Jason Brick | How To Protect Your Famiy

How To Protect Your Family

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And now your host, Joel Mark Harris.

Joel: Hello and welcome to the publishing for profit podcast. This is your host, Joel Mark Harris. Today we have a special extra episode. We have Jason brick on. He is an author, journalist, entrepreneur ghostwriter and martial artist, and he is launching a new podcast called the Safest Family on the Block. So we talk about safety, what you can do to protect your family.

From harm. And that can be anything from product safety, cyber safety, or somebody breaking into your home. so it’s going to be a really amazing podcast. I urge you to check it all out. he interviews a whole bunch of great guests, which we’ll talk about on the show. So without further ado, enjoy this episode.

Hi Jason. Welcome back to the podcast. You are my first reoccurring guest. How are you today?

Jason: I’m fantastic. I’m honored. Second first recurring guest. Wow. Thank you for having me on again. I hope I didn’t bore you too much the first time.

Joel: And so you have some very exciting news. You are starting a new podcast called the Safest Family on the Block and so I want to talk about safety. Obviously, you know, growing up safety was never a big concern for me. And we were a family that always left the doors unlocked for better, for worse. And even now, like, I mean, I think about, I don’t have children. That’s probably part of it, but, you know, Safety is never top of mind.

Sometimes, you know, I’m worried about the safety of my wife, but as a family man, yourself, how important is safety and how should families think about safety?

Jason: And that’s a huge question. And one of the purposes of the podcast was so that I can find out my own stuff because as it turns out the resources out there, aren’t what I’d hoped to do.

Yeah. During my twenties, during my teens, I was a wrestler in high school martial artist in my twenties to this day, before I had kids, I was walking around. I was a large athletic man looked broke because I was broke and could take care of myself. So safety really wasn’t something. Yeah, I thought about on a regular basis in terms of something that was my problem.

You know, even in my twenties, I might’ve even said in a half joking fashion that no, no, you need to worry about being safe. But then I had kids. And it changed my, the way that I interact with the world. There’s a wonderful quote out there that goes, that becoming a parent means spending the rest of your life with your heart walking around outside.

Joel: That’s great.

Jason: It absolutely nails it. One of the big parts of being a parent. And then what I also discovered in that time was that much of my martial arts training was great for keeping me safe, but would be actively harmful for a small human being near by me when it was happening. my first child, we actually adopted when he was eight years old.

And one thing I found out within a couple of weeks of that was I was doing some training. And at the time I knew about a desert ways to take a gun away from a person, 10 of them put the barrel pointing kind of downward and behind me, which is where my son would be standing. If we’re in a situation where it’s pointing a gun at me.

And there was a lot of that, that I found that the training I had received to protect myself did not translate well to protect another person. And then when you go out into the resources that are available, most of them are either from a news anchor who is, did some quick internet research because some kid got hurt in their beads and wanted to, I thought it would be good to put that report out, or it’s from some highly specialized violence professional who doesn’t really live in the world.

We live in. And we’ll talk about things that, normal parents wouldn’t be willing to do. Would it be able to do, or has an assessment of threat? That’s just well beyond real life in the suburbs. And so, you know, they say, if you need, if you can’t find the book you want to read, it’s on you to go ahead and write it.

I was fortunate enough to start this podcast and they’re interviewing people and it turned out that a lot of people who really know. What’s going on with safety and with family safety or aspects you can apply to them and safety. They’re really eager to come and talk to people and tell us about, so this in this podcast, I take my background and martial artists for over 30 years as a journalist for over 12 years and as a husband and a father of two, and I interview specialized professionals and bring their knowledge into the context of family.

For example, we’ve got 10 episodes in the, in the what’s the word in the can right now. And the first one is with the paramedic. Who’s in charge of San Francisco international airport. And he’s talking about the child injuries he’s seen too often in his career and what we can do. So he doesn’t see them anymore talking to a suicide prevention specialist.

It’s about the signs that should perk up our interests and what we can do when we see those signs spoke to a former covert operative about, situational awareness. And I had a career medic, walk me through. Each item in the perfect home first aid kit and like, okay, what’s this? What do we use this for?

How do people usually mess up using this, those kinds of things, those kinds of conversations with people who know a whole lot, but maybe didn’t talk about it or think about it in the context of protecting a family, rather than protecting a bodyguard clients or protecting yourself in the battlefield or the nitty gritty of a daily life in a first responder.

Joel: Can you tell me a little bit about the Genesis of this podcast and why this form, obviously this is something you’ve been planning a while. You know, you’re a man of many talents. You could go, you can spend your energy in so many different ways. So why did you choose this and how did you first come up with this idea?

Jason: That one started with that experience I had with adopting my son. And shortly thereafter, I took our family to Malaysia, to live for a year because I wanted my kids to spend a year abroad. I had the chance to do that when I was in my twenties and it was such a fundamentally and important life changing decision from experience for me that I wanted my kid to have that.

And so I became very aware of travel safety in particular. And none of my martial arts training really applied in a real way to keeping your family safe. But I knew a couple of bodyguards and I started talking to them because you know, those guys know about travel safety. Those guys know about keeping another person safe when you’re in some kind of combat situation.

So my first book idea was called. It was going to be called precious cargo. And then it was specifically applying bodyguard doctrine to family travel safety. And it walked you through basically how a bodyguard team will do advanced work on a, on a hotel or an area before they even show up how to walk in certain formations, how to move with someone money protecting.

And I got some good feedback from that, but every single I spoke to said, this is way too specialized. You’re not going to sell this as your first book that the potential audience is simply too small. And so that evolved into safest family on the block where I take the same concept of talking to security professionals, safety professionals of all stripes, and bring that information to parents and families.

Joel: What so talking to all these professionals, you’ve obviously picked up some tips and some tactics. What are some things families should be aware of that they may not even know. They may not even have on their radar.

Jason: So the one that came as the biggest surprise to me was product safety. One of our guests is Rita Robinson.

She spent her entire life as a consumer advocacy journalists, and her job was to report on companies that did bad on product recalls on how you approach a company. If you have a grievance and how to get that grievance worked out. And she talked to me about how the process by which the public finds out about dangerous product recalls.

Was for the longest time the company any would tell the government or the government would find out. And then they would tell the newspapers, newspapers would tell the reporter who they had on duty, whose job it was, and that person would do a write up paper. The official, the process has not changed even though nobody reads the daily paper anymore.

And most papers don’t have the budget to have somebody on staff and job. So it’s on us now to go to a couple of websites. And on that episode, we have them in the show notes. To go take a look before we go by the baby crib 3000 and go find out the thing, put a bear trap in there for some reason or whatever.

Right. That was the one that came as the biggest surprise to me as somebody who’d been thinking about and studying family for quite a while, that one came out of the blue, how common it is that products have dangerous. Issues and how hard it is to accidentally come across that knowledge that it’s, it’s on us as parents go be coming forward because there isn’t an information infrastructure that will otherwise bring it to us.

You know, it’s not, it’s not as sexy as learning like a gun disarm or a Jackie Chan movie, or, you know, getting a Navy seal to talk to you about situational awareness, but is real. And it’s important. And that’s the kind of surprises that I was hoping to find as I started out on this journey.

Joel: okay. So going back to your podcast, can you tell us what format, you’re going to have it in when it’s going to be released and, you know, I know you talked a little bit about some of the, the guests that you have on, and I’ve seen the list and it’s really exciting.

Cause I think you’ve got some amazing experts on there.

Jason: I know they’re so generous. I was so surprised that I get people of that caliber to come on the show, but. They, they, they really were very generous with their time and really generous with the knowledge. And some of that knowledge was earned the hard way and they’re just giving it away because they think it’s important.

I was very excited and very pleased by our guests.

Joel: can you tell us a little bit about, more about who you you’re you are having on and who you plan to maybe, interview in the future?

Jason: Oh, wow. So I already mentioned a few folks, besides them, we’ve got a Linda Sanderson who spent her life as a crime journalist and then as an investigator for a criminal defense attorney who has spent a lot of time with criminals and is talking to us about how criminals choose their victims.

That’s another person on the team. let me see here. Who else? I unfortunately did not bring the list here in front of me. But a up talked about a Karen who’s actually suicide specialist. She actually received the order of Canada for her work and suicide prevention. And she, I cheated a little to get her wrong, cause she’s my mother in law, but, but she came, we owe Alex Bromley from verbal judo, came on and talked to us about communicating with our kids in ways that create a win, win situation to take our ego and our fear of side.

Have the conversation to get the job done rather than often as parents, because we’re so emotionally messaging our kids, it can be easy to allow the emotion to overrun the conversation. Then verbal judo is a style of communication originally designed for law enforcement. But we talked about how to turn that on its ear a bit, use it to get what we need out of conversations, both with our smaller children and especially with teens.

So it’s a good lineup and moving forward, we’ve got Rory. Miller’s probably going to come on. He’s one of the foremost, self-defense and conflict communication authors operating today. Really smart guy, a little crazy, but in just the right way, I’m really looking forward to see what he has to say. I’m talking to a handful of bodyguards about doing some of that work too, about how to do an advance.

On a hotel about squad tactics. got a long list of folks for season two, as I’m calling it. And it’s going to be a lot of fun. Nice. Yeah. You had asked about, format and we’ll be releasing in three formats. first of all, just a conversation. Most of them are about an hour and it’s just like this. We sit down on the zoom, we talk about stuff.

I’m also releasing what I’m calling the TLDR series, where I just take the five things, the five most important points from each video. And so I’ll have just shore childhood injuries and then TLDR does the short childhood injuries. That’ll be like a five to seven minute video for folks who don’t have the time to listen to the whole thing.

And I’ll also be just taking the audio track. You’ll see that as a podcast and people would rather listen to it in the car, because I think that if I’m going to be talking about family and child safety, I should not be encouraging you to watch videos in the car.

Joel: And when is it going to be released every like weekly, biweekly.

Jason: So season one, which is the first 10 episodes is going to be releasing on Tuesdays and Fridays, starting August 4th with Justin’s interview. And the second one’s with Karen Petoskey. And then after we released the first season, we’ll be going to weekly episodes. I wanted to front load things. So people have plenty of stuff to watch just right out the gate.

And then we’ll go to a more. Weekly release, probably sticking to Tuesdays, but I’ll take a look at the analytics before I make a final decision on that.

Joel: Awesome. So what’s, what are some of the takeaways that parents especially can use that you’ve learned that you can pass on?

Jason: So some of the biggest, most important ones, Jim Allsup, who worked as a prosecutor for the United States department of justice, the Attorney General’s office, he sat down and talked to us about some situational awareness things. And one of the best takeaways I got from him was involving our kids, even our young kids, by making games out of just getting in the habit of paying attention.

A really good one that he suggested that he does is when he gets out of the car at a restaurant or something. He’ll see how much he can remember about the car next to him. Like license plate, make model colour what’s in the backseat. And just as a way of training his brain to just be aware of remember details, that’s not much to ask of a five-year-old, but we can play the game of, okay.

Look at the cars around the side of your car. Where do we come back are the same cars there. And that builds that muscle of paying attention. And remember it. And for a busy family, if you leave the cops, if you leave and you note the two cars and he comes back and you notice that there’s an idling panel event to the left, where it wasn’t before that’s trips, that you know, your internal rates and you start thinking in a way that you might not have, if you weren’t in the habit of paying attention. That was a really good one.

Joel: So you mentioned suicide a while back and that episode, I think that’s a super, I mean, they’re all, honestly, they’re all super important topics, but I have a feeling that is probably one that is the most difficult to deal with as a parent. And I could not imagine, you know, is there something that you can maybe, if you could talk a little bit about what you learned in that episode and, and how parents can look for signs maybe or anything else that

Jason: absolutely.

And it’s one of the most important things to remember about suicide is you’ve got two kind of different. Large categories of suicide and there’s the suicide because of something going on in life where the child is sad or afraid and doesn’t have it, doesn’t see a way out. Sometimes they’re influenced by media or by peers and, and maybe it’s even a revenge motivated kind of suicide that we’ve always thought of when we think about teen suicide.

And then there’s this suicide that has been brought on by mental illness. And those are two very, very different things that require very, very different solutions. And so being aware of the possibility of mental illness in your child, being aware of a history of mental illness in your family, and most importantly, not being in denial about the possibility that our children might require counselling or even medication under certain circumstances.

You know, I’m not a huge fan of the kind of automatic medication vibe that goes on in public schools. You know, the schools will say, kids don’t do drugs unless you mildly inconvenience and adult, and we’ll hop you up. Right. But there are also cases where asking somebody, ask me somebody who’s clinically depressed to just buck up and deal is like asking somebody with a broken leg to walk a marathon.

And. That’s a very different thing than somebody who’s going through some trouble and see suicide as a way out or commit suicide is a crack. And so, first of all, understand those two things and be aware for. And then the other thing was that there are very few specific behaviors, maybe no specific behaviors that will tell you, Oh man, if your kid starts wearing these clothes, your kid says these things in a conversation.

That means they’re considering suicide. But what you want to be alert for is changes in your child’s behaviour. If your kid is wearing black, and what’s the eyeliner in Oakland about listening to thrash metal and behaving all the emo as a default, that’s not a sign that they might commit suicide, but if they’re like that, and then all of a sudden they stopped going to concerts and taking joy from their music.

That’s a warning sign. And so, and that, that actually meshes very well with the most important aspects of situational awareness as well. You know, noisy bars, not necessarily dangerous. A quiet bar is not necessarily dangerous, but when the noisy bar goes quiet, that’s when you need to start looking for the exit.

And it’s the same with water finger child for signs of trauma signs from suicidal ideation, that’s watch for those changes in behaviour. And of course, keep communication on lanes is openness as open as possible by creating a pattern and a habit and a tradition of talking and spending time together. So you can see stop those changes in behavior when they happen.

Joel: Another big issue. And I’m not sure if you’ve touched on this in your, in your podcast yet, but is cyber safety, especially since, you know, I didn’t grow up with, you know, all this social media and I can only imagine how difficult it is growing up with, you know, being in contact with the world, you know, 24 seven.

And there’s a whole bunch of, you know, you’re open up so many dangers with social media, with letting people in, through your phone and with your computer. I don’t know if you can talk a little bit about that and what you’ve learned. about cyber safety.

Jason: So we have an episode with Kevin and Jarvis.

Who’s a guy who spent his career in cybersecurity, and he has a parent as well, talking specifically about how we can make mobile devices more secure and more safe for our children to use them both in terms of things we can set up on that phone. So they can’t get themselves in as much trouble. And things that we can do personally, in our relationship with technology to keep them safe and secure.

And then in season two, we have an episode with a police officer. Who’s spent his recent career in child trafficking, child exploitation, and I taught, and he’s going to talk to us specifically about Wars, all my lures online techniques that people use to separate kids from their parents. And so we’re going to have a lot of information about that coming out in the next, for the next couple of seasons, because just like you, man, it’s, it’s a weird thing because we did not grow up.

We do not that language as a native and our kids do, and we should be, we should count on our teenagers doing it better than us. And so what do we do? We can’t outsmart them on the way, because it would be like taking my two years of college, Spanish and going and trying to be when bar trivia in a, you know, in a pub in Mexico city, it’s just not going to work.

And Kevin has some very good suggestions for that. And most of them are very technical with, well, you go to this link and you have download this app, or you do these specific things on Facebook, et cetera. But yeah, that episode’s got some really good information and I’m really looking forward to my conversation with Alex about the childhood online lures and what we can do there as well.

Joel: Right. And so you’re turning this podcast into a bus.

Jason: That’s the notion.

Joel: Tell us a little bit about that plan and what you are going to do with your book.

Jason: Right now, I’m, I’m kind of still working on some aspects of the strategy because my hope is to actually do the traditional publishing deal on those books.

However, I also want to monetize this program. Less than three years from now. And as you know, from being an experienced experience in the publishing industry, that timeline from idea to publication and traditional publishing is quite long. So the books they’ve just found it on the block is going to be the first of three books and it’s saved his family on the block, a hundred things you can do today to make your family safe kind of things.

And it’ll be everything from installing some of those apps that we talked about to knowing these signs for suicidal ideation, to getting a scheduled or replacing the batteries in your smoke detector. And. This is actually something that my family does every year. We also replace our fire extinguisher.

We don’t buy the $200 rechargeable fire extinguisher. We buy the $25 home Depot, disposable fire extinguisher. And you replaced that once a year. And that day you go set a fire in the back yard and have your kids practice, pulling the pin and using the thing. So everybody in the house knows how to use a fire extinguisher.

So it’ll be 101 things like that are a hundred things like that. The second book is the Safest Family on the Town. Which then takes the same concept. Only applies to driving safety, safety at school, dealing with stockers, situational awareness of the mall, things like that. And then the third book will be save his family and the world and apply to foreign travel wide, broad travel safety, kind of the first book concept I had only at a more appropriate time in the journey of this whole brand.

Now between now and then I’m going to be releasing a few other smaller books I’m working right now on what I’m calling a home safety blueprint, which will be a workbook where you actually draw a map of your house and then from a checklist. Okay. Well, those are where the fire extinguishers should be. Do I have fire extinguishers?

do I have enough fire extinguishers? And I’ll actually, I tell a story on myself that, you know, I have two fire extinguishers in my home and my home is up. It’s a one-story kind of sprawling place that has three bedrooms on one side and the master bedroom and the kid’s bedroom on the other side. And so I had a fire extinguisher in both of those hallways when my children were very small.

My second son was homegrown as it were and he’s lives right across the hall from the master bedroom. And that was keeping the fire extinguisher. They were in the hall. But then it occurred to me one day. Well, if the fire’s in the hall, I can’t reach my kid for the fire extinguisher. So now the fire extinguisher lives inside the master bedroom.

Right. And so this blueprint is designed to help parents not make that mistake by giving you, you know, you’ll have a map of your house that you draw in and then. Place a fire extinguishers. Take a look at the points of entry. Take a look at the perimeter of the house. One of the other episodes was with John Riddle, who is, he was a black belts instructor of the year for 2012.

He was an officer in Florida who served more than a thousand warrants as the lead of a SWAT team. So if there’s anybody in the world who knows how to stop someone from kicking them, the door is a guy has kicked in a thousand doors. And so he had all kinds of really good advice. It’s about how to make your house a harder target.

And so applying some of those advise something as simple as the screws that hold your door, lock in place in the jam are like a half an inch. So you take those out and you put four-inch carpentry screw and the door, it won’t stop somebody from kicking in the door really. But what it will do is we’ll take a lot longer to make a whole lot more noise.

And it’ll give you the warning. You need to execute whatever your home escape plan is. And a blueprint will also have, I have a place to draw out your homeschool. You know, you look at elementary school, high schools, a lot of large corporate buildings. They have a manual, sick of emergency procedures, one for earthquake, one for tornadoes.

One’s right. No, one’s going to memorize that least of all four year old in your house. So in your house, you have two plants, you have bug out and you have buggin. And you decided in our household, if somebody kicks in the door, our plan for that, despite my own combat experience is identical to our fire plan.

Everybody gets the hell out, meet next door, called call the authorities. If you have a different plan, maybe because you don’t have a one-story house. And so there’s a second story. That’s harder to escape from. Maybe if somebody comes in, you have a different plan that involves the kids go into a Sanford room and the adult taking a firearm to the.

To a chokepoint on the staircase or whatever, but the blueprint will allow you to set that plan and make a decision and then communicate that to your family. So that’s one of the books I’ll be releasing soon. The other one is, would it be a book of games you can play with your kids to get them on team safety in a way that’s fun in a way that doesn’t scare them in a way that empowers them.

And also the study has been coming out that anything you learn in play, you learn about twice as fast and retain 10 times as long something you learn in a more academic environment. So those are the two shorter books that will be coming out in the near future. While I work through the timeline of traditional publishing.

Joel: I think that’s awesome because like a lot of those techniques that you just described, they are super simple to execute, right? Like I’m thinking about where my fire extinguisher is now and where it should be. and so I want to, I want to talk about a recent video that you released. you being a competitive guy, you, you held up this book as the number one, A book on child safety.

can you talk a little bit about, what your plan is to, to supersede this book?

Jason: Oh, absolutely. So this book is protecting the gift and it’s actually a follow-up book to, Oh, where is it here? There it is

the gift of fear, Gavin to Becker’s company de Becker and associates is if you work for the government and you do not rate, social security, sorry. Oh, good Lord. I’m blanking on the name of Saturday morning. The guys, the security guys who protect the president.

Joel: Oh, secrets, a secret service.

Jason: See if you don’t want to secret service detail, Gavin de Becker is the guy you hire Oprah hires him. You know, his company is the guys and the gift of fear was his treatise on how to apply what he knew. And how about attacks and about self-defense to keep yourself safe and protecting the gift. Was his follow-up books specifically for parents that took about half of them information from gifted fear and applied it to protecting your family.

And then also got into specialized information about schools, nannies, cybercrime, things like that. And it’s an excellent, excellent book. And it was one of the first things I read was one of the first things recommended to me. And if you’re out there and you, and you’re not part of the security community right now, but you know, somebody who is an experienced legitimate martial artist or a police officer or a career military person, and you ask them, Hey, what’s the book I should read about personal safety.

Nine out of 10 of them will tell you the gift of fear. There’s a joke running around in the sex, the sexist part of the security community about going, okay, what’s the book you bought for me? Most of your ex-girlfriends, the gift of fear, right? so it’s, the bar is really high, but it’s a way that I intend to supra surpassing.

It’s mostly in breadth of scope. Protecting the gift is about protecting your children from physical assault. It doesn’t touch on fire safety. It doesn’t touch on suicide prevention in a meaningful way. It doesn’t touch on driving skills. It does touch on injury prevention, unless those injuries I’m a bad actor attacking your kid.

So I want to expand the concept of that book. And man, I’m hoping we really hope to get Gavin de Becker on the show. At some point I would just. So this is Rebecca. If you’re listening, it’s all in. Good fun about how I’m going to take you down. And I would love, I would love to have you on the show, but so those are the ways that I hope to surpass that book.

Another piece of it is that Mr. Becker has a, is not necessarily an unjustified view, but a very narrow view on gun ownership. And he doesn’t address it in the nuanced way that I think life in America requires because his advice about guns in the home is don’t have a gun in your home. And although that is a very reasonable decision for a lot of families.

If you do have a gun in your home, I would like to be able to give you the best advice that I’ve been able to find on how to keep that gun in a safe way and how to deploy it effectively home. Anyway, that’s how I plan to surpass protecting the gift. And I said, I think I have a plan. I’d be able to do it, but I’ll need the help of folks like you and folks like your viewers to get involved, ask the right questions.

Tell me where I’m wrong. Tell me what I’ve missed so I can go on the next episode and answer those questions too.

Joel: Awesome. Well, thank you, Jason, for being on the show. I appreciate your time.

Jason: Thank you.

Joel: Hey anytime. can you remind us when the, episodes are going to go live, where people can find you?

Jason: August 4th will be the first episode and it be Tuesdays and Thursdays through the first 10 episodes. And then after that, Every Tuesday, most likely you can find us on Facebook at safe and family on the block. You can find me at my Facebook page, Jason brick, there’s three or four days in bricks, but I’m the only one who’s in the martial arts and tabletop role playing games.

And then our YouTube channel and say for family on the block, and you can find that pretty easily and you know, like, and subscribe if you can, because it’s shocking how much of a difference that makes in the success of a channel because of the way that Google and YouTube. Around video.

Joel: Perfect. Thank you so much, Jason.

Jason: Thank you, Joel. Thank you for listening, publishing for profits,

Joel: please like it. Subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.