This episode is sponsored by Transcend, a veteran owned and operated performance optimization company that I introduced recently as a sponsor on this show.
Well, since then, I have actually been using my products and I've had incredible success.
There was initial blood work that was extremely detailed and based on that, they offered supplementation.
So I began taking DHEA, BPC157 for inflammation based on the fact that I've been a stump man and martial artist and a firefighter my whole life, lots of aches and pains,
Dihexa to help cognition after multiple punches to the head and shift work and peptides.
Four months later, they did a detailed blood work again and I was actually able to taper off two of the peptides because my body had responded so well to just one of them that it was optimized at that point.
So I cannot speak highly enough of the immense range of supplementation that they offer, whether it's male health, female health, peptides to boost your own testosterone, which I would argue is needed by a lot of the fire service,
or whether it's exogenous testosterone needed, especially after TBIs or advanced age.
Now, as I mentioned before, the other side of this company is an altruistic arm called the Transcend Foundation,
which is putting veterans and first responders through some of their protocols free of charge.
Now Transcend are also offering you the audience 10% off their protocols and you can find that on JamesGearing.com under the products tab.
And if you want to hear more about Transcend and their story, listen to episode 808 with the founder Ernie Colling or go to TranscendCompany.com.
Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show former Navy reservist,
probation officer and current mental health counselor Paul Collette.
Now in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from his journey into law enforcement, the world of probation,
hunting sex offenders, addiction, corrections, his transition into the psychology world and so much more.
Now before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment.
Go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for others to find.
And this is a free library of over 1000 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Paul Collette. Enjoy.
Well, Paul, I want to start by saying two things. Firstly, thank you for your patience when we were supposed to do this.
The power company shut down my entire street. And secondly, to welcome you today instead to the Behind the Shield podcast.
Wow, thanks, James. I can't believe I'm actually here. It's an honor.
When the opportunity presented itself for for for the invite, I just had to jump on.
I like to get my my message out to my client population and ideally maybe to a broader audience, especially the one that you're connected to.
Just it just it's an amazing opportunity for me that resonates with, I think, my DNA and yours as well.
And that's why I was just so excited that you invited me on. Thank you.
Yeah, well, I'm glad you're here. So very first question, where on planet Earth are we finding you today?
Great question. I am in Newington, Connecticut, which is a suburb of Hartford, Connecticut.
So basically it's Newington, West Hartford, which is a it's an upper middle class, middle class suburb of Hartford, which is a very rural, I mean, a very urban city, which has got its own problems.
So we've been living here in Connecticut since 2006, actually December 2006. And I live here with my wife and my two daughters.
Beautiful. Well, let's start prior to 2006, your kind of early life then.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings?
So I was born 1967. So for the audience, I'm 57 years old. I was born on Langley Air Force Base, Virginia.
My dad was a colonel in the Air Force, a lieutenant colonel. He flew the AC-130 gunships for most of his career.
He did two tours in Vietnam, Grenada and Panama as well. So he's my hero. I grew up all around the country.
I was pretty much a culture to the military, you know, having grown up on many bases throughout the country and the world, for that matter.
So I have a brother who's a couple of years younger than me. He works for Southwest Airlines and he lives in Arkansas with my dad, who is now retired.
My dad, after he retired from the Air Force after 20 years, ended up getting a job with another agency for the government and did another 20 years with them as well.
So he's got two great pensions and he's rocking his retirement life. And he just think he turned 82 now.
I met him and my brother in Vegas for a couple of days. We had a great time.
My mom passed away a couple of years ago. She was a homemaker. She was she managed the household like many traditional women in those days.
Dad would go off. He'd be deployed. I wouldn't see him for, you know, six months, five months, four months, depending upon how long he was deployed.
I remember coming home from school and there would be this guy in a uniform hanging out in the kitchen.
I'm like, oh, I guess he's dad. And, you know, as growing up, I just kind of had kind of get used to my dad in and out of my life like that.
But my mom was our rock. She took care of us. She managed the household finances, fed us and made sure that everything was smooth and running well.
So when dad came home, we were all pretty much a great nuclear family, if you will.
What are the impacts of service that you heard from from your father?
For example, one of the generations I think that we did a huge disservice to was certainly the Korean War.
It's almost unmentioned, which I think those poor men and women need a lot more recognition than they get.
But the Vietnam era, obviously, a lot of those soldiers and airmen came back, you know, literally being spat on and all kinds of horrible things,
which I'm sure doesn't do much for someone's mental health when they've been serving their country.
And that's the welcome that they get. So what have been some of the kind of highs and lows that he's recalled about that part of his life?
That's a great question. And to be quite frank, he never really talked about it that much with us.
And I think it was really difficult for him to come back from deployment as an officer in the Air Force,
to come back with the love that he had and the patriotism of this country to see how things were in the 60s and 70s, early 70s.
And at the time, for him, he as he got older, as we both got older as a family,
I started to recognize that there were a lot of, at least for him historically, I think some bitterness about how society can go off the rails,
you know, when people decide that they get a say on how other people get to live their lives and how they get to serve their country.
So I never really talked about him being spat on.
But I do recall him coming through the airport as he told me that there were people there giving him a lot of nasty, dirty looks.
And that was as far as he ever talked about his time, at least for the Vietnam era.
Now, after that, growing up with him on military bases, I'd always come with him on the base and I'd go into the squadron where he would hang out with the other guys.
And he would actually bring me on to the AC-130 gunships when they were on the flight line and, you know, as many military brats, we had access to that stuff with our parents.
So I grew up around that. I remember when I was 18 years old, I got to hang out in a flight simulator and I actually got to fly a flight simulator for an AC-130,
which is kind of cool. How often do you get to do that as a teenager?
So for me, my template, my DNA was always, I always knew I was going to be either in the military or doing some type of public service.
That was no question about it. I think my dad told me at one point, he said, there's nothing more pathetic than a man who's ashamed of where he came from.
So he said, whatever you do in your life, you know, own it and be proud of it.
And I said, well, and I remember this, I said, so what happens if I want to become a ditch digger?
Would you be proud of me then? And he goes, you know, if that was your dream to be a ditch digger, then great, wonderful.
However, I think that your mother and I have instilled a different set of career values in you that you would opt not to do that.
And I get it. You know, I was just young and dumb at the time when I said that, but it was true.
You know, I mean, he gave me my potential. He helped me figure out what I wanted to be when I was growing up.
And, you know, when I was a teenager, I made a lot of dumb mistakes and got a lot of trouble. And, you know, it is what it is.
That's what we do as kids. However, I learned from that.
And I realized early on that I needed to make a choice in my life.
And that choice was, do I want to live a life of mediocrity and sitting on a couch all day and dreaming and making X amount of money day to day?
Or do I want to live a life where providing service and have a career that actually means something?
That's a choice. And I wanted to do that. So for me, my journey was a bit colorful growing up,
but at the same time, it added more texture and flavor to the person than I am today.
So define colorful.
Great question. So I have a bachelor's degree in art history.
When I was I went to Northern Arizona University, which is in Flagstaff, Arizona at the time, my dad had retired from the Air Force.
He worked as a civilian for the U.S. Army.
And we were stationed at Fort Huachuca, which is the Army Intelligence Fort or base, if you will, in Sierra Vista, Arizona, which is right on the border of Arizona and Mexico.
So at the time, I went to college and I thought I was going to major in I was picking something like engineering, which I don't even know what I was thinking of.
I suck at math. And then I changed my major to photojournalism.
Then I changed my major to what was it? History. And then I changed my major again to something.
I don't even remember what it was. Long story short, I changed my major seven times in my undergrad.
And by the time I was my senior year, my dad calls me up and he goes, you need to pick something and you need to graduate because you're you're getting to the point where we're all running out of patience here, because he actually footed the bill for my undergrad.
That was that was the that was a contract my dad took with me.
He said, I'm going to pay for undergrad. I'm going to help you get your bachelor's degree.
So you'd with state college. But the deal is you need to get great grades and when you come home for the summer, you need to work for the entire summer.
So for me, that was a no brainer. I'm like, you kidding me?
I can go to a party school and I mean, the number one major at Northern Arizona University was forestry.
So that gives you an idea of the kind of students there were there.
And it was great. It was all hippies. I had a great time with them.
But for me, having that kind of colorful and texture undergrad experience.
So I took so many classes, the actually classes that I actually enjoyed was art history.
I just had a blast taking them out of some great professors.
And so I went to my advisor and my advisor told me, hey, listen, you got enough credits to get actually a degree in art history.
How does that sound? OK, let's do it.
So I got my my undergrad in art history and then I graduated from college.
And, you know, of course, I never did anything with it.
There's nothing to do with a degree in art history. Graduated from college in 89, 90, which was the for people that are slightly older.
That was a time where it was one of the worst recessions ever.
Like borderline depression. There was like no jobs at the time.
And I had a girlfriend who actually lived in New York City and met her at college.
And she's like, hey, listen, come out, live with me in New York City and Manhattan.
Try to find a job out here. And I had another buddy who lived in California at the time.
And he was actually a screenwriter. And he said, why don't you come live with me and, you know, try to make it out here in California and L.A.
Well, I've been in L.A. before. Didn't really like it at the time.
Never been in New York. And I had a girl sort of a girlfriend.
And I was like, right, I can live with this chick and I can live in a city.
How cool is that? And so I moved to New York City.
Didn't have a job lined up. And literally three weeks after I get there, we broke up, moved out, got my own little apartment and got a job.
My first job working for the city of New York, which was pretty cool.
And that's kind of how my path for public service started at the time.
So I went from art history to now working in lower Manhattan.
I was working at a hospital called Bellevue Hospital, which for those of you who may or may not know,
Bellevue Hospital is sort of the premier psychiatric hospital in the country.
And it's also a shock trauma unit. So if the president is in town, actually, and it's NYU affiliated,
the president is in town, anything would happen to the president, they send him to Bellevue, which is a city hospital.
The reason being at the time was Bellevue had a lot of experience treating gunshot victims.
And at the time I used to see him, the army would actually send their surgeons to Bellevue for training because this is 1990.
There was no war at the time yet. So it was peacetime.
And so they actually would send army surgeons to the inner cities for training on how to work with people with wounds and gunshot wounds.
And so it was a great place for me to work. I was what they call a clinical case manager,
which is really a fancy term for saying I was just a caseworker. And I was working in the psych emergency room, having a great time.
Loved, loved the experience. And I was working with a great team of doctors, psychiatrists, social workers,
nurses, psychiatric nurses and law enforcement. So I would be hanging out in the emergency room and they would bring in people,
they called them EDPs or emotionally disturbed persons. And at the time,
my job was to hook them up to services when they're ready for discharge. And I really liked doing that.
But also being young, I think I was 21, 22 at the time, wasn't still quite sure what I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to be a social worker.
I was actually going to go to Columbia. I'd been accepted there for my graduate, graduate degree for my MSW, Master's of Social Work.
And I was ready to start that journey when after a while, I started talking to NYPD, US Marshal Service,
probation, parole officers, they would bring in their arrestees or people that were on supervision that needed a psych eval or something was going on with them.
And the more I talked to them, the more I realized that's that's a blend of social work and law enforcement being a P.O., probation officer.
That seems to fit my temperament more because I really didn't have the patience at the time to really sit down and get to know.
Plus, I was just hadn't really lived, I thought. And you want me to be, you know,
who am I at 22 years old to get a Master's of Social Work and to be a therapist and tell people how to, you know, how to help themselves mentally?
I'm like, I don't even have my shit together. What the hell am I going to do?
So I ended up taking every civil service test in the in the book.
If those of you don't know New York, all all New York City jobs are civil service. You have to take a test.
So I took the NYPD exam. I took the New York City probation officer's exam.
I took the sheriff's exam. New York City is a sheriff's office, believe it or not.
And I almost got called for the NYPD at the time when law enforcement actually was a considered a really good career to work in.
There were anywhere between 30 to 60 thousand applicants that would take the civil service test whenever it opened up.
And at the time, the NYPD exam only was opening up every three to four years.
That's how that's how hard it was to get that job. It was a great job. Great benefits.
It was just one of the most sought after jobs in civil service.
And the time you only needed and you still don't think they changed it, but you only needed a high school diploma,
a high school diploma at age 21 to be an NYPD cop, to be a New York City probation officer, which is what I became.
You needed minimum of a college degree undergrad with some experience and it paid less than the NYPD.
So I was about to get called the NYPD Academy and they my list died. So I never got never got called.
I had a choice to take the next upcoming exam, but I had to wait another three to four years before they call me.
And I was just like, what am I doing? I need to get my life going here.
I was only making at the time as a caseworker, case manager at Bellevue.
When I left, I was making twenty three thousand five hundred dollars in nineteen ninety three with a New York City rent.
Yeah. Yeah. Now, ironically, it was still affordable for me to have my own apartment in Brooklyn.
I lived in a place called Park Slope, which today, you know, I mean, just to buy a macaroni box there is like almost a million dollars.
It's just it's just insane.
But I was able to get my own studio apartment and I was able to actually live pretty well, you know, as a single guy doing what I'm doing.
But of course, it was a dead end job for me. It was a dead end career.
I needed to now up my game.
And so I got hired by the New York City probation department where I was there for three and a half years.
I want to go back to a comment you made, because it's so normal when you either move to or grow up in the U.S.
But when you hear it, thinking about, you know, from a European standpoint, it's it's insanity.
There was no war going on at the time.
So we sent the military surgeons to the inner city so they could experience gunshot wounds.
Now, you wouldn't hear that in Oslo or Reykjavik or Lisbon.
But it's so normal for us to have this high, high level of gun violence in this country that in peacetime, we'll send our military surgeons to our urban hospitals.
It was crazy and especially was crazy for me, even though I grew up on military bases, my early adult, you know, child childhood life, you know,
was being exposed to people that were serving this country and had gone to war.
I'd never seen it. I'd never been near a war. And I grew up in on military bases and suburbia.
We were middle class family. My dad was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force.
So, you know, we lived pretty well. And my mom was able to be a stay at home mother, a homemaker and raise us.
And we everything we wanted was was provided to us. We never we never had food insecurity.
We never had housing insecurity. You know, we never had to suffer in terms of, you know,
you know, where we have enough money for me to go to college, which is what I really wanted to do.
And I was very fortunate. And, you know, we were very privileged and very blessed.
And to this day, I, you know, I'm very grateful for that.
And that's the opportunities I want to provide my own children.
But moving into New York City at the time, there was anywhere between I think the statistics were between two to three thousand shootings, deaths a year.
OK, I mean, that's Chicago style today. What's going on?
And at the time, it was the height of the AIDS and the crack epidemic as well.
So here am I moving to the city for the very first time, getting exposed to all of that and violence.
And almost like the second day I was there, I saw a stabbing on the train and I'm like, oh, man, what am I just move into here?
But, you know, when you're young, you're you're you're you're invulnerable.
And I thought it was pretty cool. And I'm living my life now.
I'm a fully formed adult, allegedly. So I might as well embrace it.
So having that experience and then seeing that.
In a psychiatric hospital, in the psychiatric ER, day in and day out of people going through crisis,
the people that are suffering from substance use disorder, mental illness, housing insecurity,
domestic violence, victims, violence, things that were going on, because it was the other ER is right next door.
And I walk over there and speak to some of the doctors and the med students and some of my friends and, you know, hanging out with them.
And I could walk right up to somebody and see see a gunshot wound and watch them work on somebody in the hallway.
And, you know, so it was like drinking from a fire hose at the time.
There was just so much to learn, so much information for me that really kind of defined the path that I, you know, endeavor to go on later on.
And so that's when I became, you know, a probation officer.
But it was at the time, you're right, it was very puzzling for me.
I remember calling my dad up about that and saying, I've seen army surgeons here, civilian hospitals.
He's like, really? Why? I'm like, I don't know.
And then I had to go ask him like, oh, yeah, you know, I spoke to him.
I know, you know, we saw three we we saw three gunshot victims here. We got to work on them.
And bringing that institutional knowledge back to, you know, the VA or whatever hospitals they were working on the basis.
So that was that was a pretty cool experience.
But you think about it from a society point of view, it shows you how broken we are.
But, you know, you go to an urban urban setting for military training.
I mean, that that speaks to you. I think that this is a picture speaks a thousand words.
So I think that one statement speaks a million words.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
So when you were still in the psychiatric setting before you went into the world of probation,
you're seeing all these people in crises.
What was some of the common denominators as far as the backstory that started kind of showing their face?
Homeless. Addicted to substances. Mental illness. Criminal justice involvement.
All of all of it was the trifecta. You name it, they had it.
It was much like today, what's I think happening in other cities like San Francisco, as we see, and New York, especially Seattle.
That was in the news for a couple of years ago of the massive homeless population.
I had yet and essentially said that, James, I always tried to find, especially with the with the unhoused, right?
Or homeless, as we call them in those days. I tried to find what they call the unicorn.
Right. And that's that's the man or the woman that has that nine to five job that they lost their they lost their job.
They got fired or something happened to them.
They could no longer work. And then they fell behind in the rent or their mortgage.
And then they ended up homeless. Right. That to me was the unicorn.
I never saw anybody like that. It was everybody that was homeless.
Had a substance use disorder or alcohol use disorder. They were using substances.
I would say less than five percent was pure, pure mental illness, like untreated schizophrenia.
Rarely saw them. And those were the ones that I was actually part of.
At the time, it was called Project Help Mayor Dinkins at the time.
He created that project help homeless emergency liaison program.
And so what we did through Bellevue, we went out in a van, there was myself, a psychiatrist and a social worker.
And we would just basically patrol Manhattan at night looking for people that were a threat to themselves or others out on the streets.
And the psychiatrist had a judicial court order that when we found somebody that was clearly, clearly a threat to themselves and they needed help,
we would try to get, coax them in to go to the psych emergency room, offer them like sandwiches and drinks and try to talk to them.
They come with us, come in the van, come to the hospital, let's get you hooked up,
we'll get you services and medication and get you housing and all these wonderful things that the city could provide at the time.
And if they didn't, then we would call in a police radio, call the NYPD.
Cops would show up, show the cop the judicial order.
And then the cops would put that person in custody and then bring them to the psych emergency room and then they would be mandated for treatment.
And it was actually quite successful for a few years.
And I know some people are looking at that like, well, you can't do that.
But you have to understand the kind of people that were living out there.
And these were people that were, they were, they had gangrene, they were seeing and hearing voices, they were cutting themselves.
They were, you know, they hadn't showered or had a bath in years and they had lice and all kinds of,
their bodies were just breaking down right in front of you and disintegrating.
It was horrific to see.
And so getting them off the street and getting them the help and support they needed, it was a great program and it worked quite well.
And I learned a lot. I learned a lot about building, at the time, building rapport with people that were in crisis,
dealing with people that were resistant to treatment and yet trying to find that little,
that little way to kind of get in, you know, to convince them, hey, listen, you know, just come in with me.
At the end of this journey, I can get you an apartment. How does that sound? Right.
I can get you on Social Security disability because you clearly qualify for it.
And once you use that kind of carrot approach, a lot of the people that were out there on the streets would come in with us.
But overwhelmingly, James, it was substance use disorder.
It was substance use disorder and criminal justice involvement.
A lot of, I mean, pretty much everyone had been arrested in and out revolving doors.
A lot of, as most of the cases of people that are using substances, saw a lot of like larcenies,
thefts, things that they would boost from stores they could sell on the street for money as well.
So, you know, we had access to their rap sheets and I'd look at them like, yeah, this guy's clearly,
even at the time they would deny, like I remember I had a client, he was like, never used drugs in my life.
He's had like 30 arrests for stealing stuff from, you know, the local Macy's at the time.
And I'm like, dude, you're stealing stuff for drugs, you know.
And then, of course, they do piss tests and sure enough, there was smoking crack cocaine.
So, but yeah, that was pretty much the common denominator.
What was it that caused the dismantling of the HELP program?
It just wasn't sexy enough, man.
It was just, you know, it was, I mean, as we like to say, it was above my pay grade.
It was money, you know, but also understand too, at the time in New York, especially when I was living there,
the city was in the grips of the AIDS, HIV and crack epidemic, as well as crime and murders were just through the roof.
It was a really bad place to live.
And so, Times Square, unlike, you know, the Disney World it is today, you walked into Times Square
and I had been there many times because I lived in New York.
It was, you were taking your life in your hands.
You were going to be subjected to muggings, assaults, open air drugs, people overdosing on the streets,
much like you're seeing today.
But it didn't take, it took Mayor Giuliani to step in, you know.
And once Mayor Giuliani stepped in with Commissioner, Police Commissioner Bratton, Bill Bratton,
he was a Boston police chief who he was recruited by Giuliani to come in and run the NYPD.
And they instituted what they call the broken windows theory of policing, where essentially, you know,
the theory is if you're walking down a street and, you know, the houses can be upper middle class, beautifully,
you know, immaculated lawns and, you know, nice cars, and then you see one house with a broken window that nobody's repaired.
It gives the impression that the neighborhood is going downhill.
And in doing so, it's going to attract a criminal element.
And the first thing that they did was Mayor Bratton, I mean, Commissioner Bratton did,
is that he instituted checkpoints at all of the subways in the city because they were figuring out very quickly
that the turnstile jumpers that were jumping over there and just, you know, not paying their way into the train stations,
all had active warrants or most had active warrants.
And he said if we could just stop them from entering the system, run their names, if they have warrants, arrest them.
Not only that, we can still arrest them for theft of services, get them into the system,
send a message to the other criminal elements that you're not welcome in the train stations, you're not welcome on the buses.
It might work. And sure enough, very, very quickly, it worked.
The other thing that they did was from the squeegee guys, you know, in the city, it's the red light.
Yeah, it's the guys that would hang out with a bucket of dirty water and squeegee and you would pull up your car
and as the light is red, they would walk right up to your car and they would just pour dirty water on your front windshield
as if they're cleaning it up with a dirty squeegee.
And essentially, they would shake you down for money.
If you didn't give them a dollar or two dollars or whatever it was, they would just f up your car.
You know, it was just not a, you always dreaded pulling up to anywhere a stoplight in the city if you had a car.
So they got rid of them and almost overnight, the city started changing.
They cleaned up Times Square.
They increased the size of the NYPD.
They did a lot more aggressive policing, which had other consequences, I understand.
But having lived through a city that was almost unlivable and then to see the city that it became under that administration,
was quite a sight to see.
And now I think we've come full circle and we're actually, the city is now in a downward spiral because of a lot of other policies.
But once again, that's a macro issue.
I focus more on the micro issue, client to client.
However, it does break my heart to see how things have sort of backpedaled in this city lately.
Well, I think it's an important perspective, though.
So having seen from the pendulum swinging all the way to the wrong side,
to watching the cleanup and being part of the city and experiencing it with your own two eyes.
What are some of the macro decisions that are causing this about term?
Because I think it's important because otherwise we're going to find ourselves all the way on the other side again.
You mean things that are going on today that are causing the same issues that 30 years ago?
How are we backsliding?
I believe that we need to hold people accountable.
And with substance use disorders, especially those that I'm seeing in San Francisco,
where they have stores that are completely shutting down, closing out, huge swaths of, you know,
areas in that city that don't have pharmacies anymore, they don't have grocery stores anymore,
basically food deserts where people, the lower, lower middle class, working class, poor individuals who live in these areas,
the only places that can afford can't even find food because they're all they've been shut down.
I think what we really need to do is hold those people accountable.
And I saw something interesting about Amsterdam, like, you know, oh, Amsterdam is great.
You know, it's a it's a great country.
You can use all the drugs you want, you know, and you don't get arrested for it.
And they have low crime and all these wonderful things like, you know, understand how I understand works.
The criminal justice system.
Yeah, if you get caught with a personal amount of drugs, small amount, right, personal, you're not going to get arrested.
Anything larger than that, such as like baby dealer quantity, you're going to get arrested.
And then they put you in the system, then they drug test you.
And then they put you in a thing called drug court where, yeah, you don't go to jail, but they start to implement sanctions.
You go to drug court, you're hanging out with prosecutor, defense attorney.
You're hanging out with somebody who is a substance use clinician and we give you services and we're going to test you.
And you're going to be basically on kind of pretrial supervision while your case is pending.
And if you don't comply, then we're going to ratchet up the sanctions a little bit more and more and more until finally, you will get your new some serious time.
So, you know, and I love how people kind of kind of gloss over that.
And I honestly believe in some parts of the country, we need to return to those values and we need to hold those individuals accountable.
Listen, this is what I do for a living. I work with men that have substance use disorders.
I did that when I was a probation officer for 30 years.
Okay. Just asking somebody to go into treatment usually doesn't work.
Oftentimes, there needs to be other, you need to have, you need to find the pressure points.
There needs to be motivation. And what better way to do that is through our criminal justice system is to help people.
And probation officers and parole officers, police officers, the judges, defense attorneys, prosecutors, we're all a team here.
Some of the best people that I've ever worked with were defense attorneys.
You know, and I was in law enforcement. You know, I used to work with people, you know, on my side of the field that would say, what are you hanging out with this guy for?
He's the enemy. I'm like, he's not the fucking enemy. He's a great guy.
He's, you know, he went to an Ivy League law school and he's a defense attorney, you know, a federal public defender, not making a lot of money.
He can make far more in private practice. And here he is doing great work helping his clients.
Why can't I meet him there and help his client as well?
So holding, holding those individuals accountable with empathy and be caring about it.
And yet, I think we're kind of, we've stepped away from that. I'm starting to see, I think, James, we're kind of maybe pendulum is swinging back a little bit because people,
as we see in other parts of the country, they're voting out, you know, those individuals that they originally elected that they thought were going to be somewhat tough on crime.
And they find out that they're not and they're not holding those individuals accountable and people are sick of it.
So, yeah, that's that's kind of where we are today.
See, it's really interesting with the whole drug conversation.
I now spoke to him twice, but a few years ago, my mom, well, about 20 years ago, my mom moved to Portugal.
And a few years ago, having started the podcast, she said, hey, do you know what they did with, you know, drug prohibition in Portugal?
I said, no, she said they decriminalize.
So they didn't legalize. You don't go into a store and buy all kinds of stuff, which I don't think you do even with legalization, you know, for anything that's detrimental.
But so they and they did it completely diplomatically because they had a horrendous epidemic after one of the wars somewhere in what used to be a Portuguese colony in Africa.
So the soldiers came back. There was this massive opioid crisis and they did the whole, you know, the prohibition of drugs, war on drugs, American model.
And it was a complete failure, as we've seen here in America.
So what they did is they just like you said, the users amount, they weren't even arrested.
They were taken in and educated on the resources available to them.
So they weren't forced to go and get help, because, as you know, if you force someone, the chance of them actually going in, you know, full bore is very, very slim.
But by decriminalizing it, now you're saying to the addicts, we're not going to arrest you simply for being an addict.
Now, yeah, like you said, if you rob a car, you know, you break into a car or you break into a house and you're going to pay for that part of the crime.
Absolutely. But if you come through to these resources that we're offering you,
they had addiction counseling, mental health counseling, job creation, housing.
So they had the entire framework and it was a huge success.
And then what that did is all the people in the legal system ladder.
Now they have the resources free to actually go after the dealers and the smugglers.
And they came down like a ton of bricks on those people.
So, you know, you cut the head off the snake in two ways.
What I've seen here in the US is this kind of piecemeal attempt the same way as they piecemeal attempted national health,
which is a complete disaster, Obamacare, because they didn't do it properly.
Then they can point to the Northwest and go, see, it didn't work.
We tried it, but we didn't do that.
As you said, we didn't give all the resources to turn someone who has a mental health problem into a taxpaying functioning member of society.
We just took away the law and put kind of, you know, safe injection sites everywhere.
That's not bringing the solution to the problem.
So I love the Portuguese model and it was a huge success.
They turned it around in less than 10 years, but they actually put the resources in place and then they put the law in place.
So everything was there for them to start turning their people around.
And that's what I think is missing in this conversation in America is we're not looking at how do you get that?
As you said, that gangrene ridden, you know, homeless addict all the way through to working in business X and having a roof over their head.
There's a lot more things than a safe injection site and not arresting them to get them from A to Z.
Yeah, yeah. Great point.
And I believe you interviewed the person in Portugal for that, right?
Yeah, Jacques Goulart. Fascinating podcast and could not find anything to pick apart with his logic.
The only thing that I could think about is and I'm a little hazy on this, but.
Portugal is a homogeneous society, you know, at least as far as the population and in terms of the United States,
we are such a huge country, so diverse, so fiercely independent on the local and state levels, even even on the federal levels.
We always seem more and more.
We're more divisive these days.
So what may be working very well as far as far as the Portuguese model, say in Providence,
Rhode Island, there are going to be sections in Texas where people are going to be like, just lock them up and throw away the key.
We don't want to deal with this.
And and you're right, James, that's that's an injustice.
It's just our country is just so big.
And once we get up and running, you know, it's like almost like turning an oil tanker in the middle of the ocean.
It's not going to turn on a dime.
It's going to take quite some time for that thing to turn and stop a couple miles.
And so I think our country.
We need to be heading in that direction.
I'm hoping we're heading in that direction.
I'm hoping we have more and more.
Leaders and thought leaders that are.
Less divisive, less.
Provincial and are willing to meet other people with different points of view in the middle.
And I hope those individuals as well are capable of doing that for me.
What I look at. Is.
You know, and being involved in substance use in working with those individuals for my entire adult life is you're right.
Having these harm reduction centers, you know, safe injection sites,
which seems to be the buzzword in certain parts of the country is just not going to cut it.
You know, I mean, the theory is, yeah, you can offer services for them.
You can they come in, you know, they're going to get the free needles, you know,
that they're going to be observed as they're injecting their heroin and their opiates and whatever else they're doing.
And they're not going to overdose and they're going to leave and they're going to go back out on the street.
And then they're going to come back again. And what we can do is we can offer them services.
We can say, hey, listen, have you thought about getting X and Y?
It's not been shown to be that effective. You know, I mean, I said it's sexy.
You know, I mean, San Francisco throwing billions of dollars at that stuff.
And it just keeps getting worse. So something needs to change.
And I think it's going to take some people to make some very difficult decisions on behalf of other people
to get everybody back on the same path because people are dying.
In Connecticut, I think last year we had 2000 overdoses. We're in a big state.
You can drive from one end of the state to the other in two hours.
You don't see that ticker on Fox and C and then no do you?
No, no. And those are the ones we know about.
Yeah, you know, we've got state, you know what I mean? The times that we've got heroin, we've got fentanyl,
we've got car fentanyl and people are dying here.
So it's, you know, it just makes me sad, you know, especially as a clinician, the way I am today.
I wasn't like that when I started out my career.
You know, I was I was gunhole law enforcement man all the way.
You know, that's just who I was, you know, that's because I thought, you know, by leaning into my career more,
I, you know, I know that's just the way my life is going to be more sustainable.
But here's here's the funny thing.
What got you here? It may not necessarily get you there.
The next version of yourself in leaning more into what got you here being more like for me law enforcement,
you know, and viewing everybody as, you know, us against them and this blue wall shit
just was unsustainable for me, especially towards the middle part of my career.
I couldn't agree more. And it's interesting because there's a parallel between the drug prohibition conversation and law enforcement and fire.
I keep getting people on the fire service saying, well, can you show me data?
Can you show me studies how given the firefighter is a shorter workweek would be healthier for him?
And I've said this on here a thousand times. So let me get this straight.
You want me to do a fucking study that shows that a 56 hour workweek is more detrimental than a 42 and an 80 hour
because you tell these people they can't go home because you are such a fucking shitty leader that now your department's been short,
short staff for 10 plus years.
That that 80 hour workweek is worse than a 40. You want to study for that.
I got to study for you. The way you destroy the fire and police departments in America is work them the way that you've worked them up to this point.
So if you do the opposite, then chances are it's going to get better.
But if you take away funding, if you take away support from your law enforcement officers,
if you vilify them because the mistakes of a handful of people,
if you allow men and women to be kept from their families while you go home at 5 p.m.,
then yeah, you know, you're going to keep killing more and more and we'll have more suicides and cancers and all the things.
But if you actually care about your people and this is the same with your your country and the drug prohibition,
then you invest in them and you put make them the highest priority.
But right now, as you mentioned, we have I think it's something like a hundred thousand overdoses a year opioid related.
We lose millions to the obesity crisis of which America is 70 percent obese, sorry, 70 percent overweight over 40 percent obese.
So each of those situations, does it sound like it's a people centric, you know, focused leadership?
No. So until we, the people, the masses, the base of the pyramid demand that we, you know,
reverse this crisis, it's going to be more of the same.
They say about insanity. So we know that drug prohibition has been an epic failure and it was right off the beginning at the end of the alcohol prohibition.
The only reason we know Al Capone's name is because of that, you know, so we've done it.
We tried that model. Did it work?
No. The Philadelphia prison model, has it worked?
Doesn't seem to. So why not ask Portugal, Norway, you know, all these other places that are doing it better than us,
have some humility and say it may not be apples to apples.
Like you said, you know, Rio de Janeiro isn't the same as Lisbon, Portugal.
But how can we take the blueprint and start applying it to other ways?
Because the way we are doing it isn't working and we have to have the humility to acknowledge that.
Yeah. And, you know, you said something very interesting about management, you know, because I had some shitty managers,
horrible, toxic people that I had to work under.
And just like what you said, Rome is burning and they can't see it.
They would rather focus on things that's within their control.
And that's micromanaging their officers, their employees,
that is not focusing on why people are leaving the service and moving on to other things.
Like we had a woman who worked at my agency.
She had two master's degrees. Incredibly brilliant.
She was a great officer. She'd been there for four years.
I come in one day and it was like, oh, yeah, she quit. Like, what do you mean she quit?
Do you know how hard it was to get this job that I have working for the feds?
It was incredibly hard. And it was like even up almost toward the end of my career,
I kept expecting somebody to tap me on the shoulder and said, hey, we made a mistake.
Come with me. Right. Like I talk about imposter syndrome, like no idea.
I landed that job because I sure as hell didn't meet their fucking mold of what an officer is.
Definitely not. But she quit. Why?
Because she said the hours were too long. It was just, you know, it was like they give you an iPhone.
And I saw it happening, James. I saw it, you know, with the BlackBerry, the Pagers.
You know, today they give you an iPhone. They give you an iWatch, an Apple Watch.
They gave you a car. They gave you a brand new laptop.
And they say you can work from home too as well a couple of days out of the week.
This is a fed. And you're like, this is incredible.
Oh my God. Oh, look at all these wonderful little new toys I got.
Guess what? Now they got you 24-7. Now you're working 24-7.
I went on a vacation. First vacation I took with my four daughters, by the way.
Twenty-seven for those who are interested. Twenty-seven, twenty-two, five and three.
So I married and divorced. First marriage was a shitty one.
So we're not going to talk about her. But having said that, I went on a vacation
with my two daughters at the time. It was a cruise.
It was a one week cruise right out of New York. We're going to go to the Bahamas.
First vacation I was going to take in years. And I was told by my supervisor,
make sure you bring your laptop and your phone with you.
Like, why the fuck would I do that? I'm going to be on a cruise ship in the middle of the Caribbean
in case the court needs to get in touch with you or I need to get in touch with you.
I said, well, they don't have Wi-Fi on the cruise ship. This is like 2008, 2009.
They gave me a hotspot to make sure that I was answering my phone at the time.
That was the invite. And I started to see it and I started, you know,
I didn't want to recognize at the time because I thought, you know, I just need to lean more to my job.
I need to work more hours. I need to have control over that. That's what defines me.
Because the time I didn't have my coping skills.
So I thought to cope with the job was to throw myself more into work, completely into work.
And so here I am working literally 60, 70 hours a week,
getting paid the same amount of money as a smart dude, you know, or woman who figured it out
and only came in for 40 hours a week. But I thought, hey, you know, they're going to recognize me.
They're going to appreciate all the extra hours I put in.
But what if the work that you're doing is toxic?
And all that overtime you're doing is slowly killing you.
It happens over time. It's like putting a frog in a pot of cold water and then putting it on boil slowly.
It's too late at the end. I've seen too many men and women at the end of their law enforcement,
first respond to career, they end up dying shortly thereafter or they don't even make it to the finish line.
You know, it's funny. No one has ever been able to show me an actual study yet.
Observationally, both of our professions agree that within five years is a pretty solid, you know,
statistical result of when a lot of us do pass away, if not before.
How sad is that? Because I've always said if you look at the draw ground for a police academy, fire academy,
arguably, they're probably the fitter, more resilient members of society of your community.
So really should be living longer.
And the fact that that isn't startling to the point where there was numerous studies.
But this is the issue, too. There I tell my military friends all the time, there is no VA for first responders.
So when I walked out the back of the fire station for the last time, if I dropped dead and had a heart attack or shot myself,
I ceased to become a statistic. So we're like, oh, we had, you know, 82 law enforcement officers take their own life.
No, you didn't. You probably had eight hundred and twenty at least.
But you don't care enough to even follow someone that gave you 15, 20, 25 years of their life from the day they walk out,
you know, the station and then follow them from there on in.
We are going to manifest probably the largest amount of mental and physical health issues from our service once we retire.
And no one cares enough to even, you know, create a support system for first responders.
And when people say to me, oh, it's what you signed up for.
Like you said, no, you signed up for your profession. I signed up for my profession.
No one said, oh, that includes 80 hour work weeks.
No one said that. I didn't say that in the fire academy. We did ladders and hoes and EMS.
We didn't do, hey, let's try staying up for five nights a week, you know, for for a year to get used to it.
So there's a huge disconnect between an environment that you would see in Delta and the SEALs and the SAS,
where you're forging the most prepared, well-trained first responder and this hang on for dear life environment
that we're putting our first responders through at the moment.
And you're forging disease and mistakes, which is why we end up on YouTube.
And now they're trying to defund our profession or your profession in this case.
And this is what I tell people towards the end of my career at the agency that I retired from.
OK, and we can get into that. We'll get into that shortly.
But I would tell the young officers and management hated me talking to them.
They said, just Paul, stay away from them. You're toxic. You're just disgruntled.
I was like, you can't have me to do. I can talk to anybody I want here.
I would tell them, the young new officers, hey, listen, you got a long career ahead of you.
You know, under no illusion think that you're that special here. You are replaceable.
The day you leave this office is the day some old guy from the basement of the federal courthouse is going to come upstairs,
take your name off the door and put a new one on. And then you are forgotten.
Nobody remembers who was here in 1975 or 1982. Nobody cares. You know who cares?
People at your house, your family. But I see I saw that, especially with the young officers that would get hired.
OK, they had all they had a full life, friends and family and people that weren't in law enforcement.
And then they get hired. And next thing you know, they're only hanging out with people that are cops,
that are firefighters, that are agents, that are only people that are on the job.
They would send their kids to the same schools.
Literally, they would join the football, softball teams with kids.
They would all hang out on the weekends at night. Happy hours all the time.
It was like you never disconnected from the job because you were always connected to it 24 seven,
not only with technology, but also on the expectations that you would answer your emails and phones 24 seven.
But also you're hanging out with people that are just doing the same thing you're doing.
You know, I mean, I knew a guy that he like me, I love art. I love art museums. Right.
But nobody else there did. Right. I had a guy, you know, he liked freaking sculpt.
But, you know, sure enough, he gets hired and he's like, no, you know, screw that.
I'm just going to go to happy hour with the other guys. I'm like, dude, what are you doing, man?
And sure enough, you know, over time, 10, 15 years, they change.
Their relationships change and they get smaller.
And then if they make it to retirement, guess what?
Nobody's talking to them anymore. They're still active. They're still on the job.
Because now you just had old retirement, retired guy, you know, who's just kind of hanging out the office once in a while saying hi to everybody.
And it's like, I saw that I saw I saw the older dudes come back and hang out and try to walk down memory lane with with, you know, all the newer officers.
And they're like, dude, what are you doing here? You don't work here anymore.
Shouldn't you be in Florida dying, you know, on the beach somewhere?
And it was like you didn't set yourself up for two point over version of yourself, Frankie.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing.
I mean, I remember people coming back and, you know, they're almost viewed as a pest.
And how demoralizing is that that you gave 20, 25 years and now, you know, no one recognizes you.
You know, the era that you came from, we should, you know, remember right in the box.
But you didn't transport then old time. Now we're getting murdered.
You know what I mean? There is a disconnect. It's a shame because we should be in the fire service, for example, bring in some of these older guys in and women and, you know, come be part of training.
You know, come keep one foot in the door.
I think it's good to be connected somewhat. But that transition, you know, this is one thing I talk about with getting these first responders more time off.
People say, oh, they'll just work more.
I was like, well, yeah, but if you staff your department properly, which this better work we would attract young people again, who would want to do this job.
Now, yes, now he sculpts on the side.
And if he gets hurt or gets fired or, you know, retires ultimately, well, now he's, you know, he's going to start a gallery.
You know, there's going to be this other thing for them to go into. So you're you're forging a second tribe outside of what we do, because being connected and, you know, doing events together is very important, I think.
But that if that's your entire world, then, like you said, it becomes a downward spiral.
But if you encourage that second side rather than discourage it, and I've had so many chiefs saying, well, if we give them more time off, they'll just work more.
Well, who the fuck are you to say what they do on their days off? But actually, it would be brilliant if they were hanging drywall or landscaping, because they'd be in their own home at night.
They'd be physically tired. They spent the day in the sunshine and they're going to sleep like a baby.
What is the problem with that? So, yeah, I agree completely for a healthy transition, having a program where you still somewhat stay connected to that profession because you gave so much, but also encouraging a transition to another area so that you're not just sitting in Florida waiting to get a job.
You're actually super excited because now you've got a cabinetry business and you're teaching your grandson how to woodwork.
Well, that's fascinating because that was the stereotype when I was in New York with the FDNY.
Okay, it was the stereotype was most firefighters had another career because their schedule allowed it.
They'd go to work and they'd have a couple days down, was it like 48, 72 hours down? I forgot what it was at the time.
And many firefighters that I knew were plumbers and electricians and tradesmen.
Well, I mean, one guy was a bartender. He made more as a bartender than as a firefighter at the time.
But I mean, they all had other gigs going. So when they got closer to their retirement, they would just sort of transition smoothly into this other career that was waiting for them.
And, you know, the police officers and law enforcement, absolutely not.
You know, you're doing shift work and there's just no opportunity for that.
I can't speak to the fire service today. I know on the East Coast, they still kind of have that sort of semi-friendly schedule in the firehouse that, you know, at least some of the ones that I know still have other careers.
I know a guy who's a lieutenant in Hartford. He's with their fire department and he's going to helicopter school. He wants to fly helicopters.
You know, because when he retires, he says, I want to be a helicopter pilot. I'm like, how fucking cool is that, dude?
You know, I said, well, what does everyone else think of that? And they're like, I mean, he goes, my chief hates it.
You know, he thinks I'm wasting my time, but he goes, everyone else loves it. I'm like, cool. Then you do go do you, man.
What does this chief matter that you know? I mean, that's the point.
Like you're learning to fly a helicopter on your days off. OK, sweet. Have fun. Yeah. You got the money for that for flight school. Go for it, dude.
You know, and their retirement system sucks. They got like a 25. I think it's 30 years. I don't.
I used to be 20 and 25 and I was 30. I'm sure some of your listeners are going to call me up or DM me and say it's bullshit.
But, you know, I mean, it's not it ain't 20 anymore. No, it's not bullshit.
The UK is even worse. I think UK is is I forget at least 30, if not 35. I'm not mistaken.
And we could talk about that because I imagine the trauma you've built up over time on that career.
You know, so for those that haven't looked at my bio yet, I mean, it's it's I was a New York City probation officer.
I was a case manager. Then we give a New York City probation officer for about three and a half years.
And I was assigned a family court in Brooklyn. And then the last two years of my career as a worker for the city,
I was assigned to what they called FSU. And that was a field services unit. And that was a warrant division of probation.
So our job was to go out and arrest people that were probation absconders that had fled or, you know, were noncompliant.
And, you know, we was a team and, you know, carried guns and all that other shit.
And, you know, we rest them and bring them in. Great. You know, for a young guy like me, it was fun.
But I wasn't making that much. Once again, I wasn't making that much money.
And at the time, I had just gotten married, my first first wife and about to have a family living in Staten Island.
So I was aware of all the civil service people lived. I was the only place it was affordable.
And position opened up that I heard about was called federal probation or United States probation and never heard of it before.
Not many people do. So I got hired by federal probation in 1997. So for those that don't know who that is.
So the three branches here in the United States is the judicial, the executive and the legislative branch.
The judicial branch, which is the course, the federal court system actually has their own law enforcement division.
And it's the United States Probation Office. And those are federal probation officers that supervise federal offenders at the pretrial stage and post conviction stage as well.
There is the US Supreme Court police, but they're a small agency.
But yeah, there's a at the time there was about 1300 1300 of us across the country. The numbers have gone up a bit since then, since I got hired.
But, you know, it's a federal 20 year law enforcement position, FBI background investigation, Academy training, carry firearms.
And you work with some pretty interesting, dangerous individuals. So we do supervision.
We do pretrial supervision. So somebody gets arrested for something. And if they're out on if the judge lets them out on bond or bail,
probation officers, federal probation officers supervise them on the pretrial stage. So they all these conditions like drugs and, you know, you can't use a computer or you can't do this and this can't associate people that are on, you know, maybe co-defendants.
We monitor them and then they're sentenced. And, you know, so those of you may or may not know if you're arrested by the US government and you're charged in federal court where it says, you know, United States versus your name,
chances are 99 percent of the time they got you and you're going to plead out. Most federal court cases end in a plea agreement.
The few that do go to trial usually are not successful because a United States Assistant United States Attorney is not going to take a case that's not winnable.
So that's that's the kind of numbers that you're dealing with on the federal side. So if it's a federal case and you're indicted,
you better get a good lawyer and you better plead out and come up with a good plea agreement and cooperate if possible. So we did three things. We did what we call pre-sentence investigations, which is basically a background investigation
on the offender or the defendant, their history, their characteristics. So many times a judge will sentence somebody in federal court and they'll have all the information about what they did, say as an armed bank robbery.
But they know nothing about the defendant. Does that person have a drug problem? Does that person have a mental health issue? What's their education like? What's community support like? Anything that might mitigate or potentially add more time to their sentence.
So federal probation officers are responsible for conducting those pre-sentence investigations. I did that in the beginning of my career, which was really cool. You know, it was really cool to interview people.
In New York City, where I was hired originally in 1997, I was assigned to the WITSEC program, which is the witness protection program, US Marshals Service.
And I did witness protection investigations on individuals that were going to go into the program. So think Russian mobsters, Italian organized crime, Latin kings, people that cooperated.
And once the word got out, their life expectancy we measured in minutes rather than years.
So my job at the time was to do those very highly sensitive pre-sentence investigations for the court. And then they're sentenced in federal court.
And then they go into the program and then they disappear. The funny thing is, of course, most of them don't make it in the program because there are so many rules.
You can't contact people that are not in the program, family members, friends. You can't go on the Internet. You can't – all these weird conditions.
And the US Marshals sets them up with a job, a house, some place where – across the country where they've never lived before and they're miserable.
Most break the WITSEC protocols and they just get out of the program. But at the time, it's what I did. Loved it. It was a great career.
Then in 2001, New York City decided it was time to move, so we moved to Houston, Texas, which was great. So spent five years in Texas.
And there I did supervision and I did a lot of really good work working with those individuals that had substance use disorders.
We saw a lot of what we call border cases, checkpoint cases. So those were the cases that were coming across the border.
I think like 18 wheelers loaded up with methamphetamine and cocaine and marijuana. And those guys would get caught at the border.
It's a federal case. And so we would see them and they'd come out of federal prison and then we'd supervise them.
And then by 2006, my marriage was getting into the shitter. So wife got homesick and wanted to move back to the East Coast.
So I did what I could to preserve the marriage, which did not work out. And in 2006, December, transferred back to the East Coast, where I've been since then.
Well, you hit so many different interesting areas. One that kind of pops out immediately, though, especially if you're talking about coming across the border.
When I reflect on my career and a lot of the calls that we had after having conversations on here about human trafficking and being educated on what that actually looked like, not the kind of Liam Neeson version,
I realized how many calls I went on where there was a pimp and there was probably a trafficking situation.
And it's a shame because those have come and gone. All I can do is reflect now. I can't help those particular people.
With all these different areas that you worked in from the site ward years ago to the probation side, what have you seen as far as that element infused into the work that you've done?
The human trafficking element? Yes. So that's a great question.
In Texas, none, because the people that I was working with were those individuals that were looking for quick money.
So they would get hired by the cartel to do a $10,000 run. So they would pull up their 18-wheeler in Mexico.
And at the time, you know, the borders are pretty much open and they would pull their vehicles up in Mexico and the cartel would load them up with drugs, give them $10,000.
And if they were lucky, they'd make it through the border, go to a spot and the truck would be unloaded.
Or what's funny thing is oftentimes what would happen is they would become patsies. So they thought they were getting drugs loaded up or they would load up some drugs in their 18-wheeler.
But the real load would be behind that truck. And so as they're approaching the checkpoint at the border,
cartel would call the border and say, you know, as an anonymous tip, hey, just so you know, that Peterbilt red 18-wheeler has cocaine in it and you might want to pull it over.
And they would divert that truck over. Dogs would alert to it. Agents would swarm it. Border Patrol would swarm it.
The real cup of the carpenter, if you will, the real truck is behind them going through the checkpoint.
Brilliant, brilliant how they did it. Found that out from some DEH I was speaking to.
Oh, yeah, that guy had, you know, yeah, he got a couple keys, but that was just that was just that was just the business expense for the cartel. The real drugs were a couple of drugs behind as well.
So I didn't see really any of those human trafficking cases. But this is this is where we get into the weeds here, at least my career.
So 2006, moved back to the East Coast and I, my marriage was at that point gone.
Moved out, living on my own. Daughters were still young. They were living with their mother in Rhode Island at the time.
I was now living in Connecticut where I was working as a Fed and the position opened up at the time for a specialist position.
So in the federal probation service, those of you may not know, much like any other law enforcement or first responder career, there's rank.
Right. So in the probation service, it's probation officer, it's a line officer. And then above that is this one they called specialist.
So a probation officer specialist is somebody who specializes in either supervision or writing pre sense investigations.
And for a specialist on the supervision side, you had a gang specialist.
So those were officers that were really good at supervising organized crime individuals, people that were involved in gangs. You had what we call electronic monitoring specialists.
So those ankle bracelets. And so you were kind of a technician. You would hook them up on the ankle bracelet and then you could monitor them on your computer and get a smaller caseload.
You got more money for that. You were a specialist in that.
For me, they opened one up called sex offender specialist. It was the first position in the country at the time.
Brand new, never created before. And I thought, how cool is that? Number one, it's a promotion.
Number two, I know anything about it. Don't know anything about that population. Have no fucking idea what they do, but I'm going to put in for it.
So I applied for the position.
And I remember it was Christmas Day, actually. I remember that day because it was a pretty depressing day for me because my like I said, my marriage was gone, undergoing parental alienation.
And I was trying to get my kids for the weekend, which wasn't successful. So I was walking outside feeling very sad, you know, pity party for myself.
My phone rang, my Blackberry. And I remember reaching down for it. I look at it and as the chief.
She called me on Christmas Day and I'm like, fuck, this can't be good. What did I do?
Answer the phone. Hey, chief, what's going on? Merry Christmas. And she's like, hey, Paul, I understand you applied for the sex offender position, correct?
Yeah. She goes, do you want it? It's yours.
Sure.
Yeah. Wait, you're promoting me? Yeah. It's yours.
I'll talk to you when you get back.
So next thing you know, I'm now, you know, the sex offender specialist for the United States government on the East Coast, never created before.
It turned out later because my ego was inflated at that point. I thought I bailed out all these other candidates. Nobody applied for it.
Nobody wanted to do that job.
Nobody wanted to work with that population. Did not know that until years later when I was told the truth.
But, you know, but here I was, you know, going into the office the next, you know, the next week, you know, feeling really good about myself.
And I was happy. It was a good career doing that. I did that for almost eight years. I was a sex offender specialist. It was far too long.
So what that meant was, is that at the time we were starting to see, this is the early 2000s, we were starting to see a certain type of offender that had never been known before.
And those were Internet based offenders. Remember the Internet, you know, kind of exploded in the late 90s and then early 2000s, the Internet's not fully formed. Right.
And so what was happening is we were starting to see people that were downloading and producing and sharing child pornography on the Internet.
So the early days of Napster, those of you who remember downloading your songs illegally, peer to peer, pedophiles and sex offenders were using that.
So they would be sharing child pornography. So for those of you that are really want to go down this disgusting rabbit hole, basically, if you are in possession of child pornography,
you're going to look for other types of child pornography as well, because you want to have a collection, much like collecting baseball cards. Right.
So pedophiles, people that are into this kind of stuff, have what they call a flavor. There's a certain group that they're sexually attracted to,
much like you and I, you know, might be attracted to a certain type of woman, race, you know, gender, whatever.
You know, that's our flavor. And that's what turns us on. Well, sex offenders are just like that, too.
They have a very narrow range of individuals that they, you know, are sexually attracted to.
Young boys, young girls, certain ages, hair, no hair on their bodies. I can get these graphic as I want, but that's what they're into.
And so they're seeking out this type of material. So they would find other individuals in these, at the time, chat rooms, right.
These closed, you know, private forums. But to get access to that material, you had to have material yourself.
You had to share that material with somebody else to get it in return, much like, hey, I got a Babe Ruth baseball card.
I want to give you this for this one over here. So that was the shit test, if you will.
So I'm a pedophile. I've got a certain type of series of images of a certain type of person.
But I want those other images that somebody else may have. And they would say, yes, what do you have? This is what I have.
I'll show you mine if you show me yours. And then they're trading. Doing so is an Internet crime.
And it's a federal crime because it's going over state lines.
We would get the occasional offender that was like to catch a predator person who they thought was going to meet a 13 year old in a hotel room.
But the FBI wait for them. Those are a couple of those people we'd get as well because they cross state lines to meet somebody in mass or, you know, Rhode Island or New York.
And then we had the worst of the worst, which was the producers.
Those are the people that were actually producing child pornography. And that was somebody with, you know, as we all know, when the when the smartphones started coming online, especially with the BlackBerry, they started having cameras.
And which meant, you know, you've got this wonderful little device in your hand that you could take HD video with photos and you could share it instantaneously with anybody around the world.
And we started to see that as well. So people that would be at home like Uncle Rick at the party who was really good with balloon animals was also grooming Sally.
And, you know, family would have Uncle Rick come over and watch Sally while mom and dad went out on a date night.
And Uncle Rick is taking producing child pornography with her and sharing that information, those images of Sally out there with somebody else.
Those were the cases that we were getting and we're starting to see starting to come online very quickly.
Did you ever see the documentary they made on Jared, the subway spokesman?
I'm very familiar with Jared. Did not see that documentary though. Yeah.
So he ended up obviously being a horrendous pedophile and it was actually a woman who had befriended him initially befriended him just thinking he was a nice guy and met him at one of the meet and greets when he was, you know, the spokesperson.
But then she started having a doubts, I think, even with her own children and him, but kind of like you were saying, like there's these just absolutely stomach churning recorded phone conversations with him.
And he's talking about, yeah, the younger, the better, you know, I like this and that.
And then it's just kind of underlines what you were talking about. And it's just so horrendous because you think about, you know, these priests and these scout leaders and these gym teachers and
all these people that people have trusted their children to be around and no, you know, no disrespect to the parents at the time.
You've got to trust to a certain point. You send your kids off to school every day. You trust that their teachers aren't going to abuse them.
But, you know, some of the things that you hear and see about some of these predators and how they're able to get these kids to not tell anyone through fear, intimidation and shame.
It's just it's fucking horrendous. It's not James. It's not the stranger hiding in the bushes that that they need to be afraid of.
It's not that, you know, I've supervised hundreds of those cases, investigated hundreds of them.
It's always the person that you let into your house. It's it's it's Uncle Rick. It's it's the male babysitter that you hire.
I will never hire a male babysitter ever. I don't care if it's cousin Willie from down the street that everyone really likes, you know, and he's going to go to Yale.
You know, he's a young kid, smart. Everyone loves him. Never doing that. I've seen how quickly those those things go south.
It's it's the people that are in positions of trust. It's the it's the Cub Scout leader.
It's, you know, it's it's Father John at the Catholic Church. It's, you know, it's the coach. It's the teacher.
They these predators go to what they go to watering holes, essentially. Right.
You know, if if you're going to hunt wild animals, you don't go out into the bushes.
You just hang out at a watering hole and they come to you. And this is what these guys do. And they're very good at what they do.
The profile of a federal sex offender is typically it's going to be white male.
Educated and employed. We call that camouflage. Those are people that are not who you think a sex offender is.
You know, overwhelmingly, most of those guys were middle aged, so younger, professional, highly educated, very articulate, you know, and very good at building rapport with other people.
I have he was a pediatrician, a doctor in Mr. Connecticut.
Pretty good one, too, actually, if you know what patients used to say about him, drove a Porsche, had all the nice toys.
He loved Disney World. The guy was a Disney World fanatic.
He would go every year. Not only would he go every year, but you know what he would do? He would find the lower income, impoverished patients of his that had never been to Disney World.
And he would offer to bring those kids with him to Disney World.
He would bring one parent as a chauffeur, you know, if they wanted to come along.
But here's how smart this guy was. That parent usually is a single mother, low income, working at Dunkin Donuts, as many shifts as she can pick up.
And he comes this guy, the pediatrician of the city, of the town, saying, hey, I want to bring your son with me to Disney World.
It's going to be a big outing. Other kids are going to come along. Of course, you're welcome to come as well.
I'd like you to come, but I can only pay for your son. All right.
She's going to not she's going to she did. I mean, one of the victims like she.
Oh, my God. You mean, I get to have a week off, you know, to myself and take care of myself and my son's going to go away with his doctor and these other kids.
It's going to be a great it's going to be a great trip. Yeah, it was until he sexually assaulted the kid in the hotel.
You know, and then I went into that guy's house because he was he was actually out on pretrial supervision.
I don't know why the federal judge allowed him out. But I actually went into his house. Beautiful home.
And in his basement, there it was. He had every gaming console you could think of, flat screen TVs.
He had toys. He had games, a shit ton of Disney paraphernalia. He really liked Disney.
So it was a honey pot. It was you know, the kids would come over, hang out with him, play video games, and he's grooming them.
You know, but hey, he's Dr. You know, Dr. Rick, you know, with the M.D. from from Yale, you know, well respected.
And that's the camouflage. And that's the grooming behavior that I would see day in and day out and day in and day out.
Not only that, but family members were some of the worst people that I actually had to work with because I had a guy and he was possession and distribution case.
So he had possessed and distributed thousands and thousands of images and video over a course of several years.
Actually, was in the Navy to gets out of the gets dishonorably discharged from the Navy when this occurred.
Goes to federal prison, comes out and of course now he's going to live with mom and dad.
So like a week before he comes out, mom and dad call me up and they're like, you know, Officer Collette, we like to see you.
Would you mind stopping by, you know, the house? I'm like, yeah, I got to do an inspection anyways.
I got to see where this guy's going to live, see what he's doing.
I got to meet the family, build rapport with them, all this other stuff that we did as officers, you know, because you know, that's we need.
We need to get to know the family. This is what I want to know. What's this guy living? What's the environment like?
Are there children living there? Is there any third party risks that I need to be aware of?
So I get there. Nice couple, you know, kind of late fifties at the time.
And they go, hey, just so you know, Rick is coming out and we're having a family reunion and we'd really like him to be there.
OK. Well, like, what do you mean family reunion? Well, it's going to be a couple hundred of us.
It's going to be a huge big day. It's going to be great. And, you know, all his cousins and nieces are going to be there.
They're all excited to see him. I'm like, are these children?
Like, well, of course they are. You know, he went to federal prison for child porn, right?
You know, he's into kids, right? Oh, he would never hurt. He would never hurt his nieces and nephews.
No. I'm like, well, you know what? No, he's not going.
They filed a complaint against me with the judge that I'm keeping him from successfully reintegrating the community.
Fortunately, the judge saw through that. But I had to go to court.
I had to be presented on the stand as to articulate why I thought as a sex offender specialist,
why that's a bad idea for this guy to have access to children. Right.
So he gets out, shows up. I'm there the day he's arriving at home.
Mom and dad are there. I see his little bedroom where he's going to be living.
And sure enough, here they go again. Listen, we're about to run out to dinner.
He's coming with us. I'm like, great. I don't care. Well, we're going to go to the Olive Garden.
His nieces and nephews are going to be there. Are we doing this again? Are we really doing this again?
No, he's not going to be there. His conditions are he can't be around children and anybody under the age of 18.
That's it. Without approval of the court, he's not going.
And so at the time, I was just like so angry that this is happening.
And also, I started to realize, my God, man, these people are really facilitating this guy's access to children.
And it's not the strangers, family members of the worst, neighbors of the worst, people around.
That's why, you know, James, you know, having raised four daughters, you know, raising four daughters, two daughters, I will never allow sleepovers.
I need to find out who those parents are. My daughter wants to go to somebody's house for a play date.
Are there any other teenage boys there? Who's there? Who's access to them?
And if so, then they're not going. If I don't if I'm not comfortable getting those answers and my wife's on board with that, too, then they're not going.
It's not going to happen. And human trafficking, I'd see that as well to go back is like, yeah, here in the East Coast, we have a lot of the nail salons and a lot of the massage parlors, believe it or not.
I still think a lot of those individuals are human trafficked as well.
And they're coming from China, Eastern Europe, to a certain extent, but mostly like like East Asia.
Those are where we see a lot of them. I've got a few federal cases of those as well.
But pretty much my meat and potatoes is working with hands on actual pedophiles that are just constantly looking for victims constantly.
I'm here for eight years.
Yeah, but we'll get into I'm sure the impact of that. But I'm curious for your perspective, is it such a unique position that you held?
I watched I think it was called Leaving Neverland, Something Neverland. It was a three part documentary on Michael Jackson.
And what blows me away is, for example, Joe Rogan talks about Ivermectin and all of a sudden his episodes are getting deleted.
But Michael Jackson's catalog is still intact and is used for all kinds of commercials on television.
To me, and this is just my opinion because I wasn't there.
But what it appears to me was a sexual predator that was grooming children that was sending the parents away while they slept in his bedroom for days on end.
The parents are equally to blame in this conversation. I want to make that very clear.
But I struggle to understand why America could call everyone else a pedophile.
But they turn their head at Michael Jackson. I don't know if you even have that same perspective of him.
But I'm curious of your take of the whole Michael Jackson story.
I'm not an expert on that. But looking at that from the outside and having grown up with Michael Jackson, for Christ's sake, you know, like I was an incredible artist.
I had his post on my wall. So I was a huge fan, just so you know.
Yeah. Yeah. And you know, and he's still on Spotify. And I hear Michael Jackson's song. I still listen to it.
I still like it. And I know this may seem a little disingenuous.
But theoretically, you could separate the art from the person to a certain extent.
And were there any actual child victims that said, yeah, he sexually assaulted me?
And it's comparing him to say P. Diddy, right? Or Epstein.
I guess Michael Jackson would be further down on the list.
But for me, looking at that, you know, it's about I think it's about power. It's about charisma.
It's also about access, which equals opportunity.
And people, I think, just look at it from the abstract and not have to view actual if you've never viewed child pornography,
which I'm fairly certain most of your audience hasn't, then you honestly don't fully appreciate
and understand the damage that it's doing to people, especially children.
And many of those victims are are no longer children. They're fully formed adults.
But they're being re-victimized every time somebody downloads and shares those images with other people.
It never stops. They're immortalized for as long as there's an Internet for the rest of their lives
as being a seven year old girl who's being sexually assaulted.
And I think unless you've actually seen that and hear it, most people don't understand it.
And that's what for a while made me very angry in my career towards certain family members and friends
and people in court that would stand up and talk about how wonderful this guy was to their family and what he did.
And he was a great employee. And I'm like, did you see these images?
Do you know what he does? Do you know what he's into?
You know, sometimes spouses like the wife, she hated my guts because she kept thinking I was going to, you know, I was out to get him.
I'm like, lady, I'm not out to get him. But let me tell you something.
And I'm going to be a little graphic here. I told her this.
I said, you know, when he's on top of you at night, he ain't thinking about you, honey.
He's thinking about an 11 year old girl because I've seen it. I've seen what he's into.
And it ain't your body. It ain't you.
He's just marking time until he gets access to another one.
And that's, you know, and that's that's the shape of, you know, things that I've seen that's impacted me and other people that have worked in this field.
You know, after a while, you know, it's like, yeah, I can deal with any sex offender any day of the week.
You know, I know exactly how they operate and how they think.
And I'll be honest, too. Some of them actually liked some of the guys I supervised and investigated pretty cool guys like they're highly educated, smart, intelligent.
You're like one guy like I could have a beer with them. He's just such a cool guy.
If he wasn't really into four year old boys.
Yeah. And that's what you got exactly what you said earlier is that's what we have to separate.
Just because you can sing and dance doesn't mean that you turn your head away.
And, you know, it seems like the outcry obviously was delayed.
But how many kids have buried that down? How many people do we see in uniform?
How many stories have I heard on the Behind the Shield podcast of a soldier, a police officer, a firefighter who for years had buried the fact that they were sexually abused as a child?
Because a lot of us are sent into uniform after, you know, trauma early life.
So if that young boy didn't outcry, why are we discounting Wade Robson?
And I forget the other gentleman's name of, you know, finally getting to the point where they had the courage.
And I would I would argue the environment that we were actually talking about mental health to say I was abused, you know, and you have even if you take away all the other parts, you have a grown ass man who is orchestrating children being his bedroom.
And he's sending the parents away like take away Michael Jackson and put it to any other dude in your community.
Would you allow your children to be in a bedroom? Of course you wouldn't.
You know, so like you said, there is a kind of favoritism on some of these things where, oh, we've got to cancel this person.
But, oh, no, no, leave Michael alone because he loves children.
Yeah, he does love the children. That's the point.
You know, we've got to keep them away from him, too.
So I think, you know, this this is something for us as society to look in the mirror and go, where are we hypocrites and where can we change that?
Because fame and fortune and the ability to dance or wealth, you know, I said fortune already shouldn't damper the fact that you are responsible as a human being for your actions.
I think people have this idea in their mind of what monsters look like.
Right. And for many people, a monster is somebody that is, you know, some disheveled dude wearing a raincoat, you know, lurking in the woods, ready to spring out at you at night, you know, or down the dark alley.
The monsters are somebody that is highly intelligent, highly articulate.
You know, attractive sociopath, all these behaviors that they're really good at keying in on building rapport with you and or very quick to do violence.
And you're not prepared for it. And unless you've met one of them and have dealt with one of them, you're just going to be a victim.
And many people, I believe, just don't want to acknowledge that they would rather, you know, I mean, you know, my wife, I love her.
She loves to listen to crime podcasts. Right.
And she's always telling me these stories about serial killers and this and this and the husband did this.
And, you know, she tries to get me to listen to him. So I'm like, listen, honey, I can't listen to this shit.
I said, I live this stuff. You know, I've been in these guys' heads, you know, and I've had to see this stuff in 4K HD with sound day in and day out.
I just can't listen to stories about children being victimized or a woman being sexually assaulted or a murder.
It's just I just you know what? I just want to play my PlayStation and just, you know, veg out or read a good book, you know.
And that's that's my downtime now, man. And it's just I'm just exhausted.
It's like people think like cops, you know, you know, sit down and watch, you know, NYPD Blue.
They don't, you know, or firefighters watch Chicago fire day in and day out.
It's like, no, no, maybe they do to make fun of it. But it's like it's not that's not reality here.
Reality is dealing with the shit coming home drinking too much, you know, suffering from PTSD, you know, relationships disintegrating.
Or you being more and more upset about, you know, your life and toxic management and, you know, unable to develop resilience.
And even what the fuck does resilience mean in this field anymore?
You know, and and that's the other thing you started to allude to, James, is that you're right.
We do need to especially with with men in this field, we do need to be more vulnerable about what we're bringing into this field.
Right. But the problem is, is that for many agencies, especially with the, you know, the OGs, the old managers that are still out there,
being that vulnerable, you could have a fit for duty evaluation.
You mean, oh, this guy's got some serious issues going on, man. You know, oh, he's he's talking about his depressed this week.
I've seen it. You know, my agency, you tell somebody you're depressed, it's like, oh, that's great.
You know, let's get you some help. By the way, we need your gun. OK, we're going to get you some therapy.
Then you go to a therapist who is not culturally confident, competent, OK, or confident.
They don't understand law enforcement. They don't stand for responders.
And then you expect them. You're asking them then to sign off on getting your firearm back so you can go back to work.
What do you think the odds a therapist is going to sign off on that?
Zero. It's a career ender for many people in this field.
So many people, depending upon the agency, are just going to keep their mouth shut.
They're not going to talk about it, you know, and then they're going to suffer in silence.
I get calls in my own private practice from from guys that are cops.
They don't want to use their insurance because they're afraid that their job is going to find out that they're seeing a therapist.
And I always tell them there's no fucking way they're going to find out, dude. It's none of their business.
You know, there's all these protections. There's HIPAA. There's all these laws.
You know, if your chief were to call me up and say, hey, you know, I understand, you know, Officer Rick is seeing you.
I'll be like, I can't even talk to you, dude. I can't even I can't even say yes or no.
And I hang up on him. And I've done that.
You know, it's just but, you know, I get it. I was once there, too, with my agency.
You know, I've been suspended, admonished.
When I went to ask for help, when I started to develop PTSD from this fricking population, you know, they they hung me out to dry, dude.
You know, I I did this for eight years with this population as a senior officer.
Just so you know, the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit, that's the serial killer unit.
Those are the guys and women that investigate serial killers.
They're going to do it for three years, three years. Then they cycle them out of there. They get them help, too.
Check ins with therapists, all the support they need.
I did it for eight years with these monsters, eight years.
And when I went for help, I actually tried to get like a PTSD training.
Chiefs shot it down. You know, I asked for I said, listen, give this job to somebody else.
Let me be a senior gang guy, you know, or let me do electronic monitoring.
Nope, nope. Those positions are filled. And, you know, this is what you do.
And so towards the end, I was like, fuck you. I can't do this anymore.
So I actually resigned that position and I went back down to the line.
They didn't they couldn't comprehend that, you know, couldn't comprehend that somebody would do that.
It took a pay cut. It's like a twenty five thousand dollar pay cut to do that every year.
And I was like, no, because my my mental health and at the time I was starting to date my second wife and we were getting serious.
And here's my life now changing for the better.
I've started to realize how wonderful, you know, this new version of myself starting to, you know,
I realize I'm not going to be a Fed forever and I don't want to be a Fed forever.
I was just trying to make it to 20, dude. I was just trying to get to my retirement.
You know, and looking back, I was like, for what? Just so I were, you know, a couple thousand dollars a month.
You know, if I was lucky to live off half my little pen, you know, half of my salary for feds is actually less than that.
You know, pensions are not that great. Health insurance sucks if you're retired Fed.
You know, it's paid eight hundred eight eight hundred to nine hundred dollars a month.
You know, in federal health insurance, that's what I was paying. It wasn't that great.
But I made a decision towards the end. I said, why did I get in this field to begin with?
And that was to help people. And so I went back to graduate school.
I sat my wife down and I said, listen, you met me when I was a Fed, was a federal probation officer.
How sexy was that? Right. And, you know, I said, I I would like you to be with me through this new version.
I'm going to go back to graduate school. I want to be a therapist.
But it's going to be we're going to give up our happy hours or, you know, our date nights for a couple of years.
My weekends are going to be me sitting behind the computer and going to school.
I said, are you OK with that? She was in. She was like, yeah, absolutely.
Because she did not like the version that I was turning into, you know, always angry, always on the phone,
always ready for the next shoe to drop with this population.
You know, and by the way, I it would happen. I would have, you know, victims on my caseload.
I would have guys I was supervising and they were reoffending constantly.
They were reoffending constantly because this is what they do.
You know, if you stand too close to the monkey cage at the zoo and it throws poo in your face, you know, are you surprised?
No, it's it's nature. Sex offenders. That's their nature.
They're seeking out their next victims. They're driven by sexual urges.
And I understood that. And I understood that at some point, you know, they're going to reoffend.
But then when they did reoffend and there was a victim, then, of course, my agency would come down on me and they would audit my file.
And what didn't you do? What did you do wrong? And my response was, I don't know.
Maybe we should just supervise nice people. You know, I'm supervising monsters here and monsters are going to do monstrous behavior.
Nothing I did. You know, I want you to hire somebody else. By the way, I don't want to do this anymore.
So once I did graduate school, dude, once I was in, everything just unfolded.
Life got so much better. And I went back down to the line, kept my head low, went to school,
grinded away for all those supervision hours I needed to become licensed therapist.
And here's the funny thing is nobody knew about it in my job.
I kept that a secret because if they found out, I would not.
They would have written me up, been reprimanded. I'll give you an example.
Towards the end, I was in my office and I had I made the mistake of leaving one of my college textbooks out.
It was the therapy book and it was just sitting on my desk and my supervisor,
she comes in the office and she looks down at it and she goes, what's that?
And I go, fuck. Shit. It's a college textbook. I'm in graduate school. For what?
Just like that. Very accusatory. So I'm going to be a therapist.
And remember that she looked at me and she goes, you, a therapist?
I certainly hope you're not doing this on government time.
And I looked at her like, no, I'm not. No, you can audit, you know, do whatever you're going to do with my computer time.
No, not. And I was like, oh, man, I'm glad they found out later rather than earlier because I was doing it on government time.
But I, you know, then I got my degree and then I got my license.
And the funny thing was I actually outlasted them. I outlasted that asshole chief that I worked for, the supervisor, deputy chief.
She retired as well. All these people that were just miserable, just horrible people to work under, they had left.
They retired, they moved on, and I was actually kind of like the last man standing.
And then COVID hit, as we all remember how wonderful that was. And at that point, I was like, I'm done. I'm ready to pull the pin.
So for those of you that don't know, federal law enforcement, they have a mandatory retirement age of 57. You have to leave at 57.
You can't be hired past age 36 as well. That's why they have a 20 year retirement.
So I was hired at age 30. I left around 52, 51. So right in the middle of COVID.
And that's when I was like, it's time to pull the pin. And so when I retired, which is funny, this is how replaceable you are.
There was no retirement party for me. There was nothing. It was actually I just gave them two weeks notice because that's all they deserved.
And I just moved on into my next version of myself, which was pretty cool.
Beautiful. Yeah, I want to go. I want to dive into your mental health journey a little bit and then talk about what you're doing now.
But just before we do, there's one one point I want to pull out.
I've had some people from the psychology world when I've asked them about any common denominators of early life for these sexual predators.
That was just like, no, there's nothing glaring. They're just broken mentally.
And then I've had other people that say there was a higher incident of sexual traumas in their own childhood as well.
What, if any, were the commonalities that you were seeing as far as the back story of some of these people that were offending?
Out of the hundreds, hundreds of men that I worked with.
Not one had a history of sexual trauma. Not one.
Now, here's a caveat. They would try to use that.
Many would in their defense as a way to try to mitigate their sentence when they're in federal court.
I call it the vampire syndrome. So if you're bitten by a vampire, you become a vampire yourself.
So their twisted logic was if I tell them that I was sexually abused by Father John at the Catholic Church,
that's going to explain why I did what I did.
But the issue was that when we do their background, their exhaustive background, and I'd interview their family members, their siblings,
and I would say, hey, Rick is telling me he was molested by Uncle Mike at the party.
They'd be like, no, he wasn't. He had the best life ever. There was no evidence.
There's nothing to indicate these men ever were sexually abused.
A huge percentage came from supportive, loving families, nuclear families, mother and father present, traditional, hardworking, their early lives.
No indication whatsoever of any kind of maladaptive behavior.
But then obviously it started to come out once they moved out.
But it just was interesting to see that some would use that as a defense.
And no, there was nothing to indicate that whatsoever. Nothing.
And I get what they tried to do to use that as defense to try to mitigate.
A lot of these sentences are mandatory minimums these guys are looking at.
Possession and distribution of child pornography, I think it's a 10-year mandatory minimum on the federal side.
Production is 15 minimum.
So they could say whatever they wanted to say. Courts couldn't go below that on the guidelines.
And the judges were astute enough not even to buy into that bullshit anyways. So what?
If anything, the argument would go in the other direction. Well, you were sexually assaulted. OK.
Well, then if anything, why would you then in turn inflict that upon somebody else and not get help for it?
So, nah, never saw it.
So what then is the psychology, psychiatry world saying as far as this existing?
I know if you look at history, there has been pedophilia in all cultures since the beginning of man pretty much.
But are there any kind of revelations on what is happening to these people specifically?
What a great question.
I think as a student of history myself, especially the ancient Greeks and Romans, right,
it is fascinating to see the idea as to through the lens of time and history as to what people did to each other.
Right. And I understood, like, for example, the Spartans would do that kind of as almost like a band of brothers.
Like if you were sexually involved with your fellow soldier, you tended to be more willing to die for that person.
And having young boys being trained and indoctrinated into that kind of warrior culture.
Once again, that's two, three, four thousand years ago.
But through that lens, I can understand that that's something that occurred. I'm not going to judge that.
But through the 20th and 21st century lens of a fully formed Western educated man and realizing that that kind of behavior is unacceptable and aberrant.
We don't need to make accommodations and think about, well, some people.
I'll give you an example. So the National Man Boy Love Association, NAMBLA, they're still around.
Not many people probably know that, but they're actually it's an organization that believes that man boy love is normal, much like being a gay person.
Right. Or an LGBTQ. It's somebody that, you know, listen, I was born this way to be sexually attracted to children.
There's nothing wrong with it. I'm not harming anybody. You know, one guy tried to articulate it to me as if the child is actually he never hurt the child.
And, you know, she was deriving pleasure herself from it. All kinds of twisted forms of, you know, justifications to what they did.
Right. And that's the kind of argument that I try to hear that I'm hearing.
And then I try to block out because I realize how quickly number one, it's sick. Number two, I'm not going to entertain anybody's thinking on that.
You don't get to define sexual boundaries and what's acceptable and not acceptable with a child that's incapable of, number one, defending themselves.
And number two, has no concept of what sex is. OK. But I see it and I understand it. And I've been on the Internet and I've been in these forms.
There's manuals written by these guys on how to actually groom children and how to justify what they do to other people.
And I've read them. And I realize, yeah, they're evil. They're evil. But what does psychology come?
I'm not, you know, once, James, I got out of that field, I stopped looking into it as much.
You know, I stopped. You know, I just sort of disconnected myself from that. I'd say it's still don't have any trauma from it.
But I really went into the substance use first responder, you know, field and embraced it because that's how I started my career in.
And I'm really good at it, dealing with people with those issues and building rapport, especially with men that are working in this field as well.
But with the sex offender population having done that and having gone through that, I just I just can't do it again. I just can't. I'm done.
That's completely understandable. Well, speaking of that, before we get to what you're doing now, you've kind of touched on on some of the impacts of the job on your timeline.
So where were the kind of the lowest points that you found yourself? And then what were the tools that you use personally to climb out of that hole?
Oh, great question. Where was I? So I'd say around the time of my divorce, that was probably my lowest point.
And realizing that, you know, being married to somebody who was completely unsupportive of me in the field,
also for me as a as a partner, realizing that, you know, she didn't want to be with me. And, you know, so she moved on, did her thing.
But the issue for me, though, is I had two dollars at the time and they were minors and there was a lot of perennial alienation that I had to go through as a man.
So from like 2000 and I'd say from 2006 to probably 2009 was my darkest period.
You know, I was suffering a very clinical depression. I was very I was drinking a lot.
For those of you I'm not in recovery, by the way, I was like to say I have a complex relationship with alcohol and drugs.
I smoke weed on occasion, but really I like psilocybin. That's really my thing now because I couldn't do it when I was a fed.
Couldn't even touch it. You know, funny story. I'll tell you later about that.
But I did drink a lot, you know, and that was kind of how I dealt with, you know, the non-traditional hours, what I was going through, unable to see my kids in spite of a court order to have 50-50 custody.
They're not coming over as frequent going through that. So what I did do and I was good at it.
I threw myself more into work, you know, and I was so as a single guy at the point now that I'm divorced, living on my own, I was living on my own.
And driving that stake of work harder to the ground.
Thinking that the longer I did it, the harder I would do that.
I could just sort of steamroll my way through the pain and depression.
So the more I threw myself into my work, I thought I'm going to feel better.
The problem was, is that that work was causing more and more trauma to me.
And thinking that the time if I could just make it to this magical number of 20 and retire and sit on the beach and drink out of a coconut, that everything was just going to be great.
The problem with that line of thinking is your trauma follows you.
It will sit right there next to the beach as you're drinking out of a coconut and it's not going to go anywhere.
And so you have a choice.
And the choice is you can either take control of your life and make some difficult choices or just continue to suffer.
So I attribute a lot of my personal and professional growth to my to my wife now.
Just so you know, she's, I think, 19 years younger than me. So she's younger than me.
She's an incredible mother. We have two children, age five and three.
She's an academic interventionist behaviorist up in Springfield, Mass. So she can use a little bit further.
And she's been my rock, man. She's my best friend and she supports me.
And she met me, like I said, when I was that sex offender specialist.
And through this next version of myself, we've even grown even closer because I've had to make that decision.
And I've been the kind of person, the kind of man that I wanted to be and being grateful that I actually have a partner this time who was kind, who was supportive, who is, you know, my friend, my best friend and is willing to do whatever it takes for us as a family to be successful.
And once I had that level of support, I realized that I could deal with PTSD a lot more simpler.
I could compartmentalize it, bring it out once in a while when I wanted to look at it, hold it up to the light and make a decision about letting go of my past law enforcement career and realizing that, yeah, even though I did it for I was a fed for almost 24 years.
You know, it was a meaningful career for me. It was it was enjoyable. I, you know, like I was a fan of the fan of the circus, not really the clowns, you know, the work was enjoyable.
But, you know, even though I did work with some toxic managers and some officers as well, I actually enjoyed the work and that created some meaning for me.
But it wasn't the end all the be all, you know, I mean, genetically, I mean, you know, I can live to be 90, 100 years old like my grandfather and grandmother.
You know, so I fully expect to live a long time. I'm in good shape, reasonably, you know, healthy.
I like my cigars, like my cocktails, you know, but other than that, life is good, man.
And so realizing that I could then become an entrepreneur when I retired and continue to work because I like working. That's just like many of us these days.
You know, this is what men do. And I realized that watching other people ahead of me, especially in law enforcement when they retired, for example, being a probation officer or a police officer, those are soft skills.
You know, those skills don't really translate well into the private sector, meaning that, you know, you can't get a job at Google or Facebook, you know, or Instagram and become a coder or a project manager.
Those jobs don't translate well. It's, you know, and I saw that time and time again as, you know, officers we get closer and closer to retirement.
And they started to panic about what they were going to do because then they started to see what the numbers were.
They're retirement. They're a little measly little pension, you know, because you have a lifestyle, right?
You're making X amount of money a year and you're enjoying your vacations and you join your, you know, your, you know, your jet skis and your trucks and all these wonderful going out to eat as often as you want.
You're having a great life. And then suddenly that rug is pulled off and then you got to live on half of that if you're lucky.
And then you got to find and here's the thing. Most, if not all, in my experience of people who retired, end up going back to work again.
They all go back to work. Now, whether or not it's part time or full time or it's doing something else, everybody goes back to work.
And in this field, I saw a lot of men and women who would end up going back to work and they were miserable because it was the work that they wanted to do.
It was sort of this almost like quasi semi law enforcement work. It was working security again, you know, or doing background investigations for the federal government or, you know, just some quasi public service work.
And they were just miserable, you know, because they were doing the same thing. And like, why did you retire then? You could have just stayed where you were.
Because if you're just doing the same thing, what's the point of growth? You're just bringing your trauma once again with you on the beach.
Just because you're bragging that you've made it through and you're retired and you're getting your pension. So, F& what, dude?
I've known so many people that have retired, that have not retired, that actually left their careers before their pension. And they're far happier.
You know, they're doing sales. You know, they went back to school. They're hustling. They're skilled in the trades.
Their lives are so full and so rich. But we don't like to acknowledge that in this field because the end all the be all is that 20-year pension.
And that's the golden egg. But once again, what's the level of toxicity you're building yourself up with?
You know, are you choosing to suffer when you just don't need to suffer? I did it because I had children to support.
You know, I had children that were from my first marriage that were minors that I still had to provide child support for happily.
I still had a lifestyle. And at the time, I felt trapped, like I did not know what else I was equipped to do.
I was terrified of not being a Fed anymore, of not being a federal probationer, because that was my whole identity.
Like, I'm not going to make six figures a year anymore. What am I equipped to do? I don't have skills.
You know, I'm really good at testifying in federal court. Gee, you know, I'm really good at, you know, sniffing out guns and drugs in somebody's house and looking for child porn.
How do you think that's going to look on an interview at a Fortune 50 or 500 company? Toys R Us. Toys R Us.
It's ridiculous. And so I started to realize I need to figure this shit out, man, because I'm sick and tired of pissing my blood into another man's cup.
It's funny because I've said this about the 20 years from two different aspects.
Firstly, where did that number come from? And like you said, it's a pension. So that's not the burning desire to serve that, you know, makes you put the uniform on every day.
It's an insurance company or a financial company that's put a number on how many years you should be there.
And then you put in drop and all these other things that we have on this on the civilian side.
And then you add in the fact that you can serve for four years in the military. I know you were Navy Reserve for a long time.
And people would be like, oh, thank you for your service. But you can work as a police officer for 10. And people would be like, why'd you quit?
You know, so it's so skewed again, you know, the first responders versus the military side.
We've got it so backwards and to empower people, because I think there's a lot of skills that you do bring from law enforcement, from fire that are beautiful to transition across.
But like you said, you've got to figure out that hard skills part. You got to figure out what industry do I want to be in?
Otherwise, the firefighter becomes a teacher at the fire academy and the cop becomes a security guard at the mall.
And that's soul destroying, you know, especially, you know, a 55 year old firefighter physically probably isn't loving going up and down stairs anymore.
So, you know, realizing that you have created the ability to work well on the team, high stress environment, problem solving, all these different things that we do.
But how can I apply that? How can I serve again? That's the other thing.
I've noticed a lot of people that struggle with transition.
They go into finance, a lot of military and first responders. There's no purpose in that.
You know, oh, you know, you've got to hit your quotas and you're going to make a shitload of money.
A lot of us in uniform, that's the opposite of what we ever did.
So finding, for example, in your case, helping first responders in my case, helping first responders, that purpose never changed.
Then I want to make the world better. I want to help people. I want to protect people that put you in uniform and it carried on outside uniform.
So I think refinding that flame, not being ruled by a number set by a financial company,
but allowing that passage to go in and out of uniform because that's the mission doesn't change.
It's a costume that you wore for a while. The mission was unfaltering.
I love that because I actually work with some guys and I do some kind of life coachy stuff with them as well.
And part of that is that career transition. And it's about, oh, I like to do finance. Oh, I'd be really good at sales.
And I sit down with them and we start to pull that apart, you know, tease it out of them.
I'm like, do you like numbers? Are you good with numbers? Do you like doing your taxes every year? Do you like?
And the answers are like, oh, it's no. Like, well, then what the fuck are you doing, dude?
If you don't like it, you think you're going to have a career at it?
And this is what happens with a lot of guys in recovery that I work with that I tell them, like, listen, if you're going to quit using heroin, right, which is an opiate, it's a painkiller.
You know, and I say this oftentimes to them, like, congratulations, you found a drug that saved your life.
And they're like, what do you mean I'm using heroin? Like, well, at the time when you started, were you in pain?
Yeah. I was like, why wouldn't you take a painkiller? It saved your life until one day it didn't.
Now you're using 120 bags of heroin a day and you've overdosed six times in the past, you know, five months.
But if you're going to give up heroin, something you really enjoy, and you want to replace it with something, it has to be as good or better.
And you can apply that to having another career, your 2.0 or 2.5 or 3.0 version of yourself.
What do you want to do? Do you want to teach? Do you want to, you know, you want to go to the sales?
I mean, people in the first responder communities are really good at talking to people, right, especially out there in the streets, on the fly, you know, and they're really good at that.
So that could translate well into sales. But unless you like doing that and having to grind and build up and whatever that entails, you know, then it's not going to work.
So we have to find out, you know, before you became a cop or firefighter, is there anything else you were thinking about doing or along the way?
What do you like to do in your downtime? What do you like to watch on TV? You know, what are you passionate about?
You may not necessarily have to go back to school. And this is the great thing about living in 2025 soon. You have access to everything now.
You know, you can start an online business, you can start a side hustle, you can, you know, put up an Amazon store, an Etsy store, you can, you know, you can do a podcast, anything you want to do.
But just start off doing something that you enjoy, you think you want to do it. I always knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
I always thought that was the coolest thing. But I had a life of public service and I didn't even know what that meant.
And then this thing called the Internet comes on and then everyone's out there doing their thing online.
You know, they're making money and they're, you know, they're becoming dot comers and the whole first version of that in 2000 and watching that unfold.
And I'm like, man, I missed the boat on that. I should invest in Facebook or work to Facebook. How cool is that?
And then I realized, you know, listen, let me just stay in this field, learn what I learned. And then once I started suffering from my PTSD and getting burned out and realizing I need to get the fuck out of here,
I sat myself down. I said, why did I do this? What did I start? And I started social work.
I started to go back to graduate school. I was accepted to Columbia. And I said, fuck, I'm not going, you know.
And I'm glad I didn't because I would I would have sucked at it at the time. I would have been terrible.
You know, and then wasn't until my late 40s that I actually had the resilience and the skills and the ability and the self-awareness to say to myself, Mike, and the confidence to say, you know what?
I think I can do this. I think I can become a therapist and I think I can make a lot of money at it if I play my cards right. And it worked out, which is funny, because when I was in grad school, I had a professor and he was terrible.
I mean, you know, he asked the class, he's like, so who here wants to, you know, what do you want to do?
You know, and everyone's like, oh, I want to be a social worker. I want to I want to, you know, I want to work at an agency. I want to work here.
And he asked me, he goes, all right, Paul, what do you want to do? I don't want to open up my own private practice, make a lot of money.
And he looked at me and he goes, why would you do that? No, you're not going to make a lot of money in this field.
You know, you're going to be working with people that are impoverished and, you know, and they come from these very, you know, terrible backgrounds and you're not going to make a lot of money in this field.
And like, oh, really? Maybe you're not. I'm going to make a shitload of money. I'm going to build $150 an hour is what I want to do.
You know, because I have a lifestyle. I want nice things in life. You know, we don't shame doctors, you know, for specializing in what they specialize in, do we?
You know, you don't shame lawyers. You could graduate from the shittiest law school in the country.
You could graduate from a toilet bowl strip mall version of law school.
The day you pass the bar, you can charge $500 an hour. And nobody questions that.
Nobody questions an attorney charging that amount of money because they're expected to charge that amount of money when you go to an attorney.
When you have a heart problem and you go to a cardiologist and they say, yeah, we need to operate on you, it's going to be $100,000.
You're going to pay that money. We don't negotiate with them because they've spent all this time and energy and money doing that.
And they deserve it. They deserve that kind of lifestyle.
When my car breaks down and I got to go to the mechanic and he says, hey, you need a new Hinkley sprocket, it's going to be $1500.
You know, I'm not going to negotiate with the guy because I'm paying for his skills to get me back up and running again.
So, yeah, I went to graduate school and I grinded away 6,000 hours after to become what I am today.
You know, God damn it, I'm going to get paid well for it.
You know, and if I have to work with high net worth individuals, I have no problem taking their money and providing service because you know what?
The market determines that. And this is what I like about being an entrepreneur.
It's a meritocracy. I can work as little or as much as I want.
I got my foot on the gas pedal. And if my clients don't think that I'm a good therapist, which I think I am because they keep coming back, then they're certainly welcome to find somebody else.
So. Beautiful. Did you mention that you work with first responders too? Yes. Yeah.
OK, so I just want to hit a couple of things because I know we're getting close to being running out of time. But what is the was there? Let me rephrase that.
Was there any shift in seeing the prevalence of addiction in our profession being in versus being on the other side of the psychologist couch?
Give an example. So I think I mean, we all acknowledge that there's alcoholism in a lot of our professions.
You know, that's varying degree, varying spectrum.
But I think where the most stigma really is, is everything else. The meth, the opiates, all the other things.
And I think that, you know, we're having these conversations about suicide, but when there's an overdose, oh, God forbid, we're not talking about that.
They died suddenly in their home, surrounded by their loved ones.
But you obviously have an unusual lens now because you have people walking through your door talking about their addiction.
So were you was there a kind of aha moment where you realized how many I mean, is there a large amount of addiction outside of alcoholism that you're seeing?
Yeah, there is. And here's the here's the interesting thing about, as you know, first responder culture, there's always an excuse to drink.
Right. There's always a promotion. There's always a retirement.
There's always some type of celebration. There's always some transfer. There's always something going on. And cops and firefighters and law enforcement, they look for any excuse.
There's always a happy hour. There's always, you know, there's a cop bar, the firefighter bar that everyone goes to.
There's always stuff that, you know, for them creates these meaningful relationships. And alcohol is a lubricant for that.
And I get that, you know, and there's nothing wrong with that to a certain extent. But when that's used day in and day out, not only for celebration, you know, and all these wonderful life life changes, you know, another kid, let's have a drink, you know.
And then it's used then to sort of decompress and as medicine. Well, then that's the problem. And that's the issue.
And with other substances, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, I mean, you know, I see that as well.
The issue for me, of course, is by the time these guys get caught, especially first responders, and if they've caught with substances in their system, most agencies have a zero tolerance policy.
You know, that if you get caught using cocaine, you're going to be terminated. And so they, by the time they come to me, one of two things are about to happen.
They're about to get caught and they know it and they're looking for help or they've been caught and they're trying some way to mitigate the outcome, which is going to be termination from their job.
When I worked for the feds, there was zero tolerance. It was you cannot touch anything. If you use weed, you are terminated because you serve at the pleasure of the courts.
You know, it's like you're done. There's no union. There's no protection. You signed up for this. You understood that when you took the job.
It's funny. I was in Mexico years ago and I'm hanging out on the beach with my wife and some guy walks by with a cooler, opens up the cooler and inside is all this weed, you know, and I was like, oh man, you know what?
I want to see you here on 2019 January 1st because I knew I was like, I can't use this stuff. And in Connecticut, it's legal.
It's recreational marijuana is legal. I've got two dispensaries and walking distance of where I live, man. And it's like I can walk in and smoke it.
Edibles and gummies and all these wonderful great things. And funny thing was, you know, the week I retired, I went out and got some and I hated it.
I freaking hated it. I hated weed. It was terrible. Like this is what I was waiting for all these years.
You know, so now I use mushrooms once in a while. You know, that kind of helps me. You know, it's much more, you know, for me, it's helped with my PTSD.
I'm not a big fan of medication for me, me personally, for many of my clients I am. But for me, psilocybin has been kind of a game changer for me and it's helped me a lot.
So, yeah, I've answered your question. No, it did. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of weed either.
I've done it a few times and, you know, I just don't like being suppressed and feeling kind of, you know, heavy and all that thing. I've never had that kind of, oh, it just chills me out and they get all, you know, creative and imaginative.
I don't. It just feels like, you know, I'm being held down by the world's heaviest blanket. But mushrooms were legal when I lived in Japan and I had a blast on those. They were amazing.
So it doesn't surprise me that they're having such great effects on the mental health side because between that and MDMA, I mean, you know, I had nothing but positive experiences.
Drinking, you know, I've had many a time hunched over a toilet bowl from alcohol, you know, so it's interesting what we decide is socially acceptable and what is stigmatized.
Well, I did MDMA in the early 90s in New York. You know, I used to go to the clubs, you know, before I became a PO and, you know, some of my most incisive episodes have been on MDMA to realize how amazing that stuff is.
And then to work with veterans, even though I am one, I've never been in combat. I've been eight years in the Navy Reserve. You know, it feels interesting.
I, you know, working with veterans that are using that and ketamine treatment, it's a game changer.
And that's something else that I'd like to see change as well. But like I said, I can't focus on the macro. I mean, I have no, I have really no say as to what happens on the bigger picture and the smaller picture.
Yeah, I can help steer my clients towards those types of therapies if I need to. And I definitely stay within the scope of my practice as well.
But for me, it's been a game changer and I would definitely encourage anybody who's interested to do that. You know, MDMA, ayahuasca, psilocybin as well.
But you know, as I think Dr. Jordan Peterson once said, beware of unearned wisdom. Make sure you've got the resilience before you go down that road.
Absolutely. Well, for people listening, I'm sure they're fascinated about all the things that we've discussed today. So if they want to learn more about you, find you online or social media, where are the best places?
I'm big on LinkedIn. That's really where you can find me. So Paul Collette, I'm on LinkedIn. You'll see my pretty face on there with the beard and the mustache.
I just like reaching out to people on that. You know, it's a professional platform, which I really like LinkedIn for that. I was really opposed to that when I first came out for some reason. I don't know why.
And then after a while, I just sort of kind of grown on there. So I've got about 5,000 followers on there. So I like it.
We've got a lot of my business through there. So a lot of people reach out to me. DM me, reach out to me. If you are suffering, if you need help, give me a call. You know, it's free.
I'll help you. You know, I'll work with anybody. Because I've been there. I know what you're going through to a certain extent. And if I can't help you, I'll get you somebody who can. I have a website as well. That's my professional practice.
So it's called SAP services, CT.com. So it's SAP services, CT is Connecticut.com. And so that's my private practice. I'm sure you'll put that in your show notes as well.
But you can find me on LinkedIn and I also have my contact information there as well. Beautiful. Well, Paul, I want to say thank you so much. I mean, we've been all over the place from toxic leadership to sex offenders and everything in between.
So I want to thank you so, so much for such an incredible conversation and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thanks, James. I hope to continue to listen to you and all your incredible guests. I'm actually honored that I'm actually in the same orbit as some of these, you know, James Brolin, for Christ's sake, you've had him on a couple times, right?
Josh, yes.
Yeah, exactly. And the Quentin Tarantino guy.
Oh, John Travolta.
John Travolta. It's amazing. So you've had some incredible guests and for me to actually be on the same podcast as them.
And to get my message out about resilience and letting everybody know, listen, man, you don't have to suffer. It's, it's, it's, you know, you may be in this field and you may feel like your back is against the wall, but it doesn't have to be that way.
And there's always a way out. And I've lived it. I've lived that experience for many years. I'm here to help. Reach out to me. Let me help you. I ain't going to charge you. I'm going to talk to you. I'm going to help you. I'm going to coach you through this. That's what I want to do. Thank you.