On a mission to save lives: Uncovering the Story of Chimney Trail and Matthew Brown

[0:00]  well guys welcome back to another episode of the heart and hustle podcast I am incredibly excited to be able to talk with our guest today because when I met this individual they truly inspired me because of their lived experience but more importantly their mission that they're having in the world and so today I've got Matthew Brown a commanding officer in the U.S Navy a Seal Team Member an innovator a mental health Advocate a fly fishing guide which I thought was really cool as well but more importantly is the founder and CEO of Chimney Trail Matthew so thank you so much for being with us here man I really appreciate it Keenan I'm pumped to be here man thanks for having me absolutely so when you and I first met we come we connected on a shared passion for mental health we hopped on a zoom call together

[0:46]  but more importantly the things that you told me about your lived experience and why you're so passionate about chimney Trail but more importantly mental health in general I think needs to be shared and I want you to kind of share the opening story about your experience in coming back and learning that one of your younger comrades had made decision that impacted not only himself his family but also you would you mind giving us an introduction to kind of that story that you shared with me the first time we met definitely so uh Keenan as your listeners uh might be interested to know uh and as you mentioned a second ago I was the captain of one of our Navy ships in San Diego California and it was an incredible tour it was a really rich professionally rewarding experience and a great way to serve uh but in that tour

[1:35]  I had an experience that sort of shaped the trajectory of what I'm imagining to be the rest of my life and that's that one of our very best young officers uh I had I had finished up with my command tour and went to work for Seal Team 17 and two months into that job I got a call from the ship and it turns out that that young officer one of our very best uh had gone to a Marine Corps Exchange purchased a firearm and had taken his own life and this was one of those things was like absolutely shocking because everybody wants to think or wants to believe that they can identify someone who's having these sorts of feelings or is on sort of a path to uh to Dying by Suicide and this was not the case in fact if you would have come on and asked me hey Captain

[2:22]  like point me in the direction of somebody who could use some mental health intervention I would have grabbed this kid and been like hey help me think of somebody like it would have never have been him and so uh he didn't pass away immediately so I went to the hospital the ship that he was assigned to that I used to be in command of was actually out to sea so the the new captain of the ship called me and said hey man can you go sit with his parents at the hospital because this guy was uh first of all his name is Arun Arun so much on their own uh and arun's family uh was from India and they had come obviously to be at his bedside at the hospital and so I went and I sat with his parents and as you might imagine his mom was inconsolable but his dad was able to talk at least and he kept bringing up

[3:09]  this team building exercise that we did together where I took all of the officers on on my ship to Yosemite National Park and we climbed Cathedral Peaks together which is this really cool cluster of mountains in Yosemite and his dad grabbed me by the shoulders and he he sort of Shook Me Not sorta he did he shook me and he said why didn't I do these things with my son why didn't I do these things with my beautiful son and I think if you would have asked me at that point in time like what are you going to do with the rest of your life I was finding a lot of value in service to our Navy It's a Wonderful way to serve um but on my drive home from that experience I called my wife Jen uh and I said listen hun I think we might need to take a different path

[3:56]  and not only are we seeing it with a rune and some of the sailors on my ship but more broadly the military and Veteran Community needs a mental health care Advocate we need a health care company that specifically addresses their needs and I think we need to start that there's a lot of companies that are sort of nipping around the edges but we need somebody that is just going to do like a full-blown assault on pathological anxiety and depression and she as a an amazing woman and she was like okay let's go do that so I called my co-founders after that and then we started chimney Trail which you know and your listeners will soon find out is a company that's designed to make cognitive behavioral therapy easily accessible and not something that you need to wait in line for it's just a way

[4:43]  of improving your mental state through self-paced self-led uh cognitive behavioral therapy I mean I think that your story is so inspirational because you have the lived experience and just to be the talk in common form you know when we think about people who are in the military we think of these tough guys we think of these people who are just like Roughnecks the people who are willing to be on the front lines and sacrifice everything to protect our freedom but more importantly protect everything that we know as Americans and one of those conversations that I've been experiencing since 2014 is the mental health struggles of people who are in these positions so from your perspective as a leader what was one of like your early aha moments where you realize that there were mental health

[5:31]  struggles there were pressures there was stress that your people your comrades were dealing with that maybe kind of first turned your lights on to the struggles that other people were going for just like you were talking about with one of your young captains naturally it's the people who we don't expect need the support actually need it more than the people who seem to be struck struggling so what was one of your earliest experiences where you realized that mental health was a real Challenge and it wasn't just an accumulation of just this lived experience Yeah man so I think you know the biggest aha moment for me was that and this might come as a surprise to your listeners is that what when you think of Mental Health Care challenges in the U.S military you do sort of bias toward that very description that you had of the military person like the the roughneck

[6:20]  tough like very physical wanting to go out and do the nation's bidding in a very physical sort of way um there are traumatic events that you can experience in uniform I know I mean certainly I've experienced my fair share of traumatic events in uniform just from a combat related standpoint that can that can bring on or precipitate uh mental health challenges but the thing that is the aha moment is that it's not always a traumatic like PTSD sort of event a lot of times what happens is that you've got a young energetic person who is entering the military for any number of reasons it could be for like to advance their family's economic prospects it could be to get an education it could whatever their circumstances are they're like fully invested in this vocation

[7:09]  and they have an idea of what that vocation is going to be like what their experience is going to be but the military is a huge place and there's lots of different types of jobs some of them are super glamorous like top gun Maverick and Seal Team Six and all that kind of stuff and then there's like basic blocking and tackling of running the organization making the lights turn on and off every day and I think what happens sometimes is that you've got these War fighters in in their mentality is that they're going to go out like hard charging and when their reality doesn't marry up with what their vision for their service was going to be if it leads them into a profoundly dark place and if you don't like prepare them for that and and give them tools to honor their service in the form that it's taking in that moment they can feel uh

[7:59]  they can they can lose their passion for their service and and frankly lose their passion for life the second aha moment was that everybody talks about like the the honor and privilege that it is to be willing to give it all for your country and people are like these folks are willing to die for their country and from my perspective having lived a a really uh varied military experience it's just as important it's more important to be willing to live for your country uh a lot of people go in like okay the the standard is to die for your country like Lieutenant Dan from Forrest Gump but it's like no man you gotta live for your country so that's I think my two epiphanies so to speak yeah I think

[8:48]  let's go let's talk about the first aha moment and this is something that I didn't really recognize until you Tardis to talk about it but the realization that maybe your idea of what serving your country is going to align with or look like and then your actual role in position doesn't align with that and I'm guessing that there's a sense of turmoil that says like this is maybe not what I signed up for now I'm committed to a long-term from commitment I'm not passionate about this do you see that commonly throughout you know your experiences with your other individuals that you engage with or what does that look like for the common man for the more common person is that something that a lot of people experience because it's the first time that it's really been kind of brought to my attention that that's something that from my perspective would be very taxing on me if I signed up for one thing it didn't align with that now I'm kind of stuck in this middle Place yeah man I mean it's

[9:35]  it's 100 of the people including the people who are top gun Maverick and Seal Team Six like when you are developing your idea of what military service is you almost like forget about the service part and you're thinking about military action like and so you watch these different movies that give you an idea of what your service is going to look like and those movies like the stuff that's happening in them might happen to you over the course of a 20-year career it definitely doesn't happen to you over the course of an hour and a half long movie so so it's like you uh you're waiting for this like super high energy experience to happen but the reality is that the way that you

[10:22]  should approach it is more like a samurai like they did you know very disciplined very routine practice every single day and then in a moment where you know their services were needed they fell back to the their habits not they didn't rise to an occasion instead they like retreated to the habits that they had created through their very disciplined training and I think that if if folks entered the service with this sort of like Samurai type mentality where hey I might be using a needle gun to remove rust from the side of a ship but I'm removing that rust in the same way that uh like the Karate Kid removed like did wax on wax off like if you

[11:09]  could approach it and that like mental state then you be much better off but most folks they don't they just have this like Hollywood idea of what they're about to step off on and then we let them down inevitably and this is coming from I mean I I've been associated with the Navy for uh almost 20 years and have seen a bunch of stuff uh and I can even tell you from my perspective it like there are more uh more like deliberate slow paced discipline opportunity sort of days than there ever are like armed conflict so yeah and that makes sense you know I think about kind of even as I look out from the outsider's perspective about how technology in itself has kind of influenced the way in which we fight

[11:57]  battles today right we grew up on the ideas of going to the front lines and being in the trenches and fighting door to door like early Afghanistan days if you will but now when we see things that come down to military conflicts from the consumer the regular person's perspective I think of drones I think of air strikes and maybe there's not as many I guess hand-to-hand or Frontline combat actions that kind of are involved in the military process and I can understand if that's what I got into or that's what I signed up for and I don't get to participate in that that would be definitely a letdown for me I remember there was a movie a couple years ago that I watched it was called Jarhead and it was about a green sniper who goes throughout his deployment and never actually gets to fire his weapon and by the end of the movie he seems very distraught from a mental perspective

[12:44]  because he's not living up to what he thought he was going to be doing and that was kind of one of my early I guess subconscious experiences now recognizing that I'm talking to you that frustration that actually starts to happen there which is very interesting I mean it's it's the interesting thing and I think it's like the unspoken Genesis of military and Veteran Mental Health Care issues and frankly I don't think that it's just military and Veteran I think it's like everybody so right now one in ten kids born today is going to make an attempt on their own life before they graduate high school and to me like this is the most shocking statistic you know Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has come out and he said look adolescent Mental Health Care is the defining Health Care crisis of our time not just Mental Health Care crisis but this specific thing is the health care crisis of our

[13:31]  time and I think it's it's not just military circles it's also everybody like you go on Instagram and you have this idea of what life should manifest for you as and when your reality is not matching up to that it creates this disconnect where you feel like maybe maybe like this permanent solution to a very temporary problem is my only path uh and at chimney Trail we're trying to make sure sure that people don't suffer the distortions that lead them to suicide and instead give them a a more like realistic view of what life should be and what they can make of it give them some hope re-centering and this is something that I I'm very passionate about is you know the expectation that we have for how things should be based on what everybody else tells us what they could be is a

[14:20]  very dangerous game to be in and you know we were fortunate enough I'm 32 years old how old are you Matt Matt 40 40. cool so you and I both came up in the generation before all the social media impact the influence that it had over us both consciously and subconsciously so I very much do worry about that social media conversation because it seems like people are being rewarded more today for putting on a mask of everything is great I'm making all this money I'm doing all this amazing stuff when it doesn't align with actually who they are and I think naturally we can kind of intuitively pick up on that and naturally it's starting to create the I would say swelling effects in the mental health of the youth the first generation who's been growing up on these platforms like Instagram and it just creates such a dichotomy between where I think I should

[15:07]  be and where I am and sometimes I guess stepping away and kind of having a conversation like you're talking about being able to reframe the Paradigm of our expectations is so vital and important but who's doing the work out there to help us do that stuff you know what I mean like who's the person having that conversation yeah I mean so there's a lot of good people having the conversation I know that the Surgeon General right now is talking about like hey if social media companies are not incentivized to really create safety within their application for audiences that are 13 years of age and younger do we need to do something from a public policy standpoint or a public health care standpoint to address it uh I you know certainly there's probably some room for that yet another thing is just parents or guardians or mentors in kids

[15:57]  lives making sure that they're engaging with the kid so that they know that what you see is not necessarily the reality and I think that you and I probably have a better perspective on this than most because in the entrepreneurial space you're constantly putting on like the best possible show on behalf of your company so like yeah we're super high growth we're super this we're super that and it's like nobody really talks about the fact that your family's eating ramen noodles every night while you try to figure out how to make ends meet so there's this really unglamorous side of it that like you don't really celebrate because you need to advance your company and you know capture revenue and do all the things that make companies go uh but if you're engaging with kids making sure

[16:44]  that they understand that what they're seeing on social media is a truly distorted reality uh and and that life is way more rich in a non-like broadcast sort of way yeah I truly believe that as well and I want to use that as a perfect transition to kind of talk about your entrepreneurial Journey before we start diving into Sakana of the background and the inspiration the process of building chimney Trail so entrepreneur now on an amazing mission to save lives and but more importantly Start Spreading awareness around the importance of mental health and mental Wellness aware mental health awareness and understanding what was kind of your expectation for being an entrepreneur starting a company and did it align with what you thought and what has it been really like

[17:33]  I mean I think I knew that it was going to be hard so on the one hand it did align with what I thought but I'll just say it this way like I've served in combat operations I've been the captain of a U.S Navy warship and this project is the hardest thing I've ever done there's no doubt about it being an entrepreneur uh I don't recommend it like if you're if you're a kid out there and you're like what am I going to do with my life I think that what ends up happening is that you have this passion for solving a problem and then if you decide to create a company in order to address that problem you end up making a company rather than solving that problem like your day is spent making a company which on the one hand is tremendously valuable because I

[18:20]  can bring in experts to help out with what it is that we're doing but some part of me does think my gosh I wish that I could just go work for the Walt Disney Company leverage all of their resources and figure out how to tackle this with like a a fully Complete product you know that sort of thing um so it did measure up to like my expectation in the sense that it was going to be impossibly difficult but uh one thing I will admit to is that I thought it was going to happen a little bit faster I mean we've been working on this project since 2018 the first three years of it we ended up being in research mode because we just could not find the right solution to the problem we knew that we needed to get

[19:08]  cognitive behavioral therapy in people's hands in a very low barrier to entry sort of way we just didn't know how to do it but we partnered with the right doctors that that pointed Us in the right direction and now we're we're making some Headway um but so yeah I mean I guess it's lived up to uh to all the hype I will admit that there's one part of that that's way different I thought that I was going to be like I know that you have an athletic background I played a lot of sports was in the military which is a very competition-based organization and I thought in my head entrepreneurial space they say like 99 of business this is die and I thought it was because like other businesses were just kicking your butt when in reality 99 die because you just need to endure you know you just need to

[19:57]  like stay in the fight and and so that's been a real eye-opening experience to me is just like the grit that it takes to just keep going even when you feel like it's dead you just keep going and that's a huge part of Entrepreneurship that I think a lot of people don't understand it's literally a game of survival from the perspective of if you are doing the work consistently you will be successful but there are going to be tough days and we've both been through the ups and downs of the entrepreneurial Journey asking for support from the people who you love and honestly kind of being crazy enough to push forward an idea that you know is going to create value but getting the right people around you is also so vitally important so let's use this as an opportunity to kind of talk about what you mentioned finding the right

[20:44]  solution take me through some of the early days in looking at the marketplace looking at the solutions that were out there and then realizing maybe this isn't going to get the job done how did you guys go to the Whiteboard and start recognizing we need to bring in the types of professionals who understand best practice what type of solutions are out there what was that early research Discovery phase like for you guys yeah so uh I think for us it was we were more insulated from the general Marketplace because when we first started the project I was still in uniform okay and so I wasn't really thinking about the marketplace I was thinking about my old ship I was thinking about the Seal team that I was assigned to at that moment in time and I was just like it doesn't seem

[21:32]  like there's a solution that addresses this like what we're dealing with for these audiences which is not to say that there were not millions of amazing resources like there were so many wonderful well-intentioned people that were trying to like tackle this problem but the issue was that their Solutions were sort of specific to an area that where their research was or it was only for like this small group of people or whatever the case might be and so I just started looking at what our Sailors had available to them in a non-clinical way and the reason that I was focused on a non-clinical solution is because the number of people in need of mental health care services and the number of providers there to actually like give Services uh there's always a huge mismatch there it's like you know

[22:23]  20 to 1 or something like that depending on the study that you read so we we said okay whatever we create it can't be relying on uh like a psychiatrist or a psychologist it needs to be informed by that expertise but it we can't be relying on their hours we need to productize what it is that they do so rather than getting Psychiatric Services we need a psychiatric product and so initially it was just like what is the most scientifically vetted solution for preventing mental illness we wanted to take sort of a preventive approach and all of them came back and said cognitive behavioral therapy so CBT is essentially an understanding that the pathological feelings of anxiety and depression that

[23:10]  you have are created by a cognition and if you can separate those two and analyze the cognition you realize that most of the time if you're suffering anxiety depression the thought that created it is wildly illogical so we said okay let's train people on that because I know coming up through the military ranks I was never trained on that stuff so let's get the training in their hands and then once we figured that out then it was sort of like okay is it via email is it via an app and then we we did get like on the road to this app solution and then we discovered that there was this huge body of research that talked about marrying up problem solving therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy and if you can like Ben Franklin always says he's or he's his quote is if you want me to forget tell me if you want me to maybe remember

[23:59]  teach me if you want me to actually remember involve me and so we knew that we needed to create a product that really inspired involvement and so that sort of led us down the experiential CBT path that we're on the chimney Trail I love that I mean there's so many things to unpack and what you just said you know since I got in the mental and Behavioral Health space in 2014 I recognized the shortage of providers that we have and the demand that is needed for the services that need to be rendered and there's a famous saying in healthcare a lot of people talk about it's like but we cannot hire our way out of this problem right because there are not enough professionals who are there to meet the demand and I think when it comes to meeting the demand of so many people and the needs that they have you have to productize the solution that can

[24:47]  reach more people because like you said we're never going to be able to trade time for services we'll never be able to catch up that way and so I love what you guys are doing in going out and partnering with these you know psychological these professionals who understand what needs to happen What were some who were some of the first organizations and or people you look to for some of this expertise and pointing you in the direction of cognitive behavioral therapy what was that like yeah so I got so this is like a tremendously Charmed path like I do not anticipate that every entrepreneur who enters the the solution finding space will have this level of talent at their disposal but a former landlord of mine uh was her name is Dr Ann Wilson uh she's a pro she was a professor uh of

[25:37]  like her study was like in utero development and the transmission of Trauma from generation to generation uh like through genetic factors and I I just called her just like I like ideation phase I was like hey I'm trying to solve this problem and she she told me she's like look if you want to solve this you just need to have them do an activity and honestly it needs to put them in an unfamiliar environment and so we sort of settled on the outdoor space but to her Point she said hey you could like go through a hardware store if you want it just needs to be someplace unfamiliar and then present these Concepts these resilience building Concepts to them uh so that that was Dr Ann Wilson we leveraged the entire network that the military has in place

[26:25]  for Fleet and Family Support Services so there are a lot of doctors involved in that and then we have uh Dr Bob dudas who's the chief of academic pediatric medicine for Johns Hopkins uh he he looked at the product and he's like look we don't need to over complicate this it just needs to be something that people are compelled to do that will teach them about like the way to think clearly and to remove the cognitive distortions that cause anxiety and depression and then we met Dr Lindsay orkowski from Brown through a mutual friend and she is a a clinical researcher at Brown and does she actually does a lot of sexual assault prevention and Community uh like safety measure research for Brown

[27:14]  um and then she anyway like the network effect just sort of like took root uh and now we're working with uh Dr Leah Blaine from the Cohen Institute at University of Pennsylvania which is uh uh psychological Support Services entity of UPenn that specifically addresses military and Veteran mental health related issues so I probably forgot one or two people in there and I apologize to them um but but yeah it was just like this wonderful Network effect where once you got into it people are like oh this person is like actually trying to solve the problem and they're not like selling snake oil and they're not trying to oversell they're just trying to like provide a productized solution let's get on board yeah I think it I mean like naturally and everybody who's listening

[28:02]  and watching today can easily understand the passion that you come from in your lived experience and that's why I wanted to start the introduction today with your lived experience and the things that you've done because when you find something that you are truly passionate about and you know how it's going to impact not only the people who you can directly impact but also their family members their circle of friends you're doing such amazing work that it makes sense that people want to get on board and so I just want to you know publicly take a second to commend you guys for the amazing work that you're doing because it is so needed and we don't have a lot of organizations and people out there who are making a true impact like you guys are and I just want to say thank you so much Matthew you know you're doing some amazing stuff Keenan you're the man thanks so much for uh for the the Boost and thanks thanks for giving us a platform man giving us an opportunity to give voice to this

[28:50]  problem and uh encourage people to sort of help solve it absolutely so a couple things that you mentioned there and I think this is very interesting um there was a phenomenon that was happening in Vietnam where 25 of US soldiers who had been deployed to Vietnam had tried heroin and the US government became incredibly alarmed about the fact that one in four individuals was overseas trying heroin but something amazing happened when these people came back from their deployments was I want to say it was a small number of only like one percent or two percent of the people over in Vietnam came back and actually tried heroin on the United States and they talk about how our environment has a gigantic impact on our ability to adapt to new thoughts and or trigger certain

[29:38]  environmental triggers that bring up habits and different things like that so when you're talking about getting people into a new experiential experience why is that such an emphasis and was that something you experience in some of your leadership Retreats by taking people outside of the stresses of their normal every day to day can you just talk about that a little bit Yeah Yeah man this was a great question um you clearly did your research so uh I have I have a family history of mental illness like close like first degree of separation between me and family suffered uh major depressive disorder a clinical anxiety and depression I have a younger cousin who is addicted to opioids and took his own life um and so independent sort of the the

[30:27]  Catalyst event that that launched chimney Trail like I had all of this like past that uh certainly I um like that that experience has informed my world view I like I've man I've managed depressive symptoms like basically my entire life uh so this is not something that is foreign to me it's not like on this outside entity who's casting judgment on folks that are suffering with this it's it's like I'm like the beneficiary of my own product so to speak um and so one of the things about like heroin and you might read about like psychedelic psychedelic uh drugs that are being used now to sort of get people out of these thought patterns that they've like buried themselves in is that we talked

[31:15]  about a second ago how pathological anxiety and oppression is generated by a cognition doesn't just come out of nowhere and those cognitions if you just think something one time and never think it again it's like the most transient immaterial thing ever it's not a big deal the the real challenge comes when you think something over and over and over again and that rumination creates like a ditch and you can't get out of the ditch every time you think it you dig the ditch an inch deeper and if you think it over and over again pretty soon you're like in the Grand Canyon because you can't you can't think about anything else and so you need something to get you the hell out of the Grand Canyon and so stuff like heroin or psychedelics like those are uh like a chemical way of rewiring your brain For Better or For

[32:05]  Worse uh like I do not advise going and doing heroin right now or anything for that matter uh what CBT does is it's it puts you in the driver's seat of your own of like controlling your own brain and when you get into these ruminations that are full of illogical thought patterns CBT allows you to analyze that thought pattern and decide on a different path so the classic example is you're an 11 year old kid who has an algebra test coming up you take it you fail it and then your brain starts the process of digging this ditch which says I am a failure that's like that's in the clinical space they'll call that all or nothing thinking it's like I'm either a success or I am a failure and you're

[32:52]  making that determination on because you failed a math that's a that's a patently illogical thought so you have to train your brain to think hey I failed that math test that doesn't mean I'm a failure it means I failed that math test and I need to work hard on like factoring or whatever the algebra thing was that you failed and then what that does is it takes you out of the ditch and puts you back on you know stable ground um so I I don't know I think you know there's um I mean the the the psychiatric drug piece of this I think is very important I'm not like saying don't go see a psychiatrist and get prescriptions because sometimes you need those prescriptions to get out of the ditch but the CBT is like maybe like mountain climbing equipment

[33:42]  so you can climb your way out of the ditch like on your own uh and then there's a lot of studies that say if you can do it in this sort of very manual self-directed way that the the likelihood of it lasting uh is greater and I can just speak from personal experience that it it's made a hell of a lot of difference in my life absolutely well I mean I appreciate you sharing you know your history and your family history and some of your lived experience I think that's incredibly valuable um I always get super charged up when I hear people who are in a space who have lived experience there you know one of the issues that I find in healthcare in general is that because there's always a need to innovate a lot of products a lot of solutions come from being produced in a vacuum in a laboratory somewhere where like this is best practice I'm going to

[34:30]  put this into the marketplace and see how it performs and I find that the best Solutions come from those who have lived experience and can actually speak about the impact of the solutions that they're leveraging and I think that's so incredible you know I'm truly inspired by the beginning of our conversation today when you talked about the father of the individual who ended up dying by Suicide who shook you and said I can't believe I never took my son on these trips talk about these trips and kind of what the experience is like with people who you take on them and kind of you know the shared experience of being able to bond together in a new environment that is not military based or so I would say regimented what was some of that like so this is this is like a whole different podcast like we could talk about uh leadership and how to build a team and how to create a shared ethos

[35:20]  among the people who are expected to advance toward a common cause uh and one of the things that when you're building a team you have to do is create a shared vocabulary uh it it's helpful to have something called sacred artifacts which are just like thing like a like an object that you can look at that reminds you that you're on this team so there's shared language there's sacred artifacts uh and then there is uh shared experiences and the shared experiences uh chimney Trail exists to create a shared experience around the whole idea of mental health and wellness and cognitive behavioral therapy so I when we went to Yosemite like I wasn't the CEO of the mental health care company I I didn't

[36:09]  know like that there was mental health benefit to what we were doing I knew that I needed to take you know 25 uh young Military Officers and get them on the same page because we had a really rigorous two years ahead of us and we needed to get like our act together so what the the event was for was to create a bonding a shared experience where we knew that we were going to face some challenges we would help overcome them together uh later as we were facing challenges as a as a ship I would be able to say oh remember that time on Yosemite where we did X Y and Z and of course we collected some things we like on the ship we had like the flags that we took up the mountain when we climbed Yosemite so we had those sacred

[36:56]  artifacts as well and so that that was just like team building 101 to have like the shared language the sacred artifact the shared experience but from a mental health care company we said we need to recreate that somehow so that people have this shared language sacred artifact and shared experience around cognitive behavioral therapy processes for overcoming the distortions that cause anxiety depression and suicide what does that look like and that's why our product is like super tangible it's literally a box like we ship it to you and you open it up and there's stuff in it um and so and then we would be relying on a service like Francis for example to help to continue the shared language part of this thing so there's this vocabulary that we need to get familiar with cognitive behavioral therapy cognitive distortions there's 10 of them

[37:45]  each of them you know leads to anxiety and depression in their own special way like we all got to know about these things in order to not fall victim to them as soon as you name it you can overcome it and so that's that's sort of what the uh the Yosemite experience is about and then how we've applied it to to chimney Trail and I think that's you know the biggest thing and why I kind of host the podcast and want to have people on the show like you is we have to redefine the experience of mental health you know growing up an athlete you had mentioned that I have an athletic career you have an athletic career I never had the shared experience of having common language to be able to describe what mental health was and as I was kind of preparing for our conversation today I was just thinking about so much of the work that you and I do is really kind of

[38:32]  rewriting that narrative into language and experiences that people can share in to understand that oh maybe I wasn't feeling upset angry stressed in that moment maybe this was a sign of my mental health and I feel like from the male perspective from being an athlete from being in the military we have to do so much work to break down barriers to destigmatize the conversation to put it in a light that is more approachable because you know me personally coming from a biracial background African-American father white mother I saw how an entire generation and multi-generations of my family stigmatize these types of conversations because we didn't have a common experience or language that we could approach them with and I think the work that you're doing to be on the front lines and even talking about your Leadership Retreat right does so much

[39:19]  work in reframing these narratives and stories that we have in our head to be more efficient but more importantly more supportive so we can break down some of these barriers I think that's just vital I think you're right on the money man and and so our initial product is very like nature Centric because there's a real therapy like a clinically proven therapeutic benefit to being like in nature um but the very next step for us is taking the CBT curriculum and making it accessible to baseball teams football teams and giving the coach not trying to turn them into a psychiatrist or a psychologist but to give the coach the the language that they need to use in order to rescue someone from like their own negative mental self-image like the faster that you can overcome these

[40:06]  distortions the more productive you can be as an athlete as someone in the workplace and and like even independent the whole being productive thing you can just be happier like you can genuinely be you can feel better uh about everything you don't feel like you're on this like ladder that you need to somehow get to the top of or this mountain that you need to scale like as fast as humanly possible instead you start like looking around and appreciating the view as you're climbing the mountain and then before you know it like you're almost accidentally at the top of it and it's because you've been in this healthy space the entire time and you know healthy mental States just breathes success yeah I completely agree with you you know strategically in a lot

[40:54]  of my conversations when we talk about the work we do at Francis you know we speak about creating opportunities for conversations and kind of to go back to what I was talking about before you started talking there there are so many stigmas that we have internally culturally in our social groups that stop us from having conversations and one of the biggest things that we can do is enable people with Frameworks that have opportunistic chances to create conversations right because when I think about naturally being someone who has looked on in the eyes of society as being a male being a tough guy being somebody who doesn't complain naturally we don't want to say hey I need some help right or I need to talk to somebody because I'm feeling this way it makes us seem lesser them but when we have somebody in a key role like a leader a coach or someone else who can start

[41:41]  conversations about these things and it gives us opportunities to contribute to that conversation I feel like that's where we create the biggest change because it needs to be something that is common not something that is irregular yeah you hit the nail on the head man so uh in my line of work it is like as a military officer um and this isn't this isn't a necessarily a good thing but there's like this underlying like Ultra masculine ethos uh and I think like our pioneering women that are in the organization are doing some things to help refine that a little bit so that it's not just like meatheadish um but one of the things that I have found to be very useful is that as I'm talking to leaders that maybe just don't

[42:28]  quite really understand the mental health game and they think it's like hey you just need to toughen up quit being a little [ __ ] and get going you know that sort of mentality one of the one of the lines that I use is exactly what you just said it's like nobody likes a complainer right like you're if you're having a tough time your job is not to complain about it your job is to do something about it and so I'll talk to these leaders and I'll be like do you want them to do something about it or do you want them to just complain and they're like well I want them to do something about it and it's like this is what they need to do in order to overcome it are you on board and then they're all of a sudden like the light bulb goes off and they're oh yeah I am on board it's like proactively taking care of yourself in the same way that I expect them to take care of their body with you know stretch routines or plyometric exercises or something like

[43:16]  that they're instead they're just building this skill set that will allow for them to be more resilient uh and a better teammate yeah um I'm gonna be a little bit selfish in the next question that I ask so coming from the space that you come from how do you overcome some of those preconceived notions that mental health mental Wellness is like a soft activity especially when you're dealing with a generation of leaders who come from a tough nosed generation what are some of the challenges you face and then do you face them head on by being like hey do we want complainers or do we want people to be proactive like what is your approach and or do you have some frustrations in that space I think that I face it head on uh and I I aggressively challenge everybody that doesn't understand uh I I make I

[44:05]  challenge their assumptions and then I make them like repeat back to me what those assumptions are and why it is that they have them and for for chimney Trail it is vitally important that we get this right and I don't know how interesting this will be to your listeners but the reason for it is that we take for granted in our country something called the all volunteer force and it's this idea that one percent of the people are inspired in the same way that like clergy in the church might be inspired to adopt military services of vocation and then to put themselves on the line to defend a country and it's in its ideals that has not always been the case like you were talking about Vietnam earlier there were draftees to fight the war in Vietnam and if they were doing heroin

[44:53]  when they got over there you know like not to say that like the words in Iraq and Afghanistan didn't create their own like Groundswell of drug use but uh there is this core of people that is the all-volunteer force that we totally take for granted will be there tomorrow and there are clear and present dangers there are what they call pacing threats like the pr People's Republic of China uh Russia you can see what's happening in Ukraine right now the the Department of Defense needs to keep their all-volunteer Force because the sophistication of our weapon systems are are growing are becoming more and more sophisticated so quickly that you can't just randomly bring people into the military and expect them to be able

[45:41]  to use those systems so you always need to have this nucleus that's there to train people that you might need to bring in from other fields if you don't preserve that Force then you lose the next War uh or you have a next War when you could have otherwise prevented it with good you know good preparation and so when I talk to military leaders and when I talk to people who just don't get it I say okay you might not get mental health but you do get the fact that our recruiting numbers are the worst that they've ever been and the real the reason that they are the worst that they've ever been is that people are hearing about PTSD they're hearing about military and Veteran suicide they're hearing about sexual harassment they're hearing about like the like political agendas and this sort of thing and it's all it's all noise is what it is we need

[46:30]  to take care of the troops mental health give them the tools to know hey I'm getting ready to do just about the hardest job that there is and so I need to prepare my brain for that reality and then allow for them to go through their tenure of military service in a much more healthy State and if you do that then you get the influx of recruits that are able to sustain the force and then you've got a really healthy all-volunteer Force which makes it so that people who mean us harm are too scared to do anything about it so that that's sort of the the the brass tacks of of why it's so important and and how I push back on folks that are just like I don't get it toughen up sort of thing and I think that's incredibly valuable and I think that was incredibly incredibly well articulated and it really kind of shines the light on some of the bigger issues that we have in

[47:17]  like corporate culture today it's like people are not going to want to come work for you if they hear that everybody has a negative experience is burnt out ends up having PTSD dies by Suicide that's not a good branding exercise and how can you expect for the people to want to show up serve their country in the ways in which they should be if they don't have the support from the organization or the cultural narrative is not supportive in nature and I think that's just incredibly valuable and thank you for articulating that and I think that was a real real value piece heck yeah man I think and it's not I'm not suggesting that we need to become like a hug Fest like everybody needs to be all soft and that's like a part like let's take the Marine Corps for example a part of what makes the Marines the Marines is that you find a way or make one or like uh

[48:05]  like yeah find a way or make one right like Semper Fi always faithful uh take the hill it's like this really aggressive hard-nosed mentality and there's a lot of value in that toughness you need to be able to cultivate that toughness and what what our position is is that it is impossible to become the real resilient form of toughness that you need if you are falling victim to cognitive distortions that cause anxiety and depression absolutely the two are connected right the two are connected and I think we've taken a view in society that like our physical and our mental health are so separate rather than taking a view of us as a whole person and that's so valuable so Matthew as we kind of wrap up here today I want to give you an opportunity to let the listeners and the people who are viewing the show today know more

[48:52]  about chimney Trail how can they find out more information what type of projects are you excited about in the future and how can we get behind you you got it so first things first if you're interested in what we're doing shoot me an email my email address is Matthew m-a-t-t-h-e-w at chimneytrail.com chimney Trail spelled just like what's on my jacket um and uh so our website you can go to www.chimletrail.com and it gives you an idea of what it is that we do uh but we are principally a Government Contracting Company right now and then also we provide services for businesses so if you're a company and you want to materially improve the mental health of your Force so that you have more resilient sales people or better informed leadership like with a higher emotional quotient all those sorts of

[49:40]  things just visit our website and then shoot me an email and we will set up a curriculum specifically for you and you might be like what comes in like what is this curriculum and what you can expect is a five Box series we give you a box at the start of the curriculum and then mail you a box at the start of each new season winter spring summer and fall and inside each kit there is at least a hundred dollars worth of really quality outdoor equipment that you would normally get from a store like REI for example and that outdoor equipment is used to do an outdoor activity that teaches you about the 10 cognitive distortions that cause anxiety and depression and it steps you through the activity in a way that addresses that Distortion and it allows for you to

[50:28]  overcome it uh and there's a book like an instruction booklet that's on the inside of the kit as well so we'll give you the tools that you need in order to help your team overcome these cognitive distortions and I promise you at the end of it you're going to be happy that that you did it well I just want to say thank you for all the work that you guys are doing thank you so much for coming on the show sharing a little bit about your lived experience and your passion for what you're doing because for me it is palpable I can feel it through the screen and I know everybody else can experience that as well guys that's been another episode of the heart and hustle podcast once again Matthew Brown thank you so much for coming on the show we really appreciate you thanks Keenan foreign