L.O.G. 168 Chasing Symptoms

Hello everyone, and welcome to a very special episode of The Human Behavior Podcast. As most of you know, my name is Brian Marren, and as always, I will be joined by Greg Williams. If you're new to the show, you can find more information about us in the episode details.

Today, we're going to be talking about mass shooting events, and specifically school shootings, through the lenses of human behavior, pattern recognition, and analysis. We are doing this in order to explain as best we can how and why these events occur in the first place, how and why we react the way that we do, and how and why we think the right training can prevent the next school attack.

Greg and I are experts on human behavior, not on school shootings. Greg and I are experts in pattern recognition, not on partisan politics. Greg and I have a deep, fundamental understanding of how to build and implement training and education programs that are specifically designed to determine a person's likely intent, and we have a long history of creating a very real Left of Bang culture at many organizations.

So for this three-part series, we'll be using a different format than our typical episodes. Think of this as more of a guided discussion rather than a conversation we would have while driving at the airport. Our goal with this discussion is to allow anyone who listens to have a better understanding of these events so they can make a more informed decision about how to solve this problem at a local level.

For the first chapter in the series, we're going to start by addressing how and why school shootings occur. To start off the discussion, Greg, I think it's important to understand two things upfront: Number one, school shootings or these attacks have been around for a very long time, so this is not a new phenomenon at all. Number two, these are the most preventable attacks that Greg and I have ever studied.

So if you want to get the most out of this episode, I would suggest sitting down with a yellow pad and writing down some of the concepts that we discussed so that you can personalize this episode to your specific situation, or reach out to us with specific questions. We would love to answer them.

So on that, Greg, we're going to go ahead and start, and I think it's also important upfront to just address, let's briefly talk about rhetoric.

Yeah. So, rhetoric, most of what we hear or see on social media or on the news is rhetoric. We have the impressively dressed talking heads that are using language designed to have a persuasive effect, but they lack meaningful content. What I mean by that is that they're being insincere, but they're either misinformed, or acting on dated information, or commenting too soon when the information hasn't even come in, Brian. Therefore, the content that you're getting is not necessarily meaningful to the event.

Okay. Well, can that rhetoric be helpful, though, during times like this?

Yeah, so I would say to you, can it be helpful, comma, can it be harmful? You know, in these incidents, it's generally harmful because rhetoric serves no person, sound purpose other than getting us angered, saber-rattling, making us take sides, vilifying somebody that was at the scene. Listen, that's like promoting a movie, you know, a Hollywood film, rather than sitting there saying, "Hey, listen, these events happen. Please stay out of the area. Let's wait till calm has prevailed to tell you the story, but hug your child today and keep an eye on your school." Do you understand what I'm trying to say, Brian? I'm trying to say that they'll engage in this meaningless banter rather than having some substantive discussion.

And I agree with that. I think what happens is, I think it's one of the ways to describe it, it's a term, is, you know, we're going to need for us to "tilt at windmills" in order to feel better about something, right? So maybe I don't fully understand something. I'm upset, I'm angry, which everyone has every single right to be. And then so we need to pick a villain. We need to pick someone to go after. So with this most recent one, maybe that's the police, maybe it's the shooter, maybe it's some politician for some reason. So we all tend to sort of focus or pick on something that we think we can address or we understand, and that has to be the end.

Yeah, that has to be the issue. Spot on. So what happens, Brian, we have to have a way, psychologically, sociologically, physiologically, we have to have a way to channel our fear. Okay, so we got a couple of things that are coming out when we see these reports. We got fear because we personalize it. We think of our own children. We think of the kid that is at school right now, and my God, I'm at work trusting the school to take care of them. And we could go down that line. But then you also have the anger. How could somebody do this? And because we don't fully understand it, you know, we don't fully understand the gas bubbles from the mulch that's under Loch Ness, so we turn them into the Loch Ness Monster, Brian. And it becomes more and more vivid. You know what I'm saying? Those lights, the lights in, you know, whatever that place is in Texas, that come off in the distance, can't be some sort of electric ball of energy that's naturally formed. It must be some sinister motivation. So the problem with rhetoric is, and the reason I think that you decided to go very laser-focused in this episode is so we say, "Okay, what do we know? And what can we do with the information that we know?" and move the ball forward, Brian, rather than keep going back to this place of hate, death, and fear.

Right. And that's a great point. We talk about that a lot of time. When you're not making good decisions, if you're basing it on fear, naturally all humans fear things they don't understand. We have to make some sort of comparison to something we know, even though it might be completely illogical and have nothing to do with it, but it's a comparison. So on that kind of note, can you give me another example of that, but not having to do with school shootings?

Yeah. So, and that's, I think the key. So let me, meaning that the more we understand how events are formed, the better armed we'll be against fixing them. So let me take you back to when Shelly and I are the owners of the Powderhorn Guest Ranch, and we're leading out all these adventures, even though we're training and teaching Combat Hunter at the time. We've got a full slate, right? Well, it happens to be after September 11th, but it's some of the worst wildfires in Colorado history. So Colorado is burning down. The absolute fire ban is everywhere. So Shelly and I have a semi-marked Hinsdale County police vehicle, and when we're not actively engaged in fly fishing or taking horse tours or something, we're scanning the area of southern Gunnison County and northern Hinsdale County to make sure that nobody is violating the fire ban.

We drive down to a recreation area that's not far from the ranch, before you get to the primitive wilderness. And here's a bunch of campers and fishermen, and right in the center, they've got a big campfire and they're all cooking their fish. Now, Brian, this has been televised, it's on every poster, it's shown on the side. You know, you're from California, how much money they spend into saying "no"? Okay, and we pull up and these people are incredulous. We're going like, "First of all, you know there's a huge ban on a fire. Second of all, there's a huge fine associated with it. This is a criminally negligent act. We could take you to jail. You got to put the fire out immediately." And the guy looks at me straight in the face, Brian, says, "Hey, this is my only vacation with the kids. We just caught a fresh trout out of the stream. Are you telling me I can't cook my fish?" And it's like, okay. So what you just described are having an argument, but the argument doesn't actually fit the logic of the scene.

He was willing to adjust the way he thought to accept the idea that he wasn't doing anything wrong, right? So he could get his kids fish.

Now, don't we do that the same thing with swimming? Every year we take kids, spring opens up, we get excited, we want to go to the beach, we want to go swimming. And instead of taking a knee and saying stuff like, "How many times you and I tell people, before you go to a restaurant, rehearse a Heimlich maneuver." Why? Because it's the smart thing to do, Brian. You're very likely to get into a situation where you or somebody at the restaurant might choke. But what do we do? We don't. We conflate those with other things that are never going to happen to us. We're never going to have to jump in and save a kid with a cramp that's going to drown swimming. But what happens every spring, Brian, we see it over and over again. And so rhetoric on the news doesn't help that. What would help is a cogent response, a message. "Hey listen, before you go out today," you know, at the end of the weather, "before you go out today, remember, a lot of kids every year drown during this period because they're not prepared to get into the water."

Yeah, and those would be more, those are preventative, low-calorie things that you can do. And it's even now, you know, just reminded me of how many times we get a newer rental car and there's, when you shut it off and you put it in park and shut it off, there's a little alert that goes, that says, "Check the back seat." Yeah. Literally reminding people not to leave their own children in the back seat. But, and now we laugh because we're like, "How dumb!" Yes, we're at that point. It's also a good thing because I guarantee that may have saved someone's life. And if that little sensor was enough to, how would that cost another dollar on the cost of that vehicle? Probably less.

So you and I are annoyed, but it's worth being annoyed. That's the type of message that wouldn't be rhetoric, right? That would be meaningful content. Let me give you one more. So every single year during this time, it's graduation time right now. A bunch of kids packing the car, they have no ill meaning whatsoever. They just want to go out and cheer and paint up their car. In Detroit, we painted up our car with messages, you know, graduation messages and put banners on them with soap on the windows, and you drive around with loud music and cheering and you're happy, you're graduating, Brian, especially high school, that's a big accomplishment. And every single year around this time, some small town, some small town, the kids drive off, hit a tree, and they're all dead. And it is so somber, and it so affects the fabric of that town and so many families. Six of the eight graduates of, you know, so-and-so, Nebraska, died. Brian, those things, again, what we're talking about are preventable. Yeah, we can predict that they're going to occur, and we continue to let them occur.

And you're saying also, we allow them to occur.

No, listen, listen to what I'm trying to tell you. If we don't take a stand against them, then by act of omission, aren't we allowing them to occur? [Music] I'm using rhetoric here to ask a question for our viewers. So, let's bring it now, after those examples. We've all seen them, we're seeing them right now, this is summer and starting the graduation, these are perfect relevant examples, that kind of equate to what we're talking about and how we approach these things, right? So now let's go straight to that school shooter. You know, after every investigation, all the pre-event indicators are there, and people want to understand how and why. I mean, that's a big thing. I hear it's like, "How, what?" One of the things we talk about and train, which is psychologically very difficult to do, is how to take another person's perspective. So can you tell me what, put me in the mind, how do I get the perspective of a school shooter?

Yeah, so I got to jot a note down because you just hit on something smart. So, Brian, play a game with me. Let me depose you. Remember when you were in high school and you wrote that notebook and you had the two columns where you wanted to rape and kill those certain students, and then you were going to light the school on fire, and when the cops came, you were going to start a shootout? You remember that notebook?

No, I never did that.

Yeah, you know why? Because nobody keeps that [expletive] notebook. You've got to be damaged, you've got to be broken. There's got to be a part of you that's missing to do that. And you're saying, "Yeah, but every kid fantasizes." Yeah, Walter Mitty, I get it. But they don't fantasize about hate, death, and fear in this manner, and they don't have a plan, Brian. It's not clinically normal to react to external stress by literally in your sketchbook, while you're sitting in class, draw you taking a machete and beheading the teacher that's in front of you and having laughter that's associated. Brian, those are broken humans. Now, the beautiful thing about this is there's very few of them that's around there. And some kid will see that and say, "Oh, that's kind of, they're doing it ironically, so I'll joke with it." But then after they see that cold stare and the person says, "No, I'm amassing weapons because I want to kill you," you understand what I'm trying to get at, right? Oh, egregious. It's so outside of the ken of how normal children act in that society or in that, in that situation.

So you, I take two big takeaways from that. Tell me, tell me if I'm right on this one. You're not ever going to get inside the head of a school shooter unless you've thought of that before, unless you've done that and then you grew up past that, which we've talked to people who've done that and who ended up making a decision not to go through with anything and then became functioning members of society, right? So unless you're the last person that we know of.

Yeah, so unless you're that person, and then the other thing is what I'm getting from this is what separates, you know, what you just described from normal adolescent teen crazy behavior, you're confused, you don't know anything. What separates that is a school shooter is going to demonstrate intent. Precisely.

So, so look, if you're getting incongruent signals and diminishing social interactivity or you're getting an increasingly violent interactivity over time, those are changes in a human baseline. And specifically during this time, all kids feel that. Do you understand what I'm saying? "I'm not understood. I don't have a good relationship. My parents are breaking up or just getting together," or whatever else. But Brian, we've all had those. Every single kid in the United States, I'm not even going to talk about globally, but we could, we could make that argument. But every kid in the United States, Brian, has had those same feelings, but they didn't show up with a gun and start executing their classmates. That's the difference. The difference is that when you assign intent to a thing, let's, let's tell people what we're talking about.

So, Brian, I'm coming from the bar. I've got two burgers, two beers, and I'm walking back to Shelly on the far side of the bar. Okay, it's busy, it's July, right? And so I, you back up, I walk into you, I spill a little bit of the beer, and both of us now return and face each other. And I go, "Hey, nice move, bumpkin," or something. And you go, "Hey, [expletive] you." Okay, now listen, right there at that situation, all we have is talk. We have bluster. Okay, we have Winnie the Pooh in the blustery day. Nothing is likely to occur. Now, I would tell you, "Hey, let's de-escalate that a little bit," by both of us looking, going, "Hey, sorry, man," and you go, "Yeah, yeah, hey, keep your head on a swivel." Okay, we could have gone there, right? But the "Hey, [expletive] you" kind of hit me wrong. Do you get what I'm trying to say? So now I set down the tray that I was carrying. Okay, that's demonstrating, so you take a step back and you move the chair and you take the shirt off, sleeves. Do you see what I'm trying to say? So those preparatory acts, Brian, demonstrate that this is going somewhere else, much the same as we see in road rage. Okay, so the person passes you, the two people flip off, and now the person pulls in front of you and locks up the brakes. Brian, that's not careless, that's reckless. That's to the point that you, you know, or should have known that the actions at that point are going to escalate. You get what I'm trying to say? If we talk about de-escalation, de-escalation isn't a thing that we bring with us. Escalation is how we treat our entire environment. So intent is the opposite of that. Intent is, "Hey, you bumped into me. We're, we're going to get busy right now." And then I show you that that's going to happen.

So, so that's an example. I, I would understand, I can put myself in the mind of either one of those people. I'm standing there, someone bumps into me, or I'm carrying some drinks and food back to a table and I bump into someone. So what, what comes from that next? It's a normal interaction that happens a million times a day all over the world, right? So what comes next has to do with the choices made by the actors involved in that situation, right? So, so you, that can spiral, you know, wildly out of control. It could come to them, them somehow becoming best friends and whatever. I mean, there's, there's a multitude, a number of things that can happen there. It's a finite number of things, but there are, there are, it's a large data set. And, and so what I'm getting at with that is, is I don't have to worry necessarily about you in that example. Like, you didn't mention the type of bar we were in, you didn't mention your clothing, you didn't mention my skin color. You did, meaning you, you took it to what behavior was demonstrated and was their intent demonstrated? You know, if that response from me as you bump into me is, "Hey, [expletive] you, pal. You got a problem?" That's very different. The problem is, "Oh man, hey, you're right there, man. Like, you need a hand?" Okay, two completely different.

So any negative intent on my part, right?

That reaction, that's where one very clearly demonstrates an intent on my part. Yeah, yeah.

So, Brian, you know the way my brain works. So yeah, I might get a name wrong or a time wrong or something like that, but I think the kid's name is Dylan or Dylann Roof, that shot up the school, the hate-mongering white kid shot up the black church in the basement while they were, and they actually sat with the parishioners, yes. And then at the end, pulls out the gun and kills. What a horrible, tragic story. Well, you talked about color of skin. So here's a kid that, that's radicalized, motivated by hate. Now, he could have been like a lot of other people in our country, and when I say a lot, there are people in the country that hate everything. There's other people that, you know, run around at a .23 on, on the rage code all the time, but they don't act on it, Brian. So not only did Dylann choose to act on it, but he demonstrated intent by going to places that were specifically, historically relevant to being able for black people to get ahead in our nation and, and having the reformations that were necessary. And he went to those locations, and he brandished flags and symbols that were against black folks. And then he wore outfits that were, that were, that just fomented argument and hate and violence and death. And then, you know, he would flip off the camera, he would insert and insinuate himself into those places for civil rights. Do you get what I'm trying to say? And send exactly the wrong message. Now, what he was doing is he was taunting the audience and that's a rehearsal phase for what he ultimately did. Now, two things happened there, Brian. One, he demonstrated an intent, and two, the people around him either missed it or allowed it to go like water under a bridge, go by, and didn't connect the dots and say, "We're about to have a violent encounter with this kid." Because it's so rare, we miss it. Because it's so rare, we don't assign a part of our brain to say, "Be on the lookout for that type of behavior." And that's why afterwards, the signs are so clear and we see all those and we can connect all those dots. But when it's in progress, you know, it's like the other thing, like Dylann had a chance, just like Timothy McVeigh, to shoot it out with the coppers. Brian, he chose not to. Why did he choose not to? He didn't choose because they ambushed him so cleverly and the cops were smart and they tackled him. He had a message, Brian, it was never planned, it was part of his plan. So a plan demonstrates intent too. Do you get what I'm trying to say? You know, so what does a shopping list on your refrigerator demonstrate? Demonstrates intent. Okay. I, I'm going to go to the store and these are the items that I'm going to pick up. So when a kid does that at Columbine and starts putting, "I have to get weapons, I have to get ammo, I have to make bombs." Why would that be different?

You get one. No, and, and we, you gave it. So if I was, if I had my yellow pad out and was taking notes, I would have that, you know, "Demonstrating Intent," and start, I can add all of those examples underneath there as examples of someone who demonstrated their intent, that I can even think of my own. And then on another section, I would write a list of "contributing factors," right? So overall contributing factors. So one, obviously, you know, the mental health is one that you kind of start to talk about, because that's a big one. But yeah, it's a lack of, you know, lack of empathy, lack of ability to, of any sort of emotional control, which again, if you're a teenager, is not unusual, all right? But when we start to add all these together as we go, then it becomes glaringly obvious.

But one of the questions, you know, you just brought up another example, who's someone who lashed out here in a mass shooting? It's not unlike a school shooting. We, we kind of, the way we look at them, we put them in similar categories because of the behavior of the individual. But why is it, because I'm still trying to understand this, this kid who's going to shoot up a school, Greg, why is it that in that case, I'd say, I have all that hate and all that anger and I feel that I am not a part of this society and I'm different and I've been wronged, whatever. Why, why do I kill you? Why don't I kill me? Like, why do I, why is that? Why don't?

That's a great question. So I would tack on, why do I kill others of my family that are close to me before I go in and then continue to kill? And the reason I'm talking about that is if we go back all the way to Whitman, the Texas Tower Shooter. Not to open an old wound, but get the idea down. Whitman shot his mom before he goes to the, to the tower to start shooting others. If we go back all the way to the Bath Township shooting, yeah, Kehoe kills his mom before he goes in here. The shooter most recently at Robb Elementary shoots his grandmother, you know, in, in the forehead. So let's start there on our yellow pad and say, "Look, I'm about to do something that's so heinous and horrible that I don't ever want somebody to say, 'Oh yeah, and when he was in kindergarten, he [expletive] his pants and all the school laughed.'" And I don't want anybody to be able to bring up my history. You know why, Brian? Because I'm rewriting my history starting now. So if we see that type of behavior where we're going to disassociate, it's not unlike sometimes the suicidal ideation where I'm giving my things away because I know I'm not going to go back. But here the, the intent is that I'm going to rewrite my story right now. Now, I can't rewrite my story by just leaving a manifesto and killing myself because somebody might not read it. So I'm going to assign my death to an act. Okay? I'm not the problem in this, Brian. Everybody else is. I'm the victim. So because of that logic, because I'm the victim, I'm going to make people pay. I want to see you afraid. I want to hear you crying. Then I want to shoot you. But I don't want to encounter the cops. In almost every incident, what I want to do is I want the pain to stop, and I want to say, "Okay, my story ends there." So I kill, kill, kill. Do you get what I'm trying to say? And then it's likely that I'm going to go somewhere else and kill myself, kill myself at the scene, or do a suicide by cop. Why is that? Why is that played over and over ad nauseam? Because I feel that I was wronged. I'm okay with my decision to do what I'm about to do because I never have to face the consequences. You get it? So if we're talking about somebody like, like, you know, I've got a problem with the FBI, but that's just me. But Brian, if we're talking about something that's torturing animals, if we're talking about somebody that's doing the arson, we're talking about those psychopathy traits that we're going to see in these same people. You know, that they don't get turned off by violence. As a matter of fact, they think of violence as a language. What we're going to do is we're going to look at that and we're going to say, "Okay, I know all kids are in turmoil, especially, especially in high school. All kids are trying to find themselves. All kids are going through a breakup in their family or their personal breakup or, you know, whatever the turmoil, the external schema is not always good. But none of those kids have made a plan to behead the principal, resort to being a cannibal, killing everybody in the school by locking the doors and lighting it on fire." So we have to understand that there's a clear line, and when that line, and you're saying, "Well, the line is not sometimes that clear," this is what the people at home are saying. Yeah, it is. When you're not taking consequences for your action, when you're demonstrating intent, Brian, and when you're staging things like rehearsals, that, that's clear enough.

And they're, they're the reason why we also brought that up is because a lot of things that you'll see, especially if we're talking about a mental health issue, is a lot of these sort of pre-event indicators would be similar whether it's someone who's going to commit suicide or someone who's going to come in and shoot up the school. And the idea, it's still, it's still the demonstrating intent and how they handle things, right? So, a kid who's going to come in and shoot up the school, "Well, Greg, you're the problem, it's everyone else's fault, it's not mine," is going to kill himself as well. Yep. "Look, I'm a loser just like I've always been, it's always my fault," you know what I mean? Like, it's, it's, it's lashing out versus lashing in, and kind of, and that's a great, great way of putting it. But with all this, because you know, there, there is greater attention on everything we're talking about, all the pre-event. Like if you went down all the school shooters, you know, I always talk about when we talk about these different cases is that if you put all the writings and drawings and actions into a book, and each school shooter got their own book, or excuse me, got their own chapter in that book, you would have no idea that it was a different author in each chapter. I mean, because it looks, feels, sounds, smells the exact same. And everyone, and part of that is because they, they, you know, track each other and they follow up and they research these events, and they do that. But you know, if, if we're, if if this information is all out there and we're all tuned in, we've got all these communication devices, we've got all these, these sensors out there, whether that's your TikTok or your Facebook or your Twitter or what, you know, all this different stuff. But if we're so tuned into that, you know, well, how does this still occur? You know what I'm saying? Like the idea is, you know,

I, I totally agree. So, so let's not talk about a grievance-oriented workplace violence shooting. Okay, that happens after, you know, somebody finds their wife with somebody else and then, yeah, and it's a domestic violence situation, right? So, so we can classify those differently. Let's talk about the target population. Let's talk about school kids. Let's talk about kids killing kids. And I'll start first by expressing my disillusionment. Okay, so I'll, I'll tell you this, "I'm too fat. Nobody loves me. I don't have a boyfriend or a girlfriend. The kids at school bully me. And, and, I showed up, and my gosh, I, I just sat in a corner and I cried." We all get that. Every one of us gets that.

So then the second thing is I'll go online and I'll search actively for people that are disillusioned like me. So I'll go in there and I'll say, you know, "I'm too fat, I got pre-adolescent diabetes. I don't understand." And all of a sudden, you'll find, guess what, there's a chat group for that. And those kids are expressing it too. "Yeah, my friends don't understand me, they're a bunch of asses," and all that other stuff. Now, Brian, all of a sudden you say, "Hey, listen, I want to take a look at Hitler and Pol Pot and I want to look at Joseph Stalin, because, guess what they did when people were different, they exterminated them. And another thing, Brian, is those Columbine kids, man, they really got their say and their way by going in." Okay, where was the line across? Everybody feels in a certain way. But then when we start demonstrating the intent by doing research on those people that committed those heinous acts of mass violence, that's when we've drawn the line. So you're saying, "Okay, yeah, but kids all fantasize." Again, the fantasy argument. Yeah, kids fantasize with war. Why? Because war is about power. And power is something that we all dream of having. A girl might dream to be a princess, a boy wants to be the king. He wants to be out in front with the, the Knights of the Round Table behind him and do that stuff. But then he doesn't write down, "And we're going to kill Susie, and we're going to kill," right? "We're going to barricade ourselves in." That's the clear stepping off point. And you're going to say, "Well, it's not so clear because we never hear it." Every single one of these school shooters engages in social leakage. The thing is, are we tuned in to read the frequency? And this is why we use terms like demonstrating intent versus going off of whatever religious, cultural, or political or social ideology that the person espouses.

Because when they do that stuff, you know, this gets, it goes back to the rhetoric. I think people are a lot of times just making stuff up as they go along without even realizing it. Because, you know, some of these people, they'll write some manifesto and you'll read it, and then you're like, "Well, wait, if you believe A, B, and C here, then you, you wouldn't believe E and F over here." So you don't even really understand what you're writing, right? You don't even really fully understand the concepts that you're just regurgitating. But and, and the reason why I don't like these interpretations, why we put it in or or those things to be put in those type of categories is because it doesn't help us prevent the next one. It doesn't help us understand it. It's, "Oh, he's a white supremacist," or "a black supremacist," or "a member, he's a wannabe Nazi," he's a, like it's like, "Well, hang on, that may, that doesn't help you understand the situation. In fact, it makes it worse."

Right.

So, so you talked about demonstrating intent. And, and I know the kids, people, humans in general, we all mimic each other's behavior. But, but one of the things I, I made it clear is, the insurgent, my daughter, she demonstrates intent sometimes when she gets upset and angry versus me telling her to go do something, and I say, "Hey, if you don't do this, I'm taking away that iPad that you get to watch for a couple hours at night." So, and then she said, "Yeah, well, if you do that, then I'm going to." Okay. Now she's demonstrating her intent of what she's due, that she's clearly wanting to escalate the situation because whatever it is for her, it's the most awful thing in her world right now. Now, I know it's not, but that's very different than her saying, "Fine, I'll go clean the bathroom." Okay, so in one, yes, she complied with what I had to say. She might argue back, but that was a very clear demonstration of intent saying, "I'm going to escalate this if you do that." Okay, that's something simple we, we see in, in all of our kids, we see in our friends and people. So, so I want to use, I would just want to throw that example in there, Greg. I mean, you know, just because, because it's a simple, it's a white belt one. We don't have to look for everything doesn't mean danger and hate, death, and fear. And I got to start here. If I can do it in my house, I can do it at school.

Yeah. So give me the right to talk about your daughter without you punching me in the eye next time you see it. What, what, what you're seeing, and what you may have missed, is that the tactic that she used was negotiation. So yes, she demonstrated intent, but she's also saying, "Look, I'm more mature now, so I want to discuss with you likely paths that are going to occur." And you're like, "I'm the dad. Go clean the room." Yeah, what I'm trying to say, but what happened next is the important thing. Yeah, engaging in negotiation, that tactic is good. It shows that she's growing mentally. Okay. She felt the need to speak out. She didn't feel the need to act out. Because people that want their say, that's fine. That's how we grow, that's how we learn, that's how we get our scar tissue. But people that want their say and their way, that's when we get a very different feeling.

I'll give you an example. Yeah, we don't want to, we don't want to name, for example, we don't want to name certain classifications of people because it's not helpful. It's more rhetoric. So for example, this "incels" that they're thrown around, "involuntary celibate," and then, you know, those people, you know, are a subgroup of whatever and they become very violent against women or other people that are making love. Brian, I was in high school. I wouldn't be getting laid, yeah. So I know a whole bunch of people that would have qualified as that incel. I know people that, that, that had different colored hair. I know people that dress like, in my time, it was dressing like a hippie, a dope, or a stoner. Do you get what I'm trying to say? Or you were a jock or whatever else. Brian, those things are natural, okay? But what I didn't do is I didn't go out and burn down a local mosque. Do you get what I'm trying to say with that group? So the difference is that when I don't fear the consequences of my violence or illegal actions, okay, I think that I'm so different than you that I've earned this right over years of persecution or prosecution or whatever else, that's when the danger comes. So if she would have sabotaged something in the house, do you get what I'm trying to put a skateboard on the second step? You know, "I'm going to get even with that." Okay, that, that's absolutely not enough. And we also have to take a look at this. Like, the Nazi symbol, the Nazi symbol, when a kid is running through a neighborhood and paints it on a white garage and then, you know, writes that he hates Jews and then keeps going through the neighborhood, that's a kid that's acting out. That kid, right, we can fix that. Do you see what I'm talking about?

And that goes back, that has a plan on going to, yes, the local synagogue and lighting it on fire. That's a completely different thing. That's what we're at the issue with here. And that goes back into, you know, understanding and intent. What was their intent behind it? Do you think that 14-year-old kid who spray-painted that on the sidewalk even really has a good, full understanding of what that really means? I mean, and like you said, they know what it, what, what are they trying to do? Are, are we trying to get a rise out of you or trying to get some attention? Or, or am I making a plan? And those are two completely different things. And but you brought up a good point where about you, I mean, your example was the, the this incel community. You were like, "Okay, join the club." I know a lot of people who were part of that in high school or, or younger, whatever. But, but the, the, the idea is, you know, we do need, there's a, there's a sociological imperative for us to belong to a group, something. So that's why we choose this. And we always give the the Mean Girls example, the movie, where they walk into the, she walks into the lunchroom and it's like the, if you want it, it's sociology 101 in in a high school. It's a great example. And she goes, "Oh, those are the jocks, those are the drama kids, those are the band geeks, those are the math nerds." Those are, everyone has their clique, their group, their set that they have to belong to. And that, that, that can change across like, I'm, I'm a White Sox fan, so I'm in, I'm in that clique, I'm in that group. You know what I'm saying? So it doesn't have to be something as dedicated as this, but I can take a look at what group those people are a part of, right? To kind of help me understand, because what is the intent of the group? Well, the intent of the stoner group is to go out and get high without getting caught. The intent of the jocks is just we're going to talk about sports and that's our biggest thing in life. Whatever that sport that is, it's football, baseball, basketball, don't care. That's their whole life. Well, that's all normal and it's, and it's, and it's, it's necessary, right? So it's those, you know, individuals we're talking about don't feel like they belong to any one of those groups. So what do we want to do? We want to have our own group, right? We want to do our own. And, and from there it can start. And through things like hemophilia (sic, likely a misstatement for "homophily" or "group formation"), nice with praxis, and they'll start to, to gather others, others like more like, exactly, other like-minded people, individuals. And, and that's an important part because not because I don't care as much about what the name of your group is or what you're calling yourself, I care about what you're doing because it's normal for someone to want to belong to something, but it's not normal for someone to demonstrate violent intent. That's very, very different. And I say violent intent because again, you gave some examples. While defacing school property, is that something that happens on a high school on a frequent basis? Yeah, I would, I would imagine so. I, I think it is. But why did they do it? Were they trying to, did they break the, the candy bar machine because they were trying to steal out of it and they wanted to get a free candy bar? Or, or did they, did they do it and write a message on the wall because they hated some teacher for some, you know, what was the whole intent behind this, rather than what group did that belong to? Hey, what, what T-shirt were they wearing? Or did they do, do they go to church? Like, we, we come up with all of these different ways to, to try and understand this. And yep. And it's our way of trying to understand a school shooter. But what I'm kind of getting from this conversation is you don't, you don't need to. You're, it's unlikely you're ever going to see the world from the perspective of someone who wants to shoot up a school, but guess what? You don't need to do that. You don't need to have that understanding. You know, you know, it's like, it's like reminding me before going on deployments and we're going to give you a class on the culture and how different it is. Well, what do you think you're doing for me by doing that? Look at how different. It's not inclusivity, is it? It's certainly not. And, and, and that, that stuff's great for the context of the situation, but it doesn't help determine what someone's likely intent is. Does that make sense?

Yeah, we're all lonely. We all want to think that we're different, and we begin to look for folks that are like me. But when that comes to lonely, angry, and violent people that have no responsibility for their actions, and then when they start to put their actions and their statements together to demonstrate intent, now we have a completely different, very rare classification of human that will become or is very likely to become a school shooter.

Okay, so we're coming down this path of like likely candidates, right? So, so what's kind of, what does that look like? Because there are some things that are common to all these. Are so, so let's continue with that list of likely candidates.

So, so what I, what I will tell you is somebody that's been off script for a long time, and that people know it, and that it's like that uncle or aunt that nobody wants to talk about in their own family. But this is that situation on steroids. And you're going to say, "Okay, well, why is it likely that we miss those things?" And I'll tell you this, Brian, if every single time we get together and you go, "Hey, how's things?" And I go, "Oh, it's my son again. Now he's drawing this, it's on the wall, and he's doing those and other." Okay, sooner or later, you tune that out. And you either decide that you're not going to ask me any more questions, you're not going to, you're not going to sit with me at lunch. Do you get what I'm trying to say? So I'm going to start closing that off to you. That also makes me feel guilty to say, "Well, Millie just, you know, graduated to the top of her class." So, so we don't as a society take care of each other like we used to. We don't interact at that level. Why? Because just like monkeys, we used to have to sit with other members of our tribe and pick off the lice and eat them and pat them on the head. Why, Brian? Because empathy was a survival mechanism. It allowed us to see stress fractures in our personnel, in our group, before they did something stupid. Because if you weren't siloing the corn, what I'm trying to say, if you weren't out there fishing and you were actually sleeping in the middle of winter, Brian, our tribe could die. And, and, you know what, tribes pulled together when they saw other tribes in trouble. They pulled together. Why? Procreation was a necessity. So when you're talking about our list of candidates, you're talking about somebody that continues to choose off the menu. Okay. They continue to commit hate crimes, or write violent manifestos, or making drawings of them cutting their heads off of classmates. Okay, we all go through trauma. But, but how we deal with the trauma is the different part. If we deal with the trauma by going and lighting our cat on fire, deal with the trauma by, you know, beating up a kid, or breaking out the windows, that's the line. And, and listen, you can have a mental health issue and be lonely and angry all the time, and there's a way out. But if you do that and you choose your way out, which is acting out on a violent manner, then we have to do, there's, there's not one of these kids that doesn't have a violent background, or a criminal background, or a mental health issue background. So therefore, if we can quantify that, Brian, we can quantify everything. If we know the kids are going to drown and we give them swimming lessons, we're actually doing something. So here we've identified a subset of humans that, that are, are close enough to being broken that we have to identify them. We have to track their behavior for longer than we do the normal, and when I say "normal," I mean clinically normal kids that are around us all the time. It's okay for your kid to act up. It's okay for your kid to get in trouble with the law. That's part of them growing. But, Brian, if they don't grow out of that, do you understand? If they don't pull out of that tailspin?

No, and, and, and these things all compound. So there's a, there's a lot, there's a lot to talk about. But again, I go back to my list of like contributing factors saying, "Okay, so the, the, you know, consistent mental health issues, a recent trigger event, you know, or some, something that that recently occurred in that person's life, you know, and that that person has demonstrated intent." So I now, as I start to build it and fill it in, it gets, it gets, um, you know, it gets, it gets a little bit more vivid. And, and, and I know we're going to talk about this, I just want to hit it right now without there too much into it. We will talk about another one of those, another contributing factor on those would be, you know, access to firearms, access to weapons, things like that. And we'll kind of cover that later. And I don't want to think that we're glossing over something like that, but it's, it's a contributing factor now of four or five that we've discussed so far. And it's important to list it out. Remember that, because I just want to reiterate at this point, Greg, there is no one thing, there is no model, there is no "if they do this, then then you got them." There's no one thing I need to learn. And so that makes it a little bit more complex. But at the same time, we go back to this school, "Well, you know, a school is a petri dish. It's, it's a closed system," you know, as close as you can get because it's the same kids every single day for multiple years. They've likely known each other for a long time. Like, all of that stuff is there. So you have this, this sort of map of their behavior. So when you're talking about comparisons and baseline and what's normal, because that can get confusing. A kid acting out, as we just said, all right? A kid acting out completely normal when you're 16 years old. That's what you do. Go ask my parents. That, that continues today. I'm, I turn 39 tomorrow, and and this, I still act out towards my parents, right? But, but how do I, how do I compare that to something that isn't just acting out?

Now, this is what we're, that's what we're talking about, though. This is what we're talking about. So, so let's, let's, I'll do two things and then that, that'll be enough of a remark of the ramp up to what a school shooter feels like. One, stop thinking that it's somebody else's kid, because we're talking about your kid, we're talking about the neighborhood kid. We're talking about the kid in your school that you see all the time and every day. We're not talking about some thing that comes out of nowhere. It never comes out of nowhere. Anytime you see those kids that are planning, engaging in violent action, seeking out weapons, supporting violent ideologies, making online threats, making veiled in-person threats, Brian, those are all demonstrations of intent. So now what's the difference between a threat and a credible threat? Well, a threat, a physical action, a repeated conduct, something that would cause a reasonable person to be in fear for their safety or the safety of others. And I would include any step towards a goal that completes or acts out that threat. So, so Brian, if if I was giving away my stuff and amassing weapons and blocking open a door, okay, those are school shooter activities. Do you get what I'm trying to say now, right? You may say, "Well, they also could be indices of self-harm." Okay, well, guess what? It's just, either way you found out. You decide to kill yourself, you know, a suicidal fascination or ideation, or a homicidal fascination or ideation, both of those are warning signals. Danger, warning, Will Robinson! So that's where you got to act first or act fast, Brian, and that's where we're not doing enough. We're looking if we, if we engage in nothing but at-bang thinking, then it's a crap shoot. We have to move the dial.

And we're definitely going to get into that eventually, what we mean by "at-bang" thinking, but, um, you know, you, everything we talked about, you can go back to any one of these examples that we've used or any other example that anyone knows of, and you're going to find all of them there. You're likely going to find every single thing that we've discussed so far. I mean, it's, it's, it's almost textbook. Um, but to, to kind of focus a little bit more on, you know, that the most recent, uh, you know, at the Robb School in Uvalde, Texas, um, we look at different things when these situations occur because one, the investigation is still going on. Everyone reaches out to us, says, "Hey, can you comment on this? What do you think?" We go, "Why?" Because I get my information from Twitter, it's probably not the best place. How much stuff comes out real quick, it spreads like wildfire, and that's never really what actually happened. Pulled back some of it, some of it gets walked back, that's every single time because it just happens. But one of the things that occurred, and I think this is a good example of how we look at these things, I'd like you to explain like, um, he got into a traffic crash before he entered that school. It was outside. So, so when I look at that, I go, "How do you just by chance get a traffic accident on, on the way to go, to go do this attack that you've been planning for? That you clearly have demonstrated your intent. You've come up with some sort of plan, no matter how rudimentary it is. Uh, you've thought about it, you've rehearsed it in some manner." How do I get an accident on the way there?

Yeah, so I would tell you, look at our recent episode, we talked about the Roseville, Michigan situation. Why? Because if you're a first responder and you're showing up at an accident scene, every once in a while, not very often, but every once in a while, that's an attempt at suicide and the person is going to do a suicide by cop, or you're going to encounter this Uvalde shooter and he's dragging his guns out of the wrecked car and starts shooting. Do you see what I'm trying to say, Brian? So, so when we talk of the auspices of situation awareness, we're talking from the idea that this may be in progress and you're just getting on the carousel now. So anticipate that any situation could likely be this. So the simple answer for you, mission focus. I'm so mission focused on getting to the school and getting inside that school and starting that shooting that I'm not paying attention. Oh, [expletive], the light changed. I'm sliding to a stop, and the next thing I know is I avoided a traffic crash, but now I'm in the ditch. So what do people do? People look, now I'm carrying the guns out and I start shooting because now my incident scene, my crime scene, starts at the traffic crash. Do you get what I'm trying to say? So, so that puts into a sequence, a chain of events that begins a sequence of events that is going to be talked about for 20 years. And every year on the anniversary date, we're going to go, "How could we have missed it?" And what I'm saying to you about that is that that also gives us lead, that that didn't just happen. So now we've got the crash, then we've got the movement from crash scene to school grounds, then we've got school grounds into the school. Did you see all those chances, Brian, that we could have done something to interview?

And part of the reason why I brought that up is, is because, you know, I wanted to get that explanation of mission focus, um, because that's all, so he, you could have missed a vehicle coming right at him and crashed into it because he was so mission focused. And everyone's going, "Well, how do I, what does that even mean? How would you miss that?" Well, if you've ever been in such a hurry leaving the grocery store because you got 10 things you got to do and your, your, your arms are completely full and you're dragging the kid, you're trying to pull your keys out and you almost get hit by a car or almost walk right out into traffic. Well, that's because you're so mission focused about what you're doing, right? It's not about being distracted. You have somewhere to be. If you're so mission focused as a teacher or a parent, that's part of the reason why we don't miss, or that's part of the reason why we miss some of these big indicators, because, "Dude, I got 30 kids in this one period today, and I've got six more periods that I have to teach. And they all got to learn math, and I got to get this, and they got to make sure they hit the scores so that we get funding for next year. And I got to make sure this." You know, I'm so mission focused on what I'm doing, I'm missing what, in hindsight, is glaringly obvious.

Precisely. So I would, I would liken it to something you see every day. Stop mystifying this. Stop making this bigger than it is. It's going to occur again. It's occurred before. So think of it in context of something that you can break down and fix. That's how society is going to get through this. So, Brian, we have weather prediction, right? We're better at weather prediction now. We see these certain situations coalesce, and that means that this low-pressure system is going to bring snow or rain. And so we warn the people out ahead of that. But still, some people die because they don't heed those warnings. What we want to do is we want to get this situation to where it's manageable. Where when we see those things, those cues, those pre-events, constellation of evidence and artifacts that would tend to show us that your kid's going to be a school shooter, that we take action on it. Brian, I would point back to even Adam Lanza's mom. Adam Lanza's mom got so far afield. He was crying all the time. There was things that she started to disassociate with, with Lanza because she didn't understand it. Her husband left her. Look, when it gets that serious, you've got to tell somebody. You've got to be external with your thoughts, and you've got to go and ask for help. There's help, there's help somewhere. Because if you don't do that, Brian, then you're going to have one of these tragic accidents or incidents occur in your neighborhood as well.

So, I mean, we've, we've kind of been, been, I know, in this, this first initial sort of installment, taking to, you know, why and how these things occur. And we talked about a bunch of issues and why they get missed. When we talked about, uh, what are some of the contributing factors? Um, um, you know, what, um, why physiologically, sociologically, psychologically, we don't always see these come, these things coming in in the moment. And, you know, you did talk about what's a credible threat, was this, because we talk about demonstrating intent and what to focus on. So, you know, if, with all the different, just, just the different incidents we discussed in the last, whatever, 45 minutes that we've been talking, um, you know, pre-event indications, the way we can predict, identify, mitigate, and, and prevent these disastrous, uh, events. So what, you know, I, I want to try and, um, um, kind of summarize a little bit of what we talked about in that and, and, and sort of a, of an ending for this initial chapter because we're going to talk about how and why we get things wrong. But we sort of laid the groundwork for that in a sense. And, and I think, I think not only what we see, what we don't see, why we don't put those things together, because then everyone wants to say, "Well, you know, we need some reporting system where we can log all this stuff in an app. And then someone's going to say, 'Well, no, you can't do that because of privacy laws.'" And, and these are not something that needs to be federally mandated, funded, taxpayer, you know, approved for the, it's, you know, you and I sitting in the, in, in the teachers' lounge or the break room at the office or wherever with the community going, "Hey, do you notice anything about Billy? Let me tell you what happened." And then someone goes, "Wait, what did you say about him? Because I saw this over here." And then next thing you know, that's how that information sharing. We didn't really talk about it yet, but, and we will kind of a little bit next one. But, you know, we, we don't feel obligated to do that anymore and we don't have those conversations. And, and I, I keep it to a simple conversation because what we're trying to talk about in these episodes are this is a way of understanding it, how to sense make, how to problem solve, and how to make a decision, right? So I have to understand that I don't need to understand a school shooter. I can look for how they demonstrate intent. A whole bunch of contributing factors. Has this increased significantly over time? Is their behavior escalated or de-escalated? These are all the things that we, we talked about. But then just sitting around having a conversation, Greg, I think is, is a start to this. Does that make sense?

Yeah, and I, I guess what we're trying to do here, Brian, in this, in this series, in this three-part series, is we're trying to say, "Pull out the yellow pad, and if you're going to have a discussion, here's some discussion starters, here's some points of likely intervention where you would have made a difference." Because we can always get less than lethal force alternatives. We can harden the school, we can do all these other things. But Brian, is it going to, is it going to stop school shooters? Is it going to help us identify him? Is it going to help us be Left of Bang and give us a gift of time and distance? I think that's why we're here today. And I think that the follow-on episodes are really, really going to help flush that out.

Yeah. So again, we, we kind of wanted to hit why and how these things occur to show at a sort of a 30,000-foot view that it's, it's, there's a lot of contributing factors to these things. There's a lot that go into him. We just need to understand it better. And I think the way that we're understanding it right now, um, is not the best way because it's, it's, it's the way things are approached hasn't fixed the problem before in the past. And I see people approaching them the same way, so why would we expect it to be any different? Um, that's, that's my big point in here. So I will kind of just end this chapter, I think, Greg, unless you have something else to add on, on, on what we talked about so far.

No, no. Let's, just remember, anytime somebody's threatening to do violence and then targeting a group or a location, that's planning. Anytime that you're engaging in planning, that demonstrates intent. Intent is the key to doing something to shut off an incident far left as possible before it becomes deadly.

Yeah, that's a, it's a good point. So we'll, we'll pick up with the next chapter on, on how and, and why we, we get things wrong. Perfect. Okay, Greg, for our kind of third chapter here. You know, we talked about the, the what, how, and why these school shootings happen. How and why we kind of get things wrong. Who explained a lot of that. And then now, I think, most importantly, this, this "so what?" How do we get it right? What's the solution here, right? What's the role of, of, of training in all this? So obviously, for everyone listening, you know, we take things from a training perspective. You can train your way out of just about any, uh, a really hard situation, at least anyone that I've seen. So, so we always look at this as a solution, uh, not something that's, uh, and of course, we have different definitions for training and education than what most people have. But, um, you know, we, we talk about training changes behavior. And so if you want to change behavior, you can't just educate your way out of this. You can't read a book. You can't read a news article, uh, and, and, and then write your Congressman and be done with it. Like, you have to actually change behavior. Um, so we're going to get into that. So let's start with safety and security. What, what, let's literally define those. Can you, can you define those terms for us?

Yeah, so let's do, and the reason we should do that, Brian, let's get a quick street definition so everybody understands what we're talking about bringing to a school. A school already is supposed to be a place where kids feel safe. So safety is that state of being protected, or the, the state of feeling that it's unlikely that I'm going to ever have danger, risk, or injury. Okay? So that's our place. Now look, that should extend to the lunchroom, to the, to the playground. Do you get what I'm trying to say, to the parking lot? Why do schools invest so much time in dropping off and picking up? I know that you're dropping off and picking up the insurgent. Talk about the chaos there, right? Yeah. So what is safety? Safety is to address the danger, risk, and injury from a measured response well before the school opens, right?

Yeah. And you're talking about even too, encompassing in that is literally like psychological and emotional safety. Like I, I need to absolutely feel that I'm, I'm comfortable and safe in this environment, literally just for learning to occur. We're not even talking about school shooting, but just for learning to occur.

Brian, I was on the safety patrol at every school that I, that when I, all the way to Cantor. I did Pleasant View Elementary School, if anybody knows that in East Detroit, and then by the time I got to Cantor, I was actually a sergeant in the safety patrol, and your badge was a different color, but I wanted to be the lieutenant, and then there was a captain. I didn't understand all those things, I just knew the badge looked pretty cool, right? But what were we there for, Brian? We're there for the little things. We're there to make sure that the kids cross safely, we'll make sure that, you know, look, kids had the happy head all the time, so kids can't be, you know, aware and alert of their surroundings the entire time, because that's not in their DNA. We have to protect them. Why do we use car seats, Brian? We use car seats because they're fragile little snowflakes and we don't want them to get crushed, right? So that's a good, I think, street definition of safety. Okay.

Then, then let's jump right ahead into security, then.

Yeah, so security is being free from danger or threat, but it's actually a step. So it's, it's a thing that we have to do. So for example, there's real security and the semblance of security. Let me give you an example: locking a door, okay, having a light on, so when you don't trip in the dark. Do you get what I'm trying to say? Having a fire alarm. Now, the difference between that and safety is these are actual tangible steps that somebody take, you know, that child thing that you put on the stairs so a little kid doesn't crawl down the stairs, a latch that you put under the sink. So somebody would say, "Well, that's safety." No, no, no. The safety is a state of being, a state of feeling. Security is the steps. Do you get how I get them there? That make sense?

Yeah, no, I, I think, I think that makes sense. So, so let's just jump right in because we're talking about physical locations. What does that mean for like physical security? I mean,

So, look, physical security is the simplest one of these, Brian, and many, many, many companies make, make billions of dollars every year on doing that. So, for example, a physical security measure on your boat would be a bumper that you throw over your boat as you're approaching the dock so you don't crash your boat and and kill a bunch of people. It would also be having bullet-resistant windows or blast shields if you were living in, in a place where there may be a car bomb or a suicide bomber. So now what you've taken is you've taken from the idea of being safe and secure, danger, risk, and injury to actually taking tangible steps to reduce the danger, risk, and injury. And then the physical security would be hardening a target so that target's no longer palatable to a terrorist or a criminal or an insurgent. That makes sense. So, so I want them to go somewhere other than my bank or my house because the, the physical security is, is actually enhanced.

Oh, okay. And, and so, you know, when we look at things, obviously we look at it from a human behavior perspective, and we, we provide a "think" with a K, not a "thing" with a G, um, you know, what would, rather, rather up-armor your brain than up-armor your, your house or, or place of business. We think it's just a more effective strategy. Um, but when we get into this and when we talk about training is, you know, we use the terms, you know, "at-bang," "right of bang," "left of bang." And, and, you know what this means, and it sounds, you know, just topically saying those things like, "Oh, okay, I see what you're saying, you want to be Left of Bang, you want to mitigate something before it happens." But, but actually doing that is, is, is a lot more complicated than people think. Or, or it's, it's seemingly, uh, they'll say, "Hey, we're trying to get, we're trying to mitigate this, so we put up cameras." It's like, "Well, now you have a really good recording of the homicide that's about to happen." That's not, that's an at-bang thing that may not even stop it. It just may only be great for subsequent prosecution. Well, that doesn't help you, right? That, that's not going to prevent the situation from happening. And what a lot of these folks are doing, a lot of these companies out there, and I'm not saying it's not necessary, but "Here's an app when this happens. Hey, we're going to up-armor the school, we're going to put the glass up, we're going to have the balustrades, we're going to do this. We're going to have an armed a veteran from the neighborhood who's volunteering to come here." And that is all at-bang thinking.

What you're saying, what you're saying, when you, when you look at that as a solution, as you're saying, "I'm accepting the fact that this is going to happen, and we're going to do our best to mitigate it when it does." That's [expletive] [expletive]! And that is an absolutely unacceptable standard. That is a completely unacceptable standard for a school, completely. Right? You're looking at it, "Well, this is going to happen, let's react to it." You're just saying, "Hey, I want to be better at reacting to this incident." And I'm saying, "[expletive] you, man! That's not good enough. That's not where your head should."

That happens. So, so add that. It would be here, Brian.

Look, I hear this all the time. The veterans in the school hallways with the guns, "Hire more security." Look, folks, read your own headlines. We're going to be sleeping with the students. We're going to be accidentally shooting the students. We're going to be doing, look, you got to have trained people. If you don't have trained people for this specific event, then you're going to get injured. I saw a parent, Brian, that felt so frustrated after Uvalde that they went to their kid's school and stood out in the parking lot of their kid's school every day until their kid graduated. They felt that they were doing something. But, Brian, that was the semblance of security. That's one unsustainable and two, it's scattershot. So, so the firemen, you know, standing out in front of the school waiting for the fire, Brian, that's equally unsustainable.

Yeah, so, so the, the, the fire analogy is brought up, which is also brought up for like why, you know, we do have kids do active shooter drills and people say, "Well, it's just like a fire drill." Okay, you're one, you're, you're completely getting that analogy wrong. Um, I mean, here's why it goes right into what I said of "at-bang," right of bang, left of bang. What that means, you know, you don't hire a fireman to stand outside your school and jump into action when there's a fire. You know why you don't have to? Do you know why you don't have to? Because everything for fire prevention is literally built into the code of the building, down to how it's actually constructed, what the specific materials are. There's a standard that they have to be rated to, because why? Because not long ago, a whole bunch of kids died in fires at schools. So, so we had to learn, "Oh wow, this is, this is not the way to do things." Um, and then we had to build it literally into everything that we do, to include the, the fire drill is, is at-bang thinking. It's the last ditch effort. That's what the fire drill is. It's the code that the building is built into. It's the fire marshal who has to sign off on it. It's the firemen who come and inspect the fire extinguishers, who test the alarm when you're in school, when you're out of school. That's what it is. That's prevention. All right? That's how they go around and educate people, "Hey, you got to have this ventilation over here because you have flammable liquids." That's what we're talking about. I mean, Ben Franklin when he said "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" was literally talking about fires. He was talking about chimney sweeps cleaning out your chimney so your house didn't burn down.

So, so listen, listen. Why is this different than, look, in the last episode, we talked about, "How do we miss it so egregiously?" I will tell you this, Brian, during COVID, and COVID's not over, folks, but during the, the primary 18 months of the worst of COVID, we had to do a lot of travel, no matter that other people weren't traveling. And you know what screwed people the most, Brian? What screwed people were elevators. Why? Because they didn't know how to act on an elevator. Elevator tells everything: minimum number of people, here's the emergency button, this is open, this is closed. It tells you everything and last time it was inspected, right? But now all of a sudden you got on the elevator and there was another person there. So they actually had to put footprints because, guess what, elevators aren't always six feet apart. Okay, so you were violating protocols. And again, what we're talking about is a presumed capability, okay? That we took shortcuts on. And that's what we're doing with school shootings. You're just talking about it. You're talking about that with fire safety. Fires killed a lot of kids. Do you get what I'm trying to say? So we said, "We don't anymore want that." So we develop technology and training and education to be commensurate with it. So we had a real, a true capability rather than a presumed capability.

So, so that, that's, that's a, that's a good term for us to define: a presumed capability. Because it's exactly what you saw, um, especially this most recent shooting in Uvalde. But, but, um, a presumed capability is worse than no capability in my opinion.

Absolutely.

Uh, and, and yeah, I figured you'd agree with that. But what we mean by this is, um, the teachers and staff had their ALICE Training before the Oxford school shooting, I think it was nine or ten days prior, I believe, uh, if I read that correctly. And not sure if they call it ALICE Training, but the, the idea is that everybody knows what ALICE Training, school shooter safety, yeah, school shooter safety training. Um, the, the police officers responding to the one at Robb's School was what? They had just been checked off recently. Yeah, we did this. Drills were certified, we did our active shooter response training. We're good, even at the Facebook post. So what happens is these things get so, um, they get so watered down to some click-through [expletive] e-learning online crap. Um, and that a lot of it actually has gotten better in terms of what the content is there. It's just, I'll agree, everyone's just clicking through it, and there's no actual training involved. One, that's education, that's not training. One, that's education, not training. Remember that. Uh, and two, it's, it's ineffective. We've seen this. Okay. This is ineffective. So that's what happens when you have this presumed capability. "Hey, we got this, we're good." That's more dangerous than not having that capability at all. Because now you think you know what you're doing. So when the time, when it, when the situation occurs, you're, you're completely lost. At least if you didn't know what to do, you're more likely to think of something on the spot, right? Than having this presumed capability. And it's very dangerous. And that's what happens with the, with the, uh, um, you know, the cameras and the, the security guard. And it's like, do you know anything about that person? Uh, do you know what their training is? Do you know what the protocols and procedures are that the parents and the kids and the teachers, all the school, no. Do they have weekly meetings about this and what kids have been talking about? Like, that, that's what we're talking about, right? And that, that's, that's Left of Bang. All this other stuff that you're seeing, it's just, it's, it doesn't prevent this from occurring. Uh, it might limit the amount of people killed. Um, once again, that's a competition.

If that's your goal, if that is your desired end state, Brian, and you achieve that, that at least is something. If you're in the U.S. military, that's a typical desired end state, meaning that's the best we can do because we're going into combat. So we're going to mitigate these potential losses as best as we can, but we know there's acceptable risk in there. Yep. This is not the military we're talking about. This is, this is a [expletive] school, okay? The, the zero, it should be any more than zero kids killed is a complete and catastrophic and total failure. I mean, that should be the standard, but we don't do that. So how, how do we get there, Greg?

So here's the thing. We got to stop, we got to stop saying things that aren't patently true to get through the event emotionally. For example, we talk about school shootings being a phenomenon. The problem with the term is that the, these are situations that are predictable, preventable, and explainable. They're explicable. So therefore they can't be a phenomenon. There, uh, thing that has both symptoms, uh, there, there's a proximate cause behind it. There's an op tempo that goes along with them. Therefore, if it can be studied and if it's repeatable, Brian, then we can bring to bear a training solution. Uh, next thing, the, the people, it's an epidemic. It's an epidemic proportion. Okay. That means a widespread occurrence that's time-sensitive. Look, these are, these are rare and random. And just like you said, if you went to a person for insurance, uh, Brian, because it almost never happens, and it may never have happened in a school, it may never happen in many, many schools. But then all of a sudden you get that peak that's in the center. So you're saying that you want me to spend all my time preventing for the peak. Your correlation between the fire and school shooters is exactly correct. We have to deem that it is so important that we don't stop until we get it right. And, and Brian, the people are going to say, "Yeah, but you're talking about both ends of your mouth. You're saying that you don't want more intervention, but you have to have a fire marshal that comes in and inspects, and you have to have the firemen that, that comes in and shakes the, the fire extinguishers." What we're saying is a measured response takes into consideration before bang, at bang, just after bang, and left of the next bang. And if you don't think in those terms, Brian, because listen, just because you've stopped one school shooter doesn't mean that you're out of the woods. Do you get what I'm trying to say? You've got all those kids that are going through that system that are facing the same types of dilemmas. So the education process has to parallel the training process as well. You said something, and I, I believe it was our first episode when you were talking about the, the, the information. Okay, so first of all, there's a difference between information and intelligence, right? So Brian talked about unverified, unevaluated raw data when he said, "We're all sitting in the teachers' lounge and somebody goes, 'Hey, anybody notice Bobby Sue or Billy or whatever it was?'" You know, the idea is that's information. Now what we got to do to that is we got to vet it. We've got to work it. We've got to process it and evaluate it, Brian, until it becomes intelligence. Why am I saying that? Because without raw data, without information, we'll never have intelligence. What do I mean by that? We can't develop a training plan on all other school shootings. We have to come in and see at what level are you urban, are you rural? What are the ages of the children? What is the physical layout of the buildings? Do you get what I'm saying? There's no one size fits all, and we got to get the community involved and we got to get the clergy involved, we got to get the hospital involved. Everybody has to have a, a stake in the matter.

Yeah. And, and part of why we give a training solution to everything, because obviously training should develop some, you know, skills, attitudes, abilities, knowledge, right? That's what it's there for. But, but the end state of what it really does is it gives you a level, well, it should if it's good training, gives you a level of competence. And if I'm more competent in something like this, the more confidence I have to report something, to say something, because I know there's people listening right now that are like, "We report this all the time. We say this and nothing ever happens, nothing ever happens." Like, that's going on everywhere. Whether that's in an ER nurse reporting someone who's get, be starting to become an unruly patient before they actually explode, or whether that's a teacher or or school psychologist saying, "Hey, there's a," and there's this follow-up is just, "Well, you know, we'll just kind of kick the can down the road." Which I, I, is not actually illogical, because if you were to say, "If we can, if we can get all of every single person who's ever shot up a school, if we can get them past the age of 21, they're, they're probably going to be okay. Or probably, it's unlikely that they're, it's a lot less likely that they're going to ever engage in a violent act like that." Right? But that's across the board. The older you are, the less aggressive, the less behavior you engage in that's, you know, could be even just unsafe, right? You're less likely to speed in your thirties than your car. Security, exactly. So, so, uh, that part of that reason and, and we don't attribute value to these things, because again, even though we see this every day or every week, there's something like this, it's very hard when I see that on the news, Greg, to go, "Yeah, but what are the chances?" I mean, you guys even said it, what are the chances of it happening here? You're right. It's, it's slim. Very like, it's, it's, it's, it's pretty low. Um, however, uh, you, it has to be one of the most important things you address, because the whole safety and security thing, just like you define, man, if I focus just on that, well, my learning is going to get better because why? Students are literally going to feel and be more comfortable because they're going to be more safe and secure. So it doesn't just have to be this, "We're going to, we're going to solve the problem of school shootings." It's, "No, we're going to, we're, we're to solve the problem of of broken human beings lashing out." Well, how do we solve the problem of broken human beings lashing out? Well, everything we've been talking about is how you solve those problems. I have to address it far sooner.

So, so what I hear, first of all, violence agreement again. I hate to use the word "violent," but it sums that up so quickly. I, I read to you a couple of days ago that the [expletive] pundits that just continually, I don't even want to talk about the live action SMEs on talking about their state, it's horrible. But the, the one comment was, "This is about prevention, not prediction." Look, you're getting prediction wrong, okay? If you're doing a statistical analysis and adding zeros and ones and tracking that child through their entire life, that's a different type of prediction. We do predictive analysis every day. And the predictive analysis is, if you've got that sharp thing sticking out, for example, predictive analysis, Brian, if you use a pair of scissors to cut open a box by holding the scissors and dragging them across the tape towards your body, you have a high likelihood of cutting your hand or stabbing yourself. Okay? So predictive analysis would be, there's a box-cutting tool that's specifically designed for that. "Hey, invest in it." Guess what? You'll have both safety and the security and knowing that you're not going to have your kid fumble around with. So what we do is predictive analysis. We take a look at the set of circumstances and we say, "This has a more high, a higher likelihood of causing danger, death, or injury than this does." So here is where you need to put the best bang for your buck. This is where you really need to invest it. That means that we don't have to look, Brian, having a scan and a key card did nothing to dissuade Adam Lanza from Sandy Hook, right? Do you see what I'm trying to say? Having a, the semblance of security is more harmful. Look, is it a fact that if I put a sign out in my yard saying that I've got a pit bull, or if I've got an alarm system, or, you know, I have a .30-ought-six, is that going to stop some people? Yeah, but a person that's mission-focused, that that you're their intended target, it's not going to slow them down, not this, not a bit.

You know, so, so yeah, if you're planning for home burglary and trying to prevent that, sure, the ADT sign on the lawn is going to, is going to, it will work. It will, it will work. Someone's going to, "Ah, I'm going to just going to go try somewhere else," right? But that, that's, that's obviously, you know, not the type of threat we're talking about. And, and, and again, this goes, you know, back to part of why, you know, we talked about in the last chapter, but of this, this solution of training is, is not about getting a bunch of people that we need to go higher and put out here. Stop doing that. I would rather have the thousand or 1500 kids that go to that school with just a little bit of understanding of how this works. And then the hundred and so teachers, principals, administrators, counselors, coaches, that adults, parents that volunteer their time, make them understand how to do this. You can teach people, "Here are the indicators that we need to look out for. Here's, here's how to look for these things in our environment, and then let's act rapidly." And you know what, what happens if you get, what happens if you get a false positive, Greg? What if you find out the kid just?

Listen, so we've been teaching this for how long? I go into a room and after we're teaching the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, first responders, coppers, family members, church or anything else, I say, "I would rather come into this room and say, 'Sir, I apologize. We patted you down and opened your bag because we thought that you might have been a school shooter and it was for the betterment of our safety and security protocol.'" Then to come in and go, "Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that Lance Corporal So-and-So got blown the [expletive] up because he didn't understand what an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) or a VBIED (Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Device) or or a sniper ambush was," Brian. And that's the problem. The problem is that I get emotionally tense. You get emotionally intense, you know why? Because it's like we're yelling into a void and we don't even hear the echo back. Do you know how frustrating that gets when we talk to people and and I hear this? "It came out of nowhere. Okay, nothing comes out of nothing. Okay. Nothing we could have done. We could have never predicted this." And then for the, the next three weeks, we have a litany of of, "Well, yeah, he was violent at any speed. We always, he had a fascination with everything." We got to stop fooling ourselves, Brian. So, so, so we have to make sure that we channel our fear and our anger into something that will be better for the tribe because if we don't, then all we're going to do is we're going to invest in the next incident. Then we're going to emotionally be bereft. And then it's going to be another month, a week, a year, and it's going to be the next incident. And and people think it's overwhelming because now yesterday we had Oklahoma had a shooting at their ER, and and the week before we had a shooting at a Bodega, and the week before that, look, shootings aren't going to go away, especially when you got people that are frustrated and there's economic issues and all these other programming factors that are going on. So situation awareness alone is not enough. Situational awareness, it means have your head on a swivel. But look, these people come from somewhere. They had to buy these weapons, they had to transport this ammunition, they had to drag the bag from their car into the building, they had to make a plan because they had to write it down to plan. And you can't people can't shut up today. No one shuts up, especially the younger you are.

That's great. It's the easiest thing. It's all out there. We just don't listen anymore. We don't, well, we want to turn this, "Well, things are different back in my." It's all the same stuff. It's, we don't take the time to truly go, what are we really trying to do here? What's, what's optimal inside of a school? Is it that, you know, they, they're far enough along in algebra that they score high enough on a standardized test so that the state can continue giving us the amount of funding? Is that what the goal is? Because that's a pretty [expletive] goal. I mean, that's just a self-licking ice cream cone. All you're doing is just fulfilling the next thing. And then we do it again, and we do it again. Dude, what are you actually preparing that child for? What are we really doing here? Is there safety and security that, uh, most important to us? Because it's clearly not by the way we're handling things. And, and we get, like you said, people get angry, they have the right to be angry. We get frustrated, which leads to anger, because it's one of my go-to emotions. Um, and, and the idea is, is just because it's such a solvable problem. It is such a solvable problem. That's why we get upset. That if this was, if this was the, the, you know, asteroid, you know, getting blown by a solar flare off course to now veer straight at the, at the, at you know, at planet Earth, which don't really have a lot of solutions for that one, you know what I mean? This is such, such, it's, it's, I don't know, they're, they're, they're, um, they're complicated, but they're not complex. This is, there's very little complexity in here.

You're exactly right. And, and it's not binary, but it isn't so complex that we can't address it. And, and we talk about in a clear light of day. Chantelle, great quote, by the way. We talk about dragging things out and taking a look at them, and we talk about having an unemotional response. This is one of the few times that I say you have to have emotions. Why? Because when you talk about compassion and sympathy for the people that are dead in Uvalde, all school shootings, and all racially motivated attacks, and all this horrible stuff, compassion and sympathy are great. Their emotional reactions to the suffering of others. Okay? But what we have to do, Brian, is we have to talk about training is essential because of empathy. Empathy allows us to recognize the emotional baggage of somebody else, but then actually step in and feel some of that. Why? Because if I can't take the perspective of another, there's no way I'll ever understand what that feels like. I've got to come up and say, "What's on your heart?" I've got to come up when you're broken and go, "Look, I understand you're hurting, but you're going to hurt yourself or somebody else if I don't get you help." That's something that we don't do as a nation. We've lost the ability to take a look at the other members in the cave by the firelight and say, "It looks like so-and-so's teeth aren't good enough, maybe I'll chip in and chew the rabbit for them." You get it? That that empathy is essential in this type of response.

And, and I think what you're, what you were just talking about, we have been addressing those, you know, these are low-calorie, local solutions, meaning, yes, you just talked about, "Hey, we got to have a conversation. We need to have empathy for the people in our community." Like, that doesn't cost billions of taxpayer dollars. It doesn't take a lot of your time either. It doesn't cost a lot of your time. It doesn't take, like, this is what we're saying is that stop, look, this, you are the solution. If you're listening, this, you're the solution.

You're exactly right, Brian. We stood in a gym, it was one of the nicest gyms that I ever. We did the Jewish church and synagogue school, then we went over to that school, then we did something else. Not going to get any more detail than that. And we're standing in there, and I want to ask you a question. What level of safety and security am I willing to invest in? When while we were standing there briefing all those parents in that gym, we looked around and saw all of the sports teams and all of the investments that we're going into, all the sponsors and, okay, listen, if you're going to sponsor the kids at a sports team, which is essential, don't stop that, because group skills are where we skin our knees and where we learn empathy, Brian. But, but, but what I'm trying to say is, are you willing to invest the same amount of money in the safety and security of the personnel at your school, including teachers, because teachers are always killed in these events as well? And the answer is no, we're not. In most instances that we've investigated, you and I personally, that we have a personal stake in, we saw that there was a marked difference between what they were investing in and supporting in their extracurricular activities and some of the showier things at their school or church than what we saw when it came down to their safety and security. You can't relegate a camera stops nothing. A camera reduces the risk of nothing. What are you talking about? Go to, go to London. There's cameras every, uh, every foot and every, every 18 inches on every wall on every street corner. So there's no, there's no crime in there. Correct? Yeah. They've, they've solved that. Solved it. Cracked the code.

No. And I, I'm with you, Anis. And, and Brian, I think your assessment of of saying that training has to start to the farthest left, look, there's two continuums. There's a continuum for left of bang, uh, uh, at bang, right of bang thinking. And there's a whole bunch of different diversions or, uh, uh, calculations that are to be done left and right. And, and, and people are misusing the, the model that we built over and over. But there's also an up and down scale, the baseline. There's things that happen above a baseline or below a baseline, and those are critically important. So even if you attended a short duration training that it talked about baselines and anomalies and incongruent signals, Brian, and talked about a left of bang to left to the next bang response, even that alone, which you could do in perhaps a morning, you know what I'm saying, to a whole bunch of parents and everybody that school system would be better off than what we're seeing, the, the, the training that they're investing in.

No, I, I think, I think that's a good point. It kind of goes back to to what we brought up in that the first one about, we, everyone sort of picks their point that they're comfortable with or have some little knowledge of and, and that's where it is. You know, if I look at this in, you know, situation in Robb Elementary School, what everyone does is says, "Okay, well, if, if the police would have went in sooner, right away, less kids would have died." And then the next person comes along, goes, "Well, no, if you had better people at the front door, you never would have got in." "Well, no, if we would have known this here at the car accident, then we could have stopped it there." Then, but what I'm saying is everyone picks their spot, yeah, where because you're most familiar there. But, but keep going on that. Like, if this kid had a better upbringing, would this, would that have mitigated this? Yeah, likely it would have. Yep, sorry, that's what the data reflects. You know what I'm saying? So, so it's, we, we pick a spot and that's where we, everyone goes, and we're saying that the farther left on that timeline you go, the, the greater the impact over time on that individual's life. And if you look at it this way, you know, I would say if I'm sitting here listening to this, go, "And I want to solve the problem of school shootings." You have to give yourself a realistic timeline and say, "Okay, can we stop these in 10 years?" I think so. I think you could be done even faster. I mean, literally almost get it down to to where it's, it's, it's, it's all over the news because for the week because it's, it's the first time in a year it's happened. Could you do that in 10 years? Probably. Yeah. I mean, what I'm saying is, I, you have to take a long-term view of this and go just like automotive safety, just like any windshields that don't explode and kill the driver.

Yeah, so I, I, I know we, we, we covered a lot, um, you know, and you, you, I did want to hit just one point at the end of this one before we kind of wrap on it is, um, you, you mentioned it right in when we, we were talking on this one and, and I wrote it down and he said it's, you said, "We were there to, um, pick up on the little things." And you know what, yes, that's what it is. You know, that's what we're talking about, is it's, it is the little things that matter. It's not the big ones, right? You, you, it's the, it's because it's the little ones you can have an impact on. It's the little ones you can change. It's the little ones you can have a fix. And, and a lot of little things add up to a really, really big change.

So, so let me give you a, a, a thing, Brian. If you haven't been in our training, folks, and and then hold your tongue, hold that mouth, my mom would say, because you can't compare it if you don't know what it is and you haven't looked this up. So if you think that we're out there being boisterous, we're not trying to be, we're trying to tell you that sometimes a radically different solution can be the one that you're looking for, you just haven't found it yet. So, Brian, can you imagine the power of us going into a place? And I'm going to give you both sides of the coin. Us going into a place for a week and saying, "Okay, we're going to do a morning session, an afternoon session, an evening session." That way nobody can say, "Hey, listen, I got to work. I can't be there. I got to drop off the kids. I got to," you know, "can't get a babysitter." Because why? Because we say, "Okay, we'll do this." And you have to do your part. And guess what? There's always, there's always an excuse why I can't do my part, Brian. Why I can't just show up. Why I can't just answer the question. So then we bring a litany of experts that we work with daily, weekly, monthly, that that talk about compassion and sympathy and empathy and help us rein in our emotions. Then we bring other people that talk about physical security and explain what the art of the possible is. And then we bring in subject matter experts that talk about how you create your own program so it's unique to you and addresses your challenges, Brian. And all the time, you and I are given classes sporadically through that day, "Sporadicus" (mispronunciation of "Spartacus" or "sporadic"), I saw that movie, and and all the way through that. So the parents and the teachers and the students are educating themselves. And we say, "Okay, Brian, we're putting on that seminar. It's going to be a week-long, Monday through Friday, and it's going to be long days because we have to make sure that we, you know, mix it up so everybody avails the sums of all these experts that we're going to bring in." And you know what we get? We never get a thing about the money, we get a thing about the time. "We don't have the time. We don't have the time. We don't have." Well, you're going to take school time off for funerals, Brian. And so I hate to be that blunt, but I'm sick and tired of talking to your people and your people go, "Well, I understand all of that, but, you know, we're just not going to be able to invest the time." Yeah, so don't call us if you're not willing to invest the time. And and is it going to be expensive? Look, you paid for our time. We know what we're doing. We're going to come in, we're going to be efficient, we're not going to waste your time. But there's training that's out there. Look, if you want nothing but that bad-bang training, Brian and I are not saying there's something wrong with you. Yeah, we're going to go on.

Go on. Yeah. Just go on LinkedIn and find the person who's sharing Uvalde shooting, promoting their own [expletive] business and going over and over and over. That's going to hire them. You know, they're not talking about the issue. They're just saying, "Yeah, yeah."

And you know what? I, I sent you a couple of those photos, Brian, where they're showing the photo and they're going, "This could be you. So buy my book. This could be you. Tune into our thing." Hey, kiss my ass! You're monitoring this is free. You got it? And we're not going to stir the pot like that. And if you want us to come to your school and do an approach like we're talking about, is it going to cost you some money? Yeah, but it's not going to cost as much as you spent on your football team last year or any of the other things. And you know the difference, Brian, you're going to see a tangible result. Why? Because we use that tagline over and over, but "training changes behavior." It changes how you think. And if we can improve your critical thinking during an event, imagine how powerful it would be if we could improve your critical thinking before an event happened. Brian, that's when you're going to be closing and latching doors. That's when you're going to be changing the nine-volt battery in your smoke alarm. That's when you're going to be checking your engine oil before the [expletive] warning light comes on. And that's what we're talking about, predictive analysis, Brian. Those preventative steps before an event occur that can save a life.

Well, I think that's a good place to end on. Um, you know, just sorry we're so passionate talking about what we do here at the end for the last couple of minutes. Um, you know, but at least, you know, for, for us, we, we spent an hour and a half or two hours talking about the topic first and then two minutes about how we address it. So I, I see, see the exact opposite out of most companies and people out there. But whatever, teach to each his own or her own or their own or whatever.

Shelly would say, "Karma's a [expletive]."

It is. It definitely is. Um, well, we appreciate everyone for listening. Um, you can always reach out to us at TheHumanBehaviorPodcast@gmail.com if you want to get a hold of us. We have more on the Patreon side as well for those folks who support, help support the podcast where we even dive deep on some of these concepts or give examples or little tutorials. Um, you know, hopefully, maybe it serves some conversation. Share it with a friend if you enjoyed it. Write us and tell us how much we sucked or, or how much you agreed with it. I read and respond to every email that someone sends. So thanks everyone for tuning in, and don't forget that training changes behavior.