#862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure

0:00 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show. Greetings from Austin, Texas. My job is, as always, to deconstruct world class performers to tease out how they do what they do. My guest today, I have wanted to have on for years. Her name is Kathy Lanier. Kathy Lanier is the chief security officer of the National Football League. You may know it as the NFL, where she oversees security across the league office in all thirty-two clubs. There is a lot. that goes into that, not to mention the Super Bowl. Before the NFL, she served as chief of police of Washington, DC, from two thousand seven to two thousand sixteen. She was the first woman in the role and the longest serving chief in the forces' history. Her strategies helped cut violent crime by twenty one percent, even as the city's population grew fifteen percent. She's a graduate of the FBI National Academy and holds a master's in national security studies from the Naval Postgraduate School. Everything related

0:59 to Kathy Lanier is a study in resilience. And endurance. and applying technology and systems level thinking to everything. So it is uncommon that you get to hear anything from Kathy online or elsewhere. So I was very, very grateful to have this time with her. Please enjoy. Without further ado This wide ranging conversation with

1:22 Kathy. Linear. Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. So then also you put some questions. No se doye.

1:36 My cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoscellary. Me. So Kathy. It is so lovely to see you.

1:50 And thanks for making the time. Really nice to see you again. Glad to finally connect. I was nice to see you too, Tim. And I was Going back and forth on where to start this, and I think I'm just gonna follow the tried and true and begin at the beginning here.

2:07 And maybe we should start with tuxedo. And just give people sort of a snapshot. Uh Where you grew up. How you grew up.

2:17 You know, all those dreams. of being in law enforcement and I'm partially kidding, of course. Because I know a little bit of the backstory. But can you tell people About the beginning.

2:30 It's important. I think. for context about the choices I made in my life, like everybody on this planet. The way you're raised your family, your environment has so much influence on the way you do things as an adult. So

2:44 So my parents married right after high school. First boyfriend, girlfriend, you know. So right after high school, my father was a firefighter, went in the fire department. My mother was a secretary. She went to work for the federal government. Dream, you know, back in the fifties. Being married at eighteen is is perfectly normal. So they got married.

3:00 Bought a home, started having children, they had three kids. I'm the youngest of the three. After I was born, I think they realized that a secretary and a firefighter salary does not Exactly, covered child care for three kids. So they couldn't afford the child care for three kids for both of them to work. So my mother took a a leave of absence from work.

3:18 She didn't eventually go back, but she took a ten year leave of absence after I was born. Then when I was two. My mother took us to my grandparents for the weekend. And when we came home, my father was gone. He had taken the car. Left my mom with three kids and and no income, literally.

3:35 But she was not working at the time. So Life changed pretty dramatically for us then. I was Again, I was two. I don't remember a lot of detail early on, but I do remember

3:45 As a child growing up over that next ten years, my mom was home with us. Really just a wonderful childhood. My mother was Always there. She w helped with homework and she then take me to soccer practice and basketball practice and majorette practice. I mean she was always with us and she was just a a wonderful loving

4:04 We didn't have a lot. You know, we lived on three hundred and fifty dollars a month. My father's uh eventually paid child support. So we had you know a lot of support from the church. And from Friends and family. But it was a a fun childhood for me. I mean, my mom was with me and I

4:17 Think she was provided a lot of stability for my brothers and I. And then when I was Getting ready to go from Back then. This is back before middle school. So you went you know, elementary school, junior high school.

4:28 High school. So from sixth grade in sixth grade you leave elementary school and you go to Junior high school. So I was twelve years old, thirteen years old. Becoming a teenager.

4:38 We were going to a new school, I was going to seventh grade. My mother went back to work. I was the youngest at the time at thirteen, she felt like we were old enough to be latchkey kids and come home and let us in. be home for a couple of hours every day until she got home from work. So she went back to work in her same role working for her same boss that she left ten years earlier, which is pretty amazing.

4:56 That is amazing. In fact, that whole ten year period when my mother was off. also important is how it frames my context of things is During that ten years when my mom was Um

5:06 I remember her sitting in front of the T V and taking shorthand to the television and she would Get our favorite records and she would write down in shorthand all the words and then she would sit at the table and type them all up and give us the words so we could sing along with our songs. And You know, I thought it was just mom doing fun things for us, but it was her keeping her skills. My mom when she went back to work after a ten year break in service She still took shorthand at like ninety six words a minute and still could type over a hundred words a minute. So wow.

5:33 Just a wonderful Example of work ethic. for us. She knew she needed to go back to work and wanted to go back to work as soon as possible and she wanted to be On her game. So Great childhood, but

5:43 When I went was moving to junior high school, my mom went back to work. So I kinda lost that guardian that best friend, like at a critical time, right? Like I'm becoming a teenager. We were Going to a new school. They were bussing back in those days.

5:56 So I was being bust into a really Tough neighborhood in Washington, D C From Maryland to Washington, DC. Yeah. Right on the border of DC. Yeah. Let me pause you for one second. I'm just thinking Trying to put myself, which is

6:09 Impossible for me to do, of course, in your mom's shoes. You guys return to the house. No car. Dad's gone. Three kids. Have you spoken to her or

6:21 Do you have any best guesses as to the other things that Helped her. hold everything together. In terms of resilience or support or anything else. I mean

6:34 I suppose that Necessity is the mother of invention on some level, but have you ever spoken to her about that? I did. And you know, it's funny. My mother was. Very passive sweet.

6:46 Just kind of a very quiet internal Person and In my entire life. I never saw my mother cry. Never. Never. I mean under any circumstances when I s I'm sure she did.

6:58 But I never really saw my mother cry. And my grandmother was completely the opposite. My mom was an only child, her mother was like a pistol like Hardcore. So my grandmother was very helpful, but my mother was a rock. I mean she Took care of us.

7:13 When I tell people now we lived on food stamps Welfare. Church brought us baskets of food for the holidays. We didn't have a car for many years. We finally got a car. It didn't have heat. It used to break down every time we went out in it. You know, the hot water spigot in our bathroom used to squirt scalding hot water over you if you didn't weren't careful because it needed a washer and there was nobody to come and fix our That washer, you know.

7:35 But we had a wonderful childhood. My mother was just Solid. She loved her kids and She was a beautiful, beautiful. I always ask her why she didn't Ever

7:45 date and she's like, My kids were my life and I didn't want anybody Around my children. It didn't think of them as the same priority that I thought of them. So I think her resilience was really just

7:57 Steady. for her family. I think her family was her motivation and nothing was gonna Disrupt her. Commitment there. Yeah, the singular focus. So I interrupted you. You were saying That's okay.

8:08 There's this transition point. You're bussing in to Washington, D C And you've sort of lost Your guardian. In a sense.

8:17 At that point. So if if you wouldn't mind picking up there. Again, we were being bust into a neighborhood. The idea at the time was to racially integrate neighborhoods. I lived in a very small industrial Neighborhood like an industrial park right on the border of Washington, D C Literally There was a train that ran right behind my house in the back yard. On the other side that train tracks was Washington, DC.

8:37 We were on the Maryland side. So they were busting us to a school on the border of North East Washington. to integrate. racially integrate the schools. So each day when our bus would pick us up and take us to school, when our bus would pull up in front of the school, everything

8:51 And most big cities, I would say, but in Washington for sure is very neighborhood based. So when our bus would pull up in front of the school and we would get out as the Maryland kids coming. To the school. As soon as we'd get off the bus, we'd get jumped. Like every day there was a fight. You know, there was just it was a a terrible change.

9:08 All the way through school I was in the talented and gifted program, straight A student, loved school. And now I'm being bust into school where the kids that we were going to school with hated us. It's very racially charged. You know, it was

9:21 Agonizing. You know, to go to school'cause you had to fight just to get from the bus to the Classroom. So My mom would go, her bus would

9:30 It's funny now. It wasn't funny then, but her bus would pick her up on the corner. at seven o'clock in the morning, and my bus would pick me up on the other corner at seven fifteen. So we'd both go out to the bus stop together in the morning. And she would wait for her bus, I'd wait for my bus. She'd get on her bus and she'd ride by me and I'd wave. And then one of my older friends who had a car would come and pick me up and we would go skip school for the day. At least with Skip.

9:53 The first half. Like I would skip the first few periods so I didn't have to go through that. Agonizing, you know. Fight entry. Rough entry. So I went from You know, a talented and gifted

10:06 Student. With straight A's to Failing literally every subject the first quarter of Seventh grade, so I was chronically truant. I think I was averaging nineteen days a quarter that I was actually showing up for school.

10:18 Uh, my mother didn't know because the school never notified her, and by the time she got home from work at six PM, we were all sitting around like Pretend to do our homework. So my poor mother had no idea until about midway through the eighth grade I was So chronically true on that I was failing all of my major subjects.

10:36 So Meanwhile, while I'm skipping pool. I'm hanging out with the wrong people. Much older crowd. friends of my older brother and older you know just an older crowd and just getting in trouble and

10:47 I fall in love with a much older Boyfriend at the time. You know, think I'm in love and we wanna get married and run away and get married and so By the time I was in the ninth grade, I Fourteen years old, found myself pregnant.

10:59 My boyfriend at the time and give me a diamond ring. We were engaged. We're gonna get married. So we run away. He was Twenty six. At the time I was

11:07 Fourteen. My mother when she finds out was gonna Have him arrested. It's just Yeah.

11:14 And I'm put him in jail. So I run away from home and think, Well, we've got this, we're gonna get married and we're gonna have the baby and everything's gonna be great. The mind of a fourteen year old. Obviously things didn't work out that way, so Interestingly, I went to my father

11:28 Who had been out of the picture. Most of my life. And asked for him to sign for me to get married because of my age, one of my parents had a legally sign over My legal guardianship. To my husband.

11:40 So They literally signed over my legal guardianship to my husband. So my dad thinking he would have one less child to pay child support for'cause once he signed over my guardianship, he And cuts the child support bill. Paid one hundred dollars left a month in child support.

11:57 So he signed over my legal guardianship to my husband. We get married the day after my fifteenth birthday. I was eight months pregnant. At the time. So I guess fast forward a little bit, a year and a half later, I was Back at home, my mother was taking me to GED classes at night. I was sneaking to go to GED classes when I was still married. My husband didn't approve of me going to school.

12:19 So once we separated, my mom made sure I stayed in school, got my GED and She Would bring her typewriter home from work and she taught me how to type. On the kitchen table. So she taught me how to type and take a little shorthand and I went and got a job as a secretary. I lied about my age. Uh went and got a job as a secretary. When I was sixteen.

12:37 So started working as a secretary and then worked as a waitress in the evening. In a bar. Also lied about my age to get into uh to work in a bar. That was the only option up in my the area where I was working. So For the next Several years I worked two jobs as as a secretary and a waitress and I

12:54 You know, my motivation Really was my son. It was Kind of a A significant moment for me, and I've had a few in my life.

13:03 When my son was born, I never babysat before. I'd never held a baby. I didn't know anything about Baby through children and When he was born. He was such a good baby. His crib was at the end of my

13:14 Bed in my bedroom and I'd wake up in the morning and he'd be awake and he'd just be looking at me, waiting for me to wake up. Right. Not trying, not nothing. He would just be looking at me. So about three weeks into this about three weeks into this experiment.

13:28 I'm looking at him one morning. And it just dawns on me. For the first time that I'm a parent. And that That helpless

13:35 Little baby. was completely reliant on me and My mother was always stressed the importance of education and Work.

13:44 To us and here I was, you know, my husband didn't allow me to go to school. I would never be able to get a job. And I'm looking at this poor little innocent baby and I'm thinking his whole life depends on me. And What am I gonna be able to provide? with a ninth grade education. And not much.

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16:35 I'm gonna resist the temptation to ask. Three hundred questions about the last few minutes that you shared because we'll we'll end up spending all of our time there if I do that. But I am curious For you, I'm trying to put myself

16:52 In your shoes. At that young age. When you and we we don't need to get into the details unless you'd like to share, but When you separated. from your then husband. Like

17:04 When that happened, what did you think? was going to become of you. Like what Did you envision? your path would be at that point. I have to imagine that it

17:15 Would have just been. Incredibly. Challenging. I don't know. You can't believe everything you read on the internet, but I I read that when you were a young girl you dreamed of being a lawyer. I don't know if that's true or not. And then flash forward. You go through this entire

17:31 Tumultuous experience. And you land back At home. Where did you think your life was? Headed. Where did you think you were headed at that point?

17:41 I knew. that with a ninth grade education and a single mom that I had zero chance. Of being able to do what I thought was most important in the world and that's take care of my son. And

17:53 When I m first move back home, I Got my G E D. But I still was not able to easily find a job at my age. You know.

18:00 Sixteen, I'm seventeen. I had to wait to have sixteen and nine months to take the test to get the G D. Interestingly, you needed two fifty five to pass the test. I got two fifty six. I passed it by one point. Oh my God. Just another little like footnote of my sliding door, these sliding door moments. Holy cow, right? My mother had always stressed

18:21 the importance of education and work. So I knew I had to go back to school when I wanted to go to college. I didn't want my son to be subject to the same crappy neighborhoods and the same crappy schools that I went to. I wanted him to have a real chance And I knew if I was gonna do that, I had to go back to school and get a college education. If I didn't do that I was standing in the same food stamp line my mother stood in with me. I remember the first day I went to get food stamps. Going to the big white building.

18:45 By Prince George's Plaza right near my home and standing in the same line with my son that I stood in with my mom when I was a kid and was like, This is not my path. This can't be my path. So I just when I got my job as a secretary, they offered twition reimbursement. to go to college. So I started a community college and just started taking one class a semester. And uh that's where it started, one class a semester, and they reimbursed me for it. I recall I mean for people who don't have contact

19:09 We've been trying to schedule this for a while and understandably you got a lot of balls to juggle. And I remember hearing just pieces of your story. This was got it has to be what, more than a year ago now, I'm sure. Time flies, but it's been a long while and I just remember thinking to myself

19:30 God, I hope someday. that we can have this conversation on the podcast. So I wanna thank you again for doing it. How do you then go from uh There. What is the connective tissue?

19:42 Sort of the catalyzing events that ultimately get you into law enforcement. What are the first few dominoes that get tipped over that start to push you in that direction. So to be fair, my family's a public service family. My father was firefighter, my oldest brother had become a firefighter. Right out of high school. My other brother was a police officer.

20:04 I was working as a secretary. I was taking that one class this semester, working as a secretary, trying to get my son in private school. I wanted him in private school. I did not want him going to those schools. I'm still living in the same crappy neighborhood. But then I wanted my son in a good school. And I saw an ad. I was twenty three years old. I saw an ad in the Washington Post.

20:23 For The Metropolitan Police Department they were hiring. And what caught my attention. It's the full page and the posts. The half of the page was the tuition reimbursement. I'm like, Oh my God, tuition reimbursement. I'm paying for one class a semester. I'm gonna take me thirty years to get a degree.

20:39 So I went with a friend and we went and stood in line. They were hiring a thousand cops. This was during the um the crack cocaine wars in Washington, early nineteen ninety. So Five hundred murders a year, D C was known as the murder capital of the world at the time.

20:53 So I just went and stood in line with a thousand other people, went and took the test and I came out I wanna say I came out like sixty out of a thousand people on that test. So they called me right away. I was the only white female in the room. This is back. In the early nineties, Washington D C was

21:09 was about eighty nine percent African American, right? So I felt The same drive my mother felt. Taking care of us is that I have Son that needs me. He needs me to provide for him. And the only way I'm gonna do this is get a good job.

21:24 Government job. Not a bad Option and go back to school and get my degree. So I got hired by the Metaphonic Police in nineteen ninety. It started walking a footbeat.

21:33 My first day out of the academy was the Mount Pleasant riots. So my first day out of the academy I went to work and didn't come home for five days. It was great. Okay, we're gonna double click on that and come right back to Mount Pleasant, but before we do. I want to know what the entrance exam or qualification exam was like. You mentioned the the GED.

21:56 And like just by the skinnier teeth. Getting in, being a passing the hurdle. And then it sounds like You've Not to

22:06 Not very technical term, but kinda crushed. The examination that you took that ultimately placed you at sixty out of a thousand. What was that test like? So remember now when I started going taking classes at Prince George's community college, my goal was to be a lawyer. I want to be an attorney.

22:23 You know, I started out wanting to be a secretary like my mom. Then once I got into the workplace I realized I wanted bigger, better things. So I want to be an attorney. So I was taking political science, philosophy, you know, a lot of those kind of courses at my getting all my generals out of the way, community college.

22:39 So by the time I got to the Metropolitan Police Department at twenty three, I had Three years of College courses. But the exam verb. entry into policing. Now back in those days, they only required a high school diploma or an equivalent. So

22:51 You didn't need college. So the the entry exam was A lot of things you would expect. You do a lot of Multiple choice questions, you know, you have to be able to read and comprehend well. So reading comprehension was a big part of it. You have to do some basic math, right? So you have to understand math.

23:08 But there was a lot of Problem solving. type question. So No, they Flash a photo in front of you and then they say, you know.

23:15 Yeah, there's a photo inside of a a department store. And then you're okay, you've just walked into this department store and there's been a robbery. What is it you noticed in that quick Three seconds you had to look at that photo. What do you remember? What time was it on the clock? You know, what color was the lady's shoes that was standing at the register, right? Like So there was, you know, reading comprehension, math.

23:35 Problem solving and then a good bit of Are you paying attention. Do you have the detail to pay attention and do the things that you need to do as a police officer. Which much of which you learn as a cop. Mm-hmm. But it seems like you had either developed or innately possessed

23:51 And maybe I'm reaching, but I don't uh I mean I maybe not. I mean, it was there anything in that test that highlighted For lack of a better descriptor, like superpowers strengths of yours. That Came into like full fruition later. Where you're like, okay, if I look at the recipe, some of the ingredients of the recipe that ultimately contributed to

24:13 My success were any of them. sort of revealed in that test in any way, or not really? Yeah. Actually Great question. Actually, it's a very good question. I don't get a lot of interviews to ask the types of question you're asking. I think it's an excellent question.

24:28 I would say the two things that have Helped me in that exam. That have helped me most of my law enforcement career. My grandmother instilled in me. You know, she spent a lot of time with us growing up as well. Two things.

24:41 problem solving being a big part of that is it's like you never make excuses. When bad things happen. Don't make excuses. You put yourself in that position. You found yourself here. It is nobody else's fault but yours. You know, I'm not an excuse person. I don't make excuses. If I find myself in a bad situation I did something to get myself here.

24:59 And I'm gonna get myself out. And that was the way she taught us. You get yourself in, you get yourself out. And The other thing she taught. You know, you're gonna be damned if you do and damned if you don't. You better be damned for doing.

25:10 Like so you act you always act. You don't Лекнася dictate for you. You act and you take action and you do. You don't wait for somebody else to do for you. And those things were Really part of that.

25:26 problem solving exercise when you're coming on the police department. And it's certainly your problem solving exercise every day you're on the police department. It it certainly was for the next twenty seven years for me. You can't avoid consequences. There's consequences for everything that happens. Every decision you make has consequences. You can't avoid consequences. But you can choose what you do after those

25:45 Things happen. I imagine you've probably not met him, but I interviewed someone named Jocko Willink, who's a former Navy SEAL commander many years ago. It was the first time he ever did a public interview. And he wrote a book called Extreme Ownership. And I feel like your grandmother and what she instilled in you is in a nutshell exactly. The type of high agency thinking. That's

26:12 Jako talks about it's the same thing. Wow. My grandma was saying there there's two types of people in the world. Use people? And people who are accountable.

26:21 And I'm gonna be the accountable. So let's come back to Mount Pleasant. For people who don't have the historical context, what were the Mount Pleasant riots? And you said right before I asked About the test. He said it was great. And if that is actually Not

26:38 Sarcastic statement, but a real sort of statement of how you felt. I want to know why that was the case. But let's start with just a little bit of history for people who who aren't familiar. I certainly wasn't with the Mount Pleasant riots. When I said it was great out in terms of being a rookie right out of the academy and understanding what you've got yourself into. Right. It was here's what you've got yourself into. Right. Like you went to work today and you're not going home for five days.

27:05 So There was the night before my first day out of the academy, there was a pair of police officers walking a foot patrol in in our patrol district. They tried to place a gentleman under arrest for Drinking in public. He was Uh, Latino male didn't speak English.

27:19 We had a big problem. In our city back in those days. Law enforcement. We had very few people in the department that spokes vanished. We had a huge Latino population, there was a big gap. in our community. So

27:31 It's really difficult to do any kind of effective policing if you're not communicating with the people in the community. And we were not. So when this officer was trying to place this person under arrest. During the handcuffing the the subject. After one handcuff was on, he turned around, pulled the knife on the officer, and the officer shot.

27:47 So he was shot with one handcuff on. So rolled him over, put the other handcuff on, took the knife away, called paramedics. All the people saw was a handcuffed person who'd been shot.

28:00 So the Latino community in that neighborhood immediately began Gathering on the street, large crowd. This all happened around eleven thirty at night. So by the time I got into to the For five thirty roll call. I show up at five thirty in the morning.

28:14 Broken out around one AM. They had burned several police cars. There was uh stores that were looted and on fire. There was a big, big deal down at Mount Pleasant. So when I got to work My first day.

28:28 I walked into the station said, Hi, I'm Kathy Lanier. I'm the new you know, new rookie from the academy. They threw me a gas mask and they told me to go out and get in the van. He said, Hop over the counter. Go out the back door and get in that van. And I was like Okay.

28:40 So I hopped over the counter and went and got in that van. I was sitting with Fifteen other cops with gas mask on. And big riot sticks and they took us down and they dumped us off. On the corner of Mount Pleasant Park Road. And it was fulfilled in a

28:55 fires and looting and you know people were throwing bottles and bricks and stones at us. We had little helmets they had given us in the as we were hopping out of the van. And I didn't have a radio'cause rookies weren't allowed to have radios at the time. Right. I had not been trained how to use the radio. So my partner had the radio. So my lifeline was on my partner. But we stood there online and

29:18 Literally got tilted with bricks and bottles and I mean over the course of five days. It was uh Trial by fire for sure. But it was a big it was a big learning experience for me because I do I understood the frustration. I understood the frustration. That whole community of Mount Pleasant, all Latino.

29:34 They didn't speak English. The cops didn't speak to them very well. I mean nobody could really communicate with but the cops were Pushing people around and There was no way to try and get the story straight and really no effort to get the story straight, right? To understand um the frustration. So it was a big learning experience for me as I worked my own way up the ranks. to understand

29:55 how important inclusion is in the community. If you're a police officer and you are not embedding yourself in that community and understanding who the people are in that community and what their needs are and how to communicate, you're really not gonna be successful. We're gonna I imagine revisit that at some point'cause it seems to be a Consistent thread.

30:13 Through a lot of the work they've done. But I I want to spend a little bit more time on Mount Pleasant. I am curious. I suppose yet again what

30:23 That's the same. Maybe showed you about yourself, or just highlighted about you. constitutionally or personality wise, because I would imagine some people could get dropped in that environment after they just signed up. They're like, hey, I'm just here for tuition reimbursement. Holy shit. Like I'm getting hit with bricks. Like this is not exactly what I thought my first day was gonna be. And they're out.

30:48 Right. Like I have to imagine that there are some people who would be closer to that. Maybe they didn't quit, but they're probably closer to that end of the spectrum. And Do you thrive. In particular in intense environments, I I wonder, right? Because like in my case constitutionally sort of out of the box. Little things, especially interpersonal things.

31:10 Bother me? That are kinda trivial, frankly. Like I get all wound up about very stupid things, but in crisis situations. The car accident in front of me, some guy's got his like leg blown apart or whatever. I actually do really I do very well in those environments. I don't know why that is. I really have no idea. But was there anything that you Noticed about yourself in that type of

31:36 Environment in those types of circumstances. I think The thing for me that I thrive on. Is as we're dropped out down there and they're giving us the riot stakes and the helmets and the gas mask and they're shooting Canisters and gas and

31:49 Proud. Knowing what started this and how this all blew up. I'm thinking it myself. We're not going about this the right way. Like I was a rookie, I know nothing about policing other than what I was taught in the academy, so I

32:00 By no means did I think I was smarter than the guy making the command decisions, right? But I'm just looking at it from my perspective and going This is just not the right way to do that. Like we're not gonna win here. This is not a win situation. This should be done differently. And I just always

32:14 felt like for the minute I hit the ground. Like watching anecdote analyze the way that we were doing things and thinking, Why are we doing this this way? Like There's a better way to do these things. And so That's the way I felt at Mount Pleasant, my first day on the job. You know.

32:27 Really hard to explain. I just felt like There's a problem to be solved here and we're not going about it in a problem solving manner. We're going about it with brute force. Brute force doesn't always work. So it intrigued me and I Every day after that, once the riots were over, I started walking a footbeat in the city. Every single day I went to work, I got the problem solved.

32:46 Um Six seven. Eight times a day, you know, and Calls for service, nine one one calls, you respond to, you know, people who are in crisis, people who need help and You know, you get to try and help think through that, help solve the problem. That's

32:58 That's what I enjoyed doing. frustrating when you're at the bottom of the totem pole and you're the line officer, right? You can't You're in a chain of command. You can't make But certain decisions but I did feel like every single day I went to work I made a difference in someone's life.

33:11 No matter how small. And this was around Tell me if I'm getting this wrong, but around nineteen ninety or early early nineties. Nineteen ninety. Nineteen. Yeah. Nineteen ninety.

33:22 And You're working your way up the ranks. When did you first and we'll certainly talk about The good, the bad, and the ugly of that time frame. In some respects, but when did your first

33:36 real mentor. Show up. I have Different names from doing homework in front of me. I've got if I'm saying it correctly, Sonia Proctor. I've got Charles Ramsey who might show up a little bit later. I'm not sure exactly on the chronology, but Were there uh any

33:54 critical figures in the First few years who were helpful to you? Or was it really Just Executing, getting the job done.

34:05 delivering and working your way up. I'm wondering when your first mentor of sorts or kind of I don't want to say guardian, it might not be the right word, but influential figure showed up within policing. So I was an officer. And I loved my job. I got once I moved my way work my way up, I was foot patrol

34:26 The first Yeah. several months and then I went to motorcycle school when I got trained to ride a motor. So then I was on a motorcycle. I want to be mobile if I could get around and you know, I love the adrenaline nine one one calls getting out there, being first on the scene and And then I got moved up a little bit more and seniority and I was in a patrol car and I used to get on the radio and I'm like, all right, dispatcher, I'm in service. Give me stack me up. Give me all the calls you got pending. You know, that's been sitting there waiting. I I'll take them all. So I had a lieutenant

34:52 Two He was like us. A SWAT team. commander guy who got promoted to lieutenant and they sent him out to patrol, which is like A slap in the face to a SWAT guy, right? Like they hate. For sure.

35:03 He's come to my district and he me in his office one day he's like I hear you on the radio out there. He's like you're really humping. I was like, Yeah, I love this job. This is great. Oh. He's like, you know, you you're coming up on three years, you're gonna be eligible for sergeant. You should take that sergeant's test.

35:17 And I was like I want to do that. I like my job. I like what I'm doing. If I take Sardin tests and I'm going to get moved somewhere, he's like, No, no, you need to take the Sardin's test. Why would I want to do that? He's like Well, you wanna make more money, right?

35:29 Yeah. I'm like, that's a good point. And he said. And Once you start taking these promotional exams, it gives you more opportunities to influence

35:37 the things, you know, I you know, I hear you, you know, you're trying to change some things, yeah, why don't you Take that exam. So he pushed me pretty hard in one of the tests Announcement came out. He said, Come on, I'm gonna give you a ride. Let's go pick up your book.

35:50 You know, as you have a eight month window to study, it's like let's go pick up your books. So I was like, all right. I was a little intimidated, like, okay, so I took that Sardin's test. I was eligible for sergeant at three years. I took the first sergeants to test. There was eight hundred and ninety people. That were eligible that we took the test.

36:08 All together. After the written exam you go to um an assessment phase where you do a bunch of oral interviews and exercises and paper exercises. And I end up coming out number thirteen out of eight hundred and ninety for that. So I got promoted right away.

36:21 A very young sergeant. Twenty six years old, three years on the job. I had a Master Patrol Officer working for me that had more years on the job than I was old. He had twenty six years on the job. I was twenty six years old.

36:33 So That was the first mentor and he really uh Yeah. remained a mentor for me for most of my career. What was his name?

36:41 Donnie XM. I mean. Man. These stories are so critical, right? Because he whenever People are self made in many respects and at the same time.

36:53 You just have to wonder sometimes. If you didn't have these intervening figures. Nothing like your experience, but I had a Pretty miserable. public school experience when I was growing up and ultimately hadn't even thought of private school. And it was there was one math teacher who was basically like, You need to get the hell out of here. And I was like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, out of here to where. Right. And he just kept harping on me. And then there was one other person who chimed in. And then I had two people and I was like oh okay, maybe I should take a look at this. And it was just like If that had not happened, who knows.

37:23 Just a lot of question marks. What does a sergeant do? I'm embarrassed to admit that I have no idea. Like what does a sergeant do? This is one of the things that police departments do right. Now that I'm in the private sector, I wish the private sector had similar structure. So

37:40 Once you make sergeant, you start As a first line supervisor. So they'll give you eight to ten people that you're responsible for. So you're the squad sergeant. Like you have a squad that's assigned to you those eight to ten people. They report to you. So I'm responsible for making sure When we hop at a roll call and we hit the street that my squad of

37:57 A is doing what they're supposed to do. They're clearing their calls or taking reports like they're supposed to. If they get on a situation where they don't know what to do. go over to radio call for me, I go down and help them work through that situation and I help teach them how to manage these situations. So you're First line supervision. You're right there every day on the street with the nine one one responders. And you're helping them manage those calls and you're helping them manage how to solve those problems. You're

38:20 Signing arrest paperwork. You have to make an arrest. Wait a minute, let me look at all of the probable cause you have here before we put this person in handcuffs. Or if you got the person in handcuffs and I get on the scene. Let's review what you got here, right? Before we take somebody to jail. Let's make sure we We've met the D C code. We know that you've got a

38:36 A legitimate arrest here. So you start kind of Managing a small group and then the next level is manager. Then you become a lieutenant and then they give you like Forty people to manage.

38:47 And you start making little bigger decisions. Now you're scheduling, you're assigning, you're working through warrants and things like that. So it's a very gradual progression. In that time frame. early nineties or just nineties, I suppose, writ large. What was it like being A woman.

39:04 In the police force. It was a really tough environment when I first got there. I there were a few days in the very beginning when I was an officer that The good thing about the officer, like when I got there, the department was eighty five. Probably percent.

39:20 African American. The city was largely eighty nine percent African American, so largely African American, very few Certainly very few white females. It was Very few females, so I would think we were about Eleven percent women on the department of five thousand, fifty two hundred, I think, when I came on. Size of our department.

39:37 So very few women, very few white women. It's hard to think back to nineteen ninety sexual harassment was commonplace, nobody talked about it, nobody cared about it. It wasn't an issue. I it just it it happened every day and you just You know, you work through it. I grew up with two older brothers, so I Kinda knew how to navigate it a little bit. You know, I Listen, my brothers gave me advice.

39:55 How to deal with some of this. The good thing is is as an officer You very quickly establish yourself. And I established myself as an officer early on as a worker. Like I came to work, I did my job. I don't need anybody do me any favors. You don't need to look out for me. I don't need a partner. I can ride by myself. I'm good. Once I made sergeant, though, the harassment got worse. I had a lieutenant that was

40:15 Really, really. Sexually harassing. I mean, not just me, but several women. Physical harassment, I mean like getting you in a midnight shift in a sergeant's office and closing the door and putting her hands on you and things like that. You know, I remember saying to my

40:29 Boyfriend at the time. I was like, you know what? I got real thick skin. I can take all kinds of comments. I don't mind any of that stuff. But I'm not gonna let people put their hands on me. That's just not gonna happen. So the harassment was pretty intense. It was a it was a really tough environment.

40:44 So what happened? So I had a a lieutenant when I w I made sergeant I was sent over to um south east Washington. I was patrolling in south east. I had Really uh Good spot. I work nights, permanent nights.

40:55 I had a lieutenant that was harassing me and some other women, but me pretty intensely. Calling me on the radio, forcing me to drive him around, putting me in his cruiser with him, making me drive him around. Just not letting me do my job constant. harassment, calling me on the radio, bringing me to the office, make me drive him somewhere, things like that. So I finally, after several times of asking him to leave me alone, I finally filed a sexual harassment complaint. He had put his hands on me.

41:20 Several times. So I filed the complaint. And I remember going down to the EEO office and filing this complaint and they asked me to write a list of anybody who would ever first of all before I went down. My partner, one of my

41:32 Fellow sergeants. Who was a black male officer said to me one day We were out riding together, the lieutenant had called me in and my partner said to me The other sergeant said. How long are you gonna let this keep going on before you do something about it?

41:47 And I was like, What are you talking about? He's like I hope you're writing this stuff down. I hope you're gonna say something to somebody because this can't go on like this. So the first again. A man, not a woman, another male police officer basically said to me, If you're not gonna stand up for yourself, nobody else is gonna stand up for you.

42:04 And so when he said that it Yeah. And I He's trying to say either you're gonna allow this to keep happening or you don't want it to happen and you do something about it.

42:12 So I after That conversation. I filed this complaint. I list all the people who had witnessed because my harasser made no No effort to hide it. He made horrible comments and grabbed

42:23 women in front of others all the time. So I listed seventeen different witnesses and They did the investigation and Literally, I left the EEO office. I went to court. I had court that day. And I was in court twenty minutes after I left the EEO office for filing my complaint. My harasser, the lieutenant.

42:40 texted me on my beeper. We had beepers back then and said, I know what you're doing. And you're not gonna get away with this. So it was supposed to be confidential, but within twenty minutes of leaving the office, the person who was doing my investigation call him and told him that I had made a complaint. So I had to go back to work in that environment. One of the most violent areas of Washington D C

43:01 From that day forward he prohibited me from partnering with anybody. He refused to allow me to ride with anybody else. He Continued the harassment. He You know, came into my office.

43:11 the next day shut the door and said, Look, I know what you're doing, you need to back down, you need to withdraw this complaint, you're not gonna win. Anyway, long story short, they sustained the complaint, so the investigation, all the witnesses I listed They're all men. I didn't think any of them would tell the truth. Nobody wants us to go against us higher ranking person.

43:28 And every single one of'em told the truth. They all wrote down what they saw. They all not only talked about what they saw him doing to me. But what they saw him doing to other women. And I was Just shock.

43:39 I always say to women, you don't realize when you're in these scenarios Decent men that observe these things going on. They don't like it either. And and those other men that I was working with, they didn't like it either. And some of them This guy had harassed their girlfriends or their wives. You know what I mean? So that really

43:56 Made an impression on me that So many of the men that I work with. Stop. And did the right thing there. So When it was time for him to be disciplined for this, when we got to trial board.

44:06 I walk into trial board for the discipline to come down and they told me they had to drop the whole case and throw it out. I'm like, Why? What happened? And they said, Well, we missed the ninety days in the district of Columbia. You have to Bring discipline.

44:20 Within ninety days of the day that you knew or should have known about the misconduct. They set on this investigation till day ninety one and then turned it in. So Literally after all of that. They threw the case out and they said, Well, we'll just transfer you. Where do you want to be transferred to? And I was like, I don't want to be transferred.

44:37 I didn't do anything wrong. I don't transfer me. Transfer him. I didn't do anything. He later had several other complaints. A severe case with another

44:50 Multiple other swornness later on. But I will tell you this. Now Everything above the rank of Captain in the police department is appointed, right? You civil service exam for sergeant, lieutenant, and captain. After Captain

45:04 It's appointed by the chief of police. You're in appointed rank. And you're also at will. So if you can get appointed to Inspector or commander, but you also can get demoted. With no cause either. So I remember

45:14 One of my mentors, another mentor, a lieutenant. There were the captain and a lieutenant that were both Good mentors to be there. The captain of the two Meters I had there. pulled me aside after this complaint.

45:26 And said, You did the right thing. He's been harassing women here for years and somebody needed to stand up. So you did the right thing. He said, But just know you'll never make it past the rank of captain. Because that lieutenant was very well connected at the time to the chief of police. So very friendly with the chief of police that whole administration. So I said that's fine. I wasn't thinking.

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48:12 That actually ties into what I was going to ask you because it it strikes me as An incredibly brave thing to do. I imagine not everyone in your situation would have done that. I mean, in fact they didn't. I imagine there's a lot of fear around There could be a lot of fear.

48:28 around the political or job professional repercussions of voicing something like that, especially during a period when that was not common. Well remember my My driver in life, Tim, if you think about this and verasers work this way. My goal in life is to take care of my son. I'm a single mom.

48:46 And After he knew I made a complaint, he was threatening my job. He was really making it very difficult for me to come to work. Like it was Terrifying to come to work. You know?

48:56 And I was fighting for my job. I can't lose my job. I have a son to take care of and I'm not gonna lose my job because somebody wants to be a bully. And that's the motivation. It was terrible. I was sick to my stomach every day. I was going in the bathroom and throwing up. I mean, it was when I got to work and just Every time I heard his voice on the radio, it was

49:15 Terrible for me. But I also couldn't afford to lose my job. I was not gonna let somebody have forced me out of my my goal and not my you know, I had a a son to take care of. So I couldn't afford that. I was gonna fight

49:26 Until I knew that I was safe. So Focusing, forcing function, right? I mean having that singular priority. So it seems like I mean the predictions about you never rising above the rank of what was it, Captain? Captain. Seems like that.

49:40 Fella wasn't exactly the Nostradamus of predicting the future. Oh. Could you walk us through sort of how things Progress and why were you able? to continue to excel.

49:54 Did his prediction just turn out to be completely false? No, I think it would have been accurate. I I tell you what, the stars aligned for me. So I took sergeant test at Three years. I was eligible for lieutenant at five. I took the lieutenant's test at five years. I came in number one on that test. I took the captain's test. Seven years I came in number three on that test. So I got promoted. Bang, bang, bang. Three years, five years, seven years.

50:13 But the captain of seven years. I would have never gone past the rank of captain in that current administration. And then Marion Barry It's arrested, our mayor.

50:23 Mary and Barry is taken out and replaced by the Control board. The control board comes in nineteen ninety eight. I'm a Captain. At the time.

50:31 Marin Barry is Now taken out of play, the control board takes over, they bring in Chuck Ramsey. An outsider who knows nobody. In the department. He doesn't know anybody. He's got no click. He's got no boys.

50:43 Everybody's fresh. So he comes in. As I'm Lieutenant Just Making Captain. takes over the police department as a complete outsider and is doing his assessment of What?

50:53 officials, what command level officials he wanted to have on his team and He appointed me From the rank of captain to be an inspector to take a major narcotics branch with Less than eight years on the job. I was

51:05 twenty Nine, I think. Uh huh. All right. Chuck makes his appearance. Right. Charles Ramsey. Yeah. Okay. So

51:15 Just for my honestly, my personal curiosity'cause I know n I really know nothing about how Please. structures work. What is a captain doing? And then What does an inspector do?

51:29 If you don't mind. So again, I this is where I think the police forem gets right, you're you spend Three years. As a patrol officer, you make sergeant, you study really hard. You take the test, you make sergeant, you do go through some school.

51:41 After you make sergeant, you manage a small group, then you make lieutenant two years later. If that would The exam process. You go through some schools after that and then you manage a squad of like A platoon of forty. When I was a lieutenant, I had narcotics officers, I had detectives, and I had patrol. So I didn't just have patrol anymore, I had

51:58 Yeah, detectives snark. And Tchau. How are those forty people determined? Is it based on neighborhood or some type of sort of geographic area? At that time it's done differently and and over the course of the years it's changed, but at that time it was geographically. So I had a patrol district and of that patrol district, I had one third of that patrol district and I managed every resource.

52:20 For that part of the district. So all three shifts. And you know, day work, midnight. Evening shift, all three shifts. Those officers are split across those three shifts. And they covered all the policing. So not just the nine one one responders, the guys in the the uniform.

52:34 going to nine one one calls, but also your narcotics officers and your detectives that follow up and investigate crimes. This is Lieutenant. That's Lieutenant. Okay, so Lieutenant, is that the first time where you're getting kind of the De Cathlete's exposure to all of these different things.

52:51 Yes. And you're also getting exposure to administration. Like so part of that exam, that promotional exam is studying administration. You have to learn administration. Like so if there are municipal regulations that need to be changed. And I'm managing a a large part of the portion of the district of Columbia and I see a municipal regulation needs to be changed. I need to know the process.

53:10 to petition to change that municipal regulation. How do I go about changing that law? Because I I'm seeing firsthand the impact it's having. In our neighborhoods. So police administration starts to become more and more important there. I also now can start influencing policy. I can influence policy for my little Peace of the world, right?

53:27 I d I decide what my drug enforcement tactics are gonna be. I decide how we're gonna work. In terms of doing warrant service and things like that. So that's where you first start to get a a better understanding of influencing how policing actually is carried out. I'm not to minimize the

53:44 prior steps, but it sounds like the lieutenant role is a very dense learning opportunity. So based on the description. The best rank on the police department for me was Lieutenant. I was able to still go out on the street.

53:58 support my troops, back up my sergeants. Have fun. policing and do the policing that I enjoyed, but I also had the ability to change the environment for them. Help them? And also influence how we were policing our community.

54:10 After Captain it gets You know. So Captain is more You're strapped to your desk a lot more. More behind the desk. You're reviewing

54:20 Yeah. Bad arrest that went. Yeah, it was Somebody did a sergeant didn't do the right thing and review the paperwork. Now you've got a bad arrest. It's got to be detention journals. So you've got to review and make that decision. You've got to set things up at the courts. You've got to You know look at all the disciplinary investigations that come in. You know, officers getting disciplined for things. You gotta make decisions about that. You sit on trial boards, you know who's gonna get

54:39 Discipline who's gonna get terminated. It's Very administrative. You're helping the commander make decisions Community meetings. deployments and Just not as much fun.

54:50 Yeah. This is uh I know a few people in in law enforcement, but mostly military, former military guys and I mean very similar, right? Some of these guys they just love being in the field and they're like, Uh got promoted. It's like I just don't know how I feel about it. They're like very mixed. Well, here's the big key. When I went to go change my uniform, so you go to property division, when you get voted, you walk off the stage, you get your birds or whatever you're getting, your clusters or whatever it's for your new rank. You go to the property division, you get your new

55:19 Rank insignia. When I made captain and I went over to property division to get my new rank and seeing they said Turn in your handcuffs. And I was like, What? Trying my hand, what are you talking about?

55:30 You don't need those anymore like uh you're not taking my handcuffs. I'm like my handcuffs right here. Right here. I kept my gun belt, my handcuffs, my extra magazines, all those things that the administrative captains used to turn in. I'm like, No. Uh uh I'm keeping this stuff. Yeah. So let's come back to Chuck and Because I'm so unfamiliar with

55:53 the internal workings. It's hard for me to pick the next Sort of flash point. Maybe. moment for you. I mean There's a lot to pick from. I'm not sure how to put them in order. Not that they have to be in order, but maybe

56:07 Tell me if there's something that we should talk about before this, but You mentioned shock. Pushing you to take tough assignments. Is Special operations division, is that a sensible place to hop to next? Or what do you think? Are we skipping some important steps in between?

56:24 When Chuck came in and he initially put me in shard. I'd only been a captain I wanna say four or five months. And he Kinda did a

56:34 clean out at the top. Like a lot of that old boy network that was there when he got there. They were all people that were long past retirement. So he pushed a lot of the command staff out. So that made him push people up. pretty young in their career. So he pushed me up to be the commander of major narcotics branch. As an inspector.

56:53 Like I said, just under eight years on. So I was very young. I had a A major role. Let's see what I'm trying to do the math. How old were you then at that time? I wanna say it's thirty ish. Thirty, thirty one.

57:04 The major iconics branding. That is a lot of responsibility. Yeah. And so I went to Major Narcotics Branch. I was there for so I had major narcotics branch and vehicular homicide. So I managed all the vehicular homicide. investigative units there for just under two years. And then he promoted me again to commander. And I took over a patrol district. The fourth district where Mount Pleasant sits, the patrol district I started in. I went back now and I was the commander of that

57:29 Patrol district. It was the largest residential area in the in the city of Washington. So I took over that district. I ran that for two years. And then Chuck out of way.

57:39 He called me down to his office and he says, You know? I'm thinking I'm gonna send you to SOD. It was nine eleven happens. The Friday after nine eleven. He says, I think I'm gonna send you to special operations division. I was like, you know what, I love being the district manager. I love working in 4D. This is my goal was to retire as the commander of four D. Thanks, but I really like where I am. He's like, Oh

57:59 Okay. And then two days later a teletype came out transferring me to SOD. So like it wasn't really asking me. He's like, Oh, okay. He's like, That's a great story. Thank you for that. Glad to hear it. So I took over Special Ops. Now Special Operations Division had never had a woman in charge, so That in itself was a little intimidating. But the one thing that When you talk about mentors and I I know you probably have experienced this

58:26 Like many others is What a mentor does for you is they lend you confidence that you don't have. Like Chuck. recognize that I didn't have the confidence. I was like intimidated by this SOD thing. Like I was like, yeah, no. Uh that you know, never had a woman in charge. It's uh

58:43 Predominantly male. I always say it's the most testosterone in the police departments in SOD, right? It's the bomb squad, the SWAT team. harbor, the marine unit, the helicopter unit. Aviation. Horse mounted unit, K nine, civil disturbance unit, the uh presidential protection unit. So it's like nine or ten different units. So anyway, he recognized and that I was intimidated by that and he's like, Mm mm, you're gonna go and you're gonna do it. He sent me off to a bunch of schools. I went to POD schools, bombing schools, I learned how to manage a bomb spot, I learned how to ha manage a squat team.

59:14 And the people there were great. That was my best assignment in my entire career. I spent six years there after nine eleven recreating our Special operations division and turning it into a homeland security and counterterrorism unit. What made it so good for you? That particular role. It was the most complex rule I'd ever held.

59:31 Most of the units I'm I managed, I had to manage three or four different type of specialties. I had to manage Nine different specialties and they were highly special. These were highly dyn you know, sniper teams on the SWAT teams, you know. negotiations unit, the bomb squad. We were just after nine eleven and we were trying to evolve our department from A pre nine eleven police department in the nation's capital to a post nine eleven police department in the nation's capital.

59:56 We got caught flat footed on nine eleven and we should not have been. We didn't have the skills Training, equipment. And things that we should have had. I always say Timothy McVeigh was, you know, that Oklahoma City bombing. Was the wake up call.

1:00:09 That's when we should have started changing the way we train and prepare our police officers. But we didn't. Right. And then there's the first World Trade Center bombing. That was another wake up call. We didn't respond to that. It was not until nine eleven that the nation's police departments and then the largest cities really realized that we have to be prepared for This type of Asymmetric.

1:00:29 threat that we're now facing. So when Chuck put me in charge of SOD, he said, I want you to create The homeland security capabilities that we need, not just an SOD. But across the whole department. So he gave me a blank check to create A brand new

1:00:46 police philosophy in the Metropolitan Police Department. So we created the Homeland Security Counterterrorism Bureau. We s created C B R and E, my first year, we got seventeen million dollars in funding to buy Level A suits to send our people down to Aniston, Alabama. I went down to Aniston, Alabama. I trained in Saren and VX, live Saren and VX gas. We were trained to do rescues in hot zones. We went down to Nevada and trained on red environments, radiological environments. We trained with

1:01:12 I was one of the few people who was fortunate enough to train with Ken Alabek. And Philpatrick, two bioweapons. scientists, one from Russia and one from the US. taught my bioweapons class, you know, how to respond to biological threats.

1:01:24 Anthrax, right? We had anthrax in Washington, DC. These are all things that I was on the front end of creating. And I got to go through all of that training and all of that experience with my whole team. The Metropolitan Police Department, when we were finished that six years of of evolution was a completely different place. This is a good time to

1:01:43 I think. Come back to something I kinda promised to listeners that we would revisit. And it goes all the way back. We're not gonna go all the way back. to Mount Pleasant, but When you were first day on the job five days and you're looking at it and you're thinking to yourself, we're not doing this the right way.

1:02:01 We can't even communicate. With these community members, furthermore, we're not even trying. to set the message straight. And then If we flash forward. I have

1:02:11 Notes that are a bit scattered here, but I have notes on embracing technology. This is from governing.com. I want to give credit where credit is due, but So this relates to looking for new ways to connect the community to the police, in the case of the police. So the creation of of an anonymous text tip line. Cleverly named fifty four one one. Am I saying that the right way? Give the five O

1:02:34 Give it a five oh the four one one. Right? The five of the five. I'm so the cop they used to call us the five oh back in the old days. And four one one, you know. Four one one.

1:02:45 Yeah, right. So in in two thousand eight. It received two hundred ninety two tips by the end of two thousand eleven. That number jumped to Twelve hundred. Twelve hundred. Yeah, we got up to about twenty eight hundred. twenty eight hundred. Right. And

1:02:59 So this is and and there are many examples of how that ended up being valuable. And then there's a whole Separate. Topic which is Maybe related, but different, which is cultivating sources.

1:03:14 Right. So like developing sources, getting to know people, and this is quoting from the same piece, but you treat people with respect, you establish relationships and God, you know, I'm trying to th I'm trying to think of Some of these examples that I read about separately. But this seems to all probably feed into a lot of what you were doing in that overhaul.

1:03:36 Later. And I'm just wondering if you have any other examples of sort of cultivating access to helpful information, right? Not just drowning in noise. I'm wondering how you even thought about that. Cause I imagine one of the challenges at that time, probably even still today, but especially post nine eleven in the wake of that, that there's Kind of a good news, bad news situation if you want more. information or tips, there's probably going to be an overwhelming

1:04:04 Amount depending on how you solicit and how you search for it. So how did you think of Separating signal from noise. So For me it was pretty simple and it does go back to Mount Pleasant. Again, pretty intuitive on your part, not having been in policing. It does go back to Malpleas for me. So when I became the chief

1:04:21 Oh please. A couple of commitments I made. Myself. And to the community. Oh is that We had a tendency to

1:04:30 Place higher value on some neighborhoods and some crimes than others and Our job is to protect all of the community and every crime should be equally important to us. We're not preventing crimes, we're not being successful. Making arrests. We used to publish our arrest stats every year and go, Oh, look, we made fifty thousand arrests last year. Look how successful we are. Well, that's fifty thousand times we didn't do our job because we didn't prevent those crimes from happening. So to me, arrest stats are not a good measure of success for a police department. Now

1:04:56 I don't have a stat thing telling me what I prevented. Right, but the goal should be to try and prevent. So For me, what was very clear. Is So when I first took over Chief, I promise I was gonna go on the scene of every single homicide.

1:05:09 Why? Because I wanted people in the communities to know it didn't matter what neighborhood you lived in or what the circumstances of that homicide was. That homicide's just as important to us as every other homicide. So Homicide in Georgetown, right? In the very expensive, wealthy neighborhood. If there was a homicide there, it would get news coverage for weeks. And police were all over it and and almost always those crimes would be closed.

1:05:33 But if there was a Homicide in a Public housing project. It got little to no news coverage. You know, three people shot last night in the south east. That was it. That's all you'd hear. And Nothing about.

1:05:44 those people or what happened with those crimes and they very rarely got closed. So I put an emphasis on Trying to cultivate those relationships in the community. It was clear to me two things. People didn't trust us. They didn't trust the police.

1:05:57 And we didn't close these homicides because witnesses wouldn't come forward. They wouldn't come forward because they didn't trust us and and so we had to change that. So I had A great example. I was out We did a prime initiative during the summer called All Hands on Deck. So I was out on All Hands on Deck. I'm walking through a public housing complex and there's two

1:06:17 Middle aged women. sitting on a wall outside in the summer. They're drinking. They got open containers of alcohol, which is illegal. In the old days when I was him, we would just walk over and handcuff'em, lock'em up, take'em to the station, right? That's open container alcohol. So I go over and I sit down, start talking to him. There'd been a series of shootings in this complex and I said, You know

1:06:33 Hey. She's like, I don't know why you guys are here. You don't care about us, you know, kind of giving me the little lip. And I said, Okay, well, I'll tell you what, here's my business card, my cell phone number's on here. First of all, they had no idea it was a chi. I'm just a cop, right? Like they don't they don't watch the local news. They don't know that I'm a I'm the chief.

1:06:51 Here's my business card. If you Have any information and you want to talk to me about anything that's going on here and tell me who's out here shooting in the middle of the night. Hit these kids that are on the Tennis sport from the basketball court, please let me know. And when I walk over to the two ladies, they kinda take their beer, you know, and stick it behind the wall. I was like You know you're not supposed to be drinking out here, but I'm gonna pretend I didn't see that, right? So I give'em my business card. I give them that respect. I yes, ma'am, no, ma'am, talk to them with a little respect. I give'em my business card. My cell phone number's on there.

1:07:18 About two weeks later. I get a call at one o'clock in the morning. And it was a woman's voice. Don't know if it was those women. Can't prove it. Don't know to this day. About one o'clock in the morning, there was a shooting in that neighborhood. And the woman's voice said to me.

1:07:33 Tell your officers that the gun is behind the white athlete. And I'm like, What are you talking about? She says on Cloud Street. She gave me that. Yeah, and that's on Cloud Street. She said there's a white escalade, the gun is there.

1:07:46 So I turn on my police radio, half asleep. Switch to the sixth district where that address is. And sure enough, they're working a shooting. And I went over the radio and said, cruiser one.

1:07:58 Who's the on scene official? Have him call me. He calls me and I said, Look, I just got a tip from somebody that there's a gun involved in this case and this is where the gun is. Sure enough, that's where the gun was. They recovered that gun. From that recovery of that gun, they were able to start working this case and actually get information. So I always tie that back to I strongly believe that the fact that I Walked over to those women.

1:08:17 I showed them a little respect. I sat on the wall with them. I didn't lock them up for the road container out. They weren't hurting anybody. Yeah. I sat and chatted with them, I gave him my cell number and said, Look, I wanna help. But if you don't give me information I can't help. So that's the philosophy that I wanted all of my cops to have. That's the way I wanted all of us to police our communities.

1:08:36 I wanted people to see that you give me information, you'll see results. You tell me who's involved in shooting up the neighborhood. We'll go after them. We will make so we started with we're doing instead of just putting poster up when a homicide occurred. When we made an arrest for the homicide, we went back and put posters up saying the case is closed. Reverse games, like instead of just telling you when something bad happens, we're gonna tell you when we close it. So now people know That we've taken that person off the street. And those little things matter. Matter a lot.

1:09:02 Please confirm or deny this, but I am in the course of Speaking with you and certainly Impressed with your attention to detail, which comes back also to my signal versus noise,'cause I'm like I

1:09:18 Mm. dazzled by your ability to manage all of these details and Tell me if this is a complete dead end, but it seems like you demonstrated this really, really early on, and we'll come back to where we were in the timeline, but This is as a uh you had a job at sixteen as a secretary at a commercial real estate firm. Am I getting that right?

1:09:42 Yes. Isaac or Killbane. You handle tenant billing. Right. And It seems like you've practiced this or just had this ability that you've honed over time.

1:09:54 Thousands of pieces of correspondence come through. Police department every day, but you're also talking about learning I think at that job to never let anything that's got your name on it be imperfect. And Sound familiar, Tim? Yeah. Yeah. Well, yes, there's that also. My incredibly helpful slash.

1:10:12 O C D. Like Yeah, brain damage inducing O C D. But As you have a job that increases in scope upon scope upon scope upon scope. How do you build systems that help you to keep track of these things. Because not everyone is gonna have necessarily your

1:10:33 eye for detail or capacity to remember the details in that photograph for a fraction of time that you then need to recall. So it seems like Ultimately. And um I am cheating a little bit because you know when when uh you sent and we asked for some notes in advance of this conversation, I'll just read one thing here because I don't remember now, so I gotta go. It's great. Yeah, no, it's good. It just says no hacks for me. I try to focus on systems or strategies that will hold up over time.

1:11:04 And I'm wondering, for instance, whether it's in your current role or where we left off in terms of your timeline. as you're soliciting information from the community and they're offering more because you're showing not just the announcement of the bad thing, but that you actually took action related to their help. that closed cases, et cetera, et cetera. How do you ensure that the department

1:11:30 Or the organization that you're a part of is equipped to digest that. And I'm not sure that's an easy question to answer, but I'll just leave it there. No, it's not an easy question to answer, but I would say this.

1:11:42 I pushed technology very, very hard once I became the chief. When I took over as a chief, we had Tel Atubby Pagers. We didn't even have cell phones. And I wanted everybody to have smartphones in the early Smartphones. The first one we got was a trio. We had palm pilots and trios, right? If you remember that far back.

1:11:57 Sure, I do. And then we push putting computers in the cars and we pushed the technology gunshot detection technology, cameras. integrating those gunshot detection technology, cameras, all those things together. I really wanted technology To be those systems, right?

1:12:13 Taking all this great technology that's coming out, make us more effective and more efficient as police officers. Instead of spending three hours. Handwriting a accident report. We could pull up on the scene of an accident report, have a iPad or a laptop in the cruiser that

1:12:28 GPS. drops the intersection on a police report and all I gotta do is plank a little car down there and my police report now takes ten minutes instead of Two hours, right? So I brought all this technology the systems that made us better, made us more effective. And I relied a lot on people.

1:12:43 Everything I did, I learned from the people that work for me. And the people in the community. I made it a point to go out and talk to people and lent it. Everything I learned about fighting crime that was effective. I got it from walking around the community and giving my cellphone number out, listening to what people had to say. But if you listen to people, they will tell you what to do. And my

1:13:01 Officers, my detectives, my sergeants, my lieutenants, those guys. When I did my strategic planning sessions, I would Bring in. From all of those groups. And brainstorm with them. What are the things we need? How can we do better? What do you need that you don't have? What are the crime trends that you're seeing? But and I witnessed this evolution of

1:13:18 Technology and crime. And We had to get our police department to adjust to meet that evolution. We hire cops. For a twenty five year career. And when this technological

1:13:29 crime evolution was happening. We had detectives that didn't know how to manage a crime scene with seven different cameras they had to download to get video of the crime scene. They didn't know how to mobile forensically dump a phone. You arrest a guy who just did some armed robberies. And the biggest case and I'm sure you

1:13:46 in your research you saw this Thomas Maslin case. There was a case That really kinda set this in stone for me. This Was robbed for his cell phone. One night he's beaten with a baseball bat. They crush his skull. They take his phone.

1:13:59 Those same suspects. We find Mr. Maslin the next day with his Sc Crushed. Barely alive, no cell phone. We don't know where a cell phone is.

1:14:08 He's in the hospital. Well what we don't know is that same night, right after they robbed him, that same group of kids went to Adams Morgan, another neighborhood, and they robbed three more people and they were arrested. And when they were arrested, they had multiple cellphones on them. They were robbing people for their cellphones. 'Cause they were gonna go and turn those phones in and make money. And

1:14:26 All those cell phones were recovered as evidence and put on the books, but nobody knew that Thomas Maslin's phone was in that book. Because we didn't have anybody that had the digital forensic skill. to dump those phones and figure out whose phones they were. And when we finally did figure that out months later I said, This is never gonna happen again.

1:14:44 We need to have people that are trained. have that skill. And if we can't train our detectives to do it or we they don't have the bandwidth to do it, then we're gonna hire civilians to do it. But we're gonna have that skill and we're gonna have it out on the street daily. And so we did. We hired Criminal resource specialists, we hired some other civilians for digital forensics. So we went through this evolution and it is building systems that will endure over time. And policing was not designed that way.

1:15:07 So we had to really change the way we do policing and now Police departments are doing much better at keeping pace with technology. before we get to maybe the differences between your experience in law enforcement and and everything that preceded the NFL and the NFL, could you just give people an idea of the scope of your Responsibilities. at the NFL. What are you responsible for?

1:15:30 Everything related to security. So Executive protection. I set the standards. for physical security and cyber security at the stadiums. So all of the stadiums, the thirty stadiums across the US and our international stadiums, a little bit variation on the international, but

1:15:46 across all the US stadiums, we set the requirements for security that they have to meet. So once we set that standard, we update it. Annually. We do the audits and red teaming and we make sure that they are meeting those standards. So physical security, cybersecurity, both. We also Um Investigative responsibility. So

1:16:03 Violations of the personal conduct policy. Those are all investigations that are done by my team. We have game integrity, so management of the game integrity. program. So making sure that we are Maintaining the integrity of this game.

1:16:15 There's a a lot involved in that. If it's got anything to do with security. It falls on us. Individually, the legal office has Full responsibility for Super Bowl, Pro Bowl, Combine, Draft, and all the international series games.

1:16:29 So when I say we have nine international games this year, The reason scheduling this is so hard. Each one of those international games. I will take a team out in advance at least two trips, if not three. And we've got nine international games this year. And I'm also working on

1:16:46 We Playing Super Bowl about eighteen months out in advance. That's You know, ten days of events over twenty some venues. And then draft. So draft I'm leaving for Pittsburgh on Sunday to go manage the draft for the next Yeah, seven or eight days. So special events, ten pole events. That's a big, big part of it.

1:17:02 So tons of free time. I'm gonna die. Hundred and seventy days on the road last year. Oh my lordy. So Red teaming is a really

1:17:12 critical concept that I want people to understand. Some folks may recognize it within the context of Say tech, given. the types of people that I've interviewed before in in terms of Paying people to try to break into your systems. Let's just say. or to take down your service or to fill in the blank.

1:17:32 But They're on your side. And I wonder where red teaming I should know this comes from. It's probably from hiring people to like pr military pretending to be the Soviets, right? It's a military. I mean it was a military concept initially. And Think about it this way. You gotta look at it a little differently. I think on the tech side it is a little different, but I think of red teaming as We set a standard, like we think.

1:17:54 Use of magnetometers to screen for weapons. We think use of a perimeter to make sure everybody goes through screening, you know, all these standards we put in place of security, right? I can go and audit you and you have all those standards in place. But what a Red Team operation does is it's quality assurance.

1:18:12 Are those standards working? I tell you to do something that didn't necessarily work. So it tells you if the standards that you were using Are effective or not. Maybe that you

1:18:23 put them in place, but you didn't execute them properly. So they're not effective. So if you're not properly doing secondary screening. It's not that the magnetometers didn't work, it's that your guard didn't respond properly to an alert. It's a quality assurance. It's a quality assurance test to see If the standards that you are employing or you're requiring

1:18:42 Or being used properly and are they effective? That's the key. It's not a gotcha. It's like Is what we're doing effective? And if it's not effective, how can we make it effective? How are your responsibilities or your job?

1:18:55 with the NFL most different from what you did beforehand. I'm just imagining there might be new constraints, what you can or can't do, even though you're Coordinating with federal, state, and local law entities. I mean, just imagining what that entails with 32 clubs makes my head spin. But how is it most different? From what you did before. I'd say it's most different. In terms of its diversity. So I thought

1:19:22 Coming from twenty seven years in the nation's capital. Managing SOD, I managed every Large event. protest demonstration. We had about twenty three hundred a year that I was responsible for when I was there. So I thought and then presidential inaugurations. I was like, this is easy. Like I can come to the NFL. This Super Bowl thing's gonna be nothing. Like this is gonna be a walk in the park.

1:19:45 And The diversity here is The complexity here is so much more. It's so Much more complex. And the diversity. So I'm not only

1:19:54 Setting up the equivalent of a presidential inauguration that I did every four years before. Every year at Super Bowl. But the Super Bowl is more complex. It's spread over 10 days, over 26 venues, and it moves every year. So it's in a different place. So I've got to build all those relationships. I've got to learn all those new venues. I've got to figure out security in a completely different climate. And in you know, in Minneapolis, it was twenty five below zero. Guess what? Some technology doesn't work in that twenty five below zero. Some of the things that we do in Arizona's not gonna work in Minneapolis.

1:20:22 And then now with international. We try and go and implement our full suite of security standards and Madrid and Sao Paulo and Australia and you know, Munich.

1:20:33 But when we get there, twenty percent of what we do is gonna have to be adapted. To the local environment, right? There's laws and regulations and things that Are different. in different countries, right? Things that we do here, you can't do there. Things they do there we can't do here.

1:20:47 So the the complexity of what I do now is Far more. Complicated. And it's Far more diverse.

1:20:53 than what I used to do. And by diverse you just mean constantly shifting, like you mentioned, these different locations. There's no template. Like I can't say, Hey You know, it's inauguration. This is what we do for the inauguration. The ball sites are all the same, you know, we we know we do the same things. We know what to do with the inauguration. This is Every time it's like You just take the old plan and throw it away. Start all over.

1:21:14 Ha ha ha. Pretty much. Not completely, but pretty much. Yeah, well You don't want to start with any assumptions. No assumptions, that's for sure.

1:21:23 Gonna s shift gears just a little bit. Are there any Books. that you recommend or resources. This doesn't have to be within the context of the NFL, but when I imagine you get approached by people who are hoping to learn from you in one way or another, or you j are just mentoring people. Right, whether that was in policing or within the NFL or in other contexts. Are there any books that you

1:21:47 recommend frequently to other people. Doesn't need to be nonfiction. Could be anything. I'd say my favorite book of all times, and I made it mandatory reading for my command staff when I took her as the chief, which was a hoot because Nobody'd ever made our command staff read anything before. And I also did a book club. I also used this book and did a book club with the community.

1:22:07 The tipping point. Malcolm Gladwell. One of my all time favorite reads because it forces you to understand. that no matter what your challenge or no matter what your problem is, goes back to problem solving. Whenever the problem is you're trying to solve, there is a tipping point.

1:22:22 You just have to know what that tipping point is. And I love that book. Great. I read it Three times, I think. It's a great book. So that's one of my favorites. It just makes you think differently. take away to apply. How might that change how they act on the job or think and then therefore act on the job. It doesn't matter what you're doing, what your profession is, if you read the tipping point, the key point is

1:22:46 You can turn around any situation, you can solve any problem. If you're paying close enough attention to the details. that you can hit that tipping point. What is the tipping point? To turn around. high levels of violence in a community. What is the tipping point?

1:22:59 To turn around, whatever your problem is. So sipping points one. I would also say Blink. Blink is another one that I only read because I liked Malcolm Gladwell, but Blink For people in um High pace.

1:23:12 Professions? Blank is one that helps you really Evaluate how you make decisions. How you rely on your instinct and your experience.

1:23:21 And how much that mattered. So those are two of my favorites. The only thing I read, Tim, is stuff about my job. I I read work stuff. So nothing really fun. Let me come back to the

1:23:33 suppose this all relates everything relates to making decisions, but especially Kind of performing. Under Extreme and sustained. Pressure.

1:23:43 And I would imagine that of course part of the hiring process for a lot of the people who report to you, let's just say, or within your organization, you're already vetting for people who can operate at a high level with sustained pressure where they also have to be very good at improvising when conditions change and so on. But If you were teaching a class to

1:24:06 Could be. High school students, college students on sort of resilience and handling pressure. Some people buckle. And sometimes you learn by buckling and then you figure out how to approach it next time. What would you tell them about? Making decisions.

1:24:20 Under pressure and acting under pressure as opposed to Becoming paralyzed. How would you even begin to talk to them about that? I would say it's

1:24:31 I don't care who you are, it's not Hundred percent instinct. It is Yeah. Body's gonna react. In a crisis.

1:24:40 To what it knows. So if it's a situation where you have trained for it or you've thought about it or you've prepared for it or you've in your mind you've walked through it. You're gonna be in a lot better position. than if it's something that's never crossed your mind.

1:24:55 This is where kind of preparedness crosses that line. Like this is why we try to encourage people to be prepared. No, when you walk into a building, where the two different ways you can get out, not just the way you came in. Is there other ways you can get out of this building, right? So Everybody's gonna freeze.

1:25:09 Initially. I think to a certain extent, if you have no experience, nothing in your brain that your brain can go back to have you action. But in terms of being in a in a workplace or a professional environment. And making decisions as a leader.

1:25:23 If you have The Knowledge that you need. You've done your homework. You've read everything that there is to read, you've got your education, you've got experience. Decision making becomes easy. Each time you go up in a different level of rank. As a sergeant, when I first made sergeant, making decisions was a little tough at first because I was still pretty inexperienced myself.

1:25:43 You know, my job was to be more well read, understand the D C code a little better than the patrol officer, know what case law says. So If I didn't read that stuff and I didn't study I would be uncomfortable making decisions. And I went.

1:25:56 hesitate to make decisions. We had a lot of people that don't Like to make decisions. But the more you read, the more you learn, the more you invest. And your knowledge. The easier it is to make decisions, like to me.

1:26:07 Decisions now with all of the years I'm in thirty three Six years in this business. You know, I've again I've two master's degrees, I've studied, I've got all this experience. Decisions for me like boom, boom, boom, boom. So it comes with experience. It comes with investment of time. It comes with Preparing yourself. To be able to make a decision.

1:26:28 And of course people will throw things at me that I've never experienced before. But because I have all those other things to rely on, I can make a decision and I feel good about it. I have to imagine also Yeah, this is true in a lot of contexts outside of security or law enforcement. Certainly applies to military, but it kind of applies everywhere, which is

1:26:48 making decisions in the face of incomplete information. And so I'm uh Wondering what you have learned about That. Biasing towards Action.

1:26:59 when you have incomplete information. How do you think about that? It happens. It happens a lot, especially in burst responder communities and military, like you said, it happens a lot. You're not always gonna have a complete picture. Can I think your comfort level with being able to make those decisions Is going to

1:27:19 Ball back on Are you qualified to make that decision? If you feel qualified to make the decision Sometimes I gotta make decisions without all the information. There's two things that go along with that. One is

1:27:33 Do the best you can based on what you know at the time. But no a decision has to be made. And then if you make the wrong decision Undo it. Change it.

1:27:42 Fix it. Don't just stick with it because you've got to be the boss. And this is what I said. Admit you're wrong. Change course, go another direction. That's where people get tripped up, right? When I'm making a decision, I don't have full information. I'm saying I'm thinking to myself as I'm making this decision. I can either go this way or I can go that way.

1:28:00 If I go this way, what can go wrong? If I go this way, what can go wrong? Okay. Now I'm gonna go this way. If one of those things goes wrong, consequence thinking, right? If one of those things goes wrong, what's my course of action then? So if I'm making a decision with incomplete information.

1:28:16 As I'm making that decision and giving that Command. I'm thinking about how I'm going to deal with the collateral damage if that was the wrong decision. Right. You make a bad decision. You can't just go, Oh shoot.

1:28:28 Wow, thorn. You know, you gotta fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it. What are you gonna do about it now? How are you gonna fix it? If you could put this as metaphorically speaking, like a message on a billboard. Or have a reminder on your desk that everybody sees when they come in. Could be a quote.

1:28:44 Could be A mantra could be anything. If you could put it on a billboard for Millions of people. To see.

1:28:51 What might that be? I mean, is there anything that comes to mind? Could be someone else's quote, could be something that you try to live your life by, could be something you want everybody who's within your organization to be reminded of. Or it could be something else entirely. Does anything come to mind? I mean, I tell people all the time. Bad things happen to everybody. Right. Bad things happen to everybody.

1:29:12 And a lot of times it's we do it to ourselves. We make bad decisions, bad things happen to us ourselves. Bad things happen to everybody. Not about The bad decision you made or the bad thing that happened to you.

1:29:24 It's what you do after that. So It's easy to Have some tragedy or some terrible thing happen to you. And sit around and feel sorry for yourself.

1:29:34 Were Become a victim. Or You know, let it define you. It's your attitude and your effort. That you put into

1:29:43 How you recover. It's not what happens to you. It's not the bad thing. It's how you handle those things that really matter in life. Because you can have One of two attitudes every time something bad happens.

1:29:55 Which attitude are you gonna pick? For me. It's gonna be Yeah, I wish that never had happened. I wish I'd never made that decision. I wish that had never happened. But you know what? I'm gonna fix it. I'm gonna not let it buy me. I'm not gonna let it take me down.

1:30:08 Kathy, I mean I think that's A pretty strong way to land this plane. So You have the coolest job, by the way. I I It's so fun. Can't imagine how much you get to learn. Talking to so many people and

1:30:23 You must have a an encyclopedia in your brain. It's the best job. And It didn't come from some big long term plan. It was kind of zigging and zagging with frankly, I mean, tying into what you said, you know, some really uh you know, in retrospect, with the information I had at the time, there were good decisions about various things, you know, starting books, but made some terrible decisions on deadlines where there were kind of suicide missions and Um Ultimately just

1:30:49 Adapted and tried to make the best of A sequence of I would say, in retrospect, kind of poor decisions led to one of the best decisions, which I never thought would become this. And here we are. And thanks for uh being willing to Do the dance. And uh play some improv jazz in this conversation. Is there anything else you'd like to Say or add suggested people, request of people, anything at all before we wind to a close? No, just uh was a fascinating

1:31:18 Couple hours with you. I uh I'm an avid Follower and Really enjoyed my time here. So thank you for including me. Oh definitely, Kathy. Thank you so much. I hope we uh get to see each other at some point. Who knows? Might get to your neck of the world. Please let me know if you do. New York or D C

1:31:37 Look me up. Both. Yeah, I'll I'm in both. So I'll keep you posted. Thank you again for the time. And for everybody listening, we'll have show notes, links to everything. that we talked about at Tim.blog slash podcast as per usual. Just search for Kathy and you will find this episode. Until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. Thanks. For tuning in.

1:32:02 Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcasts. guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun again it's very short a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend something to think about. If you'd like to try it out Just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser. Tim.blog slash.

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