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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name is JamesGeering and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome back onto the show
Army Infantry Veteran, TBI survivor and the author of Canyon of Hope, Eric Donohoe.
Now in this second conversation, we discuss a host of topics from his experience working within the prison system,
the multiple incidents that created his TBIs, his powerful mental health story,
unpacking moral injury, his own journey to refinding a relationship with God, his writing experiences and so much more.
Now 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 over 1,000 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them.
So that being said, I welcome back onto the show Eric Donohoe. Enjoy.
Well Eric, I want to say thank you so, so much for coming back onto the Behind The Shield podcast.
We talked over five years ago. You were telling me before we hit start, back then I do a lot of audio only recording and some of us didn't even have the screen.
We just almost like a phone call and you were saying that you were literally on your phone in that first interview.
That was episode 217 for people listening.
But here we are now, 2024, amazing technology. You've got lighting, you've got all the things.
So I want to welcome you back to the Behind The Shield podcast today.
Hey, thanks for having me. It is absolutely great to be back and congratulations on celebrating your 1,000th episode just recently.
That's huge brother. I'm so happy for you.
Thank you so much.
So we are recording on November 6th and I looked out my door and I don't see any nuclear wars or race wars or anything.
So I think we're okay.
I had a funny feeling that arguing over two people that this is James Gearing's opinion, that neither of which I would consider a good leader was not going to result in the destruction of America.
So I'm glad that we're still here.
You know, like I said to you right before we came on, there's just a whole lot of whining going on today.
I will anchor that sentiment that neither one of them were my first two choices by any stretch of the imagination.
But we, the democracy and the health of our country does not rest on one person and to make it like it does is just ludicrous.
And then, you know, the other side to the coin is imagine if the last two years, instead of, you know, hearing about how bad the other choice was,
imagine if what we heard for the last two years from all of our media sources were, hey, we are so blessed in this country because we have two of the most amazing choices to choose from,
both going in completely different directions and would take the country in different directions, but they are equally impressive of their own right.
Imagine two years of that versus two years of what we got and, you know, we keep doing it to ourselves.
So I couldn't agree more.
I am one for, I'm one, I'm glad that that we get a little break from elections even.
Absolutely.
Absolutely. But I think this is the important point and I've talked about this over and over again. If we had the right system, even if your candidate didn't win,
you'd be like, okay, well, that's still a good person.
I disagree with them on this, this and this, but they're still a great leader.
And that's what breaks my heart is when I see people, friendships and families torn apart over these individuals that we get because, you know, as I pointed out in one of my videos I did the other day,
the people that fund their political runs are also the people behind a lot of deaths of Americans, cigarette companies, fast food and weapons manufacturers.
I mean, all these people, they're the ones paying for them to be at the front.
And so that's why the good leaders are not there because they wouldn't take those bribes.
You know, so I think this is the thing is if we ever get to a point where we all stand together and demand that that stops,
you can't, you know, a campaign doesn't require millions of dollars and that you can be from anywhere and truly vie for that position.
I think then, and only then would we see real leadership that we were excited about, like truly excited about.
Well, I agree. I mean, if you think back to, I'm not super old, but I'm getting old these days.
When I think back to my youth, I mean, you didn't get into politics to become famous or rich and somewhere along the way that that switch.
There is a whole host of politicians who went into government in debt hundreds of thousands of dollars from student loans on both sides of the aisle.
And when you look at their net worth less than 10 years later, they're all millionaires.
Wow, you make $170,000 a year. You have to have two homes, one in the most expensive place in the area, or at least have a rent payment that you're looking at.
So, you know, gotta get once we get money out of the out of the way, which we won't, we'll get back to actual elections that matter.
Absolutely. Until then, it's just more of the same. I mean, you know, I will say there are some aspects of this that I was excited to see.
I was excited to see that Mark Cuban congratulated Trump on his win.
You know, I was excited to see that because that demonstrates what you were just explaining, right?
Which is you can campaign for somebody, but we're all on the same team.
And we sometimes forget that. So I was excited to see some of these spats, but I mean, we could go into why he did that.
I could list a whole billion reasons why.
Yeah, or billion dollars.
All right. Well, let's let's deviate from that.
This is the first recording I've done since last night.
So I think the best thing to do is to revisit some of your kind of journey again, not go as deeply as we did before, but obviously five and a half years later.
So let's kind of do a brief overview.
Tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings?
So I was born in South Bend, Indiana.
My dad was in construction, specifically electrical, and my mom was a nurse and my childhood was middle class, simple.
I can't really complain about my upbringing.
I mean, there are always struggles that every family goes through, but we were Irish Catholic and, you know, we fought, but we were also thicker than thieves.
And that's just kind of the way it still is today.
Well, I don't know if I dove as deeply into this last time because I don't know when my real awakening was as far as the impact of early life on a lot of our struggles later.
So with this 2024 lens, and we're going to go through, you know, all kinds of, you know, TBIs and mental health conversations as far as when you progress through the military and beyond.
But when you reflect back now and any element of your formative years, were there parts that you think contributed to struggles later in life?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't think, I don't even think I can say that I'm a person.
I don't even think I can say that there won't be for my kids, right?
That's assuming that us as parents or that my parents got everything perfect.
And nobody does.
So, yeah, there were.
And looking at those challenges then and looking at where I'm at, some of them set me up for decisions that I made later on in life that, you know, led me down a better path because I had gone through that at a younger age.
I think that's a very under discussed part of military and first responders mental health and I, you know, again, I fell upon this myself with all these conversations that I had, but you know, you have people that were in 9 11 or the big Vegas shooting or, you know,
whatever their arena was and the tendency is to hone in on that where you had that call you had that deployment, but a lot of people, you know, have brought a lot of stuff in before they ever even put the uniform on it.
If that's not being addressed, that's part of that overall mental health jigsaw puzzle that we're missing.
Well, I mean, so when you when you get into the breakdown of where we get a lot of our veterans from.
They're from rural areas who grow up, you know, in a.
You know, I don't want to say poor setting because that's not right. You know, I wasn't exactly poor when I joined the military, but most people joined the military because it is their ladder up into something better.
And when you join for those reasons, you're climbing out of something and though that baggage, you know, if you don't treat it will, you'll carry it throughout your whole life.
And it shapes every scenario that you go through.
So in the military, they should be doing a better job of not saying, hey, you had some childhood stuff go on.
But we know that you're more likely to have PTSD.
You're more likely to suffer, you know, emotional stress issues and these sort of things.
If you went through abuse as a child, if you went through a number of traumatic brain injuries from playing football or a number of other things.
And if we did those questionings ahead of time in the recruiting phase, not to eliminate people, but to rather, you know, highlight work that we need to do with them.
We can actually make them more resilient by the time that they do come out, whether they're wounded or not, so that we're not having to play catch up all these years later.
And, you know, whether we'll do it or not, I guess.
I couldn't agree more.
I mean, you're literally echoing what I've said, you know, recently, and this is just that post traumatic growth.
That's how you forge resilience if you've had a child who's truly had a kind of Disney esque upbringing.
And now they're in bootcamp or fire Academy or God forbid they're actually at war or, you know, faced with a multiple car extrication.
The chances of that person being able to deal with that, I would argue, were less than the person who's been through the stuff.
But that only becomes a strength if you've given the tools to process what you're carrying into the job.
So I think this is a beautiful opportunity to make a better soldier, Marine firefighter cop is get these people from these backgrounds and stop fricking screening us like we're some choir boy that's never done anything wrong in our life.
That's fucking stupid, too.
You know, if you want someone to run towards gunfire or go into a burning building, they've probably done some bad stuff early on, but then given the tools to kind of move forward from the things that were detrimental.
Well, and that goes back to having and making sure you have the right mentor and leadership.
And if you're coming from a family that, you know, maybe the parent your parents had you when you were young, so you weren't, you know, they weren't as emotionally mature.
I mean, there's so many different variables that play into it, but where you can keep the variables from happening is saying our job is we're going to bring these people in and we're going to spend a lot of money on them.
We have the psychology now that we've been doing this and been at, you know, and had been at war for over 20 years.
We know what the effects of war will do on people.
We know which people are resilient and how when they were brought up as a child that created that resiliency.
So like a second ago, you had said, you know, a Disney asked childhood and that sort of thing.
And I don't disagree with you at all. But what I would add is while the individual who had a more rough childhood might be able to deal with that circumstance in the moment better, the way they're going to handle the aftermath is to bury it and put a lid on it.
Whereas the Disney ask person is going to be like, I need to talk about it. I need to go do this sort of thing. And so long term that Disney asked person is actually going to do better than the person who puts it in the jar.
Yeah, I agree. That's the thing. I think that's why, you know, giving them the tools to open those jars.
But that's an interesting point because with these Gen Z, you know, young men and women that are starting to become all the things in uniform now.
One of the reasons why we have a recruitment crisis in the first responder professions isn't because they don't want to work is because they value their mental health, they value their physical health.
So if we are going to, you know, encourage young people to serve, we've got to start fixing the things that are broken as far as those elements like you and I probably went blindly post 9 11 into uniform.
And you know, it is what it is. You didn't ask, you know, how much time do I get off or anything like that? You just you go serve.
But now there's so much understanding of wellness and even like sleep and things like that that people weren't talking about, but these young people need to be able to see, OK, this is an environment that sets me up for success so I can be a good soldier, sailor, whatever it is.
Yeah, so I definitely think in the first responder community that is a necessity.
And I I I know in my community here, they're really leaning into it.
I can't necessarily speak specifically about fire, but I know that the police communities are really leaning into the mental wellness and health aspect of it better scheduling better pay mental health treatments.
It's not like a stigma to go see somebody. Everybody's, you know, regularly seeing this person because it's about creating a performance. Right.
So it isn't I need to go see a counselor or shrink because I'm struggling. It's about I want to go see these people to have a better performance, not just in my, you know, work life, but in my personal life as well.
So I wholeheartedly agree from the first responder. When we get to the military side, I mean, I'm a little still old school like when you go to war.
You got no comfort. You got nothing out there. And so you have to be broken down to a point where you know that you can push your body beyond places you never thought possible.
And that's what makes our military so amazing. I mean, when you look at all of these amazing people that you interview on a regular basis,
the reason that they're able to push beyond is because in the beginning they were taught how to overcome those barriers in your head when your head is saying no, when your body is saying no, how do you keep going?
And that's hard to do and learn if you pull out a wellness card, I need a mental health moment.
And so I'm not saying that once you get through the training, that shouldn't be the focus and the priority. It absolutely should be.
But during that initial training, you still got to be able to, A, figure out how to come together with people you don't like that you don't necessarily respect as one team move together as one goal.
And if you cannot break people down beyond what they think is acceptable, you won't get to that core part of the onion to allow that new layering.
And so it's a, you know, I go back and forth with a lot of people on this issue because, you know, we talk about a gentler, kinder military these days. And I do believe we need that from a mental health perspective.
I do believe that we need that from a communication perspective. But I also believe wholeheartedly that the training has made us the best for a reason.
Yeah, I actually agree with you completely. I think at the front door, there should be a crucible as a crucible. Fire Academy should be extremely hard.
And we doubt the people that just, you know, shouldn't be in the profession and there's no disrespect for them. It's, you know, you can or you can't. That's the bar.
But then I think what's exciting about the first responder profession is because of the devolution, because of the recruitment crisis, the standards have been dropped by putting in an environment.
Yeah. So if you create an environment, like you said, once they've been through their initial crucible, that now supports performance makes them a better Marine soldier firefighter.
Now you put that bar back up where it belongs, you know, because they're not being broken down, you know, day in, day out. So I think the other the wellness piece can actually go hand in hand with the much higher level of a performance and, you know, just standards in general, just operational standards.
So, you know, I think that you can't work people into the ground and set the bar high. You have to do both of those simultaneously.
Well, I, yeah, I totally agree. And I think that the special operations community is is is doing a better job of trying to set that bar.
Then maybe, you know, the regular military and infantry side is and I will say that in the talks that I've had in the last year, I think that's changing.
I think commanders are starting to understand because they're understanding the performance sector, a section of it. So as young, you know, we tenants are coming in from West Point, or coming in from the Air Force Academy and and the Naval Academy, they're getting taught this type of psychology before they're arriving.
And so now this is kind of being ingrained in that leadership that, hey, look, it's okay, man, we all have days that are shit. Like, how can we make this a not shit day for you.
And while also saying, look, you know, we have a larger purpose that isn't about us. So when it is time to show up for that larger purpose, I want to make sure you're able to do that. So we talk now. So you're able to show up then.
Absolutely.
And it's also goes to what I'm sure we'll get into at some point, which is moral injury and the conversation that once you get through that crucible and you're in your craft and profession and working.
You know, we're not talking about the spiritual injuries that first responders and military are dealing with on an everyday basis.
Let's unpack that now.
Well, so for me, I wrote my my book Canyon of Hope. And one of the specific reasons I wrote Canyon of Hope was because I didn't feel like the military community, the first responder community, or even really the world, our country, the world at large is talking about moral injury.
And for me, eight years ago when I started this journey after I couldn't kill myself, and that didn't work out, I decided if this is going to be the direction that I'm going, if I have some purpose here, what's that purpose.
And so that sent me out on a on a path of trying to figure it all out. And in that path, what I realized is I had spent years putting in the work for PTSD post traumatic stress and doing showing up for counseling sessions doing the, you know, at home work, the writing all the different stuff that I was supposed to do.
And yet in 2015, December of 2015, I hadn't gotten any better. I had been doing all of that work for six years. And yet my relationship with my wife was shit. My relationship with my kids was shit. Everything was shit.
And I thought it would be better for me just to end my life because I felt everyone else would be better off without me.
And at the end of the day, when I started this journey, moral injury kept popping up throughout this journey. And the more and more I learned about moral injury, the more I was realizing that I was dealing with the wrong injury with inside me.
And so moral injury just for the audience who doesn't know is a spiritual injury to yourself. It can happen in lots of different ways. The most common way people describe it is you put yourself at your, you're put into a situation where you have to go against your moral compass, ie, you have to kill somebody, you know, so that they don't kill someone else.
That's always the extreme that they go to, but it isn't necessarily that extreme. It could be as simple as being in Iraq and being on patrol and running into a family and seeing the husband beating the crap out of the wife and the kids because he didn't feel like they were working hard enough.
And you're not allowed to step in and do anything while you're watching this person just get beat for no reason. And it goes against everything you've been taught as an individual your whole life.
That's going to leave an impression on you and make you feel like you failed. And you do enough have enough of these time again time again and time again. Eventually, it's going to start wearing on your soul, your spirit.
Now here's where the trickiness gets into this. Moral injury manifests all of the same symptoms as PTSD. So the anxious the irritability all of these different things. So the first thing everybody tells someone they have is PTSD.
And now all they do is treat PTSD. But moral injury does not get better with traditional PTSD treatments, which means you can go do this year in and year out year in and year out and nothing ever changes in your life. You won't get any better.
And so the book for me. I just wanted to show people that if you take this seriously, there's a better road for you and a better outcome that can get better. You can treat moral injury. You can treat PTSD.
Well, you can treat traumatic brain injury. It's just about putting in the work and understanding what's needed of you as an individual to do that work. And so the book is really just about me and my journey of putting in that work and finding a better way forward than sitting here with endless amounts of pills and getting fat on my couch and being depressed.
And so moral injury, you know, not to get on a soapbox, but it is it is something that none of the nine vs. moral injury is something that none of the veteran service organizations are pushing from a legislation standpoint in DC.
We've already talked about it. If you could go to any major VSOs website right now with the exception of one type in moral injury, and you might get an article where someone mentioned it in a statement, but you have nothing as far as telling you what it is, how to heal it, how to go about changing it.
And on the contrary, you know, we have a $684 million budget to combat that. It's it's just an interesting. Sorry, I keep talking.
No, you're just supposed to keep talking. You're the guy.
You know, you know, I get when I get passionate about these. I got to force myself to shut up.
No, don't. Now, when it comes to that, the evolution of partly the label, but also really the understanding.
Eight years ago, I started a page on Facebook called the dark side project. And it was after we had a few first responders suicides here.
And it was just to encourage people to make a video. Were they struggling? Were they doing fine? If they were doing fine, what was working? You know, if they were struggling, then it was a kind of vulnerability post.
And then, you know, people would interact on it. And it was a beautiful standalone thing. I set it up and, you know, barely ever interact with it.
But the very first video was me. I said, you know, I'm James Gearing and I have PTSD.
Now, I don't have PTSD, but back at that time, that was the thing that we called the thing. But then years later, people started talking about moral injury.
I'm like, that, that is a thing. And I've never been to the darkest of places and, you know, we'll get to your journey in a bit.
But, you know, there's been highs and lows, of course. But when I think about the belief system that I was given as a firefighter and a paramedic, and I'll just point to one of the things.
As a paramedic, if I do this, this and this, if I give these drugs and cardiover or defibrillate in this way, then the patient has a normal rhythm again.
And then a week later, they bake a cake and bring it to the fire station. In 14 years, I had zero saves from a cardiac arrest.
I was just the shit magnet, you know, the brain bleeds, the GI bleeds, the, you know, triple A dissection, whatever it was.
These people, you know, God gave me all the, all the ones that are like, yeah, I don't want this one to survive. So James, you can work on it.
And even I had a, I told this on here a few times, I flew to England last year, early this year, I think it was.
And I was on the tarmac, literally getting ready to taxi off.
And the last patient, last passenger that came on the plane, face planted, and ended up working a code.
And, you know, you see these stories, oh, there was 12 cardiologists on the plane.
There was no one that came from an emergency medicine background.
So I had to, you know, lead the code and there were some amazing good Samaritans that did, you know, what they could.
And there was no access to equipment. And it was just, I mean, everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
And again, that poor guy didn't make it, I'm sure.
So when you think about the moral injury to someone who's trained and being said, if you do X, Y and Z, then the outcome should be this rather than hey, heads up, probably one, maybe even less, you know, like 5% might make it.
Everyone else isn't going to. That's a whole different conversation, but we are set up for failure.
You know, you go to a house fire, you make entry through the window, you do a right hand search, you know, sweep the bed, oh, there's a child, you get them out and you've saved them.
They don't say that, you know, most of them are going to be burned up or all the animals are going to die, you know, whatever it is.
So the belief system in the first responder profession is if we do what we're trained to do, hopefully the outcome will be that you save the person.
When you spend decades and in that particular environment, you're not saving the person. That is just one example, I think of moral injury.
It's not PTSD, but it goes against everything that you believe that if I do things right and I train diligently, these people will survive.
I agree. I mean, you hit it on the nail.
I'm depending on the circumstance and the individual. I do think that PTSD could still play a role along with it, you know, given what they're seeing and what they're witnessing and that sort of thing.
But I couldn't agree more.
I mean, just the way that I find it very interesting that in today's world, when we have so much information at our fingertips, we do so little to actually promote positive change in all of our lives.
Like it is, it can be discouraging and disheartening, especially as someone who is in regular, regularly in DC and on the forefront of helping, you know, shift veteran legislation.
And it is really disheartening that it isn't something that people are talking about.
Absolutely.
Absolutely. Well, let's kind of walk through your military career and let's obviously revisit the traumas that you had.
And then because I'd love to walk through what didn't work because I think there's so much value in it too.
And that's an individual thing, of course, and then get to what has worked.
So kind of walk me through, you know, which branch that you found yourself in and then let's kind of visit some of the deployments and some of the incidents that you had.
Yeah, so at 26 years old, I joined the United States Army, Airborne Infantry, and I was stationed in Alaska at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson, and was a member of the Third Battalion 509th Infantry Scout sniper platoon.
And we deployed to Iraq in 2006.
From 2000, we were there from 2006 to 2008. I personally was there from 2006 to 2007.
And while serving in Iraq, I got blown up by two IEDs, one EFP, and I know I didn't talk about this one last time, but a Kattusha rocket attack that had hit our chahal.
And never really thought about that one as brain injury, but in writing this book, I was like, oh, wow, like, never really thought about that one too.
But so I got, you know, I got my, my, my head, my bell rung a number of times, as you can tell, as I'm trying to get that out and take conversation right now.
And then in December of 2007, so we deployed in October of 2006, we, I came home in December of 2007.
And, and shortly after that, found out that I was going to be medically retired for getting blown up too many times.
And, you know, my experience in all of this, there are so many guys out there that I've had a bad experience with that transition and being retired and all that.
I was really lucky. I, you know, I, I got transitioned over. I had some amazing people and some amazing help.
I will say that that was, we were still in the infancy of what brain injuries looked like, what treatments were, you know, all of these different things.
But I was, I was really well taken care of. And then by February 2009, I was retired.
And I started my life in the civilian side of the house.
Where, which industry did you find yourself within the civilian side of the house specifically?
After I got out. Yeah.
So in the beginning, I didn't find myself anywhere.
Well, I take that back. I take that back. I did have a job lined up. This is actually, I'm not, I didn't think, I don't think I shared this story with you last time.
So part of Warrior Transitions Unit is that they encourage you to apply for jobs and all that. So I applied to become a probation officer for the state of Alaska.
And they ended up giving me a badge and hiring me. They didn't give me a gun. Instead, they put me in a prison.
And so I got out of the military, you know, not in the best mindset, mess mind frame and didn't have a whole lot of brain PT, you know, had some therapy and counseling, but even that was still in its infancy and I'm Irish.
So most of the time we just sat in there and stared at each other and didn't talk, which is was funny to me. And, and so, you know, when I took that job, I thought, okay, I'll have this purpose in there.
And then I got in there and I started treating it like I was a drill sergeant, or I was back being a sergeant.
And I would just yell get up against the walls. I was walking by all the guards loved me because there was order to the chaos, right? Like if Eric has the probation officer, but I quickly learned that I wasn't the recycler.
I was a large man. And there was just one particular situation that I almost jumped across the table and strangled the guy and it was the combination of that interview and setting his conditions for release which were mandatory he had, like we had to release him even though it was a mistake.
And at the same time I was dealing with my wife who had just gotten diagnosed with cancer. And so after that particular appointment or that particular meeting, I resigned my appointment.
Because I literally, you know how like in those TV shows, you see like you're the person sees themselves jumping across the table and just like like, I literally thought I did it in real life.
And I went outside the jail. I sat down for a second and had to take a breather. And my boss came out who was in the room with me. And he's like what are you so freaked out about I'm like I'm so sorry I beat his ass.
He's like who's I'm like that guys he's like Eric you just got up and walked out. And I was like, did I say anything. He's like no you were real were you were real red, real red. So I just let you walk out.
I literally thought I had actually hit him and and so sitting with him on the bench looking at the beautiful Alaskan mountains the jail was in this beautiful place was Palmer correctional complex.
And we were looking at the mountains and we both decided that you know, being a probation officer probably wasn't for me.
We use the phrase. I was a garbage man not a recycler. I like that because that's how I see systemically the failures in our prison system that the people within them. I have a huge amount of respect for because I don't think we understand just how much a correction officer is in prison as well.
I mean 12 hour shifts, no daylight sometimes outnumbered. I mean it's you know miserable for them. But then when you look at our vision. Yeah, so you look at our recidivism rate to as a country as a system.
I actually just I mentioned this in a video the other day. We we make up 4% of the world's population and we have almost 25% almost quarter of the world's incarcerated people.
So clearly it's not working. Let's just put it right out there. So what is your perspective because you have such a unique lens from being within.
Well, it's twofold. One, it's case dependent. I mean, you know, there are go people behind jail. They just made bad decisions or they came from bad environments. You know, there's lots of scenarios that I actually ended up becoming friends with people that, you know, because once I resigned, I would end up seeing people who were in prison.
Because once I resigned, I would end up seeing people out in the community and I never shied away from saying hi or or knowing or saying I knew him because I was always impressed with them even on the inside because they they had taken accountability for what they did.
They were making amends for it and they were taking advantage of the opportunities that were on the inside to make themselves better.
And there are a lot of opportunities or at least in Alaska there were a good many opportunities to do something to better yourself.
That's the key, right, is a figuring out who those people are separating the bad apples, putting the good apples and getting them into different living quarters right because the bad apples are going to affect the good apples.
And so that was something that was done up there before I was even in there and you knew, you know, which Bay you walked into based on, you know, what it was the kind of reaction you were going to get from people.
And then the second thing is, you know, once you train these people in these skills, you've got to have the ability with your local elected officials with your local church leaders nonprofit leaders, business leaders, you have to find a way to help those individuals who have learned new skills, simulate back into society.
Because when they get out, they have absolutely nothing, nothing.
They don't have any money, they don't have any clothes, they have, I mean, they're just starting over in life.
And if they've made all this effort on the inside and they know when they get out, it's going to be hard, but it isn't just hard.
It's like doors are shutting in your face, you're blah, blah, blah.
Again, they're going to end up back in there because they're going to do whatever they needed to out of necessity food, they'll steal food.
And once you're in the process, like once you're in probation, you're not getting off.
I mean, the chances of somebody getting out of the cycle of probation that comes from an inner city is really slim.
And it's because we don't set them up for success.
We feel like we don't know who to invest in and that's crap.
The guards know exactly who to invest in.
See, this is why I love these conversations.
And I've had, you know, speaking of prisons, I've had a prison governor, I was superintendent, they call it there, Tom Eberhardt from Norway on twice now.
And there's many prisons, well, several prisons here in America that have started using the Norwegian model.
But when you look at the proactive nature of successful programs around the world, so for example, Bastoy, and again, the Norwegian culture is different to us at the moment, but they're all human beings just like we are.
But, you know, they would have people that were even in there for murder, but they lived on a community, a housing community.
They lost their freedom, they were on an island, but they had to cook, they had to clean, they had to go to school, they had to go to work.
And the whole emphasis was they are going to move back into your street one day.
Do you want someone who is locked in a cage, you know, 23 hours a day, or do you want someone who was truly rehabilitated?
Because as you said, it's either bad choices or it's a crime of passion or, you know, there's these things where they're not sociopaths.
There is a prison in Norway for sociopaths and they are locked in a box.
But like I said, the rest of them are rehabilitated.
You look at Portugal's decriminalization of drugs, they didn't just say, oh, we're not going to arrest you.
They took the money from the war on drugs and they put it into mental health counseling, addiction counseling, job creation, housing.
And so again, you enable the person to make the transition from addicts back to functioning member of society who is earning taxes, not taking taxes.
So every time you look at these models, the national health when it was originally created before, I just learned this recently, it was actually American companies that came into and started dismantling the NHS.
But that's a beautiful system.
If you've got a tax-based healthcare system, then your push is going to make your country as healthy as possible so you don't drain the system.
So these proactive solutions over and over again are the answers.
And it's what's so sad and we touched on at the beginning.
But if you have people who own for-profit prisons and pharmaceuticals and whatever the things are and they're gaining from people being in prison, from being obese, from being depressed, from being addicted to cigarettes,
there's no one fighting against that because those people are paying the people that we see in DC every four years.
So this is what's so sad is other countries have the answers, but we are allowing ourselves to be divided rather than saying, hey, question, why are there no gang wars on the streets of Oslo?
Maybe we should start looking at what they're doing right.
I don't disagree.
I think that you can learn a lot from looking everywhere and then you can take, just like I do in my own life and in my own business life, take things that are working and say, okay, so these are parts of it.
How do I engineer that to fit my situation and create an equation that works for my situation based on these principles?
And I think it comes back to the fact that it starts with how we look at the intellectual side of the house.
And for years, you know, well, just look at our election yesterday.
One of the biggest reasons the Democrats had a problem is because they lost working class voters and they lost working class voters, even though my entire youth growing up, if you were a working class voter and you were a union guy, you were voting Democrat.
And so during this, you know, last 40, 50 years, we've been pushing education, education, education, and then we go get this education, which are all good.
But then we sit up on this high horse and we speak down to people who have been building the country.
And we say, this is what you need to do rather than talk to them in a way that's inclusive and bringing them a part of the fold than saying, oh, you're down there, I'm up here.
And that even happens in the veteran community with why the VSOs aren't talking about moral injury.
And so really what it comes down to is who are our gatekeepers and of both DC and of our media and how are we holding them accountable.
And I think you're seeing that shift.
More and more people are getting news and information from podcasts to why people want to go on podcasts more.
If you look at this election and how much people went on, you know, the elected officials went on podcast across the board to get their message out.
It's unheard of.
Why? And it's because it goes back to capitalism.
You know, CNN wants to make money.
Fox News, their plan is to make money.
CNNBC make money. I mean, if you just look at every bit of when you watch their show, every single thing is monetized.
You cannot watch a cable news program and it not be monetized or then trying to get your money from you.
So we've we've made the news a profit machine and until we start as a society and collectively say, hey, we just won't listen to your shit no more.
They won't change.
And so that shift I think is happening.
And I as much as I hate social media, I also think social media has empowered people to be able to to offer another opportunity for news too.
But it's also a rabbit hole if you get down the wrong.
So it's, you know, we're in a dangerous age, a lot of information and everybody wants to make money off it.
Yeah, I mean, it echoes what I've heard.
Larry Doyle, who had on a couple of times, I haven't put his next one out quite yet as we record this, but it will be out by the time this comes out.
But he was from that real kind of like height of journalism era.
He was the first person to interview Nelson Mandela when he was released from Robin Island.
So journalists like true trusted journalists.
And I asked him and he said the same thing.
You know, it used to be that the news was under an umbrella of companies and the other companies made the money.
And then journalists and the news anchors and, you know, everyone in that kind of group had a pretty solid budget to just go and tell a story really well and interview people, you know, and go to these locations and be boots on the ground.
And then there was that shift, you know, I think it was Rupert Maxwell and, you know, that whole era where they said, actually, you know what the news, we need you to make money now.
And so that's when we saw that shift where as we know, and this is so funny when I hear people that think that Fox is the holy grail and CNN is a devil and vice versa.
I'm like, it's the same fucking show people literally like if you are that if you cannot see the wood for the trees, the screen is divided into four.
There's four assholes arguing with each other.
Same fucking blueprint, different color tie.
But, you know, that's what I can people I don't care about have zero insight to anything that's actually going on in America.
And let's just put this out here for the audience who sees this.
They're all making that shit up.
When they say, I've been talking to a whole bunch of sources and those sources are telling them, they're making that shit up.
Most of those pundits, they say that they it's an anonymous source or, you know, the Americans I'm talking to, they're just making it up for a talking point.
And that fits the agenda for that segment.
They're actors.
They're no longer journalists.
And we call them pundits, but they're just really actors playing a part.
Well, the problem is disgusting.
It is because I mean, the real focus is selling the advertising space between clickbait one and clickbait two.
So this is what I think is really interesting.
And I asked Larry in this most recent one, and he's like, yeah, I think, I think media is spiraling.
I think the news is dying.
And, you know, one of two things is going to happen.
Real news is going to emerge again, you know, or like you said, podcast, social media, that will be the next thing.
I mean, even documentaries, documentaries are being made now a phenomenal.
But yes, I understand the game.
Then you realize that this isn't news.
You know, it's just trying to keep you on so that they can sell, you know, boner pills and dishwashing soap.
They just want their money.
So I think I truly believe there is an awakening.
I think we've hit such a low now that I think there will be a paradigm shift and people will finally start to see the game for what it is.
Well, it's like a prime example of this all is, you know, when Harris became the nominee, that was all kind of fucked up in itself.
But she became the nominee.
And for the first, I don't know how many ever months, you know, the biggest thing that Joe Biden and the Democrats were saying is this is an existential threat to democracy.
And again, I don't have a, not making a case for you to party.
You'll get where I'm going in just a second.
So for all this time, I'm supposed to believe that if Donald Trump is elected, it's the end of democracy.
And all of a sudden we find out that you're probably at Parkinson's, which, you know, it's no shame in that.
Like there's, there's none.
And doesn't mean you can't do your job.
It just means you shouldn't do another four years.
So you passed the buck.
The Democratic Party had a real opportunity to show and highlight unity by going old school and letting the delegates battle it out to who was going to be the nominee through debates, through all kinds of different things.
It would have made for great cable news television.
With that being said, they didn't.
They just instituted one person.
And there are some people who say it's because of the money.
It's because of this or it's because of that.
It doesn't matter.
From my perspective, what I said is, well, wait a second, if I'm supposed to worry about him, you didn't have one debate.
You didn't say one thing about what you were going to do, nor was one vote.
And yet now gore the Democratic National.
So why shouldn't I be worried about you too?
Because somebody just put you in power.
And when I call it, when I would ask people that of her can.
It would just go nuts because they didn't want to acknowledge the hypocrisy.
And that's the larger problem that we have.
It's hypocrisy.
Living well and living a right life is not easy.
It's hard.
It's hard to be a nice person all the time.
It's not easy.
It's easy to be an asshole.
And we've just found ourselves living in this world where, you know, we, I'm team blue, I'm team red.
I don't want to think.
And it's because of the journalism.
And if you want to go dig deeper, we can take it another level and we can say, okay, well, why is that?
And then I would say the question is, ask yourself how many former PSI ops and CIA officials now work at these telephone or these television stations and their sole job is to slowly convince you to think a certain way.
Meaning if all you're allowed to watch is Fox News by three months down the line, all you're going to be doing is spouting Fox News.
Then all of a sudden, if all you're allowed to watch is CNN, you'll have all these epiphanies.
Oh, oh my gosh, I've grown.
I've seen all these new things.
And the reality is now you're spouting all new stuff, new statements, and then they cut you off there and they're like, nope, now all you can watch is Newsmax.
You're just going back and forth.
And it's because these people are designing information and programming to change the way you think about something.
And we don't call that out for what it is.
It's PSI ops.
We do it on other countries so that we can make them more friendly to our mission.
And now when these people come home, we don't say, hey, you can't use your skill set on us.
We allow private companies to hire them and do that to us.
I mean, that's a really interesting perspective and it makes a thousand percent.
And just to put it in a physical form instead of a psychological form, we all know that tobacco companies put other things into their cigarettes to make them more addictive.
We all know that fast food companies have psychologists working for them to figure out the way that you would want another Big Mac or Coke or whatever the thing is.
That is an absolute known fact.
And you look at the way that the country was so easily divided during COVID, if that isn't a huge red flag to exactly what you've said, the brainwashing element, if you subscribe to these God awful TV stations, all of a sudden without thinking, you would sacrifice the relationship you have with your family to be right over a vaccine or a fucking mask.
So I mean, that makes perfect sense.
When really in the big grand scheme of things, it shouldn't fucking matter to you.
Exactly.
I mean, it really, like in a grand scheme of things, like it shouldn't fucking matter.
But we made it matter because it creates and moves people to a certain direction.
It's fear based motivation, and it only works for so long and it's like a heroin addict.
It's got to get more.
It's got to be more and more and more and more and more.
And we're at a point where as the heroin addicts, you know, fear based politics is what I'm talking about.
But we're at a point where, you know, as that heroin addict who's been doing it for so long, you can't ever chase the rush anymore.
You know, it's just at some point we're going to OD.
Yeah.
And I think that's kind of where we're at, right?
And it's, it all comes back to money.
100%.
Well, that was a really interesting tangent, but let's get back onto your timeline.
We do that sometimes.
Yeah, but it's important.
This is the organic conversation that it's not, and this is the thing people are, oh, I don't talk about it as politics.
No, like, for example, I did a video the yesterday before, if you look at obesity in America, addiction in America, the product, like I said, the number of people incarcerated, it is a 45 degree line.
There's a linear relationship.
That's Democrat, then Republican, then Democrat, then Republican, and Democrat, then Republican.
So if the way we did it worked, we would see either Democrats were all good and bad and there was zigzag or between the two of them, things got better, but it's got worse and worse and worse and worse.
So to fight over which one is better when your country has got sicker and fatter and more depressed, at some point you got to go time out.
Maybe they're both shit and we need to change the way that we do this and choose these people because there are people out there that have all these solutions that have the heart to make Americans healthy and happy again, but they're not given the platform.
I wouldn't even say it's not, they're not even given.
They don't want the platform.
I think it's both.
I think I want to, you know, I think always finding the funding for any of the good people is a challenge, right?
But more so, you know, I find it more often than not that people, the good people don't want the drama that come with the politics.
They don't want to have to spend the majority of their time fundraising. They want to work on issues.
And as somebody who's regularly in DC and on the Hill, you know, doing veteran legislation, that's all they're doing is fundraising.
And that's all that they, like, it's required. If you're in a party and you're not fundraising for your party and you're not raising large sums of money, you're not going to have influence within that party.
You're not going to get chair positions.
You're not going to be able to easily get bills introduced.
And so it is this constant wheel that always comes back to money.
And we as people can immediately stop this by just saying, hey, we want to get the money out of politics.
And then demanding that in our next federal election, that, you know, we put a referendum that we talk about financing.
I personally think that when you have the one of the presidential candidates spending over a billion dollars out of their presidential campaign,
the other one close to a billion, and that's not even including all this, the super PACs and and all the other stuff that goes along with it.
Like, you're never going to a regular person who has all of it can never break through.
And even if they can, they're going to get attacked so much on the way through that, like, their motivation will be sapped by the time they get there.
That would be the most incredible thing for us to do as a country to finally say enough is enough with the whole lobbyists and, you know, just put a cap on a campaign so that anyone can do it.
I mean, one of the amendments that I voted, I think it was for was to stop candidates.
And I think this is probably a lower level, but using taxpayers money for their campaign.
I didn't even know they were.
I know that my firefighters here need to pay raise and we need an extra shift, but you're telling me that some politicians using tax money for their fucking campaign like that.
And well, so well, so on the federal level, you know, when you fill out your taxes, you can donate.
I think it's three dollars to the, you know, presidential found a or to the election campaign.
So when you go run for office like president, there is a budget that is available through taxpayer funding that is available to each campaign.
I would imagine both campaigns took the money.
It used to be that that was how you ran your campaign, right, was through this money.
Nowadays, it's just another pot of fucking money, but I don't have a problem if people are using taxpayer money, if they're not taking it from, you know what I mean, if it's designated for candidates to run.
And that was the purpose of why it was collected.
And that person is not taking money from private individuals. I think that's like the best way to do it personally.
But you know, no, hell no.
No, I mean, it's not in our lifetime is anything going to change as far as how this goes.
I just there's too much money, there's too much power in it. My hope is that by the time our kids are old enough that they don't hate us for leaving them such a mess to clean up.
But my sincere hope is that their generation is better than the ones that have come before them.
Absolutely.
Absolutely. Well, we left your story at you walking out of prison after almost choking someone over a table.
So where did you find yourself then and then this kind of explore the downward spiral that you had mentally as well.
Yeah. So at that point, sitting out there talking with my boss, my wife, I knew had cancer and I was still fresh. I knew they needed somebody in the jail.
So we right there in the spot. I actually resigned my appointment.
And from there, within a couple of weeks, my wife and I were down in Cedar Sinai, California, and she we were dealing with her rare form of breast cancer.
And that kind of just started this tempo of monotony of challenges that life hit us, you know, from miscarriages to loss of friends to suicide to trying to do things and always fucking it up and getting it wrong.
Even though I was trying to do it right to not being able to just control the emotion that I felt when society, like in the military, everything is so very black and white.
And when I got out there, it's just right or wrong.
You know, if you cut in front of me in line, you're wrong. And I should be able to say get the fuck out of the line without being called an asshole because you cut in front of me.
But that kind of tone when you talk to other people, you know, isn't respected like it is in the military.
So, you know, it's just all these different things. I just I wasn't I had ballooned to 100 or 222 pounds by by December 2015.
So my mental health had declined.
My physical health had declined. My wife and I were on the verge of divorce. My two kids hated spending time with me. And I was to stay at home, dad and parent, like everything that I was touching was just going to shit.
And I didn't understand it. I didn't know why I put in the work. I was seeing people for counseling.
And what I realized is that in this whole process and looking back on it now, there's just one key thing that was missing that whole time.
And it was faith.
Something I lost at war. And so, you know, people ask, how do you lose faith?
And I started, you start by not having a very strong definition of what faith is in the first place.
And then it follows up by saying, well, I did everything I'm supposed to be doing. I'm a good person making, you know, good efforts.
I'm putting other people in front of me and yet this shit still keeps happening to me.
And I still keep seeing the worst that humanity has to do to one another in the name of you.
And none of this shit is stopping. And now all of a sudden you want to come at me and you want to take my wife and then you're going to take kids.
You're going to take friends.
It just, I didn't have any relationship. I was pretty angry with God and the world.
And so, December 2015, I decided that, you know, I didn't know how I would ever get rid of that anger after trying to work on it for six years and it not going away.
So I figured the best solution was to make sure my family got an opportunity to not be hurt by me trying to do the right things.
And I figured that they would get more benefit from my insurance money than they would from me.
And so I sat down on the table in December. Our factor is December 7th, 2015 and put my Glock in my mouth and for whatever reason that day it wouldn't fire.
I tried over and over. I would take Glock out, cleared it, cleaned it while I was sitting there.
I would put it back together, dry-fire fine, put the magazine in, try to chamber around and then put it back in my mouth, tried to pull the trigger and it wouldn't pull.
It was like it was stuck. Like there was something in the mechanism.
And before I knew it, the day I looked at the clock and it was time to pick up my kids at daycare and I was failing again at this.
And so I was like, well, I can't fail them. You know, I tabled this for a couple of days.
And ultimately, two days later, I got the news that my first platoon sergeant had taken his own life and he and I were in my first IED.
He and I were in the first IED our platoon got together and he just wasn't right ever since that day.
And looking back on it now, I kind of see it, but when I got the news, what struck me is I was mad and then it hit me the irony of what I was about to do to my family and friends.
So at the end of the day, I sitting up one night and Rocky came on.
I can Rocky always comes in and always saved the typical macho male, right?
But it comes on and it's, you know, he's standing outside talking to his adult son and he's like, you know, life and you, me, none of us ain't going to hit as hard as life.
Life will keep hitting you and it ain't about how hard you can get hit.
I'm butchering this right now.
So how hard you know, it's about how hard you can get hit and get back up and keep moving forward.
And for me in that moment, that's when I realized I just stopped getting back up.
You know, it's hard when you get hit by these things in life to continually get back up to only get knocked back down to get back up to only get knocked back down.
And so in that moment, I called my best friend and he answered the phone like he always does bills, backyard barbecue and grill.
How may I help you?
Well, you like some raccoon or squirrel today.
And I just started crying.
And I said, Brent tried to eat my block two days ago, brother.
And we stayed on the phone for hours that night crafting a plan.
I told him that I didn't want Jen to know because she would have put me in the hospital.
And he, he agreed that it wouldn't have been a good move for me where I was at.
And so, but he also said, you know, if I don't execute the plan, he's calling Jen and I'm going to the hospital.
He's not losing another friend.
And so that was the start of this journey that I got on in 2016, trying to find purpose and why I was still here and where I was still going.
And what I came to the conclusion of was that purpose is to talk about moral injury and the kind of healing that can be accomplished when we take a look at that injury and are open to talking about it and looking at ourselves openly.
And so for me in 2016, I started a journey that had lots of highs and lows.
And I think I'll kick it back to you there.
Yeah, that's I'm glad you did.
I know you're going to cut in and out here and at any point, like just be like, hey, no, no, no, no, I don't want to interrupt, especially that kind of, you know, conversation or journey that you were on just then.
But I don't know if I really dug into this last time, because again, I've had so many awakenings in this last eight years of being this perpetual student and hearing so many stories.
But one truth that has really emerged, I mean, this Venn diagrams, I mean, they spit out some pretty solid common denominators that you don't hear really discussed is in the perfect storm that leads to suicide ideation, which could be unaddressed childhood trauma.
You know, the moral injury, as you said, what you've seen, what you've had to do, organizational betrayal, relationship issues, you know, side effects from psych meds, all the things.
When we used to talk about suicide, you constantly heard it's selfish, it's cowardly, how could you think of your family?
But then you actually shut the fuck up and you just listen to people that have been there over and over and over again.
And almost every single time they said, at that moment, I truly believe that I was the reason for my family's pain.
And at that moment in that broken brain, that made their suicide a courageous and selfless act.
Now, I'm not trying to promote it, of course, but for us to understand where they were at.
So you kind of touched on it before, expand on that, explain to me the reality of that distorted voice that you were living in at that moment.
Well, I mean, I think that you can kind of take it back to, you know, just like what we were talking about before.
What you tell yourself over and over and over again is what you actually believe.
So while my wife could be celebrating me over here and saying, hey, you've done so much good things and you've done so much good work in my head,
I would only hear the things that she would say when I screwed up.
And then those things because of the PTS, because of the brain injuries, stayed on a repeat.
And so even when I was being successful and never saw the successes, because all I heard were the negatives that kept on repeat.
That part of the repeat was not something that was my fault. That's the injuries.
Those are, you know, the manifestations of the symptoms of the injuries.
And so it was like, okay, there was a multi learning curve that had to happen in order for me to recognize a, I had come out of this funk, but be looking back.
Yes, you're not wrong.
It is absolutely if somebody is in that moment of suicide and they are actively trying to end their life.
They are not in the mindset where they believe, nor can you eat, should you tell them that their family is going to miss them.
Because the trade that could actually trigger it, that would have triggered it for me.
And the reason it would have triggered it was because that was the loop that I was feeding while the other loop was trying to stop it.
And so if you make me think about the loop, right, that is feeding it, I'm going to take it.
So it's important that you hear that message about that it's not true, right, all the time, because it isn't, it was never true for my family.
But at the same time, in the moment that somebody is actually doing that, you should never do that.
You should be doing what you're doing right now, which is asking questions and shutting the fuck up.
And letting them fill the bubbles in above their head rather than you writing it in with whatever your subconscious is telling you their thinking.
And so for me in that moment, it was just the years.
It was going to war and getting off the plane, having a Red Cross message that we lost our son, David.
It was coming home, burying our son, the army telling me that I could be here for six months.
But me deciding that the best case for me was to run back to war, because emotionally I wasn't equipped to be able to handle this with my wife.
And I knew that based on the way that my upbringing and the way that I process things with anger would only drive us apart.
And so for me, I hid behind the fact that I was needed in my platoon.
And I got on a plane less than two weeks after we buried our son and I flew back to Iraq and everybody's acting like it's noble.
But what it really is, is me running away from the emotional inept and an ineptness that I had and being able to deal with something that was just crushing me inside.
And that for me was my first moral injury of my experience in Iraq.
And then you compound that with the brain injuries, you compound that with everything else that you were asked to do and see and be a part of.
And then you come home and then there are more miscarriages and cancer and friends killing themselves and me getting starting to get sick.
And so all of these different things are coming in and in my head, every single one of them was because I made the wrong choice.
I did something here and it was because I sat there and I asked why is me not what can I learn from this?
What purpose am I supposed to get from this?
Absolutely, I'm so glad I asked you that because I mean that just as you're talking about that reinforcing of that negative voice and it's funny because the book that I just wrote, there's a huge element of that in the main character because I've heard this over and over and over again.
Thank you.
It's a great book at some point I was going to work in there, but I love it and and and and I'm rooting for you that I you know that every bit of what you hope happens with this book comes to fruition because I think if you're able to make that happen.
I think what it can do is huge.
Well, thank you.
Based on what I read in it.
So if you haven't read his new book, kinder, you should read his new book.
Thank you.
Well, back to you and your book.
So let's get to the, you know, you said they were they were highs and they were low.
So obviously you've talked about some of the traumas as far as life itself.
What's become very clear now is we all have our own unique toolbox that works for us and it's never one thing.
It's one I've realized, you know, when someone tells me they got the answer for mental health problems, the solution, the magic pill, you've lost me straight away because I know that's bullshit.
Same as food and exercise and everything else.
But you know, there are there are all kinds of things out there, the traditional stuff, the psychedelics, obviously the spiritual side.
I mean, there's this gamut of things.
So as you progressed on your healing journey, what was detrimental that maybe you were again, you had expectations of it working and it didn't.
Maybe that even compounded things.
And then what were the elements that you started collecting, including obviously your own spiritual journey that started to allow you to rise up again?
Um, oh, we're going to make some news on this one.
Um, what didn't work?
VSOs, veteran service organizations, they didn't work.
Um, my experience and again, highs and lows.
So let me clarify what I'm about to say.
There are some organizations out there that do amazing work with veterans.
For me, I was very fortunate enough to find a few along the way that really did help me and they are out there.
I don't want to sound totally negative in the space.
Um, but there are more veteran nonprofits that are out there that are supposed to be helping with PTSD, traumatic brain injury, moral injury, all these different stuff.
And they're toxic. They're just not good places for veterans to be.
And at the end of the day, um, they can set you back.
So in this journey, you know, when I started, I started out really strong.
I was really lucky.
I managed to get into an amazing program with no barriers. USA where we climbed three successive mountains over the climbing season.
And, uh, during that, see, you know, using the skills that you learned on the mountain as tools for your shed in life.
Amazing.
Great opportunity.
I learned a lot.
There are some amazing stories that I experienced in the book. I would wholeheartedly tell people to read if any chapter in the book, my book, Read Refuge on the River.
It is a, uh, it is about one of those expeditions and the healing that I found in that.
Now on the same token, there are a number of organizations that I went into expecting to grow and learn.
Um, and what I ended up walking away with was, um, less than what I had when I walked in, which already wasn't that much.
And so, um, like I tell a lot of veterans out there, um, you cannot read what you see on or cannot. Sorry. You cannot believe what you always read on these websites.
Um, I cannot tell you how many veterans. I mean, literally, I don't know. I've lost track. It's, I know it's been a long time.
I've, I don't know. I've lost track. It's, I know it's over 20 veterans who have reached out to me personally who have gone to different programs.
And it's because they saw something on their website that said, you know, I, I, my five, six years I've been trying to get better.
And I showed up to this program for three days and I'm all healed.
And the reality is that statement, it was true, but that statement was true in the moment of the time that that person was there for those three days.
And it was a random quote that was given for that moment.
But somebody else reads that and then, you know, they have that great experience and then they come home and the real work needs to start and you're not surrounded by fellow veterans.
You don't have all these people lifting you up. You have life hitting you down.
It's on you. And if you're in the wrong group, what they'll say is they'll tear you down rather than build you up.
And so I've, I'm in this place right now where I want to highlight all the good work that's being done.
But I also need to start and we need to start acknowledging all the bad that is being done too.
And that needs to be cleaned up. I mean, there are over 47,000 veteran non-profits in America, 47,000 veterans make up less than 1% of the population who served.
That's ludicrous. And then, you know, when we get into moral injury, that's a whole nother conversation that'll just blow you away.
Well, let's go there.
Okay. So, so in the process of let's let's fast forward a little bit and give the listener.
So for people who don't know who I am, I have been in DC since June of 2018, working to pass major veteran legislation.
I've helped pass five major pieces of legislation, including the 988 Suicide Hotline Act and the PACT Act for which I got, it was invited to be at the signing at the White House.
And so I've been in the thick of it on the hill with the people who are making these laws for six years doing this work. And in the process of all of this, these people have watched my journey and a number of them have encouraged me to write my book and they did all of these things.
And so this year after recovering from thyroid cancer, that was my goal. It was a call from you actually that got me off my ass and started me on my path to writing this book.
And if one of you wouldn't have called me bro, I'm being serious. I don't know where I'd be with this book if I would have even started.
And so over the course of that period of writing the book, I got really honed in on what I believe my purpose and what I believe I can offer to other veterans, which is just information about moral injury, something that isn't being done anywhere else.
So in the book, I talk a lot about that spirituality and faith.
And once the book was done and it came time for pre readers, which you know is like the worst time for an author, because you like put it out there and then you just you can't call anyone can't have you read it yet. What do you think you just got to sit and it's like the worst feeling in the world.
And so I sent it out to all these free readers and including a number of organizations that I worked with in DC for veterans.
And those organizations, one ghosted me entirely, which I would come to find out later was because they don't help promote things that talk about God.
Okay, well thanks for saving me that work. And then another organization wanted me to keep volunteering with them to train the next generation of advocates, but told me I wasn't allowed to talk about my book because they have a no God policy.
These are all true statements.
So instead of getting mad and being like why do they keep coming at me I'm like, there's got to be something to this. So I did some research, which is something that I'm good at.
And what I came to find out was that there are things called facts and facts can educate all of us.
And so I'm going to share some facts that none of these groups shared even with me as a national advocate working with them.
Out of the New Jersey VA there was a study that was done that found that individuals suffering from moral injury both on the military side and the VA side made them the highest at risk group period.
People suffering from moral injury were more likely to pull the trigger on suicide than anyone else period and stop like almost 98% success rate kind of shit right.
So I'm like, I'm reading this study and I'm like, this is crazy that we have a study coming from the VA that talks about moral injury as being the number one at risk thing.
Please tell me we have some programs within the VA or do d that I don't know about that deal with moral injury. Let's research that.
There are programs that the chaplain's will institute from base to base on the do d side, but that's all case dependent based on the chaplain's who are running it and that money doesn't come from suicide awareness or prevention money that comes from their regular budget.
What's the next highest group. What's the second highest group in the military is a question I asked myself I want to know that next science science group I I knew it was high but I didn't know it was this group.
LGBTQ plus. So the second highest group in the military and VA is LGBTQ plus. Okay.
What are that what's their breakdown 6.1% and the do d less than 10% is all I could find in the VA. Well, what's moral injuries breakdown.
Moral injury on do d side you have over 71% say that they have some sort of religious affiliation and when you look at the veteran side of the house over 90% claim to have some sort of religious affiliation.
Shit. So that group would fall into the moral category moral injury category.
6.1% to this. Did they do anything for this group.
Over the last 10 years, they spent $29.6 million to spend on psychotherapy and gender affirming care for the LGBTQ plus community.
And over that same 10 year period. Zero programs were created for moral injury and $0 were created for moral injury.
Mainly because none of the VSOs were fighting it fighting for it pushing for it and when you talk about it, they say well you can't talk about that that's separation of church and state.
And it's not saying Christianity is that you're talking about spirituality.
I'm talking about faith. Your the ability to heal from moral injury directly relates to your ability to have faith in something.
For me in the beginning it wasn't Christianity it wasn't faith in God. It was faith in my life.
That's where it started.
Faith in that very simple person who was giving me so much good information that when I was reading it, it was making me cry.
That faith led me and created a little spark that got the kindling going. It could be faith in a piece of property that brings you peace when you're there.
It just has to be something and then you have to recognize what that is and be willing to build from it.
Even have the word faith brought up is a no go.
And to me when we look at this we're spending $684 million was the DoD's
prevention for suicide prevention dollars right 684 million. And then if you really just look over the whole life of when we've been dealing with this problem, give five years to catch up for more.
So 15 years we've been dealing with this problem. We've spent billions and billions and billions of dollars and we haven't budged the needle.
We're still losing 17 veterans a day.
And yet we're sitting here talking about MDMA. We're talking about psilocybin. We're talking about all these different things. And we haven't talked about something.
Now we'll get into that too because I don't disagree with that. But what's you know any of those those medicines when you look at like let's take psilocybin or take psilocybin for example,
when if you're doing it in a correct way that is going to help you create healing. There's two ways you can look at the micro dosing ways for creating neural pathways. That's one way.
And another way is to get in touch with your spirit and that is to enter that spirit world. And that is a lot of what you have with these special operators who are going down south and doing ayahuasca treatments and peyote treatments and all these different things.
What's the one thing that happens before they take their medicine.
Do you know.
No, ceremony.
Every single one of those organizations that have shown that they have worked and shown help has had some sort of spiritual ceremony before they start. Why to entune us with our spirit.
And it doesn't mean those are for everyone because some of us it can go real dark real quick right.
But it if you're not in tune with that spirit. That's the route it's going to go.
And so the whole point of this is like what you're messing around with is the spirit. What we're getting back to is the spirit, but nobody wants to call it what it is.
Faith, moral injury. It's our ability, our spiritual self, our spiritual being that actually makes up who we are is injured.
How do you feel it.
Why finding faith in something doesn't have to be my God doesn't have to be a God, but you got to be able to have faith in something.
And so that's the other part of what we see, you know, we're when you see them saying we're in America, you know, Trump is creating an environment that causes people to lose faith in government and the offices of government right.
That's not Trump.
That's the news organizations.
That's their agenda.
They want you to have less faith in government because it makes them more money.
You're going to tune in more if you don't believe in something. These are all the same.
It's all tied back together. These people who are creating these psyopsis on us are using the same intellect of the spirit and the psyche to keep us in the place that we are.
And the question is why.
Palsy sharing is another example of an amazing person who is battling this in, you know, in a different way because of what's going on in Canada and made and it's actually coming here to India or to the United States to there are a number of states across America that have legalized now assisted suicide.
And, you know, 2015, I would have told you in a heartbeat.
Yes, I want to die today. I'm doing everything I can to live the best life I could.
So this idea that we're just going to let people, you know, make these decisions in their worst moments without any real effort to help combat the negative cycle that's going on is kind of fucked up too.
So I mean, it's, you know, it's a battle of good versus evil. That's really what I believe right now.
With the euthanasia conversation. I mean, I believe it has numerous applications, but what Kelsey was saying is, yeah, you know, it's almost being promoted, you know, in people that aren't, you know,
the end stage of ALS or cancer or wherever you would say, okay, this is, you know, this is just going to be a decay now. The quality of life is going to diminish and to be able to make that.
Yeah, it's a financial. Yeah. Well, it's the financial. I think, I mean, call me the cynic here. I don't disagree with her at all.
And I don't disagree with that, you know, you should be able to choose if that's what you want. I'm just saying there are a whole lot of people who are being told that things can't get better when it can.
And they're being told it can't get better because in order for it to get better, it costs a lot of money. Right. Today, I just went to one of my physical therapy appointments that I go to every two weeks for dry needling.
It's what keeps me off of pain meds, but I take $200 out of pocket every single time.
There are a whole host of things that I do yearly that take a good portion of my VA disability and compensation and don't even like it.
It puts me in debt. I'll put it that way every year. But because I chose that rathodes, I'm in a good place mentally. My two kids have a dad that's engaged and loving life with them.
And my wife has a partner that is all in. And, you know, that's because we put in the work in the right areas. And what Kelsey's saying is from a veteran standpoint up there, they're not putting in the work.
They're just saying, okay, well, you'd like to do this, so we'll do that. And it's in essence killing off a whole generation of what would be conservative leaders.
We're doing it here in America. We're just doing it differently. We're incentivizing an entire generation of leaders that we've trained to be leaders to sit on the couch rather than get up and be a part of a productive part of society.
And we tell them that, you know, through how we pay them.
I want to get to, you know, where people can find the book, but the last element you, you know, you found this kind of restoration of faith within your beautiful wife herself. Walk me through how then you started to have a relationship with God again.
That took time. That took some time. And it started with the chapter, Refuge on a River.
And what I will say is everything that I learned about who God was growing up in the Catholic Church my whole life was wrong.
And I looked at things wrong. And in most of my life, I looked at the hardships that would, you know, bestow other people and be like, ooh, glad I'm not him, I'm going to keep doing good.
So that doesn't happen to me as if somehow God is spiteful or vengeful, but he is not. The reality is he gave us free choice and then he left.
And when he gave us free choice and he left, obviously, man isn't always going to make the best choices. And as we progressed in mankind, you know, in the generation of life, we've gotten to a point where, you know, we don't get to blame God for all the bad because somewhere along the line, we're the one who welcomed it into the Bible.
And we're the one who welcomed this world. And but what we can do is instead of looking at it and saying why me, we can say, why not me?
We can learn from this scenario. So, for example, in 2018, when my best friend Brent, the one who sat on the phone with me for hours helping craft a plan to keep me alive, took his own life without a phone call, without me seeing it,
with me missing all of the signs.
I kind of looked at the scenario and said, you know, how am I going to make it and fallen back all the way down to where I had started climbing and started having suicidal thoughts, or I could do what I just said.
And I could say, what am I supposed to learn from this? And what am I supposed to do with all of this pain and all these negative fucking ripples that are just rushing through my pond?
And what I ended up choosing to do with it is to take all of that negative energy and wrap that up into doing good for other people. And I took eight wheelchairs to Nepal.
That's another story in itself. And that was in 2018 to try to change that negativity. And those eight wheelchairs have blossomed into over a thousand wheelchairs delivered.
And when I think about my friend Brent, I think about him pushing these kids and laughing and, you know, telling jokes and teaching them things that they need to learn. And I don't think about that tragedy.
And so it was through those experiences and trying to understand God from that perspective, rather from a static version of church and the Bible that I actually started to create a relationship with God.
One that has continued to bring me comfort, even when I should, I normally wouldn't be. I'll give you an example. Recently, you know this, the background of my book and all of this sort of stuff.
I spent way more on this book than what I intended to do.
Book for this yet?
I haven't. That's the next one. I got to raise some money to do that.
Gotcha. Well, I'll count on that because I'm doing mine now. And so many people have said, because my first one was, you know, stories of my career, but it was still a story and then it was takeaways.
And I was so nervous about doing the fiction that I wrote about kinder. And I just like you said, you know, the voice in my mind was like, ah, you're shit.
You need to get a real actor to do that. But when I asked everyone, they were like, you should read it. We loved when you read the first one with this being your story.
I would argue that you should be reading the book. And if that's the case, it's such a basic setup that you need. So you probably have the capacity to do it with, you know, very, very low budget.
So we can talk about that when we get off air.
Yeah. Yeah, let's do that. Because everybody keeps telling me that it should be my voice.
It should. But, you know, having dyslexia as a kid and then the idea of sitting and having to read and it's just like flashbacks to when you're a kid and you're having to read in class.
But I think from a standpoint of connecting with the audience, it matters a little bit more that it's my voice. Or at least that's what Jen wants me to consider.
Yeah. I mean, the way I look at it, I didn't realize how many people are waiting for the audio book. So we're withholding that story from them by not doing it, you know.
And so the beautiful thing about using basic editing software is you can say that line 12 times so you get it right.
It just keeps playing and then you just cut that bit and, you know, delete the rest and splice it on so that you get this smooth one.
Because, yeah, I mean, you know, we misread things. I found typos in my fucking book. It's edited by two people and only when I'm reading the audio book, I'm like, shit, there's an S there.
And, you know, that I use that word twice in a few sentences. So it is what it is.
Don't feel bad because here's what I'm going to tell you. Before I got my book back, it went through a five proof read. And then I read the book and I still found errors.
Mm hmm. Yeah. So it's distracting when you're reading the audio.
My point is the fact that you only found that little of errors.
Oh, I'm only on page 24. That's why.
Well, I was just going to say you're proving my point. If anybody's out there wanting to write a book, by the way, have confidence in yourself. That's what matters the most.
Have confidence in yourself and then just start.
Come up with an outline. Nobody ever says that, you know, they say start writing. No, come up with an outline.
List the chapters that you want, you know, the things that you want to talk about in your book and then then start writing.
That was the piece I missed. Somebody would have just told me an outline first shit.
Send me a whole lot of money. Yeah, I don't think I did that. So I wouldn't be able to give you that information.
I just started writing like a lunatic and it just all came together eventually.
But well, well, mate, this has been so good. You know, I mean, I know it's, you know, what do we say, six years since we talked, but you know, to revisit some of the journey and then all these new kind of elements that you brought to it.
It's been such an amazing conversation. So I want to thank you so, so much for coming back onto the show and being so generous with your time today.
I appreciate you having me and thank you for sharing this story and and my book with your platform, brother. It means the world.