[Podcast] What You Learn About Trauma When You Die for 15 Minutes with Josh Mantz

In April of 2007, while being deployed to Sadr City during Operation Iraqi Freedom, retired Major Josh Mantz and another member of his team were critically wounded by an enemy sniper attack.

The high-caliber bullet severed Staff Sergeant Marlon Harper’s aorta, killing him, and then ricocheted into Josh’s upper right thigh, severing his femoral artery. Josh went on to “flatline” for 15 minutes before being revived by an expert medical team. After recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and redeployed to Baghdad less than 5 months later to finish the deployment with his team.

Following his return Josh would go on to become a nationally recognized expert in psychological trauma and moral injury.

This episode takes you minute-by-minute through Josh's experience while he explains what the body experiences during the various stages of trauma. Not only is it an incredible story but Josh provides a mini-lesson on what we can all learn about the psychology of trauma.

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MACHINE-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript likely contains errors and is not a substitute for listening to the podcast.

Welcome to episode number 12 of the Built Unstoppable podcast. I'm your host Justin Levy and today I'm joined by Josh Mantz. Josh is a retired Army major who is a nationally recognized expert in trauma. He is a recipient of the Purple Heart bronze star with valor and the combat infantry's badge. He's also one of 25 veterans showcased in the National Veterans Memorial Museum in Columbus, Columbus, Ohio. And in his book The Beauty of a Darker Soul Josh details a sniper attack, causing him to flatline for 15 minutes before being revived by an expert medical team. 

Thanks for joining today, Josh. 

Hey, it's good to be here with you, Justin, 

If you wouldn't mind, could you delve into what happened in those moments leading up to the sniper attack?

Yeah, sure. I think context is pretty important. You know, we were in. We were I was deployed to Baghdad, I was an infantry officer at the time leading an infantry Platoon, actually scout platoon at the time. And this was in northeastern Baghdad during the height of the surge, the troop surge in the Middle East. 

So this was a not a conventional warfare environment. This was a counter insurgency environment, which, you know, I think it's really important to emphasize here that, in a lot of respects, the nature of that environment is, is grounded in building relationships and building trust with the local population. 

It is not necessarily grounded in military tactics and violence alone, although that's a part of it. So for context, you know, I served as an infantry officer during one of the most violent times of the War During one of the most violent areas of the entire war, and I never fired my weapon. 

That's not to say I wasn't prepared to but our focus and our emphasis was on building trust with the local people. 

And part of that is because, you know, the insurgents were outnumbered, they were under resourced. And we never saw them, you know, naturally, they thought from the shadows, a lot of hidden run tactics. 

So, you know, even if we tried to engage our enemy, after they fired upon us, we would only risk harming innocent members of the population. So so that was going on for a number of months. And, you know, this kind of leads us to this day, which was April 21 2007. 

And, and that morning, we're actually conducting a humanitarian patrol in conjunction with some of our Iraqi police partners. So the northern part of our sector near solder city, which is a very violent part of Baghdad, lots of issues coming out of there at the time. And we're really just trying to establish a foothold and build relationships with the people. 

But it was during the course of that humanitarian patrol, which was going quite well, that we actually got diverted to another part of the sector a couple miles away, to investigate a recent attack on American soldiers. 

And nobody was hurt in that attack, and there's no damage but an insurgent fired a rocket propelled grenade into American unit passing through and then ran away. And we were sent over there to basically investigate what happened and to see if we could find out anything in terms of who fired that rocket. 

And while we were over there, we noticed a suspicious vehicle slowly driving around about a block or two away. And for us, that's, that's an indication that that individual in that car could be an insurgent, who is attempting to videotape our tactics to use them either as propaganda, or as a training tool for them to study our tactics.

So we stop that driver and I walked up to the driver with one of my senior noncommissioned officers, Staff Sergeant Marlin Harper. And I like Justin, when I when I first got to the car door, this individual did not feel like it insurgents. He was an older gentleman, he was visibly shaking and scared, which in retrospect, that could have been another sign something was about to go down. But nonetheless, I looked in his backseat and saw a what was probably a $5,000 video camera openly laying in the backseat.

So, you know, obviously right there, there's plenty of probable cause to detain that driver and to bring them in for further questioning. But again, I you know, plays such a heavy focus on building relationships and trust that I wanted to make sure that we gave That driver, the benefit of the doubt and did everything we could to confirm his innocence or guilt before pulling him in for questioning. 

Because of that, I decided to conduct an explosives test on his fingers. And this is similar to what you would get if you're going through an airport at TSA. And they they swipe your luggage with with, you know, those those those little swipes, we basically have something like that. And you know, it takes 30 seconds to 60 seconds to do it.

Unfortunately, while we were conducting that test is when we were engaged by that sniper. 

The, the bullet actually first entered the left arm of my senior noncommissioned officer, Staff Sergeant Marlin Harper, it severed his aorta, and then it ricocheted into my thigh and severed my femoral artery. So in that instance, at plus a third piece of that bullet broke off and struck one of our interpreters, a non lethal wound. 

But what you see here is in an instant in time, three people were wounded, two of them critically wounded, and within two minutes from death, and that that basically brings you up to the current moment of this situation.

So I think that one of the biggest questions people will have is based on any memories you have, after that bullet hits you, and you know, everything that happened around them. What does be medically dead for 15 minutes feel like even if it's at the beginning, and at the end of that when you were brought back to life?

Well, yeah, that's a it's a, it's a really big question. 

So it's actually kind of that question that pushed me to go to grad school and study metaphysics and consciousness to really evaluate this experience in a more responsible way. You know, there are multiple evolutions of consciousness throughout this experience after getting hit by that by this bullet. 

First of all, the deaths was not instantaneous, for me, for Marlin, and pretty much was. But I would say, between the time I was shot, and the time that I flatlined, was probably about 30 minutes. So there's, there's a number of altered states of consciousness that I went through, throughout this process leading towards the final transition to death. 

The first I can relate to people, I somewhat I think, which is when when I was initially struck by the bullets, what what happens, right during a catastrophic, life threatening injury. 

And you really have to, you really have to kind of take a couple deep breaths, slow down, and remember that we are we are talking about this experience, retrospectively right now. But in order to really understand what it's like, you have to be willing to go back into the experience and relive it in real time. 

And one thing that happens when our bodies are facing a life threat is that we enter into what's called the autonomic response, more commonly known as fight flight or freeze responses. This is a limbic system response, the more primitive part of our brain essentially takes over. And our rational minds for the most part, go offline, and we become passengers of our own experience. 

For example, if you know a common example is if we're walking along a path in the middle of the woods, and we jump back in fear, because we think we see a snake on the ground. But then a second later, we realize we were mistaken, it was just a coiled up rope on the ground. 

That instant in time where we jumped backwards. in that instant in time, our rational minds are not in control. Right, our body acts as a sensor to the environment. And our bodies are aware of threats before we are, this is a more primitive function, meaning that the body can sometimes be wrong. But in the case of where you're basically, less willing to the body is less willing to take risk at the expense of potentially stepping on a snake, right? So it doesn't have to be perfect in that moment. It is merely jumping back in order to protect ourselves, right? Well, for most people, like if we get stung by a bee or if we get stung by an insect, or you know or if we see that potential snake on the ground, that initial reaction is kind of a fight, flight or freeze kind of response and Normally lasts very quickly, you know, a second or two later, our rational minds catch back up. And we, we realized that the, it either was or was not a threat. 

But in my case, what was interesting about this is I experienced a prolonged autonomic response that was drawn out over about 15 seconds or so, in which during that time, I went through all three of the autonomic phases based on the changing sensory inputs at hand, meaning that I experienced fight, flight and freeze, as my body was responding to the environment. 

So what happened is, at first, I didn't even know that I was shot, of course. And in fact, I didn't know that I was shot until I came back to life a couple days later, which is, which is just important to kind of keep in perspective. But after when I was shot, the the initial concussion of that bullet felt like I was being slowly picked up by the swell of an ocean wave, time shifted to slow motion.

So there's, there's this, this brings in altered states of consciousness, such as slow motion, time, fast motion, time, auditory distortion, and that I could only hear the muted shot of that sniper around in my own voice calling for a medic. 

As I, my initial response was more of a flight response, it was a reaction from the bullet, which again, I didn't even know that it was a bullet, I didn't even know that I was shot. I know this in retrospect, but if we're in the experience in real time, we got to kind of empathize with our own bodies, and realize that we are vulnerable to our own bodies, in these experiences. 

So you know, just keep that in mind. But just despite that, the first reaction was more of a jumping back. So it was kind of a flight response. 

And then the the sensory inputs changed that I was seeing in the environment. 

The very next thing I saw or remember seeing was Staff Sergeant Marlin Harper's face, who was standing several feet away. And here's where I experienced hyper vision, tunnel vision, it was like an extreme magnification of his face. And it was kind of a primal indication that something was terribly wrong. And, and of course, it was really his last conscious moment of life. 

But the power of that scene, the power of that image was enough to literally convert my body from a flight response to a fight response, in order to move through the situation and resolve the threat at hand, which in this case, I responded by immediately, dragging him to safety. 

So he slowly fell to the ground in slow motion. And then that sense of slow motion time, converted into a sense of fast motion time, and almost superhuman strength in these types of situations. 

Also, another thing about the power of the autonomic responses is that the body shuts down everything that it does not need to resolve the threat. Meaning I felt no pain, no physical pain, and I experienced almost a superhuman kind of strength and dragging him out of the way. 

With all of his gear on, he weighed at least 250 pounds, if not considerably more. And I had a blown out femoral artery, which I didn't know yet. But I kind of drugged him seamlessly, he felt like a feather. And I drove drag him to safe location. And that's where I started to remove his gear, his his equipment, you know, lots of zippers, belt buckles. 

And when I lifted up his shirt, that's where kind of the freeze response came in the one instant in time where I froze during this experience, because I saw the severity of his wound, which was probably a half dollar sized exit wound directly over his aorta, you know, and just, it's the largest artery in the body, right? It's it was just gushing blood. I've never seen any, any wound quite that severe before.

So that was kind of 15 seconds into the experience. And right at that point in time is when my medical wrapped, so my medic was only 19 years old. And he performed brilliantly that day. 

But, you know, bear in mind that this is the point where a 19 year old, first realized that he had two catastrophic injuries to deal with at the same time, and that he could not say both of us. So he had to make a conscious choice between who he was going to try to save and who was going to potentially die. 

This is a situation known as an irresolvable moral dilemma. You know, as you mentioned, I do a lot of work in trauma. And a lot of the foundations of trauma really, you know, kind of at the foundational level, they really tend to stem down to moral wounds, moral trauma, moral injury, and this is one of those situations that can potentially induce it. 

So I think with the arrival of that medic, I kind of sense the safety that came with him. And, and simultaneously, my body had expended all of its autonomic resources, right, there is no energy left. And at that point, I also, you know, I had lost a considerable amount of blood by that point already, again, which I wasn't aware of. 

But I collapsed to my left side, and then went into, you know, I would consider that the end of the autonomic response, and the beginning of another altered state of consciousness, which is quite bizarre. 

So I think I would have died there. Within the next, you know, couple seconds.

I was kind of in a state of what I would describe as subconsciousness for a few seconds. Again, no, no pain, I just felt like I was falling into a deeper and deeper sleep. So I was experiencing auditory distortion. 

My team members began to drag me across the desert floor, and I could feel my body dragging across the floor. And then just as I was about to go unconscious, that's when things changed. I heard one of my team members just yell at me at the top of his lungs. And he said, Come on, sir, stay awake. And it was in that moment, where even in the state that I was in, I could hear the pain in his voice, the emotional pain in his voice. 

And I had this kind of awareness that this injury was not just about me, it was about everyone on the team. And, and that I had to do whatever I could, to, to fight to stay alive to help my team through this situation. And the power of that moment was really enough to kind of snap me back to full consciousness, which is where the fight for my life really began. 

So following that, the medical evacuation process continued. And at this point in time, I was conscious but it it felt more like you know, I had lost a ton of blood in the medic was all over it, he cinched up, I believe, two tourniquets throughout the the evacuation process as we were heading to the medical station. And during the during the ride there, which probably lasted 10 minutes or so, I was really just fighting to stay conscious. 

I was I was fighting to make it to that aid station. That was my only goal. I felt like I had just you know, if you've ever donated blood or given blood, people often feel very queasy afterwards. So essentially, it's that feeling but magnified by about 10. 

So it was it wasn't a feeling of physical pain, it was more of a kind of a feeling sick, right, just kind of hanging on by a thread. But nonetheless, we did make it to the aid station and the ramp on that vehicle dropped and I was greeted by an expert medical team, led by Dr. Dave de Blasio. And they pulled me into the aid station. 

And here's where things really started to kind of get interesting by way of near death experiences in consciousness. By this point time I was a couple minutes from death. I knew I had lost a considerable amount of blood because I could hear the medics saying that. 

And while they were working on me, you know, first of all, especially given the current situation that we're facing globally, right now with COVID-19. And the stress that that is placed on our medical system and our emergency medical professionals. I think it's really important to emphasize that it was a privilege to still be conscious to be able to watch this team work. 

You know, they they conducted the most well rehearsed drill I've ever seen in my life. They were they were well LED, they worked as a cohesive team, watching them was like watching a choreographed dance. And even in the state that I was in, it gave me an enormous sense of comfort knowing that I was in such great hands probably gave me the strength to fight a little longer. 

But despite their very best efforts, I could feel myself starting to die. And in catastrophic injuries like this dealing with blood loss, you're essentially suffocating because the brain is not getting oxygen. 

So what the body does to protect itself is it actually pulls the remaining blood it has from the extremities into the chest cavity in order to protect the vital organs and I could literally feel that happening. 

The blood would creep out of my legs and they creep out of my arms and and as all that blood left extremities, they kind of cramped up and went numb could no longer feel them. And when that blood creeping sensation hit my stomach area. It's it's The point of the interior where I kind of realized that the injury was getting out of control. 

My breathing was extremely fast and shallow by that point. And I was just, you know, fighting to stay alive. But it was, it was, it was going to some inevitable end that I could sense and and, you know, without trying to do this, you know, a lot of people, excuse me throughout the course of near death experiences. 

You know, they'll describe things like their life flashed before their eyes, or, you know, kind of this life narrative will appear before them. I didn't have that happen. But what I do believe is what was most important to me was revealed in those final moments. And that's because I just instinctively started to repeat the names of my mom and my two sisters over and over and over again, you know, for the last minute of my life, and then when that blood Cribbins ization hit my chest, I had a conscious awareness that, that this was it, right? 

And, and, you know, a second or two later with my lab, like, I consciously knew I was taking my last breath, I knew that I was transitioning, and I died. Look it, I have temperature to articulate this experience. 

For years. I've and, you know, I'd say this about really all traumatic experiences, the value that we can gain by sticking with them, right and deriving meaning in them. And some of these feelings and emotions that are experienced at these extremes are novel emotions, right? They're novel experiences in that I have never experienced an emotion like this before, right.

So when people have difficulty describing these profound experiences, it's, it's largely because we don't have the language able to do it.

So so the the art of articulation becomes very important in processing and understanding our experiences and, and deriving meaning in them.

And, and, you know, fortunately, like, studying philosophy and metaphysics, in grad school kind of gave me a new palette, a new color palette, to be able to assess this experience through completely different lenses, and find words that I didn't know previously existed. 

You know, one thing I'll say, just broadly, and I've said this for years is that that final moment of death, it was the most peaceful feeling I've ever experienced in my life. Regardless of the pain leading up to it, that final moment of transition was profound.

Everything changed. It was as if every positive, every negative, every good, every bad, everything just vanished. And it was as if the spirit the soul becomes part of everything and nothing. At the same time. It was just a moment of incredible peace and love. And I'd have to say that if there was one kind of primal emotion that was experienced in a more powerful form than I've ever experienced before, it was love, at that last moment, love and interconnectedness, you know, kind of being part of everything, and nothing at the same time. 

Where I stopped short in the past, you know, I mean, Justin, you've known me for a little while I've been speaking about this for more than decade. And, you know, I used to describe it as well, after that, it just kind of faded to black. Right. And that's not really accurate. 

It was it was kind of it just, that was the best way I could articulate it. But in studying these really advanced philosophies, there's there's one thing that I will say, like with feeling of certainty at this point, and that is that there was absolutely no perception of finality in death, meaning, it didn't stop. It was it was a transition. There is there's a certain point where, you know, and look, this is a much longer and broader conversation, and we could probably talk about it for hours.

But there's a certain point where human consciousness and its human form goes away, right? Meaning that what happened afterwards wasn't necessarily perceptible in the form of human consciousness. But leading up to that point. I was there was definitely a feeling that I was going somewhere,

I was doing something.

You know, one of the most common experiences of near deaths that are reported is kind of a feeling of a tunnel. There's feelings of vibration. I I experienced all of that. It was kind of a reduction of consciousness, right a constriction of human consciousness until reaching this final threshold. But but there was no stoppage in turn. that threshold death is a movement. 

Death is a movement, just as birth is, you know, so things get pretty interesting when you start talking about this through the lens of consciousness, you know, motor, you know, we can't remember the precise instant in time that we were born. We cannot remember the precise instant in which we became self reflexive, conscious human beings in which we knew we were here somewhere in the world. Right.

And I would say the same holds true with death.

Like there is there, it's more of a fading into death, just as we fade into life. And that is that is something that I think is really worth reflecting on. So to kind of finish the story.

I flatlined for 15 minutes, approximately, this medical team pulled off a miracle. And, and brought me back to life. They got a faint pulse back and rushed me to the green zone, on a Blackhawk helicopter, where a surgeon performed a perfect vascular surgery the first time out the gate. 

You know, soldiers were rushing to the base to donate blood because there is a blood shortage at the time. So they were doing direct transfusions from their arms into mine. Obviously, I was all unconscious at this time. And, you know, eventually regained consciousness, you know, day or two later, to kind of learn that what had happened. And obviously, I learned first that, you know, I flatlined for 15 minutes, but also that Marlin Harper did die that day. 

Nonetheless, I continued the medical evacuation process back to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and eventually redeployed back to Baghdad, only about four and a half months later, to finish the tour. It's kind of a version of the story there.

Don't think it's a version, I think it's a incredible journey, and certainly not one that many people have. But so you talked about returning to Baghdad to finish your deployment with your team? 

Why was that so important to you? I think that a lot of people dead even went through something not as tragic as that would choose to stay home, they would go through their treatment, their recovery. And that would be it because of their fear or whatever that would be back in where that happened. So why did you read a play? Why was that important to you? No? 

That's a really good question. I'll answer it in a couple different ways. I, I don't believe in absolutes. I think a lot of these emotions we experience, we experience some kind of simultaneously a different intensity. 

So we can think of emotions as vectors that all contribute to who we are in a single moment. Right. So there's varying emotions in varying vectors that that kind of drove me to go back. First of all, I'll say that this is not something uncommon to the virtues of those of us in the service professions, and here I'm talking about, you know, just broadly, military, law enforcement, firefighters, emergency medical professionals, right. 

There's a a very strong component of selflessness. Right and and serving a much greater mission and serving a greater team. And and I think that that is even magnified, maybe when one is in a leadership role.

So you know, I was, it's very, it's very difficult to be recovering in a hospital bed, when your team members are still fighting and in harm's way, when also the people that you are serving in the Middle East, in this case, the people of Iraq. Like, look, Justin, our mission wasn't complete, you know. And so yeah, I wasn't supposed to even be really walking again for six months. And I kind of somehow made my way back into Baghdad, about four and a half months later. 

One thing that obviously drove me to do that was the team as I already mentioned, and explained, not uncommon, I believe I remember a triple amputee, who is in the room next to me, who his first question when he he regained consciousness was when can I go back? You know, when I asked that to the doctor, the doctor kind of innocently smiled at me and said, Son, you're not going anywhere for a while.

It was the wrong thing to say to me. All that did was fuel me to go back even more.

The second thing again, is is, you know, I talked briefly that the mission is important, right. And obviously, there's a huge component of serving one's team. But our mission there was really to set the conditions of freedom for people in the Middle East. And, yeah, you'll find some irreconcilable extremists over there. 

But the the high majority, high majority, 95% plus of those people that I encountered, were just like you and I, right. They, they, they were innocent people, they were good people. And they did not want to live in an environment of conflict and war. And we were merely trying to support them and set the conditions for doing this, just for context, in terms of what I spoke to earlier of relationships and trust. 

Like, when I was at West Point, I majored in Arabic, specifically, because I knew I was going to be on the ground with the people. And in order to build trust, it's helpful to be able to communicate them, communicate with them in their own language, without the assistance of an interpreter, if possible. It's It's not that I was graded Arabic, I certainly wasn't, I was good enough to get by. But you know, anyone who's traveled probably knows this. Like, it's not that you're fluent in the language, it's that you try. 

Right, that as long as you're trying to respect their culture and trying to understand that goes so far in showing respect, and building trust and getting rid of this image we have of the arrogant Americans, right. So it was it was kind of through our dedication to the people.

And you know, to be very clear, like, we had to take tremendous risks to do that tremendous risk to go out and meet with a school principal, or a city mayor or a shake, right. And that's kind of the nature of these environments, in order to build trust, we have to be able to, we have to be willing to take on a disproportionate level of risk, and even put our own lives on the line to do it. 

What I found out, this is before right before I was shot, I found out that the people were actually calling me a nickname, they had a nickname for me, and they called me Hassan Avia in Arabic. And that means the white horse. And in the Middle East, that's a horse is a very powerful symbol of hope. And, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't me, it was what our unit represented. This was not just me, this is every single soldier in our unit being willing to take these risks, right.

So, you know, for the majority of that deployment, up until the point we got shot, we really didn't we, we didn't know if what we were doing was working. We weren't getting much intelligence, if any, from the people. They were scared to talk to us because insurgents were insidious. Justin, it was a threat to the insurgent. If we would build relationships with these local people, right? They consider that a major threat. And to stop the people from talking to us, they would do the most horrendous things they would rape, torture, kidnap, kill, you know, just through the worst of the worst things in order just to stop them from from working with us, even if they wanted to.

So it was kind of just having faith in that having faith in those people by looking them in their eyes and believing in them.

That propelled us to continue to take these risks day in and day out. Indeed, Ireland had to give his life for it. And I almost did too. So did many other people. But what happened after we got shot was profound. And the basically what happened is, is when the community got wind of this, that they had shot, he saw Libya, they had shot the white horse and team. 

The population for the first time went into an uproar. They and they, you know, my team told me this afterwards, they were coming out on the streets. They were pointing, you know, in the direction of a sniper, he went that way. They were calling an accurate intelligence tips for the first time. 

And my team who, by the way, just endured this traumatic event, they regrouped. They threw their gear back on. And within six hours they detain that sniper, who also happened to be or the sillier I don't remember, but also happened to be one of the top targets that we've been looking for since the day we got into theater could never find on so even despite kind of the tragic nature of this that that I think was significant in propelling me to go back and to and to kind of prove to not only my own people but but also to the the people we were serving over there. 

That, that we were, we were in this with them, you know. And so that inspired me for sure to see that that glimmer of success, that glimmer of hope. And then kind of on the negative side, you know, not to end with a negative one here. But, you know, the, you know, again, in terms of psychological trauma and moral injury, which consistent things like shame and guilt, powerlessness and betrayal.

Guilt was a motivating factor for me to go back to, you know, I was, you know, and this is in the form of survivor's guilt, Marlin died, I lived. A lot of people think that. I mean, this is true. I mean, a lot of people who have near death experiences have this profound appreciation for being alive again, I can tell you with a straight face that I don't think I've ever felt that, even to this day, that may sound you know, interesting, but I think most of that has to do with the fact that, you know, you kind of carry the weight of this, and it's, it's not something that goes away, right, it's something that we can come to understand.

We can achieve harmony with those experiences.

But it's, it's, it's still this idea of, there's a tremendous guilt and weight over that. That's one function of it. Another function was really what I was seeing when I was in the hospital.

You know, look, I was severely wounded. And but despite the severity of that wound, I was one of the only people in that entire hospital expected to make a full recovery. And, you know, one of the images that I'll never forget, was, you know, this is point where a couple weeks later, I was on crutches, right? So I was crushing my way around the corner of the hospital. And I remember seeing this young, beautiful girl in her early 20s, pushing around her new double amputee fiance in a wheelchair. And it's an image that just riveted me, you know, how much their lives were changed, right? in that, in that by that experience, and what lies ahead of them, right. And it's, it's just when you see enough of that over and over and over again. 

And by the way, this is this is the type of cumulative trauma that our, our medical professionals, our firefighters, our police see day in and day out. It absolutely has a very real effect on our emotional and psychological state. So so there's also kind of a vector there of guilt. There's a vector of commitment and service. You know, there's a vector of leadership and a variety of complex emotions that somehow someway allowed me to get back in the bag that is that tour.

I think one of the things that certainly what I've experienced is no worse, Claire's, clear, close to, you know, your experience with this, but with what you said, of kind of looking at that doctor and smiling, saying that, you know, essentially he told you the wrong thing. 

My orthopedic surgeon, who's very well regarded, had told me that I could never work out again, you know, I'd have to find alternative ways to work out. And so my wife had gone and cancelled my gym membership and all these sorts of things. And you know, I had shattered both my shoulders, humerus was gone and bowl rotator cuffs, don't you know, they had to use donor bone. I have anchors and wire and screws in my both of my shoulders. And now I was on 16 weeks of PT first four weeks, was passive, the other the rest of it was active PT. And so five months post surgery, so a month post PT, I was swimming in open ocean in St. Lucia when I should have never been able to do that. 

But the reason why a sense essentially it was because I was told I should shouldn't be able to do that or I couldn't do that. 

So in that small way. I understand what you're saying because I did what I was told I could and shouldn't do. And we recorded the video following David's my neurosurgeon, herb, sorry, my orthopedic surgeon, and he had me email to him to his personal email account, because he hadn't seen me thing like that. And it was not to say anything about me personally. 

But it was that, like you talked about kind of that will to overcome what you're told, you shouldn't have been able to do.

Yeah, just and I applaud you for that. 

And, look, you know, I'm not recommending that people go out there and defy their physicians advice or anything like that, but in the same breath, you know, physicians are grounded in science, and they must tell us what they know, based off of strict science and stroke science alone. And, look, here's what I've learned. 

And this isn't the only time I've kind of moved through something honestly, much more challenging thing for me has been moving through Crohn's disease. You know, where I've repeated, you know, just a couple years ago, I had physicians say, look, there's, there's nothing more we can do, right? Just, you're gonna have to medicate yourself for the rest of your life and you know, not gonna be able to work out, you're not gonna quit? 

Well, look, here's how I look at that. Just because if a physician says there's nothing more we can do, he or she is not saying that there's nothing more that I can't do. And, and what how I look at that is that physician has exhausted the resources that they have at their disposal, in order to help and they're basically tapping out of the fight..

You know, and, and one thing that I have learned about moving through psychological trauma is that we have to create our way through it. Creativity is the pathway through trauma, and adversity. You know, and, and, look, there's, there's, there are so many ways to train and to work out and to move and to modify our nutritional regime, and, and to do a variety of things that can give us an advantage to to improve our situation and improve quality of life. 

So, I, I will never say the words like there's nothing more we can do. There's always one more thing we can do. And, you know, I'm not like being psychotic about that, right? It's, there's, there's certain points where if you're, if you're, if you're going too hard at something like yes, you could potentially do more damage to yourself. 

So you really have to assess your own body. But, you know, working out doesn't have to be doing, you know, high intensity workouts, right, it can be a variety of different things. And example, this is like a kind of a bigger level is, you know, later in my military career, I was in command of a, basically a medical company, right. 

And in this company with some of the most severely wounded service members that have come back from the Global War on Terrorism, severe injuries, right? Major back challenges somehow, somewhere amputees, right. And many of them are told, like, yep, we can't work out, we can't do, you know, our standard military physical training, we can't move enough to even break a sweat. And, you know, by the time I left it, within a few months, within a few I challenged my cadre to come up with an adaptive fitness program, that that would basically employ some of the methodology of like things like CrossFit, you know, back then I was really big into that. And, you know, we had people who couldn't even walk, doing full blown CrossFit. 

If I can't sprint, 400 meters, maybe I can wheelchair 400 meters. And that's what we did, we put people in wheelchairs, right, we looked at their injuries, we, we leveraged some of the same principles of physical fitness that can be leveraged anywhere, and we just use different activities, we got creative. 

So you know, that that creativity can come in the form of physical activity, it can come in the form of of thoughts, right, and disrupting our biases and our assumptions, to come to think about our experiences in a different way to think about life in a different way. And some of that can be very challenging, right, it but, you know, again, the point is like, we can never stop creating our way through this stuff. So I applaud you for doing that.

Yeah, well, thank you. But like I said, You deserve, you know, the most applause but beyond bringing folks on this podcast that have incredible stories and you know, unique stories. 

Another area that I like to touch on is the topic of leadership. And have you taught as you've talked about so far, you do have a lot of experience with it. lead in teams in the military and units and what you've gone on to do since then, if for someone that's listening to this, that might not be in that type of unit or structure, they may just be starting out their career? Or might have an initial leadership position within their company or what have you. What type of advice could you take from your years of leadership experience to boil it down to them?

It's a big question.

But like, what I would say is, I am kind of common characteristics of leadership is I've always applied the right and this is kind of seem to work in just about every organization that I've participated in, including the private sector and, you know, places like Tesla, when I was there for a while, which is a very high intensity environment. 

Look, if you're in a leadership position, I think the one of the most powerful characteristics of a leader is to stay humble. And, and to, to remember that, like, I look, in every leadership position I've ever been in, I was never the expert in anything, right, I didn't want to be the expert, my job as a leader is to pull together that team, right and move them towards a common objective. 

And that means inspiring each individual on their team, right, and to connect them with their purpose in their own way, so that they can move forward as a cohesive unit. And I think the one of the leaders biggest challenges their biggest roles is to, is to both provide that guidance, right, and to provide that Asmath. but to also place an immense focused on bringing out the best in people. And, and, and really connecting them with their purpose with their why with their mission statement. 

So just very broadly, I mean, that's kind of a core principle leadership trait that I don't think is foreign to too many people who are probably listening to this podcast, but I can't emphasize it enough. That that to connect people with with with their core purpose, and to look I trust in the power of the human spirit. And, and and where that can be activated. I've I just believe that organizations can overcome and move through anything, anything.

I absolutely agree in humility, I think is often mentioned, and it's kind of a floral, throwaway word, right? Well, we all need to stay humble. And that's a kind of a phrase or boat, when people really break down humility and infuse it into their life. A leader not actually, it changes your whole prism from the way you look at your life and you carry it on.

Right? You know, look, I mean, humility, and empathy, and compassion, right? These are things that are very difficult to quantify. And, and I think that's, that's maybe the reason why they cannot be taught in PowerPoint bullets. Okay. You know, so it's, it's something that really has to be continuously injected into the culture, a priority has to be placed upon it, we have to be having conversations around these things, we have to be finding out what's important to the employees and why. And, and, and, you know, more than anything else, it's like, knowing that I probably don't have the right answer as a leader. And if I'm not engaging my team, right to look at the collective power of a team, 

I applied this in the Middle East, I applied everywhere, right? To from the lowest ranking Private First Class to, you know, to my peers, and even senior officers, right. You've got a wealth of knowledge, and a wealth of people who are committed under under your team. So, so to to do our best to remove those barriers, right to and to bring those people together is one of the core functions of leadership that yes, it's not easy to it's not easy to train in a systematized way. But I again, I think if if, where you can combine the science of management, with the practice of humanism is where I tend to see the most profound leaders exists.

Sure, and I think that's a great way of stating it. So something that we were talking about before recording, and you said that you had a very unique answer to is what does being Built Un stoppable mean to you?

Yeah. Well, again, I kind of come back to the same word, there's a very important word is humility. That doesn't mean don't be confident, right. But one thing that I've definitely learned about psychological trauma is, you know, that that healing is a journey. It's never a fixed point in time.

We are constantly developing and growing, and we are encountering new experiences that could change our perspectives of who we are, and change our evaluation of our past experiences. Right? So So part of one of our strengths of moving through trauma is to constantly have that strength to look within ourselves and reevaluate ourselves based on the changing dynamics of the environment that we're facing, and our current development at the time. 

The same holds for for for leadership roles for personal development. Look, it's, it's never a fixed point in time, there's not an answer. Right? It's, it's, it's, it's more about embracing a culture and, and a personal philosophy of seek. Not Not knowing knowledge, necessarily, but seeking knowledge, asking better questions. 

This is something I absolutely attribute to my experience in grad school, where, you know, look around, people say, I'm an expert in psychological trauma. And I swear to you, I feel like I know less about it every single day.

And, you know, I, one of my professors gave me the best advice in the world a couple years ago. He's like, read above your paygrade. Right? So a lot of a lot of the material I read, it's extremely difficult. It's, it's, it's stuff that frustrates me and right and makes me feel like I know, nothing half the time. 

But it I have come to appreciate being disarmed by the thoughts of others. And I think one of the most valuable things that we can do as human beings is to seek out our biases, seek out what we think we know, and question it. Because it's, it's that it's that process of kind of saying in this in this more ambiguous state, that really allows creativity to flourish. Right? 

Creativity loves adversity, lovers. So it's a lot to withstand sometimes, and, you know, you have to be careful about how much of that you can endure. And I obviously, like, Look, you know, it doesn't mean doesn't mean don't be confident and decisive and, and move through the situation, right? I mean, I'm not to believe me.

But But when it comes to having conversations like this, I, you know, you know, they'll come a point like, thanks. Look, time moves, right? The witness world has never still, and, and time, this dimension of time can force decisions, right, it can force action, but where we have the benefit of time, staying in, you know, using that to question ourselves, and question, what we know, is what can really lead to a greater level of personal and organizational development, so that when time does force a decision, we're going to be well prepared to make it and to move through it in the best possible way?

I think that is absolutely one of the most unique answers to that question. But that is the purpose of asking it to every guest. Now, as we wrap up, where can people find you on the web?

So you can hit me up at phaedrus factory.com. That's my website phaedrus with a Ph. It's, it's, it's actually a book, one of Plato's dialogues. 

And it's, it's, uh, you know, just, you know, the kind of the context of name phaedrus factory, I actually won. I love Plato's novelty. You know, he's the earliest Western thinker and has shaped so much of our thought. But in the book of phaedrus, it's number one he, it's worth it's where Plato begins to outline his conception of love. 

But it's also where in the latter half of that book, he actually speaks to the art of oration, the art of speaking the art of articulation and and starts outlines some Really novel thoughts about communicating with people, which is really central to what I do. So phaedrus factory.com, most of my work revolves around. You know, I work a lot with hammer house clinicians and psychotherapists. I work with a lot of service professionals who are contending with adversity and trauma. And although it's not yet on the website, I obviously do a lot of work on the leadership development side as well.

Thank you so much for joining. And as I know, you're continuing your studies and your work with law enforcement and you know, the public and private sectors and what have you. So, as you get further down that path, I'd love to have you back on the show.

Well, anytime Justin's always good, always good chatting with you, my friend.

Absolutely. Take care. Have a great day.