Criminals are made not born.

Alright, good morning, Greg, and hello to everyone listening in. Today we're going to be talking about an event that occurred 97 years ago, right around this time, that a lot of people don't know about. In fact, this is something we discuss in a lot of our training courses. The only time people have ever even heard of it was when we were literally in the area where this occurred 97 years ago.

What we're talking about is one of the worst attacks in U.S. history, one of the worst school attacks ever. It was in 1927 in Bath Township, Michigan, by this guy, Andrew Kehoe. It ended up killing 45 people at the time, injuring a lot more. I'm going to put a link to the news story in the episode details for everyone to read; there's some great insight in there.

There are a few reasons why I want to talk about this. One, there's a historical perspective: nothing is new. There's something that came before it, and so it helps understanding these things in the past because it helps us make sense of something that's happening today. Then we can kind of reduce the novelty, and it'll maybe help us see things a little bit clearer.

Also, a lot of people have never heard of this. There have been other attacks since then that are very similar, but basically, what happened was this guy, Kehoe, was a part of the school board there, not a real popular guy. He was upset about a number of things going on in his life and so decided to blow up, to attack, the school. He packed it full of explosives, detonated them with a pretty low-level sophistication but highly organized device. They found even more explosives that didn't go off and a backup way of doing it.

The idea was he ignited and detonated this bomb at the school, killed a whole bunch of people. He set his property, which was in foreclosure — his barn, his house — he set it all on fire after he had killed his wife. Then, when people were showing up to his place, telling them, "Hey, you might want to go to the school right now," so everyone found out that something was going on at the school, everyone headed there. He headed there with what we would call today a VBIED (Vehicle-Born Improvised Explosive Device). A while after the initial explosion, he set that off to kill even more people, and he died.

So, there's this big, massive, highly organized, well-planned attack at this school. One of the big takeaways I always like to talk about, which is a similar sentiment among a lot of people, is he had a sign hanging on his fence post or somewhere on his property that said, "Criminals are made not born." From a human behavior perspective, that tells you everything you need to know about this kind of person, just with that one statement. Obviously, it's saying, "This isn't my fault. I'm not responsible. It's all of you," which is utter nonsense, to keep it very scientific. That's total junk, but you see that as a common theme.

Again, like I said, I just want to give a quick overview of what happened so if you're listening, you're kind of on the same page. You can deep dive that all you want. Like I said, I'll have this article that recaps it. It's a short article that has a ton of great information in there with a bunch of short little insights that was from Shane Kounkary; he sent that one over. This is why we want to talk about it.

So, that's a little bit of the background. The insight into all of this, and why we're discussing it, is like I said, these events have occurred before in the past in a similar manner. If we can understand some of these and how they occur, and the events that need to occur and coalesce in order for something like this to happen, there's a lot. The areas that we focus on are what all of these things going on prior to the event, not going back and saying, "Oh, you could have done this, or you could have seen that." It's like, "Well, no one told me that, or I didn't know that," right?

But what we see is we take these events, and we go, "What are the similar things across all of them that happened prior to, that needed to happen in order for this to occur?" So I can look for and identify those pre-event indications of something in the future. Now it's captured my attention. So now I'm not the person on the news going, "Yeah, well, I guess now that we see it, I should have seen this, or I should have done that, or seen coming." Yeah, and that's the initial part. Then later on everyone goes, "Oh yeah, well, I didn't know. I didn't know," which is true.

Right, because you're not trained to look for a school shooter or someone carrying out this attack. But you don't need to be. You don't need some highly specific, specified training unless your role is to go find that person. What we're talking about are those incongruent signals that someone can pick up on and go, "Hey, wait a minute, something doesn't seem right here, and here's why I need to investigate this further." Because they were all over with this one. But I'm going to throw it to you, Greg, because I've been talking for a few minutes now, on where we want to get started. I left out a lot of the great details, just so we can get into them as part of the discussion.

No, and I'll tell you, every time that you do an opening like that, Brian, I took a page full of notes because you talk about a variety of things, all of which matter. What I want people to understand going in – I apologize, I had something on my glasses – is that we're not unpacking the psychopathy of the offender to the point of breaking down all the DNA and the bullshit that most of the other people do. Our job, what we're the best in the world at, is human behavior pattern recognition and analysis.

So what we do is we look for patterns in things, and then we analyze them to determine, "Were there key takeaways that we should have or could have seen that we can pay forward?" So when an incident starts to coalesce again, we can go, "Wow, this sounds remarkably similar, and why aren't we looking at these cues right now?" One caution: don't put cues in a basket unless on the outside of that basket it's for cues, because what happens is the round peg, square hole is the quickest way to get off mark.

You talk about historical perspective. I grew up with a Marine dad, a two-fisted Marine dad that liked to make sure I understood both left and right, no matter what I was doing, it was wrong. But my dad loved fishing. So as a reserve cop during the Detroit Riots, and as a heating and cooling specialist, a skill that he learned when he left Tennessee and came to Detroit, he met a lot of people. One of the people he met was from what was called Coffee Cadillac, the biggest Cadillac dealer in Detroit. It was Zach Zakula, the biggest salesman. My dad did his heating and cooling. So he said, "Hey, Andy, here's a weekend, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, every year that you can go up to my property. I've got a private lake and all these series of homes on the lake."

Wildest thing I ever saw in my life, Brian. As we went through there to get to the lakes, we always had to go through Bath Township. My dad would always stop in town. There's a Veterans Memorial in James Cousins Memorial Park. When we went there, it wasn't just a Veterans Memorial. They talked about the James Cousins School and then before that, the Bath Township Massacre. Didn't even know what "massacre" was; I was young. I mean, when do you learn that word? And it said right on there: "45 dead, 50 injured, May 18th, 1927."

Brian, that changed the way I thought of the rest of the world because the dead were mostly kids, and I had never heard of the term "massacre." I knew what a war was because my dad wouldn't let me not understand what the Veterans Memorial was. But when they coalesced these things together, it was like, holy smokes, how did we get here? So every time that we went up there, every year, we'd go there, and we'd stop at that park. I said, "One day we're going to turn this into something more than just this memorial."

When you look back at Andrew Kehoe, Brian, Andrew Kehoe is not the devil, okay? But the devil was in him. Andrew Kehoe was 55. All the pictures you see of Andrew Kehoe, they make him look demonic, and they change the black and white. You know, he's sitting back in his chair. He was a school board member. As a matter of fact, he was the treasurer of the school board before he got voted out. So what we have to do is we have to take a look at these people and go, "They're our next-door neighbor. That's my neighbor across the street that I see every day. And are they in trouble?"

Because you think of this, just a couple of the simple things that he did. He spent months going to and from the school and the outbuildings, loading each building up with pyrotol. Brian, not all of those bombs, as you indicated, went off, but the ones that did go off were significant enough to destroy almost all of the structures. Brian, then he waits. He lies in wait, okay? And that's first-degree premeditated murder. First of all, the use of the explosives, doing it on the first day of school. Hey, start writing those down, folks, because that's the pattern.

Then, Brian waits an hour and a half after this initial explosion, and he drives to the school with his homemade VBIED. He has a lever-action rifle to detonate it because he knows that's going to work perfectly. What does he do? He rolls down the window on his car and he waves folks over to his car and he says, "Hey, come over here, I got something to tell you." And then, boom, he detonates that. One of the poor kids that had survived the initial blast an hour and a half earlier was standing there with some supervisors and adults and teachers, and he just destroys them and himself with this constructed bomb.

Brian, there's a lot there to unpack, and I'd even like to go back to the preparations that he did at his own house, and killing a significant other before you go on a rampage. I think those are the types of things that people will most likely see. This is not a guy that came unhinged and went out to the school with a rifle minutes after something happened, nor are any of the other kids that we see that shoot up a school. You see what I'm saying? It has to percolate. It has to germinate. It has to grow, that anger.

And to kind of, because everyone wants to then say, "Well, like you said, what's the psychology or physiology behind this person? What did they have a chemical imbalance? What was their childhood like? What did they experience? What were all of these things?" I understand why people want to get into that because they want to understand why this would occur, who would do something like this, and because they want to say, "That would never be me."

Well, that's a big part of it is to say, "Well, it'll never be me, or I don't know someone, or here's why I can't just have this unknown, so I have to..."

And those things I can understand. Like, whether or not I experienced it, I can go, "Oh wow, you had a troubled childhood and then this happened and this happened, and then now all of these events..." And you one, you can't prove that any of those things had any influence on what it is in a sense. Precisely, right? You actually can't. Just because someone had a shitty childhood, or was overly aggressive, or had a different... that doesn't necessarily mean anything other than, "Here's what's going on with this person when compared to a typical human being at that age or whatever." That's it. It's a comparison. It doesn't, you can't draw some sort of causal meaning between those things and what occurred. Now, can you say, "Hey, this may have been either a minor or major contributing factor?" Sure, absolutely.

There's a host of things. The reason why I bring that up is because it goes back to this guy was on the school board. You know what I mean? Like, this is someone you know, who's at the school board meeting next to you. I don't do that to scare people. I do it to remove the veil of, "This is the Boogeyman." Because if you go down the path of, "This is the Boogeyman," you're never going to see it because the Boogeyman doesn't exist, okay? There is no Bigfoot. There is no chupacabra. It's a story gone wrong, right? And there's a false attribution, and it's an error in sense-making, and it screws over everyone because now no one sees this coming.

The other thing is, when people call things unprecedented or, "This is, we've never been there," or "We've never seen something like this before," they're telling on themselves. They're what they're doing when people say that, they're telling on themselves. They're saying, "I'm ignorant. I don't know about this stuff, so this must be something that's so chaotic and rare." And it almost never is.

So, when you get past the sensationalism, we talk about these different details. Why? Because these are signals of him on transmit. That's what I love. There are some great lines even in the article that'll be in the details where the woman is going to go to take a picnic on his property and he's like, "Yeah, you might want to enjoy that picnic while you can." Like, who says that kind of stuff, right?

I mean, all of these things, all of those pre-event indications are significant and important because they have meaning to the person that says them. If all humans are on transmit, I can get some understanding of what your intent may be, and this guy was laying it out there. Kehoe is just one thing after another. He was the problem person. No one liked him, so they didn't reelect him. Then he was mad about them raising his taxes, which everyone should be. But no one took this seriously, especially it being 1927 and not seeing an attack like this before in that area.

The effect he had was, I believe, he killed like 25 or 30% of the population of children in that area for that community. He killed... Imagine right now your city or your town or your community, a quarter of the children are just gone. I mean, that's what you're talking about here. That's the level of the impact it had.

It's not to sit here and go through... I just get frustrated, you brought it up, when people get into that, "This is why someone would do that, and this is..." No, it's not. You cannot prove any of that. You're doing it after the fact, never talking to any of these people, never knowing anything about them other than what you've read, and then coming up with, "Here's my hypothesis." None of that can be proven in any of these cases. None of it can be proven.

What you can prove is, "Here are the steps they took. Here is where they demonstrated their intent. Here's where they knew what they were going to do was wrong and shouldn't be done. Here's how they said that." Because I mean, that's why I brought up a statement of where he said, "Criminals are made not born." That's such a common theme between people who carry out these attacks. It's, "I'm not the problem, you're all the problem."

So I can say, typically, these are people that do not take responsibility for their lives and their actions. How do I know that? Well, because they prove it. They say, "Well, it's all your fault, not mine, and if it wasn't for you, I'd be doing these things." It's like, "Well, you just lack the ability to take responsibility for your actions." So I can use that as an indicator. When I see them doing all these things, it's like, "Well, does this person take responsibility for their actions? Oh, okay, no. Oh, this is more significant than the other person over there." You know what I'm saying? This is how we weigh that stuff out. I kind of went on a little bit.

No, no, no, you're right on. You're right on. So let me let me tie back to focus on what matters. Yeah, let's go back to some gems that you talked about, Brian. First of all, there's a lot of comparisons here. There are a number of comparisons here with Charles Whitman, the Austin, Texas, UT Austin shooter. Now, listen, the first thing that you said that ties me to that mentally, and the reason I wrote it down, is that Whitman said, "Dear Lord, do an autopsy because something's grown in my brain making me stupid." And sure enough, we find physiology, you mentioned that. It led to psychopathy. Well, there's a direct link that we could make and point out. Yeah, he has a tumor, right? So his reasoning, everything. But there's something else there, and I want to talk about that in a minute, that he killed before he killed.

But you talked about the sign, so I want to kind of jump ahead to the sign and then go back to the killing of those folks. You have to understand, folks, the reason this is important in pattern recognition and then the subsequent analysis: Andrew Kehoe went and found just the right piece of wood. He didn't grab a piece of wood from the ranch that was laying on the ground. He found a very specific piece of wood that he then took to his shop, and he cut, and then he routered and dug with different tools these letters into it. Then he sanded and polished it. Then he painted the letters black, and then he stained the wood before he created the hanger that he put out on his ranch.

Brian, just with that information, is that important? Oh, is that significant? Okay. So you're telling me that he doesn't take responsibility for his actions? What actions did he take responsibility for? The pyrotol, the months-long setting up the ambushes, his message. So that's where we have to look, folks. You have to turn over the bed and look under the bed. You have to go into the closet and move the clothes. I really mean that figuratively, and not just metaphorically, but I mean that you have to do those things.

Why? So we take a look at Whitman and many others, the kid at the school in Uvalde did the same thing: you have a significant other, whether it's a grandmother, whether it's a wife, whether it's your mom, and what you do is you shoot them before you initiate this horrific, let's call it a massacre, whatever you want to call it, this episode. Yeah. Why? Well, if we take a look at Uvalde, he shot his grandmother in the face and then took her car and then did a bunch of other things. He fully intended to kill her. As a matter of fact, before he left the home, he was convinced she was dead. I'll back up that statement in court, in testimony, and give you a bunch of evidence, but I don't need to.

So let's go from that all the way back to Whitman. Whitman does it to his mom and then he does it to his wife. Well, then you got Kehoe that does it to his wife and then he goes up. Why would somebody do that? Why would the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority killer light his house on fire, like Kehoe lit every one of his possessions on fire? First thing, because I'm not coming back. And the second thing is, "You don't control my narrative. I control every bit of this narrative, and I'm not leaving any artifacts or evidence or witnesses behind that are going to tell you a different story." So I'm going, "I'm so controlling, Brian, that I'm going to kill everything."

Here's one for you: when Andrew Kehoe was on his property, he went around with a knife, and he cut a band on every tree on it. He had a good-sized property. Why did he cut the bark off of every tree? To guarantee that they would die. Now, he's a failed farmer, Brian, not a good farmer at all. He only has a couple of livestock. His wife, Nellie, he was getting foreclosed on. Yes, but the reason he's getting foreclosed on is because he's not paying his bills, because he's pissed about the school board building a new school and taking the taxes.

So Nellie is his wife, who he caves in her head with a coal shovel later that day. What happens is her sister and an aunt are paying Nellie to slip the money to Kehoe so he can pay the bills, and he's not. He's refusing to, because he doesn't think that he's got... Now the bank is foreclosing, so he's pissed at the bank. The crops aren't growing, so he's pissed at the crops. The cows aren't giving milk, so he's pissed at the cows. He ends up taking what little livestock he's got left, locking them in the barn, and burning it to the ground.

So there, that's what he's saying, Brian. What he's saying is, "So there." But he started this years earlier. He started this months earlier. And nobody put together those breadcrumbs and said, "They're leading to this goddamn cottage." That's what we need to do. We need to take a look at it. It was significant at certain points, but don't look for everything to be significant. Like if you're checking on something, you've got to check little things and then see if that pattern coalesces on you.

You brought up one that we see in a lot of these different cases, and you said, "Controlling the narrative." I want to kind of jump into that for a second. I want to give sort of a benign example of that. Right now, it seems like it's always election season somewhere, and constantly getting bombarded about politics, but that's a great example of how people will control the narrative, meaning, "Alright, we're going to go have this speech. We want these specific signs, these specific people, because we want this image and this specific message to get across." It's like marketing certain companies and brands. We want to control the narrative of the story for a specific purpose.

So the politician, they obviously want to get elected. They want that simple message to get to you, Greg, so you go, "Yeah, I like that, and I'm going to vote for you," or, "Hey, I will buy this product, that's a great message." So we talk about controlling. That could be the priest giving the sermon at Sunday service, right? They're telling this story with a specific outcome to control that message for an intent. Now, it's not a nefarious or bad one or whatever, but it's just, it's for a reason.

So if I look at things like that as controlling the narrative, but now I flip it over to a different situation, I can go, "Is this person attempting to control the narrative? Will someone lie in questioning to control the narrative? And then kill a witness to a crime to control the narrative?" You get what I'm saying? If I put it as one of those elements to look at, it's like, "What are they trying? What steps have they taken to control this narrative and make sure it's laser-focused?" Because, one, that demonstrates intent. It demonstrates some knowledge of what's happening. They're doing it for a specific purpose, and it shows some level of organization, meaning, "Okay, now they're starting to rise."

So now I'm starting to see these different elements. There are demonstrations of intent, there are levels of organization, what do they have access to? Now I start to put these elements together that we talk about on the show, and then we talk about and we train people on in the class. That's how I lay out these elements. Then after I have this, then maybe I can go, "Well, what else is going on with this person in life? Are they typically irrational and overreact to things? Do they typically have these things?" Like now I can put all that stuff in that maybe I know about. You get what I'm saying? Foundational elements, it's just another thing to look at.

And so let's not forget where intent falls, and that motive is less important than intent. Why is that important? So I'll give you a personal story, and I'm going to do myself ugly. So the first day of school, I was born and raised in Detroit, most folks that listen to us know that, and I was very, very proud of that. My mom is German, my aunt is German. We only spoke German around the house. My dad used to beat my mom and my aunt because they spoke German around the house, because he was born in Schitt's Creek, Tennessee, and that's not the way things were. Sorry for the folks in Schitt's Creek because it smelled like sulfur.

But when I went to my first day of school, my mom dressed me in hard shoes and short wool socks and lederhosen and a Tyrolean hat with a feather, and I had to carry this horn, and inside the horn were all kinds of treats and candies and a stapler and a marker and all the stuff that I would need in school. So I was so excited about the first day of school until I got to school. Okay, and this is kindergarten, right, which is two German words put together: Kinder Garten. I walk in, and there's not a kid in that school that looks anything like me. So I freely pissed my pants, Brian. I did not want to be there. I got physically ill. I urinated all over, and wet leather is like, a lot of people wouldn't know rubber and leather, Brian, well, it could be considered a smell. And so I left school, and it was traumatic.

Well, in Detroit, there were a lot of different ethnic groups that were part of the school that I went to, and one of the kids that I met on that first day that was consoling me was a kid named Adolf Santini. Now, imagine being in the 60s and having your name as Adolf. Now, Adolf Santini and the rest of his family only spoke Italian around the house. And Adolf, he spoke broken Italian, and he ultimately changed his name, obviously. But what happened is we saw each other probably in fifth or sixth grade. After that incident, there was busing going on, and now we're back in the same school. And some kid comes up to me and goes, "Hey, weren't you the German kid that in kindergarten pissed your pants and had to run out of school?" And I go, "No, that was Adolf. Adolf Santini." And I go, "Who else would that be?"

And so I did this kid ugly, Brian. What I did is I manipulated the story so I wasn't the foil, I wasn't the victim of the story, and I threw this kid under the bus, and it ruined him. He had to change his name. I apologized years later when we were in high school, and I go, "It was a shitty thing to do." And he's like, "Yeah, but I would have done the same." When you're drowning, when you're drowning and somebody Baywatch comes in to save you, you punch and kick them, Brian. You're not going, "Hey, glad to see you."

So what I mean by that is all of those markers were there with Kehoe. Kehoe lost an election that he thought was very important to him. Kehoe was not paying the school board taxes and as treasurer said, "We shouldn't build a new school." Now you notice how those are starting to stack up. Take little sugar cubes or something while you're listening to us at home, reading the paper, and stack those sugar cubes up. His aunt and his wife's sister bitching in his ear, "Hey, we gave you the money, what are we doing with this money?" Farm is failing. Every time he drives home, shitty farm. Now he's got an engine knock on his car, Brian. Now he goes out, and guess what? His dog is dead, or his pyrotol didn't go off when he tried to do a ditch.

Brian, to you, when you're an injustice collector, when you're looking at, "Everybody's against me," all of those things start adding up fast, and now they mature to the point where he goes, "Okay, you devalued me. You're not listening to me. So I'm going to make something loud enough that you can hear it, and I'm going to be remembered." Does he give a damn that he's going to be around? No, as a matter of fact, it's part of his plan. Why? Because that's another way to control the narrative. You go, "So there, exit stage left."

And that blows, that blows because we all want to, you said it earlier, man, we all want to be able to explain that away. "My kid could never do that. My daughter would never drive into a levee and drown her kids just after they were born or they were one year old." I'll tell you this, the killing of a significant other before a massacre happens more than you know, folks, because you're bamboozled by the news. I'll give you one that just happened last week: the wife and husband are going through a messy divorce. They're talking about custody. The dad comes over and goes, "I want to take the kids to whatever fast food joint." Dad takes them out in the desert, kills both of them, and shoots himself. Why? Who wants to control the narrative, Brian? Do you see what I'm trying to say?

Now you've got a situation where that occurs when we're passing the children, right? "I'll meet you in the parking lot," and I know there's a camera in the parking lot, "but it's okay, I'm not going to stick around here and get arrested for this because I'm going to shoot you right in front of the kids." Why? Because I want to control that narrative. Anytime somebody wants their say and their way, you should be cautious. You should understand that that's a situation where you need to go out to the parking lot, get in your car, and go home, and from home call your boss, from home call HR. Because what's happening is, Brian, you know what we use? We use this term, "toxic environment." That's worse than toxic, okay? Toxic can kill you over time. This is an environment that could kill you today.

Kehoe is a perfect example about that. What is Andrew Kehoe? Yeah, he's a farmer. Yeah, he's a school board member. Yeah, he's a husband. But you know what? He's a broken human, okay? And that's he was not responding to external stimulus the same way normal people would when a problem came up. He didn't deal with it in a rational, sane, sober manner. And when he came off the rails, he came off so far that they had to destroy the train station and start over. That's important.

Do you understand that he used so much pyrotol and he used it so well that the military stopped using pyrotol because of this incident? Well, that's pretty goddamn significant. We don't think. I still to this day remember looking at that and running my finger over that granite monument where it said "45 dead," and it talked about that, that, almost, you know, the 38, whatever number, were kids. To me, even to this day, that just blows me away. And that we've forgotten it unless we live close to it. That's the other thing, right? Because these patterns repeat themselves over and over and over. And we have to look back and go, "100 years, 97 in this instance, is still important."

Look, there was a guy that showed up at the city council meeting and with spray paint drew the big V and then circled it on the wall before he started shooting, remember? We used to talk about that in school. The problem was that he didn't shoot enough people, and he was killed during it. So now we had to change to some other incident. But during that incident, everybody did, when he went up and did that V, you remember, they sat there and watched, Brian, because nobody could put together that this was a preceding event to a violent event. This wasn't just saying something. He was going to say it, and then he was going to show you, he was going to act it out for everybody there.

That's, and this is why we keep missing all this stuff, because one, it's bad analysis or unhelpful information, or information that really helps us in no manner. And two, it's the school board meeting, and because that's powerful to me. Because there are organizations that go around different school board meetings in these different towns, and they're trying to push their agenda or whatever it is. They're not even from there. They don't even have kids in that school, so they're not, you know, they're not taxpayers in that local area where their money goes to that school. I understand, like, you don't have kids in school anymore, Greg, but you pay taxes in Gunnison County, and it goes to that school. So you're part of the community. You have a say in what goes on in that community. You're supposed to, that's how it works.

But the idea is, these are things that people have other intentions in mind or they have other things going on, and you're walking into these situations. Then people, "Why, I never really thought that would happen." I mean, you just brought up the ones with the kids in the custody. That's why we talk about parking lots all the time. It's like, "Yeah, you're in there going shopping with your family, and there's a custody dispute going on over there, there's a dope deal going on over there, there's someone ripping a car over." It's like, this is where these things have to happen.

We focus on all of these other factors that don't matter or are insignificant or are only for story after the fact to help you feel better about the situation. This is why there are so many different, like, the video breakdown stuff you see on everything that happens. Most of those are completely unhelpful and are terrible, no matter what the situation is. But what do they do? They make you feel better about it because now I watch it and go, "Oh, okay, now I get it. I wouldn't have done that."

Right. My brother wouldn't have done that.

Exactly. It's junk. It's terrible. This is why we, and this is also why we use different cases like this, because they're typically unheard of. Then people are like, "It's when you lay it all out, it's so seemingly obvious." So sometimes then people go, "Oh, well, if I see that, then I'll know." It's like, "Well, no, you can't look for those exact elements. You don't find the person in your community that's behind on their taxes and you know them out. Get a..." It's not how it works. It's a coalescing of a series of contributing factors and events that have to occur in order for things to happen.

Yeah, and I just, this is such an interesting case because of how extreme the level of detail and planning and work and time he put into this was significant. So much that even when it had happened, everyone investigating was like, "There's no way one person could have done this." They were almost like, "This can't, this couldn't have been one guy." He had a backup plan to leak gasoline out so the fumes would come through and start a spark. Like this guy...

Oh, he wanted everybody. He really did.

Well, you can't, and the reason why those details are important is because that takes time. That takes a lot of action, and all of that. Which means that, and especially now today, there's even more leakage. There's so much going on where you can't not give yourself away, in a sense. So it's that, those elements are the ones we focus in on.

Yeah, so let's compare the sign. He didn't put the sign up and then drive in, okay? He put the sign up while he was still going there nightly to build the bomb. The sign is the 1927 version of social media. He dropped a TikTok out in front of his house. Now, if you would have driven around Bath Township, tiny Bath Township, you would have seen a bunch of signs, "Praise God," "The Osbornes live here," those types of signs, but you wouldn't have seen that sign.

His use of the term "criminal," that's important because that signals something. What happened that made his mind change to the fact that he was being persecuted? And how that manifests itself into this man that is seemingly losing everything, when he doesn't understand. If he would have spent as much time he spent on that sign on his ranch, his farm wouldn't have been in foreclosure. But that doesn't matter.

Just like it doesn't matter to trainers, and this is a shout out to all the trainers that might be listening to me: look, I don't know anything. I'm good at one thing in my entire life; I blow at everything else. But I'll tell you this, I will challenge you that every time I show up at your training, you're doing training for an armed home invasion, and you've recreated the front door in the living room, and you know where to hide the guns and done all this other stuff, you're much more likely to get taken off when you stop at a local gas station. You're much more likely to encounter that. Well, are we training for that?

There was a video that was circulating a week ago, Brian, with the big guy in the domestic. He was huge, he was my size, but even more amorphous. And the cop was asking, "Do you have a gun?" And the guy said, "Yeah, I got a gun." And he came out with two guns and started shooting out in front of the motel, yeah, saw that in the parking lot. Well, why is that important? Because we go to motels a lot. That's where we stay. And when you stay at a motel with your kids on the way to Disney, because it's a long drive from Michigan, you could encounter that. Are you prepped for that? Did you create a rally point for your family in case, what if the police are knocking on the door late at night and emptying that building? You got a grab bag, a go bag, to take with you because it may be hours or days before you get back to your gear.

Brian, these are the things that we should be thinking about. When we're sitting in that school board meeting, and we hear again the toxic environment, when we hear somebody repeating those veiled threats, "Is the person bipolar, or is this person meaning to carry out these attacks?" He had unlimited access to the school and the superintendent building and all the other buildings, and that was borne out by him going there nightly. And guess what? It was kind of in the middle of nowhere. It was not a big built-up city, so we had that.

Well, then we compare that to Beslan, and we look at the Beslan. What are the things? Well, first of all, "I got to do it on the first day of school." And the first day of school or last day of school are notorious for patterns. Why? Because everybody's there. Brian's famous for saying about the Boston Marathon bombing, Brian says in class a lot of the times, "Hey, if you're planning on doing that, you got one chance at it, because the marathon comes that one time a year." Well, that's what we're talking about here. We're talking about what's going to give me the highest return on my investment. All of those people got... Because if Kehoe would have decided, Brian, "I'm going to kill all those little kids one at a time. I'm going to go around and kill those 45 people individually while they're at lunch or in town," it doesn't work the same, does it?

And why did he use an explosive? One, he was familiar with explosives. They were cheap, and they proliferated everywhere because ranchers and farmers used them all the time. That's not unlike now with guns. Guns are easy to find, right? Parents don't lock them up, or I can buy one off the street. So those comparisons as we're going down through those should be tick marks. Again, don't ever be paranoid, because it's unlikely that any of these incidents are going to happen to you. But there's a similarity in all instances and incidents, even if it's a natural disaster, Brian, even if it's a gosh-darn hurricane or a tornado. You should have certain elements built in: "Where's our rally point? Where's my emergency med kit for me? Where is it for the family? Do we have fresh water?"

I remember being a kid and Dad showing me how to drain the water out of the water tank in case we had an emergency so we had a few gallons that we could drink there. It was the shittiest-looking iron-filled water in the world, and Dad made us each drink some so we understood, "Hey, it's going to taste horrible, but you can drink it." Think about the level that my dad went through just to show us what happens in an emergency, that we could survive. "Hey, you remember filling the big old bathtub before a big storm came because we might be out of water." People don't do that. I don't think that people do that anymore because we've elided a lot of training. I don't see it. This resilience training without a plan is just wishful thinking. It's good, but it's not going to save you in an emergency, Brian. You shouldn't be looking for an Andrew Kehoe.

Andrew Kehoe will appear. What you do is you don't manifest that. You look for artifacts and evidence that would lend a reasonable person to believe that this person is going off the deep end. And then, well, nobody thought the fire at the guy's house in Santa Clara, and then he drove to work. Nobody put that together. Do you know how odd that is? That as he's leaving, his house is on fire, and instead of going to the neighbor's house or going to the fire department, he goes to work. Should have seen that one coming. That's what I'm talking about. You're getting hit so many times with the left, you missed the right in the boxing match, it's going to knock you on your ass.

So that's what you've got to think of. I have a simple plan today. I'm going to stop for lunch at, name one, Taco Bell. They just ended Taco Bell's reign in Gunnison, it's so sad, no fast food here. So what am I going to do if the parking lot's full? Where am I going to park? What am I going to do if somebody needs a headlight? Which exit will I use if somebody comes and shoots, Brian? Those are the simplest, lowest caloric intervention motivations that we can have for planning, and we never think of them.

I like using cases like this or people like this as sort of a comparison. We use different folks and we use different names sometimes to refer to an archetype, a character. Kehoe is one, but it could be, like you said, it could be Whitman, it could be whatever. That's why I like this. It's like, you're at the school board meeting and you're going, "Hey, is this Andrew Kehoe? Am I talking to Andrew Kehoe right now?" And those comparisons are great because it's sort of, if you understand everything we've been talking about, then it's easier for you because everything's a comparison anyway. Every observation you make, every sense you have, whether you're hot, cold, whatever, it's a comparison to some known for yourself. Everything, that's how your brain processes information.

So if I have this sort of correct model, a correct archetype, a correct character file folder from which to compare to, it's going to be easier for me to determine whether it is the most likely or most dangerous course of action, whether it is someone that I do need to watch or report or whatever. And that's the big thing. It always starts with that, like, "I kind of had a funny feeling about that person." Right, we've talked about that on other episodes. It's like, okay, now I have these sort of characters, I have my playing cards I can hold up as a comparison to go, "Wait a minute, is this guy pissed off because he's a taxpaying member of society and he lives in this community and has every right to speak his mind? Or is this Andrew Kehoe?" You know, "Is this kid having issues because they're a teenager and they're confused and they have a shitty home life," like so many people in the country do, "and it's just a natural time? Or is this Nicholas Cruz?" Like, what am I, what am I looking at here? Which one is it? Who am I dealing with? And when I kind of hold those up in the clear light with the gift of time and distance, like we're doing right now, exactly, it makes it much easier.

It's, "Is this person just going through life is tough and divorces and co-parenting is really stressful and it's difficult and there's schedules and this? Or is it Chris Watts from Utah that killed his family?" Like, which one is it? I mean, that's a great one too, and we've talked about it on the podcast before, because the police are at the neighbor's house, you can watch the bodycam, and they're looking at his security camera from the night before. They didn't even know what happened yet. And the guy's sitting there going like, his neighbor was like, "Hey, he's acting really weird, man." It's like, yes, this is so glaringly obvious what's going on right here.

But those are good. This is why we use case studies like this. It's as a comparison to draw out the details, so now going forward I can look at, "Do I see these similar steps in this case? Okay, yes, alright, now I definitely need to focus on and find more." "Okay, no, alright, well why not? Is this likely to be something bad? Or is it likely just to be another thing? And if it is one of those, what should I expect to see next? What other steps would I see in this case?"

We oversimplify a lot of this stuff intentionally, meaning to reinforce like, "Look, he had organization, he had low sophistication, he had access, he had this grievance. Does he have other ones? What else is going on in this individual's life?" Because each one on their own is completely nothing, but when coming together, and now you've got the first or last day of school coming up, okay, this is the time where everything is adding up right here. It's not that hard. It's really not, but with a little training, it becomes much easier.

Well, of course.

And even doing it simply, like, I feel horrible for the insurgent sometimes, but it's like, "Okay, when if I'm outside doing something, when she walks home from school, if she goes straight in and just whatever, we, she goes in to get a snack or whatever, then it's fine. But if she comes up and is like, 'Oh hey, what are you doing?' Okay, she wants to talk about something, right?" Because either something happened or whatever, it's either good or bad, but she wants to talk about something because I know she's typically hungry at the end of the day and wants to go in and have her after-school snack. So if she doesn't do that, it's for a reason. So I can then go, "Alright, well, what's on her mind?" I can figure that out because it's different.

Those little subtle, and the reason why I always bring up stuff like that with family and something close by is because, one, I've got this lab that I can be in every day, right, that I can compare to. And I can live in that, and it makes me hone those sort of observations so that you can then use that with people you don't know or have never met or, you know what I'm saying? Like it's just as much about developing yourself in your own personal life and seeing that to then use it externally in situations where you're not comfortable, you don't know anyone, or this is seemingly new. It's, "How do I compare this against some known?"

I think your comparison, the comparison analogy, Brian, is so huge. I want to make sure that we touch on why. I'll give you an example of that. If you're being carjacked and the person wants you to remain in the car, that's a bad idea. If the person is trying to kidnap you, take you with them out of the store, that's a bad idea. That's not going to end well, I'll tell you right now, and I'd be willing to testify to that fact as well.

Why is that important? I've sat through shitty training for 50 years, and some of that training, Brian, was in martial arts, some in cop work, some in the military. The one that I've seen more often than not is people invoking Beslan. I brought it up earlier. Why? 2004 siege. There's so many things written, there's videos, there's news stories, and everything else about it. Brian, first day of school. Oh, that's important. You just said that. That's something that I think is important. You had 32 hostage-takers and a thousand people that were at the school. Why is that important? Well, if you were thinking that on this day there might be something happening, how many, 30 people bail out of a vehicle? Do you get what I'm trying to say?

The history of Shamil Basayev, them listening to Rammstein 'Eiszeit' on the way in, jamming it up and doing all this other stuff. Brian, I've heard it taken from every other angle, but I can tell you this: when 30 armed people bail out of a thing and you're in a school, you've got to leave. Because if you're going to become a hostage, then you're a pawn and things aren't going to go well. And so I hear people saying stuff in those training, and they're saying, "Well, at this point, with the M9 and the AKM that they had, the thing in the Day three?" Day three? Good heavens, day three! You've got to do something right up front, and you've got to make a big, sudden, violent change in the situation, or it's going to end the same way: 334 people die, half of them are children, more than half.

You look at the situation, and people are talking about ballistics, and people are talking about the type of pigtail in Place Saint Brian. I'm telling you that what you do with your daughter, the stuff that you do at home, the talk around the kitchen table, even if you're going out to eat that night with your family, going, "Hey, in case something would have happened here, this is what we should do next." Those type of things are priceless. And getting a little Motorola Walkabout for your kids. People go, "Yeah, they've got a cell phone." Yeah, I get it. What I'm trying to say is, where's your PACE plan? Those things that you're talking about are simple interventions, Brian, that make us smarter, safer, stronger, and harder to kill. And that's where we should be putting our calories and our money, because we're not. And as a society, these things keep coming up.

It's good reading, the Beslan School Siege is a great thing to brief on because there's so much information. But how does it make me smarter, other than the fact that there's comparisons I can make to other events? The first day of school, the last day of school. I don't get any smarter, you get what I mean? At the end of the day, knowing more about the rebels doesn't make me safer.

Yeah, well, it's, "Here's all the things they did wrong when this incident occurred, so we don't want to do those things wrong if that specific incident, specific things in that order." But think about what you're saying right there. It's like, okay, it's the same thing even with Uvalde: "Here's everything that went wrong with the response, so we need to fix all that." It's like, that's where we're going to focus our efforts on, everything that happened after the fact. So you're implicitly saying there is that, "Okay, this is going to happen again. We're accepting that, and we're going to get better at responding." We're not even thinking about anything else here. We're just saying, "This is a response to it."

I mean, I get that you have to have that, but no, you don't. You don't have to have a specific response to every single specific situation that's going to occur because they don't repeat. The book could be this big. Well, there are no two incidents that are the same. There are other factors. I don't know, and I think the Kehoe one is a great one, I agree, because it's almost 100 years old, it's 97 years ago around this time. What have we done in the last 97 years since that has improved or made it better? I don't know if there's a lot of evidence to support that things are any better in the way we handle these things or the way we, well, certainly not prevent them.

It's just another one that highlights how important people's actions are, and not just what they say, but more what they do. I mean, that's the thing is that you have to take steps in order to do anything, so what steps are you taking? You and I are obviously behaviorists, and I believe that who you are is not what you say and what you... it's what you do. What you actually do is you, that's who you are. Now, you can change that, it's tough. But the things that you do, not the things that you say or the things that you talk about or think about or feel, none of that matters. It's what do you do? What are the actual things that you do every single day? That's who you are as a person. That's it. That's your legacy.

Exactly. If you want to work on that or change that, that's fine, you can. People can, it's difficult. But the idea is that if you want to get a clear picture of someone, it's what do they do? What steps do they take? It's the old yellow pad with a line down the center saying, "If you want to understand someone, write down everything they said on the left side, but then on the right side, write down what they actually did." If there's a disconnect there, if there's some dissonance, if there's something that isn't adding up, well, there you go. You're seeing an incongruent signal, and there's a reason for that. There's a reason there's an incongruent signal.

I mean, these things aren't, they're not hard to see. And like I said, we oversimplify them for a reason. It's to get it repetitive and to see those common elements across each thing to go, "Am I seeing that here in this situation that I'm in?" I now have a good comparison. Kehoe is a great one. Now I have a model, I have a character. That's why every movie character, every hit movie, they're all the same. There's only so many different things. There's the hero's narrative, there's all of these different. It's the same character over and over again. It's the divorced cop who's really good at his job but always getting, drinking and getting in trouble at work all the time, but he's cracking big cases. There have been 30,000 movies made. Why? Because there's only so many characters out there. It's the same thing around the loner who doesn't want to do anything, but he's got a heart of gold, Brian. Good person, he means well. It's like, shut up, no, it's not real.

What Brian is broadcasting to you folks, and what you've got to be writing down and listening to, is Brian is ringing the bell for: most people want their say, very few people want their way. And whenever anybody wants their say and their way in the same incident, you should perk your ears up. Sam Cassidy at Santa Clara Valley Transport, he wanted his say and his way. Shamil Basayev with the Chechens, he wanted his say and his way. When we take a look back at Andrew Kehoe, he wanted his say and his way.

I'll add this, and folks, you know that I love fishing in all its manners. What we do is kind of like fishing, the pattern recognition and then the analysis. If you're fishing in stained water, you've got to change the color of your lure because the fish can't see it. And if you can't see, even worse with that stained water, you've got to add an element of sound to your lure so the fish can find it and strike at it. So those mean that we take artifacts and evidence and modify our search criterion, and not one of those says, "Look for the fish's motive," because a fish doesn't know it's raining. The fish doesn't know all those other things.

So what we've got to do is we've got to create a lane in our mind and say, "These things logically fit the scenario that I'm in. These things don't, not only are they unorthodox, they're unexpected, they're anomalous to the situation that I find myself." And now all of a sudden, I've got this person broadcasting that, "I want my say and my way." Brian, we just switched from ML (Most Likely Course of Action) to MD (Most Dangerous Course of Action), and danger is nigh. It's not rocket science, but it's certainly science, and it's certainly something we can do with repetition and with training and with a little bit of guidance. This incident is the perfect one to deep dive, like you said, 97 years old, happened over Mother's Day weekend just this last weekend from when we're recording, and it's one that you can read in an hour and do a bunch of on-duty roll calls or a bunch of hip-pocket training, we used to call it in the Army. It's just a beautiful case to discuss.

Yeah, we've kind of covered a lot and gave some things, so hopefully some tangible things to look for. But the overall story of this is what's important, not the type of detonation device he used, and how he had studied engineering and was an electrician. That's not that, that's just why he chose that route or chose that, because it was something he was familiar with. Same thing, if I don't have any of those skills, but I've been around, I've been shooting guns my whole life, well, okay, I'm going to go, "Well, I know this is something I know." Oh, I've been going to this school now for a long time, this is a place I know, this is where these things are going to come out.

That actually goes back to the quote where people overuse or misuse where it says, "You don't rise to the level of your expectations; you fall to the level of your training." Training doesn't have to be something formalized. You just fall back to what you know. Human beings are lazy, so I'm going to fall back on what I know. So it's like, "What does this person know? What are they familiar with? What are they comfortable with? What do they consistently do over time? What have they done consistently over time?" And that's what they're always going to do, especially when that pressure builds. Especially when I'm losing the farm, I'm losing my position on the school board, my marriage is going to hell, I've got my wife is now sick or whatever with the issue was going on with Kehoe. Well, now this is happening. When that weight starts to get added, I'm going to fall back on what I know. This is such a great example of all of that and everything we talked about in here.

I would throw one more thing in, and everything Brian said was absolutely valid. Get out your yellow pad. I would add this: grab a map, take a look at it. You can do that very simply on your phone right now. You'll notice where Bath Township is. It's less than an hour and a half from the center of Detroit, so there were a lot of suburbs out there, and there were back then. It's minutes from Lansing, Michigan. Both places had huge numbers of victims available, and Kehoe did not choose them. He chose home. Burnt his place down to the ground, drove out, and attacked the school he was most familiar with. Brian, there's a lesson there. You've got to think that way. If you think that way, you pay attention to the parking lot, man, you're going to be further ahead.

Yeah, I agree. That's the important, when people ask, "Why?" Like, "Well, this is why." It's not about their motive. It's, "This is, everyone, because people do one of them, why did they choose me, or why did they choose a spot, or why did they do this?" It's like, "Well, this is why. This is what they know. This is how all humans are. They're going to go with what they know." And that's, that's the real "why."

Okay, that's covered a lot here, but yeah, we'll have some links in the episode details. I appreciate everyone tuning in and supporting the show. If you enjoy it, please share it with your friends. Thanks a lot, and don't forget that training changes behavior.