YouSaid · the spoken record

Cathy Lanier

lines on the record: 98
first: 2026-04-23
most recent: 2026-04-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Just was a fascinating couple hours with you. I'm an avid follower and really enjoyed my time here. So thank you for including me.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have the coolest job, by the way. I can't imagine how much you get to learn Talking to so many people, and you must have an encyclopedia in your brain.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's your attitude and your effort that you put into how you recover. So it's not what happens to you. It's not the bad thing. It's how you handle those things that really matter in life. Because you can have one of two attitudes every time something bad happens. Which attitude are you going to pick? For me, it's going to be, you know, I wish that never had happened. I wish I'd never made that decision. I wish that had never happened. But you know what? I'm going to fix it. I'm going to not let it find me. I'm not going to let it take me down.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I tell people all the time bad things happen to everybody, right? Bad things happen to everybody. And a lot of times as we do it to ourselves, we make bad decisions. Bad things happen to us for ourselves. Bad things happen to everybody. It's not about the bad decision you made or the bad thing that happened to you. What you do after. So it's easy to. Have some tragedy or some terrible thing happen to you and sit around and feel sorry for yourself or become a victim or let it define you.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Undo it, change it, fix it, don't just stick with it because you've got to be the boss. And this is what I said. Admit you're wrong. Change course. Go another direction. That's where people get tripped up, right? When I'm making a decision, I don't have full information. I'm going to say, I'm thinking to myself as I'm making this decision, I can either go this way or I can go that way. If I go this way, what can go wrong? If I go this way, what can go wrong? Okay, now I'm going to go this way. If one of those things goes wrong, consequence thinking, right? If one of those things goes wrong, what's my course of action then? So if I'm making a decision with incomplete information as I'm making that decision and giving that command, I'm thinking about how I'm going to deal with the collateral damage if that was the wrong decision.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It happens. It happens a lot, especially in Burstrich Fonder communities and military. Like you said, it happens a lot. You're not always going to have a complete picture. Again, I think your comfort level with being able to make those decisions. Is going to fall back on Are you qualified to make that decision? If you feel qualified to make the decision, sometimes I got to make decisions without all the information. There's two things that go along with that. One is The best you can based on what you know at the time, but know a decision has to be made. And then if you make the wrong decision,”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With experience, it comes with investment of time. It comes with preparing yourself to be able to make a decision. Of course, people will throw things at me that I've never experienced before, but because I have all those other things to rely on, I can make a decision and I feel good about it.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The knowledge that you need, you've done your homework, you've read everything that there is to read. You've got your education, you've got experience. The fishing making becomes easy. Each time you go up in a different level of rank, as a sergeant, when I first made sergeant making decisions was a little tough at first because I was still pretty inexperienced myself. You know, my job was to be more well read, understand the DC code a little better than the patrol officer, know what case law says. If I didn't read that stuff and I didn't study, I would be uncomfortable making decisions and I would hesitate to make decisions. We had a lot of people that don't like to make decisions. But the more you read, the more you learn, the more you invest and your knowledge, the easier it is to make decisions. Like to me, decisions now with all of the years I'm in 36 years in this business. Again, I have two master's degrees. I've studied. I've got all this experience. Decisions for me like, boom, boom, boom, boom. So it comes.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say it's, I don't care who you are, it's not 100% instinct. It is your body's going to react. In a crisis to what it knows. So if it's a situation where you have trained for it or you've thought about it or you've prepared for it or you've in your mind, you've walked through it, you're going to be in a lot better position than if it's something that's never crossed your mind. This is where kind of preparedness crosses that line. Like this is why we try to encourage people to be prepared. Know when you walk into a building where there are two different ways you can get out, not just the way you came in. Is there other ways you can get out of this building, right? everybody's going to freeze initially. I think to a certain extent, if you have no experience, nothing in your brain that your brain can go back to have you. But in terms of being in a, in a workplace or a professional environment and making decisions as a leader, if you have”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It doesn't matter what you're doing, what your profession is. If you read the tipping point, the key point is you can turn around any situation. You can solve any problem if you're paying close enough attention to the details that you can hit that tipping point. What is the tipping point to turn around high levels of violence in a community? What is the tipping point to turn around? For people in high paced professions, Blink is one that helps you really evaluate how you make decisions, how you rely on your instinct and your experience, and how much that matters. So those are two of my favorites. The only thing I read, Tim, is stuff about my job. I read work stuff. So, nothing really fun.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Malcolm Gladwell, one of my all-time favorite reads because it forces you to understand that no matter what your challenge or whatever, what your problem is goes back to problem solving. Whenever the problem is you're trying to solve, there is a tipping point. You just have to know what that tipping point is. And I love that book. Great. I read it three times, I think. It's a great book. So that's one of my favorites. It just makes you think differently.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd say my favorite book of all times, and I made it mandatory reading for my command staff when I forgot her was the chief, which was Ahoot because nobody ever made our command staff read anything before. And I also did a book club. I also used this book and did a book club with the community, the tipping point.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no template. Like, I can't say, hey, you know, it's inauguration. This is what we do for the inauguration. The ball sites are all the same. We do the same things. We know what to do with the inauguration. This is every time. It's like you just take the whole plan and throw it away. Start all over. Pretty much, not completely, but pretty much. Yeah.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And regulations and things that are different in different countries, right? Things that we do here, you can't do there. Things they do there we can't do here. So the complexity of what I do now is far more complicated. And it's far more diverse than what I used to do.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I thought, and then presidential inauguration. So I was like, this is easy. Like, I can come to the NFL. This Super Bowl thing is going to be nothing. Like, this is going to be a walk in the park. And the diversity here is the complexity here is so much more. It's so much more complex and the diversity. So I'm not only setting up the equivalent of a presidential inauguration that I did every four years before. Every year at Super Bowl, but the Super Bowl is more complex. It's spread over 10 days over 26 venues and it moves every year. So it's in a different place. So I've got to build all those relationships. I've got to learn all those new venues. I've got to figure out security in a completely different climate. And in Minneapolis, it was 25 below zero. Guess what? Some technology doesn't work in that 25 below zero. Some of the things that we do in Arizona is not going to work in Minneapolis. And then now with international, we try and go and implement our full suite of security standards in Madrid and Sao Paulo and Australia and Munich. But when we get there, 20% of what we do is going to have to be adapted to the local environment, right? There's laws.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd say it's most different. In terms of its diversity. So I thought coming from 27 years in the nation's capital, managing SOD, I managed every Large event protests, demonstration. We had about 2,300 a year that I was responsible for when I was there.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can go and audit you, and you have all those standards in place. But what a red team operation does is it's quality assurance. Are those standards working? If I tell you to do something that didn't necessarily work. So it tells you if the standards that you were using are effective or not, maybe that you put them in place but you didn't execute them properly. So they're not effective. So if you're not properly doing secondary screening, it's not that the magnetometers didn't work. It's that your guard didn't respond properly to an alert. It's a quality assurance. That's a quality assurance test to see if the standards that you are employing or that you're requiring are being used properly and are they effective. That's the key. It's not a gotcha. It's like, is what we're doing effective? And if it's not effective, how can we make it effective?”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Military, like military pretending to be the It's the military. I mean, it was a military concept initially. And think about it this way you got to look at it a little differently. I think on the tech side, it is a little different, but I think of red teaming as we set a standard, like we think use of magnetometers to screen for weapons. We think use of a perimeter to make sure everybody goes through screening, you know, all these standards we put in place of security, right?”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Combine, draft, and all the international series games. So when I say we have nine international games this year, the reason scheduling this is so hard. Each one of those international games, I will take a team out in advance at least two trips, if not three. And we've got nine international games this year. And I'm also working on, we plan Super Bowl about 18 months out in advance because that's, you know, 10 days of events over 20-some venues. And then draft. So draft I'm leaving for Pittsburgh on Sunday to go manage the draft for the next seven or eight days. So special events, 10 pole events. That's a big, big part of it.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everything related to security. So executive protection, I set the standards for physical security and cybersecurity at the stadiums. So all of the stadiums, the 30 stadiums across the US and our international stadiums, a little bit variation on the international, but across all the U.S. stadiums, we set the requirements for security that they have to meet. So once we set that standard, we update it annually. We do the audits and red teaming and we make sure that they are meeting those standards. So physical security, cybersecurity both. We also have investigative responsibilities, so violations of the personal conduct policy. Those are all investigations that are done by my team. We have game integrity, so management of the game integrity program. So making sure that we are maintaining the integrity of this game. There's a lot involved in that. If it's got anything to do with security, it falls on us. Individually, the legal office has full responsibility for Super Bowl.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People that are trained to have that skill. And if we can't train our detectives to do it or they don't have the bandwidth to do it, then we're going to hire civilians to do it. But we're going to have that skill and we're going to have it out on the street daily. And so we did. We hired criminal research specialists. We hired some other civilians for digital forensics. So we went through this evolution and it is building systems that will endure over time. And policing was not designed that way. So we had to really change the way we do policing. And now police departments are doing much better at keeping pace with technology.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really kind of set this in stone for me. This poor gentleman who was robbed for his cell phone one night he's beaten with a baseball bat. They crush his skull. They take his phone. Those same suspects, we find Mr. Maslin the next day with his skull crushed, barely alive, no cell phone. We don't know where his cell phone is. He's in the hospital. Well, what we don't know is that same night, right after they robbed him, that same group of kids went to Adams Morgan, another neighborhood, and they robbed three more people and they were arrested. And when they were arrested, they had multiple cell phones on them. They were robbing people for their cell phones because they were going to go and turn those phones in and make money. And all those cell phones were recovered as evidence and put on the books, but nobody knew that Thomas Maslin's phone was in that books because we didn't have anybody that had the digital forensic skill to dump those phones and figure out whose phones they were. And when we finally did figure that out month later, I said, this is never going to happen again. We need to have.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Walking around the community and giving my cell phone number out listening to what people had to say. But if you listen to people, they will tell you what to do and my officers, my detectives, my sergeants, my lieutenants, those guys, when I did my strategic planning sessions, I would bring in from all of those groups and brainstorm with them. One of the things we need, how can we do better? What do you need that you don't have? What are the crime trends that you're seeing? But when I witnessed this evolution of technology and crime and we had to get our police department to adjust to meet that evolution, we hire cops for a 25 year career. And when this technological crime evolution was happening, we had detectives that didn't know how to manage a crime scene with seven different cameras they had to download to get video of the crime scene. They didn't know how to mobily, forensically dump a phone. You arrest a guy who just did some armed robberies. And the biggest case, and I'm sure you in your research, you saw this Thomas Maslin case, there was a case that”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we were putting computers in the cars and we pushed the technology, gunshot detection technology, cameras, integrating those gunshot detection technologies cameras, all those things together. I really wanted technology to be those systems, right? Taking all this great technology that's coming out, make us more effective and more efficient as police officers instead of spending three hours handwriting an accident report, we could pull up on the scene of an accident report, have a iPad or a laptop in the cruiser that GPS drops the intersection on a police report and all I gotta do is plank a little car down there and my police report now takes 10 minutes instead of two hours, right? So I brought all this technology, the systems that made us better made us more effective. And I relied a lot on people. Everything I did, I learned from the people that work for me and the people in the community. I made it a point to go out and talk to people and lint it. Everything I learned about fighting crime that was effective, I got it from one.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's not an easy question to answer, but I would say this I push technology very, very hard once I became the chief. When I took over as the chief, we had Kellatubby Pagers. We didn't even have cell phones. And I wanted everybody to have smartphones, the early smartphones. The first one we got was a trio. We had palm pilots and trios, right? If you remember that far back.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Canvas. Like instead of just telling you what something bad happens, we're going to tell you when we close it. So now people know. We've taken that person off the street. And those little things matter.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who's the on-seen official? Have him call me? He calls me. And I said, look, I just got a tip from somebody that there's a gun involved in this case and this is where the gun is. Sure enough, that's where the gun was. They recovered that gun from that recovery of that gun. They were able to start working this case and actually get information. So I always tie that back to I strongly believe that the fact that I walked over to those women, I showed them a little respect. I sat on the wall with them. I didn't lock them up for the Oakland Dana out. They weren't hurting anybody. I sat and chatted with them. I gave them my cell number and said, look, I want to help. But if you don't give me information, I can't help. So that's the philosophy that I wanted all of my cops to have. That's the way I wanted all of us to police our communities. I wanted people to see that you give me information. You'll see results. You tell me who's involved in shooting up the neighborhood. We'll go after them. We will make it. So we started instead of just putting posters up when a homicide occurred, when we made an arrest for the homicide, we went back and put posters up saying the case is closed. Reverse.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And when I walk over to the two ladies, they kind of take their beer, you know, and stick it behind the wall. I was like, you know, you're not supposed to be drinking out here, but I'm going to pretend I didn't see that, right? So I give them my business card. I give them that respect. Yes, ma'am, no, ma'am, talk to them with a little respect. I give them my business card. My cell phone number's on there. About two weeks later, I get a call at one o'clock in the morning. And it was a woman's voice. Don't know if it was those women. Can't prove it. Don't know to this day. I get a call about one o'clock in the morning. There was a shooting in that neighborhood. And the woman's voice said to me, tell your officers that the gun is behind the white escalade. And I'm like, what are you talking about? She says on Cloud Street, she gave me the address on Cloud Street. She said, there's a white escalade. The gun is there. So I turn on my police radio, half asleep, switched to the sixth district where that address is. And sure enough, they're working a shooting. And I went over the radio. I said, Cruiser 1.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the middle of the night, hit these kids that are on the tennis board. I mean, I don't know on the basketball court. Please let me”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They wouldn't come forward because they didn't trust us. And so we had to change that. So I had a great example. I was out. We did a prime initiative during the summer called All Hands on Deck. So I was out on all hands on deck. I'm walking through a public housing complex and there's two middle-aged women sitting on a lall outside in the summer. They're drinking. They got open containers of alcohol, which is illegal. In the old days, when I was policing, we would just walk over and handcuff them, lock them up, take them to the station, right? That's open container alcohol. So I go over and I sit down and start talking to them. There'd been a series of shootings in this complex. And I said, you know, hey, she's like, I don't know why you guys are here. You don't care about us. You know, kind of giving me the lip. And I said, okay, well, I'll tell you what, here's my business card, my cell phone number's on here. First of all, they had no idea it was a cheat. I'm just the cop, right? Like they don't, they don't watch the local news. They don't know that I'm the chief. Here's my business card. If you have any information and you want to talk to me about anything that's going on here and tell me who's out here.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Promised I was going to go on the scene of every single homicide. Why? Because I wanted people in the communities to know it didn't matter what neighborhood you lived in or what the circumstances of that homicide was, that homicide is just as important to us as every other homicide. So homicide in Georgetown, right, and the very expensive, wealthy neighborhood, if there was a homicide there, it would get news coverage for weeks. And police were all over it. And almost always his crimes would be closed. But if there was a homicide in a public housing project, it got little to no news coverage. You know, three people shot last night in southeast. That was it. That's all you'd hear. And nothing about those people or what happened with those crimes. And they very rarely got closed. So I put an emphasis on trying to cultivate those relationships in the community. It was clear to me two things. People didn't trust us. They didn't trust the police. And we didn't close these homicides because witnesses wouldn't come forward.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, for me, it was pretty simple, and it does go back to Mount Pleasant. Again, pretty intuitive on your part, not having been in policing, it does go back to Mount Pleasant for me. So when I became the chief of police, a couple of commitments I made to myself and to the community was that we had a tendency to place higher value on some neighborhoods and some crimes than others. Our job is to protect all of the community and every crime should be equally important to us. We're not preventing crimes, we're not being successful. Making arrests, we used to publish our arrest stats every year and go, oh, look, we made 50,000 arrests last year. Look how successful we are. Well, that's 50,000 times we didn't do our job because we didn't prevent those crimes from happening. So to me, arrest stats are not a good measure of success for a police department. Now, I don't have a stat thing to tell you what I prevented, right? But the goal should be to try and prevent. So for me, what was very clear is, so when I first took over chief,”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got to go through all of that training and all of that experience with my whole team. The Metrofall Police Department, when we were finished that six years of evolution was a completely different place”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Homeland security capabilities that we need, not just an SOD, but across the whole department. So he gave me a blank check to create a brand new police philosophy in the Metropolitan Police Department. So we created the Homeland Security Counterterrorism Bureau. We created CBR&E. My first year, we got $17 million in funding to buy Level A suits to send our people down to Annis in Alabama. I went down to Annis in Alabama. I trained in Sarin and VX, live Sarin and VX Gas. We were trained to do rescues and hot zones. We went down to Nevada and trained on red environments, radiological environments. We trained with, I was one of the few people who was fortunate enough to train with Ken Alabek and Bill Patrick, two bioweapons scientists, one from Russia and one from the US, taught my bioweapons class, you know, how to respond to biological threats, anthrax, right? We had anthrax in Washington, D.C. These are all things that I was on the front end of creating.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pre 911 police department in the nation's capital to a post 9 11 police department in the nation's capital. We got caught flat-footed on 9-11 and we should not have been. We didn't have the skills, training, equipment, and things that we should have had. I always say, Timothy McVeigh was, you know, that Oklahoma City bombing was the wake-up call. That's when we should have started changing the way we train and prepare our police officers, but we didn't, right? And then there's the FERTS World Trade Center bombing. That was another wake-up call. We didn't respond to that. It was not until 9-11 that the nation's police departments and the largest cities really realized that we have to be prepared for this type of asymmetric”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was the most complex rule I'd ever held. Most of the units I managed, I had to manage three or four different type of specialties. I had to manage nine different specialties, and they were highly special. These were highly, you know, sniper teams on the SWAT teams, you know, negotiations unit, the bomb squad. We were just after 9-11, and we were trying to evolve our department from”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A mentor does for you is they lend you confidence that you don't have. Like Chuck recognized that I didn't have the confidence. I was like intimidated by this SOD thing. Like I was like, yeah, no, never had a woman in charge. It's predominantly male. I always say it's the most testosterone in the police departments in SOD, right? It's the bomb squad, the SWAT team harbor, the marine unit, the helicopter unit, aviation, horse-mounted unit, canine, civil disturbance unit, the presidential protection unit. So it's like nine or ten different units. So anyway, he recognized that I was intimidated by that. And he's like, you're going to go and you're going to do it. He sent me off to a bunch of schools. I went to EOD schools, bombing schools. So I learned how to manage a bomb spot. I learned how to manage a squat team. And the people there were great. That was my best assignment in my entire career. I spent six years there after 9-11 recreating our special operations division and turning it into a homeland security.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I took over special ops. Now, special operations division had never had a woman in charge. So that in itself was a little intimidating. But the one thing that when you talk about mentors, and I know you probably have experienced this like many others, is”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I went to Major Narcotics branch. I was there for, so I had major narcotics branch and vehicular homicide. So I managed all the vehicular homicide investigative units there for just under two years. And then he promoted me again to Commander. And I took over a patrol district. The fourth district where Mount Pleasant sits, the patrol district I started in. I went back now and I was the commander of that patrol district. It was the largest residential area in the city of Washington. So I took over that district. I ran that for two years. and then Chuck got away. He called me down to his office and he says, you know, I'm thinking I'm going to send you to SOD. It was 9-11 happens the Friday after 9-11. He says, I think I'm going to send you to special operations division. I was like, you know what? I love being the district manner. I love working in 4D. This is my goal was to retire as the commander of 4D. Thanks, but I really like where I am. He's like, oh, okay.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When Chuck came in and he initially put me in short, I'd only been a captain, I want to say four or five months. And he kind of did a clean out at the top. Like a lot of that old boy network that was there when he got there, there were all people that were long past retirement. So he pushed a lot of the command staff out. So that made him push people up pretty young in their career. So he pushed me up to be the commander of major narcotics branch as an inspector. Like I said, just under eight years on. So I was very young and I had a major role.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here, right here. I kept my gun belt, my handcuffs, my extra magazines, all those things that the administrative captains used to turn in. I'm like, no, I'm keeping this out.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here's the big key. When I went to go change my uniform, so you've got a property division. When you get voted, you walk off the stage, you get your birds or whatever you're getting, your clusters or whatever, it's for your new rank. You go to the property division, you get your new rank insignia. When I made captain and I went over to property division to get my new rank insignia, they said, turn in your handcuffs. And I was like, what Turning my handcuffs. What are you You don't need those anymore. Like, you're not taking my handcuffs. I'm going to keep my handcuff”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reviewing bad arrests that when somebody didn't, a sergeant didn't do the right thing and review the paperwork. Now you've got a bad arrest. It's got to be detention journaled. So you've got to review and make that decision. You've got to set things up at the courts. You've got to look at all the disciplinary investigations that come in. You know, officers getting disciplined for things. You've got to make decisions about that. You sit on trial boards. You know who's going to get disciplined? Who's going to get terminated? It's very administrative. You're helping the commander make decisions community meetings, deployment decisions. It's not as much fun.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Best rank on the police farmer for me was Lieutenant. I was able to still go out on the street, support my troops, back up my sergeants, have fun policing and do the policing that I enjoyed. But I also had the ability to change the environment for them, help them, and also influence how we were policing our community. After Captain, it gets, you know, so captain is more, you're strapped to your desk a lot more.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I'm seeing firsthand the impact it's having in our neighborhoods. So police administration starts to become more and more important there. I also now can start influencing policy. I can influence policy for my little piece of the world, right? I decide what my drug enforcement tactics are going to be. I decide how we're going to work in terms of doing warrant service and things like that. So that's where you first start to get a better understanding of influencing how policing actually is carried out”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And you're also getting exposure to administration. So part of that exam, that promotional exam is studying administration. You have to learn.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At that time, it's done differently over the course of the years, it's changed, but at that time, it was geographically. So I had a patrol district, and of that patrol district, I had one-third of that patrol district, and I managed every resource for that part of the district. So all three shifts, I had day work, midnights, evening shift, all three shifts. Those officers are split across those three shifts, and they covered all the policing. So not just the 911 responders, the guys in uniform going to 911 calls, but also your narcotics officers and your detectives that follow up and investigate crimes.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So again, this is where I think the police department gets right. You spend three years as a patrol officer, you make sergeant, you study really hard, you take the test, you make sergeant, you go through some school after you make sergeant, you manage a small group, then you make lieutenant two years later, you go through the exam process, you go through some schools after that, and then you manage a squad of like a platoon of 40 when I was a lieutenant, I had narcotics officers, I had detectives, and I had patrol. So I didn't just have patrol anymore. I had, you know, detectives narc. and”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of what officials, what command level officials he wanted to have on his team. And he appointed me from the rank of captain to be an inspector to take a major narcotics branch with less than eight years on the job. I was 29, I think.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it would have been accurate. I tell you what the star is aligned for me. So I took sergeant tested three years. I was eligible for lieutenant at five. I took the lieutenant's test at five years. I came in number one on that test. I took the captain's test seven years. I came in number three on that test. So I got promoted bang, bang, bang, three years, five years, seven years with the captain in seven years. I would have never gone past the rank of captain that current administration and then Mary and Barry gets arrested, our mayor Marion Barry is taken out and replaced by the control board. The control board comes in 1998. I'm a captain at the time. Marin Barry is now taken out of play. The control board takes over. They bring in Chuck Ramsey, an outsider who knows nobody in the department. He doesn't know anybody. He's got no click. He's got no boys. Everybody's fresh. So he comes in as I'm lieutenant just making captain, takes over the police department as a complete outsider and is doing his assessment.”
2026-04-23 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #862: Cathy Lanier, Chief Security Officer of the NFL — From 9th-Grade Dropout to DC's Longest-Serving Police Chief, Protecting the Super Bowl, and Resilience Under Extreme Pressure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT