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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on
the show, LA firefighter and the man behind the Grab Lives podcast, John Vargas.
In this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from his early life, his journey into
the fire service, the TBI that initiated his own mental health struggles, discovering the
gamut of mental health healing tools, Buddhism, psychedelics and so much more.
Before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment.
Go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and
leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for
others to find.
And this is a free library of almost 1000 episodes now.
And as I mentioned in my last episode, I just released my second book, kinder, which is
available on ebook and paperback on Amazon.
So without further ado, I introduced to you John Vargas.
So John, I want to start by saying thank you so much for taking the time and coming on
the behind the shield podcast today.
Oh, dude, thank you for having me, man.
It's an honor to collaborate and, you know, really just have this opportunity.
So thank you.
So where on planet earth are we finding you this morning?
I am in Long Beach, California, in LA County.
So Southern California area.
Is there a lot of pride in the LBC watching Snoop Dogg represent you guys in the Olympics
this year?
Snoop Dogg is a huge, I guess, part of the culture.
And I think Long Beach is a very unique city.
So it's like it's been referred to as the center of the universe because it's so diverse,
but it holds characteristics of the city of Los Angeles, but has more of a pride for the
city, which is really hard to find.
I did the 9-11 musical, the World Trade Center movie, Nicholas Cage movie.
I worked on there as a kind of glorified extra, as a firefighter.
And that was in Long Beach, right by the beach.
They built an entire, you know, ground zero set basically.
But yeah, it's a beautiful, beautiful city.
I lived just south of you in the Huntington Beach for a few years when I worked for Anaheim.
Oh, rad.
So with that, just talking about diversity for a second.
One of the things that I really struggle with when it comes to the way that we are told
that Americans feel is I see an immensely diverse culture.
And obviously when I lived in Southern California, it was very, very diverse.
When I lived in London, it was very, very diverse.
And yet the TV tells you that this race hates this race and this political party hates this
political party.
Expand on the diverse culture that you grew up around.
And if you saw, you know, huge tension between these groups or you saw a lot more community
than division.
Well, I mean, I grew up in a very more of a poor area.
So but my parents had me confined to a gated community so I could be somewhat safe.
But the beautiful part is like you could go to the next block and have these million dollar
homes and then the next block would be like a Cambodian just dense area of living.
And then the next block you'll have, you know, even more poor neighborhoods.
And then you have the next block would be, you know, highly Hispanic neighborhoods.
And then you would have million dollar homes again.
So it's very interesting how you can within a, let's say a mile radius, you have such
a diverse group of people living so closely together.
So I think the media is always going to depict a extreme version of things.
And it's designed to keep us from being against each other or to always be at a tense polarized
way of living.
And that's always been my perception of how that's always being portrayed.
And I think it's false really.
So talk to me then about your childhood.
What did your parents do?
And then what was it like growing up in that gated community in that very diverse culture?
Well I think my parents, they grew up as Hispanic gang members really.
My parents are both involved in gangs and a heavily disrupted lifestyle of living.
And my mother had me when she was 17.
So having a very young mom, she realized that she had to change her life quickly.
So she tried to protect me from living my life in that style of living.
And I think escaping that, my parents put me in private school my whole life to keep
me away from the schools around our geographical area of living.
So I had an opportunity to change the paradigm of how the generational, I guess, way of living
had been progressing.
So becoming a firefighter was a gateway to extract my family out of that environment.
And I was the first person within a couple of generations of even graduating college.
So it was a big deal to have that and gain that stigma of extracting myself out of that
way of, I guess, generational trauma really.
It sounds, I mean, that's an amazing conversation that you had parents that were initially in
the gangs as young people and then got to the point where they had children, they had
the foresight to actually, and the courage to actually say, we're not going to carry
that next domino fall with our children.
What was, when you talk to them, what was it that took them into the gangs?
What was their childhood like?
And then where did that courage come from?
Where was that ability to actually say, I see the damage this is doing and I'm not going
to let it carry on another generation?
I think most of my family is really broken.
And from just living in poverty and trying to survive, it's just the survival mode.
And so I think my family took an edge to use Christianity as their gateway to live a different
life.
And so most of that led to them making life changes.
And me growing up, I went to Christian schools my whole life.
And so there was two sides to that coin.
There's also a lot of dogma and doctrines that I was ingrained with as a small child
that also hurt me, and even living under this idea of guilt, sin also hurt me.
But also being able to have the opportunity to be in private schools rescued me from not
being involved in these other public schools around my poverty area, the geographical area,
like I had mentioned.
So I think that courage came with a cost still and understanding because I also grew up going
to a congregational church that was very legalistic and those doctrines also put me in a box.
So it was very strange to see that it also helped, but also it had some type of limitations
upon how I was able to progress in my life.
So as we look at this from a zoomed out perspective, I realized most of my life ended up becoming
a sense of anarchy still.
I grew up being this punk rock skateboarder and involved in that, I guess, anti-government,
anti-societal outcasts in a way.
So that was most of my roots and foundation of how I lived my life as an adolescent with
angst and doing everything I could do to create an image of that part of myself for me.
When I lived in Japan, there was so much respect within the workplace.
There was never a kind of challenging of the hierarchy.
But when you watch my Japanese peers, when they would off gas, when they would drink,
they would drink themselves into oblivion a lot of the times.
It's interesting when you suppress people, and I'd say the same with alcohol in America,
not that alcohol is something that should be promoted, but the stigma until you're 21
is like drawing the bow back.
And then when you let go, you have beer pong and keg stands and shots and all these kinds
of things.
If you go to Europe, they just drink with their dinner.
People drink, it's not like they're teetotal over there, but there isn't this wait, wait,
wait, wait.
And that suppression or repression, excuse me, more often than not has a greater cost
when you're actually finally free to do whatever it is you've been told not to.
Yeah, it's a pretty interesting approach, right?
From a anthropologic standpoint, you're seeing different cultures, especially from Americans,
we create everything in a taboo way.
So there's an approach to it to where you're making these false identities based off the
way we label things, the way we create our culture around even something like drinking.
And it's funny you even bring up Japan because I've been to Japan and their culture is very
interesting and they do have this presence of high amount of respect for their elders
and everything they do.
But the younger generations, they also have, like you had mentioned, this repression of
something, right?
And it's just fascinating to witness when you're also coming as an American to other
different cultures and experiencing different lifestyles and different approaches and the
way we operate.
I've had some interesting conversations with people who were into punk rock, they were
skateboarders, but they were also straight edge, which I'd never heard that term before
until a few years ago.
So you've got the ones that are really going down the drinking, smoking, whatever path.
And then you've got these guys unbeknownst to most that are skinheads and covered in
tattoos and skateboarding, but actually don't drink, don't smoke, and actually quite a clean
living.
Which of those two paths did you find yourself going down?
Oh man, I was a partier drinking and trying to rebel as much as I could.
Really the skateboarding culture is about that too, is kind of like smoking cigarettes
and skateboarding and looking cool, right?
It's like this pretty interesting way of living.
And I think the skateboarding culture in Southern California, I mean, it revolutionized in Venice
Beach and like when back in the Pau Peralta days, the Bones Brigade, they really started
that.
So the skateboarding culture has a lot of history.
And so I think being able to escape from your parents' house to go skateboarding and hang
out with your friends, be idiots at the park and doing stupid stuff, it also caused a bit
of maturity and independence when you make stupid mistakes.
And the skateboarding culture is all about falling down and getting up.
If you can take it from that perspective too, it's like you keep trying and trying again
until you complete the task of the trick you're trying to make or whatever you're trying to
accomplish.
You know, it hurts.
Concrete is unforgivable.
It's brutal.
What you mentioned, obviously skateboarding.
What about any other sports?
You ended up in a profession where we arguably need to be extremely fit and strong.
What were you doing at the school age?
Well, I was always super active, man.
Like I was a soccer player my whole life and just a really good athlete overall.
I was always a star of my team and I just loved just pushing myself to the limit.
And it was always a part of me.
It was a part of how I truly had passion for that way of the physical space in my ability
to advance myself and also the team effort, you know, and being involved within a team.
There especially with soccer or football, right?
The sport where you use your feet.
Yeah.
I realized like even when you're playing in a team sport, there is like this connection
you have with your teammates where you're not individualized, but you're within this
telepathic network of this web of existence within each other, which I really found to
be astonishing and thrilling at the same time as I continued my sports.
I played football as well, American football, and I just loved team sports essentially,
you know, and that's kind of what led me to wanting to pick a career that involved a team
environment per se and also being able to push myself to extreme physical limits.
When you were the same age, school age, were you already thinking of the fire service?
Was there something else when it came to career aspirations?
I think I initially was involved with a lot of art because I was an artist and I also
loved English class and literature.
So I read so many different books and I wanted initially to be an English teacher and an
art teacher and my mom was a teacher my entire life.
She was a teacher for about 15, 16 years and so that's kind of what I wanted.
And then there was a time period around 2008 where we had the recession and so a lot of
teachers had gotten laid off.
And so when I graduated high school, I was like, this is probably not the best career
based off how teachers get treated, number one.
And then on top of that, excuse me, I wanted to be also active because I was so active
and I never wanted to sit behind a desk or inside of a cubicle.
And so my cousin worked for the city of Los Angeles fire department and he inspired me
to go that route after I graduated.
So I lost my, I guess, drive to wanting to be a teacher.
But now I'm seeing that I am able to teach people both in the fire service and through
the podcast, which is pretty amazing.
It's interesting.
And that is a story of Steve Jobs and he went to university, but he didn't do a major or
minor.
He just took classes.
And one of the ones he took was calligraphy.
And then fast forward a few years, they invent the, the Apple, the Mac, and they become the
first ever computer company to use fonts on their screen.
And it was his calligraphy class.
So sometimes you never know the things that you thought you were supposed to do forever
that you don't, or you try a class that 10, 15, 20 years, it might circle around and be
pertinent in your new career.
Yeah, totally.
And it's truly amazing to see now when like there's a topic of discussion on a podcast
episode or even in life, like all the literature I had read over the years had been preparing
me for the subjects of discussion.
Cause I studied so many different types of literature.
And now I have this plethora of a library in my deck of cards that I can just pull out,
you know, and be very useful, especially for topics of philosophical thought and even
Eastern philosophy that has become a really great anchor and how to understand the mind
and how we are able to liberate ourselves from, from that space of that suffering in
a sense, you know?
Absolutely.
Well, you mentioned 2008, I left Anaheim in 2008, much to the shock of everyone.
Cause no one leaves Anaheim, but I went back to the East coast.
I was married at the time.
We had a little boy and she wanted to be back near her parents.
Uh, sadly about a year and a half later, I discovered that there was someone else in
the house while I was at the fire station.
So the marriage didn't last any much longer.
And I was thinking about moving back to the West coast with my son, but that's when the
crash hit and there was a hiring freeze.
So talk to me about deciding to be a firefighter in, in that time, because I know it was competitive
before, but I know it got even worse after that.
Oh man, if you were trying to be a firefighter after 2008, it was extremely challenging and
extremely competitive and you had to be in the top percentile to even get a look at your
resume.
So I spent a lot of my years on the grind.
Um, you know, I started working as an EMT for a 911 responding agency working in Tandem
with LA County fire department.
So I worked for eight years for that company before I got hired, which is working as an
EMT for that 911 agency was the least sexy job you could have done.
You're still working platoon duty, 911 calls, uh, 24 hour shifts.
So sleepless nights and part of the most populated poorest areas that you could work in.
And it taught me a lot, you know, seeing and experiencing all of that stuff.
And it, it prepared me for working as a paramedic two years prior to getting hired by LA FD.
And I also worked for the forest service for a few seasons as well as a seasonal.
So I would work, uh, fighting wildfires from the whole side of the Western hemisphere,
from Washington state all the way down to California and New Mexico.
And I would come back and then work this, you know, job that paid minimum wage, working
the same exact, doing the basically the same exact job as LA County fire.
And but really learning the trade.
And so by the time I was getting hired by the city of Los Angeles fire department, I
had such a great understanding of the culture of the way the 911 system works.
And I always was in shape for sure.
And so I think that prepared me so well for the job.
And even though it was competitive, it, it pushed me to inspire myself and find that
grit and on top of that, never giving up it.
Cause I would test for so many different departments and interviews for so many different departments.
And I took no, I never took no for an answer.
Let's contrast for a second.
When I tested for Anaheim in 2005 at the actual written and people listening to the podcast
have heard me say this many times, but I think it's important to show where we are today
in the actual written tests were a thousand plus candidates for what we discovered was
30 spots.
Everyone had, you know, fire EMT or paramedic.
A lot of them had green jeans experience.
A lot of them were ambulance operators prior, you know, explorer programs.
I mean, just, just a resume, a competitive resume.
When you fast forward now, that doesn't seem to be the case anymore, but I don't want to
load the question.
What are you seeing at LA FD now versus the environment that you were trying to test in
the beginning of your career?
It's really strange because that culture of members who strove for that greatness, I guess,
to get the job and the pride, I think when you got the badge has kind of shifted a little
bit.
You know, I think there's, I mean, cause I get a lot of rookies or paraprobationary members
who come into my station.
And so we're getting so many different types of people and I think that pride and that
aspiration for the work you did prior to build that resume has definitely changed.
I think now there is a bit of lack of that.
So you know, a lot of some of these people don't have any experience at all.
And so their first time stepping into a fire station is their first day of probation and
not understanding the culture and have never worked a 24 hour shift schedule.
And so it is hard to teach someone the culture and the understandings of this web of existence
within the fire culture as well.
So there's a bit of more of teaching that has to go on for this newer style of hiring
with people who don't have that education on the basics of the understandings of how
things are in operation, if that makes sense.
It does completely.
And if I think of, for example, ocean lifeguard, Navy seal, you know, these people are doing
immense amounts of swimming prep classes, you know, they're working up for months and
months and months to get to that point.
And that's what we were doing early in our career as well.
I mean, I was, you know, working days, going to fire academy at night, running and working
out on my lunch breaks of this work and, you know, getting to the academy early and doing
stairs and hoes and dummies and Kaiser sleds and making sure that if there was a test that
I was going to ace everything that was in my control, I couldn't, I couldn't dictate
if the person interviewing like me or not.
That's a personality trait, but I could make sure my academic and my written and my fitness
were as good as I could within this body.
But what I'm seeing now, and again, I'd love to get your take from LA perspective is when
there and we'll get into the why, but when there is less of a demand at the front door
to enter a fire department, all of a sudden people are, oh, I only need to be in the top
50%, 60%, 70% now.
And so there, that's where I think you lose a lot of that drive because those good people
are in there, but you're not asking them to rise up to the challenge anymore.
You're like, we can just walk straight in now if you want.
So as far as the number of candidates that demand to be a LA firefighter, have you seen
a decline over the last few years?
Oh, for sure.
And it's, it's hard because right now it's like all the gates are open because we have
so many vacancies and the baby boomer generation has now been retiring and mass numbers.
So there's a mass exodus, especially with that mass exodus comes a high amount of knowledge
and wisdom within those people who've been teaching the culture and teaching the way
of how firefighting has been, has been done.
And it's, it's very hard because of the city of Los Angeles is a very busy department.
And on top of that, we go to a lot of fires that require a, a higher amount of firefighter
intelligence because of the building construction.
That's very old and the water systems that are in place.
And on top of that, the EMS calls we go on are through the roof.
And so sometimes we're even seeing paper EMTs who've been getting hired, who had no experience
with that.
So now we have to go backwards on even teaching basic EMT skills.
So it's, it becomes a challenge I think for everyone because of having to backtrack instead
of being able to teach, you know, the stuff that's more advanced, we have to go over the
basics again.
So I think that's one of the bigger things that, that has we've been seeing and been
addressing and it's, it's frustrating for some of the older members, especially the
ones who the supervisors are in place.
And because they already have so much on their plate, we're busy.
You're getting your teeth kicked in every single night.
And now having to go back to teach basics is it's an extra wrench in the system.
Absolutely.
Well, again, I'm not going to load the question.
I'll kind of input some of my, my observations after, but before I do that, what collectively
is the discussion in LAFD as far as the reasons for the decline for recruitment?
Well, I think since the lockdown, there is less people wanting to be in a, in within
a job or a career for public service, especially in the medical field.
So I think right now we're just taking these applications and to be on, I'm not in recruiting
at all.
So I don't understand their algorithm.
I do know that they want a diversified amount of people also.
And so they, they choose based off your, your diversity, like even your ethnicity.
And so that's one of the main factors too, is they want to have a great mix, which is
no problem.
But, you know, is, is, does that mean you're, you're choosing a person based off their
qualifications or is it based off of your ethnicity, which is a very strange thing that
where everyone is scratching their heads on.
And I think for the, the image LAFD wants to present, you know, can also be distorted
based off of, you know, what we actually have to do in this busy environment.
That's one of the highest populated municipal cities in the United States, but that's neither
here nor there.
I really think that I have to be open with every single person who steps into my fire
station and treating them without judgment and just whatever they come to me with and
present themselves as that's what I get.
And so I have to meet them at their level regardless.
And I think for other people, it frustrates them even more because firefighters don't
like change.
And we're, we're experiencing a massive paradigm of change within the culture.
And so I think when that happens, you'll have a lot of people greeting their teeth and they're,
they're just expressing off the glory days of how things used to be and they resisted
a little bit.
And so I, I don't believe in that approach.
I think we have to adjust to what is being presented to us regardless.
It's interesting again, of these conversations when it comes to the diversity conversation,
the answer is mentorship.
And I've watched really successful mentorship programs go into underserved communities where
they are not being empowered to either believe that they could be a firefighter or a cop
or they don't have the resources because a lot of us went through academy and I had the,
actually my mom literally helped pay for my fire academy.
There's a lot of people that wouldn't be the case.
So here locally, one of my friends started one and they have it downtown.
It's completely free.
All the kids have to do is just get there, show up and then they get free training.
They obviously get the gear to train in.
There's scholarships for a fire academy.
And so what you do is you go into this group that you is underserved and you ask them all
to rise up to be the level of a firefighter and 10, 20, 30 of them do.
And you're like, okay, amazing.
And so now you've got the ethnicity and the skillset simultaneously.
If you just scoop up a bunch of English guys, because they're underserved in LA and some
of us are fucking awful, but you're stuck with us.
You know what I mean?
So it's such an easy solution.
You don't box check, you go in, you train, you expose these young people to what it's
like to be a firefighter, you give them the physical challenges and the mental challenges
and put them through some things that are going to scare them, you know, mazes and up
the aerial and things that we are having, you know, we're going to have to do in the
job.
And that allows you then to self-select the great recruits that are, you know, whatever
this minority group that you're trying to recruit from.
Because I remember at Anaheim when I tested, it was a sea of white male faces, but that
was obviously, I mean, it was, you know, obviously they weren't doing a very good job of penetrating
other areas.
So that's wasn't deliberate, but again, it's a kind of byproduct of a shitty system.
So as they say, you know, for women firefighters, why are we not going to the CrossFit gyms
and the Spartan races and the softball, you know, and all these places where women are
working as a team, they're extremely athletic, you know, there are places where you can go
and find these incredible recruits.
But the answer is not to just scoop a bunch of them up and say, all right, congratulations,
you're all firefighters now.
Yeah, I think the LAFT has done definitely an excellent job on creating more environments.
They have a women's academy and they have an area in like South LA where they're doing
the best they can to recruit members in those communities, particularly the African American
community.
So it's really, it is such a great opportunity to have someone from those areas kind of escape
those environments because it is a trap in those living areas and those areas of living
because it's just, I guess, it's just designed for people to always go into gangs and violence,
you know, and it's just a never ending loop.
And so to have people overcome the obstacle and say, hey, I want to become a firefighter
and change their life or their family and so forth is a great opportunity.
I mean, I did that for myself and I know what that feels like.
And to have a new life and a new way of having this blue collar job that has, I guess, this
golden opportunity for yourself to make a change is really huge.
Absolutely.
When I worked for Anaheim, it was the one on one off, one on one off, you know, four
times and you had a four or six day at the end.
So it's a 56 hour week.
What are you guys working in LA?
Yeah, it's very similar.
I mean, we have what's referred to as a segment.
So it's it's three days of with two days in between.
So you're working 24 hour schedule.
So with the four days in between, and then we have to work two extra days a month that
are referred to as sign hires based off of vacancy levels that so essentially working
10 days a month, 24 hour platoon schedule with those two extra days in between.
So it's a 56 hour work week.
Yeah, around there.
Yeah.
So this is this is one of the things this ties completely into the mental health conversation
as well.
What I have seen through now almost 1000 conversations and obviously my own experience prior to that
is in 2024.
And again, the pandemic certainly pulled people's eyes open on how to lead very poorly, i.e.
the government and then, you know, the way that our first responders are treated, you
know, out in the front line, everyone's clapping and now all of a sudden they're murderers
for not taking vaccines.
So you know, there's a lot of that kind of lack of support that was very evident to our
potential firefighters, police officers, doctors, nurses, etc.
But the other thing is, I'm told over and over and over again, these this younger generation
actually value their health, their mental health, their time with their loved ones.
And when you look at the way that I work most of my career, 56 plus mandatories at the yin
yang, that's the opposite of what these young people want.
So what's starting to happen here and it's so amazing to see is departments are starting
to go to 24 72 because they're realizing that the way that we're working our first responders
is killing them in a multitude of ways, whether it's suicide or overdose, whether it's cancer,
heart disease, you know, you name it.
And it's just not set up for the high core volume that most of us endure in the suburban
and urban departments.
And so when you look at it on paper, these young people are going, that doesn't look
very good.
56 hours a week and then, you know, 730 in the morning, you can tell me I can't go home
to my kid for another 24 hours.
You know, and that's your staffing model over and over and over again.
We're not talking about an earthquake or a hurricane.
We're talking about fucking continuously.
So what is interesting is you talked about firefighters hate change.
When you actually look at proactively taking care of your firefighters and giving them
an extra shift between so it was 24 48 becomes 24 72.
That actually saves a shitload of money because over time alone at the moment would cover
a D shift in most departments that bleeding money through time and a half and killing
their people in the process.
So this is where I find this the, you know, the elephant in the room in the cancer conversation,
in the suicide conversation and in the recruitment conversation is if we don't fix the things
that have been broken and we've just been turning a blind eye to this is only going
to get worse and worse and we're not going to have a fire department eventually because
the recruitment is declining.
And as you said, the type of people we're getting are some phenomenal firefighters,
but we're getting more and more and more of the wrong kind of person who's going to be
a drain, not an asset to the fire department.
Yeah, that was well said in a sense where sleep is so important.
I mean it, it, there's so many studies on sleep that we're seeing it affects our mental
health, right?
And to be, to be truly honest, I don't see that changing within the LFD at all.
I don't, I don't see that happening.
And with it, if there does happen to be a conversation surrounding the subject of shift
change, there has to be the union is going to get involved and they've already tried
to push having a 48 96 schedule, which would have been helpful, which is not going to help.
I don't see that changing at all anytime soon.
And so there's something that has to take place.
And so if you can't change the things around you and you can't do anything about what the
administration is doing, you have to take ownership for what you can do for yourself.
So that's why doing it, all these things that are going to benefit you based off biohacking
and all the knowledge you can present with yourself and using those tools to your advantage
are going to present the best opportunity for your mental health.
And that's why I started this podcast is because of the high suicidal numbers that we're seeing.
It was insane amount of numbers, especially within our own department and understanding
once I got involved with this, what were the factors and the sub brackets that were supporting
suicide ideation and was supporting this crisis that we're in right now.
A lot of it was unprocessed trauma and seeing exactly what that is, because there's so many
misnomers on what trauma is exactly.
And so I think when you build on someone who has unprocessed trauma and you add 10, 20
years of alcoholism, because that's huge in our culture, and then you add a person who's
assigned to a very busy assignment and they're getting no sleep for four days, five days,
and they come home and their wife has all their shit laid out on the porch for them
and said, Hey, you're kicked out of the house because you've been a dick the last 10 years.
This is what happens and this is a common theme that we're seeing.
And so what does that person do now that person's isolated there by themselves and some random
apartment that they can barely pay for while they're paying alimony and child support.
And so that's what leads into this crisis.
This is an example that I'm kind of sharing with you, but aside from the 24 hour shift
schedule, like we can't change that.
So what can we do?
And I really believe it has to do with your own ownership.
You have to take ownership for the things you can't change, every things you can change,
which is how you show up in your life.
Why is it you think that they it wouldn't change in LA that you wouldn't add an extra
shift between shifts, create a D shift?
Because there's been topics of discussion of already changing it.
And it came down to, I think it was a few years ago, the union had presented this idea
because many people were shooting for this 48 96 schedule that would help a lot of people
to have more time at home.
It came down to what happens when the city starts burning down and brush fires break
out on top of trying to to fill these vacant spots in the busy areas of Skid Row and other
parts of the San Fernando Valley, which are extremely busy in South LA.
There has to be the recalling for these these brush fires during fire season and the assigned
hires these mandatory days we have to work.
I think it became it came down to that.
And I really don't know that the administration's decision based off that, you know, it's I've
watched this evolve.
I've told this for eight years now.
And it's it's been you know, that that slow boulder where it took all this effort just
to get it moving and now it's starting to gain gain traction.
But what's interesting is you fill the holes by going to a better shift, because when you
show these young recruits that you actually give a shit and you create a work week that's
going to allow them to thrive, that's when you get the recruitment that you and I saw
early in our careers again, because the job hasn't changed.
We run fires, we run extrications, we go to medical calls, you know, summons, we will
hang off a rope or you know, but that's that's hasn't changed at all.
There's not more 911 abuse and there's another entire solution to that using telehealth.
But when it comes to the job, it's the working conditions that are deteriorated.
The core volumes have gone up and you know, you just as as you know, when we were testing,
like I was the last class really, actually, there was a class behind me, sorry, with the
30 of us were 15 in my class and 15 behind and we filled all the gaps and that was it.
And that was just filling retirees.
It wasn't like people were leaving Anaheim.
And so we were, you know, full.
And so be occasional, you know, overtime prior to that, we got mandatory all the time until
those guys actually got off their probation and then we were good again.
And so this is the other silly crazy thing is if you have a de shift, you have another
entire platoon to come in for wildfires for these other things.
So this actually saves a shitload of money and that money then can, you know, open that
browned out station, put that fourth person back on the rig.
But so, you know, when if we keep doing it the same way, it just gets worse and worse
and worse.
And the 4896 is just, I mean, just the fucking worst idea.
And it sounds weird to people, but it's still a 56 hour work week.
You're spinning the Rubik's Cube, but the cube is still the same fucking size.
You know, you're not giving people more time to go home.
So what we're seeing now in Florida is people are going, they're like, dude, I just shared
the other day an EMS agency in Virginia just went to it, Fire EMS, and they've had the
highest largest new hire class they've ever had because they went to this new.
So this is the thing is that this, the courage to actually change to this fixes so many of
the issues that we have.
But a nice, you know, 4896 or coming in at 7pm instead of 7am with the same schedule
that you already have isn't attracting anyone else to come to your department.
And what we need is people, good people to fill these spots, you know, extra people.
If you're going to have strike teams going out all the time, then you have to over hire
so that you can backfill using people.
So that time and a half for every single open slot is where the money is to hire all these
people.
And if LA advertised that they were going to a 2472, I guarantee you, you would have
lines around the fucking building again and you'd be blown away because I've seen it happen.
Boynton Beach, Gainesville, Pasco County, and now, you know, Virginia, when they've
reached their recruitment immediately turned around because people are like, that's better.
Long Beach is 56 hours.
LA is only 42.
I'm going to go work for LA.
You're saying a lot of great things, dude.
And the firefighter culture, there's a famous expression, what are the two things that firefighters
don't like?
Change and the way things are.
So to present this to the administration, you have a lot of politics that are involved
man.
You got a city council that makes, is the head of making the final decision for everything.
And so all these people are in politics, shaking hands with other people and lobbying ideas
that the chief is going to present.
And with that, then you have the union that's going to try to advertise as much as they
can and advocate for the people, the workers, the people who are actually in the muck and
doing the best they can to survive.
And that's essentially the best way to describe it.
We're in survival mode.
And when it comes down to those three sectors of trying to get something done, it's very
difficult to have people agree on what needs to happen in order for some type of change
to persist with something that's logical, something that's supporting mental health
and something that's supporting our physical bodies from not getting too much, not getting
any sleep.
And our marriages and our children's health.
Totally, dude.
You know what I mean?
And this is the thing is the unions and the membership should, once they're educated on
this, should be fired enough up to stop another flag covered casket being wheeled in while
bagpipes play and the last alarm sounds off.
And the politicians who arguably are only usually led by numbers, when they see how
much money they're bleeding is presented to them in a fiscal way will be like, well, shit,
I'm going to like a rock star.
We need a little extra money upfront to hire these extra people.
I'm going to save money hand over fist.
You know what I mean?
So this is where we're at.
And I think it's exciting is you can either be known as the leader, the chief, the union
leader, the county or city member that progressively fixed the fire department and made it a destination
department or you can be the one that was at the helm when it sinks because it's one
of those two choices now.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, since the lockdown, I believe that the division within our culture is what
really cause an uprise with the people health issues.
And so I hope that, you know, even having this podcast platform can allow the unification
within our members to, to realize AIDS.
It's not up to them.
There's nothing we can do to make them change their mind.
But as we bring a unification piece to what we are doing, the people who are the boots
on the ground actually doing the work, that's the change that's going to happen.
It has to come through the masses.
And so that's been one of my main points on providing for people is that's where the change
is going to happen through us.
And so, but until that happens, we have to still persist on what we can do by changing
ourselves individually.
And so what, what are those things we can change individually?
Well, I can make better choices on how I show up in my life.
And so I have to cut down on my drinking because that's for sure not helping me.
And the decisions I make on how I, how I behave, you know, that's, that's an objective thing
that shows up in your life that you can change.
And if you pull that thread with how your behavior shows up, you'll find a reason and
many reasons, belief systems and identities that you've, you've held to support the behavior
you how you show up in your life.
And you can really do some really good inner work within yourself on making changes that
create a ripple effect within the quantum field, within this, this web of this culture
that's going to cause people to change.
And so that's really my, my message is that the internal work you do for yourself is essential.
And if you, if you avoid it, you know, it's, it's still going to come knocking on your
door, whether it's now, whether it's after retirement, whether you meet an injury or
an illness, it's going to that you always have to pay the piper no matter what.
I want to go to your journey and then we'll unpack some of the tools available and some
of the, you know, the, the contributing factors to mental health challenges.
But walk me through some of the career calls that you had, and then let's get to your TBI
and your own kind of mental health journey.
Yeah.
So I, my career started off, you know, since I was 19, doing this stuff, working those,
those platoon duties, like I had mentioned.
And so up until that eight year mark, where I finally got the job, I got the tower date
to start the Academy with the city of Los Angeles fire department.
And it was a great opportunity.
It's one of my, my highly, it was one of my top three departments I wanted to work for
number one.
And once I got hired by them, it was, it was challenging.
You know, I went through two other fire academies prior to that and I was in great shape and
it was still challenging for me, even though I knew the culture and stuff, the city of
Los Angeles has a algorithm for challenges that really weeds out the weak people who
can't go into the, the turnouts and the stuff they had provided.
Because I really believe if you put turnouts on people, it's like kryptonite, you know,
people crumble.
It doesn't matter if you were a D one athlete or NFL player, it's challenging man.
And going through probation and then finally finishing, I got my shield, I got my badge
and now I started my career, right?
Working for very busy stations and the culture is very different as well.
It's, it's not the same as other departments.
The culture has been ingrained for over, over a hundred years.
So the stuff you have to understand with the culture is, is very rapid.
And on top of you being in shape and learning at, from a beginner level to advanced level
of firefighting is very challenging.
So I think as I progressed in my career, I learned so much about myself and how I can
show up as a professional and how I can adapt to the, the environment I was working in as
well.
The challenges that came up through that really affected my mental health because I had some
family issues that, that was happening while I even started the drill tower.
So I had to face those things and I kind of pushed them aside thinking, Oh, I'll deal
with you later.
And so as this kind of started coming up, you know, a lot of my career stuff was avoid
all of my personal shit and just focus on the job.
And that bit me in the ass later down the road.
And we could talk more about that.
Yeah, let's do it.
Yeah.
So coming to my traumatic brain injury stuff I had at work, I'm so fortunate enough to
have teachers and mentors who have guided me along the way on how to understand my life,
how to understand my consciousness.
And so looking to my traumatic brain injury, my injury that really was the catalyst for
change, I was taught that it's not just the experience that you have that has the catalyst
for change.
This is the stuff leading up to that moment.
And so prior to that, you know, I realized I was an alcoholic for 10 plus years, you
know, all my days off I'd be drinking and I would be disassociating.
And so for a long time that disassociativeness within myself really numbed me.
So I was really broken off from the truest essence of who I was.
And as all this stuff and these timelines led up from suppressing my true nature of
who I am really caused me to identify myself with an identity that really didn't show up
and to value myself as who I was.
So if that makes sense, if you're a firefighter, we all have this identity around who we are
as firefighters.
But when you go home, that shit doesn't matter.
So I really lost touch.
No one cares, man.
So I really lost touch with when I came home who I was.
And so I really posed this question for people is like, who are you?
Do you know?
And that really troubled me as I went through my own catalyst for change.
And so I had to look back on those events and that timeline prior to me getting injured
at work, because that is the stuff.
I was not listening to myself for a very long time.
So when I had this catalyst for change, that's the true awakening that I really needed in
order to make big changes in my life and how I show up for others, how I show up for myself
and my family.
And so that's kind of a great lesson to understand is like taking ownership for the things I
avoided.
And when I had to work through an injury, that's when all hell broke loose and the flood
gates, the levee had broken.
And so all this flood of emotions and thoughts and hypervigilance came through when I had
to sit still at home by myself in isolation.
That was really hard for me.
And that's a common theme for firefighters when you're injured is when you're now injured
at home, whether you get a back injury or whenever you're on your back on like a turtle
for eight months, you know, and you don't have the physical activity used to have before
as an outlet to improve your mental health.
Now you don't have that.
Now you're stuck with this thing, this mind that creates lies and deceit.
And now you're looping with a mental health crisis.
Talk to me about the actual TBI event and then what were your symptoms after that?
What were you struggling with?
Yeah.
So looking into traumatic grand jury and my struggles with it, it's very hard because
it's a silent epidemic.
And my years of skateboarding and going to punk rock shows, I hit my head so many times,
but I've had five significant concussions and this was the fifth.
And when you have concussions, the more you get, the more it's difficult to recover from
those injuries.
And so this last one I had on the job really broke me because of the number of traumatic
injury I did have.
And then on top of that, the symptoms I was carrying, it's very subjective for someone
who's dealing with traumatic brain injury because it's referred to as an invisible injury
because you have various symptoms that are distinct distinctly different from other people
who've had traumatic brain injury and so it can affect emotions.
It can affect hormone levels.
It can affect your sleep cycles and it can affect your nervous system response.
And so for me, I was off work for a short amount of time and I thought I was okay.
I went back to work and I went back to work and all my administrative activity I could
have had was gone.
Like I had extreme brain fog.
And so when someone would talk to me, it was hard to retrieve information and cognitively
use it and process it.
So I realized, okay, I got to go back off.
And so my symptoms got worse and what really impacted me was my nervous system and I had
severe anxiety and severe depression.
And so I also had to stop drinking because I had, it would be making my symptoms worse.
So I was white knuckling, quitting my alcoholism habit for 10 plus years.
And on top of that, having a brain injury and then dealing with the mental health issues
I was having, the emotions that really circled me down the drain until I even had suicide
ideation.
With drinking, this is one of the things I think that's not as well understood as it
should be is when you drink even a glass or two, if it's close to bed, that disrupts your
sleep.
So you come back from a 24 or 48, whatever you worked.
And then that evening, which I did all the time, I'm going to have a couple of beers
to unwind.
And I was never a binge drinker, but I would frequently have it in the evening and you
don't realize that you're self-sabotaging your sleep even more.
And then the other crazy thing about TBIs is when you have a TBI is demyelination of
the myelin sheath.
When you don't sleep, there's a demyelination of the myelin sheath.
So I was a martial artist.
I was a stunt man my whole career while I was a firefighter too.
So lots of head trauma, deliberate and accidental.
And then you add in 14 years of busy, busy up-tempo fire station shifts.
You've got this contributing factor.
Then you throw in some alcohol.
Now you've made it even worse.
And it's this vicious circle that people aren't even aware of.
Oh, totally.
And I had to learn that the hard way.
I think as I was recovering, I had to educate myself because I was going to, because it
was a worker's comp case, I had to go through doctors through that avenue, which was disturbing.
And disturbing in a sense where I went to three different doctors and the second doctor
actually prescribed me anti-anxiety medication, SSRIs.
And I kept telling him, Hey man, I don't have anxiety from anxiety.
I've never had anxiety in my life until I had a concussion.
And he just shrugged his shoulders and said, go pick up your prescription at the front
desk.
And so that's when I started to take matters into my own hands.
And I started studying traumatic brain injury by myself.
And so I picked up this book called The Concussion Repair Manual by Dr. Dan Engel.
And he explained what traumatic brain injury is, and he was a doctor who had multiple concussions.
And his last concussion left him in a halo where he was in a car accident and survived
and was basically frozen in this halo dealing with traumatic brain injury.
And so he talked about stacking your treatments.
And so I had to learn piece by piece as I would work through the injury.
And now as I educated myself, I was still dealing with severe symptoms where I would
have these panic attacks, where I would be in a catatonic state.
And I was waking up in the middle of the night and it's a deep sweat with my heart rate at
about 100 at like three o'clock in the morning.
That would happen for two months straight.
And so I had to take control of my nervous system dysfunction.
And so going to an acupuncturist who is coaching me about the subtle energy systems of the
body and also understanding how the nervous system works and the organs that were being
affected from where I hit my head and the lay lines of the body.
And so I was really being educated and learning so much about, first of all, the body, how
it's designed.
And if you don't have an understanding of how it's designed, how can you learn to recover
from an injury that is invisible?
Yeah, exactly.
This is what's really scary is you have concussions of which I have many and I have brain fog
and not to mention all the other parts of my body that were kicked that don't work anymore.
But that's something you can work through.
But then you have the more extreme side as well, which is the real kind of hidden piece
of the suicide ideation puzzle, which is the CTE, like the massive brain trauma.
I just had a Navy SEAL, Frank Larkin, on and he lost his son, Brian, to suicide.
And it was again the same thing, Sarah Wilkinson, Chad Wilkinson's widow has been on it.
The number of people I know from the SEAL community that when they did post-mortem,
they found CTE.
So if we're ignoring the trauma impact side, which again, that's underlying, seat deprivation
amplifies that as well in our community, even though we tend not to be here as much.
But I've had drywall fall on my head.
I've had knocks.
I mean, you were walking around a fire engine and clashed heads and had a TBI.
So there is that possibility too.
And if we're not taking into account making sure, checking, considering TBI as part of
the overall mental health conversation, we might drive that patient crazy because you're
going down the mental health path and you're missing the physiological path.
Oh, without a doubt.
I mean, I think after I went through so many dead ends within the Western medical system
and I wasn't getting the help, it really caused me to have even more anxiety that I was feeding
it.
It was feeding my injury even more.
And so I took an effort upon myself to just slow down.
And I had to separate my mind from the actual brain injury, which was an important factor
because the mind I realized was different.
My thoughts were actually feeding the anxiety that would take me down a downward spiral
for the day.
And so I really took it upon myself to focus on how I can overcome that first.
That was something that was in my control.
And so I was determined to be disciplined with my mind and have more of dominion over
my mind.
So I would sit in meditation.
I would sit in my room and just sit in silence for about an hour.
I would practice that every single day.
And so as I began to extrapolate myself from the symptoms, I was learning how to be in
a state of learning what the mind is doing and realizing, oh, it's like, wow, this is
a bit of, this is a game here and I can now overcome this obstacle and then deal with
the symptoms on their own.
So that was taught to me by some of my mentors who came into my path.
And then I was still having symptoms, man.
Like I still had, my nervous system was still out of whack.
And even though I did, it was doing acupuncture.
I started doing a hyperbaric chamber therapy, which was helpful.
I still had like a major factor, it was three fourths of my injury that still needed help.
So my girlfriend at the time, actually she's still my, she's still my girlfriend.
She was doing this medicine called cambo and she was telling me about it.
She's like, Hey, I think you should do this medicine cambo.
It's helped me.
She had dealt with severe depression that was labeled and pathologized as bipolar disorder
ended up being just childhood trauma.
And she was working with cambo and it was helping her with her menstrual cycle and bringing
her body into balance.
And she explained to me, you're going to be with this guy that I've been going to and
he's going to make you, you know, put this medicine on your skin and you're going to
throw up in a bucket.
And so I was like, no, I'm not doing that.
And so, but it got so severe where I kept having these panic attacks that I was like,
I was so desperate.
I was like, Hey, let's try it cambo.
And so I ended up doing cambo and ended up reversing all my symptoms about 90% within
about nine sessions within the medicine.
And so that really changed the ball game for me where I, I, I got my life back and essentially,
you know, and I was able to have all my administrative functions back.
My nervous system got completely recalibrated and my emotional, uh, anxiety and depression
stuff just went away.
And so that's one of the major parts where my life started to really change is when I,
when cambo was introduced into my life.
Amazing.
Yeah.
I've had one of my firefighter friends who's retired.
He went and did a psychedelic retreat and they offer several other things.
And cambo was one he did several times and the purge that he got, though, you know, what
didn't sound like it was very much fun, the actual mechanical action of it, but over and
over again, I just hear people say like, it's just like I shed my skin.
It was just so liberating.
Yeah.
And, uh, you know, I didn't know I was so desperate.
I didn't care.
You know, I, I, I needed anything.
So I was just reaching for something to save me.
Luckily, through the medicine of cambo, I realized like this was an intelligent medicine
that's been used for thousands of years by all these different tribes in the rainforest.
And as I started to learn about this medicine, there was a scientific factor to it as well.
These, these peptides in the medicine was going into the cell, the cells of my body
and recalibrating at a cellular cellular level, how to bring the body into balance.
And it was truly amazing.
And so as I was working through it, different viruses that I held dormant in my body were
released.
Uh, I had like streptococcus virus that was released through my body and all these different
amazing factors was bringing my body into this harmonious state.
Even releasing parasites, heavy metals and candida overgrowth from my body was another
factor that the medicine provided.
So it took my biological structure and just ringed it out of all the toxins and even energetically,
the things I was carrying.
Um, and, and what's amazing is as I was working through the medicine, emotions came up and
so it broke me to these walls I carried emotionally and it was able to bring those walls down
and show me these dormant wounds I was carrying as well towards betrayal with my father and
abandonment with my mother.
And I had to face those in through the medicine of, of Campbell as well, which truly liberated
me at an emotional state.
And it really brought perspective and opened my heart up.
And this medicine, it teaches you how to surrender in a space of heart opening.
It speaks to your heart space.
It's not through logical thinking.
And so if you think you're going to try to defeat Campbell and navigate from a cognitive
analytical state, it doesn't work that way.
It makes you go into the feeling center of who you are.
And so it really brings this, this essence of who you are and it has you harness this
warrior spirit within, which really has this gravitational pull towards who you truly are.
And you're able to really devour anything in your path that you want to accomplish as
far as your own personal growth.
Well, you mentioned about, you know, opening the walls coming down and you seeing some
of the things from early life.
And I think this is a really important place to stay for a moment.
When we talk about mental health and the first responders, the one elephant in the room is
sleep deprivation.
The other one is what happened to us before we put the uniform on and they're like, well,
John, you know, he had struggles because he had that fire.
And James had that extrication and that's why they're going through it.
And we're missing the fact that from, you know, in vitro through to 22, 25 years old,
we had an entire life that also is going to contribute.
So with this, you know, wise lens that you have now, what were some of the elements that
you kind of unpacked early life that became a contributing factor to you struggling when
you were actually in uniform?
That's a compact question.
And I like to go back to what I had mentioned before is that trauma is subjective.
And I just had this conversation with my girlfriend yesterday because we had a dog and we had
to put him down because he attacked me twice and attacked her the last time.
And so she's traumatized from the dog attacking her and I'm not.
So we talked about like, well, how come I got attacked twice?
He almost took my thumb off the last time.
And yet, you know, I'm not afraid of dogs still.
And she's very timid and fearful around dogs.
And so we talked about this.
It was a great topic of discussion because something can affect someone differently.
And so we have to understand what trauma is and the labeling of it.
It's like this, it's not this shell shock, you know, anymore.
It's not these greater events that happen.
Sometimes those can be deteriorating to someone's mental health, but sometimes it doesn't affect
anyone.
Someone could have 10 shell shock moments in their life when they're at war, they're
at fires and it doesn't affect them.
So what is it?
You know, what is trauma?
And so I really believe that trauma is a severing or a disconnection from the truest form of
yourself.
And so that's one part.
And then the other part is emotional wounding.
A lot of times subconscious fears that present and emotional wounding that happens when you're
a child that begin to kind of alter your way of living and it affects your relationships
later in life.
It affects the way you are as a parent later in life and it affects your overall look of
life.
And so for me, it was, I had built up walls to protect myself because I never wanted to
be hurt.
I didn't want to look at those wounds.
And so what was beautiful about cambo is that it breaks down those walls.
It's like a sledgehammer that just tears away at those walls you created because it is holding
you back from your personal evolution.
And so as I was working through my own issues, it had a lot to do with understanding forgiveness
and how to let go and surrendering to that space of what it actually was, my personal
involvement with it.
And that's kind of like the understanding on how I treated the medicine with my emotional
wounding, but it was essential to my overall health.
And so cambo doesn't care what you have going on, what you're thinking about.
It's going to go from whatever's out of balance and bring it into harmony.
That's what's beautiful about it.
When I look at all the different people that have been on here, the journeys they've
led, some of the ones that really struggled more often than not, there was a lot of suppressed
childhood struggles.
And when I look at my journey, even though I had the highest of highs and the lowest
of lows, I never got to that suicide ideation spot despite divorces and all kinds of things.
And so I would ask why.
Why I'm no different than anyone else.
But when I look at my childhood, for every trauma, and there were a lot, I almost died
in a house fire when I was four, for example.
There was also, I grew up on a farm.
My dad was a veterinary surgeon, so he was healing animals.
We ate around a big dining room, kitchen table, every single evening meal.
I was around blood and guts helping my dad operate.
I was in nature, I was in fresh air, I was getting my hands dirty.
So all the things that we know are healing.
So the only difference between me and someone who found themselves staring at a 45 is that
I was able by the pure, winning the roulette, whereas where I was born, who I was born into,
that as I went along, everything that hurt, something else kind of helped it.
And it forges resilience, I think.
And when you look at that trauma conversation, like you said, it might be something acute.
It might be death by a thousand cuts, which is what gets to most of our first responders.
Most of us were not on 9-11 or the Vegas shooting.
But it's whether it's processed or not.
And that might be through a religious organization.
It might be through a psychedelic, whatever it is.
But as you're going through, if you're not processing and you're burying it down, that
foundation becomes fractured.
And again, I'm saying that not as a judgmental thing, but a compassionate thing.
If you've got to deal with your trauma as you went along because of the cause that you
were dealt in a positive way, you're forging resilience as you go along.
If it's suppressed down, and there's a Mexican proverb that says, they tried to bury us,
they didn't know that we were seeds.
So you're pushing that down, but it's not being addressed.
It is a fracture to your foundation.
But the beautiful, the good news is that when it finally rears its ugly head, if you're
able to deal with it then through whatever tools that work for you, that will still become
resilience, in my opinion.
So when you look at you now versus you when you were drinking, and this sounds like a
silly question, but I think it needs to be asked because it shows the hope of healing.
What have you seen as far as your resilience, not just overcoming a TBI or overcoming addiction,
your resilience as a human being now versus a few years ago?
Well, I think resilience is a very strange topic.
And it's like the famous expression, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
But is that a belief system we're upholding to believe that we need challenges in order
to grow?
Is that true?
And that's something as a humanitarian scale of belief systems we have to look at because
I don't really truly believe we need challenges to grow anymore.
I was a perfectionist and I always strived for greatness.
And yet that was my own masochistic way of how I punished myself.
And so when I would punish myself, I thought I was making myself resilient, whether it
was through workouts, whether it was through trying to challenge myself with just everything
I could have gotten my hands on.
And I kind of lost perspective on letting the natural flow of things come into my life
and honoring natural order.
And this is a great way to discuss because firefighters are designed to challenge ourselves
and put ourselves in challenging experiences.
So I really believe I had to change perspective.
And because when you come into your life, the moment you change your perspective on
something is a way of liberating yourself off the consciousness and the way we think
about things.
And Campbell was a very challenging experience.
I would say it is one of the top challenging experiences I've ever had to endure in my
life.
And yet it brought me to the essence of who I was and it broke down those walls, but that's
what I needed at the time in order to get there.
And now that I've been able to see things from a bird's eye view and a zoomed out perspective
from a different vista, I'm able to open my heart more and live my life in that space,
which allows me to navigate my life from pushing away the analytical mind because the analytical
mind is going to get involved and disturb my true path of life.
And so that's really what brought me into my way of living.
And so it's exponentially catapulted me into how I show up and unraveling this epidemic,
this crisis we're in right now.
And so there's different avenues I've went into.
And one of them was even understanding that some people have such severe trauma that they
need things like plant medicine.
And now I started to study with people who have done plant medicine and the master plants
that are Iboga and Ayahuasca, who people need to go do those medicines.
It may not be for everyone, but these medicines take you to the essence of why something happened
in your life and gives you the understanding that supports it.
And then you can release it.
And then it has these beautiful ways of understanding the spiritual side of things where people
are healing their problems on the spiritual side and then coming into this body and being
free of it.
And Campbell was actually supportive for those two medicines, Iboga and Ayahuasca.
So as I was involved with Campbell, I became a practitioner.
I started serving this medicine.
I've been serving it for the last two and a half years.
And then so the plant medicine thing came into the paradigm and it became so fascinating
to me because I've seen people heal through these medicines and it's actual medicine has
been used for thousands of years.
So I had to take a great look at the facilitators and I had different facilitators on the podcast
where we talked about these discussions.
And it's really blown my mind of how these medicines have helped traumatic brain injury,
number one.
I know Navy SEALs, it's a huge factor of them going to do Ibogaine and going to do Iboga.
And so it really opened my eyes to actual medicine and understanding this kaleidoscope
of this crisis that we're dealing with.
The way you had mentioned it, the death of a thousand paper cuts, that shit hurts, man,
after you're covered in those cuts.
So how do we go about going into those phases of unraveling all that stuff?
And then there's things like somatic release, the body keeps the score was a huge book that
people have read and have been trying to understand.
And so the fascia of the body and understanding that has been a huge thing for me and me doing
my own healing work through my body with somatic work has been huge.
And understanding things in a subconscious level, doing things like EMDR and going into
the subconscious of what's lying dormant or underneath the surface is something we have
to address because you may think that you're walking through this life, just living a Mickey
Mouse life, but subconsciously you're holding these belief systems and these values and
the laws you create with your values that don't really support your way of living the
way you're supposed to be living.
You mentioned about suicide ideation.
How close did you get?
Where were you at the darkest point?
I would just have intrusive thoughts and I would just be sitting on my couch and there
would just be this thought that would come through like, Hey, why don't you just fucking
end it?
And that was really disturbing for me because I never had experienced that before.
And so I started fighting it and I realized after a long wrestling match with that thought
that you can't fight the thought.
Once you start fighting it, you start feeding it.
And so I had to be neutral with the idea of killing myself.
And once I went neutral into the idea of killing myself, I had to sit with how I felt about
it.
And when you go into the vehicle of the emotional body, you start to really understand truth.
And as I went into that idea, there was a lot of fear that came up.
The emotion that was supporting it was fear.
And so I always like to refer to fear as like the false illusions that we create for ourselves.
They're not true.
And so as I went underneath the fear, I really felt a lot of grief, man, and sadness.
And once I was able to understand that sadness, I understood that wasn't true.
And I was able to sit with what rung true from that point on and what resonated with
me.
And that became a practice that I had to deal with everything else in my life and to understand
that relative truth that I carried within me and what really resonated and just kind
of hit a chord within me that had that feeling of what is false, what's my reality and how
I want to feed it.
It's interesting you're talking about reality because there's a question I ask a lot of
people if they've been to that place.
And it's so important to make this common conversation because when you do a thousand
interviews, the Venn diagram spits out some pretty hard truths.
And one, if you think about when we were young, you're younger than me, but that kind of era,
we talk about suicide, like, oh, it's selfish, it's the cowards, how could they think about
your kids?
And then you listen to hundreds of people that were there, not even ideation, like right
there.
And I've had people that literally went through their attempt and they survived on the show,
jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, shot themselves.
And over and over and over again, there is this absolute belief at that moment that they
are the reason for their family's pain and that sense of burdensome.
And when you kind of take a step back, you start to realize when you're talking about
truth that the body at that point of the brain, excuse me, is so miswired that their reality
is completely distorted because a healthy brain would be like, well, if you kill yourself,
now you're going to make your wife and kids even more sad.
It doesn't make any sense.
But to a person in crisis, someone who signed on a dotted line saying I would die for a
complete stranger when I'm in my uniform.
And now they truly believe because of sleep deprivation, organizational stress, unaddressed
trauma, the side effects of psychiatric meds, alcohol, blah, blah, blah.
That's taken that perfect storm of psychosis to where I believe that my son and my wife
would be better off if I wasn't here anymore.
That would stop their pain.
I don't hear that conversation often apart from the people that have actually been in
that place.
So did you have an element of burdensome yourself?
And then have you heard that from people on your show or friends that have reached out
to you that were in that dark place?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a trance.
I was fortunate, like I had mentioned before, some of my mentors and my teachers who were
guiding me through how to understand consciousness, which really broke it down for me.
So I think when people come to that stage of their life, a lot of times things are crumbling.
And so I really believe it's just a season where someone comes into their life where
that crumbling moment, that unraveling moment of their life has to happen.
And it doesn't mean that you're meant to see it as the end.
It's actually the start of a new beginning because that part of you is shedding.
And so it's actually a moment to be within it and embrace it and to just be truthful
about yourself.
And that brutal honesty will take you to that step of coming into this rebirth cycle.
And if we see it like that and seeing it that it's not the end and it's opportunity for
growth, that is the empowerment that I would love for people to understand.
And it takes a person to work through that stuff.
And when they get to that point of understanding, hey, this is a lie.
I'm not going to follow through with this.
But for those who have followed through with this, they never had the proper guidance and
the education.
And so that's one of the things that I really want to instill is re-educating people and
the public on consciousness.
And for someone to go into a belief that they believe that that's the ultimate way of your
way out, you just have to understand how to look at belief systems now because belief
systems are supporting the benefactor of why we're doing things.
And so if you can unravel the belief systems and go underneath that, there's your identity
and going under why we identify with things.
That's where you want to get to is the identifications we've set up for ourselves.
And once you go underneath identifications of who we are, then you are down to the essence
of who you are.
And you're able to now see things from a zoomed out perspective and unravel all these things
that are in alignment with who you are.
And it takes just a pathway of these simple steps to look at consciousness.
And because consciousness is going to make its pathway, and this comes from different
wisdom cultures, particularly through Chinese wisdom culture, they speak on working its
pathway through the consciousness, through our heart space, it goes through our nervous
system and it goes through our emotional body.
And so emotions are essentially the space where you want to enter.
And that's where you get a lot of your answers.
It's going to lead you right back up into your consciousness, which is where the real
healing is at.
Yeah, I think that's such a deep inner perspective.
And I think the problem is a lot of people are in crisis.
And one of the biggest enemies, I think, is alcohol.
Because as we've all been there where you've spent the evening with a young lady who you
thought was gorgeous the night before and you wake up and you're like, oh, I don't think
I'm going to be seeing her again.
It was alcohol.
If you were stone cold sober, you never would have done that and vice versa, men and women.
And this is the problem.
You hear a lot of times that these from the people that survived their attempt, the alcohol
was kind of blurring that.
So you've got someone in psychosis, they're sleep deprived, they're drinking.
There's a shame and guilt put on suicide as well, which doesn't help.
Because if you look at that, Ms. Wired, it actually is a very selfless, courageous act
at that moment.
It's wrong.
It's a psychotic moment.
But at that moment, they're not being cowards.
They're not running from something they think they're fixing something.
But when you add in the alcohol, you add in the sleep deprivation, now you're compounding
these issues.
And then God forbid if the psych meds that are messing with your mind too.
So unpacking all these elements, which is why I'm so passionate about sleep deprivation,
and that's one we can fucking fix.
We can give people more rest and recovery, so they're not so sleep deprived.
If they're at home more, hopefully they won't drink as much, their families will be more
intact.
So we can take away some of these contributing factors.
And then as you said, if you have clarity of thought, you begin this journey of self
exploration and unpacking the shadow self and what it was telling you to do.
Yeah, dude, you bring up a good point.
And you really have to meet people where they're at.
If they're in a severe crisis, like something so severe as someone just circling the drain,
there's help man.
And the only thing you need to do is just call someone.
And that's why I truly believe the peer support group program is the best thing for that.
Because when someone is in crisis, they don't want to call a doctor, a psychologist.
They definitely don't want to call 911, especially if you're a first responder.
So the peer support group program is really a huge piece to assisting this mental health
crisis for these communities of first responders, because they understand most of these peer
support members have been there already.
And so if I'm a peer supporter myself, and so I understand if I end up talking to someone,
and this person is going through a divorce or whatever, I know someone else who I can
call if I'm not dealing with that same wavelength of what that person is dealing with.
And so it's about the people, it's about us, the people that understand each other, that
cultural competence.
And that is one of the major components for this process of support is we want to meet
people where they're at, and how they resonate within this blue collar job where you don't
get sleep.
And we've had this culture of drinking, it's like we all get it, man.
So it's nice and refreshing for us to have that program.
So I really, I mentioned peer support all the time.
It's so important for our members because it's designed for us, the people, the ones
who are in the mud, just doing this work as a unification whole.
So let's get to the podcast.
You have this amazing journey.
You've talked about some of the tools you use from Kambo to meditation and some of the
kind of Eastern philosophies as well.
What made you start the podcast and talk to me about the journey that's taken you on?
Yeah, so we had a series of members from our department have their own demise, and it was
all mental health that people were dealing with.
It was like, I think it was three deaths within the amount of a year.
And so that really shook me because I'd just gotten back to work from my injury, and I
had went through all this stuff and I didn't see much happening.
There was so much administrative malarkey happening to where nothing was getting done.
And I really wanted this message to get out that you're not alone.
And speaking on my behalf of my own struggles from a first person perspective and people
hearing my own openness and transparency, for people to just realize there is hope and
there's methods that we can understand ourselves.
And so I think that's why it started.
And as I was working through some of the kinks of starting a podcast, it took a lot of work
and a lot of effort.
So it really took off from it being more of a platform of truth, and just hearing everyone's
perspectives from people's personal life stories who have overcome massive hurdles in their
life and they have overcome it.
And taking us as a whole to understand all this stuff, because there's so many benefactors
that's happening right now.
There's the fact that firefighters as men have low testosterone.
That's a huge factor we had to listen to.
It's just the deprivation, by the way.
Yeah, it's sleep deprivation, man.
It is sleep deprivation entirely.
But that affects your mental health.
And so we have to look at this whole part of the structure and illuminate that there
is so much going on here.
There's not one answer to try to fix this.
And I've just seen so many people reach out and how it's helped them.
And one of the major things is talking about relationships and your home life outside of
being a firefighter is huge, man.
That is one of the major themes that people's home lives just tear apart from having this
type of a career.
And just to hear from people having the same categories of what they're dealing with, it
brings more of like a sense of hope and prosperity to break through these old paradigms, if that
makes sense.
No, it does.
And what I found when it comes to, for example, a sleep conversation, oh, well, they just
need to sleep better when they're at home.
Absolutely.
This is a double edged sword.
We have to own our own fitness, our nutrition, our mindful practice, our sleep habits.
I have the blue blocking glasses at night.
I sleep at 67 degrees.
I do all the things because I take it seriously.
But the other side is the environment we work in.
And the same element that you've put on us, there's a hurricane coming in.
Make sure you're not drinking.
We might need to call you in.
Okay, well, I'm not working, but I'm doing that for you.
It's the same the other way around.
All right, it's your turn to create an environment for health for us.
Because for example, as you touched on, the number of firefighters, either side of 30
that I know with testosterone in the 200s is insane.
The reproductive health, the issues with our children, which is again proven in our profession,
the amount of autism and Down syndrome and miscarriages and infertility, it affects not
just us, not just our partner, but our children.
So understanding that every other profession pretty much, including law enforcement, works
a 40 hour week, nurses, they all work 40 hours and we shrug our shoulders when we suggest
that maybe we shouldn't work in 56.
This is the thing.
If we want to fix all the things, that isn't the only thing, but it needs to be in the
center of the conversation because you want to fix firefighter cancer, you want to fix
firefighter divorces, you want to fix firefighter mental health, and you're using the same tactics
that people use for torture, interrogation, sleep deprivation.
There's your fucking sign.
We've got to give you guys more rest and recovery that has to be part of it.
Otherwise nothing's going to change.
Absolutely fucking nothing.
Yeah, dude.
I mean, it is a huge point.
And it was hard for me when you brought up that subject because I truly believe in sleep
and how important it is and vital because I know when I come home, I can feel like my
life force is just dumped.
And how am I supposed to show up for my family like a zombie and improve my mental health?
So I truly believe in it.
I mean, we had a Navy SEAL who works for our department who is part of this agency called
Three Six Romeo who's doing sleep studies, and yeah, so it's a huge topic.
But what can we do right now?
That's the real answer we have to face.
We can't change all that stuff right now.
So what can we do?
That's where I have been and pushing an agenda to get us more sleep is something I would
hope for without a doubt.
Yeah, it's coming.
I'm telling you, the dominoes are falling.
So the conversation is growing.
I'm just getting people from all over the country reaching out now, which is fucking
amazing.
But like you said, that there's the other side because it's ownership and it's also
okay.
My chief just said we're going to go to it.
That's still going to take a year and a half of hiring and all that stuff.
So I've still got to work these shifts until then.
And so that's where you're absolutely right leaning into everything from really making
sure that you're taking your vacation days and spending time with your family and being
diligent with your nutrition and doing a headspace for 15 minutes in the gym, hoping you don't
get a cold, whatever it is, those are all the tools that I think are phenomenal.
But at the same time, collectively get educated and angry enough to push for the long term
benefits that are going to allow you to actually make it to retirement and hopefully play with
your grandkids into your eighties.
Yeah, I think that's one of the main things we want to see people thrive outside of retirement
and even make it across the finish line.
But that's not what we're seeing.
We're seeing just these high amounts of cancer and alcoholism outside of your retirement
and people just suffering, man.
And I think suffering involves a lot of ignorance.
And so the best thing I try to present is the most information you could have.
If it's not something you want to grab onto, that's fine.
That's why you have multiple segues of something you can use for your toolbox to empower yourself
for having a better retirement or even getting to retirement.
And so I think it's tough, man.
I mean, I hope that this change does happen.
I really believe it will.
But it takes an army.
It takes all of us to come in together and unification.
I mean, it's so powerful how we can come on here and I can speak to you from across the
country and be able to connect on this level because that's what it's going to take.
It's going to take all of us together.
And that unity piece to this is so essential to how we're going to overcome these old
paradigms, these old ways that these systems that don't work, they don't support humanity,
they don't support the way we're supposed to show up in life.
And so these things have to crumble.
And so we have to also witness the crumbling stage of how all this is going to unravel.
Absolutely.
I think that's the one big thing is having the humility to just say, look, we did it
wrong because it worked for a long time when we were just running fires years ago.
24 48 was fine.
You know, you've got a handful of fires the whole the whole week.
Not a big deal.
But now we've got to the point and it is okay to go.
All right, now we need to change.
We were wrong.
We pushed against this.
That's fine.
As long as we start moving the right way.
And as I example, I always use one day someone said, you know what, maybe we shouldn't send
children up chimneys and working in factories.
And they changed it.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, for sure.
All right, well, none of that.
I'm going to shift some closing questions so I can be mindful of your time.
The first one I love to ask, is there a book or other books that you love to recommend
it can be related to our discussion today or completely unrelated?
Yeah, one of the first books that I had read that really opened me up to my awakening was
The Way of the Peaceful Warrior.
And that book was written by Dan Millman.
It's a great story.
And it's so simple, and it's so powerful at the same time.
Brilliant.
And what about documentaries or films?
Documentaries or films.
My favorite movie man is Gangs of New York, because that movie is about like, the antagonist.
And every story has a hero and a villain.
But that story made you question, who is the villain here?
And it's a dualistic way of storytelling.
But that movie really brought into the idea, wait, who is the villain?
It's actually your perspective on deciding who is the antagonist here.
I mean, it's a historical film or a historical story.
And Martin Scorsese is like one of my favorite directors.
It's a phenomenal film, so it's probably one of my favorite movies.
If you haven't seen it, you have to watch it.
Oh, I've seen it.
Isn't there a scene where firefighters actually fight?
There is a fire scene, isn't there?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think the other takeaway is if you don't work against each other, but you work
together, a lot less blood will be shed.
That's the other takeaway.
Without a doubt, man.
All right.
Well, then speaking of amazing people, is there a person that you'd recommend to come
on this podcast as a guest to speak to the first responders, military and associated
professions of the world?
Yeah, dude.
There's a guy named Corey Pullman.
He is a retired Navy SEAL after 10 years.
And he came on the podcast.
He was referred to me by a friend and he serves the medicine of iboga.
And there's little to no information on this medicine.
And so he has his story about what he talks about his own personal struggle of dealing
with hypervigilance and went down this plant medicine route.
And he took it upon himself to go to Africa to study with the Bwiti tribes and their traditions
of this powerful medicine.
And so he breaks it down so well.
And he's one of the most grounded individuals I've ever met.
And he takes such a great perspective.
After seeing some people who've been involved with plant medicine and things like that,
there's a weird spiritual pseudo image people present with that.
And he does not present that.
He gives a great perspective that's logical and practical with a medicine that's been
used for thousands of years that can quickly heal you.
I mean, it's referred to as the root of all healing, this medicine.
And so he was able to break all that down.
And for him being even a Navy SEAL for 10 plus years and doing this great work of learning
all this stuff and helping people change their lives is truly amazing.
Did you say he went to Africa about 10 years ago?
No, he served for 10 years for the Navy and then went to Africa after he served his time.
And I think he went to Africa twice.
Okay, because I had Marcus Capone on the show.
But if he was doing that, it sounds like he was also one of the pioneers of this movement
in the SEAL community.
Yeah, I mean, I think that group of the frogmen, they were really desperate.
They realized the VA was not supporting their health crisis or mental health crisis.
I mean, they're just passing out value in SSRIs.
And they're like, dude, what is this?
And Navy SEALs know bullshit when they see it.
And so they took it upon themselves to find what pathway of healing they could truly,
I guess, gravitate towards.
And this is something that's within that community that's very huge.
So I don't know.
He keeps some of this stuff secret.
You have to talk to him about his approach towards this stuff.
But he's a great person, man.
Okay, brilliant.
Well, thank you for that.
All right.
Well, then the very last question before we make sure everyone knows where to find you
and the podcast, what do you do to decompress?
Yeah, as far as finding the podcast, you can go on the grablives underscore podcast Instagram
page because we have our link tree under there.
And you can find our YouTube account, Spotify platform, everything that's underneath that
link trees in the Instagram account.
And I try to do my best to empower people.
And this is what my main focus is, is about empowering people to take your power back
from whether it was a traumatic incident in your life, whether it was from your resistance
and towards administration betrayal, whatever it is in your life, it's about empowering
yourself because we are divine human beings that we have the potential to overcome anything.
And so that's what I do my best to do through the Instagram account, through our episodes,
through our clips, whatever it is.
So if you can go through there, it's a great opportunity for you to hear perspectives from
myself, my own personal journey, the amazing healings I've seen from people and their stories
and maybe taking things a bit further and realizing like the multi-dimensional self
and understanding different forms of thought.
I'm always open to everything.
So aside from that, my own decompression is about sticking to my practices and they can
change every day.
I do my practice of meditation every day because it centers me.
It makes me kind of extrapolate all of the excess noise in my head and it brings more
clarity in how I show up for myself and my life.
I do cold plunging man from saunas to journal lane, which is really helpful.
It changes every day.
And like I had mentioned before, it's all about the seasons of life.
You have to flow within the natural order of things.
I study under a Qigong Kung Fu master.
So I've understood how to understand the ancient ways of how we're supposed to navigate our
power, our physical power from the trillions of cells we have that empower us every walk
of life.
That makes sense.
It does.
Beautiful.
Well, John, I want to say thank you so much.
It's been a very deep spiritual conversation and that's good.
I mean, there's some that are raw and the person is maybe sometimes even still coming
out of their crisis and others are talking specifically about treatment modalities, but
this has been a really fascinating conversation about really kind of going beneath that and
exploring, as you said, even belief systems themselves.
So I want to thank you so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the
Behind the Shield podcast today.
Oh, thanks, brother.
I really appreciate it.
I know we were trying to get this done for quite some time and it's as a podcaster to
a podcaster, it is a struggle man to schedule things.
So thank you so much, brother.
I really appreciate your time as well.
I hope all is well.
You've done so much.
Thank you, brother, for your platform and everything you've done as well.