Person of Interest with J. Warner Wallace

Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of striving for eternity in the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Well, welcome to The Rap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rapoport, and this week we are not joined by my co-host, Bud. He's not here, but we have someone else that will be very informative a friend of mine, Jim Wallace, also known as J. Warner Wallace.

I always like to ask you this,.

Why don't you go by Jim Wallace? That's your name. Well, because there's a Jim Wallace at Sojourners. So whenever I do radio, people would think he's very different to me. He's a very, very different perspective.

And some of the shows I would be on, they would say, well, you know, people think that you're him. And when we introduce or say next week we're going to have or the next hour we're going to have, we get all these angry emails.

Like, why would you have this guy on your show? So they said, you need to change your name. Well, I was always using J. Warner Wallace on search warrants anyway, because I used to want to hat tip my grandfather, whose name was Warner.

And so I would always put that on my professional stuff anyway. So I just said, okay, I'll just start using that name publicly, which I really didn't want that to change. I was Jim Wallace, believe it or not, until somebody told me I could not be, it was actually Greg Cogle who said, you cannot be Jim Wallace anymore.

So that's what changed it.

Cold Cases, Eyewitness Testimony, and the Start of Faith

And so for folks who may not know you, you just gave a hat tip there of your background. You mentioned doing warrants, signing warrants. You have, I think, 20 plus years doing some work outside of Christianity.

You've been on shows like Dateline and others. For folks who may not be familiar with you, what do you spend most of your career doing?

I spent about 26 years doing cold, well, not all of those cold cases. A lot of it was toward the end, probably the last 12, 13 years or so. And we had collateral duties before that when I was working homicides and these are just unsolved murders.

And our team would originally started picking up the unsolved just to see if we could push it across the finish line a little bit. And then at some point we got successful. So they just formed a permanent team.

And that's where I have sat for quite a bit of time, working these old cases. And some of these ended up in books, which is kind of the approach that I took when I first, I was about 35 when I first examined Christianity.

I didn't know any other way to get in. I mean, I didn't know, this wasn't something I thought, well, I'm going to take this particular approach. That's like, if you were, I don't know, if you were an English teacher, maybe you'd be focused on the way the gospels are written grammatically.

I don't know. But from an investigator's perspective, that's the only thing I knew was, well, these are making claims about the past that seem to be sequential, like they're in chronology, as if these things actually happened.

And then you get the end of John's gospel, he's making it sound like he actually saw this stuff. So in the end, I thought we'll just test these as eyewitness accounts. That's how I actually got into the whole, I became interested.

Well, also a pastor was clever and originally pitched Jesus in a way that I could catch him. He said that Jesus was super smart, like the smartest man who had ever lived. And I thought that was provocative.

I wasn't sure what to make of that. Lots of people are smart, but I wanted to see what was so smart about him. So I bought a Bible just sitting on my shelf back here that was a pew Bible that really was the gateway into studying Jesus.

And that's really what developed over those years. That's why I'm writing about it still today. Yeah. I mean, for.

Folks that don't know, you were pretty much against Christianity for years. You were a police officer, which I do always find. It's interesting that if anyone called the Los Angeles Police Department,.

They always found a Jim Wallace there for several decades. Well, yeah. So we were in a sub, I never tell people exactly what agency, I used to never tell people, because my chief would say, don't tell anybody where you're from.

You can just say you're a Los Angeles County. I don't think that that chief was just not a believer and really did not want a believer out there as the face of the agency. Isn't that interesting? You would think it would be just the opposite, right?

Now I bet you there's places in the world though, where if you were to survey the department that most would be Christians, but here in Los Angeles County, that was never the case. It was never, I didn't know a lot of, I knew a couple, they were older guys, older than me, maybe about 10 to 15 years, a more time on the agency.

They were very much, not all of them came to faith early, but they could not tell you why it was true. So they came to faith by way of an experience, which was a valid way to come to faith. I'm not against that idea, but when I asked questions, it just seemed so unreasonable that I just was not interested.

And the few people that would say they were publicly Christians, you come in contact with, were usually people you were taking to jail. And then you thought, yeah, this whole system seems like it's not very powerful and doesn't seem like it's reasonable.

And so I just stayed away from it. I only went to church because my wife was interested in going to church. And I think I would have gone like my dad where, you know, he, he, he still would go to church, even though he doesn't think it's true, but he thinks it's helpful.

He would much rather live in a Christian nation than in some other nation. And that, that's, I think that's interesting. Yeah, that's great. So he sees the power in it. And this is why this book I just wrote called, you know, person of interest really kind of tries to leverage that a little bit.

And I gave him a copy about two weeks ago. I don't know if he'll read it, but I mean, it's not as though he hasn't heard everything I could say for the last 20 years. It just doesn't seem to move him.

But, and that's just the nature of it. I always tell people, if you think that somehow this evidential approach that I take has some power beyond God's power, you're crazy. It's, it's all God top down.

It's just a matter of what is it you are communicating about the gospel that God is then going to use to do what God's going to do. And so for me, cause he knew who I was, I think he, he knew that this is gospel had to be kind of cloaked in this kind of an approach where I could come in this way.

And I thought that the same was true for my dad, but a lot of people are resistant to the truth claims for reasons entirely different than evidential reasons. You know, they've got volitional issues. They don't want it to be true.

And, and God hasn't yet moved to, to soften their hearts on this issue.

And that's why I always say that people don't have an evidence problem. They have a spiritual problem. And, and so we can give them all the evidence in the world and it doesn't matter. Now your background as, as a police officer being, you know, really being against not, not so much, maybe against the gospel, but you weren't really a believer.

You, you approached it from your background as a cold case detective. And, and for folks that don't know your first book, really that kind of was your approach, right? To apply your background as a cold case detective, doing cold cases and looking at the gospels and saying, okay, is this really, is this a legitimate source?

I mean, your, your expertise is knowing eyewitness testimony years after the fact of that's exactly what the gospel accounts are. And you applied that to that. Yeah.

And, you know, Andrew, part of it was because my family was just divided between like, you know, almost everyone was not a believer or if they were a believer, they certainly never talked about it. I never was part of their, their faith or never part of their life.

Rather. I suspect that my grandmother on my mom's side, that entire part of her family was raised Catholic, but never, never, ever. It was part of anything growing up. Really. My mom was kind of a cultural Catholic by the time she had me.

And so it was the kind of thing that you might do on a, on a, on Christmas or just probably just Christmas. I mean, Easter was not like, so it wasn't even on Easter, but you would go, I probably went a half a dozen times as a kid.

And it just seemed like something that was very insincere because it didn't feel like that. My, my mom was living it. She didn't own a Bible. It wasn't a part of our conversations, not a part of our life.

So I just thought it was this fantasy that, that some people probably think of it more deeply than others. I was not interested in it at all. But in the end, you know, a lot of it for me was I had this division between people who weren't believers.

And then I had a small pocket. My dad's second wife is, was Mormon, is Mormon. And so she raised my half brothers and sisters LDS. So when I started to look at scripture for the first time, seriously, they right away presented me with the scripture for Mormonism.

And they took on a view that was, Hey, this is, we believe these documents are foundationally true. And that, and so they, to be honest, in some ways it was a very much a presuppositional view. And I just thought, okay, I didn't know one for the other.

So I got a book of Mormon. My sister gave it to me and I read through the book of Mormon. And I remember that, but the quad in Mormonism is, is that old and new Testament and the King James, the book of Mormon, the doctrines and covenants and pearly great price.

Well, I got ahold of a quad pretty quickly. And I before I even finished the old Testament, I had read the book of Mormon and halfway through the doctrines and covenants. And as I worked through it, I realized that, you know, we, I just needed to know which of these two systems, because, you know, if you've never read scripture and you've got a King James Bible, it's going to sound a lot like the book of Mormon.

As a matter of fact, doctrinally at the time that Joseph wrote the book of Mormon, if some of his theological principles were pretty, you know, kind of like a denomination rather than as crazy as they got by the time he's the stuff that's in the pearly great price.

So if, you know, he changed his doctrines changed.

Over time. So I didn't know that. I mean, that's the important thing. People don't know that, that, and I think Sandra Tanner worked on something where she said that basically the, the book of.

Mormon is closer to Christianity than Mormonism. It absolutely is. And so if you don't know the difference, I mean, it even sounds, and of course, you know, it takes a bunch of Isaiah and he puts it just word for word in the book of Mormon.

So there's a lot of stuff that if you're just a first in time investigator, like, I'm not even sure I had read Isaiah before I read Isaiah in the book of Mormon. Right. Cause I'm just like looking at it from the first, first time.

So, so I didn't know which was true. So how do you distinguish them between, so it's not just that the evidential approach led me to something true. It also can kind of prevent you from falling into the lie because the first thing you're going to want to know is, well, how do I, what's the system by which we determine a witness is reliable.

And if we apply it to the book of Mormon really quick, it starts to deteriorate, I mean, really fast. So it's not, to me, I just knew, okay, I don't, I know I wasn't quite sure yet about Christianity, but I knew the book of Mormon was not true because it can't uphold the test.

So I just knew until I walk away from that. So in some ways it was, it kind of inoculated me from doing too much more time on that side. Yeah. I mean, you know,.

It's funny how we use our background, you use your background as an investigator, you know, with eyewitness testimony to examine, you know, book of Mormon, the gospels. It was funny when I studied Mormonism, when I was working with a coworker who was Mormon trying to explain to me, like try to convince me, I'm a, by background, I'm a software engineer.

So I write programs. Well, I actually wrote a program to calculate the birth rate and death rate and to really see because the thing is, if the book of Mormon is right, right, it should be able to have a normal birth rate that's necessary for all the people that die in the wars that are in the book of Mormon.

You know, in the 1800s to have those many people die is not unusual, but it is unusual, you know, if you're saying in the first century. And so I had calculated that the birth rate required for the death rate in the book of Mormon was like 12 to 15 times the normal.

Percentage. Right. This stuff isn't normal. I know. So that's actually, so this is part of the stuff that makes a difference when you're starting to, I mean, even just archaeologically, right, is a thousand year period of time chronicled in the book of Mormon from about 600 BC to about 400 AD.

And while you would think there'd be some evidence that any of that, any of it, a single Mormon name on some inscription somewhere. So you, so, I mean, so when you see it, then also as you start to listen to how people would justify, and this is why I'm very careful about how I will defend my Christian beliefs, because you start to see certain patterns in defense attorneys and what they say that I often will see in people who are religious on one to not one religion or another who will try to justify claims as well.

And I just don't want to, I want to make sure that we're not doing that. I mean, because if that's the case, I'm not interested, but as I got more and more and also just, I think that part of it, and I, and when I wrote cold case Christianity, I just stayed inside the gospels and I, I wrote a longer version originally, and my wife read it and she said, this is really boring.

So, so when I wrote it finally for David C. Cook, the publisher, I tried to streamline it a little bit to make it to move, to make it read faster. And so we ended up leaving a lot of stuff out and this has been hanging around.

And when Zonarman came to me and said, Hey, would you, they wanted something similar. Cause I had not been with Zonarman yet. And I said, well, I never really written that book, but I do have a different approach.

So whereas the book, whereas cold case kind of looks at everything inside the gospels, I never really got a chance to explore what I wanted to explore, which is outside the gospels. In other words, if Jesus is who he said he was, we can expect there'd be more than just this little tablet of information, the four gospels.

Of course, there's ton, there's a ton of impact that Jesus had. So what we did with this book is we said, okay, look like you're working in nobody murder. You don't even have a crime scene. You don't even have a body.

He got rid of the body and he buried it someplace and they never found it. So, so, you know, there's not even a crime scene. And no one even took a report. This is sad, but you know, he reports that she, they had a fight last night and everyone believes it.

And it probably everyone who works a missing person case like that should come in and photograph the house. But you know, you take them sometimes the guy will this, in one case, the guy came to the department like two days later.

So now he's at the front desk giving a report about his missing wife, who he thought would come back a couple of days ago. She hasn't come back. Well, that first person who takes a report is a service officer.

It's not even a detective. That's just the guy working at the front desk. He takes the report, puts it in the computer or puts it on paper in those days. And then he ships it back to records. Now, two days later, it's assigned to a detective.

We're now four days behind the murder. So by the time he gets it, he's calls, well, did she come back? Cause a lot of times they just come back and no, they didn't come back. Well, can you talk about this while I'm at work today?

Can you come over tomorrow? Sure. Now we're five days behind it. Okay. So there's just no, I mean, you've got no crime scene. You've got no body. So how do you make this case, especially if it goes cold for 30 more and which I've got a couple of those that went cold for 20 to 30 more years.

Well, you have to kind of demonstrate that on the day of the disappearance, if he was murdered, it's like a bomb went off and every bomb has got a fuse. And then afterwards there's debris everywhere. There's fallout.

You can tell people, you can demonstrate what kind of bomb you have just from the fuse and the fallout. And that's what we do in these no body murder cases. And I've done a couple of them. I think at least one's been on.

Yeah. One's been on dateline. So, so these are cases that I'm, you know, I'm pretty familiar with and nobody wants to file these cases. No DA wants to file them because they're terrible cases. You got to prove number one, that she's dead.

Then you got to prove that he did it. So, so it's a twofold problem because you have no body. So, so, so, so I thought, well, could the same, I took the same approach with Jesus. If you said, okay, I'm not going to acknowledge anything in the new Testament.

I'm just going to stop. I'm going to imagine a scenario in which every new Testament had been destroyed. If it seemed to me that if Jesus was who he said he was that God would have, there'd be more than just a new Testament title of information.

Now, granted everything about Jesus that can be known is new Testament dependent. That's not the issue because in the end, all we're going to do is find evidence of other people who have already read the new Testament who are going to be talking about it.

Okay. But that's the kind of thing you would expect, right? Like, like when Elvis died, people talked about Elvis. They still write a book a year. It's been 40 years. There's more books written about Elvis.

You'd be amazed at how many there are. So I looked at the entire catalog of Elvis books and I watched how the story morphs over time. Well, that's what you would expect from the guy who was like the biggest recording artist of his day, you know, until Michael Jackson came along and nobody sold more albums.

I think he's like the second richest dead celebrity in terms of album sales. Okay. Well, I mean, this guy has had a huge impact on the industry. Well, wouldn't you expect that people would take the core story of Elvis and extrapolate from that all kinds of legends that will sell books.

Of course they did, but they can reconstruct the core story of Elvis from what everyone has in common on all these salacious books. Well, something similar happens with Jesus, which you would expect. I mean, you would expect that Jesus is who he said he was.

He'd at least have the impact that Elvis had in history. And that's what we're trying to do with the person of interest to show that, yeah, you could reconstruct the story of Jesus from the amazing, oversized, really unparalleled impact that one person had on human history in lots of places that you might not expect it.

And that's what we're trying to do with the book is to show the unexpected nooks and crannies. There's a lot of books out there and I've got them sitting back here because I read them and cited them in the book that talk about the impact of Jesus, but none that I found would actually go back and look for the fingerprints.

So if you said, for example, he's had a huge impact on science, which he has, but no one I could find had given me a list of all of the fathers of scientific disciplines that were devout Jesus followers.

And that list is tremendous. I mean, there's no corner of science that hasn't had a discipline founded by a Christian, either in antiquity, all the way to quantum mechanics and computer sciences, computer languages.

These are things that Christians have been involved in. And here's what's cool about it is those Christians also write about Jesus. So if you just had the writings of the science fathers, you could learn more about Jesus than you can from the writings of the church fathers.

And that's very, very interesting, right? Because that means you'd have to destroy not only the new Testament, but the entire history of the antonyzing fathers and beyond and the entire history of scientific thinkers because the biggest and best ones historically wrote about Jesus too.

You'd have to destroy all that work. So that's the footprint that is so huge about Jesus. And I wanted to kind of show it, especially for young people who, I didn't learn this in Los Angeles County. Maybe others are, but I think everything, I don't think I learned a single thing about Jesus of Nazareth in my entire education through a master's degree, not a single thing.

So it's important for us. And by the way, if you were to search, and we tried this in terms, I had two research assistants and we looked at books and online resources. There's a lot of universities that will make their online libraries available.

So you can actually just kind of search or sign in and you can search, but it's hard to find people who are writing about the Christian identity of major scientists in history. As a matter of fact, most they will.

So I know I'm grossly underestimating the impact of Jesus, because a lot of these profiles about important scientists have had their religious identity scrubbed. So I don't even know, you have a sense where, okay, I know where he was born and what time he was born.

There's a good chance this dude is a Christian, but unless I can find explicitly someone writing about him being a Christian, I'm not going to include him. So I know we've underestimated the number of scientists that are Christians in the book.

Why Person of Interest Uses Illustrations and Objection Boxes

Yeah. And so the book.

You're referring to is your latest book, Person of Interest, which any book that's all about Jesus, I love just off the bat. But for folks who don't know, but before we get into the content, you have a different background as well that I think I've seen more evidence in this book than.

Any of your other books as an illustrator. Yeah. Well, I asked, my background was in design and in architecture, and then I became a detective or police officer for years, but I was working patrol. They would just have me come out and draw the murder scenes.

So I was at a lot of murders when I was just a patrol officer and I was working gangs for a couple of years. I can remember I did a couple of murders while I was working gangs, not investigating, just drawing them or building the afterwards for court.

So by the time I got assigned there, I think it was kind of a natural transition to start investigating them because I was already been at the crime scenes. So many of the people knew me. So that's kind of how that worked.

And I didn't really use the art side of it aside from drawing crime scenes until I started doing jury trials. And then we knew that we could make these visual. And the first time we really robustly did that with media was probably around 1998.

So we started, so it's been what, 24, 23 years ago. And we just started doing visual presentation. So I asked, and I always knew that if you could do a hundred closing arguments before you do the closing argument, you'll do a very good closing argument because you've worked out all the bugs.

And so I asked Zonervan because I knew that I had been speaking about cold case for probably five or six years before I wrote the book. And so I knew that all the visual material was already ready. But for this book, I knew that I needed a couple of years to build this visually.

And so they gave me two years to build the stage presentations and to give a few so I could see. And a lot of what I built, which I thought was going to be so powerful visually, I just don't use because it's, I did it once and I know it's, it drags, it's too slow.

It's not compelling. It's true. It's all good. It's all informative, but it wasn't compelling in a stage presentation. I wanted a book that would be compelling and a quick read. So that's why there's over 400 illustrations in the book.

Those are really just kind of the stage presentation illustrations that I've turned in the line. So you can, you can print them in a book, right? Because otherwise they're full color and they don't, no one can afford to print.

Also, I like the idea that if you're on a blank white page, so as I, the interior composition of the book, the layout is important to me. Like, I feel like every book is like a piece of art. The whole book is a piece of art, how it opens.

I wanted to, I told the publisher, I don't want to single it. There's not a list on the page, like the list of the science fathers. I want every page when you open it randomly to have at least one illustration or a side box or an icon for that, some graphic element on every single page, because I knew that that we're in a generation that is visual and that some people will skip over the images because they really want the text, but a lot of young people are reading image to image.

So I wanted it to be like a graphic novel in a sense that where you can just kind of quickly, and it reads fast because it's, you know,.

It's 30 images. Yeah. You know, it's funny you say that because I actually was going to ask you, I had noticed that and I didn't realize it was on purpose. I just thought you had so many, you know, either illustrations.

The other thing that's really, I really like about it is you have on not every page, but a lot of the pages you're putting basically here's what the opposition would say. Here's, you know, I'm just trying to look for the like objection.

Yeah. No, I'm trying,.

I'm trying to get the objections in too. Yeah. No, I agree. And I think that's part of it, you know, Andrew, I don't know if you probably feel the same way I do. Like we, there's like a genre of apologetics books and so many will do so many similar things.

I'm always afraid. I just don't want to do the same thing everyone else has already done because there's better books out there. I mean, who wants to write, there's already a better version exists, you know?

So people will say, oh, is your book like case for Christ? Well, not really. If you look at Lee, Lee's a journalist. So he's always interviewing people. So it's a collection of interviews. Whereas I will do some interviews, but for the most part, I don't trust experts.

Okay. And I don't trust myself as an expert. So what I have to do basically is I want to get back to what is the thing the expert is talking about? Like what is the base fact or evidence that, because if it happens in jury trials, honestly, is that we bring up an expert to talk about this DNA.

And sure enough, our guy's a County employee because it costs us zero to get him because we have no budget. It's all in the dime. We're the prosecutor. So we can't like hire the best expert we have to basically use.

And we can't occasionally, but for the most part, we're trying to do it on the cheap. Whereas the defense team that they got money, they're going to hire the same guy you have, but 15 times better. You know, he's the national expert.

He's going to be able to say, yeah, I taught this other guy at the County here. I taught him five years ago. Okay. So now you're looking like an idiot, right? So, but, but in the end we tell jurors, Hey, experts just offer inferences.

It doesn't mean it's true. You get to go back to the evidence and use your common sense to be able to determine which of these two experts is making more sense. So what I tried to do in this book is just get back to what are the facts, you know, here's the data.

Here's what you find. If you look at all the, for example, on the, we talk about the fuse that leads up to Jesus's appearance and then the fallout afterwards. And one aspect of that fallout is literature, but I wanted to know like how many voices exist in antiquity who have spoken something about Jesus.

Some of those will be a manuscript writers, but some of those voices are just recorded on manuscripts. Like we don't know anything about Celsus, except that origin speaks a lot in responding to Celsus.

So we hear Celsus's voice on the pages of origins work. So there's a voice, even though that the author is a Christian author. Well, if you go through history like that, you're going to discover that there are way, way more non-Christian voices between the Greeks and Persians and Romans and Egyptians and Jews and all the non-canonical authors.

Then there are Christian voices who say something about Jesus. And so you can now reconstruct a story. Okay. So let's take out the church fathers. Now, what would it be learned if we just had the non-Christian voices?

And I have one chapter that just summarizes. And then here's the other thing too. We knew we had about 250 pages we could work with. And so then we knew we had about 50 pages we can put in the end notes.

The problem was we had over 300 pages of end notes. So we had to kick off the other 270 pages to a PDF file because I knew if I put that stuff in, like who's going to read that? That's going to be so boring.

I mean, it has to move faster. So there's lots of footnotes, but some of these, if you wanted to know, well, who are those 400 science fathers that you've mentioned in the list? Well, you have to go to the footnotes to get that in the PDF file because there's just no way to put that in there.

People have said, why didn't you put that in there? Because it would have been about 30 continuous pages of lists. Who reads 30 pages of lists? Nobody. So I just wanted to get that data to you, but I don't want to deliver it.

In the pages of the book. That just means paying for printing of pages that no one's going to read because it's powerful to have all those names, but what are people going to do? They're going to do what they typically do when they come to the genealogies in the Bible, right?

Just flip over.

That's right. They're going to flip by them. That's exactly what they're going to do.

It is a quick moving book. Between the illustrations you have in the side notes, where you give the objection. And I think as an apologetic book, it's really good. Here's all the content and each one of them, here's the objective, here's a quick answer.

That is really helpful just for folks who want to go, hey, I've had this objection. And a lot of anyone who's been following your podcast or your blog articles, I think a lot of this has been in works much more than two years because I've been hearing this from you for a long time.

And you really do present, and I think because of your background, you present this different than others do. You're coming at it from an investigative detective type of mindset. You're bringing that in.

And I think that is a different way. That's why you always refer to your original book, Cold Case Christianity, being a cold case detective. You talk about being a case maker, saying, okay, let's make a case for this.

That's what a detective is going to do when you go to court. I think your overall approach to the way you write all of your books is very different. It's unique. And I agree with you. I have some great books that have never been published.

I have a great book on evangelism. I got 192 pages written and it'll probably never be in print. Why? There's other books that are just as good. I actually told Greg Kokel once that basically when between Greg Kokel's book, Tactics, and Jason Lyle's book, the ultimate, I'm trying to remember the title now, it's the ultimate something for creation.

I forget the title, but Jason Lyle has a book basically talking about, he's talking presuppositional apologetics. Great. Greg Kokel's book on tactics really helps you to how to answer questions. I looked at those two and said, between those two and anything from Ray Comfort,.

Because basically all his books are the same. Who needs to write another book? I get it.

Basically, those sum up exactly everything that I had written in my book. I'm like,.

Why bother? Here you go. Just read these. I've had publishers come to me and say, would you write a book where you're doing a daily devotional or something? They're out there. There are at least trouble dealing with Mark Middleburg.

It's an apologetics daily devotional. I also want my concern too, this is just my selfishness, is that I want to do something creative because that's why I do any of this, is that I missed the creative aspect of art and architecture.

For a lot of years before I was working cold cases, I wasn't able to scratch that itch the way I wanted to. I started a police band, a musical band for years. We had that. That was hilarious. Anyway, but the idea was we're just trying to scratch an itch that I didn't think that I was getting, working patrol and working gangs or whatever it was.

How do you be creative? If someone pitches a project that is informative, but I don't have a creative angle. I'm not going to enjoy doing it. It's just going to feel like a homework assignment. It's not going to feel like, oh, every day I get up and I can create something new.