The Daily - How a Teenager Found Undiagnosed Brain Injuries in the Military

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

Warning: this episode contains mentions of suicide. New reporting has found that the impact of rough sea waves on rescue-boat crews in the Coast Guard can lead to long-term effects, including traumatic brain injury. Dave Philipps, who reports about veterans for The New York Times, explains the significant blind spot in the Coast Guard and talks about how a teenager helped expose this widespread danger.  Guest: Dave Philipps, who reports about war, the military and veterans for The New York Times. Background reading:  Rescue-boat crews show signs of brain injuries. After an article by The Times, the Coast Guard vowed to protect crews from brain injuries caused by rough seas. Photo: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From the New York Times, I'm Zolinkano-Young, filling in his host. This is the Daily. Over the past decade, the U.S. military experienced a wake-up call. Research showed that traumatic brain injuries were not just caused by bombings and explosions, but also by the shockwaves troops feel from their own weapons, like artillery and shoulder-fired rockets. Now, new reporting shows that similarly devastating impacts can come from another unexpected place. The Ocean. Today, my colleague Dave Phillips on a significant blind spot in the Coast Guard and the teenager who helped expose how widespread the danger really is.

It's Tuesday, September 1st. Dave Phillips, you have been covering the military. for how long? Probably like 20 years. And I think it's fair to say that you have expanded our understanding of specifically brain injuries in the military and how they can impact a wide range of jobs. But recently your reporting took you to a branch of the military that I think most of us would not associate with head trauma. And that's the Coast Guard. How'd you end up there? Yeah, basically it started in Iraq because brain injuries were a huge part of the war. in Iraq and Afghanistan. IEDs going off, people getting really shaken up, but not having a

scratch on them. And so we started to talk about these invisible injuries. And of course, I wrote about that years ago. But it was only recently that I started to figure out that you could get those injuries, not from some big blast that comes from the enemy, but from multiple small blasts that come from firing your own weapon. So people that work on artillery cannons or mortars or fire shoulder-fired rockets. These people are repeatedly getting a shockwave that whips through their brain tissue. And over time, those repeated shocks to the brain can lead to a really lasting and disruptive issue. Right. So you're describing heavy weapons, working with explosives. You're describing combat. And I don't usually associate all of those things

with the Coast Guard. So I guess were you surprised that your journey brought you here to the Coast Guard? Yeah, because most people, when they think about the Coast Guard, they think like EMS for the sea. You know, like search and rescue, port safety, drug interdiction. And while they do have some weapons training, that's not what we really associate them with. So honestly, the Coast Guard wasn't even on my radar for these types of injuries until I got a call from a reader who said, hey, I think the same thing happened to my husband. And he recently died. Wow.

She described symptoms of a boat driver in the Coast Guard that were exactly like the symptoms that I was seeing in these other folks. So I said, hey, if this is happening to your husband and to other people who are doing the same job, help me find those people who are being exposed and are maybe also suffering. And she knew a lot of them. And she quickly connected me with a woman named Jenna Bonner. Okay. So tell me about Jenna. So you guys ready to start? Yeah. Okay.

Jana Bonner's in her 40s, she's got four kids, and she moved to a beautiful little spot in the mountains of North Carolina a number of years ago with her husband, Brett Bonner. What was your first impression of him? He was very fit. Uh-huh. Like, total life of the party. His friends used to call him big, dumb animal.

He was like a golden retriever. Jenna, she had met this guy when she was in college. And he was this young, big, mussely, you know, as she describes him, hot, guy who was a friend of her brothers. And he pretty instantly fell in love with her. In fact, after they only meet each other a couple times. He told my parents, he's like, hold on, I got to go walk my future wife out to her car. Are you serious? I mean, that level of confidence.

In front of the... He starts introducing her to other people as his future wife. Okay, not wasting time here. No. It's just fun, like very fun. Yeah. I joke that I married him because he made me laugh. And they got married pretty quickly.

He was in the Coast Guard, and he wanted to become one of their elite rescue boat drivers, which is called a surf man. Dave, this may just be me, but what's a surfman? Can you just explain that a little bit more? Yeah, yeah, yeah. When a boat is out in distress in a storm stuck in, big waves, someone has to go out there and rescue them. And that person who's driving that boat is the surf man. And these boats are built to withstand anything. They can get knocked over by a 25-foot wave and then write themselves like a rubber ducky. And so you can imagine that driving

one of those in stormy seas and surf that's higher than a building, that takes a great deal of skill. So when he's starting his career, they move to the west coast because that's where all the really rough surf is along the Pacific. And so that's where all the surfmen train. And he's really excited. He gets stationed at the Coast Guard station that's right under the Golden Gate Bridge by San Francisco. And he and Jenna get established there.

He was just not the guy who was going to sit at a desk. And he loved being on the boat. He loved being underway. He was always the guy who was like helping people. And he reaches his goal and he becomes a surfman. He joins this elite club. But when he gets there, he's doing these daily search and rescue missions, but a lot of it's not really rescue.

It's recovering bodies from people who had jumped off the bridge. Later, he said I joined the Coast Guard to save lives. Like, not this. And that empathetic side of him really struggled with the jumpers. Sure. Just like, what if I had, like, spotted them faster? And the job really started to weigh on him because he's a lifesaver. He got into this work to save people.

And he had plenty who weren't all the way dead and were begging them to save them. And they weren't able to save them. Yeah. And in a lot of these cases, these people couldn't be saved once they jumped to their deaths. And even worse, there were people who were right on the edge. And his crew would have to perform all sorts of life-saving and CPR actions on them, even though it was pretty clear they weren't going to make it. Oh, my goodness. I'd imagine that that takes a toll.

Yeah, Jenna started to notice changes in him. She noticed that he was having trouble sleeping, that his mood is really changing. And it wasn't long before he was diagnosed by the Coast Guard with PTSD. PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. And how does he respond to that? Well, I mean, he takes it seriously. He starts taking an antidepressant. He goes to counseling.

ultimately, though, he goes back to work. He's back on the boats. And then he is reassigned up to Washington at the mouth of the Columbia River to the surf school where he's actually teaching other surfmen how to do this kind of work. Okay, so that sounds maybe like a really positive change.

He's now teaching, which I imagine would be easier on the mental. It takes less of a toll, no? Right. The stress of all these rescue calls of having to hold bodies out of the ocean, that's gone. Right. But the physical punishment of this new job is way worse. Because if you're just a regular surfman at a regular surf station,

you're only out in big pounding waves once in a while, pretty rarely. But if you're at the surf school, you're out there teaching other people all day, every day. And you're not just in this big crashing surf. You're in it with student drivers. And so if Brad's driving the boat, it's a much smoother ride. He knows how to time it. He has the finesse. He has years of experience. Yes. So he would say it's so much worse because, like, you're getting slammed around. And so what would have been a rough ride anyway becomes even rougher.

Right. Okay. This is making sense. I'm thinking about getting into a car with a 16-year-old who's trying to get their driver's permit. But in that situation, not in the ocean, and I don't have to deal with 12 to 15 foot dangerous waves coming at me. Yeah, exactly. Even when this type of training goes right, it's really, really rough. And when you're dealing with students and with stormy seas, oftentimes things go wrong. And one day, that's exactly what happened to Brett out on the water. He said it was a rogue wave, like the timing of it. A student was driving.

Rhett was directing him through these big crashing waves off the Pacific coast. So he's telling the guy, like, full throttle, like, push. And one just knocked the boat completely over so that now they're upside down in this roiling surf. He's getting whipped all around. And in the meantime, he said, while you're upside down, he said it's like hitting a brick wall. Because the current is so strong underneath that you're just, like, slammed. He's counting the seconds in the darkness waiting to come up. and come up and it's not happening.

And he's like, I was out of air. I thought like, well, this is it. My life flash before my eyes. Like, this is the end because it's not rewriting. And then it finally pops back up. And when it comes back up, he's slammed on the bottom of the boat. And fortunately, the boat works as it's designed to. And eventually, they all pop up.

It sounds like he could have died. Yeah. But still, he's okay. And after several weeks, several weeks, he goes right back to work, teaching other people in big crash and surf. And all of the symptoms that he was experiencing San Francisco started to get worse. He came home with headaches all the time from work. Yeah.

Yeah, light sensitivity, short fuse, or just... He's getting headaches. He's really having trouble sleeping. The nightmares are getting worse. His mood is really changing. He put holes in the wall. He... Meaning like punched a hole in the wall.

Punch holes in the wall. Yes. And, like, he went from a fun dad to, like, he expected total silence in the car. He'd be like, shh. Like, you're yelling. Like, no, like, no, very noise sensitive. And honestly, I think she's starting to wonder what's going on. And then something really scary happens. They're on, like, a family trip. We stopped in Greeley to see his dad for a little bit. and we shopped at Campers World.

And, well, he's like, I don't feel well. I feel the zaps. I feel like something is happening in my brain. I'm not okay. And I should say, around this period of time, he's been talking to his wife, Jenna, about having noticeable zaps in his brain. Zaps, what do you mean?

That's how he describes it. Zaps. He'd say, I have these zaps in my head, like short circuits. Interesting. He says he can feel like little, glitches. Like, that's what they feel like. But they don't know the cause. And while he's sitting there in the parking lot, Brett starts to get zaps really bad. And he tries to call Jenna, ask her for help.

I get, I still have this voicemail. He leaves her voicemail, which she still has on her phone. He just said, I need help. You're going to help bad? I need help bad. Yeah. That noise at the end, is that him? Yes, that's him. He lost control of his speech. She starts to flop around and hit against the dashboard. And his oldest daughter, Kaylee, is watching from the back seat. And she just does not understand what's going on. He's kind of just, like, twitching back and forth. And then his phone, like, drops on the floor, so I couldn't grab his phone.

And she's just kind of there watching helpless until eventually her mom comes out of the store and finds him slumped over in the front seat. Still seizing. And this is just, like a really scary wake-up call for them. This sounds terrifying for the entire family. Yeah. Well, not only terrifying in the moment

where you're watching your dad or your husband completely lose control, but terrifying for the family as a whole in the long term because maybe this is the new reality. And so they're really scared and they want to know what's going on. What do the doctors think happened? Yeah, well, I mean,

the Coast Guard sends them to civilian doctors that do a full, work up. And the big thing that they want to establish, the most important thing is, does this surfman have epilepsy? Because if he does, he can't drive the boats anymore. But if this is just a one-time thing, he can go back to work. And so that's their main focus. But when they go to a neurologist and get his brain imaged, she notices something else. She says, you've had a lot of concussions, haven't you? And he kind of looks at her surprise, like, no. He's like, one. No, I haven't had a lot. She's like, no, you have.

And she shows him an image of his own brain and shows in these blotches and gray areas. Something about his gray matter. It's like. That she says show concussions repeatedly over time. Like a lot of concussions. And we were like, well, that's weird. Because he's like, I've only ever had one in pee-wee football. That's it.

And at the time, he doesn't think much of it. He's like, huh, nope. Because what else she says is there's no evidence of epilepsy, which means you can go back to work. So the Bonner family sees this as really good news. And all that stuff about the brain damage, I think at the time the family said maybe that was caused by that really violent boat rollover. And you're past that.

They hear that and they may think, okay, it's a one-off. It's due to that freak accident. And we can continue your passion here. You can continue the work that you love. Right. So he can heal and he can move on with his career. And he does.

And eventually in 2022, after 21 years of surfboat work, he retires. And so they moved to the mountains of North Carolina. From the time we met here, he loved it here. Yeah. This was the dream. Yeah. My parents moved here after they retired because we were going to move here. Yeah.

And they set up in like one of the most beautiful and low-stressed places that they can. And she thinks here's the place where he can recover. It's like we have 60 acres here. We're going to build our dream house. And he was retiring. And I missed working. So it's like, I'll go to work. You just live the dream.

Retire. But in fact, he just continues to struggle. How so? Well, he's left this stressful life behind. And yet all of the symptoms of being stressed are getting worse. He's really struggling to control his mood, sometimes depressed. He's flying into rages. He's drinking to.

cope. He's like, you're, you're trying to turn the kids against me. I'm like, no, I'm actually making so many excuses and trying to explain, like, he's doing his best. We're going to just love him through this. I'm like, I'm trying to hold everything together. Yeah. And all of these things are gradually growing worse. You know, in the Coast Guard, he was just a beloved leader, joking guy, always there for anyone. As a dad, he was always very involved. He cheered at all those kids' soccer games, his big thing was that he loved to make breakfast in the morning for everyone. But as time went on, that Brett was less and less present. And the guy that would replace him was just suspicious, angry, he had headaches all the time, a very hard person to

deal with, who was nothing like the guy that his family knew. But they do start to get ideas about why this is happening. Brett is actively trying to get better at this point. He's doing things like therapy. He's stopped drinking. He's changed his diet. He's seeing different doctors. And he goes to the VA hospital for a routine assessment and ends up getting referred to a neurologist who does these cognitive tests on him. And so she starts and she gives them like these words, five words to memorize. Part of that is brain function testing. It's pretty simple stuff. Remember five things and repeat them back. And I get four out of five in my head.

He gets two, I think, one or two. Then she asked him to count, like started 100 and count backwards by seven. And he does really, really badly on it. And as he's talking to the doctor, he says, like, yeah, like, my memory is terrible. He's like, yeah, I don't remember, like, most of my kids' childhood. I don't remember, like, all these things. And that for them is this really, really surprising wake-up call that maybe this isn't just PTSD.

It wasn't until then that I thought, oh, you're listening. You're not remembering. All these pieces start to come up, and I'm like, oh, this tracks. Like, that's why you can't pick up prescriptions because you can't remember the kids' birthdays. And it's here at this appointment when he gets diagnosed with traumatic brain injury. And do the doctors have a theory at this time of how exactly. his brain could have been injured in this way? No.

Honestly, I don't think they're looking for some larger cause, right? They're looking to just try and diagnose the patient that's in front of them. So they say, hey, you probably have a brain injury here, and maybe it's not surprising, considering this really active career, you know, being out in giant waves. Maybe you hit your head. Maybe there was a boat accident. But even with the diagnosis, no one really tells him or his wife what to expect from a brain. injury or how to handle it.

And everything that Brett is dealing with grows worse until it comes to a head on a winter morning in 2025. Morning is fine. Church is great until I'm delayed at church. And then the grocery shop and he's just getting grumpy and grumpier. It's a Sunday. The family goes to church. And after church, things get worse.

He's getting mad over little arguments that don't matter. And so all afternoon, things are sort of building. And around dinner, he gets mad at his kids for leaving the house a mess. And his response to that is he's going to take these boxes of Coast Guard files. And he's like, this needs to go. And I was like, no, I want it. It goes in the boys' room. And just set it on fire in the living room fireplace.

Jen is looking at this from the kitchen, seeing her husband just, you know, ranting and angry and this fire and black smoke. And it's just like, I don't know what to do. She feels helpless. I literally actually think he might burn the house down, so I should just take them. We should just go. Yeah.

The only thing she can do, she feels, is get the kids out of the house. He's bent over in front of the fire, and I was like, I'm going to go get dinner. We'll be back. I might have said, like, please don't burn the house down or something. Like, just, I was just like. She packs up her four kids, and she drives them to the nearest town where they go to Sonic. Get them some dinner and maybe by the time they get back, things will cool off. Well, while they're there, Brett calls the family on FaceTime.

So I answer, and he's like, don't bring the kids back tonight. Don't bring the kids home tonight. And I was like, what? Why? We're getting food and then we're coming home. Like, what is going on? Then he hangs up. And he says, don't bring the kids home.

And he just hangs up. So they call him back. And I see his face. It's like just dark. It's dark. It's being lit by the screen. Yeah, I only see his face. And he's got this really strange, vacant look.

And he keeps telling them to turn their camera off on FaceTime. And they're confused because they have turned their camera off, but they can still see him. I'm like, hey, what's going on? Like, what's happening? What's going on, bro? And I'm like, what do you mean? I'm coming back. Like, again, I'm trying to.

to like talk rationally, like, but I'm kind of frantic inside because I'm like, what is happening? They're all sitting in the car watching this as he keeps telling you to turn the camera off, and then suddenly the head of a pistol comes into the frame. Literally in a split second, you see the gun and he pulls a trigger, and we all hear it. There's a pop and a flash, and then the screen goes dark as the laptop that he's holding just tumbles into the darkness. the whole family's just watched this happen and there's this silence. Just everybody's there is stunned.

And one of the kids says, did dad just drop the laptop? Oh, no. And Jenna has this moment where she's put together what happened and she says, no, I think daddy shot himself. That's awful. Suddenly, he's gone. With no note, with no explanation.

and it really sent the whole family into this questioning, what the hell happened here? We'll be right back. Dave, so what does Brett Bonner's family do with this question of what happened to him? Yeah, man, suicide is so tough, and it raises so many questions. There's questions of blame. There's questions of what did we miss? What could we have done?

There's so many questions about what do you say about this legacy of this, this man who worked as a lifesaver for more than 20 years, the family was so uncertain that when they buried him, they buried him with nothing on his headstone because they weren't sure what to say about him yet. So Brett's oldest daughter, Kaylee, she was going into her senior year of high school and she started thinking about this.

What were the questions you had when your dad died? I know it's like super complex, but in the month afterwards, What were the things you were kept turning over in your mind? Kind of just how it escalated so quickly. And how one thing kind of led to another. Because, I mean, I kind of got a front row seat to all of it because I was born right before he made surf.

There were a lot of what-ifs in her mind, and one of them was sort of like this. What-if all those years, and the boats left him with some other brain injury. And she started to look around on the web for information about that, and she didn't find any, definitely not from the Coast Guard. And so she said, okay, if I can't find any information from official sources, I'll have to go out and gather it myself.

And she turned to the one source that she thought might actually have these answers. And that was other people who did the same surfaced, man job as her dad. Wow. So she has encountered this void of research into this, and she's going to fill it. Tell us how she does that. So her senior year, she's actually taking like a research class, and she decides that her research project is going to be what happened to her dad. And so she comes up with his questionnaire of about three dozen questions all about their brain health and sends it out. So I try to make it short because I know that their attention span is really short because my dad's was. And to be clear, this is an academically rigorous process.

It's an advanced placement class. So her methods and questions, they have to be vetted and approved before she sends them out to these guys. How many people did you get to survey? Only 77. That's a lot. Well, I was hoping more, but... This is a small population that are hard to find. Yeah, I would like...

And she gets 77 responses, both retired and active duty surfmen, which is a pretty astounding number because this is a small and very insular group of people. It's way more responses than I would have gotten as, you know, just a reporter showing up trying to talk to these people. And I was just so amazed because here's this person who, because what she'd been through was almost like a reporting partner for me. And one big reason that she got this many responses, and that's that her dad's Brett Bonner. A lot of these people had worked with him and knew him, or at least they knew the story of what happened to him. And they really felt a duty to help his family out in any way they could. Right. So she's covering ground that's completely new.

And she has no idea what she's going to find. And I looked at symptoms of TBI, and I put that in there because I knew a lot of them wouldn't have diagnosed TBI. So it's like we can connect that maybe they have a possible TBI and we can. And her driving question is how many surfmen have traumatic brain injury or symptoms that look like a brain injury? And how is that impacting their lives? So like people said they had head injuries, but like I think a lot of them dismiss injuries that normal people would be like, oh, that's an injury. And they'd be like, oh, that was just a scratch or something like that. It sounds like from talking to you guys

that if we'd asked your dad, have you ever had a head injury, he might have said no. He would have said only in peewee football. Yeah. Yeah. And when the questionnaire start coming back in, the answers are pretty astounding.

She finds an overwhelming majority of these career surfmen who spent years and years in rough seas. Very few of them had ever been diagnosed by the Coast Guard with a head injury. Very few of them believed they had a head injury, but almost all of them had the symptoms of a brain injury. They were having the memory problems, the cognitive problems, the sleep problems, the mood problems, all of the things that she was seeing in her dad, these guys were reporting to her. And at the very end of her survey, she just left a blank spot where people could make any comment that they wanted.

And I just want to read you a couple. this one from a career surfman in his mid-50s. He said, my brain has started to fail me. I feel it. I see it. It's difficult to do things that used to come natural to me. And then another guy in his mid-40s, and remember, these are people who were the highest-performing rescuers.

He wrote, It's been a struggle for me to keep my life together. The service members are describing in basically no uncertain terms brain trauma, but no one had asked them about it. No one knew to ask them. Yeah, but it's hard because it also looks like a lot of other things. You know, if you were depressed and have nightmares and can't sleep and you've had a high-stress job for years,

it's very easy for people to say it's something else in brain injury. And I think over and over again, even with the guys themselves, that's what they did. No one ever questioned that this might be a physical injury from just doing the job. So basically through Kaylee's research and your subsequent reporting, You guys have found that the brain injuries that we associate with the stories that you were previously reporting on, right? The weapons, the other parts of the military, that that's also impacting the Coast Guard. It may even be widespread.

But I guess, Dave, I'm still curious how exactly folks like Brett were sustaining such severe brain trauma. These huge waves are hitting these boats. But walk me through how exactly that results in the brain injuries we've been describing. Yeah, that's what I wanted to figure out. too because like, I don't know, I've been in boats on rough seas. I've been in big waves and I got knocked around for sure, but it didn't seem like something that intense. And so I went back and saw if there was any other research on these boats and the kinds of forces that they deliver. And it turned out that there is. For a number of years, researchers in Europe have been looking at this problem

because crews on these types of boats get a lot of injuries to their knees, to their necks, to their backs, just from the rough ride, the repeated going up into the wave and slamming down into the backside. And even though they weren't looking for problems with brain injury, they found something really surprising that would explain this. And that is, in a nutshell, that a body standing on a boat acts a lot like a whip that gets cracked. The force at one end where the feet are planted on the deck is not that much. But as that wave ripples up through the legs, through the back, and finally quickly jerks the neck, the force is many times what it was. So you might go through a wave that's hitting it only maybe six times the force of gravity, but by the time the neck jerks in the impact, when you slam into the trough, it could be the force of a car crash. And so something that from the outside seems tame, the physics of it at like a neuron level is extremely violent. And if you apply that whip crack for a career, you know, let's say 10,000 wave hits, you start to understand how profoundly damaging this could be.

So what can the Coast Guard actually do about it? What would prevention here actually look like? I tell you, one of the most surprising things that happened in all of this reporting was that when I, I picked up the phone and called the Coast Guard and warned them that I was going to do this story, that I was going to say, hey, your elite surfmen rescue crews are getting brain injuries just from doing their job. The response I got from the person who picked up the phone was good. I'm glad you're doing these stories.

I was on boats like that for years, and man, we always wondered about this. We never had any answer. So there is a hunger to understand and solve this problem, which is the best place you can start, right? because there's a lot of things that potentially you could do. You could change the design of boats. You could change the design of training. You could change the shape of a career so that you never put one person in this rough surf for 20 years.

There's lots of options, but it all starts from the same place. Yeah, I mean, it's worth noting this is not the way the government usually responds to an investigation. It's obviously great to hear that the Coast Guard is responding to your reporting positively. But I do wonder if there's reason to think, that they are actually going to follow through with action here. I mean, isn't there a world where they shouldn't have been relying on a motivated teenager in the first place to basically do their work for them? Yeah, that's really frustrating, isn't it?

And I got to tell you, it's not unique to the Coast Guard. Listen, the Department of Defense has spent, and I'm not exaggerating here, billions of dollars on brain injury, studying it, understanding it, preventing it. and in every single case across every branch, they missed this kind of injury, the injury that comes from repeatedly doing a job that everyone has said is safe. So, yeah, it's a problem that they miss,

even when they're trying to find it. It's a problem that they've ignored because it means fundamentally changing how you do things, but it's something that is now out in the open. And if it's out in the open because a teenager pointed it out, then good for her. Dave, I want to just take a step back here. You've been covering brain injuries in the military for so long.

And it seems like the scope of your reporting. It just keeps on widening. It keeps getting broader. And I do find that pretty concerning. And I wonder how your understanding of brain injuries has now shifted. Yeah. I mean, I first got into this because of huge weapons that were hurting people. But the more I learned, the more I realized you don't have to be around a big blast

or even a small blast to get injured. You don't even have to hit your head. I mean, think about the surfmen who are out there in the waves. Their head's not coming in contact with anything, and yet they end up with a profound injury. And I've really come to appreciate just how amazingly complex and delicate the brain is. I mean, we're talking about an organ with 100 billion connections,

which we barely understand at all. And I've started to wonder what other everyday things have this kind of impact and are changing our brains. So I think we really need to go forward with our eyes open and keep asking, you know, how is modern life affecting a brain that really hasn't changed since the time we lived in caves? Well, thank you so much for your reporting, Dave. Thank you. What are the big takeaways for you going through this process? I guess I was shocked that so many people responded.

I was just glad that people were willing to. Because, I mean, it was hard because you're reading about this and it's bringing up stuff. And you're like, oh, wow, that makes so much sense. And for the longest time, I was just annoyed at my dad for like, being mad all the time, but he was really just struggling. It kind of maybe reframes how you understand everything that happened. It's really helpful to understand, like get an image of what he was really going through inside and that he wouldn't know to tell us.

He didn't know. Yeah, he didn't know. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, a divided Supreme Court allowed construction on President Trump's luxury White House ballroom to continue. The decision marked a significant win for Trump, who has made completing the $400 million ballroom a major priority. In a five to four ruling, the court's majority found that the preservationists who challenged a ballroom construction did not have the legal grounds

to bring their lawsuit. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court's three liberal justices in dissenting the ruling, with Roberts writing that the construction was quote. quote, likely unlawful. And the Army Secretary Dan Driscoll submitted his resignation to President Trump following months of building tension with Defense Secretary Pete Hegsef over promotions of service members.

Last fall, Hegseff ordered Driscoll to remove two black and two female officers from the Army's promotion lists. Driscoll, citing their record of exemplary service, repeatedly refused, prompting a month. long standoff. The Times has reported that Driscoll is now barely on speaking terms with Hegsef. Hegsef has fired or forced out roughly a half dozen senior officers, prompting questions over a

widening vacuum of leadership in the Army's top ranks. Finally, a jury in Las Vegas on Monday found a man guilty of orchestrating the 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur, delivering a conviction nearly 30 years after one of the most notorious killings in hip-hop. Dwayne Keith Davis was accused of obtaining the gun used in the shooting and pursuing Shakur during a gang war that became entangled in the feud between East Coast and West Coast hip-hop labels. Davis was found guilty of first-degree murder. He promised he would appeal.

Today's episode was produced by Diana Wynn and Carlos Prieto. It was edited by Chris Haxell and Lizzo Baylon, with help from Paige Cowan, with research help from Susan Lee, and contains music by Leah Shaw Damran, Alicia Eichita Etoupe, Pat McCusker, Marion Lazano, and Diane Wong.

Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. That's it for the Daily. I'm Zolentanyar Youngs. See you tomorrow.