Preacher. Breacher. FBI Teacher.

For 12 years, Eric Robinson stood in a pulpit. For the next 24, he carried a badge. In this episode he tells Jeanne how a Baptist pastor from western New York walked into the FBI Academy having never held a gun — and spent the next two and a half decades working white-collar fraud, public corruption, counterterrorism, and crimes against children, all while serving 15 years on SWAT. The throughline that connects both lives turns out to be a single skill: getting people to talk.

It’s a heavier resume than the conversation feels, and that’s the point. Eric explains how agents survive the worst of the job by telling each other stories, why he treats an interrogation like a normal conversation instead of a table-slamming standoff, and how he stays self-aware enough not to believe the whole world is as dark as his caseload — “you’re a bird watcher; of course you find the birds.” Along the way, he shares some of his most memorable stories: the couple who got caught making out in the middle of his sermon, the church that held services in the Lucille Ball Theater, and the confession he got just by pressing play on a pile of recorded calls that caught a boyfriend cheating.

The episode closes with Two Truths & A Lie — a protective detail for an FBI director, a great-grandfather interned in WWI for preaching in German, and two Attorney General award cases — and Eric’s memoir, Irreverent: From Saving Souls to Chasing Sinners with the FBI, coming this fall. We won’t tell you which headline was the lie. You’ll have to listen.