SoulStirred: Stories of Growth And The Human Experience

Emily Garcia (00:03)
Welcome lovely listeners to SoulStirred Stories of Growth and the Human Experience. I'm Emily Garcia. And I'm Kasey Clark. We will be your guides on this journey. We are so glad you are here. Each week, we'll come together, sometimes with other incredible thinkers, creators, and adventurers, to generously share stories of self-discovery, recovery, triumph, and what it means to live a life on purpose. No matter where you are in your own journey,

connection is here for you at SoulStirred Settle in, take a deep breath in, and let's inspire each other. Welcome to SoulStirred

Emily (00:48)
Hello, SoulStirred listeners, welcome back. Today we are here with Terry Clark. Terry is a high energy professional with extensive experience in federal law enforcement and intelligence for over 30 years. He understands exactly where you are coming from and the challenges for executives and teams to operate at peak performance. Terry is both a certified teacher of mindfulness-based stress reduction, and he is an

certified epigenetics human potential and performance coach able to get you and your team into an optimized zone of functioning and flow There is so much to Terry I was reading his information before we got on and looking at his website and I suspect there's so much more to the story So Kasey I want to turn it over to you so that you can kick us off and give us a little bit More some deeper information about who Terry is

kasey (01:46)
Absolutely. Thank you for that brilliant introduction. I notice myself feeling my heart full of pride right now, because in addition to all of the things that you just said about Terry Clark, he's also my brother. And I happen to know that there's a lot of background and context and biography to understand that led to all of those.

high achieving things that you just listed in his bio. So I'm so excited, Terri, to have you here with us today and to share you with our SoulStirred audience. And I just want to invite you to tell us a little bit more, give us some of the twists and turns that have made you the you that we just heard about here today.

terry (02:28)
Wow. I'm glad to be here and support you in your exploration of deeper meaning in life, right? So we can start at the beginning and the end. We'll use time phase, right? So why don't we start with where I am now, and I'll kind of tell you how I got here. OK. So.

kasey (02:35)
Yeah.

Hahaha!

Okay, perfect.

terry (02:52)
Right now I'm working on a book on the flow state. And the flow state is when you're in that peak performance operating condition where you lose track of time and space because your capabilities are meeting the challenge at your optimal level. And it's connected to a higher purpose, like something that you have a lot of passion for, and you're doing it free of distraction. And so...

I'm writing a book on how to get into the flow state and why you should care about the flow state. One of the benefits of being in the flow state is that you can operate up to 500% of your normal level. So you can five x performance. And by doing that, that means that you have more time to do other things that are important to you besides your work, right? And the work that you do, you do it at a higher level, you perform at a higher level and you get more done and you have more joy in your life. So...

I thought that was worthy of my time to kind of do a deep dive on that. When I was looking at the wellness space, I looked at all the different aspects of wellness. And I thought, well, what's the thing that could put a finer point on it? Because there's so many aspects that come into being well and living your best life. And so all of the levers that you can pull in terms of your lifestyle choices in terms of sleep, exercise, nutrition, relationship.

supplementation, prescriptions, mindfulness, all those aspects, ways that you decide how to do those all contribute to the way that you can optimize your manifestation of your DNA. And your DNA is just the code that you're born with, but you're not locked into what it's going to manifest as in terms of your phenome, if your genome, which is the letters, Cs, Gs, As, and Ds, your phenome is how you experience your DNA. And that

experience is dictated by all those other choices you make about how you treat your body, how you treat yourself, and how you interact with others on the planet, right? So I've spent years studying this and reading about it, and so the book is helping me kind of like a crucible kind of melt away the stuff that's superfluous and get the stuff that's the most important, and then provide that information back to folks. And this is what I enjoy doing now.

kasey (04:49)
Yeah.

terry (05:07)
And I came here after I left federal law enforcement in 2013, after 24 years as a Fed and 27 years in law enforcement. And it's curious folks say, well, how did you get to wellness? And I explained that when you're in law enforcement, you actually have to be performing at a peak level because you have to be able to.

kasey (05:21)
Yeah.

terry (05:28)
run, fight and shoot on any given day, because your life might depend on it, or your partner's life or the life of some civilian, right? Some citizen that you actually took an oath to protect and defend. And so in order to do that work, the level that I held myself to with integrity, that meant I always had to be able to operate at a very high level for a long period of time, and if necessary, you know, fight in something against somebody who was trying to take my life or the life of another.

And so if you take that seriously, then you have to be fit. You have to be rested, right? You have to be able to emotionally regulate, control your own emotions so you can operate in that thought space at a high cognitive function, even when you have these high threats. And so when I talk about that in my wellness context, I try to explain to people that whatever their threats are, they're probably not gonna be the same as they were for me as a federal agent or somebody in the military who has threats to their life.

Our challenge in today's world is our brain acts like the threats that we have are threats to our life when they generally aren't. And so that takes us out of our polyvagal balance. So when you have that threat to your life or that perceived threat to your life, your brain acts like it's the same thing. And you go to fight, flight or freeze.

So everybody knows about fight or flight, but your first reaction is something that's threatening your life is for you to lock up and hold your breath. If you ever notice when you're really anxious that you're actually holding your breath, you're not breathing. And so what we want to make sure we're doing is that when we're going through life, we realize that these things that we're perceiving as a threat, they aren't actually threatening our lives. They're just something that makes us feel anxious.

So if we can notice what we're feeling and we can acknowledge whatever the emotion is, notice where we feel it in our body, somatically, right? You get into your somatic self. If you can, in your mind's eye, name the emotion, if you can experience that emotion, then you can continue to be present. And as that emotion dissipates, then you can continue to maintain access to your prefrontal lobe.

which is where you do all your higher reasoning. And you can make your best decision based on what's available to you now, rather than what decision was made when you were a child, when you developed these processes to protect yourself when you didn't feel safe. So it's all about your awareness and that comes from being mindful. And that's why I decided to get trained as a mindfulness teacher.

And the aspects that I talked about before in terms of those levers you can pull in terms of your phonomic experience versus your genomic experience, that's the basis of epigenetic wellness coaching, which is where you help people identify what their profile is, and identify what their challenges are, and then help them identify what the interventions are, to get the best experience of their own life.

So in your polyvagal nerve, that's the balance between your parasympathetic and your sympathetic. The sympathetic part of the polarity is the aspect where you are in fight, flight, or freeze. And Emily and I were talking about specifically...

that most of us, when we feel that kind of stress or that anxiety, we actually go to the freeze state first. We're not actually, we don't even think about fleeing or fighting. We're just stuck. And that's why people hold their breath when they get scared or they get anxious. So if you can notice that yourself, if your breath is not in its normal pattern, if you feel like your chest is tight, and your face is tight, or your jaw is clenched, those are somatic.

aspects of your life experience in your body that are telling you that you're stressed. So if you can notice those, it's always helpful to go back to your breath and just notice that you'll hear somebody that's not practicing this, they'll say something like, well take a deep breath. Well if somebody's holding the breath they can't take a deep breath because they're already full So what I learned how to do is say to somebody like just blow it out because if you're holding your breath

Emily (09:28)
Right.

terry (09:34)
You can still blow it out. And if you blow it out, you're going to take another breath back in because your body is going to make you breathe. So if you notice that you or somebody around you is stressed, just say, blow it out. And as they blow it out, just be with them and they can get back access to their higher cognitive function. They can get out of their amygdala. Right? Your amygdala is where you feel anger and fear, those big reptilian emotions about just being alive. Right? But then where do you have your...

You want to solve complex problems or come to a complicated solution that has that awareness. You want to be in your prefrontal lobe, which is the top of your brain, in front of your brain, right? So to get access to those, you want to be able to just breathe and be present, be aware of your body sensations and emotionally regulate. So the way that I came down that path of wanting to go into this space, though, was that as I was in law enforcement,

I had to deal with those high stress situations where life and death were actual factors in what we were doing in the moment. But if you're in your amygdala and you're locked up, then you can't make those big decisions. Or you can get emotionally triggered. And that's when you see sometimes officers that aren't aware of what they're doing. They might use too much force or they might lock up and not use force when it's needed to save somebody. So knowing where you are on the use of force gradient, what the actual threats are.

what the environment is, and knowing what the emotions are that are present are all part of making good decisions in high stress situations. So I learned how to do that in my years in law enforcement. And then I try to learn and how to bring that out even better now as I've gotten trained in mindfulness and understanding more about all the aspects that come to being able to emotionally regulate and actually knowing how the things that happen when you're a child, when you felt unsafe, how those...

protective mechanisms that the little you might have put in place may or may not serve you anymore. So if you can identify what those events were in your life that created those as you two who are experts in child protective services and all the time that you went into those houses where you saw these things happen, you know what an ACE is, an adverse childhood event, right? So when those adverse childhood events happened to us when we were young, we decided when things were too

scary for us. And so we would come up with ways to make ourselves feel safe, that would console us. But what happens is you become an adult, is if you haven't identified what those events were, if you haven't processed them, then that little version of you can make those decisions for you as an adult. And that decision isn't usually your best use of self. That's usually what the little you decided was safe. So that's why it's helpful for us to go to therapy, right?

That's why it's helpful for us to get coached. That's why it's helpful for us to be mindful, to learn how to sit and meditate, identify what those patterns of thought are, to have a journal every day, to be grateful, to be aware of how we're impacting those around us. And that's how we all get the best life we can have and have the biggest impact we wanna have.

Emily (12:47)
Wow. That is, I love what you just described. There are so many things about our nervous system that people are not aware of. And the way that, I like how you described when you need to take a breath, exhale, blow it all out. Because when you're like, I, you know, if someone is having a panic attack, you're like, okay, take a breath. They're like, already having shallow breath and can't

can't pull it in and then they just feel worse. So being able to blow it out, then you naturally, you want to breathe in. That was awesome. And I'm really fascinated by your experience in law enforcement and the idea of, you're trained to run toward the thing that everyone else is running away from. And so you're tricking your brain because as a child, if there's something scary, you learn how to deal with it. You learn to either,

blend in with the wall or people please, or be a high achiever who's gonna get out. Or, you know, there are lots of different mechanisms, but then as an adult, if you're in a profession where you need to not avoid the conflict, but move toward it, you are doing something that is counterintuitive. So I'm really excited to hear more about how you learned to do that and where that took you from there.

terry (14:09)
Yeah, so it's always interesting to me when I talk to people that they hear about the kind of work I did. So I was my work in federal law enforcement was at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, later named the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. So the history of ATF, just to be very encapsulating it, because I don't want to take up all the time talking about law enforcement history, was that

The first taxes that were collected by the United States government were the whiskey taxes. And they actually had to put down a rebellion called the Whiskey Rebellion when the folks didn't want to pay those taxes. And so the first agents of the federal government were the people that went there to make sure they could collect those whiskey taxes, because without money, the government doesn't operate, right? So that was like in 1789. Those are some of the first exercises of the use of the power of the federal government.

Flashing forward, they had the Prohibition Agency, the chief heard about Elliot Ness and his fight against Al Capone and the mobs in Chicago. They had rum runners, right? And they had gin mills, right? And so that was all moonshine. All that alcohol had to be taxed. And if somebody wasn't paying the tax, then it was the pro, there was the alcohol tax unit to collect the taxes.

until prohibition, the prohibition made it illegal. Then they had to stop anybody from using alcohol at all. And then they had to go back when they passed the other constitutional amendment to make alcohol legal again, to collect those taxes. So that was the alcohol tobacco tax unit of the IRS after it had been in the Department of Justice as prohibition. All that history comes forward, which is that they created the first gun control acts under the prohibition times.

It was called the National Firearms Act because back then you could buy a machine gun on the Sears and Roebuck catalog. And they called those guns gangster style weapons, which was the machine gun, sawed off shotgun, sawed off rifle, and then other aspects of the law. I don't want to go too deep into it, but the gangsters were using firearms and explosives to enforce their territory against their competition and then to fight off law enforcement.

Anytime you make something prohibited, you create a contraband item, you raise the value of it over what it would otherwise be. And that raised value then means that you're taking in all this cash and you can't put it in the bank, you can't call the police if somebody wants to steal your money or steal your product. You have to enforce it yourself. So that's what brings violence into those markets, just like it does in the drug markets now all over the United States and all over the world.

Emily (16:56)
Wow. That is a really fascinating thing. I've never heard it described that way before.

terry (17:03)
That's really interesting. So when Denver passed the marijuana legalization, right? When they were in the first places to do that, it's still illegal federally, but they said, we're not going to enforce it locally. And so what that did though, is it took a lot of the violence out of the sales of marijuana locally, because there are people killing each other over marijuana all over the United States, which is crazy. People say, well, it's just marijuana. Well, yeah, but if it's illegal, it's got value and it's got value. People will kill each other over.

Especially when you can't call the police to tell people somebody's stealing your stash or your cash, right? It's just an intriguing kind of a historical thing to talk about. But you know, that's not what I'm here about today. What I'm here about today is to say that...

Emily (17:37)
Right. Yeah, I saw an episode of cops with that one time.

terry (17:49)
When I was an ATF agent, I was enforced in the federal firearms and explosives laws. I was working with the DEA, with FBI, with the custom service and with local law enforcement, and I'd work on, because there are only 2,500 ATF agents in the country. So that comes out to about 50 per state, right? 50 states, 2,500. Right? So there's an average, right? There's 50 per state. And so if you look at that,

Emily (18:09)
Yeah.

terry (18:17)
That means that with that limited resource, we had to use that resource on the most important, the most significant aspects of our jurisdiction. And that was people that were serial shooters. That means people shooting more than one person or organized crime that is using guns or explosives illegally as part of their conspiracy. So the types of cases that ATF agents work are cartels and street gangs and biker gangs. Right.

An organized crime like the traditional organized crime is like La Cosa Nostra, the Italian mafia, right? So that was the oldest ones, but there's still the triads that are still working, the Chinese triads. There's still the cartels between the Southwest border in the United States, all of the United States, because there's so much money in drug trafficking. But the thing that is that we don't call them drug cartels anymore, we call them transnational criminal organizations because they're really in the business of making money.

but not actually in the business of narcotics exclusively anymore. They can do human trafficking. They're into corruption. They're into like cyber crime. They're into like shipping thousands of stolen vehicles all over the world that have stolen in United States and driven across the southern border.

Emily (19:33)
I'm curious what made you make the switch. So you go from federal law enforcement and you're in the thick of it. And then what made you decide this is time to do the work for myself or to start helping other people in this way?

terry (19:51)
Uh, I, when I was finishing my career at ATF, I was 48 and a half. I knew that I was going to retire at 50 and I wasn't feeling my best self. Uh, it's curious and it's interesting to, I think, to explain to folks that I actually experienced more stress when I was in the headquarters environment and watching DC dealing with the suits and ties and all the administrative, uh,

bullshit of being in a bureaucracy. I mean, ATF is actually the Bureau of ATF. There's nothing more bureaucratic than a Bureau. It's literal. And it actually deserves to be treated as a pejorative term, right? It's not a fun thing when you have all these rules and all this structure and all these policies and there are all these ways that catch you doing things wrong. And they're not actually about inspiring you to be your best.

Kasey (20:31)
Yeah.

terry (20:50)
And so I had so many years on the street of doing real work and working with people in law enforcement where they also were dedicated and driven and motivated to do their best for the right reasons. It was very mission focused, but it's all about doing things for your fellow officer or agent because you could die at any moment. And the only reason you get to get home safe is because they do their job and you can trust each other. Everybody's highly trained. They're highly, you know, it's codependent in a good way.

Right? Because we all know that we're all only able to survive through our ability to rely on each other's presence and our own dedication, our own professionalism. And so you have that out on the street when you're out there risking your life day in and day out arresting people who are out there to do bad things. And then when you get to headquarters near there and it's this administrative and this managerial and this task oriented thing that's got all these rules around it. If you come in.

Kasey (21:19)
Yeah.

terry (21:44)
with a certain amount of naivete because you believe that other people are motivated the same way you are and dedicated and trustworthy. And what I found, I'll own it, I won't put it in the third person, I'll put it in the first person, was that I found that there were more than a few folks that got there that were about their ambition and about their career and about their next position, and they weren't actually about doing the right things for the right reasons anymore, if they ever were. And so it was disillusioning. And

I actually, it was hurtful to me. And as I was trying to survive that environment, I felt a lot more stressed than I had when I was kicking doors, arresting people who were there to kill people, because at least the guy that's there to kill somebody because he's trying to sell drugs or trying to, you know, increase his criminal territory or not go to jail, he's being who he says he is. Right?

Kasey (22:16)
Yeah.

terry (22:43)
He's living in accordance with the rules of the game that he's agreed to play. And you're playing the other side of that rule, right? Or you get to headquarters and they have people that are carrying the same badge that you are that take the same oath that you have, but they don't have the same values that you have. And when I learned that it was really hard on me and dealing with that was, uh, it caused a lot of pressure to me physically. And so I gained weight. I wasn't working out as much, you know, uh,

Kasey (22:50)
Yeah.

terry (23:11)
Part of the way that I worked in law enforcement was that, there was always a certain amount of drinking alcohol, but when it gets to be like every night, instead of like just having a glass of wine at dinner, then you end up having more wine after your spouse goes to bed or whatever, it's a different kind of a cycle, it's not healthy. And we know more about alcohol's impact now than we did then, we always knew that there was an excessive amount, but we actually believed that a moderate amount of alcohol was okay or actually helpful. People actually talked to...

talk about resveratrol, they talk about relaxation, ation benefits. And I'm like, now we know that there's no safe amount of alcohol, it's a poison. Alcohol gets turned into acetylcholine in your liver, and it's a poison, and there's no safe amount. And so while you've, it might be an anesthetic and it might be therapeutic in terms of helping you deal with the pressure, what is it they say?

Emily (23:48)
Thank you.

terry (24:03)
The juice isn't worth the squeeze. So while you're getting anesthetized and you're relieving that pressure in that moment, what it's doing to you physically, uh, is it's creating inflammation and it's, it's detracting from your ability to recover and it's disrupting your sleep. And we know now that sleep is so critical to your health and I can go to, I can go down that road in a moment, but to stay in context here, I found a doctor online.

Emily (24:05)
Right.

Kasey (24:05)
Yeah.

terry (24:32)
who was early on, before people actually had podcasts, he was doing video posts on YouTube and he was calling himself Paleo Doc. And Paleo was like going back to the caveman ways of eating and exercising and sleeping and living, right? So it was like no processed foods, right? It's like getting your sleep, eating a whole food diet, right? Eating original foods. And so I found this guy and I actually texted him.

And I said, I wanted to learn more about it. And he said, well, why don't we get on a phone call? He got on a phone with me and I actually signed up to be his patient. And he was in West Virginia and I'm in Maryland. So he was like five hours away, but I agreed to be his patient remotely because he was already treating the whole fire department where he was. And over half the police department for all their stress induced maladies. They were all like in the sympathetic realm of the polyvagal balance. Right. And so.

Emily (25:31)
Right.

terry (25:32)
He was helping them like manage all this stuff. Their hormones were down, their adrenals were burnt out. They weren't sleeping, they were drinking too much. Their relationships were suffering. A lot of them were getting divorces. Some people were suicidal. These are all the aspects that happened with PTSD. And they're common in first responders, as you two know. You look at how you guys partied, right? You guys drank a lot. That was, I mean, child protective services is...

Emily (25:47)
Right?

Kasey (25:52)
Yeah.

Yeah.

terry (26:01)
You know, it's a cousin of police work and firefighting, right? Cause you guys would go into these traumatized scenes, but you wouldn't have any guns. But you would be there where guns had been or were, and you're dealing with traumatized children. And what I found, and I've talked to Kasey about, there's a lot of child protective services are people that are out there that haven't dealt with their own ACEs. They're out there dealing with their ACEs by dealing with people with ACEs, right? Adverse childhood events.

Kasey (26:09)
Right.

Yeah, yeah.

terry (26:30)
They had their own that probably kind of led them into this career field. So part of what happens is in a way without an awareness in a lot of cases, folks are treating their own childhood traumas by dealing with somebody else's childhood traumas, but they're not dealing with it effectively because they don't have the awareness and they're not processing it. So what they can be doing is they can be layering calcification on top of that wound. So it becomes deeper and deeper scar tissue.

And we know from law enforcement, we know from what you did when you dealt with these young kids and their families, was that life is traumatic. Life is traumatic. We need to say that life is traumatic. Nobody gets out of this alive. Right? We all know how the story ends. Between here and there, though, all these traumas, if we can process them in the moment, we're in the space where it's safe, next to where

Kasey (27:13)
Hehehe

Emily (27:15)
Thank you.

terry (27:26)
trauma happened, then these traumas are just part of our life experience, and it's part of our resilience. And we can build that muscle, and that actually can help us build relationships with ourselves or with others. And if we don't, then that's what becomes the D on PTSD disorder. It becomes disordered because we don't process the trauma in the moment or contingent to the moment with people that we can trust, who actually can help us get in touch with how do we feel it, where do we feel it.

What is the feeling? Name the feeling. Experience the feeling and let it dissipate as is healthy and normal as part of being a human living in this traumatic world. Right?

Kasey (28:07)
Exactly. Precisely.

terry (28:09)
So I went to this doctor and he started getting me well. I lost some weight. I got my mojo back. I was feeling good. I was sleeping good. It took about maybe a year and a half for me to get my shit back together in a way that I felt me again. And then it was time to retire. And as I retired, I was really on my game. I had a young son when I was 50.

He was three or four when I retired. And luckily because of the way that my household life is, my family life is, my wife is a very successful professional. She was very busy doing a lot of work that made her travel a lot. She was working 60 plus hours a week, sometimes 80 hours a week, just working her tail off. But I could be primary on our son. And I was happy with that.

I wanted to be a dad my whole life. I became a dad late in life, and I was able to focus on being the best dad I could be, which was very fulfilling for me. And so I was doing that while I was consulting because when I wrapped up my career in law enforcement, as I said, my wife had a really successful career going as a lawyer, and she could make way more money as a lawyer than I could as a federal employee. There's a cap on how much you can make as a federal employee.

I don't know if you're aware of this, but as a federal employee, you can't make more than a freshman congressperson. The top salary grade is capped out at the lowest pay of a congressperson. So that's what a grade 15 is. So if you look at the civil service code, if you look at what the pay grades are, as a federal employee, the GS 15 grade scale, GS 15, can't make more than a freshman congressperson.

Emily (29:34)
Oh, I've never heard that.

Kasey (29:41)
I didn't know that.

interesting

terry (29:58)
The only people that make more than that are the SESs, that's Senior Executive Service. And there are political appointees, but they can only make a certain amount more than that. And then there are career employees that are running the federal agencies, and they can make a little bit more than that, but even they can't make a huge amount more than that. So no matter how much responsibility you have, no matter how much scope or scale, or no matter how big the budget is, you can only make a certain amount. So you have people like the Secretary of the Veterans Administration,

Kasey (30:23)
Why is-

terry (30:27)
I think almost a million employees in the VA. It's like this huge number of employees in the VA. They're the biggest employer and they have a huge budget. Like they're, they just got an infusion of funds to take care of veterans that have been exposed to environmental threats. Well, they got like $400 billion last year to pay for that one wine item, right? That's one agency. But that secretary or that Richard McDonough,

You can't make more than like $220,000 a year in that role.

Kasey (30:59)
Why, what's the background on that, Terry? Why is that? Do you know?

terry (31:01)
Because Congress doesn't want to pay people more than they make. That's part of it. So it's, it's hubris. But the other part is that the taxpayer, I mean, you look at how much the average American citizen makes who pays taxes and they look at how much somebody running, who's a federal employee who quote unquote works for them, how much they're making. They're like, that guy shouldn't be making that much more than me. Or that gal shouldn't be making that much more than me. Well, in effect, they probably should be because

Emily (31:05)
Wow.

Kasey (31:19)
Mm-hmm.

Mm.

terry (31:30)
How many people in America are running an agency that has almost a million employees with a $400 billion budget?

Kasey (31:36)
Yeah, well, and the bottom line is that's not how compensation decisions and criteria should be based on what other people make. Yeah. A whole episode. Yeah, that could be a channel.

terry (31:44)
Right. So I don't want to go too far down the dysfunction of government because we could do like 50,000 podcasts on that. Right. So I don't want to talk about the dysfunction of government. But I do want to say though, that my wife was making more money than I was. I was happy being the primary of my kid and running my consulting business. At the end of my career, I had two hats that I wore in the last five years. One was I was the director of the United States Bomb Data Center. And so that keeps track of all the bombings in the United States.

Emily (31:51)
Ha ha ha!

terry (32:14)
And in that role, I worked with the agency in the Department of Defense called the COIC, and that was the Counter-ID Operations Integration Center. And so their job was to reduce the bombings of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan during those wars. And so ATF has all these experts on explosives, including myself, but we had people that were more steeped in it than I was even. I did post-blast investigation and I ran post-blast investigations. But then they had people with

that worked with me were experts in chemistry or like in explosive materials, right? Who were PhDs, right? Or we had people that were forensic chemists and all these expertise levels in that realm of explosives investigation. And we provided that expertise to the DOD to help them reduce the bombings of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. So what I did was I worked with them. There were also folks from LAPD and LA Sheriff's Office that had been hired.

to work with them because they looked at the tribes in Iraq and Afghanistan as being very similar to gangs, where it's not actually a top-down structure that's very organized, it's more ad hoc. And so they were looking at how the law enforcement in LA went after gangs to help the DOD look at how to go after the tribes in Taliban, right? But when I was working with those folks, I learned about some of their software approaches and their data-driven approaches where they...

Kasey (33:31)
in Iraq and Afghanistan.

terry (33:39)
They merged all their data into one data lake, they called it at the time. Now they have clouds. They didn't have clouds back then. But they take all the data, they bring it all together, and then they would analyze it with the software. Well, I took their approach and I brought it back to my role as the chief of violent crime intelligence. And in my role in violent crime intelligence, I helped police agencies. We rate and ranked the top 20 cities for per capita gun violence.

And then we'd go down and do this data approach with them, where we'd take the police data, which is very granular, we'd use the software, we'd identify the persons most associated with the shootings, and then we would use undercover and informants to go meet with them and then build cases on their active criminal activity to go arrest them.

and prosecute them and get them long sentences. And by taking these most active criminals out of play in the neighborhoods with the most gun violence, we dropped the homicides.

Kasey (34:42)
Wow.

terry (34:43)
And so I'm saying that even though we're talking about wellness here, because I had to become an expert in information technology in this data driven approach. And before I got into that role, I was the special agent in charge of resource management. So in resources, I learned about how we spent money and how we use the money. And ATF actually paid for me to go to Johns Hopkins. And I got a master's in management and leadership from Johns Hopkins while I was doing that job at ATF.

So I applied all this business management approach. I used the data driven approach. I used this information technology and in these ways that the military had come together with intelligence function to go identify the people who were killing the troops. I used those same approaches in the United States to identify the people are most connected to the shootings. We take them out of play, we drop the homicide rate. And I'm saying all this because when I left the government and I started to work with.

Kasey (35:34)
Yeah.

terry (35:41)
with companies that wanted to work with the government. It wasn't my passion anymore. I enjoy a complex challenge, but it wasn't my passion anymore. Once I started to work with that doctor, Dan Stickler, who's a brilliant guy, really a brilliant guy. He's one of the brightest people I've ever met. He talks about complicated versus complex, right? So you have complicated things, which are just something you could like run on a spreadsheet. But if you talk about complexity,

It's something that's the next layer up, that it's not that easy to understand. It takes the intuition of a human mind, which actually can learn more and understand more things than a computer can. Because our brains can take in so much data and make sense out of things that aren't available, but things that we can then access and bring them back into our working memory and make decisions about them. The brain, the human brain has not been matched yet. With all this artificial intelligence, there's no artificial intelligence can do anything close to what a human brain can do yet.

Kasey (36:40)
Yeah.

terry (36:41)
At some point it might, but they're looking at them as they call them neural networks. The way that they're training these machine learning systems is they're using the human mind as a model to have it train it, to have it do these things. They'll have it do the same thing like a billion times and it'll start to learn. And it still isn't up to the level of a five or six year old human yet in terms of making sense out of things and asking the next question, right?

Kasey (36:52)
Yeah.

I wonder what role emotion plays that humans have that computers don't.

terry (37:11)
Well, that's another part of it. The emotional experience is something that has a lot of fair hormones, right? And a lot of neurotransmitters and neuromodulators in them that are jumping across different modal networks inside your brain. So anyway, when I was dealing with Dan, and he was taking care of me, and I was learning about what his approach was, I got really deep into his idea of the human as one of the most complex systems that's ever been known to exist in the universe, right? And so,

Kasey (37:16)
Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

terry (37:40)
I got intrigued by that because I like hard problems. And the human is a very hard problem.

Emily (37:45)
Mm-hmm.

terry (37:46)
And so he offered this training to people to be coaches in this epigenetic approach to medicine of precision wellness. And he says, Terry, you gotta go get trained in this stuff. Cause you know more than most of the people I talked to, you know, more than most doctors already because you've been paying attention to all this stuff that I've been telling you, he said, why don't you get trained in it and you can go do it. So I decided, okay, I'll try that. And it's been fun for me.

And the thing is though, it's difficult as a coach to get compensated for the money that you put into learning all the things and all the time you put in. And I'm looking at my sister shaking her head, like, it's hard to get paid as a therapist or coach to get compensated for the work you put in to get up to the level it takes to be good as a therapist or coach. It's just hard because there aren't that many people that can pay you for what you're providing in terms of value. So people accept less than they're worth, right?

Kasey (38:29)
Yes.

Emily (38:29)
Mm-hmm.

Kasey (38:37)
And yet it takes PhD level education to arrive to the level where you're able to actually work with people about the complexities of what it means to be human.

terry (38:46)
Right. So I was looking at how can I be compensated at a level that can make up for the investment that I made and they can still compensate me at least as much as I was making as a consultant. And so I was like, I've got to get to more people. I've got to help more people than one-on-one because if you work one-on-one, you can only help one person at a time and they can only pay you what it's worth to them for that one hour of work. So there's a cap on it. There's a bounding box, right?

And so I don't want to live inside that bounded box with a top on it. I don't want to have a top on it. I want to provide more value because that's what excites me. So I'm going to have to get to more people. So that's why I decided to write the book. But the book is going to be the synopsis of all this knowledge. And then there's going to be a video subscription training service. And there'll be coaches that help people identify how to optimize their cognitive performance, how to access the flow state and how to reduce their dementia risk. Those are the three things that my business.

Kasey (39:39)
Yeah.

terry (39:42)
and my partnership with a few other people that I really love and that I trust and that I have respect for, that we're gonna do together. And so that's how you get all the way from law enforcement out to being somebody who's a performance expert in terms of how to reach the flow state and the cognitive optimization.

Kasey (39:48)
Yeah.

to where you are today.

Yeah.

Emily Garcia (40:06)
Stay tuned for a continuation of our discussion with Terry coming to you next week on SoulStirred

We hope our stories have touched your heart and sparked reflections in your own journey. Remember, while we are therapists, we are not your therapists, and this podcast is not a substitute for therapy. If you find yourself in need of professional support, please don't hesitate to seek it. Your wellbeing is important, and there are professionals out there who are ready to help. We encourage you to carry the spirit of growth and connection with you.

Life is a continuous journey and we're honored to be part of yours. Stay tuned for more captivating stories in the episodes to come. Until then, take care of yourselves and each other.