An Army of Normal Folks - How To Keep Going: When You Literally Lose Your Face. Or Anything Else (Pt 1)

Episode Date: December 23, 2025

Pat Hardison was a volunteer firefighter, dad, and small business owner when one call changed his life forever. After literally losing his face in a fire and enduring more than 70 surgeries, Pat took the risk of undergoing the most extensive face transplant in history. This episode will show you how to keep going when facing obstacles…. or in Pat’s case losing almost everything. Check out Pat’s new book Facing The Fire: https://lnk.to/FacingTheFireEP Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/premiumSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

11 years, 70-some surgeries, and you've built and lost your business twice, you've built and lost a family twice. You've built and lost homes twice, all because as a volunteer, you went in a burning house because a man was worried about his wife. I would definitely change some things if I could, but at the end of the day, I'd still do it again, because that's what we love, what we do. It's just part of it, you know. I've been in a hundred burning buildings and never thought anything would happen. Welcome to an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney. I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband. I'm a father. I'm an entrepreneur. And I'm a football coach in inner city Memphis. And somehow that last part, led to an Oscar for a film about one of my teams. That film's called Undefeated. I believe our country's problems will never be solved

by a bunch of fancy people in nice suits using big words that nobody ever uses on CNN and Fox, but rather by an army of normal folks. Us, just you and me deciding, hey, maybe I can help. That's what Pat Hardison, the voice you just heard, is done. Pat was a volunteer firefighter. who almost paid the ultimate sacrifice. He lost all of what we think of a face and a house fire.

His eyes, ears, nose, lips, they were all gone. He was unrecognizable as he fought to survive for years. And his physical, mental, and spiritual survival story has powerful lessons that all of us in the Army can benefit from. I can't wait for you to meet Pat right after these brief messages from our generous sponsors. I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltson. My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's

catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed. We have some breaking news to tell you about. Tennessee's Attorney General is suing a Nashville doctor. In April 2024, a fertility clinic in Nashville shut down overnight and trapped behind. and trapped behind locked doors were more than a thousand frozen embryos. I was terrified. Out of all of our journey, that was the worst moment ever. At that point, it didn't occur to me what fight was going to come to follow.

But this story isn't just about a few families' futures. It's about whether the promise of modern fertility care can be trusted at all. It doesn't matter how much I fight. It doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this. It doesn't matter how much justice we get. None of it's going to get me pregnant. Listen to what happened in Nashville on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Kyle.

Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault.

I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliffe. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person, a billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game.

This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product. run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app

or wherever you get your podcasts. Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionous History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama. We're a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control. 35 years.

That's how long Elizabeth's and its family waited for justice to occur. 35 long years. I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way, and why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make suffering worse. He would say to himself, turn to the right to the victim's family, and apologize, turn to the left, tell my family I love him.

So he had this little practice. To the right, I'm sorry, to the left. I love you. From Revisionous History, this is The Alabama Murders. Listen to Revision's History, The Alabama Murders on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Michael Lewis here. My book The Big Short tells the story of the buildup and burst of the U.S. housing market back in 2008. It follows a few unlikely but lucky people who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become. and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception. It was like feeding the monster, said Eisman. We fed the monster until it blew up.

The monster was exploding. Yet on the streets of Manhattan, there was no sign anything important had just happened. Now, 15 years after the Big Short's original release, and a decade after it became an Academy Award-winning movie, I've recorded an audiobook edition for the very first time. The big short story, what it means when people start betting against the market, and who really pays for an unchecked financial system, is as relevant today as it's ever been, offering invaluable insight into the current economy and also today's politics. Get the big short now at Pushkin.fm.fm. slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.

I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you. Because it's easy to say like go you, go blank yourself, right?

It's easy. It's easy to just drink the extra beer. easy to ignore to suppress seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just like walk the other way avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denial is easier drinking is easier yelling screaming is easy complex problem solving meditating you know takes effort listen to the psychology podcast on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Pat Hardison, welcome to an Army of normal folks. How you doing, bro?

I'm having me. Good. I really thought about more maybe about you than any guest I've had about how to introduce you. Everybody, Pat is a former volunteer firefighter who wrote a compelling book called Facing the Fire, the true story of a firefighter, a face transplant, and the fight to keep living. So I guess I've introduced you there. Pat, everybody is from Cenotopia, Mississippi, which for those are not in this part of the world, Cenotopia is in North Mississippi, probably 20, 30 minutes south of Memphis.

When you think of North Mississippi from this area of the world, you've got olive branch and you've got Horn Lake, and then you go down a little farther, you got Hernando and then over a little bit you got Cenotopia, but that whole area is really considered kind of the North Mississippi area of a community. And that's where Pat's from. I think you grew up in a little place called Strayhorn, is on a shit. Strayhorn. Pat is an interesting guy.

And obviously we're going to get into it. But I got to tell you, if hell in the afterlife. is literally burning, then the gentleman sitting across from me is a human being that has faced the closest thing to hell and is still living on earth. You don't want to go there. What's that? And you do not want to go there, I promise you. So we'll tell that story.

First, tell us about your father. What did you do for a living? He worked for a good year of tire company. He had started out, you know, changing tires and oil and worked his way on up. And when we moved to Cenotia in, in 89 and 90, he had become regional manager over several states, several stores in each state. So, I mean, by all rights, a blue-collar country guy who worked hard, did well, and moved up. 100%. But he struggled with alcohol.

Well, it didn't start until in 89 or 90, I think it was 89, we moved to Centitobia, and we lived there. And he had been on the road for about two years at that time. And me and my brother, and my sister was older, she was, she's two years older than me. My brother and I was, just turned 15, my brother was 14. And we moved to San Antonio and lived there for about a year. And then my dad came to us. I was almost 17 at this time and told me, look, I'm putting to get off the road. I want to buy the good year store here in town.

And I want you all to work with me and we'll make it a family business. And, of course, you know, back then you didn't, whatever your parents said, you did it. That's right. You know, it wasn't no question about it. You know, we got out of school. He said, you get out of school. Then I could get out on the work program, so we got out at 12 every day. And we'd go to work and change tires, change oil.

And he gave us our running money in a vehicle to drive, and that was our pay. And, you know, it was some good times. But I never knew my dad to drink. He would never let me even go to people's houses that drank because he didn't want us to be around it. And, you know, like I said, I really idolized my dad. And after we bought that tire store, well, working and in the afternoons I started noticing that he started drinking and it really it really let me down I was like man he all the stuff he's taught us over the years and now he's he's doing

what he told us we shouldn't be doing this time I'm 17 18 years old you know and it's it's it was it was different I saw a side of him that I didn't that I didn't know was there that was his way of dealing with things and now that I'm 52 years old 51 that I that I'd I understand everybody deals with things different. And, you know, I don't hold it against him. It's just his way of dealing with all the stuff that he had been through. Tell me about who you were introduced into high school that actually got you interested in firefighting. Because on the one hand, you're working in this family business.

You got this dad who you love and idolize. We're all dealing with trauma in different ways, and your dad struggles with that. but I think it was someone in high school who kind of introduced. Yeah, one of my teachers, he had, Mr. Ronnie Warren, he was, I think he taught us industrial arts back then, what it was called, and he was teaching us and wind up my high school sweetheart and stuff, you know, we wound up getting married, and we were going to church, and at the First Baptist Church one Sunday, he came up to me, and I worked right there in town, you know, and I'd never really even thought about being

a fire when he came up to me and said, how would you like to join a fire department? And, you know, I didn't think, I said, I don't think nothing about it. But another bloody of mine, Neil Copeland, they talked to him too. And we talked to each other and said, yeah, let's, we'll give it a shot. So we went down there and started training and doing everything. That's how I joined the fire department. He came up to me in the church and asked me to be a volunteer.

Alex, forgive me. I can't remember, but the people up in New York, the volunteer fire people. Wells Crowther? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Have you heard of the man in the red bandana story before? Pat.

Do what now? This guy who saved 12 people inside the World Trade Center, but he was a volunteer firefighter, a 24-year-old kid. Through some of the stories we've told, we've talked to a couple people who've been in volunteer firefighting, and it's almost like you gain a new family. Oh, it is. This volunteer firefighter thing is not just, you know, get a call when you're work, run to the volunteer station, jump on a fire truck, and go.

Way more than that. And something else I've learned, which is interesting, is far more of our firefighters in the United States or volunteer firefighters than are – when you live in a place like Memphis and you have all the fire stations and the fire trucks and the dedicated fire department, who that's their full-time job, you kind of grow into the sense that that's just the way firefighting is. But the truth is, like 70 percent of the nation's firefighters are guys who work in tire storm. And it's changed so much now. We're actually, I'm actually back at the department now, we're putting together a committee trying to get volunteers because volunteers are down nationwide across the board. Nobody has time to do it anymore. And it's so important to communities that small, like Cenotopia and the outline areas that people should be volunteers to help the community. But it's down everywhere from New York to Mississippi.

It's all the way down. It needs to be, because it needs to be brought back. and people do that because it's so much more than just sire thine. It's a big brotherhood. It's going down to the station and training and having a meal with your buddies or one of your buddies breaking down and another stand on vacation and they call you and you go run to him and help him. That's what we need to be with the volunteers.

It needs to be like an organization that it once was again. So you found more than just a way to volunteer your time. Oh, yeah, it was a passion after, in the early stages of it, just the beginning of it. And I realized that I loved it. I did a lot of deer hunting back then, and I worked a lot because I had a wife and baby when I first started. And then shortly thereafter, I had a new wife and I went to three babies. I was working a lot when it was a way to get away from everything else and go down there and hang out with a good group of guys and train and just, you know, like I said, have a meal with them.

go down and drink coffee in the morning and find out what's going on with everybody. And it was just a big fellowship brotherhood. It was awesome. So how's it work? You're at this point, you're running and own an attire store, right? Right. And you got business and customers and everything else. And if at 1.45 or 10 a.m. or 3 in the afternoon, you're working at your business and somebody gives you a call that there's a fire.

You were a little pager, and back then, you know, the tones were off on the radio, and it'd tell you what it was. And I couldn't go all the time because I was working, you know. But 90% of the time, I had some good employees that worked for me so I could leave. And actually one of the guys that worked for me and would run the business when I wasn't there, he is actually a paid fireman now. And he probably getting close to retirement in the next five or six years. But the point is, all of these people all over country that are volunteer firefighter, they have real lives. They give up a lot. at 2 o'clock in the morning, when it's 10 degrees outside, if the tone drops, then they get up and go.

And so in Cenotopia, you're not making just fires. You're making... No, you're making medical calls. You're making rescues. You're making fires. It's so much more than that. And it's, you know, these guys basically get nothing. They get paid nothing, not even for their gas, not even for the time.

And it's people, they're so under-thalued. It's unreal. They have to be well-trained. It's not just, hey, that sounds fun. Give me a call if you need help on a fire. I mean, you guys are. It's so much deeper than that. I mean, it's just like with everybody's homeowners insurance

and the communities around here, if you don't have a good volunteer base or active reserve base, what they want to call it now, then your insurance ratings are going to go up because there's no way that these departments like Senator Tome can handle everything by themselves. They need other help. And even the outline areas in the other.

counties and Tate County, there's four or five other departments there on each end of the county, and they're struggling with volunteers now. They need that help, and, you know, people don't understand. They don't want to help, but when they get their cancellation notice, me, homeowners insurance, because they don't, their fire rating went up to a 10, and most insurance companies won't take it. The reason I know, because that happened to me. And people need, you know, they don't understand that they can make a difference. They can help. And now a few messages from our generous sponsors. But first, I wanted to share an awesome update that in January and February, we're launching the first six local chapters of an army of normal folks.

If you happen to live in one of these communities and you'd be interested in being a part of it, email Alex and he'll connect you to their leaders. The cities are Memphis, Oxford, Mississippi, hottie-toddy, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Wichita. and Clinton, New York. If you'd be interested in leading a local chapter in your community, we'll hopefully be launching more this spring or summer. Please reach out to Alex about that, too. His email, army at normalfolks.us. We'll be right back.

I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltson. My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's, catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed. We have some breaking news to tell you about. Tennessee's attorney general is suing a Nashville doctor. In April 2024, a fertility clinic in Nashville shut down overnight and trapped behind locked doors were more than a thousand frozen embryos. I was terrified. Out of all of our journey, that was the worst moment ever. At that point, it didn't occur to me what fight was

going to come to follow. But this story isn't just about a few families' futures. It's about whether the promise of modern fertility care can be trusted at all. It doesn't matter how much I fight. Doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this. It doesn't matter how much justice we get. None of it's going to get me pregnant. Listen to what happened in Nashville on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page. Google Doc, and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan.

It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person, a billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person?

I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan. Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Malcolm Gladwell here. this season on Revisionous History we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control. 35 years. That's how long

Elizabeth's and its family waited for justice to occur. 35 long years. I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way. And why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make suffering worse?

He would say to himself, turn to the right, to the victim's family, and apologize, turn to the left, tell my family I love him. So he would have this little practice, to the right, I'm sorry, to the left, I love you. From Revisionous History, this is The Alabama Murders. Listen to Revisionous History, The Alabama Murders on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Michael Lewis here. My book, The Big Short, tells the story of the build-up and burst of the U.S. housing market back in 2008.

It follows a few unlikely, but lucky people who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception. It was like feeding the monster, said Eisman. We fed the monster until it blew up. The monster was exploding. Yet on the streets of Manhattan, there was no sign anything important. had just happened. Now, 15 years after the Big Short's original release, and a decade after it became an Academy Award-winning movie, I've recorded an audiobook edition for the very first

time. The Big Short story, what it means when people start betting against the market, and who really pays for an unchecked financial system, is as relevant today as it's ever been, offering invaluable insight into the current economy and also today's politics. Get the Big Short now and push or wherever audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast.

Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adapted strategy

which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it if it's going to be beneficial to you because it's easy to say like go you go blank yourself right it's easy it's easy to just drink the extra beer it's easy to ignore to suppress seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just like walk the other way avoidance is easier ignoring is easier denial is easier drinking is easier yelling screaming is easy complex problem solving meditating, you know, takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So you've got your family, you've got your babies, you've got your thriving business,

you're giving back to your community, you're involved, I think, in your church, you're really living the American dream. And you're a normal guy? I mean, just a normal guy with a family. I mean, I'm sure your business is doing well. I read where you just built a pretty new house and you had a boat. You weren't rich, but you were living a good life. I had a lot of debt. I mean, I was young.

We had just bought a business and I had just bought a new home, my dream home, that I knew that I would die on that hill that I never would have sold it. And then it was just, everything seemed to be lined up. And, you know, at least I thought anyway. And at the end of the day, on September the 5th, when everything fell apart, it all meant nothing. Before we get to that, there's an interesting story about a woman who sat down at your business one day and tried to sell you an insurance policy. Yeah, I mean, she did everything you could to get rid of her.

I did. And finally told her, she wouldn't leave. And I finally told her, I said, look, I'm going to sign a check. It's $12 a month. I was going to sign this check. I'm, you know, just to get rid of her. What was she selling? She was selling accidental insurance, just in case, you know, I had an accident.

And, you know, I never thought it was definitely, I look back now, and she got sent her in there that day. There's no way around it because I had paid $84 on that premium when I got hurt. The point is you're young, you're going. Who thinks about it at 27 years old? Who thinks about getting hurt like that, you know? You know, back then, you know, there wasn't social media. There wasn't all this other stuff.

You were just, basically, we barely had cell phones out for, you know, that many years and different times. So there's your life. That's who you are. That's where you come from. Yeah. You're volunteering in the fire department. You're living the best version of your life. You got your family.

You got your tire store. You got everything. You chase this woman out of your office with a $12 check to leave you alone. You bought the cheapest policy you could buy just to get her shut up. And one day there's a call. Tell us about that day, the morning, everything. Well, that morning, like every other morning, went down to the firehouse.

It was in September, so my business was kind of slow that time of year. Went down and drank coffee, and we had four paid guys working at that time. And I told a couple of them, I said, look, you know, I'll get us out of the house today. We need to do something. Get us, you know, I never wanted anybody to lose a house or something like that. They didn't get us a grass fire or something we could go goof off with. And I went back down there at lunch. I went to Coleman's and had a fish plate for lunch or something like that.

that day, and then I left, and at like 3.30, the tone dropped. We weren't that busy that day, so I jumped into, I mean, I'm two, three blocks away from the station, so I jumped in my truck and went down to the station. And I guess this was on that day that late in the afternoon, some of the other guys were already there. And my ex-brother-in-law was sitting in the front seat of the suburban. And I told him, I said, you get out, you don't need to be going. I made captain by this time, I said, you stay here, and I'll go with him, make sure all these guys are okay. we had two or three young guys on there that just got on the department

and I said I'll just go with them and a chief jumped in the driver's seat and I was in a pasture seat and we had three guys in the back and somebody else would bring the engine to us and we got in the call actually we were in San Antonio we got a call to go to Love which is in DeSota County to have mutual aid because Hernando was on three other house fires at that time

had three other calls at that time so we get in the truck and by this time it takes 15 minutes 20 minutes to get up there We get there, and there, of course, smoke coming out of the roof, and we get our air packs on and go in. We check everything, look at everything. Let me ask something. You say you got your air packs on.

I assume that means you're covered in that tan-looking fire outfit, your helmet, airpack, and you go in. Forget this day for just a second. In general, the vast majority of us have never walked into a burning billy. And very few have been in a burning building and run out of it. What does the inside of a burning building look like? What do you feel and what do you see? You can't see much at all because it was totally full of smoke.

You get down on. Do you have lights on your helmet or something? Yeah, we had red lights on your helmet and stuff, but you still doesn't do good in the smoke. You still can't see. So you just kind of crawl around. And we crawled around every single room looking for anything in there. Well, not that day. Just in general.

Yeah. you know, when you're in a burning structure. So you literally have- How long has been burning? Because it's all going to be different. Because if you get rid of it's just starting to burn, and it hadn't filled up smoke yet. And if they hadn't closed the windows in it yet,

it's all different. If the windows are open, it's going to breathe more and put up more smoke and more heat. It's just everyone, every, every, there's no situation that's going to be the exact same. But getting on your hands and knees and crawling around, you're trying to get below the smoke. You can at least see a little.

Yeah, you can see better below you get. Do you fly. They usually cover the roof. Depending on what the fire started at. They usually run up the wall and hit the roof and run across the roof because there's nothing in the middle of the room for them to run on. So oftentimes you know the fire's above you, but you see smoke, but you don't necessarily see flames in the walls yet. Yeah. Depends on how much oxygen is getting.

But they are. They're just all different. Yeah. And you just have to understand the nature of fire. Yeah. Are you dragging a line with you? We did. We had a line.

The first time we went in and we, so that's how we followed. it back out so you guys get on your packs you go on the house on the house look at it and look in every room and nothing was in there so we came back out of the house and there was a car in the driveway but and there was a guy that came running up to us and he jumping up and down just my wife's in the house she's in the house I said she's not in the house we checked every room and she's not in the house he said I'm telling you her car is here she's in the house so against my better judgment And I told the guys to change my air back out. And me and Matt went back in the house.

And we couldn't get in the way we went because it was really, really burning. How long had the house been burning by now? No idea. Probably 40 minutes this time. So it's hot. I mean, it's burning. It's burning. So two guys went in the garage door, and we go in the window on the north end of the house.

They didn't know we were in there. So we go in trying to find the lady, which she wasn't there. I was right the first time. And when we got in there to that bedroom in there, it's when everything basically kind of fell apart. It was, I could see the fire rolling above us, and we were staying below it, and then all of a sudden the two guys were in there,

they didn't know we were out. And I didn't even know this until they wrote the book because nobody ever told me, which it doesn't make any difference. It was still me. I went in the house on my own. Nobody thought my own. But I never knew that they were pushing the fire toward us.

and until a buddy of mine with water yeah so they were on the other in the house pushing it out putting it out but it was pushing and y'all are literally walking into it

or falling into it we didn't know that yeah you could see flames kind of boiling in the ceiling above you yeah and we were under those but it and we didn't know this either that this was a trailer house

that somebody had built a other house over so you didn't even know the structure we didn't know it had two roof lines in it So it was burning in between the roof lines, and then when it got so heavy with all the water that pushed in, the roof collapsed. And when the roof collapsed, I was at the wrong place

at the wrong time. And I could see, because when it did, I had to stand up because it was on top of me. And I could see my helmet melting. And I just had to grab the shingles. Oh, whoa, whoa. You could see the helmet on your head melting. Yeah, I could see it just dripping.

And the shingles off the roof were on me. It was really hot, so I had to just, I couldn't see nothing. I couldn't, you know, all I did, I said, hold my breath to get out to that window. I could see a window, and I held my breath and got the stuff off of me to get to the window, and I just threw my body out the window, and then they dragged me out of the house. Where was the guy you were with? He was behind me, but I don't know. I guess when the roof fell on me, it separated us, and he panicked.

He, what? He panicked. And ran? Yeah, and it's not his fault. I mean, nobody else was they had done in that situation. When you were in there and the flames were above you, were you afraid? Did you sense? I've done it a thousand times.

Really? I mean, every time you go into a burning building, it's going to be burning around you. I never was scared of stuff like that and still not scared of it. I mean, it is what it is. I could go back to the firefighting day if they would let me.

I don't know. Maybe you get used to it, but I think anybody lists me and anybody listen to this would think that's frightening as hell. Well, anybody that's a science writer, they're going to face that for sure. I mean, that's what you're doing.

And things are so different. now. You know, back then we didn't have thermal imaging cameras. If we'd had cameras back then, thermal imaging, I'd never had to go in the house because we could look through everything and saw she wasn't in there. You know, there's so much more technology today than it was in 2001 when I got hurt. And you weren't in there to put the fire out. You literally were concerned. There was a woman laying on the ground. That was all. And I looked back now and think, man, it was so stupid because if she'd have been in there, she wouldn't have been alive because it'd been burning so long. Nobody can withstand all that smoke and all that heat.

I should have stuck to my guns. If I had it do over, of course, I'd change things and do it different. But at the end of the day, what if I'd have been wrong? What should have been in there? I could have saved. So when you get out the window, I assume, and gosh, I don't want to be... No, I mean, I'm fully burning this town. I mean, my turnouts are burning. Your what? My turnouts are on fire. Your turnouts are on your gear. Your gear. You're literally on fire. I'm literally burning. And they laid me down on the ground and just wet me down. Just, you know, put water all over me and I'll get down.

And buddy and my man, he lays down. And I just told him, I was, look, man, you make sure my wife gets take care of. That's all the wound. You thought you were done? Yeah. Well, I mean, I didn't know how bad it was, for sure. None of us knew how bad it was. Because, you know, your body keeps burning like two weeks after the fire.

What? By the time your skin and stuff steadily burning for up to two weeks after the initial burn. it's I guess just the way your skin is dying off and you have to go through once you get in the hospital you have to go through all this for two weeks you're getting like they call it debrading where you go in there and they take a wire brush and kind of scrub you down

and get all the dead skin off of you. So you thought you were dead? Well I didn't think I never thought I was going to die I mean I just didn't realize how bad it was I never thought I was going to die like that even with all of it I never thought I was going to die I mean, it's, you know, at the end of the day, the idea that's just what it is.

We'll be right back. I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltson. My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed. We have some breaking news to tell you about. Tennessee's Attorney General is suing a Nashville doctor. In April 2024, a fertility clinic in Nashville shut down overnight and trapped behind locked doors were more than a thousand frozen embryos.

I was terrified. Out of all of our journey, that was the worst moment ever. At that point, it didn't occur to me what fight was going to come to follow. But this story isn't just about a few families' futures. It's about whether the promise of modern fertility care, can be trusted at all. It doesn't matter how much I fight. Doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this.

It doesn't matter how much justice we get. None of it's going to get me pregnant. Listen to what happened in Nashville on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link.

Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff.

I decided to create Kyle, my AI co-founder, after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Aldman. There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one-person, a billion-dollar company, which would have been like unimaginable without AI and now will happen. I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award-winning podcast, Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people. Oh, hey, Evan.

Good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses. Listen to Shell Game on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionous History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama. where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control. 35 years. That's how long Elizabeth's and its family waited for justice to occur. 35 long years.

I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way, and why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make suffering worse. He would say to himself, turn to the right to the victim's family and apologize, turn to the left, tell my family I love him. So he would have this little practice, to the right, I'm sorry, to the left, I love you. From Revisionous History, this is The Alabama Murders.

Listen to Revisionist History, The Alabama Murders on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Michael Lewis here. My book, The Big Short, tells the story of the buildup and births of the U.S. housing market back in 2008. It follows a few unlikely, but lucky people who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become

and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception. It was like feeding the monster, said Eisman. We fed the monster until it blew up. The monster was exploding. Yet on the streets of Manhattan, there was no sign anything important had just happened. Now, 15 years after the Big Short's original release,

and a decade after it became, an Academy Award-winning movie, I've recorded an audiobook edition for the very first time. The Big Short Story, what it means when people start betting against the market, and who really pays for an unchecked financial system, it is as relevant today as it's ever been, offering invaluable insight into the current economy and also today's politics. Get the Big Short now at Pushkin.fm. slash audiobooks, or wherever audiobooks are sold.

I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about exploring human potential. I was going to schools to try to teach kids these skills, and I get eye rolling from teachers or I get students who would be like, it's easier to punch someone in the face. When you think about emotion regulation, like you're not going to choose an adapted strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome as a result of it, if it's going to be beneficial to you. Because it's easy to say, like, go blank yourself, right?

It's easy. It's easy to just drink the extra beer. It's easy to ignore, to suppress, seeing a colleague who's bothering you and just, like, walk the other way. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials is easier. Drinking is easier. Yelling, screaming is easy.

Complex problem solving, meditating, you know, takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, so I assume you go to the burn unit. Yeah, I'm on the ground, and they can't land the helicopter there. So they put me in the ambulance, drive me down the road, a little piece. And I get in the helicopter, and I'm in the helicopter, and I'm still alert. I'm talking. I was wondering if you ever lost consciousness.

Never lost consciousness. And one of the nurses on the helicopter, Paula, she was talking to him in. And she, which I didn't know her then, but over the years I got to know her. And she was talking to me, asking me about my kids, you know, and I had three kids, and she asked me about their birthdays, and I told her. And she said, I'm writing these down because there ain't no way this is right. There's no way he can be telling us all this stuff. He's talking out of his head.

And it made me something mad. I said, what? I know my kid's names and birthdays. And they were going to intubate me in the helicopter. And I told them, I said, look, you can't do that. I ate lunch late today. If you do that, I'm going to throw up all over this helicopter. We're all packed in here as it is because there's three of us in there.

And she said, okay, we'll wait to get to the med to intubate. And we get ready to we start landing. For everybody, listen, the med is the level one trauma center in the mid-south. So we get ready to land at the regional one. And she told him, she said, all right, there's going to be a lot of people doing a lot of things as soon as we land. And I said, okay. And I mean, as soon as we land, they open that door. and it looked like a tube, six inches around.

They ram it down my throat and all of a sudden here come lunch. It's everywhere. You tried to tell them. I told them. It was everywhere. And then I was out. I mean, I was in and out of it after that.

Were you in pain? I don't remember. I mean, I'm sure it was, but by this time they had pumped me full of morphine and everything else. So I don't remember about the pain because they give you different medications to make you forget about a lot of stuff.

When you look back, on the now, is it nightmares to you? When I was in the hospital, I had a lot of nightmares because when I got to the med, once I got in there, everything was either swollen or they bandaged me all up, so I couldn't see anything. I was in a strange place with a bunch of strange people. All I knew was voices. I didn't know anybody's face. I couldn't see.

I didn't know what the building looked like. I didn't know, you know, a lot of different things. I didn't, I couldn't tell what it was. You know, I could tell when people came to visit me and they would talk to me, I could tell by that voice who they were, but I couldn't see them. They bandaged over your eyes? Yeah, they bandaged my whole head. Everything burned off.

Eye lids and all. They had to do that to protect my eyes. I was in there 63 days, you know, doing all these surgeries. They put this stuff called Integral, which is like a short cartilage. After all the debreeding and all the other stuff, they started, they put that base down. And then when it turned like a peachy color, that's when you know it. taken to your skin and then they go in and do the skin grass they take the skin on my thighs and put it on my head and that's of course skin is like a piece of

gum you stretch a piece of gum out on the table it's going to shrink back up the skin same way it was shrink back up so they'd have to go in cut it redo it redo it redo it and that's why there was so many surgeries because I went from me and a normal dad coming home to my kids every day to in the hospital I got to come home after 63 days. I was home for about two weeks. That's when the surgery started. Every two weeks, three weeks, I was in the hospital. Come home, two, three weeks back in the hospital. That was my new life. Did you ever want to give up? Of course. It would have been easy. Well, that would have been easy.

I mean, it's quitting. This is the easy part. But my kids, I couldn't. When did you get to see your kids first time? They came to the hospital. Two of them did. My oldest daughter didn't come. But Dalton, my son, and my youngest daughter came, and they came to see me at the hospital, and Dalton jumped up in my lap. He never said to him a vet, but my daughter, she wouldn't have him to do them. She was scared to death. And even when I came home, she was scared of that.

She had to go stay at her grandmother's house because she couldn't sleep. She'd scream. I don't think you guys have described yet. Like, how did your face look like at the time? And then, I mean, Chrissy's reaction, which you saw you initially. I don't, I never, I couldn't tell because I couldn't see her reaction. But she made a comment that that's not you, right? Yeah, well, she did to the doctors and stuff, but I don't remember it.

She wrote that in the book. What's going on between your ears at this time? I don't remember. You really don't? I really don't. I mean, it was just trying to stay alive and get through each day. That's all you do. No matter what you're facing, everybody does that.

I mean, I'm sitting here listening to tell the story. You're a straight shooter, you can tell. Of course. I mean, they don't need a shirt, well, you say, of course, but I sit across from a lot of people and some people shape things and some people are just very straight and you're just very straight. And I appreciate that.

Some people don't like it. Some people do. But also my heartbreaks for you. Oh, it was terrible. I mean, you're saying it very matter-of-factly and very straightforwardly, and while I appreciate that courage and toughness, I also don't want it lost that your life was shattered.

Oh, it was terrible. It was, like I said, It was every day getting up and facing that day. You didn't plan for tomorrow. It was every day there was going to be something I had to do to get through that day. One day at a time. I tell you one day at a time, that's what it was. One day at a time.

That was it. You never knew what it was going to bring. But once I could get to talk to people like the kids on my son's baseball team, I got to coach it. And there were some kids that just couldn't handle it. They would run away. But most of the kids, they got to know me as coach Pat. And that was all it was.

Once I could talk to them, they looked past all the scars and everything, and it was okay. And that's just what you had to do. You had to get through each day the best you could. Just so everybody can follow along to you, had lost your ears, your lips, your eyes, your nose, your eyebrows. Everything, everything had burned off, and they were in the process of rebuilding it. And they could have never given me what I wanted, and the doctors knew that. They were just trying to get me to a point to look better. The med, Dr. Wallace and Dr. Fleming and Dr. Hickerson and all of them, they were the best in the business around here.

I'll tell anybody, if you get in the burn, that group right there would, that's the best of the best. But they couldn't just, they couldn't get me what I wanted. It was not, it wasn't possible. Which was your face back. To be clear, literally your body was burnt up. I mean, it was like 93% of your body or something. No, I just got run from the neck up. I mean, the rest of my body was covered.

I mean, so... Well, I thought your gear was on fire. It was, but it protected you. Yeah, they got me out. But it was your neck up. Yeah, it had a spot. It burned through my gear on my back. I got a big patch on my back, but it healed on its own.

They didn't have to have surgery, but it burned through pretty good. All right, so surgeries after surgeries have surgeries, but you got a business. Oh, well, this time, it didn't matter. I mean, I had, and I had to sell my house that we just bought, I had to sell it. My dad went back to the business, but this time he is heavily alcoholic, and he went back up there and tried to run it, but it wasn't any way. It was, we had to shut it down. Clothes, he actually wound up selling it to a friend of mine.

This was in, I guess, 2003, maybe, 2002 or three that he had sold it. So that insurance policy you bought helped? It helped the first few years when I was in the hospital a lot. You know, the next several years, I could have more outpatient surgeries because I was so sick of hospitals. It wasn't even about the money. I just wanted to go be at home. Actually, I went back to work in the fall of 2004, and business was great, but by this time, you know, I'm very dependent on pain pills. I was, I would use those to get through each day where it wasn't, I wouldn't care what people thought. I wouldn't care what people said I could take a handful of pain pills

and just, it would brush off the edge, so I didn't care. And back at work in the first year, you know, we did over $1 million in business. I was like, man, this is great. This is great. And in 2005, we had another good, a decent year. It wasn't as good as the first one. So in 2005, we started building a new house. We were going to build it to sell.

So I'd put every, all my money that we had. I put everything into that house. And it appraised for about $500,000 back then. And it was, you know, I'd only owed like $2.20 on it. Payments were like $3,000 a month. And business is starting to get slow. and I'm spending money on paying pills and trying to get kids in private school and vehicles

because I'd lost everything. I'd have to start building back. So I'm just going to lose everything again because I couldn't pay for it this time. Lost everything again. Wined up the house, even with all that equity in it, it didn't sell because that's when we're in the 2006 and 7 where the market crisis.

The house of crisis. So nobody bought the house and it got bad. And that's when I really had to start. I had to, uh, it was, it was bad because I had, this time I had lost everything. My family had moved out, when we moved out of the house at the country club, or at Bradley Wood, my family had moved in with their, my wife's mother, and I moved them with my, my dad and mother, and that's as hard as it was anyway, for us breaking up like that.

And then my dad's an alcoholic, and I'm a pain pill head, so they, they didn't work out good. By this time, the money's gone in 2008, I'm at my eye doctor's appointment, and And he's writing prescriptions out for something, and I said prescription pads. He walked out of the room, I picked it up. How stupid that was of me. I looked back, and I just didn't. And so I started writing my own prescriptions, and we know how that ended. That was terrible.

It's funny. I got caught doing that, and they sent me to rehab, and I stayed there, and got back, and after about a 30-day jail stay. And then to rehab for another 30 days, I had a lot to fix, so my head's clear at this time. And I started having more surgeries, so I'm back taking medicine again. I had to because I did two or three surgeries with nothing, and it was just pain was unbearable. I couldn't take it. So they sent me to a psychiatrist.

This is the third psychiatrist I've seen, and he's a doctor here in Memphis. He was. He probably did. By now, he was old then. but he medicated me something crazy he wasn't a good doctor he actually went to prison

for overprescribing medication to patients and stuff in 2009 or 10 I had gone to see him for the last time and he had me all messed up so I went to my eye doctor we had had more I had more surgeries

and my vision was like 2200 couldn't drive anymore depending on my mother for everything and went to my eye doctor He told me, said, Pat, there's just not much more we can do. You don't have eyelids that blink, and your eyes are open all the time, so they dry out, and you're going to go blind if we can't figure out something. My neighbor, Claymore, he was with me that day, and he said, he drove me to the doctor,

and he had talked to Dr. Sliming, and he said, you know, what do you think about a face transplant? Dr. Fleming said, I don't know much about that. It's all still too new right now. So we had left, and I had to come back to Dr. Fleming, and I asked him again, I said, I'm a serious thing about this face transplant. He said, man, he said, I'm not sold on a bed. He said, I just don't know. And that concludes part one of our conversation with Pat Hardison.

And you don't want to miss part two. It's now available to listen to. Together, guys, we can change this country. But it'll start with you. I'll see you in part two. I'm investigative journalist Melissa Jeltson. My new podcast, What Happened in Nashville, tells the story of an IVF clinic's catastrophic collapse and the patients who banded together in the chaos that followed.

It doesn't matter how much I fight. It doesn't matter how much I cry over all of this. It doesn't matter how much justice we get. None of it's going to get me pregnant. Listen to what happened in. Asheville on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page

business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by Figures. people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Michael Lewis here. My bestselling book, The Big Short, tells the story of the buildup and burst of the U.S. housing market back in 2008. A decade ago, the Big Short was made into an Academy Award-winning movie, and now I'm bringing it to you for the first time as an audiobook

narrated by Yours Truly. The Big Short's story, what it means to bet against the market, and who really pays for an unchecked financial system. It's as relevant today as it's ever been. Get the big short now at Pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Greatness doesn't just show up. It's built. One shot, one choice, one moment at a time.

From NBA champion, Stefan Curry, comes shot ready, a powerful never-before-seen look at the mindset that changed the game. I fell in love with the grind. You have to find. I enjoy in the work you do when no one else is around. Success is not an accident. I'm passing the ball to you. Let's go.

Steph Curry redefined basketball. Now he's rewriting what it means to succeed. Shot Ready isn't just a memoir. It's a playbook for anyone chasing their potential. Discover stories, strategies, and over 100 never-before-seen photos. Order Shot Ready. Now at stephen Currybook.com. Don't miss Stephen Curry's New York Times bestseller Shot Ready, available now.

Malcolm Gladwell here this season on Revisionous History we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control and he said, I've been in prison 24, 25 years that's probably not long enough

and I didn't kill him. From Revisionous History, this is the Alabama murders. Listen to Revisionous History, The Alabama Murders on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.