Left of Greg 017 School Shooters are Insider Threats

Exactly. And by the way, it's snowing in Marren West. I can't believe that. I guess, apparently, they didn't know until Colorado that it's already May.

You probably heard that April showers bring 11 degrees and cold weather. That must be a Colorado thing.

We're doing fine. We're doing the miserable May gray right now out in San Diego, where that marine layer comes in and keeps it kind of gloomy. It's probably only 71.

Yeah, wow.

So it's only in the mid-60s, so it's a brisk morning today. On the way to the gym, I had to throw on a fleece, while still wearing shorts, of course. But to go in there, and it rained last night, so I couldn't do my outdoor workout because everything was all wet this morning.

So that men's extra-small fleece.

That's all available in around San Diego. It's okay. It's a youth large. Okay, for one, it's got the right cut for me. It works. It works perfectly.

So that being said, I did have a great day the other day with Carry The Load. They're awesome, awesome people. Super emotional day, and I almost started bawling on their bus when I saw two names that I haven't seen in years. So, incredible organization. So thanks to them for letting me come out and hang out and let me show me behind the curtains there. I got to see everything, so it was pretty cool.

So today on this podcast, Greg, I know we're going to talk about a few things and some of it we discussed before. But specifically, we're going to kind of talk about some of the recent events with the most recent school shootings. One at the University of North Carolina and then one at the STEM school out in Colorado, not far – that was the big news headlines – not far from where the Columbine shooting was, which everyone references a lot when these things happen.

And so part of the issue here I'd like to bring up, and this is specifically addressed to folks who've never tuned in before, maybe this is their first time listening. You know, Greg, you being the human behavior expert that you are, the DoD subject matter expert, as well as with a number of other organizations, you've been profiling, to use the word human behavior, for decades and been explaining human behavior pattern recognition and analysis for decades. This with a specific intent, I would like to say, of preventing catastrophic situations, right? So the whole point of learning this stuff is so you can read human behavior and predict likely outcomes so that you can mitigate these types of attacks. Whether that's a school shooting, whether that's a child sexual predator, whether that's human trafficking, whatever that behavior is, we're trying to prevent, we can do it by just understanding human behavior.

And I know a lot of books have been written about your work, a number of scientific studies done by me because I said, "Well, you had all the scientific studies done on your program that show it works scientifically." It's valid, and it can be reproduced, and it increases someone's situational awareness by 300%. I know one of the studies found, which is an enormous scientific number of what that actually means. But basically, world-renowned human expert on this stuff. And, you know, I've been teaching along with you for a long time now and studying this stuff as well.

And what gets me, I think we can start off, is identifying that these problems are not going to stop unless we do something about it, right? So everyone can agree with that. And now what happens after that is everyone kind of generally gets in with wherever their political leaning or political organization says and says, "Hey, this is what the problem is." And that's fine. We all as Americans enjoy political freedoms in this country that a lot of people don't get to have, and I fully support all of those people that have those opinions. But what we like to focus on is the human behavior, the human element, right? Because that's often what happens with these. It takes a human being to carry out an attack, it takes a human being to kill a bunch of people or hurt someone. So that's kind of where our lane that we stick to.

And so one of the first things I want to bring up and kind of ask you about, Greg, to get your opinion on, your subject matter expert opinion on, is there's a fascination, or a wanting to understand, the motive for these crimes. I think we talked about this before. We have a specific podcast on motive, but this is as we deal specifically with what just happened in the news the last couple of weeks. But, you know, like we were talking about before we hopped on, The New York Times, enormous, huge news organization, their lead story on this, their big story, "Hey, still unknown what the North Carolina shooter's motive was before the attack." Now you've always said, "Hey, I don't care about motive. I don't care what your motivation is to do a crime. I care about what your behavior is." So that kind of always made sense to me. So first of all, maybe we can address, what are your thoughts on why people are so interested in what the motive is, and what is your opinion, your subject matter expert opinion on motive? Does it matter? Do we need to know it? Does it help anything? Does it help us prevent the next one? Why are we so interested in it?

Yeah, and thank you for offering. First of all, for all the listeners, Marren called and said, "Hey, let's do a podcast at 1300." No advance notice whatsoever for either of us. Brian, I know you've been mulling around this in your head, so I just want to address the loaded nature of the question and ask if you could say "subject matter expert" three more times there in that intro.

Now, first of all, thanks for what you did with Carry The Load. Let's go back to that. Then let's fast-forward to your comment about the school shootings, pre-the-motive stage. When you went back, you said we can all agree, words to the effect, you said, "We can all agree that they're going to continue until we do something about them." I would take umbrage with that. I would say they're going to continue forever. And the impact is that we fail to understand that we've declared war on drugs and we're still dealing with drugs. We declared war on all of it, and I use that terminology because that's what we, you know, we, we, we, and we impose a drug czar upon you. And, you know, we insert these ideas.

Here's the thing. As long as you have a captive audience, you're going to have a person that's going to try to criminally, or terroristically, or just through rage, they're going to try to target those folks. And whether it's road rage, or whether it's workplace violence, or whether it's school, get it out of your head that it's going to go. It's never going to go away. There's always going to be damaged humans. That's where you have to interject something. You have to address the damaged human.

So if we go back to your North Carolina shooter, here we got a high-functioning autistic kid that had mental health issues that nobody wants to talk about. As a matter of fact, I remember hearing in the car, on NPR or something, where the dad said, "Hey, this isn't in my kid's DNA," even though the video's rolling with him capping rounds and shooting people like it's free. The problem that we have is, and then the final, before I dig in, the final, Brian, you sometimes say, "Hey, we've discussed this before." Hey, listen, we're rehashing cabbage that we're always going to talk about, but it's always from the new perspective. So don't get the idea that we're going back over something. This is all new news as the news media declared a "First Alert Action Date," which is another thing. Every single time one of these comes up, we have to have 360 coverage of the situation there from the ground.

So go back to the shooter in North Carolina. The motive is worthless. So what is it? The motive is a totem. The motive is designed to let us sleep at night. Because if the motivation was to attack Christians, if the motivation was to attack Braille-reading one-legged people that live in Florida, then we feel great because we're in Colorado and we don't fall into that group, right? And think that somehow we're outside of that target group.

Then we also think that these guys are targeting, or these females with yesterday, which threw everybody off. And because we have an LGBTQIA issue on the Colorado shooting, nobody's going to touch that, though I'll tell you. "Well, the females are juvenile, so we can't touch it." No, they can't tell you because it's a [expletive] odd potato. The news doesn't want to touch things they can't understand. So again, we have to create that dead Sasquatch, we have to create that Yeti, we have to create this thing that's outside of our ken.

So the guy in North Carolina says, "My [expletive] son couldn't have done this because my son doesn't have that DNA." Then everybody that lost a child – and listen, folks, I am so sorry you lost a child. No, no adults should ever outlive their children. But us immediately patting ourselves on the back on the news and saying, "What an incredible response to the STEM school shooting!" Listen to me for a minute. One student is dead. A wonderful life was snuffed out, and many other kids were shot and will be traumatized for life. Yeah, that's not what we're going to applaud ourselves about. And I'm glad first responders, I'm glad the EMT got there and all that. But then we go to the principal of Columbine 20 years later and say, "What do you think about the response?" That's all band-aids on a gaping arterial wound.

What we need to do is we need to figure out that we have to have training to identify broken humans, and that training exists. And if these folks are insider threats, an insider threat is typified and characterized by somebody that uses special knowledge to gain an advantage over a type of victim. And so here again, we have kids that are students at the school that go and shoot where they're familiar. And somebody is going to tell you, Brian, that we still don't know the motive. Motive doesn't matter. Weapon doesn't matter. Stopping, or adding legislation for a bump stock is not going to stop one more school shooting. And then somebody will counter with that right now. Somebody's pissed off, and they're dialing you, Brian.

All right, yeah, but to you, number of rounds, and this, and then the other, it would only get a lot of ideas. Wait till they get a little hung up driving a vehicle.

I think that's a good point to make right here, Greg, is that, okay, let's look at this from the perspective of, you know, a mathematician or an economist or something like that. Okay, would adding more guns to the issue solve it? Well, technically, if you add more guns, you're going to have more shootings. But then, so then you'd go, "Well, okay, let's take away all the guns, then we won't have any violence." Well, now you won't have any gun violence, but there's still going to be plenty of violence out there, right? And so I think it's that perspective and understanding of how people frame the issue.

You, Brian, you hit it on the head. Let's talk about violence. Let's talk about the big V. Let's talk about the rage. Listen, if you have a failed to thrive, if you have a person that's got low self-esteem, and they've got resilience issues, and they've got maybe the lack of proper motivation, parental supervision, role-modeling, mentorship, whatever you want to call it, and that person also now has an agenda, "I have an axe to grind, I was fired, I lost my mom, I'm going through a divorce, this happened at school, that happened."

Let's go to Kip Kinkel for a minute. Thurston High School. Kip Kinkel is now in the trick bag because he is acting out and things are going pretty bad for Kip. And so Kip decides that, "Listen, my parents now know that I have a gun and I brought my gun to school. A school resource officer came, found the gun in my locker, hooks me up, hooks a couple of other people, and sends me home for the day. My parents are coming home and they're going to know about it." Kip Kinkel comes up with the plan that, "Listen, because I'm now going to be charged with these felonies anyway, my parents can't know about this." So he kills his dad, and then he kills his mom, and then he plays video games with his friends at home before going to Thurston High School the next morning to do the shooting.

So what am I talking about? I'm talking about a timeline of events. And I want the viewers to understand that his dad called and said, "I need to get my kid into some special help, some kind of counseling, some kind of camp because I think he's going to kill me." He told his coworkers, "I think my son is going to kill me." Put yourself in that situation. Dad had denial with a capital D over the violence with a capital V. Now, in addition to dad being shot dead and dad saying, "Hey, I want to do something," mom says, "I have problems," and talks with her coworkers, talks with her friends, and says, "Kip was acting out, I'm afraid that Kip is going to kill himself." And nobody listened. And Kip Kinkel's sister is still on the road right now. I'm sorry, man, but shout out to you for the wrong reasons, and saying, "Kip didn't do this, Kip was talked into it." You know, "Kip doesn't have the ability to act out violently." Why? Because we have to wear the mask. We can't believe that Jeffrey Dahmer lived in an apartment above ours. We believe that Steven Avery is guilty. Right? One of the oldest crimes in Rihanna's property. Why can't we believe that? Because understanding that scares me.

So let's fast-forward to Columbine and we take a look at it. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. Eric Harris's dad, Dylan Klebold's mom. These are wonderful folks, and I have no idea how they can deal with the tragedy. But you have a situation here where both of these kids were acting out and acting up. And when the shooting is in progress, mom's calling and saying, "I wish, I hope that my son commits suicide because I think he's the one that's at the school killing." And the other parent calls the Jeffco Sheriff's Office and says, "Hey, there's a shooting at Columbine." And the cops go, "I know, we're well into it." And he goes, "Now I'm calling because I think my son's one of your sons." And don't fail to underscore that, Brian, that everybody knew, and everybody in the classroom would be able to point out the likely shooters if somebody would have interviewed them.

Right. Right now. And that's with a lot of the courses that we taught too. It's the same thing with the sexual harassment, the suicide stuff that we've done. Like, "Hey, we had people coming up and like, 'Hey, you're talking about my buddy over there,' or, 'Hey, you're talking about me.'" Yeah. And that, which is, like, yeah, this stuff is universal.

But to go back to your comment about the denial and what is that the shooter's parents said, "Hey, it's not in his DNA." But, well, it's obviously in his DNA if he just literally, you're sitting there, like he just committed this act, you just shot all these people, and then you're going to sit there and still deny it? "Well, no, it's not him." That denial, I think, is incredibly, incredibly powerful, especially when, like you just said, it's one of our loved ones. But even when it's so extreme, even when it's social, people are saying it, there's still that element of denial. You look at Harris and Klebold's parents, both their parents, they knew it when it happened. Now they knew, "It's my son, hey, that's my boy in there doing that killing, and I knew he was going to do it."

So part of that comes into what takes that person to then go and report it and do it? And that's what we talked about: the training and the competence, which will give you the confidence. But I think it's even without that, like you just said, you could walk into any school, any school right anywhere in the U.S. right now and go give those kids a test and say, "Write down the five people who you think are likely going to come in here and shoot up this place." And I guarantee they're going to pick the most likely people because they already know. No one knows another student like another student, actually. No one knows these kids better than them, even better than the teachers do, and we all know this.

So it's hard, I think it's, well, it's easier for kids sometimes to pick this stuff out when we're talking specifically about the school shootings, is because they know that environment. And then you've got teachers and security folks and administrators that work at that building. Well, they're not in that circle, right? They're looking from the outside in, and so they kind of lose, "Well, I don't know how to find it. I don't know how to find it," or, "I don't know how to look for this stuff, right? What am I supposed to do? How to identify these things? Give me the checklist, Greg. Give me the ten things I need to look for, write it down on this piece of paper, give me the smart card, and I'm good, right?" That's all I need. And I think it's obviously a lot more nuanced than that, but it takes that training. It takes someone to understand that.

Let me ask you to put yourself on the line again. I cobbled together probably the worst rudimentary graphic in the known world in the ten minutes I had to prepare for this while I was trying to find bands. But if you could put up that hard school, soft school (referring to an unshown visual aid). So the idea here between hard school, soft school is that every single time that we deal with any type of entity, whether it's a small private school to a major school to an entire institution, like a college level or a university, what they always want is they always want us to come in and tell them how to fix their school so they can prevent all forms of violence from ever occurring there. And we all know that that's ridiculous.

So if we take a look at here at the concept of the hard school, soft school, what I meant by this and what I was trying to explain through this is, look, you can harden your school through training because training changes behaviors, and people will know that these baseline deviations, known as anomalies, are where that threat hides. Yet, when we leave, instead of sticking with the training portion, what they think is, "I'll harden the windows, I'll harden the doors, I'll put up a fence to restrict this person from coming in." And they think that's going to let them sleep at night. But again, we're talking about an insider threat, a person that's already within those hardened doors.

Then we look at the soft school. Well, soft targeting. Bad guys, terrorists, criminals are going to go around and they're going to assess and they're going to probe, and they're going to say, "This is a soft school." Well, we don't want to harden the school to the point where the students can't take it anymore, where the students are walking around and they're thinking, "I'm being victimized, this isn't a school, this is a prison where I might be shot any time of day." In my day, we had fire drills and they were scary enough. Can you imagine being in a school nowadays and having to do an active shooter drill? Active shooter drills, and Brian, the news was saying that all the kids are desensitized to it. No, the kids aren't desensitized to it, they're at early stages of PTSD from it. That's what it is. That's why they're being quiet about it, and that's why these kids are emotional wrecks when they're being brought out of the school.

Listen, you can have it both ways. You can have the hard target school, and you can have the soft school where the emotions play an important part in assessing the mental health of the people that are around you. But what is the next phase they always do, Brian? We tell them this is how you got to harden, and this is where the education and training have to be. We tell them training changes behaviors, and you have to have an investment in time to get there. Then everybody ends up with the same thing, and it's always about money. The money for training a student, a staff, a teacher, a parent is less than a jacket, less than a pair of boots, less than a customized set of jeans that you wear (and men's small, but what is this, youth large?), but nobody wants to touch that, right?

And then they come to me afterwards and they give the same thing that every major military comes up and tells me, "Yeah, but just give me three. Give me bite-size chunks. I only want these three things." There aren't three things. There's a baseline plus anomaly equals decision, which happens to be three things. And those anomalies can be anywhere. So don't sit there and say, "When the person does this TTP (tactic, technique, and procedure), don't say when they do this it means this." That's why the news videos right, and they're going all over the place and saying, "Well, it doesn't fit the pattern, the pattern, the pattern." The pattern is over at school and they were killing. Stop there. That's enough. Then you go in and say, "What was broken?"

So this kid every single day came in and said, "I'm tired of whatever." And again, bullying. We throw bullying out there all the time. "The kid was bullied." Have you ever been to high school? Everybody gets bullied. Everybody's in a clique. That's our progesterone, our testosterone, and all our internal chemicals are fighting for us to be in charge. And somebody's the shy kid, and somebody's the jock. What you have to do is you have to level the playing field by giving everybody an advanced level of situational awareness. Once they have that increased level of situational awareness, it permeates everything in their life. They'll be a better driver, they'll be a better husband or parent or wife or kid. They'll be able to read the emotional capital of the people in the room with them at any time or any place.

And that's kind of how I try to explain it to people too. It's an increase in human performance in a sense, because it's human cognitive performance, which a lot of people have tried to do, but all they're doing is really just, they're coming with great training programs, but just for a specific "Hey, it's for this use." Yeah, "It's for this, it's for meditating, it's for this, it's for sports performance, it's for your bench press, it's for your runtime." We're saying, "No, no, if you look at it, like I like to use the analogy of a wheel, and you've got like a bicycle wheel, we've got the hub in the center and then each spoke goes off in a different direction. Well, if you strengthen that hub, that hub being that human behavior pattern recognition analysis training, you can go anywhere with that. You can use it for anything." And I think that's important to understand.

And one of the things I wanted to kind of hit on because you brought it up, in identifying what we articulate this type of threat as, is exactly what you said: an insider threat. So there's different types of insider threats that we deal with, right? And I would say, in my opinion, you can argue, but insider threats are so much worse because, one, it damages not just the act itself of whatever it is, but it's a breakdown of trust within whatever that community or tribe is or location is. It's harder to detect. We, it's not harder to detect with training, but it's harder for us to realize that the potential threat is there because we're not used to that, right?

So you go back, like a historical perspective, you know, you started with humans were hunter-gatherers and tribes and cities and city-states. And the old adage is, "We build walls to protect us." But eventually what happens if that group becomes big enough that your threats aren't out anymore? They're already there, right? So and I think that that's hard for people to realize. So we've done insider threat training with folks like, literally in Afghanistan, where U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines were training their Afghan counterparts, and then one day, one of the people they're working with, their training, comes in and tries to kill them all. Right? Well, that's an example of an insider threat and the huge because now there's a breakdown of trust of everyone in that unit.

Well, it's no different than in a school shooting with someone on the inside. It's not the boogeyman outside that we all think of. It's not the psycho in some scary movie you watched. It's not some fictionalized character. No, it's, well, it's the guy sitting next to you in class. It's the girl sitting next to you in class that you know. And I think that's harder for people to realize because then people want to freak out and go, "Well, everything could be a threat." Well, no, it's not. And I mean the list of insider threats just goes on. You look at, I think last year, don't quote me exactly on the numbers, but it was something, I believe the FBI just put out, it was just around 100 law enforcement officers were killed in the line of duty last year, and it was something like 180 committed suicide. So we always classify for our suicide prevention courses that we've done, suicide is another form of an insider threat. That person is not a threat, they're a threat to themself, but it's still one of your own.

So if you look at it right there, it's the same thing. What's killing people with cardiovascular disease is killing people in the U.S. Why? Because we're eating too much and we're too fat. You're your own worst enemy sometimes. And I think it's hard for people to kind of look at it from an insider threat perspective because they get very, it's almost like they get hyper-vigilant, right? Which is not good. So, I don't know. I like the classification of the insider threat, but why again, why is it so hard for us to go, "Hey, it's the guy"? We don't want to believe that it's our neighbor. We don't want to believe that it's our uncle who's going to, or a family friend who's going to try and attack my kid at the sleepover or the pool party. That's too hard to fathom.

So stop that. When, you know, it hurts every time I take a drink because the straw is digging me in the eye. And the doctor tells you, "Well, take a hammer and hit your hand, you'll forget about it," or "Stop taking a drink." Well, what we do is we have this pendulum swing of logic. So you take a look at Brandon Cruz from Florida. And Brandon Cruz is still killing because two of the Parkland survivors committed suicide recently. You see that Adam Lanza has been dead for years and he's still killing because one of the Sandy Hook dads committed suicide, right? But we are not going to look at that situation for what it is and say that our human behavior and our mental health system needs an overhaul. We are going to say it's a weapon or the process to buy a weapon, for example, right? We are not going to be able to look at Dylann Roof and see the broken kid without somebody telling us that it's a race war out there, and it's ripe to break open.

So I would say beware of certain things, Brian. Beware of certain classifications. One, for every time you have a ten-minute act, somebody's going to come up with a nine-minute, and they're going to be the hero. And so what they're going to try to do is take a human behavior-based threat prediction program like we offer, a scientifically valid method, let's say, and what they're going to try to do is say, "It's too hard," or "We can't do that. We can't." Oh my god, I've heard all the excuses. There's the first thing, so stop that. The second thing is anytime that you hear that, "Okay, it's art." So put your [expletive] smock on so you don't get paint all over. When we say we have to now put this hat down and put on the next hat, and this is our insider threat hat, then we have to take that down. We have to put on a rage hat. That bothers people.

You and I were on a business call yesterday, and the people clearly wanted their business, their government time in between all the training time. We're lazy. We're human beings, and we're lazy. And the roll of the dice crapshoot that we're probably not going to get attacked in our home, we're probably going to die from heart disease. Listen, we can't get the message about drunk driving across to people. There's still 55,000 people that die on the roads every year from that. How are we going to snap our fingers and get somebody to listen to school shooters? You listen to the thing. So I tell you that, stop the TTPs, stop all that other great stuff. You need some training and understand that there's a whole bunch of phases of de-escalation or identification before the actual gun, before the actual shooting, before the actual—

And you bring up a good point to go back to what you called the pendulum swing of logic. And then you kind of already hit it for me what I was going to bring up is, you know, if you go out right now, Greg, and you go to the bar, you get drunk, you're driving home and you hit a vehicle and you kill someone in that vehicle, you are responsible for that. Everyone's going to blame you. Everyone's going to say you're the horrible human being. You're going to go to jail.

Even this one, there's a one right out here in San Diego, there's a young Navy kid who killed four people. He drove his truck off the Coronado Bridge. Right at the end, there's something called Chicano Park right there in the old neighborhood, and he killed four people. He basically had had some drinks earlier in the day. They're still not clear exactly how, if you, how, and he wasn't exactly very intoxicated, but he had some drinks during the day. He was arguing, showing phone records, he just got off the phone with his wife and they were having an argument. They could see by text messages and everything. Wasn't paying attention, loses control, goes to pass a vehicle, loses control, drives his truck right off the bridge and then lands on four people and kills them. So he's going to jail. He's going to go to jail. The sentence, it was about, I think, I'm not sure if he's got sentence yet, but they're looking at at least ten years or whatever. He's going to jail for. They're holding him responsible. They're not holding his cell phone responsible. They're not holding his vehicle responsible. They're holding him. So why is it that when it's a shooting incident at a school, it's the gun's fault?

Because that's something we can hold. Look, yeah, guns are scary. If you even ask a little kid what a bomb looks like, since our earliest memories, it's the Acme dynamite bottle with the fuse lit. We know what that looks like. So if it looks like a bomb or it looks like a gun, it's a weapon of terror based on the definition that it terrifies us.

I remember a good friend a long time ago, and I'm not going to name drop because this is a non-attribution podcast. Nobody wants to come on and talk about the hard questions, right? So the one person was explaining to me that in their law enforcement career, and it was at a federal level, that every single time that they brought out their .45 and told somebody to cease their illegal activity, it worked. But in certain instances, when they were carrying their .38, their snub-nosed, they pulled that out and they had to shoot a lot more people. And they said, "Well, do you think there's a psychological component?" Yes. So take a .38-inch circle and draw it on a piece of paper. Then take a .45-inch circle and draw it on, and then color them in. And when you're on the receiving end of that, the little bullet hole looks really small. And that .38 in your hand is kind of enveloped, so even though it's a deadly weapon, the mind looks at it and goes, "Well, that can't hurt that much." But then when you see that big old .45, that big horse pistol sticking up, look at the Dirty Harry thing. So, and then, oh my god, automatic weapon! So we don't talk about the gallons of gas and the DUI, you know, fatal. We, so but somebody has something to fight about and those are convenient things that we can point at. So we can, for example, what part of the U.S. Constitution, what part of the Bill of Rights specifically covers handguns or automatic weapons? What covers the Republicans versus the Democrats? None. But they create a divisive issue, right? That's how we can garner votes or get money. Or it's in a situation, does it exploit it? And that's what it is. It's, "How do I put my ideology behind what this is? How do I advance my cause with it? How do I politicize this issue?"

And you, to bring up, because you brought up Harris and Klebold, and you brought up, those guys would have killed every kid in that school had they been better bomb makers. There was what, 99, I believe, nine explosive devices. A lot of propane tanks and camping fuel and basic stuff that you can go buy at the Home Depot right now. And we can't ban that stuff because, because we, you know, that's just the whole idea. And you brought it up to being in the podcast too, is the War on Drugs. Okay, what has that gotten us? What are the second, third order effects of those actions? You know, what have we, I believe cocaine is cheaper now than it ever has been.

Yes, more demand than, there's more supply than there is demand after 30, 40 years of fighting it. And you're going, "Well, maybe there's," but we want, it's that sunk cost. But there's got to be a different way, Brian. And we want to look outside the box. And nobody wants to look at science.

So let me, let me reverse the table and ask you a question. You know that there was an attack at a U.S. military installation down in Texas, and you know that the insider threat was a soldier, Brian, and hurt and killed a bunch of people. Why isn't that on the tip of our tongues and why isn't that in the news all the time? What failed in that terrorist attack?

Well, exactly, is what, what, and I know what you're speaking of, a Major Nidal Hasan, precisely, down at Fort Hood. I believe we might have had some folks down there at that time.

We did. We had them, you remember the phone call. We were on the East Coast and they were locked, they were sheltering in. Here they were locked out. But what did he, what did he learn from his plan? He didn't get to his exploitation phase, which is the part of the, the final step in that terrorist planning process. He never got to exploit his crime because we took that away from him. So he classified, the news media and the human, and I believe there was folks in the previous administration kind of pushing for that that said, "This is workplace violence. This isn't a terrorist attack." So exploitation, Brian, it works both ways. Right? Exploit an incident like that, because I can say that this happened. And so I can twist it from different angles. I can turn that, you know, a little ball with that hamster running around in that little clear ball. I can turn it around and I say, "Well, this is about the Nation of Islam." Nothing could be further from the truth. "Well, this has to do with this." Well, that's not true either. So everybody can pick and choose what they want to take away from it. So what's the difference? What's the difference, I would ask you, with a school shooting or a school shooter? Look at the Isla Vista and the manifesto, right? Look at many of the other incidents. Stop characterizing people that would force violence on others and subjugate them and shoot them just because of the institution. Stop thinking of it in those terms. Stop thinking that this is a weapon or no weapon. Brian, would you agree that there are incidents of blue-on-blue when you have officers showing up to an intense scene?

Yeah, if they believe that just happened in Colorado. I don't think it's being reported very widely, but that's the whole thing. Is you're having people there with guns, now the police show up to do their job, what they're trained to do, and handle that situation. And who do you have here? Someone with a gun. So everyone starts shooting each other, even though they're—

So let's roll that back. Let's scientifically take a look, and you got the dry erase board prepared for this. A lot of people can legally carry, including in churches and schools and other places. But a lot of these sheriffs in certain counties are overwhelmed by that, the request from people to open carry. So sometimes they have to take a test. Very few of the times that they have to take a test, so they have to put a bullet in the gun, right? Oh, you're downrange. So you're saying that you're legally authorized to carry a weapon doesn't mean that you have the training commensurate with the weapon. So a single resource officer doesn't mean that he's got some incredible training, just like the federal marshal on an airplane where he knows exactly how to shoot between the seats and not hit your drink while your kid's doing a crossword puzzle. I'm telling you that those guns exacerbate an already dangerous problem. So be careful about—

No, no, yeah, absolutely. And you know, I have a driver's license, but I'm not winning the Daytona 500 or the Indy 500 anytime soon. It's the same thing.

Well, I got you. I know you're usually yelling the whole time we're talking, so it's very distracting.

Exactly.

But that's a point well taken, Brian. The thing is, you and I both have weapons available to us, and we have engaged in advanced critical thinking and said, "I'm not taking that weapon to work today and brandishing it at my coworkers." Yes. So there are broken people out there. There are broken humans that need help. They need healthcare, they need mental help. They need their families or some other outside intervention, and they're not getting it. So they, in their mind, come up with the Kip Kinkel plan, which says, "Hey, I'm going to jail anyway. My parents are going to send me off to camp. I've got no other recourse."

Well, I would tell you if you're thinking about being a school shooter right now, there are options. There's a ton of options, and you can get help. And that's where that first step, the used to tell people in martial arts class, "The black belt isn't the end, the black belt's the beginning. That's the first step." You're going to take. Well, for those wannabe school shooters out there, you got to take a step back and you got to look around and you got to say, "Hey, listen, yeah, okay, I'm misunderstood. Yes, I've been marginalized. And so I can act out this way and turn this into something," or, "You know what, I can get help, and I can turn my life into something." And I know nobody wants to attribute it to Gandhi, but you can be the change that you want to see in the world. So how do you want to do it? You want to be remembered as that person that choked somebody out or killed somebody or did something? Like if you know that—

That's why that, and that goes back to everything you're talking about with the lack of role models, mental health issues. Yeah, that's how some of those people want to be remembered. But you meet those people, you can identify them. Those students can identify them. So, I think the big takeaway here is that, one, these, you're saying that these attacks can be prevented or mitigated.

You can. You can stop it before it happens. The lion's share of any violent incident can be predicted, and therefore the effects can be mitigated through understanding human behavior and those pre-event indications of violence that are all over when you have the appropriate amount of training to see them start to coalesce. Yes.

So, but what does that mean? Like, "Hey, Greg, look, man, I'm a veteran," or "Hey, some guys, I'm a cop. Hey, I've been doing this. I'm pretty situationally aware. I take a look around where I'm going. I think I'm good. I think I'd see this." Right?

It's "Where's Waldo," man. Have you ever handed a kid a "Where's Waldo" book and watched the schism going on behind their head? And then all of a sudden you got to break it down for them. You take Waldo alone and go, "This is Waldo, this is my guy." And then you put Waldo with three other people in a room, and then five, and then ten, and then 50. That's the way that you got to do it for your brain because it's got to make sense. But instead, what we do is we say, "Well, don't worry." Do you think all officers have the same level of training? Do you think the State Police has some special training that a local officer doesn't have? You are rolling the dice with who's going to be showing up at your scene. And even if they've had training, the training that they've had is "at bang" and "right of bang." Yes. And that "left of bang" training is the essential stuff. These behaviors likely indicate that this is nigh, that this crime is afoot, that something is already in progress. And any effort you take there to give yourself that gift of time and distance is going to be well-placed. It's going to be time well spent. It's going to be money well spent.

And Brian, I will tell you this: spend the money. Spend that money on training and spending time, or you're going to be spending money on lawyers, and you're going to be spending money on lawsuits. You could be spending money in the fuel tank to go to the morgue and identify your kid and to go to the cemetery to pray for him. And that's hard math, Brian, and it's hard to say that, but I'm telling you, training changes behaviors.

It is. And I think what you're saying is that we're going to pay either one way or the other. So how do we want to pay for it? Do we want to pay for it to prevent these and stop this from happening in the first place, or do we just want to pay the cleaning bill?

I mean, speak up. You're a student listening to this podcast. Speak up to your administration. What have you done to harden the school and soften our hearts and open our eyes so we can see these situations? And don't accept that they've put bars on the windows or new access codes because an insider threat is already inside. You're an administrator, you're a teacher. What has your district, or your local officer, what training have we done "at bang?" Okay, I get it. But what about "left of bang?" What about how these things start to come together? And guess what? That training is out there. You have to dig a little bit. You have to find it. And you know what? Any training beats no training. So I'm glad for those people that are doing the "at bang" training, but if you're fighting with somebody, you missed all the cues. If you're shooting, you missed all this. Everything's a de-escalation.

Yeah. And that point right there is very hard for people to understand. Especially law enforcement training, military training, for sure, it's security type training. "When this happens, I do this." It's like, okay, but you're already starting at the wrong place. And that's all this great stuff people are trying hard. "Hey, we're going to get better at reacting at these schools. Hey, we're going to create this interagency alert system. We're going to do this." That is all good stuff. But look at what you're doing. You're accepting the fact that it's going to happen. "Hey, we're going to put these trauma bags and tourniquets in the school." You're accepting the fact that it's going to happen. I just think we can hold ourselves to a higher standard, right?

Listen, no Heimlich maneuver has ever stopped a person from choking. It may have mitigated that situation, helped that person to live, but running around with that poster didn't do anything. And you know those people that were still choking. So the idea of having that AED at the golf course is great, but that's not going to stop heart disease. You get what I'm trying to say? The idea of guarding somebody to stop them from drinking alcohol, or a team from having that booze party. You have to get involved and you have to do it at the grassroots level, and you have to build that group of trained individuals. Export that training. So you know what, and you know what, somebody's still going to slip through, Brian, but I'll tell you what, then it becomes so nominal that it will be remarkable then when we talk about it.

And that's, that's the point that, you know, I think that's a good spot also to kind of end on is, you know, you have to build that culture of awareness and prevention, and building that culture takes more than one person, and it takes a lot of effort. But like you just said, yes, will someone, is there always going to be crime? Yeah, there is. Sorry. But because there's always going to be criminals. And but can we mitigate a lot of it? I believe so. And especially with specifically what we're talking about with these school incidents, which are horrific, and no one thinks it's ever going to happen to them.

And that's the fake response. Let's take response and let's dial that back to prevention. Let's dial that back to being able to see. And I'll liken it again, Brian, in that jeep tour. I was taking a lot of people out on the jeep tours, and until I stopped and I said, "That's a deer. A deer has four of these," and held up the sign, did one of those. Until we get to that level, we're not going to see these folks. They're going to keep slipping through the cracks.

Well, I think that's a good spot to kind of bring it in for a landing. I'll have all the links to our website, of course. But anyone listening, go to www.arcadiacapital.com. You can check us out on The Human Behavior Podcast on YouTube. Just get on YouTube and search "The Human Behavior Podcast." Also, Arcadia is on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all that stuff. So check out the social media accounts. We're always posting new stuff, cool stuff for you guys to learn. Just follow along and support, subscribe, like, all that stuff, and we would really appreciate that. So Greg, thank you for the time and thanks everyone for listening. And until next time, everyone, be safe.