The Parking Lot

Send us Fan Mail You rarely get the whole picture before you have to make a decision. So how do you make sense of what you can’t see without filling in the blanks with a story that’s wrong? In this episode of The Human Behavior Podcast, Brian Marren and Greg Williams explore negative space: how the information surrounding what we can observe helps us understand what we can’t. From a traffic stop to a parent-teacher conversation to pulling into an unfamiliar gas station, they discuss how conte...

Send us Fan Mail Better tools. More information. But are we making better decisions? An alert tells you a vehicle may be stolen. What do you actually know, and what have you already started assuming? This week on The Human Behavior Podcast, Brian Marren and Greg Williams use Flock cameras and automated license plate readers to examine how technology shapes human judgment. They discuss how a machine-generated alert can become an accepted explanation, why conflicting evidence gets overlooked, a...

Send us Fan Mail The fastest way to wreck a hard-won calm is to say one more thing. In this episode, dig into the escalation trap that shows up in boardrooms, squad cars, kitchens, and group texts: the moment an interaction starts to stabilize, we keep pressing because we still feel the original disrespect, risk, or resistance. That’s when accountability quietly turns into humiliation, and influence turns into a contest. We talk through why capable, experienced people miss the off-ramps. Str...

Send us Fan Mail Night vision keeps getting smarter, but our brains do not update on the same schedule. We’re joined by defense expert Alan Kearney, a former Irish Defence Forces officer who now works in European defense industry, to explore a problem that reaches far beyond goggles and helmets: what happens when advanced soldier systems outpace human cognition in the exact moments stress is highest? We start with the fundamentals of modern night vision and thermal fusion, then move into the...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we’re talking about probabilistic thinking and why language matters more than most people realize. The central idea is simple: most bad decisions don’t come from a lack of information, they come from mislabeling information. When we apply labels too early, we collapse probability, reduce our options, and lock ourselves into conclusions that may not be accurate. We’ll break down how this happens, why your baseline matters, and how small changes in langua...