Left Of Greg 068 The real story of Richard Jewell as told by Eric Rudolph

Hey, everyone. Thanks for tuning in. I'm Brian, host of The Human Behavior Podcast. You're going to be watching the video version of our audio podcast. Please, guys, if you like the video, like it, subscribe to the channel. There's going to be more content on there if you're already a subscriber, and a better way for us to get you guys some more stuff. If you have any questions or comments, go ahead and leave them below. Check out our links down below to get a hold of us and to actually find out more places where you can get more information about this. Please like and subscribe. Follow us on Facebook at HBPRNA (Human Behavior Pattern Recognition and Analysis). Remember, all these cases that we discuss and all the discussions that we have are through the lenses of what we call human behavior pattern recognition and analysis. So please like it, share it, tell your friends about it, and we hope you enjoy the show. Thanks.

I like the fact that my suit coat is rippling rather than sausage casing like normally, where I'm stretching at the seams of all my clothing. That's good to see. So on that note, I think we'll go ahead and get started today.

Today's episode, we're going to be talking about... it's inspired by the recent Richard Jewell movie that was just released. It's out on Apple or Netflix. I watched most of it over last weekend. Then we were having a conversation, actually yesterday, with our buddy Walt from down in Texas. So you guys can check us out on the Distinguished Savage podcast. We'll put the links up.

We started talking about lone wolf attacks and different types of behavior, or not just attacks, but people or humans who become lone wolves, or who are off by themselves or not part of a group. There are actually very, very few of those types of individuals, right? We all think we're our own individual person and that we have our own likes and wants and desires, but many times it's more so to kind of fit in, right? We all even want to be... we all want to be part of a group. I don't care if you're a prepper-type survivalist who says, "No, I do this." No, you're... you have a group of people that you belong with. That's what you depend on for survival. You may not see them every day, you may not go to their house for dinner, but you're part of that group.

Yeah.

And so, there are actually very few loners, and we don't... I would say the overarching term is, as a society, we don't really like those because they actually kind of scare us, right? That's the people living off by themselves, off the land, up in the mountain or something, where we're all required to be part of a community to fit in and to survive. That person's not... it's almost a little odd for us, right? For most humans to really understand, because that's not what their typical behavior is.

So one of these true loners is... because the real story about Richard Jewell and the Centennial Park bombing in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the real story is about Eric Rudolph, the guy who actually carried out the attack and who did the bombing and several others. We'll jump into that. But I know the story got mixed around where Richard Jewell was falsely accused by an Atlanta newspaper, got information leaked by federal agent sources or some law enforcement source that he was a focus of the investigation. They ran with this whole big story, completely ruined this poor guy's life. I mean, completely ruined his life, turned it upside down. I know afterwards he was at least able to recoup some money in lawsuits and stuff, but I don't think it was a lot. I'm sure he would have rather given it all back to have his life back. So that's a whole other topic we could go down.

But I want to kind of focus in on the actual person we're talking about, this Eric Rudolph. To kind of give a quick background on Eric, he had a number of bombings in the nineties, right? So four different bombings from '96 to '98. He started with the Centennial Park bombing at the '96 Atlanta Olympics and then continued on from there. He killed two people out of all the attacks, injured a couple hundred others, and kind of set off basically a five-year manhunt from federal, local, and state law enforcement agencies. A task force could basically... this guy got away for about five years, living off the grid, kind of by himself. So that's kind of what the focus of today's podcast is going to be about.

But I do want to kind of start it off with this: what these true loners are, because there are other folks out there. There's obviously Eric Rudolph. There are people like Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber (University and Airline bomber). He was the same thing; he was living in a cabin by himself, a complete loner, shut out. He was also a brilliant mathematician prior to all this. You've got guys like Tim McVeigh, I would probably put in that category. He was the leader in the Oklahoma City bombing, same thing. He moved around from group to group, was booted out of the army or had to leave, and then tried to join a bunch of groups. He joined the Michigan Militia; they were like, "Hey, dude, you're a little too much for us, keep moving." And he and his buddy Terry Nichols carried out that attack.

But when we're talking about actual true loners, it also makes it a little bit more difficult to find these individuals, right? They're not part of a group; they don't leave as much of a trace. But I just kind of want to maybe make the point that you're talking about a very, very small amount of people. I mean, is that correct, Greg, in terms of?

Yeah, psychologically insignificant. It's such a small number. Brian, you bring up such incredible points, it's hard to know where to start. So I would say, first of all, our listeners, our viewers, you have to draw a line. I'm writing down things that you said, because when you were trying to classify him, Brian, Gladwell would call them outliers, right? When Gladwell talks about outliers, folks, he actually meant creative geniuses that came up with an idea. We're actually talking about the other end of the psychological spectrum, right?

If you were going to put some labels down, I jotted down quickly: loner, lone wolf, nonconformist, and criminal. All of those stand alone; they're all buckets that survive on their own. Each of those can have a person at their disposal at some time in their life. But it's really hard to characterize a person and talk about them. Because we have the loner who's the cat lady on the block that's always been alone, never was married. We have another loner who is the guy that recently lost his wife of 47 years, and he just stays to himself in his shed. None of those people ever engage in any criminal activity. And if they do, like smoking marijuana in a place where it's still illegal, they do it behind closed doors. Even the worst criminals that you mentioned have a public persona, a persona that they have to use to go to Ace Hardware to get more chloroform. Every serial killer has to.

Exactly.

So I think this pendulous swing that we're talking about is an incredible topic. I just want to make sure that folks at home don't misabuse those titles. A lone wolf isn't a loner, and a lone wolf isn't necessarily a criminal. So let's make sure that as we're reading about this and talking about it, let's make sure we classify it.

No, and that's a great point. Because to go right back to Richard Jewell, who was a bit of a loner himself, that ends up skewing our view or putting, I guess, putting our thumb on the scale for some of these situations. So why was Richard Jewell initially considered a suspect? Well, he fell into some of those buckets. He really did.

So, Brian, and you know who's guilty of this? We're all guilty of this, everyone. Right. We've got a narrow, tunnel-vision sort of laser focus when it comes to things. So one of Brian's models, mentors, let's call it, is Greta Thunberg. The news media has put Greta Thunberg on a pedestal, knowingly or unknowingly. And I'll see an article perhaps where she's put up there, and then there's a captain of industry or a king or a monarch or our president. Her word is taken with equal verve when the people are comparing things. Look, timeout. Right. Get thee to training. One, do your homework. Two, don't start putting round pegs into square holes. Right. Don't...

Yeah, yeah. Don't equate an influencer with an expert.

You're exactly right. So what happened is Richard Jewell fit a bunch of these laminated hard-shell, drawn-it-with-a-marker things. One, people that are intrigued by an investigation and follow up with it are sometimes involved in the homicide or the attack, and they want to insinuate themselves into the investigation. Two, loners, people that keep to themselves and their neighbors don't know much about, can turn out to be a criminal and a heinous criminal, like the Milwaukee guy, Jeffrey Dahmer. Do you get what I'm trying to say? So what happens is Jewell was at the scene, immediately makes him a suspect. He saved people and was thrust into a heroic limelight. Well, maybe that was a motivation for somebody in history, that they wanted to do something, be seen. Six-tempered Tyrannus, that guy thought he was doing a heroic act for the nation. Right. So we have to be careful and not allow... what's that thing called, Marin, you shine light into it and it turns all the different colors? Yeah, the prism, the light. So we don't want to shine a light and come out with a prism and go, "There you have it," because that's flipping meaningless. Now, I haven't seen the film, I'll tell you that, but I know the story of Rudolph. I know the story of Jewell well, and it's a great one to use in this context.

So yeah, and that's why I wanted to talk about Eric Rudolph too, because the movie was about Jewell. The whole movie was about him. I didn't make it through it all. I watched it. He dies at the end. Well, sorry to blow it for you, but he dies at 44. Yeah. But they really portray him to be like... you... they developed the movie, rightly so, develops a lot of sympathy for him, because you feel bad for this guy. He's trying to do the right thing, but he's kind of like, also kind of like that, that almost like a stereotype of a cop that no one likes where he's just, "No, you got to do the rules and this." And now harassing people and all this starts to happen. So, but he's also... they portray him as like this guy who just wants... he believes in law and order and wants to do the right thing. And guess what? The guy did the right thing. The guy saw something and he said something. He went, "Whoa, this isn't right. This is what they trained me to do." Richard Jewell saved lives, right? He was a guy who was just thrust into a spotlight that shouldn't have been, that couldn't handle it.

And that's unfortunate and it's horrible. Actually, the New York Times reporter, when I was kind of doing some back research on it, actually came out and he wrote the obituary for The New York Times for Richard Jewell, it was 10 years ago when he died. But he was originally covering that story down in Atlanta. And so he wanted to run with it too, after that paper in Atlanta put out the story that he's a big suspect and this is what's going on. So he wants to run with it. He actually said his editor at The New York Times said, "Absolutely not. No way. You get a couple hundred words to talk about the story. You're not going down. You're not saying that about him. Not this. It doesn't smell right." And he said he fought it. He said he fought it to the point where he was ready to quit. He looked back, and because his editor was right, looking back, he said, "It was like the greatest lesson I ever learned in journalism, in his career, in his life." He's like, "I was so ready to jump on this and get it done because that's my job." And it took the old sage graybeard to go, "No, no, no, this doesn't smell right. There's not enough info. You can't do that." And what did everyone who ran the story do? They ruined this guy's life. I mean, that's what happened.

What are we talking about? You just brought up an excellent sidebar. We're in class right now, Brian, and we're doing in-person training. This would be a breakout session. We would talk about tactical patience, okay? Because you have to control the message, and you have to control it at a speed that's comfortable for you. The opposite side of that would be that we're talking about the gift of time and distance. And the gift of time and distance is that if you're so close to the mark, and everything seems like it's going the right way, and you seem like you've got all this credible information pouring in, and you want to press send, I would tell everybody, take that extra half-second and think that you're being ambushed, because nothing goes that easy. There's always another story. Now, that doesn't mean waiting around until everybody's like, "I don't know what to do." I get that it's a competition, but at the same token, Brian, what you did for a living, you measured right and wrong with the deaths of your closest friends and other U.S. soldiers. So here it was tantamount to the same thing, because Richard Jewell, you know what? He might have been a quirky guy, okay? But he wasn't an evil guy, and he didn't deserve the Sword of Damocles, which came down and just ripped him from his job, his life, his career. It was a footnote. What is it? Probably 13, 14 years after his death, all of a sudden there's a movie out. He can't eat the popcorn. He can't enjoy his own film, you know? And God only knows when Hollywood is injected into...

And that's the other thing, is it's why I don't want to talk too much about the movie. I was just saying, that's why I said they portrayed him in this light. I don't know how much was real or true or what he actually said. Because you know, they portrayed it as like... the FBI was basically doing completely illegal things, getting him to come in for questioning where they said, "Hey, we're going to... we want to film a training video about this. Here, just sign this real quick." And he reads it and goes, "Hey, this is a Miranda warning!" He's like, "Oh, it's fake. It's all for production." So he fake signs it. And then they go, "No, you have to sign it for real." And he's like, "Wait a minute, something doesn't seem right." So I don't know how true any of that was. If it was, I mean, that was just highly, highly illegal. So I don't know if that occurred.

But beyond that, and this is why I want to talk about it: one, it's important to understand how he got roped into that, how we can go too far on that. Right. Because there's always two sides of the coin when we start to use those buckets or those profiles that some of the three-letter agencies really like to use. And then they go, "Yeah, look, see? He fit our profile." It's like, well, yeah, so can millions of people.

But we can't be wrong, Brian. Right. If it fits in the bucket, and look, it's... what do they call that? The hoop with no net. You know what I'm saying? When you look, it fits in there perfectly. Yeah, that's when you should be most suspect.

So here, here's the deal with Rudolph, right? He had four bombings, both Birmingham and Atlanta, right? A few years apart. Started with '96 and then, what, '98, I want to make sure I'm getting it right, was the last one. And that was at the abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama.

So the whole time they're looking for this guy. It didn't take too long after they tore apart Richard Jewell's life to realize he wasn't the guy. And they're now... they're on the path of eventually, even before his last bombing, they knew they had a suspect in Eric Rudolph, right? So they knew a guy, they had the task force, they had the resources going to it. They had, you know, for years. And this guy was that survivalist, living off-the-land type thing, which can make it more difficult or makes it a lot more difficult to actually capture him.

But the point of all this is to understand one, how he was actually captured was he was rummaging through a dumpster behind a grocery store at three or four o'clock in the morning, and a patrol officer just driving past saw it and went, "Well, that doesn't seem right." You know, went and contacted... sure enough, it turns out to be the guy. He's on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted list, a huge manhunt after him, and finds out it's him.

So, this is why, when we bring up those different profiles or different ways to categorize information, that's what it's used for: to categorize. That doesn't mean that's it, and that's what you use, right? So how often is it the guy running the task force that ever catches the guy? Never. It's always someone either in a community or a police officer driving by sees... I always give the Ted Bundy example: headlights are out. "Hey, that's not the paperboy. Let's pull him over." Pulls him over and finds a rape and murder kit in the back seat and goes, "Okay, well let's hook him up." Right. So that's where it comes from. And those are the indicators you're going to see.

But the reason you brought... we always shy away from motive because motive doesn't matter. Now, we understand it, and there's... it's okay to understand and use motive for different situations, right? Like if you're talking to a suspect and you know he's your guy and you're trying to establish rapport and understanding their motivation, but that's not for understanding the crime. I don't think it's also used... we use that because we don't understand things. To explain it to a jury, we have to go, "Well, why?" Because an average person on the street doesn't understand why you would put a bomb together and then put it at the Olympics and kill people. So we have to go, "Hey, look, a prosecutor has to sit there and say, 'Look, he was upset because of this. He's an extremist ideology. This is what he believes in. This is what he was seeing. You know, this target was then... he was seen as something that would fit into what he would be angry at. It was symbolic of it.'" And that's how we have to understand it. Okay. So that's why motive is there. It's not that it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter in the case of what we talk about, human behavior pattern recognition and analysis, right? It doesn't matter in terms of finding a guy usually, even. You don't even necessarily... it doesn't matter. So you don't need it to prosecute a guy.

So no, you don't if you have evidence.

And in this case, he ended up, obviously, copping a plea deal and was sentenced to life. He's not far from you in Colorado, locked up. And he, you know, admitted to it. So there was no need for a trial. But anyway, we get into a number of different areas. And so one of the things I want to talk about is because, you know, the FBI uses their procedures in certain ways and how they do things. And I thought it was funny because I read the interview of the lead agent in charge of the task force, and this speaks directly to our feelings as well on motive, right? Because one of the guys asked him, you know, he said, "I just want to find it." Uh, so I can get the actual quote.

(Silence)

Okay. They just said, the guy interviewing this then, I think, now retired FBI agent, said, "Hey, what were Rudolph's motives for the bombing?" And I responded, he said, "Well, he had borrowed ideas from a lot of different places and formed his own personal ideology. He clearly was anti-government, anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti a lot of things. The bombings really sprang from his own unique biases and prejudices. He had his own way of looking at the world and didn't get along with a lot of people." Okay, to me, that's like, well, you got it. Meaning, yeah, he... that comes across to me as, yeah, he was into that, and he didn't like that. He didn't like that. Look, the guy's an asshole, all right? That's what it comes down to. We want to put this as, "Okay, well, he had some far-right-wing Christian ideology and that's why he was carrying out the bombings" in our way to sense-make and understand some of this. But it doesn't really have anything to do with the case as far as we're concerned. So why, why shouldn't we be concerned with those things, Greg? Why shouldn't we care about that?

So, "theory close enough." And for white-belted folks, "theory close enough" means your brain is going to lock onto patterns, and it's going to recognize patterns, and that's how you live your life. And guess what? If it's close enough to be cognitively close enough, it's going to get painted in. And then you're going to believe that until you're disabused by study and learning, having training, or something else coming up.

So if I would go white belt on you and say the first attack happened at a public place where a bunch of different nations were. The second attack happened at a gay bar in Atlanta. The third and fourth attacks happened in abortion clinics. In the first attack, the suspect called twice and warned cops, and cops didn't listen. In the second, third, and fourth attacks, he didn't call. And in the third and fourth attack, he waited till cops were on scene to detonate. In the fourth attack that killed somebody, he killed a woman and a Turkish news media person that was there. And in the fourth attack, he killed a cop and waited until the cop was over the device before detonating, permanently mauling a nurse that was working there.

So if you have just that, Brian, if you just have that, and you go to your dry-erase board, and you just did this, comma, this, comma, this, then put a big square: solve for X. What you're going to look at is, you're going to say, "What do these things have in common?" Okay, so I have a person that has a grudge with abortion clinics; that seems to be borne out. I have a person that's got a problem with authority figures; that seems to be borne out. I have a person that may have an ideology that hates political something; don't know yet, don't know yet what the Olympics meant yet. Okay. Then we also have a situation where it was a lesbian bar that wasn't hidden as a lesbian bar. It was out, and it was proud. And he knew it was likely a lesbian bar and didn't... you know, he didn't do three or four bars to try to get one gay person.

Right now, if I just have that written up there, what happens is there are things that become more likely when I'm building a profile of my suspect. And those things weren't used. Many things were used. For example, the bomber had access to dynamite because each one of the bombs was virtually identical. Each bomb was found in a backpack, and the backpack was left in what we call a natural line of drift. So those things start creating, Brian, within a real investigator, a robust case for the type of human that we're looking for. Okay. And you don't know it.

Specifically, I'll give you a real good one from the very beginning, Brian. Do you think that if we went to Eric Rudolph's house and asked his mom and dad... well, you can't ask his dad, he's dead. But if we asked his mom, "Hey, was Eric a loner?" "No." Would his brother say he's a loner? "No, I see him all the time." You're too close. You can't see that. So what happens is we have to take bias out of our conjecture, and it is conjecture. It's thinking what fits.

Now, I said something about Rudolph's dad. Rudolph's dad died of cancer. Eric Rudolph had a grudge with the government forever, thinking that there was a drug that was out there that he had heard and read a lot about on the internet that would have saved his dad's life. So he hated the feds from that day forward. He thought that because his family and he were repressed and they lived in a bad area, that the government was holding them down. And "you guys were conspiring with a different form of communism and socialism to break down the U.S. economy." And he wrote a bunch of stuff about that on internet sites. So then what does something like the Olympics represent? Do you see what I'm trying to say? Never put a round peg in a square hole. Sorry. And never rush to an unreasonable judgment. How many times have we said that? And Brian, your whole movie about Richard Jewell tends to show that a group of people rushed to an unreasonable...

Now, you're saying, "Yeah, but wait a minute. Unreasonable. There were some buckets." Yeah. Guess what? There were still some buckets empty. There were still some buckets that were only half...

Right. Well, the most important buckets that had nothing in them were evidence. Right?

Exactly.

Listen, I don't know how you do that in audio, but underline that. And folks, you go back and listen to what Brian Marren just said. That's brilliant. That's exactly what it is. Artifacts and evidence didn't occur.

Right. And so that's why when we say we don't care about motive or we don't care about ideology, I'm not saying it doesn't... look, it's, we want to do this evidence-based, not ideology-based, right? So if you look at everything you just said, okay, well he used dynamite and nails and probably the same type of similar type of backpack along a natural line of drift. Those are the things that you need to look into, right? Because how did he get access to that type of dynamite? Those are the fingerprints. "Oh, hey, does this guy we have over here fit a behavioral profile for someone?" So, when they started executing search warrants, because he was right to be a suspect, Brian, I'm not saying that Richard Jewell shouldn't have been a suspect. I'm saying that he would have been one of a number of suspects, and then you start putting it, "Okay, well you would have had a place at... how long was it there? Are there any other witnesses that put him at the scene with the backpack? Did he show up at work for it? Can we rewind the tape and look at surveillance camera?" When we executed the search and seizure warrant on his crib, when we went through the house, did we check the garbage, the dumpster outside? Was there evidence where there are physical tool mark impressions on one and the other? Those are the amazing things that you call evidence, the artifact and evidence that make your case. And we can't just say, "You know who's good for this? Jimmy's good for this. Remember how Jimmy used to rob them all down in District Seven?" But Brian, do we not still get that type of investigatory reasoning all the time, every day?

It happens so often.

And because we're all humans and guilty of this, we don't realize that we're doing it sometimes. Right. And a lot of people don't. And that's why I think focusing on some of those things goes... because you know, obviously about him, his motivation, I guess, if anything was, yeah, he hated the government for a number of reasons. Some of which you just spoke to. A lot of people do, but never built a bomb. Am I lying?

Yeah. Your point, Brian, I want you to just rewind a little bit. Motivation, modus operandi, motive. All of those are words that are in the same color spectrum, the same palette for eating, but they don't all mean the same thing. And they certainly don't in context. So when a person goes, "Well, what's his motivation?" And motivation... he's pissed off. Well, how did you know that? Because he's flipping killing people. Do you get what I'm trying to say? So sometimes it's that simple to create a starting point, isn't it?

No, no, it is. And those things are... we know people, they're obvious. You know what I mean? Like, you just said, a lot of people hate the government or are pissed off, especially right now. One, there's nothing illegal about it. In fact, I would say it's your... that's what makes America what it is, is that there's a constitutional protection to allow you to... So yeah, our founding fathers built that in because they knew, "No, you have every right to that government was a necessary evil." That's what they're pissed.

Yeah, exactly.

That's how we formed our own. They said, "How do we form a government which is something that we hate?" But, so to speak to that, you know, he had a lot of different reasons for wanting to be, or to be angry or whatever, but like you just said, that doesn't speak to... that doesn't make anything illegal. Same thing with some of the stuff that Richard Jewell was doing. He's a weird, quirky guy, but it wasn't illegal, you know?

We're having that same argument right now with a government agency that will remain nameless. And I heard it again on a phone call that you and I were on that lasted forever. Came up, sent, went down. I was singing "Sunrise, Sunset" the whole time. Right. And what do we get? We get the argument that I'm still not clear on how somebody running could be a pre-event indication of something or an atmospheric shift. Look, people run. People run for exercise. People run when they're afraid. People run when they're late for ice cream. So there's a finite number of reasons that people run. If I took running and I created one box or one bucket for running, then I put kneeling or prone position, then I put other things. What happens is they don't really mean that much until Shakespeare weaves them into a story. And all of a sudden it becomes glaringly obvious that this person is running from something. Now he's going prone behind a hedge and a helicopter goes over with a searchlight. See, absent the peripherals, Brian, it doesn't make much sense. But with Jewell, all they went for is, "Ooh, piece of candy!" They went for the big ticket items first. Right. And they didn't go, "Well, how does this help explain why he risked his own life to blow himself up? Did he really want to go that far?" You see, there are so many holes in that argument.

Well, that, and that's exactly, it brings it back to about evidence rather than ideology. Right. Because, you know, it's like you said, without context, none of these observations mean anything. Right. I mean, if you just feel like, "Hey, this is a guy, he's, you know, in his mid-thirties, and he's been angry and upset at the government. He's had military or law enforcement training." Okay, I'm just describing myself right now!

You got it! You got a bad sweater, alcoholic, angry masturbator. I mean, seriously, all of those things you have in common. So it doesn't mean, you know, it doesn't necessarily, without any context to any of those single observations...

No.

And it's free will. Those people exist in our society right next to us and never take a step to do anything criminal or illegal or dangerous, you know? And so we can't go there first. Look, knowing the case, and then the other side of the coin, where I have to be an instructor and not refer to the case, we have Eric Rudolph who would have re-offended after the Olympics. He got a flavor for it. He crossed the threshold. Now he's got... it was blood in the water. Do you get what I'm trying to say? And he made the message he wanted to say, in his way. So it was only a matter of time until he re-offended. And even if you would have stopped with that crime, that would have caught him sooner or later because he wanted to talk about it. He wanted to show people, "You see? This is how you fight." His brother is such a nutcase that his brother went on the internet and sawed his own hand off to show people, "This is how much I care! Do you see this, FBI? Do you see this?" Who would do that? So don't try to say, "Who would do that?" and go around knocking on doors and finding that person. Take a look at what the facts show and let the facts lead you. Take a look at what the facts show and let the facts lead you to the understanding that, look, this guy opened... his opening volley was a big... you know what I'm saying?

Oh, yeah. Olympic Village and tries to blow people up and does. He's not going to stop. Hundreds were injured. So that would be because we bring that up a lot on here about people who want their say, not necessarily their way. And you got people like Eric Rudolph and all the other turds that we talk about on here. Those are people that want their say, and they want their way, and they're going to get it. So, you... because he wanted both.

Yeah, he continued with his message. He continued writing about it, publishing about it.

He did... well, even to the fact of, I would think it would even have to do with him when he called 911 to say, "Hey, there's a bomb in Centennial Park." Twice. Okay.

So he does it the first time and he's a little nervous, and he goes, "Hey, that's not good enough!" Do you get what I'm trying to say? Listen, there are parts of the investigation, folks, do your homework. There are parts of the investigation that speak directly to the bomber. Take away that it's Eric Rudolph. Take away the description that you made. He cached over 250 pounds of dynamite in different locations. One of the locations he chose was right above the command center that was looking for Eric Rudolph. Now, I've read stuff, Brian, and people go, "Well, that was because he was going to blow up the feds!" He wasn't going to blow up the feds. He was going, "Look what I did! I operated right under your nose." Do you know why he wasn't caught for five years? Because he didn't want to be caught. Because the theory of the Robin Hood, the hero of the internet that was sticking it to the man, was more important than him killing another human. The body count didn't matter.

No, it didn't.

It was his message.

And you could, you could see one, he knew how to build explosive devices with an accurate timer and to go off where and when he wanted it to. That's a level of organization there that's very high, right? So, but none of the bombs... he only killed two people. And then I think he was... some people are giving credit for the third, the guy that ran up afterwards and then had a heart attack or something. But I get it. And he did horrible things, but with the skills that he had, I think he could have killed and maimed and injured a lot more people.

Precisely. There's no evidence in anything that I've read, saw, or interviews that I've conducted that would demonstrate he was going to stop until he wanted to stop. And then people say, "Account for the law." The law is because he's looking... Why didn't Osama bin Laden have to come out of hiding? Because his message was still strong enough, and he still had a bunch of puppets that were doing his work. Had it been on fumes, and he had to come out and rally the troops again, he would certainly have been the first person that risked being jailed to come out and say something. Rudolph is exactly the same. Rudolph has a fan base, and Rudolph knows that the longer that he can run, the more important his message becomes, that it's David and Goliath, standing up to the authorities, and they can't touch me. So sometimes when they said, "We're close to catching him," which is cool, I would have said the same thing if I was a public information officer, but many times what he was actually doing, Brian, is he was taunting them. He was playing a game. They want us to believe that he was an emaciated wretch that was dumpster diving. He was dumpster diving because it was part of a very disciplined schedule of dumpsters that he went to in a town of just over a thousand people. And guess what? He always did it at nighttime hours. And this time, a young cop that was doing his job, shining some lights around, goes, "Holy crap, I got a guy behind the Save A Lot at four in the morning," and goes up, and he catches him. The gosh-darn Josey Wales. Do you think that kid had any idea that he had Josey Wales?

The other thing is, when they found Rudolph, Rudolph is clean-shaven, his hair is perfect, his clothes are new and stuff. And when they go to his camp, 55-gallon drums full of all the different types of foodstuffs. Listen, they want you to believe that this guy was just barely making it because they don't want to mint a new coin. Do you get what I'm trying to say? Where somebody tries to be an Eric Rudolph. Rudolph knew exactly what he was doing. He had a low level of sophistication, (but a) high level of organization. And he was only 30 minutes from his home during the five years that he was on the run. Remember that.

So remember that if you're the investigator... I knew that would come out. And because one of the things that agent also said is, "Yeah, one of our guys, he was very adamant. He was like, 'Yeah, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this.'" He was very adamant. He knew he had to be in this area and wouldn't leave. And you know, everyone was skeptical. So you had one guy going like, "Look, he's not... he's staying close to his home. He's in this area. This is where he knows," which we can get, we'll get into. You had one guy and everyone going, "Oh no, he's got to be moving around. He's got... he's on these message boards on the internet." Remember, these are early days of the World Wide Web in the nineties. So it was a little bit different. But you know, he's doing this, and he's got this network, and... well, you had one guy. And thank God, you know, he was the voice of reason and kept saying, "No, he can't be anywhere else other than here." Why is that? Well, he's going to go back to where he knows. There's only so many areas he can go that he knows, right? And that he's comfortable with. And as humans, especially if you're on the run, or from wherever, if you're running from coronavirus, or you're running from a federal task force that's after you, you're going to go to where you feel most comfortable. You're going to stay in that area. You're going to look for familiarity. So yeah, he never, he never left the area where he was, where he lived, where he was from. He never left that area.

So, old cop trick. And listen, I understand our audience is a lot more than just retired fat cops like me. But listen, for somebody that might be conducting any kind of investigation or wants to see through some of the BS that's on television, the very first place that I would go if I was going after a fugitive is I would go to the booking area and I would see if he's ever been arrested by any of the agencies within a couple of hours from where I was. Then I would go and I would say, "Can I see the booking sheet?" The booking sheet is like the gospel. It has to be filled out: name, social security, this, that, and the other. And there's always a part at the bottom: "Who do you want us to contact?" And that never equates to the family. Sometimes maybe for a DUI, "Hey, I want you to contact my wife or my dad." But for career criminals, it's a person that'll bond them out. If a person that will give them a place to sleep overnight, that'll come and pick them up when they get kicked out the next morning. And guess what? That's like gold. So I don't sit there and say, "Well, and then you'd find his pedigree: 'I was born in Hungary and then emigrated.'" I don't need any of that. "I was educated at this..." You know what I'm trying to say? But the best thing is, who helped them last? And that's where I start. And guess what? Here he is coming out of the shower going, "Holy..." and you're not seeing... you know what I'm saying? "Get 'em, Sean!" But those things right there are the types of things, Brian, that have to happen. And listen, as detail-oriented as your criminal is, that means he's highly organized. If you don't have an architecture and an organization, you're going to miss him. And that's why sometimes things go into buckets, because the bucket doesn't say "maybe," it says "yes" or "no." "Is it present? Yes, it's present. Is this present? Yes, it's present." Now, by the time we get to three or four cues, what are we starting to do? We're starting to bias our investigation.

Listen, folks, if you can't find your car keys, go to the last place you saw your car keys, drop something of equal size and weight, and look where it goes. That's probably where your car keys are. If you're not finding your glasses... We're talking Gordian Knot stuff here. You know what I'm saying? We're talking that usually the simplest answer is the most true answer. And Rudolph is the guy that wants to have his say. Listen, Rudolph wrote and spoke about his exploits the entire time. Years after he was arrested, he writes his manifesto to make sure... because why? Because he was so flipping egotistical, Brian, he wanted people to get the story right. He wrote, "In Between the Lines of Drift," or whatever, you know, because "I'm the head militant."

Yeah. He even refers to himself as a militant. Now, you're going, "Yeah, it's easy to play armchair quarterback because we know all this."

No, we know what we're looking for. And that gray man, that dry-erase board that doesn't have any marks on it, starts getting filled in. And we start building that spider chart. And guess what? Just like we want to deny a sniper terrain, Brian, when we do that, we want to deny our suspect terrain. And Rudolph did what he knew. He did what he knew every day. Do you think that he got all those drums up there from dumpster diving? Right. Do you think that he was disheveled and unwashed? No, they said he was in great shape. His clothes were in great shape because he had planned those places. He had a bail... How do you cache 250 pounds of dynamite right on top of the federal task force that's looking for you without being a highly organized human being? You know what I'm saying? It wasn't his only cache site. And people say, "Well, people are helping him." Listen, you don't go across the street to help somebody you've never met. Yeah, it's a hobo quotient. You see a guy, you give him a dollar. Yeah, I get it. But you're not going to say, when that person comes up with the beheaded corpse of his, "Can you give me a hand getting this into the stolen car?" People don't do that. And even Eric Rudolph's closest buddies, when they knew the feds were on... listen, you don't understand what it's like to be on the feds' Top 10. You're on the Top 10 in the nation. That means the world. That means everybody's looking for you. So Rudolph knew. And what did he do? Did he go out there and poke the bear externally? Nope. He went 100% internal. And guess what? He wanted to demonstrate to everybody that would come after, that "I did it for five years. How long will you give?" His brother cut off his flipping hand. But he wasn't stupid. He didn't throw it away. What happened to his hand? Listen, this is great TV today, but "I got to jack off next Tuesday," you know? "I got to golf in a month." That is how stupid that is.

So this is why, and another reason why we always tell everyone to do your homework, right? We got to research all this stuff on your own because when you really start to find out everything that's going on, you're going like, "Wow, how did they not see this right away?" Or, "Well, I didn't know that happened," like his brother cutting his hand, recording it, and then putting it on the internet of him... "I'm so angry at the federal government for harassing me and my brother, and he's innocent. I'm going to cut my hand off!" I don't know what that was supposed to represent.

Well, yeah. And who was that message for? The message was for Eric.

Yes, exactly. Exactly.

You see what I'm trying to say? And right now there are classes of people watching us, Brian. And I like to live in a classless society, but what I mean is there's a class of people that are going, "Everything Hollywood prints is true." "I hear that the Atlanta child killer didn't do it, so he's off the hook." Then the next one is that Wisconsin guy, and him and that little kid tortured, murdered, raped that poor woman that was coming to photograph the picture of the car. And everybody says, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He wasn't guilty either." You go, "Why?" Because there's a part of us that believes there's no way a person could do that. I've seen more dead bodies than anybody that all our listeners have ever met. And guess what? Everyone started... well, everyone was a good person. Everyone... no, not very few of them, if any, were a serial killer. But the situation demanded that they do something. When it came down to you and them, it was you that had to go. And then nobody, nobody sits there and goes, "Hey, you know, it's a target of opportunity crime." Sometimes, Brian, Rudolph wasn't a target of opportunity crime. Rudolph was well thought out. He had planned this for a long time. He knew what he wanted to do. He knew what he wanted to accomplish. He continued to go back to the well. He was caught completely by a random... Remember how we talk about, "You one day, you're going to walk out of the FOB and a meteor is going to hit you." Well, you can't predict that. Do you think that young cop was searching for Eric Rudolph?

No, no.

And that's why Richard Jewell got caught. Richard Jewell got caught because people got sloppy. They saw enough of a trend leaning towards a direction and said, "That's close enough for rock and roll." And it wasn't.

No. And that's it. And a lot of that, you brought up a bunch of different issues or different topics, especially when it talks to like why we have all the different documentaries. Guys are like, "No, I think he's innocent." And you're like, "Dude, this guy totally did it." And it's... it's so obvious, but you know, it... that goes into our misunderstanding, not just the general public's misunderstanding, how this stuff actually works. Because usually, like we always say, truth is always stranger than fiction. It's usually a very simple way of things happening. It's not the, you know, the Bond villain stroking the cat. But you look at even what our originally our criminal justice system was set up for, was to actually keep innocent people out of jail. The whole point was not to allow too much government authority to just jail people, right? That you had to... that's how it's set up. That's why it's difficult even to convict very guilty parties because of our system. And that's how it was set up.

And another echelon to execute them. You get what I'm saying? Another huge...

Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, people will die in jail before you execute. Yeah. And it's, and the problem is, is that because of, you know, people have been wrongly convicted, even though I don't know how many criminal convictions, just total criminal convictions there are in the United States every year, but it's a lot. And how many of those are wrong? That number, again, is very, very, very, very small. However, they make for a great story, right? So that's what they're going to make a story about, not the 90-whatever percent that are right. It's always... so, so that that's part of it.

But I think what adds to even what you're saying about Rudolph was his sentencing. Because I pulled that out to read it. Because it's, again, it's people who want to have their say and their way. But, you know, he released a statement explaining his actions. In a statement, he claimed that he had, and this is the quote: "deprived the government of its goal of sentencing me to death. And the fact that I've entered into an agreement with the government is purely a tactical choice on my part. And in no way legitimizes the moral authority of the government to judge this matter or impute my guilt." It's like, well, that was one pretty well written. But listen, where have you heard that before? Right?

Folks, you don't have to live with Brian Marren. You don't have to ride around with him in a sled. You don't have to go to the hotel and sleep at the foot of his bed. And because we share that every other night, because we only get a single, but, and it uses up all the towels... get that what's that movie with John Candy where he's... that's us! "Those aren't pillows!" That's us. If you want to see that. But what you just did is you looped it back in expert fashion to anybody that's got a manifesto. All manifestos read that way. Why? Because those folks don't get it like we get it. Those folks think that you puny humans... Watch the film Plan 9 from Outer Space and watch the bad guy, and you'll get the best soliloquy on what it means to be a loner and a criminal dangerous loner. They don't understand the world like you do. Okay?

So I have to put my Easter Bunny outfit on now, because I'm going to rape your husband. "Why? I murdered the wife in front of the kids." That is so nonsensical to the way that we would think. But those folks go, "Wait a minute! It makes so much sense. Let me go back and show you, let me tell you, let me tie it together." So this is what I would say for the white belts in the audience. And I'm a flipping white belt, folks. I would say, "Go back and think if this guy was doing these things, he was willing to go that extra mile. If he was writing and saying these things, which he was the entire time, publicly... And do you imagine that one of his friends that played Euchre with him... Do you think he ever talked like that all the time? Do you think he talked like that to the bag boy when he had to go into town with his public persona and get some gifts? 'Well, son, you see that can right there? That's communism because, you know, that can's full of... it's full of conspiracy.'" He talked like this all the time. And I'm not talking about old crazy Joe, the violinist that's sitting there with his bucket open for money. Those people are harmless. They mean nothing to you. That's mental illness. What he had is he had a cunning mind, tactical cunning to say that, "Listen, I'm going to act out." And nobody listened. Brian, his own family didn't want to hear it. It was like watching an episode of Psycho. You get what I'm trying to say? Where mother is up in the window. His whole family was as touched as he was. We're getting sued for this one.

But if you take a look at it, how did McVeigh get friends? How did he get confidence? Birds of a feather. Homophily. He went to the group of disenfranchised people, just like him. Would it surprise you that Rudolph did ride-alongs? Nope, didn't surprise me. Would it surprise you that Rudolph got bounced out, that he was prohibited, and then held that against everybody? "You ruined my career by bouncing me out because I popped hot on a piss test." Yeah, exactly. That type of person has to follow that behavior profile.

So, I think that's a great place to go right into because that's what it is, is that, you know, you're talking about an individual who... let's take it right there. All right, he gets kicked out of the army for smoking pot, which everyone knows you can't do that in the military. And so, you know, he gets kicked out. Now, I think they've got green Tuesday...

I don't think so. Everybody, even the generals out there with a bong.

I'm fairly certain you can't do that still. Okay. All right, I'll wait until we hear from somebody else though. So, anyway, but that's what it comes down to. And that's what a lot of the... that's the bucket that most of these individuals fall into, right? "It's not, I'm not to blame. It's not my fault. It's your fault, and I'm going to take it out on you." Okay. How many times have we seen that? That's, that's any type of extremist attacks that fall under, whether that's, you know, Islamic extremism, white supremacy, black supremacism, whatever, Mexican supremacists, I don't know what the different types are, but right there, there's four, there's like four or five.

Indonesians on the top.

No, no, but you're exactly right. So, so look, go back to Rudolph being in the military, Brian, you're a subject matter expert. You're a tactics subject matter expert. There are a number of skills that you're an expert on, from having treated them on yourself. But listen, go back to just for a minute, the military with Eric Rudolph. Rudolph just wasn't a soldier. Okay? He was in the 101st Airborne. And being airborne is different than just being a leg. He had just passed his placement for air assault. That's meaningful as well. Those are hard things to get. Not every 11 Bravo gets a chance to go across the street and try out for those, and not as many make it. So these are specialized units, right?

Okay. Now, Brian, he's also a Specialist (E-4). So even though you were in the Marine Corps, Marine Corps and the Army are virtually identical. It only gets screwy when you get into the Navy and, like, in the Air Force, just for signing up, you're a Lieutenant General, so I don't know what it is, but they like hand the keys to the air base and go. But the idea is, let's think of an E-4. How long would it take a person to be an E-4 in the Marine Corps? A few years. Okay. So it's not a month and it's not one year. Do you see what I'm trying to say? And sometimes the E-rank with the year, it's right around that same thing. So an E-4 might take three or four years. An E-5 might take five or six, right? And we're talking like a Corporal or a Sergeant, and he was a Specialist, which is yet again, a distinction. What does this show about Eric Rudolph? That he could hold it together when he needed to. He held it together for years. His enlisted efficiency reports were fine. But when he had enough, what did he do? He acted out. So how does he act out to make sure that he gets bounced out without a dishonorable? He smoked some cannabis and he pops hot. So guess what? He's out.

When we take a look at these folks, this is not a ne'er-do-well. This is not a guy that you would see on the street and go, "Something's wrong with this guy." He has to be able to blend in a chameleon-like fashion. Why? Because he's never going to get to the finish line if he doesn't. You know, when we're talking about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and you see the Tsarnaev brothers, and you're taking a look at Tamerlan Tsarnaev standing next to him, everybody goes, "Well, they look just like everybody else." Not to a trained professional, they don't. To a trained professional, you're going, "Oh, predatory look, mission-focused. These guys have gone internal." And that's why training changes behavior, Brian. Because if you just go with a laminated sheet of a bunch of conjecture and horseshit, you're going to come up with, guess what? Richard Jewell, you know what I'm saying? 13 years after his life, you're going to be making a movie to try to make amends.

Yeah, and which he doesn't get, again, he gets nothing off of that movie, and probably neither does his family. You know, but that goes into those profiles or jamming the square peg in a round hole to use as a possible explanation for something, but it's not a conviction, right? It's not evidence, but it's, it's, it's theoretical. It's enough to bring them in. It's enough to talk to them or contact them. It's enough to go, "Hey, instead of these thousand people, let's narrow it down to these hundred or ten," right? Because that's what you're... what you should be trying to do anyway. Right. So it's like, "Well, where, who am I likely... what mold does that fit into?" Right. "What is my typical type of individual?" And then from there, "Okay, now we can look at this group," which is going to be a lot, but it's less than looking at an entire population, right?

Yeah, but then add the next layer, Brian, add the layer of explosives. Explosives are a very detailed thing because the person that comes and goes, "I've been an engineer with explosives for a long time," you would suspect that person. And what do they have to do in movies? You remember the movie The Kingdom? I liked like a third of the film of The Kingdom, and it's got a lot of great action, but who are they looking for? The scarred one-eyed guy with no... because he's been in the bomb maker's shop the whole time and he smells like cordite. Shut up! That's Hollywood. What you're looking for is a highly organized person. Brian, how good did Eric Rudolph do in school? He was bounced out of every school that he went to. What kind of schools did he go to? He went to very elite schools that had a laser-focused study. "I was in a Christian extremist school," or "I was in a Judeo-Christian prep school where you had to follow these rules." Brian, that speaks to me. That helps me paint stuff on that dry-erase board that's going to get me closer to the person we're looking for, and not just playing "Where's Waldo with a shotgun."

Yeah, no. And that's, that's exactly the point is that you can't, you can't just use those things as, "Oh, these are..." You know, that news story that came out that the Atlanta newspaper did on Jewell... It's like, well, that's what happens when you just use those. That's exactly what happens. You get wrong. People stopped looking. Did they, or did they not? People stopped looking.

And then everything after that, Brian, because remember, a pendulous swing of the way things are going. Every time that there was an abortion clinic accident or a bombing or an attack or something, a car backfired near one, guess who was there? "Oh, it's Eric Rudolph. We know Rudolph is behind this." And so Rudolph loved that. He cherished that, Brian.

Well, one of the comments, and I don't want to bash any police agency or anything, but one of the comments said that, "Hey, listen, it was the strategy to allow him to talk to local law enforcement." No, he talked to local law enforcement because he wanted to get his story out. Stop fibbing. Somebody says that, you know, when he was caught, he didn't fight or run from the cop, didn't try to take his cop's gun.

Yeah, because in person, he couldn't do it. He's not going to get up in your face. He's not going to carry a gun because that's not fitting his MO. He doesn't do those things. So those types of things, Brian, sometimes, and I refer to that as revisionist history. And I've done revisionist history. Brian, do you think I'm going to tell a story where I look bad or I look stupid? Of course not. "I wasn't even there on the day that it happened, but I was the guy in the lead pursuit." Do you get what I'm trying to say? "Had the fastest car." That's how we are as humans, Brian. And we have to avoid that because those biases can actually get us away from where we need to be in an investigation. I'm not saying that you're a groove in a record and everything is start to finish, but I'm telling you what, if you start going off on these spirals and you can't get yourself back, your suspect will be on the run for five years, if you know what I'm saying.

Right. And, and again, this is why these, these different, you know, profiles that people come up with, whether that's from a law enforcement agency or some person on the news or something, and the way they articulate this stuff, it really just sends us down a rabbit hole that, that is unnecessary. Right. Because it doesn't address things. Right. So you're looking at like still to this day, which has always been for a long time, is go to one thing the FBI is great at: crime stats and threats. And here's what you're going to, here's what's going on. What's always, always been the number one priority of the FBI is some type of homegrown terrorism, right? There's an insider threat issue in the U.S. Whether it's a right-wing or left-wing extremism now, whatever it is, that's always been the case. And so then what happens is, you know, people go, "Hey, FBI or whoever, this is your job. Why aren't you busting these people?" Well, first of all, you can't get arrested until you commit a crime. Second, you got to do surveillance and you got to do this. And this is what the issue is. As they're federal, they might not have jurisdiction yet if something doesn't fall under a federal statute.

But with different... and I only bring them up because they're always a lead on this stuff, and they come up with the behavioral profiles, and everyone's super, you know, thinks it's some super mystical, cool thing. And this is a generalization, exactly what you said. It's a bunch of layers of acetate paper that you lay over something, but that's the thing is that it's a use, an attempt to understand a phenomenon that's going on, even though it's not understandable. You're exactly right. But that's what it is. And if you're using it for that, that's fine, but you can't use that to process, to find a criminal and prosecute a crime. You don't, you don't need that junk. That's for the PhD types to sit back and write books and go, "What's causing this extremism in our country over protracted... over the last 400 years? Is it any different than it was a hundred or 150 years ago, or is it actually less now?" And that's for those conversations. But the problem is though that rhetoric and those conversations and those templates and that lexicon, that terminology, filters down to an investigative going, "Well, all right, he fits this profile." It's like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Let's use artifacts and evidence in support of a reasonable conclusion." We don't always look now because that stuff has become so mainstream and it's in common vernacular. I mean, everyone knows the term lone wolf. Why do people know what that means? Because this is our way of describing things. And then it's real good for the news. Why? Because that makes people scared. When you tell me "lone wolf," you think he comes out of nowhere. You're hiding, you're hiding, you're hiding in the shadows. He hides in the forest and then comes out at night and plants bombs or attacks or does this. That's scary. So one, I'm going to keep watching your show because I want to find out how I can... because that lone wolf could be in my yard tonight.

Exactly.

So it comes down to when it, you know, you got to take that evidence-based scientific approach to some of these and go, "Well, who could have done it? What would likely happen? Where did they put it? Where did they get access to the materials? Who was the target?" Because that can help and go, "Oh, okay. Well, with knowing what that is..." But it's all about, we get wrapped around, you know, kind of looking at the wrong thing. And I think that Richard Jewell case, which is the Eric Rudolph case... So that's the other reason I wanted to do this is, like, "Hey, this is the guy that did it. This is the guy that caused all this stuff." You know, Eric...

Let's make sure that flashlight goes where it needs to be pointing.

Yeah. Like this poor guy, Richard Jewell, who, I mean, he's, he's been dead now for 10, 13 years, I think 2007 when he died. You know, this poor guy gets caught up. And look what happens using all that stuff that we just talked about and all this, "Oh, that looks close enough. Hey, this fits the profile of what we think, what we think, what in our minds we believe to be true that I've seen on the news and I've seen in movies and I've seen on TV. I heard somebody talking about it. This is the guy right here. He fits everything." And yet there's no evidence to back up that claim.

Do you remember the joke that we get Collier with all the time? Eric Collier, our Sergeant-at-Arms, an incredible Marine Scout Sniper instructor. Just love him to death. Collier, we still don't know whether you live in Baltimore or Boston. I have no idea. But I know he's been a fisherman, knuckles guy. So in Iraq, Collier on the top of the kalat, and saying, "Listen, we got time. We don't have to run. We got plenty of time." And I reached down and grabbed the binos and I flipped them over. And now he goes, "Holy shit! They're right on top of us!" The joke is that when you're using the binos, if you're looking through the wrong end, things look a lot further away, right? Well, that's how evidence goes sometimes. If you push away certain things and don't give them weight, if you deny yourself the ability to step back and get a fresh set of eyes on it, right? If you're jaded and you start looking at a thing a certain way, you can't not see that. Okay. So, so it's important to not put that red round peg in a square hole. It's important not to rush to an unreasonable judgment. It's important to enlist the aid of other people. We're not talking about a normal human being. We're talking about Eric Rudolph. That was so dangerous. He's on the Top 10 list when only three people are dead. And that's going to sound callous, Brian, that's going to sound callous, but he wasn't the master criminal super... why were people scared of him? Because it was still 250 pounds of dynamite, and he got away with four bombings. That's what scared people. And that's who we need to be looking for. And Brian, you say it all the time. You say, "It's not knowing what to look for that's TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures), and there's a lot of them." So what would have been Eric Rudolph on the post office wall, that picture, remember that, but how to look for him? And you're the best in the world at reminding me what separates us from our competition is we teach people how to look. And guess what? I would add that we not only teach them how to look, but we teach them where to look. And that's why training is so important because you have to have an architecture so you don't leave stuff on the ground. You don't have a cutting room floor below the editor that's full with this possible evidence.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, so we consider everything, but we don't consider it equally. And we try to create a path, but we let the evidence show us a path instead of us putting it together. So that's a great point about how things are weighted, right? Because you said, yes, you consider everything. To us, everything has to do with everything. Not equally, but you don't weigh each piece of evidence equally. So the problem with this one was they weighed that evidence too much. They said, "Hey, the profile that we know, that we've seen before. Push the other stuff off the desk."

Or only take that. I think that would be good to know if after the evidence you say, "Hey, Oh, and this also fits these other TTPs that we've seen in like-minded individuals," because that can help you in an investigation. "Now, what other typical things are you going to see?" You're the first part, you're so spot on in this one, but you're the first person to always rein me in and go, "Hey, remember our audience just isn't cops or military first responders. We get everybody." And thank you folks for listening. Please tell somebody else. But listen, if you're thinking that your spouse is cheating on you, if you're thinking that your kid is lost or your kid is missing, if somebody stole your car, the first thing I would ask a person, "How much fuel is in your car?" "What? They could... you stole my car! Aren't you going to get out?" "No, I need to know a couple of things. One, where are the keys? Two, was there fuel in the car? Three, what does your car do that other cars don't?" Do you get what I'm trying to say? "What's your... why?" Because I want to see that unique fingerprint, Brian. I want what makes you the unique little snowflake I'm looking for. And Rudolph had it in spades. Rudolph was shouting it out! And guess what? People missed it. How do we miss it, Brian? Because we buy our own horse crap. We sit there and we think we're the smartest guy in the room. And therefore we're not going to slow off the gas and listen to what the other experts bring to the table. That's what we miss.

And that's, that's what I was getting into. This is the takeaway for, you know, 2020 right now, when everyone's in isolation and doing this stuff, is that this is the time. This is when people write manifestos. This is when people go off. This is when they have that time point. We've already, we've already seen it with the train incident up in Los Angeles. We've seen it with the hospital in the Midwest there where the guy wanted to bomb the hospital. This is those times. So that's that point to look out for is all those messages. It's, it's, you don't have to speak the language to read the writing on the wall. I don't necessarily need to know what it means, but I got... if I can spot a manifesto... because and that's why, you know, I'm on Twitter all the time, just reading through stuff. Because it's great, because you'll see people go and go, and you're like, this person, if you do a 14-tweet Twitter rant on something, you're writing a manifesto. You're so emotionally involved in what you're writing about and so angry and upset that you can't put that phone down. You might need help, and you're the likely person who's going to... So you're, you come to the top of my list, knowing full well that statistically it's an insignificant number of those people that will ever act it out. Why? Because most people want their say. So thank God for the ability for those people to write and other people to shut them down and everything else.

Yes, right. Hate speech. Hate speech is bad, but if you're going to write hate speech and you're going to write threat speech, guess what? You're coming up on somebody's radar, and you've got to get the shepherd's crook. You've got to get yanked in. And in the clear, eye-light of day, somebody's got to look at you, check your hands and check your house. And that's why we're always so laser-focused on intent. Everything has to do with intent. All humans demonstrate intent in what you do. You don't get up. There isn't absent intent. We're not looking at you. Yes. That's what separates people. They're going, "Hey, I don't want the police to have powers to look at me for this, that, and the other." Listen, you've got nothing to worry about. People that hide behind their words, and they don't come up... like, I don't know how that Twitter and stuff works, Brian, but I'm sure that it doesn't come with a photo in their house and stuff. Right. So the idea is that that guy might be worried, "Hey, freedom, freedom of speech!" You can say anything you want, but if you start saying, "Meet me down at the corner, we're going to blow up the federal building," now you've committed a crime. So know the difference. The person that does that and says that and is willing to commit that crime, there's very few of them, but they stand out of the crowd. They, and they have to create an alternative persona because if not, they stick out in every crowd they go in.

And yeah. And that comes down to... I always give it, because we always go back to the white belt look. If you're like, "Hey, how do I know it's not my friend or neighbor or cousin or this?" It's the intent. Does someone's actions demonstrate intent? And I know people probably hear the term "intent" and go, "Well, that sounds like a legal term or a law enforcement term." But everything, everything you do. So everything, every... in order for you to do something, you have to demonstrate some type of intent, right? You don't get up and leave your house for anything unless you have to or want to go somewhere. And there's going to be things you have to do to demonstrate that intent. So you have to get up, you got to put your shoes on, you got to get the car keys or whatever. That's, those are all things that... that's not just saying, "Hey, yeah, I'm going to go to the store," or "Yeah, I'm going to go to Costco and pick that stuff up." Okay. Well, I can say that all day long until I start demonstrating intent. You know, my wife is going to be very happy until she sees me do what? Pick up the keys and get stuff. So those are the two things.

The intent is demonstrated. Brian, I was on a suicide call once, and we had some gallows humor. A suicide hadn't occurred yet. It was in progress, if you know what I'm saying. And it was the shortest suicide note and send-off that I'd ever heard. And we use it to this day: "See ya!" And the guy said it exactly like that, and then committed suicide right in front of us. That person wanted their say and their way. There was no message other than that they were done, and today was checkout day. I've had the other spectrum where I've read a suicide note that was written and lettered everything but calligraphy and said, "Well, this is what you're going to know after I'm gone, this and that." If that person hurt so bad that they took that long to write it, and you missed it, you need to reassess what you were looking at. Do you get what I'm trying to say? And I'm not trying to call anybody bad, but I'm saying people telegraph their moves. And if I'm saying that kinesics telegraphs when you're going to use the left or the right, then I'm saying that your mouth and your hand and everything that you touch, a human signature can be found in their bomb, in their stitching, when they're doing sewing, in how they write a letter. Every single thing that we do is unique to us. And we will set a pattern because we have to, we're humans. Your key chain, how you secure your vehicle, and which hand you put it on, and whether you take it off and set it on the sink, or you've got a special bowl, or if you wear it at night. Brian, that minutiae, and you call it "pocket link," which I love that terminology, because as cops, we've never used that. And then the first time I heard it, I go, "Damn, I'm writing that down!" Because I steal anything I like and put it out on the broadcast as my own.

Well, at least we do say in person, "I don't know where that came from."

I don't know. Someone will attribute it to Marin. But the idea is that the reason that I like discussions like this, and listen, you and I disagree on a lot of stuff. But when it comes to the architecture, when it comes to the core values, when it comes to the six domains, when it comes to intent, we've never differed on those things. Now, you and I might give different weight to one of the things. Like, you'll say that this is a heuristic template match, and I'll go, "Now, Brian, I think it was more prototypical because look at this." And then you'll discuss that, and you may retain your opinion. But guess what? We've never missed the suspect. We've never missed the bad guy. So the idea is that we're not saying that you can't have different views. But we're saying that certain things don't matter, and they need to fall through your sieve.

I'm moving a lot of rocks in my backyard right now. It was dumped as dirt, so I had to take chicken wire. Like actual rocks? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Real rocks. That's in the meth lab downstairs, Marin. Is there smoke coming? Can anybody see it? So I've got my wheelbarrow. I do actually, but that's me. I've got my wheelbarrow, and what I did is I had to take a Lanny... our neighbor Lanny got caught in a chicken coop. So I took some chicken wire that he had to cut out and put it over. And I'm shoveling dirt through it. And guess what? I don't have the right filter, but it's catching a lot of the rocks. That's how it is, Brian. The more training you have, the tighter your filter is, and the less sand and rock mix you have at the end, it's more pure. So the more training, the more pure my signal gets. The less training, it's kind of like me with the chicken wire, where it's still kind of a rocky mess. So that's why we always say, people go, "Hey, great tagline, but what does it mean?" Training changes behavior. Look, you think everybody was born with this ability? Do you think Sherlock Holmes just occurred? You have to cultivate this, and it has to percolate, and it has to age. And that's where you start getting good at it. And once you get there, then you want the gems, Brian. And we have to create an institutional memory and take some of these gems and push it down to folks. And it doesn't matter that you're not a cop. If you're just looking for a crossword puzzle clue, this is how you go about it. This is the architecture.

Yeah, that's what it is. It's an analytical framework, an architecture. If you don't have that, then all this other stuff doesn't matter. And I think that's also a good way to articulate our biggest issue with a lot of these profiles or things that people come up with. It's like, "No, you're starting with this, and then you're trying to make everything fit that."

Yeah, but that's not how it works.

No, exactly. And that's what I'm saying. For us, it's like we always say, you know, "tennis shoe plus lawn chair equals beach ball." Got 'em. That's it. That's it. You remember, we were asked, "Could you define in just one sentence what Human Behavior Pattern Recognition and Analysis is?" I gave exactly what Brian just said. And the people got mad at me. And they said, "You keep changing it." And I go, "Why?" And they said, "It depends." And I go, "Like the undergarment?" And they go, "No, you keep saying that it depends." "Well," they say, "which one of these six domains is active?" "All of them." "All the time?" "Well, it depends." "Well, what do you mean it depends?" "Well, they're all active all the time, but in this situation, only these three have been triggered." And they go, "Well, how are we supposed to know that?" "Dude, that's what I'm trying to teach you. You got to slow down. You got to back up, and you got to see it through a pair of glasses." And guess what? On the glasses that make sure that not all the rocks get in, and some of the sand is getting in. But that's not it. That'll only get you to the tipping point. Then you have to go through that sand with your hands, and you have to look for that nugget. You have to look for that gem. And once you find those, guess what? It's going to start building on its own. You don't have to create it. You don't have to stand it up and see the house of cards fall. It's going to lead you. The evidence is going to whistle and go, "Hey, over here!" That's how strong it should be.

Yeah. And those of you following along on Instagram and seeing our Whiteboard Wednesday are getting to see what some of those terms are, not necessarily training or understanding them, which now that you're hearing them in use, it should start to click. So I think that's kind of remind everyone to follow along with that. And also, the chicken coop story comes out. Actually, by the time everyone's listening to this podcast, that chicken coop story comes out. Totally true story. And I don't know, Brian, if you're going to use the picture that Lanny sent me and demand a recount on his photo, you guys...

I will. If he actually sent you that photo and said, "Use this photo"? He said, "No, no, no, no, no! I need you to understand that you remember the photo that I chose, folks, to depict my neighbor Lanny, who I loved to death. I went on and got the toothless, bearded... you know, the guy from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I got that guy and I said, 'Hey, this is my neighbor.'" And guess what? Months later, he finally found it. His wife had to read it to him and say, "Hey, that's you." So he got pissed after getting locked in the chicken coop, and he sent me the photo that Brian's going to... So please, folks, if you've never done a lessons learned before...

Yeah, if you haven't read our lessons learned, you got to check that out on the website. Everyone, my arch-enemy, my nemesis on Instagram, you can click that little link in there and all that stuff pops up for you to choose from to watch them on YouTube or read some of those. So that chicken coop one is a good one.

So, and Brian, I can't tell you how much I appreciate all the work that you've done on the website and on The Human Behavior Podcast, which, folks, is all Brian. Brian's the star there. And the lessons learned, which Brian has to pour through and edit because I write them with a flat-sided brand. But also, I loved being on Walt's podcast. And you remember we were on Brian Willis' podcast a little while ago, and next week, we're going to be on Adam Parr's podcast. I'm very excited about that only because we get to share our passion, which is human behavior, with other folks. So thanks to Walt specifically. How did they get to his?

Yeah, I'll put the links up for the Distinguished Savage podcast. But follow along, folks. We're going to have a listener questions one, kind of inspired by Walt's stuff. I thought it was a great conversation. So I'll put the link up for that. It's already published by the time you're listening to this. So check that out. That's where he interviews us. And so, which is cool. I think it brings out a lot more than Greg and I just having a conversation.

But I did want to end with a point to remember while we're all in isolation right now or quarantine. And it kind of goes, "If you're worried about what to do while you're quarantined, remember that while he was in isolation, mathematician Theodore Kaczynski completed more than 16 successful technical projects and wrote a 35,000-word essay that was published in The New York Times." So you folks, there you go. You're falling behind. You're falling behind!

I had to use that for the Eric Rudolph podcast because someone posted... Brian is one of those guys that were out there. He's always got a quote. He's very smart when it comes to quotes. He's always got a quote. The problem is most of his quotes are from people like Ted Kaczynski or Jeffrey Dahmer, or his favorite one now is Charles Manson. You get what I'm saying? And you see, he's got the guitar back there.

So if I haven't seen it, new to me, that's perfect. So, yeah, so we're on... I was just going to tell you there's a shack somewhere, Marin, and your name and my name are carved in there.

Oh, yeah. You know what I'm trying to say? And they're still doing... they're doing with the angry face, The Human Behavior Podcast, you know?

Yeah, I love it. Exactly. That was, yeah, that was a funny one I saw on Twitter. I don't even know how many people would remember or know who Theodore Kaczynski, Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, which we started off this podcast talking about, was. And they put it, "16 technical projects in a 35,000-word essay." So first of all, as brilliant as that is, folks, to round out what we were talking about, after that manifesto was published, Kaczynski's brother called the local FBI office and said, "It's my brother."

Yep.

And they go, "How do you know?" And he goes, "I'm his flipping brother, and I've read every word! And he said that at lunch. He said it at his breakfast table. He said all that stuff before." Don't, you don't have to turn over every stone in an investigation. You just have to turn over a couple of the right ones. Training helps you figure out which ones those are.

Yeah. And if you got to... I think that's a good point there too, to end on is that his brother recognized that. So if you're reading something that a family member, friend, work acquaintance is saying, and you could picture that being a part of a trial testimony a few years from now, you... that's someone you want to call your local field office, or contact that individual and make sure... Okay, I would start there. But if you don't have anything else to add, Greg, I think that's a good spot to end on.

No, thanks, everybody. Keep the faith. Faith, not fear.

Yep. Training changes behavior.