, all of those inevitable situations happen when we exceed human behavior on one side and human performance on the other. And that's what training is. And that's what modeling and simulation can help with. And that's what this book can help you understand. Because what Brian and Brian just did in the last seven minutes is they talked about schemas, dilemmas. They talked about confounds. And the more you look at those and play those out, they become the scenarios that if you can solve for X, you'll get better the next time you approach that scenario. And we're not doing that. We're not creating practical applications scenario. We're shooting faster and flipping the tire and climbing the rope and doing the physical part of it, but we're not doing the cognitive part of it. And the cognitive lift is the heaviest lift. And if you get good at that, you'll get good at a whole lot of other skills in comp work, in corrections, in in uh first responders, in military. And that's what I think, Brian. That's what I think I got when I grabbed the book and started reading it on the plane, is that, hey, listen, you're you're preaching to the choir. And it's a very small choir and a very small church, very far away from thought centers today. And so I'm hoping people will have the balls, the temerity to actually read this and then challenge what they're seeing out on the street. I truly hope that.
SPEAKER_01:Me too. Yeah. Well, I, you know, Brent, I I want to kind of give you sort of the last word here. And, you know, I'd also like to maybe, you know, if you're interested to keep the conversation going, I want to get some feedback from our listeners. And then maybe there's a follow-up or a Patreon thing we can do if if you have the time and are interested in doing it, because I think there's a lot here, and we can go even deeper on some of these concepts. And I know there's going to be specific ones, just like when I was reading your book, there's going to be specific ones that people are going to want to do a deep dive on. There's a lot in there, and but I I appreciate too how you explain the problem with how people look at human behavior. Because I I've, you know, I'm I'm always telling Greg to stop going down that rabbit hole around the podcast. Because we just sound like two cranks going, oh, this is BS and that guy's dumb. And it's like because you do a better job of articulating why these are problems, where some of them are just we're they're known self-evident to us. And and so your your critique of this uh of that way of looking at things is always appreciated and and kind of gives our listeners a better understanding of what we mean when we say that stuff and we say that stuff doesn't matter, don't look at this, or I don't care what political ideology this guy was. You know, it's it the serial killers and the people who do that stuff are these are outliers anyway. And if you're trying to gain something from that, that's very difficult. You know what I mean? Like and you know, you look at, you know, it's like reading someone's manifesto. I read all those manifestos that these people write, and it's nonsense, it's all over the place. There's no intellectual consistency. It's like this is all you're you're grabbing parts from here, too. You're just justifying your actions, is all you're doing. And you're you're grabbing these concepts and putting them together because you're you're you're not well. You know, you're not you're you're not assimilating into society very well. And so I think people draw all kinds of ridiculous conclusions, especially the analysis part. But I I do want to give you any kind of last comments or or takeaways for for our listeners, I would, I would appreciate it.
SPEAKER_03:Well, I I guess in some ways the the book for me was a bit of a manifesto. Um I mean, I mean, again, it's it's it's got a it's got a point that I hope comes through for everybody, which is if we're hoping to make any progress on these challenging problems that are in front of all of us, we've got to have better explanations for what we're seeing out there in terms of people and their behavior. And and I have yet to crack the nut on getting people the balls and temerity that they need to go understand this stuff. But what I have found is that once they hear it, it's kind of hard to unhear. Right. And once you give them a couple tools like counterfactuals or like how to set up their organization to, you know, train for situations that might happen, once you give them a couple tools and and and you pair that with here's what really uh great companies and organizations and teams are doing out there. This is why they're winning. I I do think people start to understand that. Now, whether that can overcome the millennia uh old uh explanations that people are simply just rehashing for today's world, it is is another question. I hope that it can. And again, it's I I'm not suggesting that everything that uh I've pulled together is the only things that matter, nor that the coherence that I see doesn't potentially raise some, you know, issues between the theories that I that I raise, right? And Brian, to your point about Gary's forward, Gary was pretty clear on there's some parts that he doesn't agree with as well. So I expect that we're gonna have those conversations, but all of us having the conversation on the side of the fence, which says at its essence, if you want to know and explain people, go out there and look at the people and talk to them. I I don't find that controversial, right? It's hard, it is expensive, and it requires a very special set of skills that that some people can develop and some can't, right? But the the value is that very deep explanation that once we come up with solutions and policies and organizations and institutions work better. We just know they work better because we've seen it. We haven't always been given the the space and and the opportunity to show that they work better, but where we have, they're pretty damn good. And we've we've demonstrated that. So I'm hopeful that more demonstrations, more people getting exposed to the ideas will overcome a heck of a lot of baggage, but it's an uphill battle, and I'm not I'm not convinced necessarily that this book is going to be the thing that pushes it over, but it's my part of trying to get behind that rock and push a little bit.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, we we appreciate you coming on here and and sharing this with us. And it's it's Darwin's people. We'll put it out, obviously, with the link and everything for people who I enjoyed it on so many levels. There's some great anecdotes, and there's some great personal stories. Shout out to anyone else who also read the Guinness Book of World Records a lot when they were a kid and loved it. Your your Flowers for Algernon was one of my first short stories that I got onto as a young kid, which I thought that was funny, which I don't know if you watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but they did an episode called uh Flowers for Charlie, where it's a take on that. And it's one of the funniest episodes ever. So you got to check that out. But there's some great stuff in there. Greg, anything, anything from you uh as well?
SPEAKER_00:There's still some people pulled off to the side of the road jotting down notes because we went wicked fast on a whole bunch of ideas. I would like to say, Brian, uh what would be great is everybody write down your questions for Brian Moon, send them to Brian Merrin, and then Brian Moon, we'd love to have you on a Patreon to specifically answer some of those questions, you know? I I don't endorse shit, and I highly endorse this book because what you'll do is you'll love it and you'll come up with a whole bunch of questions, better questions that you can go back with and answer on your own, and that's learning, and that's wonderful. Again, science isn't about having all the answers, it's about asking those right questions. So, Brian, if you would work with us on that, I think that would be a great follow-up episode.
SPEAKER_03:Absolutely. Yep. My point is to get the ideas out there and let's chat through them because I I do feel pretty strongly that this is the writer set of ideas that we should be focused on. So um absolutely, yeah, whatever I can do to help the audience better appreciate the ideas and and then apply them. I mean, that's exactly uh actually give them something they can execute. So I think the book's got a lot of that. And we've got some other ideas that aren't in the book too. So uh happy to talk through those.
SPEAKER_01:That's great. We appreciate that. And again, folks, I'll have links to your to Amazon LinkedIn book, but also to like your LinkedIn if they want to connect with you on there and reach out. But yeah, I really appreciate you coming on and thanks to all of our listeners. And don't forget that training changes behavior.
