Lisa Mason (Losing a Soldier Brother to Suicide, Investing in Proactive Solutions and the Power of Community) - Episode 1185
Behind The Shield
James Geering
4.9 • 695 Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2026
⏱️ 120 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Lisa Mason is a Canadian CPA who works as a Chief Financial Officer for a healthcare technology company. In 2021, her life was changed forever when her brother Sgt. John R Little, CD died by suicide after serving two tours in Afghanistan. Through her grief journey she co-founded Operation: Talk 2 Me Johnny, a family run non-profit that aims to encourage loud conversations about mental wellness for veterans & first responders. Using their lived experience, Lisa and family share their story with everyone who will listen and organize community family friendly events to bring the mental health conversation to all individuals in a fun way with an aim of normalizing the topics and breaking the stigma.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A prerequisite to be a sponsor on the Behind the Shield podcast is you have to bring a solution |
| 0:04.8 | to one of our problems. And today's sponsor, Ease Alert, does exactly that. Founded by the son |
| 0:10.1 | of a firefighter, Blake Richardson watched the impact of sleep deprivation on his father's health |
| 0:15.7 | and decided to use modern technology to address that problem. As you've probably heard me |
| 0:20.6 | mentioned many times, |
| 0:21.7 | it is pure insanity that we wake an entire fire station for one crew to respond. And the way |
| 0:27.8 | that we're alerted makes the firefighter stress go from zero to 100. Now, Ease Alert has a host |
| 0:34.1 | of solutions, the first of which is the wearable tack pod, which alerts the first responder of an incoming call through vibration in the wrist. |
| 0:42.3 | So as you can imagine in a communal bunk room, only the crews that need to respond will be woken up. |
| 0:48.3 | Now they also have the bunk alert system, which puts vibration into the bunk itself. There's LED lighting, a turnout timer, |
| 0:58.0 | station automation where you can program bay doors to close |
| 1:02.0 | or gas stoves to turn off. |
| 1:04.0 | An understanding that sleep deprivation is behind so many things at ALS, |
| 1:09.0 | a recent study showed that EASAL ease alert improves health impacts by 169%. |
| 1:14.6 | So if you want to hear more about ease alert, you can listen to my conversation with Blake on episode 1168 of the Behind the Shield podcast or go to ease alert.com. |
| 1:28.7 | Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name's James Gearing, and this week it |
| 1:32.9 | is my absolute honor to welcome on the show, Lisa Mason. Now, Lisa is a career accountant, |
| 1:40.5 | but she is also the sister of John Little, an 18-year Canadian Armed Forces veteran |
| 1:46.8 | who took his life on November 22, 2021. So we discuss a host of topics from her early |
| 1:54.9 | family dynamic, women in wrestling, her journey into accounting, John's journey into the military, |
| 2:03.3 | his own powerful mental health story, navigating grief, the creation of Operation Talk to Me, |
| 2:10.8 | Johnny, investing proactively into our nation's health, and so much more. |
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