An Army of Normal Folks - What Your Brain Does With Trauma—And How to Finally Heal It (Pt 2)

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

Dan Jarvis came home from Afghanistan carrying wounds that didn't show up on any medical chart. In this episode, he breaks down what trauma actually does to the brain - why it hijacks your responses, why willpower alone can't fix it, and how understanding the neuroscience behind your pain is the first step to healing it. Dan built Healing the Hero, a nonprofit that has helped over 18,000 people reclaim their lives! This is a conversation about what it really takes to heal—for both veterans and civilians. It might just help you or someone you love.  Learn more about Healing the Hero hereSupport the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/#joinSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Everybody, it's Bill Courtney with an Army of Normal folks, and we continue now with part two of our conversation with Dan Jarvis right after these brief messages from our general sponsors. You end up with weekend gold tickets to Lassau Montreal. Thomas Rhett Mumford and Sons Well, here's my pride and here's my shame. John Party, Old Dominion, Carly Pierce, and more. And the prize gets even sweeter. With flights from Porter Airlines, three nights at Residence Inn downtown Montreal, and $1,000 cash.

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From Futuro Studios, I'm Fernanda Chavari, and this is American Football, a show about soccer culture in the U.S. and its underdog roots. We go beyond the game to the people and the stories that make it great. A soccer game is a festival. It's not just a game. It's your culture. I took an elbow to my head, which cracked my skull. It is an American game. The Brazilians don't like hearing that, though. Are they the only ones that don't like that? Nobody likes that.

As we get ready for the Men's World Cup this summer, listen to American Football as part of the My Coutura Podcast Network, available on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby. Okay, if you know me, you know this. I'm always searching for inspiration, for support. and useful tools to help maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together.

We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer. And that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartner depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Olympic champ Sean Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast. There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me.

It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us. We just have to find it. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Keith Geomanka seemed like a mild-mannered suburban dad. But secretly, he became someone else, a master of. disguise who went on a crime spree. At the time, did it seem like a crazy idea? It seemed very crazy, but I felt so desperate that I felt it was the quickest, easiest way out. Did you allow yourself to think about how it could go wrong on what that might look like? No, I didn't want to

manifest that. I was trying to manifest success. Every family has its secrets. But what happens when you discover that your dad has been living a double life. That is not the look of an innocent man. This is going to change my life and my family dynamic forever because everything that had existed prior in my reality is now untrue. Listen to Deep Cover the Family Man on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Alec Baldwin this season on my podcast.

Here's the thing I'm speaking with more artists, policymakers, and performers like composer Mark Schaman. Once you've established that you have the talent, it's about the hang. It's the pleasure of hanging out with the people that you're with. You know, Rob and I was always a great hang. We would sit in kibbets for hours and then eventually get around to the music. That's what I mostly think of when I think of him, the time together laughing. Lawyer of Robbie Kaplan. The great gift of being a lawyer is the ability to actually change.

things in our society in a way that very few people can. You can really make a difference to causes in the United States if you bring the right case at the right time. Marriage equality. Yeah, Windsor's the perfect example. Director Morgan Neville. Film School teaches you all the wrong things about making documentary. What do you want to say?

Documentary is all about your ear. What do you hear? I feel like my job is listening really, really hard. Listen to Here's the Thing on the IHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Podcasts. That's heartbreaking to me. Well, I was in a position where I didn't know what to do.

Like, do I self-refer to mental health? I mean, you're drinking. I'm drinking just to calm my, just so I can sleep. Which explains alcoholism and a number of us. Yes. They're self-medicating. Right. When they go into limping hijack, the nervous system is pegged.

So think of an engine and a thousand RPM's at idols, and then you hit the gas pedal. and you're up to 7,500 RPMs. An engine can't last long there. And people are the same way. So that engine, the brain, opens up the entire nervous system, and it's just you go through these cycles up. And usually it's like 90-second waves, and it just keeps going and keeps going.

But those nine- How often do you feel that in a day? It depends. Depends on the intensity. If you can keep your brain occupied, you know, you can do okay. It almost sounds like a guy getting off the mouth. I know that sounds weird. No, but seriously, I've interviewed.

And I have a friend. Actually, I was talking with that friend this weekend. And I asked him how he's dealing with his demon. And he's been clean for three years. And he's like, I still think about it some. And he said, but you know what? As long as I stay working or as long as I stay busy, I never feel it. It's when I get downtime or boredom, it comes back.

And I am in no way comparing. are veterans to folks that have a drug addiction. What I'm saying is I kind of get what they're saying about as long as they keep their brain active, they don't go through one of those triggering things. And I guess if your brain is hijacked, as long as you're staying busy working or maybe still active in the military in theater,

it doesn't happen as much. It's when you don't keep your mind. mind occupied that the hijacking takes over. And is it right? No, it's, you're 100% on target. So like a lot of us, when we come back from combat theater, we have a hard adjustment because the brain is hardwired for the fight or flight. So like if you have a...

It has become hardwired as a result of the environment and the experience. Constant. So what ends up happening is when your brain is in survival mode, because every day you're in in combat and combat actions are happening. Troop ticks, troops in contact are going on. IEDs are going off. Indirect fires coming in. Your brain is in a heightened fight or flight response.

And I'll give you a prime example. At all times. At all times. So they say that 100% of the guys, when they come back for more, would be diagnosable PTSD, right? Because they're still in the fight or flight. And then over time, the brain reprocesses things out. But here's the way that that part of the brain is supposed to work.

And I'll give you the first time we took contact in Afghanistan. stand. We're having a leadership meeting in our platoon leader and platoon sergeant's area. And I heard this in the distance. And I looked at everybody and I said, we're about to take contact. And they're all looking at me like, what? I said, we're about to take contact. And then about 10, 15 seconds later, rounds blew up about 20 meters from we were. We took our first casualties. And then afterwards, those guys were, how did you, how did you know that was going to happen? I said, because the heron the back of my neck stood up when I heard the thump. Because...

Is the thump, the munition leaving whatever tube it's in? It's the poo, the point of origin. Okay. And the way I say that is because in 2007, when I'm in Iraq, I'm a sergeant of the guard. We're getting relieved by the 10th Mountain guys. And I heard a thump in the distance. And I went on the radio. I said, did anybody hear that?

And he goes, yeah, it came from the south. And then about 15 seconds later, a hundred and 22-millimeter artillery round detonated on top of the Hess. scale barrier, which was only about 15 feet for me. And basically, that was one of my first big concussions. So that thump in 07 activated the nervous system in 2011. Wow. That's what the brain is supposed to do. It's like the alarm went off, right? That's the context that alarm's supposed to go off. Not when we're back home and we hear the fireworks on

the 4th of July. We hear the fireworks on the 4th of July. That alarm goes off and that's what triggers a lot of your vets. It's funny because if you go down, like in Memphis, we have our big Fourth of July thing on the river. Right. But I'm not talking about yard 4th of July. I'm talking about the big fireworks show. If you pay attention, before the big explosion in the sky, you hear that, boom,

and shooting those things up in the air. And that's exactly what you're talking about. But if you're at the river and you hear that thump, you're immediately going to go to. If you're a vet with PTSD, you're immediately going to go back. to Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria or wherever you heard of that the first time. And then the nervous system will open back up. Now, a lot of us are just like, okay, we're safe. We know that.

But in the moment a person that's struggling with PTSD, their brain doesn't tell them, hey, this is not, they think it's real and they think it's happening. And then their nervous system reacts. That's what they call like the flashback moment where all of a sudden you're diving for cover because you hear that thump and you think indirect fire is coming in. And then you realize, okay, I'm here, I'm safe. Right. But your nervous system is still going.

So you got that going on. Your brain's hijacked. You're feeling all kinds of guilt. Yeah. First, thank God you didn't. Right. What happened as you're thinking about lights out? So I think what it came down to was I'm like, do I ask for help?

This is my self-talk before. Do I ask for help? Or I'm like, man, if my commander finds out, They're going to put me in the barracks. They're going to take my guns away. My men aren't going to respect me. That's the language that's going on. And I'm like, well, do I call EAP?

Like an employee assistance program outside of the military. And I'm like, no, they're still going to let the commanders are still going to find out that I'm getting treatment. So that's why suicide became the better option. Right. And that's ridiculous. It should not be that way. And so you would rather kill yourself than lose face and standing with your. unit and your commander.

Correct. Man. But that's the problem with a lot of us. Is there that big a stigma over it in the military? Yeah. There is. That's a real thing. I think they're starting to be a little bit more open-minded to it.

Because if you really go into the numbers of suicides of active duty forces, the highest numbers is in the special operations community. So it's obviously got nothing to do with psychological weakness. But that's the dialogue that we tell ourselves. No, because you don't get into special forces unless you're a high- high speed anyway. Right. And you're, and they're evaluated from a psychological perspective before they even get there. Right. And so if they're having that problem, you know, what's what, it's not a weakness thing, right? But we all look at it as it's a weakness. At least that was a dialogue that I, because I would make

fun of those guys beforehand. And you're one of them. And now all of a sudden, I'm, wait a minute, I'm, I'm, I'm, I was a drill sergeant between two combat tours. I had already been a police officer. Why am I having these problems? I'm tougher than this. and thank God it was the kids in the apartment above me that ran across my ceiling when I was at the moment and I'm like okay that's a horrible idea because that that that rifle round will go right through that floor I didn't want to hurt a kid I mean I'm literally playing this out of my mind I'm like man I was stupid so I passed out went to sleep that same night because you're drunk yeah I passed out because you're self-medicating because I'm self-medicating right that's how I would sleep if I didn't if I didn't drink I wasn't sleeping and Does the drinking turn off the hijacking? Yes. It numbs it. Well, it's a central nervous system depressant.

Well, that makes complete sense. Of course, alcohol is. When the anxiety goes up, which is, PTS is the highest form of anxiety. When it goes up, alcohol will quiet it back down. It'll numb it out. You won't feel it for a while, right? And that's a sense of normal. It becomes a sense of normalcy.

But the problem is you end up being depressed because you're not processing. And because it's alcohol. And because it's an opal. It's a depressive. It's a depressive. Which exacerbates it actually once you sober up. Yeah, it makes it worse. God, what a spiral.

Yeah, it's a horrible spiral. And that's part of the problem is trying to identify that, right? So the next morning after that with the kids above me in the apartment, I get my phone rings, probably about 8 o'clock. I think it was a Saturday morning. And Ryan was one of my soldiers. He goes, hey, Sergeant Jarvis, did you hear about Corey? That's a word.

when everybody, if you're in the military and somebody says that, they're either dead or injured. Did you hear about everything behind that? And I'm like, nobody, what happened? He said, Corey shot and killed himself last night. So Corey was a 20, I think he was 21 or 22-year-old soldier from the platoon I had just come from. So I went from a line unit, you know,

probable company, one of the platoons, up to headquarters because I got put on the desk, which was what's, that's what caused me to spiral because I had time to think. Because now you're out. Now I'm out of the action and I'm behind a desk and I'm thinking. And Corey, he killed himself up the same night that I was considering it. Wow. So I couldn't imagine, you know, and I do say this.

Corey saved my life. Unfortunately, it's when he took his own. So doing the memorial service, preparing, you know, to do the send-off, let guys get closure. When I saw how it affected the guys, I realized, okay, I cannot go out this way. I cannot give permission to my men to do this. And I just continued to drink and solve Medicaid. Because now the fear of letting your men down was greater than the other fear. The fear was not letting them down, but giving them permission.

Oh, oh. Yeah, I didn't want a green light one of those guys to do the same thing. Because you knew they were all struggling. They're all struggling. One of the thing we didn't name, I think Nils Jorgensen said this well, too. Obviously, you want to say face with your men and with your commander, but also, Nils put it like, he dealt with a lot of the same things after 9-11. He was FDNY, and he said, and they actually took him out of the FDNY once he got cancer.

So he lost his career. And he said, they took away my priesthood. Yeah. So it's like you're taking away everything, like your entire identity, if they, you know, kick you out or you're losing your position because of it, too. For sure. I mean, I got another question to get to, but I'm just going to say this. I just have such deep empathy for a person who chooses to serve their country

and honor relationship with brothers and arms and risk their lives for one another to end up in an apartment drunk contemplating suicide because that's the work. It's horrible. It's a story you hear regularly. And that's the problem is your story is, I mean, it feels very personal sitting across from you hearing it, but the very truth then is, it is not uncommon. It's very common, you know. Which leads me to what are the numbers 22 and zero mean? So 22 was originally the accepted numbers of suicides per day by bets.

per day. Per day. We're losing more veterans for suicide. I did the, when I read that, I looked it up. That's more than we lost in theater per day. Totally. We're losing more men at home than we did fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. 100%.

That's nuts. Well, it's a system that we have, right? So the VA came back and they tried to revamp those numbers. I think they claim it 17 and a half. Oh, well, that's so much better. So much better, right? Because they forgot to add Texas and California in those numbers, which... The two biggest states.

Right. Which I'm pretty sure it would go the other direction. But what does zero mean? The goal is to not have any suicides. The goal is zero. You know, because even in the first responder world, we lose more cops to suicide than line of duty deaths. Same thing with firefighters. And it's just trauma, right?

Not knowing how to handle the nervous system. It's that whole... amygula being hijacked. Right. Think about it this way. And the way I explained it to people, have you ever felt like you were so scared that you thought you were going to die?

Yeah, I almost drowned once. And yes, I do know that thing. Legitimate feeling. Now imagine it's every day, every hour, every minute. That's the problem is the nervous system gets so overstimulated, and it dumps chemicals into your bloodstream, your cortisol, your adrenaline,

you guys are ending up with adrenal fatigue, they're just exhausted. They can't rest. They can't recover. A lot of them numb things out. So when you numb things out, you can't even feel the good feelings. And that becomes your normal.

And that becomes what these men and women don't want to deal with. I actually have had the drowning thing happened about 10 years ago, but I actually have had not too long ago. Recently, it's so weird that you asked that question of me because I have had, I've woken up with a sense of dread

because I dreamed I had a dream, a recollection dream, I don't know what the words are, of that moment. And it's scary. And I'm just thinking about that one little time. I wouldn't be an attack to think of that going on. But it's still a life or death moment. But it is.

But you're saying, that's happening petually. Perpetually. Every hour, every day. Every hour, every day. Depends on how intense the symptoms are. Some people that it's, some people, every hour, every day once a week. Some people, it's three times a week.

Some people, it's every single day. So when you get to that point where your stress loads and your nervous system is just going and it's firing and it's firing. And all those chemicals, you know, I use a metaphor of a box of crayons, right? I tell my Marines, this has got nothing to do with you guys. There's a Marine out there. I'm not talking about you. Guys, we have an eight pack of crayons. We know what our emotions are.

We have eight of them that we're pretty comfortable with. The ladies out there, they got a 16 pack. And we're like, what the heck is that emotion that you're dealing with? My wife's got the 54 pack. But then we throw in the 64 pack. Yeah, the 64 pack. Which is trauma, and we don't understand what future looks like. You don't understand what future?

Fuchsia, the color fuchsia. All of those emotions compiled. Because what will happen is your body will dump them all in the system at the same time. good emotions, bad emotions, and different emotions, and it overwhelms the nervous system. That's the feeling of overwhelm that you just don't know how to process. What is this? And it goes in those cycles that waves of 90 seconds, and that 90 seconds feels like an eternity. Because what happens when you go into that limbic hijack, think of your brain requiring resources, right?

It needs survival mode needs resources. So what's the first thing that gets shut off? Prefrontal cortex, logic brain, thinking brain. and get shut down. That's also where our empathy centers are. So you're losing empathy. So you lose the empathy for anybody in your world, right? Not intentionally.

That's just that part of the brain turns off. So when you get into that emotional overwhelm, you lose empathy, you lose logic, you lose decision making, you lose impulse control because that's also prefrontal cortex. And that's when guys do it, right? Not realizing because they're out of that frontal part of the brain. They're in the back of the brain.

Can that also manifest itself instead of in suicide, can it manifest itself in screaming to a spouse or children or even getting into fights and abuse and all of that? Same stuff? 100% the same thing. So when a person gets into a triggered state, right, they lose that prefrontal cortex, they lose empathy. And I always talk to groups of vets, and I'll ask him, all right, who in this room has said something to the person they love and care about the most?

And five minutes later, we're like, oh, my God, I can't believe I said that. Everybody's hands goes up because they'd love. the brain resources shut off that front part of the brain. And then all of a sudden, they're saying something in anger, not realizing because they can't connect to that person. And you're saying scientifically at that moment, they literally cannot control it. Correct. Until that limbic releases, until they come out of that, and the empathy can start coming back. It's what's getting our law enforcement in trouble, right?

I was just about to say, do cop, is this why cops, an otherwise normal nice guy ends up beating the out of somebody from, for 20 seconds. Because he's in a limbic hijack, the amygdala is taking over and the logic, impulse is gone and the empathy is gone. So you can see law enforcement officers getting in trouble all over the place, and there's people that go around, that's their whole job. They want to get cops triggered and let them do something so they can sue the department, right? So we had a-

And there's also, to be clear, there's also some just bad human beings that are cops, but those are very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very infinitesimal percentage. Right. What are the ones that I'm talking about are the ones that lose control that you would never expect that to happen to. And it happens.

It happens. And a career can be over in a second. A life can be over in a second. You know, a lot of those folks get into those limbic hijacks. There was a sergeant down to Sunrise, Florida, and there was a young black male. He was in custody.

Hands cup, but he was just running his gator, right? He's in the back of a patrol car, and he's not going anywhere. Let him run their gaiters, right? and this sergeant arrives on scene. Everybody's body cans are out. And he goes into the back of the patrol car. He's got his pepper spray out,

and he's M-Fing this kid. And a female police officer reaches to his duty belt because what they train him do to de-escalate, it pulls him away. So what does he do in that moment? He's enraged, right? He turns to her and puts his hands on her throat and starts pushing her back and M-Fing her.

He was in the hijack, right? Now all of a sudden, sudden, he's a convicted felon because he ended up getting arrested and charged with battery and a law enforcement officer because that's what he did, right? All because the limbic system overactivated from something that was probably 20 years prior. So think of it in the terms of, because I work law enforcement too, so I'm deeply passionate about trying to shift some of the culture in law enforcement because I've seen guys overreact on the job, right?

I've probably overreacted plenty of times on the job. job. But a lot of them are losing it, and they're losing their careers over it. Or they're losing their lives over. We'll be right back. Listen. And you're there. For heart-wrenching knockouts.

Breath-taking triumph. 2026 FIFA World Cup. The knockout stage. Every match. Every moment. Listen on TSN Radio. Join the globe. On the road to the July 19th final.

2026 FIFA World Cup. Stream it all live on TSN Radio. Available on I Heart Radio. I love the sounds. The buzzing from the stadium, the chanting from the fans, the announcers calling the place soccer, football, it's home.

Why do I watch the World Cup? That's like asking me, why do I breed? I inherited that fandom from my mom. It's a connecting force. From Futuro Studios, I'm Fernanda Chavari, This is American football, a show about soccer culture in the U.S. and its underdog roots. We go beyond the game to the people and the stories that make it great.

A soccer game is a festival. It's not just a game. It's your culture. I took an elbow to my head, which cracked my skull. It is an American game. The Brazilians don't like hearing that, though. Are they the only ones that don't like that? Nobody likes that. As we get ready for the Men's World Cup this summer, Listen to American Football as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby. Okay, if you know me, you know this. I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together. We're going to have these meaningful conversations with, the world's most fascinating people. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand

postpartner depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Olympic champ Sean Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast. There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me. It's given me a belief that we all have one of the of those treasures inside of us. We just have to find it. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Keith Gianmanca seemed like a mild-mannered suburban dad, but secretly, he became someone else, a master of disguise who went on a crime spree.

At the time, did it seem like a crazy idea? It seemed very crazy. but I felt so desperate that I felt it was the quickest, easiest way out. Did you allow yourself to think about how it could go wrong and what that might look like? No, I didn't want to manifest that. I was trying to manifest success. Every family has its secrets.

But what happens when you discover that your dad has been living a double life? That is not the look of an innocent man. this is going to change my life and my family dynamic forever because everything that had existed prior in my reality is now untrue. Listen to Deep Cover the Family Man on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Alec Baldwin this season on my podcast. Here's the thing I'm speaking with more artists, policymakers, and performers like composer Mark Schaman. Once you've established that you have the talent, it's about the hang. It's the pleasure of hanging out with the people that you're with. You know, Rob and I was always a great hang.

We would sit in kibbitts for hours and then eventually get around to the music. That's what I mostly think of when I think of him, the time together laughing. Lawyer of Robbie Kaplan. The great gift of being a lawyer is the ability to actually change things in our society in a way that very few people can. I mean, you can really make a difference to causes in the United States if you bring the right case at the right time. Marriage equality. Yeah, Windsor's the perfect example. Director Morgan Neville.

Film School teaches you all the wrong things about making documentary. What do you want to say? Documentary is all about your ear. What do you hear? I feel like my job is listening really, really hard. Listen to Here's the Thing on the IHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It's funny. hear the public talk about, gosh, these cops and their egos, why can't they just, look, I was

speeding, fine, give me a ticket. You don't have to be such a jerk about it. And, you know, they have these massive egos. They walk around like they own the place. And, and candidly, if you take yourself out of it, you kind of get where people are coming from because the cop is the one person walk around the streets that can actually take the one thing that's the most valuable to you, which is your liberty. And you would like them to not also be so freaking intimidating. But if you walk in the shoes of the cop and you listen to what you're saying, we outsource trauma to our police and firefighters.

Yeah. That's interesting. Say that again. We outsource. We outsource our trauma to police officers and firefighters. Yeah, because you may be the very one I'm talking about saying what you're saying, but the minute something goes bad, you're calling 911. Exactly.

You're outsourcing your issues. Right. But the trauma that the police officers and the firefighters have to endure because they agree to do that, and our community sends them to do the job, right? So there's a study with a 30-year career, 188 traumatic events. may be experienced by a police officer. And if you put a civilian side by side, maybe two or three in that same time frame,

that's one of the reasons why they're dying so young. 188 for a cop. Traumatic events, personally, life or death, to the police officer. And that's not even all, because not every critical incident is traumatic to a police officer. Where I may have experienced three

over the course of my life. If you as an officer would experience 188, what about an officer that was a vet? Those numbers are off the charge. If they're a combat vet, they may have had close to that many in a single deployment. Think about if you were a Marine in Fallujah or a Marine or a soldier in Ramadi in 06 when a lot of those guys didn't know they were going to come home or not. Because it was day in and day out, right?

Think about your World War II vets that are still walking around today, right? I mean, imagine if you were on Normandy and D-Day, how long did that go on for? Ted offensive in Vietnam. How many events did they experience in that? So they may have an entire career's worth of trauma in that short period of time. But even because there's a very close similarity between what a soldier on the battlefield feels and what a police officer feels. When I first got into Iraq and we did her first mission, I'm like, wow, this eerily feels like being a cop. same kind of feeling, same kind of heightened firefight.

Bigger guns, better guns. I felt safer in Iraq because I had a whole platoon of the infantry guys, right? I had a bunch of 20-year-olds and 50 cows. So, but yeah, I love to see the culture and law enforcement change. So initially you started 22-0. Yes. To do what? The goal was to take 22 veteran suicides at 8 to 0.

That was the initial goal. That's when I first met Scott Mann. So my paradigm change happened in 2018. So a little bit of backstory. My wife and I were divorced now, but we got married after military. And I was a deputy sheriff for Polk County, Florida. And when I went back into law enforcement, I felt eerily normal again. Really?

I did. Because it was at least back close to... Felt very close to what it felt like being in the military. So when I'm in my patrol car and I got my uniform on, I'm carrying a gun. I'm operating at a fire, flight response. So when that uniform came off, that's when I felt like the fish out of water. Just like when I went from the line infantry unit to a desk, I felt like a fish out of water. It's why I always want to go back to war.

So you felt like a fish out of water when you went home? I felt like a fish out of water when I went home. Like, I don't belong here. This is not where I'm comfortable. And again, that is not necessarily uncommon. Correct. That is horrific. Well, there's a reason why a lot of vets get involved with mixed martial arts, right?

Because you're fighting on a mat. Your brain's function in the way it's... You feel normal there. You've been wired that way now. You're wired that way. But the really cool part is when you can unwire it. So that takes us to healing the hero. And the getting unwired part is...

This is where, first of all, I have sat here in all of the stories in you, like I hope most of my listeners right now have. But now we're kind of flipping to where we get to hopefully take that perspective and understanding from your very real explanations and very personal explanations into the psychology of what healing the hero is about. I think it's interesting that your first exposure to it, you thought it was hocus pocus. I mean, those are my words. And then how you became a believer in this work, and then what you're doing with this work and what's happening with this work.

And I'm going to let you start at the beginning and just take us through it because it's fascinating to me because now we're switching in that psychology part that I find fascinating. I prefer the word neurology to psychology, and you'll understand here in a minute. Neurology is a nervous system, right? When I left the sheriff's office, you know, my wife was a civilian-level administrator,

and she was worried because I didn't have a filter, right? She was worried I was going to say something that would cause her to get called into the boss's office, right? Because I did, I had a very short fuse because I was still hardwired that way. And when I left long- Were you a scary person? I don't think I was, but there may be some people, a lot of people say I would intimidate them. I mean, I was a drill sergeant,

so I was scary for a part of my career, right? No, I'm talking after when you got back. That's a, again, I don't think I was, but at the same time, I wasn't thinking clearly. So it's possible. I just think if you were hijacked and your frontal lobe was turned off half the time and you lacked empathy, that maybe you wouldn't have even known if you were scary. Right.

Which, again, feels common for people. I'm trying to put a face and an understanding on what that is when you see it, when I see it, when our listeners see it, you know? Well, I mean, there's enough video. evidence out there to shit all the karen's out there people getting super triggered um it's pretty noticeable when you see it if you see a cop triggered or you know you're seeing somebody in school a juvenile it doesn't take much kids are easy to trigger because they're developing and they're still already in the back place especially kids that grow up in gang ridden correct neighborhoods they've

experienced all kinds of trauma i mean Memphis let's look at Memphis there is so much trauma i've coached them for 30 years and it's so sad because... Think about the future of a traumatized child, right? There's a couple different pathways. One may... Because if you look at vets and first responders, it's the same thing. 95% of people that come to us, it's childhood trauma.

Right? A lot of these people were traumatized as kids, and they decided, you know what, I'm going to be the sheepdog. I'm going to stand in the gap. I'm not going to let this happen. And then they take on a persona of a firefighter, a paramedic, a police officer, or a soldier. the other half become predators because they don't know how to process correctly

and it could go either way right so interesting that a pull of the same characters end up on opposite ends of society it's just the pivot point what are you going to look for in your life what do you want to do so as a you know that's a fascinating way to think about it really it really is you know because I had some things that happened in childhood that I never wanted anybody to experience

Me too. So I became the other side. I wanted to be a sheepdog, a protector. And I went in the military. I went to war. I was a street cop. I worked narcotics. I did a lot of those things.

And I used to get so frustrated dealing with kids as a police officer, right? Because, you know, the system just, they don't punish these kids, right? And then you realize now it's, well, they don't punish it because, one, their brain's not developed. And two, look who's raising them. I remember one time I had a six-year-old little boy ask me when I arrested his dad, when's it my turn? When's it my turn? When's it my turn? I said, what, your turn for what?

We try not to do it in front of children because, well, my dad's been arrested, my mom's been arrested, my aunts and uncles have all been arrested. When's it my turn? I'm like, what chance does that kid have? Not much. Do you think it's his fault that he's going to turn out that way? No, more than likely he'll get a turn. He'll get a turn. Or he'll go the other way and become.

Green Beret or a Navy SEAL or something. I hope. Hopefully, right? It happens. You see it all the time. A lot of these big-time operators had tons and tons of trauma, which is what makes them as a good operator. But then they have to deal with the aftermath when the music stops.

Okay. So I don't really remember how it happened, but take us through your comment or we can reverse it. So when I first met Scott Mann, it was at one of his leadership retreats for a men's leadership retreats called Spartans Rising. I'll never forget. He stopped in the middle of one of his presentations. And he looks at me and he goes, Dan, you look like you have something you want to say.

And I just said 22, zero. He said, what's that? I said, we're losing 22 veterans a day to suicide. We're going to take it to zero. And then I coached with Scott. And he taught me how to tell a story. amazing and then was invited to albuquerque new mexico uh organization i want to give them credit dr um frank berk right uh the research and recognition project and they have a process

called the reconsolidation of traumatic memories protocol rtm i cannot believe i've never heard of that but i'd never heard about it till i'm read your story so rtm and i'm i'm the i'm the ex-cop, combat vet in the back of the room. And I'm listening to the instructor. And this was all mental health professionals. Teach all these people that you can heal PTSD with a 95% success rate, yada, yada, yada. I'm like, bull crap. You are thinking you're crazy.

There's no way. I've been dealing with this stuff for a long. You're telling me you can fix it. Whatever. I have friends that have committed suicide. Exactly. I've lost a marriage. This is crap.

Yeah. And it was ironic because it was the second day that I tried. training, they were getting ready to start doing the live stuff. And I said, Alan, I said, you're saying something that I'm having a really hard time believing. Is this real? He goes, oh, absolutely. I said, well, if I'm going to recommend a veteran or first responder to do it, I'm going to have to go through it. And then he goes, oh, you want to do it today?

I'm like, yeah, sure, why not? Do it. Do the protocol. But the protocol is? The reconsolidation of traumatic memories, RTM. I mean, come on. That does sound like hocus pocus. Right.

Well, that's what I said. I mean, I'm a cop in the back of the room. Can I say a bad word? Yeah. I'm a cop in the back of the room saying, bullshit. That's how I'd feel. Right. So.

Especially since we got 22 people killing themselves. If you can do this, why aren't we doing it? But here's the irony is, I'm like, I got to go through this. He goes, hey, you want to do it today? I'm like, yeah. He goes, how about in 15 minutes when we come off break in front of the class? I'm like, whoa. I'm like, giddy up.

I'm about to show the whole class and this guy's an idiot. I'm going to shut the whole class. this dude down. So anyways, so we had talked a little bit beforehand, and that protocol, you talk about the event, and then when you start a trigger, they stop you. They do what's called a break state. A what? A break state.

They break the emotional state. So you talk about... You talk about the trauma, which we don't... Well, you've got 9,000 different traumas to talk about. We just pick one. Right? We picked one. So I started talking about the one trauma, and I'm starting to talk about it, and I got

super uncomfortable quick. Like, I went from zero to 10 at about seven seconds. You could feel it? Oh, yeah, yeah. You could feel the nervous system. Do they have you monitored or they're just watching you? They're watching you. And when I got, you know, your eyes of water, you'll start breathing heavier.

You'll start wringing your hands. You're like, you're, you know, it's some people you can start sweating. And I never forget it. He stops and he goes, hey, what color is your Dodge truck? What? Yeah, yeah, well, it's a break state. And I looked at him. So he's just asking anything to break you?

out of it. Out of that moment. And it was so funny. He says, what color is your Dodge truck? And I'm like, what? I said,

I'd drive a Ford. I'd never be caught dead driving a Dodge. Right? That's funny. And I'm like, we're very brand loyal, especially in the military.

I'm a Ford guy. Yeah, me too. I'd rather push it forward than drive a Chevy. Exactly. So I have a Ford Raptor. That's what I have. It's a 2013.

That's a cool truck. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, I'm like, I'm out of it. I'm not even thinking about the event. And then he just does the process. What they do is have you visualize different things.

Well, hold on, hold on it. After he says that about the truck. Right. And you broke. And now you may be even grinning a little bit about the old Dodge thing. Then what's the next step? The next step is the visual kinesthetic part, right? So he goes from the Dodge truck to...

Create an image in your mind before the event happened. Of that day? Mm-hmm. Are we... Was the one you're talking about... It was, yeah, it was a combat related. It was losing Doug. Okay.

So now he wants you to go back before you all went on on patrol at breakfast or something. Or it could be before you left for the deployment. Oh. So think of a bookend of the event, right? Okay. So he bookended the event and you make a black and white picture and a black and white picture. And then all you're doing is going to a third person perspective. So like if you're watching a movie, say you're in a movie,

theater and you're in the in the movie itself you're associated right if you're sitting in the seat looking at yourself on the screen you're disassociated one time well now they would take you up to the the camera room the booth where the camera reels are and you'd watch yourself in the theater watching the movie so they're doing all these layers of disassociation so that's really interesting so you're looking at it from a third person perspective right so they say go back to the day the morning or or before before that event happened and envision. Whatever you were doing, it could have been having breakfast.

Okay. You're safe, your brain knows that that's before the event. You're safe? You're safe. Right. And then you have a point after the event's over. Maybe we're back in Alaska, right? That's your safe place.

You have two pictures. So think of it from an unconscious perspective. The brain now has a book end. And the event is in the middle. Well, when that event is open, when that emotion's active in the nervous system, there's a four to six hour window you can change that emotional state.

So that's all they're doing. They're not changing the memory. They're just changing the state of the emotion attached to it. And by watching it, observing it yourself watching a movie, you're three people distanced from it. And it does things on an unconscious level where the neural pathways will eventually decouple. So then that process hit the rewind,

and then you're going all the way back to that first picture and you're bringing all the color back in. And what you're doing at that point is now you're at a safe place before, but you're going from black and white to color. So the brain thinks, when you think of a black and white movie, what is it? It's an old movie, right? Less intense.

So if you were to watch a scary movie in 4K versus black and white, which one's going to be worse, right? The 4K one. So when you go back to that color event, it's like reversing the order of the event on the brain, and that's when the amygdala goes, oh, wait a minute, that's not what this is for. And then they put you into a positive state,

like birth of a child, you know, something you did, successful at work where you felt really good deal. Think of a really good thing. Really good thing. And then you're introducing a new positive emotion in that layers over the old memory. And then when they put you back into that memory, so like for me, I was, that process, they have you tell the story again.

So sorry, tell the story again. And I don't want to because it was uncomfortable before. So I start telling the story. And all of a sudden, I'm getting through the story. I'm like, wait a minute, where's the emotions? And I remember at one point I got through the whole story and I looked at him. I'm like, all right, what kind of Jedi stuff is this? Right. Half the class is laughing. The other half is crying, right? Because they just watched a real 10 drop down to like zero to one. Right. It happened that quickly for you?

Well, that, that protocol is an 89 line script that goes line by line and it takes 60 minutes and sometimes a little bit more. I don't know how long I was up there, but probably an hour. And then, you know, fast forward. We initially at that point, and this was my words, I went over to Dr. Burke. And I said, Dr. Burke, why isn't this available to everybody? That's what I'm sitting here thinking. I swear to God, it's exactly what I'm thinking. Well, I can give you my answer. My cop answer is it's not profitable to fix the problem. We'll be right back.

Listen. And you're there for heart-wrenching knockouts. The world's biggest stage. And breathtaking triumph. I'm in 20206 FIFA World Cup. The knockout stage. Every match, every moment. Listen on TSN Radio.

Join the globe. On the road to the July 19th final. 2026 FIFA World Cup. Stream it all live on TSN Radio. Available on IHeard Radio. I love the sounds. The buzzing from the stadium. The chanting from the fans.

The announcers calling the place. Soccer. Football. It's home. Why do I watch the World Cup? That's like asking me, why do I breed? I inherited that fandom from my mom. It's a connecting force.

From Futuro Studios, I'm Fernando Chavari, and this is American Football, a show about soccer culture in the U.S. and its underdog roots. We go beyond the game to the people and the stories that make it great. A soccer game is a festival. It's not just a game. It's your culture. I took an elbow to my head, which cracked my skull. It is an American game.

The Brazilians don't like hearing that, though. Are they the only ones that don't like that? Nobody likes that. As we get ready for the Men's World Cup this summer, listen to American Football as part of the MyCultura Podcast Network, available on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby. Okay, if you know me, you know this.

I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together. We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming. I've gone through breast cancer

and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Olympic champ Sean Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast. There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me. It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us. We just have to find it.

Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Keith Gianmanca seemed like a mild-mannered suburban dad, but secretly he became someone else, a master of disguise who went on a crime spree. At the time, did it seem like a crazy idea? It seemed very crazy, but I felt so desperate that I felt it was the quickest, easiest way out. Did you allow yourself to think about how it could go wrong

and what that might look like? No. I didn't want to manifest that. I was trying to manifest success. Every family has its secrets. But what happens when you discover that your dad has been living a double life? That is not the look of an innocent man. This is going to change my life and my family dynamic forever

because everything that had existed prior in my reality is now untrue. Listen to Deep Cover the Family Man. the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Alec Baldwin. This season on my podcast, here's the thing I'm speaking with more artists, policymakers, and performers, like composer Mark Schaman. Once you've established that you have the talent, it's about the hang. It's the pleasure of hanging out with the people that you're with.

You know, Rob and I was always a great hang. We would sit in kibbits for hours and then eventually get around to the music. That's what I mostly think of when I think of him, the time together laughing. Lawyer of Robbie Kaplan. The great gift of being a lawyer is the ability to actually change things in our society in a way that very few people can. You can really make a difference to causes in the United States if you bring the right case at the right time. Marriage equality. Yeah, Windsor's the perfect example.

Director Morgan Neville. Film school teaches you all the wrong things about making documentary. What do you want to say? Documentary is all about your ear. What do you hear? I feel like my job is listening really, really hard. Listen to Here's the Thing on the IHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What was his answer?

He said, he goes, it's just the research isn't done yet. And I'm like, this should be available to everybody, right? And then... Did you literally feel better that hour? Yeah. I felt better as soon as I finished. Which is why I asked him what kind of Jedi stuff. It's like these are not the emotions you're looking for.

They were gone. That negative feeling that was associated to that memory was not in my body. Okay, but that's that memory. What about another one? I had to work on other stuff. Yeah. But the point is that same process, let's take the 10 most traumatic things that have got you crazy and thinking about killing yourself and everything.

If you can spend an hour on each one of these through this process, the memories don't go away. It's your response to them that change. Correct. It's like you now have different stimuli, right? And when I look at what we do now, so the method that we use now is it's a nine line. Instead of 89 lines, it's nine lines, right? It takes about four to six minutes to diffuse a single event, whether it's traumatic emotion or if it's anger or rage or if it's anxiety. It's a very... What's the success right of this? That's part of the problem. Everybody that does it heals. Come on. Everybody that does it heals. Everybody. Everybody that does it

heals. If they finish and do the work, everybody will heal. Some people won't finish the work. What does finish the work mean? I mean, do the number of sessions that are required. Which are? Usually three to five. Three to five, 20-minute sessions. Well, if we dig deep, it's three to five, 45 minutes. Okay, whatever. Three to five hour sessions. Right. Let's say it's the longest session in the world, hour and 15 minutes, and let's say you need six. You're talking about a, day. Right. We've had people come through. I had a, it was a wife of a firefighter. She had PTSD and she'd been in therapy for 20 years. She? It was the firefighter's wife. So, so our nonprofit,

we, no, but why was the firefighter's wife? Because we work with spouses. So she was experiencing PTSD through his life? Probably both. No kidding. Yeah. If it's stuff that her husband went through, it's vicarious trauma, it's real. A lot of therapists end up with a vicarious. trauma from doing therapy. So she had been in therapy for 20 years for PTSD, and she did two sessions with us, and she was done. And she was mad. I was like, what are you upset about?

The 20 years she'd wasted. Yeah, she goes, I've been in therapy for 20 years, and you just fixed me in two hours. Okay, so what is this called? We call the trauma resiliency protocol. TRP is what our method is. Why is the United States military not adopted this? Who runs the military? The government.

Okay. And who funds the government? Taxpayers. Okay. Who funds those running for office? Donations and taxpayers? Right. But what I'm saying is there are a lot of organizations other that get funding from pharmaceutical industry.

Ah. Big Pharma funds both sides of the politics. So you genuinely believe that's it. Yeah. I think that's part of it. What's the other part? So you ever heard the term cognitive dissonance? Yeah.

All right. A brain can't hold two beliefs, different beliefs at the same time, right? Let's think Republican and Democrat. They're absolute beliefs that Democrats have. They're absolute beliefs Republicans have. And when you cross that over, it doesn't make sense to the other person. So for a general officer who's done a career of 40 years and has seen damage of PTSD and nothing's work to fix it, they don't believe it can be correct. So I think that's part of it is cognitive dissonance.

the inability to believe that it is possible. The way it works, and I'll tell you how cognitive dissonance is, if I go to a function and somebody asks me, well, what do you guys do for nonprofit? Oh, we got a neurological intervention that removes PTSD and depression and anxiety. They're like, oh, yeah, that's cool, great, awesome, because it doesn't make sense to them. They'll move on.

And then I'll say it like this. They'll say, well, what do you guys do? I said, well, can I ask you a question first? They're like, oh, yeah, sure. I said, what will live long and didn't have to die by suicide? That'd be amazing. It'd be a beautiful world. What we do is this. Now you're past that critical faculty and you're in the unconscious brain.

So the critical faculty is what we call the bullsh-shameter between the conscious and unconscious. And it filters. Your brain filters things out. So I think a lot of those general officers filter out the possibility. And then to the ability to get to the right gatekeepers, right? It's very difficult to get to the higher levels. I honestly believe if our president, our secretary of war, our general officers realize how simple this is.

And I just tell this, it's stuff so easy we got Marines doing. I love you, Marines. Nice shot. If we're not picking on each other, there's a problem. And then we both just tell the Air Force, at least we were the military.

All right. So how many iterations have you? you done yourself? Since I've started doing this, I've worked for probably around 5,000 people. And you're telling me, of the 5,000,

none. I'm telling you, of that 5,000, I've probably had maybe a handful that didn't finish the work. In other words, because what ends up happening is they feel so much better. They're like, I'm good, deuses,

I'm out. It's kind of like, not taking your antibiotics until the whole prescription's filled. Right. Because they, if you have somebody with a lot of severe PTSD and the crazy part is the higher their scores are, the faster the brain heals. Because their brain is ready to dump it, right?

And once you start dumping that, a lot of them will move on and do the next greatest thing, but still could probably improve. Sometimes you get people that have what we call a personality disorder where they call Cluster B, very difficult to work with. If we can identify that before,

before we wouldn't let them work with one of our coaches. Yeah, but that was a problem long before the trauma happened. Correct. So. It's a different, you know, it's, you can still address a lot of their issues to make their lives better, but they still have other things they have to overcome. And that's like tons and tons and tons of childhood trauma that leads into that. But yeah, I have a, I have very few people who, who it hasn't worked with.

One of the greatest stories that I've read was that this just, happened for people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and there was a man who carried trauma all the way from World War II. Tell us that story. Mel was a beautiful soul. So Mel, he's still alive. He's 101 years old, right? Wow. And when I first met Mel, I was just, my jaw hit the floor.

I'm like, this guy's incredible. A friend of mine, Jay Gar Stecky, who's got Operation Healing Heroes that's a Discovery Channel show. They do, like, many documentaries of the live on me. Jay, you got to get this guy's story. And so I picked Mel up in Orlando, and I took him to River Ranch in Florida. It was like a little resort, and that's where he did the interviews. Is that where you do your thing, River Ranch? Nah, we do our thing remotely all over the place.

Got it. Go ahead. So Jay captured Mel's story. It was beautiful. Like, they don't make people like that anymore. And as we're, I'm driving him home, he's like, do you ever think it's really over? I'm like, what are you talking about, Mel? He said PTSD.

So Mel had gone through the RTM protocol, right? So the trauma part was resolved, but now he was still dealing with the survivor guilt, which that protocol doesn't address. I said, what are you feeling? Because I felt guilty every day I've stepped foot on U.S. oil since I got back from the war. What year was this? This would have been 2000 and probably 20. That's almost, that's 55, 6. That's 20.

40, that's 60 years that he is 60 or more years that you're telling me every single day of his life for 60 years he felt guilt. Yep. For being alive. For being alive. Because so many good men didn't come home. What would he serve? He was a B-17 waste gunner. So he last. Oh gosh. Those guys' life, life expectancy was nothing. His last combat sword he was flying over Normandy on D-Day. Wow. So imagine the visual that this guy. had. So his best friend was shot down. Oscar was

the, it was funny, he was telling the story. I used to pull Oscar out of the bars every night because he would get into fights. I'm glad some things... It was a different day back then. But some things don't change. And so they used to wave at each other when they were flying their missions.

You know, Oscar's in one plane, he's in the other. And he watched him go down into the ocean, right? Oh, God. So he's held onto that guilt. And it was framing as everything. What I mean by framing is if you look at a picture and it's got a black frame on it, and then all of a sudden you put a white frame on it, the picture looks totally different, right?

So on a zero to 10 stress load, he was a 10 on that survivor guilt. So what I did with him is I said, Mel, I want you to trade places with Oscar. You're going down into the ocean and every once in a while you get a glimpse of his airplane, he's going to survive. I want you to look at it from that perspective. And I'm like, what would you want for him? And this is the framing component. I want him to be happy and have a great life, be a good citizen, you don't hear that anymore, you know, and just be a normal person.

I said, Mel, do you want him to feel the weight of your death for the rest of his life? He's like, heavens no, I would never want that. So then I asked a question, what makes you think he's expecting less? And in that moment, his eyes got super wide, and he looked at me, and he goes, I never thought of that. So for that 60 plus years, that wasn't accessible to him. And in that very moment, the shift happened where he released the emotional attachment to the memory. So he didn't have that zero to ten went to a zero. He couldn't feel the survivor guilt anymore.

And that's what we get to actually do is address the neural pathway where that memory started and all the data that's around the memory. One of the ways that we do the process is we do it way different now. the nine lines, we're looking at it from a third person. So we'll have them associate, rate the intensity of it, and then disassociate. Look at it from a distance. Dron flying up, moving down the street. And as you're doing that, we do things like, I want you to take the color out of it,

make it black and white. I want you to turn the volume down. So you're changing the visual, the auditory, the kinesthetic. Get far enough where you don't feel it. And then we'll have them turn around again. And I want you to look into an older, wiser version of yourself. it'd be like you're drowning, isn't it? Coach Bill, I want you to turn around and look at a future wiser version of you. What would you teach yourself in that moment? That's the frame that if you learned,

you can let the feelings go easily and effortlessly. Well, that's a presuppositional statement. So you're presupposing the outcome. Once you give the answer, your brain is in an unconscious agreement attaches that new learning and then we reassociate and take you back in time. And then you come back through and reprocess it. And then we sit you in a resource anchor. It takes about four to six minutes. And then when they go back, that 10 is gone. And then the brain reconsolidates that memory.

Sleep is the biggest byproduct. So some people will sleep 12, 13 hours after going through the process. How about that? Their brain's exhausted. The brain's exhausted, but then finally got to take the foot off the gas pedal. And the 7,500 RPM's got to come back down to 1,000. We'll be right back. Listen and you're there for heart-wrenching knockouts.

Breath-taking triumph. 2026 FIFA World Cup. The knockout stage. Every match, every moment. Listen on TSN Radio. Join the globe. On the road to the July 19th final. 2026 FIFA World Cup.

Stream it all live on TSN. Radio, available on I-Hard Radio. I love the sounds. The buzzing from the stadium, the chanting from the fans, the announcers calling the place soccer, football, it's home. Why do I watch the World Cup? That's like asking me, why do I breed? I inherited that fandom from my mom.

I like watching it with my dad. It's a connecting force. From Futuro Studios, I'm Fernanda and Chavari, and this is American Football. A show about soccer culture in the U.S. and its underdog roots. We go beyond the game to the people and the stories that make it great. A soccer game is a festival. It's not just a game. It's your culture. I took an elbow to my head, which cracked my skull.

It is an American game. The Brazilians don't like hearing that, though. Are they the only ones that don't like that? Nobody likes that. As we get ready for the Men's World Cup this summer, Listen to American Football as part of the My Coutura Podcast Network, available on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby.

Okay, if you know me, you know this. I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together. We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people. Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartner depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety.

Olympic champ Sean Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast. There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to. me. It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us. We just have to find it. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Keith Gianmanca seemed like a mild-mannered suburban dad, but secretly, he became someone else, a master of disguise who went on a crime spree. At the time, did it seem like a crazy idea? It seemed very crazy. But, But I felt so desperate that I felt it was the quickest, easiest way out. Did you allow yourself to think about how it could go wrong and what that might look like?

No, I didn't want to manifest that. I was trying to manifest success. Every family has its secrets. But what happens when you discover that your dad has been living a double life? That is not the look of an innocent man. this is going to change my life and my family dynamic forever because everything that had existed prior in my reality is now untrue. Listen to Deep Cover the Family Man on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Alec Baldwin this season on my podcast. Here's the thing I'm speaking with more artists, policymakers, and performers like composer Mark Schaman.

Once you've established that you have the talent, it's about the hang. It's the pleasure of hanging out with the people that you're with. You know, Rob and I was always a great hang. We would sit in kibbets for hours and then eventually get around to the music. That's what I mostly think of when I think of him, the time together laughing. Lawyer of Robbie Kaplan. The great gift of being a lawyer is the ability to actually change things in our society in a way that very few people can.

I mean, you can really make a difference to causes in the United States if you bring the right case at the right time. Marriage equality. Yeah, Windsor's the perfect example. Director Morgan Neville. Film School teaches you all the wrong things about making documentary. What do you want to say? Documentary is all about your ear. What do you hear?

I feel like my job is listening really, really hard. Listen to Here's the Thing on the IHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you have a degree? I got a master's degree, but it's public administration. Nothing in like psychology or nothing. So, yeah, you're not one of these fancy, smart people. And I know you met Dr. Burke. The guy, the first guy.

Frank Burke, yes. Yeah. It's just interesting to me that this is something that you're doing. and it's working like it's working, you see what I'm saying? I'm trying to reconcile all that. Well, a lot of people look at me like I don't have the right pedigree, right? If I talk to a, like, there's a VA psychologist that one day when I go back and see her,

I will give her a big thank you card. Which was? Well. I can only imagine what this is. So this is our system and how it functions. She's a psychologist. She's at the highest, higher level of that field. And she was speaking at an event.

And I spoke at an event, right? And she came up to me and was very resistant about what I was talking about. Was she condescending? Very condescending. I bet. What do you talk about? You're just a cop. Well, she's like, I'm like, ma'am, I'll pay for your training to do RTM with Frank Burke.

I'll pay for your lodging. I'll pay for your meal. I'll take care of it. You'll even get continuing ed credits. And she's like, I don't need any continuing ed credits. Right. And then she went into how this is snake oil that's not real cognitive dissonance. She's never seen it, right?

And we were just having this conversation back and forth. And there's a therapist sitting right there listening to the whole conversation who had been through the training and who has been using the protocol. Guess how many words she said? None. Why? Because the other one is a doctor and she's a licensed professional. counselor.

Oh. Right? So I'm like, you could have said something. But anyways, she, um... Thanks for having my back. I'm like, and I, it was a hold my beer moment for her, for the psychologist. I says, you know what you're going to do? She's like, what's that?

I said, you're going to, you're going to cause me to train my brother and sister to the left and the right of me and we'll make your profession a whole lot less relevant. Wow. And we are. We're making them less relevant. If they don't want to be part of the solution, good. get out of the way because a lot of us vets and first responders were problem solvers. So why are you going to send her a thank you card?

Because of where we are right now. That was the pivot. That was the pivot fuel to the fire. That was the rocket fuel that took us into the peer support model. I stopped paying for therapists to get trained, right? And then COVID hits, and of course, everybody's funding dried up. Everybody, nobody knew what was going to happen with the world? And I'm like, shoot, now what are we going to do?

And then I just went down the research rabbit hole. A lot of this work, it all comes out of a body work called neuralinguistic programming. I don't know if you're familiar with NLP, but Tony Robbins was probably one of the bigger names that started off in NLP, and he calls it something different now. But NLP was founded by Dr. John Grinder and Dr. Richard Bandler. Grinder was a Green Beret linguist, and Bandler was a coder, ones and zeros. They got together, and they were trying to figure out why some people were so good at what they did. So they modeled, you know, Virginia Seteer family therapy, right? Why is she so good at what she does?

Well, then staying with her for seven, eight months, they basically said there's 18 different metamodels, and she drives down to the deepest. Also, some people are auditory, some people are kinesthetic, some people are visual. So she could get a husband and wife that one's auditory and one's visual, they're not communicating the same. And she would get them on that same wavelength, and she was very effective at it. So once they did, modeled her, they started training other therapists, into what she did, and then guess what happened to her?

She became an average family therapist. It lifted everybody up, right? Milton Erickson was the psychiatrist, who's the father, one of the modern fathers of hypnotherapy, right? He used hypnotic language patterns, so he chunked up instead of down, right? The way that might work is when we would ask, hey, when was the first time that ever happened?

They'd be like, well, I don't remember when it did. I said, no, you don't, but if you did, one was it? And all of a sudden, they'd come up with an answer because you bypass critical faculty, you go directly to the unconscious brain, And then Fritz Pearls was the Gestalt therapy, where we've known for over 100 years emotions established linearly. And they kind of like a string of pearls, right?

You pull one out and they drop down into the next layer. So that's NLP, right? And then, of course, NLP kind of got a little bit crazy going into like the, you know, coaching side and business and trying to sell things because all they did was learn how people did what they did, that it did really well and they trained other people to do that. So, and this is one of the things that Frank Burke, when I met him, he goes, you know, NLP is probably the greatest advancement in psychology in the last hundred years, but nobody knows about it. And now a lot of the research is coming out is NLP focus. So they're finally starting to validate, which is what we're doing.

When we're doing research out of Arizona State University, they've already published one study from my first nonprofit. We're doing it with brain scans. So we're seeing the brain. I was just about to ask, couldn't you bring the brain? the scientific community in if you just hook people up to brain scans and watch their brain react to this. Yeah. Well, the process that we use, Dr. David Haggardor, and he's just a beautiful soul.

He's an Army veteran. He's a clinical psychologist, neuroscientist. He developed a system called Evox. It's now owned by Firefly Neuroscience. So when I first met Dave, Dr. Phil Vakwee, who was on our board, you know, I was, we were talking in, I said, man, I really like to know what's going on in the brain. right. And next thing you know, Dr. Phil connects with, you know, David. And all of a sudden, me and Dave are having a conversation. And I'm like, well, I'm getting ready to go up to Maryland

to work with a police officer because she won't do the work remotely. He goes, well, I'll meet you there. So it was like a Friday. He closed up shop, drove from Jacksonville, North Carolina to Frederick Maryland. And next thing you know, he's doing a brain scan on a female police officer. And I'll never forget her scores were about max. She was full tilt. Like max on PTSD, max on anxiety. Her pre-evaluation scores. Her pre-evaluation. She is hijacked. So like the PCLC, the civilian version, it's an 85 point survey.

She was 85 out of 85, which means seven days a week, her life sucks. And she's constantly. Constantly and probably not sleeping. And not sleeping. So what end up happening is you see in the back of the brain, there's a part where you close your eyes for five minutes. And what's happening is as you close your eyes, your nervous system goes into full tilt because you've lost all situational awareness. So somebody with PTSD will go into a fight or fight response.

When they close their eyes. When they close their eyes. Because now they can't see what's behind it. They feel unsafe. They feel unsafe. So you measure that and you see it. And now I forget, he goes, young lady, this is the worst brain scan I have ever seen. And he said, in your scores match your brain skin.

And the relief in her voice, I've been trying to tell everybody that, right? She's a female police officer in a pretty male dominated world. plus she's mixed race on top of that. So I do a session with her, and then we come back the next day. I do another session with her, and then Dr. Haggard-Aren does a second brain scan. And after that second brain scan,

he sent the results back. He goes, gentlemen, this is profound. He said, you're getting in 24 hours results that it would take six months for an EMDR master practitioner to achieve. And he said, and most EMDR masterpractics will never get this level of work. And he goes, you're not even a therapist. so he was on board from the very beginning just from the science end

because he saw what we were doing from a scientific perspective and he's the one that's convinced us to do the research so now we're doing yeah that you've got to now we're doing I'm not a research I know I get it but but I'm telling you when I saw the first batch of data together I was I was hooked at that point I tell everybody I've officially become a nerd I know more about the brain than any self-respecting infantryman should know about it. But think about it from a clinical perspective, we deal with something called peer review literature, right? Right.

So you're telling me 30 psychiatrists are going to read the same article and come up with the same conclusion. Where is the innovation going to come from? Was the cab company ever going to create Uber? Uber? No. or Lyft was a hotel industry ever going to create Airbnb? Was Sears ever going to create Amazon? Exactly.

Same game. Same game. So now what we're doing, and Dave really convinced me. You know, that's a really good point. To my question, why isn't the psychological side of the VA adapting this? It's for the same reason the cab companies aren't invent Uber and Sears didn't invent Amazon. You want to talk about egos? Yeah, boy.

There's the Migos. Yeah, boy. Yeah, they don't. I actually get that. That makes, that's so plausibly sensible. I mean, who am I? I don't have the right initials. That's right.

You know, Dr. Haggardorn, with the brain stuff, he can hook you up to the EG. And within that 30-minute test, he can tell you if you're suicidal based on a part of the brain activating. So when the VA a few years ago did their, I think it was a mission daybreak or some new, it was like a 3 million. grant. They were going to award a $3 million grant to a company trying to do something about suicide. Dave and I, we both applied for that grant. Dave actually works for the VA right now. We both got rejected first round. We had a solution and he had a way to identify. So I don't want to call out the organization that got the grant, but what they were doing was forensic audits of social media and cell phones. So what does that mean? They're already dead.

That's the VA. it's cheaper for the VA if we do die. Why did you re-enlist an army after 9-11 in the first place? And what do you think led so many to re-enlist? What impact did 9-11 have on you that it didn't have on me? So I watched from a distance. All right, the tower is getting hit. The tower's falling.

I had already left because I worked law enforcement prior to that. I was military first. They did law enforcement, and I was out of law enforcement at that point. and watching it, I just felt helpless. Like, everybody saw what happened. And I just, I was pissed. I was angry and I wanted to figure. I didn't even think that there was an option for me at that time

until I talked to one of old. How old were you? You re-enlisted in the military at 34. I'm a glut for punishment. You were clearly nuts. Yes, totally. But I talked to a buddy of mine who was going back in, he was going from reserves to active.

I'm like, how are you doing that? And so I just went and talked to a recruiter. I had to get a little waiver. And next thing you know, I'm back at Fort Benning, Georgia, going all the way back through basic training again with a bunch of 18 and 19-year-old kids. You went through basic again? You had to? At 34?

Well, I was... That sucks. Yeah, I was supposed to do a... What do they call that? Warrior transition course. So it was like prior service. They condensed that whole period of time into like four weeks. So I get sent to Fort Knox.

I do that. and then they sent me back. Oh, so mad. You want to talk about mad? They sent me back to a unit that was in week two. Had I stayed at Fort Benning? I had to be at week seven or eight. So I went all the way to four weeks at Fortinococided four weeks a month there.

And then I came back and I got dropped into week two and I had 15 more weeks to go. Oh, that sucks. Yeah, it's not fun. So an answer was you had some training. You were pissed and you felt something needed to be done. Something needed to be done. I wanted to go. I wanted to fight.

I genuinely believe there's an entire generation of kids that were 12 years younger than you at that point that served in our military that had that same sense. That's patriotism. That's commitment. That's service. And they are the same people who are losing 22 of every single day. Right. Let's remember that.

Let's remember that. that the image of 9-11, there's an entire generation of people who served our country because they saw that and felt compelled and called to serve. And we're losing at home because of the trauma that they took. You said earlier police that people give our trauma to police. We outsource. We outsource. We outsource trauma to place.

Well, we outsource our trauma to the military to. Yeah, I think It's crazy To 18 year olds Yeah, it's crazy I think right now That a lot of these kids join in Because I think the Army

Just met their mission Like four months Before the end of the year So recruitment is through the roof With the kids who weren't even alive When the towers came down I know, it's crazy So there's a lot of patriotism

That comes I think one of the Probably one of the signature Wounds of the war Is probably going to be The moral injury component Because you're doing things that's not normal, right?

And I'll use the withdrawal from Afghanistan. We know for a fact there was a suicide spike after we abandoned Afghanistan, right? I'm connected with a lot of the Gold Star families who lost the 13 that day, and I've actually worked with some of them. And they're trying to change the system too because nobody can give them an answer

why their kids are dead, right? the fact that we lost so much blood and treasure and just gave billions of dollars of hardware to the Taliban and then paid them $40 million a week, that's moral injury. And abandoned Afghan interpreters, very brave Afghanis that thought alongside us. We abandoned...

We abandoned a group of people that we promised that we were going to help them. We promised when you're done helping us, we'll get you to the United States. God love Pineapple Express. Exactly, right? What Scott's doing and those guys, it's like, you know, it's crazy. Have you ever seen this new play? I haven't seen the play now. We'll just take some Kleenex.

It's very good. It's coming here. Is it? Yeah, he's coming here. Yeah. We'll be right back. Weekend gold tickets to Lassau, Montreal. Thomas Rhett.

Mumford and Sons. John Party. Old Dominion. Carly Pierce and Moore. And the prize gets even sweeter. with flights from Porter Airlines, three nights at Residence in downtown Montreal, and $1,000 cash. Download the free IHeart Radio app, listen to Pure Country for 10 minutes, and enter to win. Lasso, Montreal.

Every day you listen is another chance to win. I love the sounds, the buzzing from the stadium, the chanting from the fans, the announcers calling the place soccer, football, at home. Why do I watch the World Cup? That's like asking me, why do I bring? read. I inherited that fandom from my mom. It's a connecting force. From Futuro Studios, I'm Fernanda Chavari, and this is American Football, a show about soccer culture in the U.S. and its underdog roots.

We go beyond the game to the people and the stories that make it great. A soccer game is a festival. It's not just a game. It's your culture. I took an elbow to my head, which cracked my skull. It is an American game. The Brazilians don't like hearing that, though. Are they the only ones that don't like that? Nobody likes that. As we get ready for the Men's World Cup this summer,

listen to American Football as part of the My Coutura Podcast Network, available on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hodacotabee. Okay, if you know me, you know this. I'm always searching for inspiration, for support. and useful tools to help maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together. We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people.

Like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer. And that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartum depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Olympic champ Sean Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast. There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me. It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us.

We just have to find it. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Keith Gianmanca seemed like a mild-mannered suburban dad. But secretly, he became someone else, a master of a master of. disguise who went on a crime spree. At the time, did it seem like a crazy idea? It seemed very crazy, but I felt so desperate that I felt it was the quickest, easiest way out. Did you allow yourself to think about how it could go wrong on what that might look like? No, I didn't want to manifest that. I was trying to manifest success. Every family has its secrets. But what happens? But what

What happens when you discover that your dad has been living a double life? That is not the look of an innocent man. This is going to change my life and my family dynamic forever, because everything that had existed prior in my reality is now untrue. Listen to Deep Cover the Family Man on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Alec Baldwin this season on my podcast. Here's the thing I'm speaking with more artists, policymakers, and performers,

like composer Mark Schaman. Once you've established that you have the talent, it's about the hang. It's the pleasure of hanging out with the people that you're with. You know, Rob and I was always a great hang. We would sit in kibbits for hours and then eventually get around to the music.

That's what I mostly think of when I think of him, the time together laughing. Lawyer Robbie Kaplan. The great gift of being a lawyer is the ability to actually change things in our society in a way that very few people can. You can really make a difference to causes in the United States if you bring the right case at the right time.

Marriage equality. Yeah, Windsor's the perfect example. Director Morgan Neville. Film School teaches you all the wrong things about making documentary. What do you want to say? Documentary is all about your ear. What do you hear? I feel like my job is listening really, really hard.

Listen to Here's the Thing on the IHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts. Kind of off topic, but on topic, when Hurricane Helen. Aline. Thanks. Struck North Carolina. Yeah. What do you experience that America needs to hear?

So when Helene hit, you know, one of the things that Scott did through Tats for Pinappo made some connections, he's an amazing connector. So he'll go into the community. What do you need? And then they'll resource it. To get plugged into that signal group is amazing. because when an emergency happens, all these resources come to bear. They're using their skills that they use, you know,

and obviously the rule is if you're interfering with first responders, stay away because they have the legal responsibility. Right. But when we got into, because he connected us with one of the churches there, and we met him before we came back and did some training, and all six of the people we worked with were like, what did you just do? Right?

Because we know they're going to need it. When Abel and I went back, it was right after the, flood. We went through one of the communities in, I think it was, I think it was Asheville, North Carolina. We went to their PD and fire departments and they came, hey, man, you should go see these guys in the outside. They're the ones that are really dealing with a lot. So we went up to this one fire department and we're driving around this neighborhood, this community. And every home had everything inside of their house in their front yards. They pulled everything out of the homes.

And you're going by the tree lines and the mud lines are five feet above ground level. and then you start hearing some of the stories and it was just like mind-blowing like one of the guys lost like 11 people in a family right that's like war right but natural a natural cause it was very overwhelming

so that we ended up going back and trained 11 of the church ministry folks and the pastors so that they would at least have something that they could actually do on the ground so we got connected one of the one of the pastors she was a former

police officer and she's the first one that experienced it and she's the one that wanted us to come in there but yeah it was just we went in we visited some of the fire departments and these guys are just sitting there with the same look that i remember after we lost cordo that's what that's what i think is important as this work although started with vets and that's where your heart started with anybody experiences massive trauma yeah well the good thing is we're getting we're getting some credibility. So like, I'll give an example of Pittsburgh, right? That's probably our single largest growth right now. We train Pittsburgh Bureau of Fire, peer support. Good. We train McKeesport, some of their peer support. Good. So there are some. Well, this is a really

cool part is the, what they call it? The Department of Human Services for the county of Allegheny County funded two trainings for community-based trauma. So the county paid for training for us to train other nonprofits and therapists. So they have 12 therapists that work in the jail with inmates. Oh. So there's a that that's all I wouldn't even think that's another population. So when I heard about that, I was like, man, this is really, really cool. And so we train 48 new people up there plus the fire department, the other folks. And it was really kind of awesome to watch that. And so one of the guys up there, he was a news reporter, Sheldon Ingram. If you hear this yelled, I'm sorry, but I'm going to dime me out.

I called him and I said, because I did an interview with him before, I'm like, man, this is a great story, right? Think about it, the fact that they're trying to use this to help stop recidivism, help community-based trauma. I mean, the majority of the inmates at Allegheny County are African-American, right, trying to help a community that's been disenfranchised and to get them healthy. And then when he did the interview, he brought in the union president of the corrections officers. And what they spun it in was that this was only available for inmates. It wasn't available

for the corrections staff. But there was a good ending. Hey, I'm a Christian man. God uses all things for the good, for those who love him. Don Brockers on my board of directors. He's the Allegheny County Chief Deputy Fire Marshal. I'm like, Don, you think you could reach out and find out this corrections guy, the union president? Next thing, I know we're having a conversation. We meet him. he thought DB was punking him because he talked about trauma that correction staff were having so we did his brain scan

did sessions with him he had a massive shift so now we had a whole bunch of their guys coming through and they're getting ready to train we're going to eventually train their peer support so that they can work with each other two things and then we're going to close one what have you been through this

and then you experience it's another trauma. Yes. Do you do it again, or can you lean on what you've already been through? You see what I'm saying? Yeah. So your brain is going to get a new skill, so it'll probably process differently. However, new trauma is new trauma.

It's not like a vaccine, right? I have one of my coaches who's a fire captain down in Sarasota County, Florida. Every once in a while, you go, hey, man, been a rough couple weeks. Can you carve some time out? Yeah, let's go, bro. And we just do the process. So all you got to do, just for him. It's just for him.

But anybody. And it helps clean it up. Cleans it up. So all you're doing is cleaning it up. So healing the hero is it started with 22-0 and now you're healing the hero. And clearly you've talked about your board and everything. What is healing the hero now? Is it a 501C3?

Is it based in Winterhaven? Do you have, how, what, give me the structure of what this thing is now. So you see what I'm saying? Once we started, we're. We've been about two years now. And, I mean, when we stood up, it was fast. Quick, fast, in a hurry. It blew my mind.

But we had the organizational structure very quickly. So Healing the Hero is a 501C3. We're classified as a Christian ministry. Although it's not a requirement to come through. We get plenty of people that we get Jews that come through Muslims. We get non-believers. Just a, we're about your model, the world, not ours. We just want to heal everybody.

Good. So wherever you are, we're- I'm a Christian too. Yeah. But I think as Christians, we should help whoever you are regardless. There are some organizations that it's a diehard stop. It can't be that way, wouldn't, especially when it comes to trauma. Where are you?

All right. We'll meet you where you are. We'll meet you right where you are because a lot of times Jesus healed those that were believers. And then he also healed those that weren't believers that became believers. You know, it's about giving the time to, you know, get that relationship if they so choose to. So we have about 30 coaches right now that are trained. We're all over the U.S., There's no geographical boundary limitations.

I can work with some. I've worked with people in Australia. I've worked with people in Europe. So if people, do you do seminars or do people just hear about you and call up and say, hey, I need help? How does it work? It's been very grassroots and been very word of, word of mouth. So we get a lot of people that'll come through us and be, well, what's this going to cost?

I'm like, it doesn't cost you anything. Oh, come on. There's nothing that's free. I said, all right, you got me. Here's a catch. When you heal, send me three or four your buddies. Oh, I can do that. and that's how it happens.

Well, how's it funded? Donors. I'm not a really good fundraiser. So when I finish the study, that's what I have to start doing because we've gotten, like I'll give you an example. Two weeks ago, we had 25 people come through in one week. That's a lot of people. That's a lot of people.

And we got to make sure we have the structure in place. I need a full-time staff. So I need a professional executive director. I need a professional case manager. and probably hire two or three coaches full-time. Probably need a fundraiser. And probably need a fundraiser. So if you're an angel out there and you want to give to something

where we can really show you what we do, we're always open to that. But our goal is to become irrelevant. We don't want to exist. You want to go to zero. Want to go to zero. Last thing. We opened with our girlfriend, Mays,

who's under the table, comfortably sleeping. Mm-hmm. Funny. That's a support dog, but you consider yourself a support human. Explain that. So I tell people that I inherited Maze. Fortunately, that's truthful. There was one of the veterans that I had been working with.

His name was Jared, Jared Hill. He was a Navy vet 33 years old. He was a Navy CB, so he was a landlocked Iraqi war vet, had dealt with a lot of physical pain. and the VA did what they did good back then and they got him addicted to opiates. So this guy struggled with the addiction part and trauma. And we were trying to get him out of the traumatic event

that he was in because it's like, I can pull you out of a river. We can clean it up. You'll catch your breath. But if you jump right back in the river, you're going to go right back to being exhausted. And we couldn't get him out of the situation he was in. So I picked up a maze at his funeral.

And she's been with me ever since. And, yeah, and that's when I just tell people, I'm her service human. So she travels with me everywhere I go. I'm her service human. And it's funny, too, because if she gets around really loud noises, she'll start shaking. Will she? She will. And then I'll have to, like, comfort her and love on her and do the things that she would do.

Because a lot of people don't understand, service dogs, the impact is, you know, when I talked about earlier about breaking the state. So what a service dog does is they're in tune with the trigger of the vet, right? when a veteran gets emotionally triggered or they're having a nightmare at night, they'll jump up on the bed, they'll start licking their face, they'll intervene with...

Make them okay. Make them okay. Intervening physical contact, getting them away from the green dodge into the white ford, right? It breaks that state. And that's why they're so effective. And the sad part is when Jared killed himself,

he locked her out of the room because he knew he wouldn't be able to follow through with it. Wow. So you are Mazes, service human. I'm the service human, and she goes with me everywhere. And I just tell everybody, this mission is no fail. And the only faces I remember are the ones we couldn't save. Dan, with all of the people that listen to this show every week, and it's thousands,

there's absolutely 0.000 possibility that's somebody hearing us today. is not either themselves in a place that you found yourself or does not have a friend or family member in that place. And if you are that person, please hear Dan's voice. If you are the family of that person, please hear Dan's voice. If they want to find how to get help from healing the hero, how to get help from you and how to try this, this work.

What do they do? So healing the hero.org has got a blue button that says heal here. All they have to do is push that button, fill out the information there. And usually within 20 minutes, Tammy, she's our case manager. 20 minutes? Well, within 20 minutes, they'll get a response from us because I get the email and Tammy gets an email. We respond very quickly. And then what Tammy will do is schedule a 10-minute call to see how high your stress loads are.

And then place you with the right coat. You know, if you're a police officer, we'll put you with a police officer. If you're a firefighter, we'll put you with a firefighter. If you're a Marine, we'll put you with a Marine, whatever you're comfortable with. And healing heroes has been around for what? Two years, two and a half years? Two years. The first nonprofit was April of 18 that I started at.

This one was April 2024. And you said about 4,000 so far? Well, that I have worked with personally. Oh. Organization, I'd see between both organizations, it's probably around 18, 19,000. Wow. Some of that is also to the therapists that we trained. So we got some therapists up in Pittsburgh that I have a... They're doing work. They're doing work. So I have one Vietnam vet, retired Philly Cop. Awesome dude. Calls me up every six, eight weeks to share a story. Or he might need help as he stuck on something and then I'll help him correct it. And he sees five or six a day. And he's been doing this for what four years now. So five or six a day for four years, do the math. Same thing with one of the other guys. So the therapist is. It's a force multiplier, which is why I'm excited about once we get the research done and we can, you know, because it's deeply rooted in evidence-based practices.

So basically we have six evidence-based practices that are put together. And once the next randomized controlled trials done, which is going to be San Diego State University with corrections officers out of Cook County Jail in Illinois, which is Chicago, hopefully that'll give us the solidification of an evidence-based practice and then we can get the therapy world to really step in because technically it's their responsibility. But as Scott Mann says, nobody else is coming, so we're doing it. One of the things we've learned through this, they're doing this show the last three years is there's just about nothing that replaces hope. And if you don't have hope, things are pretty ugly. It feels to me like healing the hero offers hope.

So if you're listening and you need help, or if you're a family member of a highly traumatized person that needs help, healing the hero.org. Yes, sir. Dan Jarvis is working on some things that are saving lives. And one, thank you for their service.

Two, thank you for sharing your story with us. Three, thank you for the work you're doing. And four, I hope as you model this out and continue to have suss, that more and more of our country knows it so that you can go from 22 to zero my friend. I'm hoping we can take every suicide of zero, not just feds.

I love that, Dan. Thanks for being here. Thanks for a let me come. Appreciate you. And thank you for joining us this week. If Dan Jarvis has inspired you in general or better yet to take action by checking out healing the hero, sharing it with a friend in need, donating to them, or something else entirely, let me know. I really do want to hear about it. You can write me anytime at Bill at normalfolks. Us. And I promise you, I'll respond. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with friends on social. Subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it.

Join the Army at normalfokes. Us. Join or start one of our local service clubs. Buy our merch, any and all of these things that will help us grow. An Army of Normal Folks. I'm Bill Courtney. Until next time, do it you can. It's that time to put on your jersey and wave your flag, whoever you root for.

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