He Survived 4 IEDs. Then Music Helped Him Survive Coming Home | Richard Casper

Richard Casper survived four IED blasts as a Marine in Iraq.

But the fight that almost took him out did not happen overseas.

It happened when he came home.

In this episode of The Stephan Hogan Podcast, Richard Casper opens up about combat, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, survivor’s guilt, grief, veteran suicide, and the invisible wounds many veterans carry long after the war is over.

After Iraq, Richard struggled to explain what he was carrying. The memories. The guilt. The loss. The things most people could never understand unless they had lived through them.

Then he found something that helped him say what normal conversation could not.

Music.

Art.

Story.

That discovery became CreatiVets, a nonprofit helping veterans process trauma through songwriting, visual art, and creative expression.

Richard has now helped veterans walk into rooms with professional songwriters and artists and turn some of the heaviest parts of their lives into songs, paintings, and stories that finally give language to what they have been carrying.

This conversation is about war, but more than that, it is about coming home.

It is about the silence many veterans live with.

It is about PTSD, C-PTSD symptoms, traumatic brain injury, survivor’s guilt, and the fight to find purpose after service.

And it is about how creativity can reach places that words alone often cannot.

Donate to CreatiVets:
https://creativets.networkforgood.com/projects/93343-creativets-donation-page

Connect with CreatiVets:
https://creativets.org

In this episode:

Richard Casper surviving four IED blasts in Iraq

The hidden wounds of combat

Traumatic brain injury and PTSD after war

Survivor’s guilt and grief after losing fellow Marines

Why some veterans struggle to talk about what happened

The connection between veteran suicide, isolation, and purpose

How songwriting can help veterans tell the truth

Why art can reach places normal conversation cannot

The story behind CreatiVets

Helping veterans heal through music, visual art, and creative expression

What civilians need to understand about combat veterans

This episode is for veterans, military families, songwriters, artists, nonprofit leaders, and anyone who wants to better understand the war many service members are still fighting after they come home.

Subscribe to The Stephan Hogan Podcast for long-form conversations with artists, founders, builders, songwriters, leaders, and builders about faith, pressure, purpose, success, failure, and the cost of building something meaningful.

Sensitive topics in this episode include combat trauma, PTSD, grief, and veteran suicide.

Countrypolitan: https://shorturl.at/JtN6r
Studio Bank: https://www.studiobank.com/
Stage Water: https://stagewater.com/
Clothing: https://www.simonsaysnashville.com/

Filmed in Nashville, TN
Produced: Stephan Hogan
Mavericks Media Co. Production

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Yeah, I got selected to guard the president of the United States and I lived at Camp David for 14 months. I was in the second vehicle on the first like maybe month of our deployment, and I got blown up in November like 17th of 2006, and I tore cartilage in my chest. The the overpressure from the bomb went down my throat and expanded my lungs to a point where it tore cartilage in my chest. So January 2nd of 2017, I got blown up again. And that time they said it was a concussion. It was like on the side of the truck and it just blasted. And I got a concussion from that one. And then I got 24 hours off. Then January 17th, I got hit again. Early December, I moved to the first truck, the first vehicle commander, first truck. That's where Luke was shot and killed beside me. And then that's when January got hit. Um and then January 17th, I got hit again, then February 13th was the fourth time I got blown up. And that was directly underneath us. And that blew up both of our tires, and that's the one that like lifts you up off the ground because they melt down the road. Because they're old school roads like that. They melted down, put a bomb under there, melt it back, because it's just like that tar asphalt stuff. And then they sit really far away and just wait for you to drive over and go boom. All three of my siblings went to prison and jail. My sister, uh, my brother was tank quit. I just happened to meet Jelly Road, he was at a recollect tournament, and he gave me his number, and so and I still have the the voice text.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

I would take a church too whatever Charlie wants to be. That's my voice right there.

SPEAKER_02 1:28

And he just met these guys and they're just combat veterans with craziest ones in the wheelchair, the own's quadriplesic in a wheelchair. I was going to Vince's house, Vince Namey's house, on that Saturday to get adjusted by Rusty. He just puts up his table and he adjusts, and Vince's Amy are nice enough to invite some people over to get adjusted. I went there, I get to Vince's house like 145, and I go in the door, and then I get a text from the realtor who said, Hey, can you actually come like in 15 minutes to the church? I said, Oh crap, yeah. So I turn around, start walking out the door, and his door jams. If you're like his front door, like it kind of jams down and I couldn't get it open. And Vince comes around, he's like, You gotta really push that. And so I pushed it, and he's like, Did you he noticed I was only in there for like five minutes? He's like, Where are you going? You didn't even get adjusted. I said, Man, there's this church over here. He said, Oh, my daughter lives over there. Like, I know exactly what church you're talking about. Within that same breath, Amy comes around the corner to get a guitar from him for this event she's playing at night. She's like, Richard, what are you doing? I was like, Amy, there's this church. I I told her, I was like, I haven't had this set on this church since 2018, and now it's in my like hands that I can get this, but I need a minimum of $2.5 million to put down on this. And we've never even raised that in a year to get this place. And she's like, Well, there's a reason you showed up today, put it under contract.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

So, how hard was it for you to have to tell your trauma story the first time?

SPEAKER_02 2:51

Oh, the first time was the hardest. The the craziest story, and it's actually connected to music. When I was in Iraq, we weren't supposed to listen to music in the in the truck because of reasons. You're supposed to be like always watching the roads as you're driving down. Yeah, but who does that anyway? I know, right? And I had one of those Zooms. I don't know if you remember the Zooms. I had a I had a Zune instead of the iPod because I I lost my iPod, so I could only buy like this little Microsoft Zoom thing.

SPEAKER_01 3:15

All I saw was that you had a cool old school Zoom camera.

SPEAKER_02 3:19

Yeah, it was a yeah, it was like a little camerax where you just do the little thing. It's like only it was 20 gigabyte at the time. That was like the the top of the line, got out of Best Buy right before I deployed. It was pretty awesome. Yeah, but I'd listen to music actually in one of those videos, too. You could see me like changing songs. My gunner, who ended up being shot and killed, he was uh from Texas and from Kingwood, Texas. His dad's like a deacon in the church, and and I would I loved uh Mark Schultz, Christian singer. I love I had only country and Christian music on on my thing, and I didn't allow them to cuss in the truck either, um, which was hilarious. But because I was a vehicle commander, so I was the one that ran the truck, and I was just like, we're not doing that, we're just gonna go out here, do this, listen to this music. And over time, uh Luke he even told me, he's like, Thanks for for listening to all this music because you kind of brought me back to my faith a little bit, and he told me about his family, which I didn't know at the time. But there's this song by Mark Schultz called Running to Catch Myself. It's the funny, it's a five like five-minute, 45-second song about going to work every day and hating your life and your boss calling you the wrong name and all this stuff just to start it again on Monday. And the way he builds this thing up is orchestra, big band. Most people in town would never record a song like this just because it's so absurd and it has nothing to do with like his Christian music. But it when it came on, I would constantly play it. And then Luke started requesting that song. And so he was shot and killed in 2006. I had to stay in Iraq for another four or five months. The moment I touched down in 29 Palms, California, I was like, I want to see where Mark Schultz is playing next because I want to tell him that Luke, I want to tell him about Luke's life and how he helped him find Christ before he died. And I went online and I found he was playing in in Palm uh Palm Springs, which is 45 minutes away. He was playing in Palm Springs on the three days, like when I got home. So I come home, like land, see my mom and my niece, and I drive straight to the church that he's playing at, and I get there, and he's not on stage anymore. And I'm so pissed at myself. I'm like, you have a duty to go tell him that Luke lived and all about his story, and why can't you do that? And I'm sitting here going back and forth and just kind of mad at myself, and all of a sudden the door opens and he starts walking out. And I'm like, and so I run up to him, and I couldn't tell him about Luke. I felt so bad. I kept saying, My buddy, he I was like, and then he was, I started, he sees us crying, he's like, Let's go outside, let's go outside. So we went out to the porch and I was like, My buddy Luke, and I just kept crying. I was like, I can't do this. All you have to know is my buddy loved your music, you helped him, I'm gonna leave. And I just left. And I'm like, I was so distraught. And so I go back and I'm really mad. My my mom can't fly. She she's from Illinois, she won't fly. She's scared to death of it. So she drove three days to come see me at my at when I came home. And she was driving me back home. And so we stayed in in um Palm Spring, Swan and Palms area for another two days. And then we set off. We're we went on a road trip. And on our road trip, we're driving. At the time, I didn't like Cracker Barrel very much, only because of syrup. Not a big fan of the syrup. I am now cracker barrel. Oh, the like real maple syrup? The real, like thin maple syrup. I was never used to it. We always refrigerated ours. Like, come from a really poor family where it's like, you know, the wrap cheese and the white bread and just the hot dogs as like my main meal throughout the day. And so, and we had the Tom Tom was our GPS to get home, right? So we're driving and we're somewhere in Arizona, and we put in there for this Denny's or iHop or something like that. And we go right where the TomTom says to go. We pull off, we turn around. There is not one that is there. And I was mad because I was super hungry. I said, we'll just go to whatever next breakfast place is, let's stop there. So we go back on the interstate, we pull off, and it's a cracker barrel. I'm like, ah, whatever. So we go in, I sit down three days later, all of a sudden, Mark Schultz comes walking in. This is in Arizona now. He just walks in with his crew. I look at my mom. I'm so I'm so surprised that I just get up. I'm like, Mark, I'm the guy you just saw on Palm Springs like a few days ago. Uh I I want to tell you, my buddy Luke, like you, your song got him through deployment. You brought him closer to God just by having that funny song out there. And I got to have like a conversation with him and told him all about it. And he's like, That's crazy. Is he? And I was like, and what are you doing here? He's like, Oh, I rode my bike. I was like, Oh, I have a Harley too. He's like, No, I'm riding a bicycle across the country to raise awareness uh for widows and uh foster kids, I think it was. And that's what took him so long to get there. But what kind of timing and God work had that had to be that I was so mad I didn't get to share the story about Luke to him. And all of a sudden, three days later, I find him at a random cracker barrel in Arizona. That's crazy. So that was the hardest thing. That was the hardest time to try to tell my story to the one person who I thought needed to hear it the most. And from there, it was still super hard. And it wasn't until I discovered art that I still wasn't fully telling my story, but I was hiding my story and things, and it just tiptoed from there.

SPEAKER_01 8:15

When people come in to tell their stories, is it their first time a lot of the time?

SPEAKER_02 8:20

Most of the time it is, but they've already that's where we're a little bit different too. There's there's other songwriting programs for veterans and other just demographics that need help through songwriting. The big issue with those is typically like you'd be the songwriter, I'm the veteran, and we're just talking to each other now. So if a veteran doesn't want to tell you their story, like to a clinician, why are they just gonna tell it to a songwriter? They're probably not. So what we do is it it, and I did this for the first like 85 veterans who ever came through our program. Everyone who applied, I called them. Didn't matter where they were in the country. They can be Hawaii, they could be in California, they can be in Oregon, wherever. I'd call them and say, Hey, my name's Richard. You applied for a program. I just wanted you to know some of my story. I was blown up four times. I watched my friend die, I went through all this traumatic experience. I had to do one-on-one speeches with my speech teacher in college because my anxieties and depression were so bad. I was like, So will you just tell me some of your story? He's like, Oh, I served in the Marine Corps too. And then they're like, Well, yeah, also my buddy was killed beside me and all this stuff. So I'm going down this path of getting them to feel comfortable with me enough to tell me their story. And then I have multiple calls before that. And then I say, Hey, I'm gonna pay for your flight, your food, your housing to Nashville. But when you get on the off the plane, I'm gonna pick you up. I'm gonna be there with you. And so we start telling more war stories. And so it comes, it's this point to where it's so peer-to-peer that they don't care that they're telling me their story. And I say, Well, what's that one thing you can't talk about or tell your wife, or just that doesn't can't that doesn't get you through the day? And he'll tell me. And it sometimes it's the most insane things ever. I've I've had a few vendors tell me war crimes they committed that they're not proud of, but that they committed, and they're like, I have to get this off my chest. So then it's my job when we go into the the songwriting session with two writers, usually it's two pro writers. I'll lead off and say, Hey, this is my buddy Jesse. Here's some of his story. Actually, I was like, Jesse, we we have this song idea. What do you want to tell him about the song idea? So now in his head, too, it's it's a song idea, not a story. He's like, Oh yeah, we want to do this. And I would say, this isn't like an actual number that we've documented, but roughly based off my experience, around 60 to 70% of the veterans who go in these rooms are after they're done, they're like, I've never told anybody this before. So it's a it's a good feeling now because at the end of it, they're crying in the session, telling these stories about their friends who died or the people they had to take the life of. And then the moment the song's done, they're so excited they're texting their wife and those people they can't tell these stories to because they're so excited they have a song. So we repurpose their memory. So yeah, most of them they're more comfortable because of how we set this up with another mentor helping them guide them so they feel so comfortable holding their hand throughout the whole process and being in the room with them to make sure they could tell those stories.

SPEAKER_01 10:50

How does one go from starting to where you called the first 80 to where you're at now?

SPEAKER_02 10:58

I don't even know. I look back sometimes and like, how did we get here? Because now I have 10 employees. We do programs in like 19 cities, 14 states, Puerto Rico, served 1200 veterans, just bought that old band in church to turn it into a 24-hour art music center, and it was slow, slow, fast. I I in 2017-ish, we started into 2013 when I was just doing it by myself. I'd like to go out to well, my buddy Brett Gillen, he was the lead singer of a band in Bloomington, Illinois. He was the first one that taught me even what songwriting was. He was like, Yeah, I'm going to Nashville every week to find songs, write songs, do the thing, and then I come back and play him. And that was the first time I said, Oh, I could do songwriting. And he didn't know I was struggling, but that was my whole intention to start writing, was about my buddy who died. And um, so because I was coming to Nashville with him every once in a while, he would he'd he's the one that introduced me to Whiskey Jam and some of these other places. And it was, it was kind of crazy to see. I wasn't into music at first, and then I started going to Nashville to find songwriters for veterans, and he was one of the biggest like opening acts and and did a ton of work just in Illinois, Chicago, Iowa. Like he was a really big bandish in those areas, and um they started slowly dwindling down, and he would make more, he would do more with CreativeEts, not on CreativeEt staff or anything, because I wasn't even technically a staff member for four years. I was like a uh what do you call that independent contractor because I didn't make any money doing it. So that's how we had to put it. So for four years, I'm not even an employee of my own uh nonprofit, technically. But Brett, every once in a while, would help me. He would he'd be like, Oh, let's go to this bar, I know this person, and he would introduce me to a songwriter. And so slowly we started reversing roles to where he started helping me almost full time with creative eds. We lived together in this apartment and he'd go to things with me. And then um in 2000, I think it was 17, we finally had a little bit to give money to. And the brother of my buddy who was killed beside me, Luke Yepsen, his brother Kyle called me up one day because I met him after I visited his grave a bunch of times and just his family like a dewy every year. He called me and said, You know what? He's like, I'm seeing what you're doing in my brother's name. And it's and I'm tired. Luke told me I he doesn't want me to just spend my life working. That's exactly what he told me before he went to war, and now that's what I'm doing. I'm covering up from his experience by just working, working, working. He started this Texas track works down in Dallas. He said, Is there any opportunity for me to just come work for you? I said, Yes, actually, I would love for you to do that, but I don't have very much money at all. He's like, I don't care. So then I kind of had Brett and Kyle be part-time, and when I had those two, we started just scaling rapidly. Like I was able to do more with less. Like I had more people, but I could like spread those so I can go out and speak more about Creative Ets, recruit the songwriters, go out and do the things I had to do, meet the people I had to meet.

SPEAKER_01 13:46

Uh, did you have funding at this point from people donating to the nonprofit?

SPEAKER_02 13:50

Barely. Like we we had as a nonprofit at that time, we were probably like a hundred thousand dollar nonprofit. So we were doing stuff with no money at all. Like we couldn't pay people hardly. We're every veteran and every veteran that comes to town, you gotta think we're paying twice as much because we're paying for two veterans. We're paying for the veteran who's coming in, and then usually the mentor. For me, luckily, I was the mentor for those first ones, so it wasn't as much, but we still had to cover their hotel, their flights, their food while they're here. And it was about two veterans a month that would come in town and it was just one-on-one. I would pick up a veteran on like a Tuesday, we'd ride on a Wednesday, they fly out on a Thursday, and I'd pick up a veteran Thursday night from the airport, and then we'd ride on Friday, they'd fly out Saturday. It it was so exhausting because I had to live, relive my trauma story every time I was helping them understand their trauma story. So I would get worse as they got better, and then I'd have to like kind of recover a little bit and I'd write my own stories and do my own thing, and then I'd go back to the grind of just of getting them uh in there. So 2017 is also when I met this lady named Kira Pollock from Time Magazine, and it goes back to Chad Eastam, that first guy I met who introduced me to Kevin. He had me come to this TEDx talk uh and meet her. He told her a little bit of my story, and he was like, You gotta meet Richard. And I came backstage and talked to her before her big TED talk. She was so nervous. It was the probably the most wrong time to introduce me to somebody. And Chad would never, he was never like he always introduced me to people in the wild. Like when we were together, he knew everybody, but he hardly ever would call me to go somewhere. So that's why it was so weird too. And it was another kind of God moment where he did it probably at the worst time that nobody'd ever want to connect people. And he had me come and meet Kira right before her thing. And she said, I have two things I want to do for you. I think I don't know which one yet. Let's talk after this. And then so she goes back to New York, and then I get a call. She's like, Hey, we're selecting you to be one of Time's next generation leaders of 2017, and we want to do a documentary in life. I'm sitting here like, What? Like Time magazine, out of all this work I've done, we've never gotten any kind of attention, and we're still like a baby nonprofit. And I'm she heard every story. She's been putting photos in Time magazine before 9-11. So she's met the most interesting people in the world, and they've never done a documentary of those people. Now she wants to do a documentary on me. Like, why am I so special? Why is this so special? And so that was the first big break was like them coming in because then we get a little bit more uh notoriety. It's kind of like having a number one for your first time or like a top 10. For us in the nonprofit world, it's like, we got it, but now you have to lean in on it and try to get that next big right and that next big right. And so from there, it was able to bring on Kyle and Brett a little bit more. So now Brett can do all the stuff with the songwriter. So I didn't have to be the one always contacting songwriters, and he was kind of cultivating those relationships for me. And we just kind of scaled from there. And then in 2018, I was invited to be in George Bush's leadership program in Dallas, and that completely changed my scope of thinking. Because I went from like super poor family to combat, to art student, bouncer at a bar, to executive director. I had no idea what I was doing. I have no entrepreneurs in my family. And so at the Bush Institute, that was the first time I learned about nonprofits. I see all these other leaders knowing each other. They're like, Yeah, you going to Atlanta for that one symposium? You're it's like, wait, what is this? How do you guys know each other? They're like, oh yeah, there's this circuit of things we go to. This is how we find funders, this is how we do this. So I had no idea what was happening behind the scenes. So I started to lean into some so some of those relationships and we scaled like from a $300,000 nonprofit to 400 to 600 to 800 to 1 million to 2 million. It just kept growing from the the relationships that we've grown. And but each time it was more veterans served, more veterans served, more veterans served. And so we have intentions to be global. We we're building a prescription music platform to prescribe music to veterans to help them heal at VA hospitals. We're we're just really pushing the the throttle on how arts and music can truly save and educate people. Uh, and hopefully it'll bring more back to schools where it's more thoughtful around how they do it. But yeah, we're just we're running a gun and man, shooting from the hip most of the time, but it's been good.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

I'm curious about other people that might be listening that have ideas on like maybe they want to start a nonprofit. Maybe they have a dream or an itch to do something. And then at the beginning you're inevitably bootstrapping it, but then there comes the time where it's like you're like, oh shoot, we need to have money to find that to do X, Y, and Z. What is your kind of big piece of advice for people where they go wrong in that process of scaling something that might be a dream of theirs?

SPEAKER_02 18:33

Well, the first thing you have to do is look and see if it exists already. Like that's the big issue is for veteran organizations out there that serve veterans, there's like 46,000 veteran service organizations out there. So I have a lot of veterans who come to me like, I want to start a hunting fishing veteran nonprofit. I'm like, why? There's there's literally thousands of those. Like, well, I just love hunting and fishing myself. Like, man, the what you're about to set off into isn't like the normal world. It's already hard enough to do a startup just to have a company, but now imagine having a startup that's regulated by people just donate, giving you money for no product at all, and it's more uh governed over by IRS. Like you have to follow extreme rules. You have to, after a third year in, we had to get audited tax financials. We only had like a hundred thousand that we we made that year. Audited tax financials cost no less than 10 grand. So in my head, I now have to put $10,000 of administrative costs just to get audited so that the IRS could see I'm doing my job. It's it's set up in a way to make nonprofits not be successful. So it's so hard. You have to need and want to do this. I went through two relationships because I wasn't making money in the relationship because I knew what it was like to save someone's life. So there's nobody stopping me from helping veterans. I was living at Virginia Beach with this girl and she was just kind of tired of me not making money. So I said, screw this, because it was already two years into me starting creative, and I knew I wasn't doing what I needed to do. So I just moved to Nashville on a whim, paying for a room 500 bucks month to month uh by uh Frisk University. Someone was murdered like the first week I was there. I lived pretty much in this guy's closet, and it was an old bed that, like, if you laid on it, you always rolled to the middle. Um, because I had no money. And I, but I knew what it was like to save someone's life. So there's nothing that was gonna stop me. And that's the only reason we survived. I was so tenacious in how I did things, I was so specific on how I wanted to do things. And again, you have to have this drive to want to do this to start an on problem. Either tons of money, just go for it if you have that, or you you just you just have to. There was nobody doing what I was doing. And the people that were doing it were doing it in almost a dangerous way for you gotta imagine a veteran who's suicidal, if they're looking at your program, it needs to be so tight. It has to be because song reign is probably not not not the thing they were trying to do. You have to understand the whole veteran like idea. So there's this other nonprofit, I will not name its name. They do good work, but in this case, because I tell other nonprofits, I'm like, if you have someone who's so like bad off, please send them to us. Like, we know how to like really treat them. They did a Skype call with this veteran who opened up their entire, and it was a big, big gender hit writer. He poured out his he even he was like, he didn't want to do our program at first because of this other program. He said, I felt like I finally could tell my story because I was excited to write a song. So I told this guy everything, everything stuff I haven't even told my psychiatrist, and I wanted to get out there. And he said, Well, we can't put that in a song. And he's like, I just got off the Zoom call. I was like, You know how dangerous that is? If you're if you have people who are untrained to even hear these veteran stories, these veterans who think that people don't listen to them and they won't understand them, and all of a sudden you're sitting there like, Hey, let me help you tell your story, and you tell them a story, and they say, We can't tell that story. You're just putting them in a worse place than they are. So it's so hard. To set up a program that's like this, we've we've had a lot of funders who don't want to fund us because we spend too much per veteran. I'm like, you know what? I'll spend five grand on one veteran knowing they're gonna live the rest of their life rather than five grand on a hundred veterans because it makes you feel good that you help more people. And so we've had a lot of donors, we've had a lot of companies turn us down uh money, a lot of grants that say no, you spend too much per veteran. And so it's it's a hard, it's a hard world. I don't want to turn anybody truly away from trying to start something awesome, but I also want them to know you gotta be in it for the love of it. You can't be in it for money. You can't you can make a lot of money nonprofits, and people do like they make great salaries because you need those people to build these roles to manage 10 to 15 to 50 people around the country and do these things, but you won't do that for five, six years down the road, just like any good startup, anyways, where you're making money back from it. Um, and you so you can live the dream, have a salary, help people, and it's all good, but it's the toughest road to get to. And it sucks every day when you have to deal with the IRS and all these other things that you have to comply with.

SPEAKER_01 23:01

Are you at the point now where you get to spend the majority of your time focusing on building the company?

SPEAKER_02 23:06

Most of mine's building now. It's still, I just hired a COO for the first time ever to hopefully all internal like programs, or not programs, but all internal, like how do we treat employees? How do we do management? How do we build this culture? How do we do this? And I'm more going out around the even around the globe. I had an email legitimate this morning from the King's Trust, like King Charles, because they're they want to do a country uh event in London. And I've been certain to make my way to London to create if it's UK at one point because it's a turnkey program. And so now I have connections in these other countries too, which is pretty awesome. So helping build those bridges, which I've never been able to do before because I was always head down. Every songwriter was pretty much my contact and artist outside of like the ones that Brett had in every program I had to run or be a part of. And now Kyle runs our astrophotography program. Brett and now Tommy Carlos helped run all our songwriting programs. And I could do more of this stuff where I get to tell people about what we do, the impact that we're having, uh, and just keep building. And the donor cultivation is the hardest part. It's like, how do I talk you into giving me $10 a month over another nonprofit? And it's hard because you don't want to take money from other people too, but you want to show them how much you're doing, the impact that you're having. And so it becomes sometimes a competition with other nonprofits too, where I love to play with other nonprofits. Like we partner with like 40 other nonprofits, but most of them don't want to work with us because we steal a lot of their spotlight. Because we work with big artists, we have big players on board. We have, as a nonprofit, we have three record deals. We we have one with Extreme and APM Music out in LA, which helps for putting music and film and television now. We had one formerly Big Machine Records, now Hyde took over, so that they they have us under that catalog where we release music. And now we signed a deal with Warner to be our own label to distribute veterans' music. And so we're also managing all that and growing to try to create a revenue stream that will then come back to the veterans that we serve. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:58

So they can get some money off of that.

SPEAKER_02 25:00

100% and they get money and then we get a very small percentage that and they know now rather than having a distribution that'll take like 10% from them and just take it, ours is legitimately going to save other veterans' lives. And it's the coolest thing. Because most of them I'm telling them, like, hey, we have to take a percentage for overhead, but I just want you to know where it's going. They're like, no, I would give you more. Like, I don't like if my song could help save someone else's life and I get to make money off it and get notaried, like, yeah, I want to do that. So we're in this kind of building phase of that program. And our biggest, our biggest lift right now is that church that we just bought because we didn't have the money for it. And it was actually Vincent Amy that helped me get to that next level of finding the people to help me support it. And uh Gary Sinise, he was the biggest part of that.

SPEAKER_01 25:40

The word country politan comes from a real era in country music. When Nashville took country music and made it elegant, strings, background vocals, orchestra. It was country music with polish. Think Patsy Klein, Glenn Campbell, Tammy Wynette, George Jones, Charlie Pride. Songs that still had the ache and honesty of country, but dressed up with style. And that is exactly what this hotel feels like. The kind of place where every detail's been thought through. The scent when you walk in, the music, the clothes they carry, the textures, the rooms, the coffee cups, the way everything feels curated without feeling fake. So you feel the history immediately, but unlike staying right in the middle of Broadway, it feels tucked away, it feels calm, it feels like you found something. And that's honestly why I love it. It's where I go when I want to get away, think, slow down, have a restful time without technology. When you're ready, the Ryman and Broadway are about a four-minute walk. The CountryPolitan Hotel. Stay in the story.

SPEAKER_02 26:40

It's gonna be the first ever 24-hour art music center for veterans to heal at any time. There'll be like five riders' rooms, a podcast studio, wood shop, ceramic studio. The front end is gonna be like a mini ryman. We still have the pews. Uh we'll have that'll be for like original ryman pews. Yeah. Well, the original pews for the church.

SPEAKER_01 26:56

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:57

But they're like the rhyme pews where they're all the like the old, like super heavy ones. So we're gonna refurbish those and then put those back in there. So we'll have riders' rounds, hopefully not. It's almost like an art church.

SPEAKER_01 27:07

It will be, yeah. Because you there's some churches that have prayer rooms that are 24 hours, so it's like that.

SPEAKER_02 27:13

No, 100%. And that's what we've kind of lost the we've kind of lost sight of that is that if it's 1 a.m. and you have a PTSD flare up, or you get in a fight with your spouse, or you you're in this bad place, there's only the emergency room or the bar. That's the only two places you can go, or just drive around. There's not one place that you can go and just be creative. So imagine it's 1 a.m. and you're just like, dog, this is so stupid. You can just go right there and go to the writer's room, write a song. You can go down and beat the hell out of some clay and do whatever you want. So that'll be like a beacon of hope for so many veterans around the country to come to. But we're in the middle of our capital campaign. Now we had to we had to outfit it. We bought it, it's ours, but now we have to outfit it and build it up.

SPEAKER_01 27:52

It's time to get the uh the things inside the building. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 27:57

How much do you need? It's uh the first phase is about a little lower than $2 million just to put us in the door, but then we're gonna need another four million after that to actually build it up. But the cool thing about this property, it's gonna net us roughly a million a year, probably after the second to third year, just off of performances, weddings, rental space, because we have 19,000 square feet. We're gonna do a coffee shop on the downstairs of the auditorium, and then some of the side rooms will be uh rented by other nonprofits. So we'll have and then Weastern Rise Time is gonna rent. I'll give them a little discount, but Weastern Rise Time is gonna rent a room there too. So we're gonna have community partners, it's gonna raise so much money for us in the future that it'll support all of our admin and overhead costs.

SPEAKER_01 28:35

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 28:36

So over time it's gonna be so much more impactful.

SPEAKER_01 28:38

If they wanted to donate just randomly at this point, but for real, because it's happening as we speak, where do they go?

SPEAKER_02 28:44

So creativeets.org, and you spell out creative and then put a TS at the end. There's no double Vs in there where some people get lost thinking it's two words. It's one word, creativeets.org. And there's even a little tab for capital campaign if they want to support the church specifically. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 28:59

Uh capital campaign, that's the one that you're doing right now.

SPEAKER_02 29:02

But we're really pushing for monthly donors. I didn't know the power of monthly donors for a while. I always went after the big fish. I went after that person who could 75,000, 100,000, 250,000. But I didn't realize that over time, if I had a thousand donors a month that gave me $10 a month, like that's already I'm like, oh my gosh, yeah, $10,000 a month. Sweet. And then it's the subscription model. 100%. I never pushed it at all. And so even right now we're doing America 250, like we want 250 new monthly donors by July 4th, if we can. Um, because that just that pushes the needle for us. And then if we can get another 250 the next few months and then another thousand, we'd be self-sustainable just from monthly donors. And I should have been doing this. I've been on so many stages now where I try to impress those big companies and donors. But if on every one of those stages, I would have said, Can you just give 10 bucks a month, like a little more than a cup of coffee, to help us keep going? And I think almost everyone would say yes.

SPEAKER_01 30:00

You'd be like, pull out your phone right now and text blank to this number. 100%. And you'll donate 10 bucks a month.

SPEAKER_02 30:06

Yeah. And so now we do we do have the text campaign and we have some stuff online, but it's it's it's what is the text campaign? Um, yeah, it's on our website. I don't even have the number memorized, but we'll we when people donate, they'll usually give their number to and we'll be able to do text campaign around other stuff like the capital campaign that we're doing. Or we have a text give number that we have.

SPEAKER_01 30:23

We'll put it in the show notes. No, I would love that. Uh what side will I be on? Somewhere over here, I believe it'll appear right now. Um so it's male mental health month right now. And 80% of suicides in America are men. And what is it in the veteran community?

SPEAKER_02 30:51

Well, there is over 20 suicides a day in the veteran community, and that's just the low numbers. That's from the VA DOD summit, like or VA VA DOD numbers. There's another group called American Warrior Partnership that went down to the corner report and and went deeper into it that say it's a minimum of 24 suicides a day up to 44. So it's we actually outpace the normal citizen, I think 20% in suicide. So we're the highest rate of suicide to any demographic veterans are in male veterans. Uh Native American Pacific Islanders are number one, and then white Caucasians number two, and it kind of goes down the list. But it's it's so I mean, I think just men in general have a hard time opening it up and expressing themselves. But that's why I love Nashville and I love songwriting, I love the arts, and that's why I don't like that it doesn't get the credit it needs to be at, because most of us avoid it because we think it's emotional, because we think art therapy, we think, oh, I don't want to share my feelings. But if we use it as a tool, a real tool to get something out of us in real time, it's it's like taking a pill, but in a better way. Because you, if you have a headache, papa tono. If you have these thoughts, you go and create something out of art, you turn it into a song. We have this ability to put it outside of ourselves through music and arts. And there's this whole wave of people who are like, I ain't doing art, I ain't doing music. And that's how I was, and that's what completely changed me. So I'm trying to be uh more of a catalyst to what arts is and what it's not. And so you can do again, you can do art therapy, you could tape a banana to a wall, but there's this middle section that the world needs to know it's okay to do. And I think if we start with veterans, like we have an active duty Delta Force guy who works with us. He was on the Maduro raid and everything, but he does some stuff with us. We've had Navy SEALs, we have all these macho men who typically wouldn't do arts who are now doing it. And military is really good at like all the research we've done on mental health is because of the military. All the advancements we had in medical health around uh amputations is all because of the wars, like World War II and World War I. That's why in Vietnam uh era there is more people that live through amputations than any other year at war. And then all of a sudden, now we're in this war where we're having people with all four limbs blown off that are surviving. I think we could do the same thing with mental health overall. If veterans could lead the way and the things that we're doing could trickle down into the population, I think men will be more vulnerable in their own ways. We're empowering them to tell their own stories so they don't have to tell them. And that's what we need to get at. We just need to find a way to get it out, but we don't like talking about it. So use art to do that.

SPEAKER_01 33:23

So for a dude listening to this, if he wasn't a vet, but he's suicidal.

SPEAKER_02 33:29

Art is one of those things that you feel like is that they yeah, that they probably didn't try before, they probably don't know about it, but you still have to be really intentional. You gotta think, what's that one thing I can't talk about? And then how do I go to just enroll into a community college and take some art courses with no intention other than I need to try to figure out how to create what's in my head and put it outside of me without telling anybody, almost make it like a challenge. In the community college, you can do a continued education course for maybe a few hundred bucks in anywhere around the country and just start diving into that. Or again, songwriting. And now with, I mean, I know sometimes it's forbidden to talk about things like Suno in town, but if you're a a person who's never done anything, but you have these words in your head, throw those words into Suno and turn it into a song that makes you feel good, that you could finally hopefully send to somebody and say, This is how I feel. Because that's all we need. We some we need someone to speak for us most of the time, and that's what art and that's what music does. And that's where I think some of these tools are so good for the greater humanity of like healing and processing trauma. Uh, but then other people see it as stealing jobs and like not destroying a whole industry. And that's what I love and hate about AI. Well is that tech doing both.

SPEAKER_01 34:40

That's technology in general for a lot of tech. Uh I think there's always going to be the good uses for it and the bad uses for it, just like the internet. 100%. So Suno, for those that don't know, if you don't know by now, is a cool AI platform where you could like I've done it after a co-wright where I'll take a demo. We can plug it in, just the acoustic vocal, and it will create an entire demo and whatever genre we want. We can say, you know, have it this style, put acoustic guitar in the intro. You can like mess with it all you want. You put input the lyrics, and it'll pop out an AI song, and you can just keep popping out more versions of that same song. Yep. If you're around Music Row, you've probably heard of studio bank or know someone that bangs with them, and there's a reason for that. They set out to rethink the typical experience, put people at the center of it, infuse innovative technology with genuine hospitality. Their whole idea is to be uncommonly modern and surprisingly human. That's a big part of why I'm proud to partner with them. They do not make you feel like a number. You get real people, real support, and a team that actually cares about what you're building, whether that's your business, your family, or your future. They also offer immediate ATM fee reversal at any ATM machine in the entire world. That's why a lot of my friends that are on the road bank with them, visit studiobank.com or call 615-338-9998. Let them know Stefan Hogan sent you and see how Studio Bank can serve you today. Studio Bank, member FDIC Equal Housing Lender.

SPEAKER_02 36:13

But I had a guy on LinkedIn. It was a Marine I served with a long, long time ago. I haven't talked to this guy since I left uh the Marine Corps. And I saw he he posted this. He's like, I just put out an album and I started listening to the songs. And it was so good that I was like, wait a minute, these are different voices. I think I'm pretty sure this is Suno. It was like when Suno first hit where you really couldn't tell at first, like the untrained ear. And I was like, I think this, and I messaged him and I said, Hey man, this is a cool project. Did you actually, you know, have like hire someone to sing this, or did you? Or he's like, Oh no, I just put on Sunos like they're all my words, but he's like, I can't tell you how powerful this was for me. He's like, I've been struggling for so long, and I finally found something that allowed me to share my voice. And that's when I really saw it as a tool to help people. And I go back and forth too, because we use Session Musician. Every time we record or write veteran songs back to Stacey Opry, the next day we go in with some of the best session musicians in town and we tell their stories. And it's so hard because you know that their jobs at one point will probably go away because of this. But you also, as a nonprofit, if there's a way, like with our prescription music platform we're building, we have songs that I know that not every veteran is going to want to hear a country song of this song. We have a song called Trigger. We wrote with Eric Dylan about this guy who planned the day, he was gonna take his life and he tried to do it and the bullet didn't it didn't fire. And we wrote a song called Trigger, and it's so powerful. We actually released that one with Eric Dylan singing it. But I want that one that sounds like also like a rap song and sounds like a Christian song and sounds like a pop song because I know that if a veteran was trying to find themselves in a song, the music also has to be their kind of music. So if I wanted to hire the session band to take all 700 songs and turn them into four genres, how much would that be? Millions of dollars. Or I could have a Suno membership and turn those all into other songs. So there's things.

SPEAKER_01 38:02

And for going global too. You're not gonna have the national guy session musicians.

SPEAKER_02 38:06

Global is a whole new way of artists. Imagine Amy Grant, baby baby, that now she could translate in a hundred and different languages and put out around the world as her voice, especially with like what Randy Travis did. When you actually have your own voice that translates in multiple countries, it's also good for the artists because they're more revenue, more countries getting their word out more. So I just think there's so many great uses for it again, but I also it hurts the the craft and the creativeness of of the people who are just in it.

SPEAKER_01 38:34

Yeah, but we'd be lying if we if we didn't acknowledge a lot of hit songwriters every day in this town on Music Row or finishing their song and snapping it in the suno.

SPEAKER_02 38:42

No, 100%. And I know big big writers, especially in pop, that work with different, they legitimately are doing sync camps. And I just went to Portugal with one of them and we did this thing where we wrote in real time, we found a bunch of Suno tracks and we found some other beats off another website, and we created the song, and then we went back and just whole reproduced the whole thing differently but similar. And so that's what a lot of people do. And then a lot of the hit writers in country are half writing songs and then putting the vocals of their friend who's a country artist and being like, Hey, listen to the song I just wrote. And they're like, I'm not done with it. And that same artist is like, Oh, you're not done? Can I get in on this? And so there's like tricky ways that people are using it to uh kind of upgrade what they're trying to do, but it's a tool, you gotta use it as a tool. Yeah, it's like it's only gonna enhance what you're trying to do and put it out there.

SPEAKER_01 39:27

Did you see Scott Borshetta's college speech where he talked about it? Only the viral part where he talked about it. What did you think about that?

SPEAKER_02 39:33

Well, that's where it is a tool, it's it's a legitimate tool. I tell everyone, it's on the art side too. I work with big artists in the fine arts world, and I remember bringing up AI artwork. He's like, I was like, dude, you got to get on board or get out. You're I have a brain injury. Why am I not allowed to create art like you because I was blown up in Iraq? I have this thing in front of me that could allow me to create anything that I need to get off my chest in real time, and you're taking that away from me because you just don't make me use technology. And so when you use it as the tool and as the right tool, you got to get on board. Like it's it's going, it's our it's like streaming back in the day when everyone was like, streaming's not gonna take, and all of a sudden the labels are buying into streaming now because they went way past them, because nobody's looking to the future. You have to be buying into it. Warner's the only one I think that is they partner with Suno directly and they got a lot of gap from it. They're the only, I think, major label that has now partnered with um uh AI music platform. Yeah, so we'll and and they got a ton of crap for it.

SPEAKER_01 40:32

So they did, but they're some part, some understandably, because I think they're training the model off of their catalog, yeah. But at the same time, it's kind of inevitable, and Warner's a business. So they're gonna do what they're gonna do, and it's gonna make the uh AI a lot better at making music and making art. But that's something that I didn't think about about the person that doesn't is never gonna listen to country, but maybe somebody's gonna listen to hip hop, you know.

SPEAKER_02 41:00

And it'd be it could even be the same lyrics and everything, but just a different thing. Exactly. And then uh on the whole level of people who haven't found their voices too. We had a we had this quadriplegic marine. Legitimate can't move from the neck down, so obviously can't play an instrument, can't do any of that. And we wrote a song and it was a phenomenal song, and there was an opportunity I had with the Titans to um showcase his song and surprise him with it. And I just happened to meet Jelly Royal, he was at our golf tournament and he gave me his number, and so and I still have the the voice text where uh actually, yeah, I'll pull it up because I pitched him this idea. I was like, hey man, remember meeting Charlie at our uh at our event, him and Big Mike. I was like, Well, I'm going to have Big Mike invite Charlie up to say Big Mike's being honored. But what I want you to do is sing this song that he wrote with Kelsey Kulik, and it's in a female vocal and everything. And I was like, Would you surprise him at the at the Titans game with it? And uh where's this at? This is what he sent me back. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:01

Man, you know Charlie and Big Mike, man, that's my boys, man. So if Charlie wants me to sing the song, it would uh I would sing it for sure, whatever Charlie wants me to do, whatever y'all want me to do. Oh, that's my boys right there.

SPEAKER_02 42:14

And he just met these guys, and they're just combat veterans with crazy. So once in a wheelchair, the owners quadruple in a wheelchair. Yeah, and um, I pitched it, then I sent him the song as a female vocalist, Kelsey Kulik, who's now signed by Universal. He's like, Man, could I change this key? And I was like, dude, whatever you want to do. And he did full band Titan say it's online. There's a whole segment of him. He even came in and shot a video. And the cool thing was, we didn't know Charlie would actually say Jelly Roll's his favorite singer. We surprised him because he lives in Florida. We had a guy go there and say, Hey, we want you to do a video for Creative Ets just to promote Creative Ets. And he asked him a bunch of questions. And then he's like, Yeah, with your song though, is there anybody you'd love to just sing your song one day? He's like, Man, I wish Jelly Roll would sing my song. So we got it. And then the Titans film Jelly Roll on this end, uh, doing it, and he does this whole speech. So you see him on the video in this Titans game, giving this whole speech to Charlie. Charlie still doesn't know what's going on, and he's like, and you know what? Uh we have the best person to sing your song, Garth Brooks, come on out. And he's like, just kidding, I'm gonna do it. And then it cuts to him on stage and he like plays the song for him. And I'm like, this is so cool. These moments in time, just like it's the coolest thing ever being a surprise. And not only given given him a voice, oh yeah, but where I was going with that was like two weeks later, Jelly Rule on one of his vlogs, he's it was called like best week ever, because he he just played with um uh huge rock band that he idolizes. Now it just it was there, now it's gone. But then he talked about Charlie and he said, Charlie was the first person to make me realize like I only write, I only release songs I write, but I'm not allowing that someone who doesn't have a voice. Like, I kind of want to put Charlie's song out because he doesn't have the voice that I do, and why would I not give him that? Because he physically can't do this, and that's Kind of what switched in his brain at the same time that I was thinking, yeah, that's exactly why the AI does the same thing. It's given the voiceless a voice, it's given the people who don't have the tools the tools. And if we have we work with a lot of guys who don't have arms but they want to create art, why can't they use like a Chat GPT image creator or Photoshop image creator? Why can't that be considered art just because they didn't do it themselves? They don't have the means to do it themselves. Yeah, dude, that jelly roll stuff's awesome. Oh my gosh. He didn't have to do it. It was uh it was on his up and up that album. He had that thing on Hulu happen at the same time. And says a lot about someone, yeah. And that's where I always go back to is just their nature. Same with Vince. Like he never had to give me his number and invite me to his house and do these things for me. And same with Amy. There's certain people. Brantley, I have a really cool story around Brantley, too. Cause I had my hat right now. Oh, I didn't I didn't even know that. I didn't even look up. I'm just locked in, man. The cool thing about Brantley, so there's a lot of artists I deal with too who you you think are super pro-patriotic, and they probably are in their own rights. But when I asked them to do stuff, creative eds and others, it just doesn't always work out, which is fine. Again, there's a lot of nonprofits out there.

SPEAKER_01 45:05

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SPEAKER_02 45:45

When you talk about a like a person who truly cares about the person who's in front of them, I get a random text and it just says, Brantley Gilbert here. Do you have a moment for a call? But the way it said Brentley Gilbert here, I was like, this has to be like a I didn't have his number. I only met him once before that. I was like, this has to be like a prank. So I call my buddy Brian Davis and I say, Hey man, you're the only one I know right now, like that I know has Brantley's number. I was like, is this him? And he's like, No, yeah, that's him. He called me to get your number. And I was like, okay. So then I call him and he's like, hey, I just met this guy at my concert. He's a veteran, he's pursuing he's active duty army, he's pursuing music. Can I connect you all? I was like, Yeah. And then he text connect me, me, this active duty army guy, which means at a concert, he found this guy who wanted to do music. And then he remembered that he met a guy, Richard, who does helps veterans, uh, and he sought his friend to find his number to give to me. Like the whole process and chain, any other artist, most other artists would have just been like, oh man, yeah, you should look up Creative Ets. Like I've dealt with artists who say stuff like that, like, oh, go to my Twitter, tweet me on there, or go to this thing. And instead of just saying going to Creative Ets, he said, Hold on, let me call a friend, let me text this guy I never talked to before outside that one interaction, and then let me connect you to. And now he's done that twice. So there's certain people in the industry that might get a bad rap for other things, but then they just drop everything where they don't have to. And it's it's it's awesome. It feels really good.

SPEAKER_01 47:09

What is one thing that most people don't know about you?

SPEAKER_02 47:13

Um I talk so much now about my story. One thing that people don't know about me. I mean, my childhood, a lot of people, I mean, all three of my siblings went to prison and jail. Even my sister, uh, my brother was a San Quentin. He's like, my whole childhood is is kind of I'll talk about it when people want to talk, but it never comes up in the story. Like grew up on food stamps and uh I want to know about it. Yeah, I had CPS called on us because they didn't, you know, I'd go without eating lunch a lot of days because my mom wouldn't put money. She'd not intentionally, but she wouldn't put money out sometimes. She'd forget to because she was already at work. And um so were you raised by a single mom? No, no, mom and dad, but my dad was a trucker, so he's gone the entire week, but then we'd come home and he'd drink the rest of the week. So I'd like come out, I'd come out some days to walk. I've lived exactly a mile from school, and I knew that because my brother was on house arrest while he's still in school, so he had to know how far it was. And I'd come out with like my book bag on, ready to walk a mile to school, and I'd hear this blaring music, and I look up, and my dad's truck is on, he's passed out in it, the side mirror's broken out, and he's just jamming out to music. And I just like walk to school. And so, like, that was my my life is one thing that a lot of people don't know about, like how I got to where I'm at. That's just usually never conversation. I don't mind talking about it. It's just one of those things that most people will never know about. So all of your siblings ended up in jail or prison. At one point, yeah. And my brother's homeless in Florida now. The other one now, the oldest, lives with my mom in her basement, has like extreme, like almost schizophrenia now, bipolarness, all because he's just lived his life in prison system, population and drugs and alcohol and just constant uh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:52

Because uh in the Time documentary I watched, it talked about you coming home to your mom and saying at age 15 that you wanted to join them or go to war. Yeah. Is that the year that the Twin Towers were here?

SPEAKER_02 49:07

Well, so it was I was I was a junior. How old are you when you're junior? Like 16? So I was 16 when I just well, when I was 15, I knew I wanted to go to the military. I didn't I didn't want to go to war. I never like was like, I'm gonna go to the water.

SPEAKER_01 49:19

Yeah, maybe that's not what she said.

SPEAKER_02 49:21

15 honestly like 13, 14, 15, I knew I was going to the military because I need to get out of town, but I had this sense of service. And then it wasn't until 9-11 happened that I said, okay, screw this. I'm gonna go to whatever, whoever's going first. And that's when at 17 I signed up and then 18, two weeks out of high school, I went to Marine Corps boot camp.

SPEAKER_01 49:39

And then that's where they put you through all those psychological stuff.

SPEAKER_02 49:42

Yeah, which I didn't know about because I didn't sign up to guard the president of the United States and I did the guard the that's something else some people, a lot of people don't know when they meet me. It's not a conversation starter, it's only when I do my speeches around the country. But yeah, I got selected to guard the president of the United States and I lived at Camp David for 14 months. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:58

What was uh, if you can say, the hardest psychological test?

SPEAKER_02 50:03

Well, those weren't even that bad because it was there were so they were more to figure out if you're if you were willing to like give your money to someone to give them secrets. And they asked me if, you know, does your family travel outside? It was a lot of questionnaire testing. Espionage. It was a lot of like, hey, does your family go across country or leave the country a lot? Do you do this? Do you talk in your sleep? They even want to know if you'd like maybe spill secrets in your sleep. And it was more of like an actual testing, testing a bunch of apples and oranges. They they pair people off. You'd have to do interviews. So it wasn't as intensive of like physical, mental kind of training. Because from there, Marine Corps boot camp does that enough. Three months of just intensity. And then we had to do two months of school of infantry, anyways, to train to be an infantryman in the height of the war. But then all my friends went off to war and started dying. When I went off to Chesapeake, Virginia to go to security force school to how to learn how to like pistol, shotgun, MP5, all that. And then I went to Washington, DC for 11 months until my clearance went through. That's when they send an FBI to my small town of Washburn, Illinois, 1100 people in the town. And like they, but they don't send the FBI to the people you think they would. They're not sending it to your family or friends, they'll send it to your neighbor you never talked to. They'll send it to your high school best friend's cousin, and they're trying to find from like sources the true personality that you have, and if you're gonna divulge secrets, if you're like the right type of person. And so somehow I because I instantly was like, I'm not getting this job with my family history. There's no way I'm getting this job. But I guess I did well enough that they let me do it. Maybe that's why. I think it is, and I think it's because the people they talk to too, because they're probably like, we never had a problem with him. He's always been loyal, he's always done this. Like it was um, I've oh something else nobody usually knows unless I bring it up. I've never even tasted beer, never tasted alcohol. And it was because I had a family of alcoholics, and I decided at a young age, I said, you know what, none of them are successful, and they all either do drugs or drink alcohol. I'm just gonna not do either, and maybe I'll be successful. So I also did that.

SPEAKER_01 52:02

Did you choose friends in high school specifically to safeguard yourself?

SPEAKER_02 52:07

No, I could couldn't choose friends because it was I was 22 kids in my class. Seven girls, yeah. And it wasn't even a private school.

SPEAKER_01 52:13

Seven girls? Yeah, just tough pickings buying it out.

SPEAKER_02 52:16

Yeah, no, I was kind of nerdy too back then. I had like the bull cut and the I was only like 155 pounds too. I was like a beanstalk. Uh, so I didn't get the ladies, even all seven of them. I didn't get any of them. But we it was like such a tight-knit group that even uh one of the guys that tried to fight me his first day there, like legitimately, we got in a fist fight. I mainly blocked the whole time because I was like, I don't want to fight. Um, but then we became best friends because you can't help it just to become friends with every single person. And people are in a small town like that, people are dating the girl you just dated because legitimately that's all you can do or try to go to another town.

SPEAKER_01 52:52

Sounds like my wife's high school. Yeah. 20, 22, and you're graduating class, so high school. Yeah, my niece.

SPEAKER_02 53:01

15 dudes. Yeah, she has eight people in her class that she graduated with.

SPEAKER_01 53:05

Your niece? Yeah, she's that's just getting everyone's just bouncing.

SPEAKER_02 53:09

Yeah, but then the next class has like 40. It's kind of stagnant. But I mean, because the town's so small, it's not even a town, it's a village, which I got a key to. I got a key to the village for all the work I do.

SPEAKER_01 53:19

That's one of my life goals is to get to get a gee a key to Cameron Park, right? Yeah, I really want that. That's where the little city I grew up in or town. Um, I got a long way to go though, to get the key. You can do it. But I always thought if I got the key, then I'd be good enough, you know. Like, I don't know, there's that little part of you. I don't know if you ever fueled. Did you ever have like a negative core belief about yourself from high school not getting the girls, not feeling good enough that fueled you to be like, I'm gonna get the girls.

SPEAKER_02 53:48

Oh, yeah. No, most of the time it's well, oh, that's where I was going with the drinking thing. Glad you brought that back. Because I'd have my own, it was crazy because when I first didn't want to drink, it was peer pressure, peer pressure. Girls would be like, I can make you drink. It'd be like, guys be like, You're a pussy if you don't drink, all this stuff. But the moment they realized I wasn't gonna do it when I passed those tests, they were my biggest defenders. Same with my family. It was crazy. People would like, they'd block people, be like, don't even try, like, don't give them, try to give them alcohol, don't try to. And it was really cool to see that if you if you sustain to the peer pressure long enough, you find your true friends who are so like, if he's not gonna do it, I'm not gonna let anybody even try to make him do it. And that happened in the Marine Corps. I joined the Marine Corps, they're like, We're gonna make you drink all this stuff. And then again, those became my biggest advocates for not drinking. They're just like, but I also, every time they did it, it made me want to not do it more. And so that happens in creative. When people tell me I can't do stuff, I'm like, I'm gonna do it. That the church is that biggest example. I didn't have money for that church at all, and it became for sale. And I was like, this is gonna be our forever home. This is the one I want. It was way more than I ever thought I could make. My own board, my own staff, everyone was like, You can't get this. And I even a few times like I can't get this, but I was like, and then everybody I called, they're like, You have to have a capital campaign person. You can't do this without a capital campaign person. And I was like, Nope. You're like, watch hold my soda water. No, I was like, there is no way I'm not gonna not get this place. And it took a while, but it ended up getting uh three one million dollar donors. Like Creavits has never received a gift over 150,000 all the way up until this church project. And I had three one million dollar donors within two weeks of just like that just came in. It was a whole nother God story, it was insane. But again, I now we have to.

SPEAKER_01 55:30

See, speaking of God, I have to ask, because how many times in your career in doing creative vets and pouring your heart and your passion into this have you been like, How are we gonna do the next thing? Or I don't see in my head at all like a way forward through this obstacle.

SPEAKER_02 55:49

Man, through legitimate, through God, nothing has ever there's always been things that I'm like, this may not happen, but I don't care because I'm going for it. The church project was it tested me left, right, up and down, where I just kept, but I always have was there a lot of this though, like in her dialogue with God of like, is this the right thing? A little bit, but I also have I was so trusting in Amy. Amy said, This is what Amy usually talks about when because she was a part of this whole process. She helped, she came on tours. I just text her back, hey, I'm gonna tour it with this donor. Will you come up here just to kind of prove that this is a place that we want to be a part of? And um, I every day, every time we had a downfall, I told her, I was like, Amy, I'm either this place is either meant for us or I'm holding it for somebody else. So I had a backup plan was like, if it's not for me, it's for somebody else. There's always gonna be a reason why I'm on this path. Same thing with Luke Dying. Worst day of my life, best day of every veteran's life who's been through one of our programs because he's the reason I built Creative Vets. And now every single trauma, every single thing that I say it's it's almost impossible to do, or maybe it's not gonna happen, there's a reason it's either going to happen or not gonna happen. I have such a kind of a dumb blind faith now that I knew that even if that church didn't happen, that it'd be revealed to me probably in five to ten years why it didn't happen. So I and I had a conversation around um uh with uh actually Connor Smith um after his tragic accident that he had, and he spoke at this event um during it's called CRS Believers. Okay, he told his story about taking the life of that lady at the crosswalk and the whole story leading up to it in his process. And he has such a cool redemption story. But the one thing he said that I had to push back on that I went and told him afterwards, he said, I will never know why this happened until I meet God or what something that along that line. Like everything else is so positive until that moment. He's like, I'll never know why this happened. So I went up to him afterwards and I said, Hey, I just want to tell you I loved everything you said, but that part I want to push back on. Because you're gonna know why that happened some point in your life while you're still alive, if you're looking for it. One day you're gonna have a person who's been through that same exact situation hear you speak, and they're gonna come up to you and tell you their story, and you're gonna end up maybe writing a song with them, maybe making them feel like they're not alone, and they're not gonna kill themselves or they're not gonna do this. There's if you believe there's a reason, like if God put this in your path, it's in your path for a reason. And so never say that you're never gonna see why. But it's so hard to do that when you're in your when Luke died, there's no way I was like, something's good's gonna happen from this. I was so in denial, all this stuff until creatives is formed and we saved that first veteran's life and then the next veteran's life, and the next veteran's life. So I kind of have this to my wife's chagrin, she hates it because I'm so like, yeah, let's buy a house. What's worse thing? We lose a house. Oh yeah, let's have kids. Like, what's the worst thing? We lose our money. But also just my blind face in God and like what I've done and where I'm going, I know it's right. And so, like ethically right in what I'm trying to do and trying to accomplish. I feel like it's on I'm on his path. And then if ever something comes up and I don't get it or it doesn't happen, I'm never like, dang it, why didn't that happen? I was supposed to get this song, or I was supposed to do this thing. It's like there's probably a reason why that didn't happen, and I just don't lose sleep over it anymore. So it's it's actually a really awesome place to be in that I wish more people could be in.

SPEAKER_01 59:15

So you're really holding life with an open hand. Yeah. Which is a it's almost like a place of surrender in and of itself to be able to have that attitude about something where it's like, if this church isn't mine, it's somebody else's. Yeah. It's not the right one for us. And and then you're detached from it somewhat, and you don't get the idea.

SPEAKER_02 59:34

So it's more code, but I like I was like, this I wanted that. I saw it in 2018 for the first time and told myself when we were $300,000 on profit that that's gonna be ours. I was like, that's gonna be mine. I even called the council member about that space in between. Was it what church is where? So it's uh uh Robertson Avenue, it's like right when White Bridge exit. If you're going to Target off White Bridge on uh 40, like going out um west, west end, Bellevue, that area. Okay, and it's right off the highway. But if you turn like a right it off Whitebridge and a left on Robertson, it's right there, two and a half acres. You could see it from the interstate from the stoplight where the target is. Was it for sale back then? It never for sale. It was just sitting the some owners that had it were just trying to redevelop it into a hotel. And so when I kept saying that that's gonna be ours, and then when I saw the first sale sign when I was driving by one day, and I called the guy, he said, I don't have the money for this, but tell me about it. And he told me about it. I said, Well, I I'm interested, but again, I don't have money, but here's what I want to do. And he's like, Well, I'll call you if it comes back on the market. And he ended up calling me on a Friday, and it was it was the same. The Tuesday was for sale, Friday he called me, said balls in your court. I was like, dude, I can't do this, but I'm gonna go look at it anyways. When can I see it? He said, Tomorrow, like come in tomorrow, Saturday around 4 p.m. So now that I'm really close, I don't know if you know Vince's um um his chiropractor, Rusty Cross, if you met him yet, dude. Magic. He he's Rusty Cross. He's actually he'll be here Friday if you need an adjustment. Okay. Um, I was going to Vince's house, Vince and Amy's house, on that Saturday to get adjusted by Rusty. He just puts up his table and he adjusts, and Vince and Amy are nice enough to invite some people over to get adjusted. And so I went there, I get to Vince's house like 145, and I go in the door, and then I get a text from the realtor who said, Hey, can you actually come like in 15 minutes to the church? I was like, Oh crap, yeah. So I turn around, start walking out the door, and his door jams. If you ever like his front door, like it kind of jams down and I couldn't get it open. And Vince comes around, he's like, You gotta really push that. And so I pushed it and he's like, Did you he noticed I was only in there for like five minutes? He's like, Where are you going? You didn't even get adjusted. Said, man, there's this church over here. He's like, Oh, my daughter lives over there. Like, I know exactly what church you're talking about. Within that same breath, Amy comes around the corner to get a guitar from him for this event she's playing at night. She's like, Richard, what are you doing? I was like, Amy, there's this church. I I told her, I was like, I have that that set on this church since 2018, and now it's in my like hands that I could get this, but I need a minimum of $2.5 million to put down on this. And we've never even raised that in a year to get this place. And she's like, Well, there's a reason you showed up today. Put it under contract. We'll try to help in some way. And I was like, Okay. And then I go, I tour the place, fall in love with it. It's in shambles, but it's still the place. And then uh probably six weeks later, she lets me speak at her house to like eight individuals. I tell my story about where I come from, how I started creative that's what we're doing to empower wounded veterans. And then I get to this church, talk about it. And she says, Oh, Richard, I I never told you this, but a week before you showed up to my house, I actually was in the parking lot of that church and I prayed over it verbally. I don't know what's coming here, but I want to be a part of it. And that's why she actually was so open to helping me find people to invest in it, because she legitimately just asked God to put her in the path of this church. And I showed up a week later and be like, There's this church I'm trying to save. And so that's how the process started. It was yeah, a whole nother another God thing. Dude, God he just shows up, man. When I when I ask him, and uh it's been a blessing, and it really is a blessing to be able to be. I understand a lot of people are not in this headspace where they could do this, but I almost died so many times that I just gave it all up to God. I said, There's a reason I'm here. I I right when I got back from Iraq, I hit a deer on my heartlake going like 55, and I survived that. And that was the moment I said, you know what? If I didn't get killed in Iraq, I didn't get killed before that in my high school days, and I just hit this deer and I'm totally okay. There's a reason I'm here. And that's actually the only reason I even dove into art because I was I was like, if this is in my path, I'm just gonna take it, I guess, because God put it in my path.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:44

Why not? Yeah. Four IEDs. Yep. Improvised explosive device. I wonder what the odds are of hitting four, because early on in Iraq, there were they were ever well, they were everywhere the whole time, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:03:58

Yeah, I mean the majority got smarter is in 2006 and seven were the most IED deaths. Um, it's like 900 in one of those years and a thousand the other year, but then the next year it went down to 400 and then down to like 200 and down to like 15. But it was crazy. I was the only one in my whole unit hit by four. There was I was in the second truck, like there's four trucks we roll around on four Humvees. I was in the second vehicle on the first like maybe month of our deployment, and I got blown up in November like 17th of 2006, and I tore cartilage in my chest. The the overpressure from the bomb went down my throat and expanded my lungs to a point where it tore cartilage in my chest.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:39

So that was so does your whole Humvee just go.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:42

No, these are mostly from the side. Almost everyone besides the last one was from the side. So it's one of those where the shock wave does more damage than the shrapnel. Like the shrapnel goes into the vehicle and the the up armor protects you enough most of the time that it's not a physical, physical thing. It's the amount of shock wave that pushes you so fast that your brain bounces against your genes. Yeah and your organs, your skull will go so far this way, but your brain will stay in the same spot because of the shock wave and it'll bounce off your skull. That's what usually causes the brain injury. But in this case, because there's an opening in the top of the Humvee, when it blasted, it went down in that hole. And I guess my mouth was open and it went into my lungs and expanded it to the point of torque cartilage. Jeez. Um, so that was fun.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:26

And then how long were you medical?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:28

None. I wasn't. They they checked me out, and then they're like, okay, you're good to go. So I was went back to on patrol the next day. So I just went with like really bad chest cramps uh and breathing issues. But I just went back the next day. And then so it was the second one. So January 2nd of 2017, I got blown up again, and that time they said it was a concussion. It was like on the side of the truck and it just blasted, and I got a concussion from that one. Um, and then I got 24 hours off. So they let me they let me chill for 24 hours, and I went back to work on January. 4th. Then January 17th, I got hit again. Um, and oh yeah. So two weeks later, you get hit again. So yeah, November I was in that second truck, and then um by by early December, I moved to the first truck, first vehicle commander, first truck. That's where Luke was shot and killed beside me. And then that's when January I got hit. Um, and then January 17th, I got hit again. Then February 13th was the fourth time I got blown up, and that was directly underneath us, and that blew up both of our tires, and that's the one that like lifts you up off the ground because they melt down the road because they're old school roads like that. They melted down, put a bomb under there, melt it back because it's just like that tar asphalt stuff. And then they sit really far away and just wait for you to drive over and go boom. And so that one blew up, and that they said I wasn't able to work anymore because that was my third concussion. And so we drive back to this little Ford operating base where they they check us out and they said, Hey, you can't work anymore. That was your front, like you're just going back to Fallujah, Camp Fallujah. Uh, and then we got word over the wire that the people who replaced us got hit by an even bigger bomb and people had to be metavaced, like broken bones, like probably they thought they were gonna die, they're being medevaced. You guys got to go back out. That's another time where I believed in God so much that I was like, oh, uh, my job isn't done. I have to go out there and die now. That was the first time I was ever truly scared and anxious in war, was because I said, Oh, this is against the grain. There's been a process to where you're not supposed to go anymore, you go here, but now something happened, and now God's sending me back out because I didn't die for my country like I'm supposed to. Like that was my actual thought. And I was that was the first time I legitimately thought I was gonna die for probably over two hours. And that was the worst feeling ever. But I go out there, replace them. I even get out of the truck, even knowing I might die. I still get out of the truck for a little bit, go treat the um the Iraqi wounded that were hitting the thing too. And then I just kind of go back to the truck and I sit there in the whole drive back to base. I'm I'm just waiting to be blown up that last time. And I finally get to base and I kind of calm down a little bit. And I didn't feel that scared again until I came home from war and I had my first like bout of anxiety from my PTSD and all.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:04

Like a panic attack?

SPEAKER_02 1:08:05

Yeah, like and not quite a panic attack, but the same feeling of just like I'm gonna remove myself from all these situations and not talk to anybody and just and just be a recluse because I can't go out into the real world.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:17

So do you feel like there's been a huge improvement in time over time in being able to help people that are going from crazy intense getting blown up to civilian culture?

SPEAKER_02 1:08:30

Yeah, I mean, just overall in general, over the years, like in 2017, PTSD and TBI weren't even talked about in the military. There was nobody treating them. And then as we grow as an organization, it's easier. It's easier as me as I grow in my own story and help other people and get more word out. But just nonprofits in general, now it's easier now for them than ever, because this whole wave of mental health is downstream again from the military study and PTSD and veteran suicide, that it is becoming more okay and okay to talk about it and be more vulnerable about it. And even our music, we released our music through Big Machine, like I was talking about, and we have 25 million streams of our music where I've I've had inmates email or like send us actual letters saying, You help me from killing myself because I found your music on this old iPad. I had spouses email me say, Hey, your song saved my marriage because my husband wouldn't tell me anything about war. But when he heard your song, he's he related to the person of the song so much he started telling me things he's never told me before. So we knew that we had something in that music going out there. So our music is helping more people be vulnerable to an old Vietnam veteran on Facebook message us and said, I just found your music and I spent 18 years in the military Vietnam veteran, and I relate to every one of your songs. It's helped my PTSD so much. And so I that's where I also have a lot of uh like a lot of hope is that the more music that we can create and put out to the world, more people that listen to it, it's gonna help them heal through the process of the trauma. And lastly, I'll say on that too, is we had this veteran who wrote a song. It was the longest ever. We were with Lance Carpenter, um, and it was a 12-hour song because this veteran wanted very specific things. We sat there for 12 hours to help him write this song, him and Chris Ferrara. And um, he wanted so much in the song. There was a song called Ripples. We haven't released it, it's just it was his song about his buddy and this nine-year-old that was throwing grenades over this wall in Afghanistan that was blowing him up and killing his friends. This whole song. Well, then he'd stream on Twitch, just video games on Twitch. This guy, he'd have like four to 15 people watching him. But every single night when he ended this stream, he played a song. He then told us, he's like, Yeah, this like 12-year-old kid who who emailed me saying, like, hey, I was gonna kill myself until I heard your song. He said, I was like, What? I'm just being bullied. Here's a guy I could see on screen who's been through hella back and he still survives. And so I think two kids he saved in the last 10 years just from his song. So that's another thing that really encouraged me about more people and men opening up about their experiences and trauma that it's gonna downstream to this culture who's gonna be okay about talking about it and being vulnerable and doing arts. How can we help, man? Open that checkbook up.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:03

No, but it obviously we don't use checks, open that Apple Pay, open your iPhone.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:07

Um, Venmo me. No, it truly is. We're one of those nonprofits where there's a lot to just each year try to get their quota of what they're trying to do. The things that we're pushing for, if you can't tell, through even we should write sometime and from Create Events, we're pushing the envelope on all those things, rewrite the music industry, but also for veterans, just heal them around the globe. And so we have big ambitions and we have an awesome track record and the people we work with, the lives that we save. So we truly need investment from the community. We need those monthly donors to come in and those big sponsors and companies who want to support us so we can grow and finish off the prescription music platform because that ain't cheap and trying to build that and activate that in the VA hospitals around the country. Um, the whole building process so that we can start creating revenue off that to help support our admin fundraising costs so we can help even more veterans. Because I know that we can be up to 5,000 veters a year to 10,000 veterans a year, just all the veterans that we could touch were music. And again, it's gonna downstream into culture, downstream into the kids who want to learn about music and arts are gonna see their favorite Navy SEAL doing art and music, and they're gonna want to do it for the first time. So just know that it's it's a legitimate investment and in everyone's future, I feel like.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:14

Okay, so we can go to give us all the Instagram handle. Yeah, so Instagram's creative. It's C R E A T I V. Yep. E T E T S.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:25

Yep, creative vets.

unknown 1:12:27

But one.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:28

That's so weird because I just read it as creative and then vets. Yep, creative vets. But you're reading is creative at creative vets.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:35

Some people will say, Yeah, some people will be like, they'll search creative vets, and so they'll do two Vs. Yeah, that's the the one V. So sometimes it is hard when you can't see it on something. But yeah, creativeets.org, if you click on the music, it'll take you to every stream platform and you can listen to our music, and that just provides royalties back to us to help serve more veterans. Um, and then you could donate a monthly donor. If you if you have the capacity to do 10 bucks a month, 20 bucks a month, please do that because that is gonna help us forecast and know where we're going and just help us. If we lose a big funder, all of a sudden we have all these mighty little funders who are gonna help us.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:11

Yeah, and if you lose one mighty little funder that can't, you know, afford the 10 bucks because they're in hard times, it doesn't take down the 100%, yeah. Yeah, man. I think what there's there's uh strength in numbers and being able to get a lot of people on board for that. It's a a premium experience at Starbucks is nine dollars, according to their CEO. So if you can do ten dollars, you get to help someone and save a life, yeah, potentially, or you are part of some safe life. 100%. So that's really cool. I appreciate you, Richard. Man, you're like I could talk to you all day because I feel like you're the like most interesting person ever. Something we didn't talk about. I'll probably say it in the intro. You have a you know a purple heart, but like reading about just like your journey, um, some of your childhood stuff to like the different right and left turns your life has taken, you probably would have never imagined yourself where you're at now. No, not at all. But what I wanted to say in closing is that I heard this recently from a pastor, and it was interesting because and you mentioned it about um when you pushed back and you said you're gonna know why that happened. Um, I always did you ever watch the David movie with your kids?

SPEAKER_02 1:14:25

No, but my son, he goes natural Christian, he went to it and he loved it.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:29

Yeah, dude, you need to watch that movie, but it's crazy because every time in scripture, before God creates the like warrior or the man or the king, or Jesus was in the wilderness for 40 days before he started his ministry, and then the Israelites were in the wilderness before they got to the promised land, and David was under trying to be killed by Saul before he became king, and you like see all of these like men that are torn down before the rise and before they're where God wanted them to be for what their purpose was. And it's cool to hear your story because I think that that whole tearing down process is like it's like uh what the lion witch in the wardrobe where the Aslan is getting his scales ripped off. And I think that happens with these vets when they open up and they talk about what's going on inside of them, and it's the scales being torn off, it's things being brought into the light. It might be the hard time from the darkest hour of you being a drunk and an alcoholic and wanting to kill yourself, or the trigger, or the bullet misfiring, or whatever, and then God uses it, and it's really cool to see how that's happened in your life over and over and over. And uh it's inspiring, man, because I think a lot of I can speak for myself. I know for me, there's a lot of times where I'll be like, Why is this happening? And you ask for the why. Yeah, but then I'm like, God, you're out of time. You know what the you know what the end is, you know what's next. I don't, so I'm just gonna trust you. Yeah, but it's cool to hear that and where your heart is and why you did what you did and going and doing those two rights a week and just hustling to save lives because you're a friend. That's something that anybody can get get behind, you know. So everybody go check out Creative Eds, definitely. Thank you, Richard, for being here. Thank you for real, man. Um, and then also We Should Write Sometime is a platform that you've created with Kevin, and it's a way for co-writers to be able to connect. So you can go to the Apple App Store and download We Should Write Some Time and sign up, and you can get paired with other songwriters that are looking to write. And that's a really cool thing that we didn't even touch on today. But between Creative Vets, We Should Write Some Time and many other things. Richard's very busy, man. So I'm glad that you had the time to be here today. Uh, over half of you aren't subscribed that watch this podcast, it's your free gift to us so we can keep bringing you awesome conversations like the one I had with Richard today. So please hit smash that subscribe button and uh we'll see you back here next week for another conversation. Peace. Killed it. Thanks, bro. Dude, you're good at this. You should do this more often.