Episode Details
Back to EpisodesHereNOW Help CEO Bryan Gray on Closing the Gap Between Veterans and Mental Health Care | 13th & Park
Description
Bryan Gray, CEO and co-founder of HereNOW Health, joins Adam Goodman on 13th and Park to discuss one of the most urgent and underreported crises in America: veteran mental health. With an average of 17 veterans dying by suicide every single day, and 61 percent of those who died by suicide in 2023 having had no VA healthcare contact in their final years, Gray explains why the traditional system is falling short and how HereNOW Health was built to fill that gap with a single, AI-driven platform offering 24/7 clinician access, peer support, daily check-ins, risk scoring, and personalized treatment tools.
Gray traces his path to mental health technology through two formative experiences: reading Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People in high school, and watching a brilliant Carnegie Mellon classmate unravel emotionally during a high-stakes NVIDIA job interview. Those moments crystallized for him the difference between IQ and emotional intelligence, and set the direction of his career. He shares the deeply personal story of co-founder Billy Gerlach, whose brother died of a drug overdose weeks after the company was incorporated in 2019, and who himself passed away in 2023 after a fentanyl-laced Xanax. Billy's family remains central to the company's leadership and mission.
Gray walks through how HereNOW Health works in practice: a modular, dynamic platform that adapts to each user's individual needs, whether they need self-care tools, peer support, or clinical intervention. He explains the two structural barriers that have historically kept veterans from seeking help, fear of losing flight status in the military and fear of losing disability benefits as a veteran, and how HereNOW Health's anonymized access and benefit-neutral model are designed to remove both. The company launched its first deployment at Tinker Air Force Base and has since expanded through NASDVA partnerships to Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, New York, and a growing list of states and territories.
The conversation closes with a story Gray calls his most defining: a chance encounter in a hospital waiting room with a Holocaust survivor who walked from Auschwitz to England and married the man beside her four days after arriving in America. She had not spoken German in decades. Gray listened. She found peace. It is that moment, he says, that taught him the true power of active listening and why 95 percent of counseling is simply being present for someone who needs to be heard.
Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:11 Ravens vs. Steelers
1:57 From Tech to Mental Health
5:20 Co-founding HereNOW Health
7:50 Destigmatizing Mental Health
8:52 Inside the App
11:28 Veterans and the VA Gap
12:39 Anonymity and Benefits
14:00 Peer Now Academy
15:46 State Partnerships and Expansion
17:10 The Holocaust Survivor Story
20:34 The Power of Listening
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