Bruce Schutter - Episode 888

I'm extremely excited to announce a brand new sponsor for the Behind the Shield podcast that is Transcend. Now for many of you listening, you are probably working the same brutal shifts that I did for 14 years.

Suffering from sleep deprivation, body composition challenges, mental health challenges, libido, hair loss, etc. Now when it comes to the world of hormone replacement and peptide therapy, what I have seen is a shift from doctors telling us that we were within normal limits, which was definitely incorrect all the way to the other way now where men's clinics are popping up left, right and center.

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They also have the Transcend foundations where they are actually putting military and first responders through some of their therapies at no cost to the individual. So my own personal journey so far filled in the online form, went to Quest, got blood drawn and a few days later I'm talking to one of their wellness professionals as they guide me through my results and the supplementation that they suggest.

In my case specifically, because I transitioned out the fire service five years ago and been very diligent with my health, my testosterone was actually in a good place. So I went down the peptide route and some other supplements to try and maximize my physiology knowing full well the damage that 14 years of shift work has done. Now I also want to underline because I think this is very important that each of the therapies they offer, they will talk about the pros and cons.

So for example, a lot of first responders in shift work, our testosterone will be low, but sometimes nutrition, exercise and sleep can offset that on its own. So this company is not going to try and push you down a path, especially if it's one that you can't come back from. So whether it's libido, brain fog, inflammation, gut health, performance, sleep, this is definitely one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox.

So to learn more, go to transcendcompany.com or listen to episode 808 of the Behind the Shield podcast with founder Ernie Colling. This episode is sponsored by InsideTracker. And what makes me smile is before I even started my podcast seven years ago, when listening to other wellness conversations, InsideTracker was always the company they recommended for comprehensive blood work.

Well now in 2024, they have begun to offer a brand new first responder panel, which will cover nine biomarkers hitting several of the pillars of health that affect us in uniform, stress, heart health, metabolism and gut health. Now after a very simple intake form, a blood draw, you will get the results sent to your computer, smartwatch, phone, not only detailing where you are on the scale from poor to optimized, but also tips on how you can improve each of these markers.

Now this panel is usually $310, but they are also offering first responders 30% off any of their blood panels. So that brings this specific panel down to only $217. Now I myself went through their ultimate, which is their comprehensive blood work, which also includes micronutrients, hormones and other areas of overall health.

And I have to say I was absolutely amazed at firstly how easy it was, but secondly, the comprehensive information I got and the actionable information on how to improve each of my own biomarkers. Now as with all my sponsors, if you want to hear more about InsideTracker, you can hear my conversation with senior sales executive Jonathan Levitt on episode 887 of the Behind the Shield podcast.

So to sign up or simply learn more, go to insidetracker.com and for the first responder panel, the easiest way is to Google InsideTracker first responder panel. This episode is sponsored by a company I've used for well over a decade and that is 511. I wore their uniforms back in Anaheim, California and have used their products ever since.

From their incredibly strong yet light footwear to their cut uniforms for both male and female responders, I found them hands down the best workwear in all the departments that I've worked for. Outside of the fire service, I use their luggage for everything and I travel a lot and they are also now sponsoring the 7X team as we embark around the world on the Human Performance project. We have Murph coming up in May and again I bought their plate carrier.

I ended up buying real ballistic plates rather than the fake weight plates and that has been my ride or die through Murph the last few years as well. One area I want to talk about that I haven't in previous sponsorship spots is their brick and mortar element. They were predominantly an online company up till more recently but now they are approaching 100 stores all over the US.

My local store is here in Gainesville Florida and I've been multiple times and the discounts you see online are applied also in the stores. So as I mentioned 511 is offering you 15% off every purchase that you make but I do want to say more often than not they have an even deeper discount especially around holiday times. But if you use the code SHIELD15 you will get 15% off your order or in the stores every time you make a purchase.

And if you want to hear more about 511, who they stand for and who works with them, listen to episode 580 of Behind the Shield podcast with 511 regional director Will Ayers. Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show EMT and the author of Becoming a Mental Health Warrior, Bruce Schutter.

Now in this conversation we discuss a host of topics from Bruce's journey into volunteer rescue at a very early age, the impact of trauma on a young mind, his addiction journey through both consumerism and alcohol, his arrests and psychiatric holds, the powerful paradigm shift that he himself experienced, his journey of post-traumatic growth, how he developed programs to help other people overcome their addictions and so much more.

Now before we get to this incredibly important and powerful conversation as I say every week please just take a moment, go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating. Every single 5 star rating truly does elevate this podcast therefore making it easier for others to find and this is a free library of almost 900 episodes now.

So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them. So with that being said I introduce to you Bruce Schutter.

Enjoy. Well Bruce I want to start by saying firstly thank you to your wife Lee who I think originally reached out to kind of educate me on some of the stuff that you were doing, your story and your books and secondly of course I want to welcome you to the Behind the Shield podcast today. Thank you very much and yes I do depend on her, she is very good at all the details, she's a marketing manager so she hits all those details.

I always come up with the ideas so we work well together but thank you for working with her to set all this up. Yeah no I'm glad to have you. So where on planet earth are we finding you today? We are in Charlotte, North Carolina and it is actually cold today which is an anomaly.

Now I say that with a little bit of a chuckle because prior to this in the last year we were out in Wisconsin where this wouldn't even be a blip on the radar, it would be like let's go out in shorts but for North Carolina everybody's shutting down the schools and it's cold. Yeah, yeah I know we've got a cold band coming our way. I think the windchill which is Florida so even further south is supposed to be like 15 degrees tonight.

So yeah I don't think people realize some of our warm states can get a little chilly sometimes. Exactly, exactly. So I would have to start at the very beginning of your story. So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings. Okay, well I was born in Millsville, Pennsylvania so outside of Lancaster's really the biggest town.

Mom and dad, mom was a nurse and worked in the medical field, different areas of being a nurse at a hospital and different things. My dad was a chemical engineer and worked at Armstrong actually in Millsville and have a sister also and she's now a school teacher outside of Raleigh.

So we've somehow all managed and my parents retired on the western part of North Carolina so somehow after traveling around and being in all these different states we all ended up together in North Carolina now which is kind of interesting. Really a kind of small town, raised up, this is going to be in the born in 67 so 60's, 70's really, going to high school there. We moved in 6th grade and that was probably like a biggest life change and I say that because we moved to north of Philly.

So went from this small rural area, lots of farms, very slow pace of life to a more hectic pace of life but also a lot more opportunities and I think that's where all of us started to do different things and explore different things which kind of I feel like I had my early childhood where you start out and you're in first through 6th grade and then all of a sudden everything is uprooted and you have to learn a new area, you face all these challenges

but at the same time the interesting part is throughout all of this I always felt like there was something different going on.

I kind of always was swinging with my emotions, I was always anxious and nervous about a lot of things but it's not that anybody is following, there wasn't even the information there is today and it was just like you just thought maybe that's just the way the kid is for now and it's just interesting because when I look back at so many things you realize boy it was starting earlier, the mental health challenges, disorders that I have and at the

same time I don't think anybody in any of these areas really knew or had the information we have today so it was a lot of guesswork, things like that.

So I want to get to other areas of your early life but while we're on the subject and obviously your work now is completely involved when it comes to the mental health, I have been educated to the power of elements of childhood trauma when it comes to people struggling in adulthood and obviously a lot of people listening to this were wearing uniforms so our struggles are attributed to our time deployed in whatever battle zone it was or our time

as a first responder or a police officer and we kind of forget about the formative years, the first 18, 20, 25 whatever it was until we put that uniform on. When you look back now, were there any elements of your upbringing that you think were precursors to some of the struggles that you had later in life?

Oh absolutely, that's where I'm trying to, it's not a blame thing, it's looking back in that introspection and there were things that you did as a kid in both places, I was in Scouts and I got selected to be part of this honor guard with the Scouts and we would present and carry in flags at the beginning of all these events for all these different places, there's lots of camps and things and we made a mistake a couple times but to

me I was horrified and the reliving of that, the anxiety almost stopped me from wanting to be part of things.

I faced big crowds and you'd go to things like going to church or going to a youth group and the size of the groups or sometimes the size of the congregation or something small, I didn't realize it at the time but I was always on edge if you will, I was always that nervousness but I combined it with, I was always growing up with people and people like for example my mom was in the medical field and nurse so I got comfortable with learning

some of those lessons and hearing stories from working in a hospital or being in a hospital and treating sick people. So you learn a little bit but you weren't sure what to do with it and at the same time I could see these things happening, I knew nothing but the emotional extremes.

Even once we moved I think I became more aware so 8th, 9th grade I'm seeing all I am is completely happy and everything's perfect or I'm completely depressed even for no reason, could have had the greatest weekend but then I turn on a dime and I'm depressed. At that time I thought boy I am just really wired different.

Now there's some truth to it but I also didn't realize why or what I could do about it so it was a bit debilitating I guess is what I'm trying to say and I started to see those precursors where I'm like boy it's limiting some of the things I want to do but I'm also still going after things. So I'm pushing it and I'm actually fighting those things and I guess I'm building up my own tools and solutions without realizing it but they're not very good ones at that point.

Now did you have any acute events when you were early? The reason I ask, it was funny I wrote a book about 3 years ago and as I did I literally unlocked a little door in my mind that I had forgotten that I was in a house fire when I was a little boy at 4 years old and my sister who was 8 basically got us out and as a fireman now looking back we would have died in that fire, there's no question that she hadn't got us out at that moment and so there was that event.

We discovered later that my parents marriage was far from idyllic so I'm sure there was some subconscious stuff going there but I became a very anxious child when I look back now I didn't realize at the time but I was a bed wearer until quite late. I would have night terrors from hell, I'd wake up covered in plastic because I'd been punching the angled ceiling because I was in the loft.

So now when I look back it's plain as day but I could definitely factor in some of those that were probably when they were left unaddressed were haunting me and then obviously they became a dress later in life. Were there any acute events or was it more kind of death by a thousand cuts or what was your perspective now?

No, no, no it's interesting you bring that up because you actually just triggered in myself thinking about that that before we moved I always had trouble sleeping and I did have these horrible night terrors not associating that with bipolar or even anxiety and at the time it drove my parents almost crazy because they didn't know what to do and it was almost at that point too a psychiatrist therapy was looked at a last resort and it

wasn't anybody doing it intentionally saying well we're going to send you to that it's horrible but it wasn't treated like you could go there and get some help it was more like the final resort so of course we didn't do it I viewed it more like a threat at the time but you're right what happened was I had all these nightmares all these problems sleeping and then the anxiety just kept building and by the time we moved and then I got into

like a middle school you're right I could definitely see it was shaping things and there were a lot of events they were those small ones where you know when I'd get very depressed or fly off the handle if you will the emotions just didn't have control so there were lots of little fights that I got into with even friends sometimes and things where I just never knew how to work through things and it would just spiral out of control you know

and I look back now and you're right these are definitely signs but at the time there was nothing to look it up in you know I mean the closest we had and again even with my mom being in the medical field you had the PDR the physician's desk reference book there's about this big you know this thick and you could look something up then that was a real secret if you knew somebody in the medical field whereas today you know you

could go online and get about a thousand pages information so yes it definitely affected a lot of things but you're right I didn't see any of them in a total picture until much later so what were you playing as far as sports or were there other things that you found that were the kind of the healthy outlet for you as you were growing through the school ages well then what I did was so I was in track and field I tried wrestling I love sports

but I tended to gravitate towards more the singular ones I played tennis but I also loved a bike ride and I got into biking and throughout all of high school and then even into college I got into the triathlons and biathlons so it was a great outlet because when I would get so frustrated or so wired up I could go on a 20 mile bike ride I could use those sports now they weren't a lot of the high school ones I tried some of the high school sports

and I did do like track and field obviously I was on a runner but I was doing the shot put and doing some of the things like the high jump things like that but I used them as the outlet not even realizing how important that was I just knew I really loved it and found that peace and solitude doing that the reason I say that is that a lot of what you're talking about it was like here I am at ninth grade going into tenth and that's when I

found somebody who was on the rescue squad and that's when I went and signed up and joined so I was in first year of tenth grade and I went into this whole new world and it was kind of like suddenly I have two worlds you know and I'm up here in this really professional life and death type world and I'm in high school still in middle school and so I guess the long answer I'm giving is I like to be involved I'm very interested in learning

things and doing things so I was involved in a million things and I never did anything halfway and at the same time with my bipolar disorder anxiety they also didn't do things halfway and they were always pushing me to that extreme too which sometimes was a good push and sometimes wasn't.

So talk to me about that you're only 15 16 years old and you find yourself in the world of the volunteer rescue service so firstly normally when you hear volunteer they say fire service specifically so what did that role entail and then walk me through your journey through the front door?

So I knew somebody that knew somebody else who was a year older so I'm in tenth grade they knew somebody who was in eleventh and they were part of the volunteer rescue squad now definitely you're right most places it's together it's the fire department and the ambulance but in Yardley there were two separate groups and they were literally like three streets away so there was the ambulance place it was a small building with about five ambulances

in total and then there's the fire department with all the fancy toys and all the bigger equipment and I'm just saying as a joke because it was a big kind of competition always we worked together but because we were literally separate I focused and I joined the rescue squad and I started to know people there who are also in high school in some of the various schools so at 16 I went in and I got certified with the basic first aid CPR and I started

riding as a tech so there'd be the EMT the driver and then two techs if you could to have a full crew and so here I go I sign up I get all trained and it started out with a bang and never slowed down for the next five years.

My first call we went out on and it was somebody I had a heart attack we had to do CPR and to this day I can still remember the poor woman was in her 90s and I broke her rib and this was my very first call very first experience and it was kind of like I was so worried about hurting her and people had to remind me you're doing CPR to save her life a broken rib is going to be the least of her concerns you know and as a kid or even starting this you're

like boy I really don't have the perspective but it was like it was so interesting and so fascinating and so real and again I'm always looking for the experiences and always looking to try things and I had some other friends as I got to know them that were all in high school in the fire department and in the ambulance and sometimes on both so you know how it is you get hooked into that group and the next thing you know your focus is completely on that.

It was really interesting because I just kept learning and growing within that while at the same time I'm going through high school and I'm living that dual world where I'm splitting weekends or nights you know depending on if in the quote unquote real world or in the high school world it was quite interesting.

Now what about the age it's funny I've just been doing some research for the book I'm writing now and the age to enroll in the military in the UK is only 16 we graduate high school in 16 and you know which I think is the only country in the world or maybe in the western world that has it that low and then when you start to learn more and more about neurosciences excuse me neuroscience we're realizing that these young brains even 18, 19, 20 are still

developing and therefore you know some of the trauma that we're exposed to can be more detrimental to these young minds. What's your perspective now on how old you were when you started being exposed to a lot of these calls?

Well I like to so I started at 16 and within a year I knew I wanted to become an EMT and in Pennsylvania had to be 18 but we were right on the border literally the river that divides New Jersey and Pennsylvania was the end of the street and so you could be certified as an EMT in New Jersey at 17 so myself and two others went over there because we knew we kept reciprocity to then be an EMT on the squad at 17 so I thought well this would be

fantastic literally did I not realize I am jumping full on into this what I call the deep end of the life pool and yes I was completely unprepared and the funny thing was now looking back but even then people that were older in their 20s and 30s doing this or had a more stable base even you know we're still developing and all of that I just realized how ill prepared we all were and especially even at that time and it was like we focused on and I guess

it was kind of correlated to the military stuff they teach you all the skills and you focus on all the skills and you focus on handling the scenes you focus on all those pieces but nobody even thought to talk about what you do afterwards the emotions you know or how to handle the outcome of that call all that mattered was you know was it successful did you do the skills right could you save the person and looking back I'm like it's that

fantastic experience but the missing piece was I didn't know what to do with those life lessons and I would imagine that some of the same stuff you find you know you stick somebody out there at 16 going into real life events that a lot of people may not even run into it not only are you ill prepared but sometimes it I don't want to say it alienated but it made it tough to talk to my peers or friends because they had no base of this experience

you know I'm over here on this plane and I'm up here doing things that when I try to talk to them about it even when I went to college you know there are people that literally never saw somebody pass away and die and I'm like wow that happened a lot in my hands you know and I can give you excuse me all these stories and they're just like oh my god this is the first time I left home to go to school you know I feel like what happens is it kind of

puts you on a path that can be kind of lonely and in a way it's very hard even then to figure out who you can talk to and what level you can talk about it those are all those lessons I mean it's it's I guess it's you have the experiences again why you bond with the people with the fire department and the rescue squad because once you share that experience well then you can talk to them you know it's it's like no holds barred so that was my safety

net at the same time and I'm talking to people of all ages and I'm getting super involved with it and it was it was fantastic experience but my goal kind of today based on all that was to see how many people are not prepared you know for these things in life with their mental health and handling emotions sorry that's that's the long-winded to your to your short question but um it it just like you said it it has all these positives and

then there were these negatives and it was so challenging but it was so rewarding but the biggest thing is without direction and that's what kind of started me on this whole path is I feel people they have so much information these days and they get thrown into so many situations and again with the internet and all of the information available you've got people self-diagnosing themselves people figuring out all these problems at ages you know 13

14 15 years old and that might be good and helpful but you still need some direction on what to do with it you know what to make of it one thing that a lot of us in the municipal uh career fire departments I think don't experience as much as volunteer is running on people we know or living in the same community that we served so I've moved you know from obviously the UK to Orlando did my training first department in Miami area second in California third um

and fourth around the Orlando area but the last one was around theme parks so constantly moving usually lived about an hour and 15 minutes away from where I worked you know like a lot of firefighters can't afford to live where they work um and so the upside though is you're not you're not running on people I've never I've never ever run a call on someone that I know um and if I go to those cities of course I'm like okay there's where

we found that person there's where that pedestrian was was killed you know etc etc etc but it's not in my hometown so what you know are there any calls that really kind of stuck out as far as that element of being in the volunteer fire service and working in your own area yeah it's interesting we're in this small town but we're north of Philly so there's a lot of towns around us they were growing all the time they've grown even more since

we've left so we absolutely saw all these things you wouldn't expect first off in the town we saw accidents because route 95 ran right into Philly and cut through our town so there were accident scenes on on a major interstate we had all of the scenes where you're going to places around the friends you know your friend's house is right down the street you're going to a call that they may know things like that but you're right

there were there were some calls that were so impactful and again we would also see the people after the calls or maybe see some of the people that didn't make it through the calls the family members and things so it definitely was quite interesting um there were definitely two that were one being a very positive and that was in the middle of town there was a little lake it was called afton pond and it was one of those lakes gets

water in from rainwater but basically has no water flowing through it so it builds up there's streets going around builds up about five feet of mud and so a lot of times people lose control and they drive into this lake or this pond and it would happen once a year or so and i remember the call going in there and it was people we knew you know and we go in and we're of course jumping in with the fire department because again there weren't

a lot of lines drawn like we would go in and help out everybody respected each other so we're all out there attending to the patient we're trying to stabilize the car and it's sinking and at the same time we know the people inside and we're trying to keep calm and you're trying to do your professional but you're also realizing the car is sinking in that mud and your feet are underneath and at one point we were like we got to watch

out for ourselves even because it keeps sinking slowly slowly we don't get anybody stuck and again the interesting part that i'm trying to say on the story is it wasn't just the people in the car we knew i knew all these people that volunteered and were part of the fire department and the ambulance company and also all the police force we all became friends and we all knew each other and a lot of these people are in high school with me

or a lot of these people are going to neighboring schools but we're all in the high school level or you know then you have people that are in careers and things so it's like everything you did was with people you know and it was it was quite an odd situation now that one was fine because we get them out you know we had to they had to cut some of the car apart and we we get them out we rescue it you know and everybody can share that experience

that was a good one now on the flip side the one that i wanted to talk about was there's a neighboring high school and so we have the main high school i'm in and this neighboring one and in between the towns there's a crossroads in this out of the way place where there's a lot of rural towns and i'm there on a two o'clock in the morning on a saturday night call because i always did like saturday you'd be at the shift from seven to seven in the

morning you know volunteering and we get called out and it's two cars that ran ahead on into each other and the one car was filled with four kids my exact age from the neighboring high school and there was some drinking involved and there was a head-on and they you know out two in the morning you can kind of do the math on what happened and everybody's all across the street and some came got thrown out of the car we're trying to do cpr trying

to rescue them and sorry it still affects me because it was it was like seeing a mirror of what could be because these are what could have been me driving on that road it could have been and it literally the same age and a neighboring high school and you're seeing this and what happened was we were we did cpr on two of them the other two had gotten thrown from the car none of them made it was the long story of it the result of it but

the the story was that it affected our whole crew because on that call on the first ambulance none of us were over 18 and we were all basically seeing the mirror of what could be on a typical friday night when we had been hanging out with our high school friends and it was it was devastating it was a life lesson that hit you in the chest and and made it hard to breathe and didn't know what to do you know even talk about today it still brings

us up where i still remember after the call going back to the squad in utter silence and sitting there for hours this table we had outside not knowing what to say not even know how to process it let alone that but not even know what to say to each other and i think we walked away that morning basically having experienced that with like the most deepest bond and connection we ever had and at the same time and understanding that you know

there's some hard life lessons and we tried to make sense of them now we personally i made sense of some of them that you want to go out and live life but i also took it from life is short and can be tragically ended and maybe maybe we shouldn't fight so hard and we should just go and just experience things and not worry at all which is not a good lesson you know it fed into the bipolar and the anxiety disorder and everything and

it just it gave me an attitude that was said go after things but i almost didn't care and i stopped caring about myself because i got so affected by calls like that that it just really like you said it traumatized me it it did a number and it only took me it took me till 20 years later till i started taking care of this and starting this whole mental health warrior program and learning about myself to even finally figure out the

lessons on that and the thing i take from it today is that experience is not something to be wiped away it's something to be built on and today i want to help people who go through things like that or you know experience this and show them what it can do if you don't take care of your mental health and you don't process the emotions and how you can do it and still take the good lessons so there were absolutely calls that were again up on the

high of a good one and some of the ones that were to this day still haunt me type things i mean it's i think i was just telling uh having a conversation with the police officer yesterday greg grogan from the overwatch collective and we were talking about this because one of his specialties in law enforcement is a major scene invest or crash scene investigation i think exactly but traffic accidents and when i was reading your book you've got some

statistics kind of towards the beginning and i think it was that suicide is the second leading cause of death i think it was especially i think he said males or just people from 10 till i want to say it was like 30 35 um and i'm assuming the first one is traffic accidents traumatic death and so this is what's so heartbreaking is and i've talked about this a lot you know we have done nothing to change elements of driver safety we'll put

speed bumps up we'll put signs we'll obviously have numerous memorials for all the people that are dead but you know when it comes to education again maybe even the age but understanding the danger on the roads i mean of course alcohol is going to be another element but that in itself could also be attributed to education on alcohol mental health but it really it's i struggle with the fact that we lose so many people usually young people on the roads and

yet you hardly ever hear that conversation at all and it's the first responders out there that have to see this horror and it reminds them of their own children but you know it's the whole insanity piece it's doing doing the same thing expecting different results you know oh we'll you know we'll we'll have apps so it turns off the cell phones and things like that yeah that's absolutely a tool but what are we doing wrong that's not educating

our drivers to the level that they should be where they understand the danger of this we're always going to lose some people but we lose 40 000 people die hundreds of thousands you know maimed every year every single year and we just kind of shrug our shoulders and go oh well well the first responders of the world it's not oh well because every single one of those horrendous wrecks lives rent rent free in our minds yeah absolutely and

thing is it teaches you that lesson and so you become hyper aware you become very cautious you try and explain that to friends and family and people you try to tell them you know the things with the phones and you see people putting their phone in front of a steering wheel while they're texting so they can drive and text and you're saying it is not that important you know back then it wasn't even that and that's what threw me i completely

agree it's almost it parallels what happens with mental health disorders because i feel like the word isn't out about how serious some of these can be and people kind of shrug them off maybe they see it on tv and they're like oh well isn't that quirky person's bipolar and they don't realize the struggle they go through that it throws you into depression three quarters of the time and it's much like seeing stuff like this you kind of uncover

the truths of what can happen because as i was mentioning with the the experience and i don't know if it's because i threw a lot of time into it i mean i put in hundreds i put in over thousands of hours each year volunteering there because we were so gung-ho about it and so in turn i would spend a friday night doing high school stuff and every saturday night i spent 12 hours on calls and sometimes we had back-to-back calls and you would think

a little town but there was a lot of tragedy a lot of accidents and i saw things like you said there were major scenes on 95 where you had to pull out the triage tags and you had to make those decisions and today i think oh my god you know i i did them but it was almost like a robot because you have to protect yourself but then when you walk away you can't protect yourself it's kind of like with the mental health challenges you can go and get

help and there's all sorts of professional help and things but i always like to say both the emt and the mental health at two in the morning when you wake up and you're in your house or you're sitting in a chair somewhere and you're all by yourself that's where you have to learn to handle it because you just can't there's nobody to call there's nobody to go to at that point you know and that's the piece that's it's not being tragic it's

just saying there will be a time in your life where you have to be by yourself and you're on your own and again if we can make sense of the lessons from things first responders see and all the people but also same with mental health there's times if you can be empowered i guess is what i'm trying to say hence the whole idea of the warrior project and program is to empower people and not view all these as negatives i mean it's like what

you're saying you see all the accidents and you want to educate people but you also know they're only going to listen so much and sometimes it's really sad because you know there's lessons that you wish people had learned or seen you know and then you see the results with the accidents or with the situations or even the tragedies that happen out of the blue you know in some of these calls where things would strike and occur and it was almost like you

tend to think and this is a little bit of humor a little bit not but you tend to think like accidents you think well it's on the street or something you know or there was a car wreck well it's on the street or somebody gets sick maybe they're at home but i have this list of tales of things that occurred in the most unusual places and it wakes you up to that life doesn't protect you if you're out somewhere else you know i just find that

interesting that sometimes people don't realize probably too what first responders see and where they have to go sometimes you know and what i'm referencing on that one is and it was a good call because we saved the person but somebody had a heart attack on the golf course at the yardley country club now not a super fancy place but a big golf course on the fifth hole and in order to get them fast and to help them we had to drive the

ambulance across the golf course and then we had to cut through and cut through their shrubs that were blocking it to the next street in order to get to the hospital fastest and it was kind of like yeah we know we're going to take some grief for all this and yes we're driving an ambulance up and down a golf course but for the greater good you know it was it was one of those interesting kind of mind-blowing experiences and you're like it kind of shows

you that life will life will occur wherever you're at and i always find that interesting absolutely i think where i saw that frustration manifest was in you know a version of road rage to be honest you know when i was on shift and so tired so sleep deprived you know possibly having come off you know one of many horrendous wrecks and then you see someone driving like an a-hole in your own town and i mean i would just get so angry i didn't ever do this but

i would want to literally put my fist through their window and drag them out the car and beat them until they would listen and then you know put them back in their car now again that's a kind of macabre fantasy but when you have seen the result when you know that the person who caused these accidents almost never dies they're almost unscathed and that family is completely decimated you know it's it's a hard emotion to to harbor you know

and it takes a lot of diligent practice to turn that frustration and disgust into okay how can i move the needle without coming across like a complete raving psychopath right right i mean we we had an experience like that that that showed me that we were responding to a call and there was a full crew and at that point i was in the back there was another emt and the driver and somebody wouldn't pull over and we're flying along this one road

where you get up to about 50 60 because it's a long road and that person wouldn't pull over and i was in the back with this other woman and we're gathering the gear and i hear from the front oh my god hang on because we smashed into that car because they kept weaving a wooden pull away for the ambulance to move past they just didn't want to let us go by and we ended up hitting them so hard we tore the axon of their car but then in the back

as you know with the ambulance of all the equipment this stuff started flying and we're talking oxygen bottles flying around and we had one of these huge ones that came out of the cabinet that it's the giant tank and i grabbed the other woman we grabbed her because i was in the seat where i could pull her away from it you know we almost all got killed in that accident and the ambulance was totaled and then we get another ambulance to bring

us to the hospital you know and so we have to be on the patient side now and we're in these rooms next to each other and like you said we're listening to the guy screaming yell about why we didn't get out of his way and how he's going to sue us and it was so crazy you're sitting there and you're trying to tend your own wounds and you're trying to put some thing in like thinking well there was a second crew sent out i hope they're

okay to get to the next person because that's where we were headed and you're listening this person rant and rave about it it was insane like you were saying and at the same time we were just stunned because we couldn't imagine why somebody wouldn't get out of the way it wasn't like they couldn't pull back into the street you know i'm sure you've experienced that you think what were they doing that they literally fought us i mean they apparently

we back and forth so much that when they hit them that's why we hit them and tore the axle out because they came around the angle to us but it's just a crazy circumstance but it also gave me a look into the other side you know of dealing with some people that just didn't get it like you're saying and you just wonder what they're thinking and why they don't see what people are trying to do you know or trying to pay attention

more that type of thing i was driving when i was still in the mt i was driving a pediatric code we was one of those calls or if i'm remembering right we were literally handed you know a limp baby at the door and sadly i think that ended up being a child abuse call all my all my infant deaths were all child abuse which is heartbreaking but so you know my medic's in the back now i'm driving code three and there's one area in orlando where it's single

single lane where it kind of the road splits and it comes together again and there's this white car just will not yield and we're you know again pediatric cardiac arrest in the back and anyway when i passed them they finally you know gets to two lanes it says orange county fire prevention so it was one of our own fire prevention people wouldn't get out of the way and it wasn't you know even a low acuity call it was a pediatric cardiac arrest

we're trying to get to the children's hospital there so you know i mean but it's that it's that community and that selflessness versus a selfishness and i think there's a lot of selfishness on the roads you know in in society at the moment i think people are inherently good but the way that we're uh you know some of the messaging they're getting from politicians and other things it's it's fertilizing that selfishness and that manifests even in life-saving

you know yeah stories that we're talking about that selfishness and that driver almost killed all of you and was detrimental to who you were responding to and the selfishness of the woman that i was behind you know would we have saved that child's life you know probably not but could we have possibly and she may well have been the person that was between that child living and that child dying right and people are so distracted i mean i i saw

it a lot with the rescue squad and things like that and eventually i got to drive the ambulance when i was 18 and experienced it from behind the wheel like you're saying but also with all those bike rides and all the bike racing i can't tell you the number of times that i would be clipped by a pickup truck's mirror and be flipped right on the side of the river road there was a boundary it went down to the river and three or four

times i got clipped because the road was a little narrow but nobody paid attention it was like bikes were invisible you know and again anybody in the first responder stuff kind of knows a lot of stories with motorcycles and stuff that's the biggest thing but on bicycles too and it always drove me crazy because i'm like how can you not be aware when you're in these cars how can you be so unaware of seeing people and you're you're

clipping people and knocking them off bikes and uh yeah it really is something that hasn't changed you know it's only gotten worse with all the distractions we have in the cars and all sorts of things that are beeping and wanting our attention you would think it would make it safer maybe some of it does but a lot of it is do people pay attention and it's amazing how people don't and a lot of that though i think sometimes i also found maybe it feels

way sometimes it's like they just don't know what to do and that's that's kind of a big thing with mental health and even my own family with the struggles i went through people just didn't know even my own wife had trouble you know when i'm in the throes of alcoholism and using that as my short-term solution to deal with all this trauma all these emotions i do not want to face including stuff like the bipolar depression and i didn't realize

at the time because when you're in the middle of it you think well sure why didn't they just talk to me and it wasn't they didn't want to but nobody knew how and and that's why a lot of why i'm started too is to just stand up and talk kind of like you're raising awareness now on certain topics and it's so important because sometimes the most obvious is there but we need somebody to state it or point it out you know and then then you

can get more awareness you can get some people to take action 100 well you touched on alcoholism obviously so there was a you know a downward spiral of sorts what made you transition out of ems and then walk me through again if i'm understanding the book the kind of pursuit of finance that followed that well so i i kept doing this through high school and then i also worked at an ambulance company at the same time there were several other people

were emts so in summers and fall and things like that spring breaks i worked at an ambulance company so it was non-emergency calls so i was always involved with that went to college was thinking of going to the medical field honestly my attention and different things i didn't have the aptitude to make it through medical school with the paying attention in school i could do a lot better today but i didn't then and so i transitioned i was looking

for answers i at one point started studying religion at the school i was at then i found i needed more structure i went to information technology i liked the idea of finding solutions so i graduated that degree go through all sorts of things at college and what i did then was threw myself into an it career but it was all sorts of i had jobs but they were always somewhat fringe jobs they kind of fit me i worked for unisys and i was a contractor

but i was on a coast guard base and so i started out my first it job living down on a shore on the jersey shore and working on a coast guard base and going and setting up computer systems and doing support on all these travel around the country visit all the bases things like that so again i think it's kind of just me i always look for those situations so i transitioned out of the emt and all of that just looking for the next adventure if you

will i never wasn't so much i thought like i'm going to give this up because i couldn't handle it it was more i just sort of started falling like i need to move on with a career with the college and it and things like that and then what happened was i feel like as i got to be more and more involved in things i like to write in the books i had more adventures and more things i was interested in and maybe even the funds to do some of these which led

to greater misadventures and so yes i got into the to workforce but then i was pulling stunts that really were horrible and i have all these problems in the background and a lot of it is what's happening is i'm letting my challenges so i'm i'm there at this point diagnosed with anxiety disorder i'm definitely using alcohol to treat it all the time and to treat some of the past trauma and again i'm just trying to like make my way through

and i'm letting it kind of tell me what to do you know work some weird jobs work weird hours is that the best for me i'm not really sure but i love the adventure of it keep going keep pushing so i'm succeeding but i'm falling apart in the background and so i think whichever course i took i would have still been doing that moving up just like we do with the rescue squad keep moving up getting more and more in depth and things and what happened was

i get to a point where on the surface i should have felt like a great success and i'm married we have a house we got into real estate and rental properties you know this is 2008 everybody's doing that they have the ability to buy cars i thought you needed multiple cars in order to be happy you know i went full on into consumerism and the reason i say that and i laugh about today is because all of these things were really driven by my challenges because when

i was in the throes of depression and bipolar depression which i didn't even still know i had i would try to buy my way out of it so you want to you want to not be depressed you go out and get something you go out and buy some crazy stereo system or do something and i feel like i was sort of setting the direction but a lot of what i did was dictated by my challenges by my past experiences by these mental health challenges and and that's

where they start taking control i mean i had relinquished so much control at that point that my ordinary experiences were things that should have stopped and would have stopped most people you know i'm spending time while i'm working a professional job and traveling around the country and then i'm spending a weekend in jail because i let alcohol take over you know i'm i'm at points where people are calling the police and here i am on the

other side and i'm getting committed for 72 hour holds because i they don't know what is going on with me and i don't know what's going on and and that's where this went on and literally one of the things i like to tell is it went on for like 20 years and i'm building all these successes on the surface and and the behind that is completely a mess and i have relinquished so much control to me that this is normal you know it's almost

like i go back to once you've been and done some of the stuff at the emt you're not thrown by the first time you see an accident the next time it becomes a little more normal a little more normal and it's a good thing because you can protect yourself but you also have to be careful that you don't become so detached you know and so clinical about it that you forget there's an emotional angle and and that's where like we're talking at

that point i'm struggling i'm full-blown alcoholic i'm drinking all the time i have these undiagnosed problems some diagnosed and i got to the point where i didn't want to be part of this world anymore and you get to that point like you talked about i'd had enough i didn't think there was any hope at all and i just rolled the dice one day and i just drank and took pills and i said if i wake up then maybe there was something out of this maybe there was

a reason and i literally rolled the dice which i can't even you know today i say that and like oh it's not nonchalant it is like wow i that was at the point i was at there was that cry for help even to myself and when i got a second chance that's when i've changed and turned my whole life in a different direction and that's why today when we're talking about it it's like sometimes i go over the top and people tell me to calm down because i'm so

passionate about it because i have rescued myself found direction found this this thing i want to talk about with everybody you know want to share all these experiences i'm okay with telling these people this because again when i start talking and this is one of the most amazing things you know all these places i run into so many conversations i can't believe that are happening and i'm sure you find that too i mean you you get guests on or but then

you might be talking to somebody about a show somewhere and then all of a sudden they open up and i think that's the amazing part of being able to talk about all this whether it's the first responder stuff or even again talking about emotions you know even the people like what my wife went through on the outside of these things you know and understanding her emotions and trying to put all that together to help people i want to get to the consumerism

in a second before we progress through to to the solutions that you found um but before we do and i i always like to ask this anyone who's been in that dark place who's who's basically planned their own you know suicide and i've had people on here that have executed it and survived and a lot of people that were almost there um or i mean like yourself you mean you did execute and you survived yep when we were all younger there was a very

judgmental look at suicide it's cowardly it's selfish how can you do that to your family etc etc and what i've realized as i've become this you know perpetual student now of all all these things including mental health and hearing these first-hand accounts is that you cannot understand a broken mind with a healthy mind trying to understand that is like trying to think you know oh i wonder what it's like to break my femur when your

leg isn't broken you know what i mean you can't you can't put your mind there and so when you listen to these men and women and children i mean i had you know a young high school student on here um you realize that at that moment their brain is telling them this this is the end to the pain but also i think this is not really um discussed is for almost all of them there's also a feeling of being a burden so when they say oh think

about your loved ones like they are they feel like they are the problem to their children their their spouse whatever it is and so in their mind it's a selfless act it's a terrifying act but they're doing it for the greater good with that broken mind and i say broken with with compassion you know it's something that's happened to them when you got to that point two decades of battling with your mental health and then ultimately addiction was there an

element of that in your perception yeah there was it was i mean i can remember to this day it wasn't it was more like it occurred it was like one of those thoughts you have in the back of your head for years and you start to think you know i'm not getting anywhere this is all it's ever going to be you know i can't control anything and i still remember that day i was working remote and i just like snapped i just had enough and it was almost

like it's kind of one of those quirky sayings but it was almost like the pain of living was too great and the pain of not living seemed better which is that like you're saying it's that broken mind thinking but it's i reached a point where i thought rolling the dice a cry for help and and the thing that i remember though was it was in my case i was executing i was going through it i mean i i took the pills and enough that if somebody hadn't

come but i made a phone call at the same time and i i tried to rescue myself at the same time and i was i was so conflicted you know i i just i knew i didn't want to do it but i knew i didn't want to be alive and at the same time what i found was that i just didn't know how to process anything anymore you know the emotions are what broke me and it's funny because today i will tell you the number one thing that has saved me is the emotions and

being able to handle our emotions and that's hence the whole mental health but it's funny it it wasn't a specific event it wasn't even sometimes the thoughts it was just that feeling like you're describing that there is no better solution you know and and again you're right it's not viewed as a positive you're not you know you you don't think it doesn't stop you because you know things i mean at that point i'd already if you will embarrass myself i'd

already done so many horrible things being under the influence of alcohol drinking all the time i'd pull some outrageous stunts you know things like that i i had lost all self-worth i had lost that direction and that was i think that was really what drove me to this and what i see in a lot of people when i talk to them about this and people that have fought about it in that is you lose two things a sense of control and you lose a sense of direction

and without those two things it's like saying you can manage your emotions you know be positive all the time but if you don't have a reason to be positive for if you're not going somewhere in your life if you can't tie it into something you know in your life to bring that happiness each day it's kind of like hollow advice so yeah it was it was a it was uh it was something it's very hard to understand but it's also much like mental health or being part of these

challenges and things or these experience being first responder the amazing part is is if somebody else has been through it you have that unspoken language and you can talk about it so openly that i think sometimes i stun people around me who don't have that and you're talking to somebody else in the middle of anywhere you know in the middle of line at the grocery store and you start talking about something like being bipolar

or being an alcoholic and people are just stunned because you just don't hear that conversation but the two of you are speaking the same language and you're totally okay with it which is i think a testament to the power of bringing all this stuff out into the light i was listening to an interview that i did with a fire chief pat kenney and we just did a third episode and so i listened to the first one that we did and it was something that i hadn't really

brought up again recently but he's a you know he has a devout faith and it made me realize that this is how strong this miswiring becomes in our mind how many people who are deeply embedded in their faith and their particular text tells them that suicide is a sin ultimately you're going to go to hell and they still do it if there's no better example of that miswiring and how strong that pull is the wrong way that you would still make that decision

even though you might in your mind in your belief be you know experiencing eternal damnation or whatever it is so i think that was a powerful kind of way looking at it too i mean this is we you know conversely there's a lot of judgment shame and guilt around mental health around suicide but these holy texts i would argue talk about kindness and compassion which is actually what we need to apply to these men and women that are suffering absolutely

and that's that's the other side that's interesting you bring that up because after after i tried to do that and then i'm trying to rebuild my life basically the direction and a lot of what doctors are saying and people are saying was to get back to normal you know get back to work that'll give you a purpose go back to things and nobody wanted to even ask if it was right you know nobody wanted to ask is this the right direction for your

life or have you dealt with any of those things it was like let's just restore things back to that normal again and it's it's kind of like what you're saying i mean it's like there are certain lines you think once you've done something under the influence and you've you've caused some you've been sent to jail for a weekend you would think that'd be enough to wake you up and stop you but by monday or tuesday you're already thinking well i

can get that escape again with another drink or again you're thinking my god my life is so horrible here's an out and even if it violates what you believe in faith even if you think maybe this is going to help everybody that misguided idea but then even and this is interesting even the people that have tried and then you're told to get back to normal and again it's to me it's the opposite you need to explore you need to get in touch with what caused

it you need to be able to talk about it because otherwise you're going to end up going back towards it absolutely well just one more area before we talk about the becoming a mental health warrior let's check my notes out for a second consumerism this is another area i mean there's no better example than the u.s and don't get me wrong you know capitalism has its place of course a lot of us enjoy the creature comforts that we have and would

be a hypocrite unless i was living off the grid somewhere to say otherwise we're literally having a conversation through a computer now but that being said i remember coming from england and after a couple of years i found myself working for a fire department in california and when i got there as you were just alluding to it was pre 2008 everyone was paying i mean just insane amounts for their houses everyone had winnebago's jet skis you know motocross

bikes all the toys and one of the guests i had on recently said that particular area orange county there's a lot of that kind of keeping up with the jones's philosophy in in that area in general but when i look at it too there was a lot of overtime at the time a lot of forced overtime in my class and the class after me were the ones that kind of finally filled all the seats so that they were able to work more even though it

was detrimental to their health but again it was so much i mean it was something that you know 20 years prior we only would have seen on mtv cribs you know the basketball players and the rappers and everything and now firefighters are doing it and then fast forward a few years a lot of those guys lost the house the winnebago the truck you know everything they lost almost everything because of the crash but you know whether it's children

that grew up in the ghetto that ended up becoming mma fighters or football players and then are persuaded by the consumerist world that you need this diamond jewelry and you need this bentley and etc etc or whether it's you know the the the person who's a lawyer who's also being persuaded that you need the bentley and you know what i mean all of us are being told that we never have enough you know when it comes to buying things and i think now

with amazon and things it's so easy just to click just like the qvc used to be addicted to some people you know 20 plus years ago so what is your perspective of that need to fill a void with purchasing because i think most of us if we put our hand on our heart would say that we do get a little dopamine hit whether it's a ten dollar amazon purchase or you know a twenty thousand dollar car but each of those are temporary i don't think

there's anyone five years later still just you know buzzing about their new car purchase right and and that's i will wholeheartedly admit i threw myself into that and i took us into that where at one point there's just my wife and i so there's we don't have any kids there's some pets but they're not driving and uh we had five cars because you need a choice every morning and various cars you know you need a you need a high-end car you

need a rough and ready suv of course you need all these things then we got into the real estate investing and we had several rental properties all around and so we have all this stuff and then the house we had had seven acres and you've got to have a huge lawn to cut you know and make it all look nice and an extra space and we kept buying bigger so first of all i'll just come clean i'm completely guilty of falling into that trap

the reason and i think that's so detrimental and the reason that is even part of what i'm doing today is to recognize that is because a lot of people use that to fill the gaps like i did when you fall into a depression or you fall into anxiety or something you can use things to fill those gaps and you can also use things to fill the gaps when you don't have the self-confidence because maybe you're anxious about everything and

you're you're doing a good job but you don't recognize it because you're so fearful all the time and so i think consumerism is that quick i call them the short-term answers the short-term solutions i liken it to i always knew i could go and get a drink and instantly be transported to you know life's a lot better after a few drinks and all of a sudden everything looks prettier well you go out and look out and your yard's bigger and your

house is big and all these things what i didn't realize was how much it was costing me and today i see that completely and it's funny one of the things that happened was we did lose that house of cards you know we had every house stacked on the next one to get all these rentals and the cars we had them but we certainly couldn't afford them you know and we couldn't do us so again they started falling apart and we ended up having to declare bankruptcy

and we lost the whole house of dominoes and we were down to things but today we are making choices that my old self would have scoffed at wouldn't even be in the room to listen to you know we have one car and we make it work because we like to do things and we like to do things together and then when we're out we might go and do things at a park like a workout and we might meet other people there you obviously don't care what car you bring

to the park when you're doing a workout you know or if you're going on a trip somewhere and taking a little trip again i've changed this whole perspective and i think when people realize why they were using it or what they think it might have brought to them i think that's when you poke the holes in the consumerism and you start to realize and my biggest thing is and i'm not trying to tout it but one of the books was i wrote this book called one

bag life because that premise suddenly hit me as i was getting better mental health was what if everything that made me happy could fit in one bag and i said really it's about less stuff more experiences and i say that because that had a huge impact on my mental health and it also helped me kind of stop the nonsense and deal with some of those past traumas deal with some of the situations and realize you know i was actually causing a

lot of it you know some of it was genetic some of it's certain conditions i had but by having all these requirements are always needing more i was putting myself on a hamster wheel of anxiety and stress and if i didn't have them like you said then i must be doing something wrong you know everybody else is succeeding and yet it's really just like ours was a facade and it turns out you know when you just become a real person and you

do with real life experiences and you start to connect with others again and do those things it's amazing it's like seeing the other side of like wow how could we be so wrong and i do see because i'm giving some talks these days and stuff and i it's funny when i talk to teenagers and things like that they're so caught up in it because like you said it's everywhere on on all the social media sites and it's like if you don't have

all these things you're not doing something right and i'm like you can have all those and it won't bring any of that happiness you have to like make them aware and show them hey think about what you really do when you hang out with your friends it's about hanging out with your friends nobody really cares what car you came in or where you know how you got there it's the experience it's a it's an interesting quirky concept but you know

it it's like i look at the way we live today and everything has a little purpose because most of the time we spend doing things we're engaging in life and before it was all about you know if you're going on a trip it has to be so over the top and yet today you can take the simplest trip or the simplest experience and it becomes i like to call extraordinary you know i can go out in the morning and get coffee and actually have time to have coffee

where i'm not running frantic or recovering from all my mistakes from the night before and i'm like i am so over the top for that 15 minutes i can't believe i missed it all these years and today i'm like this is fantastic so i agree 100 i traveled around the world with a backpack and a guitar and a girlfriend at the time around 2000 and it was amazing because it was eventually i got hired and ended up working in japan so then i had a

little apartment i'd start buying things again but for months and months and months it was everything was in that backpack and you realize what you can get by with a couple pairs of shoes or pair of shoes and pair of flip flops and a couple pairs of jeans shorts and a hoodie you know and then a guitar and so you know you go into places and hostels and you start jamming with other people and it was it was really eye-opening how little we need and

then when i was in california i when i moved to the u.s i bought a nissan centra for cash um little stick shift which made it all the way from florida to california when i was there they used to call it my cream puff and they all had all the big trucks and everything but then you know a few years later i ended up having to move back to the east coast drove it all the way back and and traded it in with 309 000 miles on the clock still working yeah

but no car payments and it got me from a to b the same as all these other vehicles that these guys had so despite the resistance and the push to get on the property ladder and all the things because i was fortunate enough to have that baseline and that kind of firstly growing up on a farm and not being exposed to a lot of you know materialism but then this kind of humbling journey with a backpack it really did help calibrate and give you

a little bit more strength to push against this bombardment of you don't have enough and kind of have this well i don't care you know i don't i just i don't care so you go buy your stuff but i'm happy and then like you said then you have the funds to travel and you have the ability to be a little bit more present which i think is so much more valuable than stuff to the point where there's people that have you know storage units full

of stuff and the house like that's really a red flag just in itself right absolutely and then we moved out of the house down to tennessee my wife got a job there and we were going to an apartment after being in a house for 20 years and then having all this stuff and at first i thought it was the end of the world and after a few weekends there we'd go out bike riding over at this park and we'd do some rock climbing bike bike riding and

i realized every house we drove by somebody's out doing yard work raking the leaves taking out the trash you know taking things and taking care of the house and i'm like that's what we used to be we would never have time to do this you know it suddenly struck me i'm like this is one of the greatest things like you said taking a chance moving to an apartment and suddenly finding i don't have all those responsibilities when there's something wrong

you call somebody and it was like at first that sounds terrible because you don't own it but then you own your time and i was able to do we were able to do so much and have in the last years then too it's it's like the weekends don't become chore time and task time they become time to do the things you really value i had a divorce and then ultimately that led to a foreclosure and a bankruptcy um you know the house that we bought was going

to be a two-income house you know the family dynamic changed actually got the mortgage kind of reconfigured and still ended up losing it which was a shame but i did at least get some equity in that house um but then we went to an apartment so firstly i had to tell my family that i'd failed that we were losing the house um and then that we downsized to an apartment just like you said once you shirk off those useless emotions of shame and guilt

it was awesome it was liberating we got rid of the stuff that we didn't need we got back down and we did end up you know going then six months later and buying a house again but it was around the corner from a little strip mall um you know the the boys had to share a room but it also made you realize that when you think the world is collapsing when the world is ending again it's a reminder like you just need clothes you need shelter

and you need your family that's it everything else is fluff and so just like you coming back down and being forced to a two-bedroom apartment for a while with a german shepherd um you know for six months we ended up really enjoying it and we look back fondly at that and i love where i live now we did get a you know a home with a little bit more space again but um but yeah i think it's it's terrifying at first but it's actually liberating once

you let some of those superfluous emotions just come and go yeah absolutely and we did it and we've gone through some struggles in the last years and we've moved to several states like i mentioned uh with my wife working remote and all that and at one point we had the two cars and we sold one and we were fully intending we'd do it as a short-term fix and now we're like no we can do one car and the funny thing is you tell people about they

first get a little quizzical and then they start asking how do you do it you know how does that work and then what you go out on the weekends and do stuff too you know how do you not have all these like you said all these other responsibilities that didn't help me so i find it interesting too because there's a lot of people that are um intrigued by it and sometimes you wouldn't expect that you know here you're like we're talking about

something we thought was terrible we find it great but what i also find interesting is other people are asking us about it now and i'm hoping we can tune them into some of these ideas you know and help them with some of these ideas that maybe will change and help their mental health you know it helps you being able to feel different about things absolutely well speaking of mental health then you kind of left us you know 20 years

deep a um a suicide attempt that thank goodness you survived so walk me through your kind of um metamorphosis from that and how you came up with the concept of the mental health warrior so i i knew at that point and this is what's interesting so we we have the attempted suicide and we have this new bruce coming out but he didn't come out right away i even went back to some old habits and i just couldn't make anything stick and it was at that point

i realized you know okay you've been through all of this and nothing's changing and that was when i came to this realization because what happened was i wanted to help people so i got certified as a personal trainer you know i didn't want to go back to corporate day school as i'm saying and i we had like a small antiques business and i'm going to get personal trainer then a health coach then i got into became a nutrition coach and i'm

thinking i'm going to help people on that but all along i realized and i realized by looking at myself and all the challenges that the emotions were what stopped me all in the past what it caused all these problems not being able to handle fearing my own emotions and i suddenly realized well these other things are all good it's still emotions because emotions and like to challenge people you know it's involved in every aspect of life you can't

think of anything you do in a day where you don't have emotions involved and sometimes they'll propel you you know to be able to do them but sometimes they just come with the basic like i'm saying getting a cup of coffee and the emotions of contentment and your emotions of i'm enjoying this landing on that is what started all this and i realized mental health is to me is the most powerful thing out there and it had the power to take

me down all those years which meant if it is that powerful it has the power to do amazing things for people when we learn to manage it and then what do you do with that i kind of go back to when i was the emt and learning all this stuff as a kid the first thing you go in is manage the scene and the first thing you do is don't rush in either you know because you don't end up being another wreck on a wreck or something but you have to manage

the scene and i'm like that means a little structure so i came up with this idea of the mental health warrior because rather than just say hey we're gonna take care of our mental health and have that associated it's kind of a weakness like you were saying it's looked down upon all that i'm like let's break the stigma we're gonna be warriors and we're gonna be mental health warriors and that right alone says to people hey we're gonna take

this in a positive direction in a powerful direction and it just started snowballing because i started saying well how can i help people and what i need to do is create a program which gives people some elements of what a warrior is and so i created there's four components of it and i took all those 20 years of lessons and even other lessons and poured them in and the four components match up to a lot of what we've been talking about you

have a creed which is bend not break and so you say right away i'm not going to let life just break me just like when you're on a scene you know you can't break because then you can't help somebody if they're struggling and then i said well values everybody talks about mental health and take care of your emotions but again if you don't set your values and what's important and pick your direction for your life you won't go in the right place

and you will just be unhappy and i found this because at one point i'm trying to get sober and i think i wrote about in the book in that first one where i switched over i said well i'll take some value to calm my nerves you know i'll just take pills and you can get them online it's no big deal and next thing i know i'm not drinking and i've achieved my goal but all i've done is switch to another addiction all i've done is bring in more problems

so i said values have to be an important part and it tells you how do you want to live and what are you trying to go after in life and that's going to play a huge role in your mental health which like we were saying the one bag life is part of that values it's part of less stuff more experiences and that has that positive mental health and then the last two pieces were mindset rules and mental health warrior tools and mindset rules are certain truths

i see out there we need to remind ourselves on and there are guidance they're the things that can keep us out of trouble and keep us get us out of trouble and i put all that together with a series of tools and all these things that i believe we can do so much throughout the day without disrupting our life to take care of mental health and the warriors is to position it as we always know there's the advanced help you know there's the doctors and the medicines

and things but what can you do every day you know what are the powerful things you can do and so that's kind of the how it came together and then today it's it just keeps spinning into more things um you know additional books and trying to bring this message out to people so from your personal journey of you end up you know uh teaching with these tools that you use but what was your personal experience how are you able to apply this to yourself so so i had to look

and decide things like what did what makes up bruce shooter you know what what does he want to stand for do i want to go after something or fall back and just you know go back to what i had before do i want to work in it again do i want to try and help people and do all this stuff and my journey was i kind of went back to like we started this whole conversation back when i was 16 17 18 being an emt and seeing the value and and the power of helping people in a life or death situation

well i want to bring my experiences and help people because i've changed i view things completely different you know the the bruce has come around in those 20 years and found themselves again if you will and i'm back to wanting to do something that has that meaning and i also want to stand up and make that mark with mental health and alcoholism and suicide awareness and all those things because i just feel like somebody needs to talk about those things

and it has become it has become my passion obsession you know like like you do on any good career or anything and it has changed who i am which has changed how i act and changed well how i view success or how i view the day and and i just find it i don't know how to describe it sometimes in words but i find it it's a amazing new path where i find myself so in awe of some of the things in life you know because i'm actually living life today is the best way i can describe

it before i was just going through life you know and and that's something makes me want to share it with everybody well earlier you touched on kind of not being aware and no one really having the conversations when it came to the bipolar the anxiety depression when when did you have a realization that that was actually you know a mental health diagnosis and again how have you been able to to stabilize the extremes that you were experiencing before so i didn't get diagnosed with

the bipolar until i was 40 so i got diagnosed early on the anxiety disorders social anxiety the anxiety disorders social anxiety generalized anxiety the alcohol problem was kind of unknown you know and when i finally went and ended up in a facility for this outpatient treatment after trying to kill myself the doctor came and told me hey you ever heard of word bipolar boy you fit this to a t you know after talking with him and i said oh my god that was a turning point because what he

gave me was information and gave me a starting point and it was like it was like the the doors opened up and i was like oh my god i can put a name to it now i can learn about it and what it helped me do then was to take action and not feel like i have zero control you know you're going to go talk to specialists you're going to talk to a therapist and i took the tact of working together with them and trying to work with them it really changed how i wanted to stabilize everything

because i i worked with all the traditional routes but i ran into so many problems that i got to the point where i wanted to show people you can do yourself i'm not saying meds didn't play a role they helped get me some clarity of thought but there were so many side effects in my case and so many problems and i switched through like 20 30 meds never getting one to really work and then i found there were so many lifestyle changes and so many things i could do as this mental health

warrior that i found i could actually move forward that way you know i could i could find other routes i i'm not saying i wouldn't go back and need help at times um but it opens the door because you're not limited anymore and you're not limited to just here's all you can do about it you know here's the only choice that you have it's there's some people that have had good experiences with meds but i would argue they're few and far between at least the people that come on the show and it

it makes perfect sense to me if there's purely some sort of neurochemical imbalance and that is it so for example it seems like schizophrenia is one that tends to be more reliant on meds but it the rest of us the other 90 whatever percent it's about the traumas you know it's about you know the the nucleus the the kind of p beneath all the mattresses as it were and so if you just simply medicate in someone you're never addressing the origin the same way as you know people that do

psilocybin or ketamine but there's no council or no shaman along with them and they don't have a very good response it's because you haven't unpacked the things that you need to unpack so you know then you add in the side effects as you said and sometimes you know suicide ideation is one of the side effects um i hope that the more holistic um tools whether it's you know your program and all the other ones are out there everything from emdr to the good psychedelic

therapies um the one day you know meds will be in that toolbox but there'll be just one small piece of a much bigger puzzle because i don't think people realize how many options are available to them but the thing is as you said there's that quick fix element which i think psych meds more often than not fit you know ritalin and all these other things that we throw at our men women and children and you know i think you have to ask yourself am i actually getting to the root cause

of my problem whether it's a blood pressure med or a psych med am i fixing the thing that caused us in the first place yeah absolutely and i went through that with i was such a wreck physically from the drinking and from all the bad behaviors that i was pre-diabetic overweight having all these blood pressure issues and i went to the doctor and they were like you got to go on statins you got to go on all these other meds and i said no i'm gonna do lifestyle changes and i

guess they don't hear that a lot so i fought with them for a while and we made a deal six months i get to prove it if it doesn't work then i'll take your choice i proved it to them i never even had to go on the meds i fixed all these things with lifestyle and i started thinking well wait what about all these lifestyle things you can do for your mental health and that's where i'm trying to take some of my background and i've one of the books out now is the three food rules for mental

health because again the foods we eat have a correlation to our mental health they they affect the physiological part of our body which in turn affects our mental health the processing of things how well your blood's flowing is going to affect how well you're thinking and clarity you know and if you're feeding it it was sugar all the time and i kept them simple but they're all simple lifestyle changes that have so many powerful you know results that i just love exploring that with

people and that's that's where things like we're talking about you have things like the one bag life which is like a mindset and that is a mental health benefit we have these three food rules as part of the program to help people see you know because i'm as guilty as especially back when you're a first responder and stuff everything's on the go and you grab whatever you can and then you leave it and come back to it you know 20 times over but it's just amazing what you can do and i'd

like to see that i'd like to see more people take ownership of what they can do knowing that you have these advanced things if you need them you know knowing that if you need to go in for some therapy my hope is that then you take your ownership with you and you go in and work with a therapist as opposed to going in and saying i don't know what to do and i have no ownership again you know because that'll bring you back to where i felt at that day i have no choices i have no forward momentum i

can't go anywhere so what's the point and i'm just really hoping we can keep inspiring people showing them what they can do yeah well i mean it's a very unique perspective that you have as well so i would love to kind of educate people on you know the books and then obviously the the site as well so so tell people the the spectrum of books that you have out there and where are the best places to find them and the courses so everything is centered right now the website is bruce shooter

dot com and that's kind of the kickoff point because what we have is we've got nine books out so we've got the one book that talks about how it's it's i triumphed over bipolar alcoholism and anxiety disorders by coming a mental health warrior and it lays out my story that we've been talking about and lays out those four components then there's the other eight books that really get into taking action in specific areas and you can find all these with the website and then they're

all up on amazon so you can get the ebooks and the you know we're trying to get them up on some other sites each of the books it's got my quirky writing style you're not going to find textbooks you're not going to find a lot of super complicated discussions even in the food areas i created that one for for example with three food rules because i got so tired of trying to follow some of the diets that can help you out there but are so restrictive there's no way to sustain them you

know and i tried to keep things simple but real some of the other books there's a journal there's a journal there's also one that came a big part from my emt experience and the whole experience it's called euphoria of today and what it is is its mindfulness of today practice of mindfulness of today i call it and the idea was when you have wreckage of the past whether it's mental health issues or other things and you also then have a fear of the future what if we focus on today

what if we really live in today because that's the only place we really have control and yet everything you do today if you take control and manage those emotions well you just build a great tomorrow because you don't bring any problems into it and if you're doing things different today like i am i put to rest all those mistakes yes i can talk openly yes we had a whole bunch of houses in these cars and yes i was an idiot but i'm also not really sad they're all gone and i can talk about

it so you'll find a bunch of different books like that you'll find there's with those mindset rules there's 53 of them and they're little one-off things that will help remind you and keep you on a straight and narrow and what i did then was one of the biggest things i saw and was missing out there is you need something to be able to carry with you all the time how do you stay motivated throughout the day sometimes you know sometimes you just by yourself and so i created a mental

health warrior challenge coin and people in the service you know they're familiar with that it commemorates like a place you've served or an event you've been through and so i created this challenge coin and funny enough like the one coin on the back has mindset rule two which is learn to respond not react to life's challenges which can save you all the time and we've handed them out we're selling to people and they're finding it so useful so again i'm trying to have the books but

also have some daily things because i know when i was in like any of the self-help groups you know you need some of that reassurance something to carry with you that's in your hand you may not even want to talk to other people about it but you can you know you can have those things so you'll find all that stuff there and i'll just throw one last thing because i i just wore it but i because i was doing the designs and all that stuff i threw them on clothing and the reason being is i do it mostly

for us but it kick starts the conversation and whether you have the book or the coin or one of the clothing you can kick start a conversation anywhere and like we've talked i've gotten into so many interesting conversations it's like i encourage people to open that door it's scary you don't want to admit you have any problems you don't want to admit you're struggling but boy when you open up man people open up around you because they've been waiting for somebody to say that so

it's pretty neat it's definitely exciting absolutely well i want to thank you so much like i said it's a very unique perspective you've got a very interesting journey and again are very courageously vulnerable on on your highs your lows and this journey has taken you through but i urge people to go to the site and look at some of the books thank you again for sending me the the first book that you wrote and yeah i think it's it's it's again it's that immersive element i think people

can dive in and see there's so many different things and find the thing that really resonates with them you know and then move forward with it so i want to thank you so so much for being so generous and coming on the behind the shield podcast today no thank you and thanks for being so open to talk about this stuff you know i wasn't quite sure how far to go on some of my stories and as you know sometimes you're a little wary on some of these but um i appreciate and it's

cathartic if you will but being able to share that story about that experience with the neighboring high school kids and all of that because it reinforces in me today and i hope other people take from that that we can learn and to celebrate every day and to put our effort into today you know that's i feel like what we owe when we see people that we've lost and and it's kind of a neat perspective that you could take any time you don't have to be a first responder but

it's one of those life lessons that today i just hold tightly to you know it took me 20 years to learn it but i hold tightly to it today