 incubators. So I present to you Mr. Jim Vassilopoulos. You want this? A number of years ago my wife and I on a warm summer day decided to take our kids to our church picnic. We thought let's get some good Greek food, let's let the kids burn off some steam, some energy, and have a good time. So we arrived there, we filled our faces with cotton candy, and we got in the smelly bouncy houses and the kids had a blast and they got all sweaty. And then as we were walking around my son spotted that quirky little carnival game with this tiny little goldfish bowls where you throw the ping-pong ball into him. He said, Daddy, I want to play. I said, okay, why not? Plunked down a couple dollars and he was five years old at the time so I lifted him up and they let him stand on the pedestal up there and on his very first throw he takes that ping-pong ball, throws a dart and it goes right in the little tiny bowl. And my wife and I were amazed. The carnival worker was amazed. My son was elated because guess what? We just got our first family pet and it was a goldfish that he promptly named Sammy. So we went home with Sammy the fish and it was all exciting watching the fish for a little while and we went to bed that night and woke up the next morning and Sammy was relaxing at the very top of the fish bowl. And we had to have a very difficult discussion about what had happened and so we had that discussion and we didn't really know what to do. This was our first experience with this and so we had some quirky little ceremony that we made up and that ceremony culminated with a trip to the bathroom where we flushed Sammy down the toilet and my son was sad and he looked up at us with these big five-year-old eyes and he goes, you go to heaven through the toilet? And it was at that time that we realized that he had no context to understand all these things that were going around in his life. He had no context for death. He had no context to understand what happened. All the things we talked about in church just made no sense to him. So context is essential and critical to understanding the world around you and that's very, very important. We're going to talk a lot about context. Let's bring it into a context that maybe you're more familiar with. We've got a lot of pilots here. I look at these clouds here and I say, hmm, what might we draw from this picture? We could draw from this picture that there are storms below us, that there are storms ahead and maybe that we're flying above them so we're in pretty good shape. But what if I turn that picture 180 degrees around? It's a very different context that we're dealing with at this point in time and this is actually the right way to look at this picture. So what gives us context to understand the world around us? Well, we put our trust in things and so we might put our trust in the machinery that gives us context that tells us we are flying in the right direction, that we are flying towards better weather, that we are in a good position to trust our environment and we put a tremendous amount of trust in the equipment that we use because it provides us valuable context to understand the world around us. So let's talk about some other equipment we put our trust in. The new self-driving car, the autonomous vehicles. Do we trust them yet? We may have confidence in the engineers and all the people around us but who would trust themselves to get behind the wheel of a self-driving car and do this? Everyone I know who's bought a Tesla starts out saying, oh, I really love that and then about a month into it, they're like, eh, not as much because they have experiences. And what we want to take away from this is that confidence is a measure. I might be 80% confidence in something but trust is an absolute. It's very binary. You never hear people saying, I've got 80% trust in you. I've got a percentage of confidence. It's a measure but trust is very binary. And what's really important about trust is that you might be dependent on other people and you may have a lot of confidence and trust in them but the person you always trust the most is yourself. You never consider the fact that you could let yourself down and that's an important thing to think about because the nature of the talk today is how you might want to think about how you trust yourself. A number of years ago in 2011, my parents were celebrating their 53rd wedding anniversary and it was just wonderful. Life was good, lots of grandkids around and my father for many years had said, I'd love to go to Alaska. I'd love to see Alaska. Alaska is beautiful. And we said, you know, they're getting a bit older. Let's take a family vacation to Alaska and enjoy the beautiful scenery that's there. And we did. We saw wonderful things. It was a fabulous trip. But we saw one thing that surprised and shocked us. And it was kind of unsettling. One night at dinner, my father, a very kind, gentle, generous, wise man who respected everyone around him, snapped at a waiter. It was very uncharacteristic for him to snap at a waiter. Something he would never do. And what we noticed was that this was the first signs of a horrible disease that started to plague him called dementia. And he's been wrestling with it ever since and it's a very difficult thing to see because you see someone who normally patient, normally very sure of themselves. Now, unable to be unsure of themselves, they're still sure of themselves. So what they see is the world around them changing when really it's them changing. And that's when you realize potentially the enemy could be you. Because when you lose trust in yourself, you stop trusting the people around you because you never think that the enemy could be you. And that's what can happen. Now, this case with my father, which is tragic in its own right, is an extreme example. What we want to talk about today are the kinds of examples where you and I, a fighter pilot could be stuck in a mind trap that gets you operating in a way where maybe you don't trust yourself. This is a picture of the columns at Delphi. If you're familiar with Greece or Greek mythology, Delphi is where the Oracle of Delphi was and where kings and philosophers and people would go to see the future and get their reading on what might happen in the future. And inscribed at the very top of these columns is something called know thyself. It's attributed to a lot of philosophers, but no one really knows where this came from. It's an ancient Greek saying of know thyself. And this is an important part of being a leader, is knowing yourself. And when you take a look at, let's say, another Greek relic, the Parthenon, which is an Athens sitting atop the mountain of Acropolis, it's known as one of the Seven Wonders of the World because of its beauty, because of its elegance, because of its perfect lines. Yet what we don't realize is that those lines are not perfect. In fact, if you look at some of those pictures, especially the ones on the right, if you take a look at those, this is the way it looks to us, right there, the picture in the middle. The way it would look to us, if they had all the angles being right angles, it would be that top picture. And the way on the bottom, the picture on the bottom is actually the way it's constructed. It's constructed in that way because we have visual cues that deceive us. And we don't always realize that. So the Parthenon, this picture of beauty, is designed in a way to fool us into seeing something that's actually not there. This light bulb is approximating, let's say roughly 20 watts of power right now. It's not very powerful. A very dim bulb by all our standards. Yet that is the amount of power our human brain works on. 20 watts. And a vast majority of that power is allocated to our visual cortex. And if you want to understand what happens in our visual cortex, our visual cortex uses the amount of power to populate or what we're capable of doing with the amount of pixels in our thumbnail at arm's length. That's all our visual cortex can process at any given time. Our mind fills in the rest with what it thinks should be there. This is the basis for almost every magic trick that's out there. When you talk about illusionists and things like that, the fact that our brains are much less powerful than we think they are is huge. So we've got a lot of brain science these days and it's advancing at an incredibly rapid pace. So let's talk about brain science for a few minutes. It started off with Pavlov's dog. Stimulus and response. Very basic things get a lot of dog stories today. So it started off with stimulus and response and how you get a dog to salivate when it hears a bell. Then it advanced a little bit. There's John Richard Boyd, Colonel in the Air Force. Does anyone know what he came up with? The Oodaloop. This is part of how we make decisions. Zerv, Orient, Decide, Act. So more understanding of the time delays it takes to go through these processes. But then we came upon Daniel Kahneman, who together with Amos Tversky did a lot of work on brain science and how we make decisions. And how we make decisions is very complicated and may be very different than the way you understand it. I'm going to summarize their Nobel Prize winning theories as quickly as I can. There are two ways in which our brain works. The fast way and the slow way. The fast way is system one. It's a very intuitive gut response in how we make decisions. It uses the emotional cortex of our brain, let's say the reptilian old brain that we've got, and it's very fast, it's very quick, it makes these patterns, it makes decisions. And the good thing about it is it's most of the time pretty right. Let's say 80% of the time it's right, and it gives you a dopamine hit. So it makes it feel good when you make these gut decision calls. System two is the slower cognitive load decision using the outside, the newer prefrontal cortex of our brain that makes complicated decisions using analysis and data. And in that mode it goes very slow and it drags us down and we're marginally more accurate. Maybe let's just say for making the math simple 90%. This is the basis of how we make decisions. And if you want to consider a broader stimulus response cycle, imagine someone throwing a football at you, at your face really fast. You have an impulse which is either to blink or maybe raise your hands or do something like that. You can't control that. And you've got a reaction which you can somewhat control. And that's why a lot of military training goes into getting a controlled response based on a stimulus so that we don't have to think and we respond and we stay cool in those circumstances. And then you get your final response which is the action that you've got. Now what's interesting about this is system one covers the whole gamut. System one covers everything. You cannot turn system one off. System two really only engages towards the end of your decision-making process. So your emotional core is always there. And what you want to walk away from this is that our perceptions of the kind of control we think we have over our decision-making processes is far less than you could imagine. You have to understand the total complexity of how our brains work to really fully be self-aware and to not let the enemy be you. So let's talk about some of these mind traps. I'm going to go through some of these pretty quickly but when we put a lens on a situation we typically think of it making our situation clear just like glasses. But lenses don't always make things clear. They can invert the picture. They can change the picture. They can distort the picture. And we have many lenses by which we see the world and we perceive that which is around us. Some of these are the assumptions that we make. The cognitive biases we have. Logical fallacies we choose to use to convince ourselves of what is right and what is wrong as well as our imagination or our emotions. So the assumptions, we're not going to get into all of them but they're the foundation for all our thinking. And if we're not careful, our foundation is not strong and no matter what we build on top of that it will crumble. So anytime you hear something like it must, usually, probably, it is a guarantee that whatever follows that is an assumption and that is the very foundation of how we think. Our cognitive biases are these built-in efficiencies so that when we were on the savannah and we saw a lion, our reaction was get somewhere safe fast. Not a lot of thinking, get somewhere safe fast. Cognitive biases, and we'll cover these a little bit more, are these shortcuts that are very useful but they can also derail our critical thinking. Ones you might be familiar with are, let's say, confirmation bias. They would be anchoring, sunk cost fallacy. Sunk cost is great. We've already spent so much on this whole new airframe program. What's a little bit more? Why should we give up now? That's the sunk cost fallacy. You always have to be evaluating that. We've got logical fallacies, our flaws and reasoning. I specifically like the Texas sharpshooter logical fallacy, which is, I'm going to cherry pick the data that makes my point and I'm going to ignore everything else. I'm just going to hone in on that which makes my point. There are all kinds of logical fallacies that cloud up our thinking. I urge you to watch Sunday morning political talk shows and enjoy the litany of logical fallacies that are presented on an even moment. If you want to learn more, we've got a lab. We'll go into deep into all of these, but we're not going to do that now. Your imagination is one of the more powerful things that can cloud your judgment and your vision. Your imagination, let's imagine a campfire when you were a kid and someone telling a ghost story and someone said, and it got dark and a little kid wandered off in the woods and they were never seen again. If you're scared of bears, a bear ate that little kid. If you're scared of vampires, a vampire grabbed that kid, sucked its blood, killed it. Your imagination can take you to very dark places. It never takes you to the reasonable middle. It always takes you to an extreme great situation or an extremely bad situation. Your imagination can be a powerful lens that can distort your vision. And your emotions are probably the most powerful lens that can distort your vision and we can't turn them off. Almost every decision we make starts in the emotional center of our brain. We rationalize things on the outside, sometimes with logical fallacies and our cognitive biases, but every decision starts off in that emotional center of our brain and it can frequently cloud and bias our assumptions, just like the mighty Hercules found out because we are not invincible. Our emotions and bias can be the thing that brings us down and that's why we have to be very aware of them. So with that, let's try and gain some clarity. There's a story that hopefully, here at the Air Force, you might know of Icarus and Dedalus. Dedalus was a very famous inventor that served at the pleasure of King Minus of Crete and he was brilliant and he did some amazing things and invented some great stuff and he did some objectionable stuff and is the reason why the Minotaur came to be. And so because of some things that happened after that, he was imprisoned into a high tower with his son Icarus, from which there was no escape. But Dedalus was brilliant. He came up with a plan. I'm going to put wax on my arms and stick feathers into the wax and we will fly away. And so they had this plan to fly away and before they jumped off the top of this tower, Dedalus warned his son, he said, Icarus, don't go too close to the sun or the wax will melt, you'll fall into the sea and die. And if you go too close to the water, the feathers will get wet, you'll fall into the sea and die. So just stay in the middle. And they both jumped off and miraculously they flew. Yet Icarus was overtaken with the emotion of flight. He was incredible. He was flying and he was elated and he flew too close to the sun and he died. And it was awful. And it broke the heart of Dedalus who was trying to save the life of his son. Now, in another way, they say sunlight is the best disinfectant. And the best disinfectant, the best way to conquer the mind traps that can cripple the way we think, that can be the lenses that change the world we see, that can be the things that allow us to get in our own way is awareness, awareness of these things. Learning about these things is a leader. It's our imperative to learn about these mind traps that can cripple our logic and blind us. Because if you don't, if you refuse to be aware of these things, that's the kind of pride that cripples even the greatest of heroes like Odysseus, who's shown in this plate. So, I think Sun Tzu said it best. I'm not going to read this to you, but I think if you want to summarize this quote from Sun Tzu is, if you fail to understand yourself, you're going to see quite a bit of failure in what you try and accomplish. You need to understand your enemies, of course, but if you fail to understand yourself, you're going to be defeated every time. And that's why if we want to avoid the mind traps that can cripple us and keep us from accomplishing our goals, you need to be self-aware. Otherwise, the enemy is you. And with that, I'd like to invite you to the lab tomorrow for some mind hacks and party tricks. Way more entertaining than what we're talking about today. Thank you very much.