Shawn Ryan Show - Peak Points | Travis Howze - The Saddest Moments with a Firefighter

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

We’re revisiting Episode #06 with former firefighter Travis Howze in this recap, focusing on his experience responding to the Charleston Sofa Super Store fire, a tragic event that claimed the lives of nine firefighters. This moment stands as a testament to the courage and sacrifice of those who risk everything to protect others. Shawn Ryan Links: Spotify - Full Episode Apple Podcasts - Full Episode Travis Howze Links: Website - https://www.travishowze.com Book - https://amzn.to/3mpFPdC Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/travishowze Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. VET MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. One of the most tragic events in American firefighter history. I had heard that my friend Louis was missing.

This is the straw that broke the camel's back and kind of sent you into the downward spiral of PTSD. I looked down and I realized my hands were on the shoulders of one of our guys. His head should be right here. But there was no head. What eventually ended your career in the fire service? We certainly weren't expecting any of that. Often referred to that as a death trap.

When did you decide to put the bottle down? It was something as simple as how how do I wanna view my world? The word is perspective. So the SOFA Superstore fire, which claimed the lives of nine firefighters and is one of the most tragic events in American firefighter history'm if I'm not mistaken.

You're right and you were a part of that and you responded to that and you mentioned that this changed your life forever and out of all the traumatic events that you've witnessed and been a part of. This is kind of what,

this is a straw that broke the camel's back and kind of sent you into the downward spiral of PTSD. And also I watched a, I did a lot of research on this too, and it seemed to be a very controversial incident, and a lot of lessons learned happened from it. And it seems that the men, like yourself, that survived it are considered legends in the community.

considered legends in the community. But I wanted to, before we get going on that, I kind of want to put everybody in the mindset of how horrific this was, so I want to roll the tape. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.

I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.

I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you.

I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. how fucking serious and tragic this was. The day started for you at a memorial golf tournament. And I'd like to start from right there. Yeah. Yeah, the last words that you heard was my friend, my best friend, Louis Smokey, and his last dying words as he was burning to death.

Stuff to hear. June 18th, 2007 started out as a normal day for us. We certainly weren't expecting any of that. We actually all got together. I was off duty that day. We were having a golf tournament for another friend of ours who was a firefighter who was killed four months to the day prior in a car accident. That was another really good friend of mine who got me the job in Charleston actually. Really?

Yeah. He was one of my other best friends. I mean, it is so paying homage to him, trying to raise some money for his family at a golf tournament. And we're doing what firemen do. And just like, you know what SEALs do when y'all get together and cops do when they get together. We get drunk and we have a good time.

And that's what that golf tournament was about. But by the end of the day, you heard the tapes. That's what we were all thrown into. And at the end of the golf tournament, everybody's phones kind of started ringing. And we were all told the Superstore is on fire. And we all knew that that was a horrible place to have a fire. We often referred to that as a death trap if that's one of the calls we ever had to go on.

Because as firefighters, you pre-plan buildings. That means you find buildings in your area and it could possibly be a threat or be very bad. So you had to strategically plan how you would face this monster in the event that would happen. How many buildings were like that in that city? Tons of them. Tons of them?

Yeah, I mean, they're everywhere. It's just old furniture stores, actually an old grocery store that was converted into a one-story furniture warehouse. I mean, so it was a huge, it was like a hundred-something thousand square feet. Don't quote me on the square footage, but it was a big showroom

and it had a big storage facility behind it, and that's where the fire started. So we found out that that's where the fire started. So we found out that that building was on fire. We all got in our cars and just went. What were you thinking on the way there? I had heard that my friend Louis was missing. You heard that before you even arrived? Yeah.

When you heard that it was the sofa superstore, did you know it was going to be fucking bad since the... that was already pinging on everybody's radar? Well, it's like I told you earlier, it doesn't... never seems real until it's real. Yeah. And she seemed like another fire. But when I heard he was missing, that extra adrenaline kicked in and I drove faster. I broke through a police barricade with my vehicle. I didn't drive through it like smoking a bandit or anything.

We just went around and the cop was like, what the fuck? And I'm like, fuck you. I kept going. When we got there, the building had just collapsed. So I got there right when building had just collapsed. So I got there right when everybody had been pulled out. My girlfriend was driving my car at the time. My firehouse was right up the street. I told her, I said, go to my locker and my firehouse, grab my shit and get it back to me. I got to find out what's going on. And so this time

you got hundreds of firemen on scene, man. I mean hundreds. There's probably 300 something plus people on the scene that night. It it was just a sea of red lights everywhere. And I ran up to my buddy, David Griffin, who was pumping, he was the engineer on engine 11. And I ran up to him and I said, David, what do we have? And he turned around, he said, Lewis is missing. And he said, Travis, we got a lot more guys in there too. We don't know how many. And I was like, in that? I mean, because now the building is down and there's just fire everywhere you look.

It's just fire blowing. And in Charleston Fire Department, we didn't back out of fires. We were very cowboyish. And we were very prideful of the way that we did things and we were very, very aggressive and this is hundreds of years of tradition. It finally caught us and it cost us nine guys. I remember hearing reports of like 19 or 20 initially is what they thought, but by the time the smoke settled, it was nine. And it was nine really good dudes.

And all of those dudes I knew very personally. I'd worked with every single one of them. We sat around that table breaking bread many nights, having jokes, having laughs. You knew their families. And Lewis just happened to be my best friend because I wasn't his best friend, he was one of those really cool dudes

that had a lot of best friends, but he was my best friend. And when I started with Charleston Fire, he took me under his wing and showed me the ropes. And I had a very special connection with him. And I didn't know by the end of the night. I still didn't know what lie ahead. I didn't know that I'd be the one next to his burnt corpse. Sitting there looking at him in a manner I can try to describe,

but it's going to be hard. You did make entry. Yeah. You know, if I remember correctly, did you make entry and you got pulled back. Was that right? Well, we went around the delta side of the building. So when you're looking at a building, the front is alpha and then you go around clockwise. So we got to the delta side, which is where building would be the right side.

And we go through this place, man. It was just twisted steel spaghetti noodles, and it was still hot. There was still a lot of fire present, but we had guys missing. We didn't have time to not get in there. We really wanted to find these guys. And I guess some of us thought that we

were going to find them alive, but it's just not the case. There was, I think, around 15 to 20 of us on the body recovery teams. We were all broken apart and put into five-man teams, and we all came in from different parts of the building. And my five-man team, we went in and it was literally, you couldn't move two or three feet and you had to stop and you had to figure out a way to get through the voids that were there. There'd be like a little hollow opening here and we'd crawl through that and the next two seconds you're standing on what used to be the roof.

So you're in it at this point and how many guys are with you? Four other guys. And so just to paint a picture because you got really descriptive in your book about the smoke, you can't see your fucking hand in front of your face, the heat, and there was nothing, and I could see how it would be easy to get disoriented and fucking lost and something like that. And you couldn't even bring a hose in with you to retrace your steps to get the fuck out. And I mean, the amount of courage that takes,

I mean, it doesn't, did it seem like it was even a courageous thing? Did it probably didn't even go through your fucking head. It was just we're going. Only thing is, is they wanted volunteers and a lot of guys didn't raise their hand. No shit. Very, very, I think because those guys knew they didn't want what was on the inside of that building.

It's not that they're less of a firefighter. I think that they just knew, I don't want to fuck with that. We're here to do whatever we got to do, but there was a select group of us that did. I certainly often say the worst decision I ever made was going inside of that building that night, but the best decision I've ever made in my life was going inside of that fucking building that night and carrying them all home.

And it didn't seem like anything courageous is just what needed to be done. Our guys are down, we got guys down, we gotta do what we gotta do. Let's push forward and go get it. So we didn't even have fucking air packs on our back because they were all used now So we're choking on smoke and we have what call flash hoods of firefighters have flash hoods And when you put your facepiece on you pull your flash hood up and it protects skin right here protects your neck and your ears

So we're choking on smoke literally gagging on black smoke And you you can't see. And you're crawling next to big flames, fires, and they have ladder companies dumping water on top of us. And in a normal fire situation, you would never be operating inside of a fire when you have tower units raining water down, because they're just so powerful.

It could hurt you. It could injure a firefighter, blow debris on them. It could push fire on top of them and kill them. But we had no choice. We had to go in. We had to do what needed to be done. And it seemed like it took a long time to get to them. And once we started finding them,

you would hear a team shout out, I got somebody. And we would do the same. And I saw something silver and it didn't look like anything we had seen up until this point because everything was just black and then I saw something and I went over to investigate what it was. And it was by myself. And I crawled up there on my hands and knees. No. I started looking at this thing. And I say it in my book, I just turned in my head like a curious dog trying to figure out what the fuck is this.

And I realized that it was an air pack of one of our guys. We wore silver Scott air packs and it busted open. It didn't look like an air pack. It was just like filleted open. And once I realized what it was, I had my hands, I looked down and I realized my hands were on the shoulders of one of our guys and we wore black gear. It just looked like a pile of black shit, like debris. And then when I realized that I pushed back and I looked down and I realized these were his shoulders. That's his back because the pack is on her back. So this, his head should be right here. But there was no head. There was nothing. It was, there was just a couple of teeth. There was no helmet. There was no skull. It was just teeth. And I looked down at the opening, there was an opening

and there's a spinal column sticking out. And I just, when it got real for me, I realized, because I'd been to calls where we had burned up kids on Christmas. I've seen burned kids. I've been to burnt people many times, but... Nothing had like that one. No.

No. No. I realized right then, whoever's in here is dead. Whatever count that they have on the outside, every one of them's fucking dead. And I knew Lewis was in there, and we just... We had no way to tell who was who. That's one thing, when you got a dead body there, that you can recognize, but when you know it's one of yours and you don't know who the fuck it is. So what we had to do is we were tasked with not moving the bodies and just

trying to identify them the best way that we could without doing too much and what the coroner was going to do after all the smoke cleared us come in and GPS them and locate where their bodies were. So that's what we did. So this one individual, Captain Billy, was a really good dude. He'd been in fire service 30-something years. He was off engine 19. And we ended up pulling his fire pants down and his wallet was in his pants. And he opened it up and we saw his driver's license with his credit cards, man. And it was just like, God damn it.

It's one thing when you're working with dead people and you have no relationship, you don't know them because it's not real. You go to these things and it sucks. It fucks with you from time to time, but it's not personal. This is personal. No there's no get back like we talked about and you're just like What the fuck do I do? So but we got a job to do man, and we Can't sit around too long

so we got to find more of our brothers and then we go we We go not too far away and stumble on another one because at this point smoke is starting to lift a little bit more. As the fire got knocked down and we found Mark and he was, he was face down. Rolled him over, his hands were in front of his face, and it's almost like he saw the flash over that happened in that building. It's not a back draft, that's movie shit. I mean, those things happen, but flash overs happen all the time in fires, and that's when

everything reaches its combustible limit at the same exact time, and everything just, all the superheated gases in the building go, and it's just a big ball of fire. And 99% of firemen that are caught in these things die because it's so quick and it's so violent. It's almost like he felt it or saw it and did like this and then turned and fell. His hands were like this, but I didn't know it was Mark. Mark was off of my truck, ladder five,

and I had a fucking great relationship with Mark. We worked together many times. And so we roll him. You gotta think your bodies are still hot, man. You can still feel when you're touching them. Like, I'm not wearing gloves at this point. And I had them, I would take them off from time to time, but every once in a while we'd roll a guy over

and you'd have your gloves off and you could feel that heat in your hands from their gear, how hot it was, and they were fucking burnt. So bad. And when I rolled Mark over, the best description I can give you is we have a plastic face piece right here that covers our eyes and right here is usually rubber and it's black. I don't know if you've ever seen an ultrasound of a baby, a 3D. That's what his face looked like. It was baked into his mask. Damn.

a 3D. That's what his face looked like. It was baked into his mask. Damn. And we undid his coat, pulled his coat open, and we had metal name tags back then, and it had his name right there. And that's how we identified Mark. And we heard other teams yelling out that they were finding guys. And you know, it sounds selfish and everything, but I was so worried about Lewis. All of these guys were important to me, but this is my dude. Yeah, he's your best friend. And I don't want it to be real.

And I want to hurry up and find everybody. And I'm not wishing that it was somebody else, but you can't help but in that moment to be like, please don't be my friend. And the next brother we found was Brandon, my team. We go into this back storage room, it's like one of the only pieces of building that was really left intact. There was a lot of smoke damage, not a lot of fire damage. Brandon was huddled down in a corner and his body was just normal.

We rolled him out of this corner and he just had a cut over his eye And what happened was brain ran out of air, but he got away from the fire, but he died from smoke damn and he just looked peaceful man and his His wedding invitations were in the mail We're still being delivered everywhere around and he died that night. He was actually just working for somebody else He did a buddy shift for somebody else and it cost him his life. Yeah So that Brandon was I knew we had eight at that point and by this time it had come through it we have nine confirmed

This is hours into the night. And um What's the what? Was the fire completely out? Was there still smoke? At this point, smoke was still there, but it was nothing like it was. I mean, it was, we were in there for hours. So the whole fucking building came down and there was really nowhere for the smoke to go

except into the atmosphere. Part of the showroom was still there, but after the bulk of the fire was knocked down, because you gotta think, fire was knocked down, because you have to think, fire was in all these different little pockets where the collapses were. And so once those were done, man, all the smoke pretty much dissipated. That's why I think it took us so long to start finding guys, is because there was so much smoke, I really think we probably crawled over them a couple of times, possibly.

I just didn't know it. So now I know we have eight, and some guys were in there with Brandon and I love Brandon too man and just like I want to spend some time with him do whatever we need to do but I got to find Lewis you know. That limousine company you talked about that I owned I drove for Lewis's wedding we had a lot of fun together man and this is actually the night after his anniversary. He lived one year and one day after his anniversary. So I put my helmet on and I got a job to do, man.

And I was actually in a part of the building where you could stand up and I start walking out. And man, I probably made it 10 or 15 feet. And I walked through what seemed to be a doorway. I'm having to relive this because I can describe it to you. And when I did, as soon as I cleared that doorway, I looked to my left and he was laying right there. I knew it was him just by looking at his skull, you know? I didn't need confirmation. I knew. Because he had a distinct face, and even when his skin is baked off of somebody's face, you can still recognize him.

And it's a sick thing to say, but I've witnessed that. And Lewis was on his back, man, and his left leg was underneath his right. His right leg was straight out, and there was a piece of big ass piece of steel across it. And we ended up having to dig that out, but his arms were sticking up in the air, and his fucking sleeves were burned off, his fire coat, all the skin was burned off of him, and just his arm bones were sticking up. His radius and all, and his hands was burned off of him and just his arm bones were sticking up. His radius and all, his hands were burned off and his head was back and his eyeballs were burned out.

His fucking skin was burned off of his face and his mouth was wide open. And I just got on my knees next to him. I told him how much I loved him. What eventually ended your career in the fire service? So it was a culmination of a lot of things building up to one major incident. So you say, I got in a fight. I ended up going hands on with a lot of guys in the department over the course of two and a half years, and it's not something I'm proud of I'm actually very embarrassed about it But it happened and it needs to be talked about because the reason I talk about it

It's you can see a shift in people's behavior like we're family and when you see somebody acting differently Something is wrong and nobody ever pulled me to the side to help me Nobody ever pulled me to a side this to the side to try to figure out what was going on What happened was this new behavior out what was going on. What happened was this new behavior that I was taking on was just becoming normal. At the funeral for one of our guys, I got into a physical altercation on the bus.

We had a bunch of buses brought in because the funerals were so big, we couldn't take everybody's cars. So they had to bring families on buses and firemen mixed with families. And I was on a bus with some firemen and some families, some young children, some old people, and something was said to another fireman, and he threw his hat at me, and kind of joking around, but kind of not. And I just stood up and slapped him, and slapped him into the seat, the empty seat.

And everybody witnessed it. Yeah, and this is somebody I'm supposedly love, you know, and protect. And I just did that. And that event, everybody got up, they left the bus and I was kind of alone on the bus after that. And then after that was more of the same. I got into physical altercations at the training facility

where I assaulted one of our guys that needed help. He fell down and he was having flashbacks of the fire. He was there that night too and he was screaming all of our dead guy's names. I picked him up and started slamming him into the wall with all of his gear. I was like, knock it the fuck off. When I did one of the training, instructors came over and grabbed me and turned me around. When he did, I threw him into the wall and told him you put your fucking hands on me I'll kill you.

And then we had an academy instructor standing right there and I looked at him and I threatened to throw him out of a window and that was accepted and I swept under the rug. And then again behind a grocery store training one day I slapped one of our other guys right in the face because he just came close to me and said something and I just lashed out and hit him. And at this time I was drinking a lot though. I was drinking, I was coming to work drunk and everything. It wasn't acceptable.

It's embarrassing man, but nobody, it was just not an issue to anybody else. And it was just kind of all this was on my plate for me to deal with and to figure it out. And this is what happens to these cops and these firemen out there. They end up losing their jobs or hurting somebody else because of all the shit that they're going through. They bring it to work and that's what I was doing. I had no outlet for it.

The straw that broke the camel's back for me was, I came to work one day, my house, Engine 10, Ladder 5, and we had a new guy in our house and he put his coffee cup on our dead guy's monument. And it pissed me off. I went over there and I grabbed it and I shattered it on the ground and I opened the door and told him if he wants his cup it's in a million pieces and if he does it again I'll fucking kill him. And those are the words that I use and that's how I truly felt. And when I said that one of my other good friends said, why are you being such an asshole? And when he did, I took that as him defending the new guy's actions and not defending our guy's honor.

And I told him if he says another word to me, I will kill him too in a minute. And he said something to me. And at that time a bomb was lit inside of me and the fuse was about that fucking short. And when he said what he said, it's like somebody poured gasoline on that fuse and then the bomb ignited. To to this day I can't tell you what

happened now because I completely lost it and I blacked out and I just remember being outside with my captain shaking me and I'm crying and he just pretty much told me that I'd assaulted my entire firehouse and the cops were called and they were on the way to arrest me. They offer any help at all, the department? Man, I can't, so our department did the best they could with what we had at the time. We'd never, in the fire service,

there had been other incidents, but not like this magnitude, I guess. So it was kind of like a free fall to try to figure out the best way to help guys. And they came up with some counselors really quickly. I don't know the timeline on it. But they wanted guys, hey, man, we got these counselors for y'all to go talk to. And of course, me being alpha male like I am, I'm like, fuck them. I was like, these motherfuckers, they've never looked at their friends like we have.

They've never fucking held dead babies in their fucking arms. They've read books. Who the fuck are they to tell us how to feel and how to be? That was the problem. Because looking back, that was the worst fucking thing I could have ever done. I hurt myself with that mentality and I hurt other guys around me because I would tell them to, if you go talk to anybody, you're a fucking pussy. And that's one of the biggest regrets I have because I talk about being a coward and it's

not easy to say that. That's me being a coward. That's me being too manly, too macho and having too much of a fucking ego to accept the help that is available to us. We had people, licensed professionals who would listen to us. Maybe had I listened to them, I wouldn't have fucking shoved a gun down my throat and pulled a fucking trigger. Maybe if I listened to them, I wouldn't have burned my entire fucking inner circle down

to the ground, you know? But I wouldn't even give it a chance because I was too macho, the culture that I had been exposed to my entire life. That's what I speak on now. I speak about how we're killing each other with the suck it up mentality, because it's bullshit. Yeah. I understand it, suck it up, we have to deal with certain things,

but there's nothing wrong with, hey, suck it up while we're doing this, we got a job to do, let's go get our guys. And then when we come back, if it fucking bothers you, let's talk about it, because there's nothing wrong with me and you being completely human and not being okay. It's okay to not be okay. And that's what I'm trying to instill in when I speak at conferences and everything.

It's okay. It doesn't make you less of a man. Fuck, it makes you more of a man. It's worth me doing that if it reaches one fucking person in our community or even outside and it helps them become a better mother, father, husband, wife, child, whatever. If it helps them realize that they need help and they can go get the help they want, then fuck it. I'll relive it because that's what we do. We lift people up. We don't fucking help bring them down. And I got caught in this vicious cycle of bringing people down

because I was so fucked up for so long. When my whole world crumbled down on top of me right after that, when everything just started, I mean everything just started eating shit around me, I fell into the victim mindset. It was the whole why me, why me, why me, why have I been exposed to all this, why have I experienced this? I got scared to go to fucking sleep at night. I was, I would cry, alone, away from my wife. I would be in another room crying

because I was afraid to go to fucking sleep because of what was coming for me in the middle of the night. I knew it. Yeah. And I would hide that. And I'm not ashamed of that anymore. How long did it take you to be able to talk about that?

Long time, many years to talk about it the way that I talk about it now. Yeah. Long time, fucking decade. I tried, I tried later on in life to talk about it and I'd shut down every time. I just couldn't do it. Yeah.

But I realized at some point that my experiences may help other people too. And by me speaking about it, it may help me as well. And that it did. And that's why I do now. I always say when you're in a place that makes you sick, you can't get better. It's like a cancer patient testing cigarettes for Marlboro or whoever. You're only going to get sicker.

I tried to stay a hung on tooth and nail man, but I realized when I realized I had problems testing cigarettes for Marlboro or whoever. You're only gonna get sicker. I tried to stay, I hung on tooth and nail, man, but I realized I had problems and something needed to change when I finally, because people ask me, what made you reach out for help? And it was me sitting in my living room, dry firing a weapon in my mouth while I'm choking on the weapon.

The barrel down my throat was slobbering drool all over it, my tears running down my face and a bottle of whiskey next to me. And then I load it and then I go to pull the trigger and I stopped right where I thought it would go off. And luckily I stopped prior to it going off and I knew right then I needed help. So I got the help. But it wasn't in time.

But yes, to answer your question, when I got away from the fire department, things started drastically changing for me. The anxiety, I always had the nightmare shit I still do. But that rage inside of you, it calms. So getting away from there was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. I didn't want to leave like that. I wanted to stay on the job 30 years. I wanted to retire. I wanted to do the right thing for my

guys, ride that rig for them, but it wasn't in the cards for me. So I got away from there for a long time and now I'm back and now I do a lot of work with fire departments, police departments, but I'm better now. And I'm with them at a different capacity now, you know? So I'm not completely immersed in it all the time. I can step away from it. Yeah. Yeah.

When did you decide to put the bottle down? That's the day after our wedding in 2012. No shit. Yeah, man, I got so fucked up at our wedding that my poor wife, she had to eat cold grits with the cab driver that took us to our hotel because her husband was passed out upstairs. Oh shit.

Yeah, a great first night together. Oh shit. But I had been thinking about it for a while. That was just, for me, that was just the thing. I woke up the next morning and I said, I don't ever want to touch this stuff again. And I haven't. Cold turkey, done.

Yeah, I looked at it and I started looking at, if I'm ever going to get better, it's going to be a long road to hope. But I need to look at the things I can control right now that are not helping me. And the biggest one that stuck out to me was alcohol. It didn't add any positive thing in my life, nothing. Everything that it offered me was negative.

So I was like, dude, this has got to go. So I quit cold turkey right then. That's not easy to do. No. But it's at first, the hardest part about it is now being the sober guy around all the people that are drinking. Yeah. And you're sitting there when you don't want to be there,

like you talk about in your social anxiety posts. I get it. Yeah. Because I don't want to fucking be here, but I have to put on this smile. And that doesn't mean I'm not contemplating fucking everybody up in this room. Yeah.

But it's just something I've had to learn to accept and deal with. And I'd rather have that than going back home with that bottle and putting myself in a position and not be here anymore. Yeah. Well, for everybody that's listening who is from the fire service or military or police, who's fucking drowning themselves in a bottle right now. And there's a lot of them. I mean, how fast after you quit drinking,

did, how fast did that acceleration start to get you into a better mental state? And I'm sure your business fucking started taking off too at that point. Well, honestly, I'd love to tell you it was lightning fast, but it wasn't. It was a culmination of things because I was so fucked up. The biggest hurdle I had yet to face

was ownership and acceptance of everything. Yeah. And I always was asking why, and I became the victim of like, this only happens to me, why me? My life is in such a horrible spot. Even though I wasn't drinking, I still had that mentality. And that's never who I was prior to all of this.

I was very positive upbeat guy, but this thing does something to you. It rewires your brain and you have to be your own surgeon and go in and fucking reconfigure the wire. It took years of me going in and trying to rewire until I finally fixed it. It wasn't until last year when I realized what it was. It was something as simple as how the word is perspective. Something as simple as perspective. How do I want to view my world? Do I want

to look at it through this victim feeling bad, horrible, fucking poor, poor me lens? Or do I wanna look at it from a standpoint of, look, you have this beautiful life, you have these horrible experiences, yes, but you can do something with them for the greater good. And you can make a positive impact on people with what you have experienced.

And so I chose that. And the second I chose that, it was like a light switch. Well, how the fuck did that come to you? That's funny you ask, it came to me sitting in my car with a gun in my hand, ready to blow my brains out for the second time. No matter where you're watching Sean Ryan's show from,

if you get anything out of this, please like, comment, subscribe, and most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, please leave us a review on Apple and Spotify podcasts. Hi, I'm Joe Salci. I hosted the Stacking Benjamin's podcast. Every week we talk to experts about saving, investing,

personal finance trends. Crypto, can't do it. You could have done all that research, all the breadcrumbs, and thought this company's never going bankrupt. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha