JP McMichael (9/11, Responding to the Pentagon Attack and Post Traumatic Growth) - Episode 971

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Now for those of you who don't qualify, there is still the 10% off using the code BTS10, Behind the Shield 10 for a one-time purchase. Now to learn more about Thorn, go to episode 323 of the Behind the Shield podcast with Joel Titoro and Wes Barnett. 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, former veteran police officer, wrestler and MMA fighter, JP McMichael.

Now what makes JP's story even more powerful is he was one of the responders to the Pentagon on 9-11, a perspective that few of us have ever heard. So in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from his journey into law enforcement, losing friends to suicide, his project, The Catalyst of Change, the incredible growth he found through the Struggle Well program, Operation Enduring Warrior and so much more.

Now before we get to this incredible 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 five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for others to find. And this is a free library of almost 1000 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, JP McMichael. Enjoy. Well JP, I want to start by saying two things. Firstly, thank you to Operation Enduring Warrior who we will discuss in a little while, but they were the ones that brought us together and we got to sit side by side a few months ago.

And secondly, I want to welcome you to the Behind the Shield podcast today. Thank you. My pleasure. So where on planet earth we finding you this afternoon? I am in Leesburg, Virginia right now at home. I just got back in from I was out in New York and out in Idaho and got caught up in the Delta debacle that happened coming back. So what was that? I'm not familiar with it.

And all the planes, their security system updated or something and all the planes got delayed and so I was able to fly out of Idaho to Atlanta and then that flight got canceled. We got booked on another flight. That flight got canceled. I ended up spending, I think it was two days down in Atlanta. They had no hotel rooms around there. There was no cars left at the airport. And so I finally was able to get a car from in town further out and then drive back home from there.

But it was a complete mess. Yeah. I remember now the Microsoft crash, wasn't it? Yeah, that's horrendous. I was glad I wasn't traveling. I did a lot of traveling recently, so I dodged the bullet on that one. Yeah. All right. Well, then very first question as far as your timeline, tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings? All right. So I was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Maryland.

Mom and dad, I have a younger sister who is doing a secret squirrel job that she can't talk about. Her kids always talk about she's a spy, but she does something with computers, but I have no idea what it is. My dad was a plumber, ended up owning his own business. And then my mom worked at a bank early on, and then she ended up hurting her back when I was probably like 10 and ended up staying home after that and just taking care of me and my sister.

And I had to grow up very early with all that going on and help her out around the house because she couldn't do a lot. It's not like nowadays where you have surgery and you're walking around two hours later, like she was in the hospital for several weeks and then at home on bed rest and stuff like that. But it was for the most part a good, good childhood. My dad had some struggles along the way and demons that he battled with alcohol and stuff.

And so that was a tough part of in high school and things like that. But like I said, it made me grow up earlier. I started working when I was 12 years old and worked all through high school and after that and have been working up to last November every day since I was 12. So are you sure your sister wasn't responsible for the crash? She might have been probably sitting home laughing. You never know these days. No, no, you don't. What about sports and athletics?

What were you doing and playing when you were the school age? So younger, I couldn't do much because I was a big kid. I was thinking seventh, seventh grade. I was probably about same height that I am now. Six, two, six, three, um, weighed about 200 pounds. So football was out of the, you know, out of the realm at a young age.

I ended up playing football when I got into high school for a couple of years and wrestled and did track and field the shot, putting discus and was not a big fan of team sports. I liked having, um, like wrestling where you competed on your own and it was up to you as to what you did.

And that kind of, I had my own coach in high school who I used to go over and nowadays you could never do it, but I used to go over and wrestle at his house and he actually had a professional wrestling ring set up in his basement. So that was how I got into all that. And he was a, he was an older guy, worked at NASA, but just tough as nails and like, didn't let you just kind of scoot through stuff. He really busted your butt and got you to work.

And, um, that was kind of my outlet for the stuff that was going on with my dad. Um, I did sports and I worked, I was not at home a lot. Um, I would get up in the morning, go to school practices or whatever. And when I wasn't practicing or playing, I was at work right after school. So, I can relate to the team element. I played for a field hockey team in university and college.

Um, and I know I forget, like it, there was one game where I had made a mistake and, and they said, you've either got to drink the entire top shelf of liquor or you've got to wear a dress for the day. And I'm like, or option C, I could just not play this stupid game anymore. So I went and just went in more into the martial arts.

Um, and I loved, I loved the, uh, accountability and ownership that you need when it's just you and an opponent on the mat, because you might be the rock star in a gate in a team or you might be the weak link or you might have a good game or a bad game.

And you know, there is a lot of kind of blaming in the less cohesive teams, but when you're standing in front of someone, you know, especially in a combat sport, when you, when you done, I mean, even, even if it goes to the judges, I remember sometimes if it was close, I'm like, no, that's still not good enough. Even if I won, I need to make sure that the judges don't even have a part in it. If I can convincingly beat someone, then I know my training has worked.

So I, like yourself, I love that kind of element of the individual sports. Well, especially now, like you watch the fighters now, and I was just listening to your show on the way up to New York and listening to a Rashad Evans episode who that, that guy's amazing, but you watch these fights now and these judges, it's like, they don't even know what they're looking at, so you don't want to leave it in their hands. You want to have it up to you, you want to work for it.

And I've not having my dad around for several years during high school. That kind of became my thing. It was like, I have to work hard. I have to do the best that I can for me because nobody's helping me. Nobody's going to come get me. And I've got to prove, because he would tell me at times, like, you're never going to amount to anything, you're not going to do this, you're not going to do that.

And my dad was a little short guy, so it's hard for me to say there was verbal abuse there because he was so tiny, but he would constantly tell me, like, you're never going to amount to anything, you're not going to do this, you're not going to do that. And that played in my head a lot. So it was always, I have to prove him wrong. And he had passed away back in 2020, right after COVID started. And he called me three days before because I had just, I forget what I was doing at work.

I got made like the COVID coordinator at the department. He called me and said how proud he was of me and not to let the job run me into the ground. And I almost think he knew what was coming. He had a heart attack four days later and died. And I almost think he knew what was coming and wanted me to be aware of that because we had just in the last few years before that kind of our bridge had been built back up. This multi-generational trauma theme has been coming up so often.

I just finished literally two days ago, finished my book. Then there's a big theme of that in the second book now. And you know, when you hear a lot of these interviews, it's, you know, this is how my parents were, oh, wow, that's probably contributed to why you struggled later on. But what's interesting is then when you ask, well, what about their parents? Tell me about them. So what about the household that you grew up in? Did you ever hear about that? Yep. Both sides. Alcoholic grandfathers.

My grandmother on my mother's side was awesome. My grandmother on my dad's mom, I didn't meet her until I was 16. She had not been in the scene and then came back and she was awesome as well. Got to hear a lot of her story about how everything happened where she left. His dad, I was not a fan of. I remember at a young age, at 12 again, I think it was 12, 11, 12 years old, his dad was treating him like he used to treat me. Screaming at him, yelling at him. And I had to stand up for my dad.

So it's easy for me to look back now and see how everything kind of trickled down, especially I know we're going to talk about Boulder Crest later, going through struggle well and stuff like that and having my eyes open to that generational thing and how everything kind of trickles downhill and you have to be the one to draw the line and stop it. So I can look back now.

At that point, it wasn't easy for me to see it, but now I can look back and I see a lot of the struggles that my dad had and I see a lot of qualities in him, in me, since he's died that I spent a lot of my life pushing his stuff away and saying, oh, I don't want to be like him. He taught me how not to do things when a lot of what he was doing was a lot of the same qualities that I have.

It's such an important conversation because I don't think it's, you know, that there's this feeling of, oh, well, you know, my parents and my grandparents were alcoholics, so I'm doomed to be the same. And I disagree completely. Of course, there's an epigenetic element to it. If you have, you know, as an alcoholic, then you have children and, you know, that's obviously going to have an effect.

But just the same way as alcoholism can turn your genes one way, they can turn it the other way and it's the same with behaviors. But until we look back and have this multi-generational conversation, how can you stop that next domino from falling if you haven't even acknowledged what's going on? So I think it's an exciting conversation. It brings hope to this multi-generational element.

But more often than not, you know, for example, the greatest generation, a lot of times these men and women came back from World War II and they were broken. And I mean that out of compassion. How could they not be? And so that's buried down. I mean, oh, no, they were amazing. They just rolled up their sleeves and went back to work. Yeah, they did. But they were suffering. They were here and they were violent and, you know, alcoholics and all these other things.

That needs to be addressed because they had no support when they came home. We weren't talking about mental health in 1946. So, you know, I think it's so great that we can finally start these conversations and look back and go, this doesn't have to keep going. We can fix this. Yeah, I had an opportunity. We worked a World War II memorial opening in D.C. and did the security for that and getting to sit with those folks and hear their stories and just amazing, amazing.

But as I, you know, as my career went on and I started to get more involved with the PTSD stuff and looking at that and doing research on it, then my eyes got open to like you're saying, yeah, they're tough and they're doing this, but there's a lot going on inside and they're bottling it up and not handling it and everything else is going on. I heard there was a quote one time that tears unshed cause organs to weep. And that was, yeah.

I just shared a video of a sculpture that is about to go into the World War I Memorial Museum in D.C. And it was absolutely beautiful. This sculpture must be, I mean, 50 feet long. And it's obviously all these guys in the trenches and there's some nurses amongst them and so powerful. So next time I'm up there, I want to make sure I go and see that. Yeah. Well, that's like conversations that I have with my son and my daughter too about who you're looking up to as role models.

You know, I've got to meet a lot of people. I've been very fortunate in my life with the things that have happened, but. I don't have a lot of like I don't run around chasing sports players and stuff like that and movie stars and musicians and you meet them and they're nice and whatever.

But it's the men and women that are out there that defend the country that put on a uniform our nurses, our teachers, those people that are doing the hard work is who I try to teach them like look up to those folks. Yeah, it's great that these guys and girls are out doing, you know, playing basketball and whatever. They're awesome.

But look to the people that are doing the real work that are making changes in people's lives and don't run around, you know, chasing musicians and movie stars and things like that and trying to live up to their stuff. Because you see that so much because of social media now with the young people that they want to be like this or they want to do this and that.

And they kind of cut everything else off from their life and don't look at like I've got to do the work instead of foundation beneath that. And if I can get to that level, it's great. But I need to get the foundation built first. I think there's a real push to be a specialist and not a generalist. So if someone's going to enjoys playing basketball, oh, well, I need to be in the NBA rather than go you might be that point, whatever percent, or you might just really enjoy playing basketball.

So play basketball and then play soccer and then you know what I mean? And just play the things. But I think this kind of elitism that's presented to us through Instagram and some of these other things is like, oh, no, I need to be the best in the world. And you don't, you know, you might be you might find yourself there one day or you might just really enjoy surfing, but you're not Kelly Slater. And that's OK, too. Well, and it can be I think the thing that gets missed a lot is.

They don't see all the work that you look at like a Michael Jordan or a Steph Curry. They don't see all the work that's put into it. Rashad Evans that they had to do to lay that foundation. And there was things that came along the way that put them in the position area and that they got lucky breaks. There's plenty of people out there that are super talented and have those skills and they never get those opportunities or they don't chase them properly. Absolutely.

Well, you were talking about the uniform professions a second ago. Is that what you were dreaming of becoming when you were in the school age or did you have another career aspiration? I wanted to be a at one point, I wanted to be a marine biologist for I don't know why, but I think a lot of kids do. I'm a marine biologist. Yeah, no idea why that was there. But I remember when I was in fifth grade, I was a safety patrol and I always thought it was the coolest thing.

We got to wear those little belts with the badges and the cops would come by and they would stop and salute you. And I grew up, I didn't have any family that were officers, but I had family friends that were. And I always just thought they were the coolest folks. And then went back to issues with my dad. There was a police lieutenant that lived in my neighborhood and he kind of took me under his wing and talked to me a lot and helped me through a lot of process.

I got to go on some ride alongs with him. He's since retired, but just he showed me more of what it was really like. And from experiences with my dad, and I think a lot of folks that go into first responder fields and military are because of experiences that they have at a younger age where they're good or bad and they decide this is what I want to do. This person helped me or this was a horrible experience and I want to be the difference or be the change.

And I had some great experiences with folks. I also had bad experiences when my dad would get himself in trouble with officers where I did not agree with what they did. But I'm 16, 17 years old. Nobody's listening to me. But I knew by that point that was what I wanted to do. And it took me a while. I don't think I got hired when I was 27 and just applying to everywhere under the sun, but I knew that's where I wanted to be.

And my dad had told me like, you're never going to amount, you're never going to be able to do this. And I remember when I got the letter that I was hired and the day that I graduated the Academy, it was still at that point was like, I'm going to prove him wrong and I'm going to do this. And it took me years. I mean, I just retired last November after 25 years as a captain. And it took me years to see the importance of the job.

And that when I got up to that rank in the command staff, that it wasn't about me anymore. It was about helping the younger officers. It was about the time that you spent in the community and about getting to help people that really needed help and getting to spend time with kids when you'd stop to get coffee or something. That impression that you made on them. And you had that, you had the obligation, you're representing your department and your agency.

And with the way things are in this country, one officer does something stupid and it impacts everybody. And I looked at it as if I'm stopping and I can talk to these kids or these families for a few minutes and make a good impression.

Then they're going to have a different view of us and they're going to get to see that different view, which is why I teach now too, because I want to give people a view of the people that I knew in the field, as well as the work that I did and the good side of it. And there's, you know, you see the people online that are doing stuff they shouldn't be doing. But overall, I think people get into those fields because they really want to help people and really want to make a difference.

But you also get handed a lot of power when you're young and that can be very overwhelming at times. Absolutely. Which is why I think setting the bar so high and creating an environment that draws many, many candidates to the profession is so important because then you can choose from the best. What we're seeing now, I think, with this recruitment crisis is people taking everyone and lowering standards.

And that is obviously going to in turn lead to, for example, one of these horrendous tragedies that we just had, where a person with a fucking horrendous record ends up executing a woman in her in her kitchen. So you know, these are the rotten apples that, you know, perforate in our penetrate in our professions.

And I think one of the reasons is because the standards are getting lower because we're not giving these people in uniform the environment to thrive, therefore draws people into the profession. Well, and that and you have there's a lack of leadership and they don't.

And I'm not saying I know a lot of chiefs and sheriffs that are absolutely amazing that have great environments because they are able to look at the people that they want to bring in and they're gearing what they're doing towards those people. It's almost like an athlete and you have to sell your team to get the athlete that you want. And the kids that are coming out of college now, they don't want to work 9000 hours of overtime. They want to work. They're going to work hard.

They have different talents that they're not are not being taken advantage of and not being sold to them. And they're just going to cookie cutter approach. You're going to start here. You're going to do this. And this is how this has always been. So we're not going to change it. Instead of saying, look, you've got this degree in a certain area. You're really good at technology. We need this over here. Instead of starting you here, let's get you working with these folks.

Let's try something different now to the box. How can we make you want to stay with our department? And I've seen so much of that, especially with the kids that I'm teaching. And I say kids, a lot of them are not kids anymore, but when they're going into the workplace, that workplace is not looking at the talents they have. A lot of the times you'll hear the old heads like myself, you know, that have been there forever going, oh, these young kids don't know anything. They know a lot.

They just know a different set of skills than us old folk do. And we need to find a place to mesh them because they benefit the agency, just like folks like me that have been there forever and know things that they're not going to teach you in the academy. Yeah. Well, you mentioned as well, the overtime, this generation now has the ability to really research what the job is like. And when you were hired before I was, I was hired 20 years ago.

Back then it was just like, well, I'm going to grow a mustache, have a leather helmet and pull babies out of fire. It's going to be awesome. You know, now you research and you're like, oh, cancer, divorce, you know, suicide. I don't remember them talking about this 20 years ago. These young candidates are seeing all this. And then for example, in the fire service, they're seeing 56 hours a week, eight hours with the mandatory or even more. That doesn't sound good. I value my time.

I'm, you know, Gen Z and family and friendships are important to me. And they're right. They're a thousand percent right. You wouldn't go into a bank and be like, yeah, it's an eight year work week. Okay. That sounds great. You'd be like, all right, I'm going to the next bank. Thanks for the interview. So, you know, that there's that whole rolling their eyes, kids today mentality drives me crazy. You get good people from that generation by setting that bar where it's supposed to be high.

You know, lives are in our hands. The bar should never be lowered. But then you've got to create an environment that tells these young candidates, hey, once you get in this uniform, we're going to take care of you. We're going to train you well. We're going to expect you to be fit and fast and strong. And in return, we're going to give you the rest and recovery and support that you need. Yep. And they also now they're the job market is for them.

You have agencies offering 10, 20, $30,000 bonuses. So if I come to your department and I'm there for two years and I finish my time that's required, why would I not go to the next department? Especially if you've told me all these great things about your department, I've been there for two years and seen that's not the case. So I can go over here, make this money and then go to the next place. But I also when I got I kind of fell into the teaching thing.

But start, you know, giving them the real information about the job to me has been I've had some four or five students now that have gone on to become officers and firefighters. But I tell them from the start, like, look, this isn't because you get all the students will come in and be like, Oh, I watched Criminal Minds. I want to be a profiler. It's not how this works. It's not your you know, that's not what the job is anymore.

And trying to give them that reality so they can base their decisions on the reality of the job versus them spending four years in college, going into debt and then getting into a job that the first month they're there, they hate it. Absolutely. Speaking of media, because I've been one of the reasons why I've written my book is I want to make it into a TV show. That's my my end goal, because we don't have anything on on TV that really shows what we actually do and what we see.

I mean, this is an important thing. The view of the world through a first responders eyes are so unique. There's literally a handful of professions that get to see society that way. So it's so important. But we don't really have much at all. That of 49 was a pretty good one, but that was purely fire, suburban fire. We had only the brave telling the story of the Prescott 19. That was really well done. But that's pretty much it. Then we have soap operas and even the reality TV show.

Someone the other day told me and they're absolutely right. They're like, yeah, but they always say them. There's always a happy ending in that documentary. And I'm like, yeah, that's that's really true. I never thought about that way. So when it comes to law enforcement in your career, what have been the shows that have come close to at least kind of, you know, showing the good and the bad and the ugly of law enforcement? I have actually tried to stay away from watching television.

So I did four tours on Midnights and when I got home from work, I would look for just funny stuff to watch. Stupid videos, comedy, movies, things like that. I watched cops all the time growing up. And you got to see like I was just talking to my son about this earlier about like they show you like, oh, you're out doing car chases and shootouts and arrested. That's maybe five percent of your job. The rest of the time you're sitting in booking, doing paperwork in court after working all night.

There's not a lot of reality to it because nobody's going to sit and watch that. The show Jail where they were filming stuff in the jail. That was probably the most realistic that I've seen from times that I worked in the jail. But they're always geared towards whatever message they're trying to push. You don't see a lot of realistic stuff like you said on TV that you get to see glimpses of it. It would be great to see something where you get to see the first responders human side.

What are they struggling with? What happens after a shooting? When you go to speak at a school, they're always like, oh, have you ever shot anybody? Have you drawn your gun? Yeah. And it's scary. And you don't want to be the one to do that. You don't want to be in these pursuits and doing this stuff because there's after effects to it. It's like the combat vet that goes over to war. There's nothing cool about that.

You're going to live with that and see these things and hear these things over and over and over again. And they don't make us out to be human beings. And we're no different than anybody else on the street. We just put on a different uniform. Absolutely. Well, speaking of that, when you walked into the actual law enforcement profession, what was the conversation from mental health and also the fitness standards back then? The mental health was zero.

They told us the first day, look to your left, look to your right. One of these people is not going to be here. Whether it's they get killed or whether they retire early, whatever it is, your divorce rates 55% or higher. We trained every day. We were doing fitness stuff, but it was running. It's not like now where they're doing yoga and all these different types of things. It was defensive tactics and running. And you did some obstacle course stuff here and there.

You did your weapons drills, your handcuffing drills. So there wasn't a lot of, there was nothing on mental health. Fitness was pushed. But once you got out of the academy and went back to the department, that was up to you. Were you going to continue to do what you were doing or were you just going to be one of these guys that in 20 years, you know, was either just your body was broken down or you weighed 400 pounds. And the departments didn't do anything to help you with that.

They weren't like, Oh, take some time to work out or things like that. The fire department, you guys were awesome. You got to come back. You would sit around and talk about stuff. You know, there was more training, I think, in that aspect, at least from what I was seeing. But in law enforcement, it wasn't there. Yeah, I think the big thing with the fire, you know, and then a lot of times the stations, the equipment, the training equipment is actually bought by the firefighters.

Some gyms now, they're actually doing it properly. But most of my career, we paid for the squat racks and the barbells and the kettlebells and all the things. But yes, we do have an opportunity to at least train when we get back. You guys are in a cruiser or whatever the dynamic is, you don't have a gym to kind of dip into for an hour between calls.

And I got fortunate later on in my career where I had a chief or deputy chief that I worked for that was very big on the health and wellness of the officers. I got put in charge of that. I ran our peer support team for a while and got to be involved in a lot of that stuff coming around. Whereas early in my career, it was nonexistent.

We actually built before I left, I actually had an area that was built up for the officers to be able to go take 20 minute naps in between shifts or whatever, just so they had a place to go relax. And then when I got my service dog and brought her into work, they would come in and sit and play with her. And that was like night and day. So they would come in and roll around and play with her and then start talking about stuff that they were struggling with.

And I had people I had 20 years I had never even met before coming in and talk about this stuff. But it was later in my career when that chief was like, you need to come in and tell your story to the command staff. And in turn, I was able to then go to the entire department and talk about not only my story, but to play a documentary that Fairfax PD had put together about officers that had lost loved ones that had attempted suicide, and that got help and came back.

And I got to get that conversation started, which was, to me, that was well worth 20 years of battling to get it started. I wish it had started sooner, but towards the end of my career, I got to see that. And I also got to escort a widow from New Jersey at the police memorial during National Police Week for the first year where they honored officers that had died by suicide because of the job. And they finally honored them after umpteen years at that service.

Taking a tangent for a second, speaking of mental health and the reason why I'm thinking about this, you mentioned Fairfax, a lot of the leadership in the IAFF, the Firefighter Union were from there. And I found it very frustrating that my whole career, so 14 years in uniform, 20 years since I started now, our union has not talked about the work week at all.

In the mental health side, there's some peer support training, and then you've got one facility in the Northeast that's supposed to cover the entire nation. So again, I struggled to comprehend how we can have such a horrendous crisis with suicide, with cancers, with all the marital problems. And yet when you take a step back, it doesn't seem to be an equal and opposite amount of effort being put in to stop this from the people that we pay with our union dues.

And then I look at the chiefs of some of these departments and the city and county managers who have their men and women dropping like flies in police and fire and dispatch and corrections and all the places and seem unmoved. And it all comes out, oh, we don't have the money to fix it. And I ask that, how can you sleep at night? Truly, as a human being, knowing that this is your workforce, your personnel.

And I realized the same mental health problems that we're seeing on the street in all the ranks in the actual stations, that's probably occurring in leadership as well. But we're not talking about that. The only way that you could actually sleep well at night and you've had locally here four or five suicides in as many years has to be that you have some sort of mental health going on as well. Because otherwise you'd be searching the fucking earth trying to find problems.

And you'd say, we are going to change the work week. We're going to bring in a counselor that's going to be full time. We're going to raise fitness standards, whatever it is. But I don't see that. I mean, it's like swimming upstream trying to get this message with the work week specifically to get some toe holes.

And so when you think about more extreme examples, the head of a cigarette company, the head of Purdue Farmer, the head of McDonald's, that they know in their heart hearts that millions of Americans are dying because of their products and they still sleep at night. We forget that that side, the leadership side, there is also a massive mental health crisis. And until we address that, either they find some help and then start finding their humanity and actually fight for changes.

Or we say you're not fit to be in this position and we need to put someone with some empathy back in. I think this is another interesting part of this mental health conversation. Yeah. And you see too when at least what I found when I got to that level, they're distanced from the first line workers. So they're able to take vacations. They're able to have days off where the men and women that are actually in there doing the work can't. And they're telling these folks, oh, you can't go to this.

You can't do that. But they're seeing these people are never at work. And they're saying, oh, we can't do this. We can't do that. And in some instances, it was different with police and the sheriff funding wise and things like that. But there comes a time as a leader where you have to stand up and say, I'm doing this for my folks and I have to make sure my folks are OK. And if you don't agree with that, I'm going to go to bat form and it may cost me my job.

But I have to do is like you said, we have people that like I don't know how they sleep. I know my last few years in the department, I was working 16 hour days easily, if not longer. I like staying later in my office and hanging out and getting to see the night shift people because you didn't see the supervisors coming in. You didn't see the command staff people coming in. They like just having that opportunity to talk to them.

And you would get every now and then you get a speech about, oh, we have to go and do their job and be out there. They don't want you out there with them. Just like Elon Musk saying, I'm going to come in and work on the production line at Tesla. Nobody wants him touching anything down there. They want to see him. They want to talk to him. They want to they want to feel like they're being heard. They might want to get him to redesign that fucking truck at least.

Yeah, that is not an attractive truck. But it's like they don't. It's hard for me to comprehend that. When I left, one of the things I had the chief that I was talking about earlier, he had left previous to me and I told him the hardest thing for me is watching these men and women walking around this department. Looking the way that they do because they were tired. They were exhausted. They were just beat down and nobody did any. Nobody cared.

And the same people that get to these ranks, their higher levels, you spend your career saying, I would never do this. I hate that they're doing this. And then you get up there and you're doing the same thing. And in 2019, when we had it was 256 documented suicides and law enforcement. Then everybody said, oh, we have an issue. Now we're back to the hiring process is bad. So we're going to push that to the side. And you only have a few folks here and there that are speaking out about it.

And I have great respect for any chief, anybody in a command staff, staff member who gets up and speaks about this stuff because it's not the popular thing. You're going to get pushback. But like I said earlier, this is not about you. Yeah, you pushed yourself to get to these ranks and everything else, but you're there to make sure your men and women have the support that they need. They have the tools that they need.

And I push servant leadership a lot because the sheriff and the police chief, they're not out doing anything. They're doing the political stuff. They're speaking at the town halls and things like that, not demeaning their jobs at all. But your men and women that are on the front line are doing all the work. And if you're not providing them the tools that they need, that's going to reflect upon you.

And the people that are out here making these mistakes that have these bad shootings and all these other things, they're exhausted. They're still dealing with trauma and you're sending them back out. It's like somebody that comes back from war that's got severe PTSD and you go, oh, you know, in six months, we're sending you back over there. You'll be okay. You can't keep doing that stuff. It's a reflection of you, but you there was a sheriff in California. I think it was L.A. County Sheriff.

And this was a few years back when he got elected. He told his command staff, everybody from Lieutenant and above is going to take off their brass for 30 days. You're going to reapply for your jobs. And people like went crazy. One of the lieutenants went out on the media and was like, they won't know what to do. If I don't have my bars on. Well, that says a lot about you. Because these men and women know what they're doing. They work their asses off.

And if you don't have faith in the people that you're hiring for your department, they know that they see how you feel about them. They also see what you're doing. But a lot of these higher up folks, they don't they don't think that they think everybody loves them, that they're great and they don't get the fact that the men and women that are doing this job see them. They see when they're there, when they're not there, they see how they treat them.

And that's going to make a big difference as to whether or not they're going to stay with your department as well as how they're going to interact with the community. Yeah. Well, I mean, I've seen this over and over again and experienced it the last place I was at. But another area when it comes to mental health is woefully under discussed is organizational betrayal or organizational stress.

You have these people that a lot of them are hard charges and they are performing despite the environment that they're in and they do things the right way. And then, like I've had numerous people that got hurt in uniform and then they were discarded. You have people that had a good shoot that were politicized in the news and their department turned their back on them. Those kind of things can be just absolutely catastrophic because that's your tribe.

You wrote a blank check saying, I will die protecting my fellow men and women in this uniform and the people that we serve. And then all of a sudden, the tribe turns their back on you. I mean, it's horrendous. And then seeing too, these men and women have such great ideas. And you coming in as a leader when I was a shift commander, I had been out of that game for a while.

I had been in a different position and I came in and I said, look, if I come around and I'm asking you questions, it's not because I'm trying to hem you up. I don't I haven't been doing this for 10 years. I need to understand why you're doing what you're doing. And if you think there's a better way of how we're doing things, let me know that. But I wanted them to put it in writing because they have great ideas. They're doing the job every day. Give them the credit for it.

I've seen a lot of leaders where they are like, oh, this was my idea. I came up. No, it wasn't. It absolutely was not because you've been sitting behind a desk and you wouldn't know how to operate a car or work in it in corrections or whatever. If it hits you in the face, you've been away from it for so long. You have to be comfortable enough in your skin and your knowledge and everything else to allow your folks to shine. Absolutely.

Well, going to your kind of mental health story, let's start with 9-11. You have a very unique perspective. I had a lot of people on the show that obviously were in, you know, ground zero area. Talk to me about the kind of days leading up to that and that experience for you. So you know, I was happy go lucky guy, always joking around, you know, 9-11 comes up. I remember a beautiful day. I was married. I had just been married the year before. I was happy as could be.

And I go to work and I remember thinking this is a beautiful day. This would have been a great day for a mental health day. And get there. We had a trial that was going on and we're getting ready to start trial. An attorney comes in the courtroom and says a plane just hit one of the towers in New York. I'm thinking, you know, medical emergency, something like that. And a little while later, he comes in and says another plane just hit the second tower.

Now where our courthouse is in Arlington, depending on which courtroom you're in, you can see the Pentagon. So the courtroom we were in looking out of the windows, you could see it. So I turned to the guy that I was in there with and I was like something's going to happen. This is not we knew at that point it was not a mistake. It wasn't just an accident that it happened. And then a call went out over the radio that the Pentagon was on fire and we could see the plume of smoke coming up.

And one of our guys was out on the road and he came over the radio and said the Pentagon's on fire. The plane just flew over my head and crashed into the side of it. And so we told the judge, the judge had come down. We said, you know, your honor, you need to go. We have to go respond to this. We're not going to be able to be here. There was somebody in the jury room that had somebody at the Pentagon. So they were freaking out as well.

So about 10 or 15 minutes after the plane hit, I'm at the Pentagon.

And I remember I pulled out of the garage and I'm, you know, lights and sirens are going and I get down the street and I forgot how to get to the Pentagon and I drive by it every day because I lived by University of Maryland and it was very, it felt like forever, but it was quick and there was people actually getting out of their cars, telling other people to move because we had to get through because it was coming across the radio.

What had happened to regular, the media was picking it up and you get down there and it was very coming around the corner into that area and seeing that at that point, the floors hadn't dropped down yet. Like you see in the picture and there was people just running. We're running in and everybody else is running away and you couldn't even like, you couldn't panic or anything. It was just like, I've got to get in here and do this.

I, you know, you got to do your job, you're not even thinking about it. And then later on, as the day was going on, we set up the crime scene and all that stuff and the tape and everything and you get a second to stop and you're just like, man, and you can't get through on the phones. The phones were all backed up and whatever it was, we couldn't get on there. The radio was just chaotic and I remember thinking, just standing there for a minute thinking it is so quiet. Traffic had been stopped.

The roads were shut down. The airlines had been stopped and it was so, it was peacefully quiet, like eerie. And you know, you're going in and you're, you're trying to help people. You're trying to get people away from the building. They kept calling over the radio that the, we had to back up because there was planes that were coming up and I found out later that it was the planes from Norfolk that intercepted 93.

But initially they said there's plane five minutes out, four minutes out three, and they were doing a countdown. And I turned to the guy that was next to me and I was like, we're going to freaking die right here. And they kept telling us to back up away from the Pentagon too, because the floor wasn't stable.

And eventually, as you saw in the picture, those floors collapsed, but you're helping people out and you would grab people and sometimes you would have somebody and other times you'd have a part of somebody and the smells, the sounds, all of it. I could never get that out of my head. And I was there, I think till two or three in the morning that night got relieved, had to be back at work first thing in the morning. And I still, I wasn't able to contact my family.

Nobody, they knew I was down there. They didn't know if I was dead, if I was alive until I got home. I didn't see what had happened in New York till that weekend. And I slowly, at that point, I'm on our peer support team. So I'm thinking, Oh, I got this. I'm good. I'll be fine. And slowly, it just kept getting worse and worse and worse. And I would go home every night. I would lock myself in a room and basically just cry. I didn't want to be around people. I withdrew from everybody.

I would go to work. I would do my job. And then I would just go home and lock myself in this room. And two years after that in 2003, in May, my wife left. She was like, I can't deal with this anymore. And I don't know what to do with you. But I can't do it anymore. And so that I have been trying to keep up this persona and now I've failed at my job in my mind. I am a hindrance to everybody. I can't. I'm going crazy as far as I can tell. I don't know what the hell is going on.

Why am I hearing and seeing all this stuff over and over again? Plane flies overhead low and I'm right back there again. And then when she left, I remember the day she left, I was on my knees begging her not to go. And she left and to me that I was done and we all lived, my family and her family, we all lived in that same community. And so I would tell my parents and my sister and her family, she's at grad school, she's at work. She just nobody knew she left.

I'm like, I just got to keep I can't let people know I failed again. And in October of 2003, I finally got to the point. I got up one morning. It was beautiful outside just like that day and got up. I walked out on the porch. I looked around and I went back in and I sat down and I started writing out my note. And the first thing I wrote was I'm sorry to whoever it is is going to find me here. And I apologize to my parents. I apologize to her and took my service weapon.

I put it to my head and I started pulling a trigger back and I closed my eyes. And for whatever reason, I saw my wife. And that's the only reason that I'm still sitting here. And I knew in that little moment of clarity I had for whatever reason that if I shot myself, she was going to get blamed for it. And I was very, you know, you hear about people that go through these struggles and lose their job and like you said, they get discarded. I was very fortunate that I didn't for that.

I didn't pull the trigger that day. I guess I was fortunate that I could keep up my appearance at work. And I was very fortunate to that I had some great people in my life that I just happened to cross paths with. There was one guy that I was in rehab with. I had blown my shoulder out and he had gone through rehab with me, saw me at police week the following year was like, dude, something's not right with you.

Look, we're doing this post critical incident seminar and we want you, you know, I want you to come in and you need to go through this. It's going to be great. And so they put us up. We have three day seminar in Crystal City. It was run by FBI profiler and two psychologists. And I went through it and they did EMDR on me. And it was the first time that I laughed.

And I, when I remember I went out of the room because it was basically this big group debriefing and they had brought in everybody from first responders, the civilians that were working at the hotel, identifying the family members that had died were there. ECC fire, police, sheriff, everybody was all mixed in. And when I went out of the room to do the EMDR and I came back, everybody stopped and they were like, it looks like the weight of the world has been lifted off of your shoulders.

And it was for the first time I had been able to open up and talk about stuff. And they told me before I went in there, they're like, when you see this stuff, you're going to think it's the weirdest crap ever, but it works. And I am a huge advocate for it now. I get to see Kathy and Irene were the two psychologists that did the EMDR on me at various times throughout that. And then on that they kept me on as the law enforcement peer for a year when they were doing the rest of the seminar.

So I got to go through and do the EMDR with them. And I see them every year at police week and I get to thank them. I've got to introduce them to my family, to my kids. And I've just been, I was very fortunate that I had the right people at the right time that crossed paths with me. But then I was also seeing how other people were being treated and getting to see how people reacted to me after I finally started talking about stuff. I wasn't allowed to talk about the stuff.

I got my job threatened. I would get pulled out. I would be speaking to roll calls talking about stuff and they would pull me out and they're like, you can't talk about suicide. Because I guess they thought that if you talked about suicide, that you just, you know, you were going to go out and do something. And I remember thinking, all right, I have this choice that I have to make. Do I shut up or do I keep talking?

And to me, it was important enough because I knew what I had been through when I didn't want anybody to go through that. So I kept talking about it and kept talking about it and kept talking about it. And I went and I spoke at the world conference on crisis and trauma, slowly started getting out on the speaking circuit and then finally in 2019, 2020, when you had all those documented suicides, then they were like, oh, well, maybe we do need to start talking about it.

And I'm just shaking my head and I'm like, you know, whatever gets the job done, whatever we need to do, you know, to be able to get this out and start talking to people. And so I just kept pushing and pushing and pushing. Now during this time, to me, and you hear different opinions from people, some people say you get over PTSD or PTS, whatever you want to call it. Other people say it's, it's, you know, you get through it, you don't get through it. To me, I know I still have stuff.

I have just learned how my triggers work. I know when I'm starting to feel like I'm going downhill and I know what to do now, simple little things to make that change. I know that talking about it helps other people. If I go and speak somewhere and there's a thousand people in the audience, if one person comes up to me afterwards, even if they say, you know, I got this buddy that's going through this, I know you're talking about you. I'll take what I can get. I'm going to help you out.

I'll listen to you. You know, if what I told you helps you, I win. And a lot of it with the guys, I talk about fighting, I talk about wrestling, and that's where the guys latch on. And then I talk about my son and the conversations I had with him in the children's books. And then a lot of the women latch on to that. And I'll take whatever, you know, whatever I can get to draw you in, I will take it.

I like going to these conferences that I speak at and hearing other people's stories and linking them in because there's so much trauma that we're dealing with. You know, an average person, I think they said is three to six or two to six traumas in a lifetime, first responders can be anywhere from 200 to 600 during their lifetime. You can't do this job and not have it impact you. And we need to get out of this whole stigma thing of, oh, you can't talk about it. You're weak.

To me, the hardest thing I ever had to do was ask for help because I knew that I was putting my job at risk and my identity as a first responder, which is another area where we struggle with. I'm not a cop. I'm a husband. I'm a dad. I'm a brother. You know, all kinds of other things. A cop is what I did to what I was doing. But it took me again, 20 plus years to finally realize that's not who I am. But so often we get caught up in that.

And then when that is gone, where you have those injuries on the job and then you're kicked to the curb, you don't know what to do. It goes back to the cheesy TV shows. I'm a damn good cop. And I've got to see so many people that are now coming out on the speaking circuit that are sharing their stories where that you see that light bulb go off during their stories where they had that thing that happened and they were like, oh, this isn't a big family.

You know, I upset our police academy a few years back because I told them I would go out and speak to the new recruits when they started and then when they were getting ready to graduate. And I said, if you think for a second, any of these departments care about you, I can't help you. You're going to I'm getting ready to retire. You're going to get the same boards that I get behind me.

If you're at the right level, you get those boards, you get a cake and a couple of other stupid plaques and then nobody talks to you. And you know, people, they go into this job and they're like, we're a family. We're this is the most dysfunctional family. I love the men and women that I got to work with. Absolutely love them. Go to battle with them any day of the week. But you have to understand this is a job. It's not who you are. It's not your life.

And at the end of the day, when you walk away, you don't have access to all that stuff anymore. If you go back to your department a few months later, a year later, they're going to be like, who the hell are you? And if you haven't already started meeting people outside of your career and having friends outside of the job, you're going to be in for a world of hurt. Absolutely. I've heard a lot of cops say, you know, the thin blue line isn't a real thing. And it's the same in the fire service.

And I disagree. It's just not everyone in the profession is going to be there for you. There are people in very cohesive, you know, at my firehouse in Anaheim, station one, like I left, I left, you know, moved back east. And I think it was almost 10 years when they all became my groomsmen and best man, because that was my fucking ride or die crew. But the last place I worked at, I haven't heard a fucking peep from any of them. You know what I mean?

The completely toxic, you know, other side of the spectrum. So you know, when I go to the 343 hero challenges I'm doing in September, which is a 9-11 memorial fundraiser, that's the camaraderie. Those men and women get it. They show up, they sweat, you know, they're there to raise money and never let people forget what happened that day. That is, you know, and it's the same when people are struggling. It's the same people that show up, like truly show up.

That is the core of the thin blue line, the thin red line. What we need to do is push those walls out and get more people to realize that is a thing. But you know, we were talking about leadership earlier. I mean, if you look who is presented to us as presidential nominees these days, they're not selfless, you know, servant leaders. They're selfish narcissists. So even at the pinnacle of the so-called leadership pyramid, you've got that same issue.

So this is a cultural thing in America that we've got to flip back on its head. You know, the real, I was telling something the other day, I've interviewed almost a thousand people and one of the closing questions of what are some of the books you recommend, a lot of times the conversation is on leadership. Never has anyone said, oh, you've got to check out Trump or Biden's book on leadership. Because they're fucking horrible.

It's Jocko Willink and this, you know, this sports person or whatever, like real, real, you know, selfish, so selfish, selfless servant leaders that lead from the front that are leaders, not bosses. So you know, I mean, this is the problem.

If we've got that kind of toxicity in our culture as human beings in America, the most affluent country on the planet, and we don't have gratitude and community and compassion and empathy, that's going to bleed into police, fire, corrections, plumbing, banking, everything. So I think it's even greater than our uniforms. We should be better at it because we're supposed to be a family. We'll, you know, we're relying on each other when life or death situations.

So if we can't lead the charge on putting community back in this country, then what are the fucking civilians going to do? When it goes back to let's show people the humanity of the badge. I, like I said, I will never be able to say enough how fortunate I've been along my journey because I think everybody's on a path. And I talked about this at Enduring Warrior when we met up that night. We're all on a journey.

We have a reason to be here and along our path, you're going to meet people and they're going to teach you stuff, good or bad. And you have to do that as well. Like you, my favorite thing in my life is getting to teach, whether it's speaking in an event or teaching these college students. And I've got the pictures that I have up on the wall. I've got one with three of my former students that were interns. And one of the greatest things for me is being able to help my students get ahead.

And I had one young lady who wanted to be a she wanted to be a baseball reporter, which I had, you know, I don't watch baseball very much. So I'm like, I don't know anything about this, but you know, I'll see what I can do. One of our auxiliary officers on the police department was a sportscaster for Channel 4 News. So I made a call and I was like, Hey, can you help her out? Bring her along. My attorney is a he's a NFL agent. And I said, do you know anybody that does this?

He goes, I got somebody at the commanders that does reporting. And this was a couple of years back. He'll be happy to help her out. Now she's doing she's like the head reporter at the university and getting to see her go from a freshman to where she's at now and all that she's been able to do is absolutely amazing and getting to see these young people that you get to help them get past those little bumps in the road that you went through those struggles that you had to deal with.

That to me is what it's about. Absolutely. I just shared a video, a Filipino gentleman. He was a leader. I forget exactly in what capacity, but they were talking about Filipino culture and how community is so important. And he said, you know, that's when you learn when you're surrounded by people, when you're deep in this community, you're exposed to music and dance and you know, whatever it is.

And then you get mentored by this people, you know, so when you have this cohesive tribe, you're able to help each other out. They say it takes a village. But if you're divisive and the goal is that the holy dollar or whatever it is, and you're clambering on each other to make it to the top, then what are you going to be good at? You know, to yourself, that's it. That's all you're good at is chasing your dreams at the expense of everyone around you.

When I got it was so funny when I retired, like my life, it was like night and day. I spent so much time keeping to myself because of the job, because of this persona that I felt like I had to keep up because of the hours I was working. I didn't talk to anybody that lived around me. If you weren't a cop or a first responder, military, I didn't talk to you.

And now my service dog Taz, we go out for walks and the book that I just wrote about her, I'm handing it out to all the kids in the community. And so now we're going for walks and everybody comes out the little kids run around, they want to see Taz, they want to play with her. I take her out places and everybody wants to come up and play with her. Nobody cares about me. It's all about the dog.

But putting myself in those uncomfortable positions because, you know, I worked with a young lady when I was getting my master's degree, we had to go be part of a group to see like the group process and how it worked. And we were supposed to go to like AA meetings or something, but I of course didn't read the full assignment. So I went to this group on anxiety and body image that met at this coffee shop every two weeks. And it was all of these like 18 to maybe 24, 25, it was young folks.

So I go sit in and I'm listening to this and I stayed with that group for two years. And I remember I told them one night I'm like, I would have never talked to you all ever because you were just it was out of my comfort zone. You weren't what I knew. And I learned so much from those folks, hearing their journey, hearing their stories, what they had been through their different perspectives on the world where I had my, you know, straight and narrow.

This is how life has to be when you open yourself up to those people and hearing those different viewpoints, even with now with the political stuff. You can't have a differing view on politics because now all we do is yell about stuff instead of having a conversation and be like, all right, I didn't vote for this person. Why did you vote for him? Or why do you believe this? And I've got to sit down because I had a lady when I was doing my master's work came in to the coffee shop.

I used to go to Dunkin Donuts every weekend to study. And she comes up and she goes, you look like you voted for Trump. I was like, oh, this is not going to go well. Nice to meet you too. Yeah. I'm like, OK, I got the flat top. I know I look like a Marine and all this stuff. And so I'm like, fair enough. And it was this young Hispanic mom with a child. So I said I did. I said he wasn't my first choice, but that's who I did. And she goes, can I sit down and talk to you?

Because I'm curious why you voted for him versus her. So I'm like, sure. We sat down for three hours and talked. And I would have never had the insights that I got from her. And it was there was never any yelling or screaming. There was never any raising of the voices. I think we both walked away and learned something. And I've extended that into my classroom. I don't care who you're voting for. I don't care what side you're on. I don't care what your politics on. We're going to discuss stuff.

And we're going to have open communications. And we're going to respect one another. You're not allowed to come in here and say that you got your information from the media or that you got it from social media. Look at stuff. Do some research on it. And learn if somebody doesn't sign a bill you like, read it. Why didn't they sign it? Did you listen to the whole speech when they took that 10 seconds out? Or did you just listen to the 10 seconds that got their point across?

I listened to your episode with Tulsi Gabbard as well on the way to New York. Love her to death. She's amazing. I thought she would have been a great pick for vice president. I thought if you want to bring this country together, I'm on the right. She's middle of the road. Let's work together and bring this country back together. I thought that would have been a great ticket. But that's if you want to bring the country back together. Yeah, makes too much sense. You know what I mean?

Yeah, to me, she's still doing the job. She's boots on the ground. And she does not have a filter. She tells it like it is. And that's the kind of people I want to hang around with. That's the people that I want to engage with. She represents most of the normal people, I think. Most of us are standing in the middle, looking left and right, and going, why are you all screaming? And why do we keep getting these people to choose from that aren't Tulsi Gabbard?

That aren't all the people that actually excite us to stand in the middle, to get the obesity crisis and have served so they understand when to go to war and when not to go to war. I mean, all these important elements. But we don't. No matter how good they are, they never get to the end because it's a corrupt, broken system. Yeah, and it's all about money. If you're going in as a senator or congressperson, whatever, you're making $150,000 a year.

But magically, at the end of the year, your tax returns say $15 million. So when I listened to her, I was like, she's spot on about everything. She didn't sugarcoat anything. That's who I want to talk to. Because if we can't have these conversations, we're never going to get any better. You can't learn if all you do is hang around with the same people that have the same viewpoints. My son, we were talking earlier, and he was like, well, you posted something after the assassination attempt.

And I posted, like, I'm a Christian. If you're arguing that Trump should have died, he shouldn't have moved, I got no place for you. I am supporting him in this election. Regardless, I voted both sides of the fence. But we have to have conversations. And I am open to talking to anybody. You may change my mind about stuff. I don't know. But if we can't have those conversations, we're never going to get better as a people, as a country overall.

And I was trying to explain to him because he just looked at it as like, oh, you posted this about. I said, you know, I probably lost a lot of friends when I posted that, or friends, I put that in quotes. And I probably had jobs that I could have gotten that I won't get now. But I've spent so many years being told by people that mentor me, like, you have to stay right down the middle. You can't talk about this. You can't talk about your faith. I'm not going to go out and preach to you.

And my job is not to change your view on anything. But I'm also not going to allow myself to change what I believe in and what's important to me to make you happy. When that happened, it was, you know, I saw just, you know, again, like you said, the trolls and some of the things. And I just, again, my whole thing with the Biden thing was the people that were rah rah rah about him.

I'm like, all right, you get on a plane and you're about to take off and he comes out the cockpit and says, hi, I'm going to be your captain. Are you staying on the plane? Fuck no, you're not staying on the plane. No one, I mean, I can't imagine wishing that that bullet had hit anyone unless it was out of Hitler or some sex pest or something. But aside from that, no, I absolutely did not want that bullet to hit Trump. But was he any better of a leader once it flew past him?

No. And so people were acting like because it didn't hit him, now all of a sudden he's fit to be the president. Like also, no, this is the middle of the road conversation. I'm glad that he wasn't hurt because he's a human being. But it didn't magically make him not a narcissist. That's completely self-indulgent.

So this is, again, these extremist voices take you away from the middle, which is are either these two fit to be where they are or have we got better people in the military and in the school system and whatever, that would be a phenomenal person that even if your person lost, you'd be like, well, I'm still glad that other person went. They're not my favorite choice, but they're still going to do a good job. They're still going to be respected when they visit other countries.

They're still going to be compassionate and have communication when there's tension between certain areas, but then support our military if we do have no choice and go in. You know what I mean? People that you can be confident will lead your country and represent your country well. But all we had was protecting a guy who clearly, sadly, is probably not going to be with us much longer and a complete narcissist who called for the death of five young boys in New York that were innocent of a rape.

And he called for their execution in a national newspaper. We're not talking about that, are we? You know what I mean? So this is the thing. It's not about left or right. It's about the individuals that are placed in front of us. And if you can put your hand on your heart and say that if I had to choose from 1,000 people, I would choose Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, you're a fucking liar. I'm sorry.

Or like you said, you're not looking out into the real world and experiencing what leadership actually looks like. And you can't tell me that these parties, out of all the people that are in these parties, that's the two best people that you can put up. You have all these younger folks that are coming in that, because I believe when you come into any job like that, that you're supposed to be serving the public, you're doing it because you want to make a change.

Somewhere along that line, things happen. I think in politics, it gets down to the money, who's backing you, that kind of stuff. But something changes along there. And you see all these people. Four years ago, both sides said they wanted younger candidates. They put up the two oldest ones they got. So this time around, you can't tell me there's not better candidates that are out there that want to do stuff. But are they going to push for things like term limits, which are much needed?

Are you going to speak out against these people that are funding all this stuff? You're not going to, at the end of the day, I think they all get together and have drinks afterwards. I mean, not just funding it. Most of these companies are costing millions of American lives, whether it's big sugar or weapons manufacturers or whatever. The number of people in the military, where is our checks and balances to stop us continuously being in wars?

Because some people are making billions, if not trillions, of dollars when our men and women are coming home in coffins. That needs to be a conversation. Yep, and you want this country to get better. They all talk about the same stuff. But at the end of the day, what have they done? They're not making changes to anything. Now, I will say when Trump won the presidency the first time as an officer, I felt like I was supported. Yeah, they're not all bad.

Some of them are going to do some good things if you're in that group. And like I said, I voted on both sides of the fence. I try to listen to people and pick. I don't think people necessarily voted for Joe Biden last. I think they voted against they couldn't stand Trump. And they voted against him versus saying, oh, Joe Biden's a great candidate. Nothing gets him. If you support him, you support him, that's your thing. But I think there was more of against they just couldn't stand Trump.

And Lord knows what's going to happen in November. I've tried to stay away from that as much as possible and tried to stay apolitical. And I like to listen to people and have those conversations. It's interesting, too, when I get to talk to the students because we get a lot of students from all over the world. And you hear about stuff that's going on in their country, and you're like, it's not really bad here. No, exactly. But when are we reminded of that? When is there gratitude?

When people stand up on podiums and go, we are so amazing. We need to come together. But my god, look what we've got. And imagine if we could fix obesity. Imagine what that would do to our health care system. Imagine the good we could do in other countries if we took care of some of our own stuff first. To get you fired up, to get you excited, to get you to look around and go, oh, there's not a race war outside my front door, actually. And it's a beautiful place.

And the sun is shining and my kids are safe in this. Whatever it is, but we're not reminded of that. It's all doom and gloom. And it's all, this is what the other person did, rather than this is what we cumulatively, like us, as in not me, the president, but us as a nation, if we come together, these are the most amazing things we can do in the next 10 years. We can make our schools safe again. We can get people healthy again. We get people off all these fucking medications.

But you don't, because the people that make the medications are the ones paying the presidents. Well, and the young people, and I've got to see this at the school, because my first class that I teach, regardless of the class, is health and wellness. And I tell them, people will tell these students all the time, this is the best time of your life. You've got it easy. You don't have to work. These kids are struggling. I've seen it in my own kids in elementary school.

And especially after all the COVID stuff happened and everybody is locked in their house and kept away from each other, these kids are struggling. And they've gotten progressively worse and worse and worse and worse. And we want to act like nothing's going on. And I talk about the health and wellness stuff. And then I have them write a paper about why they got to the college. What are they going to do? What's their goal? And what are they doing for their health and wellness while they're there?

And I push that throughout the semester. And they will open up and tell me all this stuff that they're struggling with, that they've been through. And yet when I start talking about different things, they're like, oh, I don't know if I could do like you did this or this person did that. And they're so great. Look at all the stuff you've been through already, especially as kids that are coming from these countries where they're fleeing to our country for their safety.

You've been through more just going through that than most of us have as adults. And they don't see it. And they don't take the time. And this is across the board. We don't take the time to reflect on stuff. We don't take the time. I go quarterly. I think I talked to you about this when we were at the event. I rent a cabin every four months somewhere.

I try to find somewhere different, leave the electronics, and I sit and look at where I'm at now, where I've been since the last time I did it, and where I want to go. And are my goals still the same? What do I need to tweak? Has something changed where I need to go in a different direction? But I get to reflect on all this stuff. And it makes me so much more grateful for what I have and what I have been through.

And then also starting the day, another thing I learned at Bouldercrest, starting the day with gratitude instead of getting up and picking up our phone and going, oh my god, I got to do this. I got to do that. What are you grateful for? Because there's so much that we have to be grateful for. Waking up is the first one. I got up out of bed. Yeah, I'm on my bed.

The day that the assassination attempt happened, I'm going through trying to find information on social media about it and found out one of my friends that I have known since ninth grade. I met her the first day of ninth grade and talked to her since all the time. She passed away. They found her unresponsive in her apartment. They still don't know what happened. But I just talked to her like a week before. And it puts it into perspective.

I've had so many friends that have just died from the weirdest, whether it's suicide, drug overdoses, car accidents. At my age, you're not supposed to be losing all these people. At least that's my point of view. I consider myself young. I just turned 52. But I've had so many people I've lost. And every time I lose somebody, I'm like, man, I've really got to take a step back and look at where I'm at because tomorrow isn't promised. I don't know what I'm going to have.

And I don't want my having two kids, that put my life in a whole other realm of perspective. And my son last year, the month before I retired, he collapsed walking to school. And they called. And I got a call on his phone. I was running late for work. And I'm like, why is he calling me? He's supposed to be in school when I picked the phone up. And it's his principal screaming. He passed out. They said he collapsed. He wasn't breathing. He was unresponsive. And I was like, what?

What are you talking about? And she was so panicked. It was hard to get information out of her. But in my mind, my son's dead. I can hear the first responders coming. I can hear them doing stuff in the background. I'm like, where are they taking him? I asked her four times. I finally get to the hospital. He woke up in the hospital room, doesn't remember any of it, and just gave me the biggest hug.

And I can tell you, everything that had been going on in my life to that point didn't mean anything. They didn't think I was coming back for the last month of work. Because I had called my boss to say, hey, I'm running a little late. And then I called him back a few minutes later, like, hey, I'm on the way to the hospital. My kid collapsed. I think they think he's dead. That was the last time I talked to him. And they were like, we didn't think you were coming back.

And it took us, that was in October, it took us to February to find out what the cause of it was. And of course, they're checking for you get to the hospital. And they're testing for fentanyl and everything else, because all the crap that's going on. And he had a seizure. Never had happened before. And so he's got to go through all these tests and stuff. And now it's navigating all the things he wanted to do to explain to him, like, you're not going to be able to do this.

Or you can't do this because this is going on. And having to tell somebody that he turns 14 next weekend what you've thought about doing your entire life, now you're not going to be able to do it. And I had to sit and tell him, like, look, you've got this path going. Now you've got a bump in the road. And we're going to sit down. We've got to figure out how we can overcome this, get around it, to blaze a new one. Because he's completely overwhelmed by it.

Every time I think about it, I start crying. And at this point, I don't care with me what happens anymore with me. It's about them. I want them to grow up. I want them to be happy. I want them to have a great life. I want to see them get married, do whatever they decide they want to do. But that put everything in perspective to me. And I believe that all this stuff happens to us, whatever it is, because sometimes we need to be kicked in the pants.

And you need to slow down and stop thinking about yourself all the time. And look at how life's going, even with COVID. While I was working the whole time, my wife and my kids were stuck at home. And to me, you had all these people with the conspiracy stuff and all this. And we all have our thoughts on it. To me, that was a calling that we needed to be reminded of what was important to us. It's not the job. It's not the money. It's your family.

It's being at home and not missing out on so much stuff. Because we get so caught up in this day-to-day crap that doesn't mean anything, and we forget about that. Absolutely. Well, I want to go back to the Pentagon, not to draw out horrors, but the opposite. One of the terms that came out during COVID a lot was, I miss 912. And forget about the whole mismanagement of it, because it was an absolute shit show. I think it was absolutely a real virus.

And a lot of my medical friends bagged a lot of bodies. So it was real. But the takeaway should have been, let's make people healthier, not let's hide from a virus. But that being said, there was that kind of division and that isolation. And people really kind of romanticized about 912. Now, obviously, usually that lens is in Manhattan. Talk to me about the heroism, the community, the compassion that you saw from the Pentagon side.

So I will go even to 911 and 1 1.5, because at one point in the early evening, I turned around and I saw our judges coming out, sleeves rolled up, bringing us food, water, people from the community were bringing stuff. People were bringing little boots for the dogs. And the next day, you had all these restaurants and stuff coming in. The parking lot of the Pentagon turned into this one stop shop for the responders. You could get t-shirts, underwear, food, whatever you needed. It was there.

The community came together. Now, I did see stuff where you had Middle Eastern citizens that were treated horribly. Even people that we had worked with forever, suddenly were like, oh, we have to do this because we don't know what's going on. Bullshit. Majority of people came together at that time. And it was something that had never happened before. You didn't have any of the negativity. You didn't have any of the calling each other out. Everybody would come in and be like, how are you?

Are you doing OK? It's great to see you. How's your day going? You didn't have traffic incidents going on. It was amusing to me, especially in New York City, because you know the thought of going through New York City, everybody's yelling at you and all this honking horns and stuff. You didn't have any of that. And we have been so far away from that long before COVID happened. The country has been divided in so many different places.

And it would be great to get back to that point because you had people came out of the woodwork to help with everything. And they wanted to make sure you were OK. They were helping people that had lost people. I remember we went up to, my wife at the time, we went up to New York City for New Year's Eve, 2001 going into 2002. They wanted to go up there. And I'm just like, OK, whatever. Not even thinking about it.

Then we get up there, and my father-in-law was like, oh, we want to go down to see Ground Zero. So again, not thinking about it. I'm like, whatever you want to do, I'll go. Our area was a clusterfuck at the Pentagon. I cannot even begin to imagine New York City going up there. And they still had the fences up with the pictures of all the missing people. There were groups in the street that were praying for people.

And my father-in-law starts going around going, oh, my son was at the Pentagon and responded to this. And so all these people are coming up to me and trying to shake my hand and thank me. And I'm like, I don't want this. I don't want to be part of this. I don't want. And I'm trying to be gracious and do everything, but it was so uncomfortable. But it gave me a different perspective. Our area was bad, but then you always have that place that's worse, regardless of what you're going through.

And I remember standing out on that overlook, just thinking, man, I can't even imagine. And now I teach and I talk to the students, and they're like, we weren't even alive. So I'm like, great, thanks for making me feel like an ancient old guy. But I play a little video where they get to hear the actual phone calls and the calls from the cockpits and the calls from the stewardesses and the flight attendants.

And the towers and the people that were in the tower, calling 911 saying we're stuck up here. Because we've forgotten about that. I want you to hear the personal side of this. I want you to never forget this ever again. Because these were people that got up one morning and went to work, not knowing it was going to be their last day. And how often do we walk out of the door angry at our friends, our family, our spouse, our kids, not knowing? And we forget about that.

I got the 912 hat and all that. Because to be able to get to that point would be great. Do I think we're ever going to get there? Probably not. I think that there's going to be groups of people that are going to be OK with it, but that are going to look forward to that. And like you said, with your group from your firehouse, you have those people that come into your life that are just there, the glue that holds everything together.

I have people like that at my department that have reached out to me. I just had one of my guys that used to work for me reach out to me last night to say, hey, I bought your book for my granddaughter. And she thinks it's cool that I worked with famous people. And I'm like, dude, I'm not famous by any stretch. And he goes, well, I know differently. Or a young officer that I took her, she had done something. She was going to get disciplined for it.

But I said, let's go grab a cup of coffee across the street and just breathe. I have to do this because you violated a policy. But it's not the end of the world. And you're no different to me now. Let's just go breathe for a minute. Because you're going to see there's nobody that's high up in these agencies that haven't done dumb things. And you're young, starting out in this career. And you're like, oh my god.

And you always think the world's going to end your kids when they have relationships and they break up. And they're like, oh my god, the world's over. Yeah, it is at that moment in time. But you need to see all the other things you have. All the other things you have around you. And if we could get back to that point, it would be amazing. I'll take what I can get. I get to go, I'm blessed.

Just like you with all the people you get to meet, I get to go out and meet some amazing, amazing people and hear their stories and share their journeys with them. And because I did a thing one day. There was a Memorial Day parade they did in DC. And they were like, oh, we're having 9-11 responders come. We want to honor you guys. So I'm like, all right, whatever. I'll come. So they're like, park your SUV. We're going to come pick you up. And we're going to take you.

They want to interview you for TV or whatever. I don't remember what it was. So I get outside the tent. We're riding over there. And they were like, oh, do you know Pat Sajak? I know who he is. I don't know him. He's sitting right in front of me. I didn't realize he was in the military. Lieutenant Dan was sitting in front of me. Gary Sinise. Yeah, he's something I want to get on here one day. I mean, that man was incredible. Yeah, that guy. And I'm like, I'm awestruck.

But then they go, and this brother and sister, their family was on their mom and dad were lost on flight 93. I completely turned away from the other two. It was great to meet them. But that's who I wanted to meet. And I get up to this tent. And they're like, don't go anywhere. Somebody wants to meet you before you go in there. And it was Buzz Aldrin. And he comes up, and he was like, thanks for what you did that day. And I'm like, are you kidding me? You landed on the frickin' moon.

What are you doing? I did my job, that's all I did. But you see these people. And I try to tell my son, I'm like, these folks that you idolize and stuff, they're no different than me and you. I got to meet Shaquille O'Neal, one of the most down to earth. And he's like, oh, man, it's got to be great to be a cop. I'm like, I'll switch with you. I'll take your money and you go play some basketball. You want to be a cop. I think he was like the officer for a little bit. Here in Orlando, I think.

He was. And he's one of the most down to earth people you will ever meet. Yeah, another guy I want to get on the show. Because I mean, his altruism is incredible, too. And I tell my son, too, you look at what he's done with his career, and especially how many athletes have lost everything after they leave. And he even says, somebody pulled me aside and said, you need to manage your money. You need to do this. And now he owns everything. And he goes out of his way to help people.

And that's the kind of people you get fortunate enough to meet. And I got yelled at from my wife I don't know how many times about giving books away and you're not making any money. I may not be making huge amounts of money, but if I'm helping people, that's why I got in to do this. That was the whole mission statement of Catalysts of Change was to provide first responders and military vets the tools to overcome the traumas that they faced. It wasn't to make money. If that comes along, great.

But I want to be able to help people not go through what I did. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. This podcast is free. I have sponsors on it who their stuff is amazing, and I use it. And that's why I want to tell people, hey, if you're going to buy supplements, go to Thorne. If you want to decompress this into Newcom, I mean, they're phenomenal. But there's no Patreon, there's no VIP access, because I'm the same as you. And I've got books behind me that I give out all the time as well.

I want to get to writing, but just before we do, you talked about the darkest place, and I want to talk about Boldocrest as well in a minute. But I think it's important to reflect on this too. When 20 years ago, you and I are sitting across from a table and we're talking about suicide, chances are we'd probably be like, man, I can't believe it. It's so selfish. It's cowardly, blah, blah, blah. The old rhetoric.

And then the last eight years, I've listened to so many people who have been right there. Some people went through with their attempts, and thank God they survived it. And what I've heard over and over and over again is, of course, wanting that suffering to end. But one thing that's really never mentioned is that brain is so miswired that someone's reality actually becomes, I am the reason for my family's pain. And I'm in a profession where I've sworn to die for strangers.

Well, if I remove myself from this dynamic, then my family will be happy. I am a burden to the people that I love. Talk to me about that. Did that factor into your brain when you were getting close to the end? Yes. I was not sleeping. I wasn't eating. I felt like I was a burden to everybody. I felt like everything I did was wrong. It just magnified after my wife left.

And being able to look back now and reflect on it, I've gotten asked questions by two people that have really made me stop and think. I had a lady whose son completed suicide when he was 17. And we met, I was going to be working with her at an event. And she said to me, how come you had that moment of clarity and my son didn't? And then I had the young woman that I escorted during police week. She's got four beautiful kids. Her dad was there.

And she said that her daughter had asked her, did dad say he loved us in his note? And I didn't let her finish. And I said he didn't, did he? And she said no. And I looked down at the kids. And I said, I can't offer you much. I said, but I can tell you from being at that place that you're in a fog. You're not thinking correctly. No matter what anybody tells you, no matter people saying you're great, you're special, this, this, whatever, you can't see it.

And there's no way that your husband completed that act without being in that fog. Because he couldn't look down at your kids or at you and do that. I battled for years still. I mean, I still have times where I'll go out on the road to speak, and I get done, and I beat myself up, and I'm like, oh, this didn't go that way, or that didn't go that way. And stuff will start creeping back in. And there's nothing worse than when you're on the road by yourself for that.

Because there's always those demons, and they're just waiting for you. And to me, that's what PTSD is. It's that abyss is just sitting there, and it's just waiting for the right opportunity to get you. And I have been able, I don't think anything that I do is magnificent, stellar, special, there's nothing like that. But I constantly have people tell me that. And I'm very, I'm blessed from that day.

Because if you had told me 20 years ago, I would be teaching, and speaking, and written five books, and all this stuff, be sitting on your show with all the people you've had on there. I was just talking to my chief yesterday. I was like, I'm going on this show, and I sent him your website. And I'm like, all these people he's had on there, and then he's got me. They all say the same thing, I promise you.

Even some of the ones that are well known, they're like, oh, you had So-and-So, you had Wim Hof, or whoever. It never ends. And he's like, dude, don't downplay what you've done. Exactly. He's right. But it's hard to, I think the reason I connect with people when I'm out speaking is because of the fact that I can give them that point of view. You don't expect, I mean, you can't tell, because you're only seeing my shoulders here. I'm a big dude. I'm 6'3", 280 pounds.

You don't expect me to be standing in front of you crying about stuff, especially when I tell my story about all the stuff that I've done. I'm not the guy you expect to be writing children's books and doing all that stuff.

But I think that's the reason I connect with people, because going through that, dealing with the stuff that I've dealt with, and being given the opportunities that I have, and being able to see the opportunities that I have, people that are struggling, they can't see this stuff with them. So when they hear somebody else has gone through it and made it past it, it gives them hope. We did, this is another, this is how I got into Operation Enduring Warrior.

This guy, Chris, he calls me, and I can't remember if I talked about this at the event, but we started carrying rucksacks with a pound of weight for every law enforcement first responder suicide. And he started doing this, and it got to be June, and I'm like, this guy's got like 66 pounds on him already. He's gonna get crushed. So I reached out to him, I'm like, hey, can I help carry weight? He's like, you can do whatever the hell you want. I don't care if you wanna do it, do it.

And he goes, I walk, I shoot this little video, and I talk about whatever's on my mind, and I post it. So I start carrying the weight, and it gets to be in the fall, and it's over 100 pounds, and I'm like, this shit is heavy.

You know, I had my knee replaced, my shoulders, I've broken my neck, and so I wasn't carrying the weight one day, and I would walk at night, so I'm like, I can be slick, I can carry the backpack, and I'll have all the, he saw I wasn't carrying the backpack, and he called me out, and this dude from day one called me out on stuff. Pissed me off every time he did it, but he was right, and he gave me, one of the best dudes I've ever met in my life, and he was like, you're not carrying the weight.

So I'm like, damn it, of course he's gonna catch it. So I went online and told him the next day, I'm like, look, I can't carry all this weight. This shit's heavy, the weight of this is weighing me down. If you can help out, carry a pound, carry five pounds, whatever you can do to help out, and here's what the mission of what we're trying to do is.

And people started carrying the weight, they started telling their stories, and right after I posted my video, he came on, and he said, this is what I'm waiting for. We can't walk around with all this shit in our pack, and carry it, and continue to struggle, and struggle, and struggle, and do it on our own. We need people to help us.

And how that paralleled into struggle well and boulder crisis, even sitting here now talking about it, I'm like, the light went off, and I'm like, oh, we talk about the pack and carrying the stuff, and everything kind of interweaves itself into how it's worked out. But we don't take the time to sit and think about those things and look at how fortunate we are in our lives to have all these experiences, good and bad, because you don't get jujitsu.

You're not gonna get any better if you just roll around on the mat with the guy that's the same level doing the same stuff every day. You need to have that black or that brown belt come in there and whoop your ass, and then go, okay, here's how I did it. Let me help you get better. You have to have that fire, that, I love the Bible verse about iron sharpens iron.

If we surround ourselves with people that are better than us, that will push us to make us better, that give us a different perspective, that's how we grow. I relate back to the whole PTSD thing in law enforcement to wrestling. I go out to the ring, I'm a character, at the end of the match, I come back, I take my stuff off, I go home, I did my job. When we're in law enforcement or first responders or military, we don't take that mask off, we forget about that.

And you see all these people, and they'll come up to me afterwards and be like, who'd you wrestle? You used to wrestle? Where'd you wrestle? I'm like, you didn't hear a word of what I said, but we got the conversation started, so we can go from there. Same with the fighting. People latch on to whatever they're gonna latch on to, I don't care what it is, I've got that open conversation now. And I can share, yeah, that was, it was fun, I did it.

I listened to Rashad Evans, and I'm like, this dude's amazing, I did that, sucked at it, I was a mediocre, you go out and fight in these little places and you did it because it was fun. But people latch on to the strangest things, but then I get to open up and tell the story and get to start to help them see these things. And because when they're struggling, even when they're not struggling, when I get people when they're younger, I get to give them kind of a view of what may come up.

And if you have this trauma going on, this is what you're gonna see. Don't think you're losing your mind, don't think you're going crazy. Here's what you're gonna see, and this is what we gotta do to help you get better before that happens, because it's gonna happen. What was it that you took away from the Struggle Well program in Boulder Crest that was different than some of the other things you'd done prior? Oh, so much, so much.

So the Boulder Crest program for Warrior Path, it's six folks that come in, it's either men or women. I was the one non-military guy in my group, but we're all older guys. I think the youngest guy was 38. So we come in, we're all sitting there, arms crossed, you know, typical first responder thing. And they tell you right off the bat, this is something that happened to you. This is not who you are.

And we're gonna talk about it, but we're gonna talk about so much more this week, because you're there for seven days. So you stay on campus, and they've got Ken Falk and Josh Goldberg. When Ken Falk created this out in Blue Mountain, Virginia, you have four cabins. So you stay two to a cabin, and these are ADA compliant cabins. He was an EOD guy in the military. So he was seeing all these people come back with lost limbs and everything else.

So he made these cabins so they were accessible to them. You don't get to enjoy any of this, because you're working from six in the morning till nine so at night. And I remember the first day I come in there, I meet the guy that I'm rooming with, and they have these huge showers, they have these huge showers that are set up for folks that are in wheelchairs. And they had heated toilet seats, which I was just like, this is the coolest thing, it looks like a cockpit.

So we're sitting there for half hour trying to figure this thing out. We got water flying everywhere, all this stuff. It was the stupid things. Like, you know, first responders, we find humor in all this stuff. But they get you up at six in the morning, we did TRX. So every morning we got up, we did journaling, we did gratitude exercises, and then we did our TRX, showered, back for breakfast, and they never told you what was coming next.

So you would go work with the horses for a couple hours, and then you'd come back and you'd be hiking, or you'd be doing crafts or something.

But they made you look at your entire life, and what we talked about earlier with the family aspect of it, there was a point where you had to sit and look at your grandparents, your parents, yourself, and if you had them, your kids, and you had to look at all the positives and the negatives on each side, and you saw how all that stuff trickled down, and you had to make the decision to be the one to stop the cycle. Now you had grown men coming in there, arms crossed, didn't wanna talk to anybody.

By the end of that week, we were like six little old ladies. We wouldn't shut up. We have talked to each other every week, and this was in December of 2020, every week since then. Whether it's texting, we were doing weekly Zoom meetings, and we have helped each other through so much stuff, and the basics of that is that three to five support system. I wanna be there for you, I wanna help you, I want you to succeed, and I want nothing in return, other than for you to do the same for me.

We learned how to deal with our triggers. We learned when we start to go downhill or those demons start creeping up, we know what to do. When you get there, you don't have your cell phones. Those have to stay back in the cabins. You have no contact with your family, except the end of the night, my son would always be like, how's summer camp going? I'm like, this is not summer camp, I'm old and I'm hurting right now.

But you started with gratitude, you ended every night around a campfire, and one of the biggest things that week, our lead officer for that group, the last, I think it was the second to the last day we were there, we had to go through the labyrinth, and he went out, we got a huge snowstorm, and he went out and hand cleared it himself. And he told us, he goes, other people may lay down, they have, I guess they have pictures and stuff that you can lay down to do the labyrinth inside.

He goes, you need to go through this, because it was such a healing process. They have you go through with a stone when you first get there, and it's supposed to represent everything that you've come there with. And you walk through this labyrinth that takes 20 minutes or more, excuse me, and you leave it in the middle. And that's representing you leaving your stuff there so that you can learn this week.

And at the end of it, you go through and you pass that stone to each other as you're walking through to represent how you helped one another struggle well and get better. And at the end of it, we had to vote who would be the team lead for this exercise. And so I'm like, these guys are all been in combat, and they were like, we're out in the snowstorm, and they were like, you do this stuff every day. We went out, we got deployed, we did this stuff, but you do this every day.

You'd be out in this if you weren't here right now working. And so as the team lead, I go through and I stopped everybody before we entered the center and made everybody wait till we all got through there. And we all went in together, we joined hands, we set that stone down, we hugged each other, we told each other, we loved each other. We shared our personal stuff that we needed to do on our own. And we did that together. We shared the stuff that we needed to do on our own.

And then we all got lined up and we walked out. And when you walk out, the team lead for the group says something to each person. And he said to me, leadership recognizes leadership. Those guys coming home, I think it was the last year I was working, I'm coming home and I always kept my radio on or wherever I was going through so I could hear what was going on. And there was a call that went out, we were supposed to have our Zoom meeting that night.

And there was a call that went out for a 12 year old that was locked in his room with a gun. And I'm driving home and it was like nobody else is on the road. It was late at night. And I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, please let him be okay, please let him be okay, please let him be okay. And the first officer gets to the scene and he comes across the radio and he says, slow the response. And all you heard in the background was this mother's guttural scream.

And I'm getting goosebumps now, this killed me. I pulled my cruiser over to the side of the road and sobbed. I'm like 12 years old, he's the same age as my kids. But I got on the phone with my guys. And if I didn't have that, and that just was embedded in me. Because I can't imagine that being my son or my daughter. I can't imagine being that parent. And I will never get that, that woman's scream will never leave my head.

And I went back to work and I told people that were, and I talked about it. I was like, go home and hug your kids. I shoot these little videos. I try to do them daily, I'm not great at it. But I shoot these little videos and I always end them with thanking the people in uniform, thanking the brothers and sisters that are overseas protecting our freedom. But tell your friends and your family and your loved ones how important they are to you each and every day because tomorrow isn't promised.

And when I retired and come into regular life again, I'm like, man, I've missed so much stuff because of this persona that I had to have, because of this job that I thought was so much more important than everything else around me. And this family, and I just like you, I've got the men and women that are still there for me. I still talk to them. I go take every opportunity to see them. But this family that we have as a group, they're not there anymore. My kids and my wife are here.

And when I look back and I look at all the stuff that I've gone through, Boulder Crest was the point for me. It was the first time we went out and did the labyrinth the first time and then you come back and they have these cloth pieces and all this arts and crafts stuff on the table. So we all walked back in and we're like, what the hell is this like a kindergarten classroom? We're doing arts and crafts now.

So they were like, do we want you to replicate through this what that experience was for you? So I think I probably took 20 minutes sitting there going, what the hell am I gonna do with this? We had to do it again the second time. And when I went through, they made us stand up and look at both versions to see what was different. And I had put on both of mine what I thought of myself. Husband, cop, all this stuff.

It was the first time that I didn't use the word cop to describe myself in those things. And they made me see that I was much more than that badge. And it was hard to accept that. But I remember when I went back to work after that, I told people I could not stop talking about this program. And I knew sitting through this that that's where I wanted to go. I wanted to be a part of that group. One of the guys that I went through with, he is out in Seattle and he's a very good friend of mine.

And the other guy that I went through with, he is out in Seattle and he is a, I think he just retired from doing that, but he was a path guide out there. And so I finally, when I retired, the way everything went down a few months before I turned in my paperwork, I got my publishing contract signed and an opportunity opened up so I had an interview and I went on and the lady was like, we're looking at your CV.

She goes, we'd love to have you here, but you would be so much better with this new program we're starting called Struggle Well, that's for first responders. So is it okay if I forward your stuff to them, which I didn't even know they were doing this at this point. So I'm like, sure. Didn't hear from them, didn't hear from them. Incident happens at work with the service dog. I'm home for several weeks because I had to go have a fit for duty because I had a service dog.

So of course, if I have a service dog, my PTSD must be getting worse. And so I got sent home. And that was laughable. But that was the day I got signed for my publishing contract. And that was the day that I got the call back from the Bouldercrest folks. And I've started training with them since I retired.

And I get to go through next week and finish that training and getting to sit, when you're doing the, where you're kind of sitting in there and watching how people teach because you have different people teaching each class. So I'm trying to learn how everybody does this. But getting to listen to everything, getting to see how these people teach this, getting to hear about all these people's experiences, it's like full circle with the way everything has worked out.

And I just wanna grab these people and be like, everything's gonna be okay. Because when they first come into this experience, I see myself in them. I see how beat up, how broken they are. Then they talk about all the same things I was going through. And I just wanna say by the end of this week, you're going to be amazing. And you watch that transformation and I've never seen it with anything else. When it is something to behold. Yeah, absolutely.

When earlier you were talking about the stigma and even like, the PTSD is always gonna be a part of you. And of course, you can't unlive the things that you've seen and done. But recently I've been realizing that what we're missing in the mental health conversation, especially obviously in our professions, is I feel like we tripped over the word stigma and we got stuck. Like, oh, we've got to smash the stigma. So, okay, but that's not an actionable thing.

You're just asking people not to be dicks about it, basically. So what I think is so uplifting, encouraging, optimistic is these hundreds of stories that I've had on here, yours included, is if you take a step back, the person that you are now is more resilient than the person you were, especially when you were sitting there with a pistol in 2003. So it's not like, oh, I'll be able to live with it. I'll have a dog and I'll be sad every day but we'll get through it.

It's like, no, now you're actually teaching a bold request. And I think this is what we need to put out there. That the burdensome needs to be on the red flag list of like, if you believe you're a burden, that's your fucking sign to pick up a phone and make sure you actually talk to someone. Or if you hear your friends say about being a burden, that's your time to really step up and show up.

But on the other side, the resilience conversation, the hope that if you do the work, there is a better version of you waiting on the other side, a beacon of light for other people who are struggling because you're using your story as a fucking superpower now. I think that needs to be the next wave in the mental health conversation.

It's funny that you said the beacon of light because that's how when I signed my books for people, I always will continue to be a beacon of light in the storm for those that are struggling. Because nobody gets up and wants to struggle with this stuff. The just being able to talk about it.

And when I'm doing these presentations, I talk about how if you're a cop, you go out and you get a call from some little old lady that's got gremlins in her garden and she tells you, oh, the gremlins are still in my flowers. And you're just like, yes, ma'am. Okay, ma'am, you're writing it down and you're doing everything to make her feel comfortable, even though you know there's no gremlins running around.

But we get back to the department and you see your partner in a corner, either crying, disheveled, struggling with something. You know they're struggling with something, but we always say, oh, they'll be fine. Because we don't wanna hear somebody we care about talk about they wanna end their life. And when I've done training, whether it's for, you know, teaching peer support stuff or whatever, officers will be like, well, I don't know what to say.

Working at police week, for 20 years, I worked at police week at the hotels when the families would come in. And the officers that I would bring into work with me would say, I don't know what to say to these folks. Ask them about their officer. You don't know anything about them. Ask them about the officer. You will have to say nothing after that. They will talk to you for 20 minutes, give you a huge hug and walk away because they wanna be heard.

Don't be afraid of doing what we do every day with people we don't even know. Be a good human being. If you see somebody struggling, ask them, are you okay? And don't just go, hey, are you okay? Like we do in the morning when you're like, how you doing? Good morning. And you'll walk by before they can say anything. Stand there. All you have to do is be present. That is the biggest superpower you can have. Just stand there and let people know, I'm gonna stay here with you.

We're gonna get through this. Just like when I had to tell my son. This kid had to been over the top of the world had to been overwhelmed that all this stuff's going on. We're gonna get around this. We're gonna figure out a new path. We're gonna make this work. And I'm gonna be here with you through this. If I had an officer come in and talk to me, they could be in the worst positions.

I had to go to officer's houses before because they made a comment to a supervisor and we knew it wasn't gonna be good. And I just went in and I'm like, what can I do to help you? I'm here, I wanna listen. I want you to be here. I don't know who's told you anything. I want you to be here. And I'm gonna be here with you and do as much as I can. And if it gets past that point that it's above my level, I'm gonna find you the right person that can help you out.

There's nothing great about, I mean, there's no, this isn't rocket science. It's don't be an asshole. It's that simple. I am not the smartest guy in the room, but I know I can say, if I see you struggling, what's going on? Let's talk. Yeah. I think one thing I've realized is that, how are you doing or are you okay? The first time it's easy to brush it off. If you say it twice and you look him in the eye, you go, no, no, really, how are you doing? That's when the door comes open.

And the other side that I hear over and over again, and it works, I've used it myself many, many times, is also opening with your own vulnerability, opening with a little bit of your story. So then you've created an environment where you're like, I was struggling. Let me tell you about my divorce or whatever, just a little bit, a little sound bite. So then they can go, oh shit, yeah, that's how I'm feeling, good. Then we're on, like you said, eye to eye. You've opened that door now.

So yeah, the shrugging off or are you okay? Once, it's very, very different than saying it again, sitting down in front of him and going, mate, you don't seem like you're doing well. Talk to me, what's going on? And that second question I think is so important. And that was one of the huge things with Bouldercrest. When we all sat there with our arms crossed, nobody, we didn't know each other. We came from all over the country.

But once one person started talking, and you're like, they're going through the same thing I am. And for whatever reason, we all think that we're superhuman when we go into this job and we're the only one struggling with somebody dying in front of us. Or we're the only one struggling with a family in a car accident or seeing a kid die. Everybody struggles with it. And you have some people that, like I talked about with leadership, they get to a point where they're like, oh, nothing bothers me.

I'm, you just got to get back out there and do the job. That's bullshit. You're sending your people back out there like that. You're setting them up to fail. And it's just, it's plain and simple. If this took a lot of brain power, I wouldn't be good at it. It's just having a conversation with somebody and opening yourself up enough to be uncomfortable. Because it's not comfortable when you hear somebody say, oh, I'm thinking about killing myself.

And you hear, you ask people like, what should I say? And like, are you thinking of killing yourself? Okay, well, that was pretty straightforward. Super uncomfortable, but I've just got to let the words come out. Do you have a plan to kill yourself? Okay, now we can figure out, is this suicide ideation or is this like concrete? Yes, I'm going to do it this way. And I'm going to, I've already written the note. That's a whole, another layer of that, that entire dynamic then.

But if you beat around the bush, you never pull those facts out of those people to figure out how near crisis are they actually at this point. And having the ability, when I ran our peer team, I wanted the ability to go to the supervisors above me or above the person, not tell them anything about what was going on, but I needed the ability to say, this person needs to go home now. This person is going to go, I'm taking them somewhere. We're going to go out and have some coffee.

We're going to go, regardless of how, it could be a minor thing, but it's overwhelming to them. I needed the ability to take them off a shift. And if you're in a position of leadership, you've been put there for a reason, make it work. And if you're at the way top of it, and we're telling you like, this person is really struggling and all you're focusing on is, well, if they go off, then I'm going to be short of body. You're in the wrong job, my friend. It's that simple.

We spend so much time focusing on equipment and cars and the newest gadgets and technology. Your most important thing that you have in your department is your men and women. If they're not there, who's going to do the job? It sure as hell isn't going to be you.

They've got to be the ones out there and you need to make sure that they know it's okay to say I'm struggling with something, that you're not immediately going to label them because there's nothing wrong with them being overwhelmed by something. They're seeing the worst of the worst of the worst day in and day out. And they should be able to say, I need to step away and take a break. Yeah, 100%. Well, I want to be mindful of your time. I've been chatting over two hours now.

Before we close out, talk to me about the books and then tell people where they can find them. So the first book that I wrote was called Why Won't You Play With Me? And that was about conversations I had with my son about PTSD, what I was going through, because I didn't want him to think that the way I was acting was a reflection of him. He had come in one day, I was struggling. I just lost a friend to suicide and I lost another buddy to cancer. And I was having a pity party.

And he came into me, just little dude, and was like, why won't you play with me, dad? And I was like, I can do this stuff to myself and sit here and wallow, but I can't do it to him. So I wrote the book and then Amazon comes back because I self-published the first three books and Amazon comes back and goes, the book's not long enough. So I made a workbook in it because I knew for me having conversations with him was hard.

So I made questions in the back that you can answer and your child can answer. So when you're ready to have those conversations, it's there or you can look at it and reflect on it. This kid would ask me questions. He was a 99-year-old in a seven-year-old body. He would come up with these questions that nobody would ever think about. And it was hard for me to come up with answers to him. So I had to always step back and think about him.

So I wanted to create something that helped foster that conversation. The next book I wrote was on body image and anti-bullying. And then the third book, my daughter got upset that my son had a book and she didn't. So I wrote a book for her called Daddy's Little Girl about the milestones that a dad and a daughter go through in life, whether it's from birth to when they get married or they go away to college, whatever that may be and all those little moments that you have in between.

And each of those three books had little workbooks in the back to help those conversations get started. I had gone on and done, the day that I got sent home from work, I had gone on and done a podcast in the morning with Jeremy Sharlow, who we both know. And that night his publisher had contacted me and we started talking and I got two books published to them in March of this year. The one was called Since You've Been Gone.

And it was initially written for a young lady that I knew who lost her daughter in a car accident. And she was going to Liberty University where I got my master's degree. She was a special education teacher. And I went to her funeral and listening to these kids talk about everything that she did for them. I was like, this is something I wanted to write a book for kids to help them understand loss. And I told the story through what the kids were talking about.

Now, when they published it, they said they wanted to use photographs instead of illustrations because this book would reach anybody that had lost somebody. So I was like, you're the publishers, let's go with, I wanna be able to put in who it's for and information about Elsa who it was for and they were awesome about it.

We put that one out and then The Adventures of Taz, which is the first in a series of books about my service dog, Taz, who got donated to me from a Fourth Watch Motorcycle Club and Make Everything Great, which is two first responders that are out of Fairfax and then Fourth Watch is a motorcycle club of first responders. And they wanted to donate a dog to, initially the dog I was gonna get was named David after an officer that had lost his life in the towers on 9-11.

Capital officer got killed in the line of duty and they wanted to donate a dog to his family for his kids and the daughter had an allergy to dogs. So the dog that I was getting was a doodle of some sort. So it was hypoallergenic. So I was like, take that dog. They called me and they're like, you don't have to do this but if you would, I was like, don't even ask, take the dog. So I ended up with Taz, who was named after a firefighter out in New Jersey that died in 2022 from cancer.

And Taz, when I got her was about eight pounds, little white cotton ball and now she's 80 pounds and a bowl and a china shop. She's 18 months old so I get to take her out places and I actually got to take her up to meet the family of the firefighter a few months ago and the guys from the 4th Watch Motorcycle Club which was absolutely amazing. Just getting to hear about Taz and everything he had done and all that stuff and now I use the books. I take them out, I got little cards made for her.

They're all on Amazon. The two books, Since You've Been Gone and The Adventures of Taz are on online bookstores all over the world now thanks to the publishing company Words Matter and I use those a lot. Like I said, when I'm walking around, if I carry them in my car and if I see little kids, I'm like, hey, here's a book and this is Taz and they get all excited and get to meet her. So it's really, it's given me more opportunity to open up conversations about stuff.

And she has been a godsend to me. She's a knucklehead. She blew my other, I just had my knee replaced right before I retired, a year before I retired. She's running around the house, took my other knee out so the ACL is torn now because she ran into me but she doesn't realize she's not eight pounds anymore. But- What breed is she? She's an English cream retriever. Oh, okay. So she looks like, this is the book here. So that's what she looked like when she was young. Now she's much bigger.

And so she's very goofy and just like a retriever, she steals my socks when I come home from work and all this stuff. But she knows, I don't know how she does it. If I'm upset about something, she comes over and puts her paw on my leg. At night, if I'm like, I can't sleep or whatever, she will hop on the bed and lay right next to me to keep me from moving around and whatever. Just, I don't know how they do it. I don't know what is in these dog breeds.

She's got seven other brothers and sisters that are all service dogs as well. And just, she's been a godsend. She's absolutely amazing, but not just for what she does for me. When I had her at work for the few weeks that I was allowed to have her there, giving people the opportunity to play with her and start talking about their stuff. And I get to take her to school in the fall, so she's gonna be in there when I'm teaching.

And she opens up so many conversations and just changes people's demeanors when they meet her. And I absolutely, I'm blessed to have her and absolutely love having her around and getting to share her with people. Beautiful, yeah, I adore mine. And it's amazing the conversation to start even just walking her around here. So for people listening then, if they wanna reach out to you or find you on social media or the internet, where are the best places?

Catalystofchangeassociates.com has all of my links. Instagram is TheJPMcMichael. And that's where I usually will post, I post those little daily videos that I put up. I try to do them daily. TikTok, I've Catalyst JP is the handle for that. I put the same stuff across the board and it's basically like little videos about whatever I'm thinking about at the time. Now I'm trying to keep them under a minute so they're in the little real form.

When I started doing this years ago, I would talk and talk and talk as we're sitting here doing today. So people were like, you talk too much, you need to. So I'm keeping them cut down to short things, but just trying to put out stuff to give people those little reminders. Cause nothing that when I go out and teach, there's nothing I'm teaching you that you don't already know. I'm just reminding you. No different than you see guys like Tony Robbins and them that are out there.

They're teaching you stuff you learned when you were a kid. We've just forgotten it because everything that's going on. And letting people know, yeah, what you're going through is tough, you're struggling right now, but take a step back and you're gonna be good. You're gonna get stronger. At the end of this, when everything passes by, you're gonna be stronger than you were from the beginning. Absolutely. Well, I wanna say thank you so much. It's been such an amazing conversation, obviously.

You know, your early life and journey into law enforcement and the Pentagon story. I mean, I don't think I've really had anyone else talking about that specifically. So that was, you know, obviously very powerful as well, but then leadership and mental health and the progress that we're seeing now. And of course the books. So I wanna thank you so, so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today. Likewise, brother.

We crossed paths at that Operation Enduring Warrior event and I've followed you since then. The work that you do is absolutely amazing. The gifts that you give the people is great and it is an honor to be able to be on here with you and to be included with all the amazing people that you've had on the show before. же