Violence Is Not Random: The Hidden Signals Everyone Misses (Robert Mahoney)

This episode represents a defining framework for how we understand violence, risk, and human behavior moving forward.

This is our most complete breakdown of violence, behavioral risk, and prevention to date.

Violence is rarely spontaneous. It is patterned, observable, and in many cases preventable. The problem is not that the signals don’t exist, it’s that most people, systems, and institutions fail to recognize them in time.

In this episode, we sit down with Robert Mahoney to break down the psychology of violence, threat assessment, and the hidden behavioral signals that appear long before escalation. This is not a surface-level conversation. It is a deep operational framework for understanding how individuals move from stability to breakdown.

We challenge the idea of the “random act of violence” and replace it with a more accurate model: trajectory.

Violence develops through patterns of behavioral drift, identity disruption, isolation, grievance, fixation, and leakage. When you understand the trajectory, you stop reacting late and start seeing early.

We explore:

• the psychology behind violence and behavioral escalation
• why violence is not random and how patterns emerge early
• threat assessment and behavioral indicators most people ignore
• identity, purpose, and community as drivers of human stability
• how grievance, isolation, and fixation build over time
• why “leakage” can signal internal struggle before action
• failures in systems, law enforcement, and institutional response
• how environment design influences behavior and perceived safety
• why top-down intervention often fails and what works instead
• how prevention becomes possible through awareness and coordination

This episode sits at the intersection of psychology, human behavior, leadership, and real-world risk. Whether you are in leadership, education, security, or simply trying to better understand people, this framework changes how you see the world.

This is not about predicting violence.
This is about recognizing patterns before they become irreversible.

From Chicago to London to emerging audiences across South Asia and beyond, the patterns remain the same.

If you’re responsible for people, systems, or safety, this isn’t theoretical, it’s operational.

Robert Mahoney works directly with organizations, institutions, and leadership teams to implement prevention-first frameworks rooted in behavioral threat assessment, early intervention, and coordinated systems of care. His work focuses on identifying risk before escalation, strengthening environments, and building structures that support long-term stability.

For those looking to move beyond awareness into application:

• Website: http://www.tvtpsolutions.com/
• Book a conversation: https://calendly.com/robert-mahoney-tvtpsolutions/30min
• Phone: 401-208-0957

If this conversation adds value, follow the podcast, share it with someone who thinks deeply, and help expand the conversation globally.

Transcript

No Comfort, Only Clarity

SPEAKER_01 0:00

This is not a podcast for comfort. It's a podcast for clarity. In a culture flooded with noise, dangerous narratives, and emotional uncertainty, this space exists to examine what actually matters and what actually works. Here we question power itself, belief systems, and the assumptions most people inherit without inspection. Most people accept instead of dissect. This podcast is about correcting that. Welcome. Bienvenue, Velekomin, Marhaban, Bienvenidos to the Magnificent Ones podcast. Most conversations around violence start too late. They begin when a threat is already visible, when an attacker has already formed, when intervention becomes reaction. But what drew me to your work, Robert, is that you're operating much earlier in that timeline. Before a defined threat even exists, your framework focuses on early behavioral drift, grievance information, isolation, identity disruption, fixation on injustice, subtle subtle leakage. Signals that individually may seem disconnected, but together begin forming a trajectory. And what stands out is that this isn't about predicting violence, it's about recognizing destabil destabilization early enough to redirect to redirect it. That distinction shifts for the entire philosophy from threat management to trajectory management. Instead of asking, is this person dangerous? The question becomes Is this pathway becoming unstable? And if that's true, intervention becomes less about security and more about humans stabilization. What also struck me is that these early stage signals don't appear only before violence. They appear before a leadership collapse, organizational dysfunction, radicalization, even social fragmentation, which suggests violence may not be the starting point, but the extreme endpoint of a broader escalation process. So today I want to explore both the philosophy and the mechanics behind your framework. Where do these trajectories begin? How early can they be detected? And can intervention at a human level actually change the outcome? Robert, I think that what you're working on is more than just prevention. It's a way of understanding how escalation itself unfolds. I'm really looking forward to unpacking that with you. Robert, when you look at early stage signals like grievance, isolation, and disruption, are you trying to detect potential violence, or are you really detecting destabilizing trajectories?

SPEAKER_03 2:59

I would say it's probably more the destabilizing. So the the important thing to understand is that all humans, all of us, are in search of what I've kind of metaphorically sort of displayed as sort of three buckets that we're trying to be filled at at all times. And those three buckets are identity, purpose, and community. We will search for things that sort of fill those buckets or reconfirm though those things. And the the thing to remember is that the human brain is it finds it completely unacceptable to not know who you are or where you belong, right? And so in the absence of that, we have to go searching for that. And so that that destabilization is sort of it contributes to that. And I think when we start talking, or we use the term sort of radicalization, and I use it sort of in in quotes, because it we when we talk about radicalization, we usually bring it towards some type of aggressive or violent sort of meaning to it, that that individual has been sort of radicalized. And we start trying to intercede or interrupt the thing that they are attaching or the message that is, that they are they are gripping to. When in actuality, what they are gripping to are those intangibles. It's not necessarily the movement or the religious fundamentalism or the political ideology or a combination of all the different sort of things. It's more that sense of identity and purpose and community that they are getting from it. And so it becomes a far more death grip, sort of locked-in type of thing, because you are now becoming emotionally and psychologically dependent on this thing for your own sort of mental and psychological survival to go off that track and to just sort of be in the nothing again is, like as I said, is just unacceptable. And so we have seen a lot of individuals who have perpetrated these attacks who, like in their manifestos, in their journal writings and things like that, express a lot of sorrow. Like there is a conscious sort of knowledge that what they are going to do is going to cause a lot of pain, right? And things like that. And yet they can't get off and that track, right? They can't get off that track because we look at it as sort of like a conscious thing. If you know that you're doing this or that you are going down this sort of dark path that's going to lead to violence, why don't you just jump, sort of jump ship? And it's like, because you can't. You you psychologically and emotionally can't, because there is really no landing place for you to be. And this kind of goes into the difference between doing an intervention or or sort of an interruption, intercession, or something like that. But to go back to sort of like the radicalization, you can sort of see how this can be attributed to a lot of different things. And I and while we bring it to a negative connotation, it can also be in a very positive sense. AA does the same sort of thing. If you go to an AA meeting, you will introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Rob, I'm an alcoholic. Boom. There's your identity. What's your purpose? I'm here because I want to get clean. That's my purpose. Where's your community? Everybody else in that room, and their purpose is to help me and help themselves get clean. And so now I'm locked in, right? I've got an identity, I've got a purpose, and I've got a community of people that care about me. So I'm locked in. You can look at it from during COVID. We saw a lot of people in the public health realm get really, really agitated and sort of defensive when certain things at COVID wasn't making sense, right? Like the message, the mixed messaging and things like that. Why? Because they identify as public health professionals. Their purpose is to keep the public healthy and to do those things. And their community is typically largely other public health people that they find community with. And so part of the the when we went to when I started talking about sort of interventions or as opposed to intercessions, when you kind of push back on those types of things, or you begin to ask questions, or you try to debate with individuals who are sort of locked in on that thing, it becomes a personal attack, right? You are you are personally attacking everything that they sort of hold dear and their whole raison d'ette, basically. And what ends up happening is that they you instead of seeing the other side or or anything else, you basically just dig in your heels and you kind of you you actually remove yourself more from sort of the societal conversations and things like that because you are seeing it more as a as a personal attack.

The Random Violence Paradox

SPEAKER_01 8:32

Absolutely. How do you distinguish between temporary emotional distress and meaningful behavioral drift?

Identity Collapse Across A Lifetime

SPEAKER_03 8:40

So it's interesting because this really was sort of like the genesis of how I got sort of enveloped into this work because I had these, I kept hearing this sort of paradoxal narrative where I would hear random acts of violence. This is a horrible random act of violence, and then five to ten minutes later in the same press conference, hear that this perpetrator had a long history of behavioral problems in school or at work, that he had been, you know, mental health had been called to this individual's home a number of times. They had run-ins with police. And it just like, how is it random if because the idea of random is that you have no idea who this person who would commit an attack like this or where it was going to come from or anything like that. And yet you have this individual that was known to basically everybody that needed to know about this individual and try to help them knew about them, but somehow they they slipped through the cracks. And so I began to really delve deep into sort of why that paradox narrative and that the kind of where that origin story sort of resulted in. And really what I noticed is that the the character arc of these individuals is very similar, irregardless of motivation. It is basically a litany of one-off, seemingly innocuous events in this individual's life that don't really raise our attention to a certain level where we can predict that a threat or violent behavior is going to take place, right? And so we design, we have designed the sort of systems to operate on sort of a threshold response methodology where an individual has to get to a certain point, trigger a threshold, like go over a threshold, and then response will sort of take hold. And so you sort of see this within the different sectors where you know if you go to law enforcement because you're concerned about somebody's behavior, they'll ask you, well, are they doing anything illegal? And you'd be like, Well, no, not really, not yet. But they're they're they're definitely agitated and getting aggressive. It's like law enforcement's like, well, yeah, I mean, what do you want me to do? Right. Like, all right, I'll put them on a list, and if they do something else, at least we have sort of like a history, but there's really nothing I can do. And, you know, law enforcement has protect and serve on the side of their cars, not prevent and serve. So they're just not designed necessarily to make those coordination or or referrals and things like that for somebody who isn't really doing anything illegal. Mental health, you'll you call mental health or a mental health hotline or you know, a crisis intervention team will come in and something like that. And they'll may ask you, like, all right, well, are they a threat to themselves or others? Well, no, not yet. You know, but they're getting agitated. Well, they're gonna have to get to the back of the line, right? Because I've got, you know, X number of clinicians and I've got a stack of people on my desk that actually are. So we're gonna have to prioritize those people. And, you know, if that individual begins to get more agitated and suddenly crosses a threshold, we'll be there. But, you know, you're just gonna kind of have to wait. And education has this really sort of insular type of thing where they like to keep a lot of things in-house, right? Like they believe that they've got their counselors or their psychiatrists and psychologists in-house in the district, and that they have their own sort of checklists and everything else, and they'll just handle it in-house until it reaches a point where somebody breaches and crosses over that line, and then they pull in mental health and they pull in law enforcement. And so there's a more defensive approach that we have taken of hoping that protection and preparedness slash response measures are going to do the job instead of being more proactive. And I think part of that is just misreading what those different indicators, behavioral indicators, sort of are, and n looking at things in a lens of like, well, they broke up with their boyfriend or girlfriend. That's not really a threat thing. So it's not really something we need to worry about from a threat prevention thing. Their grandfather died or a family member died. Again, not really a threat thing. They got kicked out of their apartment, not really a threat thing. They have food insecurity, not really a threat thing. And so, but you see these in combinations, you see these cuts, and these, as you mentioned, sort of like this distabilization, right? These are all shocks to the system that really agitate that sort of sense of identity, sense of purpose, and sense of community and where you are. And so these things begin to sort of build and build and then eventually kind of snowball into sort of this outward aggressive sort of behavior. There is a line of thought and a lot of study in how this parallels with suicidal ideation. Um, a lot of the attackers also have some type of suicidal ideation. And so looking at individuals who sort of become severely depressed and their behaviors along the pathway of committing suicide is very, very similar, where they will have these sort of they'll they'll feel overwhelmed and then they'll have these sort of spikes of unusual behaviors or sort of breaching or broadcasting sort of intent to do harm, usually to themselves, to sort of test the waters to see if somebody's going to respond on their behalf, right? To see if anybody cares, to see if they can agitate somebody to the point where, like, oh, what? Hey, what did you just say? Right? Like, do you need help? And part of the the the pathway of violence, when you go through the different stages of sort of grievance, which matures into an ideation, which matures into research and then prep, and then finally sort of like this this overarching breaching or broadcasting, you see that breaching and broadcasting throughout the whole pathway. Like they are they are trying to lay breadcrumbs and lay down hints in order for to see what the public or or who's going to react to it. And there's a line of thought that this is sort of like the subconscious way of asking for help. And unfortunately, we don't we don't look at, we don't have the same empathy for somebody who is showing or detailing signs of aggressive or violent behavior in the same way that we see signs of substance abuse or depression. Like we have a different set of empathy for that person or those people than we do on the other side. And so the message for those people that are sort of like trapped in this violent pathway is okay, I gotta ramp up, right? I gotta, I gotta say something more wild or I gotta do something that's that's more scary because they're not paying attention to all these breadcrumbs that I'm laying down, and they're just kind of sitting on their hands. So I've got to try and find out where that threshold is that will get somebody's attention to finally get the help so I can talk to somebody about, you know, what's what my struggles are and and my grievances and and figure out a pathway off because I don't know, I'm not going to jump off of this train because there's not I I can't see anything that's there that's going to fill that identity, purpose, and community onto something else. So I need a little bit of help here. And nobody's coming to my my aid. So I'm going to just keep ramping it up and ramping it up and ramping it up until somebody kind of comes. And usually, you know, if we're lucky, that's usually right before they, you know, right after they post something of them with guns, with a date, or, you know, watch the news tomorrow, you know, and then everybody is like, oh, this is this is it. And we get everything descending upon, you know, that that person when we've got this long history of months, sometimes years, sometimes even decades, of these different thousand paper cuts of of showcasing this individual of this sort of downward spiral of struggle.

SPEAKER_01 18:03

I think what I find fascinating is that there's this pattern recognition to things in general. And I think a lot of people aren't trained to see these things. For example, something that I found insightful that you brought up earlier is the matter of identity. The brain needs to have an identity. And so a lot of times where you have an individual, say they're middle-aged, we'll say 50 years old for just conversation's sake. And this individual gets laid off after putting in 30 years into an organization, being a high performer, they sacrifice knights from their family, and maybe they're on their second divorce, what have you. And so now they feel betrayed and they have no identity because you've they've they're seeing it as maybe the system took their identity away. So the lashing out happens as a result of that because you an individual now feels that they were robbed of an identity in their years of sacrifice, which is tied to their identity and who they've built up for the past 35 years. So when I was trying to get a better grasp of your framework, being that there is a component of pattern recognition, does your framework focus on, say, predicting or redirecting?

SPEAKER_03 19:18

So it's a it's a combination of both. And you made a great comment because a lot of a lot of people, because of the amount of of sort of media attention towards school shootings, we think that this sort of identity, purpose, and community kind of thing is teenagers just struggling with with where they fit in and everything else. But you made a great point. Like if you're a plumber and you've been a plumber for 35 years and you were looking forward to retirement, and now all of a sudden you're retired, but now within two weeks, you're completely bored, right? Like you don't know, you've just identified as a plumber. Your purpose was to be a plumber, all your community were were other, you know, the people at the office and other plumbers, and and now you don't have anything. That can be massively disrupting. We see this with individuals who get out of the military, right? You've got a very regimented schedule and what you are and and what your purpose is and everything else for for a very defined amount of time, and then your time is up and you leave, and like you don't even know how to dress yourself for the corporate world, right? Like you become almost this helpless kind of child again, and and you you don't know where you're going. This is something that sort of worries me about sort of like the AI revolution of tasks and things like that, and people losing their jobs who have felt that they have kind of played by the rule book, that they have a defined skill that now no longer is deemed valuable. And where do you go? And and cutting those sort of those things cold turkey really is so destabilizing to the psyche and emotionally that you do kind of flail around a lot. Like, you know, sort of, you know, the those inflatable things in front of car dealerships, right? Like you're you're just grasping at basically anything. And one of the difficult things about doing that is that you will sort of piecemeal certain realities together. You almost make like a reality quilt. And we sort of see this now where there's no real purebred, sort of violent attackers. They kind of have, they're not necessarily a part of a particular group. They don't operate. In a group fashion. They're usually sort of like the lone wolf, lone, lone attacker kind of thing. And when you look through their readings and you sort of, you know, do more deep dives on who this individual was, they're like all over the map, right? They're taking bits from far right and they're taking bits from this part of a religion, but they're stopping, you know, a quarter of the way through on this conspiracy. But they're they've weaved this in almost like a reality quilt. And everything that comes in after that point gets sort of filtered through this quilt, right? Where it's just a reconfirmation of everything that's there because it's it's more stabilizing to the brain in that way of identity and in explaining the world and purpose and things like that. And so when we talk about sort of how we get people sort of off this path, one of the things that I've really tried to be a champion of is to not look at it as an intervention. Okay. When you intervention has a very top-down context to it. You are you are there there's a power dynamic of you are coming over the top. You are telling this individual that what they are doing is not okay, that what they are saying is is not acceptable, and that you are going to create a power dynamic where they have to basically do what you say, right? And as we sort of saw earlier on, with whether it's you know, you know, a conspiracy theorist that's heading down the pathway of violence, or it's you know, a public health official or something like that, it becomes a personal attack, right? That that power dynamic becomes a personal attack because intervention actually works with somebody who physically has like an addiction or physically can't do something and needs that sort of stabilizing power force to sort of lead them through. When you have a psychological and emotional sort of addiction or ideation to it, it just becomes a personal attack. And so I look at it more as sort of like an interruption or a negotiation. What you have to understand is that, again, these people have attached themselves not necessarily to the message, but to those intangibles. So you need to provide them with those intangibles, right? You need to showcase a new identity, a new purpose, and a new community that is there for them. Now they can be, it can be one or it can be all three, but it has to be, if we're gonna go back to sort of the bucket analogy, you're gonna have to match the flow. Okay? This isn't just sort of saying, well, you could take up pottery. Well, I'm not interested in pottery, so that doesn't, that doesn't, that flow into my identity isn't gonna work. So you need to actually showcase that they can get an equal amount of of you know flow that they are currently getting if they also move over to this, to this other thing. And that makes the the leap away and sort of off-ramping these individuals a lot easier. One, because they know that they have a safe landing spot that you have showcased for them. And also two, they're still in control. They're making the decision to kind of get off this path, not you telling them that they need to get off this path. And so that makes it not only easier for them to go, but more permanent as well, where they they feel that this is some a new opportunity that they can attach themselves to that they have chosen to do. So they're more willing to go down that other way and break free of the destructive pathway that they've they've kind of fallen into.

Interruption Over Intervention

SPEAKER_01 26:04

I think there's a little you know, a level of empathy that has to be had. I think a person has to also, in some cases, humble themselves or get off their their, I guess, power dynamic and just be a bit more humanizing when dealing with these people, because a conversation can solve many things. The ability to communicate with an another person, but also know that you're being listened to. And I think in a lot of these radicalizing situations, people aren't listening. They're telling, just simply stating that everything you're doing, everything you're saying is wrong, but not listening to see maybe how do I disarm disarm and bring this person from a 10 to maybe a three.

SPEAKER_03 26:47

Yeah, and there's I think there's a one of the the big sort of light bulbs that went off in my head was was realizing like how behaviors actually are influenced and how you know it I have to repeat this sometimes because it it makes total sense when you hear it, but then in practice we don't always recognize it. Our behaviors are not rational and they don't follow reason. Okay, like we don't the reason why we bought the car that we bought doesn't follow necessarily logic. It was because we like the seats or we like the color or we like the sound of the engine, right? Like all these things are more emotional. And the way in which thoughts and opinions like manifest themselves is sort of this downward flow of you you first feel something, that creates a behavior, then your thoughts and opinions are manifest off of that behavior, and then we post-rationalize that behavior to fit into a logical sort of narrative, right? And so the way in which we typically do these sort of interventions or intercessions is, as you mentioned, sort of we try to attack the what with thoughts, opinions, facts, figures, things like that, thinking that we can thus convince them that what they are feeling is a lie or is wrong or is factually not correct, and that what you are saying is is on the pathway of logic and therefore our behavior will change. And that's you're going up stream, you're going up the hill. You're basically trying to walk up a downward escalator by doing that. What you need to do is create those feelings, like, oh, I see that there's people who have a real warm community here, or there's a real sense of altruistic purpose on this thing, or oh, I can identify with that, right? That's a feeling that moves your behavior, that moves the needle of behavior, and then your thoughts and opinions will will sort of follow. And so I think there's just a misunderstanding of of how these things kind of are done from a behavioral standpoint, and we keep pushing sort of this reason and logic processes, thinking that we're going to change people's behavior by changing their minds. No, we have to change their behavior first, and then we change their minds. And there's actually a great study that's not violence related at all that kind of shows this, where they did a study on first-time buyers of electric cars, and they asked them to rank the reasons why they bought an electric car. And, you know, performance, technology, looks cool, sort of all in the top three. Environmental impact was usually around like seven, eight, somewhere on the list. They went back to those people about a year later and asked them to rank, ask the same question. Why did you buy an electric car? And the environmental impact went up to like the first one or two, right? So it was actually like the actual behavior of driving the car around for a year changed people's thoughts and opinions about why they had actually bought the car. And that is more of how we operate in the world, where we, you know, we see something, it makes us feel something, and then we we move it. I do this little study with context when I'm talking to more security professionals about, you know, different narratives and things like that. If I tell you that an event is going to happen and 8% of the population will die, that that creates a triggered emotional response and thus a behavioral prep for an event that, like, geez Louise, 8% of the world's population is going to die. That's a massive event. If I tell you that 92% of the population will survive after this event, you don't think it's a big deal at all, right? Like, and so your behavior is going to completely change depending on the context in which I present something to you. And it all goes back to sort of the feeling. It's not necessarily what the event is. I can give you all the facts and figures of what the event is going to happen and what the trigger points are, but that's not going to necessarily change the way I feel about it. It's more the context in which I present it that creates the feeling that then motivates the behavior.

SPEAKER_01 31:50

So then I guess my follow-up question to kind of segue into the meat and potatoes is that do you see violence as as the end of a behavioral continuum or a sudden event? So sorry, my throat's a little dry.

SPEAKER_03 32:06

No problem.

SPEAKER_01 32:07

My question was do you see violence as the end of a behavioral continuum or or is it just a sudden event?

SPEAKER_03 32:14

It's the end, it's the end result of a continuum. It's it's the last-ditch effort. It's it's it is something that I've exhausted all my other options. Nobody has come and tried to stop me. Nobody has tried to offer any assistance on getting me off this pathway. I've, you know, ranted and raved for all this time. I'm a broken individual. I'm struggling. I can't handle any of this anymore. And, you know, there's a sense of lashing out, right? And and we lash out in sort of the most aggressive, most horrifying way to get people's attention. And, you know, I may feel as though, you know, this particular group has caused me, was sort of like the genesis of putting me on this path. And therefore, there's sort of like a revenge thing to it to try and sort of rectify or even out the pain that that you have caused to that individual. But for the most part, it is it is really one of these things of this last-ditch sort of explosion of a number of different struggles that have just sort of manifested themselves into this sort of violent ideation. In the same way that, you know, this is why so many of them have suicidal ideation as well. Where, you know, they they've those individuals have exhausted as much of their effort and and what they can do to try and showcase that they need help. Nobody has really come to their assistance and therefore they jump off a bridge or they slit their wrists or they they shoot themselves in the head or something like that. In in the same way that, you know, alcoholics and and stuff like that might take an overdose, so they can't get clean, they don't think that, you know, there's any really other options for them, and and and they sort of OD. It's the same sort of, it's the same, it all kind of comes from the same genesis, this internal, internal struggle.

Warning Behaviors And Zen Security

SPEAKER_01 34:28

What what are the most common pathways you see individuals moving along before escalation occurs?

SPEAKER_03 34:35

So the the the one thing that we want to try and and guard ourselves against is looking at risk factors as being predictive.

SPEAKER_00 34:45

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 34:45

That is one of the things that so risk factors are not predictive in in any way, shape, or form. And I also like to tell audiences that deeming somebody within a risk factor is also an outside looking in approach. You know, most people that are in or have risk factors don't look at it as risk factors, they look at it as life, right? So if you have food insecurity, but everybody else around you also has food insecurity, that's that's not a you don't look at that as risk factor. That's just what everybody else around you has. If everybody is is, you know, of a certain political ideology or certain religious type or has access to weaponry or or thinks certain things, again, these are not necessarily predictive of certain behaviors that are going to happen. So that's why it's so important to look more at the behaviors of what is is happening. The behaviors that you'll typically see is and and the most identifiable one is sort of withdrawal, is an isolation. And I see this a lot with with schools where I'll ask them, okay, you tell me the difference between somebody who's just the quiet kid in the corner and then somebody who's struggling with isolation that no one talks to. Right? Like you can't really decipher that very much. So what you will begin to sort of see is is an is a pullback from things, whether it's through friends, whether it's just removing yourself from sort of you know your daily habits and things like that. So we might see subtle things like, you know, they just quit the soccer team. And again, not something that's really threat-related, but just unusual behavior. You'll see things of, you know, maybe certain outbursts or, you know, really defiant kind of arguments or feelings about a particular subject or certain things. You know, an a steady increase of aggressive behavior are all sort of warning signs that somebody is is going to is having some struggles. The one thing that I I do try to encourage sort of all of our audiences to, or my audiences, to understand is that like we are hardwired to detect abnormal behavior. Like our senses, whether it's sight, sound, smell, taste, even that sixth sense of like somebody comes in the room and there's just like this a different, there's just a different atmosphere that kind of comes in when somebody enters the room or or you enter into an environment that's just different. Those are all things that we're hardwired to notice. Our brains only have so much bandwidth. And so we will prioritize those those sort of things. In fact, I've I've kind of coined this idea of sort of zen security, where I create this haiku of your mission as a security professional is to kind of make the water as still as possible so that you can see what's what's causing the ripple. Right. And if you put in a lot of noise within that environment, it becomes very, very difficult to sort of pick up on these types of subtle indicators of issues because you're just focusing in on what's in front of your face. And so a lot of these behaviors are subtle at first. They're not violent related. So don't look at it at trying to detect certain threatening behaviors. It's one of the biggest, I'm a behavioral threat uh expert, I guess. Or, you know, I I've been sort of I do behavioral threat training and things like that, assessment training, but I hate the title. I hate the title because in the same way that random acts of violence creates a context, behavioral threat assessment creates a certain context of what you're supposed to be looking for. And, you know, as I mentioned earlier, like those different struggling signs can manifest themselves in a lot of different ways. You don't actually know what the straw that's going to break the camel's back is really going to be. So, you know, we've had a lot of really good success stories with incorporating, and we had a great success story with schools where they incorporated bus drivers into their behavioral threat assessment team for the purpose of sort of identifying aggressive or violent behavior or different types of things. And they kind of reported back. They found individuals who were being picked up and dropped off at a different bus stop and finding out that there was some substance abuse that was going on at the house, right? They found another individual who was being dropped off by a car that had was filled with pillows and blankets and stuff like that in the back and found out that their family had been evicted from their apartment. All these things are not violence related, right? Like we instilled this sort of behavioral threat assessment team in that incorporated the bus drivers to find threatening behavior. They find these off incidences, these non-threat violent instances, that they were able to be proactive, right? Like they were able to get that family and get that individuals that was having some substance abuse at the home the assistance that they needed so that other things did not sort of like a magnet attach onto that thing. And so, yes, I'm looking at trying to be more proactive in the prevention space so that targeted violence and things like that don't happen. But this is really, this is a multidisciplinary sort of approach. You can you can really do a lot of good just by having a more evened out security sort of dynamic of prevention, protection, and preparedness and response. And I think one of the pitfalls that we have with having this framework of random acts of violence is that it moves us more to, well, if you don't know where it's coming from, by all means put as many protective measures in between me and that individual as possible and prepare to respond if something does happen. And it's not that there isn't value in that, it's just that the the context isn't necessarily true, and that we sort of overvalue those protection and response measures and begin to sort of undervalue the importance of prevention. And you know, there's a lot of dynamics, human dynamics within that of just sort of you know quantitative to qualitative and things like that, that that security professionals and and especially whether it's a school or an office or even community kind of don't understand the the different dynamics and the complexity of of how these things sort of matriculate and sort of grow into what we sort of see as as eventually a violent attack.

Fixation And Security ROI Myths

SPEAKER_01 42:20

You know, my wrestling coach had a had a saying, you know, when when we were coming up, and his saying was, no, I'm gonna teach you how to never, ever I'm sorry, I'll I'll scale back. He said, I'll teach you how to escape from every move or in every bad position you could ever possible possibly be in. And the the end result of that was if you don't enter into certain situations in the first place, then you won't have to worry about getting out of it. So protective measures that is it's kind of too late, and that doesn't stop it from happening again and and then and the second time. And so by have pr having you know preventative measures means that there's an operational framework at play. Because protection, it's like each individual, their idea of what protection is, is not going to be consistent. And the points at which they're going to evaluate, analyze, and prioritize what steps need to be taken are not going to be consistent. But operational frameworks for prevention, it's like these are the steps that you follow, those are processes that can be repeated. So in in talking about that, is fixation the turning point where the trajectory begins to harden in in your analysis?

Why People Fall Through Cracks

SPEAKER_03 43:36

Yeah. When a grievance becomes starts to become an ideation, that's that's really the kickoff point, right? Like when when you begin to sort of see somebody who is pathologically obsessed over something, that is really a huge cue where every interaction that you have. this subject comes up. Everything that they research is on this subject. Everything that they want to talk about is this. They live, breathe this stuff 24-7, and it's just it's just everything that that they have. That is that is definitely a a an interest uh a a huge behavioral thing. To your point of sort of like the the protection and and response measures, I always kind of have a a tit for tat of sort of what metric are you using as like a successful quantitative metric, right? Like so you put in a quarter of a million dollars worth of protection and response measures. Like how are you calculating whether or not that that money is is giving you an ROI that is equal or above what do you need, right? Like you can't really say, well nothing happened today, therefore it worked. Right? And you know it and there's a lot of there's two stories that I that I often tell so the the first one is me I I had this experience of walking into a liquor store one time in this city and I was as I was approaching the the liquor store I could see the the outdoor cameras and there were some bars on the windows and there's a huge fluorescent light right by the the door which was like reinforced so reinforced metal so I open the door super heavy I get that ding dong you know as as we often do. I end up walking in there's like a little holding pen and there's a metal detector and then there's a security guard with a wand so I walk through the metal detector I get wanded. That security guard also is armed. I then get into the store and it's super harsh bright lights. I can see TVs of myself in the store and then TVs of what's going on outside and then it's floor to ceiling bulletproof glass I've got to talk to the person behind the glass with through these like little dots that are sort of on the glass and then all the commerce is done through a a drawer. And I remember having this sort of epiphany of of I'm in the most secure place I've ever been in my entire life and I've never been more scared. Right? Because the narrative isn't oh look at all these security measures don't you feel safe it's what the hell goes on here that they felt the need that they needed all this stuff to keep people safe. And so you really change the whole context and now I'm I'm causing that ripple right like I'm if going back to my analogy of sort of like the trying to keep the the the water as calm and still as possible so that they can tell abnormal activity like the I'm I'm my head's going back and forth. I'm checking the door I'm I'm not shopping and and everything else. And so so that's one instance of how like protection measures can really change the you know the the what you are projecting and what is being perceived don't always match up. And from a response standpoint there actually was a case out in Dayton, Ohio, Connor Betts, who ended up going sort of like on a late Saturday night, early Sunday morning, sort of when the bars were were kind of letting out he he ended up driving over to this area this very popular strip and within 32 seconds he had unleashed 41 bullets had gone about a hundred feet injured 20 I believe 27 individuals and killed nine people and that was with six to eight cops that were already that road right and because of just the nature of letting out all those people out of the restaurant at that time and things like that, you're not really going to get much better than 32 seconds right like between first shot and being put down that that's an amazing response from from law enforcement. And yet nine people died 27 people were injured and an entire hundreds of people that were on that have been forever changed, right? And and then and so the more responsibility that you place on your protection and response methodologies, the more you're trying to sort of like thread that needle that they are going to be able to get there in time, that that protection measure is going to be able to thwart you know a a threat or a risk that that you're not really sure how they're going to do it. But you know the people when you looked at Connor's story you saw behavioral problems in a in a litany a list of behavioral problems and interactions with mental health and law enforcement and everything else from the age of like six or seven. Right? And so here's this guy in his, I think he was in his early twenties, so you've got well over almost like a decade of issues and just kind of waiting for that that threshold to be crossed hoping that your protection measures and hoping your response is going to actually be there in time or to actually work. And so there's that that imbalance of value that that we encounter a lot in this in this space.

SPEAKER_01 49:43

So how important is is identity disruption in the in the early stages? Me meaning go into deeper on that formula so say there's I'll say Connor I'm not too familiar with that case, right? But so from age six he showed signs. So he was forming an identity throughout that time period right how important it would it have been say that in a there for lack of a better term, intervention, if there was an intervention maybe psychiatric evaluations, I I don't know the full scope of the the case, but if there was a a change in his identity then perhaps there wouldn't have been a the end result of radicalization and violence at the end.

Prevention Gets Undervalued

SPEAKER_03 50:33

Yeah so this is a difficult sort of to try and in and and pin it down exactly so it you know the one of the the big things is is that it's not always like a a a seamless transition on on a lot of things and it's and it's not always one particular thing that sort of begins to you know beat on that that bucket right and so with with Connor or with anybody else you might see something at sort of age six but then they they leave the class right or they move or you know and all these different things can be a little like a little cut right like maybe they noticed something in a class and then they went to a different teacher and they didn't have any problems because the context was different or there was something that was happening on out out sorry outside of school that was providing them with something where like those behavioral problems weren't as recognizable. And then they get something else happens and that's unrelated and the context changes again. And so this is why it's so important to sort of have this more holistic sort of threat assessment apparatus at whether it's the municipal level or or something like that, where you are able to extract information from a lot of different partners, right? So they may be a terror at school, but they're a dream at you know this one department of recreational program that they go to on the weekends, right? Or they may be fine when they go to church, right? Maybe it's the context of you know that classroom or the people in that classroom or something like that that's really causing the problems. But there's like there's but it's a cut, right? And so you know as the context of that individual's life kind of begins to change and different things begin to happen in their lives it's hard to pin down exactly sort of like okay that was one you know that that was the point that we should have done the intervention right it it's more dynamic in the fact that there needs to be an integrated sort of foundation where those little struggles that happen, they feel a sense of value basically right like the identity can change and the purpose can change the community can change but there is there is an there is a strong foundational platform that is created that they know that they have at least some value, that there are people that care about them so that when these little you know again seemingly innocuous not that big of a deal sort of incidences but in combination to things that happened when I was six or things that happened when that family member you know died or that friend moved away or things like that. Those just change it it begins to just kind of build and build and build. And so the the real struggle is to try and get this sort of like integrated into just the way you do business rather than sort of letting these different systems that are sort of hyper-specialized in specific sort of risky or specific programmatic issues of solving different issues and things like that in a person's life, whether that be you know food insecurity or housing insecurity or substance abuse or something like that, that those lanes are almost too rigid, that you need a way to look at the total picture of what's going on in that individual's life and start to begin to assess whether or not you know this person is is kind of getting hit in a lot of different ways. Somebody needs to go and and and talk to him and just make or her and make them know that there are there are people here that if they need help they can go to so why do you think prevention is still underdeveloped when compared to response?

SPEAKER_00 55:01

So I think it's that value thing.

SPEAKER_03 55:03

I think it's that that we're you know I often joke that the reason why the the price is right has been on for so long is because nobody actually knows the value of anything. We are extremely bad at assessing a value to things which is why sort of you know we are more moved our behavior is more moved on things that seemingly don't have a numerical quantitative value, right? That that have a qualitative value to it. One of the examples I use is sort of like this this doorman fallacy you know we the the idea of having a doorman or having concierge service or outside of a hotel or a restaurant or something like that. You can sort of reduce from a quantitative value that you know they're basically just opening and closing the door, right? Or they're bringing in the bags. We could just use an automatic door save a bunch of money but actually the it's it the qualitative value of putting somebody there and how people interact with with that individual actually changes people's behavior. People see the doorman they they come up with a narrative that this is a classy place or this is an important place and that I you know need to to straighten up a little bit I need to change my behavior and there's we can't put a quantitative sort of value on that in the same way that we can't really put value on happiness or the sense of safety, right? Like there's a lot of different things. So I think because prevention is more in the qualitative realm, it's very, very difficult to go and try to defend why you're going to do something that is more from a prevention side which doesn't have all the bells and whistles and things like that. And you know at least you can sort of fall back if you put bulletproof glass into all the windows and you put more cameras and you pay security professionals to sort of be out there with guns, you can at least say like well you know we're spending all this money and nothing has happened so you know therefore it's working. You know we've seen a lot of different places I mean Starbucks for one is an interesting case study hardly knock on wood but there's never been a mass attack at a Starbucks uh brick and mortar Starbucks are basically floor to ceiling glass. There's no security guard out there you can come and go as you please you can stay there as long as you want um and yet you know everybody feels safe right when you go into in into one of their establishments. You're not really looking over your shoulder thinking that you're going to get shot or or something's going to happen. So you know there there's a balance there and a lot of that sort of human emotional intelligence and contextual intelligence doesn't really filter in as much to the security field as much as I would like. And and I think that's sort of one of the big stumbling blocks is that there that there's the culmination of just not knowing the value, having it be more qualitative and putting metrics that aren't necessarily telling the whole story from a security standpoint kind of gets in the way of of really making a big push towards more preventative methodologies.

Designing Environments That Calm

SPEAKER_01 58:35

So I want to draw a parallel between the liquor store that you went to and Starbucks. And my question to you then is is early intervention more about stabilizing environments rather than correcting individuals?

AI Cannot Replace Coordination

SPEAKER_03 58:50

So this is a good this is a good question. I mean and I think the scient there's a lot of science out there that that would say yes if you can change the environment you can actually change people's behaviors without really having to do a lot of of work. One of the industries or one of the sectors that really focuses in on this that I found very fascinating is actually the transportation sector. There are a lot of different things to make roads safer and things like that that are done from a transportation standpoint that can be used, I feel to sort of answer that question. One of the things that I've I've come across is something called a pedestrian refuge. So this is sort of like a little concrete island usually near a crosswalk. In fact the crosswalk will go sort sort of through this little concrete island and this concrete island probably is about you know a foot high and probably sticks out into the lane about six inches in in either way. Nothing really like that's going to harm anybody's driving thing but that six inches to a driver closes down your your scope of of vision just enough that you that you subconsciously will decelerate. So you'll actually go slower just because you see that the road is getting a little bit narrower. They have found that speed cameras and the the signs that flash your speed actually have less effectiveness than just putting a smiley face or a frowny face as you as you pass by. Up here in New England where I am the snow will fall and they'll take sort of like aerial photos after a snowstorm and you'll be able to see the traffic patterns. And because you don't have the same references of where the sidewalk ends and where the sidewalk begins you often take much more slower and wider rounded turns. And this is used to sort of showcase how they can move sidewalks out further into the street to help with pedestrian crossings. They can also use it to help block off parking so usually you'll see a sign like you know no parking from here to the corner. They can use that information to sort of bump out the corner that just makes it difficult for anybody to actually park there. They can make it sort of you know a walkway or they can put planters there and and or stuff like that. So there's a lot of different things from the environment that that are really interesting that the transportation realm are using to sort of influence behavior without having big signs or or a traffic cop or something like that directing people and in how to do it. Starbucks is interesting because you know I I often use them as as a reference point on how they developed their their stores and all the different senses that they tried to trigger. One of the things that that Starbucks did was you know they wanted to recreate European cafe culture when they when they were really getting big and one of the things that they were trying to do was the coffee makers that were for Europeans were very, very quiet so that people could could talk and and things like that in Europe, but they were incredibly slow, right? And that didn't work with an American audience. And the the coffee makers that that were quick were super loud so nobody wanted to stay in because you couldn't really have a conversation. So they actually had to to to commission their own coffee makers that were loud enough that you knew that your coffee was being made but low enough that you could actually have a conversation. They took great amount of detail in discovering like what illumines, like what what level of lighting we wanted for the space and what what was most appealing and and most relaxing. Color tones, wood tones. They even changed the HVAC system to actually blow onto the seating area so that you would smell sort of the warm croissants being made and and more of the the coffee exhaust and things like that so that you would become more hungry or you would you know you felt like you were in more of an immersive coffee sort of environment. And so these are all things to get people to just buy you know a$5 cup of coffee, right? Like this is the level of detail that the the commercial sector is using to not like manipulate but to tease the senses in a sense that a certain behavior will then be elicited out of them. And it's one of those things that I don't see the security realm really focusing in a lot on that. We've had a lot of different colleges that have these sort of blue towers, these blue phone towers for for emergencies that are all over the the campus. And a lot of now with the proliferation of sort of like smartphones and things like that, a lot of campuses have their own app where they can students can be geolocated, they can live text or live talk to to an officer you know they they can even some of them can even upload their their class schedule. So if you're one of your classes like is on the third floor of a building all the way in the corner, you know if you send out a distress signal instead of just that that building being pinged they can actually see okay on Wednesdays at 10 o'clock you're usually at room 327. So they have a better idea of where you might be. So a far more superior security tool than say this static blue sort of phone tower. Yep every time colleges and universities tried to remove those blue towers there was always this uproar of like why are you making us less safe? Why do you not care about our safety? What happens if you know something happens and everything else and they're like you you're on your phone 247. You've got you like it's right there. And yet you know there's there's this sort of narrative of a sensory narrative of those things project a certain level of safety and security and if you remove that you know it it changes the whole dynamic. And sort of that balance of how we design the environments looking at colors looking at textures looking at lighting, sound, smells, things like that is really a realm that is like fruits of of you know just an abundance, right, of of exploration in how we can do this and and what can what we can sort of begin to sort of fine-tune so that, as I said, that sort of that water becomes more and more and more still so that those little ripples are peak our our senses that we know that there's something potentially wrong or something that our attention needs to focus in on the I'm gonna ask you a two-part question.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:41

So do you think that your framework, because colleges also have their own cultures, so that's why I'm gonna bridge it into two questions, could this framework be used also in companies to detect to detect uh to detect cultural instability?

SPEAKER_03 1:06:57

And do you think that modern society is unintentionally creating more of the conditions that your framework is designed to detect so it certainly can be used from a company or or or corporate sort of strategy on sort of the well-being of your your workforce, right? Like how you design, you know, they they spend a lot of time on trying to optimize sort of work optimization, right? Like do you have an open floor plan? Do you have, you know, how high do the did the the cubicles need to be for optimal workflow and everything else. So yes, there's a lot of this type of stuff that can be used in sort of looking at where those those ripples are sort of coming in terms of maybe policies or different types of projects and things like that that might be coming down that it that is irritating sort of the workflow and and and and the like you know the the the second question remind me remind me again on on what that is.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:14

Aaron Ross Powell Do you think that modern society is unintentionally creating more of the conditions your framework is designed to detect? Yeah I think as you talked about the advent of AI earlier as well.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:27

Yeah yeah so here's here's the thing with with sort of the advent of AI because I think it's it is something that I've been asked a lot of like, all right, well you talk a lot about coordination and the coordination gap amongst all of these different sectors and is there a way to put sort of a layer of AI into sort of overarching these these sectors where their systems are kind of linked in and so that if a person gets sort of you know an incident and is classified in the mental health realm that there's a ping that happens of like, oh you know what like three weeks ago the cops you know went to this individual's house and they they filed something and it's the same person. It's three weeks apart we know that you probably weren't talking or you know there wasn't a referral there. Maybe there's something there that that you know you need to further investigate. The same thing with schools boom like oh you know there's there's a couple of different incidents at schools that that have been reported as well to kind of get a holistic sort of realm. You run into a lot of you know civil liberties and privacy issues with that. The other problem that I have with it is that it's trying to come up with a technological solution to a psychological problem, right? And in the same way that I mentioned if you contextualize 8% of the population dying as opposed to 92% of the population living, if you put these types of if you try to put a a character arc into an AI bot or or or program and it spits you out a percentage of risk or or probability or something like that, okay like then what? Right? Like what depending on like if you know again if if you put yeah that that that's concerning and that has a 8% likelihood based on previous attacks that you know they're following the same path. Okay 92% there wasn't they didn't have that. So again like what kind of contextual narrative am I getting out of AI that is going to give me more of a better sense of of what is going on on a holistic way. And I also think it it it it sort of relinquishes human sort of intuition right like we we there's we tend to look at these sort of AI and a lot of the technology as sort of like these all-knowing sort of things. One of the things that I find interesting is you know Google Maps like if you put in you know I want to go from here to there they'll give you basically the car option the walking option and I think like you know public transport option or something like that. But you can only choose from those things. Like you're either walking or you're taking public transit or you're driving. There's no combinations that Google presents to you that like well you could walk down here or you could drive your car to to this bus stop, take the bus, and then you would have, and you could walk and it there actually would, it would send you through this park and it would be like right like there's none of that. You just sort of like you have one lane that you have to sort of stick in terms of your operations and things like that. And so the idea that you know you you see individuals who who sort of commit these attacks and their long sort of story arcs of individuals who who notice behaviors and were concerned about them and things like that lends itself to the idea of like, well then why didn't you be just proactive on that? Why do you have to abdicate your responsibility of feeling that something is wrong and throw it into some sort of database to get a probability to tell you like whether or not the the level of concern that you should have or not, you can determine the level of concern because you had a concern you saw something and it elicited a feeling. What you do with that feeling whether it's reporting or you confront that person or you think I think that's that's sort of that that that create that's within the office culture or the the the school culture of sort of what do you do once you have identified something that has that has piqued your interest and you know how do you report that and things like that. I I've long said that we don't have we we've had an entire generation brought up on see something, say something. We don't have a reporting problem, right? That's ingrained into the culture now. It's just the way we operate. What we do have is a coordination problem. You don't get on the radar of all these different things people and sectors and everything else because you have a reporting problem. You have a problem of these people falling through the cracks and not getting the help they need because you are not coordinated in the proper way.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:48

So in in in other as where we begin to wrap things up I have two final questions for you. So in your opinion what would a prevention first culture or society look like well it you know that's a good question.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:01

I don't I for me it is one of those things where you know there's there's a little bit of autonomy and a little bit of forgiveness in how the different systems the the the sort of the public assistance programs and and and and agencies that we have are allowed to sort of have I look at more as a as a concept of care rather than a system of care. So the way I see it operating now and I've worked with these sort of more public agencies and things like that where they've got analytics that can tell you listen if you're a first time recipient of food stamps they can tell you from the month, week and day that you're going to come back for housing assistance, right? But they've designed this that there's a system of care is that this system only operates with food assistance. That system only operates with housing assistance and neither the two shall meet. And so that sort of imparts this responsibility on the person in crisis to sort of navigate through their crises. That person that is getting food assistance doesn't know that in two months three weeks and four days that they are going to have a housing crisis, right? They are just trying to get food on the table. And so what you need to have to be effectively more preventative is to have a a more concept of care where these sort of things you may not have this crisis yet, but in case you do, we are going to sort of begin to wrap services around or we are going to bring you in and sort of evaluate what's going on so that we can pinpoint okay, you're on the verge of losing your job you or you have lost your job which has caused you to have food insecurity you may not find another job in time to make rent in the next month. So we are going to conceptually create these sort of connection points for you so that this sort of the the system works on behalf of the individual rather than the individual having to go from crisis to crisis to crisis to system to system to system, hoping that one, they qualify and hoping that two, that the response is going to be in a timely manner where it doesn't compound another crises that was unforeseen. So is then prevention ultimately a leadership responsibility then whether you're in a corporation or are you looking at society as a whole I think the response yeah I think the responsibility definitely falls on on leadership to sort of create that environment, right? To to be a leader in sort of facilitating that developing that concept and then facilitating that coordination between the different programs and making sure that it is integrated so that if you as the leader move up a rank or you go to another business or you go to a different place or you know certain people underneath you move around that the whole network doesn't just fall apart, right? That it is integrated just in the way that you do business. So that I leave, you leave, doesn't really matter the next people that occupy this seat this is just how the business and the s and and the system works.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:40

Thank you for your time today Robert I really appreciate your insights and it's been a pleasure Robert what I find compelling about this conversation is that your work challenges the idea that violence is unpredictable. Instead it suggests that escalation follows a trajectory and if we understand that trajectory early enough we can change outcomes. What also stands out is that this framework extends beyond violence it touches leadership culture identity and how individuals move toward instability which means prevention isn't about just safety it's about understanding human behaviors at a deeper level and I think that's what makes your work so important because if we can identify destabilizing destabilizing pathways early whether in communities organizations or individuals we're no longer just reacting to crises we're shaping outcomes before they harden. I really appreciate your work what you're doing in this space and I think this conversation opens the door to thinking about prevention not just as a security function but as a broader strategic discipline. Robert this has been a fascinating discussion thank you for coming on and sharing your insights if this podcast challenged you good clarity often does the point here isn't consensus or reassurance it's to leave you more precise than when you arrived keep what sharpens your thinking discard the rest but don't confuse familiarity with truth if this conversation mattered follow the podcast and share it selectively with people who value depth and not noise. Until next time stay disciplined with your thinking selective with your attention and honest about what you're really optimizing for.