JARROD CARTER | BUILDING A TEAM

Lou sits down with Jarrod Carter of Origin Forensics to discuss presenting at trial, mentoring young recons, managing a firm, and finding balance.

You can also find an audio only version on your favorite podcast platform.

A rough transcript can be found below.

Links from the Show:

Timeline of Topics:

00:00:00 - Introduction and the "Rub Some Dirt on It" philosophy

00:07:10 - Managing caseload and scope of work

00:12:00 - Building and running a recon team

00:26:58 - Presenting to the court

00:36:24 - Education and mentors

00:41:29 - Energy methods and restitution

00:46:35 - Teaching juries

01:02:31 - Public speaking and testimony skills

01:09:06 - Continuous learning and new tools

01:13:11 - Demonstratives and exhibits

01:24:49 - Hiring and nurturing a team, prioritizing family, and avoiding burnout

02:16:59 - AI in recon

02:49:26 - Future of AI (AGI, Reasoning)

Rough Transcript:
Please find a rough transcript of the show below. This transcript has not been thoroughly reviewed or edited, so some errors may be present.

Lou (00:00:00):

Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Data Driven Podcast. My guest today is Forensic Miracle Worker, Dr. Jarrod Carter. Jarrod is the principal analyst at Origin Forensics out of Liberty Lake, Washington. He has a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Washington State University in a PhD in bioengineering from the University of Washington. He's been in the field of collision reconstruction for over 35 years and has published papers on spinal injury, rollover dynamics, motorcycle impact simulation, and crashworthiness. Today's show deviates from the normal remote interview style format a little bit. Instead, Jarrod was kind enough to make the flight to Light Point HQ in California for an in-person conversation, and the show takes on a little bit more of an informal tone. As a result, we went deep on many topics, including building a team and running a recon business, curating clients, prioritizing family, testifying in court, generating beautiful exhibits, how law enforcement officers and engineers can learn from each other, ai and more. So without further ado, enjoy the show.

Jarrod (00:01:18):

Are we actually going now?

(00:01:20):

We're going,

Lou (00:01:21):

Yeah.

Jarrod (00:01:21):

Oh, we're going?

(00:01:22):

Yeah.

(00:01:22):

Okay. Well, before we go any further, I have a present for you.

Lou (00:01:27):

I like this. I think.

Jarrod (00:01:35):

Yeah, beautiful dude. Clean sweep. If you know anything about South Park, you'll recognize that we're officially declaring shenanigans at the beginning of this, so anything could happen. Yes. And so I just want you to have that. And in the interest of maintaining the full shenanigans, I'm going to do a wardrobe change. Not a malfunction, but just a

Lou (00:01:58):

Change. I hope not. That looks like the crew cut is nice and high and tight, so we shouldn't have any issues, although

Jarrod (00:02:04):

Just rub some dirt on it. That's my philosophy in life.

Lou (00:02:08):

Yeah. So that's really important. Where does that originate? Because one of my kids', little league coaches wears a shirt that says, rub some dirt on it. And I love the attitude.

Jarrod (00:02:20):

It's very much a Gen X type of thing, holdover from the boomer generation. I think really when you get right down to it, my wife and my daughter's got me this for Father's Day. They love to get me snarky shirts that speak to my personality, I think, and rub some dirt on it. I mean, one of my philosophies with inspections is if you're not dirty, greasy, oily, bloody, and sweating like a pig, by the time you're done, you're not really inspecting anything. If you show up and you make a couple passes around the vehicle, take a handful of photos and then wander away. Yeah. That's not an inspection. That's far from an inspection.

Lou (00:02:59):

Yeah. That's not going to get you what you need.

Jarrod (00:03:01):

No.

Lou (00:03:01):

So the rub some dirt on it for you is more like getting dirty, doing your job as opposed to having an injury. Rub some dirt on it.

Jarrod (00:03:07):

And generally speaking, if you've been in this business for any amount of time, one of the things that you'll recognize right away is that you can't control when things go sideways. And it's like, okay, well, are you going to complain about it or are you going to actually do something and try to deal with the demands that are placed on you at this point? And so rub some dirt on is just another way of saying, let's just get her done. We got to get it done. We can complain about it and cry about it, but it's not going to change the fact that it still needs to get done regardless. Dude, I can think of

Lou (00:03:43):

A lot of inspections like that, specifically one in Northern California where we pulled up. I was kind of under some time constraints, which is never good. I had a flight to catch out of there. I think I was doing multiple inspections up there at a certain time. And I show up to this motorcycle inspection, and it is in an old broken down barn. The motorcycle is annihilated, right? So you're not wheeling it around anywhere. It's tucked very firmly into a corner with cat urine all over it in dust all over it. I have no associate with me and the other expert, really nice guy, older gentleman, not going to be doing any dead lifting of motorcycles with me. And to your point, I was just like, all right, I'm going to smell like cat piss for the next six hours while I'm flying home. Yeah. Who knows exactly, not even, it might be longer than that, depending on what soap I use.

(00:04:38):

But yeah, just an hour and a half probably moving that thing to a spot in the garage where I felt like I could actually do what I needed to do, crawl all over it, scan it, take photographs, dismantle whatever I need to dismantle. It's definitely a business that is not for the meek. Inspections are one thing, but to me the most challenging curve balls you're going to get are when you're testifying in front of, well, on the record or in front of the jury, generally speaking, curve balls in front of the jury are hopefully rare, but I might get some, a depo.

Jarrod (00:05:17):

Well, I mean, curve balls in front of the jury are always, I mean, that's where the experts make their money if they're really doing their job and if they're really confident and capable, they can handle the curve balls because they've already anticipated that curve ball they've already anticipated. Okay, I might expect this. And that's one of the things like when I'm getting prepped for trial, I'll show up several days before I'm even anticipated to testify, and then I'll be in my room just going through everything

(00:05:50):

Point by point, detail by detail, going through my report, going through deposition transcripts, going through all of the evidence that I've to lay out and all the analysis. How could they take this apart? They may not have mentioned it in the deposition. They may not have brought it up maybe because they were like, they didn't want to deal with it at that point. They were going to hold it for the time of trial. And so what are the potential curve balls that I might be dealing with? And also, additionally, it's like what are the fastballs that I'm probably not going to be able to hit unless I'm really on it? Because fastballs, they're tough. It comes over the plate so fast. You've got to be dialed in and ready for it. And that's the kind of thing where it's like, I don't like to just show up and testify in a trial. It's different from a deposition. I'll get prepped for a deposition, probably take two, three days sometimes to get prepped for a deposition. But when I'm in a trial, it's just like everything else is ancillary at that point.

Lou (00:06:52):

Every call every email.

Jarrod (00:06:53):

Exactly. It's like, I'm here for my client to do my job, and I'm going to do everything I can to get prepped for this in advance, make sure that when I walk into that courtroom, there's nobody that knows this case from a reconstruction perspective or a biomechanical perspective when I'm doing that any better than I do.

(00:07:12):

They can throw curve balls, they can throw fast balls, knuckle balls, whatever they want. But I'm going to hit every single one of them. And at the very least, I'm going to get on base, if not knock it out of the park and be rounding the bases to use that baseball analogy. So yeah.

Lou (00:07:28):

Yeah, that's key for, I do very similar in my preparedness, which you can only do, by the way, if you limit the number of cases you take. If you took 300 cases a year, there's no chance that you'd have the ability to prepare like that. So that's been one of my processes over the years is going from hundreds of cases at the beginning of my career, smaller cases to 80 cases a year probably when I started Axiom that were pretty big to now even way fewer than that. I'm taking 10 mega cases a year trying to take fewer than that. But so many of my clients I really enjoy working with, and they have cool cases and they sound fun. So I do it. But one of the big things that I do in that vein is I'll ask my client as we're prepping for trial, what do you think they're going to cross me on? Correct.

(00:08:21):

Then I will sit down for hours developing what I would ask me, what are the best questions? What are the questions that might seed some doubt or that highlight something I didn't do? And on that note, I don't do that anymore. I do everything. And if a client doesn't want to hire me because I'm doing everything, it's going to be really expensive, unfortunately at a point in my career where I can just say, I'm not your guy. You strike me as somebody who's similar to that.

Jarrod (00:08:53):

Yeah. It's one of those things where, so regardless of the case are, when you say everything, it's really hard to do everything.

(00:09:06):

You got to be careful with that because there are going to be, it's like I say, nothing's impossible. If you have sufficient time and resources, well, there's not infinite time and there's not infinite resources. And your clients will tell you that. They're like, no, we don't have the money for that. I'm sorry Lou, but that's way out there. And I get that too. I get that a lot of times I'm like, you know what? The best way to do this would be X, Y, or Z. And they're like, how much is that going to cost? It's going to cost a lot if you really want to do this. It would really, I think, solidify things. And then there's also tactical and strategic lawyering that goes on where they're trying, well, is it really worth it? And then you got to deal with the client of the client a lot of times. So you got to deal with your client is reporting to another client, and that client's like, we're not spending that on this.

Lou (00:10:01):

And you don't have direct access to them, so you can't convince them as to why it's a good idea.

Jarrod (00:10:06):

And the thing you got to, well, I wouldn't say the thing you got to remember, it depends on the client you're working for and how well funded they are. If they're on the plaintiff side, do they have a really big war chest to do the battle and really go to the ground on a lot of things? On the defense side, and I'm thinking here in civil world, on the defense side, I do a lot of work in product liability with auto manufacturers and they have a lot of money. But the thing you got to remember is that they also have a valuation of the case. You've got people in-house at the manufacturer that are evaluating and then assessing a value of a case. And if you're trying to do a bunch of work that really screws with the value of their case, they may bucket that.

(00:11:01):

They may say, no, we're not doing that. I know you'd like to, but we're not going to do that. And so you've got to take, it's a give and take. And it's also, from my perspective, it's also like what's the objective of what we're trying to do? How far is this going to advance the ball? Is it really going to advance the ball a long ways or is it just going to be something that's kind of a feather in your cap? You feel better about it, you did it, but it's not really necessarily worth it. And that's always a, I've been doing this starting going back for 30 years now, and that's one of the things I always come up against. And every now and again, I can really like, look, I'm telling you if we do this, this will solidify our position on this case. This will make my reconstruction shine. It will be obvious that this is correct. And then you don't have to worry about that side of it. And like you said, I can come in and be a lot more forceful, a lot more firm in my opinions and not feel like maybe there's something I could have done or should have done and I didn't. So everything thing is, I think you and I share that in that we want to try to do as much as we possibly can. Within reason.

Lou (00:12:18):

Within reason. Yeah. That's

Jarrod (00:12:19):

The key within reason to solidify our position. And we spend a lot of money and time doing a lot of things that I don't think a lot of others will do. And to your point earlier about caseload, one of the things that I've noticed over the years is, and I don't identify with this trend because right now I think I have 60 to 70 active cases. Some of those are partitioned out to my senior analyst, James, and he does pretty fair amount of work under the auspices of my oversight, excuse me. But what I see in the industry by and large, is this massive companies basically trying to print out experts. And you can't do that. You can't print an expert.

(00:13:21):

You can't have this massive book of work, and you've got all your minions running around doing stuff and have proper oversight of it if you're going to be the expert on it. If you have three, 400 cases in your stable, how are you getting proper oversight over all the things that are being done? And if you've got a bunch of young people, I don't mean this in a derogatory sense, but if you have young engineers or young people that are doing the work for you and they don't have your level of experience, even if you're kind of guiding them through the process, the question is how well are they going to accomplish those tasks? And if they're doing the bulk of the work for you, and even I've seen this where it's like they're writing the reports, they're doing all of that stuff. I write my own reports.

(00:14:07):

You're not writing my report, my report's, my report, and I'll take what you've done and I'll bring it into the report and make sure that I agree with it, and then it's something I have confidence in. But the report is, yeah, those are my words. That's my words. I'm not taking it from you. And if somebody else does write a big chunk of a report for me, I go through it line by line, and I like, okay, this needs to be changed. This needs to be moved. This doesn't make any sense. This doesn't flow. Because at the end of the day, my name's on the bottom of that thing, and if it goes out with my name on it and it is a turd, I'm not going to be happy about that. Right. Because at the end of the day, it's your reputation on the line.

Lou (00:14:56):

Yeah. No, I understand. Like you said, the business model makes sense. That's the way to make the most money. Correct. And I'll be the first to tell you that I probably make, even though my bill rate is higher than probably almost, well a lot of other reconstructionists, most, I probably make way less than the average reconstructionist

(00:15:18):

Because I have not set my business up to be maximum for maximum profitability. I've set it up so that I enjoy doing the work that I do. I have peace of mind and I am able to do the work that I enjoy, which are the analytics. I enjoy that aspect of it. If you put me into a business model and they said, Lou, you're good at testifying. You've been doing this for a really long time. We're going to set you up with a team of engineers that do the whole recon. We're going to pat you on the ass and send you into Depo. I would prefer no thanks to work as a greeter at Walmart because

(00:15:59):

It's not going to be enjoyable for me on any level. And then I'm sure you've experienced this when you are deep into a simulation, when you are deep into a photogrammetry analysis, you are seeing things that are enhanced by your experience that are not going to be seen by other people. And you wouldn't see 'em if you didn't spend the time. Correct. So if you're doing seeing photogrammetry say, this happens to me all the time, and it shocks me every time, and it should probably just stop shocking me by now, but I'll have a set of 20 photographs and I've looked through 'em for two hours already. Right. Then I pick the photographs that I'm going to use for scene photogrammetry, start doing the photogrammetry, which might take 10, 20 hours, could take four, but it probably is going to take me 10 hours. Oh, yeah. In eight hours into it. I'm like, the heck is that mark? Right,

Jarrod (00:16:50):

Exactly.

Lou (00:16:51):

And why does it look so funny? I didn't see that before. What is that exactly? And then I'll listen to your podcast with Eugene. Then you start being able to make connections in the case that other people might not be able to make because you are so deep into it, you're bringing all of your experience to it, and you're like, well, that's a great theory, but there's a tire mark over here that is clearly from the rear tire of the motorcycle. That means that that motorcycle was actually oriented like this. And that changes a few things. So parameters in simulation, an associate or a younger guy gives you a simulation, especially if with Simon or something,

Jarrod (00:17:29):

It looks fantastic.

Lou (00:17:30):

Exactly. And then you cop in there.

Jarrod (00:17:31):

It's completely ridiculous physically.

Lou (00:17:33):

Yeah. Somebody, if you handed it to me, I'd be like, why is your coefficient restitution 0.7?

Jarrod (00:17:39):

Right?

Lou (00:17:40):

Or something like that that just kind of negates all the credibility and

Jarrod (00:17:43):

Simulation. Yeah. What's the justification for that? I mean, a lot of times specifically, not so much in photogrammetry, because there's, you really kind of have to dial everything in photogrammetry in a way that you can't really make that up. It either looks right or it doesn't look right. Either the parameters are correct or they're not correct, because you didn't do the right job, you didn't reference things correctly, you didn't set proper control. It's just not correct. And you can see that pretty easily, especially when you're overlaying the geometry in the photograph. Like, okay, that's not right. That can't possibly be right. Sometimes it's like, okay, well, in the area where we care about, it's fine. It may be out in the fringes where the distortion is really high. It's not. We could get it better, but we just don't have enough control or enough reference out there. But in simulation, I mean the phraseology, everybody uses garbage in, garbage out. If you put garbage in, you're going to get garbage out. It may look, it's the best smelling garbage you've ever come across, but when you actually dig into it, you're like, there's a bunch of rotten stuff in here. I don't know what kind of Febreeze they used

(00:18:55):

To clean this up and make it smell nice, but inside it's a mess. My favorite with that

Lou (00:19:01):

Is when experts don't provide the simulation itself, which I don't necessarily have a problem with, if you provide the reports and everything, but they will provide screenshots from the simulation, then you eventually get the real simulation and you found out how it got there. They'll provide one second snippets, and then you get the actual video and you find out that the yaw velocity is 2000 degrees per second, and that's how it got there. And you're like, okay. And the steering angles, all things that just don't make sense. But if you screenshot 'em, they can. So there can be a lot of tomfoolery within the simulation, intentional or not. And if you have a younger persons shenanigans,

Jarrod (00:19:47):

And that's a big problem. But that's always been a problem. And it's, again, I go back to the idea of this trying to print out experts versus actually develop experts. I don't want to just be the Federal Reserve and just be printing dollars or printing experts. I want to be actually building up people that are capable and competent that benefit from my experience, my understanding, but that I'm guiding them through the process so that when they get to the level where they can start doing stuff really on their own, that they're much more confident, but they're also, they've got a solid foundation to operate on. They're not just dropped into a case and said, figure it out. They're going to be gone, man, I've got 295 other cases I've got to deal with or whatever the number is.

Lou (00:20:41):

I remember when I was taking 80 cases a year, well, I don't remember. I found this document recently just scanned in some random folder, and it was an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper, and it was three columns, and it was all the voicemails that I had and the people that I had to call back. And I planned on doing it on my way to an inspection.

Jarrod (00:21:01):

And

Lou (00:21:01):

For me, that's just not a good way to live. I can't do that.

Jarrod (00:21:04):

No, it's not. It will wear you down really bad. And it's worn me down. I mean, this particular, I'm getting to the point in my career where it's like I'm still trying to grow my own business and grow the people that are working with me so that they can operate on their own. And that's a tough thing. In order to do that, you got to bring enough, you got to make enough rain that everybody gets water basically. But the hard part is you can end up just flooding yourself if you're not careful. And at the end of the day, we're talking about with reports, when it comes down to the report time or the deposition time, who's on the hook for that? It's not anybody on my staff. That's the bottleneck. That's the bottleneck. I am the bottleneck. And at some point, I only got so many hours in the day and so much horsepower mentally, and I don't have a lot to begin with, but I've only got so much mental horsepower to be able to handle all this stuff and be able to check all the boxes and make sure I'm comfortable with everything.

(00:22:16):

I don't do everything that goes into the analysis. In my cases, I oversee everything that goes into the analysis on my cases.

Lou (00:22:25):

I don't, by the time it gets to the client, correct. It's QC to the nines.

Jarrod (00:22:29):

I'm looking at everything. I don't like that. That doesn't make any sense. What's wrong with this? All these things. Because when it goes in my report and my reports probably, my reports are probably, depending on how you look at it, probably a laughing stock. But some of, I took a different turn probably about five years ago where I stopped writing these sort of summary reports, and I started just putting in as much detail as I could. Primarily, I put the detail in the exhibits. I have my reports. I don't have images or pictures or anything like that in my report. I just have text. But every page is referring to an exhibit. Some of my reports are like four or 500 pages because I have all the exhibits that I referenced, all the things that have gone into this part of the analysis where I'm discussing it, I'm referencing to an exhibit that lays that out in detail. I'll summarize it in there and point out some of the salient points. But that exhibit, I try to look at it as if I'm trying to convince the other side that I got this right, I'm going to give 'em everything I can think of and probably more than they want.

(00:23:46):

Now, that has some downsides because I had a deposition not too long ago was, like I said, it was eight hours on the record. They went through every page of that report, the exhibits and everything, and that. That's the potential downside of that. But if I'm trying to convince you, Lou Peck, that I did the job right, I'm not just trying to convince your attorney necessarily. I'm trying to convince you as the opposing expert that I got it right and lay out how I reach my conclusions and provide you with as much as I can that I think will aid you and your assessment. Then I'm going to try to, it's going to be long. It may look tedious if you're an attorney and you're looking at it and you're like, I'm not going through all this crap. Give this to my expert and let them go through it and see what they think. Summarize it for me in a 30

Lou (00:24:38):

Minute call.

Jarrod (00:24:38):

Yeah, exactly. But that takes time. That takes effort, that takes oversight. And if I'm trying to do that on every case that comes through the office, if I've got a 500 page report, or even some of the smaller ones are now around a hundred to 200 pages with exhibits, the text is not that long. You're not reading my dissertation. My dissertation was 200 pages. I'm probably the only one that ever read the blessed thing. But that's another story. But the general idea is that I'm trying to lay it out in a way that people could really fully understand what I did and the evidence I identified, how I linked it into the overall analysis, how that all makes sense. And I've got to do that. I just feel compelled to do that. I just feel sort of like I watched your interview with Mark Crouch, and I really like Mark's approach.

(00:25:37):

I think he's a great guy. His approach is like, I'm here for the court. I'm not here for the guy on the other side. Yep. I love that. I'm here for the drudge. I'm here for the jury because they need to know what's going on. And my objective is to, well, our motto at my company is Veritas Fi Ditas Claritas, which is we try to find the truth. We're faithful to the evidence, and we present with clarity. We present our findings with clarity. And the objective there is that I'm not doing that for myself. There's other people that need to know what's going on, and I'm trying to explicate that to them. I'm trying to help them understand, because if I'm presenting it to even a judge, but a jury, juries are not necessarily technical people. That's not a dig on juries. That's just like you're not going to get people that are accident reconstructionists if they do make it on your jury. Holy crap, what the heck happened in voir dire? Because the attorneys are obviously not watching who's coming through.

Lou (00:26:39):

I'll take any scientist, any engineer,

Jarrod (00:26:41):

You bring a scientist in, any mathematician, and I'll just talk to them and let them explain it to everyone else. But at the same time, it's like you can't rely on that. That's the oddball. That doesn't happen all the time.

Lou (00:26:54):

That makes our job so much more challenging. And I think is part of the reason why elite reconstructionists are hard to make, because it's a combination of that technical aptitude and the personality and the ability to handle testimony. And an aggravated attorney. That's a rare combination of traits.

Jarrod (00:27:16):

Correct.

(00:27:17):

And you can't go full contact. That's not how it works in court. You can't come out of the box and just start laying blows. And that's been a hard part for me because my wife, I love her to death, but she's like, I have a temper. She knows that. And part of my temper comes from my childhood, which is we're not even going to talk about that. If you want to, we can, but there's some childhood baggage that I bring with me, and I have this real hard time with people telling me that I'm wrong. It infuriates me for some reason, and I can only trace it back to my early childhood growing up into teenage years. And so over the years, I've become much more adept at suppressing that and being able, it still comes out occasionally, but it comes out in a more necessary context. If somebody's really being aggressive, sometimes

Lou (00:28:18):

You've

Jarrod (00:28:18):

Got to be aggressive back. I agree. That

Lou (00:28:21):

Is such a reason, a fine boundary.

Jarrod (00:28:23):

And it's like you're just on that knife edge of, this guy's a total jackass, and I need to let him know that he's being a jackass, but do it in a way that I'm not yelling or screaming or anything like that, but in a very aggressive tone, it's like, look, here's what's going on here.

Lou (00:28:44):

Yeah. If you continue down this path, what's going to happen? I'm going to be very firm and this is not going. I struggle with that all the time myself, and I'll be happy to hear your tactics, but it's such a fine balance for me. I think I tend to err and maybe there's some childhood underlying personality thing that makes us who we are and why we're similar like that. Affirmative.

Jarrod (00:29:11):

We can talk about that, I'm sure over lunch, but we're not going to get into that here, I don't think. No, nobody wants to watch the two people psychoanalyze each other in the middle. No, exactly. These guys are engineers. They know nothing about

Lou (00:29:23):

Personality.

Jarrod (00:29:25):

I watched Jordan Peterson once. That's

Lou (00:29:27):

All I know. All I had was Jerry Springer. So I err to that side as well, where it's like my native inclination is when somebody is being condescending, when somebody is being combative. Combative. Thank you. Combative. I knew it. You're welcome. My initial response is to meet it with fury right away. Oh,

Jarrod (00:29:55):

Yeah.

Lou (00:29:55):

And that's hard. It's not good.

Jarrod (00:29:57):

It's not

Lou (00:29:57):

Good at all. De in trial

Jarrod (00:29:59):

At Depo, it's not as big of a deal because it's on the transcript, but you got to be careful of that. Think about depos all the time. Yeah. You got to be careful with that. And a little bit of righteous anger goes a long way. Just like that little bit of salt, just a little bit of righteous anger goes a long way. So season the testimony in the appropriate way, but also it's like, I'm not doing this for me. My client's sitting right over there. They're going to report to their client about what I did and how I performed. And at the end of the day, that's important to me. I want them to feel like they hired the right guy. He knows what he's doing. He can handle this. He doesn't lose his crap in the middle of a deposition and go, wow, just start screaming and hollering. That's

Speaker 4 (00:30:49):

Never good.

Jarrod (00:30:49):

You've seen that. I mean, you can see that on YouTube. You can just go around and watch some crazy depositions. How in the heck did that ever happen?

Lou (00:30:56):

Yeah. And I've seen it happen on the most mundane things, like when you got your degree or something like that, and somebody will start going off, and I'm like, so been. Well, that

Jarrod (00:31:06):

Part is like there's something to hide there.

Lou (00:31:09):

If you're

Jarrod (00:31:09):

Getting angry about stuff that's on your cv, it's like maybe there's something that shouldn't be on your CV that's supposed to be the kickbox, or maybe it's embellished a little too much,

Lou (00:31:20):

Which there's been three, I've seen three instances of that recently. We are not going to get into them, but no, we're not three major instances of an expert putting something on the resume that was not true, which is mind blowing to me. I had no idea that that was happening, first of all. And second of all, for it to happen three consecutive times for me, I've witnessed it now within the past four months.

Jarrod (00:31:45):

Yeah, I agree. It's like, yeah, your cv, I've got some pretty good things on my cv, and I'm very proud of a lot of things I've done. But your CV is just a place to lay out your background, your experience, your training in a very sort of bland way. That's what I do. This is what I've done. This is who I am. This is where I've been. This is who I've worked with, those kinds of things. And at the end of the day, it's your cv. It's just like your report. If you signed your name on your report, theoretically, that's your work. Those are your words. Maybe you didn't write all of it, but you went through everything and you signed off on it. And your CV is essentially the same thing. That's a condensed version of your biography. Nevermind the fact that some people have cvs, they're astronomically

Speaker 3 (00:32:44):

Long,

Jarrod (00:32:45):

But at the same time, it's like it's a condensed version. Sure. A really long CV just means this person's done a lot of things. We get that, but it's still a condensed version of who you are in this business, a condensed version of who you are as an expert. What's your background, your experience, your training, education, all those kinds of things. And if you let something land in there that is not right, that never looks good, that's never going to end well.

Lou (00:33:16):

I mean, I tell my clients this all the time. We have many threads that are still loose that I'm going to try to go back to. I'm keeping track of them in my head, but I tell my clients all the time, credibility is paramount to me. Right? If I testify in front of the jury and they have any reason to lose faith in my fidelity to the truth, to steal some of your Latin, turn it English and bring it back, then we're done. We're cooked. They need to trust me a hundred percent. And I mean, starting with this, I don't even consider the CV part of that. Hopefully it shouldn't even enter the equation other than the fact that, yeah, I have credentials to bring to the table here, but it shouldn't be something that might ruin your credibility. More importantly for me is what I did to figure this out. Did I put my a hundred percent effort into this? Am I considering the weak sides as well as the strong sides? Am I answering cross-examination questions in a truthful and direct manner? All of that stuff. But if you lose credibility, you're hosed. That's a technical term. Yes, it's exactly.

(00:34:33):

You're technically hosed. You are. Yeah. I'm pretty sure that's in the psychological books with respect to trust. But yeah, going back to the tactics, and I actually have a, well, why is this just talked about this now if I can find it.

Jarrod (00:34:52):

Okay.

Lou (00:34:53):

Okay. This is a testimonial from one of your clients. Oh, crap.

(00:34:57):

Yeah.

(00:34:57):

So I'm going to read this. It's going to take a quick second, but never before or since have I had an expert so completely prepared on the subject matter. Moreover, when it was finally time to face the jury, he came across like a 30 year veteran. So this is earlier in your career, leaving the entire room in awe. That's a really nice word. His interaction with the jury, his delivery and his interface with a hostile opposing counsel was pure textbook. He somehow only when appropriate, managed to show the right amount of righteous indignation without ever offending or losing his cool. He charmed a jury without being obsequious. And most of all, even during the toughest of questions, he never let the jury see him sweat. No,

Jarrod (00:35:40):

I was probably sweating.

Lou (00:35:42):

I bet, right? You didn't see it. Yeah, exactly. You got a multi undershirt, regular shirt suit. I've got those little

Jarrod (00:35:46):

Pads that go under your

Lou (00:35:48):

Armpits. All that kind of gets No, you, what you see in Jarrod is what you get a throwback expert in a man utterly without guile. He possesses that rare combination, a bonafide expert in scholar with a personality that is lack of ego, typically inconsistent with those possessing copious amounts of talent. In some, I count myself lucky to have used Jarrod on the stand, but even luckier to call Jarrod a true friend. So this is from Barry Tune. First of all, he's got a great vocabulary. That guy obsequious, copious guile. I had to look up half those words. So is that something, this is early in your career, but I know that you started very young, like 19, working with John Haad. Correct. And James Collins tangentially maybe? No,

Jarrod (00:36:42):

I never met James. James was fully out of the game. I mean, John still was in contact with James, and we actually one time when we were in California, he went to see him. But I only knew James tangentially through John, and primarily because the first book I ever read on reconstruction was the accident reconstruction book that I think it was the

Lou (00:37:06):

First book. There was the Investigation Manual by Standard Baker, but I don't think there was a

Jarrod (00:37:11):

Recon book like the mathematics. I'm trying to remember the guy's name. It's a red book. I have it on my shelf, and I can't remember the guy's name to save my life probably because I've never really referred to that book very much because Baker's fricking baker, their books are, I don't know, kind of the Bibles of reconstruction when you get right down to it. The thing I liked about Jim Collins book was it was short, but there were a lot of things in there that were novel at the time that book was published, particularly how do you go from crush energy to closing speed and change in velocity? And that's based on particle physics.

Lou (00:37:56):

Yeah. Was Campbell out yet? 1979 is when Jim Collins book was published. Campbell is somewhere around there.

Jarrod (00:38:03):

It was in the mid seventies if I remember correctly. Yeah, I think

Lou (00:38:09):

That's right.

Jarrod (00:38:09):

76 or something. What you were dealing with, my understanding, and I wasn't there. So I was born in 70, so 74 to 79. I was like four to nine years old, so I didn't even know I was still picking my nose and dirt. Still

Lou (00:38:25):

Doing differential equations at that point.

Jarrod (00:38:28):

Oh yeah, exactly. Because that's how all young engineers start out. But the general idea at that time, to hear Haad, my mentor tell it, a lot of people did not grasp the concepts of energy as they relate to a crash reconstruction, and they were still doing some strange things with crush energy and how to translate that over to crash severity and closing speed and things of that nature. So one of the things, there's a whole chapter in their book, and I've got a copy. I can send it to you if you want. Yeah, I'd love it. But I probably should have brought it with me as another gift aside from a broom. But the general idea is that they were trying to explain from a particle physics perspective, how you go from energy to change in velocity or closure speed or how you go from closure speed to energy. So you see this now, Nathan Rose wrote a paper, I think it was in 2005 if I remember correctly, where he went through and tried to explain Crush Energy and how it relates to the various parameters or variables. We're trying to calculate closure speed, delta V, things of that nature. And that comes from more of a mechanics perspective like springs and masses and all that kind of stuff. But I always thought it was a more elegant approach in that they're coming from, because both John and Jim were in Lawrence Livermore National Labs.

(00:40:03):

So they had direct access to people with particle physics and type of background, and they could leverage what they learned from them and what they could glean from particle physics to translate that into the mechanics of a crash and their explanation for how you get from closure speed to crush energy or the, well not crush energy directly, but the energy available for crush, and then you can get to dissipated energy and things like that. And then also how you can get to change in velocity from that. That's a very elegant particle physics manifestation that they brought to the table that really nobody prior to that had really brought in, as far as I'm aware it brought that in and really explained it. This is how this really manifests. And I always thought that that was a very nice way of explaining it, that maybe it's just me. I just never got into the springs and masses and stuff like that was like, I need something a little bit more simple that explains it in a more robust way where I can really kind of understand it.

Lou (00:41:11):

And the result in equations are the same.

Jarrod (00:41:13):

The result in equations are the same. Yeah, it's all particle physics. And that's the thing is people have been smashing things for generations at this point on a small scale, and it just translates very nicely up to a larger scale involving vehicles. Now, it doesn't translate exactly all the time, but still once you kind of get that understanding, it gives you a lot more of an intuition about how vehicles interact when they're engaging with other vehicles. So

Lou (00:41:47):

Yeah, no, that's key. I've read multiple different explanations of it, and they all strike me a little bit differently and I kind of make Word doc and I'm like, okay, this is how Campbell's describing it. This is how Fricke's describing it. This is how Strubble ISS describing it, and I really like on the shelf behind me is the Strubble book, and it's a good book. It's a good book. The way that he goes through energy in translating that to closing speed delta V and things, he's including coefficient or restitution in there, in what I think is the appropriate manner. In a lot of places, it's not really accounted for properly and it doesn't make a huge difference. But if you're trying to be as accurate as possible

Jarrod (00:42:26):

And the coefficient or restitution is always a bugger, because especially if you get angled collisions where you're looking at a high degree of rotation post collision, the linear explanation of restitution falls through sometimes, and you've got to be very careful of that. I mean, I've had, one time I had, I was in deposition and it was a crash that involved a lot of rotation and the vehicles basically drove past each other, and the opposing expert did the linear assessment of coefficient restitution just based on approach speed and separation speed and the change in those two, one over the other. So if you have the separation speed over the approach speed, then you can compute the linear version of restitution. Well, when you have a high degree of rotation, and this was something that I spent a lot of time talking to Terry Day. Yeah, that's one of my first calls too when I'm trying to understand stuff like that or emails, emails, calls. But just to firm up my position on it was like, this doesn't seem right. And he was like, no, because there's too much rotation, restitution. If you compute it that way, you're going to miss out on the fact that the vehicles are actually engaging and rotating past each other.

(00:43:51):

And so those speeds that you're doing in the linear fashion, they don't give you the proper understanding of what's the restitution between the two vehicles. And if you get something like a negative restitution out of that, which is entirely possible, then you end up with a situation where it's like, well, obviously this simulation is wrong because it has a negative restitution. It's like, no, it's not wrong because it has a negative restitution. It's correct. It has a restitution built into the simulation that's there. But because you've got such a high degree of rotation through the impact and the vehicles are not translationally changing very, in fact, your separation velocity can end up looking negative because they pass by each other. It looks like they're passing through each other, and that's a bad thing. If it's a coline collision, that never happens, but when they rotate past each other, then it technically they're passing through each other in a way. And so you can get a negative restitution out of a situation like that. Now, your restitution is still baked in, but you have to be very circumspect about how you compute restitution after the fact. So if you just come in and take the translational velocities from pre and post impact, compute your separation speed and your approach speeds from that, and then do the ratio to get your restitution, you may get a negative number. And then it's like, well, that's not physically possible.

(00:45:23):

It's physically possible. You're just not looking at it correctly. I'm trying to approximate a bunch of different things with these simple tools for a very complex interaction. So it's an engineering judgment game. It's like, okay, well, I see this. I know how this really works fundamentally in physics, but the tools that I have really don't let me get there necessarily. Or maybe they don't give me an answer that's satisfactory or that looks correct, but in reality, I can tell you how this is all boiling out. I can explain it to a jury in a way that makes sense to them. And so it's just like with anything, going back to the getting in front of the jury part, part of it is just being able to approach it like you're teaching a class, I'm teaching this jury, they don't know anything about crash reconstruction, and I'm trying to, I'm not going to go through it soup to nuts with them, but I'm going to take out the parts that they really need to understand. I'm going to drive that home and say, look, you need to understand this. I want to make this clear that this is important, and then lay it out for 'em so that they completely understand why I did what I did, why it makes sense, why the other side's probably going to throw crap at it, but it's still, this is physically how this happens. And that's the tough part is trying to explain that.

Lou (00:46:53):

That's been one of my bigger changes I think in the evolution of my career is at the beginning I would go in with presentation, direct testimony and say, here was my investigation. Here are my interpretations of the evidence, here are my conclusions. And I'd say that 80% of the time that works. But I think you can fill in that 20% gap substantially by playing professor.

Speaker 3 (00:47:24):

Correct.

Lou (00:47:24):

And so there's going to be, I'd say, so this happened in my last trial, which was a motorcyclist hitting a pothole, and they needed to understand motorcycle dynamics to understand my analysis. Correct. Motorcycle dynamics is not easy to teach. So I was like,

Jarrod (00:47:43):

How can I, I'm surprised you can do it, but how dare you? That just means I'm underestimating your talents. You'd have to talk to the students to see if they can, you know what I'm saying? Everything I've seen says this is the best motorcycle crash reconstruction class in the world.

Lou (00:47:59):

Hey, their words, not mine. Hey, and I've worked really hard at that, and I've worked with, I got a lot of it from Tony Foale, who in my opinion don't

Jarrod (00:48:09):

Know that guy.

Lou (00:48:09):

He's a motorcycle chassis designer, experimenter engineer, and he wrote a book called, I think

Jarrod (00:48:19):

I remember you mentioning that in the class.

Lou (00:48:22):

Such a good book. So the reason I like his book so much is like that Vitori Casal motorcycle dynamics book right there, graduate level textbook. Generally beyond my capabilities. Too many equations with fancy characters. Oh yeah. Triple integrations, partial differential equations. But Tony does a good job of saying, here's how a motorcycle behaves. Here's the math, here's why. Here are experiments I've run very practical. So I take a lot of his material. I put it in the class. Then Damien Hardy, I'm sure you know that name,

Jarrod (00:48:55):

Don't know that

Lou (00:48:56):

Name. He's been around. He's like on INCR now, and again, I,

Jarrod (00:48:59):

I'm not as famous as you used, so I don't get around in the social circle circles of crash

Lou (00:49:03):

Reconstruction. Damian Harty, you'll see him post on LinkedIn, and if you don't follow him, do follow him. I will. You are going to enjoy his personality. He's in no nonsense, unbelievably intelligent guy who has spent, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of his career has been in vehicle and motorcycle dynamics. So I developed a motorcycle dynamic section for my motorcycle class, and then I just said, Hey, Damien, would you be willing, I'll pay you for your time to go through it. Tell me anything I've got wrong that I don't understand properly. And we just got on a call for hours, super generous with this time. Anyway, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants in that respect. Aren't

Jarrod (00:49:42):

We all? Yeah, aren't we all?

Lou (00:49:43):

So I spent a half an hour, maybe 20 minutes teaching the jury in that case what they needed to know about motorcycle dynamics to understand why this pothole would not disrupt the motorcycle hole, and it worked. We also did testing. That was one of those other cases where it's like the pothole is filled up as is often the case, but we recreated first step was photogrammetry. We had some photos of it, do some really detailed photogrammetry, figure out what the size of the pothole was, and then figure out what the depth was. Then we recreated it at exponents test facility in Phoenix, which is a great, to anybody in that community. I've done tons of tests there. Awesome. Good people. James Tobin is running it now as far as he's the lead point and the guy's awesome. Super helpful, makes anything happen. Recreated that road motorcycle through exemplar and then showed the videos to the jury and just said, now, motorcycle dynamics. Here's my testing. Now. These are my conclusions. Do you agree based on everything you just saw and know now, and I had one case where, and it's the same case I was talking about earlier where the jury was hung.

(00:51:03):

I approached it in my older school style, the new case. I approached it in the newer school style because I was like, I don't want them to have to believe me. If they believe me, great. I don't want them to have to, I want to teach them enough to be able to interpret the evidence and the testimony to come away with a conclusion themselves, and that's kind of my new MO and it works well. That's the clarity part.

Jarrod (00:51:26):

So in our motto, it's Veritas Fi Ditas, Claritas. There's no way you can convince somebody of the veracity of your analysis or anything along those lines unless you can clearly explain it to 'em.

(00:51:42):

If you can't explain it to 'em like they're your mom or a five-year-old. I teach classes to high schoolers. I go in and teach a section of physics on momentum analysis and a little bit of crash reconstruction in there. They love it, but part of it is because I'm doing my best to explain it at their level or try to estimate what their level is. And part of that, one of the things that I've tried to develop over the years, and I don't do this intentionally. Sometimes I've had opposing counsel say, looks like you've taken some courses in some acting classes or something like that, or how to influence people. It's like, no, I've never taken any class like that. I just know that when I look at those 12 people over there, or I look at that judge, they want to understand what I'm trying to explain them, and if I look at them and I see that they're like, I know I'm not doing my job correctly. God forbid you have somebody on the jury who's asleep, which has happened to me,

Lou (00:52:48):

You never know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I found out sometimes they're just like, I already made my decision. I'm already on your side. I don't need to listen. And then other times, you're hosed, but I know, but

Jarrod (00:52:57):

You can't tell me that. You're sitting there thinking, no, that's not good, man. I must suck because this person is asleep over there. I want 'em engaged. I want 'em engaged. I want them writing copious notes, look at them in the eye and try to see are they shaking their head? Are they making, they're screwing their face up like a German Shepherd who doesn't understand what the hell's going on. It's like, what are you doing? It's like then I'm like, okay, hold on a second. I need to backpedal a little bit. Okay, I need to explain this differently and then I'll change up my approach and try to approach it from a different direction. But all with the idea that ultimately my job when I'm on the witness stand is it's not to boost my own ego. My ego is not on the witness stand. My ability to convey information to this group of people over here or to the judge depending on how, if it's been trial versus a jury trial, things of that nature.

(00:53:57):

I'm trying to convince someone who doesn't know half of what I know, and that's not a dig on them. They just don't know half of what I know, and I'm trying to take what I know technically and break it down into little chunks, bite-sized pieces that they can digest easily and then follow it and then understand it. Like you said, it's like if you're trying to explain motorcycle dynamics based on that textbook over there, everybody in that jury is going to be like, ah, eyes roll back in their head. They got a glazed look. They may just fall asleep. Correct. But if you're trying to break it down into pieces that are things that people can understand from everyday life or just general experience, things like, oh, when you go around a curve, what's 0.2 Gs feel like? And you're on an on-ramp and you go around it at the recommended speed and you feel your butt kind of move in the seat a little bit roughly. Point two Gs a comfort level thing. And most people are like, oh yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. I do that all the time. Sometimes I scare myself because I'm going a little too fast and I feel butt slide and I'm like that kind of thing. My wife does that all the time. When I drive, she doesn't. When I try, I'm like, 0.2 Gs.

(00:55:17):

I want to feel it.

Lou (00:55:21):

I was in New Hampshire visiting family, and I watched F1 this summer and I got yelled at a couple times by my wife on the way home for on ramp shenanigans, but I have a pretty good

Jarrod (00:55:34):

Understanding. See, that's going to come in so handy for you. Now. You're just going to keep that on your desk and anytime shenanigans happens, you're just going to start sweeping.

Lou (00:55:40):

Yep. I love it. Way better than a few of the other accoutrements on my desk that have accumulated over the years, some profane and some simple like that. What was that red easy button that staples? Oh, the easy button. A hundred percent. Yeah. So yeah, an analogy, I love this quote. I can't remember who I heard it from. You might've heard it before. An analogy is an expert's best friend. Right? I love that. Simple. And then Einstein, I think said it, if you can't describe something simply, you don't understand it well enough

Jarrod (00:56:10):

That without question. And that's I think for experts to keep that quote in mind. I mean, even if you don't remember the quote, but just remember idea behind it. What's the thrust of that quote? The thrust of that quote is if you can't explain it to a five-year-old and make it make sense, you don't really understand it. I think Feynman, also, Richard Feynman famous physicist, he also said something to that effect very much as well. It's like, I can explain anything to anyone. I just need to know where they're coming from and how to break it down so that I, because I know it, I know it in my bones, I know it, and I can take what I know and say, okay, I know where this person is. I'm going to break it down into these chunks and then feed it to 'em piece by piece so they can properly digest it and understand it.

Lou (00:57:06):

Yeah. Fey's the best. I was smiling just because he's got so many quotes that are so phenomenal. He was so cheeky and smart, and him and Einstein are similar in a couple different ways. Both of them will claim that they're not very intelligent, that they just stuck with a problem for a very long time, and were curious, which I think is very valuable, especially to me as a parent. Not that my kids aren't smart. They are smart. Yeah. My kids are way

Jarrod (00:57:32):

Smarter than I ever. Me too. Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. It's going to be interesting. I look at my daughters and I'm like, damn, how did that come from me? I mean, I know I contributed genetic material to this process, but it doesn't. Something happened. There's some random mutation that came out of the ether somewhere. God was like, you get the smartest kids on the block.

Lou (00:57:54):

I don't know, man. I consider you one of the smartest people in this industry, so I think you're downplaying it, but yeah, the

Jarrod (00:58:03):

Concept though that I think I would buck back at that a little bit. I think in my engineering when I was doing engineering 3.77. By the way, it seems like you're smart. I would say I'm just too stupid to give up. That's

Lou (00:58:20):

What Feynman and Einstein would've said

Jarrod (00:58:21):

Though. That's the difference is that some of the guys that I went through with and I knew all the guys that were in the top 5% of my engineering class and we hung out together and they were like, oh, you must be super smart. And I'm like, dude, you don't know how hard I work to keep up with you guys. It's hard work, late nights, early mornings, all day, just constantly not going out on the weekends and these guys are like, I had this one guy in graduate school, I hated this kid, but

Lou (00:58:58):

I knew this kid from Calc one. He would not work at all and he'd be like, I got a 98 Lou. What'd you get? Oh man,

Jarrod (00:59:06):

That was the same thing we were, I'm trying to remember what was the name of the class? I can't remember. It was very it involved and it involved, what the heck was the name of it? It was so great that I obviously forgot it. But anyways, it was a very difficult graduate level mechanics class and involved tensors and tensor calculus and things of that nature and I struggled with that class so hard and there's this one kid, I really liked the kid. He was very, very personable, very nice. You could tell he was super cerebral, very, very smart guy. Never took notes, came in, took the test, aced it almost every single time and I was like, what are you doing? I mean, I don't see you taking any notes. You do the homework and it seems like you spend maybe an hour on it and then you ace the test and he's like, yeah, I don't even really prepare for the test. I just show up and take 'em. I was like, oh my

Lou (01:00:07):

Goodwill hunting style.

Jarrod (01:00:09):

Oh, I mean, yeah, exactly right. And that's just not that guy. I'm not that guy. I'm willing to admit that I'm stupid enough that in order for me to really get into something, I have to put in the time and the effort and that's just what it requires. Rub some dirt on it. You're going to get into it and if you're either going to know it or you're not going to know it and if you don't know it and you need to know it, you better just buckle down and do it.

Lou (01:00:37):

Yeah, I was the same way by the way kind of upper portion of my class and I had to work really hard at that. I was not, the rest of my friends were partying a lot. I was working a lot. So I guess that the word that I would use to describe you then I would say you're intelligent, but more importantly than that is the manifestation of your efforts. It's like you fully understand things and you're able to articulate them and that's a work, whether that's the result of hard work in curiosity or natural talent and speed, which I guess is how I define intelligence, is how quickly you can accumulate a skill or an understanding of something with you. For me that I'm generally slower, I'm a bit like a steamroller. Did you ever read Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig? No, you've talked about it before. It's a great book and he talks about the scientific process being a slow steamroller. It's just like chugging and it's super powerful and that's kind of how I consider myself. Not necessarily on the powerful side, but on the slow side. I am going to understand everything, but I'm going to attack it systematically from first principles and just steamroll it

(01:01:55):

Until I get it. Just don't be the

Jarrod (01:01:57):

Guy in Austin Powers who's standing in front of the steamroll. No, I love that, Steve. I think of that all the time.

Lou (01:02:03):

Get out of the wine. That's a great, I love that. So yeah, we were talking about, I can't even remember how we got on that, but I'm going to go all the way back to testimony because I read that quote or testimonial from your client because we are talking about courtroom tactics said that like a Canadian for a second courtroom tactics and I'm curious about a couple of different things. One can or can you teach somebody that? Two, how did you come into the courtroom based on that testimonial such a young age and already have that prowess? Is that baked in or is that something you learned from observation?

Jarrod (01:02:49):

I didn't learn it from observation to be honest with you. While I love my mentor, Dr. Haad, he taught me so much of what I know and helped me to develop an intuition and an understanding of crash reconstruction all those years ago, he was a testimony, a testimony giant based on all the people I've talked to that knew him and just his ability to walk into a courtroom in his cowboy boots and a western jacket and get up in front of the jury and explain things like it's down home barbecue basically. I never really got to see him testify and he never really gave me any advice about testimony or anything like that or told me this is how you got to do it. He kind of left it to you, you're either going to be able to do it or you're not going to be able to do it, is kind of the approach that I think he took with me and to a degree I think that there's some truth in that.

(01:03:51):

I was like, you're either going to be able to do it or you're not going to be able to do it, and there are some things that you can probably do to enhance your capabilities, but I think a lot of it is just do you have the natural ability? Do you have the natural self-deprecating ability to throw your ego off to the side and then get up in front of people without worry or fear and not picturing them in their underwear or something stupid like that, but just get up and explain something and do it in a way that's confident so that you're not, don't sound too cerebral, but at the same time you don't sound like Billy Bob in the backwoods or something like that. You've got to try to bring the two ends of that spectrum together and meet the jury where they are.

(01:04:43):

And I don't know that you can really teach that. I think that that's something that is taught. I think you can learn it by experience. I think you can learn it by just being in the hot seat and getting beat up and learning what works and what doesn't work, but at some point it's just like, do I have the ability? I would backtrack just a little bit. When I was at Washington State University to my undergrad, one of the things we had to take was a public speaking course. I hated it, hated I didn't want to do public speaking. I shouldn't say I hated it. I ended up loving it, but I didn't want to do it. I was like, this is stupid. I'm an engineer, why do I need to do public speaking? But I took it and I think that's what that one class gave me the confidence to know that I can get up in front of people and explain things and do it in a way that's kind of lighthearted but still educational and kind of bring 'em along for the ride.

(01:05:45):

Explain a story. I distinctly remember I did, my last project was to do a speech on the sis U train robbery in Oregon back in the, I think it was in the 18 hundreds. And I just got into this and understood the story of this train robbery and all the people that were involved and how it happened and all these kind of things. And then I just took the people along for a ride. It's like just tell 'em a story about what this is all about. Bring in a little levity but tell 'em some of the details. And I think that goes a long way, but I'm not sure, I'm not that everyone possesses that capability. Maybe I'm wrong, I'm willing to be wrong and I'm not sure you can really teach it. I think you just have to either learn it by the school of hard knocks or you just have to have it built into you in some way, shape or form.

Lou (01:06:41):

Yeah, I tend to agree and I'll say unfortunately because I think it is somewhat unfortunate it's out of the box or whatever your childhood experiences were that bring you to be able to handle that situation and there's so many nuances to those interactions in the courtroom to allow you to handle direct appropriately to handle cross-examination appropriately, to look at the jury and to understand what they're telling you with their body and why. I've never had somebody come in and teach me like, well, this is what it means when they cross their legs or their arms or whatever. It's like you've lived your life. You either have a good idea of what somebody's personal appearance and body motion means or body language I guess is the word, what that means or you don't, as we know, a lot of people with high technical aptitude very often are missing. They can't read the room

Jarrod (01:07:42):

That side of it. If you can't read the room, it is tough and I'm guilty. One of my biggest flaws is that I tend to read the room, but then I tend to push it a little too far and sometimes that can come across as offensive to some people. Just depends. So it, it's a little bit of a balancing game because for me, when I'm on the stand, one of the things I'm trying to do is I'm trying to, I want the jury to be comfortable with me and in order for them to be comfortable, they kind of got to know that you're a human. If you get up there and you're just this brain that's just monotonous you and crap at 'em and you hardly ever look over at 'em, you're always looking at counsel or whatever. It just leaves them with a feeling, I can't relate to this.

(01:08:39):

And it makes it more difficult for them to relate to the technical side of what you're trying to explain if they can't even relate to you. And I just really think that, like I said, I don't know that that's something that can be taught in any way, shape or form. I think you either have it or you don't, may be able to do some repetitions to build that muscle and get more fluid, more capable with it. But one of my things is I guess sometimes I'm just not afraid of looking stupid. That's important and I do it a lot.

Lou (01:09:24):

Yeah, I mean anytime you're learning something new, which I think is one of the most important meta skills to accident reconstruction in general, especially considering where you and I live in accident reconstruction, which is 2025.

Jarrod (01:09:37):

Correct.

Lou (01:09:38):

There is a constant stream of learning and if you're not capable of learning new things, looking stupid, asking stupid questions, taking classes, I remember when you took my motorcycle recon class, I always appreciate that about people who already are at such a high level and I was just like, Jarrod Carter's here, he could probably teach the class, but he's here to learn some stuff and I appreciate it. You got to put yourself into those positions. Eric Deyerl is another guy that stands out to me like that. He's front of the class taking notes no matter who's talking or what they're talking about, he's always learning and setting up for this. I was telling you this is very similar to setting up for testing like crash test

(01:10:27):

Because we have three cameras going. They all need constant power. They all need to be generating data and it needs to be being saved. And I probably put in eight to 10 hours to figure out what all these buttons do and how to make sure the data is on that hard drive every time and our voices sound good. What a pre fader is a post fader bypass. I didn't know any of that stuff. I had to spend 10 hours learning it. And if you don't enjoy that, if you're not willing to look stupid, if you're not, good luck being a recon nowadays.

Jarrod (01:10:59):

Oh yeah, no, that's a hundred percent the pace at which, well, I mean perfect example is Henry Vega, right? Yeah. He just basically dropped a whole new niche of reconstruction into everyone's laps. Yeah. That no one had ever really even thought about. I mean, kudos to the guy. I mean, he's a smart guy, he's very capable and he just found something that nobody else was really looking at and then tore it apart and put it back together again so the rest of us can figure out what the hell's actually going on. So great or at least make the attempt

(01:11:37):

And now we know, and I guess the point I'm trying to make is that things are changing so fast. Technology is advancing so quickly that it is truly hard to keep up and if you're unwilling to change or not even unwilling but just not motivated to change or to learn or to adapt, you're going to end up not going a hell of a lot anywhere. I mean that's the thing. I spend so much time trying to just keep up on what the heck is actually going on in recon. There's so many developments. You can't just take a class and get an ACTAR certification or an SAE certification in updates, recon updates 2025. Well, that'd be a cool class, but I mean that would be a cool class. We should probably put something like that on and just invite everyone who's doing new cool stuff to come in and just present it like Henry or others. But the general idea is if you're unwilling or unmotivated to advance and to learn new things and to look for new things and this business, good luck.

Lou (01:12:48):

Yeah, I feel like you could have probably done it in the eighties when it was primarily momentum and energy and pencil, paper, tape measure, roller wheel. You obviously still better be learning and holding your craft.

(01:13:01):

But it it's different now where we have EDR, HVEDR, video, video itself is an entire career, photogrammetry, data acquisition, which I want to talk to you somewhat about what cameras you should be using, what scan data, how to process that, scan data, how to actually use that scan data to generate useful information and

Jarrod (01:13:29):

Not just useful information but appealing, appealing information. It can't just be a point cloud and you look at it and it's like, what the hell am I even looking at? Especially when you zoom in on it. That's where my right hand man, Kyle, he's developed this capability. I mean I think it's just part of who he is, but he's developed this capability to take raw scan data and photographs and meld them together and make a vehicle model or a site model or whatever, just look super tight and appealing. That looks like that vehicle. I could virtually reinspect that vehicle right now and see a lot of detail me, not all the detail but a lot of the detail and feel comfortable presenting that to a jury and saying, look, this is what this vehicle looks like and I can zoom in on, I can show you all these different details and things and that's, you can't just line drawing anymore. No, people don't want that. They don't like it. They want it to be the CSI thing. They want it to be super sexy and have that sort of curb appeal. You walk up to me, I'm like, that looks pretty awesome. That's

Lou (01:14:52):

Fantastic. I was going to ask you about that, what some of your favorite exhibits are nowadays because I'd say I first learned that when I went to work with Dial and I would see him put in so much effort onto exhibit creation and relaying his results. The firm that I had come from before that didn't put nearly the same emphasis on that where it was just like, here's some photographs of what we did and here's what our findings are and here are the conclusions from those inspections and findings. When I went to Dial, I saw he would spend a lot of time putting everything into an exhibit that was then presented. And I've since taken that same approach and like you said, it's so important as a tool. Beautiful demonstratives that relay the point to the jury. So what are some of the favorite demonstratives you have in your toolkit?

Jarrod (01:15:55):

It's changing all the time because technology and capabilities are changing all the time. But I mean from my perspective, so one of the key things that I use as demonstrative is just my inspection photographs and the scene photographs, but I make sure they're marked up and I'm pointing things out and I'm leaving notations and identifying this is this and this is that, and sequencing them in a way that you can kind of follow through and see what I've done, particularly with scene photos when you're going through crash scene photos, it's part of my workup to go through the crash scene photos and mark out and identify evidence and sequence the photos in a way that you can because so often we get scene photos and I get it, police officers are trying to manage a complex chaotic situation and also do their job and document things, but so they're not always, the photographs that they capture are not always captured in a really sequence that makes sense.

(01:16:58):

So

(01:16:59):

A lot of time I spend a lot of time going through the scene photos and blowing 'em up and looking at everything and then marking out pieces of evidence and identifying this is this and this is that, and sequencing. So sequencing them so they make sense to me, but they would also make sense to someone else. And that's a huge exhibit and I think that goes a long way to helping someone understand how you looked at the evidence and how you teased it apart and put it back together again. As far as demonstratives outside of that, I mean 3D demonstratives are the king at this point and nice looking. 3D demonstratives of a crash site. The evidence laid out vehicles in my office, we call 'em crash reconstruction diagrams, but they're really 3D models of the entire environment that we've captured, plus vehicles are in there measurements and just go through and create three dimensional or create diagrams from that three dimensional model where I can show people exactly how the crash occurred, what the sequence was.

(01:18:07):

I can lay out measurements and show this is how much rotation we're talking about, this is the distance between these positions, this is where the impact took place. This is where the vehicles came to rest and lay it out in a way that makes good sense and that is visually appealing. And so the people can look at it and go, I understand that I don't know anything about crash reconstruction, but that I understand in diagram and it looks like the crash site. We can do that now. When I first started, I used to run blueprints, so I would draw on velum on a drafting table with the square and the whole nine yards and I would draw out the crash diagram and lay everything out and try to make it look as nice as possible and then run it through a blueprint machine to get the final product. And we've come so far since then, like I said, you can't get away with line drawings anymore.

Lou (01:19:05):

Get the drone imagery. Oh

Jarrod (01:19:06):

Man,

Lou (01:19:07):

Throw it on there and then overlay the evidence exactly where it

Jarrod (01:19:11):

Was. And then especially if you can now you're starting to see more and more law enforcement agencies operating drones, which I really appreciate because it really helps you to get another perspective on the evidence that wouldn't, a lot of times you can't get from ground level photos, especially because again, no digs on law enforcement guys. They've got a tough job and I really appreciate the work that they do, but they're not photography experts. They are oftentimes really kind of thrown into a crash investigation with not a lot of training on how to do exactly what they need to do. Some that have been in it for a while really know how to really bring tools to the table to get things done, but a lot of times it's just like I got my iPhone and I'm just snapping pictures and there's a lot of things that can get lost in the documentation based on lighting or shadows or things of that nature.

(01:20:13):

They're just trying to clear the scene. They're just trying to get this buttoned up and get traffic moving again and collect as much information as they possibly can. But now with the advent of drones, especially if it's a significant crash with significant injuries or fatality, they break out a drone and then you get a whole nother perspective that is not as much influenced. Well, from what I've seen, it's not as much influenced by some of the real problems that you have. Taking imagery at the ground level. You get shadows or you get reflections or you get sunlight reflecting off the roadway. You can't see anything on that road and the police officers don't know that. Well, if I put a circular polarizer on my camera, I can dial that glare out and then I can see what's there, but they're just like, I can see it and they take a photo, nothing shows and you can't see anything or you can kind of see it. It's like if I squint and if I kind of turn my head sideways, I can kind of see it in there. But those kind of things, now you've got drone imagery and it's not really, if it's done correctly, if it's done well, it's not as much influenced by those factors from those factors that influence your photography from the ground level. And let's just say it like it is, photos at a scene are key evidence. Those photos tell everything. If I get a case and I've got a crash report and no photos, I'm like,

(01:21:50):

What am I supposed to do with this?

(01:21:53):

Or one, I've got one right now. I got one photo from the scene. That's it. And it wasn't even taken by the officer, it was taken by somebody's wife and it wasn't even a photo, it was a screenshot from her phone of the photo. It's like, oh my. Okay, well that tells me something, but it doesn't tell me all the things that I want to know. But now with drones and when they fly 'em over and you get just this beautiful perspective on, oh, I can see where all the evidence is now, and now I can take that, I can properly control it, I can merge it in with my own site mapping and I can lay out all the evidence and I can point to it and show where everything is, and it just makes it amazing.

Lou (01:22:38):

Yeah, actually I just did that on a case. I guess it's still active now, but the police didn't take many photographs, but a couple of them were drone images

(01:22:46):

And the resolution is high enough that that was enough for me to see the tire marks and gouge marks and motorcycle final arrests, the vehicle's final arrest. I went out there, flew my own drone, shot off my own laser scans, brought it all into virtual crash, and then I can lay out the drone image from the police and I can correct the perspective and the scale. Throw it right on there. You get instant feedback that you have everything set up appropriately because all the lane lines and everything fit. Now you've got your evidence right on top of your diagram, which is tuned. Then you can start tracing it and showing clients, and you can take measurements exactly what happened, and then show that to a jury. You just put it into a PowerPoint, slap up that other image from the police and have it fade over of a two second transition and they're like, here's where everything is. Oh wow. So not all the demonstratives have to be super technical, although very often, I guess some of mine are, but something as simple as just an image fading on top of another, the police drone image and you're like, oh man, I get it. Okay. That's where everything was. We believe this guy, how can you not show it to him?

Jarrod (01:23:54):

And I give my team grief on a lot of these things because I'm super focused on details. My wife is like, you pay so much attention to details when you're at the office, but you come home and you can't even take your underwear off for three days. What the heck is going on? What's wrong with you? I'm like, I just only have so much mental bandwidth, so when I come home, this is my safe place. This is where I can just relax and I can turn everything off. When I'm in the office, I'm like, I got to be dialed in. My clients are expecting me to be dialed in, my team's expecting me to be dialed in, and I need to go through and really focus on those details that I know a lot of people probably won't focus on. I'm trying to focus on it, so I'll harass my team all the time. I need this to be this way. I understand what you're trying to do here, but it needs to be this way in order for it for me to use it and use it to convey information to people. And it's just that attention to this has to be a certain way and for me to feel comfortable with it.

Lou (01:25:07):

So let's talk about that building your team, because I was looking back actually on messages between you and me, I was trying to figure out when we met. I think it was 2016. Sounds about right. And I remember I hopped up after somebody's presentation and gave them some shit. Oh,

Jarrod (01:25:24):

Can we say bad words? Sure, yeah. This, I've been trying to mind my P's and Q's over here, but no, if we're going to start throwing bombs, then

Lou (01:25:35):

Dude, let it rip. So somebody was saying some stupid stuff. It was a perception response paper and they weren't starting the clock at the same time, remember as somebody else. And they were talking about how the times were all different. I was like, well, if you're not starting the clock at the same time anyway, I don't think we had met before that and afterwards we went to You're

Jarrod (01:25:56):

Putting on your Jeff Muttart hat.

Lou (01:25:58):

I was, yeah, I I've loved that guy. I mean, me too, dude. If you're not starting the clock at the same time between studies, then you're not comparing the same thing. And if the numbers are different, then of course they're different. And we went to, what was that? What's the bar that we go to after the pizza place in Detroit? Oh, it doesn't exist

Jarrod (01:26:18):

Anymore, but pizza, Paolo's Pizza where we used to go down in Greektown. Yeah, we found a new place. Now go back.

Lou (01:26:24):

So if you ever decide to come back to SAE one of these days, I have six papers in the hopper, but I was looking at your CV and I could tell you're in a very similar situation to me, which is you're so busy doing other stuff that you haven't really published that much over the past five or 10 years. I've got a ton of ideas,

Jarrod (01:26:41):

Much ideas, things that I'd like to talk to you about as well. But the general idea is right now it's just I got to tune the caseload down a little bit and give myself some breathing room. And part of it is also that I tell people this all the time. They're like, why don't you publish that much? So I'm busy shepherding all your crap into

Lou (01:27:02):

SAE. No, that's a ton of work. And sometimes when you reach out or Ed reaches out and Can you review this paper? I'm like, am I doing myself a disservice by saying yes to this while not writing papers that I have in the hopper? I say that every year and I've been doing it for 10

Jarrod (01:27:18):

Years almost now.

Lou (01:27:19):

So we went to the bar afterwards and we had just met and you were like, I like you, you're snarky. And I was like, I think I am snarky. And I looked up the definition last night, number one, crotchety snappish. Definitely some truth to that. Yep. Two sarcastic impertinent or irreverent in tone or manner.

Jarrod (01:27:42):

The ladder is the ladder is what we are going for. I don't tend to snap, but I do occasionally, but I tend to be sarcastic and irreverent at times. I think it's just necessary. Too many people in this business take themselves way too seriously.

Lou (01:27:57):

That's really important. Sam is in that office over there right now and she's who I spend the vast majority of my time with on the day to day. And we joke around all the time because if we're not having a good time doing something that is so serious, we're dealing with catastrophic injury cases exclusively. So if you don't have a little bit of levity in your day-to-day, then you're going to be

Jarrod (01:28:23):

In some trouble That's mandatory at my office. You won't survive in my office if you can't have a sense of humor and be a little sort of sarcastic or flip or irreverent from time to time. That way by nature, that's just my default mode. Obviously there are times and places to do that. You kind of judge by the situation, but in my office, like you said, we're dealing with things that are tragic and if you let yourself get bogged down in that, you'll lose yourself in the sadness and the tragedy. And so the best way to break that up is to just have a little lightheartedness, go out to lunch with the team every so often so you get to celebrate and enjoy just being together as a group and not be, this business is so damn stressful. It really is. And that's my first bomb, and it wasn't even a very big one

Lou (01:29:27):

Was that, damn, I didn't even catch it.

Jarrod (01:29:28):

Damn. Okay. Yeah, this business is so damn stressful, right? It is.

(01:29:34):

You just lose yourself in the stress unless you can find a way to bleed it off in some way, shape or form. You got to let the steam out every so often or you're going to blow the boiler. So it's a requirement at my office, and it's funny because Kyle, my right hand guy, he came in and very quiet, very reserved, didn't talk very much. It's funny because over time he started to kind of loosen up. He's got a tremendous sense of humor. He's just so off the cuff and funny. But I think he just had, he had to get comfortable with the idea that we could do that around here. I don't think he'd ever experienced that anywhere else where it was like, we can have fun here. I know this is work. I know it kind of sucks at times and he's been on some miserable inspections with me and I've rode him hard through a lot of those, but at the same time it's like, we need to try to get some joy out of this or we're going to,

Lou (01:30:39):

You'll burn out before the serious work. Tim Ferriss has repeats this quote a lot or made this quote, but it's something to the effect of if you take yourself too seriously, you're going to burn out before the serious work ever gets done. Correct. And it's like, that is very true. You need to have a little fun. Greg McKeown is another guy I love. He wrote the book Essentialism

(01:31:04):

And he has a whole chapter in there about play and how important that is during the day at our old office, which is, you could probably see part of it from your spot. We just moved over here a year and a half ago, but when we had a growing forensic firm and we were intentionally trying to grow a consulting business, we had the center of our office was a giant ping pong table and we would go in there and just there was yelling and screaming and we were really trying to beat each other, having a great time, 15, 20 minutes in between major projects and that helped a ton. And I want to talk to you about your team. Let's take a quick break, bathroom break

(01:31:46):

And then get back. I want to talk to you about your team and then we haven't really gone over almost any of my questions, which is totally fine. So I'm just going to cherry pick some and we'll go for a little more time. Alright.

(01:31:57):

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(01:33:05):

wanted to talk to you about your team because Yeah, so I was looking back through some of our LinkedIn messages 2016 and some of my first questions to you. Well, it must not have been 2016, but I started Axiom in 2018. Some of my earlier questions, lemme say it that way, not my first questions were about developing a team, hiring people, which proved to be for sure the most difficult part. I had so much work, I could have grown Axiom to a much larger level if I could have found sufficient. It wasn't even help. I found good help. It was other experts to stand by my side because as you said, you can't have four associates for other engineers helping one engineer unless that engineer is testifying or writing reports a hundred percent of the time.

(01:33:58):

You end up bringing in a ton of cases to keep your associates busy and then you are crazy busy. You don't see your wife, you don't see your children, and you're just taking the downstream process of what they're doing. So I wanted to find experts to come and help out and join me and I spent a ton of money on recruiters and stuff and I gave it a full college try and then I was like, this isn't working. I'm going to start whittling back the other way to the point where I was essentially a one man shop with 1099 consultants around the country that would help me out with some stuff and I enjoyed that thoroughly obviously while working on Lightpoint, which has become my primary focus. And now I'm with the JS Forensics guy, including Henry Vega, Jeff Suway, and Eric Hunter.

Jarrod (01:34:48):

And all that. Yeah, that kind of pissed me off a little bit, but that's okay. Hey man, you're welcome to come. The water's warm. I know, but you got to remember, I tried get you to come work with me at one time and you turned me down. You stiff armed me like the Heisman Trophy.

Lou (01:35:03):

That's not true. I said, let's meet up.

Jarrod (01:35:06):

Are you sure?

Lou (01:35:07):

On the record, the

(01:35:09):

Tape? I'll have to check the tape. Yeah, and it's been an evolution. My whole philosophy on what I want my consulting career to look like has kind of ebbed and flowed where I was at the beginning. I was like, we're going to be the next exponent. We're going to have 20 engineers in here that are all the best at what they do. Then it went down to I just want to be a single dude running my own ship, and now it is. I really just want to be a part of a team and have a smaller role with respect to the company and have good support and everything still and be focusing on Lightpoint. So that's ebbed and flowed. But I remember asking you questions about hiring a team and building a team, and one of the things that struck me as very interesting is your path from, and you shared this with me, is at one point you were close to tapping out. You're like, this is not working for me. The way that I've set my business up is no good. I'm not enjoying it. I don't remember exactly for what reasons, to the point where you have an awesome team working with you, you won most innovative company of the year, and it seems like you made this huge evolution, this very deliberate intentional evolution and ended up building a good company. So what was that process like and what were the tough times and what are the good times?

Jarrod (01:36:44):

Well, I don't know how I to say it without sounding maybe overly religious, but I look at it as there's definitely some time spent on my knees and a good deal of time just thinking and praying and just asking for guidance. Because yeah, there was a time where I was like, you know what? I just can't do this anymore. I mean, burnout was so close that I could smell. I could smell the smoke. It was that close. And so you just spend a lot of time being very introspective. For me, it was just praying a lot and just trying to get into my soul and what do I really want to do with my life? Where do I really want to go? How is this going to work out and not have me ending up in a rubber room with a self hugging vest? I'm not interested in that. I'm not interested in that. I don't want to do that. My family doesn't want to see that. My wife, she was stressed out for me. She could see

(01:37:55):

My daughters, thankfully, God bless 'em, they were isolated from it quite a bit. But children are great because they can sense, they have a sort of innate intuition of being able to sense their parents' stress and their parents' fear even if you don't want 'em to, they kind of know they can feel it in the air kind of thing. And I could start to see that that was affecting them. It was definitely affecting me. It was affecting my bride. That was very difficult for me. And part of it was because I was like, I got to grow. Like you said, I got to make this big thing and I just don't know why I'm so dumb and I can't do this business and I don't know how to make this grow, how to do all these things that will grow a business. And at one point I just realized this business, you can't. I know there are people out there who would disagree with me and I'm fine with that. I don't really care. But I don't think you can grow a consulting business inorganically. I don't think you can do it inorganically. I don't think you can fertilize it. I don't think you can force it. It's not a mechanism. You can't just turn a crank and just spit out a business in consulting if you're an expert, if you're trying to be a forensic expert or any other kind of expert, I just don't know that you can turn a crank and manufacture business.

Lou (01:39:36):

I wasn't able to. I mean the business came. It's a business. That was the hard

Jarrod (01:39:41):

Part. And I think we're seeing that a lot in the current milieu of forensics crash reconstruction generally, but also just expert witnessing more broadly speaking. There's huge companies out there and kudos to 'em. I mean, they're making tons of cash I'm sure, and there's a lot of venture capital and private equity that's come in a lot of consolidations, mergers. I've been approached by companies to dive into this and I think I just fundamentally disagree with the philosophy and the ethos of trying to manufacture a consulting firm or to try to, if I just infuse enough capital, if I just infuse enough capital and force enough people into it that I can create expertise. I just fundamentally don't agree with that approach. And it took me a long time. I see all these other outfits and they're these huge 900 pound gorillas and they're making so much money and it's just crazy.

(01:40:47):

But then I look at the downstream effects of that, and we are not going to say name or anything like that, but I look at the downstream effects of the people that go through that. I would classify it as a mill. Basically they're brought in young, fresh, willing to work, talented, capable, and then they just get run through the meat grinder. And I don't think that's a sustainable business model, not like I'm not the entrepreneur of the year or the best business man of the year or anything like that, but I think when it comes to this business, I've been doing it for 30 years and I kind of have a sense for what works and what doesn't work, and I think just even, I kind of gave you a ration about joining up with Jeff Sue, but I think that's the way it has to happen.

(01:41:43):

It has to be organic. It has to be people that are like-minded to you that are competent and capable and that you take the time and put the thought into bringing people in and then not grooming them, but growing them into a position and into their own capability. On my team, James is my video guy, and part of the reason why he's the video guy is he just has this, and I don't know where it comes from exactly, but if I give him a video and say, analyze this video, he puts everything else aside because he wants to look at that video. That's his thing, right? Kyle is like, we're going to go scan or we're going to go take this car apart and look at these parts or whatever. He just loves to get into the details with cars and with scan data and photogrammetry and all that kind of stuff. That's just what turns his crank does really do it for me. I mean, I can do it, but it's not like something that really jazzes me up. And so it's been identifying in them what really gets them going where I see their expertise, their niche, and trying to foster that and grow that organically because again, my philosophy is I don't know that you can inorganically just stimulate that. You can just throw seeds down or apply fertilizer and then it just spontaneously erupts, especially if it's a technical discipline like ours is.

Lou (01:43:25):

Getting back to what we were talking about earlier, I'm just going to drop this in there and let you get back on it, but I meant to mention this earlier, is the amount of time that it takes to go from college graduate to capable expert is in my opinion, something to the effect of 10 years. So that is a natural. Now is that true for graphic design or something like that? Probably not. There's a lot of intricacies to this industry that take a very long time to understand, and that is a natural impediment to quickly growing a consulting firm. The other alternative is to just hire a 20 year veteran. Then you have cultural issues and things, so it can be issue, it can be tough, especially if they're trying to

Jarrod (01:44:10):

Deal with me. That was why the arm's length, by the way, buddy. I know. I'm just a giant ass pain, so just get over it. You're either going to deal with it or you're not. Rub some dirt on it, boy. Yeah, but I think it is the same. It's just like anything. One of the things we're dealing with as a country now is just dealing with a lack of people that are really skilled in trades like welding or plumbing or manufacturing of various kinds, and part of that is once you get a certification, you've been certified as a welder or a plumber or what have you. We all know that those people don't immediately walk in and start welding anything of any importance. They're not putting up a bridge. Exactly. They're being tutored and mentored underneath someone who really knows their stuff in terms of welding or what have you in terms of the trades.

(01:45:17):

And we have this mentality in the forensics world. I don't know where it came from exactly. It wasn't like this when I first started out. When I first started out, it's like the experts were the experts. They knew their stuff and they had the bumps and the bruises and the lacerations to go along with the hard yards that they laid in to get to that stage. So they knew what they knew and they knew it really well. Getting that download from them in a lot of ways was great for me when I was young, but we've gotten to this stage now where we can just bring in people, and when I say this, I mean young people that are fresh out of college and we can just turn a crank and then make 'em an expert. And I still think that that's, I'm not convinced that's feasible.

(01:46:13):

Maybe somebody at one of these larger companies can school me on what I'm missing in terms of the business model and things of that nature. But what I see is that they get brought in, they get thrown immediately into something and it's like sink or swim. You've got to figure this out. If you're going to work for me, and I'm not saying me as in Jarrod Carter, I'm just saying me as the expert who's growing that business, the rainmaker, effectively, if you're going to work for me, you're going to figure this out because I'm too busy to put the time or the effort into making sure that you grow. You see what

Lou (01:46:50):

I'm saying? That was another big impediment for me. My kids were really young when I was trying to grow Axiom, and I realized that the amount of effort that it would require at the office to develop the younger guys into what they needed from me in what I needed them to be if we were to be a cohesive group, required so much kind of non-billable. Oh yeah, the non-billable stuff is, I don't know what the right word is, but nurturing, right? It's like nurturing. And I realized that I barely had enough energy to be as nurturing as I need to be at home, and therefore this could not continue professionally. I need to focus that effort. That was

Jarrod (01:47:35):

What broke me at home. That was what broke me was literally I was almost ready to just throw in the towel and say, I'm done with this crap,

Lou (01:47:44):

So I'll find something else to do. How'd you make that switch or what changes did you make that allowed you to be thriving again?

Jarrod (01:47:55):

I think a big part of it was just deciding that I didn't need to do everything myself

(01:48:03):

And my wife will tell you that I spent a lot of time just agonizing so early in our discussion. I said, I want to oversee all the things, but part of that early on was not only do I want to oversee all the things, I want to do, all the things, it was sort of, I got over the hurdle of fear, of missing out the FOMO issue. It's like the fear of missing out. If I don't do this then I can't, can't really claim it in my reports. I can't really claim it in my analysis. I have to be able to do everything. I can't let anybody else do it. And so what ended up happening was I would take everything and I would just bury myself in it. I would let people do stuff, but I was stupidly overseeing everything, meaning I was just like, that's wrong. That's wrong. You got to do this. You got to do that. You got to. And what I learned I think was that, like you said, I need to nurture these people to be able to do the things that I need them to do to help me out.

(01:49:19):

I need them to grow in order for me to grow, and I need to let some of the things that I'm trying to hold on because I'm the expert, I got to be the expert in everything that's not just untenable. You can't be the expert at everything. And frankly, now I've come to the position where I don't want to be the expert at everything. There's core aspects of who I am and what I do where I feel like I've got the requisite expertise and I've developed a good level of expertise. And there are some things where it's just like, it just doesn't turn my crank doesn't float my boat. I'm not interested in it. I need it, but I'm not going to devote the time or the effort to that necessarily. I can grow someone and nurture them into that area and help them to help me. And that's the kind of thing where that just takes time, deliberate time, effort. You can't just, like I said, you just can't stamp out a new expert

Lou (01:50:24):

And they have to be. I remember the first time I met James, it was at an HVE forum in Austin.

Jarrod (01:50:35):

I remember that now because you know what he did in that he left early to go to the racetrack. Yes, I remember he was the racer. Yes. So that was the first, he still is,

Lou (01:50:45):

I'm

Jarrod (01:50:45):

Sponsoring his race

Lou (01:50:46):

Team. I saw that. First of all, his excitement was very palpable right out of the gate. He was so pumped to be working for you. And then second of all, I remember him telling me, this is 2020 14, maybe 15,

(01:51:00):

So 10 plus years ago, and he was telling me about his boss, Jarrod Carter, who I hadn't known about at that point. I had just moved to the west coast. I was at a firm that was more confined. We didn't have a wide perspective and know the whole community. And he was telling me about his boss who just bought these $10,000 inter cooled computers. And I was like, who the fuck is this guy? I was like, I had just, anyway, it was impressive. But his passion and his excitement, he was so pumped to be working for you. And when you combine that with his interest level, his willingness to learn, Kyle I've met in Tempe at the photogrammetry class, he's the same way, is super valuable. It is totally necessary If you're nurturing somebody who's like, nah, I don't really care. Dead eyes,

Jarrod (01:51:58):

I've been through that

Lou (01:51:59):

As useless. I've had a couple people that have been great to mentor and it's like, it's a pleasure when you're doing

Jarrod (01:52:07):

It.

Lou (01:52:08):

Then I've had people that are not, and then it's miserable, but so you found the right people, and that's got to be the hardest part is finding somebody who's excited you want to actually interact with because you're going to have to be interacting with them so much. They're going to be over your shoulder running a sim. Yeah, they're going to be over your shoulder when you're doing photogrammetry. You can show 'em how it works, video. You're going to spend a lot of time with that person.

Jarrod (01:52:35):

And there's, like I said, I think it has to be organic, and I don't mean that to say that you can't do certain things to try to in the more traditional business type sense bring people in, but anymore, I just don't. We have an intern this summer, and so I bring interns in every summer because pretty much every summer I get interest from a high school kid who I've taught their physics class and taught 'em about reconstruction to a certain degree, and they kind of get jazzed about that. They come and spend the summer with us and kind of get a feel for what we do. I've tried to encourage 'em to stay on, but you can kind of get a sense pretty quickly if it really intrigues them or if they're really interested in completely something else. Most of the people that have done that, they're really not interested in the forensics world.

(01:53:29):

What they're really more interested in is the more traditional engineering world where it's designing products and widgets and things like that, more power to 'em. But we have an intern this summer, Brendan, and he came in and he was actually a friend of a previous intern and previous intern said, you really like cars and you really like designing things and looking at all these different aspects of automobiles and snowmobiles and motorcycles. And he said, you should go work for these guys for a summer and just kind of get a feel for it. And he's been fantastic. Just

(01:54:09):

Super catches on really fast, wants to work hard. I took him on inspections. He's crawling under over in everything and just wanting to absorb as much as he can. And that's what you're looking for. That's a future expert. That's someone who's like, they're jazzed about it. And I think if you just bring in any Tom, Dick or Harry from an engineering school and sure, it looks like a great job, probably pays pretty well, but do they really have the passion for it? Do they really have the excitement about it? Do they really want to get dirty and filthy and bloody and sweaty doing the work

(01:54:56):

Or really getting into the nuts and bolts of how you really do the analysis and really trying to understand all of the details and make sure that they've got the i's dotted and the T's crossed. And if it's just a job, it's just a job. But if it's something that you're really jazzed about and that you wake up in the morning, you're super excited, then that's the person you want. You want that person because that's a future expert. That's someone who will do the hard work to make themselves the expert at whatever it happens to be, whether it's crash reconstruction or anything else.

Lou (01:55:36):

Yeah, I remember when I was hiring younger guys to be associates, I always was a little bit concerned about hiring somebody who was an engineer and who had interest in forensics versus somebody who'd worked in forensics

(01:55:52):

Was looking to go someplace else, like the person who's worked in forensics and is now just looking for a change in geolocation or the company or whatever it is. I know you're interested in this, whereas somebody who has not been exposed to forensics thinks they know the industry, thinks they're going to be interested in it, and then three months in often you'd be like, yeah, they'd be like, this is not for me. And I'm like, okay, yeah, no, it's not. But that hurt because I just spent so much time getting you trained up. So hiring is obviously a huge challenge.

Jarrod (01:56:23):

Yeah, it is. There's no question about it. I just was watching the podcast, Sean Ryan's podcast, and I mentioned this to you, Blake Shoal, who's the CEO of Boom Supersonic, which is trying to develop a jet airliner, and he talks in there a fair bit about developing the team. And I found it so interesting because he said, we did our first test flights with a team of 50, and then the company grew up to, I think he said something like a hundred to 200 people, and he said the worst thing I ever had to do was cut the team in half. He's like, because there's just too many and we don't need all these people to do this. And so they started deliberately asking questions about, do we need somebody to do this or can other people do this? And sort of Elon Musk's idea of the best part is no part, it's you can remove stuff,

(01:57:23):

And so he's starting to look at his team and saying, yeah, we probably just got way too many people. And then you run into issues of the size of the team and the culture and how do you maintain a cohesive unit, and that's tough. It's really tough and the hiring part is very difficult because are they looking for a job or are they really interested in what you're offering them? And in this space, I don't think you can bring someone in. I think you can probably bring someone in and expose them to it and then it'll ignite their passion and you'll be able to tell that right away. But I think it's harder to bring people in and you can tell right away that it's just a job for them. They're not really interested. They're just going through the motions.

Lou (01:58:19):

That's not going to work just because the level of attention to detail that's required in all of the foundational tasks that can compile a reconstruction require a little bit of excitement, enthusiasm, passion, snuff to smell everything out. If you're just going through the paces and listening to a while, you're doing some of your work, you're going to miss something that's going to crush your boss,

Jarrod (01:58:47):

And then you'll find your boss bloody and mutilated and you're, what happened to you? It's like, well, you ruined it. Yeah,

Lou (01:58:56):

You broke it. Oh man. I was thinking about that too. Talking about bringing experts in too early. There's a couple of different things I wanted to mention there. One, the level of cases that you're working are substantially different than hopefully some of these younger experts are being exposed to. Hopefully they're doing, I don't know, anyway, not products, liability. And then two, if you do expose an engineer a recon too early to the process, to a high level case, it doesn't even have to be a high level case, a case where there's a good attorney on the other side or they didn't know enough about the case, they didn't know if enough about recon in general, and they get bloodied. I feel like every one of those is an opportunity for them to potentially give up because it can be very damaging. If you walk into a depot and you're only two years into your career and you get crushed, you might just be like, I'm out. I'm going to sell car tires. This is crazy psychologically. So you have to be careful.

Jarrod (01:59:57):

That it be extraordinarily detrimental,

(01:59:59):

And that's why, again, I just keep coming back to this and I understand the business model. I understand the concept of big firm, lots of staff, and you've got your certain rainmakers that are bringing in the juice to keep everything moving, and you're trying to provide them with a team under them that can do the things that they need, do the things that the expert requires to do their job. But what I've seen is that exactly what you were just talking about is it's forcing them into that, just jamming them from behind and shoving them into the pipeline, and I mean, that's the quickest way to burn out or to just throwing your hands up and saying, I'm done with this. Too much stress. I'm not getting paid enough. I'm being treated like I'm somebody's slave. Then you just see people just bail out. Sometimes it's like they really like the work, but they just don't want to work where they're working. They want to go somewhere else and start their own thing or go work with someone that they feel more confident that they'll actually get that nurturing, that they'll go through the process a little bit more deliberately with a lot more effort put in by the person who's overseeing them and guiding them through the process.

Lou (02:01:31):

Yeah, I got super lucky in the people that I ended up working with. My first job was at this company called SD Lyons in Massachusetts, Chris Bre and Dennis Lyons, and they're just awesome, and they were willing to watch me suck for six years and help me get better, and I got super lucky, and then I went to Eric to work with Eric Deyerl, and he's extremely talented and it was totally willing to help me up my game, and I've had a lot of people luck of who? Luck. I don't know who calls it that, maybe Seth Godin or somebody famous, but who luck. I've had a lot of that. I've seen the alternative in some of our colleagues where they're working at a place where it's just either they're not being mentored enough or they are being mentored and it's not in a good way.

(02:02:21):

You know what I'm saying? They're being shown that it's your job to advocate for your clients or something to that effect. Oh yeah. I was fortunate that everybody I worked with is, I remember one of my first, I'm not going to say who, but one of my first bosses awesome. He was just like on my side, not the clients a hundred percent of the time. That was his default. And he is like, I don't care if you piss off the client, if you said something that you believe, I don't care how the client takes it, and I'm like, so cool, but how many people are actually have that mentality? And you don't know that before you take the job. You just don't.

(02:03:00):

So there's a lot of luck to that.

(02:03:03):

Okay, so now you've got, you're in this tougher situation. Then you nurture the people, you find the right people, you're surrounding yourself with the right people. You are titrating the amount of cases that are coming in so that you're not brain dead at the end of every day, and you've got yourself into this good rhythm, and then you've got kind of the intern system to hopefully find some more organic and just, you're very involved in the community, I imagine. Try to be SAE and everything helps with that and kind of keeping an organic eye out, and are you happy with where you are? Do you want to grow more? What's the plan for Origin Forensics?

Jarrod (02:03:44):

I want to grow more but grow less, if that makes any sense. Not yet. It doesn't make any sense, but let me explain. So the general idea is I want the company to grow and flourish. I want the employees to be happy, well taken care of, and I try to take the best care of my employees as I can. I mean, obviously this is capitalism. I'm trying to make money at the same time, I want something for myself. At the end of the day, I don't know that my wife says I'll never retire. She's probably right. But I want to be able to sustain my family, sustain the business, have a few nice things. I don't need much, so I want the business to grow and to flourish, but at the same time, I'm leaning into the idea that part of that is, and you mentioned it earlier, is being more selective about the cases that I take, that they're good cases with people I want to work with that trust me, that believe that I have the capabilities and the talents to do the job and are willing to back me up and willing to get me the resources that I need to do the job for them.

(02:04:58):

That is the best possible job. Yeah, that's huge. As opposed to just taking every Tom, Dick and Harry that comes through the door. I try to take more cases locally because I think that gives us an opportunity because quite frankly, a lot of our more local cases are from local attorneys. They're not particularly high dollar, high value cases. They don't require the extreme level of effort and attention to detail that a national products liability case requires. And so I can use those to help nurture the rest of my team. I can use those. I can funnel those to James or to Kyle and say, I want you to work this up and I'll be with you the whole way. I'm going to show you how to do it. I'm going to help you write your report, make sure you've got a solid analysis, help you navigate the deposition framework and navigate through trial and all those kinds of things, and be here when you screw up, because inevitably you're going to screw up and you're going to need somebody in your corner to help back you up. After that, you're probably going to be second guessing yourself. You're going to be wondering, what did I do wrong? Maybe it's like I want to bail out now. Those kind of things. And so my focus is really, we just bought a building and that was a big, I wanted to do that for a long time. I just got to the point where I was tired of paying someone else's mortgage, and I'm like, yeah, I own this building.

(02:06:37):

If you do, you need to get a bigger office space. But anyways, I do notice you have the corner office, which is nice. Thank you. But yeah, I wanted to have my own space, a little bit of extra space to kind of grow the team, a little bit of space on the plot to expand the building and do some other things, have a lift, have bays, all that kind of stuff. Have places to put our equipment on our van, which we use for a lot of our local stuff, but give me a place where I could, that's my own and that my team feels like that's theirs as well. This is our space. We operate here. We get to do what we want to do here. This is our comfortable, safe space. I love what you said one time is like, I want to be running a pirate ship.

(02:07:30):

Totally. I love that. I never really thought about it before you said it that one time, but yeah, I'm definitely Captain Jack Sparrow type thing.

Lou (02:07:41):

Yeah, we abide by our own rules, man.

Jarrod (02:07:42):

Yeah, it's the pirate code. Who knows what the pirate code is, but that's what we live by. And I just want a group of people that they're willing to die for you if you don't, and I don't mean that literally, I don't want anybody shot, but if you need to

Lou (02:08:04):

Be there until 10 o'clock running a simulation, there's a depo coming up,

Jarrod (02:08:08):

They're willing to jump in because you've treated them well, you've taken good care of them. You've not overwhelmed them or overloaded them. You trust them, you've nurtured them. You've guided them through the process and they feel like, yeah, I'm willing to do that because I've seen the effort that my boss has put in, not only on his own time, but on making me a better person. So I don't think you can, can't fake that, I don't think. Maybe you can, I don't know. But I want to, like I said, when we started this part of the discussion, I want to grow but not grow at the same time. I want to grow organically, get a team around me of people, develop some other experts that are capable of making it rain on their own to a degree, big or small. And then I want to get to the point where I can be a lot more selective in what I do

(02:09:11):

So I can really, and you've mentioned that you've been able to do this and kudos to you. I think that's fantastic, but I haven't quite gotten to that point yet where I'm trying to grow, but you need to make it rain to a certain degree in order to keep people energized and motivated and doing things and paying the bills. But at the same time, it's like I've come to the point where it's like there's just some clients that I love working with, just love working with these people. They're great. They trust me. They give me what I

Lou (02:09:44):

Need. They understand their case, which is a big one for me. When people come in with unrealistic expectations or unrealistic understanding of what their case is, that's a big turnoff for me. If somebody calls and they're like, here's our case. I see this weakness. I see these strengths. Can you figure out how the crash happened? It's great. As opposed to, there's no way. There's no way. This was our guy's fault or whatever it is. There's no way this was the roadway. There's no way. This was our motorcycle. Whatever. It's, it's a big turnoff, but I mean, I have a cheat code for that two cheat codes, so I'm no farther along in the journey than you. With respect to that, I don't have any mouths to feed. With the consulting side, I ended up going single, essentially solo man. And when did have, I think I had three associates at one point, is like, I'd take a lot of cases to keep everybody busy, and then I have Lightpoint, which helps subsidize my lifestyle is a beast of its own. Yeah, exactly. And that's kind of fun, but that is huge. Determining who you can work with has been the biggest hack for my peace of mind

(02:10:55):

Because I realized two things at one point when I was not having the most fun is my stress came from my own clients and my own employees, the most stress. And I was like, well, that's not good. Obviously you have certain responsibility and attention you need to pay to your employees, but they shouldn't be the ones causing you the most stress.

Jarrod (02:11:23):

No.

Lou (02:11:24):

And then your own clients easy. You can fire them, not necessarily in that case, you might've come too far, you finished it, but you don't retake a case from a client that's a pain in the ass.

Jarrod (02:11:35):

Correct.

Lou (02:11:37):

And then, yeah, being in Southern California also helps because you have a lot of options for clients. So it's been amazing. I only work with people now that like you said, well, give me the resources. It's essentially blank check cases at this point where it's just like you do whatever you need to do. Now, I might run into a situation where it's like that pothole case that costs a lot of money to recreate that pothole, buy an exemplar, ride it through it, do all the testing. It's possible. Somebody's going to say no to that, but very unlikely. Now with my client list, which is awesome, one, that's one. Two, they want the truth. Three, they're fun to talk to and they can take a joke. That's really important. I need to be able to have a phone

Jarrod (02:12:20):

Call that's imperative.

Lou (02:12:21):

Yeah,

Jarrod (02:12:22):

I know right away if I've got a client on the phone and they take everything too seriously is like, this is not a good way. It's not going to be fun. This is not going to be fun.

Lou (02:12:32):

I was trying, I think I figured this out. This is an idea in progress, so take it for what it's worth. But the farther along I get in my life currently anyway, I'm optimizing for peace of mind almost nothing else, and it's led to a good place. So could I make twice as much money if I tortured myself a little? Sure. Want? Do I need twice as much money you want? No,

Jarrod (02:12:59):

No,

Lou (02:12:59):

And I'm happy.

Jarrod (02:13:00):

Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's the tough part because, and I don't begrudge anybody for their desire to just make a ton of cash. That's fine. Yeah, whatever. I mean a float your boat and you can live with the consequences of that, then so be it. I mean, do it, make it happen. For me personally, it's just not, I don't need to have the newest truck. I don't need to have any fancy stuff. I like my little gadgets and my little toys, and there's some things that's one of the things I really enjoy about this business is I get a lot of gadgets and toys and that's just makes me happy. But outside of that, I don't need much and I just want my team to be happy. I want my family to be happy, want my daughters to love me, and think that the sun rises and sets on me, and that's phenomenal having that.

(02:14:04):

And I mean, the biggest thing, that's the biggest thing for me is I look at my daughters and I'm like, I told one of my daughters, I want you to marry a man that loves you as much as I do. And my daughter looked back at me and she said, it's going to be difficult, dad. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, you can't be bad. If that doesn't get you, then what else is going to get you? Right? I'm going to test that on my daughter too. Let's see what she says. But I think, yeah, I mean some people just want to grind it out, man, and I'm happy to grind when it's necessary to grind, but I don't want to spend my whole life doing that.

Lou (02:14:43):

Yeah, I remember. So this office is relatively new to us a year and a half or so. It's been a different stage in my career. I've probably left here when everybody else is gone, not Sam, but the whole office 10 times where I'm like stay until 10 o'clock at night, maybe 15 in prior buildings. I look back at my history, it's like I was there, I was locking that place up every night, and that can work for a period of time. Now I'm very selective. I'm like, okay, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. I'll stay till 10. But it's not like I'm not doing that for three nights in a row.

Jarrod (02:15:17):

No,

Lou (02:15:17):

I'll do it for one night and then get back to my regularly scheduled program, but there's a season for everything in your twenties, I kind of feel like you should probably be airing more on the side of closing the shop down.

Jarrod (02:15:31):

Yeah. I mean that's Ecclesiastes. There's a time for everything, time for reaping, time for sowing time for war, time for peace. There's a time for everything, and it's easy for us to sit where we are and kind of rest on our laurels, like, ah, we've made it. We can be more selective. For the younger guys who are coming up, it's going to be a little bit more difficult. They're going to have to put in the hard yards, and I think it's necessary. You don't want to treat it. It's a hazing ritual. You've got to do this because I did it. You've got to just let 'em know. It requires the effort. If you want to grow up into a position where you can be more selective and make the choices that make you happier, make your family happier and make you not an ass around everybody at the office or anybody else who comes into contact with you, then you need to work now to get to that stage to level up, if you will, unlock that next achievement that gets you to that place. Totally.

Lou (02:16:36):

Yeah. I'm sure you had a stage in your career, and I certainly did a long stage most of my career where I would take any case that came in, I was like, I needed to make money. I needed to gain the experience. I wasn't getting called a million times for X, Y, or Z. I was just, if it's a tractor trailer case, I'm taking it. If it's a car case, if it's a ped, whatever it is, I'm taking it Now. I'm in a better position. So were you were talking about toys and how you love your toys. I love toys. This is something I wanted to talk to you about. There's really two things looking at our time and I'm like, all right, we've been at it for a while, but I still have two things. I want to talk about AI because you've been really focused on that

(02:17:17):

And how it integrates with recon and where you see that going, and then your toys. I also wanted to talk about your inspections too, so we'll see if we have time to do that. Let's happy to talk about, it's one of my favorite things to do. Inspections. I love inspections. Yeah, I figured that if I watched you, if I was a fly on the wall doing your inspections, I would learn a bunch. And as long as we've known each other, we've never been on the same case. I've never seen your work and I've never seen you work. So let's start. We'll sandwich it. Let's start with AI. Okay. So you have a role with SAE that is giving you direct insight into what's happening with authors and their research. So I'm more interested actually with this aspect of it is are you seeing people submit papers written by AI A, and then I wanted to go into how AI is actually being implemented in recon, but how is AI affected your peer review process right now?

Jarrod (02:18:26):

I'd say the peer review process. One of the things I've noticed recently is that SAE is now, it's clear to me that they're running every paper submission through some sort of an AI detector of some sort to assess whether or not the paper is generated by AI or if it's a paper that's like, I'm trying to remember the terminology they use. It escapes me right now, but it's happened a couple of times now where I've received a paper and then I've received a warning from SAE that this paper appears as though it's kind of manufactured in a way. And thankfully on my end, I know the people that are submitting the paper. So I wrote back to SAE as I know the people that I know the authors, and I've read through the paper. I don't think this is manufactured, but I understand that you're using this tool.

Lou (02:19:26):

He's an

Jarrod (02:19:26):

Engineer. I know he seems like a robot. He's just an engineer. That's exactly right. It's like I know he has the personality of a brick, but at the same time, I know he's a capable engineer and I know that this is him as the author. And so I think you can set that warning aside for now. But I think that what it does tell me is that SAE is very, so they've taken a very strong stance on the use of their ip, if you will, for ai, which I think they really can't. I think the genie's out of the bottle on that at this point. I think just like Google had their scraping algorithm, I'm trying to what they called it, it was like the web crawler or a crawler or something along those lines, but it was a part of their algorithm that basically could infiltrate anything and pull a scrape data out and pull it out.

(02:20:24):

I think the genie out of the bottle in that regard, because even though a lot of things at SAE are behind paywall, somehow I just have this deep and abiding sense that they just don't have the technological capability to keep that stuff isolated in a safe place that's not accessible by Google or any other AI company that's out there just crawling around, poking around and gathering materials. And you can kind of tell that if you do some of the newer tools that you're starting to see as some of these AI agents and AI reasoning models that are out there, OpenAI with ChatGPT 5, Grok with Super grok. Now Claude, the newest version of Claude. If you go through and you start, this is one of the things that I think is going to really make our job a tremendous amount easier in terms of researching and compiling information and distilling things down based on our experience and knowing what we're trying to get at and being able to sort of tune the AI to find what we're looking for and tease that information out.

(02:21:35):

But I think that there's got to be back doors out there where AI and Google and all these open ai, all these tools can warm their way into systems and pull scrape data out and then use it as part of their, not only their training, but also part of their responses. And you can tell that if you work with chat GPT or if you work with ROC or Clot or any of the other tools that are out there, you can tell pretty quickly that there's access in the background that you don't normally get access to. They get additional information somehow. I don't know how it is, but I'm sure they would say, no, we don't do that, but are you aware of No, check it out. Oh, no. I think I've heard that term before.

Lou (02:22:29):

It's like a big project that may or may not be illegal. I really don't know. And they think that access to science should be free, so they like, oh, I got you. Yeah, crawl all sorts of libraries and everything and pull all these papers and make them accessible.

Jarrod (02:22:50):

Yeah,

Lou (02:22:50):

I wonder

Jarrod (02:22:51):

That's a bit of a problem.

Lou (02:22:53):

Grok and ChatGPT are going to tools like that. They may, I mean, if that website is up and available, I think it would naturally do that unless they're being told not to.

Jarrod (02:23:03):

Well, there's a lot of stuff that comes out of it. It's like you can't get that from just the abstract that's on the front page of SAEs. If you search up a paper and it pulls up the abstract and the citation, you can't glean a lot of things that I'm seeing from just the abstract. It's coming from somewhere, and it suggests that they have an ability to go deeper and find things that aren't really kind of available to the normal chimpanzee like us. It makes sense because I'm just on my keyboard going,

Lou (02:23:36):

Dude have, I mean, they access to crazy hackers, so if they wanted to, they could access any database probably. And are they doing that?

Jarrod (02:23:45):

Yeah, I surmise. I suspect strongly that they are, but if everyone knew it, I think a lot of people would be pissed off because that's a whole nother thing. And I think SAE is trying to do their best to, there's a very explicit, if you go to sa e's website now on mobile list or on their main website, there's a popup that says none of our materials should be used for training AI or anything like that. I can't remember the exact verbiage, but if you go there, you'll see this little gray bar comes across the top that's got an X on it. You can click out of it, but it basically says, don't use our stuff for AI is effectively what it says. And so I suspect that SAE is trying to take a very firm stance on that, and I think that's fine because they're trying to protect their IP effectively, which is the technical research and everything that is in and around aerospace, maritime, and automotive engineering of all those various stripes. I think they should do that. Whether or not I think that you shouldn't be able to then if you bought a paper and you pull it into your own database, so to speak, be able to run that through an algorithm or through an LLM and be able to utilize that information that you've bought and paid for. That's another story.

Lou (02:25:19):

If

Jarrod (02:25:19):

You're not paying for it, I think you got to be circumspect about that. But if you are paying for it, that's one of the things that's in my list of all the things that I want to do, but don't always have the time to do. But really developing an LLM that specifically deals with all of the history of all the technical work that I've done. Not only reports, but depositions and research papers that I have my own library in citation manager or reference manager called EndNote, and I use that on a pre regular basis, but I mean, quite frankly, it's just old and clunky. I was using it all the way back when I was doing my graduate work. So that tells you how old that crap is and it really hasn't been upgraded. But there are tools out there now like papers and there's some others, I'm trying to remember the name of one that I was interested in here not too long ago, but very much like you upload your library, your reference library, and then it develops an LLM based on your references and it allows you to chat with the LLM and look for materials and that'd be fantastic.

(02:26:33):

That's

Lou (02:26:33):

Fricking fantastic. There's so many papers I buried in folders that I don't know about until I go in there. I'm like, wait a second, I have a paper on that. That's exactly right. That's awesome because

Jarrod (02:26:42):

Your organizational skills suck. They're not great. I rely a lot on me in that regard, Google. Yeah, exactly. But I mean if you could house, it's one of the projects I want to do is not only just get rid of all the crap I don't need anymore digitally, there's a ton of that, but also consolidate all the crap I do want digitally. I say crap, but I don't really mean that, but consolidate all the materials that are important digitally and then consolidate them into a freeform LLM of some kind that I can chat with it and tease out additional information and be able to quickly reference materials in short order. That's where I think AI is going to really make our job so much better because you can really, and if anybody's out there who's sort of monkeyed around with it a little bit, there's so much research you can do really quickly, and not only can you do it in a sort of a dumb chimp on a keyboard fashion where you type in some basic information and it gives you back a stream of consciousness effectively. You can get yourself fairly quickly up to speed on, okay, what did it tell me? Alright, what didn't I know and what it's telling me and how does that inform a new prompt that I can use to gather additional information and dig deeper into that thing Totally, and really pull out some additional information that I wouldn't be able to do on my own no matter how much time you gave me.

Lou (02:28:18):

I use it all the time for that nowadays where if I am looking for, what was an example of this? I don't know what I was looking for. Let's say it was like the lateral acceleration associated with an average lane change. And it's like, okay, I know of three or four papers and I know that the sharp two data's out there. Let me see if there's anything else out there. And you can just straight up say, I'm looking for peer reviewed literature on the average lateral acceleration of a vehicle, experiencing a lane change, going through a lane change. And then you'll get 10 papers, five of 'em will suck, maybe even eight of them, but two of them will be right on point. You're like, I didn't even know

Jarrod (02:28:52):

About these papers. I never saw 'em before. And you were talking to Mark Crouch about this, about that cross-pollination issue between the international accident investigation and reconstruction community and the US Reconstruction and investigation community, and how there's really not a tremendous amount of crossover from my part. I've tried to foster that to some degree, and we could talk about that more because not only am I trying to foster that internationally, and I'd like to see that more so people like Chris Goddard, Mark Crouch, Steven Cash former, well, Richard Lambourne who used to be really involved but isn't really involved that much anymore, but then Dean Beaumont who kind of took his place trying to bridge those international gaps so that we can, like you said, cross pollinate between what they know and what they've learned and how that's, it's in its own little bin over there and we don't really see it in the us. We have this inherent bias to the best shit gets done here

(02:30:00):

If you want to do reconstruction and accident investigation, this is where it happens. Whether that's at SAE or WREX or the Accident Reconstruction Journal or what have you. It's like, so we have this, this is the bubble that we operate in, but there's a lot of stuff going on outside of our bubble. And also in that regard, it's like one of the things I tried to do after WREX is I was like, look, SAE, you guys are, I love you guys, but you got to realize that events like Rex are really telling you that you need to up your game and also that you need to go cross disciplines with outfits like WREX and other entities. You can't just be like the engineers are where it's at. There's other people doing really cool stuff out there, and you need to work to have a foot in the door at the very least to try to get SAE into that and help either promote the event or sponsor the event or provide, do move the World Congress at SAE move the accident reconstruction part or the biomechanics part or what have you into WREX when WREX shows up so that we can have a cross disciplinary event where it's like engineers, law enforcement, investigators of all stripes that are all in the same location learning from each other as one of the things that I've noticed, and I don't know if you've noticed this as well, but it's like there's this, I don't know exactly how to describe it, but there's this love hate relationship between law enforcement investigators and reconstructionists and engineering based reconstructionists and investigators.

(02:31:53):

I don't know exactly what that stems from. It's been going on as long as I've been in this business, and it's sort of this, the engineers think too highly of themselves and the law enforcement feel like the engineers treat them. They don't know what's going on or they don't understand the physics or dynamics or what have you, but there's so much that can be learned across that boundary because I got into an argument on LinkedIn one day with a guy who was like, if you've never been to a live crash site, you can't call yourself a reconstructionist like bullshit. You can't do that. That's not, but that's a manifestation of that animosity because so much of what law enforcement uses to reconstruct crashes and understand crashes comes from engineering. I mean, engineers came up with a lot of the stuff that they use to do that.

(02:32:47):

Not all of it, but a lot of it. So having this sort of us versus them mentality, I don't think does anybody any favors a lot that you can learn from people who are boots on the ground at a crash scene gathering information and learning on the fly because they're forced to and a lot of things that can be learned by them from people who are taking it, everything after the fact and putting the pieces together and analyzing it, you bridge those gaps and it makes their investigations better. They know the things to look for and it makes the reconstructions better. They know what to look for and they're there. They're on the ground doing the work. So whatever we can do to foster that, a more symbiotic relationship or a more friendly relationship, I would say, I think would be amazing. And so WREX doesn't happen that often, but right after I attended the last WREX, I was like, I went back to SAE and I said, look, we've got to try to figure out a way to bridge that gap. Yeah,

Lou (02:33:54):

No, I totally agree. If you put those two skill sets together, if you took a really good law enforcement reconstructionist and a really good engineering reconstructionist and put 'em together, that's the best reconstructionist.

Jarrod (02:34:05):

Yeah.

Lou (02:34:06):

They both miss pieces that went together would be the complete picture, but nobody can really have that. There's a couple mass state police, when I was growing up, there was a guy growing up, I mean in my career, not when I was eight, but who was a mechanical engineer and a recon for the state patrol. And I'm like, that guy's, these, whatever it is, quintuple threat, that guy's going to be able to do everything. So yeah, I totally agree. And any efforts there I think would go a long way with the community. When I first got in the industry, I used to hear that a lot, the hostility between them. Now, I do feel like it's more few and far between. I still think that that animosity exists, but I do feel like we're making progress where it's like everybody understands. I'm glad you feel that way. I mean, I see it. I saw the LinkedIn fight too, and that didn't help by the way me, that didn't help my interpretation of the industry. That was quite ugly. Yeah, I thought it was inappropriate. Not your response, but

Jarrod (02:35:07):

The sentiment. Well, the sentiment is that you can't do this because I do. It's sort of like this secret society crap. I'm part of the secret club that gets to go to crash scenes and see all these things. Yeah, you are. And that's fantastic. I love that. I hope you do a great job documenting everything, but please don't tell me that just because you showed up on a site or a scene of a very complex and chaotic crash that you're able to discern all the things that happened in that crash just from walking around the scene. You're not, you simply not.

Lou (02:35:43):

It takes a lot of hours. It takes a

Jarrod (02:35:45):

Lot of hours to put that stuff

Lou (02:35:46):

Together. My wife always asks me when we drive through a crash scene or something, she's like, what happened? I was like,

Jarrod (02:35:52):

I don't know.

Lou (02:35:52):

Give me 50, 60 hours. I'll figure that out. Yeah, exactly. Right. But yeah, that's awesome. So with SAE, it sounds like there's a lot there with ai. I'll be curious. I don't think any papers have come in with AI yet. I have started experimenting, and I know you've done way more experimentation, but Well,

Jarrod (02:36:14):

I think you have to be careful about that because I think, so if you're saying papers written by AI, that's what I was, I haven't really seen that, but

Lou (02:36:22):

They do have a filter up that's considering it right

Jarrod (02:36:24):

Out of the gate are people are definitely using AI and exploring AI tools in research. You can see that that's definitely in the mix for sure. Whether or not they're actually writing their papers with ai. I mean, I don't think that there's full fledge. I just type in a prompt and I get a paper out and then I submit that. I haven't seen anything that leads me to believe that that's the case at this point. But what I do see is people are definitely using tools, and by tools I mean things like, I mean Recon 3D, Eugene Liscio's app, there's AI involved in that, whether you like it or not. There's an aspect of that that's certainly an artificial intelligent approach to looking at video and looking at lidar and merging the two data sets together. There's definitely an AI type component to that.

(02:37:26):

So tools that we're using, like Luma AI is one that people have tried to publish on. So there are tools that are coming online that people are using and trying to validate and verify how well they work and things like that. I'm all for that. If we can use AI to make our data better and to provide better data for our analysis, fantastic, let's do that. I think that's great. Where it runs into a problem is where you see somebody that's just basically typing in a prompt and throwing out a paper, which is feasible at this point. Seriously,

Lou (02:38:06):

You could feed it your library of SAE papers and say, write your abstract and be like, turn that

Jarrod (02:38:12):

Into a paper. Exactly. And then the whole other question is, are people writing reports with ai? And I think mean if you're using something like Grammarly or something like that to help you with the flow of your paper and the grammar spelling and all that kind of stuff, I would welcome that as a

Lou (02:38:31):

Peer reviewer.

Jarrod (02:38:32):

I don't think that that's a problem. If it helps you to make a paper better and to communicate your points and to really make the paper flow and make it clean, great. It just makes everyone else's, especially on the peer review side, makes my job a hell of a lot easier if I can actually understand what the hell they're writing,

(02:38:53):

Which oftentimes, quite frankly is, I don't know who wrote this, but clearly they have problems and it needs to go to someone who's a technical writer who really knows how to make things flow and make 'em understandable. So I haven't seen that. I mean, if they are using ai, they're using a crappy AI because it comes out like garbage. So that's a whole other thing. But yeah, I mean, I've had people ask me, have you seen people writing their reports? I mean technical forensic reports with ai. I haven't seen anything like that yet. I mean, I use AI frequently for a lot of different things, but when it comes to my words on the paper, other than grammar and spelling and that kind of stuff, the flow is mine. The verbiage is basically mine. The technical details are mine. Honestly, I would struggle to understand how you could in any way, shape or form, do a technical analysis of a crash and then feed that in some way, shape or form into AI and have it spit out a report. I struggle to see how that's feasible at this point.

Lou (02:40:11):

Yeah, I agree. So with respect to tools that we can use, I mean, there's two things that I'm curious about, I guess is one, what is available now to help us as recons, other than language writing a better report and finding out what a good synonym for great is? It's awesome. It's awesome. I've been using it for programming, which has been great. I'm just like, write me a JavaScript code that does X, Y, or Z, and I've thrown some of my Excel spreadsheets into programs instead that help me iterate better and things like that. Complex mathematical equations, you can just take a picture of a crazy math equation and just say, write me a Python script. That's what I meant. I think I said Java, but a Python script that does this for me and I can change these variables. That sort of thing is really valuable. Writing is obviously really valuable. Finding research. What other tools are available and do you see it recently? I kind of feel like we're stagnating, and I could be totally wrong, but there's all this concern that AI is going to take over every job, including recon, and I'm not so sure the difference between AI and a GI am like we have no glimmers of a GI, as far as I can tell.

Jarrod (02:41:31):

It depends on who you talk to. There's rumblings out there about a GI and Lex Friedman had a podcast with a guy named Roman Yu Polsky not too long ago, and he was talking about, he's the doomsday guy. He's the doomsday guy. And his, I wouldn't say prediction, but his worry, let's put it that way. His worry is that we wouldn't know if it was there because it wouldn't let us know until it was ready to break

Lou (02:42:05):

Out.

Jarrod (02:42:06):

That's his worry.

Lou (02:42:07):

That's terrifying.

Jarrod (02:42:08):

Which is a little terrifying. And he was on Joe Rogan's podcast as well. So I try to keep up with what people are saying about those kinds of things. And it's hard because it changes every day. Things that I put on LinkedIn or talked about just last year are totally different now, so it's hard to keep up with. But as far as I think that what I've heard and what I've seen and what I think makes the most sense is that a lot of the menial BS tasks that we don't like to do are going to be automated through agentic AI and other forms of ai, including perhaps a GI in the near future, where we'll be able to really leverage that as a way of making our lives easier and better for gathering information, for doing analysis, for doing code, things of that nature.

(02:43:08):

Where it comes down to the, I haven't seen anything to me that indicates intuition or abstract thinking. And what I mean by that is when I look at a set of scene photographs or I look at a vehicle, I have a certain sort of intuition or a certain sort of, I can abstract what I'm looking at into what actually happened. I can make that leap because I've got a human brain, I've got consciousness, and humans are really good at abstract thought and abstract thinking, taking disparate things and putting them together into something that makes sense. I haven't seen anything like that yet. I mean, definitely there's this reasoning, you're starting to see the influx of reasoning built into artificial intelligence tools like Chat, GPT and others where they're kind of going through a process that sort of seems like it's reasoning, like it's thinking through the process before it spits something in your lab effectively, but haven't seen anything that suggests to me that it's anything other than just the distillation of a bunch of different information into effectively a summarization of what's available on the internet or something like that. Now, if you could feed a crash report scene photos, vehicle inspection photos, vehicle inspection notes, scan data into an AI and say, reconstruct this crash, and it spits out something that could only be generated from a human brain abstractly, taking all that information and consolidating it and then trying to analyze it and figure out, okay, these are all the things that happened and this is how this crash happened. This is the sequence and the timing and all the severity and all that kind of stuff.

(02:45:12):

I haven't seen anything that suggests to me that it's anywhere near that level. And I think that's where a lot of people are saying, look, it's going to take care of a lot of the menial nonsense stuff that we have to deal with. And a lot of journalists are panicking because it's like AI can write really good news articles because it's really just a distillation of what's out there on the internet, on the internet in the ether, so to speak. But when it comes to technical analysis, I think it's going to provide us with tools that allow us to do even better technical analysis. But it's that abstract thinking part that I really haven't seen anything that suggests to me that it's at that level or that it may ever be at that level. There's a lot of people that say there's something unique about humans. And so it's sort of this human-centric idea that there's something unique about humans and our ability to, our ability to take things and abstract to something completely different. That is something that you really can't get through algorithmic processes. And a lot of people don't understand that what's really going on behind the scenes in AI is it's still algorithmic. It's still algorithmic processes. It's extraordinarily complex. There's no question about

Lou (02:46:34):

It. And it's polished with this beautiful language on the outside. Oh, yeah. Once it spits it out to you.

Jarrod (02:46:39):

But every time, and I've presented on this a couple of times, and when I went to the UK last year for the public safety conference for Leica, what I presented on was can we use AI in accident reconstruction? And I think, yes, you can definitely use it for accident reconstruction, for helping you do your analysis and gather research and all kinds of things like that. And that will improve over time. But you got to remember fundamentally that it's a statistical modeling process that's under the hood there. It's not like me speaking words to you and you interpreting those words because you understand my language and you as a human can understand my thought process as I'm conveying information to you. When you type in something, it's breaking that down into tokens and it's feeding it through a massive neural network and then statistically weighting what you put in and then spitting out something that statistically matches what the response should be based on its training data.

(02:47:52):

And so it's, that's a totally different model than artificial general intelligence. And so the question is how do you make the leap from something that's more algorithmic to something that is more like human consciousness and human abstract thinking? And I haven't seen anybody yet. I mean, it's not like I'm an AI genius or an AI expert or anything like that. I just fiddle with it. But the general idea is I haven't seen anybody really come in and say, this is how we make the leap from algorithmic processes to something that really truly understands language and can truly abstract or generate abstract thoughts from disparate pieces of information and then spit out something that makes reasonable sense and looks like a human did

Lou (02:48:44):

It. Yeah. So the only way at this point then, with our current technology, the way you and I understand it as critically acclaimed artificial intelligence experts, but the way that I understand it now, considering our current technology, we'd have to feed it thousands of data sets associated from a crash, photographs, EDR, data depositions, police reports, tell it what the outcome was, and then statistically train it to be able to figure out other crashes. So you'd have to give it this training set and then say, okay, well now you've seen that a thousand times. Here's a new set of data. Tell me what happened in this crash. And it's not going to be thinking, it's going to be making the statistical connections that you're talking about.

Jarrod (02:49:25):

And that's the thing is that it's still fundamentally, and I know the guys at PC Crash are trying to develop a way of feeding photos in and then having basically an AI say, well, what's the severity of this crash based on this handful of photos of this vehicle?

(02:49:45):

I think it's neat. I think if you've spent any time dealing with complex damage on vehicles and have run crash tests and done all that kind of stuff, and you look train on publicly available crashes, which are not all the crashes that are out there, there's a lot of private litigation based crashes that are out there that are far more complex. If you train on that dataset, you'll probably get some results that on occasion can be good. But then you're going to run into things where, and I've told this to people all the time, it's like this system, or not this system, but this AI LLM or whatever you want to call it, AI tool is still a statistical model. It can still, and I know people hate this term, but I use it, it can still hallucinate.

(02:50:49):

It'll statistically come up with something that is statistically this matches and it'll spit something out, and you look at it and you're like, ah, what the heck is that? Even? I don't even know what that is. And so that's something that you really have to be fundamentally aware of until we get to the point where it's like it can clearly reason and abstract information and go through that whole process a human would do. You're always going to have to be very circumspect about the result you get. Whenever I get a result from an AI prompt, I'm always going through, okay, what sources is it providing? And looking at all the sources and trying to see, okay, where did it get this chunk of information from and is that represented in the source or is that some sort of a statistical modeling that says, this text fits the best with the prompt that was originally put in, and it kind of maybe ties into this source. So there's some things you have to be really careful of. People say it can't hallucinate because it's not human. It's like, well, sure, but when you get a pilot garbage out, it's like, that looks like a, it's making crap up. And when you get it back, it's like that thing that it's telling you is like it's ball face lying to you, but doing it in the most confident way possible, which is

Lou (02:52:16):

Terrifying. It's like a bad young associate. So did you see that KI wrote about it into the point where this attorney used it to find legal precedents. Yes. That didn't exist. Exactly. Submits 'em to the court and the court's like, did you use ai? And he had to call his son or whoever it was who actually did the AI. And his son's like, yeah, I did. And bad things ensued.

Jarrod (02:52:36):

Oh yeah,

Lou (02:52:37):

That's one way to end your career. My gosh, brutal. And I see it all the time in my AI responses where I'm just like, that's complete hogwash. I'm going to refrain from swearing there and go with the 1940s version of swearing, hogwash bunk. I think I went through a stage, and I could be totally wrong about all this, but the past six months I've been like, this is accelerating so quickly. It's not long until so much of our job is either gone or changed to now watching what's happening and being like, we've been working on this a while. There's billions of dollars inserted into it, and I don't feel like I'm getting reliable. Great answers from AI most of the time still. So I feel like we're either stagnating or we've reached the end of that version of the technology and we're going to need to implement some other big step changes, which is how it works, by the way, this, it's not just this nice exponential curve. It's like nothing is happening, boom, new advancement, nothing is happening, boom, new advancement. Everybody implements it. And overall, those peaks might form this kind of natural looking exponential curve, but it's really just stagnation for a while. And then some sort of new technology,

Jarrod (02:54:02):

You get an input of exponential growth once something sort of pops into existence, and then you get this exponential curve and then it plateaus and then it keeps going, and it sort of looks like it's going exponential, but

Lou (02:54:18):

It relies on those pops.

Jarrod (02:54:19):

It relies on those pops. And I still come back to whether it's sort of the religious in me or it's sort of the human-centric part of me, which is like, I just don't know how you generate fundamentally algorithmic things, how you take ones and zeros and make them think abstractly in any way, shape or form. It's more a question of consciousness. And that's what I struggle with is like, okay, well how do we algorithmic model consciousness? We don't even know what it is. We don't even understand our own consciousness. We don't even understand how that works.

Lou (02:55:02):

David Deutsch, do you ever read any of his stuff? Occasionally? Yeah, the beginning of Infinity. He's interesting. Really intelligent guy, apparently was at the forefront of the concept of a GI, and I'm pretty darn sure. Don't quote me on this, look it up yourself, but I'm pretty darn sure I listened to him recently just be like, we're nowhere close. This isn't the technology that gets us there. Anybody who thinks it is a smoking crack.

Jarrod (02:55:26):

And I think, well, right now you're in the phase where there's this distinct, people are taking sides in that regard. You can see it pretty clearly. You've got your doom, your doomsday people, which are like a GI. We're on the verge of a GI and it's going to be the end of the world. Or at the same time we're on the verge of a GI and it's going to make everything exponentially better because computers will be like humans and all these other things. And then you got people over here that are like, how in the world are we ever going to get an algorithmic anything to not mimic consciousness or mimic something like abstract thinking, but to actually abstract, to be conscious.

(02:56:11):

We don't even understand what makes us conscious. So why are we thinking that we can program it in, and even if it can, one of the things I saw recently is now they're not, I keep saying they, I know who they are, but the general idea is that you're starting to see situations where they're imbuing, if you will, the AI with the ability to rewrite itself and modify itself over time so that as it learns, it modifies itself in order to get better and better and better. But still, it's a rules-based process. Somebody has to program in the ability of IT to rewrite itself and do certain things, and those still have to be rules based and algorithmic. So how do you get from that to human abstract thought? Personally, I don't see it, but then again, I'm no genius, so I'm just somebody who tinkers with it.

Lou (02:57:14):

I'm with you on all of those things. I'm also no genius, and I've been paying attention to a lot of people talking about it and intelligent people and people are deep into it. The doomsday guy can't remember his name and the optimists and the people who are running it, Elon Musk and Sam Altman and David Deutch, and listening to everybody and just trying to figure out, but I think you and I have a very similar take right now, which is, it's not artificial general intelligence. It's an algorithmic approach we have in recon, in our profession specifically, nothing to worry about this point, but you should probably be using it to help you be a better recon.

Jarrod (02:57:52):

Yeah. Oh, a hundred percent. There's no question about that. I mean, in recon, just as with any technical field, there's always times when technology advances and people are like, oh my God, we're all going to lose our jobs. Everybody freaks out and loses their biscuits. But we saw that with CDR. It's like, we're never going to need to do a reconstruction ever again because the car's going to tell us exactly what happened. My ask. That does not happen. You still need somebody who can abstractly examine the data, tease it apart, understand all the idiosyncrasies and idiosyncrasies involved in it, and put it all back together and put it in the context of a complex crash. And everybody was like, ah, CDR is going to make all of the reconstruction jobs obsolete. That hasn't done that, as far as I can tell.

Lou (02:58:47):

No, it's just demanded that we're more sophisticated and we understand more.

Jarrod (02:58:51):

It just puts more burden on us. And I saw on your list of things that you wanted to talk about BERLA data as well, and it's like, yeah, that tells you a lot. I've had several cases. I mean, one that's active right now where it's like if I had the burla download from that infotainment center, and I won't mention the brand or anything like that, but if I had the Burla download, well screw it down and look, oh, screw it, I've already been deposed. Who cares? But it's a Ford product. And so it had sync gen three version two in it. And if you know anything about sync gen three version two, it monitors almost everything in the car, door openings, closings, braking, shifting, all that kind of stuff. It's monitoring a ton of stuff. And so I said, well, we want to get the burla data.

(02:59:45):

So I got authorization to remove the sync module and then take it back to my office and then run it through the Burla process to get the data off of it. And the upshot of it was that the people that owned the vehicle, the vehicle had been in an incident and there were injuries involved, but then they repaired the vehicle and kept driving it for two years. And so there was no data left from the day of the incident. Now, if you'd been able to get there early on, there would've been a ton of data that would've told you a lot about what actually happened in the crash. But again, it's like people had said that, well, Burla data will just allow us to really, it'll make a lot of reconstruction just sort of obsolete because it's going to explain everything. We still, somebody technically has to look at that and tell you what it means.

(03:00:35):

The computer, the sensors don't do that. They just report raw data. They're just telling you the door was open, the door was closed, the gear shift was in this position. It was in this position. You still need to contextualize it and then explain it to someone. Same thing with CDR. Same with video. Oh yeah. Video. Video is a whole, I love guys like Mark Crouch and many others who do video analysis, including yourself. It's like video analysis is, and it's funny because there was, at SAE this last year, there were a couple of papers dealing with tracking in video using synthi and doing vehicle tracking in video to get dynamics of vehicles as they're moving through the field of a video or from a dash camera or what have you. And some of the questions that came up after the fact were you could tell that people had no clue how to analyze video or what really?

(03:01:40):

So they don't understand what's going on under the hood and how complex it is. And that, I think this is what Mark says. Mark Crouch says, this is basically video is designed to lie to you, but do it in a way that it looks realistic. That's the, or to that effect the whole, yeah, it's designed to trick you. It's designed to trick you. And so if you don't walk into it, blinders on the video is showing me exactly what happened, but in reality, it's showing you a facsimile of what happened based on how the system is programmed and how it operates and a variety of other things. And if you just walk into that blindly, you're going to get slapped

Lou (03:02:21):

Around and it can be used almost all the time in a manner that we can make speed determinations and avoidable analysis, credible, invalid. But if you don't know those pixels, were not all written anew every 30th of a second, then you're in some trouble. It's a crazy intricate system. But yeah, we've been going for three hours and 15 minutes, so we will have to save some of this stuff for round two by some of this stuff. I mean, 90% of the questions that I prepared,

Jarrod (03:02:59):

Are you running out of gas now at this point? Is that what you're telling me?

Lou (03:03:04):

Bladder's filling up, got lunch, we need to go eat on the mind. We need to go eat. Yes. And you had a flight to catch. I really appreciate you coming here. So you made this happen. I did, and I thank you for that and blame you for that because of the amount of research that was required to set up a three camera video podcast was not slight, but I do really appreciate it because it forced me to do this. I enjoyed it. And then there is no better way to have a conversation.

Jarrod (03:03:33):

No, I don't think so. That's one of the things about doing it over, when you asked me if I'd be willing to do it secretly, I didn't tell you this, but I was like, only if we can do it in person. I've done that giving lectures, and I did it with Eugene and I was like, I enjoyed it. But it just felt, what's the best way of saying it? It felt sterile, didn't feel like it was a real personal interaction. And when I watch a lot of podcasts, it's like that vibe that you get from two people in the same room having a conversation where you can get their body language, you can really sort of understand what they're thinking, and I think it just makes it that much better. So I didn't mean to make you do all this. I'm really glad you did because it's fantastic, but

Lou (03:04:25):

I appreciate the pushing, like I was telling you off camera, I think I'm going to use this as an impetus to start getting some other people here, maybe even before I tear this setup down. If I could get three or four people in here and just bank three or four podcasts and being in SoCal, there's a lot of good recons around here to pull from. But yeah, man, I appreciate your existence in the community and thank you. I love having you as a friend and somebody that I can reach out to and ask both technical questions and more personal questions like building business, hiring people, how to handle X, y, or Z. It's been great getting to know you over the years and thanks for making the trek out here. Absolutely. Happy to do it. Thanks.

Jarrod (03:05:11):

Thanks for the invite. Appreciate it. Anytime.

Lou (03:05:13):

I'll see you back here

Jarrod (03:05:14):

Soon, I hope. Well, I hope so. This is fun later, man. Alright, later.

Lou (03:05:22):

Hey everyone, one more thing before you get back to business, and that is my weekly bite-sized email to the point would you like to get an email from me every Friday discussing a single tool, paper method, or update in the community. Past topics have covered Toyota's vehicle control history, including a coverage chart, ADAS, that's advanced driver assistance systems, Tesla vehicle data reports, free video analysis tools and handheld scanners. If that sounds enjoyable and useful, head to light point data.com/to the point to get the very next one.