Making Shooters Better
Making Shooters Better is where real shooter stories turn into smarter training and preparation for everyone. Each episode dives into the journeys, wins, and lessons of competitors, instructors, and innovators from across the firearms world.
Hosted by Terry Vaughan—former British Royal Marine Commando, Top Shot competitor, and firearms instructor—this show delivers more than talk. You’ll get the mindset, methods, and motivation to train sharper and perform better, on and off the range!
Making Shooters Better
Your Vision, Brain, and Memory Will Betray You. Here’s How to Prepare Anyway.
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In this episode of Making Shooters Better, Terry sits down with Brian Baxter, combat infantry veteran, retired Texas State Trooper, and CEO of Force Science, for a conversation that changes how you understand perception, memory, decision-making, and accountability under stress.
Why can two honest people experience the same event and remember it differently? Why might body-camera footage miss the very information that drove an officer’s decision? Why can a defender continue an action for fractions of a second after the threat changes, even when they are trying to stop?
Brian breaks down the science behind time compression, tunnel vision, attention, automaticity, fragmented memory, and the uncomfortable truth that human beings do not make life-or-death decisions the way calm people imagine they do from the sofa.
This is not a conversation about excuses. It is about honest accountability: holding people to clear standards that are actually within the limits of human performance.
Whether you are law enforcement, an instructor, an armed citizen, a home defender, or simply someone who wants to better understand how the brain behaves when the stakes become terrifyingly real, this episode delivers rare insight from the world of Force Science.
You will learn why you are always behind the power curve, why “vision” is not the same as a video recording, why memory is not a playback device, and how better awareness, better training, and a little more patience after a critical incident can matter far beyond physical survival.
I mean we've got research on how long it takes to start doing something, how long it takes to stop doing something, specifically shooting. Uh and and you're looking at a little over three hundred milliseconds to start shooting, and you're looking at almost four hundred milliseconds to stop shooting. So what does that tell us? It takes longer to stop than it does to start. Here's your signal to start shooting, and when you see this signal, I want you to stop shooting. And so people would shoot as fast as they could, and then the signal to stop would come on and they'd shoot one or two extra shots. Well in this more recent research, and we don't know if it's if it's trigger differences or mechanical differences, what it is, but there were up to three shots that were fired after the stop signal that that people would look at and say, Why did you keep shooting? Why were there additional shots after the guy dropped the gun? Why were there additional shots after the guy fell to the ground? Why were there additional shots after the guy turned his back? Uh and that's the answer. It's the limits of human performance.
SPEAKER_00Where he leads world-renowned research, training, and consulting on human performance under stress, drawing on more than 30 years in armed professions, a master's degree in applied psychology, and collaboration with some of the world's most renowned scientists. Brian and his team of experts help explain human perception, cognition, decision making, and performance during life's most critical moments. Brian addresses groups across the globe, so it is not hyperbolic to say that the information we're going to be learning today is usually only available at special events and is going to be invaluable to anyone who might be called or even forced to react effectively in a life or death situation. Brian, welcome to the podcast, mate.
SPEAKER_02Terry, thank you very much. I'm happy to be here. This is going to be good.
SPEAKER_00It is. You and I met at a conference and you we started nerding out on some of the stuff that you teach within minutes, and I'm like, oh, we've got to hold this. We've got to get this recorded. So I'm really excited about this one. How old were you when you first started shooting?
SPEAKER_02I was about about eight years old, I'd say seven or eight years old, uh out of kindergarten, but still still a little kid. I started shooting uh probably like many of your uh friends. I started shooting with a little uh daisy BB gun.
SPEAKER_00And uh you graduated from a daisy BB gun to what next?
SPEAKER_02Well so the next one I had to be twelve years old. Uh when I turned 12 years old, I'd been shooting other stuff, but I didn't have my own uh 22 long rifle until I was 12 years old. But that was the the next graduation was shooting 22 long rifle, and I uh uh my family really enjoys dove hunting. And so I would go dove hunting, and I had an uncle that that thought it would be smart to put me on a 410 because it's a smaller shotgun, than to start me off on a 12 gauge. And what I learned real quickly was the weight of that 410 single shot was so light that that recoil was a lot stronger than a than a pump action 12 gauge. So I I actually, when it came to shotguns, I started shooting 12 gauge real early.
SPEAKER_00It's funny because I started on approximately the same thing, or maybe the British equivalent, it wasn't a a BB rifle, but it was an air rifle. So it was a break the barrel to put the air in, you know, put your pellet in, single shot and go. And it was one of those activities that got me not only out of the house, we lived out in the country, but it started my journey on what does it take to actually be accurate? And just learning through trial and error, I would set up all my action figures down the drive down this the back of the side of our house where it was just wooded, you know, for miles, and shoot all my action figures once I got through the page.
SPEAKER_02And I did the same thing, and I I I I would take action, I don't know if you remember these, but there was these little spring-powered guns that would shoot little discs. And and you could load a magazine with discs, and then the the little plastic gun would shoot them. I would set my action figures up high and I would put vampire Halloween vampire blood down on the desk below, and I would shoot the action figure in the feet so that they would fall and it would look like an action film. Uh I got pretty accurate pretty fast. I I also learned not just the accuracy side, but the responsibility side, which is huge. Right. Uh with uh with an air air rifle, a BB gun in my backyard, I was shooting a little paper target, and uh, you know, dad turned his back just a little bit too long, and there was a bird and a tree in my backyard, so I I shot that bird and it fell. And my dad came, all he said to me was he picked up that dead bird and he said, Wow, they sure aren't as pretty when they're dead, and broke my heart, man. I re that was the very first moment where I put together the the gravity of not just how to use a gun and how to shoot a gun and how to be accurate, because I was pretty accurate. I got that bird, uh, but also the responsibility that goes along with it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that was huge, very impactful. It was. So after decades of studying human performance, both in combat, law enforcement, critical incidents across the board, what do you think is one of the things that every um citizen, police officer, instructor, even an experienced shooter believes about human performance under stress that the science says is simply wrong?
SPEAKER_02Uh there's a few, but I would at the top of the heap I would say decision making. I'd say we get that we don't get it wrong, we just don't understand it. We don't understand the way human beings make decisions under time compression. I think we all we have this belief that that we're smart people, and most of us are, and we're responsible people, and that when we have a choice to make, we weigh options, we look at the the different choices we have, we look at the pros and the cons of those choices, and we look at, okay, what if I implement this choice, uh, what's likely to occur as a result? Well, that's not optimal, so I'll go with this choice instead. And we have this consequential, rational process that we use. And hopefully we do when we have time. We use something like that. When we're operational planning, when we're strategic planning for our business, hopefully we're using that kind of method. But under stress, that's not how humans make decisions. There's great research out there by guys like Gary Klein and Daniel Kahneman, who talk about uh Daniel Kahneman talked about system one and system two thinking. Uh the really fast and frugal, I don't have time to think about this. You know, the rock is flying at me, I'm gonna move, uh, versus system two, which is what I kind of described with that consequential method. Uh and and Gary Klein talks about uh recognition prime decision making. He talks about using our experience and our knowledge and our training and our education to recognize patterns. And when we recognize a pattern, for example, a firefighter inside of a building. Uh they've been inside buildings before, they've smelled smoke before, they've felt heat before, and they've also heard rafters cracking before. So when they hear rafters cracking overhead in that smoke-filled room, they don't think, what should I do? They just leave. That's the first choice that matches that pattern in in that scenario, and they don't go with necessarily the best of all options. They go with the first choice that matches the pattern. So I'd say uh we we know very little about decision making, most of us. And so we we hold ourselves to a standard that's not realistic uh when we're forced to make a decision in a very high stress, time compressed situation.
SPEAKER_00I already have so many questions. However, I know we're gonna be deep diving some of this, so we're gonna go on to the next one and then sort of revisit that because I want to look at time compression and then heuristics and the d the ways that we sort of circumvent the cognitive process to get to an instinctive decision based on very little data, but we will in just a little while. So you were a combat infantryman, and then you went to Texas State Troopers, and then obviously CEO for Force Science. Was there a specific incident where you realized that what people believe happened in a critical incident and what actually happened can be very two different realities?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, uh just for specificity, I I was a I became I was in the Army or National Guard, and it wasn't until well into my DPS uh state trooper career that I was activated and sent to Iraq. I went to Operation Iraqi Freedom, and so I got my combat infantry uh badge after I had been a trooper for 20 years. Uh so that that goes into that old saying that combat experience is that thing you get right after you needed it. And I was fortunate enough to have had decade or you know, almost two decades of uh public safety service before I saw actual combat, which which definitely informed and and I think improved uh the way I handled business over there. But but yes, uh uh to answer your question about different realities, I I remember as a kid hearing my grandparents argue. Uh they'd talk about a really good roast beef sandwich that they had when they were on vacation, and that was in that was in Memphis, and it was at that restaurant in Memphis. And then my grandmother would correct him, no, no, no, that was when we were in Nashville. That wasn't Memphis. That was and then they'd get into this big argument because each of them, through their perception and the memory that they've constructed over time, uh, because memory is a thing uh we don't remember the event. We don't remember the roast beef sandwich. We remember the last time we remembered the roast beef sandwich. So they're they're constructing this memory over time, and each of them uh is a hundred percent confident and a hundred percent honest, uh, but one of them is a hundred percent wrong because their their memory is incorrect. That's the first time I started wondering how how and why does this happen? There's only one way this could have gone down, uh, but what I've learned is there's two human perceptions, perceptual systems involved. And so the in '95, I was involved in a pretty serious incident in Austin, Texas. We had a riot. Uh it was Halloween, and and there was a club that let out, and there was a whole bunch of fighting and a whole bunch of shouting. And one of my partners was rendering aid to a man that had been shot. Uh he had been shot in the chest, and my partner's trying to put direct pressure, do whatever he can to help this kid not die. And I'm off to his left dealing with another person, but I'm not doing first aid, I'm handcuffing. While I'm handcuffing, I've got a very narrow external visual focus of attention on my task of handcuffing. Uh a car in a panic is trying to get out of there. They're not trying to hurt anybody, they just want to get out of dodge. Well, they hit reverse and they run over my partner. And and he's a now, this guy, he's one of those guys that's got arms like legs and legs like people. I mean, he's a big old boy. So that car ran over him, and it probably hurt the car worse than it did my partner, but it still flipped my partner over and he maintained pressure the whole time on that kid. I didn't see any of it. I didn't see my six foot four, two hundred and fifty pound partner get run over by a Cadillac, and it happened about 15 feet from me. So his memory of that event is vastly different from my memory of that event, uh, and yet they happen at the same time in the same place in pretty close vicinity. And it comes down to what not necessarily what is going on around you, but what you are able or what you choose to pay attention to in the midst of everything that's going on around you. That th those are pretty good examples of man, you can be in the same experience in the same place at the same time and have completely different experiences.
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SPEAKER_02I would I would say that in about 2002, Dr. Bill Lewinsky started asking questions that nobody else was asking, specific to law enforcement and public safety. And these questions were around perception, cognition, decision making, and performance. Uh why does the officer tell me that the threat was facing him with a knife and the officer shot that person, but the bullets are in the back? It's because the officer perceived what they perceived before they shifted their attention to the front sight. When they shifted their attention to the front sight, it was at the expense of everything else, tunnel vision, sensory gating. Uh what there's a whole lot of sixty cent words we can use to describe these things, but it comes down to tunnel vision. And and so what I would say is that force science exists to examine the humanity behind the tool in a time of crisis. We're not just taking measurements, we're not just counting shell casings, we're not just looking at at defects in the wall, we're not just looking at uh medical examiner notes. We're looking at the human being behind the tool in the time of crisis and what were their perceptions? What was their designated area of focus? Were they dominated by their vision? Were they dominated by their hearing? Uh were they were they completely internally focused and disassociated from the experience? What was going on with that human being? And then that informs us what we should expect them to remember and what it's really, really reasonable for them to not remember and and have a more holistic, uh realistic accounting of what went on based on their story. And and and as I want to get to later, I want to I want to talk about this standard of honest accountability that requires that kind of investigation. It requires an understanding of human performance and the limits of human performance.
SPEAKER_00See, I find this fascinating from from both perspectives. Both the okay, critical incident officer needs to analyze and everybody needs to analyze the the actions that came due to the behaviors that preceded. I love that. But I also like it from the perspective of what the general public has got into their heads about human performance when it comes to law enforcement, particularly, is completely and utterly in most cases wrong. And the human element is very rarely ever even considered. There's this belief, I think, unfortunately, and that's where you know companies like yours who are able to train civilians to understand the human variable are so invaluable because most times we hear of a shooting or we hear of an incident, just as you described, somebody had a knife, they were facing the officer, the officer drew the gun, he was still facing the officer with that knife as a actual uh threat, and then transfers visual uh processing his fixation point to the front site, and in that time suspect shifts. Right. So we end up with shots in the back. Well, how in the world does that happen, says the civilian. And because the time it takes to do that is so much faster than you think. And to transition the thought process away from the threat was there facing me, and suddenly the threat has spun and is now taking off is fractions of a second, potentially. But there's no as far as civilians are concerned, there's no understanding or no appreciation for that hum that human variable and the decision-making process that comes as sort of part and package of a life-threatening incident.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the the what would you describe the the time that it takes, the the very, very short amounts of time that those movements take, that's where the answers lie. Uh for years people would question uh how long does it take someone to uh you know, could someone have turned around in the amount of time that it took for the bullet to get from the end of the barrel to their body? And that's not what we need to be measuring. We need to take into account the perception time, the the there's a if if you hook somebody's brain up with a bunch of wires, you can kind of see when they become consciously aware of something. And that's generally between 200 and 500 milliseconds uh from the from the stimulus, from the light turning on, from uh from whatever the stimulus is. There's about two hundred to five hundred milliseconds. Well, it takes three hundred milliseconds to blink. So if you take into account that blinking, you could miss not only the the entire stimulus, and this is a simple laboratory stimulus. When we look at timing things in a laboratory, it's hey, when the light turns on, start shooting. When the light turns off, stop shooting. First of all, nowhere in the real world is a stimulus going to be that clear, unambiguous, and simple. Uh however, that's how you start timing these things, such as how long does it take for somebody to become consciously aware of a change in their environment. And that's between that 200 and 500 milliseconds when we're talking about vision. But you've missed it. If if if it happened, a person can turn 180 degrees in about a third of a second. That's about the same amount of time that it takes you to become consciously aware of that initial movement if you were able to see that initial movement. And I think to your point, that's where a lot of us get it wrong, is we assume that when we look at a video recording of an event and we watch it, we rewind it, we pause it, we frame by frame, we slow motion it, we back up again, we look and we go, aha! Right there, the guy's hand moves, and you can see his hand moving in his pocket. That took a lot of time and a lot of effort in a HVAC, uh, unlike this room, an air-conditioned room uh with good lighting and probably some help to say that's the definitive first movement. And then we go from that to say it took this amount of time for that 180 degree spin to happen or for that gun to come out of the pocket and fire a shot. People on the scene who are scanning their environment for additional threats, movement, changes, are not going to be most times looking exactly where they need to be looking when that initial first movement happens. So that puts them well beyond the normal time curve. I guess to sum all of that up, we live behind the power curve. We are always behind uh something that's going to potentially happen to us.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, which includes the capacity and ability to stop an action once the cognitive process and decision-making event has occurred.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. I had a case uh that I worked out of East Texas. It was one of my first expert witness cases. And in this incident, uh there was a man holding a woman hostage, uh, had an AR-15 pointed at her, she's in her car, and he's got her blocked between his garage and his great big pickup truck. She can't leave in her car, she's afraid to get out of her car because there's a guy walking around pointing an AR-15 at her. So she calls 911, tells, and this is right after the Parkland tragedy, the murder of all those children in Florida. Uh she tells 911, there's a guy holding me at gunpoint, please help. Well, they arrive not to negotiate, they arrive to take care of business, to save this hostage. And when they approach, it's a little clumsy. They've got rifles with no slings, uh, they don't really have a plan of attack, but but we're looking at time versus accuracy. Trade-off. So as they approach, the the the hostage taker has already dropped his rifle, but he grabs the rifle of the lead deputy, and they start struggling over this rifle, fighting back and forth, pulling, pushing. They end up on the ground, and another deputy there has his rifle and he sees the bad guy trying to take the rifle away from the good guy. Clearly a reasonable assessment of deadly ri deadly threat here. If that guy gets the rifle, we're all in bad shape. And so he buttstrokes the bad guy, butt stroke to the head, which is considered deadly force, takes his rifle and hits him as hard as he can in the top of the head. One. Guy's still got the rifle, they're still struggling. Bam, strikes him a second time. Bam, strikes him a third time and a fourth time. As he strikes him the fourth time, he's already made the decision. He started that cascade of motion that's going to bring a rifle up and bring a fifth strike down. He's developed a schema at this point that it ain't working. I'm gonna have to hit him again. So he is committed to the motor program of making that next strike. He's done four, he comes up, as he's coming up, the bad guy lets go of the rifle, the lead deputy maintains control of it, and the struggle's over. Bam, he comes down with the fifth strike. And it's less than a second between releasing the rifle and the and the butt stroke, that fifth butt stroke, and that's what they were after. They were after after this deputy to prosecute him for that fifth strike because the threat had ceased and he didn't immediately stop his action. Well, what had to be discussed was what is the reality? Where's the honest accountability in expecting a human being to be able to immediately stop something that they've already committed to uh mentally and physically, they've already sent the signals, they've already started that that uh potential to deliver that fifth strike. So after the fifth strike, which was notably lighter than the first four, he did he did stop. There was no sixth strike. But it's a great great example of a human being, not a cop, not a lawyer, not a doctor, not a bank teller, but a human being being unable to immediately stop doing anything. It's evident anytime you drive down the road, Terry, when you see an intersection and you see a green light, that green light is not going to go from green to red. That green light is gonna go from green to amber to red. Because as long as we've had cars and intersections and stop signs, we've understood that human beings can't stop anything immediately. They need time to perceive the change, 200 to 500 milliseconds to perceive the change, and then make a decision and then perform based on that decision. And that's why we have that yellow light, so that we have time to go from go mode to switch over to stop mode.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I think that's probably one of the things that's underestimated by most people in most cases when they hear of something like that. It's this misunderstanding, misbelief, even, that the second an event happens, and you as the Monday morning quarterback sitting there observing the call of your living room, going, Well, look, it should have stopped right then and there. No, the downstream effect of the preceding actions is now a part and parcel of the behavioral responses. And you can't just stop. It there are there are milliseconds, hundredths of a second, seconds in some cases between what got this thing started and the ability to change and go, okay, I've got to hit the brakes. You know, the reality or the conditions or the situation has changed. I need to now change the actions that are going to follow it.
SPEAKER_02And the research is there also. I mean, we've got research on how long it takes to start doing something, how long it takes to stop doing something, specifically shooting. Uh and and you're looking at a little over 300 milliseconds to start shooting, and you're looking at almost 400 milliseconds to stop shooting. So what does that tell us? It takes longer to stop than it does to start, uh, or or certainly takes longer to stop than it does to complete an action. And whether you look at uh Dr. Lewinsky's research from uh the the first go-around, or there's recent work by Lon Bartell and Associates uh using a Vertra system to to redo and and reevaluate some research that was done earlier, uh there were actually, in some cases, more shots fired after the stop signal than there were in the original research. The original research is it was about two shots after, you know, hit the here's your signal to start shooting, and when you see this signal, I want you to stop shooting. And so people would shoot as fast as they could, and then the signal to stop would come on and they'd shoot one or two extra shots. Well, in this more recent research, and we don't know if it's if it's trigger differences or mechanical differences, what it is, but there were up to three shots that were fired after the stop signal uh that that people would look at and say, why did you keep shooting? Why were there additional shots after the guy dropped the gun? Why were there additional shots after the guy fell to the ground? Why were there additional shots after the guy turned his back? Uh and that's the answer. It's the limits of human performance. And and again, what you find in the laboratory, you gotta be real careful not to say, well, this happened this way in the laboratory, so therefore it's gonna happen this way in the real world every time. We know there's gonna be differences, but it gives us ranges and it gives us an idea of what the general limits of human performance are, so that we do take a more realistic approach to investigations and uh deception, uh things that we might think are deceptive uh when they're not. They're just recollection of real human performance and real-time compression.
SPEAKER_00So I think the context here, because I I'm a bit biased here, and I I always lean towards wanting to understand the law enforcement perspective, but there are a lot of civilians that are you know concealed carry holders and one of their biggest fears and probably one of the you know the biggest um hurdles for them emotionally is not necessarily having to make the decision to defend themselves, it's the worry and the stress that comes with surviving a deadly encounter, but having all of their decisions and their judgment uh basically looked at by investigators, jurors, the media, hell even themselves, after this incident has occurred and and then finding themselves persecuted for what is effectively decisions that were made in the most stressful moment of their life, this critical incident. You think that the education of individuals could and should expand outside of law enforcement to civilians so that they have a broader understanding, especially for armed carriers, of what the human performance element is going to bring to a critical incident?
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. I you know, there was a time not that long ago, of course, when you get to be my age, everything seems like it wasn't that long ago. Where force science would only accept applications for training courses from law enforcement or public safety, some kind of uh uh armed professional uh applicant. And that's not the that's not the case anymore. Uh we do not only training, but we do a lot of expert witness work for non-law enforcement, non-public safety cases. And the reason for that is if if our mission is to study the human behind the tool, we got to remember that there's a human brain and only a human brain. There's no cop brain, surgeon brain, pilot brain. We all have the same human brain with the same capabilities and limitations. And so to your question, I would say we exist for all of those humans and hope to inform all of those humans. And I'd like to do it on the front end if we can, and not after a critical incident. We talked about this earlier, you and me. Uh when you explain things like confabulation, uh faulty memory, when you talk about those things on a podcast in the middle of the day, it sounds like education. It sounds like that's something I didn't know about how memory is consolidated and how it's malleable and fallible and constructive and all of those things. That's something that I didn't know before. That's education. But if we wait until uh an armed citizen trying to do the right thing, mind their own business, is attacked and forced to use deadly force to save their own life or someone else's, and then we start talking about confabulation and faulty memory. Well, now all of a sudden it doesn't sound like education, it sounds like excuse making when we talk about it after the fact. So I would love to get this information out before a critical incident so that we could become familiar not with what makes our case look better, but with what is actually true from an objective scientific standpoint about human performance, particularly human performance under stress arousal.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it would be invaluable. So I know one of the other things you teach is that uh vision is not like a video camera recording. Memory doesn't work that way. It doesn't catalog a chronological or even logical sometimes uh account of what actually happening or happened during a critical incident. So how are we impacted, generally speaking, during these critical incidents with how we remember or don't remember things that happened inside of that event?
SPEAKER_02Uh this is definitely one of those rabbit hole topics. Uh essentially, memory is going to be dependent on what the person paid attention to, not necessarily what they looked at. So if you've ever looked at your watch to see what time it is, and then you go back into your conversation and you realize I have no idea what time it is. I just looked dead center at my watch face, but I have no more idea what time it is now than I did before I looked. It's called looking but not seeing, and it's something that we do when we deploy a sensory modality, a perceptual tool, our vision, but we don't deploy attention along with it. So if we're looking at our watch but we're thinking, did I leave the garage door open today? Uh we're not paying attention to the watch, and so therefore we're not, even though we looked at it, we're not going to remember what the watch face read. That's a real low consequence example. A much higher consequence example is uh in a critical incident, if we have trained to be front sight focused, which many of us grew up being front sight focused all the time, and we lie to ourselves and we pretend that we're looking at the front sight on those five-yard targets. Uh, or maybe you're not lying, I don't know. But when we're front sight focused, we are paying attention to that front sight, and at the expense then of everything around it. We have this thing called foveal vision. It's it's it's where we can focus on something and identify objects. It's it's dependent on combs, uh, cones depend on light. There's a whole lot of complexity in our visual system, but in general, the what vision, the ventral stream object identification process involves our ability to focus, and it's it's an area no larger than the width of our thumb at arm's length. That's our foveal vision. If you look at a book and you're reading a sentence that says the sun is bright, you're looking at the word is, the words sun and bright are going to be visible but blurry. You wouldn't be able to identify them without the context. So the first component of what we're talking about is foveal vision. We're focusing our vision for the purpose of object identification. It's very narrow visual focus on the front sight. When we do that, we miss everything else if we don't pay attention to it. So we can shift our vision, we can go from the front sight to the door or from the front sight back to the car and scan our environment with a visual fixation here, a transition to another visual fixation, and then we kind of paint a collage of our environment. Uh, and in that way we see with our brain more than we see with our eyes because we've created this mental image of what's around us. Uh but all of that decides where our vision is. Even if we're looking at something, we might not be paying attention to it. So uh there's a really good study that that was uh led by Force Science, uh, we call it the the Mesa study, uh, where we took body cam footage, and it was the first study ever of its kind to take body cam footage and compare it to eye scan footage. So we had all the participants put eye scan glasses on, we calibrated the eye scan so that wherever their eyeballs were, there would be a circle on the on the screen. We knew where their eyeballs were at all times, but we never knew where their attention was. If they shifted their attention to the radio because they heard their call sign, they're no longer focusing their attention where they're looking, they're focusing their attention uh now on the radio. So because of all of those things, vision, attention, uh, and then memory being dependent on what we pay attention to, uh man, it's it when we look at a video and compare it to an officer's memory, uh, we're gonna see vastly different outcomes. A video, unlike the visual system that that gives us that little narrow point of focus at distance, a video is gonna capture everything that happened within that frame at generally 30 pictures per second. It's gonna take 30 pictures every second, and if something was in that frame during one of those pictures being taken, it's gonna be there. There's a lot deeper stuff that we can get into about video, about uh different kinds of frames, predictive frames, bidirectional frames, uh why sometimes a brown thing disappears on a brown background. But without getting into the really technical stuff of video, just talking about comparing, assuming we trust the video to be accurate, comparing that video to a human being's memory, they're never gonna be the same. Because the video is gonna capture everything that's within its frame, and the human is only going to capture what they paid attention to. So that's kind of intuitive at this point, that the camera is going to capture things that the human didn't capture, because there's no way a human can do that. What the Mesa study showed us was that not only is that true, but the opposite is also true. That study revealed that about 75% of the information that officers were using to make force decisions was not available to the body camera. We saw it on their eye tracker, but we didn't see it on the body camera. Either they're looking straight ahead at some threatening cue, and the body camera's blocked by the by the gun and the arms, or the officer's looking 90 degrees to their right or their left and the camera's shooting straight ahead. So the officer, the person, the human, is taking in uh signals and information and cues that they're using to make decisions that aren't captured on the body camera. So when the officer says, when he pointed the gun at me, I rolled my rifle, confirmed my reticle, and press the trigger, but the body camera doesn't show the person pointing a gun at him, doesn't mean it didn't happen. It just means it wasn't captured on the body camera. So in in that way and in hundreds of others, uh the human visual system is vastly different from a video camera, and the human memory is vastly different from a digital recording.
SPEAKER_00Which is I think probably one of the most understated and underutilized teaching tools available to us when it comes to situational awareness, critical incidents, scanning the environment. Because in addition to the limitation of our foveal vision being such a very narrow cone with everything else than you know becoming our peripheral vision, we also have sarcadic suppression where the incoming visual data is suppressed in order to facilitate a smooth viewing experience. So we have an illusion that we experience every single day without even knowing it, where we're building up our surroundings and our sense of knowing what's in our surroundings, basically in our imagination, because we're not taking in that much actual data or visual detail in any given environment. And if you add the stress of a critical incident or an attack, if you're a concealed carry holder and suddenly find yourself being targeted for a crime, you're you've already taken in much less data than you think, and now your band of focus goes from perhaps being somewhat broad to incredibly narrow.
SPEAKER_02And that's that's you know, we like to use the word tunnel vision to explain a lot of different phenomena. We talk about uh sensory gating, where your visual system takes over the colour visual dominance effect. There's a lot of research behind vision being the dominant source of information gathering, uh absent a disability, uh vision is going to be the strongest source of information gathering. And then in a critical incident, if if the most threatening thing in your world is something you're looking at, well, you might not hear things and you might not feel something touch you. Uh your visual system is going to be that dominant. And that's something that's that's very, very real in the the the psychadic suppression. When we look at experienced people versus inexperienced people, and you look at their search pattern, their visual search pattern, you see those saccades, you see those, I'm looking everywhere, and I'm not I'm not fixating my vision for more than eight hundred eight tenths of a second. I am not taking in any of this information. It's all being sloughed off, it's all being disregarded, it's not making it into the cone of what we use to make decisions because we're just looking all over the place. We don't know where to look. So there's this concept called game intelligence, and that comes with experience. Game intelligence tells us if, for example, we're shooting a five uh target array of steel, and we're supposed to go left to right. Targets must fall. We've all we've all played these games. We start left. If we've never done this before, we might forget, oh what, oh, it's to the right. I don't know where to look next. But with game intelligence, with experience, we know I'm going to drive my attention and then my vision and then my gun to the next target, and I'm gonna press the trigger. And while I'm pressing the trigger, I'm driving my attention, then my vision, then my gun to the next target, and we can, by knowing what to look for, where to look for it, how to make sense of it when we see it, uh, by knowing all those things, we call them the what, where, when, and how of game intelligence, we know what to look for next. And so you look at those search patterns, and they're not all over the place. They're not a great big cloud of color like you see with the rookies. They're very focused, and you'll see fixations, transitions, and fixations. And not only are they more focused fixations and longer fixations, but they're where they ought to be. So in that Mesa study, we had a notional event where a man beating his truck with a baseball bat ultimately shoots someone. Well, he goes from the back of his truck, walks on the opposite side of his truck so that the participants can't see him, and you look at the eye scan footage, and on the rookies, when he disappears behind his truck, they're their eyes are going everywhere. They're trying to find the guy. But on the experienced officers, you see the visual focus, the eye scan footage, go from the back of the truck right up to the window so that they know the next time I'm gonna see this guy is gonna be through this window. They're not wasting their time looking where he might be or where he where he is right now. Uh Wayne Gretzky said it best. He said, Don't go to where the puck is, go to where the puck's gonna be. So we don't look where he is, we look where he's gonna be. And and that's what the experienced officers did. So in that way, vision is very predictive. Uh and and and again, we see with our brain more so than we see with our eyeballs.
SPEAKER_00So it brings me on to now the memory for us under stress. After a traumatic event, people often say, you know, just you say, just tell us exactly what happened. But from a scientific standpoint, what's actually happening inside the brain, minutes, hours, or days after the incident is vastly different than what may have transpired during the critical incident.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Yeah, there's a and there's a couple of there's a couple of roads that I think both are important. One is what type of memory are we talking about? If we're talking about uh what time did you wake up, when did you brush your teeth, did you take a shower, uh that's episodic memory. And that's stuff that that we had to pay attention to or we won't remember it. Just like I mentioned earlier, that I leave the garage door open. If you don't pay attention to closing the garage, you're not gonna know for sure whether you did it. You've done it a thousand times before. I probably did, but I don't know for a fact I did it this time. That's episodic stuff. Uh what happened and in what order and how did it happen? And so if we don't pay attention to episodic memory, we're not gonna remember it. Procedural memory is the same as far as attention goes, but those are the things that we don't have to pay attention to. Uh in the in the regular world, we talk about things like moving our Foot from the gas to the brake. I'll often ask students, hey, did you drive to the venue today? And I'll say, Yes, I did. Say, okay, can you tell me generally the route you took to get from the hotel to the training venue? And they'll think for a second, they'll go, well, yeah, I left the parking lot, took a right, took a left on Apple Street, took a right on walk, left on don't walk, and then I took a left into the parking lot. They're able to reconstruct that because of the things that they paid attention to along the way. And then I'll say, okay, great. Sounds like you were paying attention. How many times did your foot touch the brake? And of course they don't know. And the reason they don't know is because that's an automatic function. That's something they practice to what we call automaticity. They've done it so many times that it just happens when it needs to happen. They don't need to deploy attentional resources. It's time to move my foot from the gas to the brake. They did when they were learning to drive, but they've done that hundreds of thousands of times now and it became it happens automatically. That's a procedural thing. And so we can't expect people to remember procedural things. How many times does your foot touch the brake? That makes sense to everybody. But when I say don't ask an officer how many times he pressed the trigger, don't ask how many times he shot and expect him to know the exact number. Because it's a procedural thing, just like moving your foot from the gas to the brake, he's not having to deploy attentional resources to every six millisecond trigger press. He is pressing a trigger until the threat stops being a threat, and then he has that window of time required to notice the change in his threat environment and then adjust his behavior. So that's the procedural side of it. Now that we've talked about the different types of memory and how how they either get attention and get remembered or don't, there's also the things that happen in our body, the physiological things that happen, the excitatory neurotransmitters that are released, and all the things that can affect the way our memory is cataloged. And to oversimplify it, I don't like the use of the phrase lizard brain. But I I will just to oversimplify it and make it make sense. Either your your uh my friend Mike Masingo, he's a genius. He calls it the good librarian, uh the thalamus, or the uh Conan the librarian, the amygdala. The amygdala is in the the emotion center of the brain, and the amygdala is the fear center, and when the amygdala is activated under a sympathetic nervous system response, it changes the way we store memory. So instead of reflecting on a an event that was a birthday party, and you're picturing the mom come out of the backyard with the birthday cake and the candles are lit, and you watch the child run up and try to blow the candles out, and everything's happening in kind of a cinematic playback. A traumatic memory oftentimes will be more uh flashes, more uh fragmented pieces of memory that that don't even go in the right order sometimes. They're just it's the smell of the attacker's breath, it's the flash of the muzzle, it's the visual of the great big knife, it's the car uh crossing the intersection, and and because of a visual effect getting bigger and faster as it gets closer, that's how traumatic memories are formed. So some things we gotta consider before we ask somebody, I think your words were exactly what happened. Uh we need to first have a reasonable expectation of what they might and might not remember. We need to expect the memory to be faulty, not accept it when it happens, but expect it to happen. And we need to give them a chance to decompress. There's a lot of research out there, uh even what I call it nerd fights. There's some some people that don't necessarily agree on a lot of things, but when you take all of their literature and stack it up, it paints a pretty clear picture. We need to give people a little bit of time, not too much time, but we need to give them a little bit of time uh to decompress. And and sleep can help also. Sleep can help consolidate memories. So we don't want to we don't want to tie investigators' hands and say thou shalt never interview somebody within 24 hours of an event, because we all know there are critical things that we need to we need to know for this investigation to move forward. Which way did they go? How many of them were there? Uh if they fired shots, generally which direction were they fired in? Uh do you remember the color of the getaway car? Things like that. We need it right now, right now. But as far as the exactly what happened stuff, where were you when you drew your gun? Where were you when you fired? How many shots did you fire? Those kind of things we have to be pretty flexible about. Uh there's a there's a great example uh that I use in training of an officer who confronts a guy with a knife, she ch he he charges the officer, she shoot shoots two or three rounds, but he's eating the bullets. And that's another myth that people don't understand. They think that when you shoot someone, they immediately fall because that's what happens in Hollywood. This guy's eat eating the bullets and continuing to charge her to the point that her Glock makes contact with his torso and causes a misfire. This officer takes two steps back, clears that malfunction expertly, and was able to fire additional shots and stop the threat and save her own life. I mean, this guy had a a a big knife. And when asked, hey, or or actually complimented, hey, that malfunction clearance was amazing. You did an amazing job with that. Her response was what malfunction could it be? I don't remember it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Because it was practice to automaticity. She had spent hours on the range because that's what good officers do. They train their their craft. That's what good armed citizens do. They train their craft. And she was clearing that malfunction quicker than than she was able to pay attention or even didn't need to pay attention to the to that motor program, uh, got back into the conflict and and won the day. So those are all great examples of how memory essentially fails us, uh, especially in those traumatic type critical incidents.
SPEAKER_00That information is absolutely invaluable, particularly for a home, let's say a home defender. I'm just going to use that as an example. You've just got to survive the worst thing possible. Let's say it's a home invasion, and there are two people who are uh had the lights turned off because they broke into your home. Officers arrive on scene, and there's going to probably be an urge to tell them as much as you possibly can because you want to state your case, you want them to know. But understanding the flaws in our memory system and understanding that there are going to be details you haven't you couldn't possibly be consciously aware of. You're going to want to share things that could eventually contradict what comes out during the rest of the investigation. And understanding you're not being evasive when you say, I've just been through the most traumatic event ever. I'm still processing what happened. These guys broke into my house. I I fought back. And now I want an attorney because I'm just I'm absolutely shaken beyond anything I've ever experienced in my life. That is not you being evasive. That is you understanding the flaws of your own memory and the chances that you are accurate in the description in all details of what happened next to none.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah. And and so that from the from the forced science perspective of education for the law enforcement community, we hope to instill that knowledge in investigators, not just who are investigating other officers in critical incidents, but who are investigating any armed citizen who is forced into a these aren't good choices. Right. That home defender did not get three choices. Two of them are are bad, one of them is good. They had a you know what sandwich that they had to take a bite of. They had to make one of three bad choices. Uh do something right now and live. Don't do something right now and die, or let's just see what happens. Let's just throw it to fate. So we hope officers will learn in investigations in general about memory and about memory consolidation and about gaps and confabulation and about uh attention and focus and all the things we've been talking about, because those will help that investigator get to the most and the most accurate information during the first interview. The more we interview someone, the more we risk traumatizing that person. And and that's a reason not to re-interview. What's not a reason not to re-interview is that, oh, I might say something different. This this person might say something different, and it's gonna hurt my prosecution or it's gonna hurt my defense. We should expect, I've said this, I think this would be the third time. We shouldn't accept faulty memory and changes. We should expect faulty memory and changes. So with that mindset, hopefully the law enforcement side of that home defender critical incident would be a fair application of human factors. The other side is just Brian's opinion. This is just me talking. If it's me in my home and you show up at 1 AM and the smoke is clearing, I am not going to interview right then. I will tell you which way they ran, I'll tell you the color of the car, I'll tell you how many of them there were. That's it. Public safety stuff is where I'm gonna stop. Not because I don't trust the police. I was with the state police in Texas for over 30 years. I love the police. I trust them to do right by me, but I don't trust everybody involved to understand the limits of human performance. So what I'd like what I am likely to do is to something very similar to what you said. Hey, officer, I understand what you're doing. Ask me your questions. If it's public safety or something you need to get on this person right now, I'm gonna do my best to answer it. But man, if it's about what I did, what I saw, what I thought, what I feared, I'm gonna I'm gonna hang on to that until I get a better grasp of it because my mind is spinning. I don't I don't even know what happened. I'm still dealing with with all of this. I mean, I'm I'm probably not gonna verbalize all of that, but those are the reasons that I'm not going to give a lengthy interview at the scene. Uh and hopefully when I do give a lengthy interview, it's going to be done in a cognitive interview fashion. Uh Dr. Geiselman does a great job. Uh, we've got a block on our LMS that talks about cognitive interviewing, and it's a way to get the most and the most accurate information rather than using one of these uh tricky read interrogation methods where we're likely to get a false confession, we're likely to get uh false information because the way we're asking the questions is leading this person to give an answer, whether or not they actually had the answer. So one of the other things I would remind people, uh, you know, you know, you gotta trust yourself, you gotta trust your perception, uh, you gotta give yourself time. You don't want to rush into an interview, you don't want to uh be rushed into an interview, you gotta get some sleep, that's probably gonna help. Uh decompress as much as you can because that anxiety, that trauma-induced anxiety is going to affect your ability to consolidate memory. Uh and it's gonna affect your physiology during the interview. Uh nobody wants to be fidgety and and twitchy while they're being interviewed by the police. Uh so I would remind you to do all of that stuff and and obviously call an attorney. That's that's why we have attorneys. It's not deceptive or uncooperative to exercise your constitutional uh protected God-given right. Uh, but I would I would remind people of all that stuff that uh you just gotta take your time and and uh if you don't know, you don't know. If you don't know the answer to a question, and cops are the worst about this, uh why were you standing right there? Well, I hear that question as I was standing in the wrong place. So now my answer to that question is gonna be an explanation that makes me not look stupid instead of a factual answer that talks about the the circumstances that drove me to that place. A better a better way to ask that is tell me about your position here. Now I get to tell you about why I'm there, where I think I am, what I think the advantages and disadvantages are. Uh so a cognitive style interview is going to uh most times we've also we've also got to consider out there uh we've got felons, we've got crooks, we've got bad people doing bad things on purpose. Cognitive interview ain't gonna work with them because their whole intent is to deceive. We have to use a different, more interrogative style questioning process with people who we have good reason to believe are intentionally trying to deceive us or get away with a crime. Not someone who is in their home at night, rushed out of bed, and had to fight to the death to protect their family. Those are much different situations.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell So you've been championing the honest accountability. So tell me more about that and also the framework you developed for evaluating human performance during crisis events.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell So honest accountability is something my friend Von Klein uh I give him credit for teaching me this phrase and this concept. Uh honest accountability is a standard. We often hear people say that police, armed citizens, Second Amendment supporters need to be held accountable for their actions. And I agree. I agree that I I want to be held accountable. I want the government to be held accountable, I want someone who through their actions another person was seriously injured or died. We all need to be held accountable for our decisions and our behavior. But it has to be honest accountability. And what that means is two things generally. One, that the expectation that we're holding this person to, the rule, the law, the policy, the expectation is clear and unambiguous. It's been socialized, it's been crystallized, it's been trained. It is the standard that the person knows they're being held accountable to. So a an armed citizen that goes to a licensed to carry class and they learn about the penal code in that state, they learn about the use of force laws in that state, they learn about home defense, self-defense, defense of others, that is the standard that that person should be held to because that's the expectation to which they were trained. When we start inserting concepts like lowest level of possible force, or only the force necessary, or uh, you know, exhausted all other options, we start throwing these other concepts that feel good, uh, that muddies the water, and it now holds this person to a standard that they were neither trained to, they don't understand, and they didn't expect to be held accountable to. They can't measure the lawfulness of their own behavior based on the standard lowest level of force necessary. Because that's not in the law, uh, that's not in any case law, it's not in statute, it's in policies and places, uh, which I would caution against. But that standard depends on something that is excluded from a force analysis, which is 2020 hindsight. The only way I know what was necessary is by knowing how the story started, how it proceeded, and how it ended. If I don't know how it ends, I don't know what ultimately was necessary. I know what I reasonably believe to be necessary in this moment. And I reasonably believe that as an armed citizen, when someone breaks into my home with a crowbar or a firearm, it is reasonable for me to believe it's necessary to use deadly force to protect my home. So that's a clear standard. Whereas, but you didn't use the lowest level of force available. That's not a clear standard. So that's a that's a lot of words for the first prong of honest accountability. The standard has to be clear, it has to be established, it has to be trained, the person has to be aware of it. They have to uh know that that's the standard against which they judge the lawfulness of their own behavior. The second prong is that that standard, whatever it is, cannot be beyond the limits of human performance. It can't require that you stop using force immediately when the threat ceases. Although that feels good and intuitively makes sense, the word immediately means immediately. It means it's got to stop the instant that the threat horizon changes. And as we've talked about today, that is well beyond the limits of human performance, not just in use of force, but in driving, in baseball, how many sports, how how many aspects of life can you fail 60% of the time and still be considered a world record holder? If you're a baseball player that shoot that hits a 400 batting average, that's man, that's crazy high. That's that's the the highest you could ever hope for. There's so few people that bat 400, it's almost unheard of. That means they fail 60% of the time. They got four uh about a four-tenths of a second to gauge a pitch, to make a decision, and to either swing or not swing. And so when people think we should just check your swing, we've all watched baseball. Every once in a while somebody checks their swing, but it's because they really weren't committed to hitting that ball in the first place. Checking a swing is almost impossible. It's it's expecting a human being to immediately stop a motion that's already been started. So in the spirit of education versus excuse making, it helps to paint pictures in sports, it helps to paint pictures in traffic, it helps to paint pictures in regular parts of society so that it doesn't sound like we're only talking about when deadly force is being administered via a handgun. Uh so in in reverse order, or to sum it up rather, real uh honest accountability means that the standard has to be clear, unambiguous, and and trained so that the person can judge the lawfulness of their own behavior, and it also has to be within the limits of human performance. As long as we hold people, armed citizens, officers, security officers, corrections officers, soccer dads, uh doesn't matter who they are, if we hold them to a standard of honest accountability, then we know that it's a it's a legit inquiry into what happened.
SPEAKER_00So I have one more question for you. If you knew that everyone who was listening to this podcast would someday experience the single most stressful, consequential thirty seconds of their lives, what would you want them to understand about human performance, training, perception, and accountability that might help them survive physically, psychologically, financially, legally?
SPEAKER_02That that uh that concept is something my good friend Ken Murray talks about at length. He wrote a book called Training at the Speed of Life. Uh and he talks about the seven survivals when, and it it it has to do with physical survival, spiritual survival, societal survival, financial, legal, all of those survivals that are required uh that go well beyond just living through an event. I would say you don't get to pick when it's gonna happen, where it's gonna happen, who's gonna be involved, or how it's gonna go down. You just get to be in it. And knowing that, I would say that the concept of game intelligence, knowing the what, where, when, and how are key. Having an external focus of attention, uh, we we throw this the phrase situational awareness around as if we understand it. I would say situational awareness boils down to uh knowing what to look for, where to look for it, what it looks like when you see it, how to make sense of it when you see it, and what to do next. Uh so although we can't predict exactly how something's gonna go down, and I almost guarantee if you if you practice uh for situation A, it's gonna be situation zucchini.
SPEAKER_01It is.
SPEAKER_02Just being aware and focusing your attention where it best fits. Whether you're on a walk at the park and you're going through a uh under a bridge, focus your attention on where a threat might emerge. Focus your attention on where a dog might run around the corner. Uh, and then when you pass that point, figure out what's important next. Uh I I would say, you know, in the spirit of of uh of catchy phrases, situational awareness also includes what's important now, when that's how you win, what's important now, and what's important next. Uh I think if we just kind of incorporate Those into our daily routines, our training routines, our priorities in life. And it ain't all about guns, ladies and gentlemen. I mean cardiovascular disease is going to kill most of us more than a gunfight will. So it's it's in what you eat, it's in how you exercise, how often you move, uh do you train? All of that stuff goes into situational awareness. And uh uh again, just be as prepared as we possibly can be. Trust yourself, give yourself time, give yourself a chance to sleep and uh and don't be rushed.
SPEAKER_00I think if we were to throw anything else into the mix there, it would be one of the things I think we struggle with daily is fully being present. We have so many distractions from minute to minute, second to second, that it is invariably um easier to multitask in any environment we are going through because we've got things to do. We've got lists to check, we've got conversations we've had, conversations we're going to have. There's a multitude and a myriad of things that will pull your cognitive focus away from your surroundings. And to say, be present in any environment where the general public could access, could get access to you, be fully immersed in that environment and perhaps Yes, even look at the environment through a predator's lens, asking yourself if I was going to get me, how would I do it in this environment right now? Where is the most likely approach point? And have that sense of I'm fully cognizant of what is happening in my surroundings and what might happen in this current surroundings. It helps keep some of those distractions at least to a minimum because you're going to ebb and flow over the course of a day. You just are from minute to minute. Your focus is going to be in, you know, multiple places. Just anchoring yourself in any given environment where the potential exists could very well be the difference between at least being somewhat ready, even though you're already behind the power curve, to respond as effectively as you possibly can based on your training.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. That's that's great advice. Mindfulness, present being present, uh knowing that our attentional systems are set up to alert us to external threats, like all this stuff we think is new and fancy and and uh EGG reports and all these uh charts and graphs, it all comes down to our ancestors and saber-toothed tigers.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_02W when we're walking through the woods and we're being mindful of what's in front of us, we're being present and we're paying attention to the things that are most important right now and then what's important next. If a twig breaks over our right shoulder, we're gonna turn and look. That's called a bottom-up attention grab. That's when the universe says, Hey, you need to look over here. So we go from our peripheral vision to our focal vision and we say, Oh, that's not a saber-toothed tiger, that's my dog. Everything's good. And then we go back to focus. So yeah, you are 100% right. Being present, uh, being mindful, uh that's the yeah, that's the secret weapon.
SPEAKER_00And underestimate it. It's been an absolute pleasure having this conversation with you. And I I know we could have done a six-hour podcast on this, and you did a brilliant job of sort of simplification for the layman, explaining the concepts that are inherent in what you teach. I know after a discussion at the conference, I know it even more now, but it really has been a pleasure to talk. And I hope, I hope that everyone that has listened to this soaks it up because understanding yourself and how your brain works and how it interacts with the environment or doesn't, as the case may be, is uh is worth its weight in gold. So thank you so much for joining me today.
SPEAKER_02Man, thank you for having me. This was as cool as I thought it was gonna be. Uh, like you said, we met at the conference and we we started going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole. So I knew this was gonna be good. I'm I'm very grateful for your time.
SPEAKER_00Thank you. So where can people reach you? Where are they gonna try and get in contact or or have you come in to teach?
SPEAKER_02Well, so there's a couple of options. Uh we've got social media for folks that just want to follow and see the things that we think are cool or funny or smart or important. Uh we've got uh we've got a Facebook page, we've got a LinkedIn page that are very, very active. We've got an X page that's that's kind of active. It's just harder to uh it's harder to talk about what we talk about in those short blurbs. Yeah. Uh but uh Force Science on Facebook and on LinkedIn uh are are very active. We've got the Force Science News, you can go to the ForScience.com website and register for the Force Science News. And we put out a publication either monthly, sometimes twice a month. And it's always something human performance, constitutional law uh related to uh not just police, but anybody who is armed and prepared to defend themselves or someone else, you're gonna find something of interest in most of what we publish on Force Science News. There's also a lot of training opportunities, and most of them are geared before the ar for the armed professional, uh, security officers, corrections officers, law enforcement officers. But there's something to be gained for everyone, I would say. And you could go to our website and click on the training tab, and you can locate any one of our classes that's being presented across the country for the rest of the year. We're about to have our 2027 schedule published. Uh, but I would also encourage folks to look at their calendar for September 22nd through 24th of this year. We're gonna be in Round Rock, Texas, uh, with our Force Science Conference, and we're gonna have a few hundred uh people there, scientists, practitioners, uh, lots of presenters, uh, lots of brilliant minds under one roof, and they're gonna allow me to be there as well. These guys are gonna be uh the best of the best. We've got an incredible speaker lineup. Uh we've got uh the executive director of the Alert program, for example, is gonna be one of our keynote speakers. We've got uh researchers that uh that will blow your mind. So September 22nd through 24th on Round Rock, Texas is gonna be the Force Science Conference. And you can also find that on our website. There's a there's a conference tab that you can click on for more information.
SPEAKER_00Okay, and that is open to the public as well as uh law enforcement offices, et cetera. It's a bit of everybody. Okay.
SPEAKER_02I I think it's it's again, it's definitely gonna be more geared toward the armed professional, uh, but but it's it's beneficial to everyone. I had a private investigator email and ask, hey, will this benefit me? 100% this will this will benefit you as a private investigator. So uh, you know, if you're a if you're a teacher who also carries concealed, maybe not. Uh there would be good stuff there, but it's just not geared that direction. But if you if you are an armed professional or or you provide training to armed professionals or you do case analysis as a lawyer or as an expert witness, uh it's definitely not just for armed professionals, it's for anybody in that orbit.
SPEAKER_00Okay. That's fantastic. All right, buddy. Thank you so much. I've uh I've really enjoyed this, and I know you've delivered information that I just hope people take on board because it's been l as I said, worth its weight in gold. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_02Thank you, brother.
SPEAKER_00Before we wrap this up, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for tuning in each week, for sharing the episode, subscribing, liking, commenting, and really helping this little corner of the shooting world continue to grow. Every lesson genuinely matters, and I appreciate you being part of it. I do have one small favor. If you know someone with a great story, real experience, and even lessons that you think could help make shooters better, please introduce them to me. Have them reach out to me, Terry, at laseramo.com or simply connect the two of us via email. I'd love to have a conversation with them, learn what they bring to the table, and see what a fun, valuable episode might look like with them in it. Thanks again for being here. Keep training, keep learning, and I'll see you next time on Making Tudors Better. Cheers.