Police, and the longest serving chief on the D.C. force. Full bio Books, people, tools, and resources mentioned in the interview Legal conditions/copyright information Listen onSpotify Listen onApple Podcasts Listen onOvercast Cathy Lanier, NFL Chief Security Officer — From Food Stamps to the Super Bowl War Room Additional podcast platforms 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 wen