Under Siege: Leading With Humanity When Everything Is on the Line with Sasha Larkin and Joe Polish

Sasha Larkin spent 24 years rising from undercover vice detective to Assistant Sheriff in Las Vegas, and she was the incident commander on the Route 91 lot the night of the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. In this conversation, Joe Polish asks her how you lead, decide, and stay human when the stakes are life and death, and how you carry it all without letting it break you.

Here's what you're about to discover in this conversation:

• The phone call that stopped a family vacation to Hawaii cold, and the moment Sasha kissed her kids goodbye knowing she might not come back.
• Why a terrorist attack on the other side of the world in 2008 is the reason Las Vegas firefighters were wearing bulletproof vests on October 1, 2017.
• The decision that got Sasha written up after 1 October (and why she says she would do it again tomorrow).
• How chasing a slippery drug dealer into a mosque handed Sasha a slice of humble pie and changed the way she policed an entire community.
• What a former Las Vegas showgirl learned about human desire working undercover vice (PLUS: the "ultimate package" story from her last night on the job).
• Why suicide takes more police officers than gunfire, accidents, COVID, and heart disease combined, and what that means for how you care for your own team.

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Show Notes

Assimilation: Digesting More Than Food

• Sasha explains that assimilation is the ability to digest emotions and sensory input, not just food, and that nobody calls 911 on their best day.
• Compounded trauma is not only for cops. Losing $100,000 or a million dollars on a failed deal is traumatic too, and you store it in your body.
• Her daily practice: offer the fruits of her yoga or her run to something bigger, keep the experience, and leave behind what no longer serves her.

Treating the Root, Not the Fruit

• Sasha traces homelessness back to addiction, and addiction back to trauma, using the story of a homeless man she befriended whose daughter was killed at Sandy Hook.
• Joe shares his view that addiction is a solution to pain, and that you cannot punish pain out of people.
• Joe highlights Yavapai County Sheriff David Rhodes, who built a mental health facility next to his jail and saw recidivism drop.

What Undercover Vice Reveals About People

• Prostitution is illegal in Las Vegas. It is only legal outside Clark County, and the cards handed out on the Strip are part of the misconception.
• In the early 2000s, Sasha's team ran "John education" stings because more than 600 HIV-positive working prostitutes were known in Clark County.
• CEOs, millionaires, and even fire chiefs say things to a woman they think they are paying for sex that they would never say to their spouse. Desire overrides common sense.

From Showgirl to Shaved Head

• Sasha was a ballet dancer and Las Vegas showgirl before joining one of only six women in a 120-person police academy class in the late 1990s.
• Told to shave her head, she showed up the next day with a bun. The day after that, she was bald, and there was nothing they could do to make her quit.
• Her showgirl wigs later became the disguises that made her undercover work possible.

How to Get an Angry Person to Listen

• De-escalation works a lot like a good marriage: listen first and let people express what they desperately need to express.
• Validate the emotion ("I can imagine that must be very frustrating") without escalating further, because when you escalate, they escalate.

The Drug Dealer, the Mosque, and a Slice of Humble Pie

• Sasha's squad finally gets a shot at a slippery dealer using a parking law about the distance between a car and the curb, but he escapes into a local mosque.
• Instead of forcing the issue, she studies Islam overnight and has her team wave, smile, and offer help after prayer times for three months.
• When the imam finally invites them in, they find a food pantry, a preschool, and a health clinic. The lesson: know your area, because they knew as little about you as you knew about them.

Leading a Team You Were Never Allowed to Join

• Sasha trained for years to make SWAT, then faced a crossroads between the test and starting a family, and was told by a senior leader that SWAT was not ready for a woman.
• Years later she became deputy chief over SWAT and led by asking questions, going on every call-out, and fighting for what her operators needed.
• When the budget office refused flame-resistant uniforms for a team that uses explosive breaching, she found a private donor. She calls it the Ted Lasso leadership approach.

Lessons From Mumbai That Saved Lives in Las Vegas

• After the 2008 Mumbai attacks, Las Vegas leaders studied how police and fire reached a stalemate outside the Taj Hotel.
• Sasha built a program that integrated the fire department into terrorism response, including rescue task forces and a multi-assault counterterrorism model to prevent over-convergence.
• Years of joint training meant Clark County firefighters had bulletproof vests, and trust in police, on October 1, 2017.

1 October: Command, Control, Coordination, Communication

• With "ghost calls" reporting active shooters at hotels up and down the Strip, Sasha recognized the pattern from Mumbai and went to work.
• She assigned one officer a single job for 20 hours: "Do not let me get sniped in the back."
• Amid the chaos, she witnessed the most incredible display of human spirit she has ever seen, with strangers using their shirts as tourniquets for people they did not know.

The Decision She Would Make Again

• At sunrise, Sasha gathered the 50 officers who had worked the event inside a bar on the lot, held space in silence, thanked them, and had them check each other for injuries they had not noticed.
• She was criticized for having officers walk through a crime scene, and she has never wavered: you take care of your people first.
• After 48 hours without sleep, she could not stand on her yoga mat for nearly a month, so she ran until she finally had the ugly cry.

Recovering vs. Burying Trauma

• A child's death at a crash scene showed Sasha that the fire department gave crews 72 hours off and therapy, while police went straight to the next call.
• Suicide is the leading cause of death for police officers year after year, more than felonious gunfire, accidents, COVID, and heart disease combined.
• Retirement takes away community, identity, and purpose all at once, which is why Sasha is now focused on helping first responders transition out.

Build Your Own Advisory Board

• When her mentor retired, Sasha looked outside the department and built a circle of women CEOs and nonprofit leaders through boards like Girl Scouts and Make-A-Wish.
• About five years after 1 October, she called that circle to say "I think I need help." Every one of them had been to therapy.
• Her challenge to Entrepreneurs: build a culture and a wellness plan that supports your people through death, divorce, or bankruptcy, because happy employees mean happy customers.

Resources

• Genius Network | Joe Polish's community of world-renowned Entrepreneurs.
• The Body Keeps the Score | Book by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., which Joe sent Sasha years ago.
• Sheriff David Rhodes | Yavapai County Sheriff's Office, Arizona.
• Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department | Where Sasha served for 24 years, retiring as Assistant Sheriff.