Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Episode 256 - James Smith

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

James Smith is a consultant in the private sector, as well as for military units. He is the owner of Novasind and Multus consulting. Multus consulting is interdisciplinary consulting that aggregates subject matters including, but not limited to, epistemology, psychology, intellect, culture, evolutionary biology, physics, mathematics, gastronomy, music, and more into an integrated whole. By doing so, each recipient is able to gain a unique and system-level understanding of their tradecraft, and existence, which fails to be achieved due to the overwhelming majority of educational/training approaches in the marketplace that often fail to explain how relevant subject matters integrate in people's thinking and the real world. Skills developed include but are not limited to those that optimize leadership and high-stakes decision-making, negotiations, system-level optimization, critical thinking, conflict resolution, organizational culture, and how to effortlessly deal with high expectations and responsibilities.

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Let's talk about my guest today for episode number 256. His name is James Smith. And we cover a lot of ground on a lot of topics in this episode. But what I'm going to say is it's mostly based around special operations, the training pipeline, and psychological preparation. Training for stress immunity, things you can do on the front end, and its impact that it can have. potentially on, I don't like to use the word solving, but impacting post-traumatic stress. And with that, I'm going to let James speak for himself. Episode number 256 with James Smith. Enjoy.

Close now. Where should we begin, Mr. Smith? Such a generic last name. Is that your real last name? Not the first time that has been asked of me. It's actually like a down-the-middle James Smith. I'm like, that's a made-up name. So many times car rental, other vendors. Name please give the name.

Yeah, right. Yeah, it's like the Jason Bourne alias name that people would go with. Where would you like to begin? As alluded to in me contacting you by email, in the consulting that I do and have done what I've noticed, and this is a universal statement, it's not localized to the special operations community yet due to your past and many of the individuals

who I've worked with over the years, the importance that I place on the assistance that I can offer to the community is what has, in part, led to me really taking notice of how all the necessary constituents of the training in the tactical pipeline that you are well familiar with, the one that to this day and to my knowledge is absent. It just does not exist. It is in in fact, the one that I consider to be the most significant one, which I refer to it as psychological preparation, and what it encompasses and the reason why I place it at that level and the hierarchy above everything else. Because when you think of the significance of

shoot, move, communicate, has a bedrock of tactical constituents, and you ask yourself what governs, if we were to hypothesize that something governs all of those. What do you mean by governs? That supersedes each one in terms of the hierarchy as far as what precipitates effects, effective tactical shooting, what precipitates effective tactical communication, what it precipitates

effective tactical movement. Because as you know, none of these exist in a vacuum that each one of those is precipitated by depending upon the context, I'll just generalize some aspect of thinking and decision making. then the communication comes in the form that it does. Then the shooting occurs in the way that it does. Then the movement occurs in the way that it does. And psychological state is that bedrock in terms of, I use the word bedrock. It's what comes before all those in the timeline and governs all those.

It governs both the qualitative execution and depending upon the context. the quantitative execution of the communication, the shooting, the movement. And not only that, when we talk about any instance essentially apart from traumatic brain injury, which, you know, wasn't understood as being a thing until more research went into these concussive blasts from breaching, etc. apart from that but I say apart put that on the shelf for a moment because we can come back to it when we look at post-traumatic stress and I'm careful not to use the suffix disorder just post-traumatic stress and then we generalize that to any type of traumatic stress that it is only conceivable in the absence of a prepared mind.

Nothing's traumatic if one is prepared for that event. Easy example. It's low-hanging fruit, but no less effective. You take someone who has been working in a trauma room for an extended period of time, and you take them outside of the trauma room, and they're on a street corner. and they bear witness to a accident that results in remarkable tissue damage to some pedestrians.

And then you ask yourself, so there's that trauma room surgeon, and then next to them on the corner of third and Maine is a few other people who are, you know, beyond the occasional movie or TV show are completely disconnected from tissue damage. and when we ask ourselves is what are the likely expected reactions out of this small group of people all standing there and when we go one by one do we think the trauma room surgeon is going to be freaked out or have trouble sleeping or issues with anger etc etc weeks and months and years later most people well no they they see that every day they deal with it every day it's not remarkable to them and then we go to the rest of the people well what do they do

what are they used to dealing with? And it's easy to draw an understanding of, well, what is the explanation for why one person experiences trauma and one person does not? And the way that we can look at that is using language of whether you're prepared for that or not. So on the front end of tactical training, it's, it's astounding to me that this has that this was not realized 50, 60, 70 years ago and just part of the standard operating procedure of preparing someone for this type, you know, again,

we're using as the example, the context of the tactical operator, but it applies equally as well to anyone. Yeah, a few thoughts, if you don't mind. So the analogy used, I don't know if it's actually, I don't know if it's the cleanest one. because trauma surgeon is used to seeing people wheeled into a room who have tissue damage. They're not used to seeing the mechanism of the tissue damage. And oftentimes I think it's actually witnessing the event that can cause the trauma in people. And there's also, speaking of the world that I came from, the cohort of people that I came from,

largely we received the same training, but people's variation and deviation when it came to post-traumatic stress was very, very different. you know, six people, same experience. I usually use the analogy of like cups and, you know, a volume that you can fill. Some people will spill over with something that is a drop in somebody else's glass. And I actually think the community does a great job of incremental exposure to it, whether it's through live tissue training, force-on-force training, you know, all of the things that we integrate to create the most realistic battlefield that we can in a training environment before going forward. I don't think the place for that is in the pipeline, actually,

because the pipeline is designed for selection. You know, it's, you know, you want to teach it after you have refined for and are now working with the base-lite product that you feel comfortable moving forward with. I don't know if I would put it in the initial pipeline itself. Fair. Maybe that's my fault and not specifying when I'm using the word pipeline in the naval context. So correct me if I'm wrong

You're making the point This is something to start in SQT or after I'm not aware of any of it During Bud's training which you know the B and Buds is Basic right Which is actually an overstatement of what that training is I would put it it could be it could be ruds Rudimentary underwater demolition steel training

I didn't go through SQT I went through what was called STT which was before the SQT pipeline and I am over the front of my skin is if I'm speaking about anything that happens in the STT pipeline now. But what I can speak about is my exposure to specifically the training modules that a conventional SEAL team will go through. And then the, again, only at my time at the command, the level of realistic force-on-force or medical gear or not medical gear, medical training, live tissue training, integration into

scenarios. It was pretty robust. So further specification on my part, when I stated that of all the tactical constituents that are part of the pipelines, as an outsider, it's clear to me that robust is the right word, that there's no shortage, particularly at the tier one level in terms of the resources that are available to exhaust the level of specificity that is considered to be necessary. operate at the highest level in any context of what is argued to be a necessity of tactical execution. It's that what I'm referring to is not exactly, and, you know, from the epistemology that I mentioned before we started recording, there's time for this to unfold. I guess it's worth stating now, the author of the epistemology that I reference, which is critical rationalism. is the name of it, the author is the late scientific philosopher, Carl Popper,

and one of the multitude of insights that he shared was that no matter how clearly an idea exists in a person's mind that they attempt to communicate, it is actually impossible that it can be communicated with certainty that it will be interpreted the way we intend it. So maybe we've come upon that already in terms of my accountability, that no matter, No matter how clear it was in my mind, it didn't land on you the way I thought that it might have. Well, remember you're talking to a dummy. So we have to use small childish words. I don't think that's an accurate statement. Point taken.

Okay, so in the psychological preparation that I'm referring to, a major aspect of it is the same as any other tactical training that you had in terms of if you think of, your any of those skills you know that there was a a curve a trajectory that characterized how skilled you were at the beginning and how skilled you became in time sure like anything yeah and it varied by per person sure psychological skills work very similarly and the one that I've spent a couple decades now thinking closely about is stress immunity. So going back, I recognize your criticism of my analogy of the trauma room surgeon, and that can arguably distinct from the source of the trauma, as you stated. Someone who is psychologically prepared the way that I characterize it and conduct it in my consulting

is someone who comes to terms with the idea of the sources, because this generalizes to using what is actually something that after the fact I realized came from my interest in physics, in the subject of physics, that what physics offers is a description in terms of physical transformations, laws that give context, to what is possible and what is not possible. It's fairly black and white in terms of physical transformations

the concept of differentiating possible from impossible. And you're not really ruffling anyone's feathers by referencing various laws of physics to describe what you just described as not a possible scenario because it violates one of these known laws of physics or not. Unless you're talking to people who believe in flat earth, then we have a fucking problem. I agree with you.

I agree with you. And the problem isn't that there is any ambiguity in the laws of physics. It's that it is very difficult to reason with someone who is closed to reason. That's a very good statement. I agree with that. That might be a T-shirt. It probably is, and I'm not aware of it. Yeah.

So given that understanding that in terms of physical transformations, there's such a thing as possible. and impossible, that can be integrated in ways that I have, it may have been, I'm not aware of it being done. I've done so in my consulting is used that concept to form a component of the psychological skills training that I offer, which is, as you know, there's nothing conceivable that could happen in combat that is impossible. It's low-hanging fruit, but nonetheless, anything that happens is possible. No matter how unlikely, there could be a very small likelihood, but nevertheless, possible.

Because nothing by definition can happen in the field of combat that is exempt from physical law. I would agree with that. So from that, and I don't mean to oversimplify what is in fact a concept. complex subject matter. However, from that, using this understanding of physical law, then what we know is absolutely nothing, no operator could bear witness, be the source of, be the recipient of, be the witness of, anything that defies the laws of physics. I would agree. So like any other aspect of skill training, what, in my view, deserves a seat at the top of the hierarchy of tactical training is this aspect of developing stress immunity on the basis of regardless of the small likelihood that there might be to encounter situation X. the fact that situation acts or any other does not violate a known law of physics means it very

well could happen. It's only a question of whether it will or not. Yeah, we're talking about probability at that point. That's right. And, you know, in the interest of time, because that's ultimately the limiting factor in terms of, well, how prepared can one become given, I should, it's not a not only time, it's given knowledge, but even with the most robust understanding, which is always going to be incomplete, but the most robust understanding for any upcoming mission profile, ultimately there will be a limitation in time because there's only so many hours in a day and et cetera, et cetera, to prepare, and then what to prioritize, what to spend the most time

on, what would be argued to be the most relevant. Once that's understood, and then we realize not only the significance to improving tactical execution, because apart from reducing the possibility of someone being vulnerable to trauma, apart from that, there's this whole other landscape of how much improved tactical decision-making can become in the context of improving these various psychological skills going back to what I said earlier, that govern those dynamics of shooting, moving, communicating. And what this points to is the integrity of this idea that so so far, even though it's been brief, we've briefly touched on what could be done on the front end in terms of

working towards becoming more stress immune so that one is less susceptible to becoming traumatized to begin with. And then using the physics analogy as one example of how that can be included in that training, including what I just mentioned is now, if we plug this concept in somewhere in the middle of an operational career, how can we improve tactical execution in non-obvious ways, right? Because the obvious ways, to your point, and again, for me as an outsider, have left very little, if any, stones unturned. It's more issued. schools. It's more dry. You know, you just, you, you layer on the education and knowledge over time.

You go from a high school education to, in the terms of military schooling, high school education, to your associates, to bachelor's, to PhD. And at the end of it, you're like, fuck, I've gone to every school possible. And it's easy and actually really dangerous to arrive at a place where you don't think you can improve anymore, in my opinion, at least. Agreed. Yeah, the low-hanging fruit there is you just knock off the course after course after course. And one of those courses that doesn't exist is what I'm referring to. So the at the front end, just generalizing here, but to make the point, if you think of at the front end, what could be most helpful is introducing this concept that approaching stress

immunity, getting something closer to stress immunity benefits everybody equally. That's obvious. Improving one's ability to scan the environment, make a lot of. more effective sense of it faster, more accurately, and how that influence is clear and concise communication, shooting, movement, et cetera, also a no-brainer. Sure. If there's a way to improve that, everyone raises their hands. Yeah, sign me up. That tracks. Now on the back end, similarly, what I see missing regarding individuals who are, say the individuals are having problems for whatever the reason they're having problems whether that's related to

things that they done that they that they did that they saw saw happen to others any of that that in addition to what is another enormous pathological condition the concept of identity now having listened to more than one of your interviews before I was pleased in some way to hear you differentiate the person you are from the job that you did. Yeah, I think it's essential to be healthy. I agree. And as you're probably well aware, most of popular society these days I think might disagree with you and I in that there is such a push towards conflating what someone does

what someone takes interest in, their sexual interests, their hair color, their clothes, and making that part of who they are, which leads to pathological outcomes. Because now what is one faced with when their interests change, now they're faced with,

oh, no, I'm losing my identity, where those of us who realize there's a difference between these outwardly observable behaviors and who we are as people can fluidly navigate our way through society without any of those hangups. And one of those is this idea that someone who thinks of who they are as a seal, as special

operations, any of the other divisions, any of other branches, now runs the great risk of the inevitable, which is provided they're not killed in combat and they live to retire or to choose to get out before retirement. Or get kicked out. Because they're too fucking old. Indeed. It's like, hey, you don't have to leave, but you just can't stay here. Right.

Any of those scenarios. Couple that with geographic isolation, more than likely. They oftentimes go back to where they came from. Absolutely. And now if we take that individual who thought of themselves as this is who I am, that's what explains what would otherwise be not even a topic of conversation. which would be this concept of transitioning out into the next phase of your life, whether you retired or not. Now you're doing something else. And the reason it's a thing, the reason it's a

topic of conversation, like how are you transitioning? How are you, you know, the, the ephemeral you in general, how are you doing with the transition? The only reason that's a thing in my judgment, or perhaps a more accurate way of saying is that the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the primary reason that that is a thing is because of this pathology of identity. If we take as a hypothetical identity off the table and there's just interest, I'm a person, I'm a abstract sentient, abstract thinking, sentient self-aware entity. And I create the knowledge that I have. I have interests. I follow those interests. Interest. interest change over time. And then the only way identity works in my theory, Andy, is basically the way

it has worked in law enforcement. What's this person's identity? And in that context, it's only a term used by someone describing someone else, not a first person term. And the answer to which is basic aspects of human behavior. So your significant other, for example, would be one of the first people to go to to get a sense of your identity. And what your significant other would be describing would not include what you do professionally. Hopefully, unless you married the type of person that that's what they're looking for is a social status symbol. That's a good point. Ideally, the clearest descriptions of identity are on the basis of what I'm referring to.

What kind of person is this? How accountable are they? How trustworthy are they? Other aspects that describe them most relevantly in terms of identifying them in differentiating them from other people. So it doesn't matter what they do for a living and what types of. of clothes they like to wear and the hairstyle, etc. But more accurately, these psychological features of behavior that are arguably the most relevant in the context, you know, to your point, unless you know, to those who have picked the wrong person to partner up with, these are arguably

the most viable as it regards compatibility between two people, right? These, who the person is, It's sort of like it would be unusual to meet someone. You know, they break off the engagement after three years. Oh, why? Those sneakers she liked to wear to the gym. Just, you know, I draw the line at sneakers. You know, I haven't met anybody that said that. I don't know if you have.

What kind of sneakers are we talking about? Yeah. We talking about like crocs at the gym? I have a fucking problem with that. A deal breaking. Yep. Interesting. Hard line.

You've refuted my claim. Just me, though. Fair. Yeah. Generalizing when you look at the hierarchy of what's likely to be a deal breaker. It's not going to be shoes. Right. Or a variety of other externalities that we could probably find consensus agreement on.

Right. You know, more important, less important, generally speaking, even probably across different cultures. And what all of this circles around is how much room for improvement there is psychologically in divorcing this concept of identity regarding the topic of conversation here from what individuals like yourself and those currently doing it do for a living. Now, yes, it's important to recognize there's levels. There's levels of commitment.

Anyone who's served in the military period has done a unique thing in that outside of what hasn't happened since the era of Vietnam, periods of draft, you know, anyone volunteering to serve for those not aware is sacrificing their freedom. Sort of first of all. You know, you're, as you know, you're exposing yourself to a system of hierarchy. that is not a democracy. It's built to protect the democracy, but it is not one. Yeah, if you sound on the dotted line, you are surrendering a few of the freedoms that others are free to express for the period of time that you're wearing uniform. That's it.

Yeah. And then what's more than that, depending upon what you elect to pursue in that career deserves to be differentiated on the basis of, well, what have you done to increase the likelihood of death or serious injury

and how special operations is one of the examples of, well, you've done quite a bit to increase that likelihood. And so all of that is absolutely relevant in the context of

distinguishing professions based upon different types of criteria. So it is an extraordinary thing. And as you know, especially to reach the highest level of what that community allows for. It's just an extraordinary thing. It's a factual thing. It's an extraordinary thing because of the talent pool, it's selection after selection. And by definition,

the concentration of talent at the end of it, is going to be very high in ways similarly, but for different reasons, that we can draw analogy to in different aspects of sport, for example, solely on the basis of concentration of talent. Yeah, no, it's a good parallel or analogy for sure. You know, when it comes to the idea of identity versus occupation,

I go with the business card principle, and I think anybody listening to this, I don't care what their occupation is, but if it's something you would put on a business card, it's what you do. Those things change over time. That's not who you are. That's what you do. And that can be a very blurry line depending on the community. I mean, you know, the SEAL community, you've worked with them.

It's very, it's tight knit. They almost, in my own experience, they do a very good job of keeping you looking inward and inward and inward. And I'm not going to say that they intentionally try to get you to attach your identity to it. But it becomes the deeper that you get in there, the harder it gets to recognize those things. I had an experience in 2005 that kind of forced me to lift my head up a little bit, and I'm actually very thankful for that because it was a hard reset and a realization that this shit's going to end at some point. So maybe start looking at the horizon. That actually drastically helped me, and I think I was atypical in having that experience. But it's as simple as that.

I mean, we can make it as complicated or as simple, but if it goes on a business card, it's what you do. It's not who you are. I agree. I think that's an excellent example, and it points towards what we had addressed earlier, which is this concept of, okay, so what we establish, there is unquestionably something remarkable about reaching the highest level of the special operations community, and that's definable, and it's clear, and anyone who's interested can look into that and realize that there's different levels to this thing and what goes into that.

I'd caution you against using the term remarkable. I think it's abnormal, but I think one of the most apt descriptions of anybody in the special operations community is it's very normal people tasked with doing very abnormal things. There are some definite outliers that you look at, like holy shit, that person is smart, physically capable, like the whole package, like the T-1000, whatever Terminator would be. And then there's some fucking retards. Fair. My use of the word is describing what it takes to operate at the level and especially over a career. So less about remarkable person, although there are some remarkable people. That's a debatable. That's a different conversation. I think the norm, though, is a pretty average person. I mean, you've been around the community. People think that it's like, you know, oh, they must chisel them all out of marble. Like, no, they're fucking normal.

They're tall, they're short. There's some who are gauntly thin and endurance athletes, and there's some dudes who are obviously on all the Brazilian supplements or Mexican supplements, depending on where you shop, or your preferred hobby, and everything in between. But the true abnormalities, like these true absolute legends that I would, they're the anomaly, not the norm. And I'm not trying to diminish anything.

I always try to be very careful when talking to people. There's many unrealistic expectations of that world because there's a lot of things that people don't know about it. They never actually see or touch the dragon, I guess, would be a good analogy. And it's like when you work at the highest levels of government, you get to pull back the curtain and you see that there's a donkey standing there with a fly buzzing around its head. You're like, son of a bitch, I thought it was way better than this. People could have that experience, too. I agree. I agree. We might have talked past a little each other there, Andy, that I agree with everything you just said. What I'm referring to when I use the word remarkable is more something like, you know, 300 plus days a year. Yeah. Not home training. The cost of the occupation is remarkable for sure. Yeah. That's what I'm referring to. The, and there's, It's not that there's no other approximate equivalent in the context of what does that commitment cost you.

It's not that nothing else out there comes close. It's that when you compile onto that, the likelihood of death, serious tissue damage. Just the risk in general. That's the explanation from my use of the word remarkable in the context. Yeah, totally agree with you on that part. and curiously for me is how again what i'm i have been eluding to and we can talk more about is that it just doesn't exist and i i have the privilege of not my statement isn't from where i'm standing it's the amount of consulting i've done with individuals who are you know someone who i'm

close friends with who's still at the command has have done an entire career and individuals like him and others who I talk with frequently that just affirm yeah this this doesn't exist what what I'm referring to and I can and I can talk more about it maybe it'll it'll be more clear and how that's differentiated from all the things that do exist again that are more obviously attributable to the necessary skills, most of which are the physically observable skills, sort of like if you could reflect back on, you know, AC 130 gunfire ships that are able to capture the high-resolution video and ask yourself, particularly what to the train die would a group from the command that you retired from,

what would be visually observable that would distinguish them from white side teams versus any other type of tactical unit, law enforcement, government. And if you reflect on, well on the one hand you know that there's

levels both in what's physically observable take CQB as an example as a tangible thing if you agree that not all CQB is created equal in terms of the skill sets of the teams that are conducting

house raids for sure and then from that you can accept that it doesn't even It doesn't necessarily take a trained eye of an operator to see differences in skill level in the same way that another domain that I consult in is professional sport. So if you look at, say, professionals in the NFL and you watch them executing their skills, you also realize there's levels. It's not just a difference in size and muscularity and speed.

it's not just physical attributes, it's the execution of technical skills that, because these are quantifiable things and you can isolate differences. And so in any skill by definition, there's levels, whether it's a musician, a special operator, an athlete, you name it. And because those aspects of, in this case, visually observable skills are that much more readily quantifiable, they're that much more accessible and obvious in terms of identifying the need to improve them. This is what differentiates all visually observable skills from the psychological, because once you understand that skills are skills and the mechanism to

improve them is generally the same. So when you don't use the the verbiage or the jargon of what you were actually doing if I say okay if I said Andy talk some about your CQB training like the highest level CQB training you did but don't use any of the jargon. Assume you're talking to someone who they wouldn't know what the jargon meant what you could realize is once you began generalizing without the jargon, you could basically replace that with any other jargon, and it would make sense to the golfer, to the NFL player, to the ice hockey player, to the fly fisherman, because what you would be forced to generalize to was the highly focused, committed practice of the skill with a great amount of

frequency. Yep. That's skill development. You know, this, this got distorted from the, the author of the 10,000 hour rule. People aren't aware that it was a gross generalization based upon the practice strategies of these talented young classical musicians. And it was sort of something equivalent to looking at scatterplot data and sort of just choosing to find an attractive agreement that would be catchy. That's how they landed at the you need 10,000 hours to master something? It's complete BS. Well, I think you can see it anecdotally in your own life because you could spend 10,000

hours practicing like shit and you'd be, I mean, probably mediocre just due to the amount of time put in, but I'd rather take somebody who has a thousand hours, I've targeted and precise practice. They're going to wipe the floor with the other person. That's it. And then to your point of earlier of how just individual variability has to be accounted for across any population, the same is true regarding skill development, just in terms of the amount. I'm guessing you saw this even amongst the individuals who you worked with in the CQB, there was different rates. There's always a bell curve. There's always, and that's another thing that people, I don't know if they understand, even at the J-Soc level, like, holy shit.

Everybody just must have been awesome. And I guess in comparison to their peers, maybe a tier underneath or two tiers underneath, there would be a skill difference, but amongst that cohort at the command, there's still a bottom 10% and a top 10%. You know, there's always the, fuck man, hurry up and like, oh my God, I can't keep up with this dude.

And that exists wherever you are. There's never, I'm still looking for that. perfectly manicured lawn. Every other dad out there on the block. Yes, shares the same sentiment. Yes, agreed. And because of that, what has to be accounted for

is the variability that will exist in terms of the time in reaching different skill levels. The same is true psychologically. Now, so again, the difference is that someone wants to improve their shooting. someone wants to improve their ability to cast a fly fishing rod someone wants to improve their ability in the golf course whatever it is at least what they have to to grab onto is that physical

task and in some sense for most people Andy it's a it's a more tractable idea that they can see their improvements because they they have this connection with what they have to do to improve. I understand the skill. I understand the technique. I understand I'll go as slow as I have to to do it perfectly. And the more that I repeat that, the more that I'll ingrain that pattern of movement. And in time, I can speed it up and still retain the quality of what I'm doing. And it generalizes to any skill. Psychologically, the same is true. It's that most people have a more difficult time with its practice because what you're practicing, an example of what you might be practicing is thinking differently. So this is an example of say you have someone middle of the

career. They've subsumed themselves and what they're doing. I'm a seal. I'm special operations. Detachment alpha, delta. It doesn't matter. That's who I am. You know, as I'm 48. 44. Okay. So, 1986. I remember when Top Gun came out, it was amazing. I remember.

Maverick is a hero of our time. I told my oldest son that Maverick, the new movie, was based off of real world events. And he actually, apparently I sold that one really well because he's on the couch watching it. And he looks over and he goes, did they really? steal an airplane? I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about, man? This is a made-up movie. He goes, son of the bitch, I thought you were serious. That's good. Impressive that you were able to sell that. I don't remember selling it that well. I'm just like, yeah, man, I think it was because my wife absolutely hates it, and I'm convinced she hates it because she just wants to be

contrarian. She says the second one sucks because the first one did, and I'm not seeing how those are tied, because the first one was great, and the second one is a cinematic tour to force, obviously. And I don't think she even remembers watching the first one, but it was a fucking movie from the 80s. So let's go with the grainy, shaky photography. And clearly they're not in an aircraft, but that's okay. Yeah, I don't even, so I watch it all the time to piss her off. Not to piss her off, to irritate her. If it actually pissed her off, I would turn it off for a few moments and then back on. But yeah, I got my son watched and he legitimately thought it was, because I'll make jokes. I'm like, we need to celebrate Maverick. Like, when's he getting his

holidays one of the fucking greatest naval aviators of our time my oldest son's just like okay just going along with it he didn't realize i was joking yeah i think you characterize it well a tour de force my point of bringing it up is if you recall the scene where in the second movie where where maverick is sitting with ice man yep and he's a he's it's time to let go Yes, and in that scene when he says, it's not what I do, it's who I am. Yeah, and that's why he'll be in a fucking liquor bottle the rest of his life. Precisely. Precisely.

That's a great example. You know, my conjecture would be that, you know, that line was written for the diluted population of the day that has conflated identity with who they are as a person. It was probably the single biggest insight into the character that he was playing. For those of you who don't know, Maverick is not based on a real person or real life events. But I agree with you. That statement in that whole movie was probably one of the most revealing things about probably why his career went the way. Again, made up fucking career. But it ties in nicely because he can't separate what he does with who he is.

Well said. And that then generalizes to anybody, you know, not necessarily. knowing, do you have a sense of your listening audience? In what regard? Active duty. No clue. Podcasting is interesting. Will you record this?

Michael will, I mean, hopefully he hit record. I don't even know what the fuck. He's, again, Googling gun parts over there. But you publish and you upload it to these, what would it be? It's just a platform that, you know, that it hosts the actual raw files. And once it clicks over and publishes it, I actually, I have no control over where it goes, how it gets shared, how people interpret it, how people take it. And I am sure that there is a vast amount of information collected on the listeners. It doesn't come to me.

Because it's valuable. So it's going to somebody else. Likely advertisers would be my guess. I'm sure somewhere along the line, it's like I can get total downloads. And I believe, like a YouTube will give you an age demographic, but that's something. reported on, you know, the people clicking what age they are. And it's somewhere down, somewhere farther upstream from where I am at, that valuable data, which they are targeting people with, I have to assume, is being used.

That makes sense. Yeah. But it's really, it's like we're just launching satellites into orbit here. Literally. Yeah. Well, I ask, because let's say, for example, there's someone listening that has landed directly on who up to this moment in time was operating under the notion that who I am is what I do. That brings up another psychological discussion, which is how does one react to a persuasive

argument that, let's say, for example, fall something closer to or is in the realm of objective truth than the one they've been subscribing to. It brings up, you know, going back to the flat earthers, that it goes back to a concept of first question, are you open to reasoning about the given subject first? Because if we can't get past that. They're not going to like that question. You need to spend some time on YouTube looking at flat earthers doing experiments to prove that the earth is flat, and then the experiments fail in the conduct of it to watch their responses.

because it's glorious. They bounce right up against that. Are you willing to accept reason? And it's like the camera's right in their face and their shit's just nuclearly exploding between their ears. I can imagine. There's a couple really good ones out there

of just these people who are entrenched. This is the experiment that's going to show the earth is flat and it clearly fails. So I could spend. That's amazing. It is amazing. The internet is amazing in some ways. Most ways it's terrible,

but in those ways it's great. Yeah, because if you just think about what does that say about, it poses an interesting question to me that you've raised, is what does that say about someone who not only believes the earth is flat against, forget about the evidence, just against the strength of the explanations that describe its spherical nature, that they not only, have a different belief, but that they've done whatever they've done to convict themselves of that through researching to think that an experiment will be successful to confirm what they've guessed. That's almost more amazing. And then the challenge they have to be facing at a personal level when clearly confronted with objective failure of said test. Fascinating.

So that tells you something else about that type of person, how they handle being met with that. Yeah. They're having some personal reflection in quiet time. That's excellent. So the same is true of anyone who's met with a superior explanation to the one they've been subscribing to. And what that circles around, Andy, is, I've mentioned the epistemology a few times. when we look at the difference in reactions to event, you know, going back to the,

I accept the gray area of the analogy of the surgeon and the other people. So we're street corner, third and main. But if we go back to that just as a low-hanging food example, where we look closely at, if we say for sake of example, there's three people in the street corner and they have remarkably different reactions to the same event.

Well, what we know is the event is the same. The people are the same. So the explanation for the difference in reactions has to point towards information processing in each of their minds. What the mechanism that describes that is it begins with perception perception

characterizes the identification and organization and interpretation of sensory inputs visual, auditory, tactile, smell, taste, etc. And what I have done in my consulting, and this is due to its relevance to the epistemology, which I'll connect here in a moment, I've really focused on the interpretation part

because if I use the practical example of what is it that you and I are perceiving right now, we have to go to the sensory capture. So identifying and organizing. So things like what we're wearing, the skin versus shirt versus background versus headphones and how those fits in different categories. A lot of this can be subconscious or unconscious the way that we make sense of what we're seeing. But upon reflection, one can have a grasp of, yeah, we, we, we,

We organize information into groups to make sense of it. That's how it informs our judgments and our decision-making. So, you know, when we leave here, we're walking around on the street and what informs us to, you know, stop at a stoplight or to make way for an elderly couple. Or, you know, in that case, that's a social norm. It's a highly complex subject matter. but the way that we're perceiving this information is in a very large contributing factor to not only our behavior, but the specific component of our behavior, which describes

how reactive are we emotionally. Now, that's not only mediated by how we interpret information because we have to go back to quite literally the genes we receive from our parents and the influences of our early childhood, which have, it's the reason why in any form of therapy one is bound to come up against the question, how was your childhood? Probably an important starting point. And the reason for that is because of the influences on human psychology. Yeah.

Okay. That being said, what has to be accounted for is given what each individual inherits genetically, and you would have seen that, you have children, how we. enter the world with knowledge. You saw that by the differences in personalities when your children were infants, that were not all the same sort of blank slate automaton's entering the world that are just ready to be fed information. And that's the only thing that explains how we become people with personalities. We're born with knowledge. It's just, it's fairly basic. And we build upon that through its creation thereafter once we're in the world.

But it's important to understand, particularly during the third trimester, how the mother's essentially state of psychology has profound implications on the child's development. Really? It has to do with, you know, of all things evolutionary that are fascinating, the placenta as this one of the many marvels of evolution,

is fantastic in terms of screening toxins from entering into the amniotic fluid, but it's not perfect. And the stress hormone cortisol is an example of one of those that has the potential to make it inside the placenta. And in chronic doses, that can have potentially permanent negative psychological implications on the developing fetus, lifelong. What does that usually express as? Like, what do those negative complications look like?

That could be any variety of clinical diagnoses, anxiety, depression. So much more predisposed or that type of stuff? Yeah, it's never a guarantee. It's that the odds go up considerably. I did not know that. Yeah, so you think about a woman carrying a child to term in the middle of a war zone. versus, you know, Sedona, Arizona, or one of these other places that is just, you know, the opposite of a war zone.

The odds, never guarantee, the odds are much different outcomes lifelong for each of those people as they grow. Makes sense. So there's that. The most obvious one is early childhood. And all of this, the reason why the epistemology is central to it is because. the younger someone is the less knowledge they have and therefore the less prepared they can be for the world. And that's why as an adult, we can look at the reasonable effectiveness of being psychologically prepared for any conceivable scenario, being a subject of training, and whether or not someone

is aware that that is accessible to them and whether they're interested in pursuing it. However, there comes a point in the chronology of a life cycle where, you know, reasonably we would say, well, you can't expect the four-year-old to know what is knowable that in another context could equip them to be more robust or even hypothetically immune to this abuse they're receiving in this abusive household. Like most of us wouldn't go to take that leap. We'd say, it's a kid. We don't expect them to have that knowledge. Yeah. And at some point, what we have to ask is, well, at one point, well, at what point could we make that assumption? And so what that is, is that that amounts to running the thought experiment of, along with our ABCs and our

one, two, threes, why aren't we all receiving psychological preparation when we're three, four, five, six, seven, and eight? Like, why isn't, I've been doing what I've been doing for quite a while, and it's almost absolute in every one that I've worked with as a client has had some version of the same response. Why have I never heard this before from a psychiatrist, a psychologist, mental skills, any of the other jargon. And it begs the question, being that it's so fundamental to decision making, I hold the admittedly it's a biased view, but I also think it holds up against objective argument.

It's the most important knowledge a person can have. And the reason for that is because of how everything basically is a subject of it. just literally decision-making and the execution of decisions in the form of actions are products of our state of mind. And because of that, whether it is plugged in at the end of, again, using the example of operator training, at the end of a career, in the middle of the career, at the front end of the career, that has the same integrity as the idea of optimizing one's physical condition or optimizing one's nutritional intake.

The utility of doing so is high no matter when you start, right? That's because these concepts have universal integrity that great if you are surrounded by people with the knowledge psychologically, physically, nutritionally, what have you, when you're a kid and you grow up to it in it and you don't know any different. You think everybody knows this and it turns out that they don't. Yeah, you won the lottery. You've won the lottery. You land on it in your 20s, in your middle age, in your old age. It doesn't matter.

While anyone has the choice, as unhelpful as it is, to regret that they haven't discussed. something that they find incredibly useful, the fact that they didn't discover it earlier in life, that's just not helpful thinking, but they could do that if they wanted. But nevertheless, they must acknowledge how useful it is to know it when they do. Because you can simply always advance upon that knowledge, no matter when you start. And so as it regards the psychological, it's simply as useful no matter when you, you know, hit the start button. Yes, ideally everyone would have it on the front end. I was going to say, fair to say that the earlier, the better?

Yes, unquestionably. And in my, you know, argument, as I said, literally as early as possible in life, you have children, you know, because at the at the time in which the young person is is questioning the world around them what's happening is that that's knowledge creation we had begun speaking about this before we were recording the big divisions between the epistemology for those unaware epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the question what is knowledge and where does it come from And there's many epistemologies, but most of them fall under one of two divisions.

One of those divisions is empiricism. The other is rationalism. Now, I think it's pretty clear that most of the world operates in some permutation of the empiricism, whereas the rationalism is the strongest explanation of the two. So the explanations are as follows. A little history. at the end of the Scottish Enlightenment in the early 1800s, the late 1700s in the UK, some of the brightest thinkers of the day, John Locke, David Hume, famous thinkers in psychology and philosophy,

stimulated, undoubtedly, by what was occurring throughout the Renaissance, which was this, at least as far as the Western world is concerned, and there's been no other period of creativity like that. And in so many facets of human culture were exploding as a result of what happened in the Renaissance. And an example of that was what happened in philosophy, which was that these founders of empiricism, brilliant, though they were, proposed a flawed theory,

because up to that point in Western history, the concept of intellectual authority, even though it's a flawed concept to begin with, but people will understand, the concept of intellectual authority was the church in the Western world. It was senior figures in the church that made decisions that implicated the local societies,

what's right, what's wrong, ethics, etc. So those who were who were appealed to for all things intellectual was someone in the hierarchy of the church. Now these brilliant individuals of the day coming out of the Enlightenment naturally realized there must be a stronger explanation than basically authoritarianism for what is right, what is wrong. And so as just as they were in their thinking, the solution. they came up with was flawed. The solution was empiricism, which was that he or she who should be appealed to for their wisdom is he or she who is most experienced because their posit was that experience or another way of saying experience is sense impression is where our knowledge comes from.

And therefore, he or she who is the most experienced, who's ran the most experiments, who had the most observations, is therefore the most knowledgeable, and that's who we should be appealing to for knowledge. Rationalism challenges that idea. Rationalism states that experience, for all intents and purposes, has nothing to do with knowledge, because experience is only sense impression. And I'll use an example of this with your children that'll hit home. The rationalism states that knowledge is not derivative of anything.

It doesn't come from anything as a descendant. It arises. So using mathematical terminology, empiricism posits that knowledge is derivative of experience. Rationalism posits that knowledge is integral. It is an integral of guessing and challenging what we do. guess the child example makes this clear so if you go back how old are you're uh almost 19 next month 17 and 14 okay so if you go back just take a one off all that 974 yeah if you go if you go back you know to when they were two three years old in the daddy what's that daddy what's that daddy what's

that what you're seeing is a great example of sense impression So they see that, you know, the camera, water bottle, mic stand, only because what they see, this is this brings up more misconceptions, is light reflecting off of matter. That's what we see before we have the knowledge. There's light reflecting off matter. whatever light that reflects hits the back of our retina. It's picked up by the optical nerve sent to the visual cortex. And we can't describe what we see until we have knowledge.

Until then, it's just there's things that are different in our visual field. Some are closer. Some are farther. Some are darker. Some are lighter, smaller. But it's just light reflecting off matter. And that's why I don't know whether you ever did this, but you could imagine how much fun you could have had

when they point towards a car and you could make up any word you want. That's a basketball. I never did that, actually. I have no reason for not doing it. I just never did. You can imagine how you could have completely screwed them up. I think with three kids, though,

what I was tired of was answering the question, what is that? So I was trying to get through that phase as fast as possible. Understandable. It would be a lot to keep it. It would be a lot to keep your lies together. Seriously? And he's like, oh, fuck, you're calling a car a basketball. We can't have that.

And then you have to break the belief of what it is and, you know, correct them. And that's where the knowledge creation happens. Because... But is it knowledge or is it vocabulary? I'll explain. The empiricist amongst us would say, you know, dad said it's a car. And that's why it's a car because, you know, I observed someone else who knew this.

And now there's this false bucket theory of mind where our minds are empty buckets and we just need the right knowledge to be poured into it. That's not how it works. Because all knowledge, this is from Carl Popper and critical rationalism, to begin with, it's all conjectural. So it's all incomplete, all knowledge. There's always some element of error, part truth, part error. and over time we identify and correct those errors and that's how our theories get better you probably I mean you tell me did it did it happen in your operational tenure or maybe after where there was no more running to your death it was slowing it down my understanding of it was from the army side there was a

correction made because a lot of these guys were getting shot from being so aggressive in the house side. It was about 2005, 2006. Okay. So right at the end of your operational. My last appointment was in 2010. I left the command in 2006. Okay. I misunderstood. Okay. So that's a great example of what it's sort of like looking back on that concept of if we just generalize it to it's known that there's combatants inside of a structure. Now let's evaluate some theory. One is go running in there as fast as you can. Another is take your time. Another is, you know, and 46 other ideas emerge from that.

What anyone can appreciate is, and this is always the way it is with the benefit of hindsight, well, let's quickly eliminate run in there as fast as you can because that just doesn't make any sense. It made sense up into that point, though. We were looking, we were doing legacy, we were executing legacy tactics because, we hadn't had a catastrophic failure, which in the military is oftentimes what changes direction. These publications and doctrine, I hate the phraseology, if you will. These lessons are written in blood. Well, they almost always are, unfortunately. We weren't even actually, I don't think, really objectively looking at any other theories. We were living our life in the rearview mirror

because it worked yesterday instead of, you know, what are we seen from our enemy? Are we noticing any differences. Why are they sandbagging themselves in the corners? It was there. Evolving at the speed of war is something that's very tough to do. Critically important point, the concept of legacy. That's just another word for dogma. We were following a dogmatic protocol. Because that's what the people before us did and the people before them and before them and this is what we do. Precisely. Whereas, through the lens of critical evaluation, there's just always challenging. Okay, I understand this is the way it was done and those who came before us did it. But is it the best way? Let let us reason about this. Let us think about how this

could be improved upon. And that's what allows for the speed of innovation to be faster than, for example, the pace of war. Well, I think that's one of the big improvements that the military in general has made. They become much more proactive as opposed to reactive. Because it worked worked until it didn't. And those roundtable sessions, if you will, started occurring much more frequently after those things started happening. And I think, and again, I'm over my skis as to what's going on currently in the community. But even when I left, they were doing a much better job of, let's sit down in a neutral environment and critically think about these things. And why? My favorite question is, why? Why do we do this? What's effective about that is that's essential

for knowledge creation. Without the, so philosophically, why is asking for a reason? What can be, it depends how it's used in a sentence. It can also just be asking for a fact, where, when, these are facts. These get distinguished in terms of understanding versus information knowledge.

What time was he there? What color clothes was he wearing? etc, et cetera, these are just facts. There's less variability in their interpretation, but as soon as why gets thrown in there, how is also another one. That's where the variability explodes. That's why in field interrogations,

whether in the military context or law enforcement, just the facts, just the facts please, we're not looking for your personal opinion because we'll be here all day. Yeah. It's just because there's much room for interpretation. But to your point, you know, the why and the evolution of military tactical thinking about tactics and evolving them, whether the knowledge was there from critical rationalism or not, that's an example of how it works. You have to always be challenging

an idea in order to innovate upon it because there is no progress without the the correction of errors. Yeah, that makes sense. And the same is true psychologically. And so what became clear to me was what an error there was being identified in the context of this absence of this knowledge in the pipeline. And again, I'm using the word pipeline. Yeah, I understand what you said. The whole arc of it.

Yeah. because again how you could solve for so many potential emerging problems in the area of post-traumatic stress by enhancing the preparation going into the event so that it's just so how do you do that yes so we already agreed on the advancement of skill generalizes no matter what the skill is it's the high quality focused attention on the repetitive execution of that task, whatever it is, basically as much in as frequently as possible, provided you're not going backwards as a result. Yeah, overtraining. Exactly.

Yeah. Injuring, burning out. So the same is true no matter what it is. And in the psychological case, one example of that is, as I mentioned earlier, it's not. tangible for people because it's not a physical thing. It's thinking differently. So using an example that I already gave with the physical law, there's a concept that I developed that was in part influenced by a person much, much more well known than I am, the clinical psychologist, Jordan Peterson. He's quite famous.

Heard of him once or twice. And I heard him give an example. And I don't even remember the context, but he was giving an example of the recipe for post-traumatic stress. You take someone really, really, really, really naive, and you expose them to something really, really, really horrible. Now, there's a lot of creativity with language there because what one person might describe as horrible, another, it might be just another Tuesday. Yeah, I grew up in that environment. Exactly. But most people can get a... I'm not saying I grew up in that environment.

and everybody I'm saying somebody could say that. That's right. Many people in fact. Yes. Unfortunately so. And I began thinking about that and extrapolating in addition to something else that I saw Dr. Peterson say, which regarded how what still exists in parts of the world that you've been to before is more of the minority, at least as far as the West.

the way the world used to be collectively still is in isolated cases, this tribal living and hunter-gatherer or something closer to that. Yeah, traveling very limited distances. Honestly, I would describe it as one or two centuries behind, if not a little bit more. Agreed. And, you know, whether it's areas of the deep Amazon or rural Africa or the Middle East, these places exist. It's just it's not the norm anymore, globally speaking.

Yeah. along with that, when we go to more of the violent areas of the world, whether those are certain inner cities in this country or the more obvious places in other countries where the conflicts are occurring that people are seeing on the news, those environments and growing up in those environments renders a totally different psychological profile. And it's something that provides those who are interested in thinking about this, a picture of what the world was like not only centuries but millennia ago, where the concept of the norm was death, dying, famine, starvation,

hung, disease, tribal warfare. This was just part of life. And so as a result, one may ask the question, what might have the psychological impact been? Because we've already clarified, even by virtue of repetitive exposure, even if there's no sort of dedicated training, just repetitive exposure can desensitize someone

to a given stimuli. So if we ask ourselves, what might have sort of the whole of society been like in terms of, let's say, their psychological resilience on the basis that if we go back far enough, death, dying, famine, disease, trouble warfare, tissue damage, all of it, was just the norm.

If everybody was familiar with it on a first person level, it wasn't, because it didn't exist at the time, on TV, you know, it wasn't word of mouth. It wasn't the tribal relative of yours in another geographical region

who passed word by horse to you. At some point, everybody was directly familiar with this concept. Whereas now, in many parts of the world, as you well know, usually it's by a person's own sort of choice to be disconnected from that reality of what's happening somewhere else.

You can have just the apex of ignorance where the idea of death and dying and tissue damage in the context of warfare is nothing more than if you were to question someone who's that ignorant, it wouldn't really be much more in their mind as, okay, yeah, I get it. that happens in war, but that's kind of the extent that they've dedicated thought towards the idea. You can take it even farther than that.

People can remove themselves from almost every level of struggle possible. You don't even need your house. You just have an app for everything. Groceries get delivered. You don't have to... That's true, too. You mean, you can detach yourself from, I mean, fuck, I guess, almost any objective reality that there is, depending on how far down that rabbit hole you would want to go.

I agree. and the opposite of that is how is the answer how how how does one train towards stress immunity it's the opposite of that it's the opposite it's the opposite of detaching yourself from a given idea it's engaging it in every conceivable way you can imagine and repetitively running that program so in this context of the space of possibility what you realize is there's just no shortage of scenarios one could imagine that are possible to happen in warfare. And in the context is when you provide a context because it becomes an infinite space when we say, let's just start thinking about what's possible versus not possible in life. And then it's just like we need many lifetimes to go through all the details. And by definition, it's still an infinity when we describe a certain situation. It's just that there's a lot more clearly identifiable scenarios once we've assigned a context, particularly the more specific that context becomes when you think back, if you did any jungle training versus cold weather training

versus desert, how, okay, more or less likely encountering a polar bear in South America, not just in South America, but in, you know, Brazil. You're having a shitty day if that happens. unlikely but maybe possible it escaped from a zoo i was going to say that would be that to be how that happened right so it's it's it's a it's a bit more tenable you can narrow your focus for sure you can narrow your focus and so when we when we do that then what you're able to lock down on are what's much more likely than less likely and given the more likely let us assess how well each person has fully assimilated that, which again is the opposite of disconnecting yourself. I would say it's an extreme minority, but statistically there must be individuals

operationally that have for whatever reason fallen something closer to. Yeah, I know exists, but I don't want to think about it. Yeah, probably. Just running the numbers. How do you assess in a group of people who has assimilated that and who has not? well the the low-hanging fruit example would be conversationally i'm i'm questionnaires are used all over the place in psychology but i have a lot of criticisms regarding epidemiology because it's it's just there's so much variability in terms of mistake making because for example the difference between someone answering you know literally honestly versus projecting how they'd like to think of themselves answering.

This happens all the time when questionnaires. Ideally, this would be identifiable quantitatively through diagnostic capture, right? And I'm not in a position to speak about that. That's not my field of expertise. But there would be ways of, so for example, in neuroscience labs have already identified. They basically have a fairly straightforward. reputation over the concept of free will because what they've discovered in the laboratory is when they have various types of sensors hooked up to people's brains as they're going

through different types of questionnaires that, for example, areas of the brain that are responsible for differentiating between direction are identifiable and on something like a functional magnetic resonance imaging device, fMRI, what can be identified is someone going through, say, series of left-right question scenarios and their brain is being monitored. And what they've shown is that while someone thinks they're deliberating, that respective area of the brain is already activated. So in a sense, using this example, what we'd be distinguishing is the brain from the person's conscious perception of thinking.

You're not going to whip out a blue and a red pill, are you? And ask me which one I have to take. That's funny. That analogy is you've been used before. They were onto something, the writers of the Matrix, when they did that, right? Not the Matrix reloaded or whatever the hell just came out. They were not on to shit. That movie sucks.

I hold a critical view of it as well. So I agree. Should have left that legacy intact. I agree. I agree. I agree. The, so effectively, the decision is made before we're consciously aware of it. That's what neuroscience of the many things has shown fairly incontrovertibly that.

On complex things or on left-right things? There's a, we'll quickly come to a limit that I could answer definitively on those various questions. That's a good one. I don't have an answer for you on that. It's clear, however, that when we talk about the speed and, you. and where in the chronology of information processing all this occurs, that even though in certain cases it could be fractions of a second, it's often that what is being consciously recognized as having been thought about

has in some more basal sense been decided. We're just not consciously aware of it, generally speaking. Now, when it gets into different concepts such as emotion, it becomes arguable. You'll get sort of one side of it that will posit more towards the activity at the neuronal level preceding conscious awareness and basically cognitive operations. On others, you can read peer-reviewed literature that will show how many aspects. of emotion is argued to only arise once we have cognitively appraised a given situation. So that gets distinguished from something like someone who struggles with anxiety might describe feelings of affect that they're overcome with that in their mind happen first.

Like what they notice first is I feel differently, a tightness in my chest. my respiration has increased rapidly and maybe that's what they notice first and then their negative thought root loops start coming. So that could potentially fit under the description that something's happening at their neuronal level separate from our conscious awareness. So basically what the moral of that is, Andy, is that one gets themselves into trouble by making categorical statements as it regards the implications of emotion and rationality, for example, that it's really nuanced and you have to be very specific about the details. In general, however, what can be generalized is going back to this concept of skill development and how repetitively running that using this example of the space of possibilities, everything that could put, so using an example, and I would offer the, I don't

I would offer the caveat that the example that I'll use might be difficult for some listeners because I'll use a relevant and specific one. Okay. If we think about as a thought experiment in this realm of psychological preparation, what might it sound like for a teammate to be shot? And then you run that thought experiment. Would they make any sound at all? Would it be a grunt? Would they be screaming? Anything that you could imagine.

And then what you run from that is different levels that exist within the space of possibilities. What tissue damage might that do to their body? Were they wearing body armor? Yes or no? Where did the round hit them? What kind of round? At what proximity? What type of tissue damage do different rounds do to the body if they hit the body in the same place?

So the upper arm, a 5, 5, 5, 6.6. a 7-6-2, any other type of ordinance, what does that do to the body? And the closer we get to simply the factual interpretation. As I mentioned earlier, I focused so much on the interpretation part. I think I actually skipped over why is because when we interpret information, such as getting shot, someone getting shot, all interpretation of the cognitive type that I'm referring to is based upon an underlying explanation. So you can look at interpretation as being defined as making sense of an explanation.

So if you ask someone, what comes to mind when I talk about you or one of your teammates getting shot and there's a tremendous amount of tissue damage? That question is now interpreted cognitively. how it's interpreted is based upon a pre-existing explanation that that person has at the foundations of their interpretation for any number of reasons. One way to optimize psychological preparation in the direction of stress immunity is to find out which and how many of those explanations for how somebody interprets information is flawed. flawed in the context of self-deprecating.

I use that word, Andy, because if we use as a context, something to provide guidance to how we interpret information. If you accept for sake of discussion, everything is information. The physical objects, that which is not physical, but if we just consider it information to be interpreted, then we have a starting point for how the information is interpreted. And what I advocate for is an interpretation that is something closer

to the information itself, to its factual form. So using the street corner example from earlier, there's a car accident, it's a lot of tissue damage. the factual interpretation is something closer to what the police report looks like. This make and model, this make and model, this direction, that direction, this speed, the resulting damage, injury, death, factual. There's no adjectives or adverbs, just fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. and the more one adopts this mode of interpreting the information that they encounter in their reality, that's just one example for how one can work towards stress immunity because we're not appraising

information in such a way that integrates the emotional experience. And there's a lot of examples. That in and of itself is not a novel idea. Like people will know people in their lives were more stoic, less reactive and they'll say, yeah, my uncle's kind of that way. He just never. But most people also fail to realize

this is trainable. There's many examples of this, both fictitious and factual and movies in real life. Here's an example of both. The remake of the movie Dread. The first one was Sylvester Stallone. Yeah.

The second one, I'm gonna forget his name. Is the dude from the boys. He's a news. Zealander, a Kiwi, I believe. I think that's right. Yeah. Apologized to you, famous actor, I'm forgetting your name. Cunt is one of his favorite words.

That's how I know who he is. He's a legend and a hero in my world. It's a great word. One of my favorites. I did not know that about him. Yeah. He's like, oi, cuntz. I'm like, fuck you.

At the end of that movie, the remake of Dred. It's been a while since I've seen this one. I'm going to have to take you your word. It's worth. you can actually you can YouTube the ending that I'm talking about it for whatever reason

if you're not interested in watching it all the way through he so to paraphrase it's an extraordinary night that he's been through in this urban superstructure high rise just stuck in there yeah combat all night

death tissue damage galore and on his way out he was shot on his way out his supervisor meets with him and she says looks like you've been through it. And his only comment was, I'm not going to get it verbatim,

but it's along the lines of the perps were uncooperative. Beautiful, beautiful example. Beautiful example of, that's a true statement. He could have colored that and embellished it to the nth degree with every detail of

what uncooperative manifested as, but that's just a great example of factual interpretation. If we ran through all the trials and the tribulations, how he was almost killed and how his partner was almost killed, I use the word self-deprecating. So much particularly of negative emotion is self-deprecating. It's just not helpful to its host. And because all information must be interpreted, we have to acknowledge the choice-making each one of us is accountable for in terms of our emotional experience. There's a tremendous amount of choice-making for most people.

It's presumably at the unconscious level, something we take for granted because it was conditioned early in life and we've developed, if we're not consciously aware or knowledgeable of this subject matter, into thinking this is just sort of the norm. Like this is how people operate. The misconception in this regard, Andy, being most people, I'm convinced, would describe emotional reactions as being a product of some stimuli. Like, well, most people would react that way to X happening. There's different jargon in the psychological literature, for example, incidental versus

integral emotional experiences. And that's kind of germane to this is that incidental would be described. as an emotion someone has been dealing with, say, a set of feelings already, and then they encounter some situation that they mistakenly attribute to the source of their, for example, emotional distress. So a practical example of that would be you're pissed off that your favorite sports team lost the game from earlier. Hours later, you're in the kitchen, having a discussion with somebody, it manifests into an argument and you're under the illusion that you're pissed off because of the nature of the argument when in reality you were already pissed off because

of the attachment you had to the sports team losing. That would be a description of the incidental emotional experience people have where they misattribute the cause of their emotion to some target that actually is an after-the-fact event. integral is the word used to describe as something being more reflective of an identifiable target. So someone did not have a preexisting emotional state of note. It arose as a result of an event that, say, more than one person can agree. It's clear that this was the target. That, however, enters into interpretation because the way that I describe it, Andy, is that

There's just no such thing as a form of information being the cause of someone's emotional experience. It has to be interpreted, which is key. So in this line of logic, there's no such thing as death, dying, the loss of money, divorce, anything that would be commonly sort of looked at as, oh, that must be terrible. there's no such thing as that being the source of the emotional distress because that's on its own information things that can happen things that are possible death and dying things that are guaranteed to happen the question is how does one interpret such things so someone like the morticianer has a predictable interpretation of death,

someone who's disconnected from the world, using your earlier example, like only filtering the feel good stuff to themselves by way of their ability to filter their mobile device and its access to the internet. And you can extend that to any other conceivable subject matter realm. So that's why interpretation for me became very interesting because both because it's implicated by epistemomal,

which is why in the consulting that I do, I formed an acronym, which you will be no stranger to from the military. Anything that can be made into an acronym is made into an acronym. Correct. Of course, the different branches use their own acronyms for the same words. Right. Yeah.

More confusing for the outsider. I, in thinking about epistemology and psychology and intellect and culture, two things we haven't discussed yet. I saw, man, that makes a word epic. And so the consulting that I do, I have an organizational consulting branch and an individual one. Either way, it follows the same line of logic

in that the reason why epistemology is critical to understand and think about is because of, I mean, there's many reasons, but as it regards, psychological preparation is because it implicates how we make sense of information. and how we make sense of information is integral to our psychological state. Psychology, we've been discussing quite a bit about his self-explanatory.

It is the governor to thinking and decision-making. Intellect, which in other words is the capacity to reason, all of these are improvable, right, because we're creating more knowledge in the area that is the target. So how does one become more adept at reasoning? And then if you think that through and apply it to the tactical context, well, that's critical. How well each operator reasons in a tactical environment. No controversy there, mission critical. And that is developable by way of creating knowledge in the areas of improved reasoning skills and culture.

another term that everyone is familiar with in terms of the word and I would argue even I'd be willing to say understands in some way its significance but very few people

in my judgment have a good definition for what it is now depending upon what literature one references for example in the dictionary what you'll find is something close to the arts, the humanities, the sum of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.

In evolutionary biological language, some of what I mentioned earlier, what you'll describe, what you will find is that these individuals will describe culture as something that we inherit genetically as a function of the information, the knowledge in our genes that's passed on through generations and mediated by psychology back and forth. Culture psychology, culture psychology. Simple language. Culture is anything that stimulates thinking and behavior. Anything.

If the workplace, you'll hear things like, you know, in the corporate America, for example, things like morals, ethics, employee benefits. things that make a t-shirt or a slogan on the wall as being the main cultural drivers. But what's actually a cultural influence is any conceivable thing that stimulates an individual to think differently about something. So when you open your worldview up to that, somebody with children, what you, because you have teenagers that are almost no longer teenagers you undoubtedly have ran the thought program no matter how you and the people most intimately related to to raising them no matter the job you do

there's no telling on what influence might play on them from a movie something they hear in a song a conversation at a friend's house a sports team at school at a party another famous psychologist, Paul Bloom, I heard him. He's been on, are you familiar with Sam Harris's podcast? I am aware of who Sam Harris says I don't follow that particular podcast. Brilliant neuroscientist philosopher. He's had Paul on, I think, more than any other guest. And so Paul's a famous clinical psychologist. He's specialized a lot in early childhood research. And Sam, asked him in an interview, you know, as a renowned psychologist and a father, do you have any insights to share with the rest of the world? And it was really funny. Boom's answer was,

here's what we know. Again, I might screw up a little of the verbatim. Here's what we know. Clothe them, feed them, shelter them, and hope for the best. That's not far off. In my And if you think about it from a parenting perspective, I came to this realization a while ago. As soon as they start going to school, your influence on them as a parent is actually minimal in comparison to the rest of the world. As soon as they leave the nest for the first time, which is fucking kindergarten, as much as people don't want to realize that, the external influences, I think, add up to some total that is greater than the parental influence. I think that's really well said. And that's why there's another saying that goes along with that is there's a position argued from certain individuals in the field that the pre-adolescent peer influence is potentially greater than what comes from the home. I can see that actually.

Kind of speaking to what you stated. Yeah. The point being, there's just no telling where that idea will come from. and that's an example for the cultural influence. There's no telling where the cultural influence might come from. So the most, this goes back to the critical rationalism, in terms of building a culture, what can be consciously thought of

and shared amongst a given population, whether it's a military unit, a school, a sports team, a corporation, what have you, is simply one that's based in a tradition of criticism. Going back to your commentary on how the military tactical discussion has evolved over time in terms of being proactive, that's an example of, again, whether it's using the jargon or not, it doesn't matter. It's whether it's happening is that the approach is taken where we are critically evaluating

the state of things at all times. because no matter how robust an idea is a theory is a strategy, it always has to be understood as it's not perfect. There's no such thin. It's error-ridden. It's just that up to that point. It is the hardest to overturn. And that's the significance of applying the critical evaluation, both in the context of how

any knowledge is created, as well in the context. the context of how any progress is achievable, by simply, the way that you explained to Andy was very germane to this in the, you know, the pace of war and the legacy approach versus let's get ahead of this and think proactively and try to shoot holes in an idea. This is critical because this generalizes to any conceivable type of, of idea formulation, problem solving. We propose theories which are conjectural, they're guesses, which are part truth

and part error-ridden. This all comes from the critical rationalism because we're all fallible. We're all mistake-making entities. It's just that, at least until now, we're the only species that in a robust way has developed the ability to learn from our mistakes and correct them and create new knowledge

and innovate and extrapolate. So while the, you know, humans as higher order primates, which we are, many people fail to connect that, you know, we are one of the apes. And one of our closest relatives, for example, is chimpanzees. And chimpanzees may, they may in some time, but they cannot currently do what humans can do. You know, we're the ones that develop the internet and airplanes and lasers and space travel, et cetera. what the chimpanzees can do is they can mimic, they can copy and paste. So one of them, an older one, has a stick, and they wet the stick, and they poke it in an ant hole and they pull it out and there's ants on it,

like a lollipop. They can copy and paste that. But what is not seen, and certainly not to the level of what a human does, is, you know, a chimpanzee pondering, what other things can I do with this stick? so the way a kid sees somebody doing something with a stick and now the stick

it becomes a weapon it becomes something that they can roast a smoron it becomes something they can scratch their back with something they can point in directions and who knows what else this is one example

of what distinguishes a human from other higher intelligent forms of life on earth but that do not have the yet as to be observed knowledge creating ability that a human does, where we can innovate and keep innovating. And then based upon the direction that is guiding our innovation that describes, you know,

what we've come up with so far, you know, to your point, the internet, there's a, there's all kinds of trouble one can get into. And there's, there's, it's, it's like a weapon. You know, it's just potential for, you know, for all those anti-tool. It can be used for good or evil. That's exactly right. The, the, the five, five, six. M4, M16, Carbine 16, the potential that it has with the fully loaded magazine is just that.

It's potential. If it's sitting on this table and no one intervenes with it, it'll sit here until the end of, right, until some natural forces, hundreds and thousands of years from now destroy the table and it russes and whatnot, but it'll just sit there dormant. It's just that it'll have more potential in the context of. sending around down range, then the water bottle will. That we can agree on. There's a different potential there, but it's inert until it's intervened with by a human

being. Same thing as the internet. This goes towards the artificial general intelligence discussion, and will this this silicon-based person effectively, once they come in fruition, destroy all of humanity? That's a popular... Pretty sure they're going to. We're dumb enough to create something like that and then unplug it and let it start making decisions on its own. Yeah, we're 100% capable of that.

The refuting theory, which comes from the physicist David Deutsch, who's basically the greatest innovator of critical rationalism to date, is that basically what you've just described there is just another version of a teenager. Yeah, probably. And so the philosophy coming from this component of the critical rationalist community is that, yes, there will be an extraordinary potential, you know, like the weapon, but not one to be feared and not one to enslave. This is sort of the critical point, is that this idea that, yes, there's an incredible utility that could arise with something with this type of processing speed and access to the whole of knowledge, be. like a superhuman in terms of certain capacities. Well, in fact, every capacity, once they are sentient and abstract thinking, literally it'll be another type of person, just not carbon-based. The fear-based community is that it kind of goes towards, it shares in common the same fear

of guns. And like basically anyone who thinks guns should be taken away from everybody, but the military or the law enforcement would probably invariably fall into the same community of no way in heck should we have artificial general intelligence because they're going to kill all of us in favor of subsuming resources for themselves for the same reasons misinterpreting that in the case of the artificial general. This could sound like a tangent, but it's germane to the topic here, is that something with this potential is a person, a knowledge-creating entity. And history has already shown us what happens when you enslave people.

This will be the enslavement of another type of civilization. Clearly, there's a better solution than enslavement in the event that we're entertained the hypothetical that at some point in time, these things are going to be here, how best to deal with it. So that's germane to what we're talking about too, because it falls back on error correction. We're recognizing a theory, multiple competing theories. How are we most adept at evaluating competing theories? And the answer is through critical evaluation.

What I was speaking about before we started recording, the importance of evaluating a given theory only on the basis of its contents. So the contents of one explanation versus the contents of another explanation. And as that regards the psychological preparation, one can see how, in my view, it's a very, it's a very difficult concept to refute that this is a necessity for, again, we've been using as the common example, the special operations assactor, for example, but generalize that to any person because who does not benefit from being more emotionally regulated, more considered and measured in their decision making while also developing the skill to be decisive because

we talked about time earlier and how much time we have to prepare. You can appreciate in the tactical domain how the longer one has, say one example would be by, way of distance or space, like the farther you are from the X, the more time you have. And therefore, it behooves you to consider more approaches on your way there. But the closer you get, going to the opposite end of the spectrum, now you can be disadvantaged by thinking too much, right? And you want to be able to rely on your reflex actions, which goes back to your training. How much have you automated on the basis of, for example, your CQB?

Ideally, you want those technical skills on the X to be automatic. Yeah, I would say on the way to the X, though, is not the time to be thinking through possibilities. That's why we have a robust mission planning cycle. It's usually about 72 hours unless it's time sensitive. And the whole point of that is to think through contingencies to make it a branch diagram that you can execute on. if you're in the helicopter trying to figure out what you're going to do, you might want to turn the helicopter around. Yes, understood. My point was that you could if you wanted to.

Like you have the time available because you're farther away. The more time you have, the more options you can run through for sure. That's the point that I wanted to convey. Whereas the closer you are, more often than not, you're disadvantaged by taking time to think through different scenarios. At the closest level, you're making rote decisions. They're very binary. Far more binary than people would actually think. Right.

Reflexive. Yeah. Threat or not a threat. It's basically the only decision-making point that you're working through and understanding, obviously, what is expected of you tactically and where you may be in the overall mission setting. But as far as tactical decision-making, it's largely threat-based. And on that point, Andy, the concept of threat,

because you can appreciate this in target identification in terms of friendly versus not. Across the animal kingdom, this is another fascinating concept. We are not born with fear. This is an important concept because how it influences decision making. Threat identification, yes.

Fear is learned. And a huge part of training stress immunity is mitigating fear responses because of how the negatively implicate information processing. That makes sense. And when you think about, you know, the emphasis, say, on CQB, the higher you go in the selection process to the highest levels of special operations and what constitutes a safety violation and how that can be the difference maker for one getting there or not.

Yeah, especially if you have a history of them. And then that's another example of if we drill down on the concept of a safety violation, the mechanics of it, what happened? Too slow to make a decision, too impulsive to make a decision, anything in between. And then we'd think critically about the mechanism of that because there's a variable scale on how many and who gets a safety violation. Like the guys who make it, the guys who don't make it, it's worth taking a look at what precipitates this scenario

and how much of that is able to be corrected for by training that happens before it. And again, this generalizes to any conceivable. So a great, I used the Dread example, going back to a real world example. This is something I studied quite a bit. So Chesley Sullenberger was the pilot of the then, the U.S. air flight that was landed in the Hudson River.

Yep. That guy has a boss. So I'll just put it down right here. Agreed. Yeah. In an interview with Katie Curick, one of the many, as you can imagine, that he was participating in, she asked the question, what are you thinking about as you're approaching the water? And he's talking about the physics of the Wingser Level at the minimum.

air speed enough to keep us in the air but as slow as possible for obvious reasons. Yeah. He's going through the keeping the nose slightly elevated and then she says and then amidst all that you have to maintain your composure. He said this is almost verbatim. He says yes the physiological reaction I had was strong so I had to use my training to force calm on the situation. And then she says was that difficult to do and His response was, no, it just took some effort. Great, great example for the world. So first of all, we acknowledge, is there human variability prior to any training?

Yes. So was he probably more of a calm, cool, collected individual since he was a kid? Probably. Maybe not. Maybe not, though. Yeah. But my guess is probably just having, I listened to a lot of interviews with him. It's a guess.

The thing is, it doesn't matter because all these things are trained. In his case, he referred to it as training, and as one could guess, in pilot training. Now, I cannot speak toward this. I don't know. I'm guessing what I'm arguing is not existing in the way that I would integrate it in special operations. I'm guessing something likely exists in pilot training just because you hear it colloquially spoken of between pilots, at least something in the context. of trained to maintain their cool.

I don't know what it. So I can speak to it because I actually had the same pilot's license that Sully does. He has his ATP license and I do as well. I'm not current on flying, but I have a few type ratings. The training that they're talking about, so I hold a type rating in a Gulfstream G4 and a 525S citation type rating, which means single pilot. There is zero training on keeping your cool. but this all of the training well for both of those airframes and I don't know the exact

I'm sure it starts with the seven whatever model airplane he was flying you don't actually learn how to fly him in the plane you fly a simulator and I believe it's a either a level four or a level d point being every button has to be in exactly the same place as it is in the real cockpit and it has to function exactly in that way and you get into the aircraft and I'm going to say and this is a broad, my own personal experience, 20% of the time, things go correct. 80% of the time your fucking engines blowing up. I don't even, I mean, you can count on one hand

the number of takeoffs you get to do with both engines functioning, but they don't start off with like this catastrophic cascading failure as there's like green, yellow, and red. You might want to pay attention to the red first and then work your way to the yellow. But these simulator sessions are intent. and there's protocol and procedure that you have to follow, and they'll start with a failed takeoff, a V1 cut.

You have an aircraft emergency before you get to your V1 speed, which is your go-no-go speed. If you get past your V-1 speed, you take off and you deal with the emergency in the air. Prior to V-1, throttles come to idle, and you're slamming on the brakes, maybe even thrown on the thrust reversers, depending on the aircraft that you're flying. So they'll start with something like that. Then they'll get you past V-1,

and you'll do a take-off in an emergency procedure where you come around with just one, engine and then they'll at the end of it you're working through cascading failures you're flying instrument approaches in iMC so can't see the ground can't see the runway conditions while working your way through a checklist on one engine talking to air traffic control talking to the tower landing with the fire alarm going off and it and it builds to that that's the training that they're talking about and in my experience at the type rating courses that i went to maybe things have changed There was zero emphasis and actually, I mean, they might have been mentioned like, hey, you know, you should stay cool on the radio. You know, people.

And you can hear it actually. A really good example is you can, the impact that an enhanced or an elevated emotional state, you hear it on police radio calls all the time. People who are not even involved directly in the situation, they start driving faster or erratically because what they're hearing is elevating their emotional state. Precisely. So they might talk about it a little bit, but they're not training it. That makes sense. That makes sense. You know, because upon further reflection, if something was robust in one community,

by at this point, it would bled into the others. Yeah. So that makes sense. And in that discussion of Sullenberger, what you can appreciate is, what he does mention to your point, that there was no practicing a water landing. It was all simulation. Yeah. And probably better for, you know, just the fleet in general.

logistics. I don't know what those planes cost. I don't think they're cheap. Right. Noted, yeah, of course. And when you think about the variables going on there, you know, landing a plane, he's never done it before. Granted, he was a former, he was a military fire pilot, and then he became a commercial airline pilot. There was 157 people on board.

and the point is for someone, because anybody can listen to the cockpit voice. Oh, it's awesome. I've listened to it many times. Yeah. There's a few actually, as it regards pilot examples. There's another one briefly where, again, a former female fighter pilot, gone commercial.

They have an engine explode in the air. It blows a hole in the fuselage, and someone was actually sucked out of the plane. and she's communicating this to air traffic control and as calm as you and I are talking to each other right now. And air traffic control probably didn't believe her. As I remember correctly, there was something on the version of what? Yeah. Because I think her verbiage was blew a hole in the side of the plane and someone went out.

And then the commentary was something to the fact of somebody went out? Yeah, it's not a common radio call. I've never heard it in the thousands of hours I've been flying. I would certainly tune in if I had. Right. But the example there again is absolutely calm, cool, and collect. And to your point, there's a reason why that is valuable, whether it's a 911 operator, a special operator, just fill in the blank with anybody who's responding to anything benefits from that being their baseline. Like not something they have to force, but rather that's the natural importance.

pulse. I'm a firm believer that emotions actually have no positive benefit on outcome, but my hypothesis is, or the conjecture I guess would be because it's before hypothesis, is that the potential negative outcome is actually unlimited. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm probably something closer to what you stated there is that by definition, if we describe outcome in terms of, say, the result of the material of the item, the information, something separate from the person. So something like the outcome of you receive a gift, so it's a physical item, or you bear witness to an exceptional by your judgment, musical performance, that no amount of emotional reactivity can affect that information. It, it happened, you win the lottery, so you're that much wealthier, but you,

the way you react to that emotionally has no effect on that monetary sum. It has an effect on how you might use that monetary sum, though. That's right. And that's why we have to be specific about our language. Yeah. When what I've endeavored to do, Andy, is to take a look at the competing arguments over this philosophy of training oneself to becoming something closer to psychological baseline, where baseline is the norm

because in that context of the potential, the loaded weapon, the internet, I view a motion as a potential similarly. That if you consider the sine wave, like the motion of a pendulum, the physics of the sine wave is that the height of a peak versus the depth of a subsequent

or preceding trough is the same distance. from neutral. So the peak deviation is the same in the positive or negative direction. And I conceive of the emotion that each individual possesses the emotional potential

is being characterized by the amplitude of a sine wave. So those of us who are closer to baseline is a smaller amplitude. It's not that one loses the perspective of positive or negative. It's that the amplitude is reduced. such that the strength of what's associated with that information processing is smaller.

Someone with a larger potential experiences higher highs, but by definition, lower lows. I actually think both are equally dangerous. Discuss. From a tactical perspective, sign wave, target after target after target, things are going away. You're not paying attention, sense of hubris, sense of, you know, things. are always going to go this well. You have this momentum and you're starting to feel really good about yourself and your capability and then you get your dick kicked in because you weren't paying attention to the objective world around you. So that I agree with that, but that's including more

than what I described in the context of psychological baseline. So for... Okay, well, it's overall, more, you know, you're overly enthusiastic. I've just seen, I've seen fear take people's life and I've seen enthusiasm take people's life. The farther you deviate from that baseline, I think negative or positive, it's easy to focus on the negative. I think the positive is equally as dangerous, but talked about less. I agree completely with that. What you were being critical of, I agree with, the complacency, the hubris, that's different than being, than operating at psychological baseline, because what that's conflating is different psychological attributes. I was trying to talk more specifically about the emotions. I don't really have the vernacular. I can't think in the moment of

what particular emotions, you know, because of the bottom of the trough. is going to be like fear. Right. You know, I don't know what the other side of that is. But both, if you allow them to interact with your decision-making process, I think it's the same set of blinders. One's blue and one's black. And I have no idea why I chose those colors.

I agree. And that's robustly supported in all kinds of literature. That's not even controversial. The, particularly as the strength of each increases. Yeah. Is it's clear. Because where it becomes more, one has to be very specific is regarding slight deviation.

Like so, for example, there's certain arguments that slight levels of sadness can improve analytical differentiation between competing theories. Alternatively, where slight elevations in positive mood can increase, can increase creativity. I would totally believe that and I actually think it's dangerous with absolutely no background or data to support this. I think that if anybody were able to arrive at baseline and stay there always, I think that would be a really unfulfilling life. That's a common criticism. I just, I don't, you know, and it's talked about often in decision making in the military, you know, remove your emotion from the decision making process and people will hear that and they'll

say, okay, I have to be emotionless. And I don't, one, I don't think that. that's possible. And two, I don't think that should be the goal. It's the, it's the detachment from one, that emotion and the decision making. I think emotions and the ability to express them is one of the things that's fantastic about being a human being. I think it's essential to the human experience. That is definitely a majority viewpoint that you've described. Mine, Andy, is that if we think in a more detailed fashion about what is available in the context of, using as the example to make it easier, what an emotional lens looks like

in terms of processing information versus, for sake of conversation, a intellectual lens. It's not that intellection is absent of an emotional experience, but just for conversational sake. What this points towards is something we were speaking about a minute ago

where we know that in principle the reaction doesn't affect the thing in the context of something like news received, somebody graduates, someone has a baby, someone's getting married, someone gets a huge salary bonus. The emotion doesn't change the event. Yes, it can change outcomes, the use of money, as you described. and knowing that if one accepts that it's a potential, then what we're back to is, okay, what's the amplitude of the potential?

Because like the sine wave, the higher, the high, the lower the low. So if someone walks around with the potential, it's sort of like similarly to the caliber of the weapon. If someone is walking around with this caliber weapon, a 762 caliber weapon versus a 556 caliber weapon, then in one context, the damage they can do as much is greater because of the ballistics associated with the larger round, traveling at an approximate velocity, etc.

Similarly, someone with a larger emotional potential who gets really excited when the good news arises and is really down when in their frame the bad news arises. through the example that I'm giving, that person is operating at a disadvantage. Now, it's likely that someone like that or someone listening would say, you know what, I'd rather keep my highs. I love how those highs feel.

I'll take the lows because of how much I enjoy the highs. But when we average those out over a lifetime, what my position, Andy, is that there are many more advantages to those who are operating closer to basically, line throughout because just because there's less of an emotional processing to an event that is received positively doesn't mean that it is less of a significant form of processing. I think I agree with you. So that's the, that's, that's my position on it that someone like myself who doesn't get

too high or low about anything, it's not that I don't have the capacity to fully appreciate something that I consider to be profound. It's just that I'm not emotionally expressive about it. I've been told that most of my life, that I'm more, people say that it's hard to read me or they can't tell when I'm being serious or not. I just, I don't have Mount Everest and then the, what is it, the Arias Trench?

Amarianis, yeah. Arias, yeah. It's, that's never been me. And that's more of a, for most people, a genetic thing. That's probably something how your parents would describe you as a young person. And but what's important about that is that's trainable, right? Because say someone is more.

How? Yeah. So it goes back to what I was beginning to explain earlier regarding all of the hows of the psychological preparation are in principle the same as any other type of skill development. It's that what we're placing a physical task with a cognitive exercise that must be repeated at a high quality to your point, because you can do something all day long. at a at a low quality yeah and then you're just going to reinforce that error yeah you just get a low quality result that's exactly right so is this something that you do in a classroom setting i mean so

let's say we have a troop we have 40 guys how how would you do this where would you start yeah one way would be very similar to how the logistics of something like cqb is trained where, as you know, in the small group setting, it's not 40 at the same time. No. It's three, four, five. To begin with, usually. Yeah.

So similarly, the value in that is such that the knowledge being developed can be that much more shared culturally between the group because of the way that, as we were explaining earlier, the way that it is interpreted is going to be a little. bit different for each operator. And so it's not more robust as sort of a cultural transmission if the explanation can be given in a small group setting to begin with, to only generalize later. But in principle, it's the same mechanics of what I prefer is as much creativity from the individual. So what I mean by that is instead of me saying, here's a line, repeat

this in your head 1,500 times a day in a sensory isolated environment. While something like that can be effective, what I much, what I favor much more strongly is explaining a concept and then asking the client to come up with a phrase that resonates with you most effectively as a regard satisfying this objective. And that's what you are going to practice. And, And the evolution of this more than just repeating phrases is creating explanations. That's the key. So an example of this in terms of how. I'm dealing 40 of these guys.

It's explaining the objective we're working towards. So that's clearly understood, first of all, that there's no gray area and the reason, the why that this is significant for all of you. And so, okay, everybody checks that. Now it's think about any conflict that exists between the way I've explained this and the explanations that support your interpretations leading up till now. So anyone who might say at first, you know what? I was my impulse was to disagree with you.

But as you began talking, I realized I was persuaded to. accept your position as being a superior one, then that goes back to, okay, now take a look at what explanation you have for why you were interpreting this type of information, the way you were up till now. That's what we have to restructure. And so something like what you would consider to be significant

in terms of a form of thinking to optimize a strategy for how you're interpreting the information that you encounter in the world, would be aligned with what is, I recently, on a I have a LinkedIn account and I've been doing a new one, I've been doing some writing and I recently used a concept I referred to as a psychological standard. This might be helpful to answer your question.

So we got these 40 guys, set a psychological standard. So this is the objective that we can agree makes logical sense and is superior to all. all competing theories. So using as the example, stress immunity, that we, if we agree that all of you

are better served by operating something closer to baseline, where there's reduced amplitude between the highs and the low, and that's what describes your ability to be that much more rational and calm and even tempered, no matter the circumstance, which is not to be confused

with laxadaisical or egotistical or with hubris, just simply, calm and you have that much more facility to deploy focus because you are calm. Let's say that we agree that that is a desirable state for you to be in more, not just in the tactical arena, but just in general in life, right? Things happen. So say, for example, everybody says, Chuck, that passes muster. Like, I've thought critically about that and you've persuaded me.

check okay now you create the explanation and even better lots of different explanations for why that is a superior state of mind to adopt and to live your life with there's a neural feedback loop and that happens when we write something down it's fairly i think most people are familiar with that whether they've thought about it in detail or not why that is It has to do with the active engagement of the learning process, and then specifically for that individual, the neural feedback of reinforcing what it is. So I think why a lot of people like journaling. That's right. So say, for example, everyone in this context of psychological preparation, as I refer to it, is creating the set of explanations that supports this objective, this trajectory of working towards baseline.

The more time that is spent thinking about coming up with discussing, you know, you're at the locker, you've been thinking about this standard of psychological skills training. What have you come up with? And then someone says, you know, I've been thinking about it in terms of this. The more that it's that as opposed to, you know, you having a list of 16 things that I wrote down for you to practice, like incomparable in terms of the effect that it can have. in terms of the creation of knowledge. Because what we want is maximum amount of creativity being interpreted as being accessible to use towards this process.

One of my criticisms, obviously you'll be familiar with it, is that by definition, this was actually told to me by the headshed at the highest level, that those units are thought of literally, sort of in the in the military literature is simply advanced infantry like that's by it sounds absurd when you know the difference between infantry and tier one but that's the literal description and how many of the influencing figures on the development of special operations kind of treated them this way just advanced forms of infantry but infantry nonetheless

And in many ways, Andy, from an outsider like myself, I view this as a limiting factor because it incorporates much more of the front line. This is going to, I'll clarify this after I say it, much more conventional soldier thinking than creative operator. Now, I realize that sounds like a conundrum because anyone who has even loose familiarity recognizes how individual creativity goes hand in hand, the higher you go in special operations in terms of tier level. So based off of conventional understanding, though?

That's the key. And that's why there can be this impulse for so many, especially at the operator level, to be sort of conditioned to think only give me the practical thing that is causally linked to what I do tactically. If it's not, don't talk to me about it, don't waste my time, like something I can use on target right now. And what that toes the line on dangerously is restricting that own individual's creativity,

becoming too much a seeker of the box. Give me the box that I can fit it into. I'm an expert with this box. It's got to fit in this box and then I'll use it, but only if it fits in the box. And the problem with that is by definition, that competes with the ability to, innovate upon what that individual does because everything's always attempted to fit in the structure that they've formed for themselves conventionally. Even if you're operating, it's like cognitive dissonance as a term used to describe,

you've heard of it before. And for those who haven't, it's what explains an individual's sort of a protective mechanism of the brain that protects competing theories with intersecting with each other at the time of decision making. Those, so I guess you would have, yeah, so you had children when you were still operating. And so someone like yourself in theater could conceivably, like many of the guys who have children, could be presented with a problem in that in these parts of the world where certain parts, certain microcosm of those parts of the world might have suicide vests on children.

and children might have weapons in their hands. And there's a decision to be made that it's you, it's your teammates, or the child. And that is why, you know, not knowing the degree to which it's spoken about publicly, there's many guys in special operations who have killed children. The problem is not the child. The problem is the threat. That's the key. And me using that point in the terms of the cognitive dissonance is you could say,

what is it that allows a father of two of three of one to without hesitation eliminate the threat in the form of a child you don't have time you don't have the time and the conditioned practice of that is facilitated by a form of cognitive dissonance which is the same thing that plays a role

when dad is back home and the kids are driving him crazy that's why he doesn't shoot his own children even though without thinking he might shoot a child in some other part of the world in a completely different circumstance. Yeah, but it's not the child. It's the threat. It's the, it's the recognition of the threat and then taking the desired action or required action to eliminate the threat. The child is irrelevant in that situation. I say that as somebody who has shot children. I'm understood. I'm using it as an example because most people have trouble with thinking about that. It's a tough one. You have no time to think about

it in the moment and you have the rest of your life to think about it afterwards. And the brain's protective ability to not allow for that conflict in ideas to be existing at the time of decision making is critical to the decision making in the tactical context. So given that, when you returning back to answering your question of the concept of training these guys and developing these superior explanations that replaced the ones that they previously had, this is the key to develop. developing the mindset closer to baseline because neuroplasticity is the term that it, which describes as protein synthesis at the level of neuronal circuitry. So the physical, literally, the tissue in our brains that is transmitting signals that in the context of the discussion we're having emerges as behavior is traceable back. to these structural components of the brain.

And what we know is in any skill development, neuroplasticity occurs. So while we're born with very foundational forms of it that happens when we're being carried to term, what exists throughout our life cycle is the ability to change the function of how our brain operates by way of, for example, learning new skills.

Every time a new skill is learned at the basis of explaining the neurological mechanism of that neuroplasticity comes up in the discussion, that the development of these brain, these neuronal cells is occurring. And they found in studies, Andy, how this happens instantly. For instance, somebody can be listening to music and they're monitoring their brain. And instantly, this cellular development is occurring. So once we establish that any skill development, the repetition of it, the high quality

repetition of it in order to have a high quality outcome is essential, no matter what the skill is. It's on the onus of each individual to take it upon, to take the idea seriously, to be persuaded. Hence the reason, instead of repeat these 12 things for six weeks every day and then we'll test what the outcome is, instead of that, it's keep revising your own explanations. Explanations as to why achieving a closer or less amplitude in your baseline is better. That would be one example in the context of coming closer to baseline. Okay, I think I understand that. You were saying that you think that this concept is something that could really deal with post-traumatic stress on the tail end.

Yes. And so that, okay, part of that, we have to identify the source of it. So traumatic brain injury, which I tabled in the beginning, has to be accounted for. But it's not excluded from the conversation. So what I mean by that is no matter the origin of a state of affect, and basically affect with an A is used interchangeably with the term feeling in the literature, no matter what the source of that is. So in this example that we're talking about, whether it's, say for sake of example, an operator goes through a career and is not traumatized by anything that they've seen or done, however, was a breacher and is now having behavioral problems, not because of a psychological interpretation of what was done.

Yeah, physiological blast wave injuries. Exactly. So let's take that as one example. And then another example, someone may be an officer who was farther away from the breaching element. And so they were not in that proximity. so they got away over a career clean with no concussive injuries as a result of the pressure change, but maybe in their case, something, they had problems with something psychologically.

So what we could say is the end result could be comparable between the two of them. Yeah. In that they're given a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress, but for totally different reasons. The important thing to understand is that actionably, apart for, from the advent of using psychedelics and brainwave treatment. And there's a lot of great strategies being used to resolve both of those versions, particularly the traumatic brain injury. Apart from that, in the psychological skills training arena,

what has to be understood is that as soon as conscious awareness enters the timeline. I like to use the analogy, now your hands are on the wheel. Conscious awareness of what? The issue? Yes. What's, what, I'm using a,

a generalized you, like what has come over you? So let's say it's anger. Any, any negative emotion, but anger is one of the common, you know, short fuse. Yeah, very much so.

Iritable. The moment an individual, consciously recognizes that about themselves. Your hands are on the wheel. At that moment is your opportunity to redirect. Now, it can be easier said than done, but anybody knows that because in one sense, any emotion, particularly the stronger it is,

one of the prerequisites for it to survive is your ignorance that it's happening. The experiment I have asked clients to run so that they can see this for themselves is whatever brand of humor you're most captivated by, that reliable clip on YouTube, that like autopilot, you can search that thing, you can play it, and you're falling out of your chair every time it happens. Use that, but before you press play, think about this concept, that that's information and how you interpret it is what determines how you react.

So if you choose to run the program, the psychological program before you hit play that, you are the conscious entity that is sitting in that chair, for example, and you're getting ready to hit that play button on your computer, and you're getting ready to watch this, excuse me, episode of whatever it is, you were the one authoring the interpretation of that information. It's an exercise. Right.

It's not, what will happen is you won't laugh. And the reason why you won't laugh is because the focus of attention will be on your information processing and not the external factor. It's just a, it's a good reinforcing lesson as to how this all works, that the stimuli must be interpreted. Yeah, you're taking ownership over your response as opposed to putting yourself on autopilot. That's exactly right. another analogy I use to describe that is levels of awareness, going back to the conscious awareness that something is happening. Someone without this knowledge would have difficulty using the language to describe what levels of awareness look like in the context of interpretation as it's

happening. So with the level of knowledge, something like answering the question, Like, what do I see right now? What is the experience like for me right now? In the absence of the knowledge, it might be something like Andy has hosted me on his podcast and he's sitting across the table from me. As we increase this self-awareness, I'll do this in a few different versions to show how there's levels to it. First level would be something like, I see Andy.

So I've introduced myself at least. So as opposed to just Andy's across the table, I see Andy across the table. Going another level deeper of the self-awareness, I'm thinking about what it is like for me to see Andy across the table. So now I've set up a pattern where you can see how deep this can go. I'm asking myself the question what it is like, what thoughts do I have as a result of seeing Andy. Andy across the table from me.

And as we continue down that, we get quite a distance from, look, there's Andy. We've shifted the focus of attention inward. And that's key. This is something that goes back to stoicism, where 2,500 years ago, the early Stoic philosophers were the first, at least in the Western world, to really establish this knowledge that the only thing we have control over, the only thing is the direction of our thinking. Now, that has to be carefully parsed because what we do not have control over are the thoughts that arise in consciousness.

As you and I are sitting here, who knows what thoughts have arise in our consciousness as the other one was talking? That one date back when and who knows? what we do have control over is how we direct our thinking. The easiest example of that is when I asked you earlier the age of your children,

you rattled off the rage. That was an example of you, in answering a question, in choosing to answer what was asked as opposed to rattle off some other arbitrary information. So it's a simple example, but you have children right,

how old are they? in the 1970. Notice how you didn't answer Ford F-150, Tesla, Model S, and Lamborghini. Well, it's not the question you asked. Precisely. And it goes to show that you have some autonomy

over where you direct your thinking. Now, the way this gets muddy is with someone coming from the neuroscience realm can say, well, you think you have control, but really it's been decided. before you had conscious awareness of it. But where I like to draw the line is, all right, let's speak in practical terms.

No matter at what level my brain is doing work before I'm consciously aware of it, when the words come out of my mouth, they're coming from me, right? So I'm responsible. Where my consciousness comes in in the timeline, it doesn't matter to you. It doesn't matter to the court system, right?

We can't go around shooting people because we disagree with them and say, hey, my brain made the decision. I'm just an automaton that is, you know, master blaster to my brain. The court doesn't buy that. So even though on a technical level, it's important to distinguish because that free will argument is a touchy one, and it really puts a hard stamp on that.

However, practically speaking, what we have control over is the effort we put into directing our attention one way versus another. And that's the key of the conscious awareness. that going back to a feeling of anger has overcome someone who has been clinically diagnosed as having post-traumatic stress disorder. And they can't put their finger on it, but what they know is they're angry, and then that can have all sorts of implications on their decision-making in that moment and the subsequent moments.

and an example of how this development of skill can positively reward someone on that end of it, you know, getting out or at the tail end of their career, is through the cultivation over what is afforded to them when they develop this state of self-awareness. So self-observation is one of the terms used where if you can imagine a stopwatch starting at the moment of a feeling horizon

so that we can have context. Someone who has a higher level of self-observation consciously recognizes what's happening in lesser time. So more extreme examples, just to make the point. Something like a Buddhist monk who endeavors to live in a state of mindfulness. That's their choice, that they're going to be as mindful

and connected with their environment, the world, that's their goal, and basically dissipating the whole concept of self. There is no self. It's just the world and we're a part of it. So that's one end of it. The other end of it is someone who is so disconnected that everything is somebody else's fault. I know some people like that.

I bet you do too. I do. And those are, so in simple terms, those are differences in knowledge. In this case, the knowledge of self-awareness that when you combine that with what the Stoics brought to the world, the critical rationalism, what that all sums of is nothing is anybody else's

or anything else's fault, nothing. All emergent psychological phenomenon are ultimately my responsibility, the way that I interpret. So whether it's TBI or something unrelated to TBI, but that emerges both as the psychological stress, what has to be understood is at the point in which what in the case of the person with TBI, as an example, certainly not as the only one,

but as an example, something could be a precursor to their state of mind that happens at the unconscious level as a result of the way the brain has been changed from the traumatic, from the change of pressure and the concussive forces. Whereas someone who's psychological trauma, there will similarly be changes in the brain, but for a different reason, not because they were in close proximity to concussive blasts, but because there was neural plasticity that was maladaptive, therefore unhealthy that occurred in their brain. And brain as the basis of how they thought about something they saw or did. In either case, let's say for both of them, these individuals who describe, sometimes a feeling just comes over. I don't have a

sense for where it comes from, but I'm mad and you don't want to be around me. My kids, it's not good if I'm in anybody's presence when that happens. Even though the mechanism of that could be quite different in terms of what existed as the source of the breaching charges versus something that saw two examples. The key is when both of those individuals become consciously aware. So at the moment they could sit there and say, I'm angry right now. That's what this is, is I'm angry. That's the moment where that same individual could say, I can redirect the focus of my attention at this point. So even though there could still be a sensation within the body, that anybody with anxiety or post-traumatic stress in the form of anger, irritability could describe as, no, this is

a distinct physical sensation. It's a real thing. In principle, Andy, that's no different than any other type of physical sensation that people exist, but interpret differently and therefore do not associate negatively. There's so many examples, you know, physical training. And there's all kinds of discomfort associated with whatever high repetition squats or something like this where yeah burning aching all these things but it's not described of in the context of detracting from my life no it's looked positively precisely and that's the that's the key with being able to differentiate between the psychological product and the physical thing. So it's the same thing with anxiety. The first time you jumped out of an

airplane, there was, I mean, you tell me, how would you describe the first time from the last time, the difference in the experience for you? It's an emotional event your first time. And then at some point you have a level of familiarity with it that it is always emotional to a degree, but to a far lesser degree. And talk about only, say that first time or one of those first times, only the physical sensation in your body prior to exiting the aircraft. Elevated heart rate? Yes.

Similarly, agree or disagree that you'd have the same response to first time up that big hill on the roller coaster. Probably. Right? Roller coasters aren't my job. jam, but probably. Or whatever. Yeah. The wing suit. Elevator heart rate for sure. Every time. And the example there is that's the same as when we go to different psychological conditions such as anxiety, someone having a panic attack. If they're

speaking in detailed language, just describe the physical sensation, not what you're thinking, but just what is it like physically for you. It's indistinguishable from the same things that people do that they love that get a that get a thrill out of so it might be physically right before you step off that rock with your wingsuit on physically that might be no different than some other person having an anxiety attack physiologically you mean yes yeah completely different psychologically whereas i'm i'll make some assumptions completely different risk profile as well That's true. It's that in principle, one of the keys to getting through trauma is to cognitively reappraise what you're thinking about when you recognize that the symptoms are happening. Because in the same way that I'll make the assumption before you step off that rock and you notice your heart rate is elevated, you're not ridiculing yourself as a result.

You're not having some type of negative thought loop of I'm weak-minded because my heart is beating faster before I step off this 3,000 meter. Quite the opposite, actually. I actually want that to be there. If I had ever gotten to a point where it didn't do that, I would just walk down and be done with it. It's an important warning sign. Shelf that for a moment because I'd like to come back to that. But the broader point is that the key is that you don't associate it with anything negative. Right? Whereas someone who has anxiety, there's all kinds of negative thought loops that naturally arise. And part of that is explainable by the association that is drawn that is negative. So whether it's anger, whether it's anxiety or any other negative emotion, one of the first steps is to simply let go of the negative attachment once you recognize that it's happening.

Easier said than done. Yes, but so is any, you know, meaningful skill development. Agree. Right? Somebody watching you in your wingsuit. As it goes for anybody who's skilled in anything, it's made to look much easier than it is to do without that training. It's not that hard. It's an air mattress.

You're just laying on that shit. It's just not the smartest thing to do. Noted. You get the point though. Yeah. The any, the, the, the pro golfer. It's always easier to see people at the wavops and ignore everything they had to do to climb up the mountain. Yes.

And that's the point that I want to make is that, and it's the same true psychologically. And so that's why what we wouldn't want is for someone to have the easier said than done be a reason not to engage in the process. because that, if they did that, they'd never be good at anything. Well, things that are easy should not be done. And there's a discussion to be had there. Meaningless. Except for like drinking water and sleeping. Those should be done.

And like showering, that's super easy. Yet so many people are lax in their personal hygiene. Yes, I know. Yeah. There's no app for a shower yet. Once that comes around, they'll get it tuned up. There's an idea. It's not a good one.

It's not a good one. So we acknowledge that, you know, hard-won efforts have a reward onto their own, right? There's a, you know, getting on top of the, the foothill that's only a change in elevation of 10 meters doesn't carry with it for the healthy climber. The same reward as K2. Yeah. And the thing about the psychological skills, Andy, is that no matter where somebody is plotted as a combination of their genetically received information and their early childhood, that explains their existing behavior coupled with anything after that,

such as military service and special operations or anything else, it goes back to what I said earlier regarding, it doesn't matter where one is starting, that these are trainable skills. and in the example of the psychological skills training, just the one example that we discussed is the reworking of explanations has an incredibly powerful effect because if somebody thinks about it,

that's what they did to change their view on anything. Any position that someone in their 40s like you or an I can say, we hold a much different view than we did when we were 20. Yeah, on a variety of subjects. And then when we drill down on what we did to arrive at this view that we have, that might be 180 out from the way it was 20 years ago, who knows. What we did is in principle the same thing that I'm describing.

It's just that for most people, it's not given the same type of conscious attention. I can see that. But it's the power of explanatory knowledge and how, some more of the physicist David Deutsch that I mentioned. A good explanation is one that is both hard to vary and all of its details serve a functional role. It's a healthy criteria to evaluate explanations. How hard is it to vary and how detailed is it and how relevant are the details to the point?

When we evaluate our explanation, kind of going back to the legacy, bad explanation. Why are you entering structures this way? Oh, the explanation was shitty because that's how I was taught to do it. That's how we did it before. Which is the same as every other dogmatic explanation. Yeah.

Why is an NFL team practicing a certain way? Because this is the way we practiced when I won a championship coaching with this other team six years ago. Yeah. It's the same version, no matter the domain. That's dogma. It's preserving an idea on the basis of a bad explanation because, because I said so, because you have to.

As opposed to, here's the idea, try and shoot holes in it. Great. If you can, we'll modify it. But if you can't, that means it was strong in the face of criticism, which is something completely different than protects itself from being criticized. Yeah. critical point of distinction. Yeah. So whether it's resetting a culture, whether it's modifying somebody's view of the world,

optimizing tactical strategies, improving one psychological disposition, all of them have to, all of those conditions have to first be supported or disadvantaged by where that person lands and how open they are to revising their view. going back to what we discussed almost close to the beginning. If someone's not open to the flat earther, if someone's not open to reason, it doesn't matter how robust our explanatory knowledge is because they've just closed themselves off to reason.

And so the 40 guys, they've bought in, it's a idea that's open to criticism. It's just that the idea is stronger than the one they've been using up to that point. So they accept it as being the superior explanation while recognizing we might improve that tomorrow or next week. Great, great. That's the whole point here.

But for now, we'll proceed with this one. And now you're creating your own explanations for why this is a superior approach in the context of becoming something closer to emotional baseline. And it's that whole process of critical evaluation that is integral to it because in revising and correcting, identifying errors and correcting them and coming up with new explanations, you are creating knowledge. And it's so important that that creativity is supported and promoted as opposed to being given a set of instructions because of it's. of its influence on the process of learning more. It's just ultimately, something I didn't mention

in any type of detail yet was the significance of interest. Now this goes both towards the epistemology and the intellect. What the critical rationalism posits, Andy, is that by definition, to be human, in part requires the descriptor that to be human is to be capable of understanding anything that has ever been understood.

This refutes a whole lot in the form of learning disorders and everything else. That now, it's one thing to accept from this, someone who has some type of structural brain damage. There's exceptions to this, but in general, the healthy brain is characterized by the capacity to understand anything that has ever been understood.

And from that, arises this boundary breaking potential that in most cases is self-imposed by people, I could never do that. I could never become this way. I could never become less reactive. I could never learn to do that that way. Interest is one of the most important drivers that determines how skilled, how knowledgeable one becomes.

It's a rare exception to find someone, Andy, who's extremely. extremely good at something that has no interest in it. Yeah, that would kind of be a shocker. Michael's really good at Jiu-Jitsu, but he has no interest in it. Nice. Yeah, I've thought a lot about this, and the exceptions come in a form, which I refer to as interest by proxy. So you might meet a lot of people out there in the 9-to-5 community that don't love what they do.

but are good at it. They're good at it. Yeah. You realize it's, I can see that. You realize it's by proxy because they're financially rewarded, the better they get at it. And then they can do the things that they do enjoy. They really like taking vacations with their family. Yeah, they're checked out from 9 to 5, and they're doing the shit they want to do afterwards.

Right. So I refer to that as interest by proxy, that it's still interest driven because it's supporting the thing that they really want to do. It's just what they really want to do doesn't occur between the hours of 9 to 5. Yeah. And so this is why it's so. critical to support creativity because the more interested somebody is, it's just sort of the better period, drop the microphone.

That's just a win, the more interested. Yeah, that makes total sense. And the way we get away from that is, you know, using an easy example is, you know, in the physical exercise domain, just do three sets of 10. Well, what you know is that might be effective, but only for a certain. period of time. Like, that's not a long-term strategy. And if someone has essentially limited themselves to just keep telling me the next thing I should

do, what you know is that someone who's never going to have the same type of potential as the person who's more self-interested in devising their own creative solutions. Yeah. same thing psychologically so as i i recognize for the same reason i recognize how a lot of people who aren't endeavoring say to become a competitive powerlifter or an olympic weightlifter they might have resigned themselves to be comfortable with just getting a trainer and just tell me what to do i don't i don't need to know the why i don't want to know the why just tell me what to do there's a lot of people out there that way and what we have to do and what we have to

to agree is they're always going to have a lower potential. I would agree. I don't know if they would agree, but I would agree. Under objective evaluation, it has to be that way because they're limiting their own creative input. And it's ultimately, it's limiting the solution-making capability to less minds. It's something closer to being in North Korea right now, where it's just not up to a person. It's up to the leadership. Any authoritarian structure, by definition, is removing the creative potential because it's limiting the creative thinking to less and less and less minds. And as you know, there's all kinds of authoritarian structures in the military because it's not

a democracy. And any of those in which the creativity is limited only to the leadership is restricting the ability to innovate amongst that unit. I agree. It's just less minds. Yep, I would agree. And so all of this comes together in, you know, the strategy that I've assembled in terms of the consultant. But as it regards that tail end of it, I mean, you tell me if that's clearer to you now,

the guy who's getting out, they're having problems, it doesn't matter whether it's traumatic brain injury or not, that given the repetitive exposure to their own. generation of explanations that that explain why there's a more effective way to respond to what they've noticed about themselves. That's the knowledge creation part and the the self-awareness part, you know, how long does one perpetuate in a given emotional state before they're consciously aware that they are in it? I think it'd be easier to learn the reframing for most people, than it is to recognize that they're in that state.

That's true, especially those who are more challenged to do so. That's where it really becomes one of those more easier said than Duns, because without the reframing part, say it's happening between an individual and his wife, for example, they're in it together. She's assisting him in his evolution. in the absence of them strategizing together, someone assisting with, you know,

pointing out something that the person who's struggling isn't aware of, that could be just as likely to escalate the situation. Yeah, for sure. Minus. Stop being an asshole. Fuck you, I'm not being an asshole. You're an asshole.

Exactly. Not that I've ever lived that out of my personal life. Or even a more subdued version of that, it sounds like you're angry right now. That could still lead to go after yourself, anything else. Why are you so angry right now, James? Exactly. This fucking dick lighter underneath a firecracker.

Whereas if collaboration is integral to that process, you know, we've problem solved this together. Now we both have ownership in it. And now when you do give me the assessment. because I don't have the awareness yet, and you pointed out, now I'm not tempted to tell you to go after yourself because we were in this together. It's a hard road either way, but I think really valuable stuff comes out at the end of those hard roads. I'm like half joking when I say people shouldn't do easy things.

I haven't found a lot of reward at the end of that rainbow. Pot of gold is much smaller. It's like pot of like silver, like smelted pennies or whatever the fuck pennies are made out of. I see that. And I would, on that topic, I would probably describe it a little differently in that, well, first of all, if you have logistics, you know, there's always a choice to be made. But practically speaking, some people are restricted in their choice making because they have to work and support kids, et cetera. First, I would say, how interested are you in what you're doing? and then if we found someone who was really interested in doing nothing that is challenging,

then what we would be likely to discover is a whole set of problems. Oh, yeah. You know, that that just... Agreed. Uncovered. Indeed. So we've been out of this for over three hours. I've got to pick up my daughter here pretty soon. Guilty.

No, that's okay. The conversation has been fascinating. I suspect people may have more questions for you. So it's always best, I think, to end the episodes of where people can find you. Appreciate it. Yeah. Anyone from an organization that's interested may reach me. The website is Novosin.

I guess maybe you can include it in the... We can. How do you spell it? November, Oscar, Victor, Alpha, Sierra, India, November, Delta. It's a combination of Latin and Danish. Nova New. Classic pairing. Classic pairing.

Nova is Latin for new. I learned from a Danish friend, the D is not pronounced. So it looks like sinned, but it's pronounced sin. Nova sin. Okay. New mind. It's a, the website has quite a bit on it, and it goes into the epistemology,

the psychology, the intellect culture. That is my company for organizational level consulting. If someone is an individual and they're interested in contacting me, MaltusCon, Maltus Consulting is the website, and it has my, Maltuscon.com has my information on it. I'll just get links from you over email and I'll send them over. Actually, Michael won't do that shit. He doesn't know to do that stuff.

I appreciate you having me on. Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you for making the travel out. As indicated, I'd reached out to some others formally from the community, and this is the first opportunity. And so not knowing the people listening. I don't know me either. Hopefully they're out there.

It's helpful to somebody. I hope that it was, too. James, thank you very much for your time, and I suspect we'll at some point catch up for a round two. I think we could have gone for about another three hours. But my daughter would be super pissed. Blame me. It's part of my MO.

Awesome. Thank you, man. Thank you.