Episode 176 Jesse Simpson Action Oriented – Rebuilding LIves After Trauma
This transcript is from episode 176 with guest Jesse Simpson.
Scott DeLuzio 00:00:00 Thanks for tuning into the Drive On Podcast, where we’re focused on giving hope and strength to the entire military community. Whether you’re a veteran, active duty, guard, reserve, or family member, this podcast will share inspirational stories and resources that are useful to you. I’m your host, Scott DeLuzio. Now let’s get on with the show. Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Drive On Podcast. Today, my guest is Jesse Simpson. Jesse is a Marine veteran turned entrepreneur. Jesse runs a company called Action-Oriented, which helps people rebuild their lives after a trauma or transition. His journey is one with the theme that it’s never too late to transform your life. I’m excited to have you on today, Jesse, in chat about you, your story and your background, and how you got to where you are today. Welcome to the show.
Jesse Simpson 00:00:58 Hey Scott, thanks Scott for having me on.
Scott DeLuzio 00:01:00 Yeah, absolutely. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?
Jesse Simpson 00:01:05 Yeah, sure. My name’s Jesse Simpson. I’m a Marine Corps combat veteran. I served four years in the United States Marine Corps and I served five years as a fi four years as a firefighter in the state of Arizona. Currently, I’m working now with men to help them own their powers so they can stand as pillars of strength and security and their family and community. I left the fire service about four years ago and my life has taken a wild ride, but it was the military and the fire service that really made me and provided a structure for me to step into this role that I’m taking on now. I really believe I’m grateful for these opportunities to connect with other veterans like you Scott and to share our stories with the world because I believe that the veteran community is the warrior class of our generation. Right now we are being called to step up and continue our life of service for our families, our communities, our country, and the world around us. I’m grateful to be here.
Scott DeLuzio 00:02:00 Yeah, absolutely. I’m glad that you’re here to share the story because I totally agree that I think stories like yours and the stuff that you’re doing can really have a positive impact on the veterans that are out there. Let’s take it back a little bit and let’s talk about how you ended up in the Marine Corps. Was this like a childhood ambition? Were there others in your family that served or how’d you end up in the Marines?
Jesse Simpson 00:02:29 Yeah, that’s a great question. For me, my journey takes me back to my childhood. I had a really troubled childhood. I dealt with a lot of anger and anxiety, and a lot of disconnection in my family. My single mom was raising her four kids. My older brother had cancer during that time. It was a very hard time growing up. My mom filed for bankruptcy twice when we were growing up or you’re struggling financially. My mom was emotionally bankrupt and she was projecting all that, her kids. Me as a young boy, when my dad left, when I was seven just took a lot of the weight on that. I felt completely disconnected, completely unloved, completely alone in, in my family, and in school. I started to act out a lot. I’d get in trouble for smoking weed, cussing out teachers, skipping class.
Jesse Simpson 00:03:18 It was deemed at-risk troubled youth, all these sorts of things. These labels I was given. But one day in the summer of 2001, I got in a fight with my mom. It was just like the last straw for me. I was completely just like a broken little boy. I went upstairs with a butcher knife and dug it into my wrist, wishing I was dead. I realized I felt responsible for the sadness that my mom was experiencing from the turmoil she felt with her business. These things are going on with my older brother, and I just felt responsible. And I was just like, I’m just going to end this for myself. For the rest of my family, put us all at peace. But I had this moment of clarity up thereafter I was digging this knife into my wrist.
Jesse Simpson 00:04:04 When I realized that if I were to do this, I would be even more responsible for more of my mom’s sadness. I saw a picture of her coming up and like seeing my dead body upstairs in my room. I stopped. I put the knife down and just kind of covered up the marks on my wrist and just went about my life. I was going into seventh-grade that year and it was then September 11th, 2001. I was sitting in a seventh-grade reading class that morning, unsure of what it all meant. Really it was that day that changed the trajectory of my life. It gave me a sense of purpose, a calling to serve something larger than myself. Of course, I didn’t have those words to describe it at the time, but it was because of that because of what I saw happen when the firefighters from New York City ran into the twin towers with complete disregard for their own safety in support of complete strangers.That helped me shift the things, the focus from myself, the pain that I was feeling to the idea that I can serve other people and it can, it can bring value to my life and the world around us.
Jesse Simpson 00:05:09 I saw the Butler Marines going in overseas when the war on terror kicked off. I thought about how bad it was to go over there and fight for freedom. It was just as hard as that time period was for me. It really gave me a sense of purpose. Ever since seventh grade, I’d wanted to be a Marine and a firefighter. It was that September day in New York City that started at all for me. I continued to get in trouble a lot, but I cleaned it up just enough to graduate early from high school and join the Marine Corps. I went off into the summer. I graduated early from high school and went off in January of 2007 to be a United States Marine.
Scott DeLuzio 00:05:48 That’s an interesting journey that you took. I liked how you talked about how you had that moment of clarity that your mother would end up having even more pain and more suffering if you went through with what you initially set off to do. I think that’s an important thing for people to realize. While you might end the pain for yourself, it’s really not ending. It’s really transferring it to somebody else. I think that’s an important thing that some people don’t really think all the way through when they’re setting off on something like that. I think that was first off, I’m glad that you had that moment of clarity and thought about that.
Scott DeLuzio 00:06:47 I also think that it’s an important message to spread to other people as well because the pain that you’re going through is seemingly ending for you. it doesn’t mean that it’s ending. It’s really just being transferred onto your loved ones. Nobody wants to do that to their loved ones. That’s not what anyone is setting off to do. We want to make things better. We don’t want to make things worse. So while you’re in the Marines, what was your job in the Marines, and what did you do while you’re there?
Jesse Simpson 00:07:34 I was super motivated coming out of high school, went to all the MEPS things, signed up my junior year. How to get my parents to sign me up and stuff like that. I remember when I went in the first time, I was like, I want to be infantry. I went in there and there’s this staff Sergeant Recruiter. He had his mannequin dummy with all his combat gear on it. Knee pads and elbow pads and all these things. Look really bad-ass. I learned later on that, at least from my experience, the grunts were wearing a bunch of knee pads and elbow pads, not what we really did. It was funny going in, this dude played this Moto video. Like in Iraq when he was there, showing like dead freaking Taliban or whatever was going on in that video.
Jesse Simpson 00:08:19 But either way, it was super motivating. I went in there and I was like, I don’t want to be infantry. He’s like, you want to be infantry? I was like, yeah, thanks. He’s like, you think so? He got on my ass thinking that I wanted to be infantry. He’s like if you think there’s a way you’re going to be infantry. I’m like, oh shit. Okay. It kind of pushed me up there a little bit and really started to help me own that a little bit. I always wanted to be a MITRE. I really felt the call to serve in that capacity. I went in as an infantryman and I ended up being an infantry machine gunner, choosing machine gun rounds in the school of infantry. That was my thing.
Jesse Simpson 00:08:52 I served four years. I had a lot of energy, a lot of focus, and I was just missing structure and discipline from my childhood because my dad wasn’t around as much as I needed to in the military. So I excelled in that environment and I started to grow as a leader. I was meritoriously promoted twice. I was named marine of the quarter. At one point I was pushed ahead and made a squad leader ahead of all my peers. It was a lot for me to learn as a young man developing as a leader in the situations I got to go on three deployments. The first two were used where we floated around basically Southeast Asia. We sat in the Gulf of Yemen for a while and conducted security patrols.
Jesse Simpson 00:09:35 They told us we were there in case anything were to go down, but really we just traveled to the Philippines, Thailand, Japan, Malaysia, and were there serving operations outside of Yemen in 2009 when there were some things going on there. I wasn’t telling the way back from that deployment. anybody who served from at least from my experience, during the time of war knew at least in the Marines infantry. You’re planning on going to war. We were all super motivated and they were always telling us to prepare for this because that’s where we’re going. Even up to like the day before I’m used to it, even while we were on the muse, they were saying, we’re getting ready to go into Afghanistan. I think that’s just the thing to kind of keep your triggering and alerts and focus on what you need to do.
Jesse Simpson 00:10:23 We kind of lost a lot of us and lost a little bit of hope. We were coming back towards the end of our second deployment in 2010. A lot of us are getting out and we’re going to miss the opportunity. To serve really at the highest capacity in combat, and then in like February 2010 on the way back from our second month, well, my second deployment, we got word they were doing that big push. They were doing a big push. Troop surge in Afghanistan. We have the opportunity to voluntarily go to Afghanistan really right after our second deployment. We came back and we had like three weeks. We had one week of leave and we got two weeks to get our shit together and pack up and go to Afghanistan. I spent the summer of 2010 in Afghanistan, serving in combat and really sort of fulfilling this intention, to serve in that way. Man, it was so different than what I thought it would be. I’m grateful for having the opportunity, but it was one of those challenging experiences of my life. That’s the answer to the question so we can keep going wherever you want from here.
Scott DeLuzio 00:11:35 I think that change in a changing environment and that structure and discipline that you were lacking as a kid, you might look at someone who is in high school getting in trouble all the time. You might look at them like, okay, well this, this person might not amount to much in their life. really at the end of the day, it could just be something like what you’re talking about. It could just be that they’re lacking that structure, the discipline, that rigor in their life to give them an environment where they’re going to succeed. When you join the Marine Corps, obviously a very structured environment, that was an environment where you were able to excel and succeed because you had that structure that you were lacking.
Scott DeLuzio 00:12:32 Looking at that story and thinking to myself, someone might be quick to judge someone like yourself who was in high school, maybe getting in trouble and things like that quick to judge that person and say, oh, that person’s just not going to amount to much. We might even do that as adults, too. We might look at someone who is just in the wrong environment and they may have the ability to, succeed, but, it’s really just helping that person find that right. Structured environment so that they can succeed and do what they’re fully capable of doing. I like that you pointed that out.
Jesse Simpson 00:13:15 Let me hit off that a little bit, Scott. I think you’re spot on and I want to say like, for me as a kid, and I think all young men, what we need is that structure. Whether it’s coming from sports or martial arts or something like that, and we need a masculine presence because my dad wasn’t there. He moved away. I lived in Iowa, he was living in Arkansas. I only saw him every once in a while. I didn’t have that masculine presence. Fortunately for me also in seventh grade. I acted out and I wasn’t getting the attention, the direction that I needed as a young man, which all young men need. I act it out so natural, it’s a natural process that I was experiencing, but you’re absolutely right. I felt like a complete failure.
Jesse Simpson 00:13:57 I was a total failure. I felt absolutely worthless as a kid. I felt like everything I said was stupid. Everything about my life was like failure, failure, failure, and everything on the outside. I continued to create situations and experiences in my life that reaffirmed that feeling of failure that I had inside. It was like divine intervention for me because 9/11 had a huge impact on my life in seventh grade. I’m just a little bit further into seventh grade. I was actually introduced to a man that I really believe saved my life. His name was Mr. Blue. He worked in my school as a juvenile court officer. He was like a former Kansas City Chiefs football player, a big dude. He became my first mentor and he didn’t do too much other than just provide a little bit of structure.
Jesse Simpson 00:14:41 He’d take us to the YMCA to play basketball. I lifted weights with him for the first time. He was just there. His presence was really what kind of gave a little bit of that. LI did not want to get in trouble anymore during that next year and a half, because I would miss the opportunity to go to the YMCA and play basketball. That’s how that presence of him, Mr. Blue really saved my life. It was an interesting time. I remember in eighth grade I took a downtown tour of the downtown juvenile court detention center of the town where I grew up. It was like a scare tactic sort of experience. Like you’re going to end up here if you don’t get your shit together. I was down there with like 73 boys.
Jesse Simpson 00:15:23 At the end of that tour, we went and sat in front of a judge. The judge lectured us for like 30, 45 minutes. Then at the end of it, he pointed out the first boy, he said, you’ll be dead. By the time he turned 18, he pointed to the second boy you’ll be in jail. Then he pointed to the third boy. He’s like, you have the chance to write your own story. I don’t know what happened to those other boys. Because Mr. Blue got laid off not long after that. And then my freshman year, I ended up getting kicked out of my house. I left that sort of environment behind. I don’t know what happened to those other boys, but I always say I’ve been given a chance to write a new story for my life and it’s tough as it was as a kid to experience these things. I know that they were exactly what I had to experience. I could step into leadership roles and I’m stepping into the things I serve. That push to become a Marine and these sorts of things. I just wanted to say that yet the structure is so important to us now. Now I look back as a man, like showing up for a young man in my community in whatever capacity that is, is so important, for ourselves and for the next generation.
Scott DeLuzio 00:16:32 Yeah, absolutely. I couldn’t agree with that more. I think that structure has that masculine presence. I think all of that is super important for people growing up, but that young boys growing up to show them really have that kind of a role model or something to emulate in their own lives so that they’re having that positive influence so that they become good men when they grow up as well. I think that that’s super important too. After your time in the military kind of fast forward a little bit here, like everyone else who gets out of the military. You had this transition period where you got out and had to figure out what you wanted to do with your life. What was that transition out of the military, like for you?
Jesse Simpson 00:17:35 Yes, that’s a great question. It was incredibly difficult. I’ll start there. I have a beef now really with how we separate from the military. but my experience of it, like I just got, I went from my second deployment, 2009, 2010, went to Afghanistan, all of summer, 2010, got back fall 2010. Then I was scheduled to get out like two months later from the Marine Corps. I had like two, two, and a half months between serving in combat and then being really unleashed on the civilian world. My experience of separating from the Marines was, and this was 2010, basically. 12 years ago, it’s crazy. We’re basically being coached into how to become victims in identifying things that can get us money for the rest of our life, PTSD ringing in the ears, the sort of aches and pains that we have. I didn’t have this perspective at the time I was, oh shit, everyone’s doing this.
Jesse Simpson 00:18:37 We should try to get as much money as we can. that was my experience. That was my like plan when getting on the Marines was to try to collect as much disability as I could collect much as much unemployment, which is another thing that coaches to do, getting unemployment checks and then going to community college and collecting GI bill and just trying to collect as much money as I can while smoking, sitting around smoking weed on the couch. I tried that for the first, like two weeks when I got out of the Marine Corps and I started to get really depressed. I started to fester a lot, like getting really anxious and angry and all these emotions that I have been suppressing from my childhood, from serving in combat, these sort of different things started popping up.
Jesse Simpson 00:19:13 I started to struggle a bit with a lot of well. A lot of the anger. I was yelling at my roommates, and causing problems and definitely anxiety, which I didn’t know what it was at the time. Substance abuse became a thing for me. I went into more party drugs and these sorts of things. I just started to like parties a lot. I had an opportunity when I was going to community college, in which my plan was still to become a firefighter. I went to Paris. I was going the EMT paramedic route in community college, still with the intention of becoming a firefighter. I was struggling with this sort of stuff, trying to navigate my internal emotional experience, and like being around a bunch of people who didn’t understand. When I got other Marines, it was because I was jealous in a way of like my friends and family who are back home, like living the college life and partying on the weekends.
Jesse Simpson 00:20:05 I was like, damn, that’s all like, awesome. It’d be like, leave like forever. It was just, I remember going home on leave and how amazing it was but I got there and I’m like, man, these, these civilians are turds. They just sit around. They have no sense of purpose or direction in their life. And all of a sudden I started to feel very disconnected from my friends, like my high school friends that I went back to hang out with, and these sorts of things. It was a very challenging, confusing time for me. I got an opportunity. One of my teachers who started to serve as a mentor for me when I got out, is also a yoga teacher. He invited me for your yoga class one time, like six or six or eight months after I got to the Marines.
Jesse Simpson 00:20:44 And that was like the first time I ever did anything like that, where I was able to rest my nervous system and connect a little bit with my body and stop living from the head up so much. But I still kept partying and doing my thing, going into school. And I’m really struggling to find my way. But then in January of 2013, I was fortunate enough to go on this volunteer trip to Lima, Peru, and work in an orphanage. I went down there with this idea that I was gonna help these kids. These kids who had nothing, the group in this tiny, or this really poor area, one of the poorest districts outside of Lima, Peru, I was gonna go down with my American privilege. I was a Marine Corps combat veteran, and all these things, this is wherever I’m gonna go down there and help these kids.
Jesse Simpson 00:21:29 After two weeks of playing and teaching and working with these kids who had sticks and balls and dirt to play with, but they had the biggest smiles I’d ever seen. It was clear that they started to shift something inside of me. They started to open my mind a little bit to the idea that there are so many people back in the states who have everything materially that could ever desire, but they’re deeply unhappy yet. These kids have nothing. They’re the happiest kids that I’ve ever seen. I started to ask questions like my upbringing and what I thought was important in this life. Really shifted my values in a way that it really served as a turning point for my life. I went on with my time down there in Peru. I went down there with this idea.
Jesse Simpson 00:22:14 I was gonna help these kids. I came back with the understanding that they helped me. They changed me and they pushed me on this path to continue my service after my time in the military. That meant becoming a youth mentor, just like Mr. Blue was for me. I work at the grief camp for kids. I served as I did like a bunch of volunteering hours in the oncology playroom at the Phoenix Children’s Hospital. I started to get a sense of purpose after my life. After my time in the service, by living a life of service in the community. That was really amazing for me. It gave me a lot of direction and focus. and then I kept moving forward. At this point, I moved back, I moved to Arizona and my intention was to become a firefighter.
Jesse Simpson 00:22:57 Then in 2014, I was picked up by the Mesa fire department in Mesa, Arizona, and my childhood dream job. I felt though all this time, a lot of the anxiety was still present, but I didn’t really know it. I didn’t have any self-awareness around it. I was just like I’d have times where I couldn’t catch my breath, like for no reason. I didn’t realize what it was until later, but either way, I became a firefighter and it was my childhood dream job. I felt a lot of imposter syndrome for sure. But it’s kind of funny looking back because I got picked up and I was like looking around and there’s a couple other veterans. An army officer, a couple of guys, a couple of core men, I think, and these different people were in there. And I was a bad-ass dude.
Jesse Simpson 00:23:40 LI had my bachelor’s degree. I had served in combat. I was a Marine Corps veteran. I’d always volunteered experiences, but I looked at these other guys that put them on pedestals and really didn’t think I was worthy of the job. Now it’s clear looking back though, that was just all stemming from my childhood, this lack of worth that I had. I was continuing to carry that with me throughout my entire life. I got with the fire service and I love to talk about that, but I want to bounce it back to you, Scott, and make sure I’m not, you got any questions before we move on?
Scott DeLuzio 00:24:10 I appreciate that. That volunteer experience, I want to just circle back to that. I love how that experience, where you were going down to go help out these kids and volunteer with them with the intention that, I’m going to help somebody else. You end up having this experience where you realize that these kids are actually helping you probably more than you’re helping them, not to, not to diminish what it was that you were doing for the kids at all, because I’m sure, obviously, I wasn’t there or anything, but I’m sure the work that you were doing down there was important stuff that they, they needed. I’m sure that they’re very appreciative of the type of stuff that you were doing for them.
Scott DeLuzio 00:25:07 I had a similar experience when I was in Afghanistan. I was actually in Afghanistan in 2010, the same timeframe that you were in there. Some of these kids that you see there, they had absolutely nothing like you were saying. They had balls and sticks and stuff like that would be a stretch for some of these kids to have something like that to play with. They would run up to us and ask us for a single pen. Then they would fight over it to see who would end up getting that pen. That was like how little they had. They didn’t even have a pen to write with in school or whatever, they had nothing, but you’d see them playing with trash sometimes.
Scott DeLuzio 00:26:01 They’d just be kicking a can like a soda can or whatever. They’re happy. They had all that they cared to take care of. They didn’t care about having the latest iPhone or the, some of them probably didn’t even know what an iPhone was. They didn’t care about any of those things. I think that that’s an interesting thing to look at with these kids is that you don’t need all these material things to be happy. It’s really an eye-opening experience when you start to do that. You can be happy without all this crap in your life.
Jesse Simpson 00:26:48 Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Scott DeLuzio 00:26:50 Let’s talk about your time in the fire service. First, what brought you out to Arizona? What was it for the job out here that you, you ended up taking or did you just end up out here following some other volunteer experience? What happened there?
Jesse Simpson 00:27:10 When I got to the Marines, I went back to Iowa, which is where I grew up. That’s where my friends were and went to community college there for two years. That’s when I went to Peru and these sorts of things. But pretty much like a month after I got back to Iowa, it’s like, why the fuck? Then I moved back to Iowa. I lived in California, it was sunny. There’s no winters, like cool people. I went to the beach and I just went back to Iowa and I was like, man, such a bad decision. I could’ve stayed in California. I decided along with that, I was going, I was on the trajectory for a two-year paramedic program, but I was having too much fun. I’m going to use my GI bill and go for a full four years of school.
Jesse Simpson 00:27:46 Then when I was considering schools, I was like, I want to go back to California or move to Arizona. I’d heard good things about Phoenix, Arizona State University. It just worked out that I ended up going down to Phoenix to go to ASU. That’s really what took me down there. I was seeing a girl at the time that her sister lived there. There’s a lot of things lined up and it made sense for us to go down there. That’s how I ended up there. I think 2013 was the summer and I started going to ASU. I really just heard about this city of Mesa, which is right outside Phoenix hiring for a fire department. I had my EMT, which is a requirement. And I was down at ASU doing all the volunteering and stuff in Arizona.
Jesse Simpson 00:28:29 It was really just for school. While I was going to school before I even graduated. Actually when I got picked up with the Mesa fire department. It was really interesting for me because it was truly like my childhood dream job. It was like everything I’d ever wanted. I got the job and it was interesting meeting these people who had tested for 5, 6, 7 years to get in the fire service and it was very competitive. They took 2000 people in the test, but they only hired like 40 or something like that, of that list is really competitive. It’s a good job on the surface. You have good benefits, you have time off, you all have all these different things.
Jesse Simpson 00:29:11 I was really drawn to it, not really for those things, but because I was totally driven because of what I saw on 9/11 and really because of what I thought the impact I would have on the community was. Then I got on the fire service and I want to preface what I’m about to say with the fact that it is absolutely imperative, that we have men and women that are standing up as first responders, firefighters, police, and otherwise in their community. I left, so I’ll get into that, but it is for a reason. Really what I started to find that instead of really helping people like going on like fires and motor vehicle accidents, I found that the vast majority of the calls are mental health in nature, ranging from drunks and addicts in the streets to suicides and overdoses and people’s homes.
Jesse Simpson 00:30:00 Of course we do help people, but the vast majority of these calls are just things that are not fires, that’s for sure. In fact, 3% of the calls are fires, so we are going on fires less than 3% of the time, 80% they say our medical. And I would say 80% of that 80% are mental health-related. I just felt like I was perpetuating this broken system where we are picking up people who have a mental disorder of some kind, whether it be PTSD or some other sort of like bipolar or some sort of alcohol dependency, or overdoses, these sorts of people. It’s interesting when you see someone who’s blue in the face, because they’ve taken a bunch, or they’ve overdosed on heroin. It’s really eerie when you walk into a garage and there’s a 28-year-old man hanging from the rafters and his mom’s trying to pick him up.
Jesse Simpson 00:31:02 When you see somebody who shot themselves in the head and you’re cleaning up the mess and their sister is the one that found them and she’s outside bawling in the front yard. I really got to, what are we doing here? This is ridiculous. Because we’d send these people who needed help to the hospital. If you’re suicidal, let’s say suicidal threats. You’d go to the hospital for three days. They put you on like this mental watch. They’d probably give you a bunch of medication. They pop you back on the streets and there you go. Now you have a lifetime of medication. And it was just a really, disheartening, frustrating experience. You go on the same people day after day, and there’ll be no resolution to what was going on.
Jesse Simpson 00:31:43 I started to get really frustrated with that really frustrated, really angry. At this point now I’ve been out of the Marines for a couple of years. I started to lose people to suicide that I served with. I could relate with that because of my time as a kid when I was suicidal. I’m like, what are we doing? We’re not helping these people. It really drove me because of my time after the military, getting involved in volunteering as a veteran, it really gave me a sense of purpose. I knew that if I could bring this to other veterans, that we could start to create a ripple effect, where veterans can have a sense of purpose. I come from a troubled childhood when a mentor saved my life. You combined these two people together and have a solid connection between people who meet purpose and people who need someone to be there.
Jesse Simpson 00:32:31 I created this nonprofit after graduating from my undergrad that was structured around a leadership and resiliency training program for at-risk youth with the follow-on mentorship components with veterans. This is my life purpose. This is it. I was even planning like I could build this nonprofit up and I’d eventually be able to retire from the fire to service. So I didn’t have to keep doing this bullshit. We’re not really helping people. I speak generally when I say we’re not really helping people cause we do help people. There were times that we were able to kind of bring people back, you had a diabetic problem, or got them out of something serious like car accidents. Or there were a couple fires. I’ve done chest compressions on like 50 people that had a cardiac arrest and zero \of them came back.
Jesse Simpson 00:33:24 Every once in a while you’ll hear a story about somebody who came back to a younger guy who had a heart problem and went down and firefighters brought him back. And it’s a beautiful love story. You hear about those sometimes, but I mean, my experience on the ground was overwhelmingly frustrating because I really was not making that much of an impact. Conflict Complete, the nonprofit really serves as an outlet for me to start to build something that I could really make an impact on my community. I got a lot of momentum coming off of that. This was spring of 2017. I was featured in the newspaper a couple of times and I was on a handful of podcasts. I got an all-expense-paid trip to Texas to this veterans boot camp program.
Jesse Simpson 00:34:10 L I was feeling really on purpose and doing the stuff I was going to meet after meeting on my days off while I was not busy on calls at the fire station. I was sending emails, making calls like building websites, just freaking going forward. I had no idea what I was doing to start a business, but I just knew this was something that was really important to me. I was starting to wear myself down. I was on one of the busiest ladder trucks in the country, lot 2 0 1 in Mesa. Arizona was the 16 busiest ladder truck in the country in 2016. That’s where I worked. We’re getting up, 3, 4, 5, sometimes six or seven times a night to go on calls. Most of them are just drunk. Just ridiculous calls.
Jesse Simpson 00:34:50 People fell down or whatever, but either way, it’s really disruptive to sleep. I just kept pushing through, I was taking Adderall during the day to kind of keep me focused and moving forward. I was smoking weed at night to bring me down and kept going forward on that, but it all built up. I started to notice that my hard work and determination to build this, I was talking to people. People started to notice what I was doing with this nonprofit. I had made some, a lot of different connections in the community and started to be recognized like people were in the fire service, were talking about it. All this energy culminated in September of 2017 is me being recognized as the Arizona State firefighter of the year. I had built this nonprofit while working on the job and also went on my way on a call to help a veteran who had gone completely out of my way to help this guy basically.
Jesse Simpson 00:35:42 That was what people heard about that. I was nominated for, and then awarded the state firefighter of the year. I spoke in front of the hundreds of firefighters at the state fire school and talked about leaving a lasting legacy. I talked about a man named Patty Brown. Patty Brown was one of the first responders to the World Trade Centers on 9/11. And he and his crew went up there with complete disregard for his own life and was responsible for saving hundreds of people’s lives. But he and his crew all died that day. And he is a man that really inspired me. That gave me that sense of direction. I didn’t know his name at the time, but I just did research on nine 11. Patty Brown is the guy. I had this sense of purpose in September of 2017.
Jesse Simpson 00:36:31 I was a firefighter of the year speaking in front of hundreds of my peers about legacy and purpose and living a life for others. Then about a month later, all of my shit caught up with me and my brother who had cancer at this point for like 20 years. You got terminal pancreatic cancer when he was 14 years old. When I was a kid, he was living this entire time, but there was like this rollercoaster of he’s getting better. Oh, no, he’s getting worse. It’d be like years where he’s kind of in remission or whatever, and then we’ll come back and it was, it would get worse. He had been getting worse again around this time. I had some people like other family things gone.
Jesse Simpson 00:37:14 Around this time, my best friend from the Marine Corps died of a heroin overdose. That really hit me hard here. I’m going on heroin overdoses on the fire service and it’s my best friend, Paul who died a few months before the, the last straw for me was then in October of 2017. Then there was a machine gun shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada at a country music concert. I was not there, but that really struck me at a soul level, really deep inside of me. I was just devastated because I served as a machine gunner in combat. I’ve shot machine guns, other people. I believed at the time because I was preventing that from happening here. That was not the case. I felt like my whole life was a lie.
Jesse Simpson 00:38:01 It wasn’t worth it. I was sick of all this mental health stuff and how to be a better way to help these people. Now the fricking ultimate machine gun is shooting at people just like me because I love going to music festivals and these sorts of things. People just like me enjoy their freedom here in the states. It was all these things piled up. I just crumbled into this deep depression. I pulled the brakes on the non-profit. I stopped the board director, as I told everyone I can’t do anymore. I just spiraled into this very low place. I was deeply depressed. My girlfriend at the time was with us all the time. I would go to the gym, which was really my only escape in a way. I had used that as my like physical release ever since Mr.
Jesse Simpson 00:38:43 Blue taught me how to lift weights. I built myself into a big strong man, but I’ll go to the gym and I just sit down and I just cry and I’d have to leave and I’d go home and lay on the floor and just cry. This went on for a few weeks. Then at one point in there, I was the firefighter of the year and I was smoking weed at work, obviously, that’s not okay. I know that, but that was my reality. I was so deeply depressed. I was so deeply unhappy. I was smoking weed at work. Then a couple of weeks later, I started having suicidal thoughts. Then I realized that I was having the same suicidal thoughts as a 28-year-old man. The firefighter of the year is having suicidal thoughts. I was the same seventh-grade boy internally. I was broken alone, disconnected, angry, anxious, unsure, lost all these things, this same experience inside, despite the outside looking so successful.
Jesse Simpson 00:39:39 I knew. That moment that if I didn’t break this cycle, that this was going to be my destiny. I was in either kill myself or I was going to get it into the heart of drugs, or I would be miserable in this job that I was starting to really hate and resent and have to look forward to retirement, 20 years down the wrong road. That was my experience in the fire service. It really pulled me through the mud in my life and forced me to face myself and what that meant for me. Ultimately, I remembered my time in Peru and I remembered the richness of that experience and how meaningful it was for me, and how it gave me and pushed me on this sort of path to service.
Jesse Simpson 00:40:22 I was struggling through this very challenging time in my life. I thought about South America. I thought about how real it was to be there and live that way and like how I want it to be something like that. I was talking to my girlfriend at the time and we talked about selling all our shit and going to travel and going to Peru and all these sorts of things. I mean, we had a career and we were living together. She was going to school herself. It’s not easy to just pack it up and leave. But December 31st New Year’s Eve is going into 2018. I spoke into existence and I said, I’m going to Costa Rica. I was telling some other firefighters. We were kind of bitching about the fire service and just like how we’re frustrated about it.
Jesse Simpson 00:41:05 These two other guys, one of them also actually ended up going to another department, but I was like,, I’m going to Costa Rica. I declared that that day. I had no idea what I was going to do. How was I to get there? What was going to happen? But over the next six months, I started selling my stuff. I worked it out with my girlfriend at the time to figure out how we can make this work. We sat down and figured out what we want with our life. We tried to basically determine our values and our goals, and like, we’re aligned on why we want to travel the world. We want to go to school. We want to do XYZ. We can do this. We are meant to be together, women together.
Jesse Simpson 00:41:39 If we’re meant to be together, we’ll find a way. We sold all our stuff. I sold all my clothes, all these things that I had. I sold my car. Then June 26th, 2018, I took a one-way flight to Costa Rica with no real plans of ever coming home. I left that experience of being a firefighter, that old identity that I was so patriotic, but I started to lose that connection to that. I left it behind, and I went to Costa Rica with no real plans of ever coming home.
Scott DeLuzio 00:42:10 That’s the start of this journey, but you ended up not just traveling to Costa Rica. You traveled to several other places around the world as well, in this journey, what, prompted the change of scenery, change of location and where’d you end up traveling to, and what was your experience like in this journey?
Jesse Simpson 00:42:40 The plan was to go to Costa Rica for a couple of reasons. My wife, my girlfriend at the time, had never been in the country before, and she was scared to go anywhere, but she had some friends that had recently been in Costa Rica, so they kind of talked her into that. Back up a little bit was to go to grad school. I was using vocational rehab to go to grad school online. I could travel. I was getting a GLA master of global management degree. I could travel and also learn about the world from my own experience, but also like the global business perspective while going to ASU school of global management. That was really my plan.
Jesse Simpson 00:43:28 It was also at this time when I decided to become a coach, so I could really be of service to others in their time of need. That started actually back in January 2018, I was like, I want to help people. I’m sick of this BS on the fire service, where we’re not really helping people. I felt like I was just perpetuating this broken system. I was like, I want to help people at a real grassroots level like me and you let’s figure this shit out. You can take back your life, and overcome the adversity that you’re experiencing. You can create a life of your dreams because I really believe that is possible. I still do, and I’m still on this path, but it was then I became a coach. I can be of service to others in their time of need.
Jesse Simpson 00:44:04 My plan was to do grad school while we were traveling. I felt like I jumped off a cliff with a parachute, like hang-gliding, and on this sort of journey, this travel, this leap of faith that I went on. I had no idea where I was going to land. Sometimes I would be cruising. It was beautiful and amazing. Sometimes I was getting thrown around in the wind, and just around and had no idea what’s gonna happen or things got that. Or we got our house broken into and my laptop stolen. All these things were happening, but really we just trusted it. We trusted the journey and we just took it one step at a time. Sometimes we don’t know where we’re going to be, three nights from now. We always ended up where we needed to be.
Jesse Simpson 00:44:52 I ended up living there for four months. I worked at a surf camp in the jungle for a month. I could go into a lot of details and all these stories. Obviously, it was a very rich experience, but Costa Rica was just an incredible place. The beaches are incredible. I got an opportunity to see what the medicine was called. Iowasca had an Ayahuasca retreat there that really served as a powerful transition point from this sort of old life that I was leaving to this new life. I was starting to open my eyes to this idea of unconditional love and interconnectedness to all things. It was very powerful for me and that kind of pushed me out on some things, helping me realize a lot about myself.
Jesse Simpson 00:45:35 Since my time in 2013 in Peru, I wanted to go back to Peru. We talked about hiking, Machu Picchu, which is an ancient ruin in the Andes mountains. That’s a pretty popular tourist attraction in Peru, but, convince my girlfriend to go to Peru and we’ll hike Machu Picchu. We stayed up there for a month in the Andes mountains, working out like a lodge and a tiny town in the Andes mountains. We hiked Machu Picchu was just a really cool experience. Each country we went to Costa Rica, Peru, and everywhere else gave me something special. S new lesson, a new challenge I had overcome. It gave my girlfriend something special and gave our relationship as a whole something we got to work through together.
Jesse Simpson 00:46:27 That was really special for me because then in January of 2019, 6 years to the day I was back in Lima, Peru, the city that changed the course of my life. I remember that night. One of the nights we were there, Lima sits on the coast. It’s like a cliff face, but you look out over the Pacific ocean and the sky was just lit up, all pink and purple in the sun was as bright as I’ve ever seen. No is like saying to me, Jesse, you’re on the right path. it was like a full-cycle close where I like completion in my life. I went there one time, six years ago, and now I’m back in, everything has changed. I’ve started to really use all my power to create my life. It was really special for me but ended up not long after that in Peru, we worked as bartenders at, a hostel and, all these, these different opportunities came from this website called Workaway, which is like a volunteer exchange.
Jesse Simpson 00:47:21 It was really cool to immerse myself in different countries. Although we were in South America and Central South America for 18 months, we only went to three countries and we really got to immerse in the culture and really learn about other ways of living and how to navigate life in a really authentic way; living with locals and doing this sort of thing. After that, I went to Columbia and Columbia just really opened my eyes for a lot of reasons personally. But the biggest impact had been on my wife because when most, well, I’ll just say, when most people think about Columbia, even now, I want to slap them sometime. But you think about Netflix and Narcos and people brought up recently like kidnappings and that’s just the misinformation. The propaganda is the mass media programming people to think a certain way of the world.
Jesse Simpson 00:48:14 They alter our perception of reality and prevent us from living the full experience of life. That has never been more real than my time at Columbia. My wife, we went out for dinner on the first night for her birthday. She was very obviously anxious. I mean, we went to Medellin, you see the most dangerous city in the world. There’s graffiti on the walls. There’s people asking for money on the streets. It’s a new big city and it’s loud and she’s very obviously anxious and very alert. And I’m like, geez, babe. Like what the hell is wrong? And she’s nothing, just kind of pushes them through whatever. But it was clear that she was very anxious and that we were fine, nothing happened, but we ended up going on this walking tour.
Jesse Simpson 00:48:58 One thing we always did when we got to know each other. I’d get a local perspective of the city we’re in. We took this, this tour of Medellin, this walking tour is like a three-hour tour around the city. In those three hours, five people came up to us and said, welcome to Columbia. My home is your home. Thank you for coming. I literally ran across the street with his arms wide open and hands up in the air. He gave me a big high five. He yelled, welcome to Medellin. My home is your home. Thank you for coming. It was that day just started. That was just the first day we lived there for two months where we just had this constant, this, we felt this constant warmth from the locals.
Jesse Simpson 00:49:39 Every place we went to, we were being shown around. We were invited back. We were being welcomed. Like my home is your home. It really shifted a lot of things for my wife. Not long after, we had this experience. We were riding in these cable cars. Medellin went from being the most dangerous city in the world to the most innovative city in the world in about 20 years. Part of the reason they became the most innovative city in the world is because they created this cable car system off these trains. They could connect the people in the poor districts, the Barrios, like they lived up in the mountains, down to the city center so they can get work and they could take money back to their families, so they can get all the drugs and they can actually work for a living.
Jesse Simpson 00:50:21 It really helped change the way we manage lifts. You can take these cables, but you take them over these very poor areas where these kids have six and balls and dirt. People are living in some very dangerous areas, but you can ride these cable cars over them. Like you’re at a freaking zoo. Like an exhibit and you’re like floating over and you can see people doing their laundry and stuff, kids playing soccer below. once we did that one time on the way to a park. I remember on the way back from that park. We had a great time with a bunch of locals, local Colombians who showed us around. I remember looking at my wife and the sun was shining in her face. I looked over at her, she was sitting quietly looking out the window.
Jesse Simpson 00:51:02 I was like, babe, what are you thinking? She just looked right at me right back and did the eyes. She said,” I’m just not going to fear death anymore.” I was like, oh, damn, okay, shit, it’s serious. and it just really set into me the impact this country has on people. When you give it a chance to just step outside of what you think about the world and really go experience it for yourself I mean Columbia. And ever since Columbia had this idea of helping people experience this real and authentic way of seeing the world, like, it’s one thing to go to Cancun and sit in a freaking all-inclusive resort and act like you’re traveling when really you’re just doing the same exact stuff.
Jesse Simpson 00:51:49 You would have states in another country. It’s one thing to do that versus really going out and meeting the people and seeing how other people are living their life and see how much it changes your life forever. Because that’s exactly what it does. How did that idea of burden there? But we kept traveling after that, we went to Europe for eight weeks. We backpack around Europe for eight weeks. That was where we offered like nine or 10 countries during that time. That was like three days from some points, like two or three days away. We didn’t know where the hell we’re going to stay. We were just feeling this pull. We were guiding everything. We let go of control in our life and everything started to line up. We were exactly where we were supposed to be at all times.
Jesse Simpson 00:52:27 We ended up getting engaged in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and ended our trip there. I came back, I just had this feeling. I knew I had to come home. My brother was getting very, very sick at this time. Again, at this point, it was 22 years. It was a constant roller coaster of ups and downs, but like t was getting weird and it was getting different. I just knew I had to go home. We spent basically 10 months out of the country traveling and at that point came home and that would have been 2019 summer of 2019.
Scott DeLuzio 00:52:58 Travel has such a tremendous impact on the people who take part in it. And like you said, actually traveling and actually experiencing the cultures and not just sitting in an all-inclusive resort. Actually, interact with the people who live in these areas and talk with them, get to know them, get to know their perspectives on things, because I feel like so many people are born in a certain area and a lot of times they don’t even leave a 20-mile radius outside of where they grew up. For their entire lives. It’s hard to really get a perspective on the world and how other people think and act and what their culture is like when you don’t leave that small bubble., I’ve done quite a bit of traveling myself, to a lot of different parts of the world.
Scott DeLuzio 00:54:09 But when you start to experience the cultures and the way people live in different areas, it opens your eyes to a whole new way of thinking, a whole new way of living. It’s really an incredible experience. For anyone who has the means to be able to do that, to be able to travel to different parts of the world. I know people who are listening to this, a lot of them are military veterans, things like that. A lot of them may have gone on a combat deployment. That could have a similar experience where you might interact with some of the locals, but you might also have the experience where you’re trying to kill some of those people too. It’s not exactly the same kind of experience that I’m talking about, but if you have the opportunity to get out and travel, it does open your eyes to a whole new world.
Scott DeLuzio 00:55:12 There’s a lot more to this world than the 20-mile radius that’s just around your hometown. Getting out and traveling I think is an incredible experience. I want to talk about your company that you run now. The app it’s called Action-Oriented. I think I mentioned that earlier. It tells us about what you do and how you help people. I know that a big part of what you have set out to do with your life is to help people, joining the Marines, joining the fire service volunteer work. All this stuff is all very much selfless in the sense that you’re out there trying to help other people. You had mentioned how you felt like you weren’t helping people the way that you could when you were in the fire service. You felt like you were just kind of perpetuating these problems, but, it seems like now you’re out there. Instead of being reactive to the problems you’re being proactive and trying to try to help before some of this stuff gets to be a bigger issue. Tell us about what you do now, and how you’re helping people rebuild their lives.
Jesse Simpson 00:56:34 I’m going to keep this going a little bit with some of the story because it does come in big, big clothes. Crazy. I left when I did in 2018, I had no idea where I was in the lands. I landed back in Iowa for the summer of 2019. My brother did end up passing away at the end of July that year or that month, or 2019 that summer. That being perfect timing to spin them out after that trout like six to nine months traveling after, after that, around the states. I had a plan to keep going, keep our traveling going. I was having a month backpacking through east Africa, going to hike Kilimanjaro and do all these things and then go to Bali and live for the summer of 2020, but then COVID kicked in and we had to cancel our plans.
Jesse Simpson 00:57:18 We had no idea what we’re gonna do. We literally had like a backpack and a half to our name. We decided to visit my dad in the town called Lakeland, Florida, right in between Orlando and Tampa. We plopped down here to visit my dad and a lot of things happened. I knew pretty much the first day that we needed to be here, I needed to be here to rebuild the relationship with my dad. I also needed to start meeting some people, one of which like they became really great friends. One of which was a man named Dan Jarvis, who has this organization called 22 0. This organization has a process that is the most effective and efficient least invasive way of dealing with trauma. And so I learned about this process. I got cleared in it, myself, that all the anger, anxiety, trauma that I experienced that wasn’t taken care of before from the work that I was doing, because it gets to the neurological root of trauma.
Jesse Simpson 00:58:09 I ended up being on a board of directors of this organization and serving as a resiliency coach. That’s what they do is they train coaches, basically peer support veterans, first responders, these sort of people to step in to learn this process. It’s like a two-day training and you can come and you can help people. Literally, I’ve cleared out people with a lifetime of extreme trauma in a single 90-minute session. Sometimes it takes more like two to three to get to the things and figure it out, but basically, it’s absolutely transformative and changing the game and trauma, which has played a big role in my life. I’ve seen a lot of trauma. I’ve experienced it myself. I know a lot of people like our brothers and sisters are experiencing as well. So this really clicked in, and it gave me a new sense of purpose.
Jesse Simpson 00:58:53 I was doing my coaching and I was helping people overcome adversity and take action on their dreams. I really felt amazing, but there’s always something missing when someone has trauma at the root and you can’t really get to it. You’re like, oh, you go see a therapist, but talk therapy doesn’t do a damn thing to get to the subconscious root where trauma is stored. This really clicked in and gave me a sense of purpose. I was on the board of directors and then it was so crazy because we got an appointment and I’ve got a point. We’ve got a contact because this organization with firefighters in New York City last ended up there working with 9/11 firefighters. In this July of last year, I was filming in New York city for this documentary where we were working with first responders to the attacks of 9/11, a paramedic firefighter, and a chaplain who responded to the attacks on the world trade center who had been experiencing PTSD, technically, extreme anxiety and stuff.
Jesse Simpson 00:59:50 It presents a different way for different people. A lot of times sleep flashbacks, a lot of guilt, a lot of shame survivor’s guilt is very common. These people had been experiencing this for 20 years, but we have the opportunity to be connected with them. We went up there and filmed this documentary work with them. It was so crazy because it was 20 years to the day that I was suicidal in my, in my mom’s bedroom, digging a knife and my wrists wishing I was dead. Then the documentary was released on September 11th, 2021, the 20 year anniversary from the day that the attacks happened. That moment changed my life. I think my generation, a lot of people’s lives changed that day. So there was a massive cycle close for me as far as closing things off of my childhood.
Jesse Simpson 01:00:32 I wanted to finish that up there, but really I started Action-Oriented in 2018 with coaching, with the idea of helping people one-on-one overcoming adversity, and taking action on their dreams. Then also in that time after I got back from my travels, that festering idea of starting this really this travel company was there too. So I launched action adventures also. I had been hosting adventure, travel, and sacred medicine retreats in Columbia where we’re really helping people own their power, their purpose, and move forward to actualize their full potential in a really deep way because there’s such power. Like you talked about Scott and experiencing that real authentic way of seeing the world and experiencing it and then overcoming the things we have to overcome and really going for it. I was leading action adventures during that time.
Jesse Simpson 01:01:22 Now what I’m doing is helping. I’ve created a conscious leadership academy and we don’t have to get into this. But I feel right now that we, as veterans, as leaders of men specifically, we are being tested to the ultimate extreme right now. I believe we have an evil force that is operating right now. We are responsible for stepping up as leaders to become pillars of safety and strength in our family and community. That’s what I’m doing with the leadership accelerator. It’s a 12-week mastermind group coaching experience where we work to clear up all our trauma resolution. We clear out limitations where we get rid of limiting emotions and limiting beliefs. We start to become those, these pillars. We start to become the creators of a reality, so we can really start to move forward the foundation of freedom that we need to thrive in the modern world.
Jesse Simpson 01:02:17 I’ve shifted my company from an Action-Oriented form of one-on-one coaching to group coaching specifically targeting men who want to become leaders in their community because right now it is a red alert, red alert. We have to step up now before it’s too late. That’s what I’m doing now, Action-Oriented. If there’s a man listening to this or a woman who knows a man that’s listening to this, I encourage you to reach out, hit me up on Instagram to see if you would be a good fit for this accelerator. We can really start to take our freedom and our power back as leaders of men during this time.
Scott DeLuzio 01:02:57 I will have links to your website and your Instagram, on the show notes page. Anyone who’s looking to get involved with this group, check the show notes out, take a look there, click through, and, on your website. I believe you have a quiz or a test or something like that to see if it’s kind of the right fit for you. If you’re reading through and you’re kind of on the fence and you’re not sure exactly what it’s going to do for you, or if it’s even the right fit, you can go through and take that quiz to see if this is going to be the right fit for you. Definitely check that out. If it sounds like it’s something that’s interesting to you, if it sounds like it’s something that you need in your life, or like you said, there’s someone who might need something like that in your life, or in their life, definitely check that out. anything else that we didn’t touch on yet that you wanted to add to this? Any other kind of closing message that you might have for the listeners?
Jesse Simpson 01:04:17 Yes. The website is action-oriented.com. Like you said, Scott, thank you for bringing that up. There’s a quiz called a “freedom fighter” quiz on there. You can click on that, and take a quiz. At the end of that, you can schedule a call. I’ll get it right on my calendar if you’re serious about this. I would like to just specifically talk to veterans. Let’s get into this and just remind every single one of you that the end of your time in the military is not the end of your service. It’s just the beginning. Life starts once you step out of your time and service, and you have the opportunity to start to create a new life for yourself and for your loved ones. Really step in and fully own the experience that you’ve had.
Jesse Simpson 01:05:01 Let go of the trauma, let go of the shame and guilt that you’ve experienced and start to create your life because I’m serious. When I say it’s time, we really step up and it’s time we get connected to a sense of purpose that is larger than ourselves is telling me to get connected to other men. It can be held accountable and be held into a position of integrity and really start to own our power to take our freedoms back from the entities, the people that stole it from us. I’m just calling any veteran out and helping them realize that their time and services are just beginning. Our time is now to really start to take our power back.
Scott DeLuzio 01:05:39 Absolutely. I think that that’s a great message and a good place to close out here. Jesse, it’s been a pleasure speaking with you. I really appreciated you sharing your journey all the way from your childhood through your time in the Marines, the fire service, in your travels to talk about the different experiences that you’ve had. I think there’s people out there who maybe have had a similar situation in their life, maybe, maybe they had a troubled childhood. They joined the military and now they, maybe they’re, they’re floating around. They’re not really sure what to do with their lives and everything, and hearing your stories is kind of inspirational to be able to realize that there is something that you can do with your life.
Scott DeLuzio 01:06:33 You can turn things around, you don’t have to be that victim. Like you were saying before, you don’t have to be a victim in your life. You can turn things around and you might just need that structure. You might need some guidance. I think what you’re doing now is a perfect way to do that. The website, again, action-oriented.com. I’ll have that in the show notes as well as social media. If you want to get involved, you want to check it out, go to the show notes and check out there. Again, Jesse, it’s been great speaking with you. I’m glad that you came on. Thank you very much.
Jesse Simpson 01:07:14 Thanks, Scott.
Scott DeLuzio 01:07:17 Thanks for listening to the Drive On Podcast. If you want to check out more episodes or learn more about the show, you can visit our website DriveOnPodcast.com. We’re also on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube at Drive On Podcast.