Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Full Auto Friday - Round 101

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

Rapid Fire Q and A to finish off the week: 1. How do I write the vows for my upcoming wedding and not sound like a clown 2. Suicide, how do I move on 3. I am a giant of a man, can I still do jiu-jitsu 4. Why do I not feel afraid of death like other people 5. How do I keep my job from affecting my children Enjoy

Ladies and gentlemen, it's Friday, time for Q&A, full auto Friday, number 1001. Here we go. All right, if you've found yourself here, you know it's Friday. You know on Friday we do Q&A. I have some questions for today. And I have a lovely weekend planned with my kids. So I'm going to get through this. Thank you for the questions.

Hopefully the answers. mean something to you. Maybe they make you laugh. I don't know. I do the best I can. Still very curious as to why people send me these questions, but I'm going to keep answering them as long as people send them in. So here we go. Question one. I'm getting married in CA, period, lowercase. I'm curious now if you mean Canada or California. I'm going to say California. In 2.5 months. As you are way more experienced person in weddings than me, fuck you. I've only had one under my belt. I have another one coming up, though. I assume you will be. right, if not the best person to ask for help. The problem is that my beloved, soon-to-be private

property, asked me nicely if we could do some sort of wedding vows. Though I despise this idea, I love the fuck out of her. And she definitely deserves me saying some nice stuff in public to her. My issue is, how to overcome my anxiety. I really don't like to be the focus of people, even though it's my wedding and not to turn this into, you know, a one to 15 to five minutes of our shared, lived, total disaster. How do you make this speech so it will not turn out to be dumb stand-up yet not cold? Any advice will make me very thankful. Well, I'm going to make some assumptions about your situation. I'm going to assume that you know the people coming to your wedding. I'm going to assume that those people are there to support you and you're soon to be

wife and that they care for you. And if that is the case, if you're not just inviting random people, you're actually inviting people that you care about, they already know who you guys are. So completely forget that they are going to be there. I get completely the anxiety of public speaking. It was something that took me a while to get over. And eventually, if you have enough reps doing it, you'll get to a place where it doesn't bother you anymore because you realize that everybody is human, everybody misspeaks from time to time, they'll fumble their words. And most of the people who are watching those publicly speak are really glad that they're not the person up there doing the public speaking. So it's less of a big deal than you may think it actually is. However, I can understand that this could be

stressful. But if you can put it out of your mind that what you're going to say has nothing to do with the people who are there to support you guys, I think it'll take a little bit of pressure off. I wouldn't recommend stand up for your wedding vows. And of course, you don't want to be cold either. So I think you've identified the two extremes and what you don't want to be. And the only advice that I would give you is focus on telling your soon-to-be wife what she means to you. Don't try to be anything other than yourself. Don't use words that you normally wouldn't use.

And actually maybe that would be the second piece of advice. Don't try to play a character of any kind. And this is true of anybody who does public speaking. It's exhausting to try to be anything other than yourself. So give up on that and just be yourself. Because guess what? Yourself is enough, especially in this situation. So don't try to be a character.

Don't try to even add anything in there that is funny. And don't say anything for the people who are in the audience. there to support you. Speak to your wife. Speak to your future wife. Tell her what she means to you. Tell her how you feel about her. Make it personal. Make it not too long. And also, maybe to give you a little bit of better boundaries on this, sit down with her since she's the one who brought this up and maybe try to set some boundaries of how long you would want to talk for, what maybe she is necessarily expecting, not in the words that come out of your mouth, but maybe the theme or maybe these are something that you guys could work on together because it would be weird if you talked

for a minute and she talked for 10, right? So you could probably avoid any of that awkwardness by having this conversation up front. And I think it'll give you a better idea. But just be yourself. Speak from the heart. The people that are there are already there because they love and care for you. And the day is supposed to be about you and your wife. So make the speech about you and your wife and I think it'll go off famously or it won't but that is up to you question two switching to a slightly deeper subject hello andy my father committed suicide using my hunting rifle he shot himself in the head and used a ruler to push the trigger down i was the one who found him and i have no idea how to recover move on from this i'm writing this because i haven't slept in the last 48 hours and have

scoured the internet for answers and can't seem to find anything that relates or makes sense. I have intense stomach aches and can't seem to think of anything other than his body and the scene. As a person who has handled multiple suicides of close friends, how did you move on and come to grips with what happened? Thanks for taking the time to read this. Man, what a horrific situation that you have found yourself in and then you are working your way through. I am not an expert in this. I haven't handled multiple suicides of close friends in the terms of what you are describing. I did not come across the body or discover the body at the scene. I've been notified of more than my share of friends committing suicide, but there is a difference between that and the situation that you

have described. So I'm not an expert. What I will say is that I don't think you're going to find the answer to this on the internet. I can only imagine what you have found in the last 48 hours, and I actually really hope that right now you're not hearing me answer your question because what you have been able to do is find a way to sleep, because I think sleep and time are really the only two things that you can probably do right now that are going to help with this, but it may not help very much. It may be measured in, you know, tenths or hundreds of a percentage point increase in the right direction.

I would absolutely recommend that you find somebody to talk to who is a professional at helping people deal with things like this. I do not understand how the human mind works, but I know that there are people out there who have made it their life work to do so. find one of those people. And I think right now, the biggest thing is going to be time. I can't, I've never been suicidal. I have never had ideations where it has become an option for me or an option that I was truly considered. Have I spent time thinking about the pros and cons of trying to continue to struggle through what I was going through and maybe taking the in the moment and what

in air quotes could be considered the easy way out. Yes, I have. And I think I'm probably not alone if you've ever allowed your mind to drift and think about those things, that one of the things that rapidly brings you back to the realization that this, you know, there are other options, there are better options. There are fuck so many other things that you could do other than taking your own life is the impact that it would have on those that were left behind. I can't even imagine the headspace required to go and find your hunting rifle to figure out that you would need a ruler to actually fire the rifle and then go through with that. And I can only imagine that the individual that made that choice was in just an exceptional

amount of pain, physically, mentally, the combination of the two. and they likely were not thinking about the impact that it may have. I've often heard suicide described as an incredibly selfish act. And I agree with that to a degree because of the email that you sent me and what this is doing to your life. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that you may never be able to get over the scene and the body. and what it is that you came upon. You may never be able to actually erase that from the hard drive of your memory. You may be able to develop some coping tools that can help you move past it,

but those tools are going to require time. And it's going to require effort from you, and I'm sorry that you are in this situation, because like I said at the very beginning, this sounds fucking horrendous. One thing I would recommend is get rid of the hunting rifle, donate it to a friend sell it if you ever wanted to continue hunting in your life don't use that rifle just take that simple step and be done with it there are plenty of other rifles that you could come

upon if you don't have the money to get another rifle and that's the only one that you have reach out to me again i'll buy you a rifle in the future years so you don't have to think about this but that would be an easy first step that you could make and then beyond that that there's nothing that you can do for your dad at this point your effort and energy needs to be focused on what you can do for yourself and those that were left behind and that's going to start with you taking care of yourself get some sleep don't find that sleep through alcohol or pills or the combination of the two because that's actually just passing out and it's not actually the sleep and recovery that you are going to need so focus on yourself and then do everything that you can

to build yourself into as strong of a castle or pyramid pyramid that you can be working your way through this because I feel like probably for the next few days or weeks, it's going to be a lot of having that pyramid or castle being broken down with the things that you're going to have to do, the memorial or funeral and the things that will continue. But with the passing of time, hopefully you can find some relief for this. And what will really help with that is if you can find somebody to talk to who is a professional and how the brain works and somebody who has dedicated their life to helping people that are in the situation that you are in. That's the best advice I can give you. And I hope your days continue to get better. And like I said, I hope you don't hear

this until weeks from now because you have been busy sleeping, resting, and recovery and working your way through the situation that has been presented to you. Question three, a little bit lighter topic. I've been listening to your episode on Joe Rogan's podcast and you both were discussing jiu-jitsu and all the benefits that come with it. I am 32 and stand six-foot five-inches tall, approximately 290 pounds. I'm making an effort to focus on losing weight, but wondering, are there any weight limits that would prevent me from wanting to get involved and consider learning jiu-jitsu? I'd hate to find a gym and consider joining only to realize I have no partner who comes in who is close to my size. Curious on your thoughts. Well, I hate to break it to you,

but I suspect you may already realize this. You are abnormally large for a human being. So you probably, regardless of where you go train, unless you go train amongst a population that has an average height of around seven feet, are going to be one of the bigger, if not the biggest person, and probably any gym that you go into. So just wrap your head around that right now. Finding training partners that are truly your size are going to be few and far between. But when you do find them, let me just tell you, if you go down this path, train with them as much as possible because there's going to be a huge discrepancy in your height and weight for most people. I am six foot even and float around 210 pounds plus or minus a little bit depending on whether I had pancakes for breakfast.

And I am taller and heavier than most people at the gym that I train at. Should that prohibit you from training? Absolutely not. But what I will say is you're going to need to be very careful and you're going to need to be very cautious with your training partners. and it may be difficult when you first start to find people that are willing to train with you because they are a little bit intimidated by your size and your weight. But if you can learn to control your weight and not constantly apply every ounce of it, and you can focus on technique as opposed to smashing people with your 290 pounds,

even though I know you said you're working on losing weight, and the pursuit of jiu-jitsu will help you do that. And I would highly recommend that you not lose weight first and then start jiu-jitsu. I would say start do jitsu now and continue to learn as your weight decreases and stabilizes at whatever it's at because you can learn to control your weight, the placement, the distribution of it, how you can control your limbs. And I actually think somebody your size is a fantastic training partner for people that are smaller than you, which for clarity is going to be almost fucking everybody. And I say that because if you are like me and you're six feet tall and you only train with people that are six feet tall that are. about your strength and about your weight, you're not getting a lot of different looks. And I go and I walk around in the streets like everybody else. I'm like, oh, I'm a lot bigger than a lot of people.

So I want to be able to train with a lot of different sizes. And it's very uncommon to have somebody your size, even though one of my best friends and training partners, I don't think he's 6'5. Maybe he's 6'4. I don't know. He's huge in comparison to me. And it presents very different challenges, the length of his legs, his femurs, his tib, fib, fib. know, how he can wrap his legs around me in the clothesguard, which I try to prevent at all cost because it's a nightmare to get out of there. I love it, just like I like training with smaller people as well. So you, I think, could be a fantastic training partner for people, but you really have to learn how to control your size. And by that, I mean vertical size, and then also your weight, because you can hurt people with that much weight applied improperly or accidentally. So start very, very slow, but do not avoid jiu-jitsu because of your size and current

weight. Go into it with the expectation that you are going to be bigger than most people, but try to focus as much as you can on technique. Because if you use your size and strength, and that's all you have, you will glass ceiling out. You will get to a point where you're going to encounter people with an experience level where they can deal with your size and weight. And if that's all you've been focusing on and you have very minimal technique to go with that, you're going to start to get smashed. And that's going to become very frustrating to you. And then you're likely going to give up. And I don't want that for you because I think jiu-jitsu is awesome. And it can be done by people who are six foot five and five foot six and four-foot-six. It should be for everybody. But you have to

take those things into consideration. So go find a gym that's close by. And also take the time to sit there and express exactly what you expressed to me to the owner of the gym or the head coach, because they're going to have some food for thought for you as well and maybe some strategies that you could take on board. So good luck and let me know how it goes. Question four. I can't figure out if I'm just fucked up from 17 years of firefighting or if something is imbalanced in me. Full disclosure, I am not suicidal and I have no intent of self-harm or harm to others.

But I can't shake this incredibly selfish feeling of if somebody is going to pass away in the line of duty, then it should be me. And by that, I secretly wish the job would take me and me alone. You see, I feel since I turned 18 and was on my own, life punches me in the face every chance that it gets. It's a long backstory, but I've spent my entire adult life in parentheses, I'm 36 trying to break a family cycle of poverty, alcoholism, and lack of education, and do everything right. Now, don't get me wrong. I feel I've done well and don't have things anywhere near as bad as many other people out there.

And hopefully you tell me I'm being a little selfish bitch about all of this. But since I was a little kid like Aedish watching John Wayne and Green Berets, Matthew Broderick and Glory and Charlie Sheen in your favorite real-life documentary, obviously Navy SEALs, I felt like I've shared the same outlook on my destiny as Lieutenant Danum in Forrest Gump, or Kevin Costner in The Guardian. In other words, making the ultimate sacrifice so that others may live. while on my way to the men's department of the navy recruiting office i got lost and became a fireman my feeling of my destiny went away when i met my wife thirteen years ago she's been amazing and we've been through some shit together especially the last two years she is my rock and my reason for waking up slipping on my boots and going to work but recently we've had some shit pop up that is beyond our control and this feeling of making the ultimate sacrifice at work has returned i find myself feeling tired and ready to clock out. I've been exposed to enough suicides, homicides, and line of duty death to know

the toll it takes on families and friends and coworkers. And I know that I'm not suicidal in the clinical or classical sense. I have an awesome wife to dopy dogs that are kick-ass and have normal hobbies like motorcycles, BJJ, and leatherworking. So plenty of reasons to wake up and enjoy the world, but I just can't shake this feeling that I'm strangely okay with passing in the line of duty if I find myself in that instance, but I do not wish to readily seek it out and intentionally put myself in that situation. So I guess my question is, what the fuck is wrong with my brain? Do I need a vacation? Is post-traumatic stress finally manifesting its ugly head? Why do I not feel afraid of death like most other people? And have you ever experienced similar feelings or known people

who have similar feelings? Any perspective is welcome. Wow. fascinating email. My first thought in this, when reading this, is that when your initial thoughts about this feeling of destiny, and for clarity, let's go back a step here. Lieutenant Dan and Forrest Gump and Kevin Costner and The Guardian, those are movies, therefore known as fiction. So, yeah, that sounds great, you know, making the ultimate sacrifice so that others may live. that's great when it comes to a movie theme or a movie script, but you could also change that script a little bit and say, I'm going to be so good at my job

that I'm going to do things that allow others to live without also giving my life in the service of others. So it doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. You could probably have the best of both worlds. If being introduced to your wife or getting married to your wife 13 years ago and those feelings went away and it felt like it grounded you, my first thought would be have you expressed any of these feelings to your wife. That's where I'd start.

It sounds like she had an amazing impact on your life, which I think is spectacular. And if these are starting to creep back in, and like you have said in the email, you've seen the impact that it has on friends and coworkers, she's going to be the person most directly that would have to bear the brunt of something happening to you in the line of work. so I would be very open and honest and talk with her about it. Is there anything wrong with your brain? I don't know. Do you need a vacation? I think everybody needs a vacation. I think everybody would be better served if they were forced to take two to four weeks off per year.

And they had to detach from whatever it is they did professionally and they weren't allowed to talk with anybody that was on the job. And they had to go somewhere where they were tasks saturated to the point that they could just reset their brain a little bit. You know, I realize that's kind of a pipe dream and not everybody is able to do that. In fact, most people are not able to do that. But my point is, I think it actually would be beneficial. So do you need a vacation? Yes, everybody needs a vacation. Is there something wrong with your brain?

I don't know. I don't think so. I don't think accepting the potential risk of death due to your occupation is bad. I think it would only trend towards being bad if you develop a laissez-faire or laxadaisical attitude around death, and you started taking needless risk due to your behavior because you just didn't care. And to be very clear, oftentimes when people take those needless risks, they put a lot of other people at risk as well.

Because if you work with a team, which I know that you do, and I have family that is in the fire service, I know how much they care about each other. If you do something stupid because you just don't care and you put yourself at risk because you're like, ah, fuck it. I'm going to become the storyline of a movie and they're going to create backdraft two around my life. There are going to be other people that will risk their life to try to prevent you from having that movie made about you. And you may end up actually killing somebody else because where you've arrived is that you don't care about yourself and you didn't see the cascading consequences of your behaviors. So keep that in mind as well.

The first responder world, you are from my understanding, having never lived a day in that world. but in talking to the people that I know that do, you are on a day-to-day level confronted with mortality, kids, seniors, everything in between. Accidents, peaceful deaths, horrendous deaths that you would never wish upon anybody. I don't know if that jumbles your brain. I don't know if it recalibrates how you feel about risk or about death, or the certainty of death, or how much time we may have left.

But it's got to do something to the brain. I'm just not an expert on what it is. And like I said, and I think the first question, there are people out there who have the ability to work with individuals who have these questions. And you also have a circle of friends that I'm sure you are on shift with. And there are ways to talk about these things without actually worrying people and thinking that they need to commit you to a rubber room. Is PTSD post-traumatic stress finally manifesting its ugly head? I don't know. I really don't know. People deal with stress in different ways. Some people push it down deep until it explodes. And other people seem to have the ability to have it be like water hitting a ducks back and it just slides right off. And I don't know where you fit in that. And again, I would point you back towards finding a professional, which I'm sure your department has the ability to either pay for or give you a reference to. And if you don't want to do that because you're worried about the potential impact on your job, find one outside. of your direct social circle, but there are people who can help you answer these questions

in a more direct manner. Why do I not feel afraid of death like most other people? I don't have a good answer for that other than I think it might be due to the amount of time that you spend around death. I do, what I will say is this. When people say to me, I am not afraid of death. I land that there's one of two things happening. One is that they're lying, or two is that they are sociopathic, because fear of death, in my mind, at least, allows you to realize when there is a risk of injury or death around you. And then you can take behaviors and actions to mitigate those risks. And you need to have those things present in the role and occupation that you have. So keep that in the back of your mind. Have I ever experienced similar feelings about not being afraid of death? No,

I have never not been afraid of death. Was I able to get myself to a place where I was comfortable with the risk of death occurring because of the either occupation or activity that I was doing? Yes, but that is very different than saying I'm not afraid of death. Wing suit base jumping is a good example. Not the safest activity on the face of the planet, but also probably not the most dangerous and I think a lot of the times people really want to romanticize how dangerous it can be where it can be be it's not a BB gun how dangerous it can be but the reality is you can choose to take actions and do it as safely as possible and set all of all of the variables up in your favor is there still a risk of death of course there is but you don't have to do anything

to increase that risk of death the people that I never wanted to jump with where the ones are like, fuck it, man, full sin. You only get one life to live. I'm, you know, like, they didn't pay attention to the risk. They talked about death in a very casual format. And I don't want any part of that because I want to live a very long and extended life. And I want you two as well. So if you're not afraid of death, I would say you might need to look at changing your job.

But if you have come to grips with the fact that you may die and that doesn't bother you as much as it may bothers other people. I would say that is a different thing. I would point you towards a professional that can give you better answers to these questions, but that's what I got for you. Last question for today. My question for you is this. How do I keep the negative aspects of my job from affecting my kids or kid as much as I can? I've worked in EMS for almost a decade now.

Started out on the meat wagon running 911 for a few years and have worked my way up to my dream job flying medaback on a helicopter. It's certainly not what TV portrays like you talk about. how Hollywood does not do justice to your old job. I'd say it's 90% routine easy, 8% pretty exciting, and 2% terrifying. That sounds like a pretty normal and honest ratio. I just found out that I'm going to be a father for the first time. I'm absolutely ecstatic, but also nervous how my job is going to affect my kid. We do see some horrendous stuff in our perspective on what's critical and what the public

thinks is critical is vastly different. I guess what I'm trying to say is, is my view on the world darker sense of humor? going to fuck my kid up. My answer to you is it depends. It really depends. And also realize the impact that those things would have on your kid, that darker view of the world and the darker sense of humor, it's not going to impact your kid for the first few years of the life at the very least. And before you go any further, congratulations. Obviously, I should have started with that. It's awesome that you're going to be a father for the first time. It's going to be everything that you thought it was going to be and then so much more that you never could have possibly

imagined. It is possible that your view on the world and dark sense of humor could fuck your kid up, but that just depends on how much of that behavior that you exhibit in front of that kid. And like I said, for the first, I'm going to call it five to six years of their life. It's, you know, it might have a little bit of impact, but as they age and as they develop better mechanisms to process what's going on in the world around them, your behavior in what you model for them will become even more critical. You're going to be in the most important and impactful leadership role, in my opinion, at least, on the face of the planet as a parent. And your kids are going to be listening to everything that you say and they're going to be watching your behavior. So if you want your kid to have a dark sense of humor and a darker sense of the world, and you model that for them, don't be surprised.

But you don't have to do that. That can also be a choice. And who knows what you're going to be doing, say, if you just find out you're going to be a father, so you probably have seven months until the birth. We'll call it another five to six years. before that processing capacity is really there and they start paying attention to a degree where it might have an impact. Point in all that is, you got time. Who knows what you'll be doing by then? You might have an administrative role.

You might be flying the damn helicopter instead of working in the back. That'd be pretty bitching. It's okay to have a different view of the world than other people around you. And what I suspect is when it comes to situations where people are panicking, you probably, have the ability to keep your cool due to the situations that you find yourself in occupationally. And what I could say to you is this. There's a chance that your perspective on the world could actually give your kid a few more rungs up the ladder in comparison to his or her peers. You could teach them the things that make you successful at your job while avoiding

having that darker sense of humor or exposing them to the darker side of things that you see. You could take those positive skills that you have learned and refined over. a career and pass them on to your children where they don't have to become emotionally involved in things. They don't have to argue. They can critically think through things even though the world may be falling around or falling apart around them. You can teach people those things. The best way to do so is to model it in yourself, of course, but you have this amazing ability to also verbalize this to your child as well. So, you know, a double-edged sword, if you will. There could, of course, be a negative aspect to your job, but it could be a hugely positive aspect

as well. And you always have the ability to shield your kids or your loved ones from the more negative aspects of your job. And I highly recommend that you do that, but that is different than pushing those things down and not actually addressing them. So no, it's not going to fuck your kid up at all and actually could develop them into an even more amazing young man or woman. And that's all I got for this Friday. See you guys Monday.