L.O.G. 156 Challenging Your Assumptions

Good morning, Greg.

Good morning, Brian. I'm still alive.

Well, that's good to know. We're still alive. Babysitting, folks.

Yeah, I'm scared to death of this dog.

Yeah, the dog is lurking around the house now. I don't know where. The dog looks adorable and looks like a sweetheart, but for anyone who didn't know, Greg is deathly afraid of dogs, so I'm sure you're having a great time with that.

So speaking of, every time I hear something else.

Yeah. Yeah. So today we're going to talk about, kind of, the way I look at it, we're going to talk about kind of behavior in general. But one of the things we were discussing is that, and one of the ways I describe it, is that everything you ever needed to learn in life you learned on the playground. Meaning every tool you need, every situation that you're going to be in, can be traced back to some experience you had on the playground.

It doesn't matter if it was a literal playground. I just mean kind of the playground of life, interacting with people as a kid. And no matter what your experience was on that playground, maybe you were the king of the playground, maybe you got picked on, maybe you just had your normal friends you played and did your thing. But you knew on that playground who belonged and who didn't. You knew what, you found out what it meant when someone was mean and hurt someone. You had that reaction and saw that experience. You knew what a bully was. You saw someone maybe help someone out who got hurt and fell down and skinned their knee. You saw another kid come over and lift them back up. You established hierarchies and social circles. Literally everything from a physiological, psychological, sociological, and I guess anthropological standpoint, you experienced right there.

The reason why I bring that up is you weren't an expert in anything at that age. So think back to when you were playing on a playground with kids. You weren't an expert at anything other than the playground. You were a subject matter expert on the playground of who's who in the zoo, of what goes on there and who does what.

So the reason why I bring that up is because if my little insurgent, my daughter, came to me and said, "Hey, I'm scared to go to school. Me and my friends are terrified and don't want to go to school today. No one's going because we think something's going to happen." If that situation ever occurred, I'll tell you exactly what I would do: One, she's not going to school, and I'm immediately calling the school or 9-1-1 as I'm driving there, trying to find out what's going on and telling all the other parents to get their kids and go home.

The reason why I brought that up is because that's exactly what happened with the most recent school shooting. Someone said that. Someone said that to their parents. And this stuff is never going to stop because we never address the issues as they are, and we don't focus on the things that matter. That kid is a subject matter expert at high school. If you got a kid in high school, they're an expert at high school because they live it every day. You haven't been there in decades. So yeah, I'm not going to ask the insurgent when she should go to bed and what she should eat and what she should wear, because she's a child and doesn't understand that stuff, and I have to teach her that. But you know what she's an expert at? She's an expert at her school, that classroom, everything that goes on there.

I think we can talk about this in a number of different ways, but everything you learn in life, you learn at that age on the playground interacting with other people. So whether you want to figure out what's going on in the boardroom, you have to think back to the playground. Do you want to think about what's going on on that battlefield? Well, you can think about what you learned on that playground. And I mean that in a metaphorical sense, but also a very literal sense, because it's coming up and it doesn't stop happening. So that's kind of where I wanted to start with the discussion, Greg, if that makes any sense whatsoever. But this most recent shooting in Michigan is, I mean, once again, how many pre-event indicators were there that someone chose not to pay attention to, not to attribute value to, because they were too busy?

Well, you're not actually forgetting, but they're going to say, "Well, let's go into that. Let's go into that in stages so we don't just get the file and the violin." Yeah, and the anger. The bad cop, worst cop, right? So let's do this. Okay, first of all, I want you to imagine taking your children, or your friend's children, or your nieces and nephews from the playground that they grew up on, that playground at their school that they're very familiar with, and take them to another playground. Watch how the kids react. They're excited by the playground because they understand that the playground almost always represents fun. Sure, there's a couple of skinned knees, and yeah, it's snot-lockered by that bully, and having Uncle Paul try to pick you up when it wasn't your kid. Okay, those things happen. You have to know that those things happen, but the kid's still in their mind as a kid, and they're looking at that and going, "There's some fun there. I could go there and play, and play, and play."

Now, if there's other kids on the playground, your kids will come together, and they'll look around, and they'll sniff each other, and they'll do things. And what they're doing in their brains, because this is an assimilation process all humans do, no matter what culture, no matter where you are, no matter what color you are, they'll go, "Yeah, this girl's kind of like Sally back at my place." You know what I'm saying? "Okay, so I can probably be her friend. And those guys over there, they seem like the rough boys, so I'm going to stay on the swing set for a while and see what happens with them."

Now I'm going to look around, "Okay, my parents are here, but they're not paying attention, but there's a couple of other parents. So if I have trouble, and look at that damn dog that's chasing the Frisbee! That dog is scaring me!" All of those things are going in while you're processing the environment. And Brian, we glom onto the differences instead of embracing the similarities. Kids don't. Kids look for the similarities. Do you understand? They're looking and going, "Oh my gosh, this is exactly..." Now you're going to have the shy kid, but the shy kid sooner or later is going to go over and sit on the bouncing turtle and then start getting into it.

So you have to think that way when you are in the boardroom, and you go, "Okay, I feel like I'm being manipulated. What would I have done if I was on the playground? Would I have gone and told Mom?" If I would have gone and told Mom on the playground, do you get what I'm trying to say? Then the behavior is probably something you should be telling HR. It's that simple a balance.

But this is what happens, Brian, I want to throw this at you and now get angry. So let's say that there was a small town where a person recently was shot and killed after they were awoken in a stolen car parked in a condominium parking lot, you know, pulled away. Let's say that was a case that was recently covered, and let's say because it's a small town and the paper only comes out once a week, that the news each week now is starkly different because new things have been done and it's not immediate. You're not getting a slow daily drip of new stuff.

Yeah.

So, the chunk that was in the paper this Thursday is that, "Hey, I want you to know this about the guy. You know, he had a warrant out for this, and it was attempted murder, and it was these other things." Not to disparage or say anything about either party—the police are being investigated and so is the guy—I don't want to get into that. But what I'm saying is it's always suspect when you read something like attempted murder in the newspaper, and then you go to the police report and what it was is a domestic violence incident that had an unlawful restraint and a choking and a threatening of a weapon and stuff that occurred in August. So the first question I would ask is, "If it occurred in August and it's now November when the incident happened, what happened? Did you not go look for the person?" And my question, Brian, is, "If it wasn't that important then to go out and hunt this guy and find out, why was it so important to shoot him when he just woke up?"

So you're saying, "What the hell does it say?"

I'm talking about our listeners. Yeah, they're saying, "Hey, what the hell does that have to do with the other thing I saw in the last week?" Two things happened. I saw a sheriff, and I'm not poking anybody in the eye; this is a horrific incident. I don't want it to happen anywhere. But a sheriff talking about how few rounds were fired, how quickly the cops got there. How that's after bang. I don't want to hear after bang. And at bang, I'll tell you what's meritorious: reading the article that the kids were already barricading and knew what to do and all that. That's wonderful. That's a function of training. Training changed the behavior. But Brian, peel it back to what happened before.

So now, in that same time that I'm reading about the sheriff talk about the accolades of the event, I get a very close friend that sends me a recent school memo that came out within 24 hours of the incident that you're talking about, and it said, "You have nothing to worry about because, Brian, we hired a company and they wrote our policies on school shootings, and they told us what to do, and we have a meeting every quarter with the Chief of Police that does it." Brian, we're right back to what we were talking about on another podcast about holding something up and saying, "Here's what it feels good. You got to see it on the box. If I get the warning or the guarantee on the box, you don't feel better." All emptiness, Brian. The fact of the matter was pre-event indication, pre-event indication, pre-event indication. People go insane. "We think your son's in trouble." The school's saying, "We think your son's in trouble." The parents—and now going to be charged by the prosecutor—talk about closing the date after the goat gets out or whatever. Yeah, you see where I'm feeling? I'm feeling that when all of the information is out there, why don't we act on the actionable information first and then worry about the skinned knees afterwards?

So that's the ultimate question that we have to go train people on, and once you understand it, there's that epiphany going, "Oh, fuck, I see what you're saying! Like, we should do this now." But there really isn't any urgency for a number of reasons. So you just said, "Why don't we act on the information that we have available now before that event occurs?" Well, they're going to come back and say, "Well, we didn't know for sure. We never thought it would." Okay, so if, in this specific context of school shootings, if you never thought that it could happen at your school, then you don't deserve to be working at a school because this has happened every goddamn month for as long as I've been remembering. Okay? So it is a possibility, and it's not very likely, but it's a fucking possibility.

So that argument, that goes out the window. If you haven't thought about this, when that report comes across your desk, or you're a teacher, or you're a parent, or you're a student, or you're someone involved, and you see this behavior, someone do something, there's, "Oh, we have this concerning behavior," and you don't immediately think, "Hey, is this the next school shooter?" If that thought doesn't cross your mind, well, I'm sorry, then maybe you should exclude yourself from the situation, and you don't deserve the responsibility. So there's that, that's out the window. I will not accept—

Totally agree. More. Right.

So now to say, "Hey, we have these things occur, how do we know?" Okay, I understand that gets a little bit more complicated. I'm not going to oversimplify that, because that can't. But at the same time, when you have all of these things, I don't—and it comes into, "Well, Greg, we had the experts came in and they showed us this and they gave us this matrix, and you know what? He hasn't hit quadrant three on this matrix." And, "You know what? The sum, this algorithm they gave us, you know, it's actually still low on the number. The number's at like a point, whatever, not a point eight seven." Like, that's fucking junk. That fucking doesn't work.

It's all wrong science.

Oh, 100%. And maybe we should just do a podcast specifically on some of the people that write this shit. And because it's fucking horrible and it's not working, and it doesn't work because it's all theory. It's great in a textbook, or it's great in a book, or to give a talk about it, but that shit hasn't ever picked out a school shooter before. They haven't. Not one of them. Not one of these fucks that have written these books, or are out there training, have ever actually done it. So stop listening to them.

The other part of this is when you do that, like this is why I brought up at the beginning, you're an expert at what you do. A high school kid is a fucking expert at high school. So when the kid says, "I'm scared to go to school today," and it's not just me, it's a whole group of people because this is what our concern is. I don't know, there is no bigger, greater red flag or warning sign than something like that. The kids know. All the kids know. Even during this situation, the videos are coming out of those kids going, "They're going, hey, that doesn't sound like a cop. I'm not letting them in that room." Because they fucking know. They know. Listen to them in that context. Listen. Don't listen to them when they say, "I want to stay out until two in the morning." No, they don't. That's not their area of expertise. It is inside that school, and that's where you've got to be the parent. That's when you have to step in, and you have to be the SME (Subject Matter Expert).

It's a fluctuating scale. Look, I'm going to hold this up. And I want you to see this as the baseline, folks, and I don't know where I'm pointing. This is the baseline for normalcy. Okay? A straight line is one big spike up on the line. Yeah, that spike in the center is huge. And I want you to think of it, if you can't see us, I want you to think of it having a flat piece of paper, and then the center of it, there's the Empire State Building. That's what a school shooting is. Okay? School shooting is just the—it's going to change everything. It changes the students and the teachers. And Columbine is still as palpable in Colorado as if it had occurred yesterday.

Brian, why is that important? Because when we go and we talk to the check writers, we talk to the supervisors and we say, "Listen, we're not going to give you an algorithm to pick out Tommy. We're going to show you how to pick out incongruent behavior that is going to signal an atmospheric shift, that is going to signal danger is nigh," which means that you can button up before the danger, right? You don't wait until the kid's shooting; you can button up before it occurs. In all, stop, timeout. But because it's so rare, and it's still rare, that's why we're talking about it, man. You know what I mean? And people say, "Yeah, it happens all the time." Yeah, it does happen all the time, but think about how many schools and all the different things.

Listen, here is a situation that's going to fundamentally change how you do business for the rest of your life, and it's almost never going to come to your town. But if you don't prepare for it, it's going to be the single most significant event that's ever happened in that town. But that doesn't sell us when we go to people. They look and, Brian, we even had, I don't want to say the state of Texas or the school that we talked to, that said, "You know what? I'll take my chances." That's the school administrator saying, "You know, we understand our kids, we understand what's going on. I'll take our chances." Do you think, no offense to the town, but this is a small town in Michigan. Do you think they once ever sat around and thought, "This is going to happen here," even with the training, even with the manuals they put together? You know who did think it was going to happen? Those kids. Those kids thought it was going to happen.

And if we go back to Columbine, we have the same mentality where kids didn't show up today. Do you know what I'm trying to say? When we go back to Portland, the kid that got the gun, shot his parents, stayed home playing video games next day. Yeah, we have so much stuff that we're doing, folks. Look it up; you'll see what I'm talking about. But on that one, the same thing, kids didn't go to school because they said, "Hey, he said he's coming in. He's got a countdown. He's got a list of people." And those are just three that I'm throwing out there, Brian. We've gone to tabletop exercises where we've done 30 or 40. And it doesn't just look—this is no different than workplace violence. This is no different than one of your workers, your co-workers, constantly saying, "I swear to Christ, if one more time that dog barks in the goddamn whatever, I'm going to do it." And what do we do, Brian? We go, "Billy said that 95 times." Okay. And on 96, he came back with a gun.

We're not talking statistics and analysis. Langford, I think it is, Peter J. Maybe I got that name right or wrong. He writes great stuff. I love reading his stuff. But what I like reading about it is he's talking about you've got to do things predictably and you've got to do them before they happen. All the other stuff about the numbers and this and that and the other, that could fit anybody. But the idea is, and it might be Langman, but I think it's Langford. Yeah, but the idea is that at least he's saying, "Go do something." But now what do we see all over LinkedIn and everything else? "We told you! We told her!" We're not saying "we told you." We're not saying, "we told you so." We're not playing armchair quarterback. We don't know your school. But what we're saying is the kid is the expert on the playground. The kid knows why not to go down the slide on a hot day because they learned it the hard way. So why don't you go to that expertise? And when that kid comes to you and says, "Something's wrong," we need to talk about this.

Listen, we're closing schools for anything nowadays, and COVID is the biggest thing. COVID is vivid, and it's right in our face, so COVID we think about all the time. But a school shooting, Brian, it's been 18, 19 months since we had a big formal incident like this. You know, I think it's ridiculous. I think the school, I think the safety, like for example, what level of training does your school resource officer or your safety officer have? If they don't have specialized training in this type of field, or if they don't have an open line of communication with the students and the parents, well, it's going to fail. We've—

Yeah, and this isn't something because you know that people are, "Okay, we want police at the school." And other people go, "Well, no, we don't want them there because that's scary for the kids." And you're like, "Well, this is not their responsibility." Nowhere in any police department's rules and roles and responsibilities for their community does it say to prevent school shootings. It's not their damn job. That's not what they do. It's your responsibility. It's your kid, it's your school, it's your—I mean, that's it. Like, I don't—this is—but we don't want to accept that. And what we want to then do now with this kid who shot—who, again, another school shooter. It's, you know, I think they have terrorism charges on this one. It's like, "Yeah, okay, sure. I mean, maybe that fits the legal definition of terrorism." It's a broken human being. This is a broken human being as a teenager. We could have changed the trajectory of his life. He did this. This didn't have to happen. We could have intervened sooner. And then he could be gone, "Oh wow, I need some help." And he could have gotten some help, or, but you know what I'm saying, or he would have grown out of the phase in a couple years where he was going to go shoot up a school.

Yeah, I mean, this is—every single one of these are so preventable. And you talk about the, because you even brought up Columbine, which is there's video interviews of students in that school before that event where the interviewer said, "What causes school violence? What causes bullying?" Where they literally turn and point to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in the background and literally point to them and say, "Them." Okay? I mean, this is not—this is not rocket science. It really is not. And everyone wants to conflate the issue and make it about something that really does not matter, or is—you can't affect, or is not going to change the situation. You know, this is a deeper issue of broken human beings that we need to either do something about and fix, or get them out of there. I mean, there's no—

That's a good point that hasn't been discussed. Listen, that broken human is going to explode at some part of their trajectory of life. They're in a microcosm, a school. Do you get what I'm trying to say? Where they have a degree of control and outreach, because as a kid, you have a lot more freedom than you do as an adult. Because if you were playing that kind of stuff and saying that kind of stuff as an adult, your ass would be in jail, Brian. You'd have a tether on and people would be monitoring your behavior. So my thing is they say, "Ah, kids will be kids, Your Honor." No. This is a situation where there's certain behaviors that are unacceptable, and these have to be put into law.

You said, you know, I would argue as a former Chief of Police that it's incumbent upon police officers to provide for the safety of students and, of course, to prevent those. Right. But it's not—there's no definitive, there's no, "This is how you do that." This is one of those. But now there is another one in every of those cities that had a school shooter. That's what I'm trying to say, Brian. I'm trying to say that the idea is it's very simple to understand, but what we want to do is we want to say it's guns, it's access to guns. Okay, I got it. Okay. But let's acquiesce that that doesn't go back to that. It doesn't change the fact of what was going on with this individual. If a human is broken and stress fractures are showing, we as a society have to say, "We need to intervene," because if we don't intervene, there's going to be catastrophic consequences. Are all the consequences going to be catastrophic? No. Maybe the person will fail to thrive. Maybe it's going to be a suicide, which is catastrophic, but I mean, at least it's not taking a bunch of your schoolmates. It may be fail to thrive where the person never gets back into society, Brian, and they have to be institutionalized or they have to do that. That's the case.

What do we want to do? Do we want to pay it like an insurance? That's what we're talking about. Yeah, just pay a premium like an insurance along the long haul, or do we want to keep having these spikes that are, you know, events that are life-changing? It's, where if the cost is there. So how—what is the cost going to be? Is it a cost of getting more resources and getting the help to these people that they need, and getting more involvement at a younger age? I mean, we preach left of bang all the time, right?

Well, let's look at someone's entire life. The sooner you interact, the more you invest at a younger age, earlier, earlier, earlier is better, right? Any healthcare, or excuse me, any childcare expert will tell you, "Dude, the younger you can intervene in someone's life, the better. The more support you can give them at any age." Once you get past the adult level, well, you're kind of, you're set on that. You might be set on that trajectory. People can still change, but it's harder and harder. So what I'm getting at is if this is a cost issue, you're going to pay. So how do we want to pay one way or the other? Do you want to pay in blood, and you want to pay in lives, and you want to pay in what this does to a community for the rest, for the next—that entire generation, those kids are now affected for that the entire school, that entire county, the entire—everyone who knew anything about that is now affected for the rest of their life. So that's what they're going to be imagining. So some economists could literally put a dollar amount on that.

They probably could.

I don't know what that is. Billions.

Billions. Right.

But what does it cost to prevent something like that at one school level? Not a whole lot. It's not expensive. And this is our issue all the time. And I would—there's, I hate that there's still more and more examples, but I don't know what else to do in terms of getting that message or explaining that message of, "Stop blaming these things. Why, why, you know, stop talking about the response to it. Stop talking about the tool that the kid used, and start going, 'Hey, this is another example of how we're letting down children in our society. We failed them. We failed them miserably because we didn't intervene at the earlier age. We didn't get this kid the help that he needed. And look what happened. Look what happened, kids died.'"

Okay, so I think that we—people want to overthink the issue. Some people want to use these issues to push their political agendas, to which I say, "Go fuck yourself." But I don't think we're having the discussion that needs to happen, Greg. And we don't want to accept responsibility. Now, I know in this sense, they're looking at putting charges on the parents, which is meaning we're saying that they're in some way responsible. But I mean, everyone, we—this is, we share this responsibility as a whole, as a community. You know what, what could—and I don't—this is, it's not as complicated and difficult as people think it is to prevent these things. It's really not. You have to get—if we take a look, if we take a look at the playground analogy, and if we say these behaviors don't stand on the playground, and as a parent or a teacher we would intervene, then we have to follow that logic into grade school, and into junior high school, and into high school, and into college and university, and business world. This specific band of behaviors of terrorism and bullying. And for example, I say bullying, he's a bully. He's a bully. He went into a bathroom, got a nine millimeter loaded, came out and just calmly started shooting kids. That's a bully.

What do we try to do? We try to turn it, "Oh, what was he facing? What were the stresses that he was facing?" Yeah, well, it's a little late to talk about that. Those are the things that you should have asked before. You've got to stop asking what was going on in his head, because it wasn't the stuff that you and I think about all day. Right? It isn't the kind of conversation when we have a situation like this, Brian. Clearly, it was a temporary lapse with reality, and he was off on his own agenda. Okay, that couldn't have been the first time that that happened. I guarantee it happened ten years before, when they were at Cedar Point, and he flipped out because he got the wrong snow cone. I'll agree that that probably happened at the one time that they were at the birthday party, and he did the whatever and everything. You see what I'm saying? And people go, "Yeah, well, he was a kid." He was a kid. And I'll tell you what, if you look at all that modeling behavior, you'll see that that is going to continue throughout their life.

And we do those things like, Brian, when I knew that I had to get into husky jeans, I knew I was getting a little bigger than the other kids. You get what I'm trying to say? This didn't all happen by accident. Yeah, there were pre-event indications that I needed flex pants. Right? So just like in your own life, when you take a look at that, or you take a look at the person that's compensating because they're going to grow the ponytail or get the samurai topknot. Okay, those are cries for help. That person is screaming to you that they're trying to normalize something that's going—now most of the time it's the 45-year-old person getting the earring ponytail. They're saying, "Hey, I'm losing my hair. I'm changing. My life is changing. How do I, how do I control it again?" That's not going to be the dangerous one. The dangerous one is going to be the one where the paper stacked up on the porch. You get what I'm trying to say? And they come out, and they're sitting on their porch in their underwear, and they're going, "I swear to God if that car speeds down the road one more time!" Okay, those those slow-burning adults were that kid in high school. You just didn't choose to walk in and just shoot on that day.

Yeah, they did something. The intervention happened. Well, and or they made it out of that. They made it past 18. They made it out of high school. So that's the thing is once you make it past that, you know, as you develop emotionally and mentally, I mean, physiologically, especially men, your brain's not even fully developed till your mid-20s or mid-late 20s, your prefrontal cortex. So the whole point is with these, you know, you got a chance. The longer you go without doing something like that, the less likely you're going to. So especially with these cases.

But you know, people always ask, "Well, you know, when do I call 9-1-1? When and why do I report things? What is it? How am I supposed to know?" And, you know, because everyone wants the list, and that came out with that, now you've got these are the concerning behaviors. Well, without any context, those are fucking useless. It means nothing. I can't give you a 10-point list or put it into a matrix. And then so everyone goes, "Well, then what am I supposed to do? That's too complicated." It's like, no, it's really not. It's a deviation from a baseline. You compare it to a known. You see something you don't understand, compare it to something you do understand. What is normal in the clinical sense of how a kid should act and develop? What should other kids think of my kid, of my son, my daughter? Right. Well, yeah, you're going to have normal. There's going to be bullies and little cliques and, "I don't like that kid." But if you take an individual student away from his friends and go, "What is it about that person?" they're either going to go, "Hey, look, man, that dude scares the crap out of me and this is why," or they're going to go, "Well, I don't know, like I don't know, it's not really that." Okay, so you guys just don't like them. Okay, that's different than being scared of someone. And I think when you compare those, you know, compare an unknown to a known, you'll know it. You'll see it and go, "Okay, this is one where we do need to intervene." That is, this group of kids just doesn't like that guy, and there's some animosity there, or whatever happened. All right.

I think we're overthinking this, and we need to look at this. Someone who shoots up a school. Okay, the day before this happened, everyone would go, "This is a kid. This is a kid. This is part of our community, whether my kid hangs out—"

Exactly. Right. It was a week before and a month before. I would challenge you, Brian, that not just 24 hours before, but a week before, a month before, and six months before, this would be the kid that that school would vote for. Would you agree? Vote for as being the school shooter.

You're—Oh, yeah, yeah. If you asked the kids in the hallway the day before, they would definitely say this because he was ramping up. Oh, absolutely.

Telling you that if you push that timeline back, everybody knew. There's not a kid that didn't know that this is likely the kid. Yeah. And so why did something—why didn't they do something? And maybe they did. In this instance, there were two or three examples that everybody did something, even that day, you know? But—

Well, the other thing, the other perspective to take is everyone now is like, "Okay, he's a mass murderer, terrorist, horrible human being." It's like, one day before that, you would have said, "Oh, that's the so-and-so kid. He's part of our community. Oh, that kid, like, he's a child." He's a child. So how do you—how do you make that switch to all of a sudden, "No, they're a demon. They're a monster." No, this is a broken human being. Yes, he is responsible for his actions. I'm not saying that. I'm saying you—that doesn't—that switch doesn't happen overnight. This isn't a monster. This is the kid that lives down the street from you, that doesn't know how to fit in, that has different issues at home, that whatever is going on in their life, and they need more help. They need more help than anyone else, because if not, if they don't get the help, they don't know they're going to reach out for help. It's you reap the whirlwind when you, when you walk past that. You—this is what happens. And, you know, it's sometimes hard for me and for us, but because this is what we do for a living, we understand it so well. So it's extremely frustrating to talk about any of this stuff, because it's so glaringly obvious to occur, and it continues with—

And not only is it glaringly obvious, at all these points, and then people are caught up in the moment. And you're going, "Why are you caught up in the moment?" Either the kid's going to be fine or this is leading to a school shooting. That's it. Those are your two options in every one of these situations. And every one of these pre-event indicators that pop up, it's going, "Is this behavior escalating? What else do people think about this kid? Or is it a kid who's, you know, 15 years old and talked back to a teacher and said something stupid?" I mean, that's—it's not hard to delineate between the two. Don't overcomplicate these things.

I would throw in two ways to do that, Brian. One, I would say use something that's familiar to people so they can glom onto it. So one thing that's familiar to folks is the Billboard charts, like for music, right? Yeah. And I don't—I don't trust jazz, so I don't use music. Yeah, I would not know any of the jazz artists. So when I'm looking at a situation, I think of it as being on the Jazz Billboard Top 100. I'm looking and none of this information is making sense. I would tell you as a parent or a teacher, turn it slightly and look at a different perspective. Go to the pop charts, go to easy listening, go to one of those other charts and say, "Oh, wait a minute, it's coming into focus now." Everything that's a pre-event indication. You don't have to be a subject matter expert in everything. If you can feel the atmospheric shift, if you can feel it ramping up, if you're on the playground and you go, "Hey, it looks like it's going to rain or snow or something." Brian, I'm telling you that's still strong enough for somebody to create a pre-event indication and act on it. You know, and the other thing is, I'm sick and tired of people trying to come up with a laminated list of the behaviors. It just turns out any incongruent behavior means there's a metamorphosis going on. And if that metamorphosis is going to signal an inspirational change for the better, or is it going to be a catastrophic multiple homicide over three states? It's yours to decide. But it's the same. The pre-event indications are exactly the same. Do you get what I'm trying to say?

Like, if I would ask you at home right now to say, put yourself in the shoes of a bride. I don't care what relationship you're in, I welcome everything. But let's say that you're in the old traditional man and female role, and you take a look at what do brides do sometimes in preparation for a wedding? You could categorize that behavior. They're going to go shopping, they're going to be online more looking at wedding sites, they're maybe going to make more trips to the church than they normally did, maybe they're going to lose weight or start a program or whatever. Okay, so I'm just categorizing that. I trust me, I don't mean anything by that. I'm just saying that those are certain tactics, techniques, and procedures. It'll become obvious. Okay, so protract that over to now a car. If you're driving your car and the engine warning light comes on, you can drive the fuck out of that car and sooner or later it's going to seize up and you're going to have to get it towed and it's going to be a wreck. Or you can say, "I'm going to pay attention and I'm going to routinely check my fuel gauge to make sure I have enough fuel for the upcoming weekend. I'm going to routinely check my tires because I get more efficient fuel when they're at the right." That's your kid, that's your spouse, that's your co-worker. If you look at the co-worker and they're running around with the engine warning light on, sooner or later you're going to have a catastrophic incident. That's plain and simple.

Yeah. So it's warning you ahead of time. That's what a pre-event indication is. And so regular maintenance, and that's what Brian is talking about, folks. What Brian is saying is if we invest in our youth, they're not going to turn into this, or we have a much better chance of identifying before they do and pulling them off the trigger. So invest now, invest a little over time, or invest a ton when you get to that spike at the center of the yellow pad.

I'm totally with you on that, brother. I really—

Yeah. And, you know, and it goes just back to that, that playground analogy, and which is why we brought it up. You know, if a kid can tell you, I go all the time, we have a little playground, literal playground, right by our place here. It's awesome. It's perfect. The little one gets to go out there and literally on a Saturday for hours, we'll just be outside playing with all the neighborhood kids. And we know when there's a new person, and you can go out there and go, "All right, who's that new kid? Who's this person?" And she'll come in and go, "Oh, that's so-and-so. They just moved in with their family down over here. They're from here." And you know, they're all out there playing together, all different ages, from four, up to like 10 or 11, 12. I mean, they're all in their little groups and running around. The girls are doing this and they'll all play together and the boys go over here. But you can go ask them any single time, we know more about a family two doors down that I've never met before, because I've met their son. And yeah, the little insurgent, she tells me about what's going on. "Well, he's always out here. I know how much their parents work. I know how often he's alone," because of when I've seen him and just asking the insurgent about what his activity is. "Hey, what's going on? Hey, does he ever do this? Does he react this way or get upset?" "No, he's the nicest kid ever. He's so sweet and he's always helpful in this." "Okay, good." I'm just trying to get a feel for what's going on inside that house led me to a reasonable conclusion that, you know what, his parents work a lot, man. They're gone a lot because they're working their ass off, but he's got clean clothes, his teeth are clean, right? He's happy. So that's it. That's the reason why I don't ever see them. It's because they're working to pay the bills, and it's expensive to live over here, and they've got three different jobs. Okay, so it's not that there's something going on at his home that I've got to worry about. It's just that they're gone a lot more than most of us. So it's just those little things, but I've never met those people before. I've only talked to this kid and getting involved and being out there and just asking, "Hey, what's going on? Hey, what'd you guys talk about today? Hey, what was this conversation? What was the feeling? What was the mood? Hey, I noticed something." I mean, all those little things is, she's an expert in that area.

And I'd say the corollary, Brian, I would say the corollary is true, and we have to be careful, because if we're going to conduct a grab sample experiment of a neighbor, think about a teacher having a parent-teacher night. Everybody's going to be on their best behavior. The teacher's going to dress differently, they're going to speak differently than they do on a normal day-to-day basis. So are the parents when they come in. That's not the right environment to draw a baseline from. When you see the person out on the street, "Fuck you, cops!" and they're fighting and everything, then you see them at their arraignment, "Well, your honor, with drinks, and I'm sorry, I didn't know." It's not the same person. You're not dealing with the same person when you see somebody that's in a fit of rage, and then afterwards when they've had the time and distance to calm down, and now you're doing the interview, it's quite different.

So what you have to do is you have to amass knowledge quickly, but you have to amass it from certain other things. Is the child routinely absent, or are they late, or are they disheveled, or what are these things? And you're saying, "Oh wow, we don't want to make a mark on a kid as a child." Listen, if you don't want to do A, then you're going to live with B and C. That's just the way that it happens. So whether that's lice and the lice come into the school because we didn't inspect and hold people accountable for their hygiene, Brian, then a nine millimeter is going to come into school. You understand what I'm trying to say? It's the same type of event.

And parents now consider themselves busier than they've ever been, ever, any parent ever, back to the pioneer days. Yeah, that's part of the problem, Brian, because perception is reality. And if they think they're too busy, guess what? Your kid will train themselves to walk down that hallway and shoot with other kids if you're not willing to tell them that that's the wrong thing to do. I mean, somebody's got to be there. Somebody's got to be there to give the opposing point of view, Brian. Do you see what I'm trying to say? I mean, you and I know some really, really, really together parents. Yeah, and I'm blessed by them. Yeah, we also know some, you know, "Throw a grenade in the pool, see how it goes" thing, you know? So my thing to you is, don't expect fantastic outcomes when you're phoning it in or giving subpar performance from your police, from your school, from your parents, and from yourself. We don't want to put ourselves in that list and say, "We could have done something." It's too damaging to my ego.

No, and that's always—that's with any of these cases, it's always, you know, that this kid was a monster and it was, you know, it's like, "Okay, man, like, come on!" Like, it or the, "It's because he had a gun," or, "It's because of this." It's like, "Yeah, just point, point fingers, man. Just keep, keep pointing fingers everywhere else. Don't, don't accept any responsibility."

He was confused. He had needs. He was broken. Nobody fixed them. And you're driving that car with the red light on. Sooner or later, it's going to crash. That's the fact. And so the sooner we identify and get help to those in our populace that would do harm to other people like that, the better off we'll be as a nation.

It's another—it's another example of, you know, what I always talk about is, you know, I say human behavior, it can be a lot more complicated than people realize. And sometimes it's a hell of a lot more simple than you're willing to accept. And, you know what, every one of these cases is one of those. It's, this is simple. This is not a difficult—okay, it's a complicated problem, but it's not hard to solve. It really isn't. Are you going to, are you going to prevent every single thing? No, of course not. Are you going to prevent overwhelming majority of them? Yes, you can. You 100% can. And that's, that's the frustration coming out of me is because especially with the little one, it's like, "Jesus, like, this is—"

I just want to throw this at you. I feel it, Brian. I feel it palpably. I can feel the heat coming through the goddamn computer. And you're going to live with that. Thankfully, my kids are out of school. I don't have to live with that fear every single day. But I'll tell you this, shout out to the kids that followed the procedures and the phone calls. Shout out to the school for having them. Shout out to law enforcement and first responders that showed up on the scene. Shout out to all of the fantastic parents and intervention and everybody that tried to help. But let's wind that back. And not, but, but and, and let's wind that back and say, "Listen, let's, let's do a hot wash. Let's take a look at what worked and let's, let's share that with everybody. But let's also go back and say, 'This is where we stepped on our dicks, and this is the stuff we can fix.'" You get what I'm trying to say? And the biggest one of that is pre-event indications always mean something else is coming. And you have a great deal of control on how fast and hard that, that hits you when it does come.

Yeah, no, those are all good points. And I know, you know, I'm in my after-action style is all, "Let's, here's everything we did wrong. Everything's wrong. We all did this wrong." I failed to point out sometimes the good things.

We're all going to die.

Well, I get to those at the end. But only—it is, it's just again, like we always say, "Hey, yeah, we've gotten a lot better at reacting." You know, maybe, maybe five or ten years ago, more kids would have died in that attack, but I just think that's an unacceptable standard. And that's why, and that is a completely unacceptable standard. You know, it is, is where do we want to focus this stuff on? You know, are we going to put some bulletproof glass in there? We put metal detectors in there. We're going to, okay, well, or are we going to tear down the entire school? Yeah, because we say now it's been tainted, we've got to build somewhere else. That's all in the wrong direction. None of that, none of that works. What you have to do is you have to be aggressively proactive to the point that everybody knows that you care.

And I'll take you back to just a few months ago, just a month ago, two months ago, jeez, time flies. Halloween in Detroit. Halloween when I was growing up in Detroit. All the parents stood under the streetlights at every intersection, and all the kids were going house to house. Yeah, and the parents were having a beer or a wine or whatever they had, and they were sitting there with a flashlight in their back pocket, waving for cars to slow down. Brian, community. Look it up. Look up the word. You get what I'm trying to say? It's been around for a little while.

Society.

Yeah, it's one of them concepts. It's very old. It's sweet. It's one of those things that I think worked out well for the human race so far. Good idea, stick around.

Yeah, exactly. So I don't know, like, I kind of got a little—

He got a little off track, and I'm just trying to get yelled at. I want to go to that playground now. So I don't want to end it, Brian. What you're telling me is get some binoculars and get a camera and go and park by a playground and watch kids, is that what you're trying to tell me?

Even if you don't have them, even if they're not—yeah, it doesn't matter. Go to a different—don't go to the one near your house, because then you might have to make it. So no. And it's that, that involvement. I mean, this is, this is getting those kids and doing that, you know, "Is this the one? Is this the kid? And if so, what, what, what can I prove that, can I prove that this behavior is escalating?" That's it.

You read what I read. So let's all show up at school to talk about this, or let's all show up at school for the funeral to talk about this. The timeline's in your hands. You figure out which you want to be part of.

You know, it reminds me of when we got tapped, you know, even in the midst of all the kind of combat-related stuff we were doing downrange and with folks who are about to deploy, and it's about finding bad guys and seeing the ambush and targeting people on this. And then we, we went and did the—the Army asked us to do that—the kind of pilot courses for the suicide prevention stuff. And we didn't make it two hours. We didn't make it to—we made it to the first break, about an hour and 15 minutes, and we had people coming up going, "Hey, you're talking about so-and-so," or, "Hey, you're talking about me," or, "Hey, so-and-so." In 90 minutes you get people to go, "Fuck, these are the people we need to help and get intervened on." I don't know, and people are going, "It's not that hard."

It's not because we're the smartest people on the face of the earth, Brian, and we have this power. No, no, and it's not about us. Not about it. This isn't about us. We found a process that works. If you don't choose our process, choose somebody else's process. But stop investing in a whole bunch of reading material about statistics and analysis, because they're not going to pick out Tommy. Tommy's not already gone internal, or Sally. You get what I'm trying to say? What you're going to have to do, you're going to have to localize, and you're going to have to look down and in, and it's going to take time and it's going to burn calories, and you're going to spend the money. And it's going to be, you know, vastly different when you have to spend it all at once like on this incident.

And localize is the right word, because what do we, what do we want? We want, "Okay, we want a federal grant money tied to this professor's way of doing things and categorizing it. And then we need the, well, we need—well, Greg, we need the data for that. So we need a local, state, and federal database. And then we need the, the information sharing on that. And, you know what, we need indicators. And then we need to make sure it fits in this matrix, and we need to build all that." Well, there's a, there's a billion dollars right there that someone's going to make. But you just said it, if you can have your infrastructure on a bridge, yeah, we can have a local community get together and do it. They're going to do it, Brian, and they're probably going to be incentivized because—

And they're going to do it better. No one knows that any better than the community.

You know what, back to the playground, exactly. This is that if a piece of playground equipment was killing kids, I guarantee the community would get together and get rid of it.

Yeah, right, exactly. You know what I mean? Remember that, what is that, the Will Ferrell where he's running for office and they've got the Mangler or whatever? Like that piece of equipment, and he's got all those cars. I mean, think about it, Brian, that's a simple thing. We learned from the playground, if something on the playground is going to continue to hurt kids, we're going to do away with it. There's a reason we don't have metal skates anymore. There's a reason I don't have my skate key, and the kids wear helmets now.

Well, yeah, there's a reason. It's, you know, wood chips out there, not concrete.

You know what I'm saying? I grew up with that. I still don't think so. Good.

Exactly. So I think, I think the message is we need to get back to the playground, and that's what it is. I'm ready. I've got my call. If we go back to the playground, you know, and I, I think it'll make things a little bit clearer. It'll simplify the process. It'll localize it certainly much more, and allow for everyone in the community to take part and take responsibility. And, you know what, if you fix one community, well, then you can fix that entire city. And the city, you can fix the, fix the country. And I think that's, that's all it is. So, it's not meant to oversimplify. It's, it's not as complicated as it needs to be. So I guess—

Well, I have a headache. I'm sorry, but yeah, that escalated quickly. You killed the guy. Listen, he had a trident. Where'd you get a grenade from? Shout out, shout out to everybody that was involved in the Ahmaud Arbery case. Yeah, justice prevailed. It did. Special shout out for Ahmaud Arbery's dad, if we can get him on the calls. Anybody knows Ahmaud Arbery's dad, please pass on how much we knew we predicted what was going to happen. We'd love to have him on the show. Clearly a better human being than I am. I would not be able to speak like that if I were in his shoes. I certainly would not have had the emotional maturity to say and act the way he did, I'll tell you that much.

So I mean, I'll throw another thing. We threw it out there and we said about the Wisconsin parade. Thank God the President and everybody has reached in and talked about that. Every President is different. This one, I don't understand their priorities. But my thing is, we said this guy was so self-involved, do you get what I'm trying to say? And what's he say? They grant him an interview, okay, at the jail, which I don't understand this at all because we haven't administered justice in any way, shape, or form. And don't say a thing if you're in jail. Don't say a thing, say it through an attorney. But what's the first thing he says? "Hey, I don't like the way I'm being treated around here." Yeah, he doesn't say a word about anybody that's dead. But all about him, all about him. So yeah, folks, don't, don't read into things. Go out, search for the facts. The facts will reveal themselves, and that's how you make an unbiased decision.

Yeah, well, you know, when you got people thinking that a CEO of a company resigning has something to do with a big federal trial that's going on, that by the way, you—there's a number you can call and type in exactly, listen to the entire trial on your own if you really, really want. It's not, it's easy, perfectly available, because you're shooting from the hip.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, let's connect things that have nothing to do with each other. That seems to be the common theme even with the topic we were just talking about.

But I just—I'm still hearing people say that the parade attack in Wisconsin was a terror attack and this was had something to do with other things that are happening in the nation. Darrell, folks, the more you pass that around or listen to that, that's not real. None of that's real. Get back to the fact, he, he couldn't plan a trip to the gas station, let alone an attack without slapping somebody.

Yeah, exactly. He'd be slapping somebody on that trip.

So that's horrible. We laugh because we don't want to cry anymore. I cry every day because—yeah. So, all right, I think that's a good, that's a good. That dog is right there. Yeah, standing and just staring at me. I don't know what to do, folks. Greg knows humans real well. Dogs don't get—

Yeah, I'm an expert on some kinds of monkeys.

Yeah, that's true. That's another story for a different time over a bourbon.

Yeah. All right. Well, we appreciate everyone tuning in. Don't forget you can please follow us on social media, reach out to us, thehumanbehaviorpodcast@gmail.com. Don't forget we have the Patreon site as well with lots of episode extras. We answer questions and stuff all on that side. So check that out when you get a chance. It's only a couple bucks and helps support the show. So we appreciate everyone for tuning in, and don't forget the training changes behavior.