The Defuse Podcast with Mark Follman - The Trigger Points - Inside the mission to stop mass shootings in America

This podcast provides an insight into the causes and possible solutions of mass attacks in the US. 

In this podcast Mark discusses:

• Importance of Talking to Attackers
• Key Elements of Threat Assessment
• Challenges in Reporting Threats
• The Role of Social Media in Threat Assessment
• The Importance of Human Connection in Threat Assessment

Mark discusses his recent investigative project on Elliot Rodger, the perpetrator of the Isla Vista mass shooting in 2014, and how his ongoing relationship with Elliot’s mother.

• He explains the unique aspects of Elliot's case, including his skill at hiding his intentions and the lack of warning signs that were missed.
• Mark highlights the importance of understanding the conditions of suicidality and isolation in threat assessment.
• He emphasizes the need to focus on how people behave and the process they go through to commit violent acts, rather than simplistic explanations like mental illness or ideology

BIO

Mark Follman is a longtime investigative journalist and author of the acclaimed bestseller, TRIGGER POINTS: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America.

Since 2012, when he created a pioneering online database of mass shootings, his various investigations into gun violence and its impact on society have been honoured with numerous awards.

His work has been featured on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” PBS NewsHour, and in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Mother Jones, where he is the national affairs editor. He is a frequent keynote speaker at threat assessment trainings and at conferences focused on violence prevention, mental health, and safety in education. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-follman-4a9b0620/

https://amzn.eu/d/fjqA0ab

Chapters

• 0:01 Exploring Mass Shootings and Threat Assessment
• 11:17 Understanding Warning Signs of Violence
• 19:42 Recognizing and Reporting Threats in Schools
• 25:49 Understanding Threat Assessment and Misconceptions
• 36:33 Understanding Complex Behavioral Warning Signs
• 45:42 Complex Threat Assessment in Modern Society
• 52:34 Impact of Social Media on Violence

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Diffuse podcast with host Philip Grindel, CEO and founder of Diffuse, a global threat and intelligence consultancy that blends psychology and intelligence to mitigate threats and risks to prominent people and brands.

Speaker 2: 0:20

Yet again, we have another wonderful guest and it's again a huge privilege of mine to introduce to you somebody who you may not be familiar with but is a hugely important contributor to the subject of a brilliant book and I don't say that lightly a really genuinely brilliant book, and every time I pick it up it's just packed full of material and information and learning. And the title of the book is Trigger Points Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America. It is much wider than that. It goes right back to the very beginning of behavioural threat assessment, how it evolved, where the journey took it and all that. It's a superb book and I'll put the details on the podcast because it's one of my books that, when anyone asks me, can you tell me a couple of books I need to buy? This is always one I say because it's a brilliant piece of work.

Speaker 2: 1:20

Since 2012, mark created the pioneering online database of mass shootings. His various investigations into gun violence and its impact on society have been honoured with numerous awards. His work has been featured on NPR's Fresh Air, pbs NewsHour and in the New York Times, wall Street Journal, washington Post and Mother Jones, where he's the National Affairs Editor. He is a frequent keynote speaker at threat assessment trainings and conferences, and he's focused on violent prevention, mental health, safety in education. Mark, welcome, thank you so much. It's taken a while for us to get here, but I know you're hugely busy and, as I say, I think that's because of this brilliant book you've written. So thank you so much for your time today.

Speaker 3: 2:06

Thanks, phil. I'm really glad to be here and talk with you today, my pleasure.

Speaker 2: 2:10

Let's get kind of back to the beginning then. So I mean, you know you're a journalist. What drew you into this subject?

Speaker 3: 2:18

Yeah, well, I had covered gun violence for a number of years, covered gun violence for a number of years, starting in maybe the mid 2000s and by 2012,. There was really, you know, there was something going on in America that was kind of feeling a bit next level with this problem of mass shootings and in 2012, there was an attack at a movie theater in Colorado that July that at the time was unprecedented in its scope and location. It's a little bit hard to see it that way now, I think, for folks because of so much of this happening in the years since, but there were 70 people injured in that attack, 12 people killed, a person walking to a movie theater with firearms. And so after that event I went looking for data online about the mass shootings phenomenon. It wasn't new I mean, we'd had these kinds of attacks for many years in the States and I was really startled to find that there was essentially nothing available publicly about this problem in terms of a database or analysis of cases. And that really surprised me. And there are a number of reasons why that was the situation. I think foremost because there's been a long time political chill in the United States on researching gun violence. It's also, I think, was a factor of the difficulty of defining the problem of mass shootings. There is no perfect definition or criteria for that and that's kind of a whole other discussion we don't necessarily need to get into. But those were reasons why I think nothing existed at the time. So I made the decision in my newsroom at Mother Jones, with a small team of folks, to build a database and we did that from that morning and it started to get a lot of attention. There were more attacks that year, culminating in the Sandy Hook massacre in Connecticut.

Speaker 3: 4:11

Just a horrific, unthinkable event at the time 20 first graders murdered, teachers killed, and you know, at that point I was kind of off and running on full-time coverage of gun violence and mass shootings in particular, and I soon started to hear about this very obscure field of work called behavioral threat assessment. It was virtually unknown to the public in the United States at the time, 2012, 2013. I started looking into it and getting to know some of the folks in this field of work and starting to get access to them and the work that they do, and I was very fascinated by it. Um, I thought you know for starters, this is a really interesting approach to this problem. Uh, had read a very small bit of coverage, um, where the attorney general at the time, eric Holder, had told the National Police Chiefs Association at an annual meeting that the FBI had stopped more than 100 active shooter events in the years since Sandy Hook. Well, that really spun my head around. What does that mean, right? So again, remember, this was totally unknown to the public. It had never really been written about in the general interest press in the US or, I think, anywhere. I remember Googling the term and finding really nothing, and so I began looking into it more and more and realized this was a new way to look at this problem, to talk about it publicly, to write about it as a journalist. I was very interested in learning more about it, began talking with leaders in the field, including folks at the behavioral analysis unit at the FBI. It took a while to get that access, but I think once they understood what my interest was and the work that I'd done with the database, could see that I was serious about the issue of prevention and thinking more about the problem.

Speaker 3: 6:06

That really was the driver for me, phil. I had grown frustrated, in a way that I think many people are, with the politics of this problem, particularly in the United States, that revolves around our gun laws or lack thereof a fierce, long-running political battle that's very stuck in some ways and has been for decades. Long-running political battle that's very stuck in some ways and has been for decades. And I was frustrated by that and felt, like you know, as I studied the problem of mass shootings more and more, I felt that there had to be more that we could do about it. What more can we do to solve this problem?

Speaker 3: 6:35

It can't just be about gun laws. I mean, that is obviously an essential part of the problem. But in studying and beginning to learn about the field of threat assessment, I could see wait a minute, you know, this is a potentially very powerful solution, additional tool, and that was also kind of coming together with my sense that we really need a broader based approach to this whole thing if we're going to deal with it. It's a complex issue. There are a lot of things feeding into it and that demands a more complex solution, and so I saw a lot of potential in threat assessment and that's what led me really down the path that eventually led to me writing a book and writing trigger points.

Speaker 2: 7:16

I think what's so interesting reading your research and your book and reading other elements, is the number of attackers who are in custody some of them, or some of them, have been in custody for decades and the amount of research that's been done with them in terms of their, their does or their, their willingness to discuss and I know that goes towards some of their desires for notoriety, but how important is that then, to really unpick and understand the issue by talking to people who've actually done these offences?

Speaker 3: 7:49

Yeah, I think that is a really interesting element of the sort of history of how this field was developed and I really for me that was a particular joy in doing the research and writing the book was learning about all that. It was really kind of a hidden history Again. So much of this was not public and the fact that this work was, you know, essentially began with people thinking about trying to stop assassination presidential assassination. It was a collaboration with the US Secret Service and forensic psychologists going back to the early 1980s and that hinged in large part on talking with offenders at, you know, at the time in institutions that were back then referred to as psychiatric hospitals for the criminally insane. I mean we don't use that kind of terminology anymore. I think there's a more enlightened view of how mental illness relates to violence and certainly an essential thing we can talk about more. But in studying that way back when, you know, four or five decades ago now, I think the realization by those professionals who were looking into it that you needed to talk to people who did this, that that was a source of information about the behavioral issues and the psychological issues that played into it and kind of working around I think the unhealthy narcissism in a lot of these cases and the desire for attention or notoriety, but then also kind of leveraging that. That was an interesting part of the story too, that these psychologists and agents would go into the prisons and kind of say to folks you know these, these infamous killers well, you know, you're an expert in assassination, so we really want to learn from you so that we can try to prevent it. And finding that many of them were also, I think you know, genuinely interested in a certain sense in helping with that, that there was remorse in some cases and regret, I think, if you set aside the kind of small slice of cases where you have, you know, people who are psychopathic, but there were others who you know, I think, in their life circumstances and kind of failure in life and depression and other issues they were, having had made this terrible choice and done this terrible crime and then regretted it and wanted to maybe help prevent it from happening or were at least open to that idea, and so that created opportunity, with these threat assessment researchers and practitioners, to learn more from the source, from the primary source of the problem, and I think that became even more valuable in particular with the issue of school shootings.

Speaker 3: 10:27

There was a landmark study after Columbine in 1999 where the threat assessment experts went and talked to 37 school shooters to try to understand better these same elements, right the psychology and circumstances that were going on in these cases, and found that many of them were open to talking and were very remorseful and wished that they'd had help, wished that someone had really understood what was going on with them and tried to intervene more.

Speaker 3: 10:55

And I think a lot was learned from that effort, particularly with young offenders.

Speaker 3: 11:01

So just a really fascinating, I think, component of all this work and this research of threat assessment, in hindsight, that to talk to people who you know carry out these terrible crimes was really essential.

Speaker 3: 11:17

I think that also speaks to the way that you know we tend to think culturally about perpetrators of attacks like this as evil, as monsters, as inexplicable, all of these kind of, you know, cultural and narrative elements that we have about the problem that really are a way of saying we don't understand it or we can't understand it or we don't want to, which is really, if you think about it, counterproductive to solving the problem right.

Speaker 3: 11:43

We need to understand better. This is a human behavior and so what's behind it and if we can unpack that more, there is a lot more opportunity to intervene before it happens. And of course that's not news to anyone who works in the field of threat assessment, but I think to the general public. That is in some ways a kind of revolutionary idea, because it goes directly against this notion that these are evil monsters who just snap and all that kind of mythology that we have about mass shooters and assassins and people who engage in this kind of behavior, when in fact the reality of what they do and how they do it is completely different.

Speaker 2: 12:22

So let's get into that then, because that's the crux, isn't? It? Is that we're talking about human behavior, and so over the last let's say what is it 40, 50 years that these studies have been done. There is a consistency around the behaviors that we're seeing, and it's interesting, isn't it, when you think how much the world has changed in that period, in the 40, 50 years. Clearly, the internet and all that has or will have had an impact on, on um, on some of the people's thought processes and what have you, and we can get into that. But when we just talk about the human behaviors that that that cause people to become a threat, what, what did your, what did your research find? What was the kind of key elements that you found?

Speaker 3: 13:07

Well, you know, I think there's quite a range, right, as practitioners in this field know. That said, you know, the way that I've always tried to explain this in my writing and talking about the work on this subject is that you're really talking about studying sets of behaviors and circumstances that are a process, a behavioral process that lead up to an attack like this. So there there are, you know, sort of various buckets of this In the book I used a set of eight categories that are kind of broad categories of warning behaviors or warning signs that play into this. You know, a big one, of course, is threatening communications, and within that you have subsets and kind of an evolving picture of how this works. A lot of it, of course, now happens online, as you suggest, through digital communications, but there are other ways too, right, with writing personal journals, with other forms of personal expression. There even are some cases where perpetrators have gotten tattoos that are signaling their intent, this so-called leakage, as the term in the field describes it. So that's one area.

Speaker 3: 14:17

There's what I call personal deterioration, which is talking about a person's, I think, life circumstances, but also personal and mental and behavioral health. What else there's triggering events, these stressors that come up in people's lives with something important that really knocks them down and having a lack of resiliency or ability to deal with that in a healthy way or having the support system for it. So there's a really kind of a complex picture playing into this. But I think that's really what's always been fascinating to me is kind of the essence of the threat assessment paradigm, which is to look at each case as a unique case. So to take this set of circumstances and behaviors that are known about these patterns that indicate danger, and then look at the unique individual and investigate that way and use that both as a way to evaluate the danger and then also to try to help that person and steer them away from violent ideation, violent planning and preparation for an attack, violent planning and preparation for an attack.

Speaker 3: 15:26

So there are a lot of things that play into it from my perspective, and yet they fall into what I think we can look at as a systematic set of things or an identifiable process. Right, that you know is often detectable and that's really kind of the big challenge of the development of this work is to not only train people in what that is, to deal with it, but then also to educate the public more broadly, and for me, as a journalist, that's part of the excitement of the opportunity of writing about the subject as I have for so long, because even today, whereas this is much better known, in some ways it's still unknown to so many people, and that's not just the general public I find that, still with people who work in the fields of mental health and in law enforcement, that many people have never heard of this, and I think that's just remarkable, given how much this has grown and evolved over the years and how many cases there have been, and successful ones at that, right.

Speaker 3: 16:24

I mean, this to me was another thing that made writing about this so interesting that you know the fact that there are these very serious cases dozens, maybe even hundreds of them in the US alone where people who were very clearly on the pathway to violence, that were planning a violent attack, were diverted, were stopped, were helped and we never hear about these, right, because there's no news when there's no violent attack were diverted, were stopped, were helped and we never hear about these, right, because there's no news when there's no violent attack. And yet people should know about this. I think there's also been a growing recognition in the field that people should know about this and that the field of threat assessment should be talking about this more. Right, I mean, you tell me you would know better, but I think, certainly in America that's what I've found over the more recent years that there's a much bigger push now to educate the public about this work and its importance as another tool we can use to stop this problem.

Speaker 2: 17:15

Yeah, I agree with you. I think it fascinates me, particularly in the UK where it's still relatively unknown, particularly in law enforcement, particularly in the kind of close protection world the world of protecting celebrities and public figures still tends to not be particularly aware or take particular notice of some of these indicators when they're looking at the threats towards the people they're protecting. And I think that's a massive issue. And there's a couple of things I want to get back to, because connecting that is the concept around communicated threats and the myths that circulate around that around. You know, here in the UK when I was working in Parliament, one of the greatest challenges we get, and still get now, is this whole concept that people think if somebody makes a threat to me, then that's it, I'm in danger, I've had a death threat, they're going to attack me. What did your research find about that? What was the findings and your views now on that whole area of communicated threats?

Speaker 3: 18:23

Yeah, well, I tend to think of it as a little bit more broadly, in the sense that, as you know, there's a lot of research literature in the field of threat assessment that shows the distinction between an overt threat or a veiled threat and the importance of that, or how you measure that, which is to say that many, many people make threats that are just hot air or don't mean anything or don't lead to anything, and so that in and of itself is not an indicator of danger. It certainly can be, but it can also be kind of a needle in a haystack of information, right, especially in the age of social media and digital communication, where there's so much more of this now. I mean, it's just remarkable to see how much threatening communications have exploded online in just the last few years alone, and particularly among young people. This is a huge issue with school shootings in the US and threat cases around that, but the way I see it is like anything else with the paradigm of threat assessment. It's one of a number of things, and so when you see that or that is reported, that's an indication of okay, there's something more to look into here, right, and it's much more a matter of what is that combined with, in addition to this particular statement or comment or threat? Comment or threat.

Speaker 3: 19:42

Just to give you an example, one of the cases I write about in Trigger Points a kid in a high school in Oregon who makes a comment at a bus stop one day. He says to another kid don't come to school on Friday, I'm going to shoot up the place with my dad's gun. I'm coming back here with my dad's gun and another kid hears this and gets alarmed and tells a teacher and then it gets reported to the student threat assessment team. This is one of the districts in America that was one of the early innovators with this work after Columbine in 1999. And I made them a centerpiece of the book for that reason. They have incredible institutional knowledge and casework that I was able to get inside and write about in Trigger Points. But this case where you know this kid said this it's like you know lots of kids say stupid stuff. Right, was he serious? Was it a joke? You know we see a lot of that too. Right that people report thinking someone's just joking. Perpetrators say they're just joking, especially young ones.

Speaker 3: 20:39

So when the team looked into this threat, this threatening communication, well, it turned out that this kid who I call Brandon in the book it's not his real name, but he was on their radar had been already for several years. They had a case file on him. He had made other comments about school shootings. They weren't as specific previously, but now he was being more specific about what he was going to do and that was cause for alarm. That suggested planning behavior, right, and it was far more than that. They found, you know, they quickly looked more into his situation, interviewing people around him teachers, peers. His family sent a school resource officer to the home to find out if he had access to firearms like he was claiming to his friend, claiming to his friend. All this information gathered within probably 24 or 48 hours. I remember sitting with the team at their weekly meeting where they're discussing the case and they're looking at this broad range of information. So now you are so far beyond just the threat, just beyond the threatening communication.

Speaker 3: 21:41

Right, there were some issues of personal deterioration going on with Brandon. He had stopped. He dropped out of some classes. He recently quit a drama club that he was involved in that he really liked previously. That was concerning. There was reports of an event there where he'd suffered what he saw as a great humiliation in front of his peers, and his perception of that was really interesting because the peers and the teacher had thought it was nothing.

Speaker 3: 22:10

So all of this information that the team's gathering is going into their process of evaluation, and this was a very concerning case because of what they were finding to be significant personal deterioration, signs of acute low self-esteem, possible suicidality, which, as you know, is a very important factor in threat assessment cases. So all that taken together, I think were, if you think of the report, of the threatening communication, that was the jumping off point. But there was the, you know it was the plunge into the lake full of information, or the iceberg below the tip that really allowed the team to understand the nature of the situation. And you probably have, you know, nine out of 10 other cases where a kid makes you know an adolescent male says something dumb at a bus stop or on Instagram, that means nothing and leads nowhere, right? So I think it's really important to think about it in that context.

Speaker 2: 23:08

But there's an interesting point there, isn't it? Because we're talking there, I suppose, about leakage, aren't we? And thank God that the boys that were with him or the children that were with him reported it. They had that, they had that recognition that this is something I need to report. But we know that that's one of the biggest challenges is is that there is under reporting of these issues in terms of, I mean, you know, we just take the school, the, the children, which you know I always find to be so unbelievably sad, um, on lots of levels, obviously, the families that are affected by those kids that go on and do things, but also that we have these children that find themselves that desperate that that's what they feel is the only way to behave. So is there an understanding or a piece of education around how we get people to report their concerns more often?

Speaker 3: 24:10

Yeah, I think it's an incredibly challenging and crucial part of this picture for a number of reasons, and I'll agree with you, by the way, that the cases that involve children, of course, I think for most people, are the most just kind of devastating, right, and that's part of my story too, personally, and why I focused on this for so long. It was really Sandy Hook in 2012 that that led me to continue to report on this and to write a book about threat assessment and to stay focused on this for more than a decade now, because you know, we can all agree as much as we may have differences about, about, you know, gun laws and politics and all these other things we can all agree no one wants to see that happen, to see young children slaughtered in a school or anywhere else. I mean, all of these cases are horrific, but those in particular, I think, really grab us in a unique way. And they also speak to this issue of reporting, of bystander reporting, and you know it's particularly tough with kids. So that example that I was describing from Oregon the high school kids speaking up with concern that is an exception. Statistically, it happens a lot less than the possibility for it to happen, and we do need more of that, and I think there are a number of things that get in the way. I mean, with kids it's tough because of social inhibition and concerns about getting in trouble. I think there's also a huge issue of ignorance, meaning, you know, even if I wanted to report a concern, how would I know what to do, who would I talk to, how would I be comfortable doing that? And this all goes to the question of educating the public.

Speaker 3: 25:46

I think about prevention work. One of the things about the Salem-Kaiser program in Oregon that I write about at length in the book is that they have done a really good job, in my view, over the years of creating a climate of safety and awareness, a culture of that within the school system, that they've really kind of done a good job of messaging the community that this isn't about snitching on people and this isn't about, you know, we're trying to like lock your kids up and throw away the key when they act poorly or kick them out of school. In a sense, it's the opposite of all that. We want a school system that is supportive of kids, that helps kids who need it, who are troubled in particular or maybe struggling, and that by all focusing on that and getting people to think of it that way they know they can turn to us for help, and I think they've been effective with that to the point where you do have more kids reporting in that system, and maybe now that this is such a big issue in our media and culture, maybe there's a greater awareness of the danger of it. I mean, that's sort of a whole different ball of wax.

Speaker 3: 26:51

I think there's a lot of hype around that too that kind of excessively focuses on fear and danger. You talk to a lot of people now and they'll say that their expectation is that there's going to be a school or mass shooting every day in America, and I think that's very problematic too. That doesn't reflect the statistical reality of the problem at all. So that is also a tension here too. Right, because you want people to be aware, you want them to speak up with concern, but you also don't want to create excessive fear and cause people to think that this is always happening all the time that they need to worry about it. And we have so much of this reactive response in our policies now with active shooter drills and target hardening and all this stuff that goes on in response to these attacks, and I think that could be counterproductive too to the reporting issue, because that's all all you know, wrapped up in a sense of fear, and people are maybe going to be less likely, in some ways, to report. If they're fearful, you know, they might not want to get their friend in trouble, for example. That's come up in a bunch of cases too.

Speaker 3: 27:57

And this stuff, I think, also translates into a workplace environment as well. It's different, of course, with working adults, but in some ways, fundamentally, it's similar. People may not know what to do, who to talk to, they may feel inhibited in terms of the cultural or social dynamics of their job, but it's, you know, this is an evolving landscape as well. I mean, here in California, where I'm based, we just have a new law coming into place that requires a workplace violence prevention policy in every company. So this is going to change how people change, I think, a certain level of awareness and how people and companies have to deal with it. But it's a huge, it's a huge challenge.

Speaker 2: 28:40

And the very nature of behavioural threat assessment is. You know the amount of false positives you're getting, so you know it is, to some degree, the needle in the haystack you're looking for, but of course, you can't do that unless people talk. When we talk about schools, though and I know we've touched on this beforehand and it's something that a subject that we don't see as much in the UK as you do, but we have certainly seen it and it's certainly being talked about more recently in a different concept, with the Tate family and all that sort of stuff this concept of incels and their relationship to these violent attacks. Can you talk about that, because I know that's something that you've really worked on, and more recently particularly?

Speaker 3: 29:25

sure, yeah, I just published a major investigative project uh, it's a current cover story of mother jones and also a reveal uh podcast and radio show that was broadcast on npr here in the states. Uh, last month around the elliot ro case, which took place 10 years ago, may 2014, in Isla Vista, california that's where UC Santa Barbara is. This was a horrific and infamous smash shooting where Elliot Rodger, who was 22, went on a suicidal rampage. He killed six other students and, I think, wounded and injured 14 and, of course, traumatized the whole community with this attack. It's a really unique story in a number of ways.

Speaker 3: 30:09

The focus of my current story is on his mother, chin Roger, who decided a number of years ago that she wanted to learn more about this problem and how to prevent it, and she learned about threat assessment. She started engaging with threat assessment professionals. I heard about her through some contacts in the field and reached out and began talking with her as well. This was about three years ago and she decided eventually she was very reluctant to speak in any way publicly about her experience because she was very afraid that it could cause additional harm to the victim's families, but she also, I think the more she learned about this work, came to believe that it could help save lives and came to recognize that she had experienced a lot of things with her son Elliot, who she was very close with and had tried to help for a long time. She'd experienced things that in hindsight she could see were warning signs. She came to understand what that was. She really didn't have any way of knowing that back then, but felt that there was value in talking about that and sharing more of her experience in detail with threat assessment experts and then with me as a journalist. To publicize her story to help educate the general public is really extraordinary. I mean, I've never in more than a decade of writing about this subject, I've never encountered a parent of a mass shooter willing to do this at great, I think, personal suffering. I mean, she's done a lot to relive this experience and and I think that you know it's it's very hard to even sort of think about a person in her position. Right, we tend to not even think about the parent of a perpetrator. That has changed also recently, also with the case in Michigan here where the parents were charged criminally a very extreme version of a case and very different from the Roger case, in some ways extreme version of a case and very different from the Roger case in some ways. But I spent a lot of time talking with her and reinvestigating the case.

Speaker 3: 32:07

And another reason, as you suggest, that this was an important case, is because of the so-called incel phenomenon really began with Elliot Rogers' case and he was quickly mythologized in some ways around this issue of so-called involuntary celibates, which we'll just make sure all your listeners know describes a kind of subcultural group online of aggrieved men who blame women for denying them sex and sort of air their frustration and anger in online forums. There have been studies of this subculture now by academics that have found, including one very recently, that has found that most people in that world don't subscribe to violence, they don't support violence. And yet, because of what Elliot Roger did and how his case was linked to incel culture, there's this, you know, kind of much larger concern now that incel ideology drives young attackers, aggrieved men, to commit violence and to commit school shootings, and it's complicated. One of the things I show in this investigation is that the truth about Elliot Rodgers' connection to incel is very different than the way it's been portrayed. You know.

Speaker 3: 33:21

He's essentially been portrayed online and in news media to this day as having kind of led this violent incel movement, that that was his goal or that that's what he did, and really his connection to it was much more tenuous. He expressed horrible, violent misogyny in his writings and in the videos that he made, but these were ideas that he had cultivated himself long before having any engagement online with incels, and there is some evidence too that I found that suggests that he did not identify with incels, that he saw himself differently. So there's a lot more detail on that in the story and in the podcast, but that's by way of saying that ultimately, what I came to realize in part through this project is that you know again, we always I think the public is always looking for a clear explanation of what causes these horrific acts of violence, these attacks?

Speaker 3: 34:15

specific things like mental illness, like extremist ideology. These are components in a very complex equation. Right, they're involved in many of these cases, but they don't explain what happened in terms of fundamental cause. They are not the reason why someone went and did what they did, and that's a very big misconception that I think persists and gets in the way of thinking. Think people often want to suggest that it does. So you know, what are we to think of a troubled person engaging in incel forums online, a high school kid? Well, that again may be a warning sign that correlates with someone's situation that has a whole lot of other stuff going on, and so it may bear looking into, but that doesn't mean that that person is planning to commit a violent attack.

Speaker 2: 35:34

We like to give people labels, don't we? It makes life easier for us if we can pigeonhole. You know he's an Islamist terrorist, he's a far-right terrorist. He's an incel. Pigeonhole, you know he's an islamist terrorist. He's a far-right terrorist, he's an incel. We can, we can compartmentalize people and it allows us to, um, as you sort of say, you know, kind of be comfortable with why they did it. They're not like us, they're. They're, they're these extreme cases. But I think what you're saying is that, actually, if we dig deeper into these cases, whilst there may be some, some common ideological issues, actually we're talking about people that have got problems and have got challenges and have got lots of different things that are going on in their lives, and there is a deep frustration and, um, sadness perhaps, about them. What, what would you? When you you picked up from Elliot's mum, you mentioned there were things that she in hindsight thought about. Can you share what some of those might be?

Speaker 3: 36:33

Sure. Well, one thing about his case that is somewhat exceptional he was really, really skilled at hiding what he was thinking and what he was planning to do, hiding his innermost torment. I mean, he was a person who had a lot of issues behavioral and mental health issues growing up. He was diagnosed with pervasive development disorder as a high schooler. His parents tried to get him all kinds of help therapy, special education, support, support as social life coaching. They didn't understand the nature of his violent thinking when it started to develop because he hid it very well. And I should say also his parents were divorced, so that complicated the equation too.

Speaker 3: 37:16

In terms of the family life. He was a young adult living off in the world. He'd gone away to community college in Santa Barbara, 80 miles away from where he grew up in LA. So this all created a very complicated situation and I think his mother was in touch with him frequently. She told me that she was always close with him and in close communication as she tried to help support him. But he was manipulative and duplicitous. There was some question about whether or not he was on the spectrum and that also became a problem of distortion and media coverage after the attack, because there was blame on autism in a way that is fundamentally wrong, in the same way that we're discussing issues of mental illness or ideological thinking. But, all that being said, I think, looking back through the lens of threat assessment, what his mother was able to realize was some of the things that were maybe counterintuitive or that she misunderstood, essentially didn't perceive correctly, because as a parent it's especially hard right, you're trying to help your troubled child do better, you're trying to support him and you may be looking for positive improvement.

Speaker 3: 38:33

I think that's something that I talk about a lot in the story and tell through the narration of her experience that she was seeing some things that were in fact behavioral warning signs, but to her were the opposite. So one example is um toward the end, when just before the attack, you know, she would go up and see him for dinner in in the santa barbara area where he was going to community college. Um, essentially on a monthly basis she would go up and have dinner with him and at the last dinner that they had together, which was just a few days before the attack, he was very calm, he seemed to be doing better, he seemed happier to her, he was eating more than usual. She saw this as a healthy appetite, when in fact it was probably some form of binge eating, that he had essentially entered this state of preparation, of readiness for what he was going to do. That she didn't know about A term for this that some practitioners use is unexpected brightening right A kid who's been struggling a lot but all of a sudden, you know, starting to seem a lot better. Well, as a parent, that's what she wanted to see. But that shift in behavior was meaningful and may have looked different to a threat assessment team, had there been one. There was not one involved in the case. You know that said she had also, you know she'd been very concerned about him. I mean, there was.

Speaker 3: 39:54

There was an incident well known around this case where about a month before the attack, he had dropped out of communication with her and I tell this story in great detail too in the piece he had, you know, was texting and calling with her a lot, but for suddenly, for several days he was just completely gone and this worried her. She goes online and she finds a video that he's posted. It was, it was on YouTube and it was titled why Do Girls Hate Me so Much? And it was a very strange video. I mean, if you watch it objectively, it's like here's this guy who's standing by his car in a canyon road in Santa Barbara and he's saying you know, it's a beautiful day and you know I've been in Santa Barbara for two years but I'm very lonely. He's talking about his loneliness and despair and frustration, but he's not saying anything threatening. There's nothing violent in it at all. I mean he's you know the story is much more known for the very menacing video he posted just before the attack where he said he was going to go out and kill everyone. But in this video a month prior he was just basically like talking about how he's a good looking guy and it's a beautiful place, but he's also frustrated and he's also sad. And I think again, his his mom recognized in hindsight that she kind of overlooked what was really disturbing about that video and thinking, hey, he's trying to put himself out there more, he's trying to be more social. This is one of the things he really struggled with. He was very awkward socially and really struggled with that. So you know, these are some of several examples of behavior and warning signs that to a person who has no understanding of this prevention method maybe wouldn't see, especially maybe not a parent, right? I think that speaks to the issue of educating the public. But again, it's complicated and there are so many things that play into each individual case.

Speaker 3: 41:52

The Elliot Rodger case was really valuable to me as an investigative journalist and I think to researchers as well in threat assessment, because it was very unusual for the incredibly large volume of forensic evidence with the case. I mean, he left behind hundreds of thousands of words of lucid writing and videos they recorded of himself. So there's a lot in there in terms of understanding his circumstances and behavior leading up to the attack, and that's at the heart of the work that I did with this piece too. There's really a lot that can be learned from that case the heart of the work that I did with this piece too. There's really a lot that can be learned from that case and you know, again, this speaks also to our, our sort of cultural othering of a person like Elliot Rodgers.

Speaker 3: 42:30

He's a monster. What he did is absolutely monstrous, it's horrific. I mean, the impact on that community to this day is so profound and I saw it firsthand when I went down there for this story and talk to people, but still, this is human behavior. This is a person who did this and he was in great personal crisis. So the question then is what led him to that crisis? What was going on with him? How did he spiral into that state of extreme despair and rage and then plan and he planned for a long time.

Speaker 3: 43:03

I mean his ideas of committing this attack go back probably at least four years before he actually did it, and specific planning and preparation that I detail in the story goes back more than a year. I mean he was purchasing firearms 18 months before the attack. He was going to shooting ranges. In the final few months before the attack he was going to shooting ranges. In the final few months he was conducting surveillance of his targets. He was increasingly engaging in leakage, with threatening communications recording his grievances on video. The problem was somewhat uniquely in his case, he was remarkably good at hiding it. He kept most of this very concealed until the very end. Good at hiding it, he kept most of this very concealed until the very end, including from his own mother. So it's really just a fascinating story on a number of levels that speak to this, and you know what leads a person to this and why and how.

Speaker 2: 43:54

And how can we?

Speaker 3: 43:55

see it, I think there were a lot. There were a lot of tragic missed opportunities with him, including Around the time his mother found the video. This is part of the reason this became such a famous part of the case. She reached out for help. She talked to a social worker that was working with him and they decided that they would call the mental health crisis hotline immediately in Santa Barbara, out to his apartment. And they talked to him at the door and he seemed totally fine. He presented normal, he was very good at that. He said I'm fine. I don't know why my mom called you Um, you know she's a worry wart. Um, you know I'm just busy. Um, oh, the and the video which they hadn't seen but she told them about, uh, you know. He said oh, that was just my way of expressing myself I'm lonely, I'm having trouble making friends here. And they concluded he was fine and they left and inside his apartment he already had three handguns, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, hunting knives. I mean he was ready, he was getting ready and he even wrote about this later in his what he called his autobiography.

Speaker 3: 45:03

Was the media called it a manifesto, but it was really a. It was a hundred thousand word book about his life and it had a lot of grievance in it and horrible kind of you know misogyny and his grandiose ideas about committing violence. But it was his life story he was, he was writing about his suffering and his plan and in that he said oh, thank God they didn't figure me out at the door. I would have had to you, I would have ruined everything. So all of this tells us well, there was a lot of possibility to see this coming, had the right sets of eyes been looking at it, and I think there's tremendous value in studying those lessons in order to prevent other cases like this.

Speaker 2: 45:42

It sounds, you know, heartbreaking. You know I can't imagine if we can kind of park what he did and you know we can all agree what he did was horrendous. For his mother to have to reflect on those missed opportunities, on those signals that may be a cry for help, who knows, but were misinterpreted or what have you. It must be heartbreaking when you sit back and reflect and you, and particularly when you know your son or your child has catalogued all of that material. And as you're talking about it, you know I I'm in the world of threat assessment but I can absolutely see how those would be dismissed as, as just you know, a young guy in the social media age communicating with the world about his feelings and what have you, um and the, the, the, the story about him putting on weight again, which you know I was aware of, again, I absolutely get how the mother would think that's a good sign he's doing well. You wouldn't want to interrupt that what would be seen as a recovery.

Speaker 2: 46:59

And I think this goes. It's so beautifully eloquent in the way that it really highlights the complex nature of threat assessment. You know, I know that we often talk about the indicators and all this sort of stuff, but actually I think you've pointed out just how complex this is around actually getting to know the person and getting to know the family and understanding what's changed, what have? You noticed.

Speaker 3: 47:29

I think also a key principle of the work too right that no single person is positioned to figure this out, Not the mother, not the psychologist, not the social worker.

Speaker 2: 47:41

He had help.

Speaker 3: 47:42

He had people around him trying to help him. He saw a therapist, he had a social worker, um. He had a life coach, um, there was a director running the life coaches. They were all talking to his mother and they weren't sharing information entirely because they didn't know what they were seeing. They didn't know how to take it on. I mean, this speaks to the work of threat assessment, right, and how that structured professional judgment comes into play to evaluate an incredibly complex situation like Elliot's or any other person who commits an attack like this, and I think you know.

Speaker 3: 48:15

One other thing I'll add here is that and I say this in the piece about Elliot and his mom and I say it also in trigger points that really I came to view this in a certain fundamental way as thinking about the question not so much of why someone does this, the question of motive, but the question of how they do it right, that ultimately, that may be more important. And the question of why is important. It speaks to mindset, to psychology motivation. Those are things that people want to know, but sometimes it's very hard to unpack, to untangle in a case like this. I mean, I think with Elliot Rodger, you know, that may in some ways be an unanswerable question, but there are components of the case that I do think are fundamentally more important in the way that he behaved, the process he went through to get to the point of attacking, the how, and then also in terms of his condition, suicidality and isolation, I mean those to me were fundamentally the most important, maybe more important than any kind of mental health diagnosis he did or didn't have of a mental illness or a behavioral disorder. He was suicidal for a long time. There was evidence of it and he was increasingly isolating. And again, he was good at hiding it. He was deceptive in some ways that I detail in the story that I think are very interesting and important from a prevention perspective. But my sense is that many cases, many threat cases and completed attacks are lesser in this way, which suggests hope.

Speaker 3: 49:50

Right, I think it's a hopeful way to look at it, because most people aren't going to be as good at Elliot Rodger, at hiding and manipulating in the ways that he did. He was a very intelligent person, I mean. You can see it in his writing, you can see it in the stories that his mother tells about his life, you can see it in his writing, you can see it in the stories that his mother tells about his life. But you know that that level of suicidality and isolation, I think that comes through in the story. The desperation, the rage, these are explainable conditions.

Speaker 3: 50:18

This is not about extremist ideology or incel ideology. This is. This is not about left or right politics. I think it's a much more useful way to look at it, to ask the question well, how did this person go down this pathway, how did they get to the point of attacking and what were the signs that were missed? That's really what the story is all about. The why is a little bit less answerable in some ways and may ultimately, ultimately be secondary in my view. And do you?

Speaker 2: 50:51

think then, you know, moving on from that point around, we're now in the age of social media and the internet and everything else, but my perception is we we're often more isolated now than we've ever been. You know, the community sort of side has broken down. We touched earlier on, when you and I were chatting beforehand around, people going to work. They're going to their booze, they put their headphones on. This feeling of isolation and loneliness and maybe rage seems to be growing. So do you foresee this becoming more of a problem in terms of these types of people that are struggling and potentially moving towards violence?

Speaker 3: 51:39

It could be. It's certainly a point of concern. Warning label on social media, I think, speaks to the urgency of this problem in some big ways. With a rising crisis of mental illness and suicide among youth, there's a vulnerability problem with this technology. That is huge and I don't think we understand it fully yet and certainly that's going to play into and possibly exacerbate the issue of targeted violence. I mean, you do see that in Elliot Rodgers' case too, and that's 10 years ago, where he was engaging in online forums and airing grievances and getting into arguments and recording videos of himself to put on YouTube. So there's no doubt that this technology and the way that it's affecting human interaction and behavior is huge, but I think it's going to take a long time to get our arms around that. That being said, we know that it's problematic in the ways that speak to this issue and the work around it. So what can we do or how should we be thinking about that it? So what can we do or how should we be thinking about that? It's fascinating in another way and I talk about this a little bit in the book. Social media has, as you suggest, it's become a growing part of the problem because of the isolation it causes and the sort distortion of people's point of view that it can cause, exposure to extremism among vulnerable people, all those things. But on the other hand, it's also become this really increasingly valuable tool to prevention, because you can see what people are talking about, you can see what they're thinking right and a lot of it's available open source. So that's an interesting dichotomy, I think, or almost a bit of a paradox, that, like, while this technology may be worsening the problem in some ways, it's also giving us a better way to see it and a better way, potentially, to get in the way of it, right To take action, to at least look into situations. I mean, that's tricky too because of issues of you, issues of surveillance and civil liberties and privacy, and there's a very strong impulse to say, oh well, let's just monitor social media. And you see that a lot with school threats and school shootings in America, a lot of school systems saying, well, we want to do this. Social media surveillance on kids, social media surveillance on kids I think that's fundamentally opposed to the concept of threat assessment. In some ways. It's not a dragnet approach to trying to identify dangerous people, but rather when you have someone you're concerned about. Now you can go and look at their activity online, and most of the time, you're going to find useful information there, probably. So there's an interesting kind of paradox there, but I do think that the way that it's going to and has already negatively impacted the issue of social connection is really important, not just for kids, for adults too, in a workplace environment or otherwise. We're going to have to reckon with the way that technology has caused people to be more isolated, or maybe to choose to be more isolated.

Speaker 3: 54:49

Maybe another way to think about this, too, is with the. Historically, is with the blame on violent media, on video games and violent films. You know that's been around since Columbine. You know, more than two decades ago, that, oh, these things cause people to commit violence, and, of course, we know there's no evidence of that. That's a myth. I think probably the same is going to be true about social media. Social media isn't going to cause people to commit violence. The question, then, is what is the correlation here? And I think it's going to be isolation, right, you have a history of there's many, many cases where perpetrators self-isolate toward the end playing video games. You know, alone in their room for hours on end playing violent video games and that sort of led to, I think, misleading or misguided coverage in the media saying oh this, you know, this is what drove the person to do this. They were playing first person shooters and then they went and did it.

Speaker 2: 55:43

That's not the reason.

Speaker 3: 55:44

It's because they were alone and depressed and suicidal and no one could help them or no one was there for them to connect with. And I think we'll see more versions of that, with people living in the virtual world and not having contact with people in their lives, in schools or in workplaces, or maybe with their own families. And this is important.

Speaker 2: 56:06

This is the world we live in now, do you find a connection there, because I know that's been talked about? Is this connection between the first person games, et cetera, and the concept of novel aggression?

Speaker 3: 56:17

Well, you know, I actually found this quite fascinating because I asked about this a fair amount when I was working on the book. You know, because I asked about this a fair amount when I was working on the book. You know, what is the connection here with violent video games, for example? And so the concept of novel aggression, being a person who's like testing their ability to kill, right, I've never seen any evidence or serious discussion of, you know, a first person shooter game, providing that, like someone you know figuring out that they can go kill people because they played a video game, uh. But that said, I I do think there is a question of kind of more generally, of like psychological preparation, rehearsal, in that sense like, oh, if I've developed a plan that I'm gonna go kill people, um, then you know, yeah, maybe I'll, I'll practice on on this video game shooting, but that's not a practical version of practicing with a gun. I mean, that has nothing to do with firing a real gun. So it may be a behavior in some cases. That is an indicator. Again, right, it correlates in that way. I think that, okay, if a person's becoming really fixated on playing violent video games, maybe that's important in a case where we're concerned about someone for some other troubling behaviors. But I'd be far more interested in knowing are they going to a shooting range? Um, you know, elliot Roger was not playing first person shooter games and in fact his, his roommates were and he hated it. He, you know they were noisy and and noisy and he complained about it and I think it contributed to his sense of alienation and isolation. Maybe that's a bit of an irony in his case had nothing to do with violent video games but he was going to a gun range in Oxnard and firing hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

Speaker 3: 58:02

So this is a great example, in my view, of how, in the kind of general public and cultural discussion of the problem of mass shootings and targeted violence, there's a real tendency to try to explain it in simple terms like this oh, it's the violent culture, oh, it's all misogyny or male aggression. You know why is it that all mass shooters are men or boys? In fact we know, you know there are some women who do this. It's rare. Those are interesting cultural questions, but I think people are often looking to ascribe meaning to them that isn't there. It doesn't exist. When you really look at the nature of this problem practically and forensically, it's not there. It doesn't mean that it's irrelevant, but it doesn't tell us anything, I think meaningful, about how to stop it.

Speaker 2: 58:50

No, it's just another behaviour, isn't it? I think you're right. Again, we try and create hooks that we can put things on to make it easy for ourselves to understand and maybe even justified. But actually, you know, if somebody is locking themselves away playing video games for hours on end, you know why. You know that's the key. Is it because they're lonely? Is it, you know? Is it all this sort of? And actually, who are they playing with? What are the conversations? What are the engagements? It's not just something you can say, oh yeah, tick a box, he's playing violent video games.

Speaker 2: 59:24

That's one of those indicators and I think throughout this talk it's been enlightening, I think, and I think you've made the point brilliantly around A, it's a very complex subject. B there is no magic wand that can point to someone and say that's a person who's going to do something. And it is about really deeply understanding the, the problems that people are having and the isolation and the suicide ideation is is obviously those. Those are clearly worrying aspects in anybody who's locked away, feeling suicidal. But I think what you've done is really articulate. Well, that you know, we whilst these, they're all fascinating these stories, but actually there's a common denominator about human suffering and and and troubled people, and actually that's the issue we need to deal with, because that's where the violence emanates from at some point. It doesn't mean, because you've got these issues, you're going to become violent or you're going to ever do anything like that, but there are some common commonalities in in people that are, you know, have a grievance, they're angry, they're rage, um, and and people are, you know, maybe missing those signs or maybe ignoring them or maybe not seeing them as relevant.

Speaker 2: 1:00:45

So, actually, rather than getting really technical about some of this stuff and making it into this hugely technical forensic science project, actually it's about human contact and human behavior and listening and noticing and actually engaging with people and saying, listen, you know, I've noticed you've been locked away or I've noticed you've done this and you know, maybe we need to make it much more simple in terms of engaging with each other more and actually recognising some of the challenges that people are going through in this age of the internet and social media, where I think we are much more isolated. I think people can perceive they've got lots and lots of friends and they've got a community, but actually it's all a myth, it's all. They're not real, they're not people that you know are going to turn up if you're in trouble and help you, um. So I like to think of behavioral threat assessment and management as this, this concept of human engagement, and that's how we're going to identify problem people. That's how we're going to help people that are struggling. That's how we're going to actually stop. You know the grievances that people have got by having those conversations.

Speaker 2: 1:01:49

But I think your book is absolutely superb. I'm looking forward to reading the um, the piece on elliot's uh mother, but I certainly this is a book that I think um is a huge contribution to the subject because it it goes through so many cases and and I was talking to my wife earlier on around you know, going right back to Robert Fine and how he started with this and you know Robert was my mentor. I spent a few days with Robert and he's a wonderfully humble man, but I think it's a really important book. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about it, mark, because I think you've you've taken me down a different route than I thought we're going to talk about.

Speaker 2: 1:02:29

I thought we're going to talk about all the indicators and stuff and actually you've talked about what I think is so important, which is human contact and human behaviors, and not, you know, not making it this big complex science. What have you and I think that's what's so clever about this is that actually it? It points to that. It points to um, we can all do this, we can all be threat assessment people. We can all look at ourselves and look at our friends and family and assess threats by understanding these issues. So, thank you so much. What project you're working on now? What's next for you?

Speaker 3: 1:03:00

uh, well, I have. I have some more things in in the pipeline. Um, certainly, in this terrain, this project was really a deeply invested one, and so I'm a little bit in a reset mode right now, but I will have more. So I don't have too much specific to say at the moment, but it's one of the things that's really kept me so interested in this subject, in this method of violence prevention.

Speaker 3: 1:03:24

Subject this and this method of violence prevention it's just such rich territory and I have a deep appreciation for the work that that you all do in this field, because I do think it's fundamentally hopeful.

Speaker 3: 1:03:32

I mean, this is such a grim problem and grim subject matter in so many ways, and yet there are a lot of people who are very dedicated to doing this work, who are, you know, super intelligent, empathetic, caring people, and I think you know that's fascinated me and drawn me in a way that I think makes it a very worthy story, and there's a lot more to tell about it. So I will continue to report and research on this topic, because I do see a lot of hope in it. Fundamentally it's hopeful. I mean, we may not be able to stop all violence in the world. This is a condition of human civilization, right? And yet there are many successes with this work too. And so you know, from the perspective of a journalist, you know reporting in the public interest is what we do, and I see a tremendous public interest in the value of this work and in the possibility of it. So stay tuned. I'll have more to say.

Speaker 2: 1:04:28

Well, that's a brilliant way to conclude, mark. Thank you so much, really appreciate your time. Once again, thank you to Mark and his book Trigger Points, which we will obviously distribute the details of that book. So thank you once again, mark. Thanks, phil, it's been a pleasure talking with you, so thank you once again Mo Thanks Phil.

Speaker 1: 1:04:45

It's been a pleasure talking with you. Thank you for listening to the Diffuse podcast with host Philip Rendell, ceo and founder of Diffuse. Please rate, review and subscribe on your favorite podcasting platforms.