Mike Grigsby introduces himself as a retired Kansas City Missouri police officer first, not as a former FBI forensic examiner, former CIO, or 25-year executive coach. It's a deliberate choice. Telling someone you used to be a cop instantly sorts them into one of three camps, and Mike likes having that signal up front. From there, the conversation opens into identity, tribal belonging, the mental cost of forensic work on child exploitation cases, and why the only person coming to rescue you is the version of you that's fed up with your current situation.
What You'll Hear
- Why Mike leads with retired police officer instead of former FBI forensic examiner or CIO
- What it actually looks like to work digital forensics for crimes against children
- The academy line that reframed his whole career: you bring a gun to every call, because you always bring one
- Why being jaded is self-imposed, not a product of the job
- How the math on Kansas City's 500,000 residents and roughly 1,500 sworn officers makes a case for regional public safety
- Why the Super Bowl parade shooting was a human problem, not a policing problem
- Mike's definition of an abundance mindset, and why it starts with the belief that you are enough
- The Norton Antivirus metaphor for why you can fix 95 percent of yourself but need an outside sherpa for the last 5 percent
Identity, labels, and why Mike introduces himself as a cop first
Mike Grigsby has an unusually stacked resume. Retired Kansas City Missouri Police Department officer. Former CIO of the KCPD's Information Services Division. Later CIO of a public transit authority and then the city of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Former Air Force electronics technician. FBI-assigned computer forensic examiner. Twenty-five years as an executive and organizational coach. Of all those, he introduces himself as a retired cop.
The reason is practical, not vain. He explains that once somebody hears former police officer, they fall into one of three camps: people who know a cop, people who were a cop, and people who don't love cops but are still tracking with him. That immediate sort gives him a starting point for the conversation. It orients the other person.
Sam pushes on this a little. Isn't that gaming the system? Mike says no. It's being intentional. Society has trained us to read deliberate self-presentation as manipulation, but it's just the difference between walking into a room at random and walking in on purpose. The conversation turns into a longer thread on identity: the fact that whatever label you claim sets your perspective and defines how you show up. Imposter syndrome, Mike argues, gets defeated by establishing your identity and then actually working and living from it.
The forensic work nobody wants to talk about
About four years into his time at KCPD, Mike was moved into a detective role and then assigned to an FBI computer forensics unit. The bulk of the work was digital forensics for crimes against children, with the remainder across white collar crime, homicides, and assaults.
Sam asks the question a lot of people in tech dance around: how do you do that job without it destroying you? Mike is direct about it. He says being able to talk about this category of crime at all matters, both for the child victims and for anyone wrestling with how to help. The more unspeakable something is, the more it thrives in the dark.
He describes the mental framework that kept him functional. The work is objectified by design. He's not building a case or a judgment about the person behind the computer. He's looking for evidence. Known exploitation material is already tagged in shared law enforcement databases, so he often doesn't have to view anything directly. The minute he finds one qualifying piece, the system is, in his words, bought and paid for. He moves on. He also says out loud what a lot of people in hard jobs don't: you can only do this kind of work from a place of abundance, not from a place of lack. The ones who show up feeling like they alone have to save mankind tend to ruin themselves.
Jaded is a choice, and so is the alternative
Sam and Mike spend a long stretch on jading, because they've both watched it happen to people in their industries. Sam's version is an eight-month run on a consumer internet help desk, where the burnout was so steep that people didn't remember your name until you had survived six months. Mike's version is policing.
Mike tells the story of his first summer on patrol. He and his partner kept getting dispatched to the same apartment complex, sometimes six or seven times a shift. Pulling out of a call, Mike said out loud that they should just napalm the whole complex. The comment haunted him that night. He realized there were ordinary working people living there, and he had written all of them off in a single sentence.
The next day he made a deliberate mental pivot. I get to do this job, he told himself. Nobody drafted him. He volunteered. And his job, as he reframed it, was to show up in moments where adults had temporarily forgotten how to adult, and to render dignity first. Not judgment. Not sympathy. Dignity. He landed on a line from the academy that has stuck with him since: they can have the last word, you'll always have the last act. Their yelling doesn't change the outcome. Your composure does.
He's careful to say this applies well past policing. IT help desk, healthcare, the DMV, any job where you're standing between someone's heightened emotion and the actual problem you're there to solve. The jading didn't come from the calls, he says. It came from him. That means he was also the one who could un-choose it.
Tribal dynamics, belonging, and showing up with a full tank
The episode title comes out of a long middle section on tribes, belonging, and what Mike calls going to the tribe with a heart of abundance instead of a heart of obligation. Humans are wired for tribal community, he says. Family, neighborhood, company, church, whatever it is. But he thinks we've programmed ourselves into feeling obligated to the tribe rather than genuinely glad to contribute to it.
You see it, he argues, in how people show up to the places they belong. Dragging their feet. Begrudging the cost of participation. Keeping score. That posture harms the person showing up and harms the tribe receiving them. The alternative is the one airlines and police academies both train for: put your own oxygen mask on first. Arrive at the scene safely before you try to help at the scene. You cannot pour out of an empty tank, and the tribe cannot thrive on half-hearted contribution.
Sam raises the older fear underneath all this, the evolutionary worry that vulnerability used to get you killed. If your tribe found out your family was sick and couldn't make it through winter, another tribe with their own drought might decide you're the easier meal. Mike says the modern version of that killing is excommunication. We don't literally kill people for violating tribal norms anymore, but we do cast them out, and the fear of being cast out keeps a lot of people performing in ways that harm both them and everyone around them.
Smart cities, the math on KCPD, and why regional public safety is overdue
Mike's current work sits at the intersection of public safety and technology. After his CIO years, Cisco Systems recruited him to help build smart cities, and he now does strategic business development for technology companies with public sector offerings, including an intelligent infrastructure company called Ubiquia that uses street lights as platforms for IoT sensors and cameras. He also consults with police agencies, where he points out that in 2025 most police chiefs still don't come up through a technology background.
Sam asks the uncomfortable question: is Kansas City investing in KCPD fast enough to keep up with how much the city is growing? Mike does the math out loud. Roughly 500,000 residents in Kansas City proper. Roughly 1,500 approved sworn officers, by his estimate. That's a fraction of a percent. And KCPD is anchoring a 2.5 million-person metro whose daytime population inside the city climbs past a million. By any ratio, officers are outnumbered.
His bigger point is that asking for more officers is the wrong frame. The metro has two states, 19 counties, and 122 municipalities, many with their own police forces. Criminals cross those jurisdictional lines as freely as commuters do. The only people treating those boundaries as real are the agencies themselves. Until cities figure out how to share taxes, costs, and data across jurisdictions, bumping headcount by 20 or 60 officers a year will net out close to zero after attrition. He brings up the Super Bowl parade, where 20-plus agencies, plainclothes officers, drones, cameras, and staged ambulances still could not prevent a shooting. That, he says, is the proof that public safety is a human problem, not a law enforcement staffing problem, and the response has to be rethought from the ground up.
Choice as superpower, and the Norton Antivirus theory of coaching
The last stretch of the conversation is the one Sam circles back to explicitly. Mike uses the phrase abundance mindset, and Sam wants to know where it comes from and how Mike keeps it on.
Mike says the term has picked up some bad baggage, so he wants to define it his way. Abundance does not mean an overflowing bank account. It starts with the belief that you are enough. The first lie most people believe, he argues, is that they don't matter or aren't worthy. And if the only person coming to rescue you is the version of you that's fed up with your current situation, then by definition you have to matter enough to do that rescuing. Choice, he says, is your summa cum laude. You can be a criminal today and choose a straight line tomorrow. You can be an IT call taker right now and choose to render dignity on the next call. You may have consequences to walk through, but the choice itself is always within your power.
He credits his late father Charles Grigsby as the giant in his life, the person who showed him that it doesn't cost anything to be nice and that you can recognize someone's humanity without giving them a free pass.
And he closes with a metaphor Sam loves. Back in the early 90s, if you ran Norton Antivirus on your own hard drive, it could only clean about 95 percent of your system, because it was running off the same drive it was trying to inspect. To get the last five percent you had to boot from an external disk. Coaching is that external disk. A good sherpa doesn't do the climbing for you, Mike says. They've just stepped on enough rocks to know which ones hold and which ones don't. That's what the last five percent takes.
About Mike Grigsby
Mike Grigsby is a retired Kansas City Missouri police officer, former FBI-assigned computer forensic examiner, and former CIO for both a public transit authority and the city of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He spent part of his career at Cisco Systems building smart cities and now does strategic business development for public sector technology companies, including Ubiquia. He has also been an executive and organizational coach for 25 years, working with high performers trying to unlock their final five percent.