00:00I've literally had bullets flying at me and I don't think I've ever been this nervous. Good afternoon. My name
00:06is Jared Loomis.
00:07I am a Chief Warrant Officer 4 in the Army National Guard. I've served for HUA.
00:14I've served for 26 years and it's my profound honor to introduce our first nominee. A lot of people think
00:21that
00:22mental health problems introduce themselves honestly. That PTSD,
00:27anxiety, depression,
00:29come with a name tag and a handshake with the straightforward clarity
00:34of a broken arm. I found that mental health issues are tricksters. They introduce themselves
00:42as perspective, as intelligence, as preparation
00:46for a world where people you love
00:49will abandon you. Where the world gets darker bit by bit
00:52until you can't see the love that surrounds you. Some people think
00:56veterans are defined by wounds, the trauma, the stress, the pain. I found those chapters are important, but they're also
01:07pieces of a larger story.
01:08A story where diverse human beings serve a conflicted nation
01:13together and somehow find purpose, camaraderie, resilience, caring, bonding,
01:20truth, humanity, and love. It feels better to make something for someone,
01:25serve a cause bigger than yourself, empathize, and relate to someone completely different than you.
01:33People think the military is dissociated from the rest of the country. That our experience is isolation,
01:42discomfort, that there isn't enough interest in providing veterans with care.
01:47And I've found the opposite. Our problem isn't a lack of care.
01:52If anything, it's an abundance of goodwill
01:55and a lack of understanding about where to aim it.
02:00Because sometimes the care is actually overwhelming.
02:03And when it lands, it lands. I once sent a note while I was on deployment
02:08to a random email address
02:10at a research lab saying how badly I miss my wife and kids.
02:15And that it would mean the world to me if my favorite musician could somehow play our wedding song
02:22for my wife.
02:24It was a message in a bottle that was cast out to people who knew people who knew a famous
02:31guitar player.
02:33I never could have imagined how much that famous guitar player actually cared.
02:40How much he understood the complexity of mental health.
02:44How much he understood the paradoxes of being in the military.
02:48That the drive to give is stronger than the drive to receive.
02:53A few years later, my wife and I stood at the Wiltern Theater in the city
03:01with veteran friends that we met through Heart and Armor and we slow danced to our song
03:07performed just for us in person by the man who wrote it.
03:13What a blessing it's been to struggle, to heal, to thrive, to keep serving as part of a military family,
03:21but also as part of a Heart and Armor family.
03:25And as a remarkable bonus, to be honoring the man who got that message in a bottle,
03:31who honored my wife and I that day at the Wiltern.
03:35So without further ado, I'd like to welcome to the stage board chair of the Social Impact Fund,
03:41Aaron Dawkins, and executive director of Heart and Armor Foundation, Gerard Chakren,
03:48the 2026 Philanthropist of the Year Award, to our battle buddy, our enduring supporter,
03:54our favorite musician, and our friend, John Mayer.
03:57Give a round of applause to Jared Loomis, who really put it so well.
04:05The rest of us will just be filling in a little bit of what he already said.
04:10We'll just be coloring in the lines he just drew, so thank you one more time.
04:15Well, it's so good to see both of you again.
04:18I got to know you guys a couple years ago when you finally
04:21came forward and talked about your participation in Heart and Armor.
04:25You had never really done that before.
04:27Yes.
04:27Yes.
04:28Yes.
04:28Can you talk a little bit about your participation in Heart and Armor,
04:32if people hadn't seen that story?
04:34Sure.
04:36I went down to Camp Lejeune with a friend of mine who was a self-defense instructor,
04:43and he said, come down with me.
04:44I was playing a show there anyway, like the next day.
04:47He said, meet me there.
04:48I'm going to be training the Marines in their martial arts program.
04:52I went, great.
04:52I'll go along with you.
04:53And what I didn't know that I would see is I would visit the wounded warrior barracks.
04:58They didn't know I was coming, and I didn't know that I was going to meet them.
05:02And so this is really interesting.
05:04There's no publicists.
05:05There's no photographers.
05:07There's no you're going to meet a celebrity.
05:09There's no telling someone who gets called a celebrity that they're going to meet some
05:13people that are in need.
05:15And we just sat and talked.
05:17And there was no pretense.
05:19No one had time to wonder what the other was thinking.
05:23And we just talked.
05:24And for the first time, I was introduced viscerally, sensorily to PTSD and TBI, traumatic brain injury.
05:34And up until that point, the depiction of PTSD and traumatic brain injury was bonkers, right?
05:44Like it's cartoonish.
05:45It's bonkers.
05:47And I was blown away by the subtlety of it, to be honest with you.
05:51I was blown away by the subtlety of it.
05:53And I could feel it.
05:55I could look into these veterans' eyes, and there wasn't an ounce of pity.
06:01But they're in there, and they don't.
06:04It's not the preset to look for help.
06:07It is the preset to be self-reliant, and it is the preset to figure it out.
06:12But you can only figure it out with the tools you've got.
06:17And that's when I realized that there's got to be a way to at least leave these tools in front
06:24of them for them to discover.
06:26And that's when I meet Gerard.
06:29And one of the first conversations I had with Gerard was, what do you need from me?
06:34Do you need money from me?
06:37And he said, nope.
06:39We have the money.
06:40Well, that wasn't true.
06:41Well, no, not at first, right?
06:43I mean, jump in.
06:44No, it was a while before we got to that.
06:46It was more of awareness and understanding.
06:48Yeah, it was listening, really.
06:50And I went, wait a minute.
06:52So you have the technology to start this up, but there's just this stigma.
07:01There's two sides to the stigma.
07:03The first one is how veterans feel about getting care.
07:05And the other one is how civilians feel about what veterans must be thinking.
07:10And you have to sort of bridge these two worlds and help each other tell the truth about this thing.
07:18And I found this left brain, right brain puzzle, which is, this is very physiological.
07:25PTSD is very physiological.
07:28And through Gerard and formerly N. Sears' work and now Heart and Armor's work, they are beginning to put mental
07:36health into a physiological, scientific, empirical category,
07:40which is the best news you could possibly hope to get about mental health.
07:45Because the trickiest part about mental health is that it's kind of like a dream or a wish.
07:53It's amorphous.
07:54And the idea of pinning it down into indexable, objective physiology is a relief to people.
08:03And I found that that was like, I could get my head into that.
08:07And then the other side was explaining to people who were a year behind me at that point that what
08:13PTSD is is not a car backfires and you jump to the ground.
08:17It's people who get upset when they want to meet with their friends at 8 p.m. and their friends
08:23are 15 minutes late.
08:24And what that does to somebody.
08:26And I've never been deployed.
08:28I never will be deployed.
08:29But I got it.
08:30I think so much understanding in the world is not based on experience.
08:35It's just based on a little bit of understanding and stretching out.
08:38I get it.
08:39I get how somebody could be upset or the smell of diesel fumes could bring something back.
08:50We all have this sense recall we wish we didn't have.
08:54We could all name three things that we don't want to come into contact with.
08:57So the way in which this was presented to me, I went, I know how to help tell this story.
09:03And then Gerard knew how to help with the science.
09:07And I think that has been a great collaboration for 15 years.
09:12Well, that's John.
09:12You are an incredible storyteller.
09:14And this is an incredible story to tell.
09:19But Gerard, I do want to get to the science of it.
09:21Because that's really the mission of Heart and Armor is a science.
09:24And right now, you are really focusing on female veterans, women.
09:28And why is that?
09:30I mean, before we get into that specific question,
09:33just sort of take a step back.
09:34First, thanks to the Hollywood Reporter and Social Impact Summit for focusing on science.
09:38We're really grateful to be on the same bill as the Michael J. Fox Foundation.
09:41And Steph's Foundation.
09:42But sort of propelling science to the front is something that needs to be guarded.
09:45It needs to be taken care of.
09:46It's really important.
09:47So appreciate the organizers of this for putting us in the same breath as Michael J. Fox Foundation.
09:51Yeah.
09:53Specifically, I mean, so much has changed in science since John came into this world about
09:57the physiology, as John's saying, about PTSD and what we can see on imaging.
10:01And you can kind of see our internal battles almost on, you know, through data.
10:06And that the damage that can be done physiologically to the brain by traumatic stress, but also how
10:10it can recover and regenerate is very beautiful.
10:12And for all the kind of scary things that are happening technologically and progress, it's really
10:17an extraordinary place to be to be able to watch us understand the human brain and these
10:23kind of narrative things that we can see them now through data.
10:25It's very beautiful.
10:27So sort of heading to your question about women veterans, the women are the fastest growing
10:33demographic in the military and they're the demographic we know least about scientifically.
10:37We don't really know what happens to the bodies and minds of our women veterans.
10:41They're the first generation who've been handling this level of military burden.
10:45A lot of the study, my colleague Sabra Insulik, has a great work on the biases of science of
10:53fear conditioning and fear extinction, bias towards male subjects, male mice, male veterans.
10:58So much has been done to test these phenomena on men.
11:03So our women veterans, we have a lot of catch up to do.
11:06So for us, it's all very promising.
11:08The work is really great.
11:10Ovarian aging, nutrition, military sexual trauma, these things that kind of over
11:14express in our women veterans.
11:16It's in a way, it's low hanging fruit.
11:18It's fun research because it feels like it's very generative and there's a lot to learn quickly.
11:22But people don't think of the military community and the military scientific community as a place
11:26to really understand women's physiology.
11:28But it's a great place for us to do that.
11:30And so John has been extremely generous in that and bringing other people to that,
11:34we're really grateful.
11:35And similarly, I do kind of want to say too, we've done a lot of work on
11:38trauma, race and ethnicity and outcomes of race and mental health and why our black veterans
11:44are recovering at the same rate as our white veterans.
11:48And that's been really important work too.
11:49So these kind of niche things that aren't niche at all, like these are part of our community of
11:54veterans and civilians.
11:56We've had the opportunity to study largely because of John.
11:58So we're very, very, very grateful.
12:00That's, I think what I always find interesting when I'm talking to the two of you is that
12:03John, as you're speaking, Gerard goes, huh, I feel like you always learn something when
12:07you two are in the room together.
12:08I can't repeat myself.
12:10I have, I should, I should have always just repeated myself.
12:15But I'm, yeah, I'm looking for the way in that moment to express the thing.
12:20Why did science, why was that the thing that finally like clicked for you when you thought,
12:25this is something that I really want to get involved in?
12:31I think because science is rigid enough that you can hang your hat on it for a lot of years,
12:38you know, you can, you can rely on it.
12:41I, I, I guess I like the consistency of science.
12:46I like that you can, you can hold on to it.
12:49It's the same every day.
12:50And, and again, I think when science is married with mental health, you don't know how good it
12:56feels to begin to hand over some of your own tension as to what is going on to some
13:04understanding on a physical level.
13:06I mean, there's, there's a, an MRI that can kind of conclusively show PTSD.
13:13Uh, just finding out that not everything is a hall of mirrors when it comes to mental health,
13:20that there are, you know, we, we, and I use this metaphor, uh, I don't know why it didn't make
13:25the
13:25interview because it was long and weird, but it, it, if you, if you, um, were, were, were scared of
13:32what you were feeling because mentally you felt weird. You go, I'm going to go to the doctor because
13:37I just feel weird. And I'm, my feeling weird is making me anxious. And the anxiety is just making
13:42me feel weirder and weirder and weirder. And you go, you go to the doctor and the doctor goes like,
13:48uh, what do you eat a lot of bananas? And you're like, well, yes I do. I happen to love
13:51bananas.
13:52He's like, right there. It's bananas. If you found, and you go, what? And he goes,
13:56just cut the bananas out. We're finding out now that bananas are making people feel weird. You'd be
14:00like, thank God. It's the bananas. And all I'm talking about, I know it's a goofy metaphor,
14:09but we're talking about moving things from the weight on your shoulders of why, how, this is me.
14:17There's no place else to put mental health than on your own shoulders. And there is no place to
14:23put mental health when you don't want to think about mental health. You can only be distracted
14:27from it. And when you come back to it, it's heavier. And you begin to take things off of the
14:32pile of,
14:33this is me, over to, this is in me. It belongs to some subsystem of me. But the chart you
14:41got from
14:42me yesterday is the same image you'll get from me today if you run me through the MRI. It's less
14:48of
14:49that psychic weight and more of an externalized challenge, which happens to be the challenges
14:55that veterans really like way more than the internal challenge, is the external challenge. And anytime
15:00you show someone that their internal challenge can become an external challenge, they become more
15:05engaged in that, like we all would. Well, Jared, we're about out of time, but before we go.
15:10Oh, no. Did I do that again?
15:12Well, I think, you know, as I'm listening to John speak, as I have before, I think it's important for
15:17people like John and civilians, really, to get what you're doing. And why is that important for us to
15:24fully understand what is happening, not only with veterans and PTSD, but what you're doing in the research?
15:30I mean, I think the most important thing actually is the veterans, the relationship between
15:35civilians and the people who sign up to absorb violence for those civilians is really important,
15:40played itself out through literature for thousands of years. We're studying it scientifically,
15:43but a relationship between a country and the people who stand up to service is really, really,
15:47really important. So for us, I think at the end of the day, like we care, we love the science,
15:51we care about it. But our veterans, the people who are here who served are just, they have stories
15:56about us. It's a mirror into ourselves and the sort of delicacy, the sadness, the beauty,
16:01the joy, the humor, the vulnerability. So for us, I think that that's really the take home message,
16:05is that we just hope that people take time to really look into the veterans world and to understand
16:10what the experiences are of people who are doing that work.
16:12Well, and I had someone here today say to me, and it's really sticking with me,
16:15and I want to share it with all of you, because there are a number of civilians in the audience,
16:18but there are also veterans here. And they wanted you to know, when you say,
16:22thank you for your service, really stop and think what that means. That's important to them,
16:27that you, you don't just flippantly use it as kind of a tagline, oh, you're a veteran,
16:31thank you for your service, but you really understand what that means. So thank you all.
16:36Thank you too. Thank you. Thank you for your work with Heart and Armor.
16:39Thank you. And thanks to everyone at Heart and Armor for your award. This is Heart and Armor's award.
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