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June 27, 2025 146 mins
Primary & Secondary ModCast

The panel discusses the lack of pertinent professional knowledge being passed to later generations.

Host: Matt Landfair

Panel:
Chris Cypert
Erick Gelhaus
John Hearne
Tom K.
Dr. Gary K. Roberts
Kurt Weber

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Saturday night.

Speaker 2 (00:02):
That's right. And what's especially nice is that we're actually early,
We're not late to start, yeah, because sometimes it doesn't
work that way. Waiting for my other screen to pop
up showing that we're live, but ill will.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
I got the live notification.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Well that's good, so at least it's functional, and there
it is, and then the upper upper corner it says
live as well.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Cool. So I don't remember which one it was. I
don't remember if it was Gary Roberts or Buford Boone
that brought up the idea of, especially in the ballistics realm,
a lot of the institutional information is just gone or
within that realm on the professional side, so so many

(00:48):
concepts are lost that are being rediscovered and have to
be reiterated by others. So I think that was one
of the catalysts for me. We've been talking about ballistic stuff,
and I thought, why don't we just talk about that
in general, about this continual loss of institutional knowledge.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
Where some of the issues on the l side is.
And I'm not going to say that the Center for
Army Lessons Learned was perfect, right, but it was a
way to capture stuff. Have it searchable and find it right.
And law enforcement doesn't have that. So when you get
to eighteen thousand fricking agencies across the country, never mind

(01:28):
just what you have in one state, that lesson has
been learned twenty seven times, but nobody bothered to write
it down or share it. And if it didn't get
talked about in a class or on break or over beers,
because I remember one of my lieutenants saying, go to
every class you can, but go to the bar, talk
to the real cops ll learn something.

Speaker 3 (01:48):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
This was back in the early nineties. Like that stuff
doesn't get shared unless it's unless it's a very large
investigation in your case. And then you look at how
people got frustrated over the years, and you don't have
training officers with ten, fifteen, twenty years on. You have
training officers with two or three years on who barely

(02:08):
knew how to be cops themselves, let alone teach anybody.
And then you get younger supervisors. And while three at
fifty retirement was really good, where it hurtis was with
the admin because you lost five years of experiencing the
previous rank.

Speaker 3 (02:25):
Right.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
So like when a sheriff, captain deputy chief whatever, could
retire far earlier than they used to. Everybody behind them
had less experience when they moved up. Now maybe at
the deputy the officer, deputy sergeant level, right, they're still
chasing bad guys. That was that was a good idea
to be able to let them go earlier. But on
the admin side, whether they were great or just tolerable,

(02:51):
we lost the experience.

Speaker 4 (02:56):
Did it get learned twenty seven times in each department
or no?

Speaker 1 (03:01):
I got learned once in twenty seven departments for me
being learned again and learned again.

Speaker 5 (03:06):
Because in the military, it gets learned.

Speaker 4 (03:10):
I mean in my you know, twenty years, twenty two
years in the army, we probably learned the same lesson
eight or nine times just in the units that I
was in, because nothing gets written down, nothing gets saved.
Center for Army Lessons Learned is a fantastic resource at
the brigade and division level, you know that that would

(03:34):
be like at the county and state level for you guys.
But at the individual and unit level, I wouldn't even
know how to you know, how do I even get
to it to give me information that's relevant to my job.

Speaker 1 (03:50):
They had some decent products from about five four, five
to eight that were at least at the squad and
tune level, right because we were grabbing stuff and it
was viable at least as a starting point.

Speaker 4 (04:07):
But no, there's there's great information available in it. The
issue is is that like individual service members don't don't
ever really interact with it. The people that are interacting
with it are at very high level and yeah, they
can use it to formulate plans or things like that,

(04:30):
but you know, at the individual level, Private Snuffy, he
doesn't see it, right, Okay, he's not.

Speaker 5 (04:36):
He's not benefiting from it.

Speaker 4 (04:38):
So he has to learn, you know, he's going to
learn those same lessons about you know everything room entry,
movement down to city street. He's going to learn those
same lessons that were learned countless times, you know, from
the invasion of Normandy onward.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
So how has the concept of that's how we've always
done it and your guys's opinion affected all of this
because I see that as a stifling Yeah.

Speaker 4 (05:11):
It is, it does, but I don't I don't think
it's done out of malice. I think it's more done
because like it, I think I don't remember if we
had this discussion in the P and S chats the
other day. But like, true innovation is really really hard,
and it's hard because people say all the time, you know,

(05:35):
you have to think outside the box or you know
something outside the box, And the reality is is that
your box is everything that you have ever known or experienced,
and so how do you get outside of that? You
know people that do, or people like most and Elon Musk,
and they're they're so rare that you can identify and
by name across centuries. Thinking outside the box just doesn't happen,

(05:58):
and so you do things the way they've always been
done because at best, you're going to be able to
incrementally improve something in one aspect of an area. You
might be able to improve it, you know, one and
a half or two percent, but you as an individual
are very unlikely to like totally revolutionize something.

Speaker 5 (06:20):
And you know that could be at anything that could.

Speaker 4 (06:22):
Be your stop and first procedure or your room entry procedure,
how you build a door charge.

Speaker 5 (06:29):
You are not going to totally revolutionize it.

Speaker 4 (06:31):
You're going to make incremental improvements in certain areas of
that and hopefully how you arrived at that decision gets
documented somewhere so that you can pass it on to
the next generation, and those guys can come behind you
and then they can make their incremental improvements. And then
you know, once a generation you'll get a guy who

(06:51):
can come in and look at it and say, all
of those incremental improvements were great, but what if we
did this instead? And that's how you make those evolutionstionary leaves.
But those are so rare that you know, most people
won't ever see them in their service life.

Speaker 1 (07:07):
And even if it's one one and a half two percent,
like you're talking about, Kurt, that's an improvement over people
outright forgetting how we got there or why we started
doing stuff. And one I'll bounce back to is what
side of the vehicle do you approach on car stops?
As a general rule, Right when I went to the
academy in late eighties, it was hammered in passenger side approach.

(07:30):
You're not out in the roadway, you can see more
and everything else. And then my last few years on
the job, I had noticed that decided shift back to
driver's side approaches. Okay, so you're out in the roadway,
you're trying to pay attention to the driver and the occupants.
You're trying not to be a hood ornament, and guys
are saying, hey, this is a great idea because I
can smell the alcohol on the guy better. You can

(07:51):
get that from the passenger side. But some somewhere along
the line, why we started telling folks to get out
of the roadway and get over to the shoulder was
lost and forgotten.

Speaker 3 (08:01):
M hm.

Speaker 2 (08:03):
Well, even to take that a step further, there was
a recent discussion I had where we were talking about
that driver's side approach and your positioning of that, and
I think that might have been an eye law enforcement
chat where well, if you flip around and you're facing
oncoming traffic and you're talking to the to the to
the driver. Yeah, just all these all these interesting aspects

(08:23):
that have been forgotten. Yeah, and yeah, there's not there's
no one size fits all though, but as a starting point,
at least as a starting point, right. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (08:33):
But and it's also the why why why was that
decision for arrived at what what led to hey, we
should do passenger side approaches? Why why was that deemed
better than driver's side approaches?

Speaker 3 (08:47):
Right?

Speaker 4 (08:47):
So that at least and it's the the you know,
the the old the difference between a conservative and a
liberal the fence in the field theory, where you know,
the liberal will come up and say why is our
a fence in this old and the conservative will say
why did someone think they needed a fence in the field?
And it's two different ways to approach the same problem.

(09:09):
But you know, if I can know and understand the
why of why a decision was made originally, then when
I think I have a better way, is it truly
a better way? Or am I just going back to
the guy that improved it before the guy improved it?

Speaker 3 (09:26):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (09:30):
Oh, we have the delightful and talented John Hearn, author extraordinaire.

Speaker 2 (09:38):
And is that a real background or is that a.

Speaker 1 (09:40):
No, that's a fake.

Speaker 6 (09:41):
Somebody told me to get that a real hurtin thing.

Speaker 7 (09:45):
I mean, it's like tangible.

Speaker 8 (09:47):
It's not like I'm like, have this image of me
sitting here on a beach, you know, drinking Margarita's or something.

Speaker 7 (09:54):
But it could be this is my attempt at respectability.

Speaker 8 (09:58):
I need all the little I can get when it
comes to that.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
Well, your audio works, Chris, does your audio work?

Speaker 3 (10:07):
I think so? How much?

Speaker 2 (10:08):
Sounding like a little yeah, and it's just a little muffled, but.

Speaker 3 (10:13):
Fine, a little muffled, Okay, just a little.

Speaker 2 (10:16):
And then I think Mike's been working on his setup
and he disputed himself.

Speaker 3 (10:22):
Unfortunately, my my office my daughter's home for college, and
so it's converted back to being her bedroom until until
she did. She's getting an actual apartment this fall, so
she don't have to move out in between semesters and stuff.
But yeah, my office is occupied.

Speaker 2 (10:37):
Yep, it happens. Mike, are you with us?

Speaker 3 (10:42):
I am merdfinite.

Speaker 2 (10:49):
Yeah, check your settings. Make sure your mic, the specific
mic you want to use is the one that's been
he led, and it also has helped. It helps if
you talk into the mic. Yeah, don't put the mic
in your ear. Hey, there's a mic and a camera

(11:12):
there is was that kind of an echo?

Speaker 7 (11:18):
Okay, that's an impressive reverb going on right there.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
How about now tap your mic a couple of times. Yeah,
I don't know if you're you have the right mic
that's picking up? Yeah, if you tap it. I didn't
hear any taps I heard, Eric, Okay, okay, how about now,

(11:51):
hey there you are?

Speaker 9 (11:53):
What do you know I've switched my ear Then the
microphone in my ear.

Speaker 2 (11:58):
Oh that works.

Speaker 6 (11:59):
That works.

Speaker 9 (12:00):
I'm trying to get this fucking sound board doing. You know,
it's nice to have one. It's nicer if it works.

Speaker 2 (12:06):
Absolutely, And then I think we still have one or
two to join us. Tom will be coming in at
some point in the near future. And we have a
dot gk R. Who's here.

Speaker 1 (12:21):
Wow, he's like actually cleaned up and presentable.

Speaker 2 (12:25):
Nice. He put on the suit for today just for this.

Speaker 1 (12:30):
Don't stand up, Gary, I don't want to see the shorts.

Speaker 10 (12:34):
Shorts, dude, I'm commando.

Speaker 5 (12:37):
All the four peres.

Speaker 9 (12:40):
I'm gonna go grab a couple of beverages out of
my cooler.

Speaker 3 (12:42):
I'll be right.

Speaker 2 (12:42):
Yeah. So, I think I don't remember if it was
Beauford or if it was Gary that brought up the
concept of the loss of institutional knowledge regarding ballistics.

Speaker 10 (12:57):
We talked about it in my last discussion with.

Speaker 2 (12:59):
You, Yeah, and I thought it's come up a couple
more times, and I thought this would be kind of
a good discussion just to focus on and talk about
why is it happening, how can we prevent it, how
can we improve? So I have a cool mix of military,
law enforcement and maybe even an engineer guy. If he's

(13:21):
if he gets his ice cream, he'll be here. So
we haven't done an official start, so I'll just do
the official start now, Hey one, Matt Land for Here
at Primary and Secondary Episode four thirty one. Today is
June twenty six, twenty twenty five. The episode number is Yeah,
four thirty one. The topic is talking about the continual

(13:43):
loss of institutional knowledge. If this is a foreign concept
to you, listen, we'll have a really cool discussion about this.
You'll have a really good, really good understanding of what's
going on because this is an ongoing is especially when
it comes to military law enforcement organizations, especially when there

(14:05):
may be some form of procedures. In law enforcement, we
have SOPs and laws that we follow, but also it's
important for us to understand the ballistics and other aspects
and a lot of the minutia and a lot of
the fine tuning of our profession is slowly going away.

(14:28):
So my background is in law enforcement and doing the
cop doing the top thing since last century, still doing it.
We'll figure out. I'll figure out when when I'll leave.
I don't know, But have you guys give your backgrounds.
I'll say my favorite thing I love saying this with
every episode, make sure that you are supporting those sources

(14:49):
that you found to be beneficial. When you hear these
guys talk, when you hear what they're what they're talking about,
what they represent, pay attention to that. If you like
what they're saying, Like if John Hearn says something that
you especially like, you probably need to find that guy
on social media or on whatever. Give some follows, give
some likes. If these guys share something that you especially appreciate,
make sure you share it because the algorithms do not

(15:12):
work in our favor by any means.

Speaker 1 (15:14):
So Eric background, So Eric Glhouse, former military from the
Cold War into the very early squad career law enforcement,
did twenty nine years. Well it's going a sheriff's office
out in California. Do a little bit of teaching and
a little bit of writing these days.

Speaker 2 (15:32):
Cool Mike.

Speaker 9 (15:36):
Mike Lewis twenty years Army Infantry tail end of my career,
served as the training NCO and small Arms Master gunner
at the eighty second and now also do a little
bit of training, a little bit of writing.

Speaker 6 (15:52):
Chris, Hey, I'm Chris Leiper.

Speaker 3 (15:56):
My background and twenty years in the Army most of
that time. It's just after group is a special force
of soldier. I was in eighteen Delta and I've actually
got some medical medical institutional knowledge that I've seen lost
and regained too. And retired five years ago and since
then I've been doing some teach and doing some writing.

Speaker 2 (16:15):
Court.

Speaker 5 (16:18):
I'm a retired special Forces guy. Also retired after twenty
two years. I was a State.

Speaker 4 (16:25):
Department contractor for a long time, just coming off add
special operations contract and.

Speaker 5 (16:36):
Back out looking for another job again.

Speaker 2 (16:38):
And there are video games based on your life.

Speaker 7 (16:41):
John Hey, John Hearn background head law enforcement career public
safety started eighty six, law enforcement ninety two to twenty
twenty three.

Speaker 3 (16:53):
I retired.

Speaker 8 (16:55):
Decent teaching on the side, decent writing on the side,
do my best to spread now despite poor editorship, this.

Speaker 2 (17:04):
Is this something against Eric. And since Tom just came in,
we'll throw him on the in the hot seat really quick.
Just do an interest, save him best for last, and
you're still muted.

Speaker 6 (17:23):
Uh Tom, Uh, that's all Tom. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:31):
Dark Star Gear also has a yeah, a real real job.

Speaker 6 (17:36):
I run dark Star Gear. Uh A you know, kind
of thoughts on some relevancy. And this is the first
time I've ever seen Doc gk R.

Speaker 2 (17:44):
Holy sh there is there is. And also you have
an impressive mustache.

Speaker 6 (17:50):
It's it's crooked, and it's and it's it's mirrored.

Speaker 8 (17:54):
No.

Speaker 6 (17:54):
But also I work a project meaning an engineer in
the nuclear industry where institution knowledge is a pretty big
deal and there's lots of There's been lots of high
profile failures that have led to that.

Speaker 2 (18:11):
And as I said, saving the best for last, Doctor
Gary Roberts just a dentist here, just a dentist. Yeah,
if you're not familiar with this guy, you're missing out.

Speaker 10 (18:25):
I did some twenty two plus tiers in the Navy,
did my fellowship at the Letterman Army Institute of Research
with doctor Fackler. I currently teach at a large academic
medical center in the Department of Surgery, Division of Plastic Surgery,
doing Maxell facial surgery, and just finished teaching eight hours

(18:45):
to our new residents who started yesterday. So that was
an exciting thing on facial trauma. So I was happy
to sneak out and run over here and sign on.

Speaker 2 (18:55):
Heck yeah, heck yeah. And so it started with a
cool cunt conversation. That's what it was, I said, Gary
text asking about temporary cavity, and he went up call
him back in cool conversation from that, and then I said, Hey,
we're doing this episode tonight if you're interested, and here
he is, can't.

Speaker 6 (19:16):
I don't have kids. I'm gonna do a stupid dad
joke temporary cavity, dental or bullet.

Speaker 9 (19:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
Yeah, So out of everyone, I'm guessing Gary, I'm guessing
you're going to have the shortest amount of free time
right now.

Speaker 10 (19:36):
Probably sixty to ninety minutes. I didn't have to go
to some supervision of some stuff at the hospital, gotcha. Gotcha.

Speaker 2 (19:42):
So since we have you here and you don't come
on that frequently, why don't we dive into some of
these concepts of the ballistics aspects that that people are.
People aren't understanding the basics, and they're so much misinformation
that's taking its place. What have you been seeing? What

(20:04):
has been the biggest thing that's been the most irritating
with all of this not.

Speaker 10 (20:09):
So much irritating is sad. We spent all of this
energy in the mid eighties to the nine to eleven
collecting data and breaking up myths and getting some valid
science behind what we see with projectile injuries and penetrating
trauma all the way up through after the incident in Mogadishu,

(20:34):
where we learned about different ways of treating hypolymic shock
and it's anguinating hemorrhage and such things. And after nine
to eleven all of the research become much more restricted
and classified.

Speaker 9 (20:50):
So that was one issue.

Speaker 10 (20:52):
We've also have a whole generation of military personnel who
have spent all their time deployed and never had a
chance to learn some of the basics from the people
that came before them, and that's all been lost. As
you talked about last time, I've been called by units
that I was in their compounds in the two thousand

(21:13):
and one through two thousand and six seven time frame,
and they're asking questions. I say, what about all that
stuff we left you, all those papers and reports. I mean,
they're all right there, all the answers are here. This
is not new, and they don't even know what I'm
talking about. It's all disappeared.

Speaker 3 (21:29):
And so.

Speaker 10 (21:31):
We literally have a generation of folks who never got
exposed to all the IWBA stuff, who were not at
the FBI one ballistics conferences, who did not get to
interact with anybody from layer, and we have a generation
of people that are raised on the engineering calculations coming
out of Aberdeen and Picotinny and such, which really don't

(21:52):
have a lot of validity to what we see in
anatomic and physiologic realities of penetrating trauma. Those of you
that are AT and d S or have medical knowledge,
I'm sure you've seen that you can't put everything in
a tidy mathematical calculation because people are not all cookie cutters.
They're different, and so all of that information is gone.

(22:18):
And then we have all these young troopers who go
to YouTube defined answers instead of going you know, every
every as I said, every military unit, every law enforcement
agency can go to the FBI b r F, and
now they can get the data online and they can
have actual factual data. There's a reason so CALM gets
all their ballistic testing done by the FBI b r

(22:38):
F because it is the most comprehensive, honest, and non
biased ballistic source in the United States, period bar none.
What Buford did and then passed on to Scott Patterson
is nothing short of amazing, and everybody should be levering
that information, and yet very few military units or law

(23:01):
enforcement agencies are and that is just a crisis. I
think we need to have another ballistic symposium at the
FBI Academy, sort of recapture those late eighties early nineties
days and repromulgate the information.

Speaker 3 (23:16):
But that's me.

Speaker 8 (23:20):
Staying that deceased internet celebrities may not be the best
source for ballistic information, Sir.

Speaker 10 (23:26):
Nine percent of what I see on the internet in
the areas I'm a federally certified court expert witness kind
of person is wrong. A YouTube person shooting through packs
of meat, a person shooting clear jail one or two shots.
None of that is statistically significant, nor is it correlated
with living tissue. The whole reason that organizations like the

(23:50):
Joint Serviceman Ballistics Team, the FBI BRAF, the Joint FBI
USMCMOS study, the cTTO Tisswig stuff was to get the
best munitions into the hands of our warfighters. Okay, it's
not like those guys were wanting to satisfy industry or
anything else. We see some of that coming out of Benning,

(24:14):
perhaps in some other places where they you know, next
general needs a check mark on his oeer, But I've
not seen that out of the FBI BRF. I mean,
FBI's got its issues, but not the BRF. And we
really need to double down because we have so many
failures and so many issues, and it just keeps coming

(24:35):
around time and time again. Seems to be worse on
the Instagram, Facebook, those courts of platforms. Steve Holland messaged
me last night. Steve Holland used to be one of
the forced mod folks at Fifth Group and someone was
telling him about Mark two sixty two and some other
stuff and he's like, no, actually, I was there. I

(24:56):
was there with the spr I was there with seventy
seven grade in SMK. I was there with all of
these things, and what you're saying is wrong. And the
person didn't believe them. Those guys, I mean, some of
you guys said you're from Fifth Group, you probably need Steve.
He was pretty dialed into that.

Speaker 3 (25:13):
So well.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
Part of the conversation from this morning is you brought
that up, and then you brought up the six five
and how we're how well it functioned. And it got
me thinking this by itself could be just such a
cool discussion because there's so much myth and so much
bias and it would be cool to talk to the
people behind the scenes of all of the all dis testing.
So I am in the process of gathering information people

(25:36):
for an additional podcast episode. But it's really cool hearing
what you're saying and just seeing and for people that
aren't watching on video and if you're listening after this
is released an audio only, the panels all basically nodding
in unison. Yeah, yeah, they're they're seeing this firsthand what

(25:57):
you're describing. Mike. Yeah, as just as I call just
as I called Mike, he unmutes because I know he
has something.

Speaker 9 (26:08):
I've actually got a quick vignette kind of off of
the ballistics track, but also a question on the ballistics
track everything you're saying, yes, where you're talking about the
papers we left behind, the lessons we left behind. Had
an encounter just last summer with a young army officer

(26:31):
who was employing machine guns and we'll say, a less
than optimal methodology, and sir, what are you doing, and
explained all the ways he was wrong. He looked at
me and goes, well, you know, lisk GO is a
thing now, LISTO being large scale combat operations. My reply

(26:52):
to that was yes, sir, it was a thing my
first six years in the army, two before g Watt,
and back then we just called it war. So so
much has been forgotten, and we've got institutional knowledge and
tribal knowledge, and the two are pretty similar, but they're
not exactly the same. I'm sure Kurt and Eric and

(27:14):
Chris and John can probably pile in on that as well.
But the question on ballistics, I've done a little bit
of ballistics testing on my own. I know Matt has
used Clear Ballistics Gel. I've used Clear Ballistics GEL. Obviously
it's not a one to one replicant, but it's pretty good.
It's pretty close to FBI jail, which is not a

(27:36):
one to one replicant of flesh, but it's what we use.
Clear Ballistics carries a ten percent FBI jail in a
twenty percent NATO jail. Which one would you say is
better for testing wom ballistics with different projectiles and why.

Speaker 10 (27:58):
You can make a correlation between actual twenty percent ordinance
GEL at ten degrees versus ten percent GEL at four degrees.
But the twenty percent I find is much harder to
work with. You're using twice as much material to make it,
and it doesn't have a direct correlation with living tissue

(28:19):
that ten percent does. In all of the classified meetings
we had asking Aberdeen to provide data that shows their
twenty percent GEL had any correlation with living tissue, never
could come up with a single paper or test to
show that that was concerning, and this was in a
classified setting where they had no reason not to show it.

(28:41):
That's number one. Number two at Letterman, people forget that
ten percent ordinance GEL was not pulled out of thin air.
Two to three hundred pounds hogs are being shot and
then looking at tissue simulants to replicate what we're seeing
in the living tissue. So many tissue simulants were tested

(29:06):
and the one that was found closest and most repeatable
was ten percent. And in my experience, when you shoot
ten percent, it's pretty dang close to what we see
in living tissue, as long as you factor in things
like variences in tissue density. Obviously, you shoot through a lung,

(29:27):
there's less density, so you're going to get a little
more penetration, a little less expansion. You shoot through something
like a bowel that's filled with feces, you're going to
have more density, more expense and less penetration. But as
long as you factor in the differences in tissue density,
what we see in ten percent organs JEL is very
very close to what we see in living tissue, and

(29:51):
it's most close to the four layer dentim tests bare
JELAT and I'm not a huge fan of in terms
of replicating what we see in the body. The two
tests they look at are the four layer DNIM tests
and the automobile windshield test because that kind of gives
us an idea of what bone does as well, and
around that does well in those two tests is going

(30:12):
to do very well in live shootings. And we've seen
that ever since organizations like the California h TROW San
Diego pd FBI started correlating their officer involved shootings with
what was done in the laboratory. And then after nine
to eleven and we started getting lots of overseas injuries,

(30:34):
we were able to closely look at combat loans. And
that's the reason organizations like Crane Joint Service Wind Ballistics
Team cttso the Marines until they got crushed by the army.
That's why everybody was relying on ten percent of jail
because it is very close to living tissue when you
know how to interpret it and do it correctly. I

(30:57):
don't like any of the synthetic simulants.

Speaker 3 (31:01):
Awesome information, thank you.

Speaker 2 (31:05):
I remember this also this morning, you were bringing up
people that were using food meat as a as a
testing medium, especially when.

Speaker 10 (31:15):
They put it really cold. Oh, it's just the same
temperature as gel. I go, well, yeah, but it's meat.
It's not supposed to be cold. Gel is cold because
that's where it gets the proper density to actually replicate tissue.
But meat is not supposed to be cold. Plus, when
you have a dead processed meat, the collagen is different,
everything is different about it. You much better off shooting live.

Speaker 2 (31:40):
That's awesome, Chris.

Speaker 4 (31:44):
What what was the goat test from the what was
that late eighties, early nineties, the Strasbourg goat.

Speaker 5 (31:50):
Test, Whether it did or did not happen.

Speaker 10 (31:54):
Nobody up any data on that. Nobody's been able to
have anything that looks like any proof of that, even
in a classified setting where it was carefully looked at
by multiple organizations.

Speaker 4 (32:10):
I think, but I mean, I know, at least as
far as the military goes, you know, live tissue ballistics
training is probably off the table for the military at
least writ large like you. There may be organizations that
have the capability of performing that at a very small
micro level, but you'll never get that passed, you know,

(32:35):
the big army think.

Speaker 10 (32:37):
And that's the advantage of ten percent jail because we
don't need to anymore. We have so many autopsy results,
we have so many animal studies that were ongoing through
over not almost twenty years that we have enough shots
in the living tissue that we can take that and
correlated with a ten percent jail that's properly validated, properly fabricated,
and properly interpreted. We don't really need to anymore.

Speaker 2 (33:04):
And then Chris, I had something for you, but it
just left because.

Speaker 3 (33:09):
That's what it does, all right, Well do you remember,
let me know.

Speaker 2 (33:16):
Yes, yes, And didn't you have something? You had a list.

Speaker 3 (33:24):
As far as topics go or war stories whatever. So
the big uh, we're I'm breaking up a little bit, yes,
hear me outkay, yeah, okay, yeah. As it relates to
the medical side of things, and this goes back to

(33:45):
trauma care specifically, there was this weird cycle between what
was learned during the you know, fifteen years of heavy
combat operations in Vietnam to include SPECI forces and what
was learned during that war, and then a lot of
stuff was lost during the period in between Vietnam and

(34:07):
the GUT and we came around and we basically came
full circle. So when early in the g WAT two
thousand and one, two thousand and three timeframe, uh, what
you were seeing in the military was still like ATLS protocols,
which was, oh, you know, this guy's wounded, Let's give
them two large more ivs with lactated ringers and run
them wide open. And and a lot of a lot

(34:28):
of a lot of the stuff that went on in
in Uh. You know that we learned from Somalia, but
it didn't trickle its way out to the entire military
even you know, even a decade later. And and so well,
you know, some of the stuff that was learned in Somalia,
for example, and for when it's worth you know, the
very very famous incident depicted it and Bote the book
in the movie A Blackhawk down. Uh, the private that

(34:50):
had the uncompressed uh from world believe, like in his
in his telvius and they couldn't get it clamped off. Uh.
They ended up giving that guy a ton of clear fluid,
you know, lactated ringers, and basically turned his blood in
a kool aid, which was not ideal, but it was
the protocol at the time. It just so happens that
the medic that worked on him I later worked with
when he was retired, retired to the s civilian in

(35:10):
the military, and of course.

Speaker 4 (35:12):
Of features a good friend of mine.

Speaker 3 (35:15):
Okay, awesome, Yeah, great dude, great dude, and h and
so so we we you know, it didn't populate into
the the big army at large for a long time.
But then so at the beginning of the g WoT
we were giving everybody, Hey, give them lactated ringers two
large four ivs and still them full of fluid and
get their blood pressure back up. And then we figured
out pretty quickly like that's not that's not great on
a couple of different levels. So we started doing this

(35:36):
stuff like the sperry of the jargon, but different types
of fluid, you know, head stend and these different like
it was still a clear fluid, it still didn't carry aucygen,
but it was better than like normal IV fluid. So
we thought then you know, a few years go by,
and so basically we kept going through this this progression
of like, Okay, this isn't really working that well either,
this is not really working that well either. You know,

(35:59):
we don't to get somebody's blood pressure back up to
one twenty over eighty who still still got an uncompressed
bleed somewhere in their bodies. That's not good and it's
not gonna clot if we keep their blood press, if
we get their blood pressure up. And so by the
you know, by the early twenty tens, I think I
remember correctly, we were just like, all right, screw this,

(36:19):
let's just start giving flesh freshold blood. You feel blood transfusions,
I'm gonna pull a you know, the blood off of
that guy, and I'm gonna give it to that guy.
And that's the stuff that we were doing. And at
least in the eighteen delta side of things, and in
talking to medics from Vietnam that were Special Forces guys Vietnam,
they went to the exact same thing of like early
in the war as lactated ringers, and then they started

(36:40):
using this stuff called albumen, and then you know, by
later in the war, they're like screw this, and a
huge waste of time just start giving blood to everybody.
And so they went through this like ten plus year
learning process of learning what works. But then somewhere between
like seventy five and one to three, we not everybody
forgot it, but basically the people that were right in
the manuals and the protocols and write the algorithms have

(37:01):
forgotten it, and we went through the whole thing all
over again. And we went through the whole thing all
over again during the g one. It would be really
really cool, based on all of our lessons learned from
the twenty years of twenty years of where we just
went through. If we didn't turn around and flush all
that knowledge of the next ten to fifteen years and
kind of held on to that for the next big
conflict that comes.

Speaker 5 (37:20):
Up, I'd say it's probably impossible.

Speaker 4 (37:27):
The one good thing with medical treatment especially is that
T triple C became like the accepted standard at some point.

Speaker 5 (37:37):
We adopted it at Sephardic.

Speaker 4 (37:40):
I think we were either like the first or second
unit in the army to start teaching it at Sephardic,
because like our medic went to one of the classes,
it was before it was even formalized. He went to
one of the briefings and brought it back and said,
you know, this is how it should be, and we
started stituting it there. But the issue, at least from

(38:03):
the military side, is that you're on such a short
turnover where you know, a long tour for someone is
three years in their position and location. You know, a
year to two years of that is spent learning their
job and then all of us and then they've got
a year on the ground where maybe they're fully technically

(38:26):
and tactically proficient at what's expected of them, and then
they depart, and you know, four years is getting more
and more rare. Five years and above is extremely rare
for a guy to spend at one place. And so
with that being the reality, you know, the doctor's mentioning,
you know, I was here before and I gave to

(38:47):
you guys all this information, Well nobody, you know, in
three years, nobody that was at that location is still there.
All of those people are gone, So all of the
knowledge that they had went with them.

Speaker 5 (39:00):
Because you know, that's as.

Speaker 4 (39:02):
We were talking earlier, that's one of the things in
military is really bad about is capturing that information in
a location and in a format that's easy to reproduce
and pass on to other people. It exists at some levels,
but at the individual level where the soldier is, he
rarely has access to it, rarely sees about it, and

(39:23):
really rarely gets brief that it even exists.

Speaker 5 (39:25):
So he wouldn't even know to.

Speaker 4 (39:26):
Go looking for it, you know, just in the normal
course of his duties, he wouldn't be aware that that
data exists. So where is he going to go look
for if he doesn't think that it exists. You know,
people at the at the six brigade commander level and
above know that it exists, but how often do they think,
you know, I can help my soldiers if I go

(39:47):
get this information and give it to them.

Speaker 5 (39:49):
So you know, from from that aspect.

Speaker 4 (39:51):
It's nearly impossible to really pass that information on in
any meaningful way. Very few units have long institution knowledge
Delta first sfodd D being one of them. Other than that,
there aren't very many that have, you know, institutional knowledge

(40:13):
that really reaches back more than ten or fifteen years.

Speaker 10 (40:17):
Heck, we have people in the military that are actively
suppressing data that's valid. When we did the Joint Service
Win Ballistic Team, we wrote a three hundred and thirty
one page paper. When it was finally released to the
senior folks in the Pentagon, it was thirty one pages
or so long. What happened to the other three hundred pages?

Speaker 3 (40:38):
You know?

Speaker 10 (40:41):
The fact that critically important information is withheld from the
senior leadership by middle managers and by people with vested
parochial interests in various programs that they've you know, hitched
their pony two is extremely concerning, and that's what leads
to things like XEM twenty five. It leads to things

(41:04):
where we have a program that is going in circles
for twenty years and never gets feeled, even though it
sucks up tens of millions of dollars in funding, but
nobody has an interest in actually fielding it. They just
want to keep their little rice bul filled. And this
is truly problematic.

Speaker 2 (41:25):
Mike, I saw some more nods.

Speaker 9 (41:31):
Yes to all of the above, but to what Kurt
was saying about things being forgotten and units not having
long standing institutional knowledge. It's also a doctrinal problem. For example, oh,
this was what two thousand and fourteen. Had a conversation

(41:54):
with Martsmanship program director at the time at Benning, and
part of the conversation was what is maximum effective range?
What is the definition? Because he at that time could
not find an army doctrinal definition. What we came up

(42:15):
with based on what he found was the greatest distance
at which the average trained soldier with that weapon could
be expected to have a fifty percent probability of hit.
But then Ian, being a doctrine nerd, he and I
did a deep dive and I'm looking at FM twenty

(42:39):
three TOASH nine in sixteen from nineteen sixty six that
defines the maximum effective range as the greatest distance at
which a weapon may be expected to fire accurately to
inflict casualties or damage. Did a web search a few
minutes ago, and according to what I just found, the

(43:02):
current DoD definition is the maximum distance at which a
weapon may be expected to be accurate and achieve the
desired effect. With that, what are we really looking at?
What is the desired effect? Is it incapacitation, is it suppression?

(43:23):
What is the desired effect? It depends on the task,
It depends on the mission. And then we've got other
doctrinal things like current infantry doctrine says to cover dead
space with grenade launchers, and if you go in the
grenade Launcher Manual, it does not describe how to cover

(43:44):
dead space. Dead space is doctrinately defined as areas that
cannot be directly observed or engaged with direct fire, meaning
the soldier behind the weapon can see what they're shooting.
That would mean indirect fire, which means you use an
observer to direct your fires onto target. But the grenade

(44:07):
Launcher Manual has nothing on how to deliver indirect fires.
That was removed roughly twenty five years ago from doctrine.
So unless you've got a doctrine nerd who is not
afraid of spending hours doing research through old manuals that

(44:28):
have been superseded, that institutional knowledge is absolutely lost because
somebody didn't.

Speaker 2 (44:35):
Edit and having seen some things like that department policy
or whatnot. I've seen things removed on purpose, and I've
seen things removed accidentally. Oops, didn't mean to do that,
and no one ever notices until now when someone's actually

(44:55):
looking it up and going, how exactly are we supposed
to do this? The ma, no, it's not.

Speaker 9 (45:03):
Well, it may not have been accidental or intentional. It
may been somebody saying we don't do that anymore. We
don't need to fill pages of a book with stuff
that's no longer relevant and it gets deleted, and then
we see a world where trench warfare makes it comeback,
and what do you know, stuff is relevant again.

Speaker 2 (45:24):
Reminiscent of what Chris was saying.

Speaker 3 (45:30):
Yes, it's interesting talking about what's old is new again?
H And I don't I don't pretend to have the answer,
but I think that everybody would agree that like drone warfare,
the way it's manifested itself in the last the last
few years is really a game changer in a lot
of ways, Like how are we gonna how are we

(45:51):
going to deal with this? Well, one hype of hypothetical future,
uh is, you know, all these drones are being steered,
you know, hit individuals or individual clusters of soldiers with
you know, signals, right, and so okay, cool, Well we're
you know, like in the future. You know, one possibility
is all off the top of my head, but one

(46:11):
possibility is okay, cool, Well, we're going to jam this
whole environment to where you know, drone enters the bubble
that we have surrounded ourselves with. But you know, and
then that drone is then just going to crash into
the dirt because it's not getting the signal or whatever else. Right,
The problem is is that all the stuff that we've
come to rely on often also gets jammed. You know,
something we experienced in Iraq where your jamber is also

(46:33):
working at your own comms and whatnot. And so so
people say, oh, you know, why would I need to
learn land navigation with a map that a compass. I've
got my GPS. But if you're in a but if
you're in a jammed environment in such a way where
maybe the future of drone warfare is simply like, hey,
there is a jammed bubble where like twenty first century

(46:55):
technology no longer works and we're now fighting like it's
nineteen sixty five, It would be nice to know how
to do that stuff.

Speaker 6 (47:06):
Kind of over overarching with what you're getting at Chris
in You know, again, my area is not shooting people.
It's it's vastly different. But my my big thing is
if you don't know why something is in there, you
are not the one to remove it. Uh, it just stays.

Speaker 5 (47:25):
It Just.

Speaker 6 (47:28):
We have a figurative in litteral bookshelf. You don't need
to clean it up and take that extra space, especially
if you don't understand what it is. If you're going
to put a piece in there, you can put a
piece in there, that's okay. But yeah, whenever you know, Matt,
you're you know, you're talking about getting rid of things.
We don't do that anymore or whatever, or you know,
they may not they don't have a context for it,

(47:49):
but doesn't mean the context hasn't completely gone away.

Speaker 4 (47:56):
Yeah, that was again something we talked about earlier. Know
if that was on the export of this out. But
the loss of context. But you know, again, loss of
context is tied to personnel turnover. That the person who
learned why something was done, if he doesn't pass the
why onto other people when he leaves that position or

(48:19):
you know, or she leaves that position, that information is gone.
It no longer exists. Now that you know, the next
person to come into that position, they're going to have
to learn that all over again. You know, they're going
to have to stumble into the same set of circumstances
that led that other person to be required to learn it.
It's going to happen again for the next person to

(48:40):
learn it. And if those same set of circumstances don't occur.
They're never going to learn it because there's not a
reason to explore that possibility.

Speaker 10 (48:49):
There was a situation where the finest military rifle ammunition
we ever tested was out there in the two six
two thousand and eight time frame, and the organization was
very excited about it. The colonel in charge of that

(49:11):
part of the unit left. Secretary got fired. When she left,
she deleted all the data, and when the new guy
got there, all that information was gone, and that entire
program was forgotten about and just went away.

Speaker 11 (49:33):
I think I got anything, Oh, go.

Speaker 5 (49:35):
Ahead, I was gonna say.

Speaker 3 (49:38):
I know.

Speaker 5 (49:38):
I left my unit in nineteen ninety three.

Speaker 4 (49:42):
Our our rifle ammunition was a federal sixty nine grade match.

Speaker 5 (49:48):
When I returned, it had gone to that.

Speaker 4 (49:51):
It evolved into that because me and a couple of
other ballistic nerds were like, we need to find something
better than army ball because in our in our job,
we're not restricted.

Speaker 5 (50:03):
To you know, general munitions. We can we can go
outside of that.

Speaker 4 (50:07):
For certain things, and so we settled on the sixty
nine Graine match. When I came back in two thousand,
they were back to using army ball. And you know
at this time now that the army ball is different,
it's now green tip.

Speaker 5 (50:22):
And so I asked why, you know what what.

Speaker 4 (50:24):
Testing led to the change to go backwards, and it
was like, well, I don't know.

Speaker 5 (50:29):
It's just it's army ammunition. So that's what we use.

Speaker 4 (50:31):
And it's like there's a whole process to not have
to do that. You know, if you decide you want
something else, there's a whole other list of things if you.

Speaker 5 (50:41):
Have access to. You just have to find something better.

Speaker 4 (50:44):
And that's you know, we were looking at going back
to the sixty nine grain when the original Black Hills
seventy seven grain, I don't even remember if it was
Mark two sixty two yet, but we switched over to that.
But it's yeah, you know that that lack of institutional knowledge,

(51:06):
that the lack of the ability to capture it.

Speaker 5 (51:08):
And I don't.

Speaker 4 (51:11):
Know, I'll stop, I'll stop beating that horse because I
don't have this. I don't have a solution for it either.
I just know it's bad.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
From John and Eric on the law enforcement.

Speaker 8 (51:24):
Side, Yeah, so I think that there's a bunch of
pressures that make this happen. We've already touched on the
institutional stuff, especially as the bureaucracy tends to scale up
in size, there is this huge desire to go to
an assignment for enough time to get the next promotion.

(51:46):
So you'll get somebody that gets sent to the firearms
training it to be in charge of the firearms training
in it, and they're there two or three years, and
then they're immediately on to the next thing. And you
have this resistance to developing in my mind, internals guys
that get to hang around. I think we've put such
a focus on mobility to identify good people that the

(52:09):
opportunity to develop that knowledge just doesn't exist anymore as
far as that goes.

Speaker 7 (52:15):
You know, one of the things that I was wondering about.

Speaker 8 (52:17):
I think this is an important question is is how
do we know what's true to begin with?

Speaker 3 (52:21):
Right?

Speaker 8 (52:22):
I think Doc's work is great because it's very scientific,
it's peer reviewed. There are correlations we can learn, there's
always other kind of information. There are good decisions being
made by institutions and organizations to do something one way,
often after having failed miserably doing it other ways in
a bunch of different years. But what tends to happen
is that people forget why we started doing this, why

(52:45):
do we start doing that?

Speaker 7 (52:48):
And you to.

Speaker 8 (52:50):
Tie this back into some gun stuff, you know, Jeff
Cooper famously said, if you don't write it down, it
didn't happen.

Speaker 7 (52:55):
And if you don't write it down, I'm.

Speaker 8 (52:57):
Not saying from personal experience, you can create a huge
future pository of information and people can just ignore the
folder on the network drive that has everything they're asking for.
But if you at least don't put the fold out
there on the network drive, the chances of anybody looking
at information are an absolute zero. I think what's important
to remember there's a lot of guys that do the

(53:18):
nitty gritty work. They don't necessarily want to be the
guys that sit down and document all this kind of stuff.
But who better to document all that stuff but the
guys that figured this out. I would much rather have
a fairly coarse explanation of why we decide to do X,
Y or Z than to have nothing, so that as
soon as the new manager gets in there and the

(53:39):
good idea ferry just starts to show up every day
at work, to have at least something to point toward
as far as that goes.

Speaker 7 (53:47):
So again, a lot of institutional pressures.

Speaker 8 (53:50):
You know, one of the things that's given me crazy
is I don't know what else to call it, like this,
you know anti intellectualism that you see in a lot
of American law enforcement. There is a lot of hands
on stuff that we have to know how to do.
It's valuable to be able to get dirty. But the
guys in the ivory towers do occasionally have something to contribute,
and I think we do ourselves a great disservice if

(54:10):
we just discount anything anybody in an ivory tower.

Speaker 7 (54:13):
Has to offer.

Speaker 8 (54:14):
I think we need to consider it in light of
our experiences as far as that stuff goes. But you know,
leaving yourself available to that information is hugely important, especially
in our ultimate goal is to do things better in
a way that keeps our people safer.

Speaker 2 (54:29):
Well, and what you just said kind of goes to
what Gary said earlier. We might have this huge network
drive that has all the answers. Do I want to
go through that or just go on YouTube do a
Google search? Who knows who's making this video? Eric?

Speaker 1 (54:45):
So a couple thoughts. The first is I think it
was Cecil Birch that coined the term procademic right, people
who are looking at it from an academic perspective as
well as have actually applied it, gone out and done
it hands on and then being able to convey that stuff.
There's that side of it. TC Fuller, former Army officer,
retired FBI guy has written about the fact that we

(55:07):
need the people teaching who have also who have looked
at the research side and have done stuff right. These
kind of different words to say the same thing. One
of the areas is pushing the next generation to get
involved in doing stuff so they understand it. And an
example was we were looking at changing rightful AMMO at

(55:30):
work right and I don't want to keep going down
the road of ballistics, but it did start there. Guys
were like, well, hey, start, what do you want. I'm like,
it doesn't matter what I want because I'm going to
be out the door. But what I need you to
do is go look at a bunch of different types
of AMMO that will work with one in seven, one
and nine, one in twelve twist barrels. Go out and

(55:50):
give me two three options that will work across that spectrum. Right,
And this is the type of testing I want to
see you guys do on it and then and I'm
loose to go, and then when they came back, Okay,
let's sit down and write this stuff up. So pushing
the next generation to be involved in some of that
so they can carry it forward, right, John touched on

(56:12):
the Ivory Tower thing. I used to complain that I
didn't think there was any good research out there. There is,
you just got to be willing to go behind the
academic wall. And we were talking with their early part
when it was just Matt, you, Kurt and I hear
about vehicle stops. There are good research studies out there
pushing why passenger side approaches as at least a general

(56:33):
way of doing it is is the best practice. But
if we're not sharing things along those lines right and
communicating it, then we can get into issues with that
because the data is there, we're just not doing anything
with it. And then the next good idea fairy shows
up and doesn't take that stuff into consideration, so that
would just kind of be like overview thoughts.

Speaker 10 (56:57):
Then we have institutions who want to reinvent the wheel
because the actual facts are not socially acceptable anymore. Like
when SFPD went back to take two shots, lower your
weapon and reassess the situation when we know physiologically that
that is boulder dash, and yet socially they wanted it

(57:18):
to happen. So the leadership, who really didn't care about anatomy, physiology,
facts and hard learned lessons going back thirty years, deemed
it would be more politically correct to do so, well,
guess what, it didn't work. Doesn't work. We know it's
not going to work. Go back to the old pat rogers.

(57:38):
Shoot it till it starts burning. Your change of shape, right,
And I mean we've known that since what newhaul or something,
And so it's hard when the people in leadership don't
want or can't accept the truth.

Speaker 2 (58:05):
And of course I was just muted. Yeah, they want
to go in a specific direction. A comment came up
the desire to use generative AI to search PDF documents
in order to find the answer within also creates a
disconnect between the content and the end user. Interesting.

Speaker 6 (58:21):
Interesting, agree and disagree with that statement. I think some
of it depends on who's doing the searching and how,
because people can't process information well at all. You know,
if they're hunting for a yes or no or something,
they're going to find it. But if they don't dig,
dig deeper into the you know, the sentence, they the

(58:43):
gold mine they find and then kind of backtrack it
they get into context with it.

Speaker 1 (58:49):
So Tom wouldn't be the why behind the info. Yeah,
finding that, Yeah.

Speaker 6 (58:56):
I know it's a it's a it's a cluche at
this point in time. But like you have too if
you're looking for an important piece of information and you
only take you take a four hundred page document and
you take a paragraph out of it, But honestly, the
responsibility to read the whole fucking four hundred pages. Now

(59:19):
you may not be afforded to time or whatever to
act on that entirely, But like you know, there's a
there's a scale of things, and convenience is just it
can mence kills.

Speaker 2 (59:31):
And that's that goes back to also what Gary said
about the large document that's been cut down to thirty pages. Yeah, yeah, yeah, if.

Speaker 6 (59:40):
You start the thirty pages, you don't see the other
the three hundred pages that aren't there, and you're still
gonna miss whatever is left anyway.

Speaker 3 (59:48):
But it's.

Speaker 6 (59:51):
I wouldn't put that on AI and put that on
people just not and it may not be people being
willfully ignorant or you know, doing poor jobs. They may
not be. They may have external pressures that don't allow
them to put forth the actual effort, or they may
not understand the actual effort they need to put forth
to do the work to learn.

Speaker 9 (01:00:13):
Yeah, a lot of that is I mean, answer now,
so they go to the easy button control left. But
I'll also disagree with that statement. If you already know
what is in that document, none of us are capable
of memorizing every word, every line, every page. If you
already know what's in the document and have an understanding

(01:00:34):
of it, and somebody asks you a question or I
think I know the answer, but before I give you
the answer, let me confirm control left. There's no disconnect
there because you already know what you're looking for. So
that's as it's a coin toss. Is it good, is
it bad?

Speaker 3 (01:00:51):
It depends. Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:00:53):
The other thing I point out about there's no one
document that's probably going to have all of the answers.
Most of the answer I think I've developed recently is
because I've read across multiple pieces of research, and I've
kind of looked at the mega trends that point in
a particular direction as opposed to oh my god, I
controlled f and the one word I was looking for
was found here. That sounds a lot more like confirmation

(01:01:16):
biased than any kind of serious research. And that's that's
what I tend to see a lot of people that
claim to be doing this stuff. They're just looking to
confirm what they want to do, and they're just looking
for something to hang their hat on. And you know,
one of my my pet pieces of the law enforcement. We're
going to do this because it's cool. And if you
ask them any of the levels of critical thinking that

(01:01:37):
might be associated with a critical decision like changing vehicle
equipment or changing duty guns, dude, there is nothing there
to hang their hat on. There was no testing. It's hey,
we wanted to try a block or you know, you
know whatever it is. Sometimes the rationales behind decisions are
really hard to pin down because they don't exist. And
maybe they had a really good night out with the

(01:01:59):
sales for whatever company's about to be adopted, just saying.

Speaker 6 (01:02:05):
I will say, but with the you know, back to
what you're you're talking about, Mike, I've been using I
use chet GPT for for fun, and through using it
for fun, seeing how powerful it has become.

Speaker 2 (01:02:22):
I can put in.

Speaker 6 (01:02:23):
If I'm trying to figure out something I can I
can I have like all the all the references I
have personal I've collected over the years, uh, you know
for working anything I've kept. Listen, like a literal notepad
or a text file of the references. I'll going to
chetchypt using you know, copy the list using one seven

(01:02:46):
and nineteen. Ask a question and it'll honestly it'll search
obscure documents and stuff like that and say, I think
this is I think I want to do X. Is
this the right thing to do? Within a minute, a
contextualized answer with the references I requested, and then additional

(01:03:08):
and for its So yeah, AI can be absolutely amazing
if done well. It's you know, it's it's the Internet
on steroids.

Speaker 5 (01:03:19):
But it can be.

Speaker 4 (01:03:21):
But that goes back to the people or lazy thing
is that most people don't understand how to ask the
right question.

Speaker 5 (01:03:28):
Most people answer you get the answer that they really want.

Speaker 6 (01:03:32):
Yeah, most people can't use a basic search engine. But yeah,
so for for as more right as the answer can
be is to use the shittiest grammar in the world
your answers, which had to be he can be even
wronger than they ever were before.

Speaker 5 (01:03:47):
Yeah, I mean I use it a lot for work.

Speaker 4 (01:03:49):
And one of the things that taught me as I
started using it more and more for some some complex
things that we were doing, the thing that it taught
me was you really have to final, you know, fine
tune how you ask the question, because you will ask

(01:04:11):
the incorrect question and get a brilliant answer that unfortunately
isn't what you're looking for, and you'll look at it
and you'll think, oh, that's genius, and you'll put that
into the document that you're working on, and unfortunately it's
incorrect because you asked the wrong question or or you
ask the question in the wrong way, and so you've
got a set of data out of it that isn't

(01:04:32):
what you need to reinforce what you're doing.

Speaker 6 (01:04:35):
I've been really fortunate and ask if you've had the same.
It's actually really helped me getting a bunch of wrong answers.
It's really helped me ask questions better, and you as
you learned to like run the prompts and stuff like that.
It's been just that exercise in itself has made finding
the information you have the better. The better I get

(01:04:57):
the better I get the kind of thing.

Speaker 4 (01:04:59):
The The thing that helped me with it is having
used the interpreters for the last you know, forty plus
years of work.

Speaker 5 (01:05:08):
Because you say something to a student that doesn't.

Speaker 4 (01:05:11):
Speak English, the interpreter translates, and the look you get
from the student will tell you whether or not he
understood the interpreter.

Speaker 5 (01:05:20):
And you know, if you're a.

Speaker 4 (01:05:21):
Good instructor, I don't need anything other than the look
of what that student gave the interpreter when the interpreter
finished talking. If he didn't understand it, now I have
to find another way to describe the exact same thing,
but using a different set of words, or a different
context or a different cultural reference that will allow the
interpreter to find the words that he needs to make

(01:05:44):
that student understand. So having done that for so long
that the transition over to chat EPT was fairly easy.
It was just a steep learning curve the first couple
of weeks.

Speaker 6 (01:05:55):
So I have not done that. But the last couple
of years I've worked through an interpreter UH with non
English speakers for technical stuff and have found that that
that has helped. And that's uh, you know, the look
thing you're talking about them, uh, training, you know, training
some French people who can speak a little of English
but not a lot through translators to do technical processes.

(01:06:19):
The look is when you when you know you got it.

Speaker 5 (01:06:23):
Yeah, confusion is universal that that.

Speaker 4 (01:06:26):
Yeah, that's a universal look across all cultures.

Speaker 2 (01:06:30):
Unfortunately, CHET GPT does not give that look. It just
answers you pay for.

Speaker 9 (01:06:35):
The on chat GPT. Y'all can laugh and call me
a trug delight if you want. But I'm one of
very few people I know that don't use it, just
haven't learned it. But looking at it. Saw an article
a couple of days ago. There's studies that indicate people
that use AI having much shorter and much less robust

(01:07:03):
working memory of what they did a matter of minutes later.
That's something to think about.

Speaker 6 (01:07:10):
I was kind of screwed net respect to begin with,
but I'm not afraid to go down a rabbit hole.

Speaker 9 (01:07:17):
If I'm looking for a piece of information and this
piece of information is important.

Speaker 5 (01:07:23):
I will go down a rabbit hole.

Speaker 9 (01:07:25):
Use Boully on searches, and there been searches for information
that have taken hours before finding that one piece of
information going from one document to the next document, to
the next document to the source document. But something I've
found from that is by doing it that way and
learning it that way, my God, is my recall of

(01:07:47):
it better in the future.

Speaker 3 (01:07:51):
Chris, So, I didn't bother any We had a lot
of intros to get through. But one of my other
one of my other jobs that I do during the
school years, I substitute teach my local high school. And
I've got a because of that, I've got something from
a unique perspective on on AI. I think, and not unique,

(01:08:13):
you know, one of one, but and the way that
what I've observed is that an intellectual adult with a
fully formed brain, who is generally a deep and critical thinker,
who uses AI appropriately, Uh, it can be huge destina

(01:08:35):
you know, the the analogy that I use as it
relates to and this this ties back into our institutional
knowledge discussion, which I'll circle back in a second. But
technologies in general are neutral. You know, they're there whether
they're good or bad, and outcomes is dependent upon the
people wielding them.

Speaker 10 (01:08:56):
Right.

Speaker 3 (01:08:56):
Uh. You know, splitting the atom can provide clean energy
to the whole planet, or it can kill every human
being on Earth. Right, It all depends on the prudence
of the people wielding nuclear energy, and in the same way,
AI used prudently by people who are thoughtful about how
they use it and its impacts is incredible. Basically, chat

(01:09:18):
GPT for me just using it in my personal life
is okay. I'm seeing a bunch of chatter on Twitter
about the specific political or theological or philosophical concept for
people are arguing back and forth this is what I think.
But I'm basically like, hey, chat GPT, you know I
want you to steal me in the argument for the

(01:09:39):
opposing view, and I'll basically sit there and debate with
chat GPT for forty five minutes on super laps arianism,
this theological thing whatever in order to hone and basically
wrestle with what I really believe in how much I
really believe it, and I want the best counter arguments
I can get, and chat GPT is basically my really
smart friend who types really fast, which is nice as

(01:10:00):
most of my high school students, rather than using chat
GPT as an intellectual gymnasium where they could exercise their
intellectual capacity, they use it as an intellectual wheelchair that
they just sit in and it pushes them around. Now, Unfortunately,
the reality is far more people are going to use chat,
GPTs or any language learning model. They're going to use

(01:10:23):
it as Google on feroids, and if they're going to
outsource their thinking rather than using it as an adjunct
and basically an adversary and or a partner in thinking.
So I think the frankly, I think the long term
consequences of AI for the human race are not going
to be great, but we'll see. But as that relates

(01:10:44):
to institutional knowledge, something that everybody here, law enforcement and
military has talked about, and you know, civilian research, everything
has been turnover. Like turnover is the enemy of institutional knowledge.
You've got people showing up, you've got people leaving. In
the military, I would actually argue that one of the
changes that one of the things we need to go

(01:11:05):
back to is in the enlisted ranks. Once upon a
time we had these ranks that were we still have specialists.
We had a specialists in E four. And then you
will promote the sergeant. An the army, you will promote
the sergeant. You'll be a leader, and then basically there's
an upper out criteria where you got to promote to
the next rank and if you don't, you know, you're
out of the army or whatever. Well, we used to

(01:11:26):
have Specialist five, Specialist six, Specialist seven and on up.
And basically for technical jobs, for technical expertise, people were
you weren't a leader. You just basically had a higher
pay grade. You got paid more, and you were supposed
to be the technical expert and the reservoir of knowledge.
And I think that one of the problems with turnover,
at least the military, and I spected the same in

(01:11:48):
law enforcement, is that people have to promote into higher
and higher leadership positions. When I met a lot of
really good dudes in the Army who were happy, like,
you know, it could be a signal guy at comms guy,
you know, and he's an E four. He doesn't want
to lead troops. He's not really good at leading troops,
but he's a wizard with you know, with tech, you know,

(01:12:09):
his radios or computers or whatever it is. But the
Army says, no, no, no, no, You've got to become a sergeant.
And you've got to if you're not a sergeant motive
by the time you get to ten years for mooting
me out of the army, and you know that guy
made us get out of the army, whereas he basically
just kept giving him pay raises. But let him continue
to do the same job and become a repository and
a wealth of knowledge over a twenty year career. You
could reduce some of that turnover. The chief horn officer

(01:12:31):
ranks sort of does that for the officer corps to
a degree, but I think the list of ranks, we
need to bring back the Spec five six, Spec seven
ranks and allow guys to basically hang out in the
unit for a long time, hiding in their corner, being
the expert and knowing all the things for a long
period of time. The problem is is in society in general,
because I think we have a societal problem with turnover too.

(01:12:51):
I go in a discount tire thirty years ago and
I got a certain level of service. I go in
there today to discount tired and I get frankly lesser service.
But a lot of it is con term. The manager's
been there seven months, and like nobody, none of the
regular employees have been there more than you know, more
than three or four months. And you ask them the question,
they don't know anything. Because they just got there, and
you know they'll they'll build job hops, and so for

(01:13:14):
society at large, unfortunately, I'm afraid that AI is going
to become our repository of institutional knowledge. But if people's
critical thinking skills and ability to interact with that institutional
knowledge and extrapolate not just the answer, but the why
behind the answer, the context is going to be a
very very bad thing. So that's one My solution for
military turnover is bring back to Spec five sixty seven ranks,

(01:13:38):
and for civilian turnover, it's just kind of society. I
have no idea, but I know that AI is going
to become that thing, and I don't you know, I
don't know that's a good thing.

Speaker 2 (01:13:49):
I remember a Pressburg grant that completely addressed that. On
the military side, Yeah exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:13:55):
They talked somebody talked about it, and I can't aware,
but the Canadians have that like you can stay in
that position role. And they were talking about a guy
who was a lance.

Speaker 7 (01:14:04):
Corporal or a corporal.

Speaker 1 (01:14:05):
They used the brit rank system without the additional stuff.
This guy is like a twenty year machine gunner and
he was a gunner. He had his gun team and
he knew that thing forward backwards and knew all knew
all the stuff you needed to know about being a
machine gunner, but had no desire to prevent, didn't want
to go up, just wanted to keep running the gun.

(01:14:26):
And so there's that aspect like Chris was talking about.

Speaker 4 (01:14:29):
Yeah, the British too. Was a British guy taught me
one how to use a machine gun as an indirect
fire weapon, and then how to use mortars with how
to do fire direction control with mortars without any of
the tools that you have with a map en compass,
how to actually perform the FDC procedures. And those were

(01:14:52):
British guys that had been in their positions for twelve,
you know, ten, twelve, fifteen years, were able to teach
that we're nobody in the army that I do new
that stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:15:06):
Well, what I do on a regular basis at about
an hour in I take a quick break. So let's
see here, We're gonna just have some ads run really
quick is one minute thirty eight seconds. If you can
get a refill or a bathroom break in that amount
of time, good luck. We're going to cut to those

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and be right back.

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and we're back. It's just that easy. And yeah, it
does appear that Gary Sandoff he had his minions he
needed to attend to. That happens. So, John, were you

(01:17:23):
about to say.

Speaker 6 (01:17:23):
Something I was going to talk about?

Speaker 8 (01:17:27):
You know, some of this is just institutions not knowing
how to handle people, kind of what they alluded to.
I saw that in the law enforcement world had some
really good leaders. I've had some well, I've had some
really bad managers. I've had some good leaders as far
as that goes. And there's this bias that if you're
not wanting to move up immediately there's something somehow wrong

(01:17:48):
with you, and that never works out.

Speaker 7 (01:17:51):
Well. I had a buddy, I called him the rain
Man of the radio world. So he was a radio
nerd from before he.

Speaker 8 (01:17:57):
Got on the job, and he convinced the people to
put him in charge of the radio system.

Speaker 7 (01:18:03):
We ended up with like the best radio system.

Speaker 8 (01:18:05):
In the country, like it was actually designed for cops
by cops, kind of a thing. And we get a
new leader in there and he doesn't really you know,
he is enjoying doing his radio stuff and we have
this great system.

Speaker 7 (01:18:20):
Then they don't know what to do with him.

Speaker 8 (01:18:21):
It's like, hey, du we want you to do this, this,
and this, and he's not comfortable with it, and he
ends up leaving and going somewhere else. So all that
repository of information just evaporated out of there. It's now
residing in the Midwest region. And it was amazing. As
soon as he left, all of a sudden, the AVL
stopped working and basically the whole system stopped. Because there

(01:18:43):
are fields in this world that require specialized knowledge.

Speaker 7 (01:18:47):
The problem I see with a lot of people.

Speaker 8 (01:18:49):
That end up in management positions are afraid of anybody
who knows anything more than they do, and their immediate
response is not to co opt those people, use them
to advance the mission.

Speaker 7 (01:19:00):
But I have to try to get rid of them
because they're a major threat.

Speaker 8 (01:19:02):
So oftentimes we do this, We do this to ourselves
by the people that would put in charge.

Speaker 6 (01:19:08):
Well, you know, mad leaders do it to themselves. A
good leader would take would have everybody better than the
m and would leverage the piss out of them.

Speaker 3 (01:19:18):
Well. So there was a there was a small Wars
journal article, like I mean, it was probably coming up
on twenty twenty years ago. Uh, And it was titled
it was titled why it was you know, it's clickbait title,
but it was why Arabs Lose Wars, And it talked
about some of the cultural commonalities and a lot of
Arab armies that you would see and one of them

(01:19:41):
was exactly such a story.

Speaker 10 (01:19:43):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:19:43):
And it was, but it was talking about that people
treated in a lot of Arab militaries, and I've certainly
seen this in my career. They would treat knowledge. You know,
knowledge is power, but like collecting as much of it
as you have, and like you know, like John was saying,
nobody can know more than you, because then you're you're dispensable.

(01:20:06):
And one anecdote was that there was a the author
was talking about how he was working with a uh
I forget which which country was, but he was working
with an armor unit. And there was one one officer
in the in in the the local host station armor
unit who'd been to the armor school at Fort Knox
back when at Fort Knox. And so this guy's team,

(01:20:28):
the Americans team, had managed to get technical manuals TMS
for all their tanks and basically went down and handed
them mounteach to the tank crews.

Speaker 5 (01:20:36):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (01:20:36):
He said, you know, hey, here you know tank crew,
and here you go, here's your TM for your tank,
so you know how to do stuff to it. And
then like later that afternoon he spotted that that officer,
that American trained officer going down the line, going down
the line like collecting them back up. He couldn't allow
the tank crews to have their own technical manuals know

(01:20:56):
how to do stuff their own tanks, because what do
they need him for. He's indispensable because he's the only
guy knows how to do anything. And that's something that
I saw that was very very common in some militaries
that probably weren't weren't great, weren't super professional. But I
admit that I started to see that a disturbing amount,
not just in the US military, but in US society
at large, where that same kind of dysfunctional that's a

(01:21:18):
very very toxic trait. And the more that people see
success as a zero sum game, you know, whether it
be in law enforcement, military, or anywhere else in kind
of American institutions, that's something that I didn't notice twenty
years ago, and I've noticed a lot more in the
last decade or so. It's like everybody's like, I'm gonna
get mine, and I'm not really worried about kind of

(01:21:38):
the whole team, the whole effort that put that votes
really really poorly for society in general, and especially for
the preservation of institutional knowledge.

Speaker 4 (01:21:51):
I've given that article to many, many, many, probably hundreds
of military, police, intelligence officers and countries over the years
because it is dead on correct.

Speaker 1 (01:22:08):
Yeah, I remember when that one came out, and that
got passed around a lot.

Speaker 8 (01:22:16):
Again, looking at cultural stuff, we've actually started, i think,
as a culture, to develop an animosity toward expertise. Thank you, Bill,
Actually know there's this great book. It was an article
in the Atlantic. It's now a book called The Death
of Expertise. And I think part of the problem that
we have nowadays is people don't want to accept that
there is good, solid, objective knowledge outside of their area,

(01:22:39):
and that certain people might be pository repositories for that
information and useful on consulting along the way. I mean again,
we're I think almost everything we've touched on, very little
of it's technical. We have the ability to put all
this information on the network. What we don't have vers
the ability to create cultures that actually use and share
that information, discuss the how, the hows and the whys

(01:23:02):
and the forces cars that goes the closest us seeing
anything like this was back when I was drafting policies.
You'd have draft policies and people would put in the
drafts like comments and reviews, where they would be given.
You know, I think we need to change you to
this for this reason, but I'm pretty sure that the
drafts would would be the most useful thing for somebody
five years down the line.

Speaker 7 (01:23:22):
The drafts never got saved that you know.

Speaker 8 (01:23:24):
The only thing they got saved was the final policy
as far as that goes, I think there is definitely
value in stopping to think about why. And I would
say this, if you can't explain why you're making a decision,
it may not be valid. On the other hand, if
you're saying, hey, why are we doing X, and you
can go well, this, this, this, this, or and then
sometimes it's just like, well, we tried it this way,

(01:23:45):
we tried it that way, and that's the only way
that we can get this thing to work. I think
that has a certain value too, because we learned so
many of our best lessons the hard way. You know,
one thing that drives me crazy about offer safety to
let me here for a second. You know, Pierce Brooks
wrote a book in nineteen seventy five talking about the
Ten Deadly Sins.

Speaker 7 (01:24:06):
He talked about how that book was.

Speaker 8 (01:24:08):
Based on a presentation that probably went back probably into
the sixties or the fifties, and if you look at
why officers are dying in twenty twenty five, they're dying.

Speaker 7 (01:24:17):
For the exact same reasons.

Speaker 3 (01:24:19):
You know.

Speaker 8 (01:24:19):
It's like, dude, we're making the same mistakes over and
over again. You know, things like poor searches of suspects,
poor equipment, maintenance stuff like that. You know, you've got
to have the culture to maintain the knowledge, but you
also have people that are actually willing to use it
as well.

Speaker 4 (01:24:38):
Is that loss of our death of expertise? Is that
part of the larger symptom of the anti intellectualism I
think Chris mentioned earlier.

Speaker 6 (01:24:54):
I think some of it's so John To addressed one
point you said, the right action it not easy to
kind of cliche again. Uh, you know, the right action
or the right thing done for the wrong reasons or
done without understanding isn't necessarily right. It's a thing and
you have luck.

Speaker 3 (01:25:15):
But back to.

Speaker 6 (01:25:18):
You know, the bigger thing is like, how do you
build a culture that accepts the expertise and and so on.
Is there's a lot of faith that has to go
in there. And I'll speak to the nuclear side of things,
where it does work very well, and it's the entire
industry almost had to shut down twice in order for
things to get that way, and I don't know, there's

(01:25:42):
probably just way too much inertia on the military law
enforcement side of things. But it's it's it's a cultural
thing where you know it's okay too. You know, the
goal shouldn't be to be the smartest person in the room.
It should be to you know, have all the smartest
people with you to to learn from them, but also
to help you and relieve you and so on. And

(01:26:05):
in turn, by the way, you're probably going to pick
up some of that stuff rather than trying to hoard
and be the one person, be the be the only
guy in the shop that can fix the refrigerator or
the ac or something like that. So they're obviously not
going to let you go or you're gonna be the
laugh one out the door. But you know, you know, culture,
I know some of the things you have said, Chris,

(01:26:28):
and what I've heard from people talking law enforcement is
you know, kind of a fear and you know, some
aspects of this agoing in the world I'm in are
some that way, but you know, overall the industry, I mean,
it's not and it's it took kind of catastrophe to
get there.

Speaker 2 (01:26:48):
So well, and I was just gonna say, how sad
as you're saying that, I'm thinking of stuff in law enforcement,
and how sad even just the use of light, as
simple as it is, so many concepts of that are
just forgotten. And then you. Then I come by and Hey,
check this out, and oh wow, is that magic? This

(01:27:10):
is new to you? So it's mud light.

Speaker 3 (01:27:18):
So yeah, I want to this is this is my problem,
maybe the thing I'm most passionate about in the world.
And I'll shut up for a while. So and I
Death of Expertise. Incidentally, I really enjoyed the book. I'm
not a big fan of Tom Nicols politics, but in
spite of that, there's a lot of good, good meat
in that book. The UH and I anti intellectualism. What's

(01:27:40):
going on and this is going on in society at large,
and it's infecting our institutions is uh. And this is
part of my I teach a mental agility planning and
preparation skills class that's just a seminar on how the
mental approach to self defense planning, you know, risk assessment,
all that stuff. And I and I talk about how
when you're trying to empathize with cool empathy, when you're
trying empathize with people that might want to harm you,

(01:28:02):
and think like they think I'm like something you needn't understand.
And this is a very cynical view of human nature,
but I think I've earned it. Honest. The number one
predictor of human behavior is a laziness. People invariably will
choose the path of least resistance. Everything around us is
the product of laziness in a paradoxical way. You know.

(01:28:23):
Ten thousand years ago, a couple of dudes were poking
holes in the dirt with you know, sticks and dropping
individual season them, you know, and I looked at Tom,
and I'm like, Tom, this sucks. And so we took
an animal's televic bone and made a rudimentary plow and
things got easier. And then two thousand years later somebody
is like, dude, this sucks, and now we got John
Deere tractors. Well, the problem is is that that's not
restricted to just physical labor. People are intellectually lazy, all

(01:28:48):
of us, including me. If I don't, you know, it
takes a conscious effort to keep from being lazy. And
so the problem is, like the counter argument to the
death of expertise is people go, oh, you know, look
look at this or look at that, look at all
these things the experts got wrong, and humans tend to were.
Our attitudes are a pendulum. You know. That's why electorally

(01:29:10):
in American history. You know, we get eight years of
this party and then we kind of swing back over
your eight years of this party. We tend to intellectually overreact.
And so what happens is, well, the experts wrong about this.
I'm not listening to anything any experts says ever, And
I'm like, well, when you say that, when you say
it out loud that way, it sounds really stupid. That's
what people are doing. And so there's this strain of

(01:29:32):
what I call contrarianism. I actually wrote a thing in
my blog a year or two ago that contrarianism. Contrarianism
is not critical thinking. If you just take whatever the
official word from the experts or from the government, or
from whomever, from whatever institution or whatever authority, and you
just believe the opposite, that's as uncritical as you can get.

(01:29:52):
That's your So if you say, oh, people that believe
what the experts say are people? Well, if you reject
everything the experts say, you also sheep You're just a
contrarian sheeple. And so, but that is kind of where
we're at. And and so the problem is is that
with most of this stuff, yeah, experts are wrong. Sometimes
that doesn't mean all experts are wrong all the time,
and it's been coming upon all of us to figure out, uh,

(01:30:15):
you know, who's right and who's who's got information of value.
And likewise, when it comes to institution knowledge, some institutional
knowledge is wrong and stupid. Some institutional knowledge is good
and beneficial. But it takes a ton of effort, more
effort than most people, especially groups of people are willing
to put into it, uh, in order to filter through
and you know, eat the meat, spit out the boats. Uh.

(01:30:36):
And that's just that's a that's condition of the human position.
And in very small, very elite organizations and very hand
picked people like you know, uh, I think it was
Kurt was talking about, Uh, you know, Delta. You know,
you can fight that. But the larger your organization and
or the more open your organization is to just whoever,
the harder it is to kind of preserve that intellectual
rigor that says, Okay, not everything is good, not thing

(01:31:00):
it's bad. We've got to filter it. And man, that's hard.
It's hard work. But people are just lazy, and trying
to get people in largerers to do that is possibly
the hardest leadership challenge for the leader of an organization
that I can imagine.

Speaker 6 (01:31:13):
Well, Delta has a their culture is different than Big Army,
and you know their selection process. I'm Chris confirmed for it.
Doesn't that just like you know, build the culture entirely
and once you have that person, you can do.

Speaker 5 (01:31:31):
What everything needs.

Speaker 4 (01:31:33):
Okay, it has more to do with at least their
their institutional knowledge really is based more on exposure to
longevity at the smallest possible unit level.

Speaker 5 (01:31:45):
There.

Speaker 4 (01:31:46):
Their teams always have a guy who is very, very senior.
He there's a guy on that team who has been
on that team for six, seven, eight years, and then
all all the people, you know, there's five or six
people above him in terms of how long they've been
on that team. And this one guy rotates out, another

(01:32:09):
guy rotates in, and so there's there's always a replacement,
but that replacement is getting to a team that has
an unbroken chain of people who were in that room
with the you know, faces changed, but the but the
names really don't over the years.

Speaker 5 (01:32:27):
So you know, I went back eight.

Speaker 4 (01:32:30):
Years after an event that we did with them, and
guys who had not been there could talk intelligently about
some of the lessons learned from from that event. And
that was purely because the guys that were on that
team had been with the guy that was on that
team when it had happened, and that that guy had
just continued to pass it until you know he's no

(01:32:52):
longer there. It's the experiment with the monkeys, where they,
you know, they do something where a monkey gets punished
if it does something, and they slowly take a monkey
out and replace it with a new one, and then
long after all of those monkeys are gone, all the
monkeys know not to touch that thing or they're all
going to get shocked. And so their organization operates in

(01:33:13):
the same way. So you know, at the smallest tactical level,
you've got an unbroken chain of institutional knowledge and that
is unique as far as I know it and to
anywhere else in the military.

Speaker 2 (01:33:27):
So it sounds like mentorship or fellowshipping or something along
that lines. Should be a huge should be a huge factory.

Speaker 5 (01:33:34):
Very very much.

Speaker 6 (01:33:35):
So.

Speaker 4 (01:33:35):
You know, unfortunately, like I mentioned earlier, with the army,
is our own system works against it, because the Army
really believes that what makes soldiers better at their jobs
is not spending any time in that job. If I
can limit you to a year or two in a
position and then send you to another position that in

(01:33:57):
the end they think that will make you a better
soldier than if I just left you in that team
room for ten or twelve or fifteen years and you
became a you know, a true expert at your job,
which is what you know, people like me would like
to see happen.

Speaker 5 (01:34:13):
And like Chris, you know that.

Speaker 4 (01:34:15):
You know that senior enlisted rank where a guy is
just a machine gunner for an extended period of time,
that guy knows way more about machine guns than anyone else.
But the army really and the military in general, does
not believe that.

Speaker 9 (01:34:31):
To touch on a little bit of what several of
you have said, the death of expertise, that that is
a thing. But at the same time, we have to
be careful. Critical thinking skills are vital, and I think
that's a societal problem. We're not teaching critical thinking skills anymore.
You look at the education system today, and this is

(01:34:54):
my opinion, take it or leave it. We're not teaching
kids how to think. We teach kids what to think.
It's rote memorization and they are not doing problem solving.
They're not examining and using critical thought to come to
their own conclusions. Their own conclusions may be correct, they
may be incorrect, but you can look at something and

(01:35:15):
say that is not in my best interest. I know
what the expert has said, but this is in my
best interest in my opinion, so I'm going to follow
this path. We don't teach that anymore. That's a problem.
As far as the anti intellectualism, simple showing hands, I
think would be a good thing. How many of us

(01:35:35):
have said something and had peers or seniors, whether it
was jokingly or serious, looked at you and said.

Speaker 2 (01:35:42):
Shut up, nerd, especially as a thing.

Speaker 3 (01:35:49):
Shut up nerd. It's a thing.

Speaker 9 (01:35:52):
And I'll tell you I was that guy, you know,
at twenty one, twenty three years old, I was an infantryman,
and I believed this is how the infantryman lives.

Speaker 3 (01:36:01):
You know.

Speaker 9 (01:36:02):
I drank beer, I chased women, I chased fights, reading books.

Speaker 5 (01:36:07):
I know how to do that stuff.

Speaker 9 (01:36:10):
And then one day was like, hey, man, crack this book,
and the horizons opened. I was like, oh my god,
there is so much stuff here. I can be really
really dangerous because I know what I've learned by doing,
and now I know what I'm learning by reading and

(01:36:30):
envisioning based on experience. What do you know experiential learning
model there, but that is a thing. It goes from
shut up, nerd to oh my god, look what we
can do now. Yeah, but critical thinking skills are a thing,
and we need to get back to teaching people critical
thinking skills. As far as continuity goes, Kurt, you touched

(01:36:53):
on that beautifully. Continuity is not a thing of right now,
what's going on in the army is you get your
key developmental time. You need two years in an E
six squad leader position to be eligible for promotion to
E seven so on first class. So these dudes are

(01:37:16):
getting two years in a squad leader position, Well, you
KD complete, Key developmental time complete, you get rotated out.
They go to a staff job, they go to a
broadening assignment, whether it's instructor drill sergeant, recruiting, something like that,
And it doesn't matter if they were ready to be
a platoon sergeant or not. Your KD time is complete,

(01:37:39):
you move on. It's doing a disservice to the individual
and to the organization. It's going to receive that individual later.
The last thing I'm going to hit on for an now,
and then I'm going to shut up. Is the piece
on holding information and hoarding information just personal observations. Some

(01:38:00):
tend to think that's a threat. If I'm not the
smartest man in the room, that's a threat to me.
I had some pretty smart dudes tell me one time,
if you're the smartest man in the room, you're in
the wrong room. Go to another room where you're not.
I like being in rooms where people melt my face.

(01:38:21):
But you know with that my squad leader when I
took my first fire team in nineteen ninety seven, and
I was lucky to have a very good leadership through
most of my career, this dude looked at me as like,
you're a team leader. Now your job is to learn
my job and take it from me. That's the way
leadership should be. I was talking with. This is mostly

(01:38:47):
for Chris, but I was talking with a company command
element and a couple of the team sergeants on an
operation about a month month and a half ago. And
the normal time for tea chargeant now is one year
to go beyond one.

Speaker 5 (01:39:03):
Year, and that's for you know.

Speaker 4 (01:39:05):
That's the senior enlisted position at the at the tactical
element of Special Forces. So at least in theory, you
spend six or eight years becoming an expert in your
technical field of special Forces, and then you move into
leadership where hopefully you can spend another six or so
years being the senior enlisted leader. But now they've cut

(01:39:27):
it down to one year, and guys are fighting to
stay on teams past that one year, which I was
just I was shocked to hear that.

Speaker 3 (01:39:38):
Yeah, that's like you were talking Kurt about about Delta,
and you know that there would be there would be
guys you know, on teams for six, seven, eight, nine
years and and certainly back you know, there was a
time when when you know Army Special Forces, you know,
green Berets were more that way. I had the privilege

(01:40:00):
to serve on the same detachment uninterrupted for like seven years, uh,
and that was that was rare. Even then. It was
nice being a medic because they're always they're always short
medics and team's got to have a medics. So that
kept me on the team for for a long time.
But turnover has within Army Special Forces has has sped up,

(01:40:23):
both company command, team sergeant time, team leader time. That's
the year at the first I've heard of that I had.
I got a buddy in fifth group who's a team sergeant.
Uh and he got he got a he got a
full two a year. Is just absolute insanity. And the reason,
the reason, the reason for the the the the continuity
thing is so important is because if if all these

(01:40:46):
there's an Internet Internet meme and so some saut and
the wisdom of the Internet, but it's actually correct. There's
this Internet meme that says, here's how traditions work. Society
has a problem, society develops a solution to the problem.
The problem goes away enough generations pass and people don't

(01:41:07):
understand why we do this, this traditional thing that solved
our problem. So they're like, whatever, that's stupid, and they
discard the tradition and then guess what happens, The problem
comes back. That's how tradition works. And and so for
those of you that were in in Iraq in the
early days, do you guys, do you guys remember that

(01:41:27):
there was a there was always a channel basically every
battlespace in Iraq, there was always a channel that was
single channel, plain text, unencrypted. And does anybody remember that
that basically like the purpose of it was I believe
it was called I think it's it's open source now,
but it was. It was called Sheriffs net or something
like that. The point was, early in the war, we

(01:41:50):
figured out that trucks would get blown up by eights
uh and they would dump their crypto. They would dump
the encryption for the radios, and the radios couldn't talk
encrypted anybody. So you've got wounded dudes panicking in a firefight,
freaking out, shouting into a radio that doesn't work, calling
for help, and nobody can hear them. So they're like, oh, okay, cool,
We're going to have this net with this every battlespace

(01:42:10):
owner is going to monitor this frequency in plain texts
U encrypted and its sole purpose is to be like,
help me, help me, we're being ambushed. We're right here,
send the QRF right And that saved a lot of
lives over many, many years in Iraq. Well, in twenty ten,
I was in Iraq and we were doing this. We
were doing a unique mission where we were operating in

(01:42:33):
civilian clothing, civilian vehicles, and we were going out in
very very small elements, like we were going out like
five man teams and two civilian vehicles. So when we
hit the ground. As we were getting spun up, we
were around to every battlespace owner in Bagdad, every different
unit that owned the territory and was going to send
out qrs, and like greeted them face to face. You know, Hi,
I'm Chris. This is our call sign. If you ever

(01:42:54):
hear me call for you. This who I am, Like,
I want you to understand I'm a flesh and blood person,
so please come help me if I need it, because
five days dues in two Citian vehicles, there's not a
lot of combat power if we find ourselves in a
really big fight. And we wanted to confirm their freaks,
confirm their phone numbers, confirm all the calms so that
we could reach out to them. And then we're like, hey,
you guys are monitoring Sheriff's net on this freak right,

(01:43:15):
And literally ninety percent of the battle space owners seven
years into the Iraq War were like, what, No, why
would we monitor that? Like anybody could hear you talk?
That's stupid. And in seven years from like developing this
procedure to make sure that units who'd been blown up
really bad and the radios didn't work could reach out

(01:43:36):
in plain text and just ask for help and give
a location. We learned that the hard way through blood.
Within the same war, things had slowed down enough and
we'd had enough turnover that like, we had just forgotten
that tradition. And if a new war started up tomorrow,
I guarantee you that it would it would take multiple
American bodies for us to reinvent that. And that's why

(01:43:57):
lack of continuity leads to dead soldiers, leads to dead cops,
and that's why I think leaders need to get serious
about solving this problem, and I hope they do. But anyway,
that was my last worst story about where I've seen
a lack of institutional knowledge, where nobody was still around
who understood why we did this thing, and so they
just you know, took the post a note, waded up

(01:44:19):
to it in the trash, saw it in the archive files,
and just deleted it. And institutional knowledge, a lack of it,
a loss of it gets people killed.

Speaker 6 (01:44:27):
It's I don't want to say I appreciate the story, Chris,
And the other part about that is I can't try.
I didn't do any of that shit, and it's it's
a problem everywhere. But what mechanisms. Do you guys have
the greater group too? What do you do to try

(01:44:51):
to carry you know, and impart that knowledge with the
high turnover or with the short stays and so on? Like,
how do you guys, what's the what's the fix?

Speaker 1 (01:45:00):
Is?

Speaker 3 (01:45:01):
Is there? You know?

Speaker 6 (01:45:01):
I know, you know, there's you know, take somebody in
your wing. There's mentorship and stuff like that. But is
there any other you know, is it is it so
big and so much in inter store with the institution
that it's just kind of hosed or are there things
that can be done? And before he gets answered, I'll say,
I want to go back to the chat GPT thing.

(01:45:24):
You know where where I'm at right now, we have
a lot of turnover. One of the things I've been
doing is using email threads and chat GPT to kind
of summarize and you know, make a little you know,
I can this is some of the stuff I had
to have kind of kind of kind of private, so
to speak, or siloed off the center Internet. But you know,

(01:45:48):
technology when used properly, h can you know? I'm able
to use it very well to archive conversations, you know,
go to like search all my emails with this person
or anything where this person said and give me a
give me a summary, or give me an indexed PDF,

(01:46:10):
and it's been amazing. And then I can take that
document and search it as needed.

Speaker 3 (01:46:16):
To pull up.

Speaker 6 (01:46:17):
But uh, you know, what do you what do you
guys do to to fight that with what you can?

Speaker 1 (01:46:25):
So one of the things I did before I retired
was I dumped everything I had on my drive at
work that was related to firearms training and field training
great credit, anunther folder on the organization's drive, and like,
here is all the stuff I have NERD collected for
the last several years. Now, I have no idea if

(01:46:45):
it stayed. It was in the drives for those programs,
but it was given to them. The other thing I
saw and did was take the guys that were coming
up that we knew were going to be the next
informal leaders, right, and like, hey, here's how the programs
you're coming here, you work in, came.

Speaker 6 (01:47:04):
To be where they are.

Speaker 1 (01:47:06):
Even if you don't like where we're at and you're
gonna you should be changing stuff when you take over.
Here's how we got to where we got all right,
So at least understand when you're making the decision to
go you know X or Y. Why we were sitting
where we were sitting when you had to make that decision.

Speaker 7 (01:47:26):
I'm I'm lefting you a couple of things.

Speaker 8 (01:47:28):
First off, Chris, that whole process that you described was
what a lot of my career was like here in
Mississippi because we spanned like eleven counties. So I always
made it a point, uh to go buy the local
sheriff's office and say, hello, hey, this is me when
I call for help. Is this is this radio frequency
still good for you guys? That sort of thing. So

(01:47:48):
I was really amused with just how much parallel there
was with that. Moving to Tom's question, probably the best
handling I ever saw of that was early.

Speaker 7 (01:47:57):
In my career.

Speaker 8 (01:47:58):
I had a great boss, and he was one of
these people. He had been a pretty much the same
location for about thirty years. He had no desire to
move beyond kind of like that first level of field supervision.
But when you came to work for him, you got
in the truck with him and you wrote around and
he started talking and he had what was probably three

(01:48:18):
pages of like single spaced information to discuss with you.
So you know, historic cases, you know where if we
had drownings in the past, if you have an incident here,
this is where we put the helicopter and it was
literally you had to spend like I think, like a
full week to get through the three pages of information.

(01:48:39):
So something as simple as again hating it down, is
at least a very reasonable start to that information. And
what just terrifies me is that I'm fairly sure that
when he retired that that list and all that knowledge
just went away, because you know, we assume that we've
always known this. There's no there's no reason to stop
and think that the reason we do know all this

(01:49:01):
is because it was preserved. So I mean, just writing
it down. I know that's very twentieth century when it
comes to these kind of things, But just writing it
down and you know, having occasional discussions about it, seems
to be a pretty good start.

Speaker 2 (01:49:16):
That's absolutely thing.

Speaker 9 (01:49:18):
Oh sorry, Matt, no, no, no, go ahead. That's absolutely a
thing the army that has multiple, multiple.

Speaker 5 (01:49:29):
Levels and procedures for that.

Speaker 9 (01:49:30):
You've got the Center for Army Lessons Learned out of
I think Kurt can probably confirm or deny it. I
think it's out of living worth and the Center for
army lessons learned. They they serve as a repository of
information where they pull stuff from the field from the

(01:49:51):
army writ large and they will write papers. They will
write all kinds of stuff on lessons learned. When you
get to higher echelon, say division level elements, core level elements,
so on and so forth, you've got a KMO Knowledge
Management officer and he is some big brain major who's

(01:50:11):
gone through a big brain school and typically a big
brain major at least at the division element, and his
job is to service a repository of information for the
organization with after action reviews, with call center farming, lessons

(01:50:32):
learned documents, with all this stuff, and SOP refinement is
a thing you take your ARS. A smart organization will
learn lessons through the AR process, and your SOPs are living,
breathing documents. If you're learning lessons, well that didn't work
or this worked great, you codify that in your SOP.

(01:50:57):
Or if you figure out something that didn't work, you
try to figure out a better way and codify the
better way in the s OP. These are all processes, procedures,
so on and so forth, And there are people who
are allegedly responsible for doing that. Some are better than others,
but that is an army process. I don't know if

(01:51:18):
it exists in law enforcement. I know some places in
corporate America do it, some better than others.

Speaker 6 (01:51:26):
So in you know, in my space, for a procedure
to work in a nuclear power plant, if there's been
an incident or anything that's been significant or at a step,
I'm sorry, what was it?

Speaker 2 (01:51:40):
Sure, noble?

Speaker 6 (01:51:41):
Wow? Yeah, through my island, a step that's critical, it'll
it'll reference some kind of a corrective action paper and
in that procedure for that biggler process. Yes, so you're refueling,
you know, if there's you know, there's a there's a

(01:52:02):
big engineer left to remove the head associated with that,
and and something happened to say somebody died because they
got hit, there would be a step and it would
literally list all the documents relevant to this step, why
this step is important. Uh, and it lives there forever.
So you know, it might suck because your step is
like four or five pages long, full pages with you know,

(01:52:25):
stuff in it, but you know, the history is there
forever until there's a better way and that thing that
lesson learn no longer applies.

Speaker 2 (01:52:36):
And for me the manner of passing down obviously mentorship
and being there. But it's primary and secondary, it's podcasts,
it's articles compiling this so stuff that's been lost won't
be lost anymore.

Speaker 6 (01:52:54):
Well, if you go to the forum, which I haven't checked,
if I've probably had, I did that, I should check
my log in the last have actually accessed the forum
on my devices. But but that is actually uh kind
of you know where I know where I first ran
across doc was pistol forum and then for carbing dot net,
where I know the convenience isn't there anymore because Tapa

(01:53:16):
talk is no longer free and I don't want to
pay for it. Uh, and there, but there's no good
way to access the forum unless you're a computer, and
nobody uses a computer on the shitter, So it's Facebook.

Speaker 2 (01:53:28):
Actually, if the primary and secondary forum is rather phone friendly,
I would know because.

Speaker 6 (01:53:34):
I get along. But but no, that that's where a
good snippet and go check it out, check out all
the different stickies and stuff like that, because those, you know,
those are the for each sub forum. That's how that's
how that is controlled. So there's a plug mat.

Speaker 2 (01:53:54):
Forum.

Speaker 4 (01:53:56):
I did a couple of things to address different areas
of the one thing, Mike, the written SOPs. I don't
know what it was like in the infantry. I left
the infantry a long, long, long, long time ago. But
written SOPs in special Forces are Originally when I got
there in the eighties were very common. By the nineties,

(01:54:20):
they were pretty much a thing of the past. Probably
by the mid nineties is when you stop seeing written
SOPs at the detachment level. At higher levels they had them,
but at the tactic level really did not. One of
the things I did one was mentorship of the people
that I was responsible for. I did make a really

(01:54:44):
big effort to always explain the whyse that went along
with the howse to the people I was responsible for,
and especially as the guys that were more senior. As
I moved up the guys that were more senior under
me is I took a a much larger effort to
make sure they understood why we were doing things and

(01:55:05):
how previous decisions had led us to that that course
of action. In those circumstances, I had a sheet for
new guys.

Speaker 5 (01:55:16):
Wasn't really an s op, but it was.

Speaker 4 (01:55:18):
As people would come to my team A two to
three paid sheet, you know, time frame dependent of just
some things that were different because we had a school
that trained guys at the initial skills before they were assigned.
But some of the things that we did differed procedurally

(01:55:39):
pretty greatly from what they learned in school, and so,
you know, I detailed those things in those sheets.

Speaker 5 (01:55:45):
So at least their first day when they.

Speaker 4 (01:55:46):
Went out with us to a training event, wasn't you know,
they weren't completely lost for what they were going to see.
And then the other thing was writing down AARs. We
were really good about conducting formal AARs at the company
level for everything that we did, for every operation, and

(01:56:08):
if a detachment did something, then you know the formal AAR.

Speaker 5 (01:56:13):
We would try to get as many.

Speaker 4 (01:56:14):
People involved in that that weren't involved in the operation
so they could still sit through the AAR. The company
captured all that data, and what became of it, I
don't know, even when I moved up within company leadership,
I don't know what became of the data after the
AR was over, where it got sent to and what

(01:56:34):
they did with it. What I did was I would
summarize every AR afterwards. And I started doing this when
I first got to the unit in the nineties, I
would summarize every AR and then I just started a
basic sync matrix that eventually moved over to an Excel
spreadsheet with the date of the AAR and then the

(01:56:55):
major subjects that were covered, and then I just kept
that going along so I could look back. And that
was something I included in my summaries that Hey, just
like the operation five months ago, and eleven months ago
and fourteen months ago, we had another issue with personal
accountability when we were departing, or you know, this item

(01:57:17):
of equipment has now been lost five times on operations,
so you know, clearly there's a trend that we're not
looking for this thing, you know, before we leave, or
we're not doing this because it would just you know,
just put an X in the box if it was
discussed in the AR, and then so when the next
one I could look at it and say, oh, yeah,
that that subject has been discussed a lot and we

(01:57:38):
have a continual problem with it, and then I would
pass those out to individuals into the different attachments. The
issue is is when I left. I'm fairly certain when
I left, you know, all of that stopped. I don't
know in fact, I'm certain that no one continued to
do that.

Speaker 6 (01:57:59):
How do you connect like you know and ours in
the you know, the after action process. How do you
connect you know, so you're back at that role. How
do you connect you know, five years of operational experience
to your doing another planning emission? Do you do you
go back and reference your paf ars and have like
a formal in i RO a kickoff meeting. If you

(01:58:22):
have a kickoff meeting where you're reviewed path ars and
identify what might apply here ahead of time or is
there anything for that to work.

Speaker 4 (01:58:31):
We did two things annually, usually over Christmas break because
the Army has half day, which is usually ended up
being twelve hours on twelve hours off. But we would
gather the leaders together at our unit and talk about
one of the things that we had done over the year,
lessons learned from those different things, and how we could

(01:58:53):
incorporate those into future operations, but also into future training,
because one of the things is like those lessons learned
have to be become part of your training just knowing
that they occurred.

Speaker 5 (01:59:06):
If you don't train to.

Speaker 4 (01:59:08):
Do them repeatedly, you know you're not going to remember
them long term.

Speaker 6 (01:59:12):
Yes, Like a big thing I have in my space
is you can write down a list of ship that
went wrong, a list of things you did well. How
do you go learner back? But you actually have to
learn the lessons? How do they how do you implement them?
Have they made changes?

Speaker 4 (01:59:28):
You know?

Speaker 6 (01:59:29):
Atta boys are okay? Audibles you need because you need
you know, if somebody who did something well, you need
to remind them they did well because you want to
do it again. If something didn't go well, how do
you document that you're going to take any kind of
action to not do it again?

Speaker 5 (01:59:46):
And put it put it into a training event.

Speaker 4 (01:59:48):
Find find a way to replicate a scenario that's going
to lead you to the correct conclusion. Put that into
a training event so that the next time a elements
sees it, they see it in the shoot house or
they see it in the field in the training event,
and so they're they're led to make the right decision
by the way the event is scripted.

Speaker 6 (02:00:10):
So it's actually kind of funny. I'm gonna I'm going
to make a note of that in a minute. One
of the things that I don't do and and have
been trying to, you know, really on a fucking soapbox
at times of how do we learn it? And this
is something to shoot an obvious I'm just gonna set
up a quarterly meeting to force it and go over stuff.

Speaker 3 (02:00:34):
Make it training one.

Speaker 6 (02:00:35):
Yeah, we don't necessarily do that, but we do now.

Speaker 4 (02:00:39):
Yeah, our tempo was pretty severe to where we getting
people together over Christmas holiday was pretty easy because the
Army makes a pretty big effort to make sure that
everybody's home for it when they can, but at other
times the year really was impossible. The other thing we
did at those meetings is, besides discussing what happened in

(02:01:00):
the past and how we could implement that into training,
was things we were likely to face in the future,
and then how how can we leverage what we already
know to prepare for upcoming missions that haven't yet been
given to us. And that helped us out every single
year that we did it. It helped because invariably, you know,
somebody else would reach the same conclusion that we did,

(02:01:22):
that we have this set of skills that could also
apply to this other function that no one is thought
to task us with yet.

Speaker 5 (02:01:30):
And you know, if the.

Speaker 4 (02:01:32):
Eight or twelve of us sitting together we're smart enough
to think of it, then probably one or two other
people sitting together are going to be smart enough to
think of it at some point in the near future.

Speaker 5 (02:01:41):
So you know, both of those things.

Speaker 4 (02:01:43):
Adding lessons learned to training absolutely is critical for them
to stick. And then being being able to anticipate, you know,
by by what your capabilities are and the things that
you already do.

Speaker 5 (02:01:56):
How how else can you apply those things?

Speaker 2 (02:02:00):
You know, it's the and the more you're describing this, Kurt,
the more I'm thinking this can completely apply to law
enforcement period, the after action reports, the training of the
lessons learned. These are aspects that yeah, if you're a cop,
if you're not listening this and going, yeah, we should
be doing this, you should be doing this.

Speaker 5 (02:02:22):
I apply job.

Speaker 2 (02:02:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:02:25):
So it's actually also a thing you know, when you
get in manufacturing and you know Lean six segment and
all that stuff, where I shouldn't have had the question
I have when I relate everything together like that, But
it applies everywhere. And so I worked in the kitchen

(02:02:47):
for a couple of years in high school and just
you know, Season four of The Bear was just released
and I'm in the middle of I get where I
work there, But like seeing some of the stuff going
on there and it's like, yeah, that's fresh on the
tread chef it it it applies. You know, it does
apply everywhere.

Speaker 7 (02:03:06):
It should.

Speaker 8 (02:03:07):
But American law enforcement has this horrible insular nature where
something has to happen here for it to matter. It
doesn't matter that over the county over that it happened right,
or that it's happened five times around the country.

Speaker 7 (02:03:22):
It has to happen for here to becount.

Speaker 4 (02:03:25):
You know.

Speaker 8 (02:03:25):
My favorite example about that, and I think I can
I can share this now is Memphis PD went out
and bought a whole bunch of rifles. This is early
two thousands, trying to get the patrol rifle program stood up.

Speaker 6 (02:03:36):
At the time.

Speaker 8 (02:03:37):
You know, bush Masters, eotech lights, all the slings on them,
training program, all ready to go there in the vault,
ready to go. They've got a lesson plan, all this
stuff ready to go, but the higher ups will not
sign off on the patrol rifle. They get into a
big pursuit. Fortunately nobody dies. If I recall right, it

(02:03:57):
was with a bunch of Asian gang members, the sling
in Aks, and they shoot up a bunch of patrol
cars and then all of a sudden, guess what gets
approved like the next week.

Speaker 3 (02:04:08):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:04:08):
So, while it should apply in American law enforcement, we
had this ridiculous nature that unless it happens here, right,
it doesn't count. And we have this complete inability to
learn any lesson from the past. I mean, I hate
to say anything about nice about WIMS, but you know,
galehouse Weim and I had done a series of episodes

(02:04:30):
were on his podcast talking about major law enforcement events
in America, and the number of those events that people
have heard of is almost non existent. You know people
you know Doc Roberts mentioned New Hall. I mean, how
many cops work in the street right now? Know what
New Hall is was? Why it's significant Miami. You know,

(02:04:50):
unless it happened in this jurisdiction in the last three years, nobody,
it just does not exist. So while it should matter
to law enforce the sad reality is that it does not.
And if you're one of those people that says, hey,
this has happened over here, this has happened over here,
you just quickly get the label of not just nerd,
but like a nerd Cassandra, which is probably arguably way

(02:05:13):
worse than just being in there.

Speaker 6 (02:05:17):
So a back to you know, nuclear uh there I've been.
I've supported several emergent incidents and in nuclear space if
if something happened, there's you know, the operating feet of
plants that if something major happens. I've been involved in

(02:05:40):
an incident where, you know, within six hours, all the
operators of all the active plants were on a conference
call to discuss the event. You know, you know one
of those meetings where the interros take half an hour
and you know, the the actual thing like, hey, this
happened this, you know, these are the list of reasons
why we think they are you know, throwing it out there.

(02:06:03):
Next meeting will occur in twelve hours kind of thing.
And you know everybody that's doing that thing is is
keyed in. You know, I understand, you know, law enforcement,
even military. It's you know, there's way too many for
that to be a thing. But you know that's that's
that's where newsletters, conferences and stuff like that come into play.

(02:06:26):
And that's going back to like you know, range messages
are like I don't do any of the shooting. I
listened to the you know, the the year to year
kind of stuff, because that's where you know where the
juice is at, even if it doesn't necessarily apply to you.
But that's the that's the change in the evolution.

Speaker 2 (02:06:46):
Cool. We're at two hours almost seven minutes.

Speaker 1 (02:06:57):
Does that six more hours to go?

Speaker 2 (02:07:00):
Six more hours to go? Open up those rock stars.
I think we've covered some really really really cool information,
but we don't need to stop now. Is there something
you guys want to continue talking about or is there
an idea concept? Because I could see this being a

(02:07:22):
natural break. But if there's more, let's go to Tom's
looking side to side. He's a wondering, he's thinking.

Speaker 6 (02:07:30):
So the only thing like I being immersed in AI
and you know, with the different things that I'm doing now,
I think it's probably worthy of a different kind of
off the off the wall topic of you know, AI
slash leveraging technology to do good things and and Matt,

(02:07:51):
I would want to do that with an outline, but uh,
just keep it a little more on focus.

Speaker 10 (02:07:58):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (02:07:58):
I know.

Speaker 6 (02:08:00):
This one started deeply rooting ballistics because you had doc
and that's what you talk about, and it went I
think the right direction. I I I feel uh and
and I know Chris hasn't spoken a lot, and he
and I have chatted back and forth on some stuff
I'd like to hear. I think there's more, you know,
more with him when he's not you a baseball game

(02:08:21):
or something.

Speaker 2 (02:08:22):
Well, Chris is actually also going to be in season
five of The Bear.

Speaker 6 (02:08:28):
He's the.

Speaker 2 (02:08:30):
He's the brother that no one knew about.

Speaker 8 (02:08:33):
I just want to thank Chris on his dramatic lighting
that he's managed to pull off. I mean, that's like
Hollywood level lurking there in the shadows going on.

Speaker 6 (02:08:42):
Man, we're we're getting ready for a truck for a
rant filmed in a truck.

Speaker 3 (02:08:48):
Yeah, yeah, my ring lights inside. I don't know how
to cook it up to the figurette lighter of my
uh my explorer. So what are you gonna do? Yeah? Yeah, Tom,
Tom and I get some stuff we want to talk about.
I got to I've got like notes all over the
place on that. Now. I think this has been really good.
And to answer Tom's questions succinctly and briefly, I think everybody,

(02:09:10):
everybody took a stab at it, and Kurt, you would
be pleased to know that one of the last things
I did before I left my moda to go be an
instructor at Swick in twenty fifteen twenty sixteen was we
actually we actually dusted off our team SOPs and re
basically polished them up and refined them, and so we
still had we still had team teamsops. The problem is

(02:09:33):
is that without the context, without having an appendix to
your SOP, that is the worst stories that led to
the SOPs being the way that they are. You know,
a few generations of guys is going to look at
that and be like, that's stupid whatever, and you know, delete.
But I will say this, has anybody here ever? Has
anybody here read the book The Generals by Thomas Ricks
And it's about the history of generalship in the US military,

(02:09:56):
and I highly recommend it. But he had a really
good quote that I like, and he says that it's
often said that amateur has talk tactics and experts talk logistics,
and he says, but really the next level is talking
about personnel policy. And he gets into like from World
War Two to Korea to Vietnam, like the different personnel
policies as far as rotation and the first order, second order,

(02:10:19):
and third order effects that those personnel policies had So
what we can do at our level is obviously mentorship,
capturing stuff in such a way, and applying it practically
to our training programs. All that stuff is true, but
I will say this, at the end of the day,
institutions and the people that control personnel management of those
institutions have to do better with personnel policies that make sense,

(02:10:45):
and personnel policies that support retention of positive institutional knowledge
and anything anything else is going to be restricted to
the sound of your voice and the reaching your own
and it's not going to have lasting long term effects.
Like you've got any better at the strategic levels of

(02:11:06):
whatever institution we're talking about, how do we make that happen?
Out it? But that's that's what's going to happen. So
that's my final thoughts on how to how do we
fix it?

Speaker 2 (02:11:14):
Great thoughts, Well, if no one has another topic or
a direction, we can call it a night. Eric.

Speaker 1 (02:11:23):
Now, I think we're good at this point on it
other than just collect the info and dissemin eight, share it, right, yeah,
push it to the next generation.

Speaker 2 (02:11:32):
Yeah, because if we don't do it, it will, right.
So with that in mind, I'm going to say my
absolute favorite thing to say, and that is make sure
you are following now, make sure you are supporting those
sources that you found to be beneficial. We had an
awesome two hour discussion with these guys. They're gonna share

(02:11:53):
where you can find them. If you like what they
had to say, make sure you're giving them a follow.
If they're sharing stuff that you appreciate that's helped you
understand something, better share it. Those shares go a long
way clearly on YouTube. Yeah, the fact that there are
firearms behind me, we already have some strikes. I wouldn't

(02:12:14):
be surprised if this gets demonetized or anything like that
in the near future. Those likes, those shares really really
help and that Yeah, that goes with everything primary. Secondary,
that goes with when Eric shares an article or anyone
any of these guys share something. If you like it,
make sure you're sharing it, and it doesn't matter who
the source is. Just share those good sources and then
we'll go with final thoughts and plugs.

Speaker 1 (02:12:38):
Eric, we've got to do a better job pushing the
info out right. Military's got more formalized structure's law enforcement
with eighteen thousand agencies is really going to struggle at
it and has to find a way to at least
start regionally. Cougar Mountain Solutions is my company, and the
editor over to americancop dot com.

Speaker 2 (02:13:01):
And I'm guessing you got the text from me earlier.
Was it last week or this week?

Speaker 3 (02:13:07):
It was?

Speaker 2 (02:13:07):
I sent a text to you and another person?

Speaker 10 (02:13:09):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (02:13:10):
I got it?

Speaker 1 (02:13:11):
Okay, thank you, Mike.

Speaker 9 (02:13:15):
I agree with Eric one hundred percent. Compile the information,
refine the information, share it with somebody, share.

Speaker 5 (02:13:23):
It with everybody.

Speaker 9 (02:13:26):
Information is key, and when we lose the information, we're
all lost. Cam Break Consulting Services. My company website is
Kingbreak dot us. You can find me on Instagram Mike
dot lewis five ft six and Facebook is Cambreak Consulting.

Speaker 5 (02:13:45):
Cool Kurt uh Yeah, concur one hundred percent.

Speaker 4 (02:13:52):
All of my social media stuff is private for my
friends and family, so you won't be able to find
me there.

Speaker 2 (02:13:57):
So screw you.

Speaker 5 (02:13:58):
At support. Support the people who give you good information
like primary and secondary.

Speaker 2 (02:14:04):
Thanks John.

Speaker 8 (02:14:10):
Closing thought is, guys, there's a difference between knowledge and wisdom.
In twenty twenty five, we have access to almost immediate
access to almost any fact in the world just because
there's that information out there. There are still people who
know more than you, that actually have wisdom. There's a
great joke that there's differing knowledge and wisdom. You know,

(02:14:31):
knowledge is knowing that tomato is a fruit, but it
does not going a fruit salad. And I think you
can expand that a lot more broadly. So you know, again,
it's not just enough to know a fact here or there.
You have to be able to kind of weave that
into a cohesive narrative to actually make this stuff work
for you. The business side is a two Pillars training
on Facebook at two Pillars Training. I have a really

(02:14:53):
shitty website that I still need to get revamped. Classes
around the country. Come see me in New Orleans and
July indoor range that kind of thing. Uh, speaking of
like bringing back old stuff, he remembers the tack man target.
That was the target that's been around since the nineties.
Everybody like knows this guy. Three D plastic shell. They
went out of production a couple of years ago. So

(02:15:15):
earlier this year, I Dreve went to Canada bought the
molds off the dude. So if you ever wanted your
attack man target of your own, Uh, they should be
starting to trickle out later this year, possibly as early
as July. And there is a Facebook page for two
Pillars targets in case you get really bored and uh
uh need that sort.

Speaker 3 (02:15:36):
Of thing.

Speaker 2 (02:15:40):
That's interesting and cool and you can buy him and
put them on your hangars. And yeah, Chris.

Speaker 3 (02:15:51):
Yep so from from the Shadows, I don't I don't
have any anything to add other than this, gentlemen, it
was it was a privilege to be among you great stuff,
you know, learn something always. Uh So, I'm Chris Czeiper
from citizens Spence Research. You know, we we do traveling
training across the country. Uh And you can check us
out at Citizenspenceresearch dot com. John, you need to hit

(02:16:11):
up Melody. She did our website and it's actually pretty good,
so check her out. Uh And uh so Citizenspenceresearch dot com.
You canet u up on Instagram or Facebook as well.
I have I have my own personal blog where I
write about not just gun stuff, but you know, military history, theology, philosophy,
being a dad, you name it. That's called amplified being

(02:16:32):
dot com. Uh. Also, if you want, uh, if you
find me on Facebook and don't like my takes on
current events, you can send me a disjointed rambling personal
messages lecturing me on uh you know, the history of
the Middle East, because I don't know anything about it.
It's been going on a lot lately, partly thanks to you, Matt,
and uh so thanks for having me on after I'm

(02:16:55):
you know, political, you know, I'm I'm radioactive. But anyway, yeah,
so you can find me in all those places and
it's been real pleasures.

Speaker 2 (02:17:03):
Only well, the and the fact that you're radioactive. That's
why I had Tom on, as he knows about this stuff.

Speaker 6 (02:17:10):
He's just using you for your clicks.

Speaker 2 (02:17:11):
Chris, yes, and I yeah, come, I really.

Speaker 6 (02:17:19):
Enjoyed a conversation. It's there's a lot of premier and
secondary topics that I have opinions on. I don't necessarily
feel I have an earned opinion given a lot of
people's view on civilians and not doing anything and some
of the other stuff. This is one where I feel

(02:17:40):
there's a lot of overlap. I was personally, I took
notes on my phone, personally able to take some good
and we'll be implementing stuff that will impact dozens of people.
So thank you, Kurt. And it's I feel mostly ashamed.
It should have been blinding blindingly obvious. But something is
simple as a just a fucking quarterly half hour training

(02:18:02):
thing to do something, it should have it was right
there in front of me. If it was snake, it
a bit me or whatever. But the other thing is
I think that it doesn't solve all the world's problems.
But I've been you know, over the last couple of months,
it's been increasing is you know, people talking to people

(02:18:26):
talking about stuff every not saying every problem here would
have been solved if people would have communicated and and whatnot.
But you know, in a world of texts and memes
and ship like that, talk to people. Yeah, it's amazing
what can happen.

Speaker 3 (02:18:41):
Go on to.

Speaker 6 (02:18:42):
Podcast watch podcasts. Conversations are yeah, especially kind of you
know stuff like this where you can get a lot
of different people they're priceless agree.

Speaker 2 (02:18:55):
Yeah, I get that tone means a lot. We could
we can read it and put our own tone on there,
which wasn't intended well.

Speaker 6 (02:19:02):
And and that's actually you know, Matt, going back to
you and I, uh and any of my involvement in
V and S was you know, we had some some bickering,
apparent bickering until we met in person and you know,
actually talking, it's like, well, fuck, he's really tall, and
uh we agree, I guess I am we you know

(02:19:23):
we we we you know, I know. I. It's very
easy to apply these to make your own battles and
context and tone where it's not there.

Speaker 2 (02:19:33):
So heck yeah, heck yeah. Thanks to the to the panel,
thank you to the listener or the viewer. These specific
types of discussions are my favorite. We can talk about
the contents of my wall behind me, and sure that
can be fun, but to talk about these types of topics,

(02:19:54):
for me, this is valuable because the information about the guns, backpacks,
plate care, barriers, you name it, helmets in a year,
in two years, it's not going to be that important.
This is this is this is lasting, this is human.
So these are my favorites. Unfortunately, that being said, these

(02:20:17):
are also not as popular. But I don't do it
for the despite what Chris thinks, I don't just do
this for the clicks. I do kind of like what
Tom was talking about, how do you pass things on
I do a podcast. I try to compile information, I
find a topic, and I find the right people to

(02:20:37):
talk to talk to to address these things. And I
surround myself with people smarter than me, and I get
to pick their brain, and I get to learn, and
I get to improve, and I get to pass it
all on to you, the listener of the viewer, and
I love it. So with that in mind, big thank
you to our sponsors that help this happen. Lucky Gunner,

(02:21:00):
Filster Walter, also our Patreon subscribers. If you want to
help support the network, go to Patreon dot com slash
Primary and Secondary. From there you can help support the network.
If you don't want to go through Patreon, if you
go to Primary and Secondary dot com slash forum, there
is a banner that says network support. Basically, you have
the same outline on there as well. If you want

(02:21:21):
to support this when I say support this monthly dollar
five dollars, seven hundred dollars, one thousand dollars, it's up
to you. But all of that pays for the time,
the energy, the efforts, the software, the hosting, all this
stuff behind Primary and Secondary. Unfortunately, right now, also with
what is called the Trump slump, there's a lot of

(02:21:46):
sales of gun and gun related things have gone down.
Advertising money has gone down. We've all most of us
have been affected by this. We all see this. Don't
be surprised if we have an episode about this in
the very near future. But this might be free. Access
to this kind of stuff is free, but ultimately it
does cost to produce this, So bear that in mind.

(02:22:09):
If you do appreciate what's done here, try to support
in one of those methods. If you can't do that,
make sure you're liking, make sure you're sharing, and make
sure you're subscribed. I think that's pretty much it. I
do have an episode scheduled for next week. We're going
to be talking with Slip two thousand, early two thousands.
I remember Pat Rogers talking about Slip two thousand. I

(02:22:31):
tried it out. That is my choice of weapons Loop.
There can be all kinds of great stuff out there,
That's the one I prefer. Eric, you're going to say
something now.

Speaker 1 (02:22:40):
They were local to me and before we ball moved,
and when I would order, they would just drop it
off on my front porch. In charge of shipping, they
dropped it off on their way home. They great guys
to deal with.

Speaker 2 (02:22:50):
Yeah, and so again next week, I think it's Tuesday,
and I don't have my panel completely set yet, so
if you're listening and you happen to have been a panelist,
or we happen to be connected some way, like Eric,
let me know an all three on there. We already
have a tribologist who's going to be on.

Speaker 6 (02:23:07):
Who do you have for that one?

Speaker 2 (02:23:09):
Ashton? Okay, yeah, I.

Speaker 6 (02:23:12):
Know that that'll be good. It's been a while. He
needs been a little bit about oil and Greece.

Speaker 2 (02:23:18):
Well, and we had that episode where he was on
with Cherry Bombs and that was very interesting. And now
we're going to be on with with Slip and for me,
the cool thing is I have a lot more experience
with Slip and so.

Speaker 6 (02:23:33):
And this is an honest I don't wanted to and
I apologize of Cherry Bomb and that guy did offer
I apologies. Don't recall his name, uh offered up his time.
I think he actually did two episodes a lot of times.
So on are they still in business?

Speaker 2 (02:23:47):
I do not know, Okay, And I'm sure someone right
now is googling very quickly.

Speaker 6 (02:23:52):
Somebody I can do that for it, and I don't
care it's not as quick.

Speaker 3 (02:23:56):
But yeah, the.

Speaker 6 (02:23:58):
Point there is, you know, unfair, fair, pre okay, unfair
or fair you know, pre g Watts, you know, slipped
a company that existed before. So that's a that that's
a that's it. That's it. That's a big thing.

Speaker 3 (02:24:17):
I know.

Speaker 2 (02:24:18):
They have a lot of.

Speaker 6 (02:24:20):
You know, contracts and different codes and ship on their products,
so they're they're good products. I have some downstairs. It's
one of the things I use. I get more of
a different product for free, so use that. But it's
the same principle.

Speaker 2 (02:24:36):
Yeah, yeah, and so yeah, that's that's next week. So yeah,
if you want to jump on reach out to me.
I can thank you already sent it to me. I
probably already did, kind of like this one that you
didn't necessarily say you wanted to be on that You're going,
You're going to be here.

Speaker 6 (02:24:52):
I'm stuck. It was so I first world problems. I
spent a couple of weeks in Brazil, and then I
was home for a couple of days, but I was
sick as hell, and then I had to go to France,
and then I was able to take some personal time
and go to Spain for a weekend and then back
and then back to France, and then I came back
was home for less than twenty four hours. I did laundery,
and I had to go to Charlotte all well, I

(02:25:17):
hate myself in free time.

Speaker 2 (02:25:19):
Yeah next week I am Homer, Yeah next week. I
think that's pretty much it. But again, yeah, these are
I love these conceptual topics and to talk about this
stuff because it's it really doesn't have an expiration date

(02:25:40):
and it's it's and we could have we could repeat
this topic and have a completely different panel, similar conclusions,
but with also some very cool insights. So that's pretty
much it. I think I'm going to kill the feed now,
except I'm going to kill the feed. YouTube is gonna stop.

Speaker 11 (02:25:59):
This is going to continue, though, so there, so I
guess I will hit and stream now we're gonna keep
talking about YouTube's.

Speaker 2 (02:26:09):
Over, so have a good one. We'll talk to you
later and all that other stuff.

Speaker 6 (02:26:17):
H
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