Not Lazy, Not Hopeless: Dave Matthew on Brain Injury, ADHD, and Building a Youth Movement

This episode of Hustle Zone, hosted by Ryan Perez, brings back Dave Matthew — known through his youth-focused community formerly called Bodyguards United, now rebranded Be Heroes (Blue Heroes) — for a second, more polished round on the show. Ryan and Dave have known each other since elementary school and reconnected a few years ago while both were doing youth-facing work, Ryan through anti-bullying outreach and Dave through his security and mentorship career.

Dave’s story starts with an injury most people never plan for. Over more than seven years working security and bodyguard jobs, he sustained three serious concussions out of fifteen total, leaving him with a diagnosis of permanent brain damage that affected his vision and comprehension and intensified his existing ADHD symptoms. The injuries forced him to retire from active security work — the very job that had connected him to kids dealing with prostitution, gangs, drugs, and depression. Losing that access, he said, felt like losing a huge part of himself.

Rather than stop there, Dave began sharing his own history publicly: sixteen years of bullying and depression, and three suicide attempts. He found that opening up about his own experience built a following of young people willing to share theirs, and from that he built Be Heroes — a community explicitly designed around a discovery from his research: youth respond more to fellow youth than to adults, who they often feel are “preaching” at them. The community has since grown to 66 bureaus and 27 bureau ambassadors.

One story anchors why the work matters to him. He wrote about it on Medium in a piece called “A Simple Gesture”: a teenage girl was caught stealing from a Dollarama, and when Dave sat with her to explain the ban, he asked what was wrong instead of just processing the incident. She told him she was pregnant, her parents were on their way, and she had nowhere to go — the theft had been a fight-or-flight response to panic. He gave her twenty dollars and told her it wasn’t much but it was what he could do. More than a year later, she found him again to say the gesture had changed her trajectory: she’d graduated high school, had a healthy baby, and her family had taken her back in.

The conversation also covered Dave’s move into filmmaking. With LA director Dustin Callan, he co-created the short film Photographic Memory, featuring Dominique Swain and Disney Channel’s Mia Talarico, which premiered at the Wynn International Film Festival on October 20th and won Best Short Film on October 22nd. He and Callan are now developing a second short film centered on paranoia and PTSD. Dave also produced the Sunday Money Show for two years, the first season pre-recorded and edited, the second done live.

On the personal side, Dave spoke about his partner Claudia, whom he’s known since 1998 and has been with for years, and their two kids, Jacob and Julie. He was candid that building Be Heroes while broke — including a stretch of about two years of financial strain — put real pressure on the relationship, and that he considered leaving the work for a typical 9-to-5 more than once, only to find himself miserable each time he tried. Claudia, he said, came to see that the version of him chasing his passion was simply a better version of him.

The episode’s most direct thread is ADHD itself. Diagnosed in 1997, in grade seven, Dave was never medicated. For the six years before diagnosis, he says he was labeled lazy, unmotivated, easily distracted, and a class clown, and was even held back a grade — despite, by his account, getting the right answer on a math problem but being disciplined for solving it his own way. He now describes ADHD not as a disability but, in his words, something that gives him “ability and power” to get his ideas done, framing it alongside a friend’s push (referencing Michael D Haynes, who lives with cerebral palsy) to talk about “challenges” rather than “disabilities.”

Asked what he’d tell his younger self, Dave didn’t reach for a business lesson — he said he’d tell himself to be kinder to himself, pointing to his mother leaving when he was four and the six years he went undiagnosed as wounds that hurt more from the inside than anything anyone else did to him.

The episode closes, as Hustle Zone episodes do, with a lightning round — cheesecake over other desserts, talking over texting, Sunday as a favorite day, Vancouver Island as a favorite Canadian getaway, and a nod to Dave’s friend Casey Adams, a 17-year-old entrepreneur Dave describes as now a multimillionaire.