Latest / Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann / #103: Zack Kowalske / Detective, Forensic Science

Transcript

#103: Zack Kowalske / Detective, Forensic Science · Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann

• 0:01
  Welcome to another episode of Come Together.
• 0:14
  We are Live. Welcome, Zach.
• 0:16
  Is this the first podcast that you did that you're doing?
• 0:20
  No, no, I've done a couple before and I actually used to
• 0:23
  host a podcast. I'll get out of here.
• 0:25
  Really. Yeah.
• 0:27
  Wait, what kind of podcast was it?
• 0:29
  So it was probably about 10 years ago.
• 0:33
  It was a forensic science weekly kind of forensic Science News
• 0:37
  and commentary. Wow, that's really cool.
• 0:40
  And so you do you do 1 episode a week.
• 0:42
  And used to, yeah. And then?
• 0:44
  And how long was it? I did that for about a year and
• 0:48
  a half, two years, and then I just got busy and kind of moved
• 0:53
  on to other projects currently, you know, in development of a
• 0:57
  kind of a new video based podcast project right now.
• 1:01
  That cool? Yeah, it's fun creative outlet.
• 1:05
  Yeah. Do you feel, do you feel that
• 1:07
  you've always had that kind of need for some kind of creative
• 1:09
  outlet? Oh, absolutely.
• 1:12
  Absolutely. I, yeah, I am very much because
• 1:17
  of what I do and how I don't know how how sucked into my work
• 1:23
  I can get. It's very difficult to try and
• 1:27
  maintain that sense of self. So I've always kind of sought
• 1:34
  some kind of creative outlet, whether it was writing or no
• 1:38
  video or podcast or something like that.
• 1:41
  Right now I've got I kind of multitask all that creative
• 1:45
  outlet across a few different spectrums.
• 1:48
  I know, I know exactly what you're talking.
• 1:51
  About SO. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:53
  So tell me a little about yourself.
• 1:54
  So you're so you said that you don't, you're that the nature of
• 1:58
  your work is so busy that you often have you, you need to make
• 2:01
  time for yourself. What do you do?
• 2:03
  What's so busy? Yeah, So my name is Zach
• 2:06
  Kowalski. I am a detective with a metro
• 2:09
  Atlanta Police Department. I specialize in crime scene
• 2:12
  investigations. I'm assigned to our crime lab,
• 2:15
  been there for a little over 16 1/2 years, and I specialize in
• 2:19
  crime scene reconstruction. So anything dealing with violent
• 2:22
  crimes, blood stain pattern analysis, shooting,
• 2:25
  reconstruction, you know, kind of advanced crime scene analysis
• 2:28
  work predominantly, you know, I in our crime scene
• 2:35
  investigations unit. So I'll go out the scenes that
• 2:36
  I'm requested to and, you know, try and use science to catch bad
• 2:40
  guys. And then I did you, did you go
• 2:44
  into this from a law enforcement perspective or a science
• 2:46
  perspective or both? A.
• 2:48
  Little bit of both. So I knew that I wanted to go
• 2:52
  into crime scene investigations from about the age of 12.
• 2:55
  I got my first fingerprint kit under the Christmas tree.
• 2:58
  I think that that year. Cool.
• 3:01
  Yeah, a a note to what to go. Do with the Christmas tree?
• 3:05
  Wait, what is the Tokyo do with the fingerprint kit?
• 3:08
  Destroy the bathroom counters with fluorescent powder
• 3:12
  unknowingly. So always do any kind of
• 3:15
  fingerprinting work outside because you will stain the
• 3:19
  countertops. How does it work?
• 3:22
  How does that work? Fingerprint powder?
• 3:24
  So fingerprint powder is a finely ground up, typically
• 3:29
  volcanic ash for our black ones. The bigger print powder comes in
• 3:34
  a variety of different colors and as the whole idea is that
• 3:41
  you want to apply some powder to the sebaceous oils of
• 3:44
  fingerprints so that you can increase contrast with your
• 3:48
  medium that your your prints are on, right.
• 3:50
  So if we have a, you know, white background, like a a painted
• 3:54
  wall, we want to use some black powder so that we can develop
• 3:57
  that print to where we can visualize it.
• 3:59
  And then we can, you know, take photographs of it and lift it
• 4:02
  and recover it that way. And when you get a print, I'm
• 4:05
  sorry, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off
• 4:08
  when you got a print. The shape of like the actual
• 4:12
  physical shape of the print is what you're going to use to, you
• 4:16
  know, to match with someone's DNA or you wait for the DNA on
• 4:20
  the print. So there.
• 4:22
  Yeah, Yeah. So with prints, there are a
• 4:24
  couple of different routes that you can take, right.
• 4:26
  So the first is that we can identify who that fingerprint
• 4:29
  belongs to if we have sufficient wrench characteristics that can
• 4:33
  be based off of, you know, just depends on, on what kind of
• 4:37
  surface it's on and you know, how that print is deposited.
• 4:40
  So we can identify the pattern. I'm sorry.
• 4:43
  Does that frequently happen? Oh yeah.
• 4:46
  You could like, it's pretty you you.
• 4:48
  It's not so hard to find, like it's not so hard to get a print
• 4:50
  with ridges. No, no, not at all.
• 4:52
  It is whether or not there is sufficient ridges to actually be
• 4:56
  able to ID it right. Because if you think about how
• 4:59
  you touch, you know how you interact with the world around
• 5:01
  you, your hands and your fingers and are constantly in motion.
• 5:06
  So you always think, well, you know, I touch a doorknob.
• 5:09
  I can absolutely get a fingerprint off of that.
• 5:11
  Well, what's your hand doing when you touch that doorknob?
• 5:13
  Well, typically you're twisting the door knob, right?
• 5:15
  So that is inherently distorting those Ridge characteristics.
• 5:19
  So it's not guaranteed that we're going to get a
• 5:21
  fingerprint, a quality fingerprint, I should say.
• 5:24
  Now what we can do is we can swab that print, right?
• 5:27
  And we can swab that and try and go after what's called low count
• 5:30
  DNA or trace DNA and try and go about identifying the source
• 5:34
  that. Way.
• 5:36
  Wow, amazing. That's cool.
• 5:38
  Yeah, forensic science is awesome.
• 5:39
  I mean, you know, we're looking for the absolute tiniest of
• 5:44
  evidence to either identify a source or figure out the series
• 5:48
  of actions that occurred within a scene.
• 5:50
  Yeah, awesome. So you're 12 years old, you get
• 5:52
  this kit, you start playing with it, you ruin your, you ruin your
• 5:55
  counters and and then and then, and then what's the next step?
• 6:01
  Are you always a scientist kind of guy?
• 6:03
  Is that is that the way your brain works?
• 6:05
  Yeah. So I grew up loving science and
• 6:10
  nature. I had these Audubon books that I
• 6:15
  would go out into the woods. I grew up on a bunch of wooded
• 6:19
  area in Georgia and north of Atlanta, and we had a Creek.
• 6:23
  So I would go down to the Creek and I would catch salamanders
• 6:25
  and crawdads. And, you know, I would use my
• 6:28
  Audubon books to try and identify the species.
• 6:32
  And, you know, I'd loved Steve Irwin, the crocodile Hunter.
• 6:36
  You know, I, I would go around the woods dressed in khaki
• 6:39
  thinking I was the crocodile Hunter.
• 6:42
  And so that was at an early age. I was very much inspired by the
• 6:47
  natural world around me. And so when I was in the eighth
• 6:51
  grade, I had a science teacher, Marcy Kogar.
• 6:55
  Marcy, if you're listening to this, hello.
• 6:57
  Thank you so much for literally changing my life.
• 7:00
  Any any good teachers? We absolutely need good teachers
• 7:04
  because a good teacher can have an influence and impact on the
• 7:09
  world that they might never know.
• 7:11
  So Marcy Kogar had been going back to school while she was a
• 7:16
  teacher to get her master's in forensic chemistry.
• 7:20
  And she was my eighth grade science teacher and she had, I
• 7:24
  had a textbook, one of the forensic chemistry textbooks
• 7:27
  with her in class. And I had been looking at it and
• 7:30
  I became fascinated about it. And she said, you know, she kind
• 7:33
  of encouraged me about it. And so I started reading
• 7:36
  everything I possibly could get my hands on the dealt with
• 7:38
  forensic science. And I was absolutely infatuated.
• 7:44
  So you know, fingerprint kit under the Christmas tree.
• 7:47
  And then within the next year, I was fascinated by blood stain
• 7:50
  pattern analysis by understanding that we could use
• 7:53
  physics and mathematics to understand violent how violence
• 7:58
  occurs and using science to understand that violence.
• 8:02
  So I mean in the. The coolest thing in the entire
• 8:05
  world. It really did.
• 8:08
  So you know, I'm in the night. I can very much.
• 8:10
  I have a very distinct memory of my 9th grade science class, and
• 8:16
  I was doing a project to show my class how blood stain pattern
• 8:21
  and analysis worked, and I went to a small little private
• 8:24
  school. I look back at what I'm about to
• 8:26
  tell you today and this this could never happen in today's
• 8:30
  kind of school settings that we have.
• 8:33
  But I remember having this pumpkin that I had rigged up
• 8:35
  with aquarium tubing and a pump so that I can circulate my fake
• 8:39
  blood. And then I brought this as the
• 8:42
  neck. And so then I brought this into
• 8:45
  class and I took a kitchen knife and I cut the neck and I showed
• 8:48
  how the pump, how the pumping and I was making blood stains,
• 8:51
  you know, in front of a ninth grade science class, so.
• 8:54
  What did you just say? Did you teacher love it?
• 8:56
  They loved it, absolutely loved it.
• 8:57
  I. Bet they did, by the way,
• 8:59
  because that's creative. It's such a fun like that.
• 9:01
  That's this is the kind of assignments we need to
• 9:03
  encourage, I feel like. Yeah, you know, I never had a
• 9:06
  bad teacher in high school or, you know, middle school for
• 9:12
  that. I was always blessed with great
• 9:13
  teachers who really encouraged me and just let me kind of
• 9:18
  thrive my, you know, beat my own weird little drum.
• 9:22
  And and really the same thing for my mom.
• 9:24
  My mom is absolutely the reason that I am where I am today is
• 9:29
  because she was so encouraging of everything that I got into.
• 9:34
  You know, I, I, we turned our, we had a, a detached garage that
• 9:39
  had been converted into an apartment and my older brother
• 9:43
  lived up top and we turned the lower level into my own little
• 9:48
  crime lab. So yeah, at that point I'm
• 9:53
  12/13. So they so they really leaned
• 9:56
  into it you all. 100%, you know, really leaned into it and.
• 10:01
  Was your family in law enforcement?
• 10:02
  No, no, just you. Yeah, my, my grandfather Bucky,
• 10:08
  he went into civil defense in the 50s after he finished World
• 10:12
  War 2. But no, I've, I'm of my
• 10:17
  immediate family. I'm the only one that decided to
• 10:19
  go to long. But they they gave you that, by
• 10:21
  the way, that space is not, it's not.
• 10:24
  So speaking as a teacher and as an older brother and as now a
• 10:27
  parent, that space is not easy to give a kid.
• 10:31
  Like, I know it's like people talk about it a lot, but I feel
• 10:34
  like human nature is to want, especially like if you're a
• 10:37
  parent, you want your kid to kind of live the life either
• 10:39
  that you feel like you lived well or live the life that you
• 10:42
  didn't live better, you know? And like a parent will typically
• 10:46
  have an idea, like an outline for the kid what their life is.
• 10:49
  And if that kid wants to deviate, parents, you know, it's
• 10:51
  hard. You don't know what to do with
• 10:53
  that, you know? And so I give a ton of props and
• 10:56
  credit to people that are willing to give other people the
• 10:58
  space to be themselves and not trample on them, you know?
• 11:01
  Oh, that was absolutely 100% my mom.
• 11:05
  That's awesome. Yeah.
• 11:06
  And yeah, I will for always. And I've tried, you know, I'm a
• 11:11
  parent myself. My daughter just graduated high
• 11:13
  school last week. Congratulations.
• 11:15
  Thank you very much. Now I just got to get her
• 11:17
  through just got to get her through college, but that was
• 11:19
  definitely one of the biggest growing pains and learning
• 11:24
  points for myself as a parent was that, you know, our kids are
• 11:30
  not us. So, you know, understanding that
• 11:34
  my learning style and my kind of viewpoint on education is very
• 11:39
  different from my daughters, you know, I'm, I did my master, I
• 11:45
  did my undergrad in, you know, investigated forensics, my
• 11:48
  master's in forensic science and I'm a PhD researcher in forensic
• 11:51
  science out of Staffordshire University.
• 11:54
  So education is very much a key focus point for me, you know,
• 11:59
  personal education. My daughter's not that way.
• 12:03
  You know, she, she's super excited to be going in to marine
• 12:08
  sciences down at the college that she's going to go off to,
• 12:12
  You know, she wants to go be a shark researcher.
• 12:13
  And hey, if that's what you want to do, go.
• 12:15
  I will encourage you every different way that I can because
• 12:18
  that was ultimately what I kind of had to learn was that our
• 12:22
  kids are going to find their own way.
• 12:24
  And it is your job as a parent to just encourage them and to
• 12:28
  support them. So just to just for your, just
• 12:30
  to, I'm sorry, hop in real quick.
• 12:32
  I, I know I mentioned this on the phone recently, but I just
• 12:35
  saw that the place I was mentioning to you, the dolphin
• 12:39
  therapy place that I sold my medical equipment to is looking
• 12:42
  for interns for that thing coming up.
• 12:45
  So I'll send you the information after if you would like for
• 12:47
  your. Daughter.
• 12:47
  Yeah, absolutely. Anything to get started is such
• 12:50
  a is such a phenomenal way to do it.
• 12:51
  That was down in the keys, right?
• 12:53
  It's, well, yeah, but it's the closest key.
• 12:55
  It's Key Largo so. Hell, maybe I want to go be an
• 12:58
  intern. By the way, I, you know what, I
• 13:02
  think that I think it's funny because we live in a time,
• 13:06
  especially with remote work and you know, I mean, I know that
• 13:08
  your schedule at this particular moment is crazy.
• 13:11
  But I think that for a lot of people, there's a lot more time
• 13:14
  and opportunity to kind of chase these crazy dreams down today
• 13:17
  than there's ever been before, you know?
• 13:19
  100%. Yeah, go ahead.
• 13:22
  Yeah, please. No, I mean, I completely agree,
• 13:25
  you know, But I am by far. I'm a victim of my own
• 13:32
  eccentricities, you know, apart from my full time detective
• 13:38
  work, I also run a private practice firm where I'm a, where
• 13:42
  I run an expert witness firm. So I do private case work for
• 13:45
  both prosecution and defence, doing crimes reconstruction,
• 13:48
  shooting reconstruction, all that kind of stuff.
• 13:50
  And that is pretty much a full time job all on its own is of
• 13:53
  running a company and then the PhD thing and all these other
• 13:57
  little projects. I found myself how do you
• 13:59
  balance your time? What's your what's your typical?
• 14:01
  Do you have a typical day or do you just is every week something
• 14:03
  else? Yeah, so I kind of divide 1.
• 14:08
  I live and die by my calendar. I kind of plan my days out down
• 14:13
  to like the half hour blocks because I have to.
• 14:18
  So at the Police Department, I work typically Tuesday through
• 14:23
  Friday from 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM. So I work for 10's and then I'm
• 14:28
  on call on off hours and my partner and I split on call
• 14:33
  status. So you know, somebody has to be
• 14:35
  available at 3:00 AM to respond to, you know, something.
• 14:38
  So, so that's kind of how that works.
• 14:41
  And I'll kind of go into what an average day there looks like.
• 14:45
  Saturday, Sunday, Monday are devoted to my private case work
• 14:48
  in the company and that can be as short as 3 hours a day or as
• 14:55
  deep as 12 to 14 hours a day and just really depends on the
• 14:59
  requirements of the company at that point and my case caseload
• 15:02
  volume. I stay really freaking busy with
• 15:04
  it, which is a good thing. I'm by no means complaining, I
• 15:07
  absolutely love what I do. Once again, you wouldn't do it.
• 15:10
  You wouldn't do all this if you didn't love it.
• 15:11
  You. Know absolutely not.
• 15:13
  And then with the PhD work, I kind of sprinkle it in
• 15:16
  throughout. I'm in the final phases.
• 15:19
  I've just provided my first draft of my dissertation, so
• 15:23
  I've got my revision notes. Got to do some revision work
• 15:27
  over the next month, month and a half, and then I'll submit it be
• 15:29
  done with it. Is there is there a maximum
• 15:33
  amount of time that you have to take to do a PhD?
• 15:35
  Or can you take as much time as you want and sprinkle over next
• 15:38
  month of years? No, there is a minimum and
• 15:40
  maximum registration period. So it depends on if you're full
• 15:44
  time or part time. So I'm a part time researcher.
• 15:48
  So the minimum registration period is five years, which is
• 15:52
  I'm at and then the maximum registration period, I want to
• 15:57
  say is 10 years. It might be 7 though it's I
• 16:00
  think it's 10 if you're full time.
• 16:03
  Typically what you see is a minimum registration period of
• 16:07
  about three years, with a maximum registration between
• 16:10
  7:00 to 10:00. Right.
• 16:12
  And I guess that's depending on how heavy or top your
• 16:14
  dissertation is going to be. Correct.
• 16:16
  Right, right, right. That's really interesting
• 16:18
  because one of the things I mean, I've, I've been thinking,
• 16:20
  you know, I've, I've, I've, I'm always thinking a little bit
• 16:22
  about going back to school because if excuse me for no
• 16:25
  other reason other than teaching, I love teaching and I
• 16:28
  would love an opportunity to teach college students.
• 16:30
  And, you know, there's, it's almost impossible these days to
• 16:34
  get a job teaching, teaching in college without a PhD, you know?
• 16:39
  You know, the PhD thing has been the most, it has really been the
• 16:46
  biggest challenge for me, not just in terms of conducting the
• 16:52
  actual research itself, but you truly become a subject matter
• 16:57
  expert when you do a PhD is, you know, if you have ever had
• 17:03
  imposter syndrome, I highly recommend you do a PhD because
• 17:07
  you'll come out on the other end being a being an expert in your
• 17:11
  field. So.
• 17:13
  What do you? What do you?
• 17:14
  What's your PhD focusing on? What do you?
• 17:15
  What are you going to be defending?
• 17:17
  Yeah, so blood stain pattern analysis, my dissertation
• 17:20
  research specifically has been in how environmental variables
• 17:24
  influence our accuracy of measurement, and that is across
• 17:29
  multiple different surface types.
• 17:30
  So how does surface roughness, porosity and other environmental
• 17:36
  variables kind of affect the overall stain shape and size?
• 17:42
  And then there's also a contingent, which was the the
• 17:46
  most novel research component. And this is where it got a lot
• 17:49
  of traction. I just did an interview with
• 17:51
  BBCA couple weeks ago on it. It was, I did a Astro forensics,
• 17:56
  I guess is kind of what I'm work.
• 17:58
  I'm calling it Astro. Yeah, as in space.
• 18:01
  So it was the first space forensics research, so.
• 18:06
  No way. Let's go.
• 18:08
  It's so cool. Yeah, it's super cool.
• 18:10
  And the story behind it is super neat, right.
• 18:12
  So what we ended up doing was taking the same study that we
• 18:17
  were doing here on Earth and doing that in a zero gravity
• 18:21
  environment. And so how this all started,
• 18:25
  this is a super just bizarre. Yeah, it's a, it's a bizarre
• 18:30
  series of events. So years ago, I had gone to my
• 18:35
  advisor and I said, hey, I so back story, I'm a huge space
• 18:39
  nerd. I if you didn't know, I love
• 18:42
  anything. Science but I.
• 18:43
  Really love talking about this. OK, I really love space science,
• 18:46
  right? So I'd gone to my advisor and I
• 18:50
  said, hey, I'd like to do a thought experiment as the last
• 18:54
  chapter of the research that takes it into a space
• 18:57
  environment and how blood stain pattern analysis will be
• 19:00
  influenced by that space environment.
• 19:04
  Because here on Earth, gravity is incredibly pervasive.
• 19:07
  It is always with us. It influences everything that we
• 19:10
  examine. So when you remove that gravity,
• 19:13
  how do fluid dynamics affect blood and blood stain patterns?
• 19:18
  I said. So, you know, I'd like to do it
• 19:19
  as a thought experiment. And what that just meant was is
• 19:22
  I would do a pretty exhaustive literature review of studies
• 19:26
  that are dealing with fluid dynamics and space medicine
• 19:30
  already. And then I would apply those
• 19:34
  concepts to a thought experiment of how blood stamp power
• 19:37
  analysis would work. So as part of that, I'd reached
• 19:40
  out to a friend of mine who had a colleague at NASA's Jet
• 19:45
  Propulsion Laboratory in California, JPL, and she put me
• 19:49
  in touch with her. I was like, hey, I'm looking for
• 19:51
  any kind of research studies or video that I can get my hands on
• 19:55
  of fluid dynamic studies on the ISS.
• 19:59
  And so she put me in touch with somebody who put me into and I
• 20:01
  go down this. So nice that people are willing
• 20:03
  to do that by the way, isn't it? It's.
• 20:04
  Fantastic. When you tell somebody just kind
• 20:07
  of like, hey, this is what I'm looking for it.
• 20:09
  It never hurts to cold e-mail somebody because what's the
• 20:13
  worst they can tell? The worst they can tell you is
• 20:16
  no, in which case you're exactly where you are right now.
• 20:20
  You have nothing but advantage to gain.
• 20:23
  So, you know, be willing to be, you know, put yourself out.
• 20:29
  Willing. Yeah, be willing to put yourself
• 20:30
  out there because what ended up happening was I got a hold of a
• 20:34
  study that was on hemorrhaging in space.
• 20:37
  Right. So bleeding in space and how to
• 20:39
  hemorrhage control by a guy? Yeah, fascinating because,
• 20:45
  because, because there's no gravity, right?
• 20:48
  Where's the, how's the hemorrhage going to rupture?
• 20:53
  I guess a man of error, Like how's he, how's he going to
• 20:56
  spread? You know what's going to happen.
• 20:58
  Yeah. So basically, so if you don't
• 21:02
  know when you cut yourself in space and you start bleeding,
• 21:05
  there is no gravitational pull, right?
• 21:08
  So what happens is the fluid just accumulates in kind of this
• 21:12
  mass. It's called a fluid Dome around
• 21:14
  that injury site. So like as you move, the mass is
• 21:18
  going to kind of move with it. That looks like jello, right?
• 21:21
  It's like if you think, if you think of like a bowl of yellow
• 21:25
  and how that. That.
• 21:26
  Jiggle, yeah, but it's around the injury site.
• 21:29
  Right, right, right. So let's say I have a cut in my
• 21:30
  hands, right. And then the the blood would
• 21:33
  kind of just. It just oozed out and it would
• 21:36
  just stay together because of surface tension.
• 21:39
  So until you have a sufficient force, like until you move your
• 21:43
  hand quick enough and you create what's called a shear force,
• 21:46
  that shear force is what's going to detach the liquid from your
• 21:49
  hand. So I'd read George's paper on
• 21:53
  it. And so I'd emailed him.
• 21:54
  I said, hey, this is what I'm doing.
• 21:56
  I would love if you have any video that you'd be willing to
• 21:59
  let me look at so I can kind of extrapolate some concepts.
• 22:04
  Well, he replied back and he said, that sounds absolutely
• 22:07
  fascinating. I am actually going to be
• 22:09
  driving down to Kennedy Space Center next month for my next
• 22:14
  research flight. Would you like to meet for
• 22:16
  coffee while I pass through Atlanta?
• 22:18
  Nice. Abso freaking lutely I would
• 22:21
  like to. Make you for coffee.
• 22:23
  So George and I met at a coffee shop that was just off the
• 22:27
  highway not too far from where I live.
• 22:29
  And we proceeded to spend 2 hours talking about all things
• 22:34
  space medicine and my research. And you know, just it was, it
• 22:39
  was a great sounding board. And towards the end of the
• 22:41
  conversation, he asked me a phenomenal question that has
• 22:45
  forever changed my life. If you could do this research
• 22:50
  in, in 0 gravity, how would you do your research?
• 22:54
  And so that's such a phenomenal question because it forces you
• 22:58
  to do 2 things. One, this type of research is
• 23:01
  incredibly expensive. So any kind of microgravity
• 23:04
  research, you know, a parabolic flight arc.
• 23:07
  So if you have ever heard the term the vomit comet, it's a
• 23:09
  plane that does a series of parabolic flights.
• 23:12
  And so it induces gravity for researchers that runs about 40
• 23:16
  grand to put anything actually up into the ISS.
• 23:20
  You're talking about millions of dollars because weight matters.
• 23:24
  So you're in confined environment.
• 23:27
  So when you're asked the question of how would you do
• 23:28
  your research, you have to boil your research down to the
• 23:32
  simplest investigative question. I see.
• 23:35
  What are we actually looking at, right?
• 23:37
  And how can we do it in the simplest terms?
• 23:42
  So on the back of a Starbucks napkin, I kind of sketched out
• 23:45
  what I was thinking and he said, well, I tell you what, if I have
• 23:50
  any extra time, if you'll, if you want to ship me a couple
• 23:52
  materials and I have some extra time, I'll see if I can't do it.
• 23:56
  And you know, so that was December of 2021 that he would
• 24:03
  did that flight. And unfortunately he didn't have
• 24:04
  any extra time. His real research, you know,
• 24:06
  his, his, his research that that NASA was actually paying for
• 24:10
  took priority. And so it didn't happen.
• 24:14
  But he did another series of flights in May of the following
• 24:17
  year. So six months later and he calls
• 24:19
  me and says Zach, I had time and I was able to get 2 tests out of
• 24:23
  it. How so?
• 24:25
  When did he call you? How many years later?
• 24:27
  Six months later, so. Six months later, got you.
• 24:29
  So in May of 22 and so we've been able to do 2 tests, which
• 24:39
  gave me just enough data to kind of work with and from there was
• 24:43
  able to actually make a study out of it.
• 24:46
  And so that published that published last year in Forensic
• 24:50
  Science International. I highly recommend anybody
• 24:52
  that's interested in it you know check it out.
• 24:54
  Send me a couple of links by the way, to put in the show no
• 24:56
  caption of the stuff that you've done and I want to read them
• 25:00
  myself. Yeah, what I wasn't expecting
• 25:02
  was the kind of the media storm that that ended up starting.
• 25:07
  So I have since went on Fox News, BBC and a variety of
• 25:13
  variety of other. New York Post did a comment on
• 25:16
  it, so it was pretty cool to get some actual.
• 25:20
  Is that some real like when you when you when that initially
• 25:22
  starts rolling? And do you think it's like a
• 25:23
  prank at first? They like, you know, like what
• 25:25
  is this or how did that feel? Yeah, it was definitely surreal,
• 25:31
  but gratifying, you know? You know, when you're doing
• 25:36
  novel research like Astro forensics, you know, people call
• 25:39
  you crazy. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, it was.
• 25:41
  Very much eventually you're going to.
• 25:43
  You may as well start now, right?
• 25:44
  That was the whole thought, right, Is, you know, when you're
• 25:47
  doing something that is so far outside the spectrum, it most
• 25:54
  people make fun of it because it sounds, it sounds crazy.
• 25:57
  But I'm going to tell you a little, a little little secret
• 26:00
  of of how I try and live my life.
• 26:03
  In order to be exceptional, you have to be the exception.
• 26:07
  Yeah, Right. So I've never really worried
• 26:12
  about what people thought of my research or thought of my work.
• 26:16
  I love what I do. And if you can have that level
• 26:19
  of self-confidence, yeah, then yeah, go, go for it.
• 26:24
  You know, it, it, it, it was difficult getting it published
• 26:27
  because of that. So I wrote up the study and I
• 26:29
  initially had submitted it to Journal of Forensic Science.
• 26:33
  And Journal of Forensic Science had said that it was the Astro
• 26:37
  forensics was immature in its study and that maybe in a few
• 26:41
  years, as it developed, you know, what they'd consider and
• 26:44
  whatnot. To which, you know, I I laughed
• 26:48
  at the response and the denial because I'm pretty sure that's
• 26:50
  what they said to Galileo. Yeah.
• 26:53
  Not not calling myself Galileo. Wow.
• 26:54
  That's. I understand.
• 26:55
  Yeah, but I think I understand what you're trying to say.
• 26:58
  But yeah, and, you know, it's novel for a reason, right?
• 27:03
  Novel literally means new research.
• 27:05
  So, you know, so then I pitched it to Science and Justice out of
• 27:11
  the UK and other journal. They kind of had the same
• 27:14
  responses, that it was a little, you know, a little nascent,
• 27:19
  didn't really kind of fit with contemporary research.
• 27:22
  And then I pitched it to Forensic Science International,
• 27:24
  and they loved it. There you go.
• 27:26
  And so, you know, don't. I've been told no a lot in my
• 27:32
  life of different ideas and. No, it's just a word.
• 27:36
  No, it's just a word, you know, You got to keep plugging away.
• 27:39
  I work cold cases a lot and in my cold case investigations.
• 27:43
  What's the cold case? Sorry.
• 27:45
  So a cold, yeah, a cold case is any kind of typically it's a
• 27:50
  homicide or you can have violent crimes, But so I work cold case
• 27:53
  homicides. So cold case homicides are
• 27:56
  murder investigations where all leads have been exhausted.
• 28:00
  They're typically old cases, so they can be 20-30 years old that
• 28:04
  you're still trying to solve. Wow.
• 28:07
  So in the bet, the the only way that you solve a 30 year old
• 28:14
  murder is by having dogged determination.
• 28:18
  Yeah. And and you know, you're going
• 28:20
  to get lab results that don't help you, you're going to get
• 28:24
  negative results and you have to have the tenacity to be able to
• 28:28
  go, OK, that that lab test didn't work for us to produce a
• 28:33
  positive lead. What's the next one?
• 28:36
  Right? What's our next piece of
• 28:37
  evidence that we can try and re examine?
• 28:39
  What's our next lead that we can try and follow?
• 28:42
  What's the next interview that we can try and go conduct to try
• 28:45
  and get that that one piece of information that is going to
• 28:49
  change everything? Yeah, yeah.
• 28:51
  So being willing to accept and disregard no is a superpower.
• 28:57
  So you probably so I mean it's interesting.
• 28:59
  Did you you think you learned that from work or you think
• 29:02
  that's what made you good at work and you knew that already?
• 29:05
  Oh, I have no idea. That's a chicken and egg, kind
• 29:08
  of. I know, right, But there's
• 29:09
  certain things that people know, you know, like I know that for
• 29:12
  example, I have a very, you know, similar, similar
• 29:14
  experiences where I've been told no a lot that I've had to like
• 29:17
  go alternative routes to try to get the yes, right.
• 29:21
  You know, I think that's probably a, that is probably a
• 29:25
  personal trait that that is probably something that I, I
• 29:28
  bring to work. I grew up kind of a socially
• 29:36
  awkward kid. You know, I didn't have a whole
• 29:39
  lot of friends because I was this weird little eccentric kid,
• 29:42
  right? But the friend group I had, we
• 29:45
  were a small little friend group.
• 29:47
  And that that was, and we're still all best friends today, 30
• 29:50
  years later. That's amazing.
• 29:52
  Oh yeah, yeah, your true friendship is one of the best
• 29:56
  blessings that we can have in life.
• 29:59
  So shout out to my crew where I was going with that is chicken
• 30:06
  before the egg, right? Yeah, in terms of not being in
• 30:08
  terms of not just taking a no and like kind of figuring things
• 30:11
  out because you need to do that with the science journals, you
• 30:13
  need to do that with work. You need to do that with, you
• 30:16
  know, like just. I think it's a learned, you
• 30:18
  know, probably a learned thing. I don't know where I got it
• 30:24
  from. Yeah, Yeah, I think, I think
• 30:26
  that I think because I think for a lot of people, the difference
• 30:28
  between success and failure is who's able to just last another
• 30:31
  day, just like one more day. So it's funny you say one more
• 30:34
  day. Harrison Ford has an amazing
• 30:37
  quote that I can't quite remember off the top of my head,
• 30:40
  but that's the summary of it, is that consistency is success,
• 30:44
  right? Is if you can tell yourself one
• 30:46
  more day, right? And so when I had when I started
• 30:50
  my most recent kind of YouTube channel, a creative endeavor,
• 30:56
  that was what I told myself. I said just you just gotta make
• 30:58
  it one more day. You just gotta shoot one more
• 31:01
  episode. Just shoot, you know, write one
• 31:04
  more script and just keep going. And that was a lot of fun for
• 31:07
  me. That was the creative outlet
• 31:09
  that I needed And you know, life kind of evolves you and changes,
• 31:13
  right. So I started kind of my private
• 31:16
  company started picking up, so I didn't have as much time to
• 31:18
  shoot. And so you kind of figure out
• 31:20
  how you evolved through that. For me it kind of shifted into
• 31:24
  writing sub stack articles and I saw that those are.
• 31:29
  Those are I read a couple of them.
• 31:30
  I read a couple of them earlier. They were they were a lot of
• 31:32
  fun. I wanted to actually ask you
• 31:33
  about them. We'll get back to them.
• 31:36
  But they're very they're really cool.
• 31:37
  I like them a lot. Yeah, well, thank you.
• 31:40
  Yeah, I've always loved writing and that was kind of what at
• 31:43
  that point, the Science Detective, that's the YouTube
• 31:46
  series that that I, I started last year, year before I wanted
• 31:53
  to bring forensic science topics and concepts to an audience,
• 31:59
  right. And, and communicate those
• 32:02
  science ideas. I prefer video, you know, I
• 32:05
  prefer visual medium because this is, you know, it's really
• 32:08
  difficult for me to explain a blood stain pattern to you when
• 32:11
  I can just show you a really cool blood stain pattern.
• 32:14
  And same thing with like, you know, thinking of those concepts
• 32:17
  in microgravity. But it's also, you know, so that
• 32:21
  evolves, you know, kind of ran out of time for, because I had
• 32:24
  to, you know, actually do real casework.
• 32:27
  And so that's where I kind of shifted gears and turned it into
• 32:32
  a riding outlet. And I enjoy that.
• 32:35
  You know, I'll bounce back and forth.
• 32:36
  You know, the theme and the concept of the science
• 32:39
  detective, more than anything is what is consistent.
• 32:42
  Yes, of course, I know. So yeah, it's a lot of fun, by
• 32:45
  the way. It's really, really cool.
• 32:47
  It's really, really cool because because it's fun to to see
• 32:52
  because when someone has a passion and it like they become
• 32:57
  an embodiment of a combination of their own, like personality
• 33:01
  and twist and that passion and like that, like presents it in a
• 33:05
  whole. It's it's, it's one of the most
• 33:08
  magical experience. I think that people love, you
• 33:11
  know, and I think that with enough time and you know, effort
• 33:15
  getting out there, like the quality is going to be there.
• 33:17
  If you're authentic, you know, when you because you're
• 33:19
  authentic about it, you know, you can't fake authenticity and
• 33:24
  passion. You can't fake that kind of
• 33:26
  stuff. So when you read it and like you
• 33:27
  see all the work you're doing, I'm like, this guy loves you
• 33:31
  know what he does, You know, like you can, you can detect
• 33:33
  that immediately. Yeah, I my biggest problem is I,
• 33:38
  I have too many hands on too many different projects right
• 33:43
  now. You know, my therapist asked me
• 33:47
  several months ago. She's like, what happens if you
• 33:52
  don't do them all at the same time?
• 33:53
  I was like, I don't know, my head explodes.
• 33:57
  Yeah. But it was such a great question
• 33:59
  that challenged me at that kind of season in my life was to
• 34:04
  really try and focus on once again, getting back to basic
• 34:09
  principles of what is the most important project right now.
• 34:14
  Let's get that done so that I can kind of compound interest my
• 34:17
  time and move on to other ones. Right.
• 34:20
  So like I've got right now I've got three different books I'm
• 34:22
  working on that are all at different phases.
• 34:25
  And it's like trying to make a dent.
• 34:29
  Three different dinners at the same time, right?
• 34:32
  You're not you're going to make a crappy dinner across all three
• 34:34
  of them. Whereas if you just take one
• 34:37
  project, devote everything into it, and then kind of go from
• 34:43
  there, I kind of equate the idea if you've ever heard of the
• 34:46
  snowball technique with like paying down debts and stuff like
• 34:50
  that, is you devote all your, you know, financial resources to
• 34:54
  1. Project.
• 34:55
  Yep. And then you snowball it to the
• 34:57
  next one. Same thing with your time is,
• 35:00
  you know, if you can focus everything on one project or
• 35:04
  endeavor, whatever, then you kind of compound from there.
• 35:09
  Right, right, right, right. Yeah, it's, it's just, again,
• 35:13
  it's just a matter of the discipline of doing it.
• 35:15
  You know, I said this yesterday and I said this today and I'll
• 35:17
  and I'll say it again tomorrow. I think that that in five years
• 35:22
  and 10 years from now or even 15 years from now, the difference
• 35:26
  between what's going to make people successful or not is
• 35:28
  their ability to be autonomous and disciplined.
• 35:30
  And I think that, you know, like, like what you, what you do
• 35:35
  is like the way that you reach out to people, try to make
• 35:39
  something happen, make a connection.
• 35:40
  Do you know anyone else that would be able to help me move
• 35:42
  that on to the next person? Like we have information.
• 35:46
  Information is more easily achievable than ever.
• 35:48
  But connections and discipline are actually what we're going to
• 35:51
  need to actually turn that information to something
• 35:53
  tangible, you know? Oh, absolutely.
• 35:55
  You know, and being in my and law enforcement and, and that
• 36:00
  forensic community for more than 16 1/2 years at this point.
• 36:06
  If I run across a problem, you know, on a scene or dealing with
• 36:10
  some kind of analysis or some kind of hairball thing that I'm
• 36:13
  thinking of. If I don't know the answer, I
• 36:16
  can probably get to the answer within two phone calls is I'll
• 36:20
  know somebody that I can call who will know somebody who knows
• 36:23
  the answer, right? Is.
• 36:25
  And that's a lot of times you, you run into when you're trying
• 36:29
  to solve difficult cases like we'll go back to cold case
• 36:32
  homicides. They're cold for a reason, right
• 36:35
  as you have exhausted all available analytical testing at
• 36:38
  that point. So you have to think outside of
• 36:40
  the box on being able to obtain that partial DNA profile or
• 36:45
  whatever it is because all the investigators that have touched
• 36:49
  that case before, you didn't think of that, right?
• 36:52
  Or this the science and technology didn't exist at the
• 36:55
  time, right? So that's what that's one of the
• 36:57
  big things now is we look at cases that were working cold
• 37:02
  cases like can we apply any advanced DNA analysis to this
• 37:08
  case, right? So when you start kind of
• 37:11
  getting on the fringe of what modern day forensic science can
• 37:17
  do, I'll give you a good example.
• 37:20
  I had a case where I had a surface that is incredibly
• 37:25
  abnormal. I won't kind of say what that
• 37:27
  surface is just because it still is an active investigation, but
• 37:32
  it's a really abnormal surface that you would never process for
• 37:35
  DNA today. And then you wouldn't think to
• 37:39
  look there. Yeah, you'll, it pushes the
• 37:42
  limits of what our capability is.
• 37:45
  You're talking about such a low level of DNA that may you
• 37:51
  wouldn't think to be right. Yeah, you just wouldn't.
• 37:53
  Most labs aren't going to try it, but I had an idea of how we
• 37:59
  can do it. And so I called my main state
• 38:03
  crime lab. I said, hey, is this something
• 38:06
  you can do? Is this something that we we can
• 38:08
  do in doing it through this process?
• 38:10
  And they said no, that that's not possible.
• 38:13
  It falls outside of their validation protocols.
• 38:17
  Excuse, excuse, excuse. So then I contacted a good
• 38:22
  colleague of mine. He runs a private crime lab shop
• 38:25
  out of California and he's kind of my sounding board when I have
• 38:32
  crazy snowball, you know, crazy hair brained ideas.
• 38:35
  And I called him, I said, hey, I've got this type of evidence
• 38:39
  and I want to get DNA off of it. And here's how I'm thinking we
• 38:42
  can do it. Is that something we can try?
• 38:46
  And what I love about him is he'll always say doesn't hurt to
• 38:50
  try, you know, because he he's going to charge me for it,
• 38:53
  right? So I mean, he's got, you know,
• 38:55
  once again, you have nothing but advantage.
• 38:59
  You know there's only upside. You know if at most.
• 39:02
  If at most. Yeah, if at most the, it fails
• 39:05
  to be able to develop a, you know, suitable profile or any
• 39:09
  kind of partial profile, then you're exactly in the same place
• 39:13
  that you were already. So I sent this, this item out to
• 39:17
  him and it worked right. Amazing.
• 39:20
  We we ended up generating something off of it that
• 39:24
  everyone else said that you couldn't do.
• 39:27
  So that that once again comes back to being able to be not
• 39:32
  just tenacious, but innovative thinking, being able to think.
• 39:36
  Yeah. Being able to think outside the
• 39:37
  box and just don't don't care what people think man, you know,
• 39:44
  have. You have you ever thought about
• 39:47
  heading out? I know this.
• 39:49
  I mean, I'm only, I'm only going to say this because I'm super,
• 39:51
  super interested in this whole like era and time period and top
• 39:54
  and like everything about it. But you head out to California
• 39:58
  to like LA to like where like the whole Manson family was.
• 40:03
  And like there's a lot of there's a lot of of, you know,
• 40:07
  deaths apparently that were associated with the family that
• 40:10
  were never actually closed up cases because they didn't have
• 40:14
  the evidence. Can you hear me All right, by
• 40:17
  the way? Well, yeah, I can hear you.
• 40:18
  OK, yeah. And so there's a great book
• 40:22
  called Chaos. I don't know if you ever heard
• 40:23
  of it or read it by a guy named Tom O'Neill.
• 40:26
  And he started as an he's an investigative journalist and,
• 40:31
  and he started by writing a piece for the 30 year
• 40:33
  anniversary for the Manson murders in the, you know, 95.
• 40:37
  And he's supposed to write a news news article and it turns
• 40:42
  into a 20 year project. And he wrote this enormous book,
• 40:47
  incredible, not enormous, but incredible book that's just so
• 40:50
  detailed, Rich about about Manson, all the potential
• 40:52
  directions that were that were associated with him.
• 40:55
  And he doesn't have any kind of he's missing evidence.
• 40:58
  He's missing a lot of, you know, either evidence or files and
• 41:03
  stuff like that. There's.
• 41:04
  A lot of that's one of the whole.
• 41:05
  Area. You know, that's one of the most
• 41:07
  difficult things about working cold cases is over years, over
• 41:11
  decades, evidence gets lost, evidence deteriorates, evidence
• 41:15
  gets accidentally destroyed. You know, or people are late or
• 41:18
  people, or the technology has not been updated and people
• 41:20
  haven't come back to look at it again, you know?
• 41:23
  Yeah. It's really interesting.
• 41:25
  I mean, do you ever work with investigative journalists and
• 41:28
  stuff like that to kind of try to figure out like.
• 41:31
  Not within my government casework, just, I mean, there's,
• 41:35
  there's a pretty hard line there between, you know, being able to
• 41:40
  talk about criminal investigations with media.
• 41:46
  But what if, what if someone comes up to you and says, hey, I
• 41:48
  have this story I'm working on. I need help finding some
• 41:51
  evidence, you know, in terms of XY and Z evidence, you know,
• 41:54
  murder, DNA or whatever. Yeah.
• 41:56
  So as long as it's not a conflict with my current
• 41:59
  casework, you know, So as long as it's not, you know, and by
• 42:02
  any way that I represent, I recently did that for a
• 42:05
  documentary series of a pretty infamous case, cold case from
• 42:10
  the 60s here in Atlanta. And so I just did a piece with
• 42:14
  them to, I'm not going to say just because that documentary
• 42:17
  series is currently in production.
• 42:20
  OK, fine. Let me know.
• 42:21
  Let me know when it comes. Out Yeah, yeah, it it'll be it
• 42:24
  should be airing in in October. That's exciting.
• 42:28
  I need to set a. Reminder yeah, it's super
• 42:30
  exciting, but they, but there's the same thing is, you know, it
• 42:33
  was a a private investigator and investigative journalist who
• 42:35
  were shooting this and they were deep diving into this case and
• 42:40
  they reached out to me because of we just closed a cold case
• 42:43
  with my agency and they wanted my opinion and thoughts on this
• 42:48
  particular case. And so that was that was a neat
• 42:50
  opportunity and a fascinating look into, you know, this case
• 42:54
  from the 60s. Cool.
• 42:57
  So I'm excited to hear. I'm excited to find out about
• 42:59
  it. I'm really excited because I
• 43:01
  love that whole era. I love like 60s.
• 43:02
  America, to me, is one of the most fascinating points in time.
• 43:06
  Ever. I very much feel the same about
• 43:08
  the 50s and 60s, right? Is that whole concept of
• 43:11
  retrofuturism? Yes.
• 43:16
  I think I may have been born in the wrong era.
• 43:21
  You know what? I feel the same way.
• 43:22
  But I actually think that for people like us that feel like we
• 43:24
  were born in the wrong era, we were probably meant to just
• 43:26
  carry over the spirit of that era into this one.
• 43:29
  You know, actually, and maybe that's what it is right is maybe
• 43:31
  it's the spirit that I well, apart from the architectural and
• 43:34
  like just like the beautiful design concepts of that era.
• 43:39
  But the you have this post World War 2 excitement and enthusiasm
• 43:45
  and this innovation that really. Explosion of creativity.
• 43:50
  Yeah, absolutely. And I don't know, to me, I, I, I
• 43:56
  look at that and it just seems a little different from our
• 43:59
  current techno, whatever it is that we're currently in.
• 44:06
  I would love to see a blending of the two and I'd love to see
• 44:09
  that kind of those design, same design concepts.
• 44:12
  I think that's coming up. I think that's coming up, I
• 44:14
  hope. I think so.
• 44:15
  Yeah, the the reason why I think that is because I think that the
• 44:20
  50s and 60s were kind of a relatively similar in the sense
• 44:26
  that there was a streak of anti authoritarianism that kind of
• 44:30
  was driving the underlying motivation.
• 44:32
  Like a rejection of the whole militaristic World War 2, tough
• 44:36
  parents kind of culture where you're supposed to live a
• 44:38
  straight proper life. And, and a lot of people, you
• 44:41
  know, wanted to pursue their own thing.
• 44:43
  And, and at that time, you know, trust in institutions had
• 44:46
  collapsed, you know, or in in many, many ways.
• 44:49
  And, and I think that we're experiencing a similar thing
• 44:53
  where we have all the technology and intelligence and creativity.
• 44:56
  And in the last couple of years it has been a lot, you know,
• 44:59
  lack of trust in institutions. And almost like I was scrambling
• 45:02
  to try to re establish like what's going, you know, who's
• 45:05
  going to emerge as like the new trusted, creative, intelligent,
• 45:10
  honest, authoritative perspective and and everyone's
• 45:13
  kind of scrambling for it at one time.
• 45:15
  You know, it's really, really interesting.
• 45:16
  And I think that that's going to, I think that's what's going
• 45:18
  to lead to creative and and cultural blossoming, I hope.
• 45:24
  I agree. We're at this unique point as a
• 45:28
  society where you have such a hard division of political
• 45:34
  ideologies and societal ideologies, right is everyone
• 45:40
  has a very firm opinion on how our society should look and be
• 45:48
  shaped and be run. And that happens to be meeting
• 45:53
  at a time point when we're also at this technological
• 45:57
  revolution. With ground breaking ground with
• 46:00
  every day is just another. Oh, it's fascinating.
• 46:03
  You know, it's, it's I love being in the future.
• 46:05
  I can't wait for my flying car. But you have these all these
• 46:11
  roads that are starting to merge at the same point, right?
• 46:15
  And I have no idea what the next two or three years are going to.
• 46:19
  Look, I I I'm excited, though. I don't know, but I.
• 46:23
  Choose to just like Doctor Who, I choose to be an eternal
• 46:27
  optimist. So regardless of who you voted
• 46:31
  for or how you what you think of our political parties at at the
• 46:38
  ground level of our society, I choose to see the good, which is
• 46:43
  very difficult to do in my career.
• 46:46
  But yeah. How do you how do you keep that
• 46:48
  up? How do you maintain that?
• 46:51
  Oh. Is it just like you just choose
• 46:55
  to kind of see the goodness that you put out into the world and
• 46:57
  you see it kind of come back to you?
• 46:59
  I think so. You know, I, I have been, I've
• 47:06
  investigated tons of really just horrific scenes over the years
• 47:11
  that, you know, do leave some mental scars.
• 47:16
  I'll be the first one to tell you that, you know, I was
• 47:18
  involved in a shooting pretty early on in my career.
• 47:21
  And then that was followed by, you know, working lots of
• 47:24
  horrific child murders and stuff like that, that had a ultimate
• 47:28
  impact on like post traumatic stress and PTSD and all that
• 47:31
  kind of stuff. So it took me several years to
• 47:35
  try and understand how, how that kind of my, my personal outlook
• 47:41
  was and how it evolved and developed for me.
• 47:44
  I nowadays I, I work things very academically, very clinically is
• 47:49
  the best way to try and describe that, you know, So when I go and
• 47:54
  work, you know, a terrible scene, it, it's just a, it's
• 48:00
  just a scene to me. I'm very much disembow or not
• 48:03
  disembodied. Disassociated.
• 48:05
  Disassociate from the emotional context of that scene.
• 48:10
  So let's can we talk about that a little bit?
• 48:12
  Is that OK? Yeah, absolutely.
• 48:14
  So I did, I did want to get to this.
• 48:16
  This is one of the many topics that I wanted to get to.
• 48:18
  But yeah, the, the what some things that you've experienced,
• 48:23
  I guess earlier in your career, things that help shape you.
• 48:27
  How do how do you know, how do people doing public service, you
• 48:35
  know, carry the weight of the responsibility that you carry
• 48:39
  and what do you do to deal with it and stuff like that.
• 48:41
  And I would love for you, honestly, I don't care what
• 48:43
  direction you go. I just want to hear what you
• 48:45
  think about all that. So take it away please.
• 48:48
  Yeah, when I first started in law enforcement, mental health.
• 48:52
  What's Atlanta like, sorry, in terms of law enforcement, in
• 48:54
  terms of like what do you typically see?
• 48:56
  What kind of crime do you typically see in Atlanta?
• 48:57
  Like I know for example, certain places are more prone, you see
• 49:01
  drugs more often or some places are more geared towards
• 49:03
  prostitution or. Violent.
• 49:06
  I mean, do you have it all in Atlanta?
• 49:08
  You have everything from violent crime to human trafficking to
• 49:12
  drugs. I mean, I work for an agency
• 49:15
  that is in the metro Atlanta area, so I don't work for
• 49:17
  Atlanta proper. I see.
• 49:20
  But it's the same concept, right?
• 49:22
  It just kind of spreads out. So you have very much a diverse
• 49:25
  selection of crime types. OK.
• 49:29
  But yeah, I mean, when I first started in law enforcement, we,
• 49:34
  you didn't really talk about mental health.
• 49:36
  You just I, I very much came up under a man up and kind of
• 49:41
  toughen it out and, you know, you just don't talk about you
• 49:45
  just move on to your next, your next assignment, you know, your
• 49:48
  next tasking that you got to handle.
• 49:51
  And that slowly evolved and changed over my career.
• 49:55
  Thank God for the better, you know, law enforcement, public
• 49:59
  safety in general. So law enforcement,
• 50:01
  firefighters, communications and corrections have an incredibly
• 50:05
  high suicide rate. Last year, more cops committed
• 50:09
  suicide than were killed in the line of duty.
• 50:11
  No way. Yeah.
• 50:13
  So it is we we are more likely to die by our own hands than by,
• 50:17
  you know, a bad guy. And that's because, oh, it's
• 50:20
  absolutely horrendous. Thankfully, within the past 10
• 50:27
  years, that has very much made a shift.
• 50:30
  You know, the concept of destigmatizing mental health was
• 50:34
  a big thing with that normalizing the conversation
• 50:38
  about mental health. You know, going out to it's very
• 50:43
  difficult to try and discuss and talk about some of the scenes
• 50:47
  that we go to with somebody who has no context or understanding
• 50:50
  of it, right? Is I can't really tell you what
• 50:55
  you know, digging up with your hands a murdered 4 year old
• 51:00
  feels like or. But that's stuff that you that
• 51:04
  you guys have to deal with. Yeah, I can very much think of
• 51:07
  the day before Christmas of 2013 where that was what I was doing
• 51:12
  is, you know, having to dig up a fresh, shallow grave of a child
• 51:18
  and that that is and you. Take that whole you, take that
• 51:21
  with you forever. No, I mean, yeah.
• 51:24
  I mean, that was what, 12 years ago, 13 years ago, something
• 51:27
  like that. And I can still very much see
• 51:30
  the fog of the woods that I was in.
• 51:31
  And, you know, I can go right back to it over time, time, time
• 51:36
  dulls it, right? But it, it's a compounding
• 51:40
  thing, right? Because then you're moving on to
• 51:42
  your next case. Yeah, ultimately that all caught
• 51:45
  up with me. So that how do you deal with it?
• 51:48
  It's kind of dependent upon the individual per Everyone handles
• 51:52
  it differently, right? You know, if you handle it in a
• 51:55
  really positive light, you're probably working out and
• 51:59
  exercising because exercise is incredibly helpful for mental
• 52:03
  health. You're prioritizing doing that,
• 52:06
  right? I try, I try to once again, we
• 52:11
  come back to time, I try and work out at least two to three
• 52:14
  times a week that that has definitely not been the case
• 52:18
  over the past month and a half because my basement has been
• 52:22
  under a remodel. So I haven't had that's been my
• 52:25
  excuse is what that is. I got you.
• 52:28
  Sounds like a good one. Yeah, Yeah, I think so.
• 52:33
  So, you know, that's a healthy way of doing it, finding those
• 52:37
  positive, healthy outlets with your family, stuff like that.
• 52:41
  Because then there's the negative outlet, right?
• 52:43
  There is, you know, alcoholism, Yep, alcoholism, you know,
• 52:49
  substance abuse, those really negative behaviors that can
• 52:56
  increase risk, right? So buying, you know, really
• 52:59
  crazy things and you know, gambling and all those different
• 53:03
  vices can be so easy because it's giving us that dopamine
• 53:06
  hit, right? What I mean, that's not new
• 53:09
  novel to just law enforcement. Everyone is constantly looking
• 53:12
  for that dopamine hit to take their mind off of their own
• 53:16
  individual stresses and problems.
• 53:18
  My baseline and my stresses and problems are just a little
• 53:21
  different from your stresses and problems, right?
• 53:24
  Doesn't mean that we're not both dealing with stresses and
• 53:27
  problems. It's just yours.
• 53:30
  May be, you know, you know, you you had a bad day and you know,
• 53:34
  you're you're under a lot of stress at work and you know,
• 53:37
  because you got to get, you know, different expense reports
• 53:39
  out or, or whatever normal, you know, the normal person does.
• 53:42
  My bad day looks a way freaking different than that.
• 53:46
  So that's the the dicotomy there for me and my career.
• 53:53
  I went down a, you know, a really, it crept up on me and I
• 53:58
  didn't even realize it right, so.
• 54:01
  Because it's because it happened slowly or in smaller in small
• 54:04
  bites. 100% right. So I was when I was involved in
• 54:09
  a shooting back in 2013. What happened?
• 54:15
  A friend of mine at an agency north of us had stopped a car
• 54:18
  for a license plate violation. As he was walking up to the car,
• 54:22
  the guy gets out and shoots him seven times.
• 54:25
  By the grace of God, he ends up surviving.
• 54:29
  And. So, so this guy then flees down
• 54:32
  South that down the highway and our agency ends up picking him
• 54:35
  up. I'm a new word.
• 54:38
  I'm a, you know, less than one month detective.
• 54:40
  Then like any good detective, I was, you know, just leaving
• 54:43
  dinner and I end up in this car chase and shooting with this
• 54:46
  with this guy who tried killing, you know, a friend of mine tried
• 54:49
  killing me and a lot, you know, several other officers.
• 54:53
  What was his story? Was he on?
• 54:54
  Was he on drugs? Was he part of a was he a crime?
• 54:56
  Was he a gang man? What was what was the situation?
• 55:00
  He was in a mental health crisis.
• 55:02
  He was basically going out looking for.
• 55:04
  A fight, a lot of that. Yeah, yeah.
• 55:07
  I mean normal people who aren't having mental health crises
• 55:10
  don't try and obsolete officers. Yeah, you could be an
• 55:14
  aggressive, you know, like you could be.
• 55:19
  You don't have to be having a mental break to be to be acting
• 55:22
  violently or aggressively necessarily.
• 55:24
  Yeah, absolutely. That's correct.
• 55:26
  Yeah. You know, so we end up in, you
• 55:29
  know, a hellacious gunfight. He ends up getting killed, you
• 55:33
  know, and thank, thank God Dave survives.
• 55:36
  So that was pretty early on. I was 24 years old at the time.
• 55:39
  That's really young. So what, what what are you
• 55:42
  experiencing? So are you are you?
• 55:44
  I'm only I'm just curious about like I started two months ago
• 55:49
  doing jiu Jitsu, right, Just, you know, totally.
• 55:52
  Thank you very much. It's a lot of fun.
• 55:54
  It's again being the crap out of right and.
• 55:57
  And getting twisted up into like looking like a pretzel.
• 56:00
  Oh yeah. Oh, yeah.
• 56:01
  You know, and there's and there's and there's two or three
• 56:03
  times where especially. And it's interesting starting
• 56:05
  this kind of later in my life because it's a totally new
• 56:09
  experience. My body is not used to any of
• 56:10
  that. And on the way home from my
• 56:13
  second class, I, I, my whole body, I, I, I was driving home,
• 56:18
  my whole body was shaking and like, my, like, I was just going
• 56:21
  through this massive physical. Yeah, so I'm.
• 56:26
  Not sure whether it's a trauma or shock or what, right?
• 56:29
  But like if you guys are shaking, I'm on the wheel and
• 56:31
  like, I can't. And that's just with a couple of
• 56:33
  friendly guys that just want to teach me some moves that I
• 56:36
  happen to be taking falls in the wrong way.
• 56:37
  You know, like you can't imagine being 24 year olds and, and
• 56:41
  being in this world. So at that point, your body is
• 56:45
  undergoing a fight or flight or freeze response.
• 56:49
  And so now I kind of teach about Physiology and neurology of
• 56:52
  stress and Combat Stress, right? And so within those first couple
• 56:57
  seconds, as soon as you are exposed to a stimulus that you
• 57:02
  perceive to be advantage, you know, disadvantage to your
• 57:06
  health, you know, such as somebody shooting at you or
• 57:10
  being twisted up like a pretzel and getting into a fight, your
• 57:14
  body is going to start dumping hormones, right?
• 57:16
  So epinephrine, neuro epinephrine gets dumped into the
• 57:18
  bloodstream and that is going to kind of start that adrenaline
• 57:22
  response. So we're going to start
• 57:25
  experiencing heightened increased heart rate, increased
• 57:28
  respiratory rate because we're trying to get more oxygen into
• 57:31
  our blood for our brain to be able to process these things.
• 57:34
  Yeah. You know, your blood's gonna
• 57:36
  start kind of getting pulled away from your limbs and towards
• 57:40
  your core. That's why you start kind of
• 57:41
  getting those shaking. And then you're gonna have, you
• 57:45
  know, cortisol being introduced into your, into your bloodstream
• 57:48
  so they can try and level it out.
• 57:50
  But yeah, you know, your body undergoes a crazy chain reaction
• 57:55
  just in terms of blood chemistry during those kind of responses.
• 58:01
  Not to mention, you know, the mental health component of after
• 58:05
  the fact, right, of anything like post traumatic stress or
• 58:10
  anxiety and you know, depression, stuff like that.
• 58:13
  For me, I, I had a hard time sleeping after that in terms of
• 58:17
  like falling asleep. So I was diagnosed with acute
• 58:20
  post traumatic stress as well as pre insomnia.
• 58:23
  That's just a really fancy way of saying I had a hard time
• 58:26
  falling asleep because my brain was going 1000 miles an hour.
• 58:30
  So have you? What do you, what do you think
• 58:34
  about the, the research There's, and there's I guess a good
• 58:38
  amount of it, although it's not really done so much in the
• 58:40
  states about PTSD and psychedelics and stuff like that
• 58:43
  and using it to use it. Like, do you think that that's
• 58:47
  that should be something that we look to use for our law
• 58:51
  enforcement and our, you know, and our veterans and, and the
• 58:55
  people that you know, and the people that are on the front
• 58:57
  lines? Yeah, You know, so I have, I
• 59:01
  mean, similarly you have, you know, listened to quite a few
• 59:05
  podcast. You know, I think Sean Ryan
• 59:07
  talks a lot about it on his show.
• 59:09
  Oh yeah, you know, so he there is definitely something.
• 59:13
  He's the hero for talking about it the way he does, by the way.
• 59:15
  100%, you know, shout out to Sean Ryan.
• 59:18
  You know, you're, you're you very much normalize the
• 59:21
  conversation that is needed both in the veteran community and in
• 59:24
  the public safety community. So I very much admire that about
• 59:28
  him. He's a hero, I think.
• 59:31
  You know, I think that it definitely merits study,
• 59:37
  rigorous scientific study in terms of what the long term
• 59:40
  effects are, whether you know, if you're at that point with
• 59:45
  post traumatic stress or cumulative post traumatic
• 59:47
  stress, you probably aren't going to be in a duty ready
• 59:52
  status to where you can. I mean, maybe you can, I don't
• 59:57
  know. Can't can't imagine how much how
• 1:00:00
  much worse is it than the PTSD that keeps law enforcement
• 1:00:04
  officers up every night that you know, like how much you know, I
• 1:00:09
  mean, and down the line, how much does what we had this does
• 1:00:12
  the status quo compound and how much is it like you said, you
• 1:00:15
  know, more more deaths by suit by your own hands than by than
• 1:00:18
  than in the field. I'd rather seek interesting and
• 1:00:23
  hopefully helpful realities than than alcohol, you know?
• 1:00:28
  Oh, yeah. You know, if DMT is helpful and
• 1:00:32
  and better than you know, Yeah. You went with Coors.
• 1:00:38
  I went with Jack. You know, my, my mine was Crown
• 1:00:40
  Royal. Like I loved Crown Royal.
• 1:00:42
  Do you? Do you still?
• 1:00:43
  Do you still drink? No, I quit drinking a couple
• 1:00:46
  years ago. I quit drinking I guess probably
• 1:00:50
  3 or 4 years ago now. And not, not because of not
• 1:00:53
  because of this, you know, I quit drinking because I wanted
• 1:00:56
  to quit smoking. And quitting smoking was by far
• 1:01:00
  one of the hardest things that I, I personally ever did.
• 1:01:04
  And so I had very much had this association with the two.
• 1:01:07
  You know, when I drank, I wanted a cigarette.
• 1:01:09
  And you know, so best way, the best discipline I had was it's a
• 1:01:13
  much. More, it's a way healthier
• 1:01:15
  outlook. I mean, cutting out drinking and
• 1:01:17
  smoking in one go is just. Spectacular for you?
• 1:01:20
  Yeah, it very much was. And you know then I wanted to.
• 1:01:25
  That was very much when I really started kind of feeling that I
• 1:01:29
  wanted to level up. And you know, Jocko, if you've
• 1:01:35
  ever listened to Jocko, yeah, Jocko's podcast, he is adamant
• 1:01:40
  about that. There is nothing good that comes
• 1:01:42
  out of alcohol. And I could not agree with him
• 1:01:44
  more about that. Having gone through everything
• 1:01:46
  I've gone through in my career, you know, that alcohol only, it
• 1:01:51
  almost cost me my job. It almost cost me lots of
• 1:01:54
  different things because I was trying to medicate this post
• 1:02:00
  traumatic stress and, and trying to sleep in a really unhealthy
• 1:02:04
  way. So you know, anyone listening
• 1:02:08
  out there, you know, I, I encourage you to really question
• 1:02:11
  what does alcohol actually bring you?
• 1:02:15
  And if you are honest with yourself, the answer is a sum of
• 1:02:19
  0. You know, but.
• 1:02:20
  I think that it's a little bit more and by the way, I'm
• 1:02:23
  certainly not a heavy advocate of alcohol period.
• 1:02:26
  I do think that for people to have a drink or two as a social
• 1:02:31
  lubricant, it could be could be like once a week or once every
• 1:02:35
  couple of weeks could be a massive benefit to themselves to
• 1:02:38
  help them get over some kind of social hump that they have.
• 1:02:41
  I think but but but physically, you know, but like to use it as
• 1:02:44
  a remedy or to use it as a medication is is.
• 1:02:48
  A by no means, don't get me wrong, I am not this anti
• 1:02:51
  alcohol purist. If you want to go get, you know,
• 1:02:54
  have drinks. I envy you.
• 1:02:56
  I very much miss it. I went, you know, but and I had
• 1:03:01
  always told myself that, you know, after I quit smoking and
• 1:03:03
  been clean from smoking for a year, that I can go back to
• 1:03:06
  drinking it. It's not like I have this like I
• 1:03:09
  can't do it. No, it was just a personal
• 1:03:11
  choice to wear. Yeah, yeah, totally.
• 1:03:12
  And, and, and the longer that it, it kind of persisted, the
• 1:03:15
  more I was like, hey, you know, I don't need this in my life.
• 1:03:19
  You know, I feel a lot better not having it in my life.
• 1:03:22
  You know, I haven't, you know, I don't wake up with hangovers or
• 1:03:25
  anything like that. So that, that is helpful, you
• 1:03:28
  know, with the using it as a social lubricant.
• 1:03:31
  I definitely understand that, right.
• 1:03:32
  But then what are you doing there?
• 1:03:35
  You're using alcohol to remedy a personal problem and, and that
• 1:03:42
  is some kind of social anxiety, right?
• 1:03:45
  So, so I just with anybody, I, I encourage you understand its
• 1:03:50
  place in your life and whether or not it's actually needed,
• 1:03:52
  right? Because I can tell you I have of
• 1:03:56
  at least in my career, I have seen so many adverse actions and
• 1:04:04
  incidents that alcohol was a contributing factor, whether
• 1:04:08
  that was a DUI or fatal wrecks or murders, you know, all
• 1:04:14
  because alcohol was the inhibitor, you know of good
• 1:04:19
  choice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:04:22
  I'm, I totally agree with you, you know, and I again, I'm not,
• 1:04:27
  I'm not, I'm definitely not advocate for it.
• 1:04:31
  I'm definitely not an advocate against it in a healthy way.
• 1:04:34
  I happen to know that even for myself, as I became more mature,
• 1:04:37
  I realized that it alcohol tends to lead me to lead me to down
• 1:04:41
  more immature behaviors and paths that just don't align with
• 1:04:45
  the way the decisions and ways to of interacting that I want to
• 1:04:50
  be, you know, that, you know, the way that I am.
• 1:04:54
  But you know, and for example, like you said, I do have social
• 1:04:57
  anxiety and something, you know, and if I'm in a new setting and
• 1:05:00
  I'm at a wedding and I've never, I haven't met anyone around me,
• 1:05:02
  then a drink or two will, you know, get me talking to one
• 1:05:05
  person over and say, what are you up to?
• 1:05:06
  If you know? And I'm, it's funny because if
• 1:05:09
  once you start talking to me, then I'll jump right in.
• 1:05:12
  But to make that initial like initial hello, yeah, kills me,
• 1:05:17
  you know, But do is there a lot of corruption in in in law
• 1:05:26
  enforcement that you've experienced?
• 1:05:28
  No, it's not like what you see on TV's.
• 1:05:30
  No, it's not. No, no, that, that is a very,
• 1:05:33
  very, very small percentage of what you know of law
• 1:05:38
  enforcement. Gotcha.
• 1:05:40
  So majority, majority of are you are you suspicious of people
• 1:05:44
  being corrupt or not typically? Not typically, just because that
• 1:05:48
  that is so incredibly rare, right?
• 1:05:51
  Right, and do. No, that's, that's not to say
• 1:05:53
  that it doesn't happen. You know, Al, there was a story
• 1:05:57
  a couple weeks ago about an entire small Police Department
• 1:06:01
  out in Alabama that was super corrupt.
• 1:06:04
  But once again, that that's you're talking about a series of
• 1:06:10
  actions and events that are so statistically small compared.
• 1:06:16
  You know, it's just like the whole concept of excessive
• 1:06:18
  force. You know, if you look at, you
• 1:06:22
  know, that became really obviously a highlighted social
• 1:06:27
  perspective not just during Ferguson back in what 2016, but
• 1:06:32
  also with George Floyd, you know, back in 2020.
• 1:06:36
  I mean, actually this week is the anniversary, right?
• 1:06:39
  You know, the five year anniversary of George Floyd and
• 1:06:43
  and that was a horrific thing, but and it brought, but it
• 1:06:45
  brought police excessive police violence in into the spotlight,
• 1:06:52
  right. And what most people don't
• 1:06:54
  realize is that out of the 50 plus billion law enforcement
• 1:07:00
  citizen encounters a year that the actual likelihood of it
• 1:07:05
  resulting in in the sustained allegation of excessive force or
• 1:07:12
  police brutality is less than a thousandth of a percent, right?
• 1:07:15
  It is where it is something that is so astronomically small you
• 1:07:21
  you have a higher likelihood of being struck by lightning
• 1:07:24
  multiple times. Really than by having that
• 1:07:27
  really. Yeah.
• 1:07:28
  Oh yeah. Wow.
• 1:07:31
  Wow. I didn't know that.
• 1:07:33
  That's amazing to hear, you know?
• 1:07:35
  Yeah, I was living in Seattle at the time.
• 1:07:37
  When? When the riots were happening.
• 1:07:39
  Yeah, and. I mean, I was living here in
• 1:07:42
  Atlanta, and Atlanta was burning because of Rashard Brooks, so.
• 1:07:46
  What was So what? So what what what was that like
• 1:07:49
  was especially from. I'm sorry, does first of all,
• 1:07:53
  does law enforcement or does, I guess doing your public work
• 1:07:58
  restrict you in any way from your private work?
• 1:08:00
  Like when you told them that you're going.
• 1:08:02
  Yeah, so you and you told them that you want to open your own
• 1:08:04
  thing, open your own shop, what they say.
• 1:08:06
  Yeah. My agreement with my agency is
• 1:08:08
  that I just won't work any private cases within the county
• 1:08:12
  that I work in, right, Because that would be a conflict of
• 1:08:15
  interest. So I just don't work any private
• 1:08:18
  cases within Fulton County, which is the county that
• 1:08:21
  Atlanta's in. But, you know, all the
• 1:08:23
  surrounding counties, you know. And so, you know, in my private
• 1:08:27
  case work, I do everything nationally, right?
• 1:08:29
  So I've got case work in everything from Georgia to
• 1:08:33
  Alaska and Texas and Illinois. Is that all there?
• 1:08:36
  I do, Really. Yeah.
• 1:08:40
  Awesome. So what's that like?
• 1:08:43
  That's one of the best. That's probably, in my opinion,
• 1:08:45
  the best perk of opening up my own shop was, you know, the
• 1:08:50
  opportunity to travel and meet and network with new clients and
• 1:08:55
  new attorneys. You know, I doing both
• 1:08:58
  prosecution and defense casework makes me, it gives me a unique
• 1:09:04
  perspective in my government casework because I am a defense
• 1:09:08
  expert. So I understand kind of I've
• 1:09:11
  learned the thought process, the thought processes behind what a
• 1:09:15
  defense attorney is looking at in terms of how they approach a
• 1:09:19
  case and mitigate the case. And that has made my government
• 1:09:22
  case work a lot better, more roll around, I think.
• 1:09:26
  How so? Can you tell me can?
• 1:09:27
  You tell me the difference in like, I guess philosophies,
• 1:09:29
  perspectives, coming at something from a defensive
• 1:09:31
  perspective or as a prosecutor. Like what do you mean?
• 1:09:35
  Like what if I were hiring you and I was a prosecutor?
• 1:09:38
  If I was, if I was a defendant, you know, what's the difference
• 1:09:41
  between what I'd be asking you to do or the responsibilities
• 1:09:44
  that you have? I mean, so typically it's this,
• 1:09:46
  you're asking me to do the same thing, right?
• 1:09:48
  It is, you know, that's why I went into what I do is evidence
• 1:09:52
  doesn't have a, you know, have a bias.
• 1:09:55
  You know, the evidence is what the evidence is.
• 1:09:58
  The interpreting it has a bias. The interpreting has a bias,
• 1:10:01
  absolutely right. So when I'm dealing with
• 1:10:06
  concepts like shooting reconstruction, right, is you
• 1:10:10
  can only you, there is no bias to the measurement of a, of a
• 1:10:14
  trajectory flight path, right? It's going to only line up a
• 1:10:17
  certain way. It is the interpretation of, of
• 1:10:21
  how that flight path goes with the overall story of, of that
• 1:10:27
  case, right? And that is up to the prosecutor
• 1:10:29
  or the defense attorney where I kind of help them is advising in
• 1:10:35
  manners of whether or not something actually could be
• 1:10:39
  possible, right. So is it possible that the
• 1:10:43
  defendant could have been acting in self-defense?
• 1:10:47
  Well, based off of all of this evidence, yes.
• 1:10:50
  Or based off of this one, you know, based off of this gunshot
• 1:10:53
  wound in this blood stain pattern, Absolutely not.
• 1:10:56
  Your defendant as guilty as sin, you should probably take.
• 1:10:59
  Wow. Wait, so, So what would be the
• 1:11:01
  case with the, can you give me some examples of like cases that
• 1:11:04
  happened that you can describe what gave it away to you that it
• 1:11:06
  was possible or not? You know, because I guess, I
• 1:11:09
  guess the whole and I guess the way to to kind of keep keep
• 1:11:12
  framing this is beyond a reasonable doubt or not, right?
• 1:11:16
  Like that's all that the court uses.
• 1:11:18
  So you're not saying this for a fact, You're saying within a
• 1:11:22
  reasonable doubt. Could this person have been
• 1:11:24
  acting in self-defense or within a reasonable doubt?
• 1:11:26
  Is this guy guilty of sin? You know, when it comes to when
• 1:11:33
  it comes to acting in self-defense, you know, my, I am
• 1:11:37
  just testifying or providing opinion to, you know, what the
• 1:11:42
  blood stain patterns are or what the shooting reconstruction
• 1:11:44
  evidence is or what the body positioning possibly could have
• 1:11:48
  been. And then that data is
• 1:11:51
  interpreted into the story by the attorney.
• 1:11:54
  So I had a case in Houston back in February that was a
• 1:11:59
  self-defense case and I ended up testifying to talking about
• 1:12:05
  response time. So kind of a subset of shooting
• 1:12:08
  reconstruction is human factors and how we respond under stress,
• 1:12:12
  right? So I was kind of talking a
• 1:12:14
  little bit about that earlier about what your body's kind of
• 1:12:16
  undergoing, but like response time to a stimulus, right?
• 1:12:20
  So a stimulus being, you know, I'm presented with maybe an
• 1:12:23
  armed robber, say for example, you know, is how quick can I
• 1:12:28
  respond to that by, you know, what's the average draw time and
• 1:12:32
  the average time to draw your gun and fire a shot, right?
• 1:12:35
  You know, based off of, you know, studies within the past
• 1:12:39
  decade that ranges between 1.7 seconds to 1.42 seconds on
• 1:12:43
  average. And we know with, and there's a
• 1:12:45
  obviously a standard deviation range there, but we can start
• 1:12:48
  taking some of that information and interpreting that across
• 1:12:52
  other concepts that are other types of evidence that we have,
• 1:12:56
  right? So if we can use blood stain
• 1:12:58
  patterns like in this case that this is what I did, right, was
• 1:13:01
  looking at the blood stain patterns to understand the
• 1:13:05
  movement of the decedent after he was shot.
• 1:13:09
  You know. So that would help me understand
• 1:13:11
  the original position that he was in, as well as taking that
• 1:13:15
  data and correlating it with the flight paths that he had of
• 1:13:21
  bullet wounds that he had. And said those start to help me
• 1:13:24
  understand where he was at specific times when he was shot,
• 1:13:27
  which I can then use to compare against testimonial evidence.
• 1:13:32
  Yeah. And so that's what I do a lot
• 1:13:33
  of. But is it so does it?
• 1:13:37
  I mean, I guess I know this also, I guess from jujitsu just
• 1:13:41
  starting that your bodies are capable of falling in ways that
• 1:13:46
  we have that that if you remove our consciousness or you remove,
• 1:13:50
  you know, our brain control, our bodies are capable of falling in
• 1:13:54
  ways that we have agree, have no way of explaining or like even
• 1:13:57
  recreating again, you know, so, so like someone's getting shot
• 1:14:01
  and their body obviously immediately goes, I'm sure it's
• 1:14:05
  flooded with, you know, this adrenaline with this, you know,
• 1:14:09
  without, with the stress, with the everything, just like, and
• 1:14:13
  you probably don't even remember how you landed, what happened,
• 1:14:18
  how how you fell. Depends on the nature of the of
• 1:14:21
  the individual wound, right? You know, is it a fatal gunshot
• 1:14:24
  wound? You know, to where you.
• 1:14:26
  You shot in the leg. Yeah.
• 1:14:28
  Or is it, you know, something that is?
• 1:14:30
  Yeah. So what was that fatal?
• 1:14:32
  In that case, it was a fatal gunshot wound.
• 1:14:35
  Gotcha. And so your job was to prove,
• 1:14:40
  because it was self-defense, that the person was the person
• 1:14:48
  was responding to some to, to to to a threat.
• 1:14:53
  Oh, I'm not proving anything. I am providing.
• 1:14:57
  Potential evidence of. Whether or not I'm providing,
• 1:14:59
  I'm providing factual information about the evidence
• 1:15:03
  for the jury to decide if you know, based off of those facts
• 1:15:10
  that self-defense was reasonable in this case, they agreed that
• 1:15:14
  it was, you know, that self-defense was reasonable and
• 1:15:16
  they acquitted him. And that was the absolute
• 1:15:20
  correct answer. And you know, in my opinion, I,
• 1:15:23
  I very much always did bifurcate personal opinions, right, and
• 1:15:28
  personal feelings and. Emotional feelings from my
• 1:15:30
  casework. Yeah.
• 1:15:32
  Oh yeah. I mean, that's kind of the key
• 1:15:33
  thing is you, you have to remain objective throughout all of your
• 1:15:36
  analysis, regardless of what type of casework if you're
• 1:15:39
  doing, if you're a, you know, a police detective or a crime lab
• 1:15:43
  analyst or a private examiner is that's the whole, the point of
• 1:15:49
  forensic sciences that it is objective and does not care
• 1:15:52
  about guilt or innocence. It just cares about, you know
• 1:15:58
  what is the factual information you.
• 1:16:00
  Feel that the facts that the facts of this scenario were not
• 1:16:05
  properly understood and and the results do not manifest the way
• 1:16:12
  that you felt the evidence laid out.
• 1:16:15
  Absolutely. It does happen.
• 1:16:17
  Yeah, it does happen. I mean, look at me, we can see
• 1:16:20
  that in exoneration cases, right, Is, you know, evidence
• 1:16:25
  can only be misinterpreted, like you said.
• 1:16:28
  And that is not just misinterpretation by an analyst,
• 1:16:33
  by a forensic analyst, but also by the jury, right?
• 1:16:37
  You know, the, you know, if you look at cases like I think of
• 1:16:42
  the case of David Cam. And so David Cam was an innocent
• 1:16:49
  man who was convicted guilty of murdering his wife and his
• 1:16:53
  children. And it was all based off of
• 1:16:58
  who's found guilty because of bad blood stain pattern
• 1:17:03
  analysis. You know, there the analyst in
• 1:17:07
  that case made opinions that they, there was no factual basis
• 1:17:11
  to make. And so that influences the jury
• 1:17:14
  to believe that the weight of that evidence is of greater
• 1:17:18
  value than it actually is. And so you know.
• 1:17:21
  Can you argue that should be illegal to do that?
• 1:17:26
  OK. I mean, I could make that
• 1:17:28
  argument all day long, but you know, the problem is, is that we
• 1:17:31
  have and that is a failure of the criminal justice system more
• 1:17:37
  than anything, because it is up to the Trier of fact, you know,
• 1:17:42
  that that judge is supposed to be the gatekeeper of, you know,
• 1:17:45
  expert witness testimonial evidence.
• 1:17:48
  So when I testify in court, I have to basically state my
• 1:17:52
  qualifications and my experience.
• 1:17:55
  And then the judge will say that, you know, he's recognized
• 1:17:59
  as an expert in, you know, student reconstruction or blood
• 1:18:03
  stamp out whatever I'm being recognized as an expert in.
• 1:18:06
  And then I can give my opinion and I can testify to those
• 1:18:10
  opinions and to the factual evidence, Right, right, right.
• 1:18:14
  If I'm not found to be of sufficient value, you know, or
• 1:18:20
  to have sufficient skills and experience, you know, then IAA
• 1:18:24
  lay witness cannot give opinion, you know, I, I look at.
• 1:18:30
  People say objection speculation because that would be that would
• 1:18:33
  be the line that people. That there's, yeah, there's a
• 1:18:35
  ton. There's a ton of different, you
• 1:18:37
  know, rules in court of what you can, you know, object to.
• 1:18:43
  Yeah. But we, we have our criminal
• 1:18:44
  justice system set up a kind of a very specific adversarial way
• 1:18:49
  for a reason. Because the whole idea is that
• 1:18:52
  the adversarial system helps the Trier fact, whether that's the
• 1:18:56
  judge or the jury, refine all the points down to the truth,
• 1:19:02
  right? And that's not always, that
• 1:19:05
  doesn't always work, you know, and we see that in exoneration
• 1:19:09
  cases. Blackstone's ratio.
• 1:19:13
  So there was a rabbi named Miamondis back during the 15th
• 1:19:17
  century and he came up with this thought, this concept that it is
• 1:19:24
  better to let 1000 guilty persons go than to ever imprison
• 1:19:29
  an innocent man, right. And then there's a guy named
• 1:19:33
  Blackstone back in the 19th century, he was an attorney.
• 1:19:35
  He kind of refined it and said, you know, it would became 100
• 1:19:39
  guilty persons than to ever, you know, convict an innocent man
• 1:19:42
  and put him in prison. And that is very much I could
• 1:19:45
  not agree more. That's why I do the work the way
• 1:19:48
  I do is because the worst thing that we could ever do is put an
• 1:19:53
  innocent person in prison and take away somebody's freedoms.
• 1:19:57
  And that is a. Something as a detective, as a
• 1:20:01
  police officer that I tried that never lose touch of is the the
• 1:20:06
  weight of what you were doing, the weight of the power that you
• 1:20:09
  have in doing criminal investigations is so great.
• 1:20:16
  So yeah, that's tangent that I. Didn't.
• 1:20:18
  No, no, no. I think, no.
• 1:20:20
  I think it's amazing. I think it's amazing.
• 1:20:22
  I want to ask you one last question.
• 1:20:23
  First of all, I want to absolutely, absolutely have you
• 1:20:25
  back on the podcast again because this is a blast.
• 1:20:27
  And there's a hundred more things that I want to get to.
• 1:20:29
  Yeah. We'll have to find time again in
• 1:20:31
  the future to do this again and, you know, hear what else you're
• 1:20:33
  working on. The last thing I want to ask,
• 1:20:36
  two last things I want to ask you, but the last thing I want
• 1:20:37
  to ask you is the Han Solo shot. Who?
• 1:20:46
  Fight who? Fight Who shot?
• 1:20:47
  Who shot first? George Lucas tried pacifying it
• 1:20:53
  with his revisions and these. Are business Dude, George Lucas
• 1:20:57
  is a revisionist. Dude, he is a revisionist, you
• 1:21:00
  know. So actually I just finished the
• 1:21:03
  George Lucas biography like 3 weeks ago.
• 1:21:06
  Fantastic biography for. I would definitely read that.
• 1:21:11
  It's, I think it's called George Lucas a life, and it is I, I'd
• 1:21:16
  done that one. I I love biographies.
• 1:21:19
  Me too. I just.
• 1:21:20
  Started his technology. Started Pixar.
• 1:21:23
  Yeah. It's amazing.
• 1:21:24
  It's so cool. Yeah.
• 1:21:25
  That's why True stories of homage.
• 1:21:27
  Speaking of. Pixar, Have You Done Steve Jobs
• 1:21:30
  by Walter Isaacson? I of course, and I'm working on,
• 1:21:35
  there's an amazing book to Pixar and beyond.
• 1:21:38
  The CFO of the company, Lawrence Levy, writes about taking the
• 1:21:43
  company public from a business perspective as a CFO of Pixar.
• 1:21:47
  While I was going public in 95 and working with Steve Jobs and
• 1:21:50
  everything like that. And, and he and I have have
• 1:21:53
  corresponded a couple of times. I'm dying to get him on the
• 1:21:55
  podcast. That's awesome.
• 1:21:57
  But yeah, the Toy Story's a homage to to Star Wars.
• 1:22:01
  Yeah, so Steve Jobs. Oh see, I could talk about books
• 1:22:06
  all day long. Another great one is Bob Iger's
• 1:22:09
  Right of a Lifetime. You like?
• 1:22:11
  That one, I loved it. I got to read it.
• 1:22:14
  I got. To read it because he brings a
• 1:22:16
  really great perspective of leadership and I love anything,
• 1:22:20
  any kind of leadership biography.
• 1:22:22
  I mean, extreme ownership going back to Jocko, right?
• 1:22:27
  Extreme ownership was one of the first leadership books that I
• 1:22:30
  really kind of dived into. And thank God I did it early in
• 1:22:34
  my career because that that that philosophy has very much molded
• 1:22:40
  my outlook on my work ethic. And I think that that has been a
• 1:22:45
  driving factor of why one, I'm just kind of neurotic when it
• 1:22:49
  comes to diving into a bunch of projects, but really taking that
• 1:22:52
  concept of ownership and, you know, the more ownership you
• 1:22:54
  take, the more successful you'll be.
• 1:22:56
  Yeah, I got to check out. I got to, I got to check out
• 1:22:59
  that that George Lucas book. So.
• 1:23:01
  So George would. Like to say that Han Solo
• 1:23:04
  totally shot first. He did shoot first.
• 1:23:07
  Can you explain why you got how you got there?
• 1:23:10
  Yeah, cuz I watched the original cuz the original videos were the
• 1:23:13
  best, you know? Yeah, New Hope, The
• 1:23:16
  unadulterated New Hope from 78 is the only good version.
• 1:23:21
  Yeah, yeah, I'm a little sad. What happened to the Star Wars
• 1:23:24
  world? What what do you think of the
• 1:23:26
  movie Interstellar? So, and this is absolutely, this
• 1:23:32
  will be a great reason of why we have to have a.
• 1:23:35
  Another. Conversation, another round of
• 1:23:37
  conversation is so a side hobby of mine.
• 1:23:41
  I'm very much kind of a polymath and so I love anything that
• 1:23:47
  deals with like quantum dynamics and quantum physics and and so
• 1:23:52
  the concept of understanding reality.
• 1:23:57
  Yeah, Interstellar is a great movie because it one it's a
• 1:24:04
  great you know, it it it's a beautifully shot masterpiece.
• 1:24:10
  It really is it is a cinematic masterpiece.
• 1:24:12
  But the concepts of multi dimensions and what space-time
• 1:24:21
  actually is, I think it's done really well in there.
• 1:24:26
  You know the concepts of you know how black holes work and
• 1:24:31
  you know how we can visualize them And going back to, you
• 1:24:34
  know, my level space. Yeah, I'm.
• 1:24:36
  Sorry. But yeah, it's really good.
• 1:24:38
  I I love how they ended up you. Know OK, we're gonna have to get
• 1:24:42
  back to that we're gonna have to go back to that so.
• 1:24:44
  Yeah, I'm a huge proponent of simulation hypothesis and you
• 1:24:48
  know. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:24:50
  Well, you know what? As time goes on, I think that I
• 1:24:53
  think it feels more and more like inevitable.
• 1:24:57
  You know, it's pretty, I, I, I'm a little nervous that we're a
• 1:25:05
  couple of years away from just not being able to discern what
• 1:25:07
  reality is from anything and like, you know, from AI or from
• 1:25:12
  technology. And we're just, you know, we it
• 1:25:15
  just we, we have no idea what reality is.
• 1:25:19
  Oh yeah. It's really scary.
• 1:25:20
  It's really freaky. But you know what?
• 1:25:22
  I, I, I do hope that I do hope. And I believe that because
• 1:25:30
  there's been a cosmic positive karmic history where, like,
• 1:25:36
  putting out goodness and effort and all those things, you know,
• 1:25:42
  lead to positive consequences. And it's not on the outside.
• 1:25:47
  On the inside, you know in one way or the other that things
• 1:25:51
  will turn out OK, but just not the way that we expect anything
• 1:25:53
  to be. Yeah, it's that concept of
• 1:25:55
  manifestation, right? Is, you know, projecting how you
• 1:26:00
  want the world around you to be. You know, if if you, I am a firm
• 1:26:06
  believer of if you can dream it, you can do it.
• 1:26:10
  There's another Walt Disney quote for you.
• 1:26:14
  But if you're not happy with where you are in life, then
• 1:26:20
  change it. It it really is that simple, you
• 1:26:23
  say, Oh, but Zach, I've got pills to pay.
• 1:26:25
  I've got you know, the my friend, you are only within this
• 1:26:30
  particular lifetime here once. So do not don't forego it.
• 1:26:35
  Don't. Give it up it episode is going
• 1:26:37
  to have is going to be so much fun.
• 1:26:38
  Oh yeah, this gets into the really philosophical stance.
• 1:26:42
  Yeah, yeah, that's the stuff I love.
• 1:26:44
  It, you know, it's, I work with death on such a regular basis
• 1:26:52
  that it has very much given me a perspective on the value of
• 1:26:56
  life. You know, a friend of mine was
• 1:27:02
  killed on duty a couple months ago and you know, it was, that
• 1:27:08
  was by far the hardest scene I have ever worked.
• 1:27:12
  And it very much was kind of a, I don't know, an earth
• 1:27:18
  shattering moment or series of moments, right?
• 1:27:25
  It really gives you pause for perspective.
• 1:27:30
  But life's short. Live it.
• 1:27:35
  If you're not happy with it, change it.
• 1:27:36
  It really is that simple. Zach, this has been such a
• 1:27:40
  pleasure. I'm so happy that you responded
• 1:27:42
  to my e-mail initially, and I'm so happy you made this happen.
• 1:27:45
  And I'm so excited for our future conversations.
• 1:27:48
  I'm so excited to see the work you're doing and the research
• 1:27:50
  that you're doing. And you're literally, dude,
• 1:27:53
  you're, you're, you're living, you're living science fiction in
• 1:27:57
  this world. And it's just science.
• 1:27:59
  And it's so cool. And as an observer, I just want
• 1:28:01
  to say I'm a huge fan. I really appreciate everything
• 1:28:03
  that you're doing. Well, I greatly appreciate it.
• 1:28:06
  I, I love what I do. And you know, I, I try and I, I
• 1:28:11
  try and actually live what I preach.
• 1:28:12
  And you know, like Humphrey Bogart said at the end of
• 1:28:15
  Casablanca, this is the beginning of a beautiful
• 1:28:17
  friendship. I hope so.
• 1:28:19
  I hope so, Zach. Thanks so much for the time,
• 1:28:20
  man. We're going to be, you're
• 1:28:21
  definitely going to be in touch and we'll talk soon, OK?
• 1:28:24
  Sounds great. Take care and be safe.
• 1:28:26
  Good night everyone. Bye.