#166: Perceptions & Consequences

My hypothesis would be, Greg, let's say you snapped your fingers and there was no such thing as different skin colors in the world and never had been. Nothing else has changed, just no skin color. Would we still have all the wars and fighting and hate and discontent that history says?

Absolutely.

Absolutely. Would this kid still have done this for a different reason? He would have picked something else.

And you know what the reason would have been? The reason would have been that morning when he went to Apple and he put his quarter in the gumball machine, but he got an orange gumball instead of the blue gumball, and that was it.

And here's what was strange about all these people. Welcome to the Left of Greg podcast. Hello, and thank you for tuning in to the Left of Greg podcast. I'm Brian Marren, the host and creator of the show. As always, I will be joined by human behavior expert Mr. Greg Williams, who the show is affectionately named after. Here on the Left of Greg show, our goal is to increase your advanced critical thinking ability through a better understanding of what we call human behavior pattern recognition and analysis. If you'd like to find out more about what that is, you can check the episode details. If you have any questions or would like us to cover a specific topic, please reach out to us at leftofgreg at gmail.com. This week Greg and I are talking about perception, second and third order effects, and how ideological analysis causes us to misinterpret events. We explain these concepts by using two recent police officer involved shootings that have a lot more to the story than most people realize. During the episode, we also give a general statement on the recent Buffalo supermarket shooting, and I try my best to explain why these mass shootings continue to happen, even though the prevent indicators are not only glaringly obvious, but often the exact same in every case. Please don't forget to follow us on social media. You can find the links in the episode details, and if you enjoyed the podcast, please tell your friends about it. Thanks for tuning in, and we hope you enjoy the show. All right. Well, good morning, Greg. As we have been the last few weeks, recording these on a Friday morning, which kind of seems to work well for us. I've been busy again, and hello to everyone listening. We appreciate everyone listening, sharing the episodes, and reaching out to us with different questions and podcast ideas. So we've got some good ideas from that coming up. Oh, another one I've got to tell you about, but we'll talk about that after the show, Greg. Remind me of that, because it's Bath Township, Michigan - there's something coming out. One of our listeners reached out about a cool one. So today what we're going to be talking about - we're going to be talking about several cases, but two of them in particular. I'll give a quick brief synopsis right now, and then we're going to break down what actually happened. Because as you listening know, a lot of times, especially what's first reported in a news story is not always what actually happened, or they paint it in a certain light to pander to some emotional reaction and it turns into clickbait, which is sad for everyone involved in the actual story. Because one, it's missed, and two, we start having feelings and emotions, and then legislation or something might come from that which has nothing to do with what actually occurred. So the first one is actually Wayne County, Michigan - Greg, I believe the town is Roseville. A couple of weeks ago, a guy by the name of Frank Robles - there was a traffic accident, and a police officer shot and killed a man who confronted him with a knife after the traffic crash. So what was reported was: there's this traffic crash, police show up, they're obviously trying to assess the situation, the guy's holding a knife, the police officer feels like his life is threatened, and ends up killing him at the scene. That's kind of what gets reported. The other case we're going to be talking about in parallel is the one from a Target store in Florida, where some teens robbed the store - they stole some Pokemon cards, I believe, and some food, some pizza or something - and they leave and are subsequently in an altercation with police in the parking lot where the police officers shot and killed one of them. I think the other ones are still alive. Obviously that's kind of how the story got reported as, you know, cops kill kid over Pokemon cards, which, although that makes for a wonderful headline, is not really exactly what happened. So we're going to talk about these two cases and several others, and it's going to go around the theme of: who's really responsible for what happened, the second and third order effects and reactions of your actions, and of course how these things get reported versus what really happened. And I always put sort of an asterisk on that - everyone wants to say, oh, it's the media, the media. It's like, okay, this is how humans are. Think about any story you told, or some gossip your friend told you, and then you start repeating the same junk without even knowing whether it's true, without even verifying it. Sure, the media can get blamed, but it's humans - this is how we are. We don't take the time to actually look into what the contributing factors were. So that's my preamble, I guess, Greg.

Yeah, that's a great lead-in. I would say that I had to learn the hard way growing up. When it was a legitimate news story - back in the days when you had to read the news - there were pages and they would say advertisement on them, but they looked a lot like the articles, Brian.

Oh yeah, I know what you mean.

Now there's no such need to do that. So this morning a headline was: "18 times that Taylor Swift's shoes predicted a stock market increase." That is clickbait.

Hang on, hang on. First of all, are you not immediately informing me of any Taylor Swift news?

I stand corrected. That was the wrong person to choose. But the idea, Brian, is that we are so used to gossip. Gossip is a huge part of how humans learn, how humans stay in relationships, how humans learn about others and break up from relationships.

How we teach each other too.

Yes, exactly. The problem is - Fables are a form of gossip, so you got to really be careful here. But I think a central theme is the gift of time and distance. What that means is that I have a hammer in the basement and I've designated it as the hammer of truth and justice.

Oh, there you go.

Shelly's locked it away and I don't know where it is in the basement, but I know it's out there. And every time I see somebody pipe up on the news or in print news saying words that translate to, I'm not educated on this matter and your job is to educate me - that's the kind of rhetoric, Brian, that just drives me up a tree. So I'll give you an example. Try to find, folks, the guy's name - and I'm sad he's dead, I'm sad when anybody dies - it is Frank Robles, R-O-B-L-E-S, from Roseville, Michigan.

From Roseville, Michigan, Wayne County.

So what happened just a few hours ago, Brian - that's why the confusion in the date - just a couple of hours ago, the officer who shot and killed Frank is Chad Lee. He just got exonerated by a shooting board in the county that said he didn't do anything wrong. He did something clearly, but it was authorized in this instance. Now, Frank Robles may have a family - I'm not going to do the research, that's your job, meaning the person listening. Frank Robles may have been undergoing a temporary break from reality, but what he did is he set in motion a chain of events that led to his own death. He's singularly responsible for his own death, and he's also responsible for the danger that he put others in that morning - Chad Lee's future as a police officer, the semi driver of the truck that he rammed into to begin this event - which appears, not only on its face but from the artifacts and evidence, to be a protracted attempt at killing himself.

That's what it felt like when I called you right away and said, hey, let's run on this story a couple of weeks ago. So this is what happened: Frank Robles is driving down - what was the street, Greg?

Groesbeck - it's a major road.

Groesbeck. It's a big, wide, major road that runs through Detroit and the surrounding suburbs and all the towns in there. And he drives his car directly into an oncoming semi-truck. So what we learned was this was an attempted suicide. He now gets out, police show up at the scene, they're trying to assess the situation. You can find the body cam footage - I think maybe we'll look at that on the Patreon side.

Yeah, let's break that down on Patreon.

They show up, they find him, he's standing there. You can tell even from the police officers looking around checking the scene - here's this guy standing there, hey, are you okay? He said no. And I think that's probably what caused the police officer to take a second look, thinking this guy is a victim of a car accident or needs medical help. Then - he has a knife in his hands. The officer gives him commands to drop the knife, drop the knife. He doesn't. He kind of lunges - you can tell in the video he moves forward towards the officer with the knife in his hand. The officer ends up engaging and killing him on the scene. And the autopsy revealed he also had slit wrists and was bleeding from them as well. So we call that suicide by cop. This guy wants to die, and obviously he tried once and failed - twice actually: he slit his wrists, he rammed his vehicle into a semi. He still obviously has this intent to die that day, and he did. Now, anytime something involves suicide or mental health - we talk about that all the time, we have the most empathy for anyone like that. If you're struggling, we just - the podcast released this week with Joseph Reed about broken people, we always try to empathize with this. But in this situation, the second and third order effects of what he did destroyed that community. Not only is this officer's life completely changed and his career possibly in jeopardy forever, but like you said, the driver of the truck was just driving to work that morning to a job site delivering whatever he's delivering, going, what the hell just happened? And then because there's a crime scene investigation they have to lock down the streets, which causes everyone delays - traffic, getting to work - and it interrupts everyone's day. And a young girl walking to school just blocks away from where this occurred - because of the extra traffic, because of the crime scene shutdown, because people aren't paying attention and need to get to work - she's running across the street and someone hits her with a vehicle by accident, likely not paying attention, clearly didn't see her crossing in the crosswalk. And she is still - right now, I didn't get any other updates when I checked this morning - fighting for her life because she has a traumatic brain injury and she's in the hospital.

Now, the investigators - deputy investigators - just so you know, we're not just throwing chicken bones on a car hood.

And I'll put the links in the episode notes.

Look it up for yourself, folks. The proximate cause of the accident that put this poor girl in intensive care, where she's been since this incident - The investigation shows that because the roads were closed, some people tried to squeak around on different routes. And because they weren't at their best on new routes, not paying close attention, they hit her. Now, if you talk proximate cause, Frank Robles is the proximate cause of that incident. Now, we're not vilifying Frank. Frank had a bad day, and Frank's day was so bad it ended in his life. What we're saying is your methodology, your choices that you make - that's really what ties these two capers together, Brian. That's what turns a shoplifting into a homicide, and that's what turned this attempted suicide. Look, here's my problem with just a Frank Robles caper. When it came out, I notified you almost immediately, because there was no video, there was no noise, there was nothing except for Roosevelt coppers gun down drug addict - of course - and local fishermen, you know, because he had a fishing knife and he was a fisherman and Nancy loves fishing and everything else. Listen, folks, you can't go through somebody's life after the fact and cherry-pick. You can, and we do, but you can't go through somebody's life the way people did with Ed Gein - ate his neighbors, dug up people from the cemetery, made lampshades out of their bones - and go back and say, "Oh, you know what? Ed Gein in 11th grade, nicest guy I ever met. We played soccer together and brought home that trophy." You don't do that. You don't get to pick and choose what Frank entered his life on. There was a great story overnight, and I wish I had it for you, Brian, but coppers had to kill a mentally deranged young man who was off his meds. He had some problems, had a weapon, and assaulted the officers. And afterwards, of course, the poor guy's dead and the poor officers are traumatized. But the mom said, "I'd rather my son be in a mental hospital getting treatment right now than being on a gurney in the morgue." She came to grips with it, Brian. She didn't jump in and say, "Hey, police this and that." Things happen. She wished it would have been different. We all wished it would have been different. But in this case - Frank is as surprised as anybody that he lived from the accident. You can see that in the video. He's walking around at the scene. Let's do that on Patreon, let's show how we would break down that video. He's got the knife in his hand and he's walking towards other people, but he's not walking towards them like, "Hey, I'm going to stab everybody in the forehead." He's walking around like he's in a daze, and all of a sudden it catches up to him - hey, I'm still alive, what's next? So now we've got the wrists that are cut - that didn't work - so now we've got a sense of exasperation in Frank. He's manic, he's broken, Brian, and now he's searching for something. And who shows up? A cop. Now let's go to the mindset of the cop real quick. What's the cop there for, Brian? It's a traffic accident. So what's his first fourteen file folders? Set up flares, call for assistance, who's going to write it - is Michigan State Police going to do it?

Greg, can you check your connection there real quick? Sorry, it's just getting kind of choppy. I still hear everything, just kind of a little bit.

I apologize, I'm not sure what's causing that, Brian. But the idea being that here on the scene, the only one that knows what's going to happen next is Frank Robles, and all of a sudden the copper sees a knife in his hand and is going, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, you need to stop." And Frank doesn't. Frank had myriad opportunities to change the trajectory in those last few minutes of his life, and he chose to die. That's an important standard. Even now, Brian, that's why I said go try to find the real story - all the sensationalist stuff is still on whatever search engines you choose. And you know what's not on there? It appears from all the events that Frank Robles was trying to kill himself and caused this unfortunate chain of events.

Yeah, and that's what it is. He's ultimately responsible for this. But the second murder of facts is - yes, did Frank Robles want to die? He didn't want to kill a little girl walking to school. He didn't want to drag a police officer into it. He didn't want to injure a semi-truck driver. This is just what happened because he lacked some organization, he lacked some critical thinking, and he couldn't work his way out of the situation. And yes, it gets reported differently. So it's one of those cautionary tales - let's take a look at what really happened here. And that's not unlike the Target shooting as well, because it gets reported as "the Pokemon cards" and "police officers kill someone." What these kids did is put ski masks on, covered themselves up, went in, stole a bunch of stuff, came running out. I think they had already called police - I can't remember what the witness description was - but the police were there almost immediately. And then you're in the parking lot putting your grandma back in the car because you went to Target to get her stuff that you do every week, and the next thing you know you're caught in a crossfire because some kids decided to go in and rob a place and then come running out. Because if you picture arriving on the scene, you don't know what happened. Due to the ski masks and them running out - did they just do an armed robbery? Are they going to shoot their way out? What they ended up doing is they didn't comply with commands, they tried to flee, and they drove their car directly at the police officers. Well, deadly force is authorized if you're trying to kill someone, because a vehicle is a weapon. And that sets off all these events. Now all those store employees, everyone who's in the parking lot - their life is forever changed. Now maybe they don't want to go back to Target. Now grandma's scared to leave the house. I mean, this is what occurs from it, and then it all gets reported as "teens gunned down over Pokemon cards."

Yeah, so let's talk about that for a minute. Here's another one, Brian, where I want folks to do their own research to try to find the real article, because this is weeks old and there's still not a clear article out there. The videos are out, the investigation's in full swing, and we're not getting the right answers. So listen, this is the first news piece that came out, from the professional news people on television at the scene. They said some teens stole Pokemon cards and pizzas and then deputies fired shots outside the Target store. This deputy-involved shooting is being investigated by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. It's their job to find out if the deputies rightfully pulled the triggers and to determine if this shooting was justified. Okay, so first of all, Brian, the driver was 20. That's not a teen. That's a fact. The second thing is we still don't know, because it's not being publicized by the news, and the police are saying it's under investigation. They should go to the Osceola County detectives or whatever. License plates covered up, license plates allegedly didn't fit the car, there's word that the car may have been reported stolen - we don't know that yet. The 20-year-old driver - the vehicle was backed into a spot and he had a gun. Okay, that's not been reported by anybody. That's fact, that's happening at the scene. They drove when they left, and the people that fired the shots were in fear for their life and fired into the car. Now, here's where I say training changes behavior, Brian, because yes, they hit the driver in the chest and the driver's dead. He chose to drive at those folks. The people chose a getaway car. I'll tell you right now, felony murder rule - they could charge the people that did the shoplifting with the death of their own co-conspirator, Brian, for his death. Coppers were on the way because Target called and said we got some guys with masks bum-rushing the store. They didn't know what they had. They didn't know they had somebody that was going to take popcorn and a Christmas tree ornament. That's my problem with it - they made those choices, Brian. That was not the cops that made the choice.

They set that chain of events into motion. This is what they chose - you can't separate it. They should be the ones responsible. Every single person in that car: these are people that we should say you don't get to live in our society. Sorry, you gave up that right when you caused all this. And now we're going to vilify the responding officers. You can also make the argument that this was a property crime - why are we escalating it to this point? Did the police officers' actions somehow escalate the situation? Maybe. But given that set of circumstances, given what's happening in that moment, you can't necessarily determine that on the ground. I can't say, okay, it's a bunch of punk kids stealing Pokémon cards, they're on camera, we got the license plate, we can investigate this, no reason to chase. You don't know that at the time.

Most of our listeners and viewers, especially loyal ones, know that I'm an orphan. So when you talk about taking my mom - there's a Target in Montrose, and when we'd take mom, we'd pull right up front and Shelly would diligently get around and help her out. We used the FJ because it was easier for her to get in with the wing doors. Not anymore - she's dead, it's a lot easier carrying her around because she was cremated.

We still do.

Yeah, we still. Brian, I saw the video and I replayed it over and over, and I imagined my mom and Shelly walking into that store. That's the first thing I'll say. Second thing: don't be fooled that this is just Pokémon cards. Just a few days ago in Brookfield, Wisconsin, four men assaulted a man who came out with Pokémon cards, and the man they assaulted was a concealed carry permit holder - he pulled out his gun and the attackers ran off. These beatings and thievery are happening around the country because that's the hot thing right now, Brian. And you sent me one yesterday where if you'd read just the headline it would have looked like police assaulted a guy in a car. They were actually arresting a vicious carjacker.

Yeah, they were attempting to arrest a carjacking suspect in a stolen vehicle. Another one said man gets assaulted on a traffic stop. Technically you're correct - that was a traffic stop. Did you want to explain why it wasn't just a routine traffic stop?

The cops had a town hall in Osceola County in Kissimmee - however you pronounce it - and they tried to talk about this very incident, the Target Pokémon card shooting. One of the Orange County residents in Florida raised her hand and said, all you have is one camera view and it doesn't tell the whole story, and we're talking about children here. No, we're not.

No, we're not.

And the items taken are minimal - lady, you don't know what you're talking about. One, I agree nobody should die for a property crime. But the cops didn't unduly escalate the situation. They attempted to make a traffic stop - completely within their right - on private property owned by Target, with an illegally parked car that was backed in, revving the engine, and then it pulls forward quickly and rams into people and into other cars. That was a choice the police officer didn't make. And these aren't children, Brian. When you take a gun, you're no longer a child - you may have the mind of a child, the experiences of a child, but you've just come into the arena and said I'm here for the professional game. And these cops were professionals, Brian. They didn't want to kill anybody. I've been around cops my entire life - my daddy was a cop. I only met one cop in my entire career who used to say, you know what, this might be the night I get to shoot somebody. One guy, and that guy was unsafe at any speed. This is what ties these two together: Roosevelt chose what he was going to do, and the teenagers and that twenty-year-old in Osceola County chose what they were going to do.

We talk about perception a lot - from a physiological level of how human perception works and how unreliable it is, to a sociological level of how different groups are perceived, to how a news headline can influence your perception of events. We've even had philosophical discussions about what perception means. Orientation and perception are probably the two most important things to understand about humans in the world, because everything revolves around what you orient toward, what you care about, your environment - and then perception.

Right. And predictive analysis.

Right. Perception is how you perceive the events unfolding in your environment - everything that's going on using your five senses and everything you've learned - and how corrupt our human perception can be. All of us, some less, some more, but everyone, no matter how logically you try to look at something, evaluate a situation, analyze something, you have cognition biases, you have perception biases, you have things that are fighting against you. Knowing about them and understanding them will likely help you to not fall into that trap, but there is no way to avoid that. There's no training that gets rid of your cognition biases. You can understand them.

You can't, because they were on board for survival, Brian. We had much less to attend to in our lives, and the sense of urgency was only for those things that would cause fatalities. So we're very skeptical about any light motion and edges in our environment that doesn't mean to cause immediate death in any way.

It's so funny because you just said that, because I saw an article last week - it was sort of a joke, almost like an Onion or Duffel Blog type article about college papers or something - and it was like, once again anthropologist finds out that people used to just sit around and not do a whole lot back in, you know. I mean, if you weren't hunting or sleeping you kind of just hung out. It was hilarious - like, they passed the time, and I'm studying this tribe in Africa and they sleep a lot, they hang out a lot and do nothing. Yeah, because everything that we're wired to do is geared for survival, so if we're in a situation where we don't need to use it, that's good. But now everything is competing for our attention. There wasn't anything back in the day to compete for our attention as much. So now we're constantly on, and we don't realize how it affects our perception. So I did just want to mention things like perception and functional field of view, because it all plays into this - and into the perception in the moment of those individuals, of the suspect, of the police officer, of the perception of everyone around there. Because one witness, the one who thought he heard the suspect start shooting, said all he heard was boom, boom, boom, then he heard the return fire of boom, boom, boom. That's completely different than what everyone else said. So is that guy wrong? Well, that's how he perceived the events to occur.

And if we continue to weigh the amount of media buzz against the officers in this - just vilify and fire these officers - is that what we're going with now, the sheer weight of the alleged evidence against somebody, Brian? I mean, that's not how our legal system works. We have to have more respect for it.

Agreed. But here's where we get into what we do. Someone will say - and this is my issue - a lot of law enforcement agencies, or even corporate entities, do not do a very good job of communicating these issues and communicating the concerns. You can almost see the contempt on their face because they're so annoyed at the questions, and you can tell they just want to shake people in the public. It's like, no, they don't understand - so fucking explain it better. Because here's the thing: people will say, well, you never could have predicted that would have happened. And that's not true. A lot of us don't know that isn't true. It's like, well, what do you mean you're going to tell me you could have predicted this girl getting run over on the way to school because of an accident that happened down the street? And yes, you can, and it's happened many, many times before. Let's say a water main breaks at a major intersection and now the 911 and city services side pop up, they start blocking off traffic - and what does that do to everyone's day driving their kids to school? Now you've got to find a new route, now you're running late, which means you're going to be driving faster and paying less attention, you haven't run this route before so you don't know it well, and then boom, that's when those things occur. We talk about this all the time: it's never, "Greg, I had a wonderful night's sleep, I woke up, had a nice jog, had a great healthy breakfast, had a cup of coffee, walked out, and then I saw this going down." No, that's never when shit happens. It's always during times of extreme stress, or extreme boredom, extreme chaos, or nothing going on, where you're not attending to your environment properly.

So let me throw this at you. Thanks for being Mr. Science today, because that puts things into perspective for me. Sometimes, Brian, a lot of stuff hits the cutting room floor - we never edit anything, folks - but we don't go into it assuming everybody is thinking at the same level we are, meaning with the same background and experiences. We can examine that.

Right. I just said communication for the police - we do that too. What happens when we get into these conversations and then people go, hey, we weren't really tracking after this point?

Right, exactly. That just happened with our recent guest when I made a comment about two books - A Town Through a Tale of Piglet - that I absolutely love, and he's like, holy crap, those are real books.

Those are real books.

So, Brian, within the last week - because it's Friday now - two deaths occurred within 24 hours, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast. Both were kids digging in the sand on the beach, having fun with others in the presence of others, when the sand collapsed and before they could get them out, both of those people died. In the instance of the 13-year-old, they got him out, got a pulse, got him breathing, but there was no more recovered brain activity. On the older kid on the East Coast, not so lucky, and both died. Brian, both of those incidents happen every year in the spring and summer, but we still look at them just like a shark attack and go, oh my God, nobody could have predicted it. Now, the other side of that coin is getting into the shit when you don't have the right to get me into the shit. Normally we talk about this on road rage - you do not have the right to drive recklessly and act like an idiot because it creates a chain of events that are going to cause an accident you'll never see. So I'll throw two at you right quick. Georgia, Taco Bell shootout. The Georgia Taco Bell employee allegedly went back into the store during this argument over a food order - and this is early morning hours - retrieved their AR-15, came out, and gunfire rang out between the two groups.

I'm sorry, real quick - I didn't get a chance to look at this one. The employee went and grabbed their AR-15 that they had in Taco Bell?

An employee went back into Taco Bell and grabbed their assault rifle that they had in Taco Bell.

Is that like a Georgia thing, like you're allowed to bring your rifle to work or something like that?

No, no, no. Listen to me. So while the cops are investigating, 200 yards away from that investigation, gunfire rang out at another South Fulton fast food restaurant, this time at McDonald's. And the news says, be advised, two different crime scenes - neither of the situations have anything to do with each other. Brian, think about what we're talking about. I go to fast food. I don't do it when I'm with you or with Shelly, but I sneak away sometimes. A lot of people do. But the idea is that we all go to fast food restaurants at one time or another for the convenience.

Usually early morning hours.

Not fair. It's not fair to engage me in this run-and-gun battle. Now I'll counterpoint that with Sunday. Thinking of my mom again - my mom loved flea markets. And here you've got people at Houston's arguably largest flea market, Brian, thousands of people shopping on a beautiful Sunday. Two groups of people get into a verbal argument, the guns come out, and now five people are shot and two are dead - in the center of the Sunday Houston flea market where you and I would take our loved ones and walk around looking for the wicker chair.

Yeah.

So when we talk about this guy in Roseville, Michigan, who got into the accident and didn't have the right to endanger others - and then we start talking about these kids, remember they're children, Brian, that ran into this Target store in broad daylight and caused this mayhem - I would put these all in the class of you don't have the right to do that to me. And if we think just a few days ago when we were talking about the escapees from prison, and the woman being dead now - Brian, they were staying at a hotel where other people stay on their way to Disney. Do you get what I'm trying to say? You don't have that right. So I think that when you think of the law, stop thinking of the poor innocent victim in this being the criminal. Start to align and break down the incident so you can figure out who caused what, why, and where. Now, is Target responsible because they had these Pokémon cards out there? Should there be barbed wire? Come on.

Right. That's ridiculous. And we go to that - oh, this poor kid. Because those incidents do happen, it's just they're so rare. That's what they make the movies about, the documentary about - that case where someone was wrongfully convicted.

They happen because we make mistakes because we're humans.

Yes. But you can't equate that to every other case that's out there, because 99.9 percent of all other cases are exactly what they appear to be - the person is responsible because they did something wrong. And that goes into how our perception of these events works. This is why I framed it from the perspective of the news headlines, and then you walk through each one of those cases with the actual facts and you're like, well, that sounds completely different.

How can that be?

And part of that is everyone's rushing to find out what's going on. We get listeners right now - and I appreciate everyone reaching out - who constantly say, hey, aren't you guys going to talk about the most recent shooting in Buffalo? And I'm like, why? One, the investigation is incomplete. Two -

You all know the most important facts, right?

Different than anything we've ever talked about again, including to the point where it was completely preventable and people knew about it.

So let's do this, Brian. Let's create a graduated cylinder for our desks, and this is for you folks that are listening right now. So the graduated cylinder's up on my desk and I made it out of one of those things where you put dimes, nickels and quarters in. You know what I'm saying? Have you ever seen one of those banks where it sorts out the quarters?

Where it organizes your change. Yeah, and it spins it around. They're cool.

It's very simple, though. It's plastic, right?

I used to have one as a kid.

And what I'm going to do, Brian, is I'm going to take a marker and I'm going to go across there and I'm going to say stress fractures visible. That'll be my lowest level. Then the next thing is social media leakage. That'll be my next thing. Next thing shows up at the school in a completely inappropriate outfit and is the school loner that everybody would point at because of their bizarre behavior. I'm not talking about unique hairstyle. I'm not talking about liking music that nobody in your school likes and being quirky. I know quirky. I was a quirky kid. You get what I'm trying to say?

Everyone's in some way, yeah.

And add now to that the fascination for weapons, the hate speech rhetoric - in this event it happens to be racist, not unlike Dylann Roof, the church guy, right? But Brian, that's not all of the issue. You've got broken humans. There's 8 billion people that are available to do this. Think about that on the planet. So when we have one out of 8 billion that acts out and does it, it's remarkable because it's so rare. But if you look at those coins, everyone shares those same graduated cylinder achievements and thresholds, every single one of them. So it's no different than the Oxford shooter. It's no different than the Columbine shooters. And this guy just a little bit different in his methodology. And you know what scares me most about these incidents, Brian, is that the availability of video makes other people look at it and go, fuck it, it's checkout time. Copycat that.

It certainly does, especially when you're live streaming it and you can find that recording and you can see it from a first-person shooter perspective just like the video game you've been playing. But the other issue I have with all of that is another facet that I would say is a new part to all of this stuff, right? You didn't have that.

But let's say people live stream their pursuits. We've seen that. I know of three that you and I talked about where they were on the pursuit going, hey, the cops are right behind me. And then-

And they learned that from news choppers that used to follow police all the time.

Exactly. And then remember the guy - can't think of his name right now - that was a news reporter, the weatherman with two different names and the bad background, and he went and he killed the newsman right on the air.

Yeah, right, east coast. North Carolina or something like that. I can't remember where.

And then the broken human that jumped out of the car and shot the guy while he was doing it, then got into a pursuit. So, Brian, it's not unprecedented, that's not what I mean. But what I'm talking about is on both sides of the issue now - that was important to the news media. Listen, police don't do the perp walk because they don't want to stimulate other people into thinking that that's cool. So why are we still allowing the news media, Brian, to make a circus out of those type of issues? It's not free press when you're reporting just this horrible tension- and anxiety-producing information.

And here's my take, and this is in no way a thought-out take on this - this is kind of right now in the moment, but I have thought about it in the past. When everyone looks at these situations, we've got to understand why this would happen, or we want to place blame on something, and everyone just picks something that they think it should be or it must be. So it must be because he's a white supremacist, it must be because he had guns, it must be because he was bullied when he was a kid. There's all of these things. But what people forget about this is - let's go back to the person. Because my hypothesis would be, Greg: let's say you snap your fingers and there was no such thing as different skin colors in the world and never had been. Nothing else has changed, just there's no skin color. Would we still have all the wars and fighting and hate and discontent that history shows?

Absolutely.

Absolutely. Would this kid still have done this for a different reason? Yep. He would have picked something else.

The reason would have been that morning when he went to the store and put his quarter in the gumball machine, but he got an orange gumball instead of the blue gumball. And that was it.

Here's what we forget about all these people that carry this out - the fucking sense of entitlement, the narcissism. You have to think that you're owed something and that you can go out and do this because you've been wronged. Dude, you're fucking 18 years old, you haven't done a damn thing in the world. And the other thing is, people forget this - he's a piece of shit. It doesn't matter. He would have come up with some other reason to do it, whether it was race or religion or whatever ideology.

He was already radicalized and broken.

It's bullshit, because he found something he was looking for. All you've got to do is go through any one of the things that any of these people say and none of it actually makes sense, and none of it is in line with any specific viewpoint. It's ramblings of a complete fucking asshole. And this is the problem - this is why we don't ever prevent them, Greg. We don't ever prevent them, because now we go, well, we've got to combat white supremacy. Well, yeah, of course. Racism is a horrible, awful thing, a horrible part of the human condition that's been around for a really long time, and we haven't cracked the code yet on how to get people past it. But we're getting better. And it's disgusting when you see someone who just blames someone because of the color of their skin - you're a moron. But treat them as that. Treat this kid as the narcissistic moron that he was, and then he did an awful thing. I totally got off topic. I started this conversation about today, but -

There's no way to rehabilitate him, or Dylan, or any of those guys. Remember the shooter from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas?

Once you do that, those are the ones that are the same thing.

It was the same situation. Years before, they yanked him out. They said this is the kid most likely to do a school shooting. Happened the same thing with this kid. Violence is a language. Violence is the way to get immediate notice, and sometimes can be the first and strongest instrumentality of change.

Violence is an ideology.

I agree with you, and I feel your anger. Brian, it's easy to see that this has hit an emotional tipping point with you, because they're all the same. And you and I had an incredible talk a couple of days ago with a person that shall remain nameless for now, during a side business deal. And the person said, people ask me all the time, are these school shootings preventable? And then he paused - three, two, one - and we're already smiling.

Yeah.

And he said, yes, absolutely. And you know what, that was our marker for whether that phone call was going to go longer, Brian. Because I'll tell you right now, there are people out there making their living right after this thing at that store - on LinkedIn, my only link to other humans - somebody hawking their book: hey, I hope you're going to take a look, you better start reading my book. And that hammer of truth and justice was jumping around in a box in the basement. Because see, that's what pisses me off. You want to do something about this? Shine the light on the problem. The problem is we have broken humans in society, and if they don't get the mental health that they need, this will never end. And because they're becoming less sophisticated but more organized, we're going to see more body count. The attacks are easier to pull off.

It's easier to learn how to do it, it's easier to pull something off, for a number of reasons. But yeah, it just goes back to - this kid is 18 years old. We've seen it time and time again with all these folks. If you can get them to not do that and get out of high school into their 20s, guess what happens? Your likelihood of violence, anger, rage - it goes down. That's why, I don't know if it still is, but you used to have to be 25 years old to rent a car. And your car insurance rates go down as you get older, because you're less likely to - I mean, if you can put it on an actuarial table, that's what insurance underwriters do. So why can't you do it with anything we're talking about?

You're less goofy.

And that's the thing - when you get into this horrible analysis of why he did it, well, one, you're not him, so shut the fuck up. You didn't talk to him either. You don't know why he did any of that stuff. There are a lot of reasons, and it takes away from the real problem, and it takes away from us solving it when you politicize these things and make it all about one issue. Well, now we're never going to solve it, because it's just about this issue.

You've got to pick a side, whether you're for that issue or against it. It's horrifying and it's frustrating, and you see it over and over again. Target jumped in to solve this problem and said, no, we're not pressing charges, we want to bow out of this gracefully. Second thing is they put signs on all their stores - hey, we're no longer carrying those cards, if you want them you've got to order them online - to prevent further violence. That's a coward's way out. That changes nothing. You can't change human behavior by taking those things off of your shelf. That's just going to create somebody else who's going to sell two times as many and have them on their shelf. Violence has to be addressed. We're now back to a level of violence that I didn't think we'd get back to. There was a shooting at a steakhouse just a couple of days ago, and I feel when they go back to it, you're going to see that it had to do with a workplace violence issue - a guy had gotten fired, came back, was sitting at the bar, things got out of hand, they called the cops, he shot the security guard, the cops shot him. And the poor woman standing there made me think again of my mom and my aunt with their hats and the feather - the old thing, "this is such a nice steakhouse and all we came here for was a quiet meal, and now it's a homicide scene."

It's the Luby's diner. In Texas. That case back in the 80s or 70s, whenever it was.

Angry man, woman-hater, drives his pickup truck through the front window.

Crashes through the plate glass window. And that changed legislation and gun laws and all of this. But is it still happening? Yes. We didn't fix the underlying problems. Fuck, I forgot where I was going to go with this.

You were so angry a minute ago. Angry Brian came out. Brian doesn't have diabetes, but he does have a sugar problem.

I didn't want to get into that one too much, because we get into that as sort of this is why these things occur, this is why the ideological difference is.

Let's stop victim blaming. Let's stop victim praising. Let's deal in facts. Brian, if we deal in facts and we deal in science, we will come out to demonstrated intent. Because when you talk about perspective, when you talk about orientation - every one of those bad guys had a chance to say no. They had a chance to sit out, they had a chance to comply, they had a chance to say, you got me. And they didn't do it. And now the next story will be that Biden inspired the shooter. And pray tell, that helps nothing. You know that crappy movie with Eddie Murphy - love Eddie Murphy in almost everything - but where every time he said a word, a leaf fell off the tree? Think about it. If that were true in life, where every time you said a word a leaf fell off the tree, all of that rhetoric and shit that doesn't need to be out there on the line - it's not helping anybody. Remember what Alito said - I think it was Alito - about pornography? I know it when I see it. What purpose does it serve?

Yeah, because I can't describe it, but I know it when I see it.

My arguments are always going to be for science unless I'm proven wrong. My argument is always going to be: bring the facts forward. This was a broken kid. He was going to spin out of control - they prevented it by a year because he was going to do it at school, and he chose, Brian, a place he goes to all the time. He didn't choose a random store. He went to this store all the time.

So that's kind of our comments on that case for now. I mean, we need to definitely revisit it.

I guess we're going to talk about that. How did that start?

That was my fault. I'm going to go ahead and take the blame on that one. That was all me. I said, hey, we weren't going to talk about this, and then I said, but let me tell you what my thoughts are.

It came screaming out.

It is frustrating because it seems - and I have to call myself out on this - what seems so self-evident to me needs to be explained clearly. We all look for some explanatory storyline for why something occurred, so we go with the lowest-calorie thing. It's obviously because of this. It's obviously because of his access to guns. It's obviously because he was abused as a child. Everyone picks their point and goes, this is what it is. Maybe it's all of that. Maybe it's none of that. Don't overcomplicate things you don't need to. Just look at who this person was, look at their behavior, look at how they treated others. Don't just go after what they said. Are you going to go after people with Tourette's because they say awful things all the time? They don't mean anything by it, they can't help it. What are they doing? What's their behavior like? With all of these cases, to bring it back to how to understand this - that's difficult to do in the middle of the situation.

I would say stop and think about it and compare it. Brian, there were three shootings and a stabbing during graduations or graduation parties, at least one of which resulted in someone being fatally killed. Find those articles. Those articles pull at heartstrings, but those articles don't give you the full picture. Evil is around you all the time. People who are broken are going to do bad things. You've got criminal type, you've got negligent type, you've got accidental or incidental because they've got a mental health issue. Brian, we've got to start teaching everybody: these are fun events - don't bring the gun to the wedding. If you're carrying a gun, don't drink too much. If you've got a sharp-pointed object during an argument, put it away, because you're a human and you're likely to use it. It's about human behavior. The more we know about human behavior, the more predictive analysis works.

You can come up with other outcomes, identify potential other things that are happening. I go back to what we'll talk about on the Patreon site - the video of the police officer in Michigan in the case we talked about today. You can tell just from his body cam moving forward that he did a double take, almost like he went, wait, hang on. He knew right then and there this is not a normal situation. This is a different traffic accident out of the 300 I've showed up at in my career. This one is different. And then out comes the gun, then out comes the situation. I'm not saying he did anything wrong - in fact he didn't, because they did the investigation. He did what he was trained to do. It fell within their policies and procedures, the escalation of force, and it fit the legal definition for the authorization of deadly force to protect himself and his fellow officers. But it's a perception issue. How can you sit there in the moment and come up with potentially other outcomes for this situation? I'm not saying that's easy, but it is absolutely 100% achievable. You can predict these likely things. You just brought up graduation - it's prom season right now. Are there going to be parties where kids drink too much and die, get in car accidents, DUIs? All that stuff is absolutely about to happen. We're in that time period, just because it's May into June.

Let me make a prediction, Brian. In the next couple of weeks, there's going to be a homicide or a homicide-suicide when recently divorced persons are trading custody of the kids in a public place, and one of them is going to lose their mind and kill the other one or kill both of them. We know that's going to happen. We know there's historic precedent for it. We know those are high-stress moments. Yet what happens? We're diligent and we're safe and we protect each other, and then our guard gets let down - because humans have a tendency toward entropy, we get complacent. Back when I was on the road, I wore my gun in the same place I wore my badge so that if somebody saw it, they'd likely figure out I was a cop and not shoot me in the head. But what happens later? All of a sudden you've just got to run into town and pick up that pizza, and you throw the gun and badge in the center console. And then later it's, I'm not going to bring my badge, but I've got my gun on my shoe. Brian, we're all guilty of that. What I'm trying to say is, as a society, we can't get complacent when it comes to reporting incidents. We've got to look at the incident and warn people. When the warning light comes on, check your oil. It's graduation season. The first thing that's going to happen is six graduating kids are all going to die in the same wreck because they're screwing around and hit a tree. Then at the graduation ceremony somebody's going to drink too much or take pills and be found dead in their room. Then the parents are going to fight and there's going to be a shootout. Brian, we can predict it. If you can graph it - we pay people to predict what's going to happen with the stock market. They're sometimes right, and they're sometimes wrong.

Usually wrong.

But the idea is the long-term effects of it are that these things pay and these things don't, right? So that's what I'm telling you, man. You've got to look around you, just like cop shootings, Brian. Cops are so much better now at what they're doing, but that doesn't mean that every incident has to result in a shooting. Let's talk about that on Patreon as well, because I'm not saying that the cops did anything wrong in these instances. But I'm saying that we're never going to get out of the cop shoot mentality if we stay in the bang, bang, you're dead binary, you know, when the force escalates, you need to be here. And when they're here, you need to be here. Escalation, Brian, is not in a cop's milieu. Escalation is a product of the scene, of the suspect, of their intent.

Yeah, of everything involved. It's the totality of it.

De-escalation has got to be like fighting racism - it's got to be part of your DNA. It can't be a thing. You can't go, fuck, let's run and get that anti-racist spray now. It's either part of how you culture or it's not. And it's part of your culture or it's not. You've got to fix that first.

That's a great point. The anti-racist spray analogy is funny because that's exactly how we are as humans - okay, now we have to go get this toolkit, now we have to go get that thing over there. No, you don't. You already possess the ability to accomplish this. Use what you have and then make it part of everything that you do, so it's not a thing anymore.

They're going to shit at me for this too. And I'm always wrong on numbers, folks, because not only do I have coprolalia, but I have the disease where you can't see things in order when it comes to numbers.

Is that a disease? Can I get - you're pretty bad. Oh yeah.

I don't know. But the idea is - now you made me forget my train of thought. Oh my God, I need coffee. But the idea is, when you read the news and Congress is passing a bill for twenty-seven million dollars or two hundred and seventy million dollars - I don't know where to put the decimal - but the idea is it's so cops can get free training in how to deal with people that have close-set injuries like PTSD. Listen, we're not going to do anything about PTSD and helmets and identifying those soldiers that need the extra support. What we're going to do is say, hey, those cops, those first-line people are killing them at a higher rate than other people.

That's exactly what I'm talking about - how we look at these problems. It's like, oh, we'll just get them to do this. That doesn't address the fucking issue. Jesus.

They need more training. And Brian, we need training in electricity because power lines come down during storms, so anyone in fire needs training.

Everyone says they need more training until it's time to go do training and they just buy a vehicle instead, or buy some everybody thing.

Yeah, and got money.

You've had more money now than ever, and yet - oh, our budget. Okay, your budget's higher than it's ever been in the history of this place being here, but okay.

Build that new training academy, get those new details - there you go. And now the thing is, you coins - let's trade coins. Coins used to mean something; they're meaningless now. Keep your coin. You know what, give it to a hobo so they can get some coffee. And I can't call it a hobo.

You can't - that's old school. Wasn't it specific? Like, I thought it specifically had to deal with ones that would ride around on trains. I thought that's what the origin of that was. Could be wrong. I do - I had a train set as a kid. We had HO scale and a small LGB scale for around Christmas.

Chicago's well known for trains.

Absolutely it is. There's millions of trains. I've sat at train crossings for hours of my life if you put it all together.

My brother Jeff used to put HO scale trains in his mouth all the time. I don't know why, but he loved trains. I'll tell you that. So let's get him about the hobo next time I run into him.

I think that maybe that's why he loved it - it wasn't about the trains, it was about the people riding. Thank God it wasn't plugged in. So that spiraled off the tracks there, Greg. We'll get into those videos - we'll do that on the Patreon site. Folks, you can come check that out on there and see how we break stuff down. Those are quick little tutorials that we give, and we do other discussions on there. And again, for those of you who do follow us on there, we do appreciate it - thank you. For those of you who are reaching out, we do appreciate that as well. And if you send us ideas for topics or things to do, we'll do it on there. Since we talked about graduation - I saw someone made a funny comment. It's kind of graduation season right now, so they said don't forget to take some photos without your significant other, because when you look back, you're likely not going to be with that person. I thought it was funny. It was good life advice. Make sure you get some without that boyfriend or girlfriend in your life, because you're young and you just graduated and things may change.

The wife and I just went over 30 years. We've been together longer than that. So you had to mention Shelly, did you?

Yeah, want to make sure everyone knew who you're talking about.

She's not proud of it anymore. Now it's like, yeah, we're together.

She's telling people, no, we've only been together for like - it hasn't been that long.

We don't have kids, we're just - I love it.

We're just dating. I'm still feeling them out.

Hey, you haven't even commented on my name on the show.

Yeah, I saw that earlier - Dog Sitting SME. You are watching Ember again.

We'll talk about that next week. She's sleeping finally. But all night, Ember and I - Rhodesian Ridgeback - that is the sprinkler. Every time she comes over the house she vomits on absolutely every hard surface in the house.

Poor pup. She's eating something that's bothering her. That sucks.

She looks like me now. She's even wearing a jacket - and she's wearing red because it's Friday. We'll have everybody deployed.

Absolutely. Thanks everyone for tuning in, we do appreciate it. Share it with your friends. Reach out to us at leftofgreg@gmail.com. And don't forget that training changes behavior. That's all for today, folks. But if you'd like even more content, you can head over to our Patreon page - the link can be found in the episode details. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast, follow us on social media, and please tell your friends about the show. Thanks for tuning in and thank you for your support.