This season, OZY’s hit podcast, The Thread, delves into how a sweet little boy named Jimmy became a mass murderer. You can still see the video on YouTube (and can watch it below). It’s really not all that exciting. It’s from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, in 2006. A group of young summer interns is giving presentations about the scientific research they conducted that summer. One of the program’s instructors introduces the next speaker. “His goals are to become a researcher and make scientific discoveries,” she says of 18-year-old James Eagan Holmes. “In personal life, he enjoys playing soccer and strategy games, and his dream is to own a Slurpee machine.” Everyone is still laughing as a skinny, geeky-looking kid with big ears and a mop of hair brushed forward over his forehead approaches the microphone. He wears an oversized shirt that’s buttoned but untucked. James Holmes is bright-eyed and, like almost anyone who’s asked to give a presentation before a packed room of peers and mentors, nervous and a bit awkward. He talks about his research on subjective experience, and the computer program he developed to help understand how people perceive causality. There is polite applause at the end. At that moment, Holmes is aware that he has what he refers to as his “broken mind” — it’s the reason he wants to be a neuroscientist. But no one, including Holmes, has any clue that fewer than six years later, he will walk into a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and open fire, killing 12 people and injuring 58 others. | 
