L.O.G. 118 Profiling an Anomaly

Hello and welcome to the video version of The Human Behavior Podcast. I'm Brian Marren, the host and creator of the show. As always, I will be joined by human behavior expert, Mr. Greg Williams, who the show is affectionately named after. On the show, we discuss different topics through the lenses of what we call human behavior pattern recognition analysis. If you'd like to find out more about what that is, please check the links in the episode details and go to our website to learn more. Please don't forget to follow us on social media; the links are also in the episode details, and hit the Like and Subscribe button to help support our work. Thanks for tuning in, and we hope you enjoy the show.

All right, let's go ahead and get started. This is actually the first time we've recorded a podcast together in the same room, and not the first time that we've been in a hotel room together. First time in Virginia, perhaps, and first time for this reason of making a recording. We are in a hotel room in Virginia, and it is important to remember that the state motto is "Virginia is for Lovers."

There we go. I cannot even hope to define what we have as "loft." That just changes everything, please.

So, for all you listeners, this is the first time Greg and I recorded one actually together. We're on the road right now recording this. It will probably get released about a week later, which is fine, but it does change the dynamic a little bit. I like it. We're recording it on video as well, from my iPad on the bed of the hotel room, so if anyone were to walk in, this would look like something else is going on here.

What would that be?

Fine. We're going to go ahead, since we're on the road this week, we still want to record one, and we're going to talk about profiling an anomaly. The term "profiling" gets thrown around a lot, usually incorrectly, but we'll get to all that. What we focus on is exactly that: we take a behavioral approach to profiling. We don't care about things like your motive for a crime, let's say, your different ideological views on whatever. We really focus on behavior, and the term "profiling" gets thrown around a lot. So we talk about profiling an anomaly. Maybe, Greg, should we start with a rough definition of profiling and what you mean by that?

Yeah, the thing is, I'm not going to do it justice, Brian. If anybody wants to know what that is, take a look at the profile on your computer. Literally, go to your phone, open up the section for Settings to "Profile," and take a look at all of the things that encompasses. Whether you're alive or whether you're dead, whether you're working during the day or you work at night, whether you're a heterochromatic and have one blue eye and one green eye—all of those things put together to create a profile. But more importantly, it's a profile of your day, of your likes, of where you stop for coffee, what kind of car you drive. People are amassing that data all the time.

And so the idea is, we profile anomalous behavior, which means it's something that you're doing today or at this moment that falls outside of the purview of that profile that was created for your normal behavior. And when we say "normal," Brian, let's make sure that we understand that we're talking about a clinical definition. Do you get what I'm trying to say? Abnormal would be something unusual; normal would be something usual.

Yeah. And again, you give that when you say "a clinical definition," just for that setting, in that context, for that given time, in terms of normal. I don't care what type of music you listen to or you like to dress a certain way. That is normal. It's just within the context from which this observation is made.

Precisely. So it's all very, very contextual, which is important, because the context in which you view something defines how relevant that observation is.

Absolutely.

And a thing that you just touched on for anybody that's viewing or listening: you've got to remember what Brian just said. It's about the context within which it's viewed. So, for example, Brian and I just got off a series of long flights—21 straight hours of flying—and during that time, both of us saw what we would (and Brian and I are very different people), but we saw what we'd see as extreme. We saw extreme clothing. We saw extreme haircuts. We saw people with extreme tattoos that were visible. Do you get what I'm saying?

Now, who's to say that's extreme for that person? That may be completely baseline, and so that would be normal for them. Now, if that person were for some reason to cover up those "job stoppers," do you get what I'm trying to say, or attempt to conceal that, that would be abnormal, wouldn't it? So what we're talking about as an anomaly would be something for that person, in that place, at that time, based on the totality of what they do, not this—you can't profile something that you see for a nanosecond and go, "Oh, clearly that's going to be this," unless it's an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade), right? It's so blatantly obvious. The guy jumps around the corner pointing a rocket at you, you don't have to wait for, "Well, let's give this time to play out." It's not "RPG Turn-In Day" where you get a free shirt if you buy back your RPG.

No, but you're exactly right. And you're going to wonder why we're beating the dead horse—sorry to all the horse riders in the room—but the idea is that people are doing it wrong, Brian. And one thing that I saw that was a perfect definition: do you remember our good friend, John, from Stanford Research Institute?

Yes.

So I got on John's bad side many times, he's a genius. And the reason was that I would ask him questions, and being an engineer and being a doctor, it was like, "Just look, just watch." And there was one day that he had the TV that was bigger than the TV that's in the room that we're in right now. And on that TV screen, he had all these lines of code, you remember that? And it was like Helvetica, size 1.2, and there were different colors and they were streaming, and they took up the entire television. And I made the mistake of interrupting him when he was taking his notes because I needed to know, and I was like, "How can you read all that data, all that size, all at the same time?" And you remember our good English friend was right next to him, and they were all hunched over with soup, and he goes, "This is what we're looking for." And of all those lines of code that were streaming by, Brian, there was one code that was very abrupt, it was very short, and then everything filled in. So it almost looked like a city landscape, a silhouette at night, and there was one band missing. And he goes, "That's what we're looking for right there." And I said, "Yeah, but what about all the little letters and numbers?" He goes, "No, no, no, that's something anomalous. We have to solve that."

Isn't that what we do? We look at a baseline for something that's missing or something that's apparent that perhaps shouldn't be there, or exactly the thing that we need to be there, and that's what we're drawing our reasonable conclusion on, right?

And so it's not profiling an individual, or a person, place, or event, specifically a race, a church, a car. It's an anomaly within some observation or within some context, I guess I should say, right?

Well, Brian, you're spot-on again, but what's the term in bowling when you score a perfect game? Because I don't bowl, and you're from Chicago, and there's a lot of bowling.

I don't, I have no idea. The perfect game? I know when you're like an albatross or an eagle, turkey, when...

So that's what I'm talking about. And I don't know enough, and clearly I'm built for bowling rather than running. But in golf, the same thing. My Uncle Paul used to abuse the caddies, and Jeff and I had to be caddies one time for his albatrosses. And when we were out on the course, I know that there was a term for one under par, two under par, three under par. I don't know those terms, but...

Yeah, birdie, eagle.

Why would we have terms like that if those weren't anomalous, right? The whole reason that we assign a name to those things, the whole reason that you get a poster or a model for an Oscar, or a person throwing darts or something, is because that was an anomaly. People don't score that many bull's-eyes. So, therefore, everything is par, and then you're either above or below par, isn't that it?

Yeah, so what we're saying—I don't want to get into the weeds on this, but it's so important. LinkedIn is the only thing that I read when I'm traveling because it's the only social media I have, and these people are constantly battling it out. It's a battle of the "network idiots" sometimes, where you're seeing that a person says, "Well, you can't baseline profile this and that." The FBI came out with that report, Brian, that said that you can't behaviorally profile an individual looking for these traits. What is their division? Their Behavioral Sciences Division, they profile people all the time. What they're trying to say, and what they're at odds with themselves, is they're not profiling an anomaly, they're trying to profile a specific human in their skin. And that's impossible because we have free will. We do different things on different dates. Even though pattern recognition says, "Well, we do this same day over and over," there's a day that we turned left instead of turning right. There's a day we picked the apple instead of the banana at the gift shop, right?

And I'll always argue with you about how much free will we really actually have, but I get what you're saying. And I think what sometimes they're trying to do is say, just like you said, "It's like you've seen a movie." It's like, "This is the type of person you're trying to—you're trying to come up with this persona, this character." And I get what they're trying to do, and I think maybe it helps—maybe it helps a jury or a person or someone on the street understand it, and it might help somebody that's not exposed to it. But here's the thing, it's so, it's too general so as not to actually help find the person, right? And then in some cases, you're right, I mean, you, because you can't be—and then when some local cop arrests the guy, they go, "Yeah, see? It fits the profile." It's like, "Well, your profile is so general." That's not what we're talking about here. They're trying to take that computer profile, like you said, and then take that, "All right, here's what we have from their Facebook profile and then everything we know about them." If you use that for a specific person to find them, yes, that could be. But if you're trying to apply that prototypically in some sort of fashion to, in order to say, "This is the likely individual we're looking for," well, I mean, you're—yeah, but are we—but you're using it to look for an individual. Which is the case: are we looking for an abhorrent behavior pattern that may indicate potential violence, or are we looking that this person is more likely to buy the item off the shelf or the car? Do you see what—what are we using that profile for, I guess?

Well, that's with any data collection, Greg. What are you using it for? What's the point? You've got all this information, you have these metrics. That's no different than the little WHOOP strap I'm wearing on my thing. I get all this data in this app. Great. How do you use it? Because it doesn't matter. All that information is meaningless. It doesn't knock on your brain door and go, "By the way, we've noticed these trends." Does it? Right?

No, you have to. That's the idea. It does, but they're general, right? And there's no prescription for it. It's just, it's very descriptive, right? It says, "Hey, you slept like [expletive] last night." And I'm sitting there looking at it like, "Yeah, I [expletive] know that. I feel that right now, trust me." If we're not making any sense out there, there are certain things that I like about that, and then, but again, it goes into—that goes into operationalizing the information. But this is what we're talking about with profiling an anomaly versus profiling a person or a thing, right? You have to go, "What's different about this?" Let's look at that thing, that one thing that's odd here, and then extrapolate, figure out, "Why is that odd?" Because there's a reason why something doesn't fit the baseline. That reason could be benign. That could be—you're exactly right.

So let's take a look at this. First of all, folks, you don't get to see the smoke and the mirrors, because there is none. The idea is that you see Brian and I not running with notes. There's probably a yellow pad. I've got my pads to take notes. Clearly, we've got our coffee and our water, and we're just spitballing here. But here's the idea: Brian's on to something, and I want to tell you, there is no profile for what constitutes a school shooter. And because COVID's breaking up, school shooters are going to be back. People are going to be back in groups. People are going to come back and shoot those groups, right? And why do we choose this place? Because this place is familiar to us. We know that it's going to be a soft target, we can get in, all of that, and we have on previous broadcasts.

But let's say this: how do we profile an anomaly? Jimmy or Sally has had a 3.2 (and I don't know [expletive] about numbers) grade point average for the last four semesters in a row, and I don't know how long that would be. But then comes along that now they've got a teardrop tattoo. They said that ever since the piglet from the movie Babe died in the third episode, that they just can't get past that in their life. They're wearing black, they tore their clothes. Their grade point now dropped to a 1.2. When before they never swore, now they're acting out. And when they always had an open door policy on their room, now they're closing the door. Brian, those are a series of anomalous behaviors, all strung together, which would show a reasonable person that there's a cluster. There's more than one cue across a wider spectrum that would indicate something's going on. Do you know what that indicates? Teenage. That means adolescence.

So, the idea—the reason we talk about behavior pattern recognition: first of all, what things fall into a bucket that define you, okay? And then anomaly detection is the analysis portion. The analysis is, what did the sage greybeards bring to the table? And to do a correct analysis, Brian, I have to go to a counselor, I have to go to a mechanic, I have to go to a physician. Like, for example, if I hear a knock on my car, I go to the mechanic, and the mechanic goes, "It's the dude knocking on your [expletive] car." And I'm going, "Oh, well, maybe I shouldn't have run him over." Do you see what I'm trying to say? None of that information is beneficial to the average user unless you do the profile analysis with the information that you gathered, looking for known-knowns against the unknown, against the baseline within which that environment conditions are interacting with you and you're interacting with them. That's the only way to create an anomaly detection system. And then, how do I apply that information? I mean, that's it, that's a root cause of the root skill that we transfer to people. And one of the things I think—and you tell me what you think—because I think some of the reasons, or one of the ways, things go wrong or we get this wrong, is it's almost like we're doing this "ends justification" in some aspects. And then the other one is, okay, the same thing, "This is what I think is happening, let me collect evidence to find that that's happening." It's like, okay, let me—you're Shelley wants to—I'm doing surveillance on Shelley, all right? And I don't know that it's your birthday tonight, but I'm watching her in the house, and she's letting people in through the back door, and she's hiding stuff around, and she's got... So it's either a brothel, gambling, or looking like this, going like, "Dude, oh my god!" Now, maybe your neighbor got you a rifle for your birthday, so now I see a guy in there with a gun, and now they're hiding, and now they're going, "I'm like, dude, this is an ambush! It's an assassination!" Well, I'm already doing that, right? And I go, "Holy crap, they're going to ambush Greg!" Now, my hypothesis is true, they are going to ambush you. Yes, but the ambush is a surprise birthday, which I know, and it's going to be mutually beneficial, and everybody's going to be happy, right?

But you see, I think that's what happened. That's the best analogy to come up with off the top of my head right now, but on why some of these things occur, and then we start jamming that square peg into that round hole. You're always looking for that, because that's what everyone wants, especially—you brought the school shooters—that's what they want. They want this piece of paper. Yes, they want the list: "Give me the four people that are going to be the school shooter, give me the ten things I need to look for." Oh, come on. So listen, you've got 1,200 or 200 or 2,400, or however many students you've got in the school at one time. All of those students have had a fascination or an ideation with sex, or with homicide, or with suicide, or with something. You're going to go into the same 20-minute span, exactly, while masturbating in class. So the idea is that adolescence is a weird time, that our brain is calculating different things that are going on. And then you have real bullying, and then you have this unconscious feeling that you're being ostracized or bullied when you're not, because you're different.

And so, if you wanted to calculate on a bell curve somehow that these five out of the 1,200 are the people that are most likely to do something stupid, then I would say to you, listen, the way you vet this system is you take a look at all of the students and you say, "Which ones have resiliently bounced back from these differences: the grade point challenge, the divorce at home, the losing the girlfriend—which have demonstrated that even though they cried and rubbed some dirt on it, they bounced back in and created some..." We're not looking for that person. We're looking for the person that took that and then said, "There was some other injustice against me, and this has changed in my life, and now I'm going to do..." And even that person, Brian, that starts wearing the darker clothing and listening to the music and cutting themselves, it's significant to mention that that person isn't going to become a school shooter; it's just that they've displayed anomalous behavior, which means they need an intervention. So, I've had a temporary lapse with hope. Okay, so I feel hopeless and I need an adult, I need somebody to step in—a counselor or a teacher—to go. When somebody's hopeless, what do you give them? You give them a future. "Listen, things are going to get better. It blows right now, but I can tell you that..." I remember I got divorced after ten years of marriage, and I thought everything was fine. That's how clueless I was, because when it comes to certain things, I can be a human behavior profiler for everybody else, but in my own life, I'm constantly walking under the wall, right? Always hardest. It is, because you don't turn that lens that way, right? And so, all of a sudden, I thought that after ten years, and I was so young, and already had two kids—now, you've got to remember, I got married at 17 that first time. And so here I am looking at life, and I'm going, "Brian, this is it. I've got nothing else that's going on." And a couple of my friends came up to me and go, "You're so stupid, because in a year when you look back on this..." Well, I couldn't see that year, Brian. That year looked so far away. Things looked so different, I was so afraid. And I would tell you that that's just for a break with hope.

So let's say that we have a break with reality or a break with perspective—all of these things that we could have a break with. Do you understand what I'm trying to say? Which one is going to be the most dangerous? Well, if I all of a sudden have a suicidal ideation and homicidal fascination, that means I have to accelerate the intervention. Do you see what I'm trying to say? And maybe have to go deeper and longer. If my kid just decides that they're going to get big tires on their pickup and embrace the hunting channel or something, I'm probably going to be okay. Now, if I start making threats and I have the means to carry out those threats and I start calling my shotgun "Kurt Cobain," Brian, do you see what I'm trying to say? Maybe we have a problem. That's what we're saying. We don't look—I don't give a [expletive] about motive. I don't care about that. But is there intent, and is the intent established to the point where it's going to hurt you or another?

And these are what you're getting into, from what I see, is—because you brought up a bunch of different things. You've got people who completely avoid or pass the buck—no, no responsibility. Like, "Oh, this is absolutely not my fault." But then you gave the example from your personal life where you took it all, like, "This was all you." So, I think it's those extremes on either end of those is where those issues come, right? And naturally, we don't want to accept responsibility for things. Naturally, we want to pass it off onto someone else. But when you get into those extremes—so if you look at a typical distribution of behavior, two-thirds fall within one standard deviation of the mean, right? So everyone falls in the center, and then you have the extremes on the other end. Physics, math, everything bears you out, right?

Exactly.

So the idea is what you're talking about there, is so—because I think that your personal example is a great one, it ties right into the school shooters. So it's like the extremes in either direction. So, "No, I'm angry. No, everything that happened to me, no, maybe it even wasn't my fault, whatever, but it's everyone else's fault. Yes, I've been wronged my whole life, and I'm going to take it out on you." So that's external. "I'm going to blame everything to the extreme. I'm never going to accept responsibility for my actions." It's always so—

So I lose compassion. I lose—

That's important, right? I no longer—I dehumanize other people. It's no longer—it's, "I no longer have to abide by any rules because, well, I've been wronged." Exactly. So the ends justify the means. "I have a moral high point in my life to prove to you how wrong..." That's the school shooter, yes, right? But then the opposite end of that, where, "Everything's my fault. I'm to blame. I'm the worst. If I wasn't here, Brian, things would be much better." So that's what I'm saying. It's, you've got the same individual on two opposite ends of the extreme. So if you take that behavior, that distribution, the school shooter is on the right end or whatever, left end, I don't care which end. Then the other end is the kid who's going to commit suicide. So it's the same logic.

Yeah, right.

They're using the same logic, they're using it in a different manner. And this is how I apply it to different extremist groups in general. Of course, the person who wants to join the white supremacist movement is the same person who wants to join Antifa. They're the same person on the political spectrum, but that's the same person, right? And so it's that injustice collection. So I think that's like almost looking for those extremes—those are the anomalies. Anything outside, first of all, if I'm outside that one standard deviation of the mean, I've got to start looking. I go out to that second standard—that's it, man, those are the ones that are doing it.

And that, but think, that can also be where you find your creative people.

Yeah. You can also be where you want to know, "Who's the best poet?" Absolutely. That's to find, "Who's the best filmmaker?" Yes, it's all the way out here, man. And again, we're to the point where we're having that award because it's so specific and it's so unusual, above or below par. And listen, I don't know numbers, Brian, you're much better at numbers than math. Even for being a Marine, that would tell you something about the Detroit school system, folks. But listen, there's a lot of kids out there, so let's just say American kids. How many kids in America are 16 to 10? Do you get what I'm trying to say? And so if we take a look at that, how many of those ever turn out to commit suicide or harm themselves? You've got a much larger swath of those kids that turn into heroin users or armed robbery people. And even those numbers, Brian, statistically so low, do you get what I'm saying? So why do we worry about it? Because that blip on the radar ends up being the most catastrophic, horrible loss of life at that school, at that church, at that restaurant, or that King Soopers.

And that's what people don't think. We keep up-armoring, Brian. Do you remember the first times in Iraq, and do you remember how the FOBs (Forward Operating Bases) and then the COPs (Combat Outposts)—do you remember how up-armored they were with the sandbags and the vehicles were huge and all that other stuff? Listen, it wasn't until those started breaking down that you had a chance of meeting the people that we were policing. And that's what's going on now is we've got the cops that are worried about the response. Well, that's that bang. We've got the police saying, "We have to have a vehicle for the entry." Well, that's at "bang," and after "bang," we have... Do you see what I'm trying to say? Where's our mechanism for identifying this early enough that we can have a softer intervention? And we may never know that we avoided the homicide or the suicide or the school shooting, but it's certainly worth the juice, it's worth the squeezing, right? Because it's hard to prove a negative.

Yes, you can, though. That plays into just our general humans having a negativity bias, right?

Of course, we do.

We like—we need that. That's the only survival. There's only the reason why there's 37 different news channels.

Exactly right.

There's only enough content out there for one, but there's 30 seconds. I have to keep clicking until the confirmation bias pops up, and I go, "Hey, this guy's speaking my language." And for some, that's NPR; for some, that's CNN. But because we have that, and then you brought into what you brought up, with these even the PhD folks who write specifically about school shooters and stuff, they go, "Well, look, this is just a method." But it's just a method. You can't just learn this, sit through, click through this online course, or go through this training, and then now you're going to spot everyone. Because it's the bottom. And that makes it confusing for a lot of people. It's like, "Well, then what are we supposed to do? Let's just arm the teachers." It's like, "Okay, no, no, no, no!" That's what I'm saying. It's like, "Okay, so two weeks ago you were complaining that the teachers weren't doing a good enough job teaching the kid, and now you want to also give them the additional responsibility of protecting that child?" It's like, "Wait, wait a minute, wait a minute!"

What's a doctor's name that we really like, Brian? Is it Langman (spelling unconfirmed) - the guy that wrote the great stuff on school shooters in the FBI and the Secret Service? Everybody else came in, Cornell him—no, no, Cornell (spelling unconfirmed) is a great guy, by the way. Read that because that's good stuff, and he's got—but he's talking about profiling. I'm talking about the Langman/Langford (spelling unconfirmed), whatever, the doctor that did the papers after the school shooters. Really good stuff, folks, I'll make sure it's on the website. But the reason that I'm bringing up his name is that people said, "Yeah, but you can't use that because that's a psychological profile, and the teachers aren't psychologists." Listen, it doesn't matter how many doctors or PhDs or letters or numbers that you have in front of your name. If you're thinking of cottage cheese or milk, they have a "best by" date on them, yeah? Okay, now, some of them are going to go bad even though they have a "best by" date on them. The milk is going to be sour when you open it, the cottage cheese is going to look like a science experiment—that's our kids, okay? Some of them work right up to the expiration date. There are some of them a week after, you go, "Holy [expletive]! This is pretty fresh still." Yeah, I think I can get a couple days out. My wife hates it, Haley. But the idea here, Brian, is our unique little snowflakes are just like the homeless people. Some have mental health issues, some don't. Some are just angry and want to be alone, and some, listen, they're just down on their luck. So we can't treat this with a band-aid, because what is that band-aid going to look like, and how big is it going to be?

But I'll tell you this: if a person is making a credible threat—these school shooters saying, "I swear to God, I'm coming back, and I'll kill every one of you to have my..." That's hard to walk back, Brian. That's hard to unring that bell. So what I think is that we have to get to the point where we hold people accountable for their words. Okay, listen, we're talking about hating Asians. Listen, if you hate anybody, I don't care who you're hating. If you hate Martians with that sort of vitriol and that hate speech and all that other stuff—and don't get me started on hate speech, no such thing, I get it—but what I'm trying to say is the type of hate speech that has an intent behind it that, "I swear I'm going to burn down this church." Dylann Roof is a perfect example. Dylann was spouting hate for a long amount of time, but he was also doing other things, Brian: he was amassing firearms, he was making threatening videos and statements. And guess what? It was the totality there, not the individual. Almost nothing goes wrong all at once. It's just like your car. There are little things on your car that start giving you warnings over time. Yeah, but guess what? I wanted to save a couple of bucks, I push it a little longer, and the tire looked low, but [expletive] it, I can check that next week. And then what happens, Brian, is the crash on the interstate, but it didn't have to happen. That's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about that's the essence of human behavior profiling: understanding enough to compare the knowns against the unknowns, and then speculate what that means in this environment against this baseline.

The other issue I see with this is, again, this is with a lot of issues, is people want to say, "Okay, well, what am I supposed to do? I can't do this, or this isn't..." "But someone else needs to be doing this." Like, I mean, how many times have we heard it with different schools? Especially, "This is incredible. We, you guys, should be training those people over there." And we're like, "Yeah, and you, and everyone else." Like, "Well, no, I don't need to be in this."

Yeah, no. "Yeah, you do it." Meaning, "Yeah, but these people work for me, Brian." "Well, they work for me and they'll do fine. They'll tell me when something's wrong."

We pass the responsibility at an individual level. And I brought it up on a previous episode about the example of—you're sitting at a stoplight screwing around on your phone, and you have a five-second delay from the time the light turns green to when you go. The guy honks behind you, and you start traveling. Well, individually, that means absolutely nothing. Multiply that by how many hundred million Americans drive every day, every stoplight, every town, every city experiences a billion dollars an hour. It was something, right? Whatever that length of time is, I guarantee it's in the billions of dollars of lost productivity. How many millions of hours of time? I mean, extrapolate that over your lifetime. If you had five seconds every day, add it up over the course of your lifetime, that's a long time.

So let me depose you. Do you know that on computers there's chess and solitaire that are on every computer when you buy it? Did you know that?

Yeah.

Okay, well, I'm one of the people that didn't. And so I went to a police agency, just two very brief stories, and you can figure it out on your own. I went to a police agency, and the first thing I did is I walked around in their shoes and drove around with them in their cars and walked and talked to everybody before I took over. I wanted to know, "Listen, I'm not your boss now, but I will be in three days, so tell me everything." And every time something had to be entered for property, anytime anything had to be entered for a traffic stop, any crime, log sheet—those type of things all had to be in this computer program. So while they were teaching me the computer program, I was teaching them how to be a cop. It was funny, this balance, because they had me on the computer. And so what I found is that the people were lingering at the PD, waiting for the computer to print, waiting for their line in the computer and stuff. And there was a line of them that were playing solitaire. So I went high and right, and I said, "I want Solitaire off of every one of the computers." And the IT person says, "You have no idea what you're talking about." "Let's back that up a little bit. Every computer has one." Like, "Okay, well, we have to come up with a way to penalize them if I come in and I find them playing Solitaire at this time. I'm going to dock and pay, I'm going to do that."

So the reason was, Brian, they're not doing their job if they're not out there meeting the public, they're not out there going door-to-door, making contact and having an interaction with people. So what they thought they were doing is they thought that they were just taking a break, but what they were doing is they were affecting the productivity. And part of baselining a community, the best cops in the world are the ones that are out there meeting people. And I'm telling you, making a traffic stop and giving them a written warning and telling them, "Hey, listen, I know you're working, man, so I'm not going to give you a ticket, but you've got to understand this is a school zone." Those type of interactions, Brian, play for years, and that person's going to see you when you're down on the ground fighting with a suspect and go, "Okay, I understand that." But that's not what we're doing. Do you understand? We all want to just sit back and wait for that call to come, and that's the problem with profiling. Profiling over time means that you have to see all of those differences, you have to experience them in the moment, in the baseline. And if you're at the station house playing Solitaire and waiting for the radio call, "Any unit in the area," and that's what we're doing with school shootings, you're saying that everybody's got a plan, "If somebody says something, we're writing it down." Yeah, but those things don't necessarily add up to anything more than, "This troubled kid needs a good talking to."

And that's—you have profiling, you have to be proactive. And that thing you just said at the end, "Hey, this kid needs a talking to," that just instantly reminded me of that coach, teacher—I can't remember what—oh, yeah, the video where the kid walked in with a shotgun and he walked right up to the kid and gave him, like, "You don't, you don't want to do this. This isn't, this isn't you." And he was right. He was 100% right. And that kid was just had a break with reality, had all of that building up over time. He thought that this was the end. And that guy, probably no training at all in anything like this, walked up, took one look at that person and said, "Nah, he didn't go attack him, he didn't fight him." Because he didn't, in that moment, in that spacetime, thought, "This kid's not—this isn't what's happening here. This kid doesn't really want to do that." So that's a different individual, that's a different thing.

That's so important to create those people in our society. Kip Kinkel is in trouble. Dad buys a gun. He steals a gun, he's got it in his locker. He misuses the gun that dad legally buys for him. All of this stuff. And finally, Kip Kinkel is going to get kicked out of school. So Kip Kinkel is going to come back and he's going to kill everybody at school. That's his plan. Nobody tells anybody because we don't want to ruin this kid's future. "Maybe this is just a theft. The guy doesn't want to prosecute. Talk to him." Kip Kinkel goes back, and the first thing is his mom's unloading the groceries. He shoots her, kills mom. Dad is coming home just a little bit later. He has already rolled mom up in a carpet in the kitchen just so he doesn't have to look at her. Remember, that's his mom, for the love of God. And you talk about a break in reality, I'm giving you a break in reality. I'm giving you a break in reality, reality, hope, and perspective, all three in one. Okay, but they're all temporary, Brian. But Kip Kinkel doesn't think they're temporary, okay? Now, when he kills his wife there (or his mother), they're less temporary. So his dad comes up, he walks up with a Ruger 10/22, shoots his dad in the back of the head. Then calls his buddies over, and for a few hours of relief, is playing a first-person shooter game at home. No connection there, folks. It could have been any game, it could have been Zelda. The kids go home, and the next morning Kip says, "Okay, I'm going to pull the fire alarm, and when everybody's channelized down this hallway, I'm going to kill them." Before he can enact the mass killing plan, and he does shoot, he does kill. A couple of the kids tackle Kip, but this is what's important: he fights those kids. Then the cop comes, he fights the cop, gets the cop's gun. They fight him again and they get him in a police car. On the way to the police station, he kicks out the window and tries to jump out of the car, killing himself. And then when he gets to the jail cell, he tries to hang himself in the jail cell. Do you understand how this went from preventable, to in progress, to "there's nothing we can do but chipper-shredder put this kid in the prison, arrest him"? I'm telling you that my hope as an educator, my hope as an innovator, is that we can create an intervention at some point along there where we can prevent, or if we can't, we can mitigate, and then if we can't, we can stop. Do you see what I'm trying to say? It's—there's got to be a way. It's a continuous loop, it's not just—it's a series of circles.

It is. And whether it's how far down that path, you're never going to know. You don't know the person you bump into walking out of the gas station where they're at. That's why I was saying, you don't know if someone's glass is full, so you have to recognize it and then just either stay away or intervene and get them help, like you just said, depending on the situation.

But you mentioned these terms, "a break with hope," "reality," "perspective." I'm going to ask you to define those a little bit. I mean, you already did, but what you said, after you said it was a break from one of those things, "break from hope, reality, or perspective," it can be temporary, yes. For all of us, we've all had those feelings of, or we've either yelled at someone that we shouldn't have yelled at, gotten upset over something that we shouldn't have. That's just that break in perspective. "Oh my God, I'm yelling at the person who's taking my order, and they can't do anything, nothing to do with it." Yes. Hope, yeah, we've all been in that position where it's like, "Dude, I don't know how I can. I fell down pretty hard, and I don't know if I can get back up from this one." Right? And then same thing, even reality—"break with reality." You don't know what's going on in your life, same thing. Like the bottom falls out, and you haven't even had a break with hope yet. You're just going like, "What the hell is going on? I thought this person was my friend. I thought this was going..." There's all those things. But for some people, at some point, it's no longer temporary, right?

So don't overly define something, okay? And no, I don't mean you. I mean, I would tell the general person at home that a lot of people are PhDs because they spent all their life in school and never on the street. And a lot of people get their master's degrees on a test where there's four people that they chose, and they stick their hand in warm or cold water, and they can blow me because I've been working the street my entire life, and I know the street. And the idea is when you're talking about, for example, a break in perspective, it can be temporary or permanent. Who's permanent? The person in California that we met at the Vigiluccis that walked in, walked ahead of the stack, walked over and got his seat, and thought he was entitled all the way. That guy will never come back off the gas. He is completely thinking he's the mayor of Munchkin Village, and everything is...

Our friend at Chick-fil-A a couple...

Yeah, just a couple hours ago. That's perfect, okay? And she was out of her mind, right? And it showed because she had complete transparent loss with perspective. I'll give you one: there's a movie with John Candy called Summer Rental, and the guy called him "renter" all the time. The guy that was First Blood's colonel. That guy is in the movie, and he's the boat captain. And they're standing in line waiting for the lobster over and over and over, and finally the guy comes in and moves them all out of the way, and they take the last five lobsters and have a big fight. There are people that have that break with perspective that they'll never understand the way the other half lives, and they don't want to. But you know what? Those aren't generally not the people that are killing people and doing Silence of the Lambs with you in the basement, putting the lotion on the skin. So what's a temporary break with perspective? You already said it. You're up at the counter, "This isn't what I ordered."

I'll give you a perfect one. My flight—the four-and-a-half-hour layover in Dallas, and then I had a 33-minute catch between Charlotte and wherever, Lynchburg, Fredericksburg, whatever it is. Okay, Brian, the lady on the other end of the line (it just happened to be a female, I don't care anything else about it, that was just a qualifier that I was actually talking to a human on the other end of the phone). I said, "Lady, do you understand that with this four-and-a-half-hour layover, if I just have, like, maybe 30 to 90 minutes one way or the other, I could make that flight with no problem. I'm not going to have to run, my bags will get there." And she goes, "Yeah, but it's a non-refundable ticket." I go, "Ma'am, I'm not talking about refunds, I'm talking about logistics. I need to get there sooner. And I understand if there's a transfer of the thing, I'll pay the difference." "No, it's a non-refundable ticket, and so we'd have to go through and restart the itinerary, and that would be about double." I don't know, "Man, we don't." And she goes, "Well, yes, you do." And I go, "No, when I land in Dallas, could I not walk up to the counter and get a one-way ticket to Lynchburg from there and have an earlier flight to Charlotte?" "Yeah, but nobody's going to do that." I go, "Yeah, but I might be able to do that." What was happening, Brian, is she was transmitting on one frequency, I was transmitting on another, and our words were getting garbled, and the messages were missed. How many times a day do you think we do that? So we can fix loss of perspective.

So I'll give you a quick loss of hope. My dad decided that he was going to embrace my mom's Lutheran side when they weren't fighting and drinking and beating up each other, and we went to Peace United Methodist Church in the East Side of Detroit. And when we went in, they were so overly nice, and it was coming up on a holiday, like it's coming up on Easter. And they said, "Oh, we want to give your son a role in the play." And I was, like, seven or nine. And they gave me this role in the play, and it was coming up Sunday. And they gave me such—to welcome me—such a pivotal, pivotal role. I was like Job, do you get what I'm trying to say? And they even made the lines for me. And the idea was I was supposed to rehearse this stuff. I went home, I blew it off. I was skating in the backyard, and I was playing hockey. And all of a sudden it came time to go to church, and I knew I was unprepared, and I felt hopeless. I was out in the yard, I had made this big snowball, I tunneled into the side of this—I mean, a big six-foot radius probably. It's a Detroit snow, the lake effect snow, you know, from Chicago. Yeah. And I tunneled into it and made this little mini igloo, and I hid. It was my version of running away. I hid in the backyard, my parents were yelling for me. I was inconsolable, I was crying. Why? Because I felt that these new friends that I didn't even really meet at this church, now I'm letting everybody down. Do you get what I'm saying? So had I known maybe about counseling or confession or self-help or more about resilience. I mean, Brian, I didn't know about suicide, but had I, I was feeling suicidal. I was completely depressed. But that was temporary. And what it took is it took somebody going, "This isn't the end of the world." And I know how hard that is to hear, yeah? Do you see what I'm trying to say? Okay, so hope and despair can be fixed. Okay, some people, it can't be. Some people are so hopeless and despair-filled that they're going to blow their brains out, they're just looking for a place for it to happen. So if there's a continuum, left to right, up and down, or anything, the ones that are the most dangerous are hope and reality. Because if I have a break with reality, I'm going to do something stupid that I can't unring, right? If I have a severe enough break with hope, that perspective. So I think that we should be on the lookout for that too. And who's best at that? Who knows a Marine better than a Marine? Who's meaner to a former Marine than a Marine? No, you guys are ruthless at that.

Well, yeah, and you get into—I appreciate the distinction you're talking about, hope and reality, perspective. And that break with perspective, we see that a lot. And then I think that leads into what you also brought up, intent versus motive. But what is someone's intent, right? So now, and recently, the last couple years, super highly charged political environment. That's very—it's become very binary, I guess. It became very—I don't know, it became very easy to do this "us versus them," which I hate that, because that oversimplifies it. I think you're being intellectually lazy when you just say, "Oh, they're the bad guys and we're the good guys." I'm sorry, the world's a little bit more complicated than that. But that, when I talk about intent, is what's important, right? So yes, you always give the one that I'm sure everyone listening has heard it before, most people want their say, not their way. That's the idea. And it's the demonstration of intent.

And you brought up, because you said something at the beginning—and I know where it's from because I read the report and missed that the first time I read it, read it several times over that report—but you said someone names their shotgun "Kurt Cobain." That's a little bit different than just having a stupid name for your weapon system and how you talk about it. And that demonstration of intent is what differentiates that, "Hey, man, this is a really weird anomaly. This person's acting strangely." It's like, "Okay, but what do they—what does it look like they're trying to do? It just looks like they're trying to get some attention right now." Okay, well, that's all they're probably trying to do then, right? I mean, that demonstration of intent is what makes that anomaly very important. "Hey, this is different. This kid's saying this." And you brought up even some words when someone says, "Hey, I swear to God I'll do this," or, "If I have a chance, I'll kill everyone in this place." I always say, when people say that stuff, I believe them. Even some drunk [expletive] at a bar says, "Yeah, I'll kick your ass." I believe them. I believe that that's what they intend until you amass evidence that outweighs that and you can prove that it's unlikely. And if a guy is so drunk he can't even stand up, it's unlikely he's going to do it. But I believe you when you say those things, yes, right? Because like you said, "Words matter." And because of social media and how much, and just how much interaction there is on these platforms between people all over the world, it's really, really loud and noisy. I think people forget they have that break in whatever reality or perspective when we start saying things that we forget those words have meaning. Words do have meaning. Now, your behavior and your intent always overpower it for me. It's like saying what people believe to be true is not what they say, it's what they do. That's what I believe to be true, and that's intent, right?

And so I think that's important because this has opened up, this—my belief about social media stuff—is that it's really opened up this, "I'll say whatever." And "reality TV" (in quotation marks) has a play in that too, because it's always shitty people, and it kind of normalizes the shitty behavior.

Exactly.

But it normalizes—well, that's like, to me, that's more dangerous than anything else. You want to put on the gratuitous violence in a movie, that's fine. I'm okay with that because it's a movie. This is—they're trying to portray that this is reality. And when you see people in those reality situations, you think, "Oh, that's okay to act like that." So I think that stuff actually does far more harm than anything else out there. People write it off and go, "Oh, it's just a bunch of jackasses and it's not even really reality." I'm like, "Yeah, but it's normalizing a lot of behaviors." And where I'm going with this is that you have to—what someone's going to say in person is going to be different than what they say online, right? I have this veil, of course. I have a barrier there. I'm not being—I'm just all coming out. I don't necessarily mean everything I say. That's very different when someone says something in person, it's much more powerful. And I think that's important when you get these things, like, "Oh, what did that person say?" "Well, who did they say it to, and how did they do it?" And filtering through that, because that is sometimes hard to do, is how do you determine this intent? We're talking about an anomaly, how do I do much easier—someone's attempting...

So, listen, you're talking about words and I'm talking about actions, and I would tell you that they're the same thing. So let's go to—and folks, I've had like two hours of sleep, so I'm going to be—I'm having some metaphors here. So let's do Whitman (Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower shooter). You're scaring me because we're right by that, right across Tower Street. But there is a tower there, and that's the first thing I see when I go. Yeah, that's scary as hell. But no one else probably sees that, right? Because they don't know you're seeing it, we're seeing it from context. So Whitman kills his mom before he goes on his killing spree. Kip Kinkel killed his mom and his dad. What's the Bath School shooter that blew up the stuff? Bath Township, Andrew (Andrew Kehoe, the Bath School disaster). Kills his mom before he goes in. So we could go down a list of those people. Isla Vista shooter killed his roommate before he went on his kill spree. There was somebody else that killed the roommate just before they went out. But Joe killed who he thought was, and that's as important to him, yet it's Manson. It's a rerun. Well, if I haven't seen her today...

The idea that I'm trying to lay out here is if we took a look at those, why would a person do that? Because what they're trying to do is build—they're trying to burn the bridges because they've had this lapse of reality and they're not coming back. So they're trying to demonstrate in their action when they leave the car running, when they leave the door open their car, when they've killed the mom—they've already what they're doing is they're saying the inevitable end of this is I'm going to kill myself. Kip Kinkel, if he wasn't interrupted, would have killed himself. The shooter in the hallway would have killed himself. Karl Pierson (Arapahoe High School shooter) had three or four Molotov cocktails, a shotgun, a bunch of stuff, and then once he kills his girlfriend (as stated by speaker, Karl Pierson killed Claire Davis, not his girlfriend) and he takes a look at the gravity of the situation, he killed himself. Someone came trying to stop him, but he saw it as a... Yes.

So the idea is, listen, when you choose your exit strategy and you're leaning towards those, it's like a big arrow saying, "This is going to end with violence, and the violence is going to be internal. I'm going to stop it." So you're either going to kill me or I'm going to kill myself. Why is that important? Because that's what we're talking about here. We're talking about what were those things in the past that we could look at and go, "These breadcrumbs indicate this." When we were teaching IED detection and we were going through collets (training exercises) in Iraq, I was saying, "Hey, listen, what does it look like when we're stripping with our mouth the plastic from a cord for a light and we spit that out? What does that look like?" And we would do that on the ground, we would do that in the dirt, to say, "What are these copper fibers? Where else would you see that?" So I'm saying that why can't we do the same thing with an action of a human? Naming something, and naming it for a suicidal person. Being demonstrative. "If this ever happens, I'm going to be doing one of those." Being specific in your words where it's not just, "I'm going to kill you," "I swear to God I'll come back and shoot you in the [expletive] head and burn this place to the ground." Brian, that's a descriptive. Then, yes. And what you're doing is you're laying out. And listen, everybody in the audience that's listening to us today said, "My mom used to be famous, when Jeff gets home, I think I killed him." Because my brother Jeff was always out [expletive] around, right? And my mom felt exasperated. How do you tell the difference? You tell the difference not with a lie detector, you tell the difference with the brain's chemistry.

The what's the guy in Denver? I always forget that killed his old lady and dumps her body at work, and killed Shanann—Chris Watts. Chris Watts and Shanann Watts and the two kids. Okay, so listen, to the point—news interviews. Gets to the point where he has to be done with his wife and his kids. Has a complete and total break with reality. And the only thing he knows is now I've got to get rid of the body. So where does he go? Where's the place he's familiar with? He goes to his work. He goes to the dumpster outside of his job. So, Brian, predictive analysis is us sitting down and saying what's most likely. Like you and I were driving back talking about South Park and Family Guy with Seth MacFarlane, and how the people had their creative meeting in a room. Brian, when you get a bunch of creative people together, they can build masterpieces. The da Vinci. The artwork. Murderers that lack that forward thinking—not that much, do you get what I'm trying to say? "Oh, I wish she would come back. I don't know where she is. This is kind of unusual." And then people are, "Are you cheating?" Well, there's a check in the box. You know, if you've been unfaithful and you're doing this, and then your cell phone tower is pinging, and you're buying the gosh game stuff at Target. So it's not hard to pick out the murderers because the murderers—it's a moment of violence, it's an episode. Now they're trying to cover it up. With a school shooter, they're trying to cover it up before they ever get there, yes. Do you see what I'm trying to say? So that's what we have to have.

Worry about the technique if you're telling me, "Did this guy kill his old lady?" Yeah, and guess what? I bet there's an algorithm that shows, "Well, it's most likely somebody that's even..." The interesting one about the Chris Watts one because I know I think Netflix or someone did a big documentary thing on it not long ago. Well, after we did. But here's the thing though, even because they showed, I think it was the police body cam footage of him and the neighbors—the police officer in the neighbor's house asking, because he had a security camera that showed whatever. "Yeah, can I take a look at that?" This, and like, he's like, "Yeah," showing him like, "Hey, here's where he backed up his truck." And the neighbor, the neighbor is going, "Hey, he's acting really weird, man. Like, I don't get that." Like the neighbor's going like, "What is going on here?" And they're going through the investigation still. It just happened. But that's what I mean, even that guy right there who has no idea what's going on, no training, no experience, nothing, goes, "Hey, this is—this guy's acting really odd here."

So let me give you one. Gunnison (Colorado) had its first homicide in forever. And so it's up at Arrowhead, and I'm not at liberty to give a tremendous amount of details, but I'll tell you this: Arrowhead is in the middle of nowhere. Arrowhead, you can't get to for three-quarters of the year unless you're on a snowmobile or a helicopter, right? And so sadly, the female is found dead, and it's obviously not self-inflicted or accidental or some manner of death other than homicide. And the person that was in the house last with this female tried to light her and the house on fire. But because it was spontaneous, and the person didn't research and isn't an arsonist, most arsonists snuff out their own flames, they don't leave enough oxygen flowing. And so, trust me, folks, I have no emotions, but I'm trying to show emotion and empathy for the poor woman. But the guy now can't get off of the mountain because he's killed this woman in Arrowhead, which is up on the mountain with the snow and everything else. So after a long trek, he finally ends up down on the two-track road that connects Gunnison to Salida on one side and to Montrose on the other. And he's hitchhiking in completely inappropriate clothing, with blood spatter on him. Do you get what I'm trying to say? And the person stops and goes, "Dude, what are you doing?" And he goes, "Can you tell me which direction is Grand Junction?"

Okay, so this fish out of water sticks out so much, it's like a neon glow stick waving, "Pay attention!" A matter of 24 hours later, somebody goes, "Hey, this woman was killed in Arrowhead, we're looking for the suspect." And all the people on the road, they go, "We saw," because there was one guy hitchhiking 50 miles from the closest town in inappropriate clothing. So spontaneity. And somebody right now listening is going to go, "Yeah, but school shooters are spontaneous." No, they're not. School shooters are walking around that bucket and it's getting filled every day, every day, every day, something else is dropping into it. And so finally, the day they go, "Hey, I've got a release today because this is it, this is my last day." The homicide suspect is going, listening to you going, "Man, man." And they go, "I wonder if I took this lamp and put it upside down?" And guess what? Now you can't walk those remarks back.

I would tell you this: anybody that sets a baseline for abusive, dangerous, threatening language, manipulative behavior, and then goes the extra step to amass a weapon, or make a plan, or go online, do you understand what I'm saying? That's a demonstration of intent. That's where we need to put our time and our money.

So that that's my big thing too. Even with dealing with people who are manipulative in their behavior, and you hear a lot of people in relationships talk about this, "Oh, this guy or this girl is very manipulative," and they do this. And that's what I always go to, is now, did they make a plan? Because there are people that lie, that they're just liars, narcissists, whatever. There are people that just [expletive], they don't care what they're saying.

[Expletive] artists.

Well, they don't care if they're saying if it's true or not. They're just a bullshitter, right? The [expletive] might be true, some of it's not. And you know that they've got a long history. So there are different types. But when you go into someone who demonstrates making a plan—now, a plan doesn't have to be, "I'm sitting in the garage in the woods with the photos up of everyone and maps and this." No, it's what you just said, "I'll demonstrate intent by making some plan. I'll come up with something, some sort of ruse or way to get my way out of you." And you see that with manipulative people all the time. But I just want to throw that in there because everything you mentioned is the exact same thing almost. It's like a bullet point list of the school shooter or the homicide. Yeah, it's like if I do something to manipulate you into getting what I want, well, I'm going to keep doing that. And then it's a person cheating on their significant other, you're still going to have a plan. There's a plan. At some point, there's some sort of plan. It's usually a pretty shitty one, and people get caught, right? But it's usually a low level of organization. And that's why...

But why is this a shitty plan? Because human beings, your electrochemical neurotransmitters, want you to be found out. They want to have you found out in a crowd. That's why there's social leakage. That's why these people show pictures of their gun before they go and kill people. Why? Because I have this need to be understood, Brian, in my tribe, in my person. I have to have my say and my way. And that's when it becomes dangerous. People don't understand that when you see something like that, why are we taking these Facebook things off? Alyssa, with King Soopers taking it off right away? Not because of his race, not because of his ideology, not because of political belief—because he's making threats on there, and he's showing weapons. How many times have you seen the people showing their guns and demonstrating crude acts of violent acts, and we're saying, "Yeah, but everybody can be a unique little snowflake." Listen, the difference is constitutional. When you take that step and you're now talking fighting words, or your threats are tangible, and you've taken steps to go towards... You know, what's the difference between driving through a crowd of angry people to get away, and driving through a crowd of angry people because you want to kill them? Yeah, well, there's a big difference, isn't there? Do you get what I'm trying to say? Because I'm hitting the accelerator because I think you're all going to kill me and drag me out of my car. Like the two cops at the Irish funeral. You see what I'm saying? Wrong place, wrong time, Brian. And the other one is, "You know what? [Expletive] this, I'm accelerating and I'm going to put them right between my headlights." So, one's trying to get away, one's trying to get in.

It's the same. Could you, upon reflection, decide which one was which? And I say you could reasonably decide, yes. And the difference would be artifacts and evidence and support. So if we want to stop a school shooter, if we want to stop the next homicide at a mall, if we want Gabby Giffords not to get shot in the head, what we need to do is we need to say, "These certain issues—mental health. These certain issues—lapse with reality. These certain—these ones are red flags." And I hate to use that because now the "red flag" warning is being bastardized, right? But these are red flags, and we have to intervene. But what's the U.S. Supreme Court wasting time on now? A guy that walked into the kitchen when he was having an argument with his wife, they took an unloaded gun and set it on the table and said, "Well, if that's how you feel, you might as well shoot me." And now we're doing a Supreme Court decision on whether the cops had the right to come back into the house and take all of his guns. Listen, that guy's not the guy, he's not the guy. And we have to say that. And you said a great—we did a broadcast, I think it was a week ago, Brian, about accepting responsibility. Not every kid's going to be a school shooter, but not every kid is going to be a [expletive] scholar either. And what you have to do is you have to be a parent to accept that, "Hey, listen, my kid's not..." It's saying, "It's my kid." Yeah, and I love him. You know what I'm trying to say? Yeah, but it's my baby, and I brought the girl to the prom, so I'm going to dance with her. And that's what I'm saying, is sometimes we have to take a look at that. And the best way I can tell it is, Brian, profiling an anomaly is hard, and it takes training, and it takes deliberate effort. But once you measure the knowns against the unknowns, against the baseline, and then you model that behavior against what's known historically for that person in the context, just like the stock market, you're going to be able to make a more informed decision. Yet, just like the stock market, there's going to be times that you'll lose and times that you gained that were unpredictable. And there's going to be other contributing factors outside of your control or observation or knowing, right?

And some of those may be an insider.

Okay, do you know what I'm trying to say? Some may be exterior—a sniper. Some may be when the bottom dropped out of the market, which would be an explosive, a bomb. Do you see what I'm trying to say? We could equate it to wartime or equate it to the boardroom. Then how do I not jump to an unreasonable conclusion, yet attribute value to something, right? So we're talking about your information. Information really is, like, I see this, how do I not go, "Oh, no, it's Colonel Mustard in the study with the pipe wrench, got him!" Because you don't need to. Yeah. The idea is, when does the artifact, when does the evidence, when does the statement with the intent—like, for example, there's that time when you're walking up on that scout car, or from your scout car walking up on the suspect vehicle, and all of a sudden you see him adjust the mirror and you know, "Here we are." And I already start walking back to my scout car because I know he's going to hit the accelerator, he's going to drive. That moment, that free fall, that feeling in the pit of your stomach—that's what we're looking for here. And so let's make it tangible. When we have the threat and the demonstrated intent, and we have at least three or more cues that would lead a reasonable person to believe that this behavior is anomalous, that's when we've got to act. And acting doesn't mean shooting somebody. It can mean walking in and sitting down and saying, "Carl, you're scaring everybody at school. Do you have a gun? What do you plan on doing with that gun?" How many times was that done? How many times when we do these autopsies, these protocols where we go back and tear apart these cases, do we find that somebody said, "Yeah, but I really never thought he was going to use the gun." The guy that came to work that night and said it was his last night, and barricaded all the buildings so he could kill everybody inside with him—he had demonstrated that he had put it online, he had done all these other things. We have to hold people accountable for their actions and their statements. And guess what? If you don't mean to do—and somebody's going to go, "Yeah, but most of these people hide. They go under the radar." They don't go under the radar. They just aren't criminals. They're just not hardcore [expletive]. They turned away, and you didn't pay attention to them. Maybe if you were to shine the light on their life once in a while and ask them what they were thinking. How many times have you heard me say, "Hey, what are you feeling right now? What's going on in your head?" And why? Because I want to know what's on your heart. What's on your heart and what's on your mind.

It's—those are great points. But that does take effort. That's why I say it's our responsibility. It's everyone's. These things happen because society lets it happen. I mean, I know nothing. I've never lived in Colorado. Been through Boulder once. Didn't know anything about that shooter. Didn't know anyone who knows him. Nothing connected to it all. But that's still partly my responsibility as a contributing member to society. We bear some of that. Now, it doesn't mean I have to get punished for something I had nothing to do with it. It just means we've got to stop looking at it as "it's us versus them." It's "that guy over there," "it's that girl," "it's this type of way of thinking." That's the problem. It's, "We're always the problem." I always do, "Twitter isn't the problem, it's the people using Twitter that are the problem. Facebook isn't the problem, it's how people use it that's the problem." So it's always the people. And you know, I always give that same thing. We do this stuff all the time, and I know this is why part of the reason why we have this podcast, to get it out there.

Just the story from even this morning. I walk out to get the rental car, and who's right in that park right next to that vehicle in a hotel parking lot, is a vehicle occupied by a man and woman in the front seat, and they're sleeping. Okay, well, it's already like after eight in the morning. Now, it's a little dark out here, it's raining, and so it wasn't bright light coming in. It was cool out, so it probably wasn't 100 degrees in that car, right? So then they're sleeping, obviously enough to where I could take photos. And I stationed it so it looked like I was taking a photo of the line.

It should be, right, right, right. Which, you fooled me, I thought that's what you were doing.

Well, yeah, you couldn't even see them yet, they were on the other side of the vehicle. And then I had to say, "Hey, car occupied by two, they're sleeping." So we're sitting here, we're at a hotel. It's not full. There's a hotel literally that joins the parking lot here. There's 16 other hotels within like a two-mile drive up here, right? And it's COVID, and so it's unreasonable to assume that they're all—there's no massive aggression in town. It's not whatever's going on here. So, but we're also, "Okay, why would—why are they here then?" Okay, well, we're the first pull-in off the interstate, right here. The very first right turn, the very first turn is right off of here, and we're here. And you're going, "Okay, well, they either couldn't get in, or they got in late, they didn't need a room. They said, 'Eff it, this is where people sleep. We'll sleep.'" And guess what? "I'm off the road so I'm not going to..." They were in there, and they were—I mean, they were each in the front seat, and they were almost—they were touching each other, face-to-face, almost cuddled. I was like, "Dude, I don't sleep like that with my wife anymore."

Dude, she's on her side because you're married.

Exactly. But meaning, I'm like, "This isn't—there's nothing odd going on here." But that's nothing apparent. It's, "Hey, does this fit the baseline?" For at, in their head, it probably did. "This is a geographic anchor point for a place to sleep at. Every hotel is, 'I'll be safe here. Be safe for a few hours.'" Exactly. And that's it. It's nothing beyond that. They weren't doing anything illegal. I'm sure the owner of this hotel could probably have them removed if they wanted to. Of course they could be trustworthy, pay, or go. But the idea is, "Profiling an anomaly. Gee, that's odd. Let's create." So how much—how long would it have taken to knock on the window and go, "Hey, I don't want to bother you guys. Are you okay? Is everything fine here?"

Well, that—

And hearing their story. What should their story sound like? "Hey, listen, last night, started raining, pulled off." But that was in my mind, is I'm taking their snap in their photo, pretending like it's a Chick-fil-A. My thing is, all right, if that guy goes, "Hey, man, what the [expletive] are you doing?" I'm going to act like he scared the crap out of me. "I had no idea they were in there sleeping." You had a story. I mean, like, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry, holy crap, I had no idea you were in here. My God, is everything okay?" I would have just turned it on them to defuse the situation. That's having a plan going up. "But did you—did you see alcohol? Did you see?" No, no. So it didn't fit. It was anomalous, but it wasn't anomalous with intent and danger. And that's what I mean, is you've got us when we're talking about profiling an anomaly, like you see a million anomalies a day. "What am I supposed to—" Yes.

Okay, taking that extra half—

But that's what I'm saying, is yes, take that extra half second, because if you do it proactively, you won't have to do it anymore. You don't have to do it after the bang. And you have to think about it consciously versus having consciously trying to take in every single thing you see in your environment.

So, Nikolas Cruz (Parkland shooter), right? So Cruz takes a bag full of guns in an Uber to school. And upon retrospect, when they talk to the guy, there was everybody that knew there were guns in that bag. The Uber driver knew, he knew. When they were dragging it to school, everybody seeing it knew there were guns in that bag. Okay, that's what I'm talking about. You don't, you don't have to be a Wile E. Coyote super genius to intervene at that point. Our dear friend, Andy Brown, at Fairchild Air Force Base, I can't think of the shooter's name. The person that drove him there in a taxi said he absolutely knew that in that duffel bag there was a gun, could see it, knew the way guns were boxed and everything. And a person later in the bathroom that went in and saw the styrofoam said they knew by the shape of the styrofoam it was a gun. Brian, what I'm saying is, why not use the lowest available caloric input to try to create an understanding of why you're doing that behavior? When people scare me, I tell them they're scaring me. When I worked the road and somebody started balling up their fists and acting like a goofball, I would tell them, "Look, you're scaring me now. You look like you're going to assault me. Are you planning on hitting me?" And I would bring it right out in the open, and then people would start going "whoop" and orient and go, "What's happening over there?" Brian, sometimes we have to name it. Sometimes we have to name the monster and say what we're scared of. And if one person would have said, "Hey, what's with the gun in the bag, son?" Maybe we could have saved a life.

That's usually what it is. That's in most of these things. It's that person who makes sure the door is locked, and then that person ends up not being able to get in. One who walks up and says, "Hey, what's going on here?" Just—I tell people, just be mildly amused and entertained with your environment.

Yes.

And when necessary, being the one that calls, or being the one that calls 9-1-1 and says, "Hey, there's probably nothing, but..." Or being the one that goes over and going, "You're scaring everybody. You need to leave." Just those interventions, we're not talking about huge interventions with a body bunker and that gun. You get that a lot of scaring people. You tell that a lot. "Why is he in the changing room? He's not buying clothes." But no, and how sick is that? I just bought this shirt, by the way, folks. I hope you like it.

Yeah, it looks nice on you actually.

Thank you. You're such an ass. I got it because it's pouring rain outside, and the other shirt exposed my bologna-sized areola through the wet shirt, and so I don't want to—

How's that for—

I think on that note, I think on that note, we'll leave everyone with that.

No, but "shock to conscience," Brian, that's the old standard. I think we covered a lot about what this means about profiling, and what profiling is, and what we mean by an anomaly, and how it's more complicated than people want to think, but also, I think, less difficult than people want to think sometimes, right?

Meaning, depending on how good you want to be. How good do you want to be? You want to be major league? Do you want to do this for a living, or do you want to just save a life in your neighborhood?

I'm saying when it comes to intervening, because, yeah, I agree. Because you said it even here at the end, the low-calorie intervention. People, your daughter, your son, even with the neighbor kids, where it starts, it starts with you and your own family and your friends. If everyone just agrees, if we just focused on what we could control, you and I would be out of a job in no time.

We would.

And the greatest thing for us, selfishly, is we have job security because nobody's paying attention, and they're not paying attention to the right things. Everybody wants to drop it on the tongue, Brian. Everybody wants to winnow it down to the pill that I take, that fish oil, that 1200 milligrams (mg) of fish oil to make my prostate safe or whatever.

Yeah, I think everyone's learning that now with the internet influencers who have popped up over the years, and then people keep going along and then realize eventually they run out of stuff or can't perform or can't do any more, and people go, "Oh, wait, there's a lot more to this and you're not..."

The idea, "What you're doing? So I got a certificate for eight hours!" It's like, "For eight hours, really?" "I put out this report and I wrote this book." And then it's important to understand that I've been doing this every single day since 1978. Yeah, every day of my life, and trying to get better. And I don't know how long ago that it was born, and I'm still learning, I'm learning every day. That's the thing, is that there's no, there's no end. There's no end point, no end.

With me, just Brian. Who, who'd know you could fit that many dead people in that trunk? Lord knows I have seen it. Yeah, I think it's good. So, do you want feedback on this if people listen to this episode? Tell us what they thought. Yeah, we're trying to listen along or have questions. Or feedback is always good. You can email us at thehumanbehaviorpodcast@gmail.com. You can always hit the link in the episode details to pick up your official The Human Behavior Podcast coffee mug. It will take you right to there. And you can—I like that, which I have now fixed, Greg. We don't have to pay. I no longer get charged a dollar fifty every time someone orders it. We know those guys go out of business. Now it breaks even. The Marine was in charge of the finances. It was—I thought I had it set up so perfectly. But apparently so funny, this communication where I was getting it was like a dollar seventeen every time someone ordered one that we had to pay. So that we ironed out that, so now, now we're—we're even there. I think we might make like a quarter on every purchase if that. But anyway, and we're donating that money to our own fund. Yeah, to our somewhere lunch.

I don't think that's it. Or this shirt.

Yeah, exactly. You get a free bowl of soup with that sugar. I did. It was at the soup kitchen. Yeah, so shout out to Dirty Mike and the boys. All right, shout out to everybody showing up at Liberty. Thank you. Thanks. Yeah, thanks everyone for tuning in and listening. Again, reach out to us if you have questions. Please like it, share the episode, do all that good stuff. It really helps if you can take a second, leave a little review at the bottom, or hit the stars—five stars if you think we're awesome. If you thought we sucked, at least just tell us why so I can read your horrible complaint on the next podcast. I'd rather have the five stars, actually. So thanks everyone for tuning in, and don't forget that training changes behavior.