- I was like mom, and she goes,
oh god, I remember it,
"The school just called,
Adam's dead."
So we only moved into this place about five months ago,
and this little cave here is kind of my inspiration space.
I've got my little village here of stuff
from all around the world,
given to me for all kinds of reasons.
As the CEO of Believe LTD.,
I travel a lot, and I'm in production a ton.
At Believe, we went from creating a program
aimed at young people in the US,
to a feature documentary that I'm extraordinarily proud of.
A typical day, I'm up by 6:30,
it's already 9:30 on the east coast,
come downstairs, have that cup of coffee.
I step outside, I spend time in my garden,
I water our plants.
And then I pop upstairs by 8am, I'm in my office,
and it is emails, phone calls.
This is Patrick.
Writing notes, transcribing notes from the white board.
Whether I'm here in Los Angeles,
or traveling around the world,
one thing that I have made sure
is always with me is my medication.
And every other day, no matter what,
I have to take my medication.
This is it.
These are the six tools.
So this drug essentially replaces
what my body doesn't naturally produce,
the liver doesn't make the proteins
that help blood vessels seal up when they've been burst,
which actually happens all the time.
This puts those proteins into my body
so that I essentially operate like a normal person.
That little seven minute process was all Adam needed to do
to save his own life.
It was just the two of us, we're two years apart.
Our parents got divorced when we were both really young.
We both had this rare disease, hemophilia,
that none of our friends had,
and no one else in our family had,
so that was nice.
I had some challenges related to hemophilia.
There were seven years in particular
where I was bleeding a lot,
I was home a lot, on the couch, missing school.
During those times,
my brother was one of my only social outlets.
And he was also the only other person I knew who got it.
Who knew what a bleed felt like.
It gave me such a sense of comfort.
I have no idea how I would have turned out without Adam.
He was my teammate.
And he was an excellent teammate.
I was in an acting conservatory.
And I go to my phone, and it's blowin up,
and I don't know why.
I call my mom, and a colleague picks up.
Like, it's 9:30 in the morning on a Wednesday,
and my mom's nursing colleague
is picking up the phone at home?
That's not good.
She was like, "Patrick, just come home.
"Just come home."
I was like, "What's going on?"
"You should just come home."
And I was like, "Put my mother on the phone."
And she came on the phone,
and I was like, "Mom?"
And she goes,
oh god, I remember it,
"The school just called.
"Adam's dead."
I, in that moment, understood grief,
'cause Adam's dead is a non-negotiable statement.
That's it.
That's my brother, Adam.
It's funny, it doesn't get easier.
But you get used to it.
He took some kind of minor head injury.
We actually don't know exactly what happened.
The medicine was in the duffel bag,
under his bed,
three feet away from where his head was.
This was life-sustaining stuff.
What, why?
What was the difference between my brother and I?
He didn't identify as having hemophilia.
I did.
Growing up, I was the athlete, I was pushing boundaries.
Not Adam.
He didn't have the identity.
When he went to college,
it was too easy to forget that he had hemophilia.
That was the problem.
About two years into the acting thing,
I had a chance to do this project in New York
with drug users and recovering drug users.
And I would go in and interview them,
hear their life story,
turn that into a monologue,
and I put a show together based on all these stories.
And I just watched the impact that that had
on the participants, their peers, and I thought,
"This is all I wanna do."
I'm making a difference here.
Like, this is the most important thing I've done.
How can I do something like this
that would affect people like my brother?
I just started doing the homework.
Where are young people with hemophilia,
who maybe don't have an identity as being somebody
with a severe life-threatening bleeding disorder?
A lot of them are watching comedic video online.
Why don't we put comedic video online
that just so happens to be about hemophilia?
- It's like, my gym teacher doesn't need to treat me
like a bubble girl just because I have Von Willebrand's!
- How does that make you feel?
- We've now been making "Stop the Bleeding" for five years,
across eight seasons, which includes 49 episodes.
Starting a couple of years ago,
we also had all of our episodes transcribed
and re-recorded in Spanish,
and distributed it to the global Spanish speaking audience.
So that was the first project.
"Stop the Bleeding" was very well received right away.
So we developed a workbook,
and an activity and a workshop session,
and then either for groups of teenagers,
or kids, or full families.
I'd show them episodes of the show,
we would talk about its themes,
kind of break it apart,
and just engage in a live event experience together!
That started going really well,
so then there was more interest in
what else could you guys do for the local community here
in North Dakota, or Houston, TX, or in Hawaii.
There was actually a kid a few months ago in Michigan,
he was so into the screening.
His parents said to me,
"Thank you so much for creating this show.
"He gets bullied at school.
"He has trouble identifying himself and seeing himself
"in the world, and this show gives him
"a sense of security and grounding."
That's all I need.
That kid feels a little safer in the world?
I've done my job.
Then a couple years after my presence in the community grew,
we made a documentary about the hemophiliac mountaineer's
historic climb of Everest and the Seven Summits,
while raising awareness and money
for his blood brothers in developing countries.
- [Chris] Hemophilia looks very different
in other places in the world.
People with the same condition that I have
aren't making it past 10 years old.
- "Bombardier Blood" is a feature length documentary
about hemophiliac mountaineer Chris Bombardier,
and his historic mission
to climb Mount Everest and the Seven Summits.
It shows what you can accomplish with hemophilia in 2018,
if you have access to medicine and proper care.
But in Everest's own home country of Nepal,
most kids there are dying of hemophilia before age 10.
For them, life with hemophilia is a death sentence,
and I hate to say that, but it's true.
Every one of Chris's Seven Summits climbs
has been connected to a fundraiser to get sponsorships
for these kids through Save One Life,
which is a non-profit organization he belongs to.
These sponsorships mean that families are able
to have a refrigerator in their house
so they might be able to store a little bit of medicine,
because they live eight hours from the only hospital
that keeps a fractional amount even necessary.
It's my position that if "Stop the Bleeding"
and Believe, LTD, really, was around
when my brother was alive,
that he would still be alive.
I think about Adam and why I'm doing all this.
Ideas are big, man.
Ideas are powerful.
All of this started with an idea for a webseries.
Something terrible happened to my brother,
caused a tremendous amount of pain,
and I said I'm figuring out how to do something
with all of this.