Season 2, episode 5: standing in the gap // Thursday, October 29, 2020

Neil: They're going to go into this darkened room . . . very low light with white noise, very disorienting room.   

There was a guy named Jimmy Graham, former seal, a CIA bodyguard, who was the lead at the team at Benghazi. 

I go in there with him. And something's going to happen in here. I'm not even sure quite what. There was a black bucket that came down over his head, and at lightning speed, this whole thing happened. Guns are going off and people are dropping. And Jimmy shot the bad guys and the good guys lived and the scenario was just like, wow, what just happened, man? 

Laura: The scene you just heard was not from a movie, or from a war. It came from something in between. Something I’d never even heard of until I traveled through Denver, Colorado on my way from one coast to the other.

If you’re just joining us, I suggest going back to the beginning of the season to catch up on this Pandemic Odyssey. You might even want to go back to season 1, which will keep you busy for a while.

In season 2, I’m doing episodes once a week. But this week I’m making an exception, because it’s an exceptional week. It’s the final week before the US Presidential elections. So if you haven’t voted yet, make sure you do. 

To say that things are tense right now is an understatement. There’s a lot of fear about where we are now and what’s ahead. Some of that fear is justified--but it can paralyze us if we let it. 

So this week I’m bringing you stories of people who are facing fear with courage--often in surprising ways. They’re people I spoke to as I traveled across the nation, people who represent a wide range of politics, people you might sometimes disagree with. 

But they all share one very important thing: in the face of fear, they’re reaching out to others instead of hunkering down. They see a nation divided, and are working hard to create communities that can cross that division.

The original Odyssey isn’t just a story about going home. It’s about surviving in a world where there are monsters and giants and storms that will leave you shipwrecked. 

In the last episode, episode 4, I told you about the unruly mob of AirBNB guests who took over my home. I was lucky that I had neighbors who stepped in to help me, and that no one got hurt. But the situation reminded me not to take my safety for granted. Today I want to introduce you to a couple of people who have thought a lot about that. 

Jimmy: Jimmy Graham, the founder and CEO of the Apple shepherd program, background, seal teams, CA GRS program that kind of led me into this for doing protective type training for people, husband, to an amazing woman and a father of four amazing children.

Neil: Neil Pinkham. I'm also known as the Sage in the program  I'm the guy who is watching Jimmy's back at all times.

That's my role. He moves out at Mach six. So somebody better watch that big gap behind.  husband, father two sons, grandfather of two granddaughters down South Louisiana. 

Laura: In case you didn’t get it from the opening of this episode, here’s a trigger warning that Jimmy and Neil will be talking about guns. A lot. They work together at Able Shepherd, an elite-level self defense program. I’ll let them tell you more about in a minute.

But first, I need to give a disclaimer. Because in this country, conversations about guns are--sorry for the pun--loaded. They evoke school and church shootings, or gang violence, or the NRA, or gun control. 

A few years ago the podcast The Daily did maybe a piece on these topics that is the best I’ve ever heard. I highly recommend checking it out no matter what you think about guns. I’ll include a link to that episode in my show notes.

But we’re not talking about any of those things today. Today we’re stepping away from the conversation about if we should be carrying guns, and instead talking about how to make using them safer. 

Jimmy: 75% of people will shoot the wrong person when they're excited, when their heart's beating and they get scared. 75%. And it doesn't matter if they're FBI, they're police, if they're military.  

So the way to counter that for people that are going to be in those environments is very fast, make a decision, I don't really care if it's right or wrong, but you decide right now--go. ‘Cause that's the way the real world works. 

Laura: Calling Able Shepherd a self-defense program undersells it a bit. The program equips people to handle guns safely in high-stress situations like being in a building with an active shooter, or having someone on the street come after you with a gun. 

As a former Navy Seal and CIA bodyguard, Jimmy has a lot of personal experience in this area. But the program grew out of something much more ordinary: watching everyday people handle guns. 

Jimmy: The way this all started was that I saw a level of training in the Seal teams and the CIA. And I go to a church in a new town and they say, “will you join the security team?” I'm over here twitching, ‘cause they're still shooting paper and saying they can go save my daughter in an active shooter thing.

And I'm like, “Oh my goodness, there's so much more to this.” And they're running around shooting and all this kind of stuff, and I go, “Can I do some drills with you?” And guess what? 75% shoot the wrong person. 

I'm like, “Wait, now we're talking about my daughter. We're not talking hypothetical over in Benghazi. We're talking about my daughter. I'm going to bring in some stuff for free and show you.” So we work with them. They get better. So if police and churches and all this are still using this dated stuff, and now it's life and death stuff. So my job became to bridge that gap. 

Laura: Jimmy knew firsthand that shooting at paper targets--what he calls “shooting paper” wasn’t enough to ensure that people wouldn’t shoot the wrong person when they were under stress. So he created a training system that would simulate real life situations where there was a ton of stress--situations like the one you heard Neil talk about at the beginning of this episode. 

Jimmy: It's called reality-based scenario training. The seals and agents in the CIA, they've been doing it for 20 plus years. It's a real gun that's converted to fire training ammunition that comes out about 400 feet per second. So they're moving. But all of the role-players have a big helmet that's really thick Lexan so they won't break. You can hit somebody in the face as hard as you can with a gun and they're fine. You can shoot them and they've got protective equipment on. But the best way to learn how to engage and shoot people is to shoot people.

So the technology has caught up with us to where people that would go over in a protective posture overseas will do this hundreds of times before they ever get that opportunity. 

Neil: You learn to control your emotions. You learn to shoot, don't shoot. You learn by screwing up, killing the wrong person, killing the innocent. 

We've seen FBI, SWAT guys blow that. We've seen police blow that a lot. It's not something that people do a lot, getting used to adrenaline addiction--it's all moving too fast, and you're so nervous--to where it finally slows down, and a half second seems like all the time in the world to you. And I now have the calmness to watch a guy draw a gun and decide if he's going to point that gun at me.

Jimmy: So when you have to decide that quickly, if you're going to stand in front of your children or run off this way, you’ve just got to do it. And then we discuss it and say, “that was wrong.” “Roger, that,” and then you fix it.

And you do it over and over, and now you create those neural pathways. And we say a lot of times the person who does the right thing isn't the bravest or the fastest or the smartest. It's the one that's most familiar with it. I’ve got a buddy that says we don't rise to the occasion. We fall back on our training.

Laura: In the beginning, Jimmy created his program for law enforcement and the security industry, places where guns were already being used, but where the training was often out of date. 

Jimmy: I underestimated how hard that would be.

“We got a guy, we, we know what we're doing. This is the latest in police tactics.” I'm like, “Man, this is 20 years--at that.” 

I've been in schools before where we do these active shooter drills with police, and they're shooting kids. ‘Cause why? You told them “run, hide, fight.” He said, “Jimmy, he's running at me.” Okay, stop for a second. You just made a fatal mistake when they did their part. You told them to run, hide, fight--and then you shot them.

There's something broken here, because we saw it in the Seal teams, too. Sometimes it's bad training. I was trained for years to keep your finger on the trigger, and enter a room while pulling the trigger. It's called “take out the Slack,”and then let the gun go off. And that's going to show you how high-skilled, and high speed we are because we can shoot faster at paper. 

When we started doing the simulation stuff, we started shooting the wrong people. People come out and go “help!” and you go POW! Whoops! Your finger shouldn't have been there on the trigger. We lost good people in the Seal teams because of our own bad training.

Laura: Jimmy was quick to say that not all police training is dated. These days he works with the police a lot. He says that there are good police officers out there--a lot of them. 

Jimmy: Some police officers are very, very well-trained, and some right now are killing it. They’re amazing, and they're very sharp. They're efficient.

Some are antiquated, and it's just not okay. I believe that this is a problem nationally, because I've seen it. When you stop learning--if you get to a point, myself included--that's when you become dangerous. If you're a know-it-all--and I see it a lot with law enforcement--I absolutely support law enforcement, but here's the problem: this blue brotherhood, this Seal brotherhood, this Marine brotherhood, there should be that. But if you're a bad apple, we need to get rid of you and sing it from the rooftops. Like make an example. Like we don't protect criminals. You go to jail because what it does is if you do, if you protect them, you kind of screw over the good guys. 

There are people that are amazing and it's an honorable job. We might have some bad apples. That is not a corrupt system. We have good police officers that need to be respected.    

Leadership has got to come from the top. The bottom doesn't drive this. Somebody's got to look at this and say, “There's a better way to do this, and you will be held accountable.”

There should be a standard. It means the leadership has to say, “My objective is to have better cops. What's rewarded will be repeated. Great job. You're an amazing cop. Can you please go to the police academy and teach? I'll give you a raise. We need more guys like you.” 

When I hired instructors, I said, “My instructors will be the people that we want more of. Period. So if you can't handle your language, can't handle your alcohol and you're irresponsible, you'll never work for me ever. That's the deal.” 

People need to understand that there's a time to defend your life. One of the things that we say is, “What would happen if you didn't pull the trigger?”

“I would die.” That's a good answer. 

If you grabbed my TV and ran out of my house and I shoot you in the back? That's not self-defense anymore. Well, what would happen if I didn’t pull the trigger?

It's just a good way to think about it. When I say accountability, the first one I'm talking about is me, how to hold myself accountable. I might not be on the right side of right. I thought I was, but I didn't really think about it. So that's something that we have to check individually.

But then there needs to be leadership that says, “My team, what are you guys doing?” You know, because if there's cops out killing people, Seals out killing people--if there's anybody out murdering people, you belong in jail. Period. And it protects the guys that are out there doing it for the right reasons.

Laura: Thankfully, that resistance from law enforcement was temporary. These days Jimmy works with the police a lot. But in the beginning, the people who came to Able Shepherd weren't the ones Jimmy had expected.

Jimmy: What happened is they didn't walk in the door. Who did walk in the door was dads and husbands, immediately followed by wives and mothers. You were made to protect your children. And then they do it, and they're successful, and they go, “This is cool. This is fun.” And this shooting thing becomes a conduit to building communities. 

Laura: Even though I grew up in Minnesota, a part of the country where I had friends whose dads went hunting on the weekends, I don’t typically think about guns as a community-builder. But Able Shepherd has been just that. Jimmy and Neil met when Neil was attending one of Jimmy’s trainings. They became friends. They started thinking about how they could equip communities to take care of each other better in times of crisis. 

Neil: You know, it's interesting that all of this is just an evolution of four years of Able Shepherd taking care of one another. These are people taking care of each other, finding better ways to do it. 

Jimmy: We launched a thing called Stand in the Gap Initiative, because people needed it. 

Do you wear a mask? Do you not wear a mask? Whether it's COVID or racism or whatever, everything is divisive right now. The Stand in the Gap Initiative says we need to be united.

So if there's essential things we can get united on, whether it's the education, our kids, whatever these things are, everything is ripping us apart. Who's going to stand in that gap to bring people back together? The most immediate thing for us is a safety thing.

Laura: Jimmy and Neil have spent a lot of time thinking through worst case scenarios, and finding practical solutions to keep communities safe. And it’s not just about guns. 

Jimmy: We call it 2 minutes, 10 minutes. It goes on your refrigerator. It's got a graph with your house in the middle, and then it's got two minutes and it says name and phone number. These are two people that could be at your house in two minutes that you trust with your children. 

Now. 10 people in 10 minutes. Are there 10 people that show up to your house in 10 minutes to help you for whatever? Put in those names and numbers.

There's an app called Life360. Get on your phone--it’ll take you 10 minutes--load all of those names into this app, and then turn the location off. Why? Because if you turn it all on, they're going to see where you're at. That's kind of creepy, right? 

But if you had it on there and all of a sudden things change, turn it on. Now, you'll see everybody. Now you have a panic button for 12 people.  

Okay, well, what if this phone doesn't work? For $35 you can buy a radio and talk to those people. You're programmed with the same frequency--and I've actually done this in my neighborhood. Now I don't care if this phone works, because I can still talk to you. This is kind of like our GI Joe walkie-talkies we grew up with, but they work amazingly well. One of those radios has the capability of two radios that I used to carry on the SEAL teams. 

And then obviously having food and water. We call it the root cellar mentality, meaning that my grandparents had a root cellar. So if the power went out for a month, they're fine. They don't even have to go to the store. So that kind of thing just gives you this peace of mind. It just means don't live this just-in-time lifestyle. It means if there's a blizzard or a hurricane or a wildfire, it means  your people can eat, they can drink, they can live, they can do whatever and you can help your neighbors.

That's a good way to live. We just got comfortable.

We needed each other before. Now we don't because of Amazon and Walmart, right? And that's cool, but we left a good way to live.    

Laura: I used to think that people who adapted this root cellar mentality were a little extreme. But then a year ago PG&E shut off our power for four days to prevent wildfires. And then COVID-19 happened and suddenly the shelves in our grocery stores were empty. 

In both of those situations, I was lucky to live in a place where community already existed. When the power went out, our neighbors across the street who had a generator invited us to come over to charge our phones and computers. They fed us dinner. Friends nearby who still had power let us put our perishable food in their freezer. 

When the unruly AirBNB guests took over my home, my neighbors contacted me immediately, and kept tabs on things when I couldn't. 

But my neighborhood is unusual; Jimmy and Neil are trying to build communities where that kind of connection becomes typical. 

The Stand in the Gap Initiative goes hand in hand with the work they do at Able Shepherd. Jimmy says that he’s glad that civilians are coming to Able Shepherd in large numbers, because no matter how good the police are, they can’t do everything. 

Jimmy: In my town, there's 70,000 people, and there are seven cops on duty. That's just bad math. If there's an attack on a town, they're going to go with the population. They're going to go to the schools--they're going to go to the big schools. So if I'm at a small Christian school with my kids and they go off to the public school, there's 10,000 people, they're not going to send a cop. There's only seven dudes. So nobody's coming. Whose job is to protect it? It's mine. It's always been mine. It's your job to protect your kids. When we say take care of one another, our motto, that's exactly what we mean.

I used to be a younger guy. Man, let's bring it. Let's grab our ARs, take it to the streets, take this nation back. Then I had kids. It's not a mature way to think.

I never want them to see tanks rolling down that street. I never want to see war planes over the top of Castle Rock. They don't need to see that ever. 

If people were responsible with firearms, you would be safer and you'd never see a gun ever. I don't need to wear it out on the outside of my pants to say, “look at me, look at me. I'm a guy with a gun.”

It just means if somebody was out here harming you, I would step in for you. That I choose life. I want to live. I don't want to go over there and be a martyr for you. I want us both to live. 

Neil: I don't want this nation to come apart. We are so divided. It might even get worse by the time this is done. So we're sorting out every day core values. What are my core values? My values are Judeo-Christian values. It's what I fall back on. I don't care what color or what gender you are. If you share my values, you’re my brother and my sister. 

Jimmy: People say, well, you're gonna live in fear. I don't believe in fear. I'm having a blast. My job is to basically see if we can get some sense going on, bring this at least to our local community. That I think is the answer, is take care of one another and then develop these communities. And that's the way we were designed to live anyways.

Laura: Whatever happens next week in our elections, I hope the training Jimmy and Neil are providing isn’t needed. As a nation, we may never agree about the second amendment, and I know that realistically, we will probably never get rid of guns completely. But I do hope that more of our police officers and security guards and civilian gun owners seek out programs like Able Shepherd. 

I’m ending each episode this season with an invitation, and so today, my invitation to you is to put aside for just a moment whatever you think about guns, and instead think about how you can be more connected to your community. Introduce yourself to your neighbors. Make a 2 minute, 10 minute list. Put it on your fridge. Not because you’re living in fear, but because there’s a lot of peace in knowing that there are people who will be there for you if you need them. 

If you appreciated today’s episode, be sure to rate it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Thank you to Jimmy Graham and Neil Pinkham for their willingness to stand in the gap, and for spending time talking with me for today’s episode. Thank you to Gary Oberg for introducing us, and for loving me enough to argue graciously about all of this and more. Thank you to all of the friends and family in the state of Colorado who made us feel so welcome and safe: Rosemary Wahtola Tremmor, Jen Sheedy, Gary and Debbie Oberg, Sarah Edgell, and Paul Brokering. You were safe harbours in this long and difficult journey.

In the next episode, we journey through smoky lands singed with fire, and I talk with someone whose story is our best hope for the future. Subscribe wherever you listen so you don’t miss it.