L.O.G. 105 Downtown The Nashville Bombing

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

No, no, no, we should be... We're on Facebook Live, folks. All right, we're on Facebook Live right now. Yes, we are. Is my lighting good enough?

Facebook Live? Yeah, it should be turned down a little bit, Mike. Anybody that's seen you in person...

Oh, that's, you have the face for radio.

That's one.

I do have a face for radio. Okay, so we will go ahead. Oh, the voice for radio. So we'll go ahead and get started for today with today's episode. For those listening, we are going on Facebook Live again. I'll have the link in the episode details. You can go ahead and follow me on there so when we go live, you can chime in if you'd like to.

But today, we're going to be talking about obviously the recent bombing in Nashville on Christmas morning. Joining us is our good friend Mike Syracuse. So Mikey, thank you so much for hopping on with us today.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, so I'm going to go ahead and jump in, and the way we're going to do this today is I'll kind of give a few details about the bombing just so everyone's on the same page. And then we'll kind of jump into the although who, what, when, where, why, the intent, all this stuff. And Greg and I will talk about how we always do about these different cases from the human behavior perspective. And then the reason why we brought Mike on, because Mike, you have this huge background in intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR) collection, aggregation of data and information. So you're bringing in that background and the overall strategic implication.

So I'm just going to go ahead and jump right in for all our listeners. Basically, I'm sure most people listening to this have heard, but if not, it was early Christmas morning. A guy by the name of Anthony Quinn Warner parked his RV that was packed with explosives in front of the AT&T transmission building in downtown Nashville. Before the explosion, the RV, which was parked there for several hours, started to broadcast a computerized female voice repeatedly warning that a bomb would explode in 15 minutes and directing people to evacuate. The RV actually also broadcast Petula Clark's 1964 hit by the name of "Downtown."

So the bombing did significant damage to businesses surrounding the area, but the only fatality was the bomber by the name of Anthony Quinn Warner. At the time of this recording, which is what is it, Wednesday today, the 30th, he was the only person believed to be involved in the bombing. So immediate effects of that: communications were impacted throughout the area, widespread cell phone service outages. The disruption brought communication to the region all over, multi-state area affected 911 call centers, hospitals, air—the airport was kind of shut down for a little while or affected, I guess, a lot of flights delayed in amount. So big loss of communication in the area.

So, this was kind of the basics of the attack in terms of what physically took place. So I think I want to start there just so everyone's on the same page. And again, remember, this is all we know of now at the time of recording this. Nothing else has come out. So I want to go to you, Greg, first to kind of get the first comments and hear about this case.

So I'm not going to make a lot of friends today, Brian, but welcome everybody. It's good hearing from you. No, I don't think I do. We love Nashville, I want to start there, and Nashville is resilient, and Nashville is going to bounce back from this. We're four buildings away just a few months ago from where the blast occurred when we were there teaching and training. And now, here we got Tony Warner, and Tony Warner committed suicide. Let's not lose sight and over-attribute a bunch of value to a guy that chose this means of suicide and chose to do it in front of AT&T because he was, among other things, one of the 5G conspiracy theorists and many other things.

Now, that's part one, Brian. Part two, part two is what really pisses me off is that journalism is broken. So what we had to do is endure everybody that ever met Tony Warner at any time in his life, and hear them build this story of Tony Warner, who was just a guy. He was an alarm guy. Why? They built alarms because he liked the access. He liked being behind the velvet ropes. He was done, and when he decided he was done, Brian, for the love of God, a year ago his girlfriend called the cops and said, "Hey, he's building bombs in that RV!" And nobody did anything. So in addition to talking about journalism being broken because it drives us in the wrong directions, and vilifies coppers, and emblazons zeros, I think intelligence is broken, and I think tactical intelligence is fractured.

Okay, well, and I would say if you're just saying that the journalism is broken, I get that complaint. But I would just say I would make it a little bit more broad and say these are narratives, right? So narratives come out that we all buy into. But meaning, we all do it as human beings, regardless if we're reading a newspaper, or we do it when you view another person. So these narratives come out about these events, people, places, whatever, and then we kind of just assume that, hey, that's what we've heard before in the past. This is why we do these kind of breakdowns of the case study, Greg. So you brought up a number of issues of, hey, here's what specifically happened.

And then now I'm going to go ahead and throw it right back to you, Greg, real quick, because what's the number one thing that everyone reports is though I brought some great reporting even initially on in terms of specifically what happened, meaning there was footage of it, there was, hey, this is what occurred of the actual events that occurred. Hey, this is what it was. But then what does everything say? Police are still searching for the motive, which, well, I'll tell you in this one, the motive was he wanted to die, which he achieved. He achieved it. But this is important. We talked about this on a number of podcasts. In fact, just last week we talked about intent specifically versus motive. But that's where these narratives come from. It's our wanting to understand and a reporter wanting to explain, and us needing to justify it in our head going, "Oh, okay, this is why." We all want to know why. Everyone wants to know, "Well, why would he do this? Why would he do this?" And us, for what we do, and even Mike would probably agree with it too, that's kind of not really as important in terms of a threat perspective and understanding it and preventing the next, of course, preventing the next one from occurring. That's not as important as what actually took place. Does that kind of make sense, Greg, what you're getting at here?

Yeah, exactly. And my thing is, let's not make a rigid box on this guy because the news media would tend to lead us down rabbit holes that have nothing to do with demonstrating the intent and fixing the problem. For example, saying that his last arrest was 1978. Who gives a [ __ ]? I mean, that has nothing to do with it. Saying authorities never had this guy on the radar, and then having four articles simultaneously come out saying he was on the radar for a year, but nobody did. So what does matter then? Intent matters. Their words and their statements, that means a substantial step was taken towards doing something. He gave away all his things. That's a suicide thing. He lied about retirement and cancer. Those are suicide aspects that if you were doing that, Brian, I would be calling somebody and I would try to get an involuntary commitment because I think you're in danger. So, in other words, all of this ramp-up, all of this lead-up to what was about to happen clearly stated, "Hey, I'm in trouble. I'm a broken human that's going to act out in some manner." Okay? And nobody did anything.

So, well, that's, let's stick with that for a minute right now, Greg, because those are the comments that have already come out in these reports. I mean, even immediately afterwards, right? Normally, this stuff even takes sometimes longer for us to find out after the fact that, oh, he's been displaying this. But, you know, some of the things he did, he signed over his house and some other personal belongings to someone for nothing, for no cost. He told his neighbor just a few days before—I think his neighbors reported, I'm getting a couple different quotes, but the general is he said, "Hey, Tony, you know, is Santa going to bring you something for Christmas?" He said, "Yeah, I'm going to be famous. I'm going to be so famous in Nashville, in the world. They'll never forget. Never forget me." Exactly.

Okay, so these, again, people just shrug this stuff off coupled with the fact they said, "Oh, we knew he was a hermit. He was always like this." The RV was there for a while. He was always in his backyard or parked in his driveway. And then it just wasn't there for a few days right before this Toronto holiday.

Yeah. Full moon, for the love of God. What more cues did somebody need?

Well, yeah, exactly. And then so same thing you brought up. Same thing he told the woman that he signed his house over to is, "Yeah, I don't, I think he told her that he had cancer." He told everyone else he's retiring, all this stuff. So these are the obviously pre-event indicators that we always look at: the behavior, the showing, the demonstrating intent. Like you just said, if I start taking all my valuables and giving them away to you and my friends go, "Hey, I don't need that anymore," that's a massive indicator for suicide, right? We've seen that from suicide bombers in the Middle East, we've seen that from suicide bombers here in the U.S. We've seen it from people who just committed suicide, not intending to harm or do any damage anywhere else. So these are the major indicators obviously that we look at and that come out. And then even down to the point of where we're talking, "left of bang," when it occurred, the police officers at the scene—and I don't want to come across like I'm bashing them—this is what happens to all humans, right? Is that they, "Oh, that's odd. There's an RV parked there for a few hours," or "We didn't even notice it when we pulled up." You know what I mean? On a completely dead street Christmas morning, when you know what's the baseline for that area and you see this stuff. But I want to, before we go too far, Greg, I do want to kind of toss to Mike to get you to come in with kind of some of your perspective on this and the overall strategic implications.

Well, gentlemen, I was only a P3 guy (a reference to a high-level strategic perspective), so I can only go to about 30,000 feet. So that's what I'll do. As far as the media, it's right behind you, confirmation bias, right? Like people are constantly looking to confirm what they think they know, to feel safe. That's the way it is. So let's go there, safety. And then I'll just jump to my big issue with this whole thing is how does an RV sit in front of critical infrastructure for five hours literally unnoticed, right? To me, that's a huge concern.

So up to 30,000 feet, we've taken a look at this country and said, "Hey, here's all the critical infrastructure that really matters." And you would think that's a lot. Well, the whole of the United States is a lot, the critical infrastructure isn't that much. So you model that, you look at it, you say, "This is important." And then when things happen around that, because up to the highest level of intelligence, we're interested in three things, right? Location, identity, and activity. Well, the location we know, and then we kind of prioritize that. So in a perfect world, let's just take this one step worse: it's three guys that are together, and they want their planets to take down the whole internet. Could they do that with three vehicles? No. Could they come close? It would be interesting. So the system, in my point, is that here you've got this critical infrastructure that is literally a multi-billion dollar asset, and a clear threat signal sits in front of it for five hours. My question is, why isn't that system working?

So we can say that tactical intelligence is broken, maybe, maybe not. It may be misfocused, any number of things. But that strategic, operational, tactical meld that has to happen. So if you have five hours, you know when you find this van or this thing sitting there within a minute of it being there, now you have four hours to talk to the neighbors. And if you have to wake up all of his neighbors to get answers at 3:30 in the morning, you do it. If you want to be serious about protecting against threats, specifically domestic ones, and pairs or quads, then we need to get serious about refusing the intelligence in this country. Back to Greg's point.

Well, yeah, and Mike, I think it feeds into it. I'll let you guys tell me what you think. But part of this is what you talk about, like, all right, critical infrastructure, and this is now the discussion, because, well, excuse me, this isn't the discussion that it should be, because even some of the folks that said, I just want to pull it up real quick, because one of the guys, I think he's a tech professor of some sort at like Vanderbilt, said like, "Hey, you have no idea how big this was. The bombing, the damage of the AT&T office was a single point of failure." And this guy, Doug Schmidt, he's a Vanderbilt Professor of Computer Science, said, "That's the Achilles' heel, the weak link, when one thing goes wrong and everything comes crashing down."

So here's the thing, but because we're human beings and in the society that we have now, we're obsessed with what we're obsessed with ourselves, which means we're obsessed with other people, which we then that becomes the story. So now this guy, Tony Warner, is the story, and we all want to understand why. And the story should be like, "Look, this isn't hard." I mean, Mike, you just said it. Yeah, the whole of the United States is huge, but critical infrastructure, well, it really is not huge. It's a finite set, and that's to our advantage. And then back to Greg's point, it has to be prioritized literally by day, precisely, you know, because Christmas. Because on Christmas morning in this political environment, with the QAnon and all these conspiracy theories, I'm going to tell you this from my experience and what we should be just seeing at an unclassified level, that building is like number at the top on Christmas morning.

Yeah, I'll use one example, if I may, real quick. I just want to fall back to the French, the one that happened in France that involved the concert and the soccer game. And a little thing that went unnoticed was the name of the band, and it was The Eagles of Death Metal. And that was purposeful. They chose The Eagles of Death Metal for a very specific reason. So with this logic, you say, "Hey, that band venue on that night is a very high priority," and it's the same thing here. We look at all of our infrastructure, you have to prioritize it. I hate to fall back on it, but you have to keep it in context. And you know, I've been advocating for a while now that we're on the verge of a new suicide outbreak in this country. I think we're going to see a lot of people that invested their ilk in something that's now gone, being very unhappy. And if we look at the overall picture of this pattern, this, you know, spree shooter, this guy's as close to the Vegas shooter on the opposite end of the spectrum as you can get. You know what I mean? His interest wasn't killing a lot of people. So he was like the Weather Underground meets, I don't know, because The Weather Underground used to do that: go to critical infrastructure, blow it up, tell everybody about it.

I guess the IRA. So did the IRA.

Yeah.

So as I said, yeah, here's the reason tactical intelligence is broken, Michael, and I love that you picked up on it, but I want to make sure that it's laser-focused, my argument. Okay, so Christmas Day bombing by one actor with a vehicle that he built over a year ago, and, you know, you can find that in Poor Man's James Bond. Everybody out there that knows how to do that stuff, don't do it because, you know, your message is muddied whenever you injure anybody else. But what it did effectively is stop communications from Georgia to Kentucky, affected 911 call centers, shut down communication for hospitals and air in and around Nashville Airport. Okay, so somebody is going to make a link and say, you know, "He intended to do that." This, and it doesn't matter what his intent was. What matters is tactical intelligence is broken because at the tactical level, the boots on the ground are there to stop this exact type of attack. If you had this vehicle parked outside of the Hesco barrier (collapsible wire mesh container filled with sand or earth, used for military fortifications) outside of your cafeteria for four hours, do you think somebody would have done something about it? Yes. So the military is trained to see that and say, "Hey, there's an anomaly in the baseline, we have to investigate it." But police have lost their eye on the prize because they're being belittled and berated for everything else, and there's less money and less training dollars that are out there.

So this article comes up and says, just a couple of days ago, "Hey, around Christmas in broad daylight, the car break-ins and Gunnison are up." Okay, Stevie Wonder called to tell you that one. It's Christmas. Okay, so on a criticality scale, and on availability scale, and the access scale, that's important. And guess what? People need money around Christmas, and people do boneheaded things and leave their cars running and leave the gift on the front seat. How many times have you been in a Walmart that doesn't have a camera? How is it that all of those cameras in Walmart and all of those coppers work in the street missed a person walking around and gaining entrance to a vehicle the same way? It's not apathy, it's lack of training and lack of prioritization. You can't have context without relevance. You can't have relevance without context. And on duty roll call, somebody would have said, "Hey, it's Christmas, start driving through the parking lots. You guys at Walmart, if you see somebody lingering by a sled for a while, do me a favor, call 911." None of that happened. That's what I'm talking about. You can't have operational and strategic level priorities if the people on the ground, the boots on the ground, don't understand the mission, and that's what happened here.

I completely agree with you. But, and it's the same issue, it's just a different layer of the onion. I can tell you that it's unclassified. I mean, this infrastructure has been prioritized. Like, I can say that for a fact. I can say this specific building has been prioritized, right? And sometimes at the tactical level, we just need wake-ups. We need cues. We need intelligence to come down or signals to come down to say, "Hey," otherwise we get complacent. Otherwise, because I guarantee if there would have been a flag on that RV that didn't represent USA, USA, it would have got attention.

But my point is, if you get a signal that says, "Hey," and it should kind of be that, you know, critical infrastructure on every day should be part of any forces regular habit, just by design. I mean, ever since 9/11. So we've gotten lazy about 9/11. But the truth is that we're more prone now than we've ever been over the last 10 years due to these types of efforts by these types of people. So again, you know, this guy's the Unabomber. He doesn't want to kill anybody, but he wants to disrupt life, so he has something to say. You know, if you look back on his profile, and we can talk about profiles and everything else, but I again, go fall back to a higher level. We look at the whole country and we say, "Are we right now as resilient to this type of, whether it be domestic or foreign, as we were 10 years ago?" And I'm here to say, unequivocally, we're not. Absolutely, we're not. We're not in the area of wildfire. We're not in the area of wildfire. We're not in the area, obviously, with prone diseases. Yeah, and it quite, it looks now like we're not.

I mean, New York City spends, I don't know how many billions of dollars to create their own intelligence network. Right now, I would hope that they're, you know, taking the basic things again, back to the French example, those things matter. Because you can't protect everything, but you have to get inside of these guys. So you get inside of this guy's head the same way you would get inside of a spree shooter's head to a degree. He had something to say. Ideologically, I don't think he was left or right or anything. I don't think it really mattered.

No, that's right. And I agree, but he had a—he had a recognizable psychological disorder that is still part of that same milk. I'm sorry, and I'll say it, that that lack of reasoning cult that exists that says that, hey, these things don't matter. Well, in good common sense for United States of America to go forward so we keep enjoying the things that we enjoy from a strategic and operational and tactical perspective, one at a time, we have to look at it and say, "Hey, this system should be capable." And I understand the privacy. We'll just set that aside and say you upgrade up front with that. But this system has to be capable of saying, "Hey, four pieces of critical infrastructure on Valentine's Day all have the same type of vehicle parked out in front of them." You can do that with AI, machine learning, and connections that enhance the tactical. Because I would argue that the problem with the tacticals is the same thing it's always been: huge seams that exist even after we've spent billions and billions and billions of dollars. I guarantee that every force in the country is still getting anti-terrorism money. We'll take a little bit of that. And again, I'm not indicting the Nashville PD either, not at all. What I am advocating is a good quality after-action review that says, "Why did this vehicle sit in front of critical infrastructure for five hours?" That's five hours of intelligence, real quick. That's five hours of intelligence that could have been used pretty wisely.

Yeah, look at the Mobius Loop. Every AAR (After-Action Review) is the beginning sentence of your mission statement for the next mission. That's what's missing. What's missing is we're not learning from the example. So Marren and I, a couple of years back, Marren, Shelly and I were doing research on Somalia because we had a project that was going there, and one of the things that we found out is that the large-scale attacks were always occurring on the days where the Muslim population, specifically those who practice Islam, were at mosque. And the reason was that they wanted to make sure that the attacks on the people that were at the bars and the nightclubs and everything else didn't include Muslims. Okay, that came loud and clear after like the third investigation we did. And so we didn't need a computer, and so we called some people. They go, "Wow, that's an interesting statistic." And the next time we were at a counterterrorism symposium, let's call it, they brought that up and they said, "Look at this detail. Listen, coppers on the street, if you're a police officer listening to my voice, and I worked 27 Christmases without getting off, I worked 27 New Year's. We loved working the holidays because we knew that you'd be safe in your home while we were out there beating the streets in Chicago, in Detroit, and L.A."

Nashville coppers are great coppers, but maybe nobody told them that this AT&T, which is just a place where you send your cable bill, this is critical infrastructure. Maybe the communications network is not on an even kilter where they understand the operational goals of that region and the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Energy. You get what I'm saying, Mike? And so they're like, "I have a strategic blog."

I'd say that that's probably almost factual, that again, the seams that should be seamless are again, blocked. Yes, for a host of reasons. It's like every, you know, if you look at an accident, it's the same thing. There are four or five major causal factors that this thing happened. You know, all it took was one cop just saying, "You know what, I'm bored. I'm going to go just do a little thing that was talked about at this exercise we did a year ago," where he said, "We should do routine scans if we get a feeling about something." You know, that stuff's trained. The question is, you know, the one thing that took me and, again, just as an aviator, I just look at the film and say, "Hey, right? You know, you block and tackle to do it." Right? There was kind of a feeling, I thought, that it wasn't going to happen. The one cop, the way he was walking and the way he was looking, it was kind of like he was maintaining a boundary. And he was lucky because if it would have been another minute earlier, he kind of casually walked away. If you'd have been standing where he was standing a minute earlier, you would have, you know, got a pretty good concussion feeling.

And might have know that. And that speaks to understanding the threat and not listening to our own kind of intuition, I guess, and a number of issues. Mike, like we're so hyper-focused on external threats, and we're just, we're past that. Like, I mean, we're, there's never going to... We're so large, I mean, you look at how civilizations form, right? From families, of tribes, and then cities, and then city-states, and then once you reach that certain point, and it's only a couple hundred people, you've got to worry about the insider threats, right? You have to worry about what's going on inside the castle walls, you know what I mean? And we're at that point in the U.S. that we have been for a long time. That's always been a bigger threat. Not always, but meaning it is now, and it has been for quite the last 12-15 years, I would say, even. I mean, people, people, they say 12 years at least. Well, I mean, 2007. But my point is, we're always looking up and out. We don't, we don't think about those inside.

And then, even like you just said, brought up—and this isn't to bash on those guys walking the street when they watch the body cam footage and they're going, "Man, this is creepy. That's weird. This is like out of a movie." I'm like, "What are you doing next to that RV? Like you're, it's right there. What do you, if it's broadcasting, get away from it!" That's the whole thing. You're a bomb until proven innocent, right, in that situation? Like, you don't sit there and, but they just never, like you just said, "Well, that'll never happen here. My kid would never shoot up the school. Those attacks might happen here. That's always somewhere else." And it's like, no. And just understanding some, all you talked about was basic stuff. Hey, that's a critical building, so when you're near this building, it's more important than those buildings over there. So things that happen around here are more important. Just like we would at school. Like you said, like a school, if I go walking around, I just stand outside of school and I stare at it for a little while, eventually a cop's going to show up because someone's going to see me, like, "Hey, dude, what are you doing here? Like you have no business here," right? It's the same thing there. But if I did that three blocks down at a shopping center, well, that's just normal activity. It's just all about that context.

Well, again, I'm just, I'm a little, I'm a little concerned from the technological and the melding perspective, because Greg's point is so well made. The question becomes, we'll fall back a little bit: what about an information awareness service to cops that says, "Hey, some of your protocol here, and if you don't know it, it's important that you do know it, and here's why." Because we're also getting a report, you know, through this service, that says a similar RV was spotted on a camera in Detroit, and a similar RV in the same morning, and they're all headed towards critical infrastructure, and we're four hours out. But now you have an ability, and again, I understand the privacy issue, right? But there are ways with that too. If you look at it from a perspective that we're interested in location, identity, and activity. So my question is, why wasn't there just a simple license plate reader outside of this building that was in real time capturing these things? Or a time was a simple time. These are simple transactions that happen over the internet, right? So the question becomes, is that building or are critical infrastructure not censored enough? You know, isn't there not a camera that says, "Hey, there's an RV sitting in front of me," that's a pretty simple one, right? That triggers some type of AI machine learning that does. What happens in information awareness service to the Nashville PD that says, "Hey, you know, from a strategic perspective and an operational perspective, we think that you have just gone on this Christmas morning from green to yellow." That's all. You know what? Why aren't departments on a national scale, you know, a green or yellow or red? And I understand what happened after 9/11. I'm not talking about it being widely publicized, I'm talking about good operational heuristics between the operation and tactical communicating through the strategic level now. Because now you have a guy who's, you know, 55, whatever, or 63, whatever his age was, he's representing millions of men that feel just as disgruntled, and he will find some heroes among those guys. We'll find some people that admire what he did. But my problem is that the system should be smarter than it is.

I totally agree, Brian, if I could illustrate a point that Mike is making here. Okay, so first of all, Brian, I think the cops were heroes. The cops didn't know what was going on, right? They might not have been trained in this specific type of protocol, but they did save lives by getting people out of the area. Okay, so we got to applaud them, and nobody else, no common citizen was going to show up on Christmas to do that, certainly not an AT&T employee. But what happened soon after that is all the money that we spent goes on lateral communications. So every agency that was near Nashville knew about what was going on quickly. And not far away, they had a white van, a white box van that was broadcasting similar signals, and the coppers stopped that guy and hooked him up for a series of felonies. And now you've got this copycat thing that's going because people still have scanners and information.

Yet in Aspen, across the country, there were three separate Black Hills Energy gas line sites attacked by a crew that's been known to do domestic terrorism. And guess what? The Pitkin County Sheriff that's out in Aspen, Colorado, not far from where I'm at right now, broadcasting from Rogue Man or West, and they missed it. And it was within 24 hours of this bomb going off in front of AT&T. What happens is the message is mixed up. We keep looking for this bald-headed Superman with the white cat and all of these different things coming together to coalesce to create danger, rather than looking at the simple thing that absent AT&T and absent this bomb being parked in front of it, this would have been avoided. So simply, the elevation of situational awareness in this incident would have created a mitigation.

That's kind of what I was going to comment about what Mike was talking about: some complex attack that can be seen at a national level. Like that, that's, that's great and that would be amazing. But either any one of those could have been avoided, meaning if there was some complex that, hey, now we've got an RV here in this city, in this city, in that city, holy crap, it's a big one. But we can, either one of those could have been seen, just like you're talking about, that someone mildly curious with their environment who went, "Hey, let's make sure we check this area." I mean, Greg, we were, I don't want to say where and when, but not long ago, just I'm literally driving in from our hotel to a training course and what did we see as we drove past that courthouse was, you know, a vehicle parked there with a bunch of gas cans. And all we had to do was go, you know, besides wipe our pants clean, just do a lap around and go, "Okay, what's going on? Okay, here's the guy working the string trimmer, there's a guy with a..." Okay, that's all. But it took what, 30 seconds. And that's what we're talking about is attributing value to those observations that we pass up, and especially if that's your job. But really, anyone can do that, just identifying, because it's very hard when we think, "Oh my God, everything could potentially be a threat." Everyone's trying to get us, whether that's an attack of some sort, political, religious, whatever the ideology is. Everyone's constantly hyper, at least. But you're not doing anything when you look at the world that way. There's only so many ways someone can come in and kill you. There's only so many places to attack with any sort of significance, so put your money there, Brian.

Yeah, and that's what it is, it's that prioritizing. But we don't do that personally. And now what do we want to do? How many documentaries and news reports are going to come out about this guy and his whole life and everything that happened to him? And you're growing, you're putting way too much time and effort into looking at people and him and not extracting the lessons learned, right? What are the lessons learned here? That's what we need going forward. And learning those lessons at a tactical, operational, and strategic level. Because that's what it is. I don't give a crap about this guy or what he believed in because he was an idiot anyway. Like, if you think that I'm going to blow this building up, like, you've already, you're so far outside of any rational thought that you don't, I don't want you in my society. Okay? So I don't care what that thought is, whether you're on the left, right, center, whatever the crap is, dude. You, you are so far out. But what happens is now because this happens, and then you get, you get copycats that come in, right? Like you're talking about. Now it starts to normalize that behavior. Now that person who has that similar thoughts goes, "Oh, yeah, you know what? Hey, that's a good idea. I'm going to load my RV up with a bunch of bombs now." And that's the, that's the issue.

Let me ask one question, Brian. Wait, Mike, one second, Brian, let me ask you a question. I think, and I want to see if you think the same way. I think more time is going to be spent by the Feds trying to explain away why nobody executed a search for a year ago when his old lady was sitting on the porch saying, "I want to turn in his guns because I think he's violent. I think there's bombs." And they said, "Well, we can't go in the yard. Can't look in it." Listen, there's a whole bunch of things that search warrants allow people to do specifically based on fact. And why did she go to psychological counseling when she was trying to turn him in? So I'm telling you that they'll spend a million dollars trying to put a positive spin on what the Feds missed instead of saying, "You know what, we screwed up, let's fix it before we move out smartly." And Mike said that these type of incidents are necessary so we go, "Wow, we need to focus more on the infrastructure." But if we play that, we're going to lose a cop, we're going to lose a civilian, we're going to lose a bit of infrastructure every time we have to relearn these life skills. I'm just saying I think they're going to spend a lot of time trying to say, "Oh, there was no, there were no pre-event indications," when there were a ton of pre-event indications, just like many of the cases we've covered.

Well, yeah, I agree. We should come to a degree. But this, I'm going to argue that he was a very rational person. He was, he was warped. His deductive reasoning took him to the only place that he thought that he could. We did some, my son and I wrote a script about a survivor of spree shooters. So we did a deep dive. This was right after Gabby Giffords got shot. But just a deep dive into spree shooters and it became really clear to us that it's a game, you know, yes, to a certain degree. And this guy wanted to be different, right? Because in order to defeat—not to defeat—in order to contain the complexity that's capable of these types of binds, especially if they're collective and in very small groups, we better be concerned. That's all I have to say. I mean, this guy did a multi—I mean, it was a terrorist because terrorism is easily defined. Terrorism is not so much about the event as it is about the reaction of the event. Yes, that has been true terrorism ever since the beginning.

Yep. You know, I've got to go on record saying that Tony Warner was a bully and a coward. He may have rationally thought out his suicide. He may have been a Petula Clark fan. He was probably wearing his favorite belt buckling hat and had a drink before he blew himself up. But he was a bully and he was a coward, and he wanted to stay in his way. Anytime that you have that dangerous combination, bells and whistles need to be going off, and computers aren't there yet.

Well, don't start a question of whether computers are there or not. I mean, my interest in this is to look at what happened. What were the causal factors that allowed, and again, I'm going to get very specific, that it allowed a white RV to sit in front of critical infrastructure for five hours with no one taking any—I mean, I'm even indicting the strategic level here. I'm going to indict AT&T a little bit here. AT&T, it's like, "Hey, man, you got a white RV that sits in front of one of your most critical pieces of infrastructure and nothing?" Okay, maybe you should hire us to tell you what you should do because, exactly. No, I'm being dead serious now. Because you're not that serious. But remember that Christmas morning a couple of times with them. It's Christmas morning, AT&T, and you had an RV sitting in front of your building for five hours. I know guys that could set up systems for a hundred thousand dollars to keep you safe from that, that would send people, you know what I mean? It's not a hard tactical fix. But from a, but again, I'll get back to your point, all the things that you said about him being a coward and a bully, yeah, but in from my view as a hunter, because that's what I am, I'm going to hunt these dudes. So I'm going to go back to the core elements of the way I grew up because a lot of it stemmed from that betrayal that a lot of these people felt from their institutions, whether it was the church or whether it was all of that stuff. So now they don't trust anything, so they're easily back to your confirmation bias there. You know, whether it was Timothy McVeigh who grew up three, literally, to walk by the guy's house. You know that mindset.

You know, Greg and Brian, for sure, you've got to crawl inside of it and say, "Okay, we've got a huge country here, and quite realistically, three dumbass bully cowards that are bright enough could cause a huge problem." Look what one guy did on Christmas morning.

So my interest again is to understand the swamp that these guys come out of, and gals, and what encourages it, you know? So the four or five major causal factors, but the primary fault line here, and it's not fault to point fingers at the Feds, because it's collective. AT&T is responsible, the PD is responsible, you know, the strategic level. Because I can guarantee you that somewhere in the United States government, there's a priority list that has that building really high that morning, as it should be. But if there's no mechanism, information exchange that happens between these institutions that allow, that empower that kid to say, "Hey, you know, like, I'm on the scene now at 6:30 in the morning." I'm talking about the safety of that kid's walking there now. He's standing there with a full protective gear on because he knows after four hours of intel gathering, because they woke up all those guys' neighbors and said, "This guy's a threat, this is real."

Yeah, I would add to that that all of the surveillance cameras in the world aren't going to help because they're not geared toward predictive analysis. The failure again, there is training. You say you're a hunter. I've hunted people my entire life. I've put more felons behind bars, and that's all predictive analysis and going out and finding bad guys or killing bad guys or stopping bad guys should be everybody's mission, Mike. And that city, Nashville, is no different than any other big city where people should be trained not to just be able to go back and rewind the tape and find the cause. Okay, that's wonderful. Oh, hey, now we know and it'll never happen again. But I think that's a bunch of horse crap. I think we should be able to use it to mitigate these crimes in the future. Absolutely.

And so let's fall back just a little bit, if I may, Brian, or I'll give it back to you. But I don't know, it's always hardware, software, and wetware. And the long pole in the tent, this goes back to our other table talks and our other things that we've talked about. It's about creating information that is tactically executable. I mean, that's the goal. But we, we have a system here and it's not just about computers, it's about the computers. You said about predictive analytics, but again, let's go back to our own dog food. Predictive analytics doesn't live alone in this space. If I were to say what's an information awareness service that allows, you know, local police forces to have only the information on that morning that's been vetted and pure and it really matters, right? That starts out as a minimum viable product as just a descriptive, you know, it says, "Here is the, here's the lay of the land." And then, then we go again, we go to a diagnostic, and then we go to a predictive, and then we go to a prescriptive. But again, machines don't operate in themselves. I have cameras there and I have bugs there in front of these buildings to send a signal to a cop to confirm it, just like I would a submarine. That's a huge ellipse now. I need the tactical eyes with the proper training, proper queuing. Because to me, I look at to say they just weren't informed. "It's not going to happen here," right? You said it earlier.

But no, and these are good points when we talk about, you know, like you said, an information awareness service or predictive analysis, or, or, you know, being that "left of bang" and stopping something before it happens. And there's technological, so like you said, there's hardware, software. So that means there's, there's. I say we get left of... Let's get left of predictive analytics here because that's really...

Right. I'm not talking about predictive analytics. I'm talking about creating better situational awareness through a descriptive and a diagnostic against it, and predictive yet.

And these things all come down to people, though. And I think a lot of times, you know, our ideologies, or, or attitudes, or personality stuff get in the way of all this stuff. Because you could have the best, you know, information awareness service in the world, and, you know, you've got someone that says, "Now we're going to go with this for RPD," because, "You know what, that stuff's junk." You know what I mean? Like, there's always, there's someone at the end of this. And it's the same thing with the guys on the street that day, the guys and girls, the police officers that were there and going, "Hmm, you know, hey, this is odd. This is weird." They're out there doing their job, but even them, like, you could tell it never clicked in their head until, until it actually happened. And that's not, I'm not bashing on them, but that happens all the time in a lot of these. But what, what, well, you know, it's the same thing without a ship, right? I mean, there's a reason...

But the thing is, is that I would say it's a verification, validation, accreditation problem with information. Again, if these guys are getting to say, "Hey, this is no kidding, this is a real deal," because it was obvious to me that they didn't, they were like, "It was another event."

Yeah, but then that's what I'm saying. What makes it any different? That's what I'm saying. Don't have any context right there. So they're their own, almost their own, you know, personal information awareness system of how they process this an event and add context to something like that. That right there wasn't even working, and not their fault. It's not a blame, it's just literally like they weren't even trained in that.

But so... Well, I don't know if it's so much trained isn't much as it's, "Look what we've gone through in the last five years." I can't speak, I cannot speak to, I can only speak to a couple of specific police departments. I can't speak to Nashville's culture or anything like that. But let's just say that if you, I'll just say this: when in the Navy, if you had a divided nation, chances are you're going to have a divided ship. Right?

No, that's, yeah.

And you've got the same problem in police forces and fire forces, like everywhere. If you've got a divided nation and divided leadership, you're going to have divided forces. When you have divided forces, but not if you have that seem. That's my only point. I guess what you're saying as a red teamer, all I want to do is crawl inside of these guys' heads and say, "What am I going to attack, and why am I going to attack it?"

But you also know that really good leadership can overcome stuff like that, meaning, and I, I think that this gets into, that's the big problem. Well, that, but this gets into a number of different areas. And my thing goes back to because, you know, Greg and I do this human behavior, and that obviously gets us into a lot of areas because everything is touched or influenced by a human can be profiled, right? But this, this is still, when it gets into different ideological differences kind of get in the way. I mean, you look at even how all of this stuff is reported, it's all narrative. It's, "Here's the narrative." It's the same thing again. So, so in six months, when I sit down and turn on Netflix, I'm going to see the documentary on this guy who blew it up, and they're going to interview the whatever FBI agent, and they're going to interview his second grade teacher. And it's the same damn story every single time. And it's, and so we get so obsessed with that and these people and what happened versus what we're trying to do. And that's why I want people to focus, and we have a small platform, but to go just look at the actual event. Take all that, take all of that out, and look at the event. What happened, and how you could have prevented this. Just a person walking down the street and going, "Hey, that's, that's odd over there. What, what, what right in front of the AT&T building? Oh, man!" Like, and I think that's more important because what happens is when we start going into drifting the area of, and everyone does this, look at the pundits on every cable news channel as an expert and whatever, whether you're an expert in terrorism, you're an expert in psychology. They break it, there's so much. So what's that pure signal that we need to vector in?

So you say that because I look at it and I say, I ask two questions at this stage, right? I, I say, "What's the emphasis? What infrastructure right now is it really at risk given the predominant domestic threat?" You know, that's first. And then second, "What clear signatures," and this, so we can learn about this, "what clear signatures were most likely missed and who should lead this change?" I mean, okay, it's funny, if you look at the, if you look at the maps, and I can't say it for sure, but it looked like, you know, the big cement blocks, things that we would make in front of buildings that everybody had. So you go to the commissary now, you can't, yeah, parking for the commissary, you have to walk away. Okay, you know, we spent all of that money, and that's a lot of money. And again, you know, this last week, and I'm sure that there were millions, if not billions of dollars spent still in post-terrorism money for police forces and other things. And I just said, if we've got all of this weapons of war equipment sitting in garages waiting to be used, then why don't we use the weapons of countering war? You know, information used effectively in every case. Because that's the thing, you know, and it takes humans and software and heart because again, well-trained humans better than anything else. Absolutely. That said, "Hey, we're going to do every holiday, we are going to do a tour of our critical infrastructure every two hours." That's simple military stuff that they were used to. We're just not getting the executable orders in my opinion, framed by some type of...

Cops aren't military. Cops aren't military. This comes down to Trump being military. You're missing a valid point. You're making great points, but you're missing something. Are you telling me that coppers went over based on an investigation a year before and somebody said, "This guy at this house with this RV is supposed to be building bombs." That information should not go away. This is not about a computer base. This is about somebody at a roll call that said, "Hey, did you notice that RV in front of AT&T? Hey, who'd the plate come back to? Tony Warner. Hey, didn't we have a BOLO (Be On the Lookout) on Tony Warner a year ago?" That's what I'm saying.

Level. But again, you know, I'm at the same point. How does an RV sit in front of AT&T critical infrastructure for five hours and nothing's done about it? Everything else aside. Because what I heard you say is exactly the way that I grew up with cops, the simple logic of forensics that says, "Hey," back to my original point, a simple license plate reader at AT&T. I mean, one of the biggest advantages we had through 9/11 was we used license plate readers because they got around the privacy issue, right? Think about it. And I'm talking about readers, we're other people. I'm with you, it's not an either/or. And I totally agree with your point. But I'm talking about at the lowest level, a person walking a dog on Christmas morning seeing that should have been spurred to call somebody, and when the dispatcher put it together, they should have said, "You know, this is a recipe for danger," and people should do that. And that's the human loop that we're missing at the ground level.

And well, that's it, that's right. So what you're both talking about, Greg is emphasizing is the, is you know, the bottom-up approach or Mike, you're more top-down approach, but not because you need both. They have to go hand-in-glove, right? Because it goes in context. Right? It's, it's Christmas morning. There's an RV parked in front of the building. One view of that could be, you know, look what's happening in the country. Millions of people are unemployed, you know, people are just everywhere now. Back to your point, Greg. But if you're doing a license plate check and this guy's got his RV parked and he owns a home, you know, how many miles away? I mean, something needs to be said about that. But if you know, but if that, because I'm with you, Greg. But it, it can't be, because what I see from a general view of this malice, because that's what it is, is that we live in a culture that has a hard time distinguishing reality and reality TV generally. And then in our own lives, you just, it's not beneficial to get involved. It's just not.

Yes, and we're in violent agreement there. And my, my only repeat comment, and it's not redundant here, is that training could have altered the outcome here, and of the Pitkin incident, and of many other things by just doing a simple algorithm. If you're trained in saying, "Baseline plus anomaly equals decision," and those decisions have huge strategic implications, then we're going to educate people going forward and use some of this intelligent, incredible, intelligent architecture hardware that's out there to help us save lives and nip this in the bud long before it happens. Instead, they're going to spend 100 million dollars on telling us what happened, and a year from now, a great report and a documentary are going to come out, and somebody's going to sit down on a shelf to the next shooting, to the next. So I'm in violent agreement with you, Michael. And Brian, I think your points are well taken. I just think that what we're doing is we're trying to make excuses for the people that see things and don't do something about them. And it happens every night. It happens with DUIs, it happens with domestic abuse, it happens with drugs and criminality and everything. And I think the wrong approach is trying to say, "Hey, there's a bunch of disgruntled Americans." Yeah, you know what, I'm pissed off, I'm out of work right now. That's why I'm on a podcast with you, Mike. We're trying to get new work. But that doesn't mean it's okay for me to drive an RV in front of an AT&T and blow up, so we should be able to pick this.

I think you misconstrued my, my, my view of this has nothing to do. It's as far, it's a, it's like trying to be a producer's view of it, to understand. We have to understand what the threat is doing. I'm just speaking as a red teamer here. I mean, with the vile, with a look at eradicating this threat the same way I would look at a Soviet sub or anything else, because it's similar, right? We can't one-off. I agree with you, but it's humans and it's humans, it's always been humans. That's why computers, they're not completely different. It's the same thing. I don't, if I'm hunting a submarine or a terrorist or people like this, I don't care, it doesn't matter because they all give that signature.

Okay, so I'll give away that's, this is one of them. That's, that's a good point, and their signatures. That's a good point to focus on. Okay, so I, because, and I think these issues get conflated because we have so many experts, I'm doing air quotes if you're just listening, or pundits, right? The, the idea is, you know, to us, to you, Mike, and certainly to me and Greg, like these are all the same thing. An insider threat is an insider threat, whether it's this guy blowing up the RV, a kid going into school to shoot himself, a kid committing suicide, someone at work stealing. Like it's, to us, those threat analytics are the same. Like I don't know, I might not know what their intent or what their end goal is, but you can, you can still figure out, hey, this, based on these set of circumstances, put into this context, this is wrong and leading to danger, or that something is going on here versus something going on there.

Now, there is a lot of noise out there, and that confusion gets tough. And that's, that's what my big thing is about, even like applying this to your freaking social media posts, you know, whatever it is, like interpreting information, right? It doesn't matter. But I think we get wrapped up in, and the problem is, and you've got to now go, "Well, I've got to get X amount of hours of this type of training to understand cultural differences in my own city," which is insane how you don't know that already as an adult. Two, I have to then get training on sexual harassment, then I have to get training on proper conduct and this thing, then I have to get training on this. And we're going, like, "Dude, no, you don't. It's all the same. If you're looking for a threat, you're looking for a threat. And if I use the proper methodology and I can verify using artifacts and evidence to support a reasonable conclusion, I'm going to be right so many more times than I'm wrong." And when I get to that wrong point, it'll be obvious at some point, right? I just, I think we conflate all of these issues, and of course, everyone, I mean, even some people commenting along on Facebook Live, it's like, "Oh, yeah, we've got to, it's, it's all their fault." It's like, "No, it's your fault." You know what I mean? It's, yeah, there's this infamous day of just, you know, "Oh, it's these narratives. Like, 'Oh, it's just a disgruntled old guy who he was, you know, old white man who this,' or 'It's all cops are racists,' or 'All politicians are crooked,' or 'The, but not this one that I voted for.'" Like, these are just narratives. And if we've got to get through that, that's all [ __ ] noise that someone's going to, that someone is trying to capitalize on.

I would, I would take a little bit of issue that it's with the word narrative. I'm going to go over here again over your left shoulder. These are a bunch of confirmation biases, right?

Daily, at scale.

And being fed daily.

And every day. Yes. And being fed sometimes from, you know, some woman sitting in, you know, St. Pete whose only job is to convince the American public that candidate A is this. That's what she does every day, right? And then in, in from a domestic threat perspective. So back to what we were talking about, right? Like again, but my focus is at the operational layer here. It is. It's saying, "I've got in the state of Tennessee, I've got this many police departments. I've got a context of Tennessee. We need to be able to give them the best executable intelligence so they can do their job." In their job, they understand, don't want to get too involved in it as a minimum viable product here, as an information service, not interested in predictive analytics. I'm going to say that you guys are really good or you have the training, you have the intent of getting really good. We're going to provide you the first baseline of something that is valued and executable that matters. Because right now, it just seems, it gets back to what you were saying, that same thing that affects us as a culture. We're all trying to answer questions. I'm at the point in my life all the time is, I'm not going to answer any question that I don't agree with. I want to, I'm more interested in the question.

Yeah.

Than I am in any answers here. Because we can go down this road, I've seen it. It's broken my heart too many times over the last 15, 20 years of playing this, this narrative out, because once, once a confirmation narrative becomes a cult, then the narrative becomes the confirmation bias, and that's what's scary.

So, so I'll, let's, then let's, let's solve the hard problem on this podcast, right? You get, you, I'll go each, you answer separately. So, Greg, you know, how would, how would this have been prevented? And I know you're going to say, "Well, it's training, it's training and training." Look, I get it. But what does that mean? Like, you, from your perspective, how would this be trained or how would this have been prevented? Then Mike, you take it. How does that work at an operational and strategic layer? So, like, what, what would, what if this had been put in place, then this would, then this bombing would not have happened? What would have been that thing that would be put in place?

Yeah, so real quick, I think it's already been in place, really. That's what you're concerned, and it's broken. That's, that's my original argument. This was a suicide that spun out of control. I want everybody to know that I completely agree with Mike Syracuse. I'm just looking at it through a different lens. I'm the boots on the ground lens, and Mike is in the intel center on this specific point, for this specific argument. So strategically, Brian, what's happened is we have COVID, we have an election year, we have people thinking that this is more important somehow than other previous years. And strategically, we don't have a national goal. We don't have a national message. We don't have a law enforcement or first responder message that's clear. That's, that creates turbulence, turbidity, which muddles the signal. Operationally, we have a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of money, each of which, like you brought up before, think that they have the answer, and that the answer is making things bigger and more expensive. Okay? And then at the ground level, what we have is the foot soldiers every single day in the emergency rooms at triage, the fire departments, everybody else that aren't getting any of that [ __ ]. And what they're getting is they're getting a bunch of tools, but they're not getting the training to be into picking out the signal, the bandwidth of that signal, and not only finding that signal, a bunch of all the noise, but then likely saying, "This is the most likely origin and message that I'm reading, and this is the most dangerous." And now I don't have to focus on anything but the most dangerous to save lives. So when I beat my training drum, what I'm trying to say is you have to have clear standards. You have to have a method. You have to have an architecture and a procedure to get from here to there. And money isn't going to get us out of this, and a bunch of talking heads on the news aren't going to get us out of this, and technology isn't. It's going to be a human that's in that loop, that's emboldened by all these things, that's going to pick out and go, "Hey, what's this guy doing with the gun in front of the bank? Hey, what's this kid doing coming out of an Uber heading into school?" That's all I'm saying.

So Mike, then kind of from your perspective, I know you did say, you know, you think it's already there, that it's broken or it's not working. And I always throw it back to that too, is my always thing is, okay, let's not reinvent the wheel. There's been a lot of smart people who've been alive before us and throughout the history of mankind or womankind. And what, what do we mean? Like why do we still not figuring this out? Why are we still this? And because all of these really, really smart people have laid it out. Like when I read new stuff, I'm like, "Oh, this is the same thing someone said a hundred years ago." You know what I mean? This is the same thing someone said a hundred years before that. So what is it at our layer? How do we not get that institutionalized? Why isn't it carried forward? That was not an easy question. It was like we could go a number of places with that, but I was thinking, well, let's just look at it for what it is, right?

Again, I'll put on my accident investigator hat. You know, it tends to, I don't know, with people that kind of look at life from a duality, that it's one way or the other. As an investigator and as a good analyst, you can't, right? You walk into this situation and say, "What's the data and in this case, the information telling us?" Well, again, and I'm going to be really simple, the information is telling me is that an RV sat in front of critical infrastructure with at least four parties that should have direct responsibility for keeping that property and us safe, and it sat there for five hours. Because I've got to start somewhere. So the hard problem to me is, why isn't that information one, captured, and then two, made available to the people that can execute on it? Because if I've got a lot of great cops out there and now I give them a piece of actionable intelligence that then sparks their creativity in ways, that's what we're supposed to do at the operational layer, right? But we're not getting it done. So because I would step back and say, "Oh, go ahead."

No, no, you. Because right there what you're talking about is the most important thing is that person on the ground. And all this amazing technology is supporting that individual, but that's what gets lost. We look at the, okay, that's what happened in my tech life from 20 years right now.

And it's where I focus: information exchange requirements to represent the user. Artificial intelligence, great for what it does. I'm interested in augmenting human intelligence, and that's what we're talking about here. So let's just take it from a classic anti-submarine warfare, which is a classic signal-noise ratio problem. You get a possible which says, "Hey, man, this guy, we got some intel that says that this guy is building bombs in his house, and his girlfriend's not happy." You get a possible when you find his RV parked in front of the AT&T building on Christmas morning, and then you do some back intel, and then you've got a certain when the thing blows up. Well, we want to be left of that bang, right? Well, we can be left of that thing. It's the same problem. All of the information that was required to avert this was available to the system. That's the bottom line truth. Everything was available.

Now, when I look at it from an information science perspective and as an information scientist, okay, what do those information exchange requirements look like today? And why didn't they provide the signatures to the cop on the ground that needed them? Because my main concern here is that 20-year-old kid or 22-year-old, 24-year-old kid that's walking to the end of the street there, and he just happens to be walked away probably because some lieutenant called him away and said, "Get away from there." You know, because they're not getting the intelligence either. So it's not so much not only the information they need to keep us safe, what about the information that gets to them so they're safe? That's what concerns me the most about this whole thing. So again, as we look at possible, probable, to certain, it's a heuristic all the time. We may get ellipses that say, there's a, you know, ellipse-like thing that says, "There's a van parked in front of critical infrastructure." Okay. What Greg is advocating as far as leadership, I think what Brian's advocating is separate of getting that intel from anybody. This is our city. And again, I'm not indicting Nashville or anybody else, because I mean, it happened. It could have been a different city.

Yeah, it just happened.

Yeah, our interest here is just, my interest here is to look at it like an accident and just identify causal factors in the interest of making it better. Primarily in this case for that kid standing at the end of the street that thankfully walked away or he may not be walking, you know, within a minute. So again, in culminating it, why doesn't that kid have the good intelligence that should have been made available to him over five hours to know that that was probably 90% an active bomb? Because he sure as hell wouldn't have been standing there with no protective gear, just lastly fair, walking around. And that's again, it's not an indictment of Nashville PD, it's an indictment of the system.

No, it's billions and billions and billions of dollars to clear the pathways between strategic, operational, and tactical intelligence. And it is obvious to me right now that it's back to Greg's thing, it's broken or cemented.

Well, it's because that's where we're, you know, my opinion of most of these things are, it's like we already have all of the tools that we need. Like everything has been created there. Yes, technology's always going to get better, but we already have the tools and needs. So I always say when people go, "Well, think outside the box," I'm like, [  ], you haven't used everything you have in that box yet! Until you master those skills, stay in the [  ] box!

But that's my least favorite saying right now because, and the only reason I say that is because in our business, I think I speak for all of us, our business is building containers for all of those boxes.

Yes, there's a reason for the captures. I look at what's going on out there and there's all these boxes and I'm like, "Okay, but I'm going to reframe the question. I'm going to use all of your answers. I may discard some of them, but what is the sense-making at the right level here?"

But right, that's the right question. And it's, well, it's because we, we constantly, throughout the human race, we, we once we created, once whoever decided to turn a rock into a hammer, right? Or whatever created the first tool, we then look for different technological advantages, whatever that technology is. But we forget that, that a process or a method or training is a technology. A new skill set is a technology. We look at it as rocks of technology, right? That's what I'm saying, it's like, no, that doesn't have a screen, that doesn't have a user interface. But, but we forget that. And that's when it turns into what, which term I hate, and is that, and Greg, I know you're the same way, is the human in the loop. It's like, no, we haven't mastered machine in the loop yet! There are still situations where Mike and I, let's say we're talking and we're talking over a radio and that message gets confused. So just we haven't figured out A to B conversation through one medium yet. We haven't mastered that yet. But then we're already trying to take the people out of it and go, "Well, let's just get this tech." And I think that's, that's the issue is that we don't use them effectively as they need. I mean, how many times have you seen a piece of gear or equipment sitting in a Pelican case in the corner not being used? How many times have you seen someone with a $25,000 thermal night vision combined optic with this white phosphorus thing and they're like, "Well, we only use that at night." It's like, you know, you could use a thermal during the day, right? And here's all the things you can do. It's like, I heard the numbers of how much software sits on, let's just say, government servers that will never be used, astronomical. And it gets back to Greg's point, we have to have the user in mind always from the beginning.

And if I may real quick, so something struck me when you were talking, Brian, I, I think at a core, we've kind of lost our survival instinct walking down the street. And I'm a native person to that city, and I see this building, I know what it is, and I see an RV camper, and it's Christmas morning. I'm a little concerned. Now, that may be my training and everything else, but I think we've lost context of how soft we become as a culture and how...

But, but Mike, that, that argument, that argument too, though, that's, that's evolution. Every generation before us has said that about the generation before them. You know, 500 years ago, I guarantee there were a bunch of guys sitting around going, "Yeah, we're becoming too soft." So, so it's nowhere...

But nowhere in our history have we had as much capacity as we have right now and so limited capability. If you told me in 2020 that we've experienced, and all for the same reasons, information sharing, in my opinion, pandemics, the wildfires at scale, and not that they're happening, but our response to them, that's what I mean by losing our survival instinct. We, we have amazing capacity yet people are suffering at a scale that we shouldn't be suffering.

So, so let's, let's set survival instinct on a shelf, and let's put right next to it something equally as important as advanced critical thinking. So, yeah, that is survival, right? What happened with the last couple of years? You can't get a bomb or a gun into the New Year's celebration in New York City because there's cordons and there's people at man gates and there's different balustrades and all these other things, fail-safes, to make sure that you're not going to get in there. But this was different. This wasn't the Ariana Grande concert. This wasn't the British in Ulster. What this was is the guy chose the thing and parked there, and there's no precedent for that. So all of that training that said, "Okay, if the guy comes up and his jacket's bulky, check. Okay, if the guy's wearing a long jacket on hot..." What they did, Brian, is they went to the TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) and they rehearsed over and over, "This is what's going to happen." And all this guy did with this Petula Clark recording is commit suicide on a city street that just happened to correspond with an AT&T. And my thing is, I don't think it would happen. Listen to me, I don't care what he did. You're missing the point. The intent was that he had a bomb in a truck, and that's different than what people were trained for. People were trained for stopping the guy. People were trained for contacting him at a checkpoint and a control point because Iraq and Afghanistan taught us how to do that. But nobody said, "Hey, what if you're driving at night and you see a piece of critical infrastructure and you see this RV in front of it?" There was no protocol. So now we have to relearn that, and it's going to, it's going to be Sanskrit again, and then it's going to have to be a computer, and then we're going to learn. And I agree, he chose it for a reason, but Mike, I don't care that he chose it for a reason. The simpler, simpler problem was nobody told that copper on the beat. Nobody told that kid walking a dog. Nobody told the guy at the other end of the surveillance camera that when one plus two come together, it's likely going to be a three. Nobody told him that.

Well, that's the thing. I guess in order to design that algorithm at scale, right? Let's just call it algorithm at scale. We, and again, I'm not, everything that I say is unclassified because all my work was classified. But I can guarantee you that this type of building, this building, maybe specifically, sure. You know, it's a prioritized list for a reason. You cannot protect everything. You can't.

That's true. All you can do is prioritize what needs to be protected. Now the ultimate goal is just like if you're hunting submarines and you get an ellipse, either the system itself sends a signal or is signaled by the system. What should happen in those types of situations? Again, it's Christmas morning. One, I shouldn't, if I'm, if I'm really focused on keeping infrastructure safe, it's a, it's a habit, right? It's a habit unless, again, but our posture has fallen so far due to a host of issues. But again, I'll go back to the primary question, it's really simple. How does an RV sit in front of critical infrastructure that's been identified for over 15 years? I think I can, and I can see Greg's focus, but the thing is, is that the, the, that signal exists to make sure that the guys on the ground know what's happening. We had a five-hour window where nothing got done to answer your question. I find ridiculous. Which I think like hundreds of dollars.

I think I can't answer that question. And Greg brought up a good point when they said they went to TTPs. And for anyone listening, TTPs, Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures, right? That's how we do things. And, you know, everyone's got different TTPs. And that's what our problem is, is we're constantly chasing TTPs rather than engaging in advanced critical thinking. And we've seen that time and time again. You know how many times like me overseas, it's like, "Okay, they built this new bigger IED (Improvised Explosive Device). Okay, we're going to build a bigger truck." And you're like, "Wait, what?" And then, "Oh, now they built this one. Okay, now we'll get a, now we'll shape the whole of it like a V." It's like, you're constantly behind the curve. You're fighting the last TTP. You're fighting the last war, right? We're not, we're not doing it because now, right now, the, the how many RVs are being searched and pulled over and all this right now? Because they're thinking, "Well, it's an RV." It's like, no, you can, it's, that's a container. So, so anything, container, can have an explosive device in it. So, so we, we look at it and we're constantly chasing after, "Oh, what got us last? Okay, how did they do that? Well, let's, oh, look at that, that's where it is. We can just, we can just cut the chain right there if we get rid of, get rid of this certain type of high nitrate fertilizer coming in the country." Okay, but then they're going to get something else. So don't look at it that way. Don't look at just this one. I mean, it's important to still do that for certain situations, but we're constantly chasing those Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures. I go to my checklist, this is what I do. It's not, there's, there's no, there is no critical thinking because we're relying on this stuff. And I think that goes to your survival thing, right? I mean, that's what advanced, you said, I'm going to put advanced sort of thinking next to survival. It's, I think it's part of the same book.

Right.

Yeah, I mean, meaning, meaning that's why they're next to each other though, because you have to, you interact, you know what I'm saying? And, and, and that's, that's one of the biggest issues. And that's what, what comes of this. And, and, and I, we're, we're bashing all of this, but things have gotten better. I mean, you know, Mike, you know how it was prior to 9/11 and then after. And then there are certain information awareness services that are getting better and detecting things. So, so it, it's just when there's something, it shocks me that again, I don't know what else to say about it. And I thought I'd been shocked out. But this one really shocks me. I mean, because it's this intelligence failure right here is, is, and I'll say it on the record, is just as significant as 9/11 was. I'm going to say it right on the record because I believe it, because it's happening here. It means it can happen, it'll happen anywhere. We've got, let's just say, 350 major metropolitan cities. You know, I don't trust this domestic terrorist that I do trust at the new administration. But again, if you'd have told me five years ago that this pandemic would have went down the way it said, I said that can't happen because of the institutional critical thinking in our systems. And I think that needs to be looked at. And we know it as warfighters and as cops that that needs to be as simple as possible. "Let the systems collect and report for me so I can analyze." That's really the key. But I have to know how to do that first. Mike, that's my thing.

Isn't that why I mean, again, but, but, but if you talk about the military industrial complex, there have been multiple billions of dollars spent over the last 15 years all across this nation in the name of counterterrorism. I can't tell you how many training courses and everything, right? People have gone through and specialized units and MRAPs (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles) and everything else. Yet our basic core, the thing that you guys teach information exchange, yes, personal level, at the intrapersonal level, is getting more for a host of reasons. And I know some people listen to me and say, "Well, I'm not really interested in what that guy, you know, is thinking." But I say, I'm not interested either, but it's presenting the challenge, you know? Because my job's simple. I want to clarify the signals and the signatures. Clarify them. So look at this thing the same way I would look at an accident and say, "What went down?" Right? And it's become really clear and, you know, but he has a message. He was a terrorist. His message was very clear. You know what I mean? He wanted to not kill people, but he wanted to blow up that building. No question. You know, he just doesn't all that work and everything else, there's a lot of thought there. It's warped, you know, he was on a suicide mission. Why that becomes important, because you say, "Okay, what does that mean for us in the future?" Well, I've been saying it for a while. There's going to be a spike in suicides, specifically males and females between the ages of 55 and 70 in this country over the next three, three or four years. There is no question. Part of this thing that's breaking apart now, this movement, whatever it was, is going to leave a lot of frustrated, angry people. My concern is three or four of them that decide to go out like the Beatles, not kill anybody, but destroy whatever, whatever symbolic thing that they, they think is, yeah.

Whatever they attach that message to.

Each of us could say that we would all be happy if somebody did some of those things at our own deepest level, right? Like some people would say, "I wouldn't mind if somebody destroyed the pork production in this country," right? A lot of people would set up and go, "Yay!" Yeah, but you can't live in a culture that allows that to happen again because of complexity, right? Like to me, I think, and again, just to summarize my whole view of this thing, is that we need to look at it from a completely different lens. These are not issues that we can just frame. We have to understand that this all stems from chaos. All of it. This, this man's mind to a certain degree, even though he maintained it, went chaotic. And the only way he could frame that and the only way he could justify his life was to say, "I'm going to do this thing," like it was a big video game for any number of reasons, right?

Yeah, and, and that, that gets into, I mean, there's so many contributing factors to these different situations, right? I mean, I mean, you, you literally talk to everything from, but you talked pretty like internal for to him, personal issues. You talked about societally, she talked about government, but right.

Right.

But that's what I mean, as our way of making sense of this. There are a lot of reasons why it would get to that level of someone carrying out.

Just keep it simple, though, right? You just keep it simple. In this case, all that stuff aside, right, there's three things that matter: location, identity, and activity. Location is a given. That's why Google Maps and everything is so important. Location is everything. It's that first part of that triangulation that you have to have. We can control that. We can, that's what we, that's where everything. There's a reason Google bought, you know, Keyhole back in 2005. There was a reason DARPA looked at Keyhole and did something different. Location's everything in intelligence. And then there's identity and activity. Again, my interest is at the highest levels of saying, "How can we have hardware and software work together the best possible way to make sure that those signatures are delivered to the people, the people that need them, timely?" That's it. And but what it takes is a rarely, because this isn't a new discussion at all. God, this is the same thing we talked about after 9/11. The exact same thing. There was a failure of intelligence and people say, "Well, you know, we weren't really expecting, you know, vehicle." I had a discussion in 2003 with a guy and I got chastised because we were talking about vehicle-borne IEDs. He said, "That's not going to be a problem in this country." Like, yeah it is. People are going to do whatever they need to do to make an impact. Back to Greg's point, you know, our question is, is how do we teach them, but not only train them, but train the system to support them? If you can't train the system to support the humans, if the humans aren't acting in a rational way, I guess that's my standard.

But people are. Yeah, what is the warfare? But keeping your cities safe, that's what I would ask them. What do you know? And posture this morning, you know, place a police department. I, I get that you think about it, but that becomes something in terms of remember after 9/11, we had the yellow, orange, red, green, and people are just like, "This is junk, this doesn't tell us anything." Like it, it has to be specific to something. And that goes down to instead of kidding in these big nebulous concepts that all interact with each other and influence each other at a macro and micro level, you know, you boil down to like what you said, location, identity, activity. And that's what Greg's doing too, is that look, you, there's, there's a million things we could pick apart from just this event and do a 12-hour podcast on. There's probably 700 items we could pull, extract. So, so what, what's, what's the, how do we boil it down? What do I need to do? Well, you don't need to know all that. Like you just said, it's location, identity, activity, or baseline plus anomaly equals decision. And these are just, these are, these are factors that have to happen at that tactical level. We don't look at the tactical level correctly.

Can we talk a little bit about that one? What's that? Right. Can we talk about that little, that one a little bit, the baseline? Not that I disagree with it because I don't. In this case, there, there, we've kept, we came to find out as you say, how many databases or data sets that you need to look at to do this scale of things, like not that many. But the next thing you looked at, there's three types of indicators: there's a pure indicator, there's a support indicator, and they're anomalies, and they need to be clearly understood so the machines and the humans can talk about them as such. Pure indicators are, you know, somebody gets money from a front organization, right? Supporting, or you might be a support indicator. A pure indicator in this case would be somebody parks a white RV in front of critical infrastructure. That's a pure indicator, right? That should be sending off at least enough just little bells that just say, "Hey," not a national system like we had after 9/11, but internal to that department, if you know, because that's what I would say. Say, "Okay, Mike, what would you do?" Well, if they hired us, we'd say this: "Do a purple team and say these are the 10 types of signatures given the environment, given your city that you should be looking at and looking for." You know, "Things that park in front of critical infrastructure on significant dates is a signature you should be looking for." I'm not talking about overall change of your whole system, but a simple awareness that these types of situations, these 10, you know, are important enough to frame at least every, you know, because again, you know, like I would ask, "What's their terrorist readiness level inside of a department?" Because I'd have to say in this one, it wasn't really high. Now there's a host of reasons for that. I'm not indicting them again. You put a "zombic" flag on that RV and it doesn't sit there for five hours, I can guarantee you that. But again, it's Christmas time. People look at that, you know, lots of hardship across the country. A guy's parked in his RV. There's one part of the equation. Nobody's going to think twice about it if the posture isn't such. Well, there's another piece of the pie that's not going to think about it. So it's just like an aviation accident. There are a whole host of things that had to exactly line up for this event to happen. Any one of them doesn't happen, the event doesn't happen. So my point becomes, "Okay, what are the signatures that we can see left of the bang," like Greg talks about, "and how do you stop this?" And short of that, how do you keep that kid at the end of the street safe so he's not unaware of literally what the system knew for five hours, that guy was a threat, but it didn't have the collective ability to put it all together?

Right. There were enough signatures out there that said, because this wasn't a failure of indicators, like Greg talked about. We had it. That's a great statement. Yeah, so it's not a failure of indicators, real quick. It wasn't a failure of indicators of our, it was our models of persuasion that failed us again. So I'll just throw it out from human behavior and psychological and sociological. I admire absolutely everything Mike Syracuse has done. I think he's got a brilliant mind. I think he's spot on when he's talking about the operational levels of information and exploiting that to create actionable intelligence. But my, and not but, and my worldview is that this is a broken human. Tony was broken. Yes. And Tony was walking around broken for a long time as a suicidal, selfish, coward, bully. And people teach you how to treat them. And the people around him are the ones we should be indicting because those people around him that allegedly knew him the best, if you read all the journals, saw that he was broken and saw that his intent was evident and did nothing about it. So I'm just rolling the dial a little bit back from the five hours that he sat in front of there with the RV transmitting the messages in the last hour. I'm saying we can roll that back a year, and then three years, and then five years, and we can say that predictive analysis at the street level with even the most basic training would have identified this cat long before he would have been able to perpetrate this horrible crime. That's it. That's all I've got to say.

Well, and it, I mean, that's, that's always the, there's, there's always someone who saw something or, or witnessed this or experienced something or said, "Yeah, that guy was creepy," or, "That girl was off," or, or this. And, and that, that's also a very difficult, you know, the average person walking down the street isn't going to go, "Oh, man, maybe that's going to be the guy that blows up the AT&T building," right? We don't know. We don't ever think that. And, and I think, part of that is because we do focus on, you know, it's never, it's never my problem, Greg, it's always someone else's, right? We do it societally, we do that. All humans do that, right? I don't want to accept responsibility like you're talking about because at first it was, you know, I mean, especially the woman who did call the police and say, "Hey, this is what's going on." But then they have to go, "Okay, well, there's certain laws here and, well, it's probably nothing and, you know, we're so busy focused on whatever else is going on over here." And, and that's, that's also, I, I think, you know, one of the decisions where I always say we're, you know, chasing TTPs or looking at what just happened or, or not understanding an external threat, an insider threat, how much worse those insider threats are. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it, because they're harder to see because they create more damage in the community, in our country. And, and the, these second and third order effects are much worse. And it's easy, look, when someone come, you would, someone not look at 9/11? We were all, all live for that one. And, you know, some of, most of the people listening to this podcast probably were too. Man, yeah, that did, that unify us? And we all worked together and said, "Man, we've got to go fight these people that attacked us." And then we, we, we've, we've suddenly for a minute or a day or a year, a week, whatever, forget about all this, this noise and all the hyperbole and go, "Holy [ __ ], there's something bigger here. We may not exist because of this," right? We, now we have an existential threat to our lives. And then we forget about that stuff. But, but there always is an existential threat. There's always something there. And, and, and we choose to focus on other issues. And, and, and that, that affects us at a tactical, operational, strategic level. And Mike, I like that you kind of focused on that operational level needs to be really good because a strategic level is going to change, right? It's going to change with politicians and, and, and administrations. And meaning the strategic, strategic vision in this regard, your strategic vision is changing every day, possibly every hour.

Go back to the French model. When The Eagles of Death Metal are playing a concert, that model is changing all the time because your infrastructure, you can't protect all the infrastructure in this country. It's just not possible. So again, you have to prioritize it. And the reason is, is you kind of look at it like a tactical action officer within a carrier, right? Yeah, all that stuff's important. All the intelligence. I can have a, I can have a signal that's three years old that's really valuable. But right now, I've got an RV sitting in front, and what's my CIWS (Close-In Weapon System)? You know, what's my 50 cal that makes sure that that thing, you know, what's my information equivalent of a CIWS? Well, it needs to be a simple camera that AT&T, I can't believe, I just, I can't get over that they do not have better physical surveillance of their building. It just blows my mind. I'm not even indicting Nashville. The signal shouldn't come from Nashville PD in this case. The signal should have came from AT&T. I mean, because that goes into responsibility. Whose responsibility is that, right? It's their building.

But they're a company, they're for profit. They do...

I know. I agree.

But then, then they AT&T, they also have a multi-million dollar security position. They pay a lot of ex-SEALs and everybody else to do a lot of things. Yeah, but then they're going to have to go, "All right, you want us to do all that? Well, guess what? Now your little phone, TV, and internet bundle is now $500 a month because I've got to pay for all this." You know, and that gets into...

No, come on, think about it, Brian. I mean, you've got, you've got a building. If you look at the building, look at the top of the building, right? Like if you don't know what critical infrastructure is, you don't have to be really well-trained to find critical infrastructure. Most times, look for the biggest cooling posture. Yeah, biggest cooling things on top of buildings. This one, massive. These huge lines and everything else. It's in AT&T's best interest, obviously. Yeah, my question is, why wouldn't you be interested? I mean, that's like simple cameras and just simple machine logic, and it isn't a predictive analytic. All it is is a descriptive, "Hey, central ops center that AT&T probably has a dozen of around the world, one of them's definitely security focused, your most important piece of infrastructure, maybe in the country, has a van sitting in front of it for the last two hours." I would think that there's somebody at AT&T that would be very, very interested in that information. My question is, again, you know, a dog with a bone, but how does an RV sit in front of this critical infrastructure for five hours? It just blows my mind, right? Especially back to Greg's point, given everything that we knew about this guy. Because intelligence is no longer 20/20 in retrospect, it's 20/20,000. It really is. In a half an hour, we could have figured out all kinds of things and come to a very good conclusion: this guy had an active bomb right there. Now, from 2:30 to 5 o'clock, we've got a whole different posture going on. Yeah, it's a local issue. Yeah, people on the street should know it, but it's also a national issue every day. Every day, I, I know that there is a, you know, signatures of what is that threat the most in this country and where it's getting distributed to. I don't know, see my point. But yeah, the kids standing there and the people that are responsible because would it happen in New York City? That's what we really need to do is look at the intelligence operations as they exist across these different cities and say, "What city is it, it's more prone to happening?" You know, because I, I know that New York City's spent, I don't even know how many billions of dollars on intelligence-like operations for their own city to do these things.

And I would counter that by saying, you're exactly right, but the lowest level of intervention is always my favorite. Yeah, and the idea is if somebody walked up to me in Iraq and said, "That guy's building bombs in an RV." If somebody walked up to me in Afghanistan and said, "Somebody's building bombs in an RV," or if somebody walked up to me on the streets of Detroit and said, "Somebody's building a bomb in that RV." The idea is the irony of the situation that the coppers were there, couldn't look over the fence, couldn't see the RV, and then wrote a 1082 entry in their log sheet and walked away. That's what, that's one of the catalysts that was missed here. And why is it ironic? Because hours after this incident, a guy in a box truck was transmitting messages, and they sure as [ __ ] pulled him over and yanked him out of the car. The problem is that...

Well, that's my point, I think the problem is the priorities.

No, I know it's the point, Mike, but I want to make sure we don't lose touch with the street level. You're talking operational and strategic, and it's wonderful. And I'm just trying to make sure that we don't miss the tactical. The boots on the ground are the ones that can mitigate this, and they just don't sometimes understand they have that power. It's supposed to be formed around... well, I shouldn't say that it's not, but like, you know, you look at the Marine Corps as an example. It's literally the entire Marine Corps is centered upon starting with the rifleman on the ground, and then everything behind that. Then you have an infantry platoon, then you have a weapons platoon, then you have a weapons company, then you have a battalion, then you have a Marine Air-Ground Task Force. But it starts there and then all of this around it. But a lot of times what happens is, "Hey, we've got this new whiz-bang thing, let's do that!" And then the guy on the ground or girl on the ground is going, "Well, okay, what do I do with this? How do I use this?" Or "You want me to do this now? Okay, now this is what I do." Okay. And then then that means you just took away from something else that they were doing. And it's just a backwards way of looking at it versus supporting that. It has to start, I agree with Greg, it has to start with that person on the ground because that's where the decisions are going to be. I mean, you know how many bad things have happened or good things have happened, right, because of some human on the ground that either A, left a door open, or B, made double-checked and made sure that door was locked? Like, I mean, that's, that's, that's the thing. It comes down, it always, and Mike, you know this, always comes down to error. I mean, immediately, always.

So my point would be real quick, you say, "What's the simplest fix here?" Right? If you're only given no money and you can only use what's out there, and what fix would you provide to every police department out there? That's the question we should be asking ourselves right now. For no cost, here's what I would recommend: we know what the critical infrastructure is in this country. And this is the leadership issue, right? If the leadership says, "Hey, for the next two months, we're going to be keeping an eye on the critical infrastructure in our city." Nothing more than that. That's a simple, just like a Marine would get, it's like, "Hey, on your priority list while you're doing your job here." What I would do is I would provide every city in this country a list of the critical infrastructure in their country, and then open up that mechanism that's probably, it is highly classified, but there are because I think that's probably what happens here. You know what I mean? But if you get people's awareness up to say, "This is the critical infrastructure in your country, in your city." I believe every cop in every city, and I'm talking like a guy who boots on the ground as a tactical air traffic controller or as a pilot hunting submarines, every cop in every city in this country should know verbatim where every piece of critical infrastructure in their city is. Same thing that every cop, fireman, Buffalo, you know, every fireman in Buffalo, New York can do the location of every single water hydrant in the city. Well, it's the same thing for cops. That is simple. Critical infrastructure's a priority, learn it. Nothing more than that. That's a simple analytic and a simple leadership thing that says, "This is an awareness problem." Again, we can get into descriptive and predictive and, you know, analytics, but really it's just about saying, "What are you guys focused on?" Because again, this concerns me that on all levels, both from a hardware, wetware, and a software, strategic, operation, and tactical, there's a problem when this can happen on Christmas Day in the United States after the billions of dollars that have been spent in actually saying that this shouldn't happen.

Yeah, no, I mean, there's always a give and take with all this. I mean, even I just want to hit kind of some of the comments of some of the people going along. You know, one person's going on and on about why you keep talking about surveillance, we have, we have civil liberties and all this stuff. It's like, yeah, look at that. That's always a, that's always a give and take there. Yes, the freer your society, the more of those, the less we do, well, guess what? The easier it is for someone to hurt us and attack us. And so, so, so that argument is, look, I get it, but there's always a, that's a, that's an open, that's a constant ongoing discussion, right? It's always balancing, "Hey, I don't want, I want privacy, but, but I also want security and safety." It's like, "Well, you, you can't..."

What's the, I don't have access to it, but what's the privacy issue with a city saying that they have critical infrastructure and an environment? No, no, no, no, no, I was just getting direct threats. Yeah, and now we have an anomaly of, because RVs shouldn't be parked downtown in front of the, in front of the AT&T building on Christmas morning. No. Right? And did you justify that anomaly? Sure, during a borderline depression, you can justify an RV sitting downtown.

And, and, you know, some of the comments kind of brought up too, you know, my buddy, buddy Dan usually chimes in, but he, you know, same thing. Good, good point. She's like, "Well, people aren't tactical. Police can barely have to actually," all the points we talked about is they're focused on these other issues that we think are super important that distract us from it. And you said like, "Look, this event actually, it's, it's been a little while since it, it's happened here in the U.S.," right? I mean, in, in a sense of what we saw of this, right? So we lose focus on, hey, there's, there's something going on here. There hasn't been an event like this since in the United States probably since The Weather Underground. And that's what I'm saying. And that's what kind of he, he brought that point up. It's, it's, yes, and all unique in what it did, but, but not unique in, in, uh, you know, plenty of indicators being present, right? But it did bring up the point because you said, you know, "Hey, with these companies, it's AT&T's point, you know, fault." And he's like, "Yeah, you know, and as for all the SEALs that work there for those big companies, no one ever listens to them." So, and that's kind of, I mean, that, that's what we see that all the time with their companies. "Yeah, we have a security plan," and the guy's sitting there going, like, "Yeah, they won't let me do anything. I told them they need to do this. I told them they knew that. They said, 'No,' like, 'I told them they need to do this.'" So, so there is still that. And, and that happens everywhere. There's always like, even with like COVID right now, right? You go to every terrorism or counterterrorism conference and all this stuff. And what does everyone want to talk about? Like, either, you know, some sort of extremism, whether it's homegrown terrorism or Muslim extremism or this or that, or China and North Korea and Russia and this. And then when it gets for the doctors to come up and go, "Hey, let me talk to you about, about, about what a pandemic would do to there." Everyone goes, "Hey, you've got to want to go have a beer at the bar." Yeah, this is like no one's sitting in the seats anymore because it's like, "Uh, yeah, that, we don't care about that stuff." And we just realized, "Well, let's just shut down our whole economy for," I mean, we don't ever prioritize these things correctly sometimes because we're so focused on what's happened last, what's right in front of us, what's the last thing that occurred and how do we protect against that. That's my issue with a lot of it. But I don't any, I think, I think we kind of, we kind of covered a lot of areas and I don't want to go too much farther because a lot of the stuff that we brought up, we could go very much further in depth with. Mike, I like how you did boil it down to stuff like location, identity, and activity. You know, I, I think that there needs to be an information awareness service that that makes sense and works and we're still working on that. And that information awareness service starts with the individual. What is my information awareness? We all said like you brought up the points, "Okay, we don't have those survival skills anymore. We haven't been tested as a human being individually much anymore." Well, guess what? We can learn. We can, we can train, right? We can, we can, we can figure out that advanced critical thinking stuff to to now be able to see that RV sitting out in front of there and go, "That's odd. We need to call in someone now." Or, or, or prior to that when, when it has to be odd in context though.

Yeah, sitting in front of piece of critical infrastructure. So again, from an information awareness service, what I would provide them is hell, a simple map of what your critical infrastructure is in your city, and how, how they should know this at certain mechanisms within their departments. But how's that going to be prioritized given, just as an example, is one piece of infrastructure more important given this sequence of events, say near the new president and this holiday, than this piece is? Well, yeah, those are things that can be done with, you know, that, whatever the leadership, if they have a little think tank for an afternoon and get together with, like Marines used to do, with just simple cars. You know, like, just know your infrastructure in your city because that's the best way forward to protect yourself. Because let's face it, if four guys want to come into your city and create havoc during [ __ ], what are you going to do about it? If four guys with the right intent or gals want to do havoc, they will, and it can get ugly quick. So you've got to get left of that bang to see any signatures that may be provided. This guy did provide plenty of signatures. You did the biggest one, in my mind, the biggest signature that went unrequited was five hours sitting in front of critical infrastructure, though, right? And that's the most critical signature there is.

I, I think, I'm going to, I'm going to end it on a comment that actually you said, Mike, that I really liked and I, and it said, you said, "It's, it's confirmation bias happening daily at scale." And I think that can be used for a lot of different, different areas and different things that happen. So, I, I know we'll probably talk some more about this one. We appreciate you coming on, you know, and sharing this. I know it was a, it was a good discussion that again, I think shows the, the complexity of, of these situations. I, I just, I don't like the fact that we get so focused on the individuals involved rather than taking the lessons learned going forward. And we get the, you know, I, I just, I'm going to read more about this, you know, Anthony Tony Warner guy in the next thing and versus, hey, this is what was important. I think we brought up a lot of good discussion points that need, that all interact with each other. Like I said, there's a lot of contributing factors to these, but, but there are takeaways, there are things you can do to mitigate it. Are you going to mitigate every one of them? Nope. But can you mitigate a lot of them? Absolutely, you can. I mean, these are all winnable, achievable, attainable goals. So let's, let's focus on what matters versus getting, getting, getting around that noise. So unless you guys...

You can't, you can't hunt. You're not, if you don't know what you're hunting for, hey, that's simple, right? Like there's some signals out there and you want to aggregate them, but the human mind right here is the best algorithm that exists. And that's what it, back to Greg's point, always fundamentally, it's a guy on the ground, a gal on the ground that's making that decision. We need to get them the best information we can: contextually driven, verified, validated, accredited in a way that they can execute on it. Otherwise, we're putting them into danger and our infrastructure danger and our cities and our towns and our nation and our culture of danger. We know how to do this. Again, I'm just shocked that this happened.

Yeah. All right, well, on, on that, I think that's a good point to end on. Thanks everyone for tuning in. Don't forget, check out episode details, links. You can follow us, follow me on Facebook so that you can follow along live and chime in. If I get a chance to read them, but sometimes we're too engaged in conversation. I'm trying to follow along and take notes that I always get to read all the comments, so I apologize for that. But I do like hearing from everyone, and thanks for listening along. Don't forget that training changes.