A conversation with Robert Carlson and Fran Racioppi on lessons from the military, threat assessments, leadership, and more.?

Question

Robert Carlson · Answer

Welcome to Creator Conversations. Listening to Robert Carlson and Fran Ricciopi discuss their military careers, how to be prepared for security threats, and how to excel as a leader. Moderated by me, Liv Bencher. In order to get us started, do you guys mind telling the audience a little bit more about you? Fran, why don't we start with you? Absolutely, yeah, thanks for having me and great to connect with everybody. My name is Fran Ricciopi. I spent 13 years in the Army Special Forces as a Green Beret. I studied broadcast journalism before that, and so my big dream was always to be a reporter and be the next Tom Brokaw. And then 9-11 was my junior year, and I was like, well, do I wanna go to the middle of nowhere and be a traffic reporter, which is awesome, by the way, or I can go in the Army. And I decided to go in the Army and see if I could do great things there and had an awesome career. Got out in 2016 and went to business school and then worked as the Chief Security Officer at Snapchat, and then went on from there to build my own company in security here in New York and started a podcast called the Jedbro Podcast two and a half years ago, where I've had an awesome opportunity to talk to elite performers in athletics, in business, in politics, in the military, you name it. We're trying to have those conversations, and I'm really proud and honored to be a part of any question too. Awesome, and Robert? Yeah, yeah, I appreciate it, Liv, and this is an awesome opportunity. I mean, to be able to sit here and talk with you and somebody like Fran of his caliber and background is pretty cool. So my background, I've been in the military for going on 30 years now. It's been in the Air Force the whole time. The last seven of those years were with special operations, doing special operations JTAC. And I'm also a police officer. I work for one of the largest metropolitan police departments in the Southeastern kind of United States area as one of their lead instructors. So I've been doing that for about 15 years with that agency. And then I did a couple of years up North along the Canadian border on a SWAT team for about four or five years up there. I do a lot of tactical medical training. I've actually got a really neat opportunity a couple of years ago. Military asked me if I wanted to go back on an active status and travel around the country teaching tactical medicine to police officers. So that's kind of where my life has currently got me sitting is bouncing around the country teaching cops all over the country. Wow, you both have very interesting and exciting backgrounds. And so, as you mentioned, you both are or were members of the armed forces and thank you so much for your service. What motivated you to join the military and what are some of the biggest lessons that you've learned or learned? Robert, we can start with you. I know Brandon mentioned that he joined after 9-11 as most of the people that I work with that was kind of their big impetus to join the military. However, I was well in the military by that point. So I didn't really have that single moment that drove me to join. I was raised by my grandfather who had fought in World War II. He was a very influential part of my life growing up. So I don't really recall a time in my life where joining the military wasn't in the plan. That was just, that was kind of always what I was kind of destined to do or thought that I was supposed to do. I don't really know if I can say why I joined because I've just known my whole life that was where I was going to go. Now, I thought initially that it was just going to be a stepping stone. When I joined the military, I was planning on just doing four years and then getting out and doing civilian law enforcement as the rest of my career. But once I got in and was being successful, and honestly, I was just having so much fun. Once that first enlistment came up and all the opportunities that were sitting in front of me, I just wasn't, I wasn't ready to give it up yet. So it became a career, but that wasn't the original plan. What are some of the biggest lessons that you've learned so far? I'm sure there's a lot. Oh God, there's a ton. I mean, obviously being in the military has definitely instilled a very strong work ethic and desire to always achieve the absolute best that I can do in absolutely everything. But I think one of the biggest things that I've learned from the military is investing in myself. And what I mean by that is ultimately I'm responsible for my own professional development, my own growth, even my own personal development. And that's what a lot of what the military has really kind of taught is how to develop myself, how to invest myself and make myself the most worthy product that I can to make myself more competitive, whether it's in a professional environment, whether it's in an athletic environment, or even whether it's in a personal environment, that really strong desire to constantly self-improve. And Fran, same question to you. You mentioned 9-11, any other motivating factors and lessons that you've learned? So for me, I care about impact. And when I was in college and 9-11 happened, my desire was actually to really be a war correspondent because what I was intrigued with was the fact that you had journalism on the front lines. And I said, well, if I was a war correspondent, then I could be on the front lines. But then what I saw was this big difference between what a soldier does when they're on the front lines and what a journalist does. And I realized that telling the story is important, but taking part in the action was really what I cared about. And so that was that transition point for me that said, well, that's why right now where I am in my life, graduating college, I'm young, it's a young man's game primarily in the military. I can go out and I can do that. And then later on down the road, we'll see where the things lie. And I can create impact in a different way later on in my life. And so that's what really mattered to me when I went in. And when I went in, I started in the infantry. And at the time in the early 2000s, I mean, that was a critical part of our strategy, especially in Iraq was a massive ground war. And so to be a part of the infantry and to be a part of the daily operations that were happening in so many different regions of that country was a really awesome experience, especially when you're leading a platoon of 41 soldiers, who you're responsible for. You just learn so much about leadership and leadership under fire, literally and figuratively, because those are the lessons that you take away. And then when I went on and transitioned into special forces and became a special forces detachment commander, and then took roles of increasing responsibility, you always remember those early lessons. And you remember the perspective that is gained from being in all these different environments and all these situations that the military puts you in. So when you get out and you'd go off and you do other things and you figure out, well, how am I gonna continue to be impactful? How am I gonna build something that resonates with people? How am I gonna create a mark on the world that makes people better? Because what's leadership? We define leadership, especially in the military and in any organization is really about how do we empower others to achieve that common goal that we've set forth? How do we get them to do something that they may otherwise not even wanna do or know that they're gonna have to do or be asked to do? And that's the impact that we have on others as leaders, as coaches, as mentors is so critical. And you take that away from the military. The military teaches you that every single day because those lessons start from when you first look at a recruiting poster or you first look at any commercial. What you never see is come be a follower and one day we'll make you a leader. We talk about leadership from day one. Everything you see, every Marine Corps billboard that you see out there talks about leadership from day one. The minute you walk into that recruiting office we're developing leaders and that's what effective organizations do. And that's what I take away. Yeah, definitely. And I think this transitions nicely into our next question because you both led teams in dynamic and dangerous situations. And so what do you believe is key to fostering a trust and efficient teamwork in those high stakes situations? So you mentioned it, it's trust. Teamwork teams are built on trust. It's knowing that the person next to you is gonna perform when the moment counts. That they operate with integrity. They operate with a certain level of drive. They have the skills. They're effective in what they do. And that comes down to trust. Friction on teams most often comes down to like one of two things. One is role confusion when people actually don't really understand what it is that their job is within a team and they try to do other people's job and then that just creates chaos. And the other one is lack of trust. When I sit across from somebody and I don't have the full confidence that in the moment they're gonna do the right thing, the thing that we need them to do and execute at a high level. When we have trust, when we build that, then we can execute free. When we talk about preparation, it's all in the preparation. It's all in the training. How much work have I put in to know that every single person around me is as proficient as they can be? And whatever it is, whether we're in the military or we're operating a corporate environment, we're on a team at work, we're on an athletic team. It's those constant repetitions, that constant work that we put in that builds that trust, it builds that camaraderie. And that's ultimately the fabric of the teamwork is when I know what everyone else is gonna do in a certain situation. And now I can align my actions and theirs to that. Robert, anything to add to that? Yeah. I mean, Frank really hit it on the head that it's all about trust, right? No one's ever gonna follow somebody that they don't trust. Long time ago, I had somebody that described leadership to me and this just really resonated with me. I've put it in all the classes that I do about leadership now. But leadership is defined as the art of influencing people to do more than the science of management says is possible. And I think there's a couple of critical components out of that statement that I really kind of take to home. It's an art for one, right? It's not, there's nothing set in stone. Each person has to find their own unique style and their own unique format that's gonna work for them. And then the other part is influencing. And influencing, there's a couple of critical components when you look at how to influence people to accomplish an objective. Trust is a very critical component of that. But the other part of that is you have to know what motivates your people. You have to know your people and what is important to them so that you can influence them in order to accomplish that objective. It's a combination of getting to know your people and then by getting to know your people, that also helps build that trust and rapport because nobody's gonna trust somebody that they've never interacted with or they don't know on that kind of personal level. But you've gotta get to understand, you've gotta get to learn your team. And this applies, like Fran said, not just in a military environment, but in any environment where you're working as part of a group. Every person on that group is an individual and individuals have their own bias, their own motivations, their own fears, their own strengths and their own weaknesses. And as the leader of that group, you need to learn what all of those things are so that you can influence that team in the best way. So this applies in every dynamic that we do that involves groups of people, is learning what is important to each other. It's so important. I mean, I wanna reiterate what Robert's talking about here because our job as leaders is to understand what motivates our people, but also what we need them to do because everybody's not gonna be good at everything. And we don't need everybody to be good at everything, right? We actually, in a lot of cases, we don't want everybody to be good at everything because then you have a bunch of people who walk around and they think they're all great and then they start questioning each other and it becomes this whole kind of competition, right? It's why you don't field 11 quarterbacks on a football team, right? We put people in specific roles based on strengths because that's where they're gonna be the most successful and drive maximum impact to our organization. And I'll give you an example. I had a soldier, best soldier I've ever had, worst soldier I've ever had. He could not make it on time one day, never. He was grossly overweight. We would start a run in morning, like physical training, and you'd get two minutes down the road and he was gone. He would disappear, he'd fall out of the formation, go back to his room, go have breakfast. He was impossible to control at an administrative level. So Robert talked about management. He's a manager's nightmare. The guy had been promoted and busted down in rank like three times, but he was the best soldier and I wanted no one near me in combat besides him because for somehow, even though he fell out of every run, he was the fastest guy on the battlefield closing with the enemy. He was the best shot. He was the most proficient tactically and he had this spirit about him that you felt safe when he was around because he was gonna be the guy that was gonna be critical to winning the fight. And then we'd go and try to do a run and he would not show up. So from a leadership perspective, and we separate the two, management and leadership, he did exactly what I needed him to do. He was at the point of impact that was most critical to me and the organization. From a manager perspective, he was completely uncontrollable. And so our job is to understand what do we need out of our people? Now, sure, people may listen to this and argue with me that, well, he was always a terrible soldier, whatever. We can argue that all day long. But the point is we wanna put people in the places where they're gonna be successful. And then we have to assume how much we wanna deal with the other stuff maybe. And so I wanna circle back to leadership at the end if we have time, but you sort of were talking about being prepared and training and Robert, you're an expert in active shooter events and Fran, you have an extensive background in security in the corporate world as well. So I wanted to ask, how do you both view the evolution of threat response over the years? So like you said, my background in the law enforcement setting is active shooter. It's pretty much what I spent my entire law enforcement career on. That's the context that I kind of look at most everything through. That's the lens that I tend to view most anything when we start talking about threat response or any kind of response like that. And I think we've seen a tremendous shift over the years when it comes to dealing with threats and not just in active shooter, but this applies in a lot of areas. Back in the day, back when I was growing up, when I first got started out in law enforcement, we had very specialized units. Everything was very pigeonholed. And so when we would have any kind of threat that would pop up, the standard response for most first responders was, we're going to just contain it, we're gonna box it in, keep it from getting any worse and then we're gonna let the specialist show up, i.e. SWAT teams. And that was for every scenario, whether it was active shooter, acts of terrorism, hostage situation, all of it. There were specialized units that were uniquely trained to deal with those. And then over the years, we started seeing that that wasn't working because that took too long. And in a scenario where you're dealing with a threat that is of a dynamic nature, and what I mean by that is it's ongoing, it's ever-changing, it's fluid, and people's lives or whatever is critical is at risk. Because you can also apply this exact same theory to financial as well, right? We're not always trying to protect lives. Sometimes we may be trying to protect an asset that has a value. And so whatever our asset is, whether that's a property, whether that's a life, whether that's a dollar amount, if it is at risk and we are losing that asset right now, we can't wait for that specialized unit to respond to deal with it. And so what we've seen over the years is that paradigm shift of waiting for the specialized units where now the first officers, again, law enforcement being my background, so I use the term officers, the first individuals that are on scene and have the capability to deal with it have to go in and deal with it right away. They have to go in and intervene so that we stop the loss of whatever it is that is important to us. In my case, that being loss of life. So now we have transitioned where from a law enforcement perspective, that first officer on scene has to get in and deal with it. And it's even gone away from waiting till you get two or three officers. Now it's if you're by yourself, if you're the first one that pulls up, you go. And you go in, you may be going in by yourself. You may be going in against a numerically superior threat. You may be going in against a threat that has more firepower than you do, that's already entrenched and has had time to fortify themselves, but you still go. Because if you don't, people are gonna die. Lives are gonna get lost, assets are gonna get lost. And that's the biggest shift that I've seen when it comes to dealing with threats is no longer waiting for the so-called specialized units. But now that boots on the ground person is put into the role of they must deal with this on their own, potentially by themselves, because otherwise people will die while we wait. I think there's an acceptance of that when we talk about things like mass casualty events, that they're real. I mean, they're real and they're becoming more commonplace. And we're in an unprecedented time in society, in our country where we're seeing these events on a daily basis. I mean, the threshold for what is even considered a mass casualty event to make the network national news is like five people now. But think about all the events that happen every day that you don't even make the news. They don't make the national news. Some don't make local news because local news is dealing with the two, three, fours and the ones, twos don't make the news because they only got 30 minutes. So there's a reality that has to be injected into this. I mean, we're at a point in time where my daughter gets on the bus every day and I don't, and I'm forced to think like, well, I hope I see her, except for, and that's a very scary place to be. And that's the reality that we live in. And so we have to take action on this. We can't sit back and say, well, it's not gonna happen in my town or that doesn't happen here. Yes, it does. And yes, it can. And yes, it will. And when we talk about things like school, primarily thinking about like school shootings, right? And it's these environments that, people are going after kids and it's horrifying, number one. But number two, it's incumbent upon administrators, law enforcement, parents, the security community to get everyone to understand that we can take measurable action. And the measurable action doesn't have to be, arm every teacher and put gun lockers in classrooms, right? Because there's a point where you exacerbate the problem and you create more residual issues. But having deliberate conversations within each one of our communities, with each one of our locations about how do we respond to this in a reasonable way is critical to the protection of life, assets, whatever you name it. But there's also no blanket response. What works in the elementary school here may not work in the elementary school down the road. And so we have to go through those exercises. We have to take the time to sit down and think about it. What if this does happen here? What are we gonna do? How are we gonna do it? And to Robert's point, that specialization, specialization is important, but that's phase two. And when I build security programs in my company, in FR6, we're always looking at what's the window of time that I have to manage, you know, we're talking about school or talking about a corporate environment before I get that next level of intervention. Okay, so if I have a security guard, I have security officers in my location, I need to know how long till the police get here. And that's gonna be different. That's gonna be different town and city, between town and city. It's gonna be different depending on the time of day. It's gonna be dependent on the time of year. Is it a holiday? Is it not? The resourcing of the police department. And so how well we interact with law enforcement on the private sector is really important to understand how do we develop and scale our programs so that we can close that gap. If I have to cover 90 seconds before someone's gonna be there because I'm next to the police station, I'm gonna approach that one way. But if I'm not gonna see a police officer on my corporate office location for five minutes, 10 minutes, that's a huge variation and a huge gap that I now have to create a program to fit to get, to respond to. Now it comes down to how quickly can I become the intermediary or how, you know, my team, right? The program that I put in place become that intermediary to get that next level of intervention. I think Fran's hitting, totally hitting nail on the head when he's talking about filling that gap. That's something that we talk about a lot with law enforcement, with private, because I do a lot of consulting with private businesses or run a nonprofit that does community education as it relates to active shooters. And one of the things we always talk about is the first thing you need to do, your goal is to fill the gap until the appropriate, the specialized response gets there. Step one in that is what can you do to reduce that gap as much as possible? How can we compress that gap? Could that be early surveillance and early detection? Could it be rapid communication with law enforcement? All of those things help cut down seconds off of that gap and seconds equal lives. So our first objective is we wanna reduce that time gap as much as possible. Once we've done that, so that's step one, is figuring out how can you get that specialized asset, that specialized response as fast as you can. Now you've built your window. Now you look at it and say, okay, now what do I need to do to fill this window? Because now we've shrunk that window down. So like Fran was talking about, if it's a 30 second response versus if you're out in the middle of nowhere, if you're in a very rural area, let's be honest, you could potentially have 15, 20, even 30 minutes before you get some sort of armed professional response, i.e. law enforcement getting on scene. You're not even playing the same game anymore when you're talking about filling a 30 minute window versus filling a 30 second window. And so your options are completely different. So that's kind of how we always approach it is what can we do to reduce that gap as much as possible? And then now we have a realistic window. Now we go ahead and build our response. We build our actions based off of that. So I guess like something I'm having trouble just wrapping my head around as someone who, you know, sits at a desk most of the day for my job, how do you stay mentally prepared for these situations where you have to act right now or maybe you're the first person on the scene, whether that be like daily routines or kind of what goes through your head right before you need to act, how do you stay mentally prepared? The experts have a phrase that they love using called tactical performance imagery. It basically boils down to what if games? I constantly am running through, every time I go into a new environment or a new scenario, what if? What if I need to get out of here quickly? What if I need to react to something? What if the building catches on fire? All these different things so that then I'm already starting to build those neural pathways in my brain of, you know, how can I react when something happens? So I'm not waiting for that adrenaline and that stress to kick in and then make a decision because it's not going to happen then. If you wait until emergency kicks off and that adrenaline kicks in, your brain literally cannot create new neural pathways once that happens. So you want to do all that now. So that what if game constantly running through potential scenarios and then tied into that when you're doing that is a positive imagery, right? It kind of ties into that tactical performance imagery. We've actually done studies in the military on this before we would go in and do hits on structures or whatever. And we would look at high performance teams and low performance teams. And one of the big questions that we would ask them is, all right, right before you went through the door, what was your thoughts? The teams that would sit there and run through all of the possible bad outcomes. I hope I don't do this. I hope I don't make a mistake. I hope this doesn't happen. Those teams were your historically low performer teams because they're running through all of these possible negative outcomes. Well, it's that self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Your brain is getting tons of mental rehearsals. It's what effing constantly, but it's what effing what it shouldn't be doing. And you look at high performance teams, ask that same question to them. What we found was they were visualizing themselves walking through and being successful. They were visualizing, I'm going to take down this room. I'm going to win against this threat. I'm going to do this. Wasn't I hope, it was I'm going to do this. So now their brain has this positive neural pathway, this successful result built into it right before it kicks into action. More often than not, that's what comes to fruition. So not only running through all of these what if scenarios, but making sure as you're visualizing those scenarios that you're visualizing the positive outcome, not the I hope it doesn't outcomes. You want to visualize what you want to perform. I think that was a great explanation when we talk about the individual operator, the individual person, right? Because ultimately we need individuals to understand their role in these situations. I'll give you a different day. I'll give you the strategic picture, right? I'll give you the hardest job that a security professional has. So chief security officer, director of security at an organization. Let's say I'm called a coming, you brought up, you work at a desk, right? You work in an office environment, right? Majority of people work in an office environment. So their biggest challenge, their biggest why are they hired is to bridge that gap. And that gap is how do I create a program that keeps my employees and team members safe, instills in them the confidence that they can come to work every day and not have to think about security, but they're always thinking about security. And that is a very complicated and difficult task that we ask of our security professionals. And I say this actually, I was like on the eve of going to the global security conference next week in Dallas. So, but that's what we're gonna talk about all week, right? That's what we're doing is how do you create a program within your organization that educates and trains all of your employees from your most senior level to your most junior, gets their buy-in, gets them thinking about security, but allows them to come to work every day and focus on their job. Because although our mission as security professionals is to protect people, property, and assets, our job at the core is to create the environment by which the rest of the company can come to work and effectively drive revenue and make the business successful. Because that's why I have businesses, right? We have businesses to make money, right? To make money for the business, make money for shareholders and organizations. And so if we create environments as security professionals that hinder that and become a roadblock to the rest of the employee's ability to come to work and effectively do their job, now we're gonna have friction between your security director and your executive level staff, because now you're just a cost center and you're creating problems. So you do that by creating culturally focused educational programs that understand the true mission of the company or the organization and where security falls into that. What's the real threat picture? Is it external? Meaning somebody is gonna come from the outside and create a risk or a threat to the people, property, brand, reputation, or is it internal? Do we have an insider risk? And we're gonna approach those in a couple of different ways and then we're gonna develop our entire systems, whether that be, how do we educate our employees? How do we build our actual structures with vestibules and turnstiles? Are they even needed? Do we have an open campus or a closed campus? How do we bring technology into it with badges and access readers and CCTV? How do we use our security guards? Are we using them as brand ambassadors? Are they bouncers? You know, what do we really want out of them? And then how do we take our leadership team and get the buy-in from them? Because generally your employee population is gonna care about what your leadership cares about. And it's really hard to empower a staff to have a culture of security if you have leadership who's also not bought in and reinforcing that message. And then do all that in an environment that fosters culture and community and brings everyone together versus being the organization within the company that makes you swipe your badge. These cameras are here to watch me and create a negative effect on the business. I think both of you hit on really important messages and I'm gonna ask one more question and I wanna loop back to leadership. Are there any individuals either from history, you know them personally, you don't know them personally that exemplifies a great leader to you? I talk to great leaders every day. Okay, there's a poster, there's a picture behind me. Okay, and it's George Washington and George Washington is on his horse. And if you know history about George Washington, he had like, I don't know how many, but it was a number of horses like shot out from under him. And then that actually throughout the war like gave him this idea that he like couldn't be killed because all these horses were getting shot, but he somehow wasn't. And so he was kind of had in his mind this idea that, well, maybe I can't be killed, maybe I'm somewhat immortal. Here's a person who led the birth of our country and is critical to the winning of the American Revolution who then in his mind believes that he may, he probably can't be killed. Yet had the courage and the forethought when offered to become the king said no. That's leadership, that's vision. That's the ability to see the big picture and put everything else in front of yourself. The inscription on this poster says, first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen. Because that is what defines leadership. A leader is somebody who has a bias to action, first in war. They're gonna take action based on the information that they have, understanding what they don't know and make a decision. And when they act, they're going to act swiftly and what we use to call violence of action, right? And they're gonna be deliberate about what they do and then ready to change if it doesn't work. First in peace. Diplomacy is critical in anything that we do, whether it's in the military, whether it's in politics, whether it's going to work every day and shaking hands with your coworkers and smiling and asking them how their night was. We get further as a society, as an organization, as teams, as individuals with a smile, a handshake and a hug than we do being adversarial. But people get into positions of power and they walk, they look in the mirror and they say, oh, I'm in charge now. Now everybody owes me or reports to me. And my job is to come in here and tell them what to do. No, your job is to make them want to do their job to the best of their ability. And that usually requires putting them first and creating an environment where they're comfortable to do that. And that's that third piece about first in the hearts of his countrymen. So to me, that's why it's on my wall. And it's a reminder to me every day about how I should conduct myself. You don't always get it right, but you can try. So this is a hard question because there's so many great leaders that are out there. But with every single leader that's out there, you also, the more you learn about them, you're like, well, this thing is great, but I don't like this other thing. So I don't think there's any one true great leader that stands out. But the one that was the most impactful to me was just the guy that basically, he initially empowered me to become a team leader. He was the team leader that kind of trained me. And then as he promoted, I stepped in behind him and slid up. But for me, what he taught me was empowerment. And that he trusted his team, me being a member of his team, that when he would set out an objective, that he then trusted that I was going to go out and do those things. There was no micromanaging. He gave me my left and right limits, and then he backed off and said, all right, go do your thing. He was there if I started to fail. I knew I could call him and say, hey, I've hit a roadblock. What do you think I should do? But he let me run. And that taught me leadership. And that taught me how to get things done. The part where I think a lot of people kind of fail, they're good at one side or they're good at the other, but rarely do I come across somebody that's good at both. When I failed to meet that objective, and if I fell short, if I didn't live up to his expectation, the repercussions were strong and they were fierce, as it should be. He would back off and let you run with it. But if you didn't succeed, you were gonna know about it. And at the end of it, as he developed me, you became terrified of failing, not because of the repercussion, but just having to see the expression on his face. You knew he expected more from you. And to me, that was, he was probably one of the greatest leaders that I ever had the privilege to work for because he truly cared about me. He knew every aspect of my life. When I got hurt and I was in the hospital, he was there the entire time. He made sure I was taken care of. He made sure my family was taken care of. When I was training or whatever, he was constantly making sure, pushing me to always be better and better and better. And then when it was time to give me a task, he gave me the task and said, Art, do you have any questions? And when I'd say no, he disappeared and let me run with it. Now, later on, I found out he was watching. He never left the background. He always was watching everything I did so that he could catch me if I was starting to fall. If I was starting to fail, he would be there to jump in and see if I needed help. But from my perspective at the time, I never saw him. I thought I was kind of out there working without a safety net. So that meant to me, this guy must really, really trust me. So years later, as I started kind of getting more and more into leadership roles and I started seeing the way he did it, I really took a lot of effort to try and model my behavior and become at least some level of what he was to me. I took a lot of lessons from him in how to lead people, how to inspire people, how to empower people to do their own success, but then how to hold them accountable for that success. Wow, I've found this conversation to be super interesting and beneficial. I learned a lot. So I'm sure our audience on any question will as well. And just before we close out, is there anything you would like to plug or tell people where else they can find you outside of any question? Robert, do you want to start? Obviously, you can find me on any question. I'm really active on LinkedIn. If you've got anything, any questions as it relates to active shooter, whether it's from a law enforcement perspective or even from a civilian preparedness perspective, I run a couple of companies that deal with both of those. If you're in any kind of first responder role, whether it's law enforcement, military, we do a lot of training with them to prepare them to respond to emergencies, whether it's the medical side or the tactical side. LinkedIn is my primary social media platform. Fran? If you want to hear more about leadership and you care about podcasts, whether you want to watch it on video or listen to it on like 30 plus podcast platforms, then you can go to Jedberg Podcast, jedbergpodcast.com or at Jedberg Podcast on any of the social media platforms. And that's where we're releasing episodes every week where we're talking to influential leaders across all different industries and all different domains. And then if we care about security and want to talk more about how to build security programs in both the private and the public sector, FR6.com, FRSIX.com is where you can find all that stuff. And then we also have some leadership development and team building programs that we run out of there too. Awesome. Well, thank you both. I appreciate your time. Cool, thanks guys. Thank you guys. Have a great rest of your day.

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"A conversation with Robert Carlson and Fran Racioppi on lessons from the military, threat assessments, leadership, and more."