Latest / Making Shooters Better / She Had a Bounty on Her Head in One of the World’s Most Dangerous Cities—What Kept Her Alive Isn’t What You Think

Transcript

She Had a Bounty on Her Head in One of the World’s Most Dangerous Cities—What Kept Her Alive Isn’t What You Think · Making Shooters Better

0:00
SPEAKER_00: But let me tell you for a second about the bounties.
0:02
SPEAKER_00: So I'm going to say we were a year and a half into the job and we get called into the embassy.
0:10
SPEAKER_00: We're probably out at the training facility or something.
0:12
SPEAKER_00: And we get called into the embassy, the three of us, four of us at the time.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: Because it was three of us that were advisors and then we brought in a fourth guy to run the program, all of us Americans, right?
0:22
SPEAKER_00: And so we go into the embassy up to what we call the cone of silence, which is the top deck, which is the CI.
0:28
SPEAKER_00: And um you know, there's all this murmuring on, and everyone's looking at us weird.
0:31
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, you know, like like what the fuck is going on?
0:34
SPEAKER_00: And all and then they say, okay, like we need to tell you something.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: We're like, okay, okay, well, you got the intel that you guys have bounties on your head because it was the um narcos and the guerrillas, because the thing was this administration that was uh that was running Columbia at the time was obviously looking to disband all of the guerrilla groups and of course quash the narcos.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: So of course they wanted them dead, and then they wanted anybody that was keeping them alive dead.
1:16
SPEAKER_02: Hello and welcome to Making Shooters Better, brought to you by Laser Ammo, the most affordable laser-based dry-fi training equipment available.
1:23
SPEAKER_02: My name's Terry Vaughan, and today I am joined by Dr.
1:26
SPEAKER_02: Mary Beth Wilkes-Jankey, who is not just, and I can't even believe I'm saying just, a former Secret Service agent.
1:33
SPEAKER_02: She's also a forensic psychologist.
1:35
SPEAKER_02: So she lives at this very rare intersection of protection, trauma, resilience, threat awareness, and high-stakes decision making.
1:45
SPEAKER_02: She's moved through four distinct worlds over the course of her career: federal protection, international executive protection, which is the thinking man's bodyguard, forensic psychology, and also now teaching and speaking.
2:01
SPEAKER_02: So if you think of yourself as I do, as a protector, then what Mary Beth is going to share with us today about fear, confidence, and resilience, and the fact that they're not just traits bestowed on us in a moment of crisis, they're they're disciplines that have to be built long before we ever need them.
2:21
SPEAKER_02: It's going to be bloody fascinating.
2:23
SPEAKER_02: I can't wait to dive into this.
2:24
SPEAKER_02: So Dr.
2:25
SPEAKER_02: Mary Beth.
2:27
SPEAKER_00: No pressure, Terry.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having.
2:31
SPEAKER_00: I'm super excited about this.
2:33
SPEAKER_00: Like, I haven't like really chatted with anybody in a while.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: I've kind of like been taking the back, whatever you want to call it, for a while because I'm pursuing something new.
2:44
SPEAKER_00: But this is great to get back into chatting.
2:47
SPEAKER_02: It's fascinating.
2:48
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, because I imagine you've been speaking quite a bit, right?
2:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm I I'm gonna throw this in there because I don't think I told you this, but I'm also pursuing um getting a um my facilitator's uh certification to use psychedelics for people with trauma.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
3:03
SPEAKER_00: It's a huge cutting edge.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and law enforcement.
3:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't know if you saw, but President Trump signed a bill the other day to put a shit ton of money into the research of psychedelics based on different people that have influenced him, like former governor Rick Perry in Texas, um, a guy named Marcus Capone, SEAL Team 6, and his wife that started a foundation because of what IBA Gain did for him.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: My drug of choice or my medicine of choice will be psilocybin, which is mushrooms, but there are a lot of them out there and they all have some validity.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: I know, I know, and we're off.
3:38
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but what a fascinating topic.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: Now, I feel like I love, love, love psychology and talk therapy has obviously for a lot of people changed their lives, but I also feel it has its limits, especially for people with trauma, because sometimes therapy can re-traumatize.
3:56
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
3:56
SPEAKER_00: So this is a way that you get to do these journeys.
3:59
SPEAKER_00: Like I'll do six to ten hour journeys using psilocybin for people that aren't asked to tell me really much except from the beginning via paperwork and a few pre-calls, right?
4:08
SPEAKER_00: And then it's not like, oh, tell me about everything that ever happened to you, because that can just re-traumatize and fuck them up all over again.
4:14
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
4:15
SPEAKER_02: So yeah.
4:16
SPEAKER_02: So potentially you're sitting with that same person for the entirety of this journey, right?
4:21
SPEAKER_02: Like it's completely got to be monitored, I assume.
4:24
SPEAKER_02: Eight hours, same person.
4:26
SPEAKER_00: When I did mine, it was ten hours.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: You so you did it.
4:31
SPEAKER_00: I had no idea.
4:31
SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, I did mine in January because I was like, well, if I'm gonna do this with people, I have to know how it's gonna be for me.
4:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
4:37
SPEAKER_02: So yeah, it was really fun.
4:39
SPEAKER_02: And you and you were under under, I use I don't know whether that's a clinical term or not, but that's 10 hours of the journey?
4:46
SPEAKER_00: Two days, 10 hours each.
4:50
SPEAKER_02: And did you were you aware of this 10 hours passing?
4:52
SPEAKER_02: Or you totally out?
4:54
SPEAKER_00: No, no.
4:54
SPEAKER_00: The first day when she like I was in my head going, oh, when this is done, I'm probably gonna go for like a run or something.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: I wake up because she rubs my arm and I'm like, hey, what's up?
5:03
SPEAKER_00: It's pitch black.
5:04
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, no way was it 10 hours?
5:06
SPEAKER_00: And so when it was the second day, I'm like, oh, I got this down.
5:09
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna cut this shit off at six hours.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: No, all of a sudden I'm like, hey, Allison, like how much time she goes, 10 hours.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, no way.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: I don't know where I was.
5:19
SPEAKER_00: I don't know where I was.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: Do you remember any of it?
5:22
SPEAKER_00: I remember the shapes, I remember the music, I remember the colors, I remember, you know, just the waves and all that.
5:29
SPEAKER_00: I didn't like a lot of people have visuals, I didn't have that, but they say every wave, every color, every shape means something.
5:35
SPEAKER_00: And you do the integration and you do the work after and you start to make sense, you know?
5:41
SPEAKER_02: Absolutely bloody fascinated.
5:43
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's a whole other podcast.
5:45
SPEAKER_02: Right?
5:46
SPEAKER_02: Could be.
5:46
SPEAKER_02: But now I've now I've heard it, I can't let go of it.
5:50
SPEAKER_02: So you're in Is there a certain measured amount of the mushroom that you take that gives you the 10 hours, or it's individual for everybody based on body flux?
6:00
SPEAKER_00: It's individual for everybody.
6:02
SPEAKER_00: And sure, I'm sure the dose matters, but like maybe if they gave the same dose to 10 people, we all be under a cer a different amount of time.
6:10
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
6:11
unknown: Do you want to do that?
6:12
SPEAKER_00: I'll find out when I start.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, she told me it was somewhere around, see, because there's a difference of what is the psilocybin and then psilocin, which is the psychoactive part of it.
6:23
SPEAKER_00: And I'm forgetting, but I they did use the strain called B plus.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: There's lots of strains of mushrooms.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: And this one was called B plus, which what I understand is a little bit more gentle than so, like because you do the intake stuff for a few weeks, you have these calls, and she sort of makes the decision on what that person needs to dive deep.
6:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
6:43
SPEAKER_00: I know, crazy.
6:45
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to my world.
6:46
SPEAKER_00: I get so bored, I gotta take on the new challenge.
6:51
SPEAKER_00: What a fascinating challenge.
6:53
SPEAKER_02: It's it's really fun.
6:55
SPEAKER_02: Again, uh you brought it up, so now I'm on it.
6:57
SPEAKER_02: You so is it like a teaspoon of powder, or is it or is it literally?
7:02
SPEAKER_00: It was a bunch of powder.
7:03
SPEAKER_00: It was a bunch of she grinds it up.
7:05
SPEAKER_00: So for me, she ground it up and then she put lemon in it, and it tasted like shit.
7:11
SPEAKER_00: And it it it was sort of applesaucy consistency, but the taste was like mud or earth.
7:16
SPEAKER_00: But you're like, okay, it's a few things, just stick it down there and maybe chase it with whatever.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: And then sh but we didn't do that till she said to me, Are we like 20 minutes away from like going?
7:25
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, yeah.
7:26
SPEAKER_00: So we do that, I go to the bathroom and I go lay down and we start and the music goes on, the eye mask goes on.
7:31
unknown: Yeah.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: You go under.
7:33
SPEAKER_02: Is it like drifting to sleep or you just suddenly check?
7:36
SPEAKER_00: I really thought I was gonna be like, Oh, I'm gonna be sleeping through this.
7:38
SPEAKER_00: Uh-uh.
7:39
SPEAKER_00: I was somewhere, I don't know, because I remember every change of uh of song on the playlist.
7:46
SPEAKER_03: Uh-huh.
7:49
SPEAKER_03: So ten hours you drift off, you're not even aware you've drifted off.
7:52
SPEAKER_02: You're still kind of aware of what's going on, but not wholly.
7:57
SPEAKER_02: And then she rubs your arm after 10 hours and you come out of it.
7:59
SPEAKER_02: And then what?
8:00
SPEAKER_02: There's a report on what happened?
8:02
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no.
8:02
SPEAKER_00: So then we um she makes sure I get some she sits me on the side of the bed, she gives me some like sweetened tea that she's made, has like ginger and stuff in it to give me some energy.
8:12
SPEAKER_00: I'm like out of it, right?
8:13
SPEAKER_00: I'm totally out of it.
8:14
SPEAKER_00: I'm probably dehydrated.
8:16
SPEAKER_00: I need some food.
8:17
SPEAKER_00: So she gives me that at least to hydrate me, give me some sugar.
8:20
SPEAKER_00: Then we go outside, you know, out to the living room, and they we're, you know, eating some.
8:26
SPEAKER_00: It's I had two facilitators, so a facilitator and a co-facilitator.
8:30
SPEAKER_00: Then we're eating like hummus and carrot, like all this super healthy stuff and berries.
8:34
SPEAKER_00: And then she draws me a hot bath.
8:35
SPEAKER_00: That's a choice, you don't have to.
8:38
SPEAKER_00: Um and she goes to me, Come on, Mary Beth, like tell us where you were all day.
8:43
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, This I look at her like I have no fucking idea.
8:49
SPEAKER_00: And she's like, Well, that's okay.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: She's like, that's okay, you know, like I get it, whatever, this, that, whatever.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: And then the next day she says to me, Listen, you have some choices.
8:57
SPEAKER_00: Um you can leave, you can run, you know, depending on how some people, some people like have not as good as experiences, I suppose.
9:06
SPEAKER_00: Or we could do you can choose to do a dose that digs deeper into this, or you can choose a dose that does this.
9:13
SPEAKER_00: And then we just talked about it, and that I made the choice to kind of go really deep.
9:19
SPEAKER_00: Oh ten hours later.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: And then the next day, so so you arrive on a Wednesday, you do this Thursday, Friday.
9:28
SPEAKER_00: On Saturday, we had a recovery day.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: So I'm still there, right?
9:32
SPEAKER_00: I flew to Florida for this.
9:33
SPEAKER_00: I didn't wasn't not doing it here locally.
9:35
SPEAKER_00: And so there's like prescribed things like you walk in nature.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: Um, they have some prescribed journaling, which was super helpful.
9:42
SPEAKER_00: Literally, she says, You have to take a nap.
9:44
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, gee, twist my arm.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: Love naps.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: And then we eat really healthy food and we talk and we did like a little bit of a burning.
9:52
SPEAKER_00: In other words, when we are journaling, she says, Okay, we're all gonna do this.
9:56
SPEAKER_00: So it was all three of us.
9:57
SPEAKER_00: Let's make a because they had done their own journeys.
9:59
SPEAKER_00: She said, Let's make a list of things that we want to leave behind after this journey and things we want to bring in.
10:06
SPEAKER_00: So we all three of us kind of shared our list, and then we took the list that we want to get rid of and we went outside and had a little bonfire and burned them.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: So it's pretty like symbolic, you know.
10:17
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it felt a little pathodic at least.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and like, but you, you know, you think in your head, what and you have these lists, right?
10:23
SPEAKER_00: So like now I do like my journaling and I'm doing some of the mantras and you know, whatever, and listening to the playlists every so often.
10:32
SPEAKER_00: And you know, you're integrating and integrating.
10:34
SPEAKER_00: That's the biggest thing, is a lot of people do journeys and they're like set off, bye-bye, and like there's no integration.
10:40
SPEAKER_00: And like you can't do that.
10:42
SPEAKER_00: You can't say, Oh, that's so great that all this shit came up for you.
10:46
SPEAKER_00: Good luck.
10:47
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
10:47
SPEAKER_00: So I think that's the one huge um benefit for me being a clinical psychologist.
10:54
SPEAKER_00: Not everybody that does this is a psychologist, they're usually in the helping field some way, like massage therapists or whatever they do, like all sorts of like the people that are doing my facilitators course have all different professions, all very cool.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: And but the integration, which is like, you know, when you go back to the 60s and 70s when people were just like shrooming out on a trip, completely different because you're looking externally and everything's great.
11:18
SPEAKER_00: This is eye mask, you gotta look internally.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: The intensity is completely different.
11:23
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: Uh so like when I was going home on Sunday, like in the airport, I said, Oh fuck, I I can't even deal with people like, and if they start talking to me, I'm gonna speak Spanish and say, you know, no entiendo.
11:36
SPEAKER_02: Keep everyone at arms distance.
11:37
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, nope.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: I was like, don't talk to me.
11:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, it was tough.
11:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because I just wanted to be home.
11:42
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
11:43
SPEAKER_02: I say we I I can't help but sort of naturally think, okay, what would I do?
11:47
SPEAKER_02: How would I respond if I did something like that?
11:49
SPEAKER_02: And I just like I had a lengthy discussion recently with the team while I was out of town.
11:54
SPEAKER_02: Everyone's giving me crap because I'm not drinking.
11:56
SPEAKER_02: I'll have non-alcoholic beer, doesn't have sugar, low calories, and uh no caffeine.
12:02
SPEAKER_02: Uh-huh.
12:02
SPEAKER_02: But I'm not drinking.
12:03
SPEAKER_02: And they're all like, oh, one won't hurt and two won't hurt.
12:06
SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, hell no.
12:07
SPEAKER_02: Why?
12:08
SPEAKER_02: Because I don't like the idea of my judgment being in sort of impacted in any way.
12:13
SPEAKER_02: My observational skills, my ability to make decisions, I don't like any of it.
12:16
SPEAKER_02: So for me, immediately, and you're like, okay, 10 hours, don't even know where I was, I got a mask on.
12:21
SPEAKER_02: I'm you are completely entrusting yourself to somebody else.
12:27
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
12:27
SPEAKER_02: And I know that be that would be huge for me.
12:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's why you have the pre-calls, because you're supposed to get familiar with that person's voice and who they are.
12:35
SPEAKER_00: And it has to be a fit.
12:36
SPEAKER_00: It took me a while to find my place because I looked at probably five places.
12:42
SPEAKER_00: I might say to you, hey Terry, this is amazing.
12:45
SPEAKER_00: This person's amazing.
12:46
SPEAKER_00: And you talk to her, and it's not a fit.
12:48
SPEAKER_00: Well, then go on.
12:49
SPEAKER_00: Like I looked at a place where they were doing group ones, a few individual, and just whatever it was, there it wasn't a fit for me.
12:55
SPEAKER_00: And I just I found and I found this.
12:57
SPEAKER_00: And so it just it took me six months, maybe, but I wasn't, but I wasn't rushing.
13:02
SPEAKER_00: I just knew I wanted to do my own journey before I did them with other people.
13:05
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
13:06
SPEAKER_02: So how long is the qualification process if you're going to get certified in this?
13:10
SPEAKER_00: Well, this this course that I chose to do 16 weeks.
13:13
SPEAKER_00: And then there's the practicum.
13:15
SPEAKER_00: A lot of places don't do practicum, but I know that I'm doing well enough in this program that she will allow me to work with people to be a co-facilitator to through like a practic.
13:24
SPEAKER_00: It's almost like a residency in in as a doctor.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: You know what I'm saying?
13:27
SPEAKER_00: You've got to kind of like be shadowed for a while before you're able to be on your own.
13:32
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I imagine part of that trust is because of your forensic psychologist background that's got to help.
13:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think, you know, listen, I'm 60 years old, I'm not 25.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: Right?
13:42
SPEAKER_00: So there's a life experience, there's um the different things I've done, the exposure to people, cultures, etc.
13:51
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
13:52
SPEAKER_03: So yeah.
13:53
SPEAKER_03: Well Yeah.
13:55
SPEAKER_02: So a little fear just to start.
13:58
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
13:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
13:59
SPEAKER_02: Fascinating tangent.
14:01
SPEAKER_02: But so I ask every guest.
14:03
SPEAKER_02: Usually I use this use this as an icebreaker.
14:05
SPEAKER_02: Plus, I like to hear the story.
14:06
SPEAKER_02: I grew up in a country where you know firearms were not the norm.
14:09
SPEAKER_02: So how were you when you first started shooting?
14:13
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
14:14
SPEAKER_00: Uh I was 16.
14:18
SPEAKER_00: I was a junior in high school, what we call high school, um, a junior, so third year, because we have a program in the United States in law enforcement, maybe exists in other countries called like law enforcement explorers, where the local police sort of like have this like we're like junior cops, right?
14:36
SPEAKER_00: They're kind of tutoring us, guiding us, mentoring us.
14:39
SPEAKER_00: We get to do ride-alongs with them.
14:41
SPEAKER_00: We get to like do some security at like we thought we were so cool wearing our jackets.
14:45
SPEAKER_00: I mean, come on, we weren't doing shit, but we thought we were cool.
14:48
SPEAKER_00: And so you you kind of get interested in that.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: All of us sort of had an interest in law enforcement.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: I really think most of us did eventually go into law enforcement, but they also took us to the range to shoot.
14:57
SPEAKER_02: And that was your first time.
14:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
15:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
15:01
SPEAKER_00: No, just pistols.
15:03
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
15:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so it wasn't everything.
15:06
SPEAKER_00: It's good, but like he's like, Oh, you're a natural, but you know, they're encouraged.
15:10
SPEAKER_00: Was I really?
15:11
SPEAKER_00: Probably not, but he was encouraging me, right?
15:13
SPEAKER_00: I'm a realist.
15:14
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
15:15
SPEAKER_02: That pragmatist, the pragmatic streak wouldn't let you take the compliment.
15:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I was just like this, like, oh great, you know, but was I really?
15:23
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
15:24
SPEAKER_02: Um probably as a firearms instructor or the guy on the job, you know, he he probably sees people just screw that up left, right, and Chelsea.
15:31
SPEAKER_02: And you were the one person that died.
15:33
SPEAKER_00: I wasn't bad.
15:33
SPEAKER_00: I was good, but it wasn't like, are you a natural?
15:36
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't know.
15:37
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'd like to think so, but I can't say that like I'm the super expert, amazing shot every every weapon that gets in my hands, right?
15:44
SPEAKER_02: No, but but it's sometimes it it's always funny, isn't it?
15:47
SPEAKER_02: If someone says you're a natural or something, you're like, yeah, great.
15:49
SPEAKER_02: There are that sometimes there are natural skills and you just you you uncover them.
15:54
SPEAKER_02: But also sometimes it just comes down to what did the instructor ask me to do?
15:58
SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay, I'll I'll implement those instructions and then we do really well, and you look like a natural.
16:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
16:04
SPEAKER_00: No, I think, you know, I was so interested and so I'm trying to find the word, but I like whatever he told me, I did, because I was like, what an opportunity.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: This is amazing.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: I'm 16.
16:17
SPEAKER_00: Like again, one of seven kids, fifth.
16:21
SPEAKER_00: None of my siblings came close to anything like that.
16:23
SPEAKER_00: So to me, it was like so cool to have that opportunity.
16:26
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that is that is it's fascinating.
16:29
SPEAKER_02: So it's kind of funny, you mentioning ride-along.
16:31
SPEAKER_02: I did a ride-along not too long after being in the States, and you had to fill out as a civilian, right?
16:37
SPEAKER_02: Or I met this guy through where I was teaching martial arts, and he's like, You should come on a ride-along sometimes.
16:41
SPEAKER_02: I'm like, Great.
16:42
SPEAKER_02: And then I had to fill out all these forms that said, if something happens, I will not intervene.
16:47
SPEAKER_02: Right.
16:48
SPEAKER_02: As a civilian, I'm not allowed to.
16:49
SPEAKER_02: During the ride-along, I told him about this paperwork, and you know, he's taking my Muay Thai classes.
16:54
SPEAKER_02: And so this guy's like, I'm sorry.
16:56
SPEAKER_02: The hell?
16:57
SPEAKER_02: They said you're not.
16:58
SPEAKER_02: He said, if I'm getting my ass kicked, you better.
17:01
SPEAKER_02: Right.
17:02
SPEAKER_02: Let me just film it.
17:03
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
17:04
SPEAKER_02: Except what the fuck?
17:06
SPEAKER_02: And he was adamant.
17:07
SPEAKER_02: He's like, you better get in there and you start kicking some ass.
17:09
SPEAKER_02: And of course I laughed.
17:10
SPEAKER_02: I said, Well, I just want to make sure we were clear that that's exactly what you're talking about.
17:13
SPEAKER_00: Did you die for something to happen?
17:15
SPEAKER_00: Come on.
17:16
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it was.
17:17
SPEAKER_02: It was it was kind of a fun.
17:18
SPEAKER_02: And it was a great experience.
17:19
SPEAKER_02: It really was.
17:20
SPEAKER_02: What state were you in?
17:21
SPEAKER_02: Uh Georgia.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: Cool.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
17:24
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
17:24
SPEAKER_00: Some good action there.
17:25
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, there were.
17:27
SPEAKER_02: And it was it was kind of interesting as well.
17:28
SPEAKER_02: Because he had several interactions with the general public, I say in quotations for those who are listening.
17:35
SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, this is what you deal with every day?
17:39
SPEAKER_00: No, thank you.
17:40
SPEAKER_02: No.
17:41
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it was an eye-opener.
17:43
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
17:43
SPEAKER_02: It really was.
17:44
SPEAKER_02: I mean, yeah, yeah.
17:45
SPEAKER_00: I never wanted to do local.
17:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
17:47
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'll bet not.
17:48
SPEAKER_02: No.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: But it's but some people, that's exactly what they want.
17:52
SPEAKER_00: And I get it.
17:53
SPEAKER_00: Like we all have our preferences, right?
17:55
SPEAKER_00: It's like in psychology.
17:56
SPEAKER_00: Some people want to work with older, some people want to work with kids.
17:59
SPEAKER_00: Some people, you know, just it's we kind of know what we what we're best fit for.
18:03
SPEAKER_02: So that exposure doing that program in high school, was that what would acted as the catalyst for the Secret Service?
18:11
SPEAKER_00: Well, okay.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: So I was that same year, or around that same year, I was sitting in my high school.
18:17
SPEAKER_00: Um, I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, and my high school had these electives, and one of them was something like law and whatever, or something like that.
18:25
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, oh, that sounds cool.
18:27
SPEAKER_00: And I was the only junior, most of them were seniors.
18:30
SPEAKER_00: And one day the guy, the teacher, was like explaining to us all these different levels of law enforcement.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: And I came home and I was like to my parents, I'm like, I'm gonna be an FBI agent.
18:40
SPEAKER_00: Like I just click, light bulb, figured it out, and they were like, great.
18:44
SPEAKER_00: And then um, my father, who was an executive vice president in personnel, what we used to, you know, human resources personnel, um, worked in a company in Chicago where another executive vice president was a former FBI agent who ran the Chicago field office.
19:00
SPEAKER_00: So every summer, I know, every summer I'd, you know, take the train downtown, meet my father for lunch.
19:06
SPEAKER_00: But before we went to lunch, he'd like march me through the office and say, This is the daughter that wants to be a Charlie's Angel.
19:14
SPEAKER_00: As we were walking to Marlon Johnson's office, who used to be the head of the Chicago field office for the FBI.
19:21
SPEAKER_00: And I would sit there like in awe, of course, right?
19:24
SPEAKER_00: Of course.
19:24
SPEAKER_00: And and I'd ask him questions.
19:26
SPEAKER_00: And if he couldn't answer them, he'd take his phone, put it on speaker, dial the Chicago field office, talk to one of his cronies, and say, Hey, I have this woman who's going to be an amazing agent one day.
19:38
SPEAKER_00: She has a question I don't have the answer to.
19:40
SPEAKER_00: And it kind of made it all tangible.
19:42
SPEAKER_00: Whereas before you think, no way, like who gets to do that?
19:45
SPEAKER_00: They're different than me.
19:47
SPEAKER_00: And then that just made it all real.
19:49
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
19:49
SPEAKER_00: And then I I studied criminal justice in college, which all like brought it, you know, little by little, some of my professors were former law enforcement.
19:59
SPEAKER_00: So, or you get introduced to law enforcement along the way.
20:03
SPEAKER_02: So, from the classes and obviously that experience, which I can't imagine how great that must have been to have a stranger and someone you could fire questions at, and somebody with the confidence to say, I don't know, but let me get someone who does.
20:16
SPEAKER_00: That's rare in itself.
20:18
SPEAKER_00: He was the bomb.
20:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he was the bomb.
20:19
SPEAKER_00: Marlon Johnson, I will never forget his name.
20:22
SPEAKER_02: But if the original goal was the FBI, how did we end up with the Secret Service?
20:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
20:27
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so you're gonna have to read the book of that whole story.
20:30
SPEAKER_00: It's just true.
20:31
SPEAKER_00: There are just some stories that are too long.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
20:34
SPEAKER_00: The book's sitting up there on my shelf over there.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: It's the protector.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: But it that didn't work out.
20:39
SPEAKER_00: I, you know, I'm I am a big believer things happened for a reason.
20:42
SPEAKER_00: Ended up not making into the FBI, ended up in the Secret Service, but Terry, only for 13 months.
20:49
SPEAKER_00: And that is also another story that you'll read about in my book.
20:52
SPEAKER_00: But that's what launched me into the private sector of international executive protection.
20:57
SPEAKER_02: So the screening process to get into the Secret Service, how long is that?
21:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
21:02
SPEAKER_00: So they told me when I applied.
21:04
SPEAKER_00: So I had so I graduate college, Indiana University.
21:08
SPEAKER_00: I go to live in Spain because I had studied a semester overseas my junior year, and I was like, oh, like one you may or may not understand.
21:16
SPEAKER_00: Do you speak a second language?
21:19
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
21:19
SPEAKER_00: So I, you know, when I went overseas, my junior year, second semester, I was in a program where every class was in Spanish, which sucked, to be honest with you, because my Spanish was not that good.
21:29
SPEAKER_00: Even today, I think it would be challenging because it's, you know, one thing speaking it colloquially, another thing, you know, hearing Don Quixote, no joke, you know, being taught in Spanish.
21:39
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, so I'm over there and I'm like, I think five, six months you realize I don't know shit.
21:46
SPEAKER_00: You know, you're learning, but boy, you're still tripping over yourself.
21:48
SPEAKER_00: So I graduate college, I tell my parents I'm gonna go back to Spain for the summer.
21:55
SPEAKER_00: And whatever.
21:56
SPEAKER_00: I ended up staying three years.
21:58
SPEAKER_00: You did?
21:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, I I had lots of naysayers like, oh my God, you just got your college degree.
22:05
SPEAKER_00: Like, you gotta get a job.
22:07
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, fuck you.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: Like I'm 24, 20, sorry, it was 21.
22:11
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, but my parents were super supportive.
22:15
SPEAKER_00: And there I was, you know, on my own.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: It's not like my parents were supporting me.
22:20
SPEAKER_00: It was me and earning money to to survive.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: And it was the bomb.
22:25
SPEAKER_00: I don't even remember what the original question was, but I ended up in Spain.
22:32
SPEAKER_00: And then sorry.
22:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
22:33
SPEAKER_00: And then then I, after three years, I was just like, it's time to come home.
22:38
SPEAKER_00: Like I was again, I got bored with what I was doing.
22:41
SPEAKER_00: So I come back to the U.S., I applied to the DEA in the Secret Service.
22:46
SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm in Chicago with my parents.
22:48
SPEAKER_00: I moved to DC for a job because they all they both told me expect to wait two years.
22:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
22:54
SPEAKER_00: You know, and that's pretty normal, depending.
22:57
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
22:58
SPEAKER_00: They were pretty neck and neck, both of those agencies, as far as like if one was doing uh the panel interview, the other one was doing the panel interview, if one was doing the medical, the other one was doing the medical.
23:09
SPEAKER_00: And so I'm working at this organization in DC where I was traveling to Central America to do um election observation, because I'm I'm by more or less bilingual at that point.
23:19
SPEAKER_00: I I'm in Miami, I was in El Salvador for the week.
23:22
SPEAKER_00: I come to Miami to spend a weekend, and again, pre-page or pre-cell phone, this is 1990, 1991, 91.
23:30
SPEAKER_00: And I call my office and they're like, oh, this guy, whoever the heck his name was, called you from the Secret Service.
23:36
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, okay, cool.
23:37
SPEAKER_00: Thinking.
23:37
SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is nine months into it.
23:39
SPEAKER_00: There's a glitch, there's a something, there's a whatever.
23:42
SPEAKER_00: And I call and he's like, hi, Mary Beth.
23:45
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, hi.
23:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I remember sitting in my hotel room, Miami, and he's like, I'm calling to offer you a job with the Secret Service.
23:52
SPEAKER_00: And I literally almost fell off my bed.
23:54
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, this is nine months, not two years.
23:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
23:57
SPEAKER_00: Right.
23:57
SPEAKER_00: So here's my theory.
23:58
SPEAKER_00: No one ever said this to me.
24:00
SPEAKER_00: One, I'm a female.
24:01
SPEAKER_00: They need females.
24:02
SPEAKER_00: Two, Spanish speaker, right?
24:05
SPEAKER_00: They loved that.
24:06
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I was yanked all over the place with my Spanish ability in the Washington.
24:11
SPEAKER_00: I was assigned to the Washington Field Office, which is the epicenter of the Secret Service, right?
24:15
SPEAKER_00: Washington, D.C.
24:16
SPEAKER_00: I was the only Spanish speaker in the whole effing office.
24:20
SPEAKER_00: That's like, that's where the government loses it sometimes.
24:23
SPEAKER_00: They just lack, like, we have these resources.
24:25
SPEAKER_00: We had a ton of Spanish speakers in Miami.
24:28
SPEAKER_00: But I mean, I was yanked everywhere.
24:30
SPEAKER_00: Like, oh, we have this interview and there's they only speak Spanish.
24:34
SPEAKER_00: We have this ambassador, or we have this president of Spain coming in.
24:37
SPEAKER_00: You need to come and do this advance with me at the embassy.
24:39
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was like, as a new Asian, it was the bomb because I wasn't just doing the normal, boring new stuff.
24:44
SPEAKER_00: But it was like, where's the common sense here?
24:47
SPEAKER_00: Um, so I ended up with the Secret Service because honestly, they called first.
24:50
SPEAKER_00: If the DEA would have called first, I would have gone with the DEA.
24:53
SPEAKER_00: Completely mind-blown.
24:55
SPEAKER_02: Why?
24:56
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
24:57
SPEAKER_02: Well, first of all, I I can't imagine how difficult getting into the Secret Service is in the first place.
25:03
SPEAKER_02: I've only ever talked to one Secret Service agent, and the way he painted the picture was it was super challenging to even get in.
25:10
SPEAKER_02: I don't know if he was referencing the process specifically itself or the background checks and the deep dive that they did before he managed to make it in.
25:27
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing I can do about it.
25:29
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
25:30
SPEAKER_00: So the process, like it used to be, again, this is early 90s when I applied.
25:34
SPEAKER_00: I came back to the US in 1990, that's when I applied.
25:37
SPEAKER_00: We didn't have computer forms.
25:39
SPEAKER_00: So you I went down to those offices in Chicago, got my forms, and came home and filled them out.
25:46
unknown: Yeah.
25:47
SPEAKER_00: You know, sometimes you got to get several copies because you effed it up.
25:51
SPEAKER_00: So, like, no computer.
25:53
SPEAKER_00: Oh, let me just send it in and let me just modify on the typewriter, right?
25:57
SPEAKER_00: So that's the pain.
25:58
SPEAKER_00: Like people say, how did you get nice?
26:00
SPEAKER_00: Like, I applied because that was the pain in the ass.
26:03
SPEAKER_00: And then when you hit another stage, there's more forms because you've made it this far.
26:07
SPEAKER_00: And now we're going to talk about the drugs, the crimes, your family, all this other stuff that's now that's that next step that they're going to panel, they're going to look at you, and then they could that could nix you then.
26:17
SPEAKER_00: So it's all these different phases.
26:19
SPEAKER_00: There's also a test in there in the very beginning.
26:22
SPEAKER_00: Let me even go before that.
26:24
SPEAKER_00: At least in my day, they I was in Chicago at the time.
26:28
SPEAKER_00: They brought me into the Chicago field office to talk me to talk to the what they call the um the head of the Chicago field office because he decides whether you're even material enough.
26:39
SPEAKER_00: He could have been like nice girl, butt.
26:41
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
26:42
SPEAKER_00: But he said, okay, like I, I, he, he was digging on me, and I'll tell you why I didn't realize this.
26:48
SPEAKER_00: When I moved to DC and he transferred me, you know, he made sure I took my test in Chicago before he left.
26:54
SPEAKER_00: He wanted me to get in as much as I could and wanted to make sure like I was a good candidate.
26:59
SPEAKER_00: I didn't realize again, my life is just my life.
27:02
SPEAKER_00: You look at it from the outside, it's different when you're living it, right?
27:06
SPEAKER_00: I just kind of make these decisions.
27:07
SPEAKER_00: So I go to Sh I then go to DC and this guy named Lou Susi takes over my case.
27:13
SPEAKER_00: And he's like, Oh, Bill Tebby, that was the head of the Chicago field office, really told me to take good care of you because you're a good candidate.
27:20
SPEAKER_00: So I'm sitting in the panel interview with this guy, Lou Susi, and two other people.
27:25
SPEAKER_00: And he says to me, and this is where it like it finally dawned on me, he says, So, Miss Wilkes, let me get something straight.
27:32
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, Oh shit.
27:34
SPEAKER_00: He goes, Yeah, I'll bet.
27:35
SPEAKER_00: You uh right?
27:36
SPEAKER_00: He goes, and I thought like I'm I'm screwed, like I'm I'm done.
27:39
SPEAKER_00: He says to me, You graduated college, you moved to Spain, you found a job, you found a place to live, you stayed there for three years, and he's going on about this experience in my life, this phase.
27:54
SPEAKER_00: And I I look at him and I go, Yes, sir.
27:57
SPEAKER_00: And he goes, You know what?
28:01
SPEAKER_00: He goes, that is amazing.
28:03
SPEAKER_00: He goes, the Secret Service moved me to Paris, they found my housing, they moved me, I had a job.
28:11
SPEAKER_00: He goes, and I thought it sucked.
28:13
SPEAKER_00: He goes, that you did that all on your own.
28:15
SPEAKER_00: That's so what he was doing for me in the panel, unbeknownst to me, because he and Bill Tebby, the Chicago guy and him, were looking at like this is a woman who's a self-starter, she's self-motivated, she's whatever.
28:28
SPEAKER_00: She survived in a foreign country on her own, you know, whatever.
28:31
SPEAKER_00: So I didn't realize until then like why how they saw me.
28:36
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
28:36
SPEAKER_00: Do you know what I mean?
28:37
SPEAKER_00: So like these two guys were talking, and it's like take care of her because we need her.
28:41
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
28:42
SPEAKER_02: Well, it's such an unusual journey, too, because not many people there are people that go off, they put a backpack on, they spend a few months in the country.
28:48
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
28:49
SPEAKER_02: And that's great.
28:49
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
28:50
SPEAKER_02: You lived it.
28:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
28:52
SPEAKER_02: And it's very different.
28:53
SPEAKER_02: It's like I moved to the States.
28:55
SPEAKER_02: I didn't know if I was going to like it.
28:56
SPEAKER_02: You know, you can visit a place a hundred times and be like, this is great.
28:59
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
29:00
SPEAKER_02: Living there.
29:00
SPEAKER_02: You know, then you're so different.
29:03
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
29:04
SPEAKER_02: But you go in by yourself and just all right, well, here we go.
29:06
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
29:07
SPEAKER_02: I can't imagine how much of a a standout that made you in amongst the other applicants.
29:12
SPEAKER_02: So 13 months, at what point did you end up in Bogota?
29:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
29:18
SPEAKER_00: So my time in Bogota, I was a private contractor by then.
29:21
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
29:22
SPEAKER_00: All right.
29:22
SPEAKER_00: Right.
29:23
SPEAKER_00: This is where it can get confusing, but I lay it out in the book, right?
29:26
SPEAKER_00: Because once I lost my job with the Secret Service 13 months later, I then hit this world of have gun, will travel, always a suitcase packed.
29:35
SPEAKER_00: No joke.
29:36
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
29:37
SPEAKER_00: And everyone in your audience that's younger than, say, 50, maybe even 55, can laugh.
29:42
SPEAKER_00: We had pagers.
29:43
SPEAKER_00: So if you didn't have your pager with you, you might lose out on a job.
29:46
SPEAKER_00: Like, literally, that's the way it worked.
29:48
SPEAKER_00: And it was such a smaller industry back then, you know, that like I remember one guy was so bummed.
29:53
SPEAKER_00: He goes, I left my pager at home.
29:54
SPEAKER_00: Is there still room on the job?
29:56
SPEAKER_00: This was three hours later.
29:57
SPEAKER_00: He lost out.
29:59
SPEAKER_00: Like I was heading to the airport.
30:01
SPEAKER_00: And so all those jobs, like I did work some pretty awesome State Department contracts.
30:08
SPEAKER_00: And that was my Bogota contract.
30:11
SPEAKER_00: But that was pretty much almost, I would say, pretty much my final contract as like a protector.
30:19
SPEAKER_00: So that was 03, mid-03 to the end of 05.
30:22
SPEAKER_00: And then I did a little bit in 06, but I was home and they asked me to come back for a couple of trainings.
30:27
SPEAKER_00: But I was there pretty much straight two and a half years.
30:31
SPEAKER_02: So my understanding, and could be just individual bias, but I think of Bogota and I immediately go, whoa, okay, all right.
30:40
SPEAKER_02: Not a place that most people are going for a holiday for sure.
30:43
SPEAKER_00: Is that the right impression?
30:45
SPEAKER_00: Not today.
30:46
SPEAKER_00: Today people would go there for a vacation, but not in 03.
30:49
SPEAKER_00: So we're talking obviously 23 years ago.
30:52
SPEAKER_00: And 23 years ago, um it was the kidnap capital of the world.
30:57
SPEAKER_00: It is no longer the kidnap capital of the world.
30:59
SPEAKER_00: I believe Mexico has that, you know, title.
31:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
31:03
SPEAKER_00: So back then, um, yeah, I mean, that's that's why we were there.
31:08
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we had a very small team.
31:12
SPEAKER_00: We were only three.
31:13
SPEAKER_00: I was the second.
31:14
SPEAKER_00: And again, very unusual that they asked a woman, but this is what happens.
31:19
SPEAKER_00: The guy that was there before me, and I knew him because we had worked together.
31:23
SPEAKER_00: He's sitting in a Monday morning briefing.
31:25
SPEAKER_00: So we worked under the auspices of the U.S.
31:28
SPEAKER_00: Embassy and what's called the RSO's office, regional security office.
31:31
SPEAKER_00: So it's all State Department agents, right?
31:33
SPEAKER_00: U.S.
31:33
SPEAKER_00: State Department.
31:35
SPEAKER_00: Monday morning briefing, the RSO comes in, regional security officer, and he's like, okay, guys, uh, this is going to be a unicorn, but does anybody know a female that might want to come to Bogota, who is either former Secret Service or State Department, who's bilingual and kind of like wants to, yeah, right?
31:56
SPEAKER_00: Wants to work in this crazy world.
31:58
SPEAKER_00: And this guy that I had worked with, he says he was eating his breakfast and he had like this mouthful of like whatever.
32:02
SPEAKER_00: And he's like, you know.
32:05
SPEAKER_00: And that was me, also known as the Unicorn.
32:10
SPEAKER_00: And he goes, the guy's like, yeah, no fucking way.
32:12
SPEAKER_00: Next thing you know, like I'm down in Boca Taw.
32:14
SPEAKER_00: And so the reason they really needed a female is because at the time our ambassador was a female, her name was Ann Patterson, and then the Minister of Defense of Columbia, which was gonna, which was my charge, was a woman.
32:29
SPEAKER_00: And here was the issue.
32:30
SPEAKER_00: She, even though there had been 17 attempts on the president's life, of President of Columbia's life, she was considered more at risk by some, if not most, and and certainly the ambassador, because she ran under this sort of campaign of quashing corruption in the military.
32:48
SPEAKER_00: And you have to understand they were so entwined with the far, like all the terrorists, the guerrillas, the the drug guys, the drug lords.
32:58
SPEAKER_00: And they were like, Oh, really?
32:59
SPEAKER_00: You're gonna take away, you know, my millions, whatever the heck they were getting.
33:03
SPEAKER_00: So they felt she was more at risk, and quite frankly, she was.
33:06
SPEAKER_00: And so the they needed a female because she didn't want another man that she couldn't trust.
33:10
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
33:10
SPEAKER_03: No, I don't know.
33:11
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I ended up I ended up down there for two and a half years.
33:15
SPEAKER_00: And again, could have been six if I had wanted to.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: I just get bored.
33:18
SPEAKER_00: I was like, okay, I did what I need to do here.
33:21
SPEAKER_00: I know, I'm a flake.
33:23
SPEAKER_02: But no, I'm having a really hard time.
33:25
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm gonna run security down in Bogota for two and a half years, and then I'm gonna come to arrive at a point where I'm like, I'm just bored of it.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: My mentor, my mentor, his name's Tony Scotty, for I don't know how old your um your audience is, but Tony Scotty had Scotty driving school, like a legend in the world of like what I would call anti-terrorism driving.
33:45
SPEAKER_00: He's probably about 80 something now.
33:47
SPEAKER_00: He'd kill me for saying that, right?
33:49
SPEAKER_00: Because he and I still talk.
33:51
SPEAKER_00: And he says to me, now he's from Boston, right?
33:54
SPEAKER_00: Italian.
33:54
SPEAKER_00: He's like, Are you fucking kidding me?
33:56
SPEAKER_00: You're leaving Bogota?
33:58
SPEAKER_00: He goes, You know how many men would die for that job?
34:01
SPEAKER_00: And I go, Tony, I don't give a shit.
34:03
SPEAKER_00: Like, it's my life, and I'm bored.
34:05
SPEAKER_00: Like, I kind of like, how many times can I teach the same course over and over?
34:10
SPEAKER_00: And if I haven't figured out, and if the security for the Minister of Defense isn't what it should be, then I three one year, two years, three more years isn't going to make a difference.
34:20
SPEAKER_00: Make a difference.
34:20
SPEAKER_00: Right.
34:21
SPEAKER_00: So that was like my exit.
34:23
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34:37
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34:48
SPEAKER_02: Shoot me an email, Terry at laser ammo.com and let's get you and your clients dialed in with the best dry fire laser-based training equipment available.
34:57
SPEAKER_02: And now back to the episode.
34:59
SPEAKER_02: So was there an advanced detail or it was just literally you three on this woman, the ambassador, to keep her safe and what?
35:08
SPEAKER_02: Like is I say if you know the protection is advanced parties and then the actual security and then you know all of the plans that have to go into place to make that happen by itself.
35:20
SPEAKER_02: So how did it work down there?
35:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so different.
35:22
SPEAKER_00: Um, so let me explain.
35:24
SPEAKER_00: The three of us each had our own charges, meaning the guy that was before me had the president.
35:29
SPEAKER_00: I had the minister of defense.
35:30
SPEAKER_00: I was originally given the minister of the defense and the vice president, but the ambassador said to me, Mary Beth, I know that that's a lot.
35:38
SPEAKER_00: Like they brought me down just for the minister of defense.
35:40
SPEAKER_00: And then I'm sitting in my first meeting with the ambassador and her number two.
35:45
SPEAKER_00: And she's like, Oh, yeah, blah, blah, blah.
35:48
SPEAKER_00: The minister of defense, the vice president, and the mayor of Bogota.
35:53
SPEAKER_00: And here's me.
35:53
SPEAKER_00: Never let them see you sweat, shut my mouth, don't say a word.
35:56
SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking they're fucking me over.
35:57
SPEAKER_00: They fucked, they brought me down here for this, and now I'm gonna like, I'm gonna kill myself trying to make sure all these people are safe.
36:04
SPEAKER_00: She said to me, I know she's a job unto herself.
36:07
SPEAKER_00: Just do the job for a little while, write me a cable.
36:09
SPEAKER_00: I promise you I'll get a third advisor.
36:12
SPEAKER_00: So my title in the end was U.S.
36:15
SPEAKER_00: Security Advisor to the Minister of Defense of Columbia.
36:18
SPEAKER_00: So my job was not to protect her, but rather to be an advisor to those that do protect her.
36:24
SPEAKER_00: So what we did was we'd observe, we would go on these missions.
36:27
SPEAKER_00: I refrained from protection because here's my mentality.
36:30
SPEAKER_00: That was not true of one of my teammates.
36:33
SPEAKER_00: He felt like he had to get in there and save the day.
36:35
SPEAKER_00: Fine, your choice, your job, whatever.
36:37
SPEAKER_00: My thing was, uh-uh, there's too much liability.
36:40
SPEAKER_00: You told me what my job is.
36:41
SPEAKER_00: If I go in there and I'm protecting and something happens, then I'm liable.
36:45
SPEAKER_00: Right?
36:46
SPEAKER_00: So if I'm told I'm an advisor and I'm observing, the idea was, okay, we're identifying where their strengths and weaknesses are.
36:53
SPEAKER_00: So we did things like buy them equipment, buy them weapons.
36:57
SPEAKER_00: We actually got the Minister of Defense some armored vehicles.
37:00
SPEAKER_00: So that's what we're supposed to do is to assure that like they kind of get up to our level of security, which you know.
37:09
SPEAKER_00: Then we started a year into it, when I was already getting bored, we started um just being honest, when we started an academy, again, much longer story, but we still we got a huge influx into our budget because we were we were doing well in the eyes of the embassy and back uh in the State Department.
37:28
SPEAKER_00: So they gave us more money.
37:30
SPEAKER_00: And what we did with that money is we started a training facility.
37:33
SPEAKER_00: So in addition to our duties as uh security advisors, we then kind of did uh two, do we do one-week courses?
37:43
SPEAKER_00: One week courses of like really maybe it's two weeks of intense like VIP protection.
37:48
SPEAKER_00: So we would go out to the racetrack and do motorcades and we'd like smash up vehicles and we'd have like the paintball guns and like shoot 'em ups and you know, explosives and uh, you know, walking for like like everything it takes to be an agent, all that advanced work and whatever.
38:04
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, we were constantly advising and training and whatever, and it was so much fun.
38:09
SPEAKER_00: Um, and let me just say to your audience, because it's it wouldn't be normal, in my humble opinion, for any average woman to walk to book into a uh any spot in Bogota where it's 98% male, right?
38:24
SPEAKER_00: Because it's a very chauvinistic country.
38:26
SPEAKER_00: It still is, quite frankly.
38:28
SPEAKER_00: But prior to me accepting that job, I had been working in the anti-terrorism assistance program as an instructor in um Albuquerque, New Mexico.
38:39
SPEAKER_00: As such, we had three different classes of Columbia.
38:43
SPEAKER_00: Well, we had five come through, but I trained three of them before I took the job to go to Columbia.
38:49
SPEAKER_00: So I already knew a ton of agents that were down there.
38:53
SPEAKER_00: So I show up, they didn't even know I was coming down.
38:55
SPEAKER_00: I show up at the presidential palace and it was like old home week.
38:59
SPEAKER_00: They call me Maribel in Spanish, and it's like, what are you doing here?
39:02
SPEAKER_00: You have to meet my wife, you have to come over for dinner.
39:05
SPEAKER_00: You know, so that was like somebody that already had respect and whatever.
39:09
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't like they were like, Who's this woman?
39:11
SPEAKER_00: Right.
39:12
SPEAKER_00: So I got lucky that way as well.
39:14
SPEAKER_02: Oh, that made a huge difference, I imagine, because you've already got the pedigree.
39:18
SPEAKER_02: They already know with everything they've learned where that information came from.
39:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I didn't have to.
39:25
SPEAKER_02: Are you carrying?
39:26
SPEAKER_02: Are you, I mean, what's why you carry it?
39:28
SPEAKER_00: Are you kidding me?
39:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
39:29
SPEAKER_00: So Terry.
39:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so so I um the way the embassy worked is like because your contractors, um, they stick you in a hotel.
39:41
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, this isn't working for me.
39:42
SPEAKER_00: Like I they knew all my business, like that was not working for me.
39:46
SPEAKER_00: So, longer story short, I find an apartment.
39:49
SPEAKER_00: They also shifted us after one year from contractors to um uh employees for a couple of reasons.
39:58
SPEAKER_00: One, they wanted us to carry diplomatic passports, so if something happened, we'd have diplomatic immunity, you know, and there were a couple other reasons too, but doesn't matter.
40:06
SPEAKER_00: So once that happened, I kept my same apartment.
40:09
SPEAKER_00: The embassy took it over, they then paid it directly, and I had the best location and the best garage.
40:16
SPEAKER_00: So we had an armored vehicle for our team when we were going out to the training center and to go to the embassy.
40:22
SPEAKER_00: And so every morning, yours truly, I'd go down to the garage, I'd have my vest on, it was fitted for me.
40:29
SPEAKER_00: I was making sure it's tight to my body, my sidearm, which was a Glock, was tight, right?
40:34
SPEAKER_00: I loaded long weapons and extra ammunition in the back, and then I'd pull out, and we all know this in this industry.
40:39
SPEAKER_00: You pull out and you don't know what the fuck you're gonna encounter because it's a choke point, right?
40:44
SPEAKER_00: And if they're following us, we had bounties on our head, by the way, all three of us.
40:48
SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you about that in a second.
40:50
SPEAKER_00: Um, so you pull out because then I needed to go get my teammates, and then we needed to go to the training center.
40:55
SPEAKER_00: So we had a level three B, I think it was called, whatever it was called, level three something armored vehicle.
41:03
SPEAKER_00: Um, again, side arms, vests, long weapons, ammo.
41:07
SPEAKER_00: Um, so yeah, we definitely carried and with the blessing absolute of the all that came from the embassy.
41:14
SPEAKER_00: Um so that was like my my everyday, like it was really normal that we all carried.
41:20
SPEAKER_00: Um but let me tell you for a second about the bounties.
41:23
SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna say we were a year and a half into the job, and we get called into the embassy.
41:31
SPEAKER_00: We were probably out at the training facility or something, and we get called into the embassy, the three of us, four of us at the time, because it was three of us that were advisors, and then we brought in a fourth guy to run the program, all of us Americans, right?
41:43
SPEAKER_00: And so we go into the embassy up to what we call the cone to silence, which is the top deck, which is the CI.
41:49
SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, there's all this murmuring, all this murmuring, and everyone's looking at us weird.
41:53
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, you know, like like what the fuck is going on?
41:56
SPEAKER_00: And all and then they say, okay, like we need to tell you something.
41:58
SPEAKER_00: We're like, okay, like, okay, well, you guys, um, you know, we've got the intel that you guys have bounties on your head because it was the um narcos and the guerrillas, because the thing was this administration that was uh that was running Columbia at the time was obviously looking to disband all of the guerrilla groups and of course quash the narcos.
42:24
SPEAKER_00: So of course they wanted them dead, and then they wanted anybody that was keeping them alive dead.
42:28
SPEAKER_00: So they tell us this, so they're like, oh yeah, so you guys gotta like, you know, up the security.
42:32
SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to go, fuck you.
42:33
SPEAKER_00: What do you think we've been doing every day?
42:35
SPEAKER_00: You're like, oh, all of a sudden I wasn't taking my job seriously, and I'm gonna up the security.
42:39
SPEAKER_00: So I was like, we were like, oh yeah, thank you, thank you, thank you.
42:42
SPEAKER_00: But I mean, nothing really changed.
42:44
SPEAKER_00: We were we were all squared away.
42:45
SPEAKER_00: We really were.
42:46
SPEAKER_00: We were such a small team of people that really respected each other, otherwise it would never have worked.
42:51
SPEAKER_02: So yeah.
42:53
SPEAKER_03: Did they tell you what the bounty was?
42:56
SPEAKER_00: No, but I never told my parents either.
42:59
SPEAKER_03: Oh, better not, no.
43:00
SPEAKER_00: Mom and dad, they're up there listening, yeah.
43:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a great question.
43:04
SPEAKER_00: I wish I would have.
43:06
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
43:07
SPEAKER_00: I should make I should make something up, Terry.
43:09
SPEAKER_00: I should make something up.
43:10
SPEAKER_00: Four four pounds of cocaine, I don't know.
43:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
43:13
SPEAKER_00: Four million bucks.
43:14
SPEAKER_02: Immediately my head, I would have been thinking, well, what am I worth?
43:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, come on.
43:19
SPEAKER_00: Like, big deal.
43:20
SPEAKER_00: How much?
43:21
SPEAKER_00: You guys gonna sell me out?
43:24
SPEAKER_02: I think it was probably entertaining to watch, or I wish I could have watched all your faces when you're like, yeah, literally nothing's about to change.
43:31
SPEAKER_02: We're already got our shit together.
43:32
SPEAKER_02: We're already doing everything we can.
43:34
SPEAKER_02: Um, you know?
43:35
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
43:39
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no.
43:40
SPEAKER_00: Nick, I appreciate it, but they were acting all like, oh, you don't, you know, like you you little ones need to up the game.
43:45
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, mm-hmm.
43:47
SPEAKER_02: But they had no idea.
43:48
SPEAKER_00: You know, I know they meant well, but all this at the same time I think it was a little bit arrogant, but whatever.
43:54
SPEAKER_02: So while you were training these teams, did you have any instances where something happened and whether you You got to observe it or not, you got the after action report, came back, and they performed well or they performed badly.
44:06
SPEAKER_02: When I assume over that period of time something must have happened with the guys you were training.
44:11
SPEAKER_00: So the when I look back about what what my job was as the Minister of Defense being my charge, right?
44:19
SPEAKER_00: The police, so so in a lot of other countries, unlike most w you know first world countries who have organized or have organizations that protect the number ones.
44:32
SPEAKER_00: So the number ones aren't our bosses.
44:34
SPEAKER_00: We are beholden to our organizations, right?
44:37
SPEAKER_00: Different, say in Latin America and in a lot of other countries, where when President Alvaro Yuribe became president of Columbia, that's who it was when I was there, um, he brought people he could trust from like the police that had been protecting him as a senator.
44:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I got it.
44:53
SPEAKER_00: So those were police for the president and the vice president.
44:56
SPEAKER_00: Minister of Defense didn't have a choice.
44:58
SPEAKER_00: She didn't say, Oh, I want these people.
44:59
SPEAKER_00: She gets military people.
45:01
SPEAKER_00: It's a rotation.
45:02
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
45:02
SPEAKER_00: Right?
45:03
SPEAKER_00: The head of her security detail could have given a flying fuck about her and about what I had to say.
45:10
SPEAKER_00: I can't tell you how many times I'd say to him, I'm making this up.
45:15
SPEAKER_00: Jorge.
45:16
SPEAKER_00: Like I do, I would do a uh an event in some, you know, FARC territory, and we'd come back and I'd do my after action report and then I would discuss it with him.
45:26
SPEAKER_00: And he's like, it was this.
45:28
SPEAKER_00: It was the yes man.
45:29
SPEAKER_00: He could he was I watched him all the time at these events talking to the generals.
45:34
SPEAKER_00: They they I really do think she was lucky to be alive because I really do think they were conspiring against her.
45:41
SPEAKER_00: He he didn't want to listen.
45:42
SPEAKER_00: He didn't share anything of what I shared with him with his men.
45:46
SPEAKER_00: And at one of the events, this general, I will, he will remain unnamed.
45:51
SPEAKER_00: I didn't like him from the get-go.
45:52
SPEAKER_00: And he comes up to me all like, you know, swagger.
45:55
SPEAKER_00: And he goes, Oh, you're Mari Bell.
45:58
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, mm-hmm.
46:00
SPEAKER_00: And he goes, Oh, you work with the embassy.
46:02
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, oh, here we go.
46:03
SPEAKER_00: What game are we playing?
46:05
SPEAKER_00: And he's like, he starts like bullshitting me.
46:08
SPEAKER_00: And just, oh, you know, I've heard great things about you.
46:11
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, you're so full of shit.
46:12
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's just, it was this game.
46:14
SPEAKER_00: And I think he was like kind of just acting like he was my friend, but he wasn't my friend.
46:18
SPEAKER_00: And he certainly, some of them did turn out, some of those generals at that top level did turn out to be friends of the embassy, but this guy was not one of them.
46:26
SPEAKER_00: And one, so I'm on this plane back with the Minister of Defense and her security.
46:32
SPEAKER_00: So it's just the three of us.
46:34
SPEAKER_00: And she says to me, Um, can you come up and talk after we get on the plane?
46:39
SPEAKER_00: Can you come up and talk to me?
46:40
SPEAKER_00: Blah, blah, blah.
46:40
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, sure.
46:41
SPEAKER_00: She's English speaking, even though sometimes we'd speak Spanish, sometimes English.
46:45
SPEAKER_00: So she and I are talking in the sorry in the back of the plane, and her security guy's up in the front, like, I don't know, I'm not even joking, probably eating Cheetos and lemonade.
46:54
SPEAKER_00: And that's what he was doing half the time during the events.
46:57
SPEAKER_00: He wasn't watching her.
46:58
SPEAKER_00: I'm not even kidding you.
46:59
SPEAKER_00: You would flip.
47:00
SPEAKER_00: It was so infuriating.
47:01
SPEAKER_00: I would take pictures.
47:02
SPEAKER_00: I was really like I would say to him, see, like this doesn't work.
47:05
SPEAKER_00: Like she's your person.
47:06
SPEAKER_00: He'd be like, Oh, you're right.
47:08
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
47:08
SPEAKER_00: Just BSing me.
47:09
SPEAKER_00: So she says to me, she finally had gained, I'm I'm realizing this in the moment, had gained some trust with me.
47:15
SPEAKER_00: And she says to me, Um, Mary Beth, well, she called me Marie Bell, like, what are your thoughts about my head of security?
47:22
SPEAKER_00: And I go, Ooh, I don't know if this is a test or whether whatever.
47:25
SPEAKER_00: And I just said to her, I just thought to myself, what do I have to lose?
47:28
SPEAKER_00: If I lose my job, I lose my job.
47:29
SPEAKER_00: I said, listen, I gotta be honest, I don't trust him.
47:31
SPEAKER_00: I go, he doesn't um look out for you.
47:34
SPEAKER_00: I see him talking to the generals at all these events.
47:37
SPEAKER_00: And when I've had talks with him about how to modify his tactics, techniques, and procedures along with his team, he yeses me, but he doesn't, he's never made a modification.
47:46
SPEAKER_00: And she goes, That's what I thought.
47:48
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
47:49
SPEAKER_00: And thankfully, you know, it was the right answer because she probably wanted to see where my loyalty was as well.
47:54
SPEAKER_00: Because if I would have said, Oh, he's amazing, it was so obviously it was so obvious he wasn't amazing.
47:59
SPEAKER_00: So maybe she thought I was in cahoots, right?
48:01
SPEAKER_00: So good answer, you know, kept my job and just did my best to keep her alive and she's alive.
48:08
SPEAKER_00: But then then she switched, then she stepped out and we brought somebody else in.
48:11
SPEAKER_02: But yeah, you got rid of him.
48:14
SPEAKER_00: No, uh, no, I wish.
48:16
SPEAKER_00: He rotated out, thankfully.
48:17
SPEAKER_00: He thankfully rotated out like a military rotation.
48:20
SPEAKER_00: And then I had somebody that was so into it.
48:24
SPEAKER_00: Like so much so that when we did we didn't do polygraph, we did voice stress analysis, you know, which is similar as far as like he took it so seriously, he got rid of guys that failed it.
48:35
SPEAKER_00: So I was like, oh, hallelujah, we finally have somebody that's listening.
48:38
SPEAKER_00: And then we did all sorts of training and he was really, really, really into it.
48:41
SPEAKER_02: He took his role seriously.
48:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, and he was really concerned about keeping her and then her successor alive.
48:48
SPEAKER_02: Nice change.
48:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was the bomb.
48:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, pun intended.
48:53
SPEAKER_02: So uh something I read rather than something you've already said is talking about fear.
49:04
SPEAKER_02: X, Y, Z, and and how did you respond?
49:08
SPEAKER_00: I will tell you that it was probably every day.
49:10
SPEAKER_00: I mean, like when I was pulling out of that garage, I'm like, you know, this could be it.
49:14
SPEAKER_00: But I I I have a few sort of mottos, I guess I'd call them, as one is, I am stronger than I think I am.
49:21
SPEAKER_00: The other one is never let him see you sweat.
49:23
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
49:24
SPEAKER_00: So I I did a lot of things scared, but in a in such a focused, calm way, because there's so many things that come into this, Terry, like mindset.
49:35
SPEAKER_00: What was I telling myself?
49:36
SPEAKER_00: If I was telling myself, oh, you know what, you're gonna fucking die today.
49:39
SPEAKER_00: You've got a bounty on your head, they're gonna get you.
49:40
SPEAKER_00: Like, oh my god, I might as well just curl up in a ball and never leave my house.
49:43
SPEAKER_00: What good is that gonna do me?
49:45
SPEAKER_00: So the mentality was, oh no, this is the best job I've had so far.
49:51
SPEAKER_00: This is what my training led me to.
49:54
SPEAKER_00: And if you're gonna pussy out now, then like leave and this isn't for you, but like do it, like do it scared.
50:01
SPEAKER_00: And but what's equally as important to that is the recovery from that, meaning, what did I do to continue to keep myself mentally and physically strong?
50:10
SPEAKER_00: Right.
50:11
SPEAKER_00: So the moment is important, but also the moments before and after are super important.
50:16
SPEAKER_00: Like, I I am a physical fitness person, I am a runner.
50:19
SPEAKER_00: Those are my ways to like deal with my stress.
50:22
SPEAKER_00: And if you're you or any of your audience's runners, they'll understand what I mean when you think everything's so fucked up and then you go for a run and you come back like everything's good.
50:33
SPEAKER_00: Right?
50:34
SPEAKER_00: So that was that's my yeah.
50:36
SPEAKER_00: And it's true too when I go to the gym and I just put some you know headphones on and I just, you know, get in my own zone, um, running on the beach, whatever.
50:44
SPEAKER_00: I just that's my thing.
50:46
SPEAKER_00: So that's you've got to find your outlets.
50:50
SPEAKER_00: And I say this to people all the time.
50:51
SPEAKER_00: I'll say, have a glass of wine, do whatever.
50:53
SPEAKER_00: They're like, oh my God, I can't believe as a psychologist, you're telling me to drink.
50:57
SPEAKER_00: I go, stand by on that.
50:59
SPEAKER_00: I said, listen, I wasn't telling you to pound a fifth of vodka, right?
51:04
SPEAKER_00: I said, if it's if it's one of your coping mechanisms, great.
51:08
SPEAKER_00: If it's your only coping mechanism, it's a problem.
51:11
SPEAKER_00: You know, I can't think of anything better than on a Friday night or even the end of a Monday night, if my husband's home and not traveling, us coming out of our respective offices, hitting the kitchen, opening a bottle of wine and debriefing to a glass of wine.
51:25
SPEAKER_00: That is like, you know, the nervous system calms.
51:30
SPEAKER_00: You get you get you reconnect with your loved one and you just, you know, let out the stress for the day.
51:36
SPEAKER_00: So you have to have the moment because this, any aspect of this job is so stressful, and you've got to navigate the stress.
51:45
SPEAKER_00: The we all know this.
51:46
SPEAKER_00: This is like emergency room medicine.
51:48
SPEAKER_00: We don't know what's going to happen on any given day.
51:51
SPEAKER_00: It is like coming at us, coming at us, coming at us.
51:53
SPEAKER_00: You can have the best laid plans, and then you know it rarely does it go like that.
51:58
SPEAKER_00: So you got to be prepared.
51:59
SPEAKER_00: And then at the end of the day, your nervous system's like, uh, right.
52:02
SPEAKER_00: So how do you deal with that?
52:03
SPEAKER_00: It needs that break.
52:05
SPEAKER_00: So if you aren't doing anything about it, and then like you're out, you're out drugging, whoring, and drinking, those aren't, you know, that's not a good combination.
52:12
SPEAKER_00: That's not coping.
52:13
SPEAKER_00: That's cool be shitty.
52:15
SPEAKER_00: That's maladaptive, that's not adaptive.
52:17
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
52:18
SPEAKER_02: One of the things I stress constantly, because I I get the question if I'm teaching personal safety, somebody's going to say to me at some point, how do you do this without getting constantly just bent out of shape?
52:26
SPEAKER_02: You're you're paranoid, it's going to be.
52:28
SPEAKER_02: I said, Well, the reality is we all know, yes, it could be today, but the chances are it won't be.
52:33
SPEAKER_02: I need a level of attention commensurate to the risk.
52:37
SPEAKER_02: Now, in your particular case, that risk was exponentially higher.
52:41
SPEAKER_02: But again, even in obviously for you, it was hours at a time, but for most people, they can kind of pick and choose a little bit as to when they dial up that awareness and when they dial it back down.
52:53
SPEAKER_02: And then having those supportive routines around, okay, I'm off the clock now.
52:58
SPEAKER_02: Like I had an interview with someone recently who said that she adopts uh Colonel Jeff Cooper's color code system.
53:04
SPEAKER_02: And she's when she's out with a person, per certain person, she's in white.
53:08
SPEAKER_02: I didn't believe that for a second.
53:10
SPEAKER_02: She's also a badass, just like you.
53:13
SPEAKER_02: What I attributed that to was she's in white with that person, but her white is vastly different to everybody else's white.
53:21
SPEAKER_02: Her subconscious is still doing the shit, right?
53:23
SPEAKER_02: It's still scanning.
53:24
SPEAKER_02: But she she claimed, and after I sort of challenged her on it, she said, No, you're probably right, like my subconscious is still scanning.
53:31
SPEAKER_02: I'm just I've taken it down a notch because I've got help, right?
53:35
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
53:36
SPEAKER_02: But she's also a big fan of, okay, what are my supportive processes or my supportive outlets for the stress that often comes with being attentive?
53:46
SPEAKER_02: And I try to, I've always tried to tell people, like, look, you can either take this so seriously, you're always on edge, or you can look at the whole thing like it's a fucking game.
53:56
SPEAKER_02: Your your role in this is to see the assholes coming as soon as possible.
54:00
SPEAKER_02: Their goal and their game is to get as close to you to perpetrate the crime as possible.
54:05
SPEAKER_02: And in that sort of dance, if you will, there is the okay, how are you going to respond?
54:10
SPEAKER_02: When are you going to see it coming?
54:11
SPEAKER_02: How are you going to deal with it when it happens?
54:14
SPEAKER_02: You know, dealing with the emotions, etc.
54:16
SPEAKER_02: There is this sort of sense that, yes, the consequences of this game are extremely serious.
54:22
SPEAKER_02: But the reality is if you are looking at your environment sort of dialed up when necessary, down when unnecessary, you can modulate the length the sense of fatigue and also the sense of stress.
54:35
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
54:36
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
54:36
SPEAKER_02: I love that you are you're promoting these outlets for people to know, okay, at the end of the day, my wife and I do exactly the same thing.
54:44
SPEAKER_02: Let's go have a glass of wine downstairs, debrief about all the shit that happened today.
54:49
SPEAKER_02: And that's uh chill out, right?
54:51
SPEAKER_02: That's uh okay.
54:52
SPEAKER_02: We're out of the offices, we're relaxing.
54:55
SPEAKER_02: That's a routine.
54:55
SPEAKER_02: I get up at 4:30 most mornings and go to the gym.
54:58
SPEAKER_02: I work out very hard, mostly so that I can then keep in check all the stresses that are gonna come from the day, whether that's work-related or just scanning the environment.
55:09
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
55:09
SPEAKER_02: But I think it's it's sort of a holistic approach to personal safety.
55:13
SPEAKER_02: People tend to think uh in linear sense, okay, I've got one job, I've got to be attentive.
55:18
SPEAKER_02: But that's just one aspect.
55:20
SPEAKER_02: The rest of it is the supporting roles that we adopt.
55:24
SPEAKER_02: I personally.
55:25
SPEAKER_02: And I love that there are totally true.
55:28
SPEAKER_00: And the thing that you may or may not recognize that I'm going to share, and it might be so obvious to so many people, but when you say, like you and I were talking about how we reconnect with our spouses at the end of the day, it's much more than relationships are everything.
55:42
SPEAKER_00: Right.
55:43
SPEAKER_00: And so maybe you need to go do that with your teammates sometimes.
55:47
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you need to get the fuck away from your teammates sometimes.
55:50
SPEAKER_00: Right?
55:51
SPEAKER_00: Because sometimes it's like a lot of hours together.
55:53
SPEAKER_00: And it's like, can we just not talk about the job?
55:55
SPEAKER_00: Right?
55:55
SPEAKER_00: Can I just reconnect with somebody that isn't the job, which is also healthy?
55:59
SPEAKER_00: Um, and I get sometimes we like to hang out because who else gets it?
56:03
SPEAKER_00: Like that's why cops hang around with cops and doctors probably hang around with doctors and you know, et cetera.
56:07
SPEAKER_00: But you know, those connections when people start withdrawing, that's when it gets because they're keeping it in.
56:14
SPEAKER_00: You gotta get it out because like the way I describe it is when you think about those manhole covers in New York and they're like got a little bit of steam coming out.
56:23
SPEAKER_00: If you don't let that steam out more full, that whole thing's gonna blow.
56:27
SPEAKER_00: So you've got to, otherwise it's gonna, it's gonna come out somewhere, and usually it ain't pretty if you aren't doing it in healthy ways.
56:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
56:34
SPEAKER_02: No, I totally agree.
56:36
SPEAKER_02: It's great, and it's a it's a wonderful way to also balance everything because I don't want to be on all the time.
56:42
SPEAKER_00: Yes, amen.
56:44
SPEAKER_02: Just you know, I I told uh the other person I'm referencing now who is also in security and just said, well, I'm at home and I've secured the perimeter, the alarms on, the doors are locked, I know it's locked down.
56:55
SPEAKER_02: I'm about as white as you can get if you're gonna use the color code system.
56:59
SPEAKER_02: Like I'm chilled out.
57:01
SPEAKER_02: Now, is in the back of my mind a response ready to go should something happen?
57:06
SPEAKER_02: You damn straight skippy, right?
57:08
SPEAKER_02: If something's about to go down, I'm gonna there's gonna be a switch.
57:12
SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna go from being white probably all the way up to low red in flick of a switch, which I imagine was the same for you.
57:21
SPEAKER_02: And pulling out of that garage every day is that okay, I I I can see myself having a big breath, game head on, I'm ready.
57:30
SPEAKER_02: And if some asshole wants to bring it, they're gonna have a bad day.
57:34
SPEAKER_02: At least the first five or six, you know, after that, who knows?
57:37
SPEAKER_02: But at least I'm gonna get it.
57:42
SPEAKER_02: Correct.
57:42
SPEAKER_02: You're like, okay, I'm ready.
57:44
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
57:44
SPEAKER_02: And that preparation, that mental prep and that sort of yeah.
57:49
SPEAKER_00: If you don't think the mental prep is equally as important as the physical prep, you're missing out.
57:53
SPEAKER_00: The mind-body thing is so huge.
57:56
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
57:57
SPEAKER_02: Thinking through what is my response going to be?
57:59
SPEAKER_02: Like, what am I going to first?
58:01
SPEAKER_02: So I don't I'm I'm not familiar with this.
58:02
SPEAKER_02: So you said you had a level three vehicle.
58:05
SPEAKER_02: What level of protection did that give you?
58:07
SPEAKER_00: Up to nine.
58:08
SPEAKER_00: I don't think it was beyond a nine millimeter.
58:11
SPEAKER_00: I don't think it was seven six.
58:12
SPEAKER_00: It might have been five five six, Terry, but it wasn't seven six two.
58:16
SPEAKER_00: That's level four, I believe.
58:17
SPEAKER_00: Someone here might go, oh my gosh, she doesn't know what she's talking about.
58:19
SPEAKER_00: I am not an expert in armored vehicles, but you know, I mean better than, you know, nothing.
58:26
SPEAKER_02: Nothing, but not as good as it would have.
58:28
SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, and this is actually an interesting um discussion because if you remember when the three black water contractors got hung from the bridge in Felluja, and it turned into sort of those that thing of they didn't have what they needed, this, that, whatever.
58:46
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna take a deep breath here because I already felt the emotion coming.
58:48
SPEAKER_00: I called my parents.
58:50
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
58:50
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, listen, if anything ever happens to me, I had everything I ever asked for from the embassy.
58:58
SPEAKER_00: My mom's like, this isn't a good discussion, Mary Beth.
59:01
SPEAKER_00: You know, and I'm like, well, mom, she said I made her hair go gray.
59:06
SPEAKER_00: But here's the thing, like my mentality was I did have everything that like I had, like I said, I had an armored vest that was fitted for my body.
59:13
SPEAKER_00: I had almost any I I can't think of anything I asked for that I didn't get.
59:18
SPEAKER_00: Right.
59:18
SPEAKER_00: So it just was really important for me, like the knowing that I'm doing my job, that like the embassy wasn't screwing me.
59:24
SPEAKER_00: And so mom and dad, do not sue any, do not sue, do not whatever.
59:28
SPEAKER_00: It was just important for me to know that like I was doing a job that one, I wanted to, two, that I was trained to do, and three, that I was well equipped for.
59:36
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that it makes all the difference.
59:38
SPEAKER_02: But it's also an incredibly tough discussion to have, especially with a parent outside of because you said in the beginning, it's very different when you're living it than looking at it from the outside.
59:51
SPEAKER_02: And with the training, with the equipment, came a sense of I am as prepared as I can be.
59:56
SPEAKER_02: And we always know that there are variables out of our control.
1:00:00
SPEAKER_02: They're just there always will be, right?
1:00:02
SPEAKER_02: And if something happens, we are already behind the power curve.
1:00:05
SPEAKER_02: We are responding to something that has already been initiated, which can make it difficult.
1:00:10
SPEAKER_02: But the reality is the training allows us to respond that much faster, that much more efficiently, because we've run as many plans and contingent plans as possible.
1:00:21
SPEAKER_02: But when you're trying to sort of describe that to somebody else, someone outside the circle of understanding, it sounds like you're um like you have a death wish.
1:00:33
SPEAKER_02: Flippant, yes, about the risks.
1:00:35
SPEAKER_00: And you're like, yeah, that's not the case.
1:00:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:00:38
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'm gonna show you the the side of me that got whatever with my mom.
1:00:42
SPEAKER_00: It just shows the bitch side of me, right?
1:00:44
SPEAKER_00: So we're in I'm in between contracts at the time before where they made us um employees, and I'm spent I was living in San Diego at the time, but I was visiting my parents in Chicago, and after dinner, sitting outside having a glass of wine, and my mom smokes and she's like this.
1:01:02
SPEAKER_00: Um, Mary Beth, um, you're not going back to Colombia.
1:01:07
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Yeah, like whatever.
1:01:11
SPEAKER_00: And my dad sitting there not saying a word because he was a smart man.
1:01:16
SPEAKER_00: And so it ensued like this.
1:01:18
SPEAKER_00: And this is where I, this is the bitchy side, I'm telling you.
1:01:21
SPEAKER_00: I go, okay, mom, I'll just go home to San Diego and I'll go to the farmer's market and get killed.
1:01:27
SPEAKER_00: So I'll explain to you what where I got bitchy.
1:01:29
SPEAKER_00: So I listen, it's not that I didn't understand my mom's concern, but about two months after my time in Colombia, there was a story in the newspaper about this 85, I think 84, 85-year-old man who was driving near a farmer's market in Santa Monica.
1:01:47
SPEAKER_00: And oops, I put my foot on the accelerator, not the brake, and killed like eight people in a farmer's market.
1:01:53
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:01:54
SPEAKER_00: So I say to my mom, like, okay, I'll just go back to San Diego, I'll go to the farmer's market, and I'll get killed buying basil.
1:01:59
SPEAKER_00: Like, mom, it's fate.
1:02:01
SPEAKER_00: Like, if I die in Colombia, that's where I'm supposed to die.
1:02:04
SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna die in a fucking farmer's market in San Diego.
1:02:07
SPEAKER_00: Like that, that's like no way.
1:02:08
SPEAKER_00: I'd rather die in Colombia in some bomb, right?
1:02:12
SPEAKER_00: So that was like, she's like, that's not funny.
1:02:15
SPEAKER_00: You're putting yourself into danger.
1:02:17
SPEAKER_00: You're making the choice.
1:02:18
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, I understand, mom, but like it got emotional.
1:02:22
SPEAKER_00: And I'm getting emotional now.
1:02:23
SPEAKER_00: But I go, Mom, this is what I was trained to do.
1:02:26
SPEAKER_00: And like, this is like the best mission I've ever had.
1:02:29
SPEAKER_00: And I made it home alive.
1:02:30
SPEAKER_02: So you're in one piece.
1:02:34
SPEAKER_02: What movie is it?
1:02:35
SPEAKER_02: I think it's uh I can't remember.
1:02:37
SPEAKER_02: It's one of the comedic movies, and it is like the guy just keeps saying, but did you die?
1:02:43
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what movie you're talking about.
1:02:44
SPEAKER_00: I want to know which one it is.
1:02:46
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think it's hangover.
1:02:47
SPEAKER_00: I think it's one of the hangover movies.
1:02:50
SPEAKER_02: The guy's standing there and he's talking about being shot in the leg or something.
1:02:53
SPEAKER_02: He's like, But did you die?
1:02:54
SPEAKER_00: Did you die?
1:02:55
SPEAKER_00: Like it's all trivial.
1:02:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:02:57
SPEAKER_00: So stuck in that.
1:02:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:02:59
SPEAKER_00: Uh-huh.
1:03:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:03:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's awesome.
1:03:02
SPEAKER_02: So I would I'm very curious, and this is a very personally motivated question because I've been teaching how to recognize threats based on nonverbals for a lot of years.
1:03:10
SPEAKER_02: And I would like to know if there's one, perhaps one.
1:03:13
SPEAKER_02: There's probably a laundry list, but is there one behavioral cue that you specifically find, okay, if if I see this, it's indicative of, and it could it be a potential threat, give somebody up to no good.
1:03:26
SPEAKER_02: If there's one behavioral trait that you look for, even in a crowd, what would it be?
1:03:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
1:03:33
SPEAKER_00: So one of my friends taught me the word for it, which is the anomalies, right?
1:03:36
SPEAKER_00: Because there's baseline, there's a baseline.
1:03:38
SPEAKER_00: So if you're in a crowd of like people like around Taylor Swift, everybody's like, ah, right?
1:03:44
SPEAKER_00: But what about the person who's got his hand in his pocket and has like no expression whatsoever?
1:03:49
SPEAKER_00: Like what's going on there?
1:03:50
SPEAKER_00: So that's the anomaly to the baseline.
1:03:52
SPEAKER_00: So I think it really is situationally dependent.
1:03:56
SPEAKER_00: Like it could be the complete opposite.
1:03:57
SPEAKER_00: Somebody who's like got a creepy smile on his face when everybody else is sort of serious.
1:04:02
SPEAKER_00: Like I would like to have seen John um uh Hinckley when he was about to shoot Reagan.
1:04:07
SPEAKER_00: Like, what was that?
1:04:08
SPEAKER_00: What how was he different?
1:04:10
SPEAKER_00: Because he was he had to be so focused, pussy, and whatever going on in his head, right?
1:04:13
SPEAKER_00: Because he was impressing or trying to impress Jody Foster.
1:04:16
SPEAKER_00: So it's that like, you know, they used to teach us nobody's eyes are gonna kill you.
1:04:20
SPEAKER_00: So stop looking at people's eyes, look at their hands.
1:04:23
SPEAKER_00: But that's when you're working like a uh a handshake line, right?
1:04:26
SPEAKER_00: You got to make sure, like, get your hands, where you're the hands, where the hands, but that's that situation.
1:04:31
SPEAKER_00: So you have to determine what's the baseline and what are the anomalies for each situation.
1:04:36
SPEAKER_00: Those are the games you play, you know.
1:04:38
SPEAKER_00: Like if you've I'm sure you do this all the time.
1:04:40
SPEAKER_00: You're in an elevator.
1:04:41
SPEAKER_00: I'm doing this all the time.
1:04:42
SPEAKER_00: What am I gonna do if that guy, if that guy, if somebody comes in, like I am always in the back corner, even though somebody says, Oh no, if you're in a crowd and you're screwed, I'm like, I don't want to be the first one shot.
1:04:51
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to be the one that guy can access.
1:04:53
SPEAKER_00: I want to have some moving room.
1:04:54
SPEAKER_00: Like it just depends.
1:04:56
SPEAKER_00: It depends.
1:04:57
SPEAKER_02: Plus, you're also in the back of the elevator and know where the wall is, and you're fighting off the wall.
1:05:01
SPEAKER_00: And you can use that, yeah.
1:05:02
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, use it.
1:05:03
SPEAKER_02: But cheers.
1:05:04
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's interesting.
1:05:05
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, because I I, in my own way, have stressed the exact same thing.
1:05:10
SPEAKER_02: I one of the things I would say is, okay, well, what's normal for this environment?
1:05:13
SPEAKER_02: What do I expect to see?
1:05:14
SPEAKER_02: What do I not expect to see?
1:05:15
SPEAKER_02: And then identify those variables outside of what the norm would be.
1:05:20
SPEAKER_02: Obviously, there's a left and right extreme on a sliding scale, but it was it's always interesting because people will invariably not baseline their environment.
1:05:28
SPEAKER_02: They will look for perhaps behaviors specific to what they think should correlate to either aggression or violence or or problems in some way, but they haven't baselined the environment well enough to actually realize that that behavior is perfectly congruent with this environment at this particular time.
1:05:46
SPEAKER_02: And so they're pinging the wrong people.
1:05:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:05:51
SPEAKER_02: And I think your Taylor Swift example is perfect.
1:05:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:05:54
SPEAKER_02: Everybody's probably going crazy if you're a Taylor Swift fan.
1:05:58
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
1:05:58
SPEAKER_02: Who's the person who Who's not?
1:06:01
SPEAKER_02: Which behavior is a is set apart from that?
1:06:04
SPEAKER_02: Is it above or below what you would expect?
1:06:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:06:07
SPEAKER_00: I hope that's a great teaching moment for some of your audience.
1:06:11
SPEAKER_00: I know it is.
1:06:12
SPEAKER_02: Because it is.
1:06:13
SPEAKER_00: It's it's giving you a couple of things.
1:06:15
SPEAKER_00: It's basic, but like it's a game you can constantly play.
1:06:18
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
1:06:18
SPEAKER_02: You're constantly saying to yourself, okay, I need a measure from which to begin my scanning.
1:06:24
SPEAKER_02: Otherwise, I'm trying to look at everything.
1:06:26
SPEAKER_02: I had someone who came up on my LinkedIn page and she's very nice.
1:06:29
SPEAKER_02: She has a personal safety store and they sell all the personal safety gadgetry.
1:06:32
SPEAKER_02: And her post on LinkedIn was uh ladies, when you're out and about, pay attention to everything.
1:06:40
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
1:06:40
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:06:41
SPEAKER_02: Oh, what?
1:06:43
SPEAKER_02: How do I do that?
1:06:44
SPEAKER_02: Her heart was in the right place.
1:06:45
SPEAKER_02: But the reality is you can't.
1:06:47
SPEAKER_02: You're going to be bloody exhausted two minutes after you leave the house.
1:06:50
SPEAKER_02: That's it.
1:06:50
SPEAKER_02: That's the end of your day.
1:06:52
SPEAKER_02: You can't, you have to selectively apply additional effort, never being off, to specific circumstances and specific people.
1:07:01
SPEAKER_02: And it's it's you know, people have good intentions, and hers was it hers, her heart was in the right place.
1:07:07
SPEAKER_02: But I kind of commented, messaged her.
1:07:09
SPEAKER_02: I didn't want to, you know, call her out on her actual post on LinkedIn.
1:07:13
SPEAKER_02: But I said, that's impossible.
1:07:14
SPEAKER_02: You you've been to one of my classes, yes, it's been a while.
1:07:17
SPEAKER_02: But you understand that cognitively you cannot pay attention to everything.
1:07:21
SPEAKER_02: You've got to have, okay, my expected, something to measure from, and then above or below, something like where is the outlying behavior.
1:07:29
SPEAKER_02: Was she receptive?
1:07:31
SPEAKER_02: She was.
1:07:33
SPEAKER_02: She said, Well, you know, it's different for women, and we need to, we've got to be a lot more.
1:07:37
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, Don't justify.
1:07:39
SPEAKER_00: Listen to me.
1:07:42
SPEAKER_02: A little bit, yeah.
1:07:43
SPEAKER_02: I still understand.
1:07:45
SPEAKER_00: Your nervous system's gonna be jacked all the time.
1:07:47
SPEAKER_00: You can't be aware of everything.
1:07:49
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
1:07:50
SPEAKER_02: And then you're exhausted.
1:07:51
SPEAKER_02: Um people kind of go through these, you know, I think, rotations.
1:07:55
SPEAKER_02: You know, okay, today something bad happened in my neighborhood.
1:07:57
SPEAKER_02: So today I'm gonna be super attentive.
1:07:59
SPEAKER_02: Three days from now, I'm tired of doing it, so I don't do it at all.
1:08:02
SPEAKER_02: And then wait for something else to happen and it initiates another, you know, visceral response.
1:08:07
SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, well, why don't we just sort of level that out a bit?
1:08:10
SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
1:08:10
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, something that works.
1:08:13
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:08:14
SPEAKER_00: Good for you.
1:08:15
SPEAKER_02: So if you ever had a moment when your instincts were screening, something was off.
1:08:19
SPEAKER_02: God, maybe.
1:08:19
SPEAKER_02: Maybe it wasn't something tangible, it was a gut response.
1:08:23
SPEAKER_00: Um I mean, I I'd say often.
1:08:25
SPEAKER_03: I mean three times a day.
1:08:28
SPEAKER_00: I mean um, you know, probably because I worked so often overseas and like what I'd call sort of like hell holes, you know.
1:08:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:08:38
SPEAKER_00: Um not nice, like Haiti was a hellhole.
1:08:41
SPEAKER_00: Um Lima, Peru.
1:08:44
SPEAKER_00: Like what what jumped into my head when you said that was there's this time, so I'm got this protectee in Lima.
1:08:51
SPEAKER_00: He's working for the Organization of American States for their he's doing election observation.
1:08:58
SPEAKER_00: And I'm pretty it's the first time the OAS, the Organization of American States, had ever hired security, but the situation in Lima at the time, which was um 90 92, 93.
1:09:10
SPEAKER_00: So the two elections that we covered were those end of 92, beginning of 93.
1:09:16
SPEAKER_00: First protection job I had out of the Secret Service.
1:09:19
SPEAKER_00: And um the Sendero Luminoso, which is the shining path, the head of that organization had just been arrested.
1:09:27
SPEAKER_00: So they were going insane.
1:09:28
SPEAKER_00: They were bombing the US Embassy, bombing airplanes, uh putting bombs on airplanes, uh, American airlines at the airport.
1:09:35
SPEAKER_00: They were doing all sorts of stuff.
1:09:37
SPEAKER_00: And they so they had protection.
1:09:42
SPEAKER_00: So one day I show up, usually I split with my partner, where there were only two of us that were protecting him, which is crazy, but that's what they could afford.
1:09:49
SPEAKER_00: Usually he had nights, I had days.
1:09:52
SPEAKER_00: And but this day, I think he was doing some administrative stuff at our administrative offices in this building.
1:09:57
SPEAKER_00: And I was showing up with the protectee and there was every everyone was like coming outside.
1:10:03
SPEAKER_00: There was a bomb threat.
1:10:04
SPEAKER_00: And I said to my partner, take our protectee back to the hotel.
1:10:08
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna make sure we have everybody else that was part of the contract, and so we can get them all back to the hotel.
1:10:13
SPEAKER_00: And this woman comes up to me, she's probably-I mean, I'm probably only 26 at the time.
1:10:19
SPEAKER_00: She's probably 21-ish.
1:10:22
SPEAKER_00: And she's like, Oh my god, like again, speaking in Spanish, because a lot of the people they had hired were Spanish speaking, even though they lived in Washington, DC.
1:10:29
SPEAKER_00: You know, my uncle's up there, he didn't come out, he's missing, whatever.
1:10:33
SPEAKER_00: And I'm looking at her and I'm looking at this building.
1:10:35
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's got the the Peruvian, the Lima Peru police, and they're trying, you know, they're standing on the steps, not letting people in.
1:10:43
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, fuck.
1:10:46
SPEAKER_00: Like, I can't not go look for him.
1:10:48
SPEAKER_00: But there's a bomb threat in the building.
1:10:50
SPEAKER_00: But I can't not look for him, but there's a bomb threat in the building.
1:10:53
SPEAKER_00: And I just like this.
1:10:55
SPEAKER_00: Okay, stupid ass.
1:10:57
SPEAKER_00: I'm a stupid ass.
1:10:58
SPEAKER_00: I'm a stupid ass.
1:10:58
SPEAKER_00: But I just like went up the stairs and the cops are trying to call me act like they didn't hear him.
1:11:02
SPEAKER_00: I go in the building and I go find Tio, whatever the hell his name was, you know, uncle, whoever.
1:11:07
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, you know, screaming for him.
1:11:09
SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden he comes out.
1:11:11
SPEAKER_00: He's like, you see this little door open to the bathroom.
1:11:14
SPEAKER_00: And Tia, whoever, when he heard the bond threat, he thought there was an attack.
1:11:19
SPEAKER_00: So he had gone to hide, you know, he had gone to hide in the bathroom.
1:11:23
SPEAKER_00: And I grab him and I'm like, let's downstairs and out.
1:11:26
SPEAKER_00: And like I brought him and everyone's like happy.
1:11:28
SPEAKER_00: We all went back to the hotel.
1:11:30
SPEAKER_00: And of course, leave, but I knew it was like a stupid, like I knew my intuition, like, thank God there wasn't a bomb.
1:11:38
SPEAKER_00: But I was like, that, like I knew my instincts.
1:11:40
SPEAKER_00: Come on, like that was this, that was a stupid call on my part.
1:11:43
SPEAKER_00: That's where my mom really could have lambasted me, right?
1:11:46
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:11:47
SPEAKER_00: But I just felt like who else is gonna do it?
1:11:49
SPEAKER_00: And if it like, yeah, I don't know.
1:11:50
SPEAKER_00: I just sometimes you just do stupid stuff and you thank God that you made it through.
1:11:54
SPEAKER_02: It was a calling for you in that particular case.
1:11:56
SPEAKER_02: That wasn't ignoring your instincts outside an elevator door because the door's just open, there's a creepy guy in there, but you don't want to offend him, so you get in anyway, right?
1:12:05
SPEAKER_02: This yeah, that was you your natural tendency and professionally everything you've done up to this point has been to protect.
1:12:13
SPEAKER_02: And so you may have had a gut response saying, Well, this is stupid and you could well be in there, I'm gonna have to ignore that in order to step in here and and see if I can find this person to keep safe.
1:12:25
SPEAKER_02: So I think as far as yes, your mum would probably have chewed you out, but like there's a reasoning behind it, right?
1:12:32
SPEAKER_02: And I think oftentimes without instincts, there are some times when it's a good call to ignore them or to just set them aside and go, okay, I gotta do this anyway.
1:12:41
SPEAKER_02: You just you you push on.
1:12:43
SPEAKER_02: And there are some times when your instincts are trying to tell you something, and we consciously, uh cognitively talk ourselves out of it because we we can't find the mechanism that created the instinctive response.
1:12:55
SPEAKER_02: We don't know what triggered it, so now we think of it, well, it's gotta be bullshit.
1:12:59
SPEAKER_02: It's just I've got a gut feeling.
1:13:02
SPEAKER_02: How can I trust that I'm gonna do the thing anyway?
1:13:04
SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna get in the elevator with a creepy person because I don't want to offend them, and you know, social norm says we shouldn't be rude, which I think is come total horseshit, unless you're with you.
1:13:14
SPEAKER_02: Don't get it.
1:13:14
SPEAKER_02: I'm with you.
1:13:15
SPEAKER_02: Don't get in the box.
1:13:16
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
1:13:16
SPEAKER_02: Don't get it, no way.
1:13:19
SPEAKER_02: But I think I would love to hear your take on why everyone, male and female, should listen perhaps more closely to what their instincts are potentially telling them in any given like a normal situation, obviously not traveling overseas, protecting people aside.
1:13:34
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:13:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's providing you actually have good instincts, and I'm not insulting anybody.
1:13:39
SPEAKER_00: Some people just don't, right?
1:13:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:13:42
SPEAKER_00: So if you do, like have you heard it a million times at this point in your life where people go, I knew it, I I felt it, and I didn't listen, and this happened, and you're like, Yeah.
1:13:51
unknown: Yeah.
1:13:52
SPEAKER_00: You know, like so.
1:13:53
SPEAKER_00: I think they're like if you are over, say, 20 years old, you've had that happen if you have decent intuition or instincts.
1:13:59
SPEAKER_00: And I think sometimes people develop them more and more and more in this industry.
1:14:04
SPEAKER_00: So don't think if you don't have great ones, I think you can still be a little bit better.
1:14:08
SPEAKER_00: I think it is developable.
1:14:10
SPEAKER_00: Um, but I like I think it's also worthwhile, like within a team, or if if you have one team member, depends how big your team is, to say, like, why do why did you do that?
1:14:22
SPEAKER_00: Because I don't think I would have done that.
1:14:24
SPEAKER_00: Like, what was telling you to act that way and like learn?
1:14:27
SPEAKER_00: And like this, you know this, this is an industry with huge egos, right?
1:14:31
SPEAKER_00: But you don't learn unless you put your ego aside sometimes.
1:14:35
SPEAKER_00: Like ego has its place at a certain point, but like when you're in this industry, you want to survive and you want your client to survive.
1:14:42
SPEAKER_00: So why not learn from other people, even if you aren't particularly fond of that person?
1:14:47
SPEAKER_00: If they did something that you go, wow, I would have done something completely different.
1:14:50
SPEAKER_00: Why did you do that?
1:14:52
SPEAKER_00: You know, so I think that is good if you want to like build, even if you think you have great instincts, if you observe something and you're like, huh.
1:14:59
SPEAKER_00: And like learn, learn, learn, learn.
1:15:01
SPEAKER_00: Like I just, as you know, you know, I just don't stop learning.
1:15:05
SPEAKER_00: You gotta put your ego aside sometimes.
1:15:07
SPEAKER_00: Like, listen, my ego's just it's very healthy, but I can easily put it aside because there's so much to learn and quite frankly, I want to stay alive.
1:15:16
SPEAKER_02: So Yeah.
1:15:18
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:15:19
SPEAKER_02: It's having more a higher rate of curiosity than a higher ego.
1:15:24
SPEAKER_02: I think it's just I'm too perpetual student, reading, observing, learning, listening.
1:15:30
SPEAKER_02: You get it.
1:15:31
SPEAKER_02: It's always odd because you know, sometimes I'll go to speak and people will see me after the event, and there's one individual that goes up to do the presentation.
1:15:37
SPEAKER_02: There's an entirely different individual that stands at the back of the room now just observing everybody else.
1:15:42
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:15:42
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:15:43
SPEAKER_02: You're so bloody antisocial.
1:15:44
SPEAKER_02: I'm like, look at what there is to see around you.
1:15:47
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's the best.
1:15:49
SPEAKER_02: But I think one of the things I try to stress is uh subconscious being in it solely to keep us alive.
1:15:57
SPEAKER_02: Is observing behaviors that we may not be able to tangibly say, I saw this.
1:16:03
SPEAKER_02: The blink rate for this individual was 35 blinks per second.
1:16:07
SPEAKER_02: I saw them take three big breaths, they kept licking their lips, their hands were in their pockets.
1:16:11
SPEAKER_02: You may not be able to tangibly say those markers perhaps indicate someone's heightened level of stress or heightened uh you know psychological engagement.
1:16:22
SPEAKER_02: But your subconscious is going, that shit doesn't look right.
1:16:27
SPEAKER_02: And now your gut's going, okay, is that there's a warning.
1:16:30
SPEAKER_02: And even if you can't identify why you're having that response, yeah, trust it.
1:16:36
SPEAKER_02: For the love of trust it.
1:16:38
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:16:39
SPEAKER_02: It's so great.
1:16:40
SPEAKER_02: So I want to talk just a little bit about self-talk, because I know you've said that that influences, you know, a lot of how we are or how we interpret or even interact with the world.
1:16:50
SPEAKER_02: Can you kind of expand on that?
1:16:52
SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
1:16:53
SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
1:16:54
SPEAKER_00: So our thoughts and self-talk, sort of the same thing, right?
1:16:57
SPEAKER_00: Because our thoughts create self-talk.
1:16:59
SPEAKER_00: It's all about mindset.
1:17:00
SPEAKER_00: So those two things to me form mindset.
1:17:02
SPEAKER_00: Um so my my psychology bent, although I kind of when I'm talking with my clients, I meet them where they are, but I am very much a cognitive behavioral theory person, which means cognitions, thoughts, it's a fancy word for thoughts, thoughts and self-talk create feelings.
1:17:20
SPEAKER_00: Like, for example, oh fuck, I didn't work out today.
1:17:23
SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm feeling chubby, I I feel like a frump.
1:17:26
SPEAKER_00: I would up how do you think you're gonna feel?
1:17:29
SPEAKER_00: Right?
1:17:31
SPEAKER_00: And then it translates into how you behave and how you show up in the world and how you live your life.
1:17:36
SPEAKER_00: Like shift that thought to okay, I didn't work out today.
1:17:40
SPEAKER_00: Like, like say Levy, I'll do better tomorrow.
1:17:43
SPEAKER_00: Okay, like I still look good, I'll I'll push harder, whatever.
1:17:48
SPEAKER_00: The whole my you know, I say this recently, it just something somebody said, mindset isn't something, mindset is everything.
1:17:56
SPEAKER_00: Mindset matters.
1:17:58
SPEAKER_00: And if you I have a sign up here, you probably can't see it.
1:18:02
SPEAKER_00: It's someone gave this to me, it says, I'm gonna pull it here so you can see it.
1:18:06
SPEAKER_00: Sorry about that.
1:18:07
SPEAKER_00: It says, if you can see this, this is very cool.
1:18:09
SPEAKER_00: It says, Whispered to her, you cannot withstand the storm.
1:18:16
SPEAKER_00: She whispered back, I am the storm.
1:18:20
SPEAKER_00: So think about that.
1:18:21
SPEAKER_00: If someone says to you, you can't withstand the storm, you can't get that job, you don't belong in this room, you blah, blah, blah, blah, and you believe it, you're a fucking idiot.
1:18:30
SPEAKER_00: I'm just saying that to be really blunt with your audience because do you think that my whole life, everyone, not everyone, lots and lots and lots of people doubted me, told me I couldn't do things.
1:18:42
SPEAKER_00: You can't do this, you can't do that.
1:18:44
SPEAKER_00: Women don't do that job.
1:18:45
SPEAKER_00: Women don't go live in Spain by themselves, you know, on and on.
1:18:49
SPEAKER_00: People don't, women don't go to Colombia, women don't watch me, right?
1:18:53
SPEAKER_00: So it's the mindset.
1:18:54
SPEAKER_00: What are you telling yourself?
1:18:56
SPEAKER_00: Like it's not, again, doesn't mean I didn't have my doubts, doesn't mean sometimes I didn't listen to those people and let them get to me for a second.
1:19:03
SPEAKER_00: But just like when I was in the Secret Service training and this big uh former military um academy guy comes up to me and says to me, What are you even doing here?
1:19:15
SPEAKER_00: Why don't you just leave?
1:19:17
SPEAKER_00: And I said to him, Why would I leave?
1:19:18
SPEAKER_00: I'm having so much fun.
1:19:20
SPEAKER_00: Listen, he he got to me, but no fucking way was I gonna let him see that he got me.
1:19:24
SPEAKER_00: Never let him see sweat.
1:19:26
SPEAKER_00: All he got was that sort of snarky answer back for me.
1:19:28
SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure I drove him crazy.
1:19:31
SPEAKER_00: But I belonged there as much as he did.
1:19:33
SPEAKER_00: And listen, that that piece of shit got fired when um the whole Cartagena scandal happened in the Secret Service.
1:19:41
SPEAKER_00: So guess what?
1:19:42
SPEAKER_00: You got yours, buddy.
1:19:43
SPEAKER_00: But anyway, it's all to say that, you know, what you're telling yourself matters.
1:19:47
SPEAKER_00: If I told myself I don't belong, Bryce, I'd probably end up like as a car salesman or something.
1:19:54
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
1:19:54
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what I would end up at that I don't know.
1:19:57
SPEAKER_00: But it's all to say that, you know, even in my own family, there's been a lot of doubt.
1:20:01
SPEAKER_00: Not just my mom, and not saying doubt.
1:20:02
SPEAKER_00: She was very afraid, don't get me wrong.
1:20:04
SPEAKER_00: But like one of my sisters said to me when, you know, I was in Spain, she's like, what are you gonna tell people when you come back and you're looking for a job?
1:20:13
SPEAKER_00: I said, I'm gonna tell them I was living in Spain for three years.
1:20:16
SPEAKER_00: What do you think I'm gonna tell them?
1:20:17
SPEAKER_00: Bitch.
1:20:18
SPEAKER_00: You know.
1:20:22
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
1:20:23
SPEAKER_00: Like, like you guys, you guys who let people get in their heads, don't give people, don't let people rent space in your head.
1:20:32
SPEAKER_00: Like that is about them.
1:20:33
SPEAKER_00: That is not about you.
1:20:35
SPEAKER_00: Tell yourself that you belong.
1:20:36
SPEAKER_00: It's you know, just push forward.
1:20:38
SPEAKER_00: What you tell yourself matters.
1:20:40
SPEAKER_00: Stop that crazy spiral of self-criticism.
1:20:43
SPEAKER_00: It's just not healthy.
1:20:44
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't do anybody any good.
1:20:45
SPEAKER_00: And I say to people, would you talk like that to your best friend or someone you love?
1:20:50
SPEAKER_00: No, start start talking to yourself like you talk to people you love.
1:20:54
SPEAKER_00: There was a hilarious to yourself.
1:20:57
SPEAKER_00: You do it to other people.
1:20:59
SPEAKER_00: There was a hilarious Instagram post that one of my friends sent me about six months ago.
1:21:03
SPEAKER_00: And it was today, I'm gonna talk to myself all day like I talk to my dog.
1:21:08
SPEAKER_00: Oh, Mary Beth, you're such a good girl, and oh, you're so pretty.
1:21:12
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
1:21:13
SPEAKER_00: So, like, be joke, make a joke about it, but do it.
1:21:16
SPEAKER_00: And and like it, if you you like people say, Oh, that doesn't work.
1:21:20
SPEAKER_00: It works.
1:21:20
SPEAKER_00: If you move the the meter, you move that inch by inch, millimeter by millimeter, you start believing it.
1:21:26
SPEAKER_02: Incremental improvements.
1:21:28
SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes, yeah.
1:21:29
SPEAKER_02: I was out in the garage doing a DIY project, which is not my happy place.
1:21:33
SPEAKER_02: I don't particularly like DIY.
1:21:35
SPEAKER_02: I'm with you.
1:21:36
SPEAKER_02: Funny thing is, I have I can do it, but damn, I'm probably gonna hate every minute of it.
1:21:41
SPEAKER_02: And I had done something, I'd measured a piece of wood and cut it wrong.
1:21:45
SPEAKER_02: I didn't measure twice and cut once.
1:21:46
SPEAKER_02: Um I was chastising myself.
1:21:49
SPEAKER_02: This was decades ago now, and my wife came out and thought I was on the phone with somebody, and she's like, Who are you talking to?
1:21:57
SPEAKER_02: Because I was just chewing myself out, and she's like, You were talking to yourself like that?
1:22:03
SPEAKER_02: And I yes, but it was very much what I grew up with.
1:22:08
SPEAKER_02: There was it was always negative, and everybody was always a bloody idiot, and you're too stupid to do this.
1:22:14
SPEAKER_02: So it it was uh it was an echo of that, right?
1:22:17
SPEAKER_02: It was just that formative sort of programming coming to rear its ugly head.
1:22:22
SPEAKER_02: And she said, Would you talk to any of your friends like that?
1:22:25
SPEAKER_02: And I was oh, absolutely not.
1:22:27
SPEAKER_02: You know, I was horrified at the very thought.
1:22:29
SPEAKER_02: And then she said, Then why in the hell would you talk to yourself like that?
1:22:32
SPEAKER_02: And it's funny because she disappeared back inside and I was a bit huffy.
1:22:35
SPEAKER_02: And then I thought about this for a minute and I'm waiting.
1:22:38
SPEAKER_02: She could be onto something.
1:22:39
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, she's not wrong.
1:22:41
SPEAKER_02: No, I was talking to myself like I was a grade A idiot, and I passed myself up and down.
1:22:46
SPEAKER_02: And it took probably weeks, if not months, of just sort of gently testing the waters with, you know, maybe I'm not gonna just chastise myself up and down for the errors that we make as humans every day.
1:22:58
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
1:22:59
SPEAKER_02: And uh the first place that I found myself able to transition my thought process was at the gym.
1:23:06
SPEAKER_02: I would often use anger to achieve the objective, and I would cuss myself along the way.
1:23:12
SPEAKER_02: So instead, I thought, well, how would I talk to someone if I was training them?
1:23:16
SPEAKER_02: I would say, well, you have a nice job, that's great.
1:23:18
SPEAKER_02: No, we didn't make a PB today.
1:23:20
SPEAKER_02: That's okay.
1:23:20
SPEAKER_02: We're gonna do it next week or we'll do it next month, it doesn't matter, but you've achieved today's goal.
1:23:24
SPEAKER_02: Well done.
1:23:25
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:23:25
SPEAKER_02: And it was these little, little glimpses, and it felt weird as hell as well to change that narrative.
1:23:31
SPEAKER_02: Where I suddenly found myself going, Oh, hold on a minute.
1:23:34
SPEAKER_02: If I'm prepared to listen to the critic, should I not also be prepared to listen to the coach?
1:23:38
SPEAKER_00: And that's Imagine that.
1:23:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:23:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:23:40
SPEAKER_00: Crazy.
1:23:41
SPEAKER_00: But you know what you said about how that's the way you grew up, it was always negative.
1:23:45
SPEAKER_00: All who we are as humans is always based in our the core beliefs that were established when we were younger, but they're changeable.
1:23:52
SPEAKER_00: Like that's not like a lot of what we were told was not true.
1:23:55
unknown: Yeah.
1:23:56
SPEAKER_00: So it but it takes time.
1:23:58
SPEAKER_00: And you said it took weeks or months for some people, it takes years.
1:24:01
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:24:01
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:24:02
SPEAKER_00: And one big distinction that I made with my clients is I am totally fine with you being hard on yourself, but self-criticism sucks.
1:24:10
SPEAKER_00: It does nobody any good.
1:24:12
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, good, be hard on yourself.
1:24:14
SPEAKER_00: That's how you get far in life.
1:24:16
SPEAKER_00: Who else is gonna be who else is gonna be?
1:24:17
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you've gonna be I I don't want to misinterpret the it's you'll be competitive with yourself, achieve great things, push.
1:24:25
SPEAKER_02: But also along the way, it's a journey to get there anyway.
1:24:28
SPEAKER_02: Be kind to yourself.
1:24:30
SPEAKER_02: Yes, even if it's little little slivers along the way.
1:24:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but it matters because it stops that crazy spiral.
1:24:36
SPEAKER_00: I can imagine that example you gave me of you being in the garage.
1:24:39
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure you were spiraling and it took you back how many years about, oh, you're a piece of shit or whatever.
1:24:44
SPEAKER_00: It did.
1:24:44
SPEAKER_00: That spiral just can put you in a crappy mood.
1:24:47
SPEAKER_00: And then how are you showing up for your wife and your family, right?
1:24:50
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
1:24:51
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:24:52
SPEAKER_02: And it's very hard if you talk to yourself like that, then you're constantly having to buffer with how you talk to others, right?
1:24:57
SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
1:24:58
SPEAKER_02: And it does influence.
1:24:59
SPEAKER_00: What are you thinking about then, but you aren't saying it that way.
1:25:02
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
1:25:03
SPEAKER_02: Uh-huh.
1:25:04
SPEAKER_00: So choose a different lens to look through things, right?
1:25:06
SPEAKER_00: Choose one that's more positive, more supportive, that's going to shift your thoughts and self-talk and the way you feel and the way you show up in life matters.
1:25:15
SPEAKER_02: It did.
1:25:16
SPEAKER_02: And I'm glad I I put that in place long before we started having kids, but by the time we got to them, I'd already made the promise I was never going to treat my kids the way I was treated.
1:25:24
SPEAKER_02: And so that in addition to that promise I'd made myself was also I'm always going to be positive.
1:25:30
SPEAKER_02: I'm not going to be that dad.
1:25:33
SPEAKER_02: Things are not good enough, or criticism, etc., etc.
1:25:36
SPEAKER_02: And so the kids, they're all amazing.
1:25:38
SPEAKER_02: They've achieved amazing things.
1:25:40
SPEAKER_02: But it's it is funny sometimes to look at where they've gone and go, I wonder if they would have achieved the same if they hadn't been listening to me say the things I listened to growing up.
1:25:52
SPEAKER_02: It's probably not.
1:25:54
SPEAKER_00: It can drive somebody or it can fold somebody, right?
1:25:57
SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
1:25:59
SPEAKER_02: Like just before I joined, I went into the Royal Marine Commandos, which in England is one of those tough ones to get into, right?
1:26:07
SPEAKER_02: And my dad, one of the last things he said before I started was, There's no fucking way you're getting in there.
1:26:13
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, he he threw every ounce of shade he could with, yeah, this is not gonna happen.
1:26:18
SPEAKER_02: But it was funny because in that one instance it was exactly what you said.
1:26:23
SPEAKER_02: Watch this.
1:26:24
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:26:25
SPEAKER_02: And you know, there were a lot of people getting a few.
1:26:30
SPEAKER_00: I showed you.
1:26:32
SPEAKER_02: I was a little bit, yeah.
1:26:33
SPEAKER_02: Because there were a lot of people that failed along the way, and then you're gonna be able to do it.
1:26:35
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, of course.
1:26:36
SPEAKER_02: You get you've got the in your like, yeah, I made it.
1:26:39
SPEAKER_02: And he said, uh I'll give a little bit of credit where it was due.
1:26:42
SPEAKER_02: He did say, I had no idea you had it in you.
1:26:45
SPEAKER_02: And that was about as big a compliment as I could expect.
1:26:47
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, thanks, Dave.
1:26:48
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:26:48
SPEAKER_02: Like I got I dug my heels in and was like, you think like that.
1:26:52
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that stuff drives us.
1:26:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:26:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the pros and cons.
1:26:56
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:26:57
SPEAKER_02: So you obviously moving from um Secret Service into working as a contractor.
1:27:04
SPEAKER_02: This totality of this journey, if you were standing in front of someone right now who's thinking about changing something about themselves, what would you what would you want to see them change?
1:27:17
SPEAKER_00: I would want to s I I go back to what the what you and I were just talking about.
1:27:21
SPEAKER_00: I would want to see them change their mindset.
1:27:23
SPEAKER_00: You know, I um I've spent a lot of years right around I mean a lot of years is relative for me, right?
1:27:29
SPEAKER_00: But like five since COVID.
1:27:31
SPEAKER_00: Um because I do speaking on a lot of things, but it just turned into everybody wanted to hear about resilience because COVID just fucked a lot of people.
1:27:40
SPEAKER_00: And I think even six years later, because we are six years into it, um, people still are there's there's a lot of damage done.
1:27:49
SPEAKER_00: And like I just want to say to some people get off the fucking couch because COVID made us like, you know, Grubhub Netflix addicts, right?
1:27:58
SPEAKER_00: And that's fun.
1:28:00
SPEAKER_00: A night a week, but like that's not life and that's not healthy.
1:28:04
SPEAKER_00: So you got to do what's hard and you got to do what you don't want to do.
1:28:07
SPEAKER_00: And you got to like do the box jumps at the gym or make that healthy meal or drink more water.
1:28:12
SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying like don't live life.
1:28:14
SPEAKER_00: Listen, I I am craving a pizza for tonight, right?
1:28:16
SPEAKER_00: I'm just being honest, right?
1:28:18
SPEAKER_00: Glass of wine, maybe two.
1:28:20
SPEAKER_00: But like I worked really hard this week and you know, I did what's hard.
1:28:24
SPEAKER_00: The one thing that I won't do, and my husband keeps pushing me because I can see it from here, is that fucking cold dunk tank.
1:28:30
SPEAKER_00: You know?
1:28:31
SPEAKER_00: I say to him, I die of hypothermia.
1:28:33
SPEAKER_00: Do you want me to die?
1:28:34
SPEAKER_00: You know, because I'm I'm pretty thin.
1:28:36
SPEAKER_01: But that's cold pledges for you.
1:28:38
SPEAKER_00: No.
1:28:39
SPEAKER_00: But, you know, I've done it, but I he does it every day.
1:28:42
SPEAKER_00: But I'm married to a former Navy SEAL, so it's like, God, talk about, you know, making me feel like a schlep, but I know I'm not, I'm not saying that, but I'm just saying, like, no, I'm not doing that.
1:28:51
SPEAKER_00: Like, that's good for you.
1:28:52
SPEAKER_00: But what I'm saying is like that whole mindset, it it it transitions and builds resilience because they're they're they're hand in hand.
1:29:01
SPEAKER_00: The build, you know, you know I'm a big resilience person, and that's what I've spoken about, but the whole foundation of building resilience is mindset.
1:29:10
SPEAKER_00: Because if you can shift your mindset, you can shift your life.
1:29:13
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's actually a quote from um Tony Robbins.
1:29:17
SPEAKER_00: And I'm a believer.
1:29:18
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I didn't get that from him.
1:29:20
SPEAKER_00: He comes from a different angle, but you know this.
1:29:23
SPEAKER_00: If you can change how you talk to yourself, how you think, how you look at things, your whole life will change.
1:29:30
SPEAKER_00: I have I have seen it with so many of my clients.
1:29:34
SPEAKER_00: And when you realize that it's within your own power to manage your anxiety, to come out of depression because everything is in here.
1:29:43
SPEAKER_00: I remember a student when I was a uh a counselor at a in a cow when I was in one of my internships when I was getting my doctorate.
1:29:51
SPEAKER_00: And the student looks at me and she goes, I can't believe that you're telling me that this is all within my own power.
1:29:58
SPEAKER_00: And I go, let's experiment, let's see it.
1:30:01
SPEAKER_00: And then, like, I don't remember how many months, she's still in touch with me now.
1:30:04
SPEAKER_00: That was a long time ago.
1:30:06
SPEAKER_00: And she's like, Holy, like, holy shit, like, what do people go to, Terry?
1:30:10
SPEAKER_00: They go to a medication.
1:30:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they go to whatever.
1:30:14
SPEAKER_00: But here's the thing this is what I really learned and respected.
1:30:17
SPEAKER_00: When I was in this counseling center, the rule was if you were gonna do meds, because we had two psychiatrists there, you had to go to therapy.
1:30:26
SPEAKER_00: Because the idea was they wanted those meds to be temporary, unless it was like say schizophrenia or bipolar, right?
1:30:33
SPEAKER_00: Different circumstances.
1:30:34
SPEAKER_00: And if you had schizophrenia, you would have been referred out anyway because it was too high level.
1:30:39
SPEAKER_00: Um, but and I I and I really agree with that because I remember working with this young woman who was a gymnast, and she's like, I don't want to go on meds, I don't want to go on meds, I don't want to go on meds.
1:30:48
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, I'm not a med pusher, sweetheart, but you're not even functioning.
1:30:53
SPEAKER_00: You can't even get out of bed.
1:30:54
SPEAKER_00: You're barely coming to these appointments.
1:30:56
SPEAKER_00: We need to get you to baseline or at least closer to baseline so that you and I can communicate and you can get back to yourself.
1:31:03
SPEAKER_00: And we did it.
1:31:04
SPEAKER_00: She got on meds and she was off by the end of by summer.
1:31:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:31:08
SPEAKER_00: So do you know what I mean?
1:31:09
SPEAKER_00: Like that's the thing, but it was up here.
1:31:12
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
1:31:13
SPEAKER_00: Right?
1:31:14
unknown: Yeah.
1:31:14
SPEAKER_00: So that's I that was my very long-winded answer to your question.
1:31:18
SPEAKER_02: It wasn't long-winded at all.
1:31:19
SPEAKER_02: It's great insight.
1:31:20
SPEAKER_02: No, because one of the things I've done with people is I try to suggest that we choose to do things that make us either uncomfortable or afraid, or something that stresses us out so that we're better positioned to uh man uh manage the emotions, right?
1:31:35
SPEAKER_02: All of the side it things that occur and are triggered by doing the thing that makes us either uncomfortable or scared.
1:31:41
SPEAKER_02: Public speaking would be a great example.
1:31:43
SPEAKER_02: I was terrified for the first 18 months of public speaking.
1:31:47
SPEAKER_02: I'm an introvert, hated it.
1:31:49
SPEAKER_02: But my drive to want to share the information I had outweighed my fear.
1:31:54
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
1:31:55
SPEAKER_02: And yeah, and you know, for most people, public speaking is one of those things.
1:31:58
SPEAKER_02: It'll get your hands shaking and you feel like throwing up.
1:32:00
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
1:32:01
SPEAKER_02: I said, But yes, but go do that.
1:32:02
SPEAKER_02: Go join a Toastmasters or something and manage the emotion because at some point you might face a situation in your life where it is out of your control, and those same type of emotions are going to manifest if you've got no coping mechanism, if you don't know what to do with them, you're screwed.
1:32:18
SPEAKER_02: That's brilliant.
1:32:20
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:32:20
SPEAKER_02: And it's fine, so but to hear somebody else say it, because sometimes it can feel like I'm just yelling into a void.
1:32:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, it makes sense.
1:32:28
SPEAKER_00: Like I yeah.
1:32:30
SPEAKER_00: Public speaking, I think, is the number one fear.
1:32:32
SPEAKER_00: It's either that or heights.
1:32:33
SPEAKER_00: I forget which one is higher, but those two.
1:32:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, terrifying.
1:32:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:32:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:32:37
SPEAKER_00: You probably get over it.
1:32:40
SPEAKER_02: Do you get nervous before you're gonna do it?
1:32:41
SPEAKER_02: Every time.
1:32:41
SPEAKER_00: Every time, because here's the thing it's a different audience every time, and you want to be able to reach that audience.
1:32:46
SPEAKER_00: And is that are you gonna be able to?
1:32:48
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
1:32:49
SPEAKER_00: I'm not cocky enough to say, oh, I've done this before.
1:32:51
SPEAKER_00: Uh mm-mm.
1:32:53
SPEAKER_00: Because I want to I want it to matter.
1:32:54
SPEAKER_00: It's like the prep and the amount of time and whatever.
1:32:58
SPEAKER_00: I want it to matter.
1:32:58
SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, why am I standing up here?
1:33:00
SPEAKER_00: I don't like to stand up on a stage.
1:33:02
SPEAKER_00: I like to be in the shadows.
1:33:03
SPEAKER_00: I still like to be in the shadows.
1:33:04
SPEAKER_00: Are you with me?
1:33:06
SPEAKER_00: Right?
1:33:06
SPEAKER_00: So it's not fun to be out in center stage.
1:33:08
SPEAKER_00: So if I'm it's gotta matter.
1:33:10
SPEAKER_02: Yes.
1:33:10
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:33:11
SPEAKER_02: You're gonna be delivering something that is you have enough of a drive to deliver it that you can set aside your personal feelings about it, whether that's fear or just discomfort.
1:33:21
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:33:21
SPEAKER_02: I love that.
1:33:21
SPEAKER_02: I think that's great.
1:33:23
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:33:24
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
1:33:24
SPEAKER_02: Both.
1:33:25
SPEAKER_02: So if if somebody wants to either connect with you or get your book or have you come speak, where are they going?
1:33:32
SPEAKER_02: Sure.
1:33:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:33:33
SPEAKER_00: So I have a website.
1:33:34
SPEAKER_00: It's drmarybeth.com.
1:33:36
SPEAKER_00: So it's D-R-M-A-R-Y-B-E-T-H dot com.
1:33:40
SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm that same uh handle on Instagram um and LinkedIn.
1:33:46
SPEAKER_00: Um and my book you can get on Amazon.
1:33:49
SPEAKER_00: Um you can find out about it at my website.
1:33:51
SPEAKER_00: It's called The Protector.
1:33:52
SPEAKER_00: It's up there, you can see it over there.
1:33:54
SPEAKER_00: And it's got a whole huge long subtitle, but it's called The Protector, and it's under my name, Mary Beth Wilkesjanky, even though I really every day go by Janky by itself.
1:34:03
SPEAKER_00: But uh it's also an audio.
1:34:04
SPEAKER_00: I went through that hell of doing the audio version of my book.
1:34:08
SPEAKER_00: Um, and it's me because people are like, oh, why don't you have someone else do it?
1:34:11
SPEAKER_00: I said, because nobody else can say, are you fucking kidding me better than me?
1:34:19
SPEAKER_00: Am I wrong?
1:34:20
SPEAKER_00: Come on.
1:34:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:34:21
SPEAKER_00: Not at all.
1:34:23
SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
1:34:24
SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Jerry.
1:34:25
SPEAKER_00: This is awesome.
1:34:26
SPEAKER_02: You are you are so authentic.
1:34:28
SPEAKER_02: Okay, thank you.
1:34:29
SPEAKER_02: Literally talked to you for hours.
1:34:31
SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much for making it again here.
1:34:33
SPEAKER_02: I think you've shared some brilliant nuggets of information.
1:34:37
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
1:34:37
SPEAKER_00: Hi to your audience.
1:34:38
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
1:34:39
SPEAKER_00: You contact me.
1:34:40
SPEAKER_00: I respond to everybody, so don't hesitate.
1:34:43
SPEAKER_02: All right.
1:34:43
SPEAKER_02: Thank you for joining us for today's episode.
1:34:45
SPEAKER_02: I hope you found it as entertaining and engaging as I did.
1:34:48
SPEAKER_02: I learned things.
1:34:48
SPEAKER_02: It's been fantastic.
1:34:49
SPEAKER_02: Don't forget to hit like, share, subscribe, all the usual culprits.
1:34:53
SPEAKER_02: It helps support the show and help us bring you the guests that you want to hear from.
1:34:57
SPEAKER_02: For now, thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you in the next episode.
1:35:00
SPEAKER_02: Cheers.