Rob Jones: Surviving Hard Hits and Leadership in the Field

Rob Jones | Echelon Front

Dr. Kevin Rindal | Vimocity

After losing both legs to an IED in Afghanistan, Rob Jones picked up a marker in his hospital bed and wrote three words on the whiteboard in front of him. Survive, recover, live. What does it take to survive the hardest hits, recover when life knocks you flat, and live a life of strength, purpose, and brotherhood. It's the only thing that empowers you to solve problems in your life is if you take ownership of your problems, you can take ownership of your life. [Music]

Dr. Kevin here and I just want to personally thank you for being a part of this community. It means the world to us and without you we wouldn't exist. The only favor that I will ever ask is that you like or subscribe to the work ready podcast as this ensures that we can continue to grow this community and bring these amazing guests and conversations to you each week. Thank you so much.

Hello and welcome to the Work Ready podcast. It's my honor to uh to welcome Rob Jones to the show. Rob Jones is a USWhy this show exists (workforce athletes, leadership, family)

Marine Corps veteran, father, double above knee ampute, parolympic rower, endurance athlete, author, speaker, and leadership instructor with Echelon Front. Rob, so grateful to have you on the show, man. Yeah, thanks for having I really appreciate the opportunity to come talk to you and be one of the inaugural guests on the podcast. This is exciting. I I hear also, Rob, you're a stand-up comedian, so you're not not only a a warrior, but uh that probably plays into your your speaking ability. Tell me a little bit more about your your standup comedy. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say I'm an active stand-up comedian. I have I have done it before. Well, the genesis of it is I grew up watching standup comedy. I would wake up at : in the morning in elementary school and watch this show called Evening at the Improv. And I I imagine I didn't get about % of the jokes cuz I was just a little kid and it was an adult show. But, you know, um I would say I just always grew up trying to be funny, always wanting to be funny. And so, standup comedy was always something that had interested me. And then when I got wounded, I got this email. I was in the hospital. I got thisMeet Rob Jones — USMC combat engineer, double above-knee amputee, Paralympian

email from Wounded Warrior Project saying that they had these producers that wanted to do a documentary about teaching wounded veterans how to do standup comedy. It was basically a call for auditions. So, I did a little video and sent it into them and they selected me as one of the five veterans. And over the course of about a year and a half, we produced this documentary called Comedy Warriors, where we would write some standup comedy and then they would fly us out to Los Angeles and they'd rent out one of the uh bigger clubs like uh the the Improv or the Laugh Factory and we would perform for pretty well-known standup comedians like Bob Saget, BJ Novak, Zack Galifanakis, uh Lewis Black, you know, people like that. and they would give us some tips. And that evening we would go up and we do we do a five minute set uh for the for the main show and that was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed doing that just like I thought I would. But I was also training for the parolympics at the time. So standup comedy took a backseat to the parolympics and then I kind of came back to standup comedy after the bike ride across the country and I was doing some uh open mics in Washington DC.

Then I was also training for the month of marathon. So one of those also had to take a backseat and again I had to put the you know standup comedy in the back seat and I haven't really returned to it. But yes, certainly my my natural desire to to want to make people laugh certainly plays into just about everything that I do in life. But also as a leadership instructor at Echelon Front, I I truly believe that if I'm teaching a workshop or if I'm doing a keynote and people aren't at at least enjoying themselves, at least if they're not engaged in the story part of it, if they're not engaged in what I'm saying, if they're not having a good time, they're not going to be they're not going to learn because they're going to be bored. And so I think that, you know, flexing that funny bone that I have is a way that I can keep them engaged, build a good relationship with them very quickly, and thus increase the the learning potential of anything that I'm doing. Yeah. No, that came through in that presentation that you gave, too. I mean, it was just I mean, you just had those little hooks in there that that cause people to laugh and and it really draws people in and shows humility. But how how have you Yeah, I use that as a gauge. Usually my when I when I get up there, if I introduce myself and for a kind of a standard kina for a regular workshop, I'll usually get up there and say, you know, my my name's Rob Jones. I was a combat engineer in the Marine Corps. I supposed to find IEDs. And as you can see, I wasn't very good at it. And I can usually gauge like if that gets a big laugh, then I'm saying, okay, this this crowd's going to be, you know, this audience uh is going to be really engaging. I can do. But if it doesn't get anything or if it gets very little, I go, "Okay, I'm going to have to do a little bit more work to establish a rapport so we can have this back and forth during the keynote that that uh you know, I like to employ." So, you can kind of use that as a gauge uh to to know get things kicked off. And I learned that from Steve Martin. Steve Martin, I read his book uh Born Standing Up and he in that book he always talked about he talked about how he hated it when comedians just come out and say how's everybody doing and said he wouldComedy as a leadership tool (and why laughs improve learning)

like to have a line really quick line to get things going. And I I kind of use that philosophy as well, like the the first thing that you say, the first words that come out of your mouth should engage the audience in some way and it kind of establishes, you know, this rapport and it sets the standard for the rest of the time that you're going to be talking to them. So, I love that. I'm going to have to read that book. I I think it's a great book. Oh, yeah. I just there's a lot of stuff in standup comedy that applies to what I do as a leadership instructor as well, just in terms of philosophy. You want to go too long on your brief, but you can't go too long, but you can't you you have to go this just this certain amount of time that your brief should last before people start getting bored and the engagement drops off. So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff like that that from standup comedy that you can tie into just being a teacher and the skill of improv too, just thinking on your feet and being able to to adapt. So, well, we are going to definitely uh come back to this thread about um comedy, laughter, thinking on your feet, and how you lead other teams as we go through this conversation. Um in preparation for this podcast, I listen to a ton of your stuff. I mean, man, anyone who wants to learn more about Rob Jones, just type it into YouTube or or Google and you'll come up with some amazing resources. I I was telling you before we started, I think I've listened to about nine hours of you. I feel like you're a great friend. Um, just riding my bike, uh, listening to Joo. I think you may be one of the only three three repeat guests on the Joo podcast, which I mean that was definitely a feather in your cap. That's uh my favorite podcast to listen to. So, um, why don't you I want to break this up into chapter three different chapters. So, we're going to start with chapter one, and that's your experience as a a Marine Corps combat engineer. and love to have you just set the stage for us in terms of like what caused you first of all to even go into the Marine Corps and then tell us a little bit more about um what your role was and we'll dive down that. Yeah, I'll try and do that briefly. Uh I was in college. I was at Virginia Tech. I was a junior at Virginia Tech and my my major was computer science. Uh so when I got to Virginia Tech, I wanted to be a video game programmer. That's all I wanted to do. But unfortunately, I didn't really have I did not have a good work ethic. I didn't have the work ethic that it required to do well. Uh so I spent more too much time playing video games. Not enough time not enough time learning how to make them and learning how to be a good uh programmer. So by the time my junior year came around, I was basically failing. I mean I a low D, you know, I was and I remember the the catalyst was I had these my two main computer science courses uh after the first I think I failed both the first exams and those both those courses and I realized at that point there's no way I'm going to get out of college in in four years. I'm gonna have to be here for five years. And that just made me feel like a total loser. Uh, so I had a little bit of an existential crisis at that point and I decided that instead of being a computer scientist, I should go to film school. So, I started looking at that, but that was super expensive. And then I started looking for some other stuff. And I just so happened to be talking to my my friend uh Matt on AOL Instant Messenger. Uh, and he had had the same the same kind of realization a year before and he joined the Marine Corps because his dad was in the Marines. and he basically just told me that it was the best thing he'd ever done. And so that made me curious and I started researching the Marine Corps and I kind of liked what I saw. So I went down to this library and I got the first Marine Corps book I could find which is this book called Brotherhood of Brotherhood of Heroes about the battle of Pleu in World War II. And I read that book and it just it just clicked with me the all the things that I was missing in my life. I those guys had courage. They were selfless individuals. and they were all a part of this really powerful brotherhood. And I didn't have any of those things. I wasn't particularly courageous. I was mostly thought about myself and I didn't have a“Proofing the lane” in combat—and on the jobsite

group. I didn't have a a brotherhood, a tribe of people around me when I was at college. And so I figured the best way for me to get those things that I needed were was to join the Marine Corps and go try and fight in a war. And so I think two days after I finished the book, I went down to the recruiter's office in the next town over, walked into the office and said, "I want to join the Marine Corps." And that was pretty much the easiest recruiting job that that recruiter ever had because I think I was down at MEPS, you know, two days later getting sworn in. Uh, and then I called my parents and told them what I did. I'm sure they love that. Yeah, they uh I mean they weren't Yeah, I think my dad was very they were both very surprised because it probably came kind of came out of left field uh for both of them, but you know, they were they didn't really have a choice in the matter because I was or . Uh but you know, they were they were supportive once I kind explained to them, you know, what my reasoning was. And so yeah, that's and then you asked me uh what does a combat engineer do, right? Yeah. Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about that. I mean, it's such a unique role. I'm like, man. Yeah, there's a multitude of things that a combat engineer can do. There's basically three specialties. The first one is building things like uh building forward operating bases and that kind of stuff. Uh the second specialty would be the air wings. So, they're building runways and that kind of stuff. A lot of construction things. And then the third one is destroying stuff, which is using explosives, employing and defeating minefields, building obstacles, using explosives, and that kind of thing. And that's that's what I every kid's dream, right? Yeah. Basically the dream. Um and that's what I fell into that that specialty. And so the way that that played out in Iraq and Afghanistan was my Iraq deployment in . We we got a lot of training in common industry school about how to use mine detectors and metal detectors because one of the things we're supposed to be able to do is uh get through minefields. And so naturally that meant that we were going we were kind of uh naturally positioned to be the experts in IED detection and route clearance which was you know more and more important as the war uh went on. And so in Iraq there weren't tons of IEDs in my area but what they did have were uh weapons caches. So again metal detectors we would just go into an area that we got some intelligence on from the local populace that there might be some weapons buried there. We'd go through, we would, you know, sweep that entire area with our metal detector and we'd find things like RPGs, ammunition, mortars, grenades, just in a all usually uh in burlap sacks buried in the ground. So, we'd find those things and we'd hand them over to explosive ordinance disposal. Uh but then in Afghanistan, the war is picking up in , so IEDs were all over the place. And so the way that would work would be anytime we came to an area where we thought there was going to be an IED, for example, a bridge going over a river, Taliban knew that we wouldn't just be swimming across the river. Typically, if it was a creek, we would we would wait across the creek, but if it was this big body of water, we can't we're not going to swim across in pounds of gear. So, we would have to use the bridge. So, they would put IEDs around the mouth of that bridge then on the other side. And so we knew that they knew that we knew that they knew that we knew, you know, all this kind of thing. So we would just sweep uh to the other side every time we would go through one of these areas. And then another another time where there's basically guaranteed to be an IED as if you've already found one. So they would put them usually in clusters. They put one here, one here, one here. So if one person stepped on an IED or if you found one, there's almost guaranteed you're going to find a second or a third. So that's basically how it would work. So I would and that so I would clear the I would clear a way across and I would I would mark a safe path. So as long as everybody knew or as long as everybody followed the path that I delineated for them they knew that they wouldn't be stepping on an IED. Yeah. And when you have heard you describe this before you call it proofing the lane. Can you maybe expand on that a little bit? cuz I think I mean proving the lane is one thing in battle, but it just feels like again that's a theme of your life in terms of how you've used that as a metaphor to just, you know, serve others, love others. Um, so yeah, I'd love to hear you expand on that. Yeah. So in in IED detection and route clearance, there's the first thing you should do is clear the land. That's what you're doing with your metal detector. You're you're basically developing a theory about whether or not there's an IED buried in front of you by waving your metal detector over the top by examining it with your eyes and developing a theory but without actually touching anything. So in the end you have a theory and that theory can be .% accurate but you don't actually know if there's an IED buried in front of you. Can't you can't possibly know that for sure. For % sure. So the only way to % guarantee that there's not an IED buried in front of you is to step on that spot. And that's what we call proofing the lane. So usually thatFrom fixed mindset to possibility thinking

terminology comes from uh route clearance using tanks. So what they would do is they would clear the lane with a vehicle and then a tank would literally just drive through with a with a a mine rake or a mine plow mining up, you know, shoving everything out of the way. And then finally it would drive itself over that area that it had just mine you know mine plowed and if it if things exploded then there was there's still a a mine there. But basically what it's what it's doing is you're proving your theory whether or proving or disproving your theory based upon whether or not when you step on that spot does a mine actually explode? Does an IED explode? So that's what proofing the lane is called. What it does that's what it is. That's the theory behind it. The way that applies to life is there's a lot of things that people are unsure about whether or not they can do or things that just haven't been done before. And there and and also just a lot of the times people are waiting for somebody to do something. And so what proofing the lane in in life is is being being the person that's going to go out there and do the thing or or take the first step so that other people can follow you. And also unfortunately having to be the one that has to endure the consequences of taking that action, the difficulties that are associated with it, and the burden of responsibility of being the one that's going to to lead the way through this difficult situation or lead the way uh to determine whether or not something is possible. And if you can do that, then a lot of the time people will see that. They'll see that what you did is possible. And then you just kind of open the floodgates to a bunch of other people being able to do it too. Rob, at the start of this interview, you said that when you're in college, you didn't have a strong purpose, didn't have strong discipline, you didn't have a tribe or community. How did you go from that to now you're putting your life on the line um proofing the lane for the rest of your team, your squad as you're out there? I'm just so interested in that development. Yeah. Well, obvious well, it started with the recognition that I didn't have those things. So, I I had the I had, you know, enough self-reflection that I saw that I didn't have that stuff. And then I read the book and identified, oh, that's what I need. So, I, you know, identified what I needed. I realized I didn't have it and I set a course to achieving it. And yeah, going joining the Marine Corps and going to fight in a war is probably the best way that you can develop those things. So, it was it was through the Marine Corps and going to war and having a brotherhood of of Marines that I cared about more than myself that developed those those traits within me. But yeah, I I mean, I learned the importance of putting the team first out of selflessness all the way back in boot camp when, you know, if if one person screwed up, the entire platoon was punished. And guess what? There were people screwing up every seconds. Somebody made a mistake that would get the platoon punished. And then so I had that and then I I saw how that how that worked in war as well. You know, I couldn't be thinking about myself. No, no marine can be thinking about solely themselves in war because if you do that, then you're going to leave the the enemy an opportunity to kill somebody that you care about or do damage to the platoon. So you can't you can't think about yourself at all really when you're teaching leadership skills to people and you I mean you're working with construction companies, utility companies, you know, the frontline workers, like what are some of the principles that you teach people in your leadership sessions when it comes toThe “funny hat” story: caring for family in crisis

building community, building purpose, building those different um things that you just talked about? Yeah. build I mean building community and building uh purpose would be essentially building relationships first primarily because that's how in order for any team to work together in order for true teamwork to to occur which is when teams are supporting each other when people are supporting each other in order for that to occur everybody on the team has to put the team before themselves have to put the other people on the team before themselves and they don't do that then teamwork just isn't going to happen if if I don't care if I don't if the if I don't think the team is more important than me, then I'm going to be acting in my own self-interest and I'm not going to be helping this guy because I I only care about myself. Or if my department over here thinks it's the most important thing, it's import more important than the the whole team, then I'm not going to help this other department over here. Or this crew isn't going to help this other crew because they think they're the most important thing. So, we have to be subservient to the the the whole team, the bigger team, in order for teamwork to be be able to be effective, in order for effective teamwork to happen. And in order for that to happen, we have to actually care about the other people on the team. And the way that we care about other people on the team is by having a good relationship with them. So if I don't have any relationship what whatsoever with Kevin, I don't I don't care about his podcast. I'm not going to do my best to try and make sure he has a good podcast. But since I like you, since we have a good relationship, I want your podcast to to do well. I want this podcast to be great. And here's the thing. If I do that, if I put you before myself and I make sure that your podcast is good, I'm going to benefit from that, too. And but that that's not going to be my primary uh my primary objective. My primary objective is to to help you have a good podcast and to support you. But if I do that, then yes, in the end, I will also uh I will also benefit. And then establishing a purpose, I would say that that's the thing that I teach with that is alignment. We have to be we have to have a team and then we have to have the goal that we're all working toward. We have to make sure that everybody on the team is working in the same direction towards that same goal. Because if I'm working towards this goal and somebody else is working towards that goal, even if we do support each other, we're going to be so far apart from each other that we can't we can't work together effectively. So, we all have to be going towards the same objective, the same mission. I love that, Rob. I mean, it's so paradoxical because I think the tendency is when we want to be in the lead, when we want to win, it's like myself first. Like, I've got to only look out for myself if if we're going to do this. Yeah. And that can work for that might work a little bit, but in the end, it's not going to be a good strategy for you because everybody else is going to see that, too. And guess what? When you are looking out for yourself, when you're on a team, the rest of the team's going to see it and then you're going to be isolated. But yeah, I mean a lot of what we teach is counterintuitive. It's it's it's that goes against natural human tendencies. It's our human tendency to look out for yourself. That's what we're ingrained to do from our instincts or look out for our tribe, our small tribe. But really, we have to overcome that and look at the bigger team. And if we can do that, then not only is the team going to benefit, but we're going to benefit.Modeling resilience for your crew (and your kids)

So that we say what we say is if the team wins, everyone wins. Thanks for sharing that. Vimosity is more than training. It's a safety and readiness platform trusted by companies to keep their field professionals strong, healthy, and ready for the job. Now, we're launching something new, the Work Ready Community. It's the first online community built exclusively for field employees. A place to connect, learn, and lead the future of our industry. Join us and be part of the movement.

take us back to into that moment where you made contact with ID. But uh take our listeners through that experience the you know the impact your first thoughts when you came back to you know consciousness and and realized you know what had just taken place. Yeah. Yeah, you heard this story uh at the at the keynote. Um but my battalion and we were on a big mission. I won't go into the details of the mission. We were just all moving to the north and we were just going to take over a bunch of Taliban territory. That was our mission for the day. And the Taliban obviously didn't want us to do that. So they had placed a bunch of, you know, IEDs around and and where we were going to be going. And the way it worked is : in the afternoon, my squad at the battalion halted so we could get reorganized. So my squad halted in this one spot and then when we stepped back off maybe minutes later within seconds of us stepping off. Uh our point man stepped on an IED. Fortunately for everybody present it malfunction. So an IED is a big jug of explosives and then inside of the IED is tucked a little blasting cap which is about that big, you know, about the half of the size of a a big pen and it's stuffed with very volatile explosives. And what's supposed to happen is uh an electrical charge from the pressure plate connecting the wires in the pressure plate connects to a battery. The battery goes into that blasting cap. And that electrical charge is enough to ignite or or set off those volatile explosives and then when those go off it, you know, expose the main charge which is that judge of ammonium nitrate. And uh for whatever reason didn't go off appropriately. All that happened was that blasting cap exploded, but we allDiscovering Paralympic rowing—survive • recover • live

knew that, like I said earlier, where there's one, there's two, there's three, maybe even four. So, we knew that we were essentially in the middle of a this little small minefield, and it was my job to get us through because he was out there in the middle of the minefield. So, I had to find a safe path through. So, I stepped forward, started doing what I was talking about earlier, waving my metal detector back and forth in front of me. And in an instant, I just went from doing what I, you know, knew how to do and what I had been doing for the last months. I went from being up here like this to being on my back and I was screaming, you know, a lot a lot like you would hear in the movies from from somebody that had been wounded. They do a pretty good job there. Screaming my head off, shrieking, and my vision had been gone into a tunnel. I could see the sky and that was about it. And it was kind of like my my mind and my body had disconnected from each other. I I could tell my my body was screaming and doing all these things, but I wasn't act I wasn't telling it to consciously. It was just doing it on its own. It was acting, you know, primally and re or reacting primally to what had happened to me. But I was just kind of sitting there. I was aware of what was going on, but I wasn't controlling anything. I was just, you know, just aware. And even in those moments where I was just barely aware, I knew what had happened. Uh, I instinctively I knew that I had stepped on an IED and that parts of my legs were going to be gone. And then after about probably to seconds of that, I guess the endorphins got into my body and I calmed down a little bit. And then shortly after that, uh, a combat engineer had cleared a safe path to me and my fellow Marines were able to get to me and they put tourniquets on my legs really quick, uh, to stop the bleeding. And then the corman, which is a medic in the in the Navy and the Marine Corps, got to me next. He gave me a shot of morphine. And that really calmed me down. And then I was able to start thinking about things. And the first thoughts I had were about the future. I didn't think I was going to be able to work out. I didn't I was going to have to I was going to have to stop being a Marine, which is all I really knew at that point. This is the only path that I knew forward for myself. And I figured my mom I was going to be, you know, an invalid being taken care of by my mom for the rest of my life. Um and so I just asked these guys to kill me. I said just I don't want to live like this. Just just shoot me. And obviously they said no, you're going to be fine. Uh, and then I asked them if my legs were amputated above or below the knee, and they told me they were amputated below the knee, which is probably true, but by the time I woke up, they were amputated above the knee. But, uh, they, you know, after a couple minutes, they had called in helicopters and they moved me over to a stretcher and they carried that stretcher to this tank that was waiting. And then I remember the last thing I remember before I went unconscious again was just looking up at these Marines looking down on me in the back of the tank. I know who these guys were, but they, you know, they slid me in. I could see I remember seeing their faces and then the corman gave me another shot and he said, "This is going to put you to sleep." And I went to sleep and then I woke up in the hospital, you know, a couple days later. And were you transported to Germany when you woke up? Oh, not not immediately. So Okay. They transported me because that would have been you know a legit that would have taken days to get it took two days to get there. So I needed to be operated on immediately. Mhm. So they took me from sight of injury and saying in Afghanistan to I don't exact I think I think camp leatherneck either camp leatherneck or Bram you know it's big bases uh in Afghanistan. And I don't know which one I went to first. Uh there where they revised through they, you know, saved my life. They did a call for blood. You know, they got me some blood and uh stabilized me there. Once I was stable there, went to the next base to the next base, you know, more stabilization. Uh more amputation revision until finally Germany. And I think I was only in Germany for hours before they had me on a on a plane back to America. Thanks for sharing that. Um, you know, as as I think about those moments, you're you're in shock and you're thinking about all the things that like the way your life is going to be impacted. And that initial thought is like just I don't want to go through that, you know, shoot me. Um, you know, we know there are a lot of people going through dark times in life and like what would you say to those people who may be going through one of those dark moments as you've been through that that low point to where you are today and you you have hindsight to to say man um I'm so grateful to to be alive and um just love to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah, there'd be a lot of things to say obviously. Um the IHow iterative steps beat brute force (learning to walk/run/row again)

would say relevant to what we just talked about two things and the first thing would be um you have to keep an open mind and this is true in life and this is true in in leadership. This is one of the fundamental things that we teach in in leadership is to keep an open mind because the fact of the matter is no matter how much evidence you have, no matter how how good your theory is, no matter what you how good you are at what you do, you don't know what's going to happen. And if you close your mind and you decide what is going to happen before you even know for sure, then you're not going to see any other possibilities. You're not going to be able to listen to anybody else. You're not going to be able to work to get collaborate. You're not going to be able to change your mind. You're not going to be able to shift as things happen because you've already decided that this is what's going to happen and you've closed your mind to any other possibilities or any other opportunities. And so if you do that, you are effectively committing yourself to one thing. And if that one thing doesn't doesn't end up working out the way that you wanted it to, then you're not going to see another path and and you're going to you're not going to want to not going to want to continue. And so that's what had that's what happened. When I was there at sight of injury, I said, "Oh, this I just my legs just got blown off. So, this now means that can't stay in the Marine Corps. Not going to be able to exercise. Not going to be able to do anything that I want to do. My mom's going to take care of me like I'm a baby. I'm going to be in a wheelchair forever. That is what's going to happen. No other possibility could possibly occur. So, therefore, I want to die because I don't want to live that way. But if I had just been able to detach from that perspective and o open my mind some and say to myself, well maybe those thing maybe I won't be able to do those things. Uh actually it came to pass that I can do all those things that I thought I was going to be able to do. Um my mom doesn't take care of me like I'm a baby. I take care of babies. uh if I just keep kept my mind open to those possibilities that maybe these things these things are concerns but they're not guaranteed to it's not guaranteed to be this way. If I had been able to keep my mind open I probably wouldn't have been asked to kill because I could have been I would have been able to see all these millions and millions of possibilities for my life that could come from stepping on an IED or that could occur after stepping on an IED. But I didn't allow myself to see that and so I just closed my mind and and I wanted to be dead. So, first thing would be just keep your you you don't know what's going to happen. Even even when something really really really bad happens to you, you don't know what's going to happen as a result of that for sure. And the only way to to know is to find a new objective, find a new mission, and then pursue it and see what will happen and make it happen. Yeah. And the other thing would be, and I you're we're probably going to get to this uh with the next story um that I have a feeling you're going to want to talk about, which and that would be look out for the people that you care about. Find a way that you can help the people that you care about. And that is where you're going to gain the strength to continue forward no matter what happens. And I'll leave that there because I think you're probably going to get to the next thing. Well, and you know, you tell the story where you're laying there in the bed in the hospital bed and all these thoughts you you've you know, gotten past some of those, but you you have anxiety about your mom coming in and seeing you and like what is she going to think? And um and so your initial instinct is, well, I've got to make her laugh. And this goes back to like just who you are as a person and um and using that as a tool. I'd love you to tell a story about um the hat. Yeah. So, when I woke up in the hospital bed, I was barely conscious. I was so, you know, hopped up on all the medication that they they I think they typically try and keep you essentially anesthetized the entire time. You're not really supposed to wake up.