L.O.G. 212 So There

L.O.G. 212 So There

Alright, Greg, good morning on this early morning that we're recording this on, on May 31st. A lot going on. I didn't sleep well last night because I finally went and got my hair trimmed up, and was only a little bit off, because it was literally kind of down to my chest at this point. I wanted to get rid of the—I was getting too many, too many Jesus comments regarding my look, and tried to get it trimmed up. And she went way too short with it, so now I'm angry. It woke me up in the middle of the night. I have my 40th birthday in a couple days. My son Max is due sometime in the next two weeks. So, got a few things.

Sunday, right? Such Memorial Day.

Yeah. Had a long but good Memorial Weekend. But so, we have a lot going on.

Nobody knows Stu Hugh, your alter ego that was pumping you full of the most amazing mixed drinks all weekend to take your mind off of things. Yes, while we were—I think your hair looks great. I really do. But that comes from a guy that's got this...

Yeah, thanks. Thanks. It's the one thing that people liked about me, and I got rid of half of it. So that's so bad.

Don't think that way. People know you for other things, I just haven't figured out.

Yeah, we just don't know yet. It's got to be there. More evidence. Okay, so we're talking about today, something we've seen that's nothing new, but a lot of—called "social media leakage" right now. And this, obviously, has taken place before, is what people called manifestos, and kind of why people write this stuff and put it out in the world before they go commit some terrible act of violence.

And we'll talk about some of the reasons sort of behind it and what it is. We kind of refer to these folks as—our term is "Injustice Collector"—that we use, because it sums up a lot of what even a lot of the clinical psychologists would say about these folks, and get into their—a lot of narcissistic traits. We don't really get into trait theory much, but it's there. The point is, they're basically saying it's everyone else's fault for what's going on, not theirs. Right? And we see that a lot in society. Everyone wants everyone else to do something and change. God forbid they change themselves.

That's part of the equation. And there's a long list of folks who've done this. I'm sure we'll get into. Cho at the Virginia Tech shoot, Anders Breivik over in Europe, Ted Kaczynski was a big one with his. And then Christopher Dorner, the one out here who was a former LAPD guy, was killing cops out here on the West Coast a few years back. Gabriel Wortman up in Canada. There are different cases that we're going to talk about.

And we're talking about kind of how they use that. Meaning, some of the questions I like to pose people is, "Is this manifesto? Are they using it sort of as a tool?" There's this ideology that they're espousing. Is it almost like the power source of an IED? Right? I've got to have a battery or some type of power source to power my bomb, except in this case, that human is the bomb that explodes, right? So, it's all used because you see a lot of similarities in a lot of them.

And we don't get into the weeds of what their ideology is because it really doesn't matter. Because one, they kind of pick it. They feel wronged, and then they pick this one that they have some relation to or feel some affinity towards, and use that as the leading problem. So Kaczynski was, "Hey, this technology is ruining us as a society. This is where it's going. I'm going to do something about it." And they cherry-pick past authors and past philosophers or past shooters or past—they pick it. I mean, even Patrick Crusius did one too. I mean, it's—I guess it's interesting for folks to study, and that's great. But rarely, when you study that, does everyone then say, "Well, it's this ideology." It's like, "Well, no, it's this person." Because there are all kinds of different ideologies. There's religious, social, cultural, political ideologies that you can have, and that you can use it as a power source.

But we obviously look at their behavior and we look at demonstrations of intent. So the point of this too is also to kind of get into, not just—we're talking about this after these events, obviously, because we remember the information. But then how do we use it before an event? How do I know? Is this person who wants their say, or is this person who wants their say and their way? Or even during an event, during one of these catastrophic events, can I predict what this person's likely going to do based on their actions? Because, guess what, I'm not going to know what their ideology is in that moment. And they might not even be clear on a lot of these folks. They use this stuff, and then if you were to actually sit down and talk to them and ask them to explain the reasons behind their ideology, the history behind it, they don't even know. They're like an inch deep on it, or they're one slide deep, as we say. They can opine topically on some ideology, but they really don't have a full understanding of why they're doing it, which is all humans in a lot of ways, right?

And how we do that—politics is always a great example. You get people really angry about some policy, and then you go to ask them about it, and they don't even really know the ins and outs of it. But that's kind of how we are. Now, most humans aren't the ones that are actually going to go and do something. These are the ones we're focusing on.

You're outside now, but...

Yeah, I'm outside.

So, listen, let me give you two examples that we can use to sort of frame your argument, because you've got a very good argument.

So, the first: Scottsdale, Arizona. Cops showed up at a house fire back probably 2001-2003 time frame. There was a suspect that they were looking for, Robert Fisher. And Fisher, in Scottsdale, Arizona, brutally murdered his wife and two kids, then burned the house down before he decided to square off with the cops. And even before that, way long time ago, we used to call that "the so there." And what's the "so there"? The "so there" is that, "Look, so there. You're not getting me, you're not getting my wife, you're not getting my house, you're not getting anybody. Look, I messed up my pants when I was a kid, and my wife knew that. She also knew that I couldn't hold a job. And so my economic, misguided, disoriented brain tells me that the first person I got to 'schwack' is my own family, because I don't want them on the news afterwards saying, 'Oh, he always had problems, he had this, you should see the little thing he had in his closet, you know, that nobody talks about,' right?" And you're going, "Wait a minute, can that be true?"

Well, look, that leads us down a rabbit hole that's not always important or irrelevant. Let me give you an example: Gabriel Wortman. So, folks, to keep up with Brian and I in some of these episodes, you've got to do a little bit of the homework yourself. So, Gabriel Wortman, back in 2020, went on a shooting spree in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia that left 22 dead. And Gabe is no longer with us after a shootout at a gas station. So, a very good writer that happens to be in law enforcement, that wrote for a very, very good publication for law enforcement, said in his talk about Gabriel Wortman that Wortman would light fires at these locations where he had the criminal acts, to hide evidence, Brian, and to misguide the responding officers to show them that, "Hey, look, I'm over here, I'm over there," and distract them and use up a bunch of resources.

That's not why Wortman did it. Wortman did it because he did this, "So there. Look, you bitched at me 13 years ago when I tried to buy your property, and you acted like an ass and turned me in when I did the shoplift thing on my bicycle as a kid. So now that I'm on my killing spree, guess what? I've got these injustices that I'm collecting. Okay, and it's your turn. And when I do it, I'm going to poop on your bed, I'm going to light your house on fire, I'm going to piss on your car in the garage, and I'm going to shoot your dog." And you're going, "Oh my God, Greg, where are you going?" No, Brian, that's it. That's exactly what's in their mind. "Fast, I am a mindset. I am so angry with everybody else." And again, "I'm the one that's misguided and disoriented, but I can't see it because I'm the one walking around dressed like a cop killing people."

So, what we miss, Brian, is we miss trying to get into the shoes of the offender by taking a look at the life of the offender. And I don't mean going back and saying, "He was beat by his father." Look, you talk about manifestos, "My dad molested my uncle." That doesn't mean anything to who I am now. Look, Gabriel Wortman, Brian, he left a manifesto. You know what his manifesto was? He spent years building realistic police cars. That's his manifesto. He spent years putting together a realistic-looking police uniform. Why? Because he hated the cops, but he revered the cops. He never trusted the cops, and knew that he wanted to kill cops, and he ended up killing one female copper during his rampage. But the idea of having the power to make a traffic stop and being believed in that moment, and then walking up and gunning somebody down, Brian, it was part of his fantasy. So he had a fantasy life that he lived out. Look, Isla Vista Manifesto in the car, but then acting it out.

So, the manifesto is a manifestation, for lack of better words, of all of that hate and anger that has come together inside of that person. And they want to say, "So there," and they want to just leave a scorched-earth policy behind them. And that's why it's important in your context to say, "Look, if I know that now, Gabriel Wortman had to be put down like a diseased rhino. Gabriel Wortman, there was no talking about, there was no sending a negotiator." Do you understand? That's part of why we discuss these things.

We say the same thing. That's similar to Christopher Dorner, right? Running around in California.

Yeah.

Well, he was specifically targeting police officers and people that had done him wrong. And it's just that—it's almost another thing. It's, "I'm so angry at you, killing you wasn't enough. So now I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to break your floor. I'm going to light the house on fire, and there's going to be nothing left of you." Because it's pure rage at that point when he's doing it.

Exactly. And then now it's over time.

And so, one of the things you just hit on right there is, in that moment, can you make a determination on what their likely intent is going to be? I think so, yeah, meaning, if you look at every school shooter, what do they do? It's either they commit suicide or, for the most part, they give up. And once they're done killing, that's kind of it. Meaning, what are they really there to do and what are they likely to do next in the moment? And you brought it up, is this person someone we can talk off the ledge or get them to come in? Especially with the Wortman examples, there was no other way. He was going—he had a plan, and you can tell he had a plan, and he's going to fight until the bitter end, and he doesn't care. I mean, there's a complete and total lack of regard for anyone in that moment, and including himself.

Including himself, which is important, because he knows it's checkout time. Okay? When you do "check please" in a restaurant or you're walking around in City Market and you're ready to check out, it's checkout time. And he knew it was checkout time. He knew he couldn't unring that bell.

But here's the comparison, Brian, and this is something that you touched on, it's hugely important. So, we look at Dahmer, we look at Gacy, killed 33. We look at Bundy, Ted Bundy, killed 30. Okay, those are all numbers that are larger than Gabriel Wortman. Okay, but none of those guys shot it out with the cops, and none of those guys committed suicide. Do you understand the importance of that? Right? Because they wanted what? They wanted their say and their way. But now you get to a Gabriel Wortman that wants to say and his way, but he knows it's also end times. He knows it's also, "I'm not that guy that's going to sit and do an interview after this. I'm certainly not the guy that's going to sit in a jail cell and rot."

When you take a look at it, out of 500 serial killers that were studied over a period of time—I think it was 10 years, but do your own homework on it—only six percent of those committed suicide. And those that did commit suicide, committed suicide in prison. Why? Because they couldn't act on their—they couldn't apply the trade anymore. Do you understand what I'm saying? The notoriety had—and when that notoriety, their essence was diminished, and that's why they did it.

So, when you take a look at things like, you can categorize active shooters. Okay, most active shooters are male, most active shooters act alone. But you know what? Those things don't help me categorize them when I'm hunting them to face off with them. You see what I mean? And I don't know enough about the background. Nobody's doing the search warrant on their home and calling me on the radio and saying, "Hey, Clarice Starling, you know, you're looking for a guy that was James Gum or Jamie Gumb." Okay, we don't have that continuous update of information, Brian. So what we have to do is we have to take a look at signs.

So, your buddy, that was a copper, when the railway transit shooting occurred in California. Yeah. Okay, so the neighbors knew the guy was a recluse. He kept to himself. On this morning, he got up like every other morning at the same exact time. But what did he do differently, Brian? He lit his house on fire on the way to work. You know what that means? That means, "So there. I'm not coming back. I'm never coming back." So, now we're at Apocalypse Now, based on Conrad's Heart of Darkness and in the movie, where on the tape he says, "Sell the house, we're divorced. I'm never coming back." Why? Because that part of that brain switches.

Whitman, old one from Texas, who did Whitman shoot before he went to the tower? Yeah. Because you can't have anybody back there. People that are going to end it—it's going to end with me, right? "I'm done." What are they going to do? They're going to shoot somebody at home, a family member in their residence or near their residence, before they go on their spree.

Well, that was even, nearly 100 years ago, Bath Township, Michigan, Andrew Kehoe. Andrew Kehoe, who blew up a school that he had packed with explosives and killed people, showing up at two schools—well, in the parking lot with a V-bed that he ignited. And it killed a ton of people. Before he went there, what did he do? He killed his mom. He put a sign out on his lawn or hung it on his fence, I believe it was, "Criminals are made, not born," I think is what it was, was the quote, which is the ultimate, "Look, this isn't my fault."

He flipped them off, right? Yeah, right.

But look at that.

Let's go back to Wortman, and I'm on a Canada kick right now. The RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) is going through this protracted investigation that's been going on since about the exact incident. And the reason is the headlines are saying, "Look, what did they know about Wortman? Why did they do this? Why didn't they do that?" It's easy to go backwards. Yeah, it is, and pick at scabs. Okay, what happens, though, is every one of the articles that I read are mean-spirited, saying, trying to get the faith back in the RCMP, trying to get people to trust the RCMP. So, did Wortman's manifesto work? Yeah, Wortman had the last "screw you," because what he did is he said, "I will discredit these folks by using their own tactics against them." Right?

Yeah.

So he had that plan that if these things ever went this far sideways, and I did—for example, the party the night of Wortman, he gets into a scrum with his girlfriend, and he gets into a scrum at the party, and he's embarrassed. So, embarrassment to some people is the line in the sand. If I go to a sporting event, sometimes wearing the wrong color can be a death sentence. Wortman, he got so angry on that night that he goes, "Okay, it's on. And now that it's on, I'm burning down everything I've ever built that I own. I'm burning the cars that I spent so much time detailing, and then I'm killing you, and I'm going to burn your house." And then he goes on the spree. That's different than serial killers. That's a spree killer, and specifically one like this that's got an agenda is the one that you have to take down, Brian. You literally—look how calm Cho was before Virginia Tech. What did Cho do? Cho listed all the injustices, wrote down, "I'm not sure what I'm doing right now, but I know I'm going to be doing all these bad things very soon." And he mails it away. And even the people around him said, "We felt physically cold when we encountered Cho." Why? Because Cho had mentally checked out. Cho is already in his final resting place, all he has to do is get there, right?

And so his manifesto, even though sometimes the manifesto again is hard to read because the person doesn't know exactly what they're doing.

Yeah.

We call these people "outliers." Malcolm Gladwell made millions of dollars calling people outliers. Are they really outliers? No, they're the people that are sitting right next to you that you don't understand how to unpack them.

Because they don't know how to unpack themselves.

Exactly. And that's part of it too, is that's why they become these rambling, incoherent manifestos sometimes, because there is no clear message. They're just grasping at straws at that point. And people went on and on about Kaczynski because he's a brilliant mathematician, he's a really, really smart guy. And so, "Well, look at what he's saying." It's like, "Yeah, but that doesn't—and if you give him a math equation, I would trust him with that. And he's going to know what to do. But that doesn't mean he understands everything that's going on and why he's doing it."

And that was one too, that you sort of misclassified these things, or people do. It's like, "Okay, he's this loner, and he moved off in the woods." Well, no, he's not a loner. Because if he was a loner, you never would have heard about him because he never would have done those—he would have said, "I'm checking out and I'm staying in my tiny cabin in the woods, and you're never going to hear from me again." But he couldn't do that. He just—the anger just festered and festered and grew and grew and grew, and he just had to get his message out. So he's not a loner. He wants to be, but he wants society to know how wrong they all are and how right he is. And how, "So finally..."

You know what I mean? "Finally, you're on the social leakage," to the point that everybody can latch onto that and go, "Holy crap, this guy so wanted his message to get out there that even though he lived in a shack off the grid, he rode a bike from his rented typewriter, you know, with paper copies of something." And Brian, how lunatic were the things that he wrote? Lunatic enough—they were off the rails so far that his brother—what did his brother do? His brother goes, "Holy crap, I know who wrote that. Yeah, I know who wrote that. I've seen that before." Okay. So how touched do you have to be for you to narrow in on somebody just based on their words? And that's where people say sometimes, "Okay, I got this guy at work, and I'm really worried about the guy at work." Look, the guy at work is just like everybody else at work. They're never going to do anything. You know what you got to worry about? You got to worry about that small sliver of people that want their say and they want their way, and guess what? They're writing things about it and they're posting things about it and they're hanging up those off-color cartoons. And when they're eating that apple, they're pointing the knife at you and saying, "You know what would square things up?" They're always looking for retribution. Okay.

And most people are just talk. Most people are just hot air and full of crap. And as a matter of fact, like even serial killers, Brian, they account for less than one percent of all the people that are ever killed. But why do we hold them in such high esteem when it comes to news? Harold Shipman killed 218 people, they suspect he killed as many as 250. To us, that's amazing, that's noteworthy, that's remarkable. So we don't understand that. So we try to put everybody in that package, and everybody's not in that package. A broken human that goes out to kill or to burn down his own house, or to go across the street and kill his neighbor and burn down their house—that's a very different kind of person. So if there's a classification for that, and I like the "injustice collector" because it fits, then that's the type of person that we have to kill. There is not going to be negotiating once they start shooting.

There's not. Dorner had to die for his message. He had to become a martyr. To Dorner, martyrdom was how to get his message out to the most amount of people in the shortest amount of time. And so each killing was symbolic. He wasn't angry at the people he killed; they were a symbol of his violence, and violence became his language. I know that's hard for us to take a look at. But when we start classifying that the arson fire that I set was to destroy evidence—that means I want to stick around, that means I'm just covering my tracks, right? That's not what was happening with Gabriel Wortman, and certainly not what was happening with the railway transit guy.

Yeah. And that's, you know, part of getting that message out. It is including, you know, they sort of have to die in those situations in order to get it, in order because they don't want the narrative to change. I mean, that was, you know, they have to control the narrative.

You're exactly right.

And that's—so that's another issue. It's—these are definitely, you know, people that feel as if they have no control over everything. It must be everyone's fault. So what can they control? Well, like you said, violence can be a language, and they can use that, and they can control it and they can wield it however they want. And then they can get that message out.

You know, that reminds me of Nidal Hassan down at Fort Hood, who was a psychologist. He killed all those people. And then, you know, what did everyone end up saying? "Oh, this is, you know, workplace violence, this is just something, it's 'going postal,' right? It's something that happens in the United States." Well, he wasn't happy with that. And he was—that was not the message he wanted. So what did he have to start doing? All kinds of crazy antics in the courtroom. And then all of a sudden, he grew his beard out really long, and everything was about—he was an extremist. And sure, he was in touch with all kinds of people overseas, and that's all been noted. But whatever he uses that for is his choice, and it doesn't necessarily fit the way you're measuring it, in the way you're connecting the dots. And this is the issue. Again, like I always say, "Humans are horrible at measurement and assessment." And we have to take our tools that we know and apply them to the situation and go, "Ah, yes, here's what it is," without just simply looking at their behavior and what they've done over time. And I think that makes it a little bit more clear to show, you know, the difference between these folks. Because that's what—that is the difficult part that people do want to understand. It's like, "Well, yeah, most people talk crap and say whatever they want. Social media certainly increases that amount, it increases the amount of rhetoric, so it can make it more difficult then." But it doesn't. Over time, you have to look at it with the right lenses. And going, "Is this person the 'injustice collector'? Do they just want their say, or do they want their way? How do they demonstrate that intent?" Because these themes throughout these manifestos are very similar, and they're rambling, and they're taken from different people all over, and they're mashed together, just like any human does. And they want it to fit their narrative. "Oh, this guy knows exactly what I was talking about. That's the same thing that happened to me." It's like, "No, you're not some well-known person that got taken down, you know, by the—by those, you know, social mob because of something you said." That's not you, just because you agree with what that person said. Your significance is different.

Exactly. And you can't—we don't like that, especially if you have that kind of really narcissistic trait where the person is the introverted sort of narcissist, which is the scariest kind sometimes, because the narcissist who everyone knows is a narcissist is fine. I mean, not fine, but precisely, you—that's who they are. When you can't tell, that's difficult, because they're hiding something. And they have feelings like, "No, I belong somewhere. And I, even though they haven't accomplished anything maybe to achieve that, they have that feeling of wrong, and it's just 'you're the problem,' you know, 'not me.' So here's what I'm going to do."

And those signs, it's like, you know, because you brought up the burning the house down or killing the family. You know, that's not unlike—even in the moment, it doesn't even have to be one of these types, because it could just be any criminal type act. It's, "I, you know, leaving the door open on the car when you get out of it." Well, why? Why would you do that, right? "You're either coming around or you're never coming back."

Exactly. Why? You don't even know. And that's a perfect point of clarification.

Because if I pull up to a 7-Eleven and I leave my car running and I don't close my door fully, and I run into a place—first of all, you're going to get your carjacked, right? But second of all, it's because you forgot the orange juice and you've got—yeah, whatever, yeah. So that's very different than pulling up at a scene, a discotheque or a restaurant or something, and parking across all lanes of traffic, leaving your car running and stepping out. That's a big, likely indication that things have gone so far sideways that it's going to take a high volume of well-aimed fire to solve the problem, or a significant amount of explosives.

And when we say that, your Nidal Hassan is a perfect example of this. Nidal wanted to send a message. And the message that he sent when they said "workplace violence," he couldn't get back there. So he had to become more and more outlandish and reach out to more and more people, and it just—what it did is it muddied the water. He no longer had a clear, laser-focused message. And that's why each year we don't celebrate that, unless you live close to the location.

When you take a look at a person that's willing to trade their life for somebody else as a martyr, that's completely different than a person that's an "injustice collector" that sat in her basement and saying, "They're all laughing in the office space with the red stapler. You know, I swear to God, I'll burn this place to the ground." That character is just a quintessential character in Family Guy, Brian, when we watch an episode of Family Guy where he says, "Where do you see yourself in five years?" And he goes, "Don't say 'doing your wife,' don't say 'doing your wife,' 'doing your kid.'" We feel that that's so outlandish that we can't make sense of us ever doing that in that situation. That's the perfect definition of anomic. We're so misguided that we're clueless. Well, that's how these folks feel, but Brian, they can't stop from saying that. They're constantly having that running dialogue, so it's going to leak. It's going to leak in different places.

The Uvalde shooter shot his grandmother, didn't kill her. Why? Because she was that person at home, just like Whitman shot his mom, right? So the idea is they follow these—and somebody's going to say, "So do they research the other person?" Yeah, but they don't research them and say, "Point one: kill somebody." Right? You see what I'm trying to say? There's no agenda in that manner. The agenda is, "This person is the only person on the face of the planet that understands the amount of pain I'm in, and therefore I'm going to kill just like they did." Right? And you know what? It just happens that I happen to kill the person here. And it's not a take on something that's happened previously. You just go to Kehoe, who is he reading? Perfectly stuff. It wasn't, you know, he wasn't there. There were no trendsetters. But the idea is they fall into that because of their psychopathy or sociopathy and different ways they're going.

Exactly. And the way they're looking at what they're doing, right? So they have to—that becomes a natural conclusion to the story, as part of the conclusion of the story. It just happens almost automatically. It happens naturally. And through just that process of where they're going mentally to go, "You know what? Oh, yeah, then I got to get rid of my mom because she can't be around for this because I don't want them to talk about it."

Exactly. "My parents when I was eight years old, and yeah, and you know something else happened and I was a broken human being." And, "No, we're not going to do on the narrative," right, Brian? And here's the point that Brian just made, folks, write this down: You can be a sociopath, you can be a psychopath, and never hurt somebody but yourself your entire life. Yeah, you can be ruthless in business because of your psychopathy and never hurt anybody else. You might not have an emotional—

Wildly dangerous. Yeah.

That's what I'm trying to say. So those are the people that we worry most about when we take a look at American Psycho, when our CEO Shelly's favorite films. The idea is when we see Bateman's decline, Bateman has characteristics of sociopathy and psychopathy. And the question to you is, did he commit any of those murders, or was it all in his head? Was it just a manifestation of the voices in his head? And so there's a great argument made. But the idea is at the end of the day, it's Hollywood. At the end of the day, they wrote a script on a person, right?

Yeah, they fall into the same narrative with those scripts that those people do. It's, "Well, it's, is this—is this this individual? Or did society, because of its decline or decay, push this person into it?" It's like, "That's BS." Like, "No, it's the least important point, and you don't get to—you don't get to do that." You don't get to say, "Well, I see why they did it." No, I—maybe, maybe everything. You can say maybe Ted Kaczynski had the right to write his manifesto. He didn't have the right to make bombs and kill people. No, you can say, "This is where I think it's going, and I'm upset with it, and I don't like it. We need to make changes." Absolutely. That's—that makes our society better when you point out those things and go, "Wow, right, this guy's a brilliant guy. Maybe he's on to something. Maybe we need to look into this." Right? But you don't get to do these other things. Right? So that's—that's the point too, is the responsibility is on the person. And when we start getting into all this extraneous, "Well, look at the pressure they were under and look at this"—those—I'm not saying those are supporting—there may be contributing factors. But when hasn't life been difficult for people? It's a necessity for humans to have discomfort, to have something to worry about, to have something to fight against. That is ingrained in us as humans. That's how you can't—you can't be happy if you don't know what it means to be sad, like heaven if you don't understand the concept of hell. Right? That's—that's how it works. It's a comparative baseline. You have to compare it to something. So you don't get to just throw on whatever this ideological thing is and point to, "Well, here's what the concept is, and that's what we need to go after." It's like, "No, we need to go after the people who are likely going to do this. That's where we need to focus our resources." Because it's a relatively—well, it's an extremely small amount of people.

Statistically insignificant.

Insignificant, but howling. Yeah, but howling because it hurts us personally, and we feel scared. And whenever we're afraid of something, we overvalue or overweight that thing in our environment.

And Brian, at the end of the day, the idea is that you can avoid almost all of these instances because people fail to talk about it. They don't make the connection that when somebody's leaking, that person's already broken. Something has broken, and that's why they're leaking. And so, stepping in and being the one that says something or notifying somebody else and saying, "Hey, this is"—for example, a person will follow a path, and we call that "mission-focused." And when a person is mission-focused, it's very important: are they mission-focused to lose weight and quit smoking? Are they mission-focused because they're cheating on their spouse or significant other? Are they mission-focused—we had the predator that built the shed in the driveway of his house so he could molest the neighbor kids in the shed rather than doing it under the watchful eye of his parents at his home. You know, the idea is that those seem so outlandish, just like that Family Guy episode. But when we look at them, Brian, we start connecting the dots and we say, "This seems inevitable. This person needs some sort of intervention." Maybe I'm not qualified to do that. So that's when you've got to notify people. And that's the same for suicide, it's the same for a homicide.

It's the reason the person has the cameras facing out on their house isn't because they're worried about you breaking in all the time. The Ring camera is a perfect example of that. What's the Ring camera capture more than anything else? People cheating on their spouse, because they're too stupid, and we forget quickly that we installed the camera for that. So, if you spend your time people-watching, you'll notice that almost everybody is cattle. Almost everybody's a sheep or a cow walking around, ruminating in their environment and pooping and going to sleep, right? But those people that are more alert than everybody else, Brian, those are the ones that you tend to tune into earlier. And you know what you're going to do? You're going to define them to a highly motivated, successful person, or a low-motivated, "everybody's out to get me and I'm going to show you." And that's why the bullying comes up, Brian. You were bullied as a teen. I'm bullied. You're clearly being bullied for that haircut. All of those cells—

I believe myself probably. No, no, no, one can kick my ass like I can.

Exactly. But that's because I need to control my narrative. And when you take charge of my narrative and it goes places I didn't expect it or intended to go, I may bite you like that dog that's not paying attention, or I may kick you like that teenager that's not paying attention, or I may shoot you like that guy across the street whose cup was full. And because you didn't consider his cup might be full, right? You added on and said, "So there," too.

And "so there" it was. It was a linchpin. And then you could take everything that we're talking about in all these examples from these different cases, and you could—I mean, because you just said it too, is you apply that almost the opposite end of the same spectrum, is then the person who's going to commit suicide. So now they're not saying everyone else is the problem. They're taking on problems that aren't theirs, and they're saying, "Well, it must be me. I must be the broken human. I'm not contributing to society anymore. I have no value. I should end my life." And it's just sort of paraphrasing generally, but there's a lot, again, there's a lot of contributing factors to all those. But that's the person that made the decision. And it's very similar in the sense that they're not going to write a manifesto, but they might leave a letter, a suicide note, or they might reach out to someone like that last minute. And it's, it's, it's, it's almost the same type of behavior. It's just an internal sort of taking on this added responsibility versus, "I'm going to deflect all responsibility outward, and you have to pay for this." So it's, meaning, everything that we're talking about, and how this works, can be applied to those same different situations. I mean, an insider threat is an insider threat. It's one of us. Now, they might be exactly themselves if they're suicide, they might be a threat to others if they're going to be homicidal. So we kind of overlay or put in all of these different themes or ideologies. And I look at those as maybe their ideology is just that's their battery, that's their power source, right? That's where they gain—they get that energy from feeding off of that. And we all do that in different ways. We do that in what our interests, our hobbies are, working out, or whatever it is. We get that from somewhere. And it can turn—the same thing that can be an extremely positive force for good in your life can be used as a force for evil the same way. I mean, that's a lot of different ideologies are like that, or religious ones especially. It can be the greatest thing, and you could be the greatest human and treat everyone with what you think, how you think they should be treated. Or you can take it the exact opposite direction, and you can get very violent with it. So, why we focus so much on that stuff, and I really think it makes it more difficult to understand this, which makes it more difficult to identify that person. That's what everyone wants is the way, "How do I know the difference?" And there's a lot of different fish in that aquarium, Brian.

We're not talking about the guy that's pulling the armed robbery and then all of a sudden the cops show up, so he takes hostages. That's a different angle. You're not talking about the person that's a three-time felon loser that's got the gun and the eight ball and said, "Not today. I'm not going to jail." So, what we have to stop doing is creating a specific bandwidth of offender and trying to make people fit into that. That's where we sometimes go off the rails, right? What we have to do is we have to take a look at intent. Intent's a simple thing. And we have to take a look at the most likely future behavior is predicated on their past behavior. So Wortman would have been a perfect example. The BOLO (Be On the Look Out) that should have been out for Wortman is, "When you see Gabe Wortman, you've got to gun him down like a diseased dog, because if you don't, he's going to infect this—he'll keep killing people. It's going to be a zombie." And that's hard. And most people—Dorner, perfect example too. Dorner was off the rails. Dorner had exceeded his expiration on the milk carton, and he knew it. And he wasn't afraid to say it. And look how afraid that made us. It made SWAT teams make mistakes, it made other people do silly things. And folks that know the inside track on these papers, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Well, we did an episode just on Dorner too, so, yeah, go back and listen to that one.

Exactly. Would Bundy have ever committed suicide? No, it wasn't in Bundy. Bundy had to tell his story. Dahmer had to tell his story. Dahmer wasn't afraid of the story, and he always knew there was another dick to blow or another lover to kill and strangle, Brian. So that's what we have to look for. We have to look at the tumultuous behavior that is laying in tatters on the floor behind a person. If you look, there was a good one—and I hate platitudes, but "hurt people hurt." I love that one. Yeah, okay. So, and there was a thing the other day in the news, and they tried to put a positive spin on a turd in the punch bowl. And the guy said, "Hey, guy goes into rob a bank. He doesn't have a gun, but he intimated he has a gun and a bomb. 'Give me the money.'" A guy in the bank recognized him as his neighbor and goes over and goes, "Hey, aren't you Jimmy from down the street? Man, things are really bad." And the guy goes, "Yeah, I got nothing. I got to go to jail. I don't have any money. I don't have anything." And he walks him outside and he hugs the guy and talks him off the ledge. And everybody thought, "Oh, the story ends there. It's great." No, the guy still went to jail. That guy was robbing a bank. It didn't matter. He demonstrated all the factors for the intent. So you think that Good Samaritan is going to—"Oh, it's okay. You know, 'tabula rasa,' but he will start over." No, that's—there's consequences, right? These folks do not consider the consequences, Brian. They do not. They continue to play outside of your rules because they're in complete control of their own narrative.

And they're typically sort of like a habitual line-crosser, right? I mean, a lot of times where they're going to—they're going to push, they're going to push the boundaries all the time with every one of their relationships. I mean, that's typically what happens in these. So, those are why we key in on those little things of pushing boundaries, not respecting other people, not respecting visible signs of authority. Those type of things are the importance versus what that person believes. Like, I don't care what they believe, you know, they might—because they might not have even spent much time digging deep into their thoughts. They didn't do a lot of research, right? If they did that much reflection, they would have come to a realization and gone, "You know what? Maybe I can change me." But they didn't. Right?

And so, when you have this "so there" mentality, that's what leads to all these. And, you know, we keep seeing the same ones over and over again. It keeps happening, and everyone goes back to, "You know, what's the motive? What's the motive? Oh, they were, you know, they were incensed by some act from someone else, and they didn't like this group, so they're going to attack that group." Well, screw it, that group didn't exist 10 years ago, and it's not going to exist 10 years from now. So what's your excuse? What's your theory then? Because then it goes out the window, then it doesn't make any sense. Because when you hold it in your hand in a clear light of day, it's nothing. If you can't use a theory that works in multiple domains with multiple people in multiple incidences over a significant amount of time, then how good is your theory of what you're talking about? You know, it, it, it, it can—

Another one: "Imposter Theory." Throw that out on the table. Oh my God, if we come up with any more of these ridiculous things. But Brian, your point is well taken. The idea is that a broken human is going to do a number of things, and those things are finite. Even with free will, they're going to try to fix their broken—they're going to say, "It's too much, I don't want to live with 'broke' anymore." They're going to reach out, or they're going to hurt in silence, but they're going to leak somewhere. And so, we could categorize those. We could come up with—and I'm not doing a scientific study—but let's say there were five or eight likely responses, right? Then we measure those likely responses against the baseline, and we come up with those people that pop hot in our environment. Right?

So, if you're in a lot of medical pain, like from cancer and from a procedure and all that other stuff, there's a category there. And what we're not trying to do is we never force somebody into that category. So if that person starts reaching out and saying, "Hey, you know, I'd be much more comfortable if I was dead, and you know, let's give it a second chance in heaven," those type of things fit. It's a form of manifesto, it's certainly a form of social leakage. And we just got to weigh it compared to other artifacts and evidence within our environment to determine the likelihood that that person's broken enough to hurt themselves or somebody else. It really is that simple when we take a look at it. We overcomplicate it. And I go right back to the parking lot, Brian. I can't tell you by looking at a crowd of thousands which person is broken just by glancing. Nobody can. No one. Okay. But if that person's backwards, dragging a duffel bag, that's right, you know, into the thing, and it's sending off sparks, okay, you probably got a problem that you need to investigate. And that's it. That's what we're trying to say, is that when that person is hurt, and you know they're hurt, investigate. Go over and find out. And if you're not going to be the one to find out, go to HR. And if they can't find out, go to a cop. And if we did that more—see, we try to make knee-jerk reactions to things in progress. And because we do, we choose poorly. Taking a knee, giving ourselves a gift of time and distance, looking at the totality of what a person is showing us is a much better indicator of what their future is going to be than all of us just trying to jump in with a gun at the last second and try to solve problems at banks.

No, and this is where sometimes we do get into the point where the words coupled with their actions do matter in a sense, right? I agree. There's a difference between, you know, "Hey man, I don't—" There's a difference between, "I don't want to go back to jail," and, "I'm not going back to jail." Those are two different statements. One clearly is demonstrating what they feel and what they have in their mind. "Like, I'm not going back to jail" means, "I'm going to do whatever I can in this situation to not go back to jail."

So, let's talk about that in the context of what's happening on the streets now. If a cop gets shot and people are saying, "Yeah, but social justice, social injustice," you know, that's how a person's expressing their mistrust and displeasure with cops, Brian, that's insane. If you're willing to go toe-to-toe with a cop and fight them or shoot them or kill them, what chance do I have as a common citizen? Right? What chance do I have coming up against you? So that's where you should be thinking, "Society." It's the idea of there's an order, there's a process, there's a way things unfold, and this isn't the way. So your misguided, disoriented actions—that your gut feeling, gut feeling isn't science. I can give you the scientific reasoning for it, right? But the idea is that you can't just say, "Well, I feel really, really strongly about this, you know, so it's the right thing." Don't let your—don't let your feelings get in the way of what's right in this society. And these folks are broken. And if they have to scream out and you don't listen, the next level is acting out. If you're not going to listen to me, Brian, I'm going to show you. And when I'm done, I'm going to drop the mic. And that drop the mic moment is the "so there."

So there. Yeah. No, and, um, you—I mean, even—well, it—it just, it reminded me even—even BTK, who was, oh, they couldn't capture him, and he reached back out to the police doing the—"Why aren't you following me anymore? Why aren't you—"

Because I'm powerless without you. There's a symbiotic relation between us. And the idea of the—of the spouse that's beaten and the person that's doing the beating, of the molester and the molested, there's a relationship there, right? And if we can understand that, then we can look by—look, I don't say that we have to understand everything the guy ate when he was growing up and all the different, you know, things that—understanding that they congeal to form what's in front of you now is important enough. But motive is much less important than intent and demonstrations of intent, especially social leakage. You have to dig into. And folks, if you're right now this far into the call and you're going, "Social leakage, I still don't get it." Oh my God, how many articles have been written, how many things are out there? Do a little bit of research, and there's examples of social leakage. Isla Vista, Elliot Rodger, his social leakage is amazing. And just remember, he was sitting next to you ordering a coffee at Starbucks when you were there too.

And Brian, this is such a small problem when we take a look at society, but it's the important problem because this is one of those quality of life issues that nags all of us: "Will my kid do this? Does my husband have a plan?"

Right. Yeah. "And my neighbor kid do more than mow lawns?" Right? But the thing is, is, you know, before you can—before you can problem-solve, you have to sense-make. Right? Because meaning, before you try to come up with a solution, you have to ask the right questions. And actually, just in most of the time, just asking the right questions gets you about halfway to the right answer. I mean, simply doing that. And that's why we try to boil it down to those, you know, the simpler concepts of, you know, "people who want their say versus people who want their way."

"Acting out versus acting out."

Yeah. I totally agree. Because that's a great one, you know, because developmentally all humans have to go through that. You have to act—you have to act up, like you have to be put in—like you have to be told no, you have to learn boundaries, you know, as a child. And if you don't, you never will. Once you get to a certain age, it's unlikely you ever will. You know, it's interesting. It's like experience from when, and folks have had this, and even in law enforcement too, but the military one, where, you know, you have someone who grew up in like a really rough area and they were—they were in a gang, maybe they were doing whatever, and they—they chose to join the military, or maybe they went in front of that judge who was like, "Hey, if you join the military, we'll commute your sentence," or whatever. And they first get exposed to boundaries and discipline and organization. And they eat it up because they never had that before in their life. And I've seen it—I've seen it become binary. They either continue being the criminal that they were, or they become one of the best people you've ever served with because they never had that growing up. Now they have this institutionally, and they're like, "This is all I needed in life. This is no one ever showed me what right looked like." And they rise to the occasion.

What's the Freshman 15, Brian? Yeah. Why do we do that? Because all of a sudden we're stepping out of one thing into a new thing, and all of a sudden we're faced with these new boundaries. And I didn't want to test them at home because I got my ass kicked. But now all of a sudden, you know, there's some underage drinking, a guy smoking a little pot. I'm thinking, "Hey, you know, this is my church." I'm thinking, "Hey, how bad could this be?" And then guess what, Brian? Then that becomes habit-forming, right?

Right.

Because I like the feeling associated with what, for the first time in my life, controlling my narrative. And sometimes we've got to get smacked down. We've got to get scar tissue to understand who we really are and what we want to form into. And thank God it's such a small percentage of the population, but it's just an overly violent and scary percentage of the population.

Right. Right. Because they're—they're, you know, low-frequency, high-impact events. You know, I mean that—that's—

School shooting, yeah, earthquake it, right? School shooting, tornado, I totally agree.

And so that—that's why, but, but, you know, one of the points we try to make with all this is, that's the point, is you can—you can control it, you can see it, you can intervene, you can act. You know, that's the whole point, is that, you know, because no one, or rarely people ever see it in person, so they don't understand it. They don't—they've never tasted it, touched it, smelled it, felt it. So then you never account for that. You never go, "Is this the person that's going to go and shoot up their work?" And we fail to think that sometimes, or we look into things that don't matter, and then we start jamming that square peg into the round hole. You know what I mean? And so that's why we kind of stick to those, those demonstrations of intent, especially when it comes to these, you know, "injustice collectors" and, and, you know, all these different cases that we talked about.

So, how do we sort of get better at this in a sense, in dealing with it, right? And because we've all either heard a story or talked to someone or, like you said, maybe had a gut feeling about something, which typically what happens, people justify it and they go, "Well, either I don't want to get involved," or, "Maybe that's just how they always are."

Well, yeah. So, we regionalize injustice. We do. We rationalize it away. We rationalize it away until it makes no sense. And then I would say this, Brian: Columbine just passed. Go out, buy the book on Columbine. It's a great book. I've had mine for, I don't know how many years now. Why do I have it? Because every year I read the same book just before Columbine, so I don't miss the signals in my own life, in my own family. Both Klebold and Harris's parents had a litany of cues that their kids had. Right? First of all, they're both convicted felons in high school. Yeah. Okay. Not all of the kids are, Brian. Okay. They both had bomb-making materials in their homes that the parents knew about. There was a bomb recovered, a fully functioning bomb, close to Eric Harris's home, and his dad, when he found out about it from police coming around searching the neighborhood, knew it was his kid.

These incidents don't happen with everybody. Everybody out there is bullied. Everybody out there pooped their bed or pissed in their bed. Everybody out there got in a fight in their neighborhood, Brian. Everybody out there said the "F" word and then tried to cover it up and take it back. But not a lot of kids built a fully functioning bomb. Not a lot of kids, you know, were convicted felons because they tried to make money so they could buy more bomb-making or make a plan.

Yes, or made a detailed plan, right? And the plan included killing everybody else, and if I couldn't, going on killing myself. My thing is, Brian, words hurt. Your intent matters, and social leakage is the earliest, probably earliest intervention point. So my thing is, Brian, every action has consequences. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So look to the science on this one. Those cues start to coalesce. Your first instinct is denial. You must fight that and go, "Say, what's going on here?" And if the person says, "Oh, look over there, there's nothing to see here," you know you're onto something. The person flees, you know you're onto something.

Yeah, right.

And you got to dig deeper, Brian. You got to—if you want to live in this current lifestyle and environment, you have to be more apex and less, "Can't we all get along?"

No, and it's sometimes, like I said, it's the right questions.

I agree.

If a person is just, you know, they just want to have their say, what else should I expect to see? If this is the person who's going to act out and do something, what else should I expect to see? What else would I find? What would I see next? I can balance those two things out as sort of that analytical framework of without falling into sort of that trap. And you know, once you do that, it's easy after the event. I know how—we know everyone, even really, really smart people, people who do stuff like this get fooled. You get—fraud happens everywhere, right? It's to the smartest people, to the dumbest people. Everyone gets fooled, you know, at some point in their life or in multiple times in their life by something, whether it's really small or it's really big. And people can—or it's going to happen. So, when we—we don't, you know, we have to take a look at those events and go, "Wait, is this that event that they're talking about? Is this the situation?" Because it'll start to unfold in front of you. I mean, literally that yellow pad. How many times have I told people that call me, go, "Hey, I got a question about something." And I always say, "Hey, think about it, write it down on a yellow pad. What was it that you saw? What was the felt? What were the actions that you witnessed?" And then they call back and like, "Oh my God, you were right." I was like, "I didn't say anything, you did all the work." Exactly. You know what I mean? And when we say, "Do your research, do your homework," that's exactly what we mean. Yellow pad is the greatest invention in the world. So, yeah.

Well, I know. I just feel angry now. I feel angry about your haircut. You know, they found brass knuckles in my locker. I'm just angry all the time. I'm just saying. Real—no, but the Bart Simpson—folks, you don't understand how much this takes out of us talking about bad people and the lack of consequences and stuff. And it hurts both ways. That's an edge that cuts both ways. But I think, Brian, that we gave everybody an idea of how to see those things in their environment. Not necessarily what to look for, but how to look and where to look when it comes to social media leakage.

I agreed. And that's, you know, this is the "so there" theory, I guess, right? That we're talking about. And, you know, we boil it down to those simple concepts. There's obviously a lot behind it. You can go in much, much farther detail on everything we talked about. But the point of it is, you know, use that in this situation: is this the "so there"? Are they doing that? You know, get my helmet out, right?

If it is, turn on the warning light.

Yeah. And you don't—I mean, ideology is half made up most of the time. So stop worrying about motive and look for their intent: "What are they likely going to do next? What have they done before in the past? What are they telling me?" Someone's trying to tell me something right now through their words, through their actions, through their behavior, through their clothing, through whatever. What are they trying to tell me right now? Am I listening? Am I receiving on the right frequency here? And that sort of understanding.

Most of those signals are benign, and most people just want their say, not their way. And again, the danger is in the context of, if I want my say and my way, and I'm determined to control the narrative, this might spin wildly out of control. And violence is a language. So if I understand just that from this episode, I'll be safer today.

Okay. Yeah.

Yeah, that's another one I forgot to mention there at the end, "violence is a language." And we've kind of used that one before, and people use it, people use it all the time. Okay, well, we kind of got into a lot. Each one of those kind of flew by pretty quickly. I didn't realize we're that far in already. You know, each one of these things, like we said, we can go into detail, but, you know, I'd like to hear from anyone listening, you know, what their thoughts are and how we approach stuff and any specific questions. You know, always The Human Behavior Podcast@gmail.com. And then, of course, our Patreon site as well, where like we said, we put up the—we put up the paywall for a couple bucks just to keep some of the riffraff out. And so far, all the riffraff has been kept out. We've got some great Patreon subscribers that ask amazing questions. I know.

And then I have to go, "Damn, that's a good one. I got to take a while." You know what? Let's just record a whole episode on that question.

Oh my God. Does that stay this time? Yeah. Really, it's actually easier to do that than to write out a detailed response sometimes.

Totally.

So, to just to discuss it. So, anything else to add here, Greg?

No, just like Samson, Brian cut his hair and now he's powerless. So anybody wants to run over and beat him up, today's the day.

Yeah. She took too much off. I was not happy.

I think it looks great.

Thank you. Then again, thank you. Alright. Yeah, I don't—it's just where I drive my power from, and now it's all gone. Alright, well, we appreciate everyone, everyone tuning in and supporting the show and sharing it with your friends if you enjoyed it. Please, please do that. That kind of helps get the message out there. And then, you know, obviously follow along on the website. You can check out the podcast website: The Human Behavior Podcast@gmail.com, or TheHumanBehaviorPodcast.com (I think that's what the podcast is, right? .com). And we have no idea.

But also sending messages till we answer.

But also you can go to The Arcadis Cognarati website there. You sign up to stay on top of everything and find out when we're doing our next in-person stuff or the webinars and the more we have coming up too. So you can stay connected there. But follow us on social media as well. Thanks everyone for tuning in and don't forget that training changes behavior.