transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:09] Welcome to the Outside the Secret Service Podcast. On the show, you'll hear stories from the former, the fired, and the retired members of one of the world's premier law enforcement agencies, the United States Secret Service. I'm your host, retired special agent, Jim Holcomb. And if you're ready, grab your go bag and switch your radio to Charlie Coded as we go Outside the Secret Service. Jason Russell, former Special Agent of the United States Secret Service and current Founder and President of Secure Environment Consultants. He is Jason Russell. Good morning, Jason Russell.

Speaker 2:
[00:48] Hey, Tim, how are you?

Speaker 1:
[00:49] I'm well, how are you?

Speaker 2:
[00:51] I'm good.

Speaker 1:
[00:52] So, familiar with the podcast and the questions I sent you those? Okay, perfect. So, you, good sir, were an agent, we just, we called the former Special Agent of the United States Secret Service from 2002 to 2010. Is that right?

Speaker 2:
[01:05] Do I have those dates?

Speaker 1:
[01:07] And I knew you were in the greater Michigan area. Were you Rock City, Detroit, or Grand Rapids?

Speaker 2:
[01:13] Yeah, I was. I was kind of rare. I started in Detroit and did a few years there, and then I actually got a key number all the way across the state, two hours to Grand Rapids, paid for the move and everything, which I don't think they would do that nowadays. But that was like when Stu Allison and some of the guys had left Grand Rapids, and they had kind of an opening there, and they said, who wants to go to Grand Rapids? And I was from Lansing, so I actually grew up in Kalamazoo, which is on the west side of the state of Michigan. So I took the key number and got transferred all the way across the state of Michigan to Grand Rapids. The rest of my time there, and then I left in early 2010.

Speaker 1:
[01:59] Okay. Well, let's back up. So what are you doing before you join the Secret Service? Like what prompts that interest? What brings you to the hallowed halls of RTC?

Speaker 2:
[02:11] So I started off as a police officer. I had no interest in criminal justice whatsoever. I mean, in fact, I won in my high school. I was a terrible, terrible student. I mean, epically bad. I won most improved grade point average my senior year in high school, and my grade point average went up to a 2.8 grade. So yeah, not good. Very working class upbringing. Nobody in my family, the youngest, the sixth, nobody went to college. Yeah. So that really wasn't like a thing that even I considered, but all of my friends were going to college. So I couldn't get into any college. There was nobody that's going to take the 2.3. I showed them the most improved award, and they're like, yeah, you're still not.

Speaker 1:
[02:58] The electoral college wouldn't accept you.

Speaker 2:
[03:00] No college. So community college has to take you. It's kind of a little law. So I went to community college in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Speaker 1:
[03:10] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[03:11] Which is where I grew up and did my first couple of years there, and really still didn't know what I wanted to do. I was like, well, maybe a bit. I didn't have any clue. I took no initiative in school to really see what I was interested in. Yeah. And then I took the criminal justice class, and I remember it being the first time in my life that I was like, all right, I actually enjoyed reading this material. And I was like, all right, maybe this is it. I never had considered being a police officer. Like it was not even anything, not in my family. And a lot of times that's kind of where that comes from. So started taking more of those classes and actually was able to do pretty well. Finally, transferred to Western Michigan University, it's right there in Kalamazoo, and got a bachelor's degree in criminal justice. At that time, this is 1996, 1997, the way it worked is you could actually do the police academy as your senior year in college. It was a really cool program. So basically, you do all the police academy classes, but they spread it out over an entire year. You get the credits for it for your criminal justice degree. So I graduated and was one of the few people at the time that actually had a job. I had applied at a bunch of places and got hired with the city of Lansing. So that's Capital City of Michigan, never been there before, moved there. I remember having to learn the streets. There was no MapQuest or GPS at the time. We're talking 1997. So I had to go buy a map book. And I would drive the streets of Lansing to try to learn where I was going. And you had to actually know the streets in those days when you're a police officer. So I loved my time as a police officer, spent about five years in Lansing, started in June 1997. So when I was in Lansing, actually, for whatever reason, because I had enjoyed the criminal justice coursework, I was like, maybe I'll go back and get my master's degree, which at the time was pretty rare actually for law enforcement, particularly a police officer to have a master's degree. So I went back, I worked the night shift as a police officer in Lansing, and I would go to class during the day and often do my homework in my patrol car at night. So 2001, I finished up my master's degree, and I had actually started applying at agencies while I was in school. And actually, my initial interview for the Secret Service was scheduled for 9-11. It was supposed to be in the Grand Rapids field office on 9-11, and the rat at the time, I'm trying to think of his name, I'll come up with it. I actually called me and was like, God, obviously, we're not doing your interview today. So I started in the process there about that 9-11 time. And I also started in the process with the CIA. Actually at the same time.

Speaker 1:
[06:12] You're kidding.

Speaker 2:
[06:15] So I was in two processes with the CIA. I was actually in their Directorate of Operations Program process, which is the, you know, the Wann-Destin case officer. You know, people call them agents, but they're not. They're actually called officers. I remember I did my first interview for that, for the CIA over the phone. They called my, you know, at the time, there's no cell phones, right? So they called my house phone in Lansing. And we're very kind of, you know, cagey as to who they were, finally figured it out based on my application. I'd actually applied online for the CIA, believe it or not. That was like among the barrier.

Speaker 1:
[06:51] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[06:52] And they asked me a bunch of questions about, like, you know, tell me about three different places in the world and kind of what's going on there. I had, I was completely stupid to those things. So I said some of the most basic things like, well, Osama bin Laden hates us and, you know, stuff like that. And yeah, I was like, look, I think you'd be okay for this job, but you're not ready yet. I'm going to give you a month. You need to read. He told me to read The Economist. I remember it very clearly. He said, you need to read The Economist for the next month. I'm going to call you back in a month. We're going to try this again. So I did. I read everything I could get out of The Economist and try to learn as much as I could. And he sure enough called back in a month and did my second phone interview. And he's like, all right, we're going to put you through to the next round of this. And I was actually going through another process with the CIA at the same time for their Directorate of Security, which does polygraphs and investigation. They actually flew me out to DC. I interviewed in DC, and actually in Virginia somewhere in a very nondescript building, and went through some testing processes and interviewed. I actually got offered that job. They sent me a letter, offered me, I think I was going to start at a GS9 or something as probably to be a polygraph examiner. So I was going through that process. I had gone through, obviously started with the Secret Service process, had my initial interview. Paul Mueller was the name of the rack. And in Grand Rapids at the time, very nice guy, amazing hair. I remember very clearly. Maybe the best I've ever seen to this day. So started that process, was in the process with the CIA. CIA had offered me a job. I met with the other, the director of operations. I actually met him in a hotel, which I thought was very, like this is real CIA stuff. And did kind of an intro. You know, they actually had a group of us there. They had brought in from around Michigan. I remember very clearly, because in embassy suites, and I thought that was kind of ironic that we're meeting at embassy suites to talk about a CIA job. And this was just after 9-11. So obviously they were, you know, in the process of plusing out. And I remember I was in the Secret Service process, but I had just started. I was in, I'd offered this other job at the CIA. And it's the one time, I think this is a good kind of theme of my life, where I was like, I don't know if I'm qualified for this job. And I gave up. I dropped out voluntarily before I even actually found out whether I was. And it's probably one of the bigger regrets that I have. So you could have made, I don't know that I would have taken it. But it's one of the things that I think later in life spurred me to be like, you have to do things that make you uncomfortable and maybe you think you're not necessarily qualified to do, right? And you'll find out, quite frankly. So anyways, long story short, ended up taking the Secret Service position. And that was a time, Jim, when they were hiring a boatload of us, right? This is after your time, I'm sure when you probably had already gone through and were well working. But they had so many of us, a lot of us would go into offices and sit for a few months and do nothing basically while we waited to go to training. So that's what happened to me.

Speaker 1:
[10:10] So what was your hire date then in 02? Because I mean, I remember that ramp up time after 911. And it's funny to say, well, we can't do your interview today. Looking back, I'm sure they're like, we should have taken everybody on 911 that we could interview.

Speaker 2:
[10:24] I think it literally both scheduled like a month later, and the process moved at the normal pace, I think. Now I know they have these accelerated hiring process where you can basically get your job in a day or something, you get pretty close or whatever. I got hired in September of the exact date, September 02.

Speaker 1:
[10:43] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[10:43] So like 20 years ago. Yeah. So about a year from that initial, it was supposed to be that initial interview, ended up going to training just around Christmas time, and then finished in the summer of 2003, I guess it would have been. So and then back to the Detroit Field Office, and counterfeit squad, that's back in the counterfeit squad days, we're probably still there, but we're still looking at regular doing runouts on counterfeit notes. One of the things that I thought was most cool about, I actually, I don't know if it was the last one, but it was pretty close to one of the last of the big offset counterfeit operations. So we got a confidential informant who was working with a print shop owner. I mean, this is right a flat C scenario, right? But it was real. In fact, it was in the news. I still have the newspapers on the front page of the Detroit Free Press when the guy got busted. Basically, he was a print shop owner. His print shop was across the street from the police station. So we would do the surveillance from the police parking lot, this print shop owner. This print shop owner had teamed up with this guy. This guy owned a business called Extreme Kidnapping. So he would basically kidnap you. This is all a true story, Jim. It sounds very far-fetched. But the print shop owner and this guy, the way I can prove this is, this Extreme Kidnapping guy actually went on the Howard Stern Show and talked about how he had been arrested by the Secret Service. We actually used this Howard Stern interview in court to prosecute him. He was dumb enough to admit on the Howard Stern Show, how he had printed counterfeit money with this offset, this print shop owner. So, sorry, I didn't-

Speaker 1:
[12:32] So, an offset printer is, the way, think of old school printing press, things like that, counterfeit in our day is also really easily made on a Xerox printer, on a photocopier, a scanner now. But the offset stuff, you could use better paper, better ink quality, you could layer it. So, and especially this is back before all the enhanced security features on the Federal Reserve notes. So, there's a lot of effort expended in an offset enterprise. And it's a little more, dangerous isn't the right word, but it's harmful, definitely more harmful to society if, hey, someone gets an offset printing operation.

Speaker 2:
[13:14] Yeah, the quality is, was much better.

Speaker 1:
[13:16] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[13:17] And you had printed, you know, they do the plates. So, they do the old school where they're actually, you know, creating the plates and printing multiple times with different plates and different, you know, seals. And at the time, I think when we actually did the search warrant on the print shop, you know, they had racks and, you know, the bottom of racks, you think about a rack in a store where they have a little lip at the bottom and then you can flip it up and it's open. He had stacked all the money inside those racks. He probably had a couple hundred thousand dollars, almost all the way printed, and then a pallet of paper. And what was interesting is we were able to charge him with even the money that was on the pallet that had not been printed.

Speaker 1:
[13:58] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[13:59] Because it was clear that that's, you know, the paper was designed for that. So that was a pretty cool, unique thing that I did while I was in the counterfeit squad, that was the case that came in. We used to have this, you know, the person would call in to the front desk and ask, you know, I got a counterfeit and they would, you know, say, I remember very clearly part pick up. And I was always the fastest for whatever reason in the squad. I could always get that call the quickest, you know, and it was a guy said, hey, my friend is thinking about doing this thing. And I want to, it took about a year from the time this guy called me, just a phone call saying, I think this has happened and we started this case. But then, you know, did counterfeit work there? I actually got moved to Detective Intelligence pretty quickly after that. So, okay.

Speaker 1:
[14:44] I think I cut you off when you were about to talk about his prosecution and using the Howard Stern interview.

Speaker 2:
[14:49] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[14:50] Well, I don't want to step on that.

Speaker 2:
[14:51] No, it's good. So we, so when we raided him, you know, we kind of used the ruse, because I had the informant, we used the ruse to get both of the people at the print shop at the same time. Yeah, sure. So both of the partners there. I think the ruse that we were going to use was, I was a, I worked at a bank, and we were telling the guys that when, you know, they eventually do destroy money, right? They eventually take the money and they grind it up. You can buy it on those little, you know, whatever.

Speaker 1:
[15:21] The tubes, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[15:23] So we told them was when they do that, they obviously exchange the money out, the Federal Reserve exchanges the money out. So we told them that we were going to take the counterfeit, we were going to put real bills on the top and the bottom, and then the counterfeit was going to be mixed in. So it wasn't even going to be actually put into circulation. It was actually just going to be going to the Federal Reserve to be destroyed. And they bought off on that pretty easily. So we raided them, you know, took them both into custody. The guy, the print shop owner was actually part of like this little community's board of supervisors or whatever. So it was a pretty big kind of local news story. And then the other partner there, the extreme kidnapping guy eventually goes on Howard Stern. The reason he was on Howard Stern had nothing to do with the counterfeit thing. It was because this crazy extreme kidnapping business that he had, where you would pay him and he would come kidnap you. And apparently that was a real business. So and somehow as a part of this, he started talking about how he was in the middle of a case with the Secret Service and that we allege that he had created counterfeit money and kind of admitted to it, which is pretty stupid in the Howard Stern interview. So he was able to, we prosecuted him and the print shop guy. I think they got, they probably got a slap on the wrist, but I remember thinking when I was going through at RTC and they're showing you all the offset. You have to think about that time, 1990 or 2003. It was pretty rare. Everything was digital at that time. Even though the printing quality was pretty terrible, it was all digital, so it was pretty cool to get one of those and maybe one of the last ones that happened. So I was pretty excited about that.

Speaker 1:
[17:03] Yeah, that's awesome. This is back in the day where Howard Stern is on regular old radio. There's no satellite yet or anything like that. And it is a massive national radio show.

Speaker 2:
[17:17] So yeah, I listened to it. So I heard it and I didn't know this was happening. I heard him talking about, we got this extreme kidnapping guy on, and I'm like, this is no way this could be the guy. And it was, it was sure enough, the guy and he talked about the whole thing. He made a lot of stuff up. You know, we held a shotgun to his head.

Speaker 1:
[17:34] Oh, of course.

Speaker 2:
[17:35] Yeah. And not true. And, you know, we probably weren't even allowed to take shotguns on raids at that time. So, but yeah, it was a pretty cool case. That was a massive deal at that time. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[17:46] That's so great. That's so great. So, did you meet anybody in the Secret Service? Did you work a case with the Secret Service in Lansing? Or, like, what?

Speaker 2:
[17:56] You know, I had a professor when I was going through my master's program, and she was, you know, she was talking about police work. And when we would be in class, I would have these real examples of stuff, right? Everybody else was, were students. They had no life experience. They had actually never been on the street to experience anything that they were kind of learning about. I always found it weird. I never, you know, pushed, you know, like, this isn't actually what I see on the streets, right? But this professor was really good about, she wanted to come out and actually watch. So she had never done a ride-along. So she started doing kind of this series of ride-alongs with me where she would ride on the night shift and kind of watch like all the things that she had talked about, you know, like, as theory. And as we were doing this, she would talk to me about, you know, you really need to think about what you're going to do next. Like this is, you know, unless you're going to try to rise up and be, you know, a command person here, like this is going to end up, you're going to want to do something else. So she would talk about different agencies, you know, NCIS, Secret Service. And obviously, I think for this, for me, Secret Service was always just this kind of thing that I was like, yeah, I had a 2.3 GPA in high school. I'm pretty sure that it won't let me protect the president.

Speaker 1:
[19:18] I graduated high school barely literate.

Speaker 2:
[19:21] And I've got a great story about that because many years, I had a creative writing class in high school and the teacher was very arrogant. I don't, she didn't like me very much at all. And every day, I would, we'd have to write a different thing. And I would always write about, no matter what the topic was, I'd always write about my hound dog. I didn't even have a hound dog. But no matter what the thing was, I'd always integrate this somewhere in there about my hound dog. She hated me. So many years later, I'm at the Secret Service and I'm doing a career day. And I see her, right? And I'm Sue, you know? And I mean, she could not fathom how Jason Russell, you know, that was writing about his hound dog and was, you know, at a 1.5 GPA, made it to the Secret Service. I think it made her concerned a little bit about the safety of our leaders. But yeah, it was an interesting...

Speaker 1:
[20:14] Well, you know, and for the kids listening, hey, the race is long and high school is dumb. It matters, it's fine, you know? And again, man, I taught high school. I can attest firsthand how dumb it is. And it is not the defining arc of your life, you know? And so yeah, man, hey, shocker, people grow up in the way we want them to. And then what I appreciate about your story is, hey, school just wasn't interesting until you had a CJ class. And local high school here in the town I live in has a high school CJ class, which I think is pretty cool. Yeah. And frankly, it was kind of the same for me in college, mediocre student, and then I took my first history class. And I'm like, I'll do this for fun. You can give me the grade, don't give me a grade, whatever. I'm just going to read all your books. And I think it's high time we reassess this approach to a standard liberal arts education in high school. And it really should empower the student to, hey, sort of assess, hey, what do I like? What interests me? You know, but I don't think the same model of jamming three years of foreign language down a kid's throat is, you know, making a better society. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[21:38] And also I think, you know, I totally agree at the time that like the idea that you could learn about a trade or about something other than the major stuff was maybe barely starting a little bit. But I remember thinking that those kids were like almost, you know, the untouchables, like the auto shop kids and the, you know, that was looked at very differently. Totally. Now to see these schools that are built around trades and quite frankly, probably those kids are getting out and making far more money. The other thing I think though for me was, and I try to make sure that I talk to people about this is, you know, every expectation that's said of you doesn't necessarily mean that that's all you can do, right? For my family, you know, no disrespect to my mom and dad, they did certainly the best that they could, but there was no expectation, you know. I don't think my parents ever looked at a report card. I'm pretty sure I convinced them that they just didn't do that anymore. I'm like, you know, that was maybe in your day, but we don't.

Speaker 1:
[22:40] It's a waste of paper. They don't.

Speaker 2:
[22:42] And there was no check. It wasn't like nowadays I can get out and see my son's grades every single day, what his tests are, right? You know, at that time, it was like, you've got to trust the dummy to bring it home to you and present it to you as if it's a real thing. It was printed on a dot matrix printer in the office. You know, they never asked for it. So I think that whole idea, I just lived to what the expectation was, and the expectation was you don't really have to try very hard. You know, you'll go and work in a factory, or you'll go be a, you know, whatever, you'll work as a clerk in a store or whatever. And yeah, and that was okay. And I never really for myself decided like, hey, I want to do something more. I mean, I always, my mom, you know, she passed, but when I became a Secret Service agent, I might as well have landed on the moon. Sure, that was so beyond her comprehension.

Speaker 1:
[23:35] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[23:36] And you know, I think even the entire time that I did it and beyond, she still couldn't like, you know, obviously she would tell all of her friends as quickly as she possibly could, but she still couldn't like wrap her mind around it, right? Because, you know, there was like, you can actually do things, you know, my son talks about some of the stuff that he wants to do, and he's like, I probably won't be able to do that. I'm like, there are people that have that job, and you don't get it by not trying. It's not like the Navy SEALs show up and say, you're going to be a Navy SEAL or F-35 pilot. They just come to your house and say, hey, you have to try for that. And some people make it and some people don't. But there are people that do it. There are astronauts that just went around the moon because they applied to be an astronaut.

Speaker 1:
[24:21] That's right.

Speaker 2:
[24:21] They probably did it online like I applied for the CIA. Like literally a job application. It was similar to the McDonald's job application in many ways. And it was for the CIA.

Speaker 1:
[24:36] Yeah. That's a really memorable lesson to instill in young people. And so true, the first job out of college, they hired seven people a year. And I'm like, all right, so you're saying there's a chance. And, hey, went to the process and I got to be one of those. And completely life-changing opportunity for me and a whole lot of development. But going back, man, I think one of the things that makes a great agent is people who are self-starters and people who are willing to do that thing that just hasn't been done. And to quote the Princess Bride, you're only saying it can't be done because it hasn't been done before. You know, and we find ourselves as agents in really seemingly impossible situations, but they tend to find a way, you know, hey, we're taking the President to an active war zone. No is not an answer. Figure it out.

Speaker 2:
[25:40] Yeah. And I tell you, you know, we haven't chatted about it yet, but when I started my business, now that I have this business, when I, a lot of what we have to do here is very, like, I need you to go out and solve problems. And even other people that weren't Secret Service agents that are in the admin side of my building, or there's this, you know, my Chief Operating Officer and people like that. Every time we send a Secret Service agent out, she's like, man, they just figure it out. Like, we don't have to give them the entire playbook. We can give them pieces and say, here's what the end result needs to look like. I need you to figure out how to get there. And I can't hold your hand the whole time. And I also need you to be very detailed. I need you to just solve these problems along the way. And what's interesting is the difference. And I have great consultants that come from a lot of backgrounds. But when I send the Secret Service men and women out, it's a lot less interaction that I have to have to get to the final result. And I think it comes from that idea that you're either going to figure this out or you're not. And if you don't pay attention to detail, you know even small mistakes can have big impacts at the Secret Service. Like you do something small and stupid, people will remember it forever. So a real quick story is, when I was pretty new, I was the transportation counterpart, APD visit. And it's the day before the visit. So the second supervisor, the car plane comes in and all that stuff. And obviously, they're unloading the cars and we're going to run routes and stuff. And I have the route books, if you remember the route. And I take them out of my car and I put them on top of the hood. Yeah, I think you can see where this is going. And the wind comes and blows these, and there's, you know, there's dozens of copies of these route books. It's everything that we have, right? It's blowing them all over the airport. And every agent off the car plane is chasing down, we're on the tarmac, right? Second supervisor, all the bosses, my boss, the sack of the deep, you know, everybody's out there, the sack of Detroit Field Office. And as everybody's chasing these routes, you know, papers and trying to grab them and stuff. And I mean, that is a great example. That's a tiny little detail to think about, but securing, making sure that you're not doing something stupid, like a windy day, putting, you know, the routes. Luckily, it was in an airport, so I think the worst that would have happened is they're flowing against the fence, but you can imagine. You've seen this, right, where a guy leaves something on a clerk's, you know, a debt, or whatever, an owner at a grocery store or something, you know, and it's something. So details are important, and you have to pay attention to every single little one of them.

Speaker 1:
[28:44] My kingdom for a binder clip, right?

Speaker 2:
[28:48] Or just a rock on top of it, or, you know, another good one that I have, I don't mind telling stories that make me look stupid. So in Grand Rapids, obviously President Ford is from Grand Rapids. So as you know, when you live in an area that has a former president, particularly almost right when they get out of office, they start making those plans for the eventual death of this former president. And essentially, what happens is, as new agents come and go in those offices, the plans just get handed out from agent to agent. And then once somebody, then the person dies and you're the agent that's ended up being there. So President Ford died when I was in Grand Rapids and I was the site agent for his funeral location. And during that week, it was a very hectic week, VP at the time Cheney was coming in, so we had kind of a VP visit at the same time. And at some point during that week, I had misplaced my badge. Yeah. And you know how bad that is, right? Like I tell, you know, I'll tell the other part of this in a second, but I always tell places when I go to work, we are on threats is, when do you communicate out to other people? And I talk about the Secret Service. If you got in trouble at Secret Service, everybody knew. They put an e-mail out saying, you're welcome, not allowed to do it.

Speaker 1:
[30:12] Lost his baton, right?

Speaker 2:
[30:14] These next two days or whatever, right? You lose your pins, you lose your badge. It goes out, not only to the Secret Service, it goes out over the entire, you know, NCIC or whatever, like everything. So I look everywhere for this badge. I cannot find it, you know, and it's a hectic week and it's already stressful. And I have a counterpart and he's helping me look, and we're looking everywhere, we can't find it. So finally I have to go tell the boss, like, I can't find our badge. They do all the, you know, whatever they do to get the badge out. And that night I get a call from my VP counterpart. He's like, I need you to meet me at my hotel in the lobby, in the lobby bar, I just need you to come and meet me. And so I show up there and I can't remember his name, he was great, but he's got a box and it's wrapped. It's like a gift wrapped. And I'm like, oh, he's giving me a present for our things. And unwrap it. It's my badge. He's like, it was under a piece of paper on your desk. And I found it after you left. And we had already put the message out, you know, that Jason Russell lost his badge because he's a dope. And then I lost it on my desk, Jim, underneath a piece of paper, you know. So, little mistakes, and to have a way of becoming big things at the Secret Service.

Speaker 1:
[31:33] Yes. It's funny, you're misplacing your badge or really just burying your badge, you know, no harm, no foul there. Agents in the Secret Service, officers in the Secret Service, notorious ball busters, and never missing a chance to mess with other people. And there was a time, and this seemed to be service-wide, but certainly among our generation of agents, that if you left your cred book on your desk, someone was going to alter it in some way. And so, they're not going to take it because they don't want you to, then bosses get involved. But on our credentials, there's a photo of you and it's got your name in the Secret Service stuff and all the commission. And they would cover your photo with a photo of a gorilla. And so, the next time you go and present your creds to the local sheriff or at the airport to get on a plane, you not having looked at your creds, present this photo in your credential book and it's a freaking gorilla. And the agent can't figure out why somebody is looking at them like they have a third eye. And they're like, what? And then, the big reveal that this thing has been in here for two weeks and I've been showing people. And then you're thinking, how many people have I shown this to that didn't say anything? The fact that you're prepped is, I would say, on par with that. Hey, I got you something. I got you something nice. It's your dignity. But it looks like a badge. That's hilarious.

Speaker 2:
[33:10] Yeah, it's great.

Speaker 1:
[33:12] All right. So you're doing, you're in Grand Rapids. So again, starting Detroit, Rock City, Grand Rapids. The Gerald Ford Presidential Library is there now, is that right? Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[33:21] So Gerald Ford grew up in Grand Rapids. And so he would come back, obviously, often come to Michigan for various things. He went to University of Michigan. So I'm a Michigan State guy, but I was, I did some advances at the University of Michigan, got to go in and listen to him talk to the University of Michigan football team. But anyways, yeah, end up in Grand Rapids. And I think it's different from for those that aren't agents. A big office, you might do one specific thing because there's a lot of agents. You might be in the counterfeit squad or protect intelligence or credit fraud or whatever. In a little office, you do everything. That's right. So there was only four of us. So it's really like, you're everything. You're doing protective intelligence, you're doing fraud, you're doing counterfeit, you're doing all types of different things. I really like that, obviously, being able to be a journeyman or a utility player, where you're not in one specific thing, but you get to spread yourself around a little bit. And a smaller office was nice to be able to work in and just a smaller group. The problem with that is, as you know, you're on duty every couple of weeks instead of once every couple of months, but you work that out. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[34:31] And then there's, you talk about the offsite case you had and you're able to work that for a full year in an RO or a smaller office, a resident office, they call that, and a field office might have, we'll say for numbers 50 agents, and an RO or an RA is going to have between four and 10. So significantly reduce manpower size. And there's a lot of putting out of fires, right? And the idea of being able to work a year long counterfeit case uninterrupted, that you are solely dedicated to that, is next to impossible because you'll be the duty agent and you're going to get a threat case. And that threat case now trumps everything else you're doing. It takes priority over everything. And then not to mention all the post standing you're going to go do. And so, that big counterfeit case becomes really a part time venture when you can get to it. It's not that it's not important. It's just there's not the manpower to dedicate to it in a small office.

Speaker 2:
[35:31] Yeah. And I think you'll learn obviously just how to be a utility player, right? Because if a person gets transferred, which did happen while we were there, now you're down to three or two agents for a while. And it's not like the workload changes or anything changes. It's like, hey, now we have to figure it out with less people, right? So another thing I think Secret Service agents are particularly good at is kind of rolling with the punches, right? Like, hey, things change. Like, now we have two people, you're trying to post people and I can't give you 10, but I can give you two. And you're like, okay, how can I make two work instead of 10 work? And those things teach you just the ability to problem solve. The other thing, truthfully, I do a lot of public speaking now, and public speaking, I was deftly afraid of. I mean, like, you know, that's a lot of people's kind of primal fear. And I was one of those people who would... And one of the things that Secret Service, if you remember, as you do police briefings and things like that, you got to get up in front of people and talk. And forcing myself to learn to do that actually allowed me to actually get really good at it. And now people will pay me to come and talk. So, you know, I learned so much there that I've translated to the work that I do now in the business that I've created that I think was able to set us apart because of the levels that I would go to that other people wouldn't. You know, I tell people all the time, I talk to people that want to start businesses or business classes. And people will tell me their ideas for business. And then I'll start asking them a couple of questions about, you know, what if this happens? What if this happens? What I'm really doing is looking for them to give me an excuse, right? And once somebody gives me an excuse, then I'm like, you're done. You'll be done. You won't make it. Because it's going to get hard. It's going to get really difficult. You're going to want to quit. And it's going to look like you're going to go bankrupt and you're going to lose your house and everything. And the difference between people that are successful and people that are, is you have to be able to push through those circumstances. If you can't, you will fail. I mean, that's why, you know, I don't know what the percentage is, but a vast majority of businesses fail. And it's because, not because people don't have good ideas, it's because they'll quit. And you just, as a business owner, I don't even have to be that particularly smart. I just have to wait everybody else out. And they'll eventually drop off because they'll give up and I'll still be here. You know, and that truthfully, that's the path to success in business.

Speaker 1:
[38:04] That's interesting. You do eight years and you're seguing over to the SEC, which I'm dying to talk about. I want to give you all the Secret Service time you do eight years and leave the service. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[38:17] So in that time, in the eight years, I met my wife. And my wife had started a child care company. So at the time when I met my wife, she had one child care center. She started in 2004 or 2005. So I was in Grand Rapids. I met her and she had started one child care. By the time 2010 rolled around, I had overstayed my welcome. As you know, we're talking eight years now, and I still haven't moved on to phase two. Luckily, I had some good bosses, Mark Connolly in particular, that really protected me. Mark works for me now and has worked for me since 2015, and will always work for me as long as he wants to stay here. So I had overstayed my welcome. And it was coming time for them to say, look, and if you remember at that time 2010, it was like, yeah, I know you don't want to go, but you're going to go, and if not, you're going to have to leave the agency. And I loved the Secret Service. I didn't want to leave. I also had, my wife now had three child care centers in the Grand Rapids area. She now has seven, but she had three centers at the time. And I just wasn't able to make that move anymore, right? So, and at the time, the job pickings were pretty small. But I was able to find one 1811 physician at the Department of Housing Inspector General, so Hutto IG. And I took, and I luckily, I was lucky enough to get that job. So I was able to move literally from Friday, I was Secret Service agent, you know, Monday I was a Hutto IG agent. I didn't have to do any training or anything. They'll let you go there. So I did that. That was actually cool because you'd think Hutto IG would be kind of boring, but it actually was extremely busy. We dealt with Section 8 housing, crimes that happened in Section 8 housing. And I was able to be on the US Marshals fugitive task force here in West Michigan. So I would spend three days of my five day week out hunting fugitives. So nothing to do with housing. But the one thing that was interesting about that was the reason they loved having the Hutto IG guys on the task force is we were the biggest hammer that they had. So when we would go to a house and they'd say, hey, we're so and so. And they'd say, I don't know anything about so and so. They'd say, are you on section 8 housing? Yeah. And they'd say, that guy will take your housing away in about a quick hot second if you're going to interfere with an official investigation. So I was like, we're going to tell on you guy. And we would get tons of information from having, which people are like the Hutto IG, what do you do? It was actually, I went back to real police work, Jim. I was in foot chases. We were chasing murderers. And you go from being a police officer, I was in foot chases and high-speed chases and all that to the Secret Service, but we did great stuff. But it's not, people on TV, it looks like we're repelling from airplanes. And it's a little bit less than that. Sometimes, most days, it's particularly me because I was not a high-ranking agent. So I spent a lot of times near dumpsters and underneath stages or whatever. Not sure why I wore a suit for that. But then I went back to this thing where I was back in police work again. And I did that from 2010 to 2016. But I'd actually started my business in 2013. So I was able to start SEC, which was my security consulting business in 2013, while I was actually still working as a federal agent.

Speaker 1:
[42:02] And you hit on the OIG, that's Office of Inspector General, and you mentioned that transition 1811 to unpack for listeners. Anybody called a special agent in the federal government is a job series 1811. We all go to special agent high school at one of a couple locations, and that allows you to move from entity to entity. And hey, listen, while there are some that probably carry a little more cache, a little more renown, I would say the Secret Service, probably the Bureau is up there with those. Man, do not sleep on the power and the ability to get things done. My favorite agents, Postal, US Postal, man. If there's mail involved, you keep a US Postal agent in your back pocket, and the world is your oyster. I had a former student, it was probably 2005 or so, post-college, looking at the agent route, and we talked about all the options, man, by seeing OIG's praises and Postal and obviously the Secret Service, he ends up going Postal, where he's now a sack over at Postal and just loves it. He's had a just awesome career, and we would do on a task force some health and human food stamp fraud, like all the stuff that really, really matters when it comes to fraud, waste, and abuse, which seems to be a popular topic in our news these days. So awesome, and I love to hear that. I love the plug for HUD. Any agents listening, now, you're not allowed to leave and go work over at the O&D. That's close, like report cards of your youth. They just don't do that anymore. Okay, so awesome. So in 2013, you start SEC. What's the genesis for that? And SEC, Secure Environment Consultants, not to be confused with the Southeastern Conference in-

Speaker 2:
[43:54] Or the stock people that do investigation. So it was, yeah, Secure Environment Consultants. We actually started as Secure Education Consultants. So what spurred that truthfully was Sandy Hook. So at the time, my daughter who's now finishing up her freshman year at Michigan State was in kindergarten. And obviously Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December of 2012. I mean, that just like devastated me. My wife owns child care, so the idea of little kids being in that environment and having terrible things happen to them. And I was like, man, I'm sure there's somebody doing this stuff. But my wife had the child cares. So I really actually at the time was looking for a consultant or somebody that could come out and that helped specifically child care. So my wife has babies down to six weeks of age and her child care. So I started to think about what would they do in these? So men don't have locks on their doors, right? And you get in there and there's babies, toddlers, kids that can't even walk or crawl. And was looking for somebody who worked with child care for security consulting. And I had that Secret Service experience. I was like, I could do this, but I wonder if there's somebody who already does it. And there wasn't. My wife wrote her emergency plan. And at the time it didn't sound like, I was like, okay. But then what I was thinking about, she's never responded to an emergency in her life. How is she going to write a plan to respond to something that she's never even experienced? So that was really the impetus for starting SEC, was to work with child carers at the time. How can I do a better job of helping her child carers? We really started with three pieces to it. One was doing assessments, looking at their existing spaces, looking at their existing policies, procedures, writing emergency plans, and then training them on how to respond to emergencies. So actually, our letters, the SEC actually track our services. So it's site assessment, emergency preparedness, and critical incident response training. So that was the three tenets, the three pillars, like the three legs of the stool, right? You have to have the spaces, and the processes, and the procedures. You have to have good plans, and then you have to train, right? And I felt like that group of services made a lot of sense, and could help people be better prepared. So really, literally, my first client was my wife, you know, and she didn't pay me.

Speaker 1:
[46:32] So that was good to ask. Did you give her a discount? Did you?

Speaker 2:
[46:34] Yeah. You know, started that process of just going in and looking at the spaces and getting them to understand, like, you know, her doors and her classrooms swing out into the hallway. So, you know, the police officer, no disrespect to the police officer, but the police officer that had trained them previously was like, well, you just should, you know, barricade your doors. And I'm like, you can't barricade an outward swinging door.

Speaker 1:
[46:58] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[46:59] So, and that was their plan, though. Never occurred to them like that didn't make sense, right? Or there's a bunch of glass in your doors, and we might need to put coverings on it. So those assessments allowed us to really look at, okay, what's the reality of this place look like, and what are some areas you can improve? But the planning allowed us to really kind of plan for, okay, if this bad thing happens, what are we going to do? And I think the most valuable piece is, you know, training, right? Like, in emergencies, you're not going to go grab a book and say, okay, flip to the active shooter section, you're going to respond based on either kind of primal prehistoric fight, flight or freeze, or you're going to have some experience and training that tells you what you should do. So we focused really heavily on those three pieces. And, you know, the first year, I didn't have a single client, you know, that paid, you know, I would volunteer a lot of time. I really wanted to get out there and just get the services out there. And then slowly, you know, started getting one client here, you know. The hardest thing to do in business is to go from zero clients to one. Because somebody has to be the first one to say, I'll actually pay you to do this.

Speaker 1:
[48:08] I will pay for this. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[48:09] Right. And in the world I was in, a lot of times I was like, well, the police will do that or I can get it for free from this or that. And I was like, well, you can, but it's not quite the same. And then trying to explain that to them was tough, right? So, you know, to go from that, no clients to that first paying client was like, somebody actually paid me to do this. And I remember very clearly, because it wasn't a child care action, it wasn't, it was my friend who owns a factory, they make hoses for airplanes, brought me in to do an assessment for his factory and to train all of his staff. And just saw the value in it, right? And then I was able to take that and build on that and say, I actually do have a client, right? And then you slowly kind of explain your services. I sent a lot of cold emails and had one superintendent from a large school district here in Michigan. Say, you know what? Let's see, come up. He was designing, they were designing new schools. And I asked if any security consultant had ever looked at the designs. And he said, no. And I said, well, I was a Secret Service agent. I tell you, back to our Secret Service thing, that brand helped me and provided credibility right off the bat. And at the beginning, I leaned into it a lot. I had to, I had no other choice, right? I didn't have clients to lean back and say, I did nothing but these people can tell you that I'm great security consultant. So I leaned really heavily into the Secret Service branding. I was always careful and I never have puffed myself up to be something I wasn't at the Secret Service. Even when you asked me to do this, Jim, I'm like, that's going to be a short conversation. I was nothing, I was a nothing agent. I was a field office agent. I never tell people that I was on PPD or any of that stuff. But even that brand helped create that credibility to be able to go out and do some of these things. And really it was a slow, slow slog and the doubt creeps in every single day. So for me, after three years, 2016, I decided I'm either going to do this full time or I'm going to be done. And having a backup plan, in other words, still being the huddo IG agent, right? But doing this on the side is kind of like a side business. It was growing enough that I was earning, not enough to support myself or my family, but certainly a little bit of money that I thought, okay, there's something here. October 2016, I remember very well, I quit, resigned and said, I'm going to do this full-time, and either it's going to work, or it's going to fail miserably. I will say that I had my wife, who had started a business and had a successful business and recognized that there's going to be ups and downs and that having a backup plan sometimes when you're trying to be an entrepreneur is the worst thing you can have because you will quit easier. And she was like, let's do it. Hold all of my retirement money, my TSP, all of that and said, I'm going to go all in if it works. Great. If it doesn't, I'll go back and be a security guard or whatever I can do somewhere. So, and it didn't, it wasn't like it just took all of a sudden. There was still hard years for many, many. It's still to this day, we're well established and I've got almost 300 employees now. But there are still days, I always joke that there's days where I think I'm going to have a private jet. And then there's days when I think I'm going to go bankrupt. And often those things happen on the exact same day. That's what being a business owner is. It's like, you're going to be like, I could be Elon Musk. Or I'm going to go bankrupt. And those things, I'll have those feelings within an hour on the same day, just because of the ups and downs of doing this. But what I've learned is you just have to be like, I know it works. I know you can't give up, quite frankly. That's the key piece. You just can't give up. Once you give up, you're done.

Speaker 1:
[52:25] Yeah. Those are great lessons. Let me circle back. This, the genesis for the podcast was, there are no shortage of opportunities for the Secret Service to take a beating, and many of those are rightly earned. But I would argue, imaginarily with myself, that, hey, there are five times as many, 10 times as many phenomenal people in the service, then there are, hey, the one-off who does something really stupid, right? And the stupid ones tend to garner a lot of attention. And I remember, you know, I had this conversation with this agent who is still working, and once they're done, you know, the curtain will be revealed that, hey, you're really kind of the reason behind this. And I thought, man, if people just knew how good, you know, just genuinely good the people who work at the Secret Service are, how industrious, man. And again, I will put our work ethic up against anybody, you know, for getting done. And especially, man, in the federal government. And people can say whatever they want, you know. And again, hey, sometimes we earn that criticism. We can never say we're lazy. You know, they can never say, man. Yeah. And whatever the good people of America pay us, gang between us, you probably owe us some more. You know, in Jason, for however, you know, I say brief, man, hey, eight years is no joke. Man, and life gets a vote too, you know. And it's not like, you know, you stormed off and quit, you know. And there was another guy who did like two years, my buddy Brian, you know, life gets a vote, situations happen, and you can't stay, and that's okay. But what I love is, man, the thing that brought you to the Secret Service continues. You know, and now it's serving, you know, I would say, if you asked us, hey, you have a choice between protecting your kids or protecting the president, now we're all going to say our kids. You know, and as a society, you know, I think, well, we tend to invest a lot into that. And I think the outrage around school shootings, rightly so, is, hey, how come we can't make our schoolhouses as safe as the White House? You know, and I think, man, you rightly, and man, early, and in a space where people aren't bringing the attention to the mission, you did that, and that's, you know, man, that's to be applauded. And I think that is honoring, hey, all the training you got, all the investment you got, all the opportunity and the experience you had in the Secret Service. Man, you just took it somewhere else, man, in a place that, hey, we're all grateful that you're protecting our kids while we're off doing other things. So, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[55:23] And I think, but for the Secret Service, I would have never been able to, like, even with the experience I had as a police officer. And, you know, once again, I always say no disrespect to the police, but police and security are not the same thing.

Speaker 1:
[55:37] Not the same.

Speaker 2:
[55:38] We use them very interchangeably, and particularly in the private world where it's like, well, my police officer come and do that assessment. I'm like, it's not the same thing because they're not looking at things the way that we look at things, which is not how do we respond when something bad has happened, but how do we prevent the bad thing from ever happening in the first place? By putting, whether it's physical security, putting good processes in place, how do we learn from mistakes that have happened in the past, right? And build processes that prevent those things from happening. And then once again, how do we go to a level of detail that may seem extreme, but it's necessary? An example is, you know, I was reviewing an incident that happened, a pretty large public incident, where there was some delays in the alerts that would go out to tell people that it was happening. And the reason the delay in the alert happened was because the people that were supposed to push the button had never actually practiced it, and there was a plastic cover over the button. And they kept pushing the plastic cover, and then couldn't figure out why the alert wasn't coming out on their phone. And then finally realized, well, we have to push this down. Well, that was a six-minute delay. And in six minutes, what could happen with an active shooter in a space where people don't know that it's happening? Now, that's a level of detail that most people are not going to pick up on it, because it's just not in your nature. But the one thing that I remember from the Secret Service maybe is based out of fear, is you did not want to make mistakes in small details, right? So how many pictures are going to be taken, or where you're going to walk, or anything that you might not even notice it, other people are going to notice it, and they're going to tell you that they noticed it, and you're not going to make that mistake the second time. So you learn to pay attention to detail. And I think you never connect those concepts to business. But I can tell you that when I talk to clients, when I talk to customers, and I'm like, why do you love us so much? It's because of the level of attention to detail that we pay. And that 100% comes from my time at the Secret Service. We will go to a level of detail, and we will go to a level of completion that no other consulting firm will go to. Because it's built in to our nature. It's built in to what I do and what I created. And now, I've spread that out to our entire network of consultants and security staff that work for me. And they're doing it for clients around the world.

Speaker 1:
[58:19] That's awesome. So, you start with daycare centers, your buddy throws you a bone, and you're doing airplane hoses, factory. Then you get the Michigan School District. Man, that's 13 years ago. What is the SEC enterprise look like now? Where are you guys at? What do you do?

Speaker 2:
[58:38] So now, we've rebranded because we were doing so many non-school things. So we took the education out, changed it to environment. So we're Secure Environment Consultants. Now, we work with, I mean, you name the sector, we're there. So we do, and our services have evolved over time. We've added an old mother side of the business called SEC Shield, which we provide third-party directors of security. So I have several retired Secret Service agents that outwork for me in school districts or non-school districts as their director. So they work for me, but they're placed within an organization. We still do our traditional side assessments. We do our traditional planning and training. We now just do it for much larger organizations. So we've worked with large insurance companies. We worked with Fortune 100 companies. We still do a lot of work in schools, but now we're in schools all across the country, as well as international. So we have thousands and thousands of clients now. We do probably an average of maybe 2,000 assessments a year, in various different types of organizations. We do probably over 2,000 trainings a year. Once again, and you name it, law firms, factories, public utilities, we're doing work in those spaces. We're not one of the bigger firms. We're probably in that middle tier. We're not one of the big, massive ones, but I think we've built a really good reputation. We use great people to do the work. And one of the things we've gotten into, that is kind of an offshoot of education that you've assisted me with, Jim, is fraternities and sororities. Safety and security for that. My daughters are both in college. My oldest daughter was in a sorority, and I did some training for her sorority when she was there, and it was eye-opening for them. And I went to her house, and I looked at her house and saw all the things that I was like, wait, why is this this way? And why don't you have this? And so I literally took the site assessment, planning, training concept, and applied it to that sorority and fraternity world, and made a huge difference for the parents. My own piece of mind is a father whose daughter was in this environment, but also other parents who said, this is nice that this is happening. So you were instrumental in helping us create that, and we're open to continue to do that in that college and university environment as well.

Speaker 1:
[61:06] Yeah, it's not getting any safer on the colleges and university campuses. And again, plans are great, training is better. When the bad things happen, you're not going to reach for a manual. I think that's really important. All right, so as you're out there and you're doing your SEC thing and people you learn, you work for the Secret Service, there's always that, oh my gosh, that must have been great. Do you have a, is there an awe story? You've been kind of a share several, but is there a story, man, that sort of anchors that experience for you or really sort of represents that Secret Service?

Speaker 2:
[61:42] Yeah, I mean, I think anytime I was at the inaugurations or the conventions, you see kind of that most kind of baseline level where it's like everything is, every person is here for that particular piece. So I think for me, in the 2008 convention, I was a co-stander that the day of the John McCain gave his acceptance speech, I'm a co-stander and I'm up, I'm like, I'm as far away from John McCain as you can possibly get. And I mean, literally, they're like, is there a farther place to put this kid? Let's try to get them out there. And I don't know how this happened to this day, but the site agent somehow called my phone and said, hey, we need you to come down to the stage because we're going to have you sit. We can't get an agent anywhere near the stage. It was all bike racked off. And I don't know why they picked me, but they asked me to come down and we want you to sit right in front of the stage in a chair next to his sons. And so I was right there. I mean, I was, you know, for me, and I didn't go to PBDX and all those things. But every time you see that picture of John McCain giving his acceptance speech, I'm right there. My mom, you know, who's once again was like, she's watching the speech and there's her dopey son, you know, who barely graduated from high school. And I'm sitting there while John McCain is giving his acceptance speech. And what's funny about that story is, you know, when he finishes a speech, he comes down and obviously I'm right there. I kind of start the rope line, right? And I remember at the time, she's still a news person, Megan Kelly.

Speaker 1:
[63:28] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[63:29] You know, she's the big deal then. And we're working, we're going through the rope line and out front because the future is not making it there. It's like he just comes down and he's going. And it was as we get to like at the end, she's kind of right in front of me and she's like, do you mind if I take a picture? And I was like, well, we're really, I really can't take a picture with you. And she's like, I'm not talking about with you, I'm talking about John McCain. And I'm like, sure, I'm pretty sure you can do that. So that was my, you're not a big deal moment. But I mean, the cool thing about it is just get to experience little things like that. Even at the level I was at, the average person is never going to see to get to ride in a presidential motorcade. One other quick story is, I was driving a car in the motorcade in my hometown. And the route that we happened to be going was from downtown to who was going to make an off the record movement. We were taking the entire motorcade. Well, it's my route that I take home from the office every day. So I'm driving the car. It's, you know, it's within the first five cars. But you know when you drive home sometime and you just don't think about...

Speaker 1:
[64:45] Is it autopilot?

Speaker 2:
[64:46] Autopilot. You'd think that that wouldn't be a day that I would have that autopilot reaction. But as the motorcade gets to the exit where my house is, I start to take the exit. And I realize I'm not up the exit. Thank goodness. And the other cars are just going to follow me.

Speaker 1:
[65:05] They're just going to follow you, dude. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[65:07] So luckily, I didn't. And I come back down and like the whole motorcade. So you talk about like, once again, I got transportation was not a good place for me to be. I would not have been a good TS agent because I let the motorcade routes fly over the airport. I left the entire motorcade to my condo. You know...

Speaker 1:
[65:25] I was going to say they would have run the motorcade routes, but they blew away at the airport.

Speaker 2:
[65:30] Yeah, exactly. So, that's another story that I always remember. Like, jeez, the things that could have went wrong with that. But I loved my time there and I would have loved to stay. You know, I always think about what could have been. But I think other than, you know, beyond anything else I've ever done, that certainly was probably the highlight of my professional careers.

Speaker 1:
[65:54] Yeah. Well, don't spend too much time thinking what could have been about being a TS agent in the transportation sector. That doesn't sound like it would have happened. So what do you miss, you know, if you look back and again, hey, at this point, man, you'd have had 24 years in. You know, the hope is that you would have retired at this point, or who knows, maybe you're the director at this point. But, you know, looking back, like, you know, and in those ensuing years, what did you miss from being in the service?

Speaker 2:
[66:20] Obviously, it's probably like everybody's told you, the people. The company that he built. I still have buddies, you know, that I've been gone from for, you know, a year, and I still have good friends that I'll text with that are still on the job or some have retired and moved on. I've hired some of them to work for me. You know, John Landry, Coach, is one of those examples of just people you meet that are incredible. So I'd say the camaraderie, that agency, I think, maybe more than any other. I say that because I was there and I've seen it. I think you come together because you have to rely on each other so much that it's not about you, it's about the team. So you learn how to really play into a team environment more, maybe than any other place in the world. Because I have to count that you're going to do, just like the guy that drew the motorcade routes, counted on the fact that the dopey guy driving that car wasn't going to drive to his condo instead, right? He's going to follow the motorcade. You have to count on the people. And I think that builds a level of camaraderie that is unique. Maybe that you only see in other things, like high-level tactical units. And then, at the same time, you spend with these people, right? Because you're traveling and you're away from your families, and you go to the ranch in Crawford, Texas, and you spend three weeks on midnights with an agent from Pennsylvania. But you get to know that person so much in that time that now you're a lifelong friend with that person. So the people, I think, more than anything else, I miss.

Speaker 1:
[67:50] Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a theme that comes through time and again on the podcast. And you're absolutely right. You spend time with the guy and one of my dear friends on the job, Rob Donovan. Great dude. We end up working something like that. It's 12-hour days for a week together on counter surveillance up around Camp David. And you get the niceties out of the way. And I remember on the first day, Rob says, do you like college football? I said, yeah, I root for this team and this team. And my rooting passions pale in comparison to the schools I hate, which is apropos of nothing. And I said, what about you? The remaining 12 hours of which there was like 11 hours and 15 minutes left, Rob talks to me about Georgia football. And I get a collegiate level, 300 level course in Georgia football. And I'm like, all right, I believe it. I'm in, and I'm not a Georgia fan by any means, but I definitely don't hate Georgia. And anytime they're winning and doing well, I think of Rob and I'll text him and go dogs. I don't care about Georgia football per se. But hey man, this guy that is clearly now one of my good friends, cares about them a lot. And so why shouldn't I? It's very funny. You're right. The people you spend all that time with, man. Yeah, that's good stuff. And again, I don't think that happens in many other places.

Speaker 2:
[69:21] And I think it is because of the nature of the job, where there's some downtime, where if you're standing post or you're in a car with somebody, for that number of times, or you're on a shift with them or whatever, like you're just spending a long amount of time. So you're going to get to know people maybe at a level that you don't, as you're going into an office and you spend an hour, a couple of hours with another agent in a regular agency. You're spending a lot of time with people and you're traveling with them, and you're going out to dinner with them, and all these things that I think make the Secret Service unique in just terms of the mission. You build those relationships that you'll have for a long time. And then you meet new agents. I connect with people, I never worked with you. You connect with people and you automatically have this weird ability to kind of speak the language and connect. And as I've started a business, I've had agents that were before me reach out and after me, and we can almost automatically connect and talk to each other on the same level because we have some level of shared experience.

Speaker 1:
[70:24] And I think by and large, you know, there is a shared values set, you know, and you don't get the job without some stick to itness, you know, that little grit with some resilience, you know. And so I think, you know, like the superintendent bet on you, I think you bet on others like, hey, if you've got that resume, I think this is what I'm getting. And I would say you're almost always right. You know, it's its own sort of fraternity, minus a secret handshake. But hey, we have shared values and virtues. And so you tend to know what you're getting. And I'll say this, it's why those who, when we find out they don't share that, the guys who steal, the guys who went to prison, like man, pariahs, like you are not of us. Hey, no shortage of opportunity for any of us to straight up steal cash, to lie on vouchers, to, and I think, minus a way, maybe that's the cardinal sin in the Secret Service is theft. Like none of us, I don't know anybody who would turn a blind eye to theft.

Speaker 2:
[71:38] No, I mean, I think you're right. There is that just shared set of general values and there's some things you just don't do. You're going to get bad people in every agency. Like you should be, when it's all documented, obviously. Secret Service, I think, gets a little more heat than other agencies get for whatever reason, because maybe sometimes well-deserved, but I think sometimes it's overblown. I think what happens a lot with the Secret Service is other things get connected that are not connected, and then it looks like a picture that it's not. It's like a connected out picture, but it's just put together incorrectly. And that's just the reality of being a high-profile agency. And when you are a high-profile agency, people love nothing better than when you do something stupid or when you fail. So the one thing that agents hate is when other agents make us embarrassed or less proud to say I was a Secret Service agent. Because you know, when people introduce you, to me, to this day, if somebody that I know introduces me to another person, within the first 10 things that they say, they tell that person that I was a Secret Service agent. And it automatically changes the dynamic of how that person interacts with me. I have friends all the time that have done amazing things. When we go to dinner, if we're with couples that we don't know, once the Jason was a Secret Service agent comes up, I do the rest of the conversation. It's like questions about that. You have Edge Fund Manager, and they're like, yeah, this guy's worth 6 billion, but he wasn't a Secret Service agent, so he's not that interested. And so that's a responsibility with that. And when it gets tarnished or when something happens to it, it's frustrating. And you want to go on, and I've done media, I've done CNN. When Jonathan Wackrow is not available, sometimes they'll call me. Yeah, be his backup hitter. They call me and they say, we need you. And then Jonathan says he'll do it. And I'm like, yeah, we don't need you. Which is fine. Jonathan's amazing. But a lot of times, they used to want to call me when an agent would do something wrong. And I'd be like, I'm not really interested in being the gotcha guy. Yeah, like use somebody else for that. So I think it's just frustrating for everybody when those things happen.

Speaker 1:
[73:58] Yeah, I think, so we mentioned theft and now my mind is racing. Do you think there are other behaviors or traits that will make an agent sort of dead to the rest of us? I've not asked us of anybody else. Like now we're just in the, you know.

Speaker 2:
[74:17] I think when they do things of kind of what I would say is extreme moral, you know, questionableness, you know. So you have things where it's like, hey, yeah, there's, you know, obviously there's some high-profile incidents that come to mind, you know, that Secret Service has been involved in where they're probably doing things they shouldn't have been doing, places they shouldn't have been doing it. I think that's another thing that, you know, it's just disappointing, because it kind of puts this pale on the entire agency and every person in it, that, you know, these, you know, these are people who can't be trusted or whatever, you know. So it's just an unfortunate reality of, of, that's human nature though, right? You're going to have people in every place that make mistakes. Now, there's people in police departments, I always used to say no matter how dumb the thing is that you've done, somebody will do something dumber than you. You just have to be patient, it's going to happen and they're going to forget about your dumb thing. I know, you know, in the Secret Service, they don't forget about the dumb things as much. There's books written about them, Jim, you know. So it's like those things stick around for a long time. So.

Speaker 1:
[75:29] Agreed. You know, the one that comes to mind immediately for me is laziness.

Speaker 2:
[75:36] Oh, for sure.

Speaker 1:
[75:37] Like, man, if you're a guy or if you're an agent, if you're an officer who's not willing to suffer like everybody else, man, the trust factor is gone.

Speaker 2:
[75:49] Yeah, that's a great one. So a guy that pushes your post five minutes late, you know, it's like, yeah, it's only five minutes. But what that basically is telling me is your time is more important than my time and, you know, or shows up late or, you know, tries to get out of something. You know, it's like, we're all going to be miserable at points. You're expected to deal with a certain level of misery. And there's a certain bonding factor, I think, with that misery. It's like, we've all been through it. Don't try to shortcut that. Like, deal with the misery along with the rest of us. Stand post in the middle of the night at Crawford and, you know, and be in the freezing cold or whatever, and be miserable, and eat a subway sandwich for 21 days straight, because that's the only place that we can get food from. Those things, I think, are bonding in some ways. But when people try to shortcut it or try to get out of it, or, you know, try to get out of trips that are necessarily that good, like, oh, I can't, you know, those things, I think, will give you a reputation of somebody that can't be trusted, and that, you know, it'll tarnish, and it'll come back and bite you eventually, it always does.

Speaker 1:
[76:55] Yeah, I agree. You talked earlier about the improvisational nature, you know, of agents to, and the guys you hire, you know, in SEC that you send out, like, I think that is part of what makes, you know, our military so lethal. You know, hey, you've got a commander's intent, go get it done. And it's not always going to look like it did on paper because the enemy gets a vote too. And I think, you know, when the service, and again, all sorts of backgrounds that make for a great agent, you know, I'm not here to say otherwise. But I think the secret sauce is that sort of improvisational nature of, hey, we understand the mission, we understand this visit is going to happen. But you gave me five less post standards, so I need some concertina wire, a couple orange cones, and maybe, you know, a chicken with a radio tape to its back that I could send on patrol. You know, and I think, you know, for military guys, bring that, you know, just by nature of that. And I think college athletes can bring that, you know, and I think they do well there. But it is part of the secret sauce of, frankly, the Secret Service, and that's that, you know, they're going to outwork almost everybody else, you know, if you got the right one. And then we understand what the intent of the mission is. And we have, if we're not given the right resources, we'll find the other resources to make that work.

Speaker 2:
[78:16] Yeah. It's like a chef, right? Like, yeah, you can give me enough ingredients, I can come up with some dishes that are going to work, right? Like, I don't need to necessarily need every step of the recipe. A chef can take whatever they find and create something that is amazing.

Speaker 1:
[78:30] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[78:31] I think agents have that level of, in many cases, have that level of like, okay, I just need to know the general idea of what I'm trying to do here. I'll figure out the rest of the way and the end result will be good. I don't need somebody holding my hand throughout the process. And I think you learn that because you find pretty quickly that nobody's going to hold your hand and if you can't solve these problems, you won't be giving your opportunities to do the cooler stuff are just going to be diminished to the point where you're just kind of marginalized in the agency, right? Like you stick out like a sore thumb when you can't solve problems. And when you're needy and I struggle as a leader sometimes because you know the generation now not of just agents but just of people in general is like the level of detail that I have to give so to get what I want them to do from, you know, kind of where we start. Sometimes I feel like I can't hold your hand through this entire process. I can get you started. I want to be able to push you and then you try to figure it out to get to the end. And a lot of people can't do that. I think Secret Service agents in many ways have that unique set of skills to do that.

Speaker 1:
[79:44] Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. Awesome. All right. What, I guess, sort of the last of the standard questions, I think we've covered everything else. Hey, what would you learn in your eight years in the Secret Service? What's your big takeaway?

Speaker 2:
[79:58] I mean, you think, honestly, what some of the things we've talked about, which is, you know, be resourceful, you know, pay attention to detail. Because that's important. And everything you do, you know, how you do the little things is how you do the big things. You know, we talked about it a little bit earlier, that I can go into most organizations if I'm doing an assessment, just look at a couple of things and tell you how they're going to be overall safety and security wise. I think that comes from the Secret Service, which is, if the little things are bad, the big things are definitely going to be bad, right? It's very few people that are, their car is a mess, right? This is a great, they'll take the cart back at the grocery store and put it in the car corral. If people do that, that's a good sign that probably the rest of their life is somewhat, you know, they care about thing. Yeah, some of the cars are in complete disaster. I don't need to see the rest of your life. I really don't. All I need to see is show me what your car, and I say this to adults all the time too, show me your kids, and I'll tell you probably what you're like, right? Because I can tell it based on your kids. So I think that's what I learned at the Secret Service more than anything is like, you can, how you do the small things, how you do the little things that may be insignificant, how you hold the post that nobody is ever going to see, right? How you pay attention and prepare even at a post that you're like, nothing is going to happen here, is how you'll do the big things, right? So in business, I think it constantly comes back to me as like, there's a reason that I'm successful and I'm secure enough now to say, yeah, it's a successful business. Yeah, of course. For seniors, we're doing pretty good. And it's because I paid attention to that, how I did the small things, how I did the big things, and clients see that, people see that, and then it helps you be successful in everything you do. So I think that's probably the main thing that I learned there is that attention to detail.

Speaker 1:
[82:02] Yeah, that seems that is a, I think, a lifelong lesson learned and applied. And that's the car example, the car example, both imply the same thing. Hey, is there order and discipline in your life? I'm going to give some people a little pass on their kids, but I get what you're saying in the large front. Hey, they are their own unique soul man. And yeah, anyway, the point is certainly well made. All right. So Jason Russell, your bonus question of all the Secret Service movies that are out there or TV shows. I'll even give you TV shows now too, because there's a couple of good ones. Do you have a favorite or do you have one that makes your skin crawl? When you see it, you're like, this is so inaccurate.

Speaker 2:
[82:49] Every Secret Service movie has a lot of major things that are totally wrong. Most TV shows get it worse than movies, I think. Okay. I think movies take the time maybe to have somebody consult to say, okay, yeah, we don't do this, we don't do that. TV shows, I think, show no concern. I've seen them where they're like, they're talking about an agent who had passed. Like, you know, obviously during their lifetime, you never knew they were a secret service agent because they run a lot of the television. I'm like, that's it. They tell people within three seconds. Right. No straight in the service. So I think television shows are generally bad. What, you know, like Paradise, the new show that's on, yeah, where the secret service agents, it's pretty bad. You know, there, there's a lot of stereotypes, the glasses and the book, you know, some of that's, you know, real, but for the most part, it's not. Of the movies, I think truthfully, In the Line of Fire is kind of my favorite.

Speaker 1:
[83:50] Sure.

Speaker 2:
[83:51] And I think one of the reasons is because my favorite scene in In the Line of Fire is when he's kind of given that speech, you know, it's the night before that visit where, you know, the guy that's going to assassinate, and he goes back and talks about the Kennedy assassination. And I think Clint Eastwood does such an amazing job in that scene of like the emotion and his lips are quivering. Like, it's probably my favorite scene of like an age old. And I just think that movie overall, I don't know how accurate. I mean, they get in a shooting in the morning, and then in the afternoon, they're just like back at the office or whatever, you know, an agent dies and they just move on. Right. You know, they're doing, obviously, they're kicking in doors by themselves. And a lot of that stuff is not realistic. But some of the protection stuff, I think was pretty cool in that. And I remember that was before I was an agent, obviously, that movie came out. And just thinking like, how cool would that be to be one of those people. Yeah. And so now when I watch it, you know, I think back like I actually did that. Like, that's a pretty cool. Even to myself and, you know, maybe it's for people of us and maybe did a little bit of less time. And sometimes I'll just be driving and I'll be like, man, I was a Secret Service agent. Like, it's still cool to me. Even when I see current agents and I'm like, I did that job, like, I was that person. I'm still in awe of like, how cool is that? You know, so and that always sticks to me. So when I see it on TV or my kids or anywhere, you know, everybody's always looking at me like, is this real? Is that true? And I'm like, none of it's real. None of that really happened.

Speaker 1:
[85:28] Yeah, agreed and concur on nearly everything he said. The Paradise is interesting and I've got lots to like about that show. The man, one thing they got right, and it's a small scene, but when they're evacuating POTUS from the White House, and I always want to call him Randall from This Is Us, the agent in charge in there, he tells the other agent, we're going, you got to make sure we don't get followed. Like in the elevator is closed and you hear the machine gun fire, and not that I'm saying we leave people behind to massacre the masses, but hey man, not everybody goes. Yeah. And in that emergency situation, it's not, oh, we'll take all the agents with us. No, no, people have to defend the Alamo, and cover the six. And I thought that was a nice detail that was included in an accurate one. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[86:29] And you can see it on the agent's face, like he knows his fate in that scene, right? You know, the guy, this is the job that I signed up for, and that's what I'm here to do. So yeah, it is a good show.

Speaker 1:
[86:39] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[86:40] There's some interesting things about it, but I do like it.

Speaker 1:
[86:44] You talk about, hey, you brought up in the line of fire, this is going there, but the doors that, hey, being an agent open, I just gone to Ireland recently and there's a beautiful watch shop down there in downtown Dublin. We're in company or we're in Suns, I think it is. And I'm up there and looking around and I'm upstairs, and I'm in the Omega Rolex section, and a guy comes over, and one of the salesmen, and we get to talking and looking at this one watch in particular, and he says, you know where that watch is from. And I said, no, I don't. And it's a Rolex, and it's got sort of a gold dial. It's like the Submariner version. And he says, that's the watch that Clint Eastwood wore in In the Line of Fire. I said, you don't say. I said, really? Hey, like you, I think it's a great movie, and I'm intrigued. I'm like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. And we're talking about the watch, and he says, what are you wearing? And one of the nice things about being in the Secret Service is we get some really neat opportunities to buy watches that are then Secret Service branded, and I happen to be wearing one of those. And I pull it off, I say, well, only because you brought it up. But yeah, man, hey, I'm retired from the Secret Service. Brother, the next thing I know, that watch is out of the case and on my wrist. And he's like, no, I had to take some pictures with it. Well, my nephews are there, and I bring them up, and I'm like, fellas, you want to try on the watch? The guy could not have been nicer. And I think to your point, Jason, all we did was talk about the Secret Service for the next 45 minutes. And he was all into it, and he loved the movie. Obviously, Born and Raised in Ireland, but he's a huge fan of that movie and asked all the questions. And so we talk about that. But, you know, hey...

Speaker 2:
[88:20] The highest levels. What's interesting to me is even meeting with CEOs of major companies, you have an advantage right away once they find that out, because there's something interesting about you that they don't have.

Speaker 1:
[88:34] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[88:36] And there's something unique that they're like, okay, that's a cool thing. And they want to hear stories, and that's not often the case. So I'll do, you know, we do executive assessments, you've been hooked up to some of these, and you'll be talking with somebody who's maybe a billionaire, right? And they're like, once again, they weren't a Secret Service agent, so they want to hear your stories, and it automatically makes you, it gives you an opportunity for conversation sometimes that you wouldn't normally have. And I think that's a cool feature of having done that job.

Speaker 1:
[89:05] Agreed. To that point, you're working at the White House, and the Olympic team is there, and I'm bouncing a room ahead of the president. I'm the warm up act, I guess, but I walk in and so, hey, I'm there to make sure that that room is sort of in order and everything's what it needs to be before the president comes in. And so the athletes, it meant almost every room. Like, oh my gosh, you're with the Secret Service. I'm like, hey, time out. You're wearing a gold medal. You're an Olympic athlete. Enough talk about me, kids. Like, let's talk about you and what you've done with your life.

Speaker 2:
[89:41] I remember that at the University of Michigan. Very clearly, because once again, I'm a Michigan state guy, but I got to meet with Lloyd Carr and same thing. He was like, wow, tell me about this or that. And then I remember we were going in to have President Ford speak to the team. And before he went in, I went in the room and it fell silent. And they went, I have this entire Michigan football team, like, dole, shmole, that kind of item. Like, you know, it was so smooth. But yeah, those are the things that are really unique.

Speaker 1:
[90:09] You're like, you guys could bench press my car. Right? That's awesome. Well, man, I can't thank you enough. This has been great for me. And I'm sure the good people who are listening to this are going to learn a lot, not only about, hey, what it takes to find that, hey, there are many unique paths to the Secret Service. I didn't even know how to read coming out of high school. And then, you know, hey, how we apply the things we learned in the Secret Service to business. And I'll link the SEC's website in the show notes for anybody looking for that. And again, no one's too far away to be helped by the SEC enterprise based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Speaker 2:
[90:49] So for sure, we're there for everybody. And this was great, Jim. I appreciate you invited me on and I had a lot of fun.

Speaker 1:
[90:55] You got it, man. I'm going to stop recording so we can talk about people behind their back. That will do it for us here on the Outside the Secret Service Podcast. Thanks for joining us. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode when they're dropped every other Tuesday. If you are or know of a former fired or retired member of the US Secret Service, who would like to be on the show, reach out to us at otssecretserviceatgmail.com. Until next time, remember, what's in the follow-up stays in the follow-up, and if you're on time, you're late. OTSS, out.