2026-04-30 06:20:04
Elad Gil (@eladgil) is CEO of Gil & Co, a multi-stage investment firm, holding company, and operating company working on the world’s most advanced technologies. Elad is a serial entrepreneur, operating executive, and investor or advisor to private companies, including AirBnB, Anduril, Coinbase, Figma, Instacart, OpenAI, SpaceX, and Stripe. He was previously VP of Corporate Strategy at Twitter and started mobile at Google. He was the founder and CEO of Mixerlabs and Color. Elad is the author of the bestseller High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 People.
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The post Elad Gil, Consigliere to Empire Builders — How to Spot Billion-Dollar Companies Before Everyone Else, The Misty AI Frontier, How Coke Beat Pepsi, When Consensus Pays, and Much More (#863) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-04-25 02:46:08
The following is a guest post from Dr. Tommy Wood (@drtommywood), associate professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at the University of Washington, where his research focuses on brain health.
In this blog post, Tommy covers:
Tommy’s new book is The Stimulated Mind: Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia and Stay Sharp at Any Age.
“The era of preventive neurology has arrived.” —The American Academy of Neurology, 2023.1
Over the past 5–10 years, there has been a notable shift in how we think about cognitive decline and dementia, from a predestined inevitability to something that we might be able to prevent at both the individual and population levels. Current estimates suggest that at least 45% of dementia cases may be preventable, though there are many scientists in the field who feel this is a conservative underestimate. That 45% comes from the most recent iteration of the Lancet Commission on Dementia Prevention, which looked at the effects of 14 modifiable dementia risk factors—low education, hearing and vision loss, high LDL cholesterol, brain trauma, physical inactivity, diabetes, smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, excessive alcohol, social isolation, depression, and air pollution.2 Other studies suggest that more than 70% of dementia may be preventable when including risk factors not considered in the Lancet analysis,3 with at least half of preventable cases seeming to be related to modifiable factors in our lifestyles and the environment. This means that we may have significant capacity to modify our individual risk of cognitive decline.
In this article, I’ll cover some lesser-known and emerging modifiable risk factors for cognitive decline and dementia. The big rocks of lifestyle will always be critical, but several additional interventions are increasingly worth looking at, due to their relatively low effort and big potential for long-term impact on brain health. For each intervention, I’ll include low-lift strategies you can consider adding to your brain-health toolkit to minimize the risk of cognitive decline and dementia.
One notable factor missing from the Lancet report that garnered both formal academic commentaries and mainstream media was nutrient status—specifically, homocysteine-lowering B vitamins (mainly B12 and folate [B9] but also B6 and riboflavin [B2]) and Omega-3 fatty acids.8,9 One reason for the omission may be that it’s hard to isolate the benefits of these nutrients individually. Unlike an individual risk factor like smoking, there is less evidence for B vitamins and Omega-3s individually because they’re both required to see benefit.
The first study to find this interaction was VITACOG, which randomized participants with elevated homocysteine to a B vitamin supplement containing B12, folic acid, and B6.10 This resulted in slowed brain atrophy and cognitive decline. In particular, this benefit was only seen in participants who had adequate Omega-3 status.11 Since then, multiple randomized trials have found the same—either that the benefit of B vitamins depends on Omega-3 status or that the benefit of Omega-3 supplementation depends on having adequate B vitamins status (i.e., not having high homocysteine).12,13 Though I think it’s probably an overestimate, one meta-analysis even suggested that Omega-3 intake and homocysteine levels each contributed more than 20% of modifiable dementia risk.14
In studies of homocysteine lowering with B vitamins, the most benefit is seen when keeping homocysteine under 13 μmol/L, but a variety of other lines of evidence suggest that less than 10–11 μmol/L is probably better.15 Studies examining the relationship between Omega-3 status and risk of cognitive decline or dementia suggest that we should aim for an Omega-3 Index (percentage of Omega-3 fats in red blood cells) of at least 5%, with lowest risk in those above 8%.16-18 If you’re not sure if you would benefit from additional intake or a supplement, most primary care physicians will measure homocysteine and potentially Omega-3 status as well. OmegaQuant offers an at-home Omega-3 Index test. The at-home DRIfT test includes Omega-3 Index as well as homocysteine, HbA1c, and Vitamin D.
Strategies to get adequate B vitamins and Omega-3s
Test plasma homocysteine (serum is acceptable but can show falsely elevated levels if not processed properly) and supplement if needed. If homocysteine is elevated (above 11 μmol/L), consider the doses used in VITACOG—800 mcg folic acid (or 1,360 dietary folate equivalents, DFE) and 500 mcg B12. Some studies lowering homocysteine with B vitamins have also included around 20 mg of B6 and 1–2 mg of riboflavin per day. Omega-3 status can be improved through regular seafood consumption, though supplementation can be worthwhile in those who don’t. Aiming to average 2–4 grams of long-chain Omega-3s (a combination of EPA and DHA) per day is a good target. Good options for homocysteine-lowering B vitamin supplements include Thorne Methyl-Guard (2 capsules/day), Pure Encapsulations MethylAssist (1 capsule/day), and Designs for Health Homocysteine Supreme (1 capsule/day). For Omega-3s, I generally recommend Nordic Naturals Ultimate Omega 2X, Parasol Omega-3, or Momentous Omega-3.
It often feels like our world is becoming increasingly toxic… in many ways. But even if we only focus on environmental exposures and dementia risk, there are a few important modifiable factors that come to mind.
Air quality
Included as a modifiable risk factor on the Lancet Commission’s list, several recent studies have found that air pollution from roads, local industrial activity, or wildfires can increase the risk of dementia.19 Inhaling tiny particles, nitrogen oxides, and ozone that are released into the air can trigger inflammation and oxidative stress as well as physiological stress.20 While it can be impossible to escape the air around you without completely and permanently relocating, a measured approach would include wearing a mask when you’re outside on very smoky days—for instance, during wildfire season (an N95 mask will filter out the 2.5-micron particles thought to be particularly problematic).
It’s also important to recognize that the air inside can often be several times worse than the air outdoors.21A high-leverage intervention could therefore be to get an air purifier for spaces where you spend a lot of time. For example, a recent study in healthy adults found that an indoor HEPA air filter significantly reduced blood pressure—another well-known risk factor for dementia.22 Though there is wide variety in these devices, with some being able to filter more than others, if you live in an area with a lot of air pollution, anything is probably better than nothing.
Finally, in another interesting twist for ways that risk factors may interact, a recent study from the University of Washington also found that the effect of air pollution on dementia risk was attenuated in those who had good B vitamin intake, potentially because B vitamins counteract the increase in homocysteine that can result from air pollution exposure.23 This wasn’t a randomized trial, but it’s another good reason to focus on getting enough B vitamins.
[NOTE FROM TIM: James Nestor, author of Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, travels with a portable CO₂ monitor called an Aranet4 and has been recording levels in hotels for years. What he’s found is alarming: many hotels—especially the expensive, LEED-certified “green” ones—have sealed their windows shut to save on heating and cooling costs. They therefore recirculate stale air from other rooms. He’s recorded CO₂ levels as high as 2,800 parts per million in these hotels. For reference, outdoor air is often around 425 ppm, and cognitive test scores can drop significantly once you hit 1,500 ppm. His practical fix: have yourself or your assistant call ahead and ask if the hotel has windows that open, even a few inches, and make that a criterion for booking. I now do this whenever possible.]
Water quality
Though the municipal water supply is very safe, depending on the region and your local plumbing, there are several possible contaminants that can potentially affect your health. It would be difficult to cover an exhaustive list, but lead and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS, or “forever chemicals”) are two good examples. Lead exposure is associated with an increased risk of dementia,24 and though exposure has decreased with the banning of lead in gasoline, there are still millions of lead pipes that supply water in certain areas of the United States.25
The risk from PFAS has only been appreciated more recently, but early evidence suggests you can commonly find them in food packaging, nonstick cookware (especially if old or damaged), and drinking water. These forever chemicals can accumulate in the brain, potentially increasing your risk of metabolic disease and dementia.26,27 As with air filters, there are many different options for water filters on the market, but even the basic versions can remove the majority of heavy metals and PFAS in the water, which can add up to a lot of benefit over time.
Microplastics
These tiny particles shed from plastic containers, tubes, and pipes and can end up in what we eat and drink. One recent study that took social media by storm suggested that we consume, on average, a credit card’s worth of microplastics per week.28 However, another group reanalyzed the data and suggested the true amount might be less than 0.0001% of that.29 Several studies have also supposedly found microplastics throughout the body, including in blood vessels and the brain.30 One study even suggested that microplastic levels were much higher in the brains of people who had dementia than those who didn’t.31 However, we don’t yet know if microplastics play a role in the development of dementia. For instance, vascular disease is seen in most cases of dementia, resulting in slow or inadequate blood flow to the brain. This probably makes it more likely that any microplastics in the blood will eventually lodge themselves in the brain. So microplastic accumulation in the brain may well be a consequence, rather than a cause, of dementia.
We also don’t know if these studies are even measuring microplastics in the first place. To measure microplastics in the brain, tissue samples are heated up to high temperatures through a process called pyrolysis. A mass spectrometer is then used to measure the amount and type of plastic compounds such as polyethylene. The problem is that polyethylene is just a simple string of carbons and hydrogens. Fats are also a simple string of carbons and hydrogens and can look like polyethylene once heated up through pyrolysis. As a result, there’s debate as to whether pyrolysis is a valid method for looking at microplastics in the body, where high amounts of fat will always be present.32,33
With that said, even if the estimates of microplastic exposure and accumulation in the body are exaggerated, this is not a problem we should ignore. Many components of plastics, such as bisphenols and phthalates, have been linked to neurodevelopmental disorders in children and heart disease in adults.34,35We can dramatically reduce exposure to (micro)plastics by drinking (filtered) tap water instead of plastic bottled water, using wooden or metal cooking and eating utensils, storing and microwaving food in glass containers, and increasing intake of fresh foods that have not been stored in plastic. While many microplastics are probably eliminated by the body naturally, one very interesting study suggested that anthocyanins from fruits and vegetables might help counteract some of the negative effects of plastics on health.36 Another study in mice found that β-glucan—a fiber found in oats and mushrooms—might decrease absorption of PFAS.37,38 Though this work was done in animal and test-tube studies, and there are currently no trials in humans yet, the recommendation is simply to eat more fiber and berries. This can also provide other brain benefits because there are a vast number of human studies showing that berry intake can improve cognitive function in both the short and long term.39
Set-and-forget strategies to reduce environmental exposures
For air filters, the blood pressure study I mention used the HealthMate. Jaspr units come highly recommended, as do most of the Blueair models (tailored to the size of the room). The Coway Airmega is a good budget option. Consider checking your local water quality online (EPA, EWG) and then start using a water filter if needed. This could be either a jug that you can place in the fridge (e.g., all-rounders like Epic, ClearlyFiltered, and Brita Elite or Cyclopure, specifically for PFAS) or under-sink reverse osmosis devices that filter water on its way to the tap.
If you haven’t seen your dentist for a while, now might be a good time. Don’t get me wrong: the irony of a Brit writing about the importance of dental health is not lost on me. But there is an ever-increasing amount of research suggesting that oral health can directly impact brain health. Periodontal disease, as it is more formally known, can start as inflammation of the gums (gingivitis) that can eventually affect the underlying ligaments and bone (periodontitis). Periodontal disease is caused by an imbalance of the microbiome in the mouth, which leads to the overgrowth of certain bacterial species like Porphyromonas gingivalis and Streptococcus mutans. This imbalance of bacteria can cause tooth decay and local inflammation that provides a route for bacteria in the mouth to enter the body.
More than twenty years ago, P. gingivalis was found in arterial atherosclerotic plaques known to cause heart attacks and strokes.40 And since then, researchers have collected reasonably strong evidence to suggest that poor oral health plays a direct role in the risk of heart disease—either because of bacteria invading the arteries after they enter the bloodstream or through an increase in chronic inflammation.41 More recently, P. gingivalis has also been found inside amyloid plaques in the brains of individuals with Alzheimer’s disease.42 As amyloid can have antimicrobial effects,43 it’s believed that one reason for it to accumulate in the brain is as an immune response to the presence of bacteria and viruses that are causing local inflammation. In line with this, though the results of individual studies are inconsistent, meta-analyses suggest that those who have periodontal disease are at an increased risk of cognitive decline and dementia, while treatment of gum disease is associated with decreased risk.44-47
One recent study using data from the NHANES database in the United States found that those with worse oral health were more likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s later in life.48 The study also measured the amounts of antibodies against oral bacteria like P. gingivalis. Higher levels of antibodies that fight bacteria from the mouth were associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease, suggesting that those with an invasion or infection by those bacteria were more likely to experience cognitive decline. Therefore, staying on top of oral hygiene likely has both direct and indirect benefits to brain health, while also being easy to do and low risk.
Strategies to improve oral health
If you don’t already, brush your teeth every day (ideally, at least two minutes twice a day) and find a way to clear out stuff that accumulates between your teeth and near your gums (floss, water flossers, or interdental toothbrushes). See your dentist or dental hygienist at least a couple of times a year and treat any periodontal disease promptly. In the case of periodontitis specifically, you could consider chewing xylitol gums (2–3 grams of xylitol, 2–3 times per day) or using a xylitol mouthwash, such as TheraBreath or ACT. Most xylitol gum studies use Epic, but I like Kaigum as well.
In my book The Stimulated Mind, I make the case that the way we use our brains dictates how they function. The way we respond to cognitive stimuli is then determined by the modifiable factors associated with cognitive function, many of which are mentioned above. Though there is a vast amount of evidence for the benefit of education and stimulating work, hobbies, and activities in terms of better cognitive function and lower dementia risk,49 we also have some very recent evidence that cognitive training may contribute as well.
The largest, and probably still the best, study of brain training was the Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly (ACTIVE) study. Started nearly 30 years ago, ACTIVE randomized 2,800 participants aged 65 or older to a control group or one of three brain-training groups: processing speed, reasoning, or memory. Memory training involved learning tools like mnemonics to memorize lists of words. Reasoning training involved searching for patterns in sequences of numbers or letters. Processing-speed training involved identifying an object on a computer screen that was flashed up at increasingly brief intervals, as well as having to divide attention between two search tasks. Participants did ten training sessions of around sixty minutes over five to six weeks, followed by brief booster sessions at one year and three years. Five years later, all three training groups had experienced less decline in quality of life compared to the control group, with the largest benefit in the processing speed group.50-52
The ability to process information within milliseconds is critical to everything from decision-making to memory and performing complex skills like driving or playing a sport. Processing speed tends to decline with age, with one analysis of more than one million people suggesting that a significant decline in processing speed begins at around 60.53 However, I would argue that at least part of this is because we tend to stop doing activities that require us to rapidly process information, because ACTIVE found that processing speed in older adults can be improved through training. Most important for our purposes here, a very recent 20-year follow-up of the ACTIVE study found that those who did processing speed training, including the booster sessions, had a significantly lower risk of dementia compared to the control group.54
An updated version of the processing speed task used in ACTIVE—“Double Decision,” in which participants identify a central object while also locating a peripheral target under increasingly brief and demanding conditions—is included in the brain training platform BrainHQ.55 BrainHQ offers exercises (free and paid tiers are available) targeting memory, attention, processing speed, people skills, navigation, and related cognitive abilities and was designed by a team of neuroscientists led by Dr. Michael Merzenich, co-inventor of the multi-channel cochlear implant. Another study using Double Decision found that processing speed training improved certain aspects of acetylcholine signaling in the anterior cingulate cortex, which plays a critical role in attention, decision-making, and impulse control.56 This may be one way that processing speed training translated to improved cognitive outcomes in ACTIVE.
Though ACTIVE gives us some good evidence for the potential benefit of a specific type of dedicated cognitive training, it’s likely that similar benefits can be found in a range of activities that stimulate our ability to rapidly process information. For example, playing musical instruments, dancing, and sports with a coordinative component have all been linked with improvements in brain structure and function, as well as a lower dementia risk.49 One of my favorite recent studies, called “Creative Experiences and Brain Clocks,” looked at the influence of creative arts such as dance, visual art (drawing, painting), and music on the brain.57 They found that those with greater expertise in one of these skills had younger-looking brains based on improved connectivity in networks that are susceptible to the aging process. The most important network was the fronto-parietal network, involved in attention and decision-making. This suggests that learning and gaining expertise in complex skills can help to maintain brain functions that otherwise tend to decline with time.
One final activity that overlaps with both creative skills and brain training is video games, which can require navigating a large and complex world and solving problems, quickly reacting to the environment, and careful strategic planning. The creative arts study included a randomized trial where participants were trained to play StarCraft II, which resulted in benefits to brain networks that paralleled those seen with creative skills. This is just the latest in a long string of evidence that playing video games—especially in those who were previously non-gamers—can promote certain aspects of cognitive function.
In one classic study, researchers had adults aged sixty to eighty play solitaire, Angry Birds, or Super Mario 3D World for thirty minutes every day for four weeks.58 At the end of the intervention, adults in the Super Mario group showed better improvements in a test of hippocampus function, which was similar to results they had previously seen in undergraduate students.59 Other groups have shown that playing Super Mario increases the gray matter in the hippocampus of older adults and can improve feelings of well-being and working memory in individuals with depression.60,61 Importantly, Super Mario doesn’t have a monopoly on cognitive training, and it’s probably the complex immersive nature of the game that is most important, because other games, like Minecraft and various action video games, have been found to be beneficial in a similar way.62,63
Strategies to stimulate and train your brain
Dancing, martial arts, music, brain training, video games, etc.—it probably matters less what you pick, so choose a creative art, physical activity, or complex skill that requires focused attention and rapid information processing. The goal is to progressively challenge your cognitive muscles and then maintain practice to keep those skills and networks sharp.
If cognitive stimulus is a primary driver of cognitive function, it makes sense that we should do whatever we can to avoid the loss of that stimulus. For example, multiple studies have found that people who lose their hearing or eyesight with age tend to be at an increased risk of dementia—especially those who are at higher risk due to other reasons, such as chronic medical conditions.64-67 Not only does sensory loss result in a loss of inputs to the brain, but people who lose a sense are also less likely to engage with the world in ways that they used to. As a result, they may be more likely to stay at home and perform fewer activities, decreasing stimulus indirectly. Both hearing and vision loss were included on the Lancet Commission’s list of modifiable risk factors, and this risk does appear to be reversible—for instance, if somebody gets hearing aids for hearing loss or surgery if they’re losing their sight due to cataracts.64-67
A more insidious loss of stimulus and function comes from the accumulation of periods where we’re unable to experience our normal physical and cognitive stimuli. An analysis from the Adult Changes in Thought study—where adults over sixty-five had their cognitive function assessed at regular intervals for several years—found that cognitive decline rapidly accelerated when a participant was hospitalized between assessments. And the more severe the illness, the more severe the decline.68 Similar results were seen in the Rush Memory and Aging Project.69 Outside of older adults, there are studies that show even just two weeks of forced bed rest in otherwise healthy people can significantly impair cognitive function due to the loss of critical inputs from physical activity and other cognitive stimuli.70 And within a few weeks of an extended period of inactivity, processing speed also starts to decline.71
It stands to reason, then, that we should do what we can to minimize the likelihood of significant illness as we get older. There are many ways to do this, including physical activity that both improves immune function and makes us less frail and susceptible to falls, but vaccines—especially the shingles vaccine—may be a critical addition to this toolkit.
Shingles (herpes zoster) is caused by reactivation of the chickenpox virus, which can lie dormant for decades in the spinal nerves of people who were previously infected. When immune function drops—during periods of extended stress, for example—the virus can pop back up and cause a painful rash in the area of skin associated with the nerve where the virus was hiding. Since immune system function decreases with aging, shingles is more common in older adults, which is why a shingles vaccination is now recommended for anyone over the age of fifty.
A fascinating recent study looked at the effect of the shingles vaccine on dementia risk.72,73 In 2013 the National Health Service in Wales rolled out a shingles vaccine program based on date of birth. If you were born before September 1, 1933, your chance of getting the vaccine was essentially zero percent, but almost 50 percent of the people born between September 2, 1933, and September 1, 1934, got the vaccine. As you might expect, there was a sudden decrease in shingles diagnoses in those eligible for the vaccine. There was also a sudden drop in dementia diagnoses. Part of the benefit came from preventing or minimizing shingles reactivations, but the authors suggested that there might be a broader benefit of the vaccine for inflammation and the immune system. The same team used a similar approach to study data from when the shingles vaccine was implemented in Australia in 2016 and found the same association with lower dementia rates.74 Similar studies have also now been done in the US and Canada, with similar results.75,76
While we wait for more definitive studies, I think current data give us something to apply practically. We know that it’s impossible to completely avoid viral infections, and it could be counterproductive to try. At the same time, as we get older, we are increasingly susceptible to viral infections that have the potential to knock us back for long periods, or worse. If we think about all the accumulated illness we might experience over decades, each time losing a little fitness and a little muscle mass and a little cognitive function, it’s going to add up. As a result, we may end up thinking that we’re just succumbing to the inevitable process of aging, when in fact it’s the accumulated total effect of periods when our bodies weren’t able to receive (and respond to) physical and cognitive inputs. This makes illness and injury prevention a critical part of long-term brain health.
Strategies to keep what you’ve got
Consider hearing aids and visual aids/interventions as soon as you need them, as these have been associated with lower dementia risk. An increasing body of evidence also suggests that it would be prudent to take advantage of vaccinations and early treatments for viral infections like flu and shingles to minimize the time spent out of action, which then also appears to translate to a lower risk of cognitive decline and dementia.75-79
Perhaps the clearest omission from the Lancet report was poor sleep as a risk factor for dementia, which is fairly well established at this point.4-6 However, I’m also pretty sure most people have accepted the idea that sleep is critical for cognitive function and physical health.7
Therefore, I won’t belabor the usual recommendations:80 keep your bedroom cool and dark, get morning light and dim the lights in the evening to anchor your circadian rhythm, take a warm shower/bath before bed, use a sleep mask, consider a magnesium supplement, and spend enough time in bed (obvious, but still the most common problem I see in people not getting enough sleep). Ventilation and air quality can also matter for sleep because CO2 levels climb quickly in a closed room, particularly when multiple people are sleeping in the same room, and elevated CO2 degrades deep sleep.81-83 In addition to these basics, a handful of lesser-known strategies deserve more attention and may be worth considering:
***
If the majority of dementia cases truly are preventable, a sensible approach would be to tackle our own individual risk factors and stack the deck in our favor.
By building on the big lifestyle rocks with these simple and targeted interventions, we can improve multiple aspects of physical health while maximizing our chances of staying sharp for decades to come.
Tommy’s new book is The Stimulated Mind: Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia and Stay Sharp at Any Age.
Photo by Milad Fakurian.
The post How to Keep Your Brain Sharp: A Practical Playbook Beyond the Basics appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-04-24 12:55:29
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Cathy Lanier. Cathy is the chief security officer for the National Football League (NFL), supervising all operations and activities of the NFL Security Department. Prior to her work at the NFL, Cathy served as chief of police with the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department, becoming the first female police chief of the nation’s capital, the first commanding officer of Homeland Security and Counter-Terrorism for D.C. Police, and the longest serving chief on the D.C. force.
Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview
Legal conditions/copyright information
Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
Tim Ferriss: Cathy, it is so lovely to see you, and thanks for making the time. Really nice to see you again.
Cathy Lanier: Glad to finally connect. It was nice to see you, too, Tim.
Tim Ferriss: And I was going back and forth on where to start this, and I think I’m just going to follow the tried and true and begin at the beginning here. And maybe we should start with Tuxedo and just give people sort of a snapshot of where you grew up, how you grew up, all those dreams of being in law enforcement. I’m partially kidding, of course, because I know a little bit of the backstory. But can you tell people about the beginning?
Cathy Lanier: It’s important, I think, for context about the choices I made in my life. Like everybody on this planet, the way you’re raised, your family, your environment has so much influence on the way you do things as an adult. So my parents married right after high school, first boyfriend, girlfriend. So right after high school, my father was a firefighter, went in the fire department. My mother was a secretary. She went to work for the federal government. Back in the ’50s, being married at 18 was perfectly normal. So they got married, bought a home, started having children. They had three kids. I’m the youngest of the three. After I was born, I think they realized that a secretary and a firefighter salary does not exactly cover childcare for three kids. So they couldn’t afford the childcare for three kids for both of them to work, so my mother took a leave of absence from work. She did eventually go back, but she took a 10-year leave of absence after I was born.
And then when I was two, my mother took us to my grandparents for the weekend, and when we came home, my father was gone, and left my mom with three kids and no income, literally, because she was not working at the time. So life changed pretty dramatically for us then. Again, I was two. I don’t remember a lot of detail early on. But I do remember as a child growing up over that next 10 years while mom was home with us, really just a wonderful childhood. My mother was always there. She helped with homework and she would take me to soccer practice and basketball practice and majorette practice. She was always with us and she was just a wonderful, loving, caring mom. And we didn’t have a lot. We lived on $350 a month. My father eventually paid child support. We had a lot of support from the church and from friends and family. But it was a fun childhood for me. I mean, my mom was with me, and I think she provided a lot of stability for my brothers and I.
And then when I was getting ready to go from — back then, this was back before middle school, so you went elementary school, junior high school, high school. So in sixth grade, you leave elementary school and you go to junior high school. So I was 12 years old, 13 years old, becoming a teenager. We were going to a new school. I was going to seventh grade. My mother went back to work. I was the youngest at the time at 13. She felt like we were old enough to be latchkey kids and come home and let us in, be home for a couple hours every day until she got home from work. So she went back to work in her same role working for her same boss that she left 10 years earlier, which is pretty amazing.
Tim Ferriss: That is amazing.
Cathy Lanier: In fact, that whole 10-year period while my mother was off, also important is how it frames my context of things, is during that 10 years when my mom was home, I remember her sitting in front of the TV and taking shorthand to the television. She would get our favorite records and she would write down in shorthand all the words. And then she would sit at the table and type them all up and give us the words so we could sing along with our songs. And I thought it was just Mom doing fun things for us, but it was her keeping her skills. My mom, when she went back to work after a 10-year break in service, she still took shorthand at 96 words a minute and still could type over 100 words a minute. So just a wonderful example of work ethic for us. She knew she needed to go back to work and wanted to go back to work as soon as possible and she wanted to be on her game.
So I mean, great childhood. But when I was moving to junior high school, my mom went back to work, so I kind of lost that guardian, that best friend at a critical time, right? I’m becoming a teenager, we were going to a new school. They were busing back in those days, so I was being bused into a really tough neighborhood in Washington, DC. So that’s where everything started —
Tim Ferriss: From Maryland to Washington, DC.
Cathy Lanier: From Maryland.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Cathy Lanier: Right on the border of DC.
Tim Ferriss: Can I pause you for one second?
Cathy Lanier: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: I’m just trying to put myself, which is impossible for me to do, of course, in your mom’s shoes, right? You guys returned to the house, no car, dad’s gone, three kids. Have you spoken to her or do you have any best guesses as to the other things that helped her hold everything together in terms of resilience or support or anything else? I mean, I suppose that necessity is the mother of invention on some level, but have you ever spoken to her about that?
Cathy Lanier: I did. And it’s funny, my mother was very passive, sweet, just kind of a very quiet, internal person, and in my entire life, I never saw my mother cry. Never. Never. I mean, under any circumstances. I’m sure she did, but I never really saw my mother cry. And my grandmother was completely the opposite. My mom was an only child. Her mother was like a pistol, like hardcore — so my grandmother was very helpful, but my mother was a rock. I mean, she took care of us. When I tell people now, we lived on food stamps, welfare, the church brought us baskets of food for the holidays, but we didn’t have a car for many years. We finally got a car. It didn’t have heat. It used to break down every time we went out in it. The hot water spigot in our bathroom used to squirt scalding hot water over you if you weren’t careful because it needed a washer, and there was nobody to come and fix that washer.
But we had a wonderful childhood. My mother was just solid. She loved her kids, and she was a beautiful, beautiful woman. And I always ask her why she didn’t ever date, and she’s like, “My kids were my life, and I didn’t want anybody around my children that didn’t think of them as the same priority that I thought of them.” So I think her resilience was really just steady for her family. I think her family was her motivation, and nothing was going to disrupt her commitment there.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the singular focus. So I interrupted you. You were saying —
Cathy Lanier: That’s okay.
Tim Ferriss: — there’s this transition point, you’re busing in to Washington, DC, and you’ve sort of lost your guardian in a sense at that point. So if you wouldn’t mind picking up there.
Cathy Lanier: So, again, we were being bused into a neighborhood. The idea at the time was to racially integrate neighborhoods. I lived in a very small industrial neighborhood, like an industrial park, right on the border of Washington, DC. Literally, there was a train that ran right behind my house in the backyard. On the other side of that train tracks was Washington, DC. We were on the Maryland side. So they were busing us to a school on the border of Northeast Washington to racially integrate the schools.
So each day when our bus would pick us up and take us to school, when our bus would pull up in front of the school — everything in most big cities, I would say, but in Washington for sure, is very neighborhood-based. So when our bus would pull up in front of the school and we would get out as the Maryland kids coming to the school, as soon as we’d get off the bus, we’d get jumped. Every day there was a fight. It was a terrible change. All the way through school, I was in the talented and gifted program, straight-A student, loved school, and now I’m being bused into a school where the kids that we were going to school with hated us. It was very racially charged. It was agonizing to go to school because you had to fight just to get from the bus to the classroom.
So my mom would go — her bus would — it’s funny now. It wasn’t funny then. But her bus would pick her up on the corner at 7:00 in the morning, and my bus would pick me up on the other corner at 7:15. So we’d both go out to the bus stop together in the morning, and she would wait for her bus, I’d wait for my bus. She’d get on her bus and she’d ride by me, and I’d wave, and then one of my older friends who had a car would come and pick me up and we would go skip school for the day. I at least would skip the first half. I would skip the first few periods so I didn’t have to go through that agonizing fight every morning.
Tim Ferriss: Entry, rough entry. Mm-hmm.
Cathy Lanier: So I went from a talented and gifted student with straight As to failing literally every subject the first quarter of seventh grade. I was chronically truant. I think I was averaging 19 days a quarter that I was actually showing up for school. My mother didn’t know because the school never notified her, and by the time she got home from work at 6:00 p.m., we were all sitting around pretending to do our homework. So my poor mother had no idea until about midway through the eighth grade I was so chronically truant that I was failing all of my major subjects.
So meanwhile, while I’m skipping school, I’m hanging out with the wrong people, much older crowd, friends of my older brother and just an older crowd and just getting in trouble. And I fall in love with a much older boyfriend at the time, think I’m in love, and we want to get married and run away and get married. And so by the time I was in the ninth grade, I’m 14 years old, found myself pregnant. My boyfriend at the time had given me a diamond ring. We were engaged, we’re going to get married, so we run away. He was 26 at the time. I was 14. My mother, when she finds out, was going to have him arrested. She was going to put him in jail. So I run away from home and think, “Well, we’ve got this. We’re going to get married and we’re going to have the baby and everything’s going to be great.” The mind of a 14-year-old. Obviously things didn’t work out that way.
Interestingly, I went to my father who had been out of the picture most of my life and asked for him to sign for me to get married. Because of my age, one of my parents had to legally sign over my legal guardianship to my husband. So they literally signed over my legal guardianship to my husband. So my dad, thinking he would have one less child to pay child support for, because once he signed over my guardianship, he —
Tim Ferriss: Right, cuts the child support bill.
Cathy Lanier: — paid $100 less a month in child support. So he signed over my legal guardianship to my husband. We got married the day after my 15th birthday. I was eight months pregnant at the time.
So I guess fast-forward a little bit, a year and a half later, I was back at home. My mother was taking me to GED classes at night. I was sneaking to go to GED classes when I was still married. My husband didn’t approve of me going to school. So once we separated, my mom made sure I stayed in school, got my GED. And she would bring her typewriter home from work and she taught me how to type on the kitchen table. So she taught me how to type and take a little shorthand, and I went and got a job as a secretary. I lied about my age. I got a job as a secretary when I was 16, so started working as secretary and then worked as a waitress in the evening in a bar. Also lied about my age to work in a bar. That was the only option up in the area where I was working. So for the next several years, I worked two jobs as a secretary and a waitress.
And my motivation really was my son. It was kind of a significant moment for me, and I’ve had a few in my life. When my son was born, I had never babysat before, I’d never held a baby. I didn’t know anything about babies or children. And when he was born, he was such a good baby. His crib was at the end of my bed in my bedroom. And I’d wake up in the morning, and he’d be awake and he’d just be looking at me, waiting for me to wake up. Not crying, nothing. He would just be looking at me. So about three weeks into this —
Tim Ferriss: That is remarkable. Yeah.
Cathy Lanier: Yeah, about three weeks into this experiment, I’m looking at him one morning, and it just dawns on me for the first time that I’m a parent and that that helpless little baby was completely reliant on me. And my mother always stressed the importance of education and work to us, and here I was, my husband didn’t allow me to go to school, I would never be able to get a job, and I’m looking at this poor little innocent baby and I’m thinking his whole life depends on me, and what am I going to be able to provide with a ninth grade education? Not much. So that was a aha moment.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to resist the temptation to ask 300 questions about the last few minutes that you shared because we’ll end up spending all of our time there if I do that. But I am curious for you, I’m trying to put myself in your shoes at that young age, when you — and we don’t need to get into the details unless you’d like to share, but when you separated from your then-husband, when that happened, what did you think was going to become of you? What did you envision your path would be at that point? I have to imagine that it would have just been incredibly challenging. I don’t know. You can’t believe everything you read on the internet, but I read that when you were a young girl, you dreamed of being a lawyer. I don’t know if that’s true or not.
Cathy Lanier: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: And then flash-forward, you go through this entire tumultuous experience and you land back at home. Where did you think your life was headed? Where did you think you were headed at that point?
Cathy Lanier: Well, I knew that with a ninth grade education and a single mom that I had zero chance of being able to do what I thought was most important in the world, and that’s take care of my son. And when I first moved back home, I got my GED, but I still was not able to easily find a job at my age. It was 16, almost 17. I had to wait till I was 16 and nine months to take the test to get the GED. Interestingly, you needed 255 to pass the test. I got 256. I passed it by one point.
Tim Ferriss: Oh my God. Talk about —
Cathy Lanier: There’s another little footnote of my life.
Tim Ferriss: — these Sliding Door moments. Holy cow, right? Okay.
Cathy Lanier: So I knew that my mother had always stressed the importance of education and work, so I knew I had to go back to school, and I wanted to go to college. I didn’t want my son to be subject to the same crappy neighborhoods and the same crappy schools that I went to. I wanted him to have a real chance, and I knew if I was going to do that, I had to go back to school and get a college education. If I didn’t do that, I was standing in the same food stamp line my mother stood in with me. I remember the first day I went to get food stamps, going to the big white building by Prince George’s Plaza right near my home and standing in the same line with my son that I stood in with my mom when I was a kid, and I was like, “This is not my path. This can’t be my path.”
And so when I got my job as a secretary, they offered tuition reimbursement to go to college, so I started at community college. I just started taking one class a semester, and that’s where it started, one class a semester. And they reimbursed me for it.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, for people who don’t have context, we’ve been trying to schedule this for a while, and understandably you got a lot of balls to juggle. And I remember hearing just pieces of your story. This was, God, it has to be, what, more than a year ago now, I’m sure. Time flies. But it’s been a long while. And I just remember thinking to myself, “God, I hope someday that we can have this conversation on the podcast,” so I want to thank you again for doing it.
How do you then go from there — what is the connective tissue, sort of the catalyzing events that ultimately get you into law enforcement? What are the first few dominoes that get tipped over that start to push you in that direction?
Cathy Lanier: So to be fair, my family’s a public service family. My father was a firefighter. My oldest brother had become a firefighter right out of high school. My other brother was a police officer. I was working as a secretary. I was taking that one class a semester working as a secretary, trying to get my son in private school. I wanted him in private school. I did not want him going to those schools. I was still living in the same crappy neighborhood, but I wanted my son in a good school.
And I saw an ad — I was 23 years old. I saw an ad in the Washington Post for the Metropolitan Police Department; they were hiring. And what caught my attention — it’s a full page ad in the Post. Half of the page said tuition reimbursement. I’m like, “Oh my God, tuition reimbursement. I’m paying for one class a semester. Going to take me 30 years to get a degree.”
So I went with a friend, and we went and stood in line. They were hiring a thousand cops. This was during the crack cocaine wars in Washington, early 1990. 500 murders a year. DC was known as the murder capital of the world at the time. So I just went and stood in line with a thousand other people, went and took the test, and I came out — I want to say I came out like 60 out of a thousand people on that test. So they called me right away. I was the only white female in the room. This is back in the early ’90s. Washington DC was about 89% African American.
So I mean, I felt the same drive my mother felt taking care of us is that I have a son that needs me, he needs me to provide for him, and the only way I’m going to do this is get a good job, government job, not a bad option, and go back to school and get my degree. So I got hired by the Metropolitan Police in 1990, started walking a footbeat. My first day out of the academy was the Mount Pleasant riots. So my first day out of the academy, I went to work and didn’t come home for five days. It was great.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, we’re going to double-click on that and come right back to Mount Pleasant, but before we do, I want to know what the entrance exam or qualification exam was like, right? Because you mentioned the GED, and just by the skin of your teeth getting in, passing the hurdle. And then it sounds like you’ve, not a very technical term, but kind of crushed the examination that you took that ultimately placed you at 60 out of a thousand. What was that test like?
Cathy Lanier: So remember, now when I started taking classes at Prince George’s Community College, my goal was to be a lawyer. I wanted to be an attorney. I started out wanting to be a secretary like my mom. Then once I got into the workplace, I realized I wanted bigger, better things, so I wanted to be an attorney. So I was taking political science, philosophy, a lot of those kind of courses, getting all my generals out of the way at community college. So by the time I got to the Metropolitan Police Department at 23, I had three years of college courses. But the exam for entry into policing, now back in those days, they only required a high school diploma or an equivalent. You didn’t need college.
So the entry exam was a lot of things that you would expect for law enforcement. You do a lot of multiple choice questions. You have to be able to read and comprehend well, so reading comprehension was a big part of it. You have to do some basic math, so you have to understand math. But there was a lot of problem-solving type questions. So they flash a photo in front of you and then they say — there’s a photo inside of a department store, and then, okay, you’ve just walked into this department store and there’s been a robbery. What is it you noticed in that quick three seconds you had to look at that photo? What do you remember? What time was it on the clock? What color was the lady’s shoes that was standing at the register? So there was reading comprehension, math, problem-solving, and then a good bit of, are you paying attention? Do you have the detail to pay attention to do the things that you need to do as a police officer, much of which you learn as a cop.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. But it seems like you had either developed or innately possessed — and maybe I’m reaching, but I mean, maybe not. I mean, was there anything in that test that highlighted, for lack of a better descriptor, superpowers, strengths of yours, that came into full fruition later where you’re like, “Okay, if I look at the recipe, some of the ingredients of the recipe that ultimately contributed to my success,” were any of them sort of revealed in that test in any way or not really?
Cathy Lanier: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I won’t — okay.
Cathy Lanier: Actually, great question. Actually, it’s a very good question. I don’t get a lot of interviews to ask the types of question you’re asking. I think it’s an excellent question. So I would say the two things that have helped me in that exam and that have helped me most of my law enforcement career, my grandmother instilled in me — she spent a lot of time with us growing up as well — two things, problem-solving being a big part of that. You never make excuses. When bad things happen, don’t make excuses. You put yourself in that position. You found yourself here. It is nobody else’s fault but yours. I’m not an excuse person. I don’t make excuses. If I find myself in a bad situation, I did something to get myself here and I’m going to get myself out. And that was the way she taught us. You get yourself in, you get yourself out. And the other thing she taught me was, she’s like, “You’re going to be damned if you do and damned if you don’t. You better be damned for doing.” So you act. You always act. You don’t let your circumstances dictate for you. You act and you take action and you do. You don’t wait for somebody else to do for you.
And those things were really part of that problem-solving exercise when you’re coming on the police department, and it’s certainly your problem-solving exercise every day you’re on the police department. It certainly was for the next 27 years for me. Look, you can’t avoid consequences. There’s consequences for everything that happens. Every decision you make has consequences. You can’t avoid consequences. But you can choose what you do after those things happen.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I imagine you’ve probably not met him, but I interviewed someone named Jocko Willink, who’s a former Navy SEAL commander, many years ago. It was the first time he ever did a public interview. And he wrote a book called Extreme Ownership. And I feel like your grandmother and what she instilled in you is in a nutshell exactly the type of high-agency thinking that Jocko talks about. It’s the same thing. Wow.
Cathy Lanier: My grandma would say there’s two types of people in the world, excuse people and people who are accountable, and I’m going to be the accountable.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s come back to Mount Pleasant. For people who don’t have the historical context, what were the Mount Pleasant riots? And you said right before I asked about the test, you said it was great. And if that is actually not a sarcastic statement, but a real statement of how you felt, I want to know why that was the case. But let’s start with just a little bit of history for people who aren’t familiar, I certainly wasn’t, with the Mount Pleasant riots.
Cathy Lanier: Well, when I said it was great, in terms of being a rookie right out of the academy and understanding what you’ve got yourself into, it was, “Here’s what you’ve got yourself into. You went to work today and you’re not going home for five days.”
So the night before my first day out of the academy, there was a pair of police officers walking a foot patrol in our patrol district. They tried to place a gentleman under arrest for drinking in public. He was a Latino male, didn’t speak English. We had a big problem in our city back in those days. We had very few people on the department that spoke Spanish. We had a huge Latino population. There was a big gap in our community. So it’s really difficult to do any kind of effective policing if you’re not communicating with the people in the community, and we were not. So when this officer was trying to place this person under arrest, during the handcuffing the subject, after one handcuff was on, he turned around, pulled a knife on the officer, and the officer shot, so he was shot with one handcuff on. So the partner of the officer shot, rolled him over, put the other handcuff on, took the knife away, called paramedics. All’s the people saw was a handcuffed person who had been shot. So the Latino community in that neighborhood immediately began gathering on the street, large crowd. This all happened around 11:30 at night so by the time I got into the station for 5:30 roll call, I show up at 5:30 in the morning, the riot had broken out around 1:00 a.m. They had burned several police cars. There was stores that were looted and on fire. There was a big, big deal down in Mount Pleasant. So when I got to work my first day, I walked into the station, said, “Hi, I’m Cathy Lanier. I’m the new rookie from the academy.” And they threw me a gas mask and they told me to go out and get in the van. And he said, “Hop over the counter, go out the back door and get in that van.” And I was like, “Okay.” So I hopped over the counter and went and got in that van.
I was sitting with 15 other cops with gas masks on and big riot sticks. And they took us down and they dumped us off on the corner of Mount Pleasant Park Road and it was fully engulfed in fires and looting. And people were throwing bottles and bricks and stones at us. We had little helmets they had given us as we were hopping out of the van. And I didn’t have a radio because rookies weren’t allowed to have radios at the time. I had not been trained how to use the radio. So my partner had the radio. So my lifeline was on my partner, but we stood there online and literally got pelted with bricks and bottles. And I mean, over the course of five days, it was trial by fire for sure. But it was a big learning experience for me because I understood the frustration.
I understood the frustration. That whole community in Mount Pleasant were all Latino. They didn’t speak English. The cops didn’t speak to them very well. I mean, nobody could really communicate with — but the cops were pushing people around and there was no way to try and get the story straight and really no effort to get the story straight, to understand the frustration. So it was a big learning experience for me as I worked my way up the ranks to understand how important inclusion is in the community. If you’re a police officer and you are not embedding yourself in that community and understanding who the people are in that community and what their needs are and how to communicate, you’re really not going to be successful.
Tim Ferriss: We’re going to, I imagine, revisit that at some point because it seems to be a consistent thread through a lot of the work that you’ve done, but I want to spend a little bit more time on Mount Pleasant. I am curious, I suppose, yet again, what that maybe showed you about yourself or just highlighted about you constitutionally or personality wise, right? Because I would imagine some people could get dropped in that environment after they just signed up, they’re like, “Hey, I’m just here for tuition reimbursement. Holy shit, I’m getting hit with bricks. This is not exactly what I thought my first day was going to be,” and they’re out. I have to imagine that there are some people who would be closer to that.
Maybe they didn’t quit, but they were probably closer to that end of the spectrum. And do you thrive in particular in intense environments? I wonder, right? Because in my case, constitutionally out of the box, little things, especially interpersonal things, bother me that are trivial, frankly. I get all wound up about very stupid things, but in crisis situations, the car accident in front of me, some guy’s got his leg blown apart or whatever. I actually do really very well in those environments. I don’t know why that is. I really have no idea, but was there anything that you noticed about yourself in that type of environment, in those types of circumstances?
Cathy Lanier: I think the thing for me that I thrive on is as we’re dropped out down there and they’re giving us the riot sticks and the helmets and the gas mask and they’re shooting canisters of gas into the crowd and knowing what started this and how this all blew up, I’m thinking to myself, we’re not going about this the right way. I was a rookie. I know nothing about policing other than what I was taught in the academy so by no means did I think I was smarter than the guy making the command decisions, right? But I’m just looking at it from my perspective and going, “This is just not the right way to do this. We’re not going to win here. This is not a win situation. This should be done differently.” And I just always felt like from the minute I hit the ground, watching [inaudible] analyze the way that we were doing things and thinking, why are we doing this this way?
There’s a better way to do these things. And so that’s the way I felt in Mount Pleasant. My first day on the job, really hard to explain, I just felt like there’s a problem to be solved here and we’re not going about it in a problem solving manner. We’re going about it with brute force. Brute force doesn’t always work. And so it intrigued me and every day after that, once the riots were over, I started walking a foot beat in the city. Every single day I went to work, I got to problem solve. For six, seven, eight times a day, calls for service, 911 calls, you respond to people who are in crisis, people who need help and you get to try and help think through that, help solve the problem. And that’s what I enjoyed doing. It’s frustrating when you’re at the bottom of the totem pole and you’re the line officer. You’re in a chain of command, you can’t make certain decisions. But I did feel like every single day I went to work, I made a difference in someone’s life, no matter how small.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And this was around, tell me if I’m getting this wrong, but around 1990 or early ’90s?
Cathy Lanier: 1990.
Tim Ferriss: 1990.
Cathy Lanier: Yep. 1990.
Tim Ferriss: And you were working your way up the ranks. When did you first, and we’ll certainly talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly of that timeframe in some respects, but when did your first real mentor show up? I have different names from doing homework in front of me. I’ve got, if I’m saying it correctly, Sonya Proctor, I’ve got Charles Ramsey, who might show up a little bit later. I’m not sure exactly on the chronology, but were there any critical figures in the first few years who were helpful to you? Or was it really just executing, getting the job done, delivering and working your way up? I’m wondering when your first mentor of sorts or — I don’t want to say guardian, it might not be the right word — but influential figure showed up in policing.
Cathy Lanier: So I was an officer and I loved my job. Once I worked my way up, I was foot patrol the first several months. And then I went to motorcycle school and I got trained to ride a motor and then I was on a motorcycle. I wanted to be mobile so I could get around and I love the adrenaline, 911 calls, getting out there, being first on the scene. And then I got moved up a little bit more in seniority and I was in a patrol car. And I used to get on the radio and I’m like, “All right, Dispatcher, I’m in service. Stack me up. Give me all the calls you got pending that’s been sitting there waiting. I’ll take them off.” So I had a lieutenant who, he was like a SWAT team commander guy who got promoted to lieutenant and they sent him out to patrol, which is like a slap in the face to a SWAT guy, right?
Tim Ferriss: For sure.
Cathy Lanier: They hate the call stuff. But he had come to my district and he called me in his office one day. He’s like, “I hear you on the radio out there.” He’s like, “You’re really humping.” I was like, “Yeah, I love this job. This is great. It’s fun.” And he’s like, “You’re coming up on three years, you’re going to be eligible for sergeant. You should take that sergeant’s test.” And I was like, “Why’d I want to do that? I like my job. I like what I’m doing. If I take a sergeant test I’m going to get moved somewhere,” he’s like, “No, no, you need to take the sergeant’s test.” I’m like, “Well, why would I want to do that?” And he’s like, “Well, you want to make more money, right?”
And I’m like, “That’s a good point.” And he said, “And once you start taking these promotional exams, it gives you more opportunities to influence the things. I hear you, you’re trying to change some things, why don’t you take that exam?” So he pushed me pretty hard. And when the test announcement came out, he said, “Come on, I’m going to give you a ride. Let’s go pick up your books. You have an eight-month window to study.” He’s like, “Let’s go pick up your books.” So I was like, “All right.” I was a little intimidated. I’m like, okay. So I took that sergeant’s test. I was eligible for sergeant at three years. I took the first sergeants to test. There was 890 people that were eligible that we took the test altogether.
After the written exam, you go to an assessment phase where you do a bunch of oral interviews and exercises and paper exercises. And I ended up coming out number 13 out of 890 for that. So I got promoted right away, a very young sergeant, 26 years old, three years on the job. I had a master patrol officer working for me that had more years on the job than I was old. He had 26 years on the job, I was 26 years old. So that was the first mentor. And he had remained a mentor for me for most of my career.
Tim Ferriss: What was his name?
Cathy Lanier: Donny Exum.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, man, these stories are so critical because whenever — I mean, people are self-made in many respects and at the same time, you just have to wonder sometimes, right? If you didn’t have these intervening figures, nothing like your experience, but I had a pretty miserable public school experience when I was growing up and ultimately hadn’t even thought of private school. And there was one math teacher who was basically like, “You need to get the hell out of here.” And I was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, out of here to where?” And he just kept harping on me. And then there was one other person who chimed in. Then I had two people and I was like, “Oh, okay, maybe I should take a look at this.” And it was just like, if that had not happened, who knows? It’s just a lot of question marks.
Cathy Lanier: Critical. Those mentors are critical.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. What does a sergeant do? I’m embarrassed to admit that I have no idea. What does a sergeant do?
Cathy Lanier: So this is one of the things that police departments do right. Now that I’m in the private sector, I wish the private sector had a similar structure. So once you make sergeant, you start as a first line supervisor. So they’ll give you eight people, eight to 10 people that you’re responsible for. So you’re the squad sergeant. You have a squad that’s assigned to you, those eight to 10 people, they report to you. So I’m responsible for making sure when we pop at a roll call and we hit the street that my squad of eight is doing what they’re supposed to do. They’re clearing their calls, they’re taking reports like they’re supposed to. If they get in a situation where they don’t know what to do, they go over the radio call for me, I go down and help them work through that situation and I help teach them how to manage these situations.
So you’re first line supervision, you’re right there every day on the street with the 911 responders and you’re helping them manage those calls and you’re helping them manage how to solve those problems. You’re signing arrest paperwork. If you make an arrest, “Wait a minute, let me look at all of the probable cause you have here before we put this person in handcuffs.” Or if you’ve got the person in handcuffs when I get on the scene, “Let’s review what you got here before we take somebody to jail. Let’s make sure we’ve met the DC code, we know that you’ve got a legitimate arrest here.” So you start managing a small group and then the next level is manager. Then you become a lieutenant and then they give you like 40 people to manage and you start making little bigger decisions. Now you’re scheduling, you’re assigning, you’re working through warrants and things like that. So it’s a very gradual progression.
Tim Ferriss: In that timeframe, early 90s or just 90s, I suppose, writ large, what was it like being a woman in the police force?
Cathy Lanier: It was a really tough environment when I first got there. There were a few days in the very beginning when I was an officer that — the good thing about the officer, when I got there, the department was 85 probably percent African American. The city was largely 89% African American. So largely African American, certainly very few white females. It was very few females. So I would think we were about 11% women on the department of 5,000, 5,200, I think, when I came on, the size of our department. So very few women, very few white women, little bit — this was a very — it’s hard to think back to 1990. Sexual harassment was commonplace. Nobody talked about it. Nobody cared about it. It wasn’t an issue. It happened every day and you work through it. I grew up with two older brothers, so I knew how to navigate it a little bit.
Listen, my brothers gave me advice on how to deal with some of this. The good thing is as an officer, you very quickly establish yourself. And I established myself as an officer early on as a worker. I came to work, I did my job. I don’t need anybody to do me any favors. You don’t need to look out for me. I don’t need a partner. I can ride by myself, I’m good. Once I made sergeant though, the harassment got worse. I mean, I had a lieutenant that was really, really sexually harassing. I mean, not just me, but several women, physical harassment. I mean, getting you on a midnight shift in a sergeant’s office and closing the door and putting hands on you and things like that. And I remember saying to my boyfriend at the time, I was like, “You know what? I got real thick skin. I can take all kinds of comments. I don’t mind any of that stuff, but I’m not going to let people put their hands on me. That’s just not going to happen.” So the harassment was pretty intense. It was a really tough environment.
Tim Ferriss: So what happened?
Cathy Lanier: So had a lieutenant, when I made sergeant, I was sent over to Southeast Washington. I was patrolling in Southeast. I had really a good squad. I worked nights, permanent nights. So I had a lieutenant that was harassing me and some other women, but me pretty intensely, calling me on the radio, forcing me to drive him around, putting me in his cruiser with them, making me drive him around, just not letting me do my job. Constant harassment, calling me on the radio, bringing me to the office, making me drive him somewhere, things like that. And so I finally, after several times of asking him to leave me alone, I finally filed a sexual harassment complaint. He had put his hands on me several times. So I filed a complaint, and I remember going down to the EEO office and filing this complaint, and they asked me to write a list of anybody who had ever — well, first of all, before I went down, my partner, one of my fellow sergeants, who was a Black male officer, said to me one day, we were out riding together.
The lieutenant had called me in and my partner said to me, the other sergeant said, “How long are you going to let this keep going on before you do something about it?” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” He’s like, “I hope you’re writing this stuff down. I hope you’re going to say something to somebody because this can’t go on like this.” So the first, again, a man, not a woman, another male police officer basically said to me, “If you’re not going to stand up for yourself, nobody else is going to stand up for you.” And so when he said that, it clicked. He’s trying to say either you’re going to allow this to keep happening or you don’t want it to happen and you do something about it. So after that conversation, I filed this complaint, I list all the people who had witnessed because my harasser made no effort to hide it.
He made horrible comments and grabbed women in front of others all the time. So I listed 17 different witnesses and they did the investigation. And literally I left the EEO office, I went to court, I had court that day and I was in court 20 minutes after I left the EEO office from filing my complaint, my harasser, the lieutenant, texted me on my beeper, we had beepers back then and said, “I know what you’re doing and you’re not going to get away with this.” So it was supposed to be confidential, but within 20 minutes of leaving the office, the person who was doing my investigation called him and told him that I had made a complaint.
Tim Ferriss: Gross.
Cathy Lanier: So I had to go back to work in that environment, one of the most violent areas of Washington DC. From that day forward, he prohibited me from partnering with anybody. He refused to allow me to ride with anybody else. He continued the harassment. He came into my office the next day, shut the door and said, “Look, I know that what you’re doing. You need to back down. You need to withdraw this complaint. You’re not going to win.” Anyway, long story short, they sustained the complaint. So the investigation, all the witnesses I listed, they were all men. I didn’t think any of them would tell the truth. Nobody wants to go against a higher ranking person, and every single one of them told the truth. They all wrote down what they saw. They all not only talked about what they saw him doing to me, but what they saw him doing to other women.
And I was just shocked. I always say to women, you don’t realize when you’re in these scenarios, decent men that observe these things going on, they don’t like it either. They don’t like it either. And those other men that I was working with, they didn’t like it either. And some of them, this guy had harassed their girlfriends or their wives, you know what I mean? So that really made an impression on me, that so many of the men that I work with stood up and did the right thing there. When it was time for him to be disciplined for this, when we got to trial board, I walk into trial board for the discipline to come down and they told me they had to drop the whole case and throw it out. And I’m like, “Why? What happened?” And they said, “Well, we missed the 90 days. In the District of Columbia, you have to bring discipline within 90 days of the day that you knew or should have known about the misconduct.” They sat on this investigation till day 91 and then turned it in.
So literally after all of that, they threw the case out and they said, “Well, we’ll just transfer you. Where do you want to be transferred to?” And I was like, “I don’t want to be transferred. I didn’t do anything wrong. Don’t transfer me. Transfer him. I didn’t do anything.” He later had several other complaints come forward and eventually was terminated for a severe case with multiple other subordinates later on.
But I will tell you this, now everything above the rank of captain in the police department is appointed. You civil service exam for sergeant, lieutenant, and captain. After captain, it’s appointed by the chief of police. You’re an appointed rank and you’re also at will so you can get appointed to inspector or commander, but you also can get demoted with no cause either.
So I remember one of my mentors, another mentor, a lieutenant, there was a captain and a lieutenant that were both good mentors to me there. The captain of the two mentors I had there pulled me aside after this complaint and said, “You did the right thing. He’s been harassing women here for years and somebody needed to stand up so you did the right thing.” He said, “But just know you’ll never make it past the rank of captain.” Because that lieutenant was very well-connected at the time to the chief of police, so very friendly with the chief of police that whole administration. So I said, “That’s fine. That’s fine.” I wasn’t thinking long-term longevity and promotion.
Tim Ferriss: So that actually ties into what I was going to ask you because it strikes me as an incredibly brave thing to do. I imagine not everyone in your situation would’ve done that. I mean, in fact, they didn’t. I mean, I imagine there’s a lot of fear around, there could be a lot of fear around the political or job, professional repercussions of voicing something like that, especially during a period when that was not common.
Cathy Lanier: Well, remember, my driver in life, Tim, if you think about this, and harassers work this way, my goal in life is to take care of my son. I’m a single mom and after he knew I made a complaint, he was threatening my job. He was really making it very difficult for me to come to work. It was terrifying to come to work. And I was fighting for my job, I can’t lose my job. I have a son to take care of and I’m not going to lose my job because somebody wants to be a bully. And that’s the motivation. It was terrible. I was sick to my stomach every day. I was going in the bathroom and throwing up. I mean, when I got to work and just every time I heard his voice on the radio, it was terrible for me, but I also couldn’t afford to lose my job. I was not going to let somebody force me out of my goal. And I had a son to take care of, so I couldn’t afford that. I was going to fight until I knew that I was safe.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, it’s a focusing, forcing function, right? I mean, having that singular priority. So it seems like, I mean, the predictions about you never rising above the rank of, what was it, captain?
Cathy Lanier: Captain.
Tim Ferriss: Seems like that fellow wasn’t exactly the Nostradamus of predicting the future. So could you walk us through how things progressed and why were you able to continue to excel? Did his prediction just turn out to be completely false.
Cathy Lanier: I think it would have been accurate. I tell you what, the stars aligned for me. So I took sergeant test at three years. I was eligible for lieutenant at five. I took the lieutenant’s test at five years. I came in number one on that test. I took the captain’s test, seven years, I came in number three on that test. So I got promoted bang, bang, bang, three years, five years, seven years. I was a captain in seven years. I would have never gone past the rank of captain in that current administration. And then Marion Barry gets arrested, our mayor, Marion Barry is taken out and replaced by the control board. The control board comes in 1998. I’m a captain at the time. Marion Barry is now taken out of play. The control board takes over. They bring in Chuck Ramsey, an outsider who knows nobody in the department.
He doesn’t know anybody. He’s got no clique. He’s got no boys. Everybody’s fresh. So he comes in as I’m a lieutenant just making captain, takes over the police department as a complete outsider and is doing his assessment of what officials, what command level officials he wanted to have on his team. And he appointed me from the rank of captain to be an inspector to take over major narcotics branch with less than eight years on the job. I was 29, I think.
Tim Ferriss: All right. Then Chuck makes his appearance. Right. Okay. Charles Ramsey.
Cathy Lanier: He’s the next big mentor.
Tim Ferriss: Yes. Okay. So just for honestly, my personal curiosity, because I really know nothing about how police structures work. What is a captain doing? And then what does an inspector do, if you don’t mind?
Cathy Lanier: So again, this is where I think the police department gets right. You spend three years as a patrol officer, you make sergeant, you study really hard, you take the test, you make sergeant, you go through some schools. After you make sergeant, you manage a small group, then you make lieutenant two years later, you go through the exam process, you go through some schools after that, and then you manage a platoon of 40. When I was a lieutenant, I had narcotics officers, I had detectives, and I had patrol.
Tim Ferriss: How are those 40 people determined? Is it based on neighborhood or some type of geographic area?
Cathy Lanier: So at that time, it’s done differently and over the course of the years, it’s changed, but at that time it was geographically. So I had a patrol district, and of that patrol district, I had one third of that patrol district, and I managed every resource for that part of the district. So all three shifts. I had day work, midnights, evening shift, all three shifts. Those officers are split across those three shifts, and they covered all the policing. So not just the 911 responders, the guys in uniform going to 911 calls, but also your narcotics officers and your detectives that follow up and investigate crimes.
Tim Ferriss: This is lieutenant.
Cathy Lanier: That’s lieutenant.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So lieutenant, is that the first time where you’re getting the decathlete’s exposure to all of these different things?
Cathy Lanier: Yes. And you’re also getting exposure to administration. So part of that promotional exam is studying administration. You have to learn administration. So if there are municipal regulations that need to be changed, and I’m managing a large part of the portion of the District of Columbia, I see a municipal regulation needs to be changed, I need to know the process to petition to change that municipal regulation. How do I go about changing that law? Because I’m seeing firsthand the impact it’s having in our neighborhoods, so police administration starts to become more and more important there. I also now can start influencing policy. I can influence policy for my little piece of the world. I decide what my drug enforcement tactics are going to be. I decide how we’re going to work in terms of doing warrant service and things like that. So that’s where you first start to get a better understanding of influencing how policing actually is carried out.
Tim Ferriss: Not to minimize the prior steps, but it sounds like the lieutenant role is a very dense learning opportunity based on the description.
Cathy Lanier: And I think the best role, the best rank on the police department for me was lieutenant. I was able to still go out on the street, support my troops, back up my sergeants, have fun policing and do the policing that I enjoyed, but I also had the ability to change the environment for them, help them, and also influence how we were policing our community.
After captain, it gets — the captain is more — you’re strapped to your desk a lot more.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I was going to say more behind the desk.
Cathy Lanier: You’re reviewing bad arrests, that a sergeant didn’t do the right thing and review the paperwork. Now you’ve got a bad arrest that’s got to be detention journaled. So you’ve got to review and make that decision. You’ve got to set things up at the courts. You’ve got to look at all the disciplinary investigations that come in. Officers getting disciplined for things. You’ve got to make decisions about that. You sit on trial boards. Who’s going to get disciplined? Who’s going to get terminated? It’s very administrative. You’re helping the commander make decisions, community meetings, deployment decisions, and it’s not as much fun.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I know a few people in law enforcement, but mostly military, former military guys. And I mean, very similar. Some of these guys, they just love being in the field and they’re like, “I got promoted.” It’s like, “I just don’t know how I feel about it.” There’s very mixed excuses.
Cathy Lanier: Well, here’s the big key. When I went to go change my uniform, so you go to property division, when you get promoted, you walk off the stage, you get your birds or whatever you’re getting, your clusters or whatever for your new rank. You go to the property division, you get your new rank insignia. When I made captain and I went over to property division to get my new rank insignia, they said, “Turn in your handcuffs.”
And I was like, “What? Turn in my handcuffs? What are you talking about?”
“Well, you don’t need those anymore.”
I’m like, “You’re not taking my handcuffs. I’m going to keep my handcuffs. Right here. Right here.”
I kept my gun belt. I kept my gun belt, my handcuffs, my extra magazines, all those things that the administrative captains used to turn in. I’m like, “No, I’m keeping this stuff.”
Tim Ferriss: So let’s come back to Chuck. And because I’m so unfamiliar with the internal workings, it’s hard for me to pick the next sort of flashpoint, maybe a seminal moment for you. I mean, there’s a lot to pick from. I’m not sure how to put them in order, not that they have to be in order, but maybe tell me if there’s something that we just talked about before this. But you mentioned Chuck, pushing you to take tough assignments. Is special operations division, is that a sensible place to hop to next? Or what do you think? Are we skipping some important steps in between?
Cathy Lanier: When Chuck came in and he initially put me in charge, I’d only been a captain, I want to say four or five months, and he kind of did a clean out at the top. A lot of that old boy network that was there when he got there, they were all people that were long past retirement. So he pushed a lot of the command staff out. So that made him push people up pretty young in their career. So he pushed me up to be the commander of major narcotics branch as an inspector, like I said, just under eight years on. So I was very young and I had a major role —
Tim Ferriss: Let’s see. I’m trying to do the math. How old were you then at that point?
Cathy Lanier: So I want to say I was 30-ish, 30, 31. I made the narcotics branch.
Tim Ferriss: Man, that’s amazing. That is a lot of responsibility. Yeah.
Cathy Lanier: And so, I went to major narcotics branch. I was there for — so I had major narcotics branch and vehicular homicide. So I managed all the vehicular homicide investigative units there for just under two years. And then he promoted me again to commander. And I took over a patrol district, the fourth district where Mount Pleasant sits. The patrol district I started in, I went back now and I was the commander of that patrol district. It was the largest residential area in the city of Washington. So I took over that district. I ran that for two years, and then Chuck got a way. He called me down to his office and he says, “I’m thinking I’m going to send you to SOD.” It was 9/11 happens. The Friday after 9/11, he says, “I think I’m going to send you to special operations division.”
I was like, “You know what? I love being the district commander. I love working in 4D. My goal was to retire as the commander of 4D. Thanks, but I really like where I am.”
And he’s like, “Oh, okay.” And then two days later, a teletype came out transferring me to SOD. So it wasn’t really asking me. He’s like, “Oh, okay.”
Tim Ferriss: He’s like, “That’s a great story. Thank you for that.”
Cathy Lanier: Yeah, funny. Right. “Glad to hear it.”
So I took over special ops. Now, special operations division had never had a woman in charge. So that in itself was a little intimidating. But the one thing that when you talk about mentors, and I know you probably have experienced this like many others, is what a mentor does for you is they lend you confidence that you don’t have. Chuck recognized that I didn’t have the confidence. I was intimidated by this SOD thing. I was like, yeah, no. Never had a woman in charge. It’s a predominantly male. I always say the most testosterone in the police departments in SOD. It’s the bomb squad, the SWAT team, Harbor, the Marine Unit, the helicopter unit, aviation, horse-mounted unit, K-9, civil disturbance unit, the presidential protection unit. So it’s like nine or 10 different units, your high-end stuff. So anyway, he recognized that I was intimidated by that. And he’s like, “Mm-mm, you’re going to go and you’re going to do it.”
He sent me off to a bunch of schools. I went to EOD schools, bombing schools, so I learned how to manage a bomb squad. I learned how to manage a SWAT team and the people there were great. That was my best assignment in my entire career. I spent six years there after 9/11, recreating our special operations division and turning it into a Homeland Security and counterterrorism unit.
Tim Ferriss: What made it so good for you, that particular role?
Cathy Lanier: Well, it was the most complex role I’d ever held. Most of the units I managed, I had to manage three or four different type of specialties. I had to manage nine different specialties, and they were highly special. These were highly trying — sniper teams on the SWAT teams, negotiations unit, the bomb squad. We were just after 9/11 and we were trying to evolve our department from a pre 9/11 police department in the nation’s Capitol to a post 9/11 police department in the nation’s Capitol. We got caught flatfooted on 9/11 and we should not have been. We didn’t have the skills, training, equipment, and things that we should have had. I always say Timothy McVeigh was, that Oklahoma City bombing was the wake-up call. That’s when we should have started changing the way we train and prepare our police officers, but we didn’t.
And then there’s the first World Trade Center bombing. That was another wake-up call. We didn’t respond to that. It was not until 9/11 that the nation’s police departments and the largest cities really realized that we have to be prepared for this type of asymmetric threat that we’re now facing. So when Chuck put me in charge of SOD, he said, “I want you to create the homeland security capabilities that we need, not just in SOD, but across the whole department.”
So he gave me a blank check to create a brand new police philosophy in the Metropolitan Police Department. So we created the Homeland Security Counterterrorism Bureau. We created CBR&E. My first year, we got $17 million in funding to buy level A suits to send our people down to Anniston, Alabama. I went down to Anniston, Alabama. I trained in Sarin and VX, live Sarin and VX gas. We were trained to do rescues in hot zones. We went down to Nevada and trained on rad environments, radiological environments. We trained with — I was one of the few people that was fortunate enough to train with Ken Alibek and Bill Patrick, two bioweapons scientists, one from Russia and one from the US, taught my bioweapons class, how to respond to biological threats, anthrax, right? We had anthrax in Washington, DC. These are all things that I was on the front end of creating, and I got to go through all of that training and all of that experience with my whole team. And the Metropolitan Police Department, when we were finished that six years of evolution, was a completely different place.
Tim Ferriss: This is a good time to, I think, come back to something I kind of promised to listeners that we would revisit, and it goes all the way back. We’re not going to go all the way back to Mount Pleasant, but when you were first day on the job, five days, and you’re looking at it, and you’re thinking to yourself, “We’re not doing this the right way. We can’t even communicate with these community members. Furthermore, we’re not even trying to set the message straight.”
And then if we flash forward, I have notes that are a bit scattered here, but I have notes on embracing technology. So this is from governing.com. I want to give credit where credit is due. So this relates to looking for new ways to connect the community to the police, in the case of the police. So the creation of an anonymous text tip line, cleverly named 50 411. Am I saying that the right way?
Cathy Lanier: Give the 5-0, the 411, right?
Tim Ferriss: The 5-0. I’m such an idiot.
Cathy Lanier: We are the 5-0, like the cop, you know, they used to call us the 5-0 back in the old days and 411, you know 411.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right. So in 2008, it received 292 tips. By the end of 2011, that number jumped to 1200.
Cathy Lanier: 1200. Yeah. We got up to about 2800.
Tim Ferriss: 2800. Right. And there are many examples of how that ended up being valuable. And then there’s a whole separate topic, which is maybe related but different, which is cultivating sources, right? So like developing sources, getting to know people, and this is quoting from the same piece, but you treat people with respect, you establish relationships. And God, I’m trying to think of some of these examples that I read about separately, but this seems to all probably feed into a lot of what you were doing in that overhaul later, right?
Cathy Lanier: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: And I’m just wondering if you have any other examples of sort of cultivating a access to helpful information, right? Not just drowning in noise. I’m wondering how you even thought about that. Because I imagine one of the challenges at that time, probably even still today, but especially post 9/11 in the wake of that, that there’s kind of a good news, bad news situation. If you want more information or tips, there’s probably going to be an overwhelming amount depending on how you solicit and how you search for it. So how did you think of separating signal from noise?
Cathy Lanier: So for me, it was pretty simple and it does go back to Mount Pleasant. Again, pretty intuitive on your part not having been in policing. So when I became the chief of police, a couple of commitments I made to myself and to the community was that we had a tendency to place higher value on some neighborhoods and some crimes than others. And our job is to protect all of the community and every crime should be equally important to us. If we’re not preventing crimes, we’re not being successful, making arrests. We used to publish our arrest stats every year and go, “Oh, look, we made 50,000 arrests last year. Look how successful we are.”
Well, that’s 50,000 times. We didn’t do our job because we didn’t prevent those crimes from happening. So to me, arrest stats are not a good measure of success for a police department. Now, I don’t have a stat that can tell you what I prevented, but the goal should be to try and prevent. So for me, what was very clear is, so when I first took over as chief, I promised I was going to go on the scene of every single homicide. Why? Because I wanted people in the communities to know it didn’t matter what neighborhood you lived in or what the circumstances of that homicide was, that homicide’s just as important to us as every other homicide. So homicide in Georgetown, in the very expensive, wealthy neighborhood, if there was a homicide there, it would get news coverage for weeks and police were all over it. And almost always those crimes would be closed. But if there was a homicide in a public housing project, it got little to no news coverage. Three people shot last night in Southeast.
That was it. That’s all you hear. And nothing about those people or what happened with those crimes. And they very rarely got closed. So I put an emphasis on trying to cultivate those relationships in the community. And it was clear to me two things. People didn’t trust us, they didn’t trust the police, and we didn’t close these homicides, because witnesses wouldn’t come forward. They wouldn’t come forward, because they didn’t trust us. And so, we had to change that. So I had a great example. I was out, we did a crime initiative during the summer called All Hands on Deck. So I was out on all hands on deck. I’m walking through a public housing complex and there’s two middle-aged women sitting on a wall outside in the summer. They’re drinking. They got open containers of alcohol, which is illegal. They could have been — in the old days when I was policing, we would just walk over and handcuff them, lock them up, take them to the station.
That’s open container alcohol. So I go over and I sit down, start talking to them. There had been a series of shootings in this complex and I said, “Hey.”
She’s like, “I don’t know why you guys are here. You don’t care about us.”
Kind of giving me the lip. And I said, “Okay, well, I’ll tell you what, here’s my business card. My cell phone number’s on here.” First of all, they had no idea it was a chief. I’m just the cop. They don’t watch the local news. They don’t know that I’m the chief. “Here’s my business card. If you have any information and you want to talk to me about anything that’s going on here, and tell me who’s out here shooting in the middle of the night, hit these kids that are on the tennis court, on the basketball court, please let me know.”
And when I walk over to the two ladies, they kind of take their beer and stick it behind the wall. I was like, “You know you’re not supposed to be drinking out here, but I’m going to pretend I didn’t see that.”
So I give them my business card. I give them that respect. Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. Talk to them with a little respect. I give them my business card, my cell phone number’s on there. About two weeks later, I get a call at one o’clock in the morning, and it was a woman’s voice. Don’t know if it was those women, can’t prove it, don’t know to this day. But I get a call about one o’clock in the morning. There was a shooting in that neighborhood, and the woman’s voice said to me, “Tell your officers that the gun is behind the white Escalade.”
And I’m like, “What are you talking about?”
She says, “On Cloud Street…” She gave me the address on Cloud Street. She said, “There’s a white Escalade. The gun is there.”
So I turn on my police radio half asleep, switch to the sixth district where that address is, and sure enough, they’re working a shooting. And I went over the radio, I said, “Cruiser one, who’s the on scene official? Have him call me.” He calls me and I said, “Look, I just got a tip from somebody that there’s a gun involved in this case and this is where the gun is.”
Sure enough, that’s where the gun was. They recovered that gun. From that recovery of that gun, they were able to start working this case and actually get information. So I always tie that back to, I strongly believe that the fact that I walked over to those women, I showed them a little respect. I sat on the wall with them. I didn’t lock them up for the open container of alcohol. They weren’t hurting anybody. I sat and chatted with them. I gave them my cell number and said, “Look, I want to help, but if you don’t give me information, I can’t help.”
So that’s the philosophy that I wanted all of my cops to have. That’s the way I wanted all of us to lease our communities. I wanted people to see that you give me information, you’ll see results. You tell me who’s involved in shooting up the neighborhood. We’ll go after them. We will make arrests. So we started doing, instead of just putting posters up when a homicide occurred, when we made an arrest for the homicide, we went back and put posters up saying the case is closed. Reverse canvas. Instead of just telling you when something bad happens, we’re going to tell you when we close it. So now people know that we’ve taken that person off the street and those little things matter.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Matter a lot. I want to please confirm or deny this, but I am in the course of speaking with you and certainly in the course of doing homework for this conversation, impressed with your attention to detail, which comes back also to my signal versus noise, because I am dazzled by your ability to manage all of these details. And tell me if this is a complete dead end, but it seems like you demonstrated this really, really early on. And we’ll come back to where we were in the timeline, but this is how you had a job at 16 as a secretary at a commercial real estate firm. Am I getting that right? And you handled —
Cathy Lanier: That’s Eisinger Kilbane.
Tim Ferriss: You handled tenant billing, right?
Cathy Lanier: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And it seems like you’ve practiced this or just had this ability that you’ve honed over time. Thousands of pieces of correspondence come through the police department every day, but you’re also talking about learning, I think at that job to never let anything that’s got your name on it be imperfect. And it’s just like, how come —
Cathy Lanier: Sound familiar, Tim?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, yes, there’s that also. My incredibly helpful slash —
Cathy Lanier: OCD?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, brain damage too, saying OCD. But as you have a job that increases in scope upon scope, upon scope, upon scope, and how do you build systems that help you to keep track of these things, right? Because not everyone is going to have necessarily your eye for detail or capacity to remember the details in that photograph that flash for a fraction of time that you then need to recall. So it seems like ultimately, and I am cheating a little bit, because when you sent and we asked for some notes in advance of this conversation, I’ll just read one thing here, because —
Cathy Lanier: I don’t remember now, so you’re going to get me on this.
Tim Ferriss: Great. Yeah, no, it’s good. It just says, “No hacks for me. I try to focus on systems or strategies that will hold up over time.”
And I’m wondering, for instance, whether it’s in your current role or where we left off in terms of your timeline, as you’re soliciting information from the community and they’re offering more, because you’re showing not just the announcement of the bad thing, but that you actually took action related to their help that closed cases, et cetera, et cetera. How do you ensure that the department or the organization that you’re a part of is equipped to digest that? And I’m not sure that’s an easy question to answer, but I’ll just leave it there.
Cathy Lanier: No, it’s not an easy question to answer, but I would say this — I pushed technology very, very hard once I became the chief. When I took over as a chief, we had Teletubby pagers. We didn’t even have cell phones, and I wanted everybody to have smartphones. The early smartphones, the first one we got was a Trio. We had Palm Pilots and Trios, right? If you remember that far back.
Tim Ferriss: Sure, I do.
Cathy Lanier: And then we pushed putting computers in the cars and we pushed the technology, gunshot detection technology, cameras, integrating those gunshot detection technology cameras, all those things together. I really wanted technology to be those systems, right? Taking all this great technology that’s coming out, make us more effective and more efficient as police officers. Instead of spending three hours handwriting an accident report, we could pull up on the scene of an accident report, have a iPad or a laptop in the cruiser that GPS drops the intersection on a police report and all’s I got to do is plink a little car down there and my police report now takes 10 minutes instead of two hours.
So I brought all this technology, the systems that made us better, it made us more effective. And I relied a lot on people. I mean, everything I did, I learned from the people that work for me and the people in the community. I made it a point to go out and talk to people and listen. Everything I learned about fighting crime that was effective, I got it from walking around the community and giving my cell phone number out, listening to what people had to say. Because if you listen to people, they will tell you what to do.
And my officers, my detectives, my sergeants, my lieutenants, those guys, when I did my strategic planning sessions, I would bring in from all of those groups and brainstorm with them. What are the things we need? How can we do better? What do you need that you don’t have? What are the crime trends that you’re seeing? But when I witnessed this evolution of technology and crime, and we had to get our police department to adjust to meet that evolution. We hire cops for a 25-year career. And when this technological crime evolution was happening, we had detectives that didn’t know how to manage a crime scene with seven different cameras they had to download to get video of the crime scene. They didn’t know how to mobily, forensically dump a phone. You arrest a guy who just did some armed robberies. And the biggest case, and I’m sure in your research, you saw this Thomas Maslin case.
There was a case that really kind of set this in stone for me. There’s this poor gentleman who was robbed for his cell phone one night, he’s beaten with a baseball bat. They crush his skull, they take his phone. Those same suspects, we find Mr. Maslin the next day with his skull crushed, barely alive, no cell phone. We don’t know where his cell phone is. He’s in the hospital. Well, what we don’t know is that same night right after they robbed him, that same group of kids went to Adams Morgan, another neighborhood, and they robbed three more people and they were arrested. And when they were arrested, they had multiple cell phones on them. They were robbing people for their cell phones, because they were going to go and turn those phones in and make money. And all those cell phones were recovered as evidence and put on the books, but nobody knew that Thomas Maslin’s phone was in that books, because we didn’t have anybody that had the digital forensic skill to dump those phones and figure out whose phones they were.
And when we finally did figure that out months later, I said, “This is never going to happen again. We need to have people that are trained to have that skill. And if we can’t train our detectives to do it or they don’t have the bandwidth to do it, then we’re going to hire civilians to do it, but we’re going to have that skill and we’re going to have it out on the street daily.”
And so we did. We hired criminal research specialists, we hired some other civilians for digital forensics. And so, we went through this evolution and it is building systems that will endure over time and policing was not designed that way. So we had to really change the way we do policing. And now police departments are doing much better at keeping pace with technology.
Tim Ferriss: Before we get to maybe the differences between your experience in law enforcement and everything that preceded the NFL and the NFL, could you just give people an idea of the scope of your responsibilities at the NFL? What are you responsible for?
Cathy Lanier: Everything related to security. So executive protection, I set the standards for physical security and cybersecurity at the stadiums. So all of the stadiums, the 30 stadiums across the US and our international stadiums, a little bit of variation on the international, but across all the US stadiums, we set the requirements for security that they have to meet. So once we set that standard, we update it annually. We do the audits and red teaming and we make sure that they are meeting those standards. So physical security, cybersecurity, both. We also have investigative responsibilities. So violations of the personal conduct policy. Those are all investigations that are done by my team. We have game integrity, so management of the game integrity program. So making sure that we are maintaining the integrity of this game. There’s a lot involved in that.
If it’s got anything to do with security, it falls on us. Individually, the league office has full responsibility for Super Bowl, Pro Bowl, Combine, Draft, and all the international series games. So when I say we have nine international games this year, the reason scheduling this is so hard, each one of those international games, I will take a team out and advance at least two trips, if not three. And we’ve got nine international games this year. And I’m also working on, we plan Super Bowl about 18 months out in advance ’cause that’s 10 days of events over 20 some venues and then Draft. So Draft, I’m leaving for Pittsburgh on Sunday to go manage the Draft for the next seven or eight days. So special events, tentpole events, that’s a big, big part of it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So tons of free time.
Cathy Lanier: Tons of free time. 170 days on the road last year.
Tim Ferriss: Oh my Lordy. So red teaming is a really critical concept that I want people to understand. Some folks may recognize it within the context of say tech, given the types of people that I’ve interviewed before in terms of paying people to try to break into your systems, let’s just say, or to take down your service or to fill in the blank, but they’re on your side. And I wonder where red teaming, I should know this, comes from. It’s probably from hiring people —
Cathy Lanier: Military.
Tim Ferriss: Military —
Cathy Lanier: Military.
Tim Ferriss: — pretending to be the Soviets, right. Probably.
Cathy Lanier: It’s the military. I mean, it was a military concept initially. And think about it this way. You’ve got to look at it a little differently. I think on the tech side, it is a little different, but I think of red teaming as we set a standard, like, we think use of magnetometers to screen for weapons. We think use of a perimeter to make sure everybody goes through screening. All these standards we put in place of security. I can go and audit you and you have all those standards in place, but what a red team operation does is it’s quality assurance. Are those standards working? Did I tell you to do something that didn’t necessarily work? So it tells you if the standards that you were using are effective or not. It may be that you put them in place, but you didn’t execute them properly, so they’re not effective.
So if you’re not properly doing secondary screening, it’s not that the magnetometers didn’t work, it’s that your guard didn’t respond properly to an alert. So it’s a quality assurance. It’s a quality assurance test to see if the standards that you are employing or you’re requiring are being used properly and are they effective? That’s the key. It’s not a gotcha. It’s like, is what we’re doing effective? And if it’s not effective, how can we make it effective?
Tim Ferriss: How are your responsibilities or your job with the NFL most different from what you did beforehand? I’m just imagining there might be new constraints on what you can or can’t do, even though you’re coordinating with federal, state and local law entities. I mean, just imagining what that entails with 32 clubs makes my head spin. But how is it most different from what you did before?
Cathy Lanier: I’d say it’s most different in terms of its diversity. So I thought coming from 27 years in the nation’s capital, managing SOD, I managed every large event protest, demonstration. We had about 2,300 a year that I was responsible for when I was there. So I thought, and then presidential inaugurations, I was like, “This is easy. I can come to the NFL, this Super Bowl thing’s going to be nothing. This is going to be a walk in the park.” And the diversity here is, the complexity here is so much more. It’s so much more complex and the diversity. So I’m not only setting up the equivalent of a presidential inauguration that I did every four years before, every year it’s Super Bowl, but the Super Bowl is more complex. It’s spread over 10 days, over 26 venues, and it moves every year. So it’s in a different place.
So I’ve got to build all those relationships. I’ve got to learn all those new venues. I’ve got to figure out security in a completely different climate. And in Minneapolis, it was 25 below zero. Guess what? Some technology doesn’t work in that 25 below zero. Some of the things that we do in Arizona’s not going to work in Minneapolis. And then now with international, we try and go and implement our full suite of security standards in Madrid and Sao Paulo and Australia and Munich. But when we get there, 20% of what we do is going to have to be adapted to the local environment. There’s laws and regulations and things that are different in different countries. Things that we do here, you can’t do there. Things they do there, we can’t do here. So the complexity of what I do now is far more complicated and it’s far more diverse than what I used to do.
Tim Ferriss: And by diverse, you just mean constantly shifting, like you mentioned, these different locations with —
Cathy Lanier: There’s no template. I can’t say, “Hey, it’s inauguration. This is what we do for the inauguration.” The ball sites are all the same. We do the same things. We know what to do with the inauguration. This is, every time it’s like you just take the old plan and throw it away, start all over. Pretty much, not completely, but pretty much.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, no shortage of learning —
Cathy Lanier: You don’t want to start with any assumptions. No assumptions, that’s for sure.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to shift gears just a little bit. I’m wondering if, are there any books that you recommend or resources? This doesn’t have to be within the context of the NFL, but when I imagine you get approached by people who are hoping to learn from you in one way or another, or you are just mentoring people, whether that was in policing or within the NFL or in other contexts, are there any books that you recommend frequently to other people? It doesn’t need to be nonfiction, could be anything.
Cathy Lanier: So I’d say my favorite book of all times, and I made it mandatory reading for my command staff when I took over as the chief, which was a hoot because nobody ever made our command staff read anything before. And I also did a book club. I also used this book and did a book club with the community, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell. One of my all time favorite reads, because it forces you to understand that no matter what your challenge and no matter what your problem is, it goes back to problem solving. Whatever the problem is you’re trying to solve, there is a tipping point. You just have to know what that tipping point is. And I love that book. I’ve read it three times, I think. It’s a great book, so that’s one of my favorites. It just makes you think differently.
Tim Ferriss: What did you hope people reading it would take away to apply? How might that change how they act on the job or think and then therefore act on the job?
Cathy Lanier: Well, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, what your profession is. If you read The Tipping Point, the key point is that you can turn around any situation, you can solve any problem if you’re paying close enough attention to the details that you can hit that tipping point. What is the tipping point to turn around high levels of violence in a community? What is the tipping point to turn around whatever your problem is?
I would also say Blink. Blink is another one that I only read because I liked Malcolm Gladwell, but Blink, for people in high-paced professions, Blink is one that helps you really evaluate how you make decisions, how you rely on your instinct and your experience and how much that matters. So those are two of my favorites. And then the only thing I read, Tim, is stuff about my job. I read work stuff, so nothing really fun.
Tim Ferriss: Well, let me come back to the — I suppose this all relates, everything relates to making decisions, but especially performing under extreme and sustained pressure. And I would imagine that, of course, part of the hiring process for a lot of the people who report to you, let’s just say, or within your organization, you’re already vetting for people who can operate at a high level with sustained pressure, where they also have to be very good at improvising when conditions change and so on. But if you were teaching a class to, could be high school students, college students on sort of resilience and handling pressure, right, some people buckle and sometimes you learn by buckling and then you figure out how to approach it next time. What would you tell them about making decisions under pressure and acting under pressure as opposed to becoming paralyzed? How would you even begin to talk to them about that?
Cathy Lanier: I would say it’s — I don’t care who you are. It’s not 100% instinct, right. It is, your body’s going to react in a crisis to what it knows. So if it’s a situation where you have trained for it or you’ve thought about it or you’ve prepared for it, in your mind, you’ve walked through it, you’re going to be in a lot better position than if it’s something that’s never crossed your mind. This is where kind of preparedness crosses that line. And this is why we try and encourage people to be prepared. Know when you walk into a building, what are the two different ways you can get out, not just the way you came in. Is there other ways you can get out of this building? Right. So everybody’s going to freeze initially. I think to a certain extent, if you have no experience, nothing in your brain that your brain can go back to have you act.
But in terms of being in a workplace or a professional environment and making decisions as a leader, if you have the knowledge that you need, you’ve done your homework, you’ve read everything that there is to read, you’ve got your education, you’ve got experience, decision making becomes easy. Each time you go up at a different level of rank, as a sergeant, when I first made sergeant, making decisions was a little tough at first because I was still pretty inexperienced myself. So my job was to be more well-read, understand the DC code a little better than the patrol officer, know what case law says. So if I didn’t read that stuff and I didn’t study, I would be uncomfortable making decisions and I would hesitate to make decisions. We had a lot of people that don’t like to make decisions. But the more you read, the more you learn, the more you invest in your knowledge, the easier it is to make decisions.
To me, decisions now with all of the years I’m in 36 years in this business, and now again, I have two master’s degrees, I’ve studied, I’ve got all this experience, decisions for me like boom, boom, boom, boom. So it comes with experience. It comes with investment of time. It comes with preparing yourself to be able to make a decision. And of course people will throw things at me that I’ve never experienced before, but because I have all those other things to rely on, I can make a decision and I feel good about it.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I have to imagine also, this is true in a lot of contexts outside of security or law enforcement. Certainly applies to military, but it kind of applies everywhere, which is making decisions in the face of incomplete information. And so I’m wondering what you have learned about that, making decisions, biasing towards action when you have incomplete information. How do you think about that?
Cathy Lanier: It happens. It happens a lot, especially in first responder communities and military. Like you said, it happens a lot. You’re not always going to have a complete picture. Again, I think your comfort level with being able to make those decisions is going to fall back on, are you qualified to make that decision? If you feel qualified to make the decision, sometimes I got to make decisions without all the information. There’s two things that go along with that. One is, do the best you can based on what you know at the time, but know a decision has to be made. And then if you make the wrong decision, undo it, change it, fix it. Don’t just stick with it because you’ve got to be the boss. And this is what I said. Admit you’re wrong. Change course, go another direction. That’s where people get tripped up, right.
When I’m making a decision and I don’t have full information, I’m thinking to myself as I’m making this decision, “I can either go this way or I can go that way. If I go this way, what can go wrong? If I go this way, what can go wrong?” Okay, now I’m going to go this way. If one of those things goes wrong, consequence thinking, right. “If one of those things goes wrong, what’s my course of action then?” So if I’m making a decision with incomplete information, as I’m making that decision and giving that command, I’m thinking about how I’m going to deal with the collateral damage if that was the wrong decision ’cause that’s next. You make a bad decision, you can’t just go, “Oh shoot. Wow, darn.”
Tim Ferriss: Tough look. Yeah.
Cathy Lanier: You’ve got to — right, fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it. What are you going to do about it now? How are you going to fix it?
Tim Ferriss: So just a few more questions and then let you get back to your very busy day. If you could put, this is metaphorically speaking, like a message on a billboard or have a reminder on your desk that everybody sees when they come in. It could be a quote, could be a mantra, could be anything. If you could put it on a billboard for millions of people to see, what might that be? I mean, is there anything that comes to mind? Could be someone else’s quote, could be something that you try to live your life by, could be something you want everybody who’s within your organization to be reminded of, or it could be something else entirely. Does anything come to mind?
Cathy Lanier: I mean, I tell people all the time, bad things happen to everybody. Bad things happen to everybody. And a lot of times it’s we do it to ourself. We make bad decisions, bad things happen to us because of ourselves. Bad things happen to everybody. It’s not about the bad decision you made or the bad thing that happened to you; it’s what you do after that. So it’s easy to have some tragedy or some terrible thing happen to you and sit around and feel sorry for yourself or become a victim or let it define you. It’s your attitude and your effort that you put into how you recover. So it’s not what happens to you. It’s not the bad thing.
It’s how you handle those things that really matter in life because you can have one of two attitudes every time something bad happens, which attitude are you going to pick? For me, it’s going to be, I wish that never had happened. I wish I’d never made that decision. I wish that had never happened, but you know what, I’m going to fix it. I’m going to not let it define me. I’m not going to let it take me down.
Tim Ferriss: Well, Cathy, I mean, I think that’s a pretty strong way to land this plane. I’m so —
Cathy Lanier: You have the coolest job, by the way.
Tim Ferriss: It’s so fun.
Cathy Lanier: I can’t imagine how much you get to learn talking to so many people and you must have an encyclopedia in your brain.
Tim Ferriss: It’s the best job. And it didn’t come from some big long-term plan. It was kind of zigging and zagging with, frankly, I mean, tying into what you said, some really — in retrospect, with the information I had at the time, there were good decisions about various things, starting books, but made some terrible decisions on deadlines where there were kind of suicide missions and ultimately just adapted and tried to make the best of a sequence of, I would say, in retrospect, kind of poor decisions led to one of the best decisions, which I never thought would become this. And here we are. And thanks for —
Cathy Lanier: Good for you.
Tim Ferriss: Thanks for being willing to do the dance and play some improv jazz in this conversation. Is there anything else you’d like to say or add, suggest to people, request of people, anything at all before we wind to a close?
Cathy Lanier: No, just was a fascinating couple of hours with you. I’m an avid follower and really enjoyed my time here, so thank you for including me.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, definitely. Cathy, thank you so much. I hope we get to see each other at some point. Who knows? Might get to your neck of the world. Probably will, actually.
Cathy Lanier: Please let me know if you do. New York or DC, look me up.
Tim Ferriss: I’m in both. So I’ll keep you posted. Thank you again for the time.
Cathy Lanier: Okay. All right.Tim Ferriss: And for everybody listening, we’ll have show notes, links to everything that we talked about at tim.blog/podcast as per usual. Just search for Cathy and you will find this episode. Until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in.
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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC’s Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure (#862) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-04-24 05:21:33
Cathy Lanier serves as the chief security officer (CSO) for the National Football League (NFL). As the league’s CSO, she supervises all operations and activities of the NFL Security Department—overseeing coordination with the league office and all 32 clubs and working with federal, state, and local law entities to ensure the security of the NFL’s venues, fans, players, staff, and infrastructure.
Prior to her work at the NFL, Cathy served as chief of police with the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) from 2007 to 2016, becoming the first female police chief of the nation’s capital, the first commanding officer of Homeland Security and Counter-Terrorism for D.C. Police, and the longest serving chief on the D.C. force. Her innovative strategies were credited with reducing violent crime in Washington by 21 percent from 2007 to 2015, while the city’s population grew by 15 percent.
Cathy is a graduate of the FBI National Academy and the United States Drug Enforcement Administration’s Drug Unit Commanders Academy. She holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in management from Johns Hopkins University and a master’s degree in national security studies from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
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“You’re going to be damned if you do and damned if you don’t. You better be damned for doing.”
— Cathy Lanier
“I’m not an excuse person. I don’t make excuses. If I find myself in a bad situation, I did something to get myself here and I’m going to get myself out.”
— Cathy Lanier
“What a mentor does for you is they lend you confidence that you don’t have.”
— Cathy Lanier
“To me, arrest stats are not a good measure of success for a police department.”
— Cathy Lanier
“Effective communication, both verbal and written, is critical for professional success. And it is a skill that develops over time, the listening part of it more importantly than the communicating part.”
— Cathy Lanier
“Bad things happen to everybody. It’s not about the bad decision you made or the bad thing that happened to you; it’s what you do after that.”
— Cathy Lanier
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Want to hear another episode with the author whose books became required reading for Cathy’s command staff? Listen to my conversation with best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell, in which we discussed the ideas behind The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, creative “recipes” for storytelling, his years at The Washington Post, lessons from Revisionist History, taking and organizing notes, the advantages of disadvantages, flaws that turned into strengths, writing in noisy public places, and much more.
The post Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC’s Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure (#862) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-04-17 02:12:09
Welcome to another episode featuring a 4-Hour Workweek case study—a conversation with someone who has read the book, applied it, and built a life and a businesses I never could have imagined. In this episode, we have Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko and Exploding Topics, both acquired by Semrush, which itself was recently acquired by Adobe for $1.9 billion. We cover geoarbitrage, testing assumptions cheaply, building a muse, automating income, and—the chapter almost everyone skips—Filling the Void.
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Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
Tim Ferriss: Brian, nice to meet you finally. Thank you for taking the time.
Brian Dean: Hey, great to be here.
Tim Ferriss: Brian, where should we begin? I’m thinking maybe because the impetus for this is somewhat around the connective tissue of The 4-Hour Workweek, should we just begin with how on earth you and The 4-Hour Workweek intersected? Maybe we start there?
Brian Dean: So it intersected at a really weird and sort of low time in my life where I had just started a PhD program at Purdue and I basically hated it. It was just overall not great experience. I went in gung ho, “I’m going to be a scientist,” and all this stuff. And then the hard reality of pipetting in a lab and having an advisor, breathing down your neck was like, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m out.” So my plan was to get a job because I had a degree. I was like, “Let me get a job as a dietician.” Unfortunately, that didn’t really work out and I ended up in my dad’s basement.
Tim Ferriss: What was the timing of this? This was what year, roughly?
Brian Dean: This was 2008. So I think the book was relatively new then.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. 2008, that would’ve been a year after publication, let’s just say. And also not exactly the hottest job market for people who may not recall. It was a tough time overall because of the financial crisis.
Brian Dean: Totally unbeknownst to me as going to graduate school, spending most of my time at bars, drinking, the great financial crisis was over my head. Never heard of it until I started to get a job. And suddenly it became very real, very fast. So basically I was in my dad’s basement, broke, no girlfriend obviously, no real prospects. I’m just kind of lazily applying for jobs every morning and just sitting around and watching Jerry Springer in the afternoon. That’s pretty much my day.
And then one day I have an idea. I’m like, “I should start something.” I don’t know where this came from. I’m like, “I should start a search engine for nutrition questions. When people ask how much vitamin C is in a carrot, it’ll just give them the answers.” This is basically what an LLM would do way before and someone that’s not remotely qualified to come up with something like this.
So I was like, “How do I start a business?” It’d never crossed my mind before. I literally thought starting a business was like in The Office when Michael Scott gives this lecture and he’s like, “First, you need a building.” So I’m thinking this is this huge undertaking I’m about to do. So I go to the bookstore to find a book to help me get started. And I basically saw The 4-Hour Workweek, grabbed it, and it just sort of spoke to me.
Tim Ferriss: What happened after that?
Brian Dean: It blew my mind. I read the book. I’m like, “Well, I could start a business.” It was just a crazy, mind-blowing concept that someone has no experience was totally broke, could start something, not necessarily be a smash hit, but you could start something. So basically I just followed the book exactly as it was written. I mean, I literally had notes in the margins. You had those little Q&As at the end or little steps at the end. I would make sure I wouldn’t go past that page until I did everything. I was like, “I’m not going to…”
Tim Ferriss: My dream reader.
Brian Dean: I was like, “I’m not going to go to the next page until I’m good and ready.” So basically I followed the plan and then created an ebook about nutrition, how to help your back pain with nutrition.
Tim Ferriss: And we have so much to cover. I know I’m cheating a little bit, but I think it’s fair to say that your first attempt did not turn into the mega hit that you might’ve hoped.
Turns out it’s hard to get traffic, right? Or it can be hard to get traffic. And if you don’t have a budget for paid ads, well, I guess necessity is the mother of invention or at least learning. And just I want to add a sidebar here, which is this is so fucking common. It is incredibly common that you basically have your sort of first love/relationship. Seldom works out, right?
Brian Dean: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: But you learn a lot and that leads to something else. But tell us about what you learned and how you adapted to that first experience.
Brian Dean: I spent all this time on creating a product that I thought was helpful, I thought was good. And then it was like, “Now what? How do you get people to actually see this thing?” And like you said, Tim, there’s paid ads, which wasn’t really something that I could do considering I was broke in my dad’s basement, having Dinty Moore beef stew for dinner every night, or so called free traffic, which I was like, “What? Free traffic? How does that work?” So of course I went all in on that and eventually sort of stumbled on this thing called “Search Engine Optimization,” which was like, you can rank in Google and people who are searching for what you sell, you can get in front of them. And I was like, “Oh, I’ve used Google.” And I never really understood that there was this whole world behind the scenes, figuring out how it works, trying to game the algorithm and stuff. And that sent me down the path of learning this thing called SEO.
Tim Ferriss: Also, I would say, just to paint a picture for folks, because I remember looking at this when I started my first, let’s call it real business, also out of necessity when everybody at the startup I joined got fired in 2000, 2001, not a great time for most dot com companies. So I was working off of my soon to expire COBRA healthcare in California and eating also microwave dinners. Or I remember I had a couple of favorites at Jack in the Box, which was in the parking lot of a Safeway. So that was my nutritional intake. Very similar, it sounds like, right? But slowly figuring out the mechanics behind these things that we use every day, right? And you took it certainly a lot further than I ever did. And it’s the Wild West, right? I mean, SEO can be, especially those days, kind of the Wild West.
So you built up a huge kind of portfolio of domains, it seems like, something like close to 200 or over 200. What was the game plan? When you started getting into SEO and then flashing forward, what was the sort of plan in terms of revenue generation?
Brian Dean: The idea was you’d have these one-page websites rank and then you’d have AdSense display ads on each of those. And back then, it was sort of a loophole that if you had a domain that matched the keyword exactly, then it was a massive advantage in the search results. So I would have lorealshampoo.org and I would just write a thousand words about why L’Oreal shampoo is great, which I obviously don’t really know a lot about.
Tim Ferriss: For those who can’t see the video, we are both completely bald. Yeah.
Brian Dean: And then putting AdSense ads on the pages times 200, and the idea is that you scale up enough and take a few steps later, you’ve got a private island or something.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, right.
Brian Dean: That was the plan.
Tim Ferriss: Right. ABC dot dot dot M and then private island. So let’s backstep for a second because we can talk about the business and the business experiments and adventures, which we will, and misadventures, a.k.a. Panda Death, which we’ll probably get to. But if we’re looking back to your reading of the book, there are a couple of different directions as a choose your own adventure map that you can take. And part of that oftentimes is figuring out your target monthly income, doing exercises like Dreamlining, which people can find for free to figure out exactly what it is that you are building as a lifestyle and the things you want to do, et cetera. And you come up with this very precise, not necessarily accurate, but it’s a starting point number, right? Where were you when you’re going through all of this? Because you can build a business for the sake of building a business and generating all this cash, but then the question is, what do you do with that?
How does it inform your life? Were you thinking about that stuff at the time or was it just get out of the basement, and eat something besides the Dinty Moore stew?
Brian Dean: Have a proper meal. Yeah, exactly. Have a meal that’s not out of a can. So I just wrote that in the whole dreamlining section that was basically what I wrote. It changed. It morphed a little bit. At first it was that. And then during this building the 200 websites at some point, I was in Asia backpacking and then my whole world changed to 3k a month. I was like, “If you can get 3k a month in Thailand, you can live like a king.” So my whole goal just became to get 3k a month passive income. That was my entire focus. So it sort of shifted once I had sort of a lifestyle that I tried and liked, I was like, “Oh, I could live like a backpacker. I can do this.” So then it just became 3k a month for a long time. For, like, a year.
Tim Ferriss: For a year. Did you hit the 3k a month before the Google slap, which may be one and the same as the Panda update, I’m not sure. Maybe those are two separate things entirely, but where were you before things got pretty strongly corrected?
Brian Dean: Yeah, it was maybe a 3k a month around there for like a couple months. Had a good ride and then it kind of got slapped. Didn’t last long.
The first was a Panda update, as you mentioned, which was a very content-focused update. That was where —
Tim Ferriss: By Google.
Brian Dean: By Google. It was an update that basically was, “If your content is thin or repetitive or not helpful, we’re going to wipe you out.” And it was like one day they push a button and thousands of websites get completely obliterated, including mine.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a rough — where were you when this happened? Do you remember when you got the news?
Brian Dean: That first one… I got slapped twice. The first time didn’t scare me straight enough. So I went back to the — I was like, “Oh, I’ll just do a different type of black hat SEO and I’ll get away with it.” It didn’t work. So that one, I think I was in Thailand when it happened.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s then go to, you get scared straight as you put it, and you build your first, as I think you’ve put it, real site, right? Which isn’t L’Orealshampoo.org. It’s something else. When you decided to hop to the white hat side of things, what did you end up doing and why?
Brian Dean: So there was that first update and then a second update where I was in Spain and Granada and I went to my hostel, I checked the laptop and it was like, again, it was like a repeat of the Thailand experience. Everything dropped. This was a different set of websites that got knocked out. And I was like, “You know what? This is crazy. Why am I doing this? This is an insane way to live.” So then I was like, “I’m going to build this one real website.” And I was kind of inspired because there were these forums at the time with these marketing people and they were basically like, “Spam, spam, spam.” And there were a couple voices in there of people who were like, “Guys, build a real business. What are you guys doing? Build something real that’s durable, that’s not 100 percent reliant on Google.” And I kind of ignored those people.
And then once I got hit that second time, I was like, “Okay, it’s time to build something real.” So I basically built a sort of real site in the personal finance space, wrote real blog content, didn’t do any shady spammy stuff and tried to keep it on the up and up.
Tim Ferriss: And what is the bridge or what happens between that and then building Backlinko? How do you end up segueing? I mean, I guess this could be a very fast montage in the sort of fictionalized movie of your life, but what happened to go from there to Backlinko, which ultimately you ended up getting acquired? What transpired between those two?
Brian Dean: So once a site started to get a little bit of traction, I was like, “Wow, this is a whole world I didn’t know about. Real marketing, white hat SEO.” And it was fun. It was working and it was more enjoyable because I didn’t have to look over my shoulder that I was going to get hit with an update next week. And it was cool because I’m reaching out to other websites and they’re like, “Oh, this is really helpful,” And they’re linking to me. I’m not paying for links. They’re just naturally doing it. And I’m like, “How do I learn more about this?” This whole world opened up. I’m like, “How do I get better at this?” And all the advice that I read on all these white hat SEO blogs were basically vague advice, create great content, build relationships with other people, market your site in a — yeah.
What do you do with that?
Tim Ferriss: Lead with integrity. You’re like, “Okay, what’s my next step?” Very unclear.
Brian Dean: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: All right.
Brian Dean: It was as vague as you could imagine.
Tim Ferriss: Then Backlinko is a case of sort of creating the thing that you couldn’t find?
Brian Dean: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Is that a fair way to put it?
Brian Dean: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: One thing that I saw here in the prep notes, which I was like, “Oh, that’s so smart,” and I wanted to highlight it is — there are a number of things, obviously, that you ended up doing really well that seemed to have set the stage for a lot of things that came. One of them was digging through Google Patents and engineer statements. And I’ll come back and expand on why this is smart, but it’ll probably become very obvious once you explain why you did it. Why were you digging through Google Patents and then engineer statements, are those part of the patents or are those something separate?
Brian Dean: Separate.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So could you explain what you were doing?
Brian Dean: When I launched Backlinko, I was like, “There must be other people like me who are getting into this whole world of white hat SEO. They want to learn more about it and they’re disappointed about what’s out there.” And it turns out there was. I just didn’t know how to reach them at first. So I basically followed the same advice that I read for starting a blog, which was, you need to publish every week or every other day, and that’s how you build an audience. You just publish and pray that people come. So that’s what I did.
Tim Ferriss: People still give that advice. Publish and pray. Yeah, exactly.
Brian Dean: So yeah, I did that and banged my head against the wall. And I was like, “You know what?” I came up with an actually creative idea for a post that would be really special instead of just the stuff I was putting out every week, which was good. It was definitely actually decent to give myself some credit, but it wasn’t anything that’s going to grab you by the shirt and be like, “I need to read this.” It was just slightly above average and what was out there. I was really going on that consistency play. “If I do this consistently over time, there’ll be like a secret society that will just send me traffic as a reward for being so consistent.” I didn’t really have the whole thing planned out, to be honest. I just knew consistency equaled traffic at some point, and it honestly didn’t for me.
So I had this idea for a post, which was Google recently had said that there’s 200 ranking factors in the algorithm. So I was like, “Let’s just try to find them.” Obviously a lot of it’s going to be conjecture and guessing and speculation, but let’s just do a list of 200 instead of the list of 10 or 20 that I’d seen out there. And then I got to like 55 and I’m like, “Man, you have to really dig to find some of these.” And that’s when I went through the Google Patents and also people would interview Google engineers or they would give statements about, they’d be at a conference and they would give a talk and one of the slides would mention a ranking factor that they’re considering. So it took a lot of digging. It took like 20 to 25 hours to complete. this single post.
And that’s really why I was digging into all this stuff.
Tim Ferriss: And I just want to add an addendum to that, which is people who have not heard of this approach, for some folks they’ll be like, “Oh, I or someone else has done that.” But it is incredible what you can learn through reviewing patents and looking at very niche events, industry events for videos and transcripts of presentations. This was incredibly valuable when I was getting started as well, mostly looking at kind of closed door or very small event presentations and things like that. All right. So I guess that was sort of a massive post that you really invested in. I mean, 25 hours is not trivial, right? I mean, that’s a lot more presumably than you’re putting into the kind of publish and pray consistent approach to just sliding a plate with content salad out the door and hoping that leprechaun’s going to show up and trade for a pot of gold, right?
So what was the response to that post?
Brian Dean: Massive traffic and controversy, kind of everything you want in a piece of content, to be honest. I mean, you had the traffic, you had people, the wow factor, and then you had the controversy, which is like, “Those aren’t Google’s 200 ranking factors, no one knows those.” And then people saying, “Well, this is at least trying to come up with something,” and then people saying, “Well, they shouldn’t do it.” So there’s a perfect little debate around it that was pretty lightweight. It’s not anything super controversial, but just enough to get people’s attention. So yeah, brought in, I mean, I would say I was probably getting 150 visitors a month, that probably brought in a couple thousand when I first put it out. It’s brought in a million since then.
Tim Ferriss: What did you then follow that up with in terms of lessons learned, coming up with new rules for yourself in terms of how you were going to approach the business? How did that inform things going forward once you saw that response?
Brian Dean: I just threw out the whole playbook I was doing. I was using this consistency thing. I would even have on Fridays, I would have like a Q&A, I would just put five questions and answer them. And of course I wasn’t getting any questions, so I just completely made them up and then answer my own questions, just to have something to put out there. And I’m reading it. I’m like, “Why would anyone want to read this?” So then I just scrapped the whole thing and was like, “I’m just going to put out something once a month and it’s going to be the best thing on that topic that’s ever been written by 10x.” And that was sort of how I totally changed my content focus to quality over quantity.
Tim Ferriss: So you had a fun YouTube video on ultimately the acquisition of Backlinko. And I guess the original email you got was like, “Hey, we’d love to connect to collaborate.” And you’re like, “Well, that smells like every bullshit spam email I’ve ever received.” So you just ignored it, right?
Brian Dean: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: As I remember. And we won’t spend a ton of time on this, but what is Semrush? This is the acquirer ultimately, but for people who don’t know, what is Semrush?
Brian Dean: They’re essentially a marketing platform that help you get better results from SEO, pay-per-click, and also now AI search.
Tim Ferriss: And are they private, publicly traded? They’re publicly traded, right? Yeah. It looks like on the New York Stock Exchange.
Brian Dean: They got acquired by Adobe last year, so they will be part of Adobe, I think, sometime this year when everything goes through.
Tim Ferriss: Got it. And they acquired you ultimately while they were public, right?
Brian Dean: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, there’s so many good aspects to this, but do you want to tell the story about flying to Boston? I mean, eventually this contact, I can’t remember his name, but since you ignored the first email he wrote and they basically said, “Hey, look, we might be interested in buying your company. Let me be direct.” And you’re like, “Okay, I’ll reply to that one.” But can you tell the story of flying to Boston? I think it’s pretty funny. I also liked in your video when you said, “Up to that point, I hadn’t sold anything, except for maybe a used car.” I think you said something like that. I was like, “That’s a pretty good line.” Okay. So the first Boston trip, what happens there or what’s in your mind?
Brian Dean: In my mind, I’m like, “We’re going to close this thing. Let’s go to Boston.” It was really a meet and greet where the executive team just wanted to meet me and chat about, see how it could help them, how Backlinko could fit into their platform and their business. And so I spend the day with them in the office and then afterwards we all go out to drinks to celebrate the deal, and I’m shitting myself. I’m like, “What? We’re celebrating the deal now. I never saw a contract or an agreement or anything.” I’m like, “We’re going to sign it tonight.”
So we go out and we’re at Legal Sea Foods just taking shots, “Yeah, this is great, Brian. This is going to be the best thing ever.” And I’m thinking, “Where’s the contract? When are we going to sign?” I really thought right there they’re going to buy this company —
Tim Ferriss: “Did I miss something? Did I black out? What happened?”
Brian Dean: Exactly. I’m like, “Did I agree? Is a verbal agreement enough for a deal like this?” So yeah, that was definitely — I was way off on that. It took two more months of due diligence after that meeting for the deal to actually close.
Tim Ferriss: You said two months?
Brian Dean: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Which, for people who have never gone through it, it can be very challenging if you don’t have your ducks in a row, which almost nobody does unless they’ve kind of been through this before or are venture backed and they have people overseeing all this stuff. Two months is pretty good, right? It’s painful, but man, due diligence can go on forever. For people who are starting a company, maybe they never intend to sell it, but hey, you had not gone into Backlinko thinking that you were going to sell it, right? But they want to preserve the optionality.
I remember coming across, and I haven’t read it in a long time, but a book by John Warrillow called Built to Sell, which talks a bit about this. And I thought it was actually very good, a very kind of, I don’t want to say basic, but pretty sort of foundational primer for some of this stuff. But what advice would you give to folks? I mean, one comes to mind, which I have also had to learn the hard way about independent contractors, but what are some of the tenets or sort of commandments of like, “Hey, just in case one day you want to sell this thing, here are a couple of things that I learned.”? Anything come to mind?
Brian Dean: Independent contractors, for sure. Maybe you can expand on that, Tim, because you have experience with that.
Tim Ferriss: Look, if you ever want to sell something, the acquiring party is going to want to know with some assurance, and they’ll have reps and warranties in the agreement that basically say, “Hey, if you miss something or you’re not telling us the truth, there’s going to be a world of trouble and we’ll probably be able to back out of the deal and take all the money back.” But they want to know that everything they’re buying is free and clear, right? So if you’ve had, as I have and as you have in some cases, well, I’ll just speak personally, always maintained a very small full-time team, but have used dozens and probably hundreds, certainly hundreds of contractors over the span of decades. And if you’re building something and they want to see, they meaning the acquiring company, every single contract to make sure that someone isn’t going to come out of the woodwork and say, “Hey, I own a part of that. Hey, I contributed to this and therefore I am entitled to a piece of equity. Yada, yada, yada, yada.” Which if the deal’s big enough, come out of the woodwork no matter what. You see this with a lot of tech IPOs and stuff. As soon as they file the S1 getting ready to IPO, then some rando comes out of the woodwork and says, “I’m the seventh co-founder.” And you’re like, “What? No one’s ever heard of this person.” And they just want nuisance money to go away.
So that’s the relatively short and sweet on independent contractors. This is going to be true also with pretty much any agreement or contract, right? You just want to document, document, document, make everything formal. No verbal, no handshake. If you want to preserve the option to cleanly and hopefully relatively quickly sell a company later. Anything else that you would add to that, Brian?
Brian Dean: If you don’t have your finances in order, like you don’t get P&Ls, that is something they obviously will care a lot about. And I was good. Luckily I had a good accountant that did that stuff, so that wasn’t a big deal. The number one time sink for me was the independent contractors. I mean, I’m like you, I hired so many people that did one, like created a blog post image or something or like a social media image once for like 10 bucks and I had to go try to find them. Basically I have to hire, almost like a private investigator to find these people because you don’t even barely remember them. And even people that ghosted me. I had people that I paid a deposit for work and they never even replied. They totally, they ghosted me.
And I still had to reach out to those people. Of course, they’re not going to reply, but you have to show that you tried. And then obviously since this experience, every contractor that gets hired signs an ironclad agreement that says, “You don’t own any of this work. Once you’re paid, it’s a property of blah, blah, blah.” And yeah, that made things a lot easier the second time, but I had no idea this independent contractor thing was so important to the acquirer, but absolutely is.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And so we won’t spend a ton of time on sort of what followed, but there was one funny anecdote about the public announcement. Could you just explain that given the time zone differences? I thought that one was great.
Brian Dean: Time zone differences and I’m like early to bed kind of person. So they told me that, “Hey, Brian, we’re going to announce this tomorrow and we’re going to announce it at 5: 00 p.m. Eastern.” And I’m like, “Oh man, I don’t know. Is it possible to send it earlier? That’s like 10: 00 p.m. here. I’m already kind of getting ready for bed.” Basically say, “I’m in my PJs at that point. Is it possible to push this earlier?” And they said, “No, because it’s a public company due to SEC rules, we have to make these announcements after the market’s closed.” Yeah, I was so embarrassed. I was like, “Oh yeah, right. I forgot the league I’m playing in here.”
Tim Ferriss: So you sell the company, presumably there’s some type of earnout or period of time for which you’re required to still work on Backlinko, right? Who knows what the exact terms are of that, but for people who’ve never gone through it, right, you can have a vesting period, you can have an earnout where you get X percentage of the total purchase price based on hitting or exceeding X, Y, and Z metrics or whatever, right? So there’s a period of time like that. Post acquisition, let’s just say, because I know that was very stressful and you started grinding your teeth and that kind of evaporated as soon as the deal was done. Let’s just flash forward two or three months after the acquisition. What does your life look like? What does a week look like for you?
Brian Dean: It’s honestly not that different because I had another startup that I was already working on. So I was basically running on a treadmill and then I just hopped onto another treadmill that was right next to it and just kept going. So there wasn’t a whole lot of downtime to really reflect or analyze. That one day that the announcement was made, especially the next day, because it was late here. So the next day was really when I was sending messages to people and stuff and getting congratulations and whatnot. But after that day, I was pretty much back working on the next thing, like, didn’t reflect too much on it. So my life was more or less the same one day after. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Looking back, are you basically like, “Hey, I’m a border collie. I need to work or I’m going to go crazy. So I’m glad I did that.” Do you wish you had approached it differently?
Brian Dean: I kind of wish I approached it differently. Yeah. And looking back, I wish I took some time off. It was just tricky because you know how it is. When you have a startup, it’s kind of a strange situation. I had a new company that was growing. I had this old company that I sold and it felt weird to say to the new team like, “Hey guys, I need to reflect about how great my life is. I need to chill out. You guys still work though. You work your assess off. I’m going to sit on the beach for a while.” So it felt a little weird. I felt like I kind of had to go back into the trenches with them right away, almost even more so to prove like, look, I’m not done. I’m not going to rest in my laurels. We’re still in it to win it.
Tim Ferriss: Financially at that point, were you focused on the new company, Exploding Topics, because you wanted to get to that sort of big pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? What was the driver behind that? I don’t know to what extent you were sort of financially stable, had savings. We don’t have to get into all the nitty-gritty if you don’t want to, but I’m just curious, what was driving the involvement in the new company for you?
Brian Dean: It wasn’t really a hundred percent financial. When I sold Backlinko, before then I was probably okay for most of my life. Then when I sold Backlinko, it was like, okay, I’m probably good forever. And then I wouldn’t have probably started something else right away if I hadn’t already. So, towards the end of Backlinko’s, when I was involved with it before I sold, I was honestly getting a little bit bored with it. I was bored talking about the same things, writing about the same things, doing the whole course launch thing, and I kind of wanted something new. And I saw an opportunity where there were more trends than ever, but I couldn’t find a good tool for curating them that was like, here are all the trends in this space right now. There was Google Trends, which is fantastic if you know about a topic and you want to see how it’s trending, but what about a trend you’ve never even heard of?
And that’s sort of where I realized the opportunity was. So it wasn’t really purely financial. It was more like, this is kind of exciting and new. I think it’s a good opportunity as well, and it’ll give me something to do between these sessions with Backlinko, which was, it was also boring because it was so optimized. I work three hours a week. It was like 4-Hour Workweek, honestly, at the end. It was getting so much traffic on autopilot. The launches were really easy to do. Even courses were easier to create at the end because I just had it all down to a science. Even if it was a totally different topic, I knew exactly how to create a course. So the challenge wasn’t really there. And this was like, okay, new challenge, new space. And that’s basically, it wasn’t so much financial, it was more just to freshen things up and to try something new.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. And you’d also already committed to other people, right, with this new startup. So it makes a lot of sense. When you had, with Backlinko, so much on autopilot, the three hours per week, right, what were you doing with the rest of that time? Because the most, and we don’t have to dig into the book too much here, but if I had to point to one chapter that people pay no attention to, because typically they’re like, “Oh yeah, that’d be a nice problem to have,” and they forget about it, is the “Filling the Void” chapter.
Brian Dean: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: “Filling the Void” chapter, 4-Hour Workweek is really important so you don’t go into psychological free fall, among other reasons. But what were you doing with the rest of your time if Backlinko at one point, right, when the flywheel was really spinning, was only occupying or requiring three hours a week?
Brian Dean: Yeah, I was bored, honestly. I wasn’t filling it well. I wasn’t filling the void. I was basically going to the gym, reading books, playing video games, nothing, and I think that was part of this and we, this boredom was I needed to reread that chapter essentially and fill this with something meaningful. And I think that’s why I was seeking another startup project because I’m like —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, 100 percent. Yeah.
Brian Dean: It was like, I need to work. I need to build something. I’m not building this. I’m just maintaining it. And so that’s really what got me into Exploding Topics. So honestly, the filling the void chapter, the whole filling the void concept, I really only took seriously recently, but before then I basically filled it with sort of nonsense to be honest, and then started another startup.
Tim Ferriss: What were some of the things you did differently with Exploding Topics after all of the experience with Backlinko? And maybe things that in retrospect you’re like, “Wow, that was a really smart decision and change.” And maybe somewhere you’re like, “Hmm, okay, lesson learned. Right. Would probably, if I were starting from scratch with Exploding Topics, I would’ve done it differently.” Anything come to mind in terms of good and quote, unquote bad decisions?
Brian Dean: Yeah, we can start with the bad one, which was how to monetize this site. I had this very strange idea that we’re going to create this awesome free resource that anyone can visit and just see trends right away. They can filter, they can go by category and you think, “Oh, how are you going to monetize that?” Logically, you think SaaS, an upgraded version of what they’re seeing for free. And for some reason, I was like, “A paid newsletter. Let’s create a paid newsletter.” So we created this paid newsletter that was, granted, helpful in objective terms, but not necessarily for that person who wants to see trends in their particular niche. So we would send them a trend on some sort of face cream and then on a car and then a battery and then a tech startup and they would be like, “What is this?” People were like, “I want just trends about e-commerce. I just want trends about this one thing. Why are you sending me all this stuff?”
And then people would also sign up thinking it’s SaaS, even though we said everywhere, like paid newsletter, paid newsletter, and they’d be like, “I thought this was SaaS. I thought it was SaaS.” That was our number one complaint. And yeah, sometimes you just need to get that beaten over your head because I was like, “Oh, SaaS is so complicated.” I mean, my co-founder was a coder, but I’m still like, “Oh, we’re going to have to hire developers and I don’t know anything about this whole world. UI…”
Tim Ferriss: And for people who may be listening who don’t recognize the term, a lot of people will, but Software as a Service, right, think about Dropbox, maybe not the best example, but I mean, Dropbox is a great example, but with a lot of these products, there’s a freemium version. There’s a version that you get to use for free. And then if you want a bunch of additional storage or features or access, whatever it might be, then you pay 9.99 a month or whatever. And there’s the basic, intermediate, advanced version, enterprise, et cetera, that’s SaaS. Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to define that.
Brian Dean: Yep. Yeah. But if you had told me that before we started, I would’ve been like, “Oh, logically, then we should have the premium advanced enterprise version in the backend instead of the paid newsletter idea.” So that didn’t really go well until we ultimately shifted to what we should have been in the first place. So that was sort of the bad decision. The good decision was definitely investing in this data, publishing data early on. So with Backlinko, this is something I only discovered after five years of running the site. And then with Exploding Topics, I was like, “Day one, we’re going to publish tons of data. We’re going to be the source.” That’s another strategy, like be the source of information on technology, software, e-commerce trends, anything trend related, we’re going to be the source. We’re going to have the latest data, we’re going to have the best visuals, and we’re just going to be the source for that information. As opposed to writing how-to content, we’re really focused on data-driven content.
Tim Ferriss: Did it work right out of the gate or was there a formula that you realized worked after you had a particular well-received publication of data?
Brian Dean: Yeah, it did. It took a while to get going. A lot of mistakes, a lot of posts that weren’t great, or the topic wasn’t a good choice. What really helped us, what was sort of the smash hit were these very specific stats that people look for. So what I discovered through this process was this stats page idea is nothing new. People write the biggest stats around the fitness industry or LinkedIn stats or whatever, and those are fine, but usually journalists aren’t looking for LinkedIn stats or TikTok stats. Some of them are, and that’s fine, but most of them look into something very specific like how many users does TikTok have or how many people use LinkedIn every day, like daily active users, or how many posts are on LinkedIn every day. It’s super specific. So if you’re able to find a credible stat around that, then you can crush it.
Even if you’re not the one that developed it. A lot of times these are also buried in PDFs or white papers or again, interviews that you have to pull out. One of our biggest smash hits in this area was how many users that ChatGPT have? Granted, we publish this early. That’s another thing that can help a lot. If you publish one of the first or the first specific stats page, then you get into this virtuous cycle where you’re very visible when someone’s searching for that topic, then they link to you, they mention you, makes you more visible, and then you just are in this massive flywheel. So one of our best pieces was how many users does ChatGPT have? And every once in a while, Sam Altman will give a talk and he’ll mention it, or when they raise a round, they’ll mention it. And all we did was just document their user growth based on these statements that they made.
The initial post probably costs, hiring a freelancer like 200 bucks, and then to update it every couple months is another 50, and it’s been referenced like 3,000 times. It’s absolutely insane. The effort to reward ratio is nuts on that. And of course it’s just like, part of it is some pieces do better than others, but we’ve noticed that that formula tends to work well. If you can find a trending specific stat that bloggers or journalists are looking for when they write about that topic, they’re very likely to reference you.
Tim Ferriss: So I read, I’ll give credit here. This is on growthmanifesto.com, found this doing research. You were interviewed. Towards the end of that interview by Alex, he asked you what the best piece of business advice was that you’ve ever received. Now this may have changed and there’s probably more, but it was Noah Kagan advising you to double down on what works. Could you expand on that? And then I’m wondering if there are any other sort of mantras or short pieces of advice that you would also put on the Mount Rushmore of your best advice that you’ve received.
Brian Dean: It sounds so simple, but it’s one of those pieces of advice that’s simple but hard to follow because when you’re running a business, there’s like a million things to worry about, to focus on. There’s new opportunities, new challenges, other competitors, you have an employee that’s sick. It’s hard to really focus on that little thing that works. But I think this is especially important when you’re first starting out, because when you’re first starting out, nothing’s working almost by definition. You’re starting something new. At least in my experience, when I’m starting something new, I don’t know, nothing’s working. And then when something does, most people are like, “Okay, that works. Now let’s go with something else.” But instead, you should just take that niche. It’s almost like a little niche when you’re rock climbing. Just take that niche and just double down, triple down, quadruple. It should really be like 10X down on what works, but it’s so rare that you find something that works. And honestly, in most businesses, if you can find one thing that works and scale it up, that can get you pretty far.
Tim Ferriss: Aside from The 4-Hour Workweek, which was, I suppose, a catalyst of sorts in the beginning, have there been any other books that stand out or resources when someone comes to you and they’re like, “I’m thinking about starting a business. I’d like to start a business” — are there any books or resources that you tend to recommend frequently?
Brian Dean: Yes. For people that are just like, “I want to start a business,” and they’re like, “I don’t know what to do, how to do it,” they’re totally green, then Ready, Fire, Aim is usually the book that I recommend. Are you familiar with that one?
Tim Ferriss: I’ve heard of it.
Brian Dean: Michael Masterson.
Tim Ferriss: What leads you to recommend this book?
Brian Dean: It gets people into the action mindset, leaning towards action instead of analysis. I was guilty of this when I first started, like doing a lot of spreadsheets and analysis and business cards, registering your company, all those things that you can do later that don’t really matter. This gets you going on the most important things. And then later, you can always change course. If you can start — but the key is really starting, starting, starting, or like Paul Graham says, “Action produces information.” So this book basically will hopefully give people a kick in the butt to get started instead of analyzing and then being like, “Okay, now I’m ready.” Just be like, “Start today and then change as you go.”
I feel like that book is almost a litmus test. If you read that book and at the end you don’t do anything, then you’re probably not ready.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah, right?
Brian Dean: The book, the whole point is to get started and it gives you advice on how to know you’ve got traction and what to do once you get traction. So I feel like if you just read the book and you’re like, “Okay, what’s the next book to read?” It’s probably not the best approach. So that book is hopefully the kick in the butt that someone needs.
Tim Ferriss: This might be a tough question to answer, but how would you define the startup costs for Backlinko and Exploding Topics? In the first three months of those two companies existing, how much money was invested in each of those? How much money was required/invested?
Brian Dean: Yeah, I would say for Backlinko’s case, a few hundred bucks at the most. It was domain, WordPress. I probably hired someone to create a basic blog design theme for WordPress. Don’t remember how much, but if I spent a thousand, I would say that’s a lot. It was probably more like 500 bucks because it’s a blog. I mean, really, at the end of the day, there shouldn’t be a lot of costs involved with that.
Exploding Topics was a lot different because I acquired a prototype version from someone for 75,000 to start with and hire them and that was part of their pay package as well. So just on day one, I was in with that much. And then it was a redesign and a rebrand, adding more trends, hiring a couple of people to do some basic things. So that was probably more like 90,000, something in that range. But it was a unique situation because it wasn’t built from scratch. It was acquiring someone and then that was also paying for some of their time. It was like hiring them as part of the acquisition and that was paid out over the course of a few months. So I’m not exactly sure how much would be in that first couple months, but it was in that range.
Tim Ferriss: Why did you acquire something and what was the deal structure of the acquisition?
Brian Dean: So I acquired it because I was trying to build this exact thing myself and just stumbling and stubbing my toe over and over again. So I knew that there was an opportunity for this trend. I couldn’t even describe it very well. It was just basically, you want to go to a website and it just shows you trends in whatever niche you’re interested in. And that sounds so simple, but nothing existed like that, believe it or not.
And I hired someone to build something like that and it was horrible. It used Reddit. So we’d look at Subreddits and we would see how many times a word was mentioned or something, and we found nothing valuable. The signal-to-noise ratio was completely backwards. It was like for every 200 hits, one was decent. And then one day someone forwarded me this random site this guy started and I’m like, “No, this, this is exactly what I want,” but it was even better than I had imagined.
So then I reached out to him, and then the deal structure was essentially buy it 100 percent, straight up. Part of the acquisition costs will be — you’ll get paid that. And then on top of that, if it goes well over the first, I think, couple months, then we can set up some sort of part-time deal. And if that goes well, we can do full-time. And if it goes well, then —
Tim Ferriss: And he would be helping you throughout that entire period of time to help you determine if it’s going well or not?
Brian Dean: Exactly. And he was the coder and developer behind the original version. So he was best qualified to continue to work on it and improve it. Rather than hiring someone random to come in, it was his vision to start with. And then I said, basically, “If it goes well with full-time for, I think another month or so, we’ll basically be co-founders on this thing. The only rub will be if you want a lot of equity, then you’re going to have to put money in to fund this thing, or if you prefer that you get more cash, then you can just get a proper salary and then I’ll own most of the business.” So that’s basically what we did. He chose more money and then he owned part as equity in Exploding Topics.
Tim Ferriss: How did you end up in Europe?
Brian Dean: I mean, love, to be honest.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’ll do it.
Brian Dean: Yeah. I mean, my wife, we met in Thailand many years ago, and then we moved to Berlin, this is actually a funny story, partially from The 4-Hour Workweek because you mentioned Berlin as this cheap place.
So we’re in Thailand looking at Craigslist and looking at all these apartments that are like palaces for 300 euros a month. And we’re like, “Tim was right. This is amazing. You can live like a king in Berlin for nothing.” So we start replying to all this. So as we’re flying there, we send out all these emails.
Tim Ferriss: Uh-oh.
Brian Dean: And of course, they’re all scams. It’s like, “I’m lost. Oh, I’m out of town and I lost my passport, but if you leave this money in this Western Union.” I’m like, “No!”
Tim Ferriss: Oh, no.
Brian Dean: We show up to Berlin. We’re in a hostel for like eight euros a night in a 12-bed hostel while we realize that this whole thing, all these ads we’re applying to is a scam. No one uses Craigslist in Germany. So then we eventually found an apartment, lived in Germany, and she’s Portuguese. So we visited Portugal a number of times where we lived there and eventually it was like, “We could freeze our asses off or we could live in the sun, so let’s look at the sun.” So that’s basically how we ended up here.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The thing about The 4-Hour Workweek, the principles and frameworks all still work. Obviously some of the tech tools, since they were last updated in 2009, most of them are completely irrelevant. Probably not going to use GoToMyPC at this point to access your home computer remotely to do the work you need to do. But the pricing examples, obviously, have changed since it was first written in 2007, 2009.
So the principle, the idea of geoarbitrage and applying that to what you earn and how you pay contractors, employees, and then your sort of living expenses, it applies. But definitely for anybody who ends up picking it up, if you read that doing something in Buenos Aires costs A, B, and C, I would go online and fact-check that because it’s probably changed a little bit.
Looking at all the questions I could possibly ask, what are other sort of lessons learned or things that you would like to share with folks? Could be about your journey, could be about mistakes along the way, really anything at all. Because part of the value of these conversations is that we can get into a lot of specifics that are omitted in the magazine and profiles of people that end up reading like a list of highlights, right? And there’s obviously a survivorship bias to begin with if people appear on magazine covers. I know that’s an antiquated example to use, but what else would you like to share with folks or anything else you’d like to add just about the journey? Because it’s not over, it still goes.
Brian Dean: Yeah. One thing was that I wanted to share would be actually filling the void. I felt the void after selling Exploding Topics and how I was able to fill the void.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, please.
Brian Dean: So yeah, so set the stage for you. I sold Backlinko, and then about two years later sold Exploding Topics and was just going full-time. Not super crazy working all the time because I was fairly efficient, but still working all the time. And then went from that to basically stop, to zero. And a lot of people, I think they have this feeling of listlessness, no direction, maybe a bit of depression. For me, the symptom was stress. I think I was wired for stress, not only just in general, but also because of the sale process is stressful. And then just because the sale is done, your body and I think part of your reptilian brain doesn’t really recognize that, and it’s looking for threats and it’s looking for opportunities and it’s just not chilled out.
So I struggled for two months with stress. On my Oura Ring, my stress was like 2X baseline from after I sold. And you’d think it’d be the opposite. You’re like, “This is great. I sold two companies. I’m good for the rest of my life. What is there to be stressed about?” And then I realized what I needed was a hard reset.
That was the first step. We went on a trip, got away from the environment, got away from the day-to-day life, and then it somehow was able to hack my brain to be like, “Okay, you’re safe,” or, “things are chill now.” So when I went back home, the stress was gone. It was back to baseline or below baseline.
Then I got a little bit more —
Tim Ferriss: What was the trip? What was the extra —
Brian Dean: It was a trip to the south of Portugal, to The Algarve.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s a nice spot.
Brian Dean: So went to the beach.
Tim Ferriss: Nice oranges. Toasty.
Brian Dean: Yeah. Yeah, good oranges.
Tim Ferriss: Depending —
Brian Dean: Good oranges, yeah. Yeah, so spent some time down there and that was just the hard reset. I think it’s just to get you to get out of your environment.
But then when I got back, it was like stress is gone, but now feeling a little bit bored. That boredom was coming back. And I was tempted to start another startup. And I read this — someone sent me this, another friend who had a big acquisition. He sent me this thing by, I think it was Yale School of Management, and it was basically they interviewed founders that had just exited and they asked them their advice. “What was it like? What were the good ups and the downs?” And they basically said,” When you sell, there are psychological dangers that can occur. One is that you lose your sense of structure. The other is you lose your sense of purpose and you lose your sense of connection with your team. It all goes away. You have it and then one day you literally don’t.”
So different people react to it in different ways, but they warn that — a lot of case studies in this paper were saying people that started companies within a year of selling usually regretted it. So it was basically, “Take a year and don’t make any major commitments whatsoever.” So that’s what I did. It kept me from starting these. I had all these ideas, “I’m going to start a startup,” and then I’d be like, “no, wait a year, wait a year, wait a year.” And then by the time a year came around, I didn’t really want to because I was able to fill the void largely with tennis.
For me, tennis has been — one activity fills almost all of these boxes or checks all of the boxes and fills this void. It’s amazing, man, because if you think about it, if you want to have fun, you play video games or watch TV or something. If you want to socialize, you go out drinking. If you want to exercise, you go to the gym. If you want to get fresh air, you go for a walk. Tennis does all of these things in one activity. And if you want a community, you need to — whatever, I don’t know. I actually don’t even know how to do that outside of tennis. That was the thing that changed was I joined a tennis club and there’s a lot of other entrepreneurs there. A lot of Americans, man. It’s like the 51st state over there, to be honest. It’s getting a little crazy.
But anyway, so yeah, I filled the void with this community of people that are playing tennis, trying to improve, obsessed with the game, watching YouTube videos, reading about it, practicing all the time. And now I don’t have that same sense of wanting to start something new.
Tim Ferriss: I love that. And just a few observations since, as you would imagine, since the book came out in 2007, I’ve had the opportunity to vicariously watch a lot of people grapple with this. And having worked with so many startups and angel investing, granted in a venture-backed environment, but a lot of the challenges are the same, right?
Brian Dean: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: Whether you’re coming out of, for instance, I know guys in special operations, if you’re coming out of running a company, if you’re coming out of starting and running a company, when you lose, as you put it, and I really liked the categories you mentioned, when you lose the structure, when you lose, in a sense, the identity, when you lose the connection to team, you can end up with a severe degree of vertigo and a very precarious paradox of choice. And something like tennis — and some people listening might think like, “What? Tennis?”
Brian Dean: Probably.
Tim Ferriss: Even if it’s not the forever solution and the end-all, be-all, what it does, just like getting your recommended daily allowance of essential amino acids and vitamins and so on, you’re getting just enough that it provides you with the psycho-emotional health and space to think about things more clearly instead of being reactive. You know what I mean?
Brian Dean: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: You’re getting enough of all of those things and it provides you with a buffer and a certain equilibrium that allows you to think about things more clearly. And furthermore, this is not necessarily a problem you have to solve after everything vanishes. You can think about this in advance and experiment with things so that when you have a real phase shift, which in the context of The 4-Hour Workweek isn’t necessarily selling a company, it’s just like once you get it to a high degree of automation where it requires two, three hours a week, if that, to manage, which is more common than people might think, what you do with the rest of the time is a tremendously big question.
Brian Dean: Yep.
Tim Ferriss: So I love that. It makes me want to go back to The Algarve also. It can get a little toasty.
Brian Dean: Could be worse. Let’s put it that way.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. It’s a good country for tennis.
Brian, this has been super fun. Where would you like people to find you online, if anywhere?
Brian Dean: So let’s start with YouTube. So that would be the first place, and then LinkedIn. @BrianDean on YouTube and @BrianEDean on LinkedIn.
Tim Ferriss: Perfect.
Brian Dean: The other Brian must have grabbed that one. I don’t know.
Tim Ferriss: Brian, is there anything else you would like to say before we wind to a close?
Brian Dean: Oh, this has been great. That’s it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Thanks, man. I know it’s late, several time zones away, and I appreciate being flexible on the timing. So thanks so much for taking the time.
Everybody listening or watching, we will link to everything we discussed in the show notes as usual at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, as always, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in.
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The post The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies (#861) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
2026-04-16 19:36:34
Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show.
This is a shorter episode and by request. Many of you have requested more 4-Hour Workweek Case Studies—conversations with people who have read the book, applied it, and built lives and businesses I never could have imagined.
Brian Dean—today’s guest—has a story that starts exactly where a lot of great stories start: broke, directionless, and eating canned beef stew in his dad’s basement during the 2008 financial crisis.
He picked up a copy of The 4-Hour Workweek and took action. As is nearly always the case, his path wasn’t a straight line, but a series of winding turns, all fed by experiments. Today’s episode covers geoarbitrage, testing assumptions cheaply, building a muse, automating income, and—the chapter almost everyone skips—filling the void. His journey includes failures, two successful exits, and a hard-won answer to the question most people never think to ask: what do you actually do with your freedom once you have it?
But who is Brian?
Brian Dean is the founder of Backlinko and Exploding Topics, both acquired by Semrush, which itself was recently acquired by Adobe for $1.9 billion.
P.S. A special thank you to Elaine Pofeldt for getting Brian’s story on my radar. Elaine is the author of The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business and more recently, Tiny Business, Big Money.
Please enjoy!
This episode is brought to you by:
Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.
“So, I go to the bookstore to find a book to help me get started. And I basically saw The 4-Hour Workweek, grabbed it, and it just sort of spoke to me … It blew my mind. I read the book. I’m like, ‘Well, I could start a business.’ It was just a crazy, mind-blowing concept that someone who has no experience, was totally broke, could start something, not necessarily be a smash hit, but you could start something.”
— Brian Dean
“I feel like [Ready, Fire, Aim] is almost a litmus test. If you read that book and at the end you don’t do anything, then you’re probably not ready.”
— Brian Dean
“When you sell [your company], there are psychological dangers that can occur. One is that you lose your sense of structure. The other is you lose your sense of purpose and you lose your sense of connection with your team. It all goes away. You have it and then one day you literally don’t.”
— Brian Dean
“Tennis … fills almost all of these boxes or checks all of the boxes and fills this void. It’s amazing because, if you think about it, if you want to have fun, you play video games or watch TV or something. If you want to socialize, you go out drinking. If you want to exercise, you go to the gym. If you want to get fresh air, you go for a walk. Tennis does all of these things in one activity.”
— Brian Dean
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Want to hear an episode with the person who gave Brian his best piece of business advice? Listen to my conversation with serial entrepreneur and AppSumo founder Noah Kagan, in which we discussed launching a million-dollar business in a weekend, the 48-hour money challenge, finding your first customers before you build anything, the LOT (listen, options, transition) sales framework, the “coffee challenge” as a training wheel for asking, geoarbitrage from Austin to Barcelona, why most business ideas die of “idea constipation,” and much more.
The post 4-Hour Workweek Success Story Brian Dean — From Dad’s Basement to Selling Two Companies (#861) appeared first on The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.
