One of the Most Emotional Moments Ever Shared on the Shawn Ryan Show
One of the Most Emotional Moments Ever Shared on the Shawn Ryan Show
The humid summer heat of eastern Tennessee hung heavy over the small town of Blackwood, but inside the sprawling warehouse that served as the studio for The Jacob Vance Show, the air conditioning was cranked down to a crisp, shivering sixty-five degrees.
Jacob Vance, a former Marine sniper turned wildly popular independent podcaster, adjusted his headphones. Across the wide oak table sat Ronnie Cole, a man whose unassuming posture hid the mind of a world-class memory grandmaster. Between them, a massive black leather Bible sat face-up on the desk, its cover embossed with a striking silver trident—the emblem of Ronnie’s past work with elite military units.
“You’ve got it in your brain, though, Jacob,” Ronnie was saying, his voice a steady, grounding baritone that had held millions of listeners captive for the past hour. “So now, this afternoon, you review it. You review it again tonight. You review it tomorrow. Then you’ve got it locked down. The Kingdom of Heaven… comforted… filled… mercy. See it in your mind. Is that all of them? Did you say inherit the earth?”
Jacob blinked, a sudden grin breaking through his thick beard. “Inherit the earth. That’s it. Man, that’s crazy.”
“That’s how memory works,” Ronnie said with a warm, encouraging smile. “You take what you want to remember, and you visualize it interacting with a specific location around a room. If what’s important to you is scripture and your faith, you map out what we call a ‘Mind Palace.’ If you want to give a massive business speech, you do the exact same thing—you place the first point by the door, the second by the lamp, the third on the sofa. Roman orators gave entire hours-long speeches on the floor of the Senate using this exact method two thousand years ago. That’s where the phrase ‘in the first place’ actually comes from.”
Jacob leaned forward, resting his massive forearms on the table. “Look, Ronnie, I want to memorize scripture. I’m relatively new to this—it’s been about two years since I really came back to my faith. But we’re right here in the middle of the Bible Belt, man. Everybody around here has verses memorized by heart, and for a long time, I felt like the only guy standing in the back of the church who couldn’t quote a single line. Where do you even start with something like this?”
Ronnie took a slow breath, his eyes dropping to the silver trident on the Bible. The warmth in his expression receded slightly, replaced by the heavy, solemn shadow of a memory that clearly still carried a sharp edge.
“It starts with whatever you want to protect, Jacob,” Ronnie said softly. “A lot of people want it word-for-word. But for me… it started with a tragedy. And a promise I broke.”
The studio grew completely still. Jacob didn’t interrupt; he simply nodded, letting the silence give Ronnie the space to speak.
“Between 2010 and 2020, I lost my way,” Ronnie began, his voice dropping an octave. “I completely lost my faith. I looked at the world, I looked at the suffering, and I just decided it was all a fairy tale. Now, my mom—she was a deeply religious woman. A saintly lady, truly. But she suffered from a terrible, agonizing psychological affliction. She was a severe hoarder.”
Ronnie cleared his throat, the phantom weight of old grief tightening his jaw.
“It was a massive, crushing heartache for me. For nearly ten years, I had only been inside her house four or five times because the sight of it literally broke my spirit. The hoarding had gotten so bad that stuff was stacked all the way to the ceiling. There was only one cleared space in the entire house—a single, worn-out armchair where she sat, lived, and slept. There wasn’t even a place for anyone else to sit down.”
“One afternoon, after months of agonizing over it, I told myself, ‘Today is the day. Today I am going over there, and we are going to fix this. We are going to change her life.’ I drove over, walked up to the porch, and knocked. No answer. I knocked harder. Nothing.”
“The panic started to set in, so I turned the knob. The door was unlocked. Jacob, the moment I cracked that door, the stench that hit me was absolutely overwhelming. It was suffocating. I stepped into the kitchen, looking for her, and I swear to you, I froze. Sitting right there on the kitchen counter, clear as day, was a wild possum. It was eating out of a bowl of leftover soup.”
Jacob’s eyebrows shot up, but he kept his focus locked on Ronnie.
“I know it sounds absurd,” Ronnie said, a faint, humorless chuckle escaping his lips. “The thing just looked at me like, ‘Come on in, dude, I’m just enjoying this soup.’ But in that moment, something inside me snapped. It wasn’t anger at my mom—it was raw, burning fury at the sheer misery of the situation. I marched into the backyard and found her sitting on a bench. I said, ‘Mom, there is a literal possum living on your kitchen counter right now.'”
“She looked at me and said, ‘No, Ronnie, there’s not.’ I told her there was, and when I dragged her inside to prove it, she just stood there in absolute denial. She couldn’t see it. Her mind wouldn’t let her. And that’s when the rage boiled over. I yelled at her. I told her I was hiring a professional industrial cleaning crew, that I had completely had it, and that she couldn’t live like an animal anymore.”
Ronnie paused, his fingers tightening against the edge of the desk. The red light of the microphone caught a sudden glint of moisture in his eyes.
“But I was so angry, Jacob, and I wanted so badly to shock her out of her complacency. She was a woman of absolute, unshakable faith, so I looked her dead in the eye and I said the words that will haunt me until the day I die. I said, ‘Mom, there is no God. There’s no God. A loving God would never let you live like this.'”
“I got the reaction I wanted,” Ronnie whispered. “The look of pure, agonizing heartbreak on her face… it shattered her. We had a terrible falling out right then and there. It only lasted a few hours because my mother loved me fiercely, and she forgave me almost instantly. But over the next two weeks, she kept texting me. Every single day, the same message: ‘Ronnie, I’m praying for you to get back to God. I know you had your faith once, and I’m praying every night that you find it again.’ And I would just text back coldly, ‘Mom, I don’t care about any of that. I just want your house clean.’“
The air in the studio felt heavy, charged with the raw vulnerability of the story. Jacob leaned in closer, his own eyes dark with empathy.
“August tenth was the day,” Ronnie continued, his voice trembling slightly. “The professional hoarding crew pulled up to the house in a massive truck. They were standing right behind me on the porch. I knocked on the front door. No answer. I walked over to the side window, rubbed the grime away from the glass, and looked inside.”
Ronnie stopped. He took a long, shaky breath, fighting back a decade’s worth of suppressed tears.
“She was on the floor, Jacob. I smashed through that window as fast as I could, glass cutting my hands, and I dropped to my knees beside her. The exact day that I had determined was going to be the day we changed her life… I found her dead on the living room floor.”
“Oh, man,” Jacob breathed, shaking his head.
“I was frantic. I was screaming, ‘Mom, get up! Please get up!’ But she was already gone,” Ronnie said, his voice dropping to a fragile whisper. “And as I was sitting there on the floor, weeping over her body, waiting for the paramedics to arrive, my eyes drifted up to the refrigerator. I had been in that kitchen exactly two weeks prior, Jacob. I knew every inch of it. And right there, pinned to the center of the freezer door, was a photograph that hadn’t been there two weeks ago.”
“It was an old, faded picture of me when I was a little boy. And right underneath it, written in her neat, looping handwriting, was Proverbs 22:6: ‘Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is older, he will not depart from it.’“
“She knew I knew the scripture,” Ronnie said, a single tear finally spilling over. “Because she was the one who had written it on my heart when I was a boy. Even after I cursed her faith, even after I told her God didn’t exist, her very last act on this earth was to print out a picture of her son, write down a promise from God, and pray that I would find my way home. She died fighting for my soul.”
Ronnie took a deep, centering breath, wiping his face with the back of his hand. The grief in his expression slowly hardened into something powerful, something triumphant.
“After that day, Jacob, a series of events unfolded in my life that were so mathematically, undeniably miraculous that I finally had to stop and say, ‘Ronnie, you’re not the smartest guy in the room. You haven’t figured out that God doesn’t exist. There is a grand design out here that you are completely blind to.’ So, I opened the Bible again. I started praying.”
“And as a tribute to her legacy, to make sure I spent every single day forced to look at the Word, I sat down and developed an entire structural memory curriculum. I called it the 1189 Bible Memory Course. There are exactly 1,189 chapters in the Bible. I designed a system where a person could mentally map out 1,189 unique locations in a massive, sprawling Mind Palace, allowing them to instantly recall the core thematic narrative of every single chapter in the entire text. If someone asks you what’s in Exodus Chapter 20, you instantly see the Ten Commandments. Numbers Chapter 9? The Israelites following the pillar of cloud and fire through the desert.”
Ronnie smiled, a genuine spark returning to his eyes. “The funny thing is, Jacob, I built it purely as an act of devotion for others. I put it up on my website and completely forgot about it. Then, a few months later, my phone started exploding with sales notifications. I had no idea what was happening until I found out a pastor had taken the course, built a massive mental cathedral, and could literally recite the contents of every single chapter in the Bible on command. He had talked about it on a massive radio show, and it just took off.”
Jacob shook his head in sheer amazement. “That is absolutely unbelievable, man. It’s like you built a weapon for the spirit out of your own grief.”
“It changed my life,” Ronnie said, tapping the leather cover of the Bible between them. “Do you mind if I share what Psalm Chapter 1 says about this exact practice? It’s the very foundation of everything I teach.”
“Please,” Jacob said. “Fire away.”
“Psalm 1 says: ‘Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He will be like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither; and in whatever he does, he prospers.’“
Ronnie leaned forward, his eyes locking onto Jacob’s with absolute intensity.
“Right there in the middle of the very first Psalm, it gives a concrete, physical promise: the person who meditates on scripture, who writes it into the fabric of their daily mind, will prosper in whatever they do. Think about it, Jacob. When Jesus was starving in the wilderness and the devil came to tempt him, he didn’t argue, he didn’t debate—he quoted scripture. He pulled the Word out of his heart like a sword.”
“We live in a world completely saturated by technology now,” Ronnie continued, his voice rising with a passionate, infectious energy. “I know we have AI. I know we have Google. I know we can pull up any verse in the world in less than half a second with our thumbs. But there is a massive, fundamental difference between reading a line of text on a glowing screen and having that truth written onto the living tablet of your heart. When you are standing in a hospital room with a friend who just lost their child, or when you are staring down the barrel of your own personal ruin in the dead of night, Google cannot save your soul. But a verse trapped inside your mind, burning like a lantern in the dark—that will get you through the storm.”
“So, to answer your question, Jacob,” Ronnie concluded, leaning back with a peaceful smile. “If you want to start memorizing scripture, stop trying to just stare at the page until your eyes blur. Build a palace. Take your childhood home, take this very studio, and start placing the words of God in the corners of the rooms. Walk through those doors every single day. Honor the architecture of your mind, and let the Word move in.”
Jacob sat back in his chair, completely stunned, staring at the silver trident on the Bible cover as the finality of Ronnie’s words settled over the room. He reached over, tapped the button on his audio console, and looked directly into the camera lens mounted on the wall.
“Roger that, brother,” Jacob said, his voice thick with emotion. “Thank you for sharing that, Ronnie. Truly.”
He took a breath, transitioning back into his host persona, though his eyes remained fiercely intense.
“No matter where you are watching or listening to The Jacob Vance Show from today,” Jacob said to the millions of listeners tuning in across the country, “if you got anything out of this episode at all—anything at all—please hit that like button, leave a comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this episode everywhere you possibly can. The world needs to hear this story. And if you’re feeling extra generous today, head over to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a five-star review. We’ll see you guys next time.”
Jacob hit the master kill-switch on the mixing board. The red ‘ON AIR’ light above the door flickered and went dark, leaving the two men sitting in the quiet, cool sanctuary of the studio, the unwritten verses of a new palace waiting just beyond the threshold.
