Tommy Aceto - Episode 889

This episode is sponsored by InsideTracker. And what makes me smile is before I even started my podcast seven years ago, when listening to other wellness conversations, InsideTracker was always the company they recommended for comprehensive blood work. Well, now in 2024, they have begun to offer a brand new first responder panel, which will cover nine biomarkers hitting several of the pillars of health that affect us in uniform. Stress, heart health, metabolism and gut health.

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Now, as with all my sponsors, if you want to hear more about inside tracker, you can hear my conversation with senior sales executive Jonathan Levitt on episode eight hundred and eighty seven of the Behind the Shield podcast. So to sign up or simply learn more, go to inside tracker dot com. And for the first responder panel, the easiest way is to Google inside tracker first responder panel. This episode is sponsored by a company I've used for well over a decade, and that is five eleven.

I wore their uniforms back in Anaheim, California, and I've used their products ever since. From their incredibly strong, yet light footwear to their cut uniforms for both male and female responders. I found them hands down the best workwear in all the departments that I've worked for. Outside of the fire service, I use their luggage for everything and I travel a lot, and they are also now sponsoring the seven X team as we embark around the world on the human performance project.

We have Murph coming up in May. And again, I bought their plate carrier. I ended up buying real ballistic plates rather than the fake weight plates. And that has been my ride or die through Murph the last few years as well. But one area I want to talk about that I haven't in previous sponsorship spots is their brick and mortar element. They were predominantly an online company up till more recently, but now they are approaching 100 stores all over the U.S.

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And if you want to hear more about 511, who they stand for and who works with them, listen to episode 580 of Behind the Shield podcast with 511 Regional Director Will Ayers. Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name is James Gearing, and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show former Navy SEAL and member of the Veteran Mental Health Leadership Coalition, Tommy Aceto.

Now, in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from his early life, his journey into the Navy, entering the world of special operations, his perspective on war, his transition story, the healing power of psychedelics, and so much more. Now, before we get to this incredibly powerful and important conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment, go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating.

Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for others to find. And this is a free library of almost 900 episodes now. So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them. So with that being said, I introduce to you Tommy Aceto. Enjoy. Well, Tommy, I want to start by saying thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you so much for coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today. No, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me. So where on planet Earth are we finding you this afternoon? Well, Flow State is now over Zay. I live in Nashville area. Beautiful. Now, what took you over there? Oh, man, just fate. I needed to get out of California and I just got out of the Navy a few years ago and I needed to start my life over really.

And I met a beautiful gal who's now my bride and we ended up getting married in my Buds instructor's backyard on the 4th of July as I was coming across the country in an airstream. So it's kind of definitely a good story. And she had a job in Houston and I was living in California at the time. So I basically went to New York City. I went from California, picked her up in Houston, went to Nashville, got married. And then I kept going on to a program

called Virginia High Performance. It's where they basically rehab special forces operators. It's a beautiful program run by a friend of mine. And after that, I went and swam around Statue of Liberty. So I was living on an airstream at the time and that's how we ended up here. And we love it. We absolutely love Nashville. I believe it's the heartbeat of America. It's got these big guns called the music industry. And it's funny because I always thought everybody was going west and now

everybody's coming back. With Virginia High Performance, was Jeff Nichols still coaching them when you were going over there? The name sounds familiar, but mine was Tim. I had a guy named Tim. He was a hell of an instructor. Okay. Yeah. Jeff was a former dev guru guy turned like strength and conditioning guru in the tactical space. So I know he was there for a while and then he ended up forming his own gym. Okay. Yeah. Alex runs it. And yeah, it's an incredible program.

If you're an athlete or a veteran that seems to have lost their way, I would really recommend checking out that because they don't just hit it from an exercise perspective. It's more, they have massage, they have sound bowls, sound therapy, they have cognitive instruction, they have a dietitian and basically all your meals are put together for you. And it's a four week course. So sometimes it's hard to get people to step away from their life for that long, but I

think it's a hell of a tune up. Absolutely. I think the physical side is something that's missed a lot. We're going to get into obviously the spiritual side, the emotional side, but when you combine, for example, psychedelics with the physicality, whether it's hiking or diving or surfing or just simply unfucking your body through therapies and exercise, that to me is the kind of whole holistic approach. Yeah. Mind, body and spirit, man. We've got three of them. If you're

only operating two, then you're only a 2D creature. Absolutely. Well, before we get into your journey and into the mental health space, let's start at the very beginning of your timeline. So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings? I was born in Gross Point, Michigan. My dad actually was a football wrestling coach at Gross Point North, which is the movie, John Cusack's movie, Gross Point Blank.

If you see, it's an 80s movie. And I was first house, I was born in St. Clair Shores and then we moved around the Metro Detroit area, ended up on a lake in Chesterfield, Michigan, Lake St. Clair. And I grew up the son of two athletes. So I used to say I was a musician trapped in an athlete's body or an athlete's home. And so in Detroit, you jock a musician or a lawyer or whatever, something professional. And I found success in sports. I was a two-time all-state athlete

in two different sports, soccer and wrestling. And I ended up winning the state title in wrestling in Michigan in 1999. And then I ended up playing soccer in college. Basically, because I didn't want to cut weight in college again. So I thought I'd go out on a high and I enjoyed playing soccer in college. I had the opportunity to play with my older brother, Paul Cito, who he's a chef in Miami. And we went real far in the NCAA playoffs my freshman year.

I started and we had a coach, his name was Scott Fowler, and he was a great guy. And he was a great guy. We had a coach, his name was Scott Fry, and he left our program after we went to the semifinals in the NCAA tournament to coach at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. And he went on to win six national titles with the women's soccer program there. And it was sad because I was the one that my coach told that he was leaving in his office the day that he told the team. But he said

secret for four hours. I couldn't tell the players. And so I'm like, I don't keep good secrets. And so he told the team, and I just remember my older brother who was going to be a senior that year, that his whole class was just sobbing. Because this guy, I had few coaches in my life that I would run through a wall for. And this was one of them, Scott Fry. He'll go down as one of the best collegiate coaches of all time. And then after I played soccer in college, I went to Elmah

College and I thought I was going to be a pediatrician since I was six. And so I was pre-med. I took all my classes and I just got burnt out. I really did. It was something not right and I wasn't prepared to do the work, I think. And I think God had other plans for me. So I became a seal medic. And the interesting thing of how I jumped from being a pediatric, wanting to be a pediatrician to a seal medic was an athlete, a teammate of mine. His name was Jake Olson and he became a

Huey pilot in the Marines. And I remember him coming back to a game and he was just yoked and just stud. And I just remember that feeling of like, it was more than being an athlete. And so I talked to him after my senior year and he's like, I'm going to enlist in the Navy so I can go to be a pediatrician and they'll pay back my college loans. And he's like, Tommy, he's like, you do not want to enlist in the Navy. He's like, you do not want to be a shoe. And I was like,

what's that? And he's like, you need to be a seal. And I was like, a Navy seal? And he's like, yeah. And that's crazy. You can't. And he goes, you're crazy. And I said, you're right. And that was it. I watched one discovery video. There was nothing in 2003. And I just needed to start my hero's

journey. So you have to get away from home. And the beautiful part was, I was like, I never in a million years would I be able to say that this would be what I'm doing right now, which is healing trauma of the mind and bringing awareness to people that the best medicine for the mind is not what they're selling. Well, I want to go pull a few things out of that. Firstly, you said you were a son of two athletes. Your dad was coaching wrestling and soccer. What

about your mom? What was she doing? Yeah, she was an all state swimmer. She played basketball, volleyball, everything, but her sport was diving. She was a diver. And you mentioned Scott Fry. So you progressed through all your school and collegiate athletics. And then obviously you get into a tactical profession where again, leadership is extremely important. When you look back now, what was it about Scott that made him such a great leader, even through your perspective today?

When someone walks in the room, it doesn't matter. He was five foot one, maybe, maybe five foot two Scottish, just, you know, ginger. And he would walk in that room and he'd get that little tear in his eye and that little thing, like it's energy. And when, when he would say something and he would be on the verge of, you know, losing it with the tears, it speaks volumes. And you're seeing that with another guy that just started making a lot of

news, coach Dan Campbell from the Detroit Lions. He's a big dude, but he wears his emotions on his sleeve. And I'm telling you the human version of energy is emotions and good leaders. They understand that. Isn't it ironic that when you and I were young, we were told that men didn't cry,

that men had this two dimensional, you know, pseudo stoic element to them. And now what we're realizing, you know, I mean, it's common sense when you just kind of debunk the myths, that real passion, whether it's in combat, whether it's in first responder professions, or even just mentoring young men to become an incredibly cohesive team should move you to tears. Yeah. Well, I'm in the business of teaching warriors how to surrender. And, you know, we're not taught that it's a

defense mechanism. My, both my grandparents served in the Navy. My dad's father was the champion of the Pacific fleet. Back when boxing was a big deal in the ships. He got his lung ripped out from shrapnel in the Japanese theater. And, you know, my dad didn't get taught how to cry. Never, you know, he had an anger issue. He was a good, he was a good man, but his drug was anger. And he, I was a middle child, right? So it's, I always ask people, I can spot out middle children.

I'm like, you're a middle kid, aren't you? And they're like, yep. But, you know, middle ones just doing this thing the whole time. And usually tougher too. I was the fighter. My brother was a hell of an athlete. He was all state soccer player twice and wrestling twice too. But he, he wasn't a fighter. And I would fight his fights and I would fight my younger sister's fights, you know, and I was just, that was me. So, the thing about emotions is when we are in a safe place

and we can let go as a man, it's not a lot of it's like for me, it was driving in a car. I can drive in a car, hear a song, and I can just wail. And what we're studying now is this release of energy and what it does in the endorphins that it can create the neurochemistry that it can reroute. And it's like the book I'm writing right now is called Feel to Heal and it's about feeling your

emotions. Another interesting perspective when it comes to early life and, you know, moving forward, you did wrestling, which arguably, even though it's a team sport, you are alone on the mat at that point. And then you did soccer, football, which now you're one of 11 and it's, you know, the other side of the spectrum. When you look back now, how did each of those roles factor into your success going through buds and beyond? Oh, man, this is gonna be longer than two hours.

Yeah, man, I, soccer is a beautiful game, the football, right? It should be called football. But it's the beautiful game. It's problem solving and, you know, the ability to rely on your teammates and figure things out. There's no timeouts. It's just, you know, it's tough. It's tough to score a goal. I think that's why Americans don't like it because, you know, they should make a goal like four points or something. Fly tackle should be like one. But, yeah, exactly. So, yeah,

I got a lot. I mean, to be honest with you, for the buds aspect of it, soccer was the reason why I could run. I was, I'm 6'2", trying to get down to 210 pounds. But my first day of soccer camp, my coach, Scott Fry, this is what a terry was. He used the women's national soccer team pre-season workout, which was a five-minute mile. And it was a four-month conditioning program that you would do intervals, long runs, challenge days. And then it would just make you, if you did it, you would

run a five-minute mile. So every year, first day of camp, there's only a couple of people on campus. And my campus was like 1,400 people in the middle of cornfield. So it's like, it was like smaller than my high school. But we would show up to the track and there'd be the football players, which I'll come back to that. But I lived in a fraternity, all football players. I was the head guy in my fraternity, but I was a soccer player. But I could bench press more than the football alignment in

college. So we would walk out to the field and they would be all in the middle of the field, all in the middle of the field, coking and joking, talking about the summers and stuff. And we would walk out and the football players knew what we were going to do. And we'd get on that track and there was three heats and we would bust our ass doing that five-minute mile. And I swear to you, running four 75-second splits as a big dude is not fun. The third lap is a gut check.

And if you have anything left after that, it's just put out. And that's why my coach did that every year to see who came to camp prepared. And if you didn't make the five-minute mile, every five seconds you were over, you had to run three to five miles at 6.30 AM, which added on

another session to three a days. So you're doing four a days. And by the third day, if so, if you were 6.15 or older with the fat boys or slower with the fat boys, you were miserable because those guys were sleeping and going to get breakfast and you can't move your legs and you're going to run. So my best I ever got was five or seven. I never did it. But yeah, wrestling, soccer was incredible for the compression on the joints and the bones to make it through buds, which we see

guys fail out because they can't run. They don't have the compression. Football players are big guys. Wrestling was the other side of my formula for buds. There was a difference, and we'd say in buds, there's a difference between being cold and tired and cold, wet and tired. There's a huge difference. And when you're in that state, a mental state, there's not many sports out there that can do what wrestling can do for you because we're hungry and tired.

I would always see, you'd see in training, there would be the water polo players, the football players, the basketball players, soccer players, and then there was the wrestlers. And they usually did better than the rest of the sports. Interesting. Yeah, it's funny, wrestling over and over again seems to be one of the sports that a lot of the SEALs and special operations guys did. And then obviously in your community, water polo

was another one that you just mentioned. A lot of the guys came from that background too. The other advantage I was from Michigan. So when people were cold in the water, I was like, it's not like Superior. Yeah, same in England. When you go to the beach as an English boy, you're basically doing a Wim Hof workout just to go swimming. Yeah, fall through the ice a couple

of times and you'll learn what self-preservation is all about. Yeah, exactly. Well, then one more thing when we stay on charter and then we'll progress through into the military side. As I progress through this podcast and I'm this perpetual student, I'm hearing this stories and seeing these common denominators really surface. One of the areas that I don't think gets enough attention when it comes to first responder in military mental health is the impact

of childhood trauma. And so we look at Afghanistan, we look at 9-11, whatever our big trauma is. When you look back now and you have this kind of multi-generational element, your grandfather was World War II veteran, arguably probably brought some trauma back with him and your father and now you. When you look back, were there elements of your childhood that contributed to struggles later in life? No. Yes, absolutely. Like I said, my father, God bless him, he was a good man.

He just had a lot of anger and man, there's so many, I think there's so many stories that resonate with this. I study trauma, I study the nervous system and I study under Dr. Joe Dispenza, this thing called epigenetics, which is the energy of an environment or the energy of an experience, call it trauma, and how it affects your genetics. And there are studies being done right now, Dr. Joe does them all the time where they gather all this information, 1500 people out of 2200 people

in his week-long seminars. So you have a controlled environment and they're studying the gene expression, they're taking every fluid out of the body. I mean, they take spit, sweat, urine, blood, feces, some were given breast milk at these retreats, I mean, EEGs, everything. And they're finding that after seven days, you could basically start to develop the same gene expressions, which create the same proteins, which create the same genes. And so if you could do that

in seven days, then we have to look at this thing called epigenetics. And that's what I think this country is suffering from is the generational trauma of war and conflict, abuse, drugs, and all these things that are, you say, well, my dad was an alcoholic, his dad was an alcoholic. I'm like, no, yeah, but his dad had trauma, his dad had trauma, and his dad had trauma. And if you look at our history, all the wars, that's literally just repeating the cycle of shit. And we call it living.

It's our reality. And that's accepted. That's it. You come, you serve, you die. And I think we need to change the narrative on this thing called genetic disease or childhood trauma is the core trauma of all traumas. And even if you come, and this is so funny that you brought this up, because I've worked with a lot of people on a socioeconomic scale, sons and daughters of billionaires, millionaires, or orphans, don't know my dad, don't know my father, don't know my mother.

And you get these identity issues. One says, I like the right or the wealthy. I don't deserve this. I don't even give my permission to feel this way. And so now they have the access to do to do a lifestyle of destruction, and they have enough leash to hang themselves with. And the other side, yeah, you get raped, you don't know your dad, you don't know these things. It's a real easy one to pinpoint the neglect, the abuse. And so the thing is, is we all had,

I believe we all have micro traumas somewhere along the line. And it's really just how we dealt with them. And if you come from a good environment, you might have less trauma, but life has its way of, you know, influence or infecting you with some sort of trauma. It's just part of it. But I do believe that childhood trauma is the core cause root of our addictions, of our PTS, and maybe even our cancers and other lifestyle choices that eventually lead to health issues.

Absolutely. It's funny, when you're talking about that spectrum of people, I worked on a summer camp for seven, six years, excuse me. And it was a, it was a quite a wealthy camps as a performing arts camp, a lot of wealthy Jewish families would send their kids there. And when I worked there, there was one year I worked with a guy called Ty, who sadly, years later, I discovered a past away. I don't know what from to this day, but I ended up kind of naming my son after him,

just because we just had this amazing friendship while we were there. But he'd always worked in the inner city camps. And he was a real like hip hop dude, you know, always wore all the camo and

all that stuff. But we would compare notes. And it was the same thing, whether it was like you said, possibly, you know, fatherless kid that was on a sponsorship program from Brooklyn somewhere, or one of these wealthy kids that lived in Manhattan, you've got an absent father from whatever issue it is in the inner city dynamic, and then you've got a parent who's physically

present, but maybe is absent. And the kids always in boarding school, and they never really see their parent, two different bank accounts, same kind of trauma, you know, so you know, as you said, it's not socio economic, it's a human experience. And then with the epigenetic side, I couldn't agree more. And it's something that I, you know, there's, there's no absolute, I'm sure there are some people that are drawn to addiction a little bit stronger. And I've heard that. However,

when you look back, you know, is it, is it a gene and alcoholism gene? Or is it granddad, you know, was grazed around violence and great granddad was raised around violence. So it's this thing where, by the time you reach adulthood, you've been groomed the same way as your alcoholic parent, your alcoholic grandparent. So is nature and nurture, but to discard the ability to reverse that through changing your environment through post-traumatic growth is the same as saying,

Oh, you'll never fix cancer. Here's your chemo. You know, we've got to do better. We've got to look at what causes cancer the same way. They're making money on it. Oh, yeah. That's the X conversation that well that we have to go there because the reality is it's not enough just to have the right intentions. It's not enough just to have it because they're still in a system. And this is where I get a little angry because I didn't serve to live in a system that is as

broken as ours. And it's still the best country in my opinion on the planet, but it can be much better. And I don't, and that's, you know, that's part of my, you know, like we talked earlier, my programming, I did a very elite program and I don't aim low. I don't think we're designed to aim low. And if we, if we can, you know, this cliche, but if you can heal just one more person,

it's a good, it's a win, but it's not one more person. This is millions of people were talking about here and you rep, you, you, you, you drop that ripple in the water and guess what happens? We create a better world and better families. And it's funny cause I, I've been watching this for five years. I've been healing. I've been helping show warriors how to heal themselves. And when you do that, you see the family heal and then you see the community heal and then you see the

country heal. So it's a, it's time. That's a good place to segue. We're jumping ahead a little bit, but I know that you are, you know, a huge fan of one of the candidates that will be on the ballot later this year. I have said the same thing over and over again, again, I'm coming from another country. I'm an American citizen. Now my country, the way we chose people, there wasn't the financial element, but you still end up with the same kind of idiot over and over and over again, because of

the broken system that we use there in America. You know, if you're a millionaire and you have no ethics, man, you're on the fucking, you know, super fast train to becoming the next president because our system is so fucked up that all the good leaders of the world can't or won't participate. So talk to me about your perspective. Cause the reason I asked that is I believe completely that

community is the, is the answer to this trauma. But let's be honest, the last two administrations which span both sides of the aisle, I've done nothing but divide this country and set groups against each other. So what is your perspective at the top as far as, you know, some people that you're excited about that maybe will start pulling us back together again?

Yeah. Let me first explain my mindset and what you just said. If you're in a system, there's this thing in the intelligence world called being handled. There's a reason why every actor has an agent and every network in Hollywood has three letters. And so when you see the world, like I see the world, which is, I would say slightly different than most people. It's, it's because I'm aware of the system. And if I want to fix the system,

I have to get outside of the system. And so my goal in my life is to never be handled by money or by anything. I want to be a free man. I am a free man. And so we're, again, it goes back to my programming of being a problem solver. So I see the corruption in big pharma. We see the corruption. The big pharma doesn't just corrupt. It's not just big pharma and the drugs. It's the fact that big pharma owns the medical schools that programs our healers into a system that's

controlled by our insurance. Absolutely. And that's just one pillar, but you got to look at the military industrial complex, which causes this cycle of trauma, addictions, brokenness. People want to look at the movies and say, thank you for your service and say, man, what a honorable thing. They don't see the destructive families in the shit we leave for our kids. And so there's the military industrial complex, there's the big pharma, and there's a banking

system, which is controlled by Black Rock, State Street, and Vanguard. If this sounds familiar, you've probably been listening to a guy named Mr. Bobby Kennedy Jr. because he's the only one that's talking about it. And I also have an experience in the intelligence world of doing asset validation. If you want to find out who someone is, you look at their trauma. And you see that he has seen behind the curtain the whole time, and they killed his dad, and they

killed his uncle. And I say they, we know who you're talking about. The gig is up. So it's like, how do you fix the system? You get behind a champion that's aiming dead center, center mass to unify this country. And it's going to take a miracle, but I believe in miracles. And I believe in someone that's willing to risk their own safety of their life for the betterment of our children in our country. So I'm going with Bobby on this one.

When I listened to him on Joe Rogan, I was really impressed. When I listened to Tulsi, who's supposed to be coming on at some point, I've been waiting for a while now, but it's going to happen eventually. But I don't think she's going to be running, if I'm not mistaken. But again, it seemed like a person who understands fitness, who had been in the military, who, again, was someone who was pulling people together rather than driving it apart, them apart.

But this is what we need. It really is. And these truths are apparent to us. I think that's what made people so scared about even podcasts. Joe Rogan's done an amazing job, whether people love him or hate him, of really pulling uncomfortable situations out into the light. But when it comes to the big farmer and all these monsters that are coming out of the country, it's really the big farmer and all these monster corporations that are behind a lot of this. Something that I

kind of had an aha moment on recently is we talk about the mental health crisis. Well, you and I wouldn't be able to sleep at night if we made products that kill people, the devastated families in West Virginia or Ohio, or we're sending our young men and women off to war simply because then we could sell more uniforms and whatever it was. And then I realized, well,

that's also the mental health crisis. The reason that you can own a fast food chain knowing that obesity and diabetes is partly your fault and sleep at night or cigarettes or whatever it is, is because you yourself have become a sociopath. It's the only way that you'd be able to sleep knowing that your products are killing people. So this is, I think, another part of the conversation is we got to switch it back to the politicians, the frivolous lawsuit lawyers, all these people

that profit out of greed, that they are sick. That's the only way to put it. They are mentally sick. So when we're trying to understand why they don't change, because they haven't faced their own trauma. Yeah. And I understand what you're saying about the sociopath. For me, it's about being a predator. And I was a predator. I was trained to be the best predator on the damn planet. And we'll be writing about the people that I was a predator with for a long time.

But if you want to look at psychological, like a good psychological analysis, a predator, we call that the sympathetic state, which is flight, fight, procreate, or freeze. Most people freeze. And so that's acting in an animal state. Now, if you do that long enough, you are programming your neurological system, which is the computer, that runs the whole damn thing into a primal survival state, which drives up cortisol and does a whole bunch of bad things.

And here's the other side, all the addictions, the porn addictions, the alcohol, the abuse, all this crap, literally it's run off the program. So I believe, and I think theology hijacks this, too, because we're taught if you're raised as a Christian or a spiritual or any kind of religion that you're above all the animals, that you're human. We just happen to born naked with Victorian bodies and eat this apple and everything goes to shit. Well, I'm like, no, we're still freaking

human. We're still animals. We still have fangs. We still can kill people. We still have that ability to destroy and to do things that are inhumane. And I think it's the cognizance of diffidence that you can justify your actions by making millions of dollars by selling poison to people. And you can sleep at night. And the funny thing is you can't fake the funk on a nasty dunk. Those people are the ones that have the corruption and they're the ones that have all the

addictions. Here's a perfect example of a beautiful Ark. I love Arks. I'm a writer, so I like stories with Arks. The Wolf of Wall Street guy, I forgot his name. He just did a podcast with my friends down in Cancun who run an Ibogaine addiction center called Beyond. And my friend Talia, she's just a wonderful human being and she's pregnant right now and she's a heavyweight and she beat her heroin addiction. And so I've gotten to speak with her and she has a lot of

celebrities down there in her clinic. And this guy from the Wolf of Wall Street, just a horrible person, right? Just nasty, nasty, nasty, nasty stuff. The guy does these psychedelics and he has this Ark and now he's talking about how to become a better human being. So you don't have to look further than the Bible to look for characters that have good Arks and say that these guys were, you know, one guy killed a Christian, you know, Saul, you know, and the Paul. And so you have these

Arks. And here's where I get a little crazy and I start looking at this religious text now with the archaeological supported data that there might've been psychedelics involved back then. I mean, was the burning bush, was it really burning? Maybe in the eye of the beholder, you know, was that bush maybe an Ibogaine brush? Maybe. I don't know. You know, it's like I, I just think there's more to the story. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is the thing and we'll get into it,

but this is the arrogance of modern medicine. And again, let me preface elements of modern medicine are phenomenal. I mean, you know, the horrors of war also brought out the incredible trauma surgery, prosthesis, you know, I would not want to have surgery with that anesthetic. You know, some of the emergency medicine drugs that I used as a paramedic, you know, were phenomenal, literally saved lives Narcan and D50 and Epi and some of these other ones, even though a lot of them are

actually naturally occurring, they just synthesize them. But, you know, when it comes to, you know, the disease management and the psychiatric meds, there's become this forced snobbery and, you know, ridicule of medicine that had lasted for not just centuries, millennia. And we are finally having this awakening of something that's only been thrust upon us for a few decades, which is most of the chronic disease medicine doesn't work. Arguably even chemo, the old chemo, at least,

you know, let's just scorch earth, the body and fingers crossed that it survives. It doesn't seem to be great medicine to me, but now we're looking at whether it's chiropractic and acupuncture or, you know, Ibogaine or, you know, THC. Rick Simpson oil. Yeah, I mean, all of the things. Yeah, Rick Simpson oil, they're saying it's shrinking tumors.

If you go watch the documentary Dose 2, and it talks about this high concentration of THC that comes in this little tar and you take a little teeny dab of it and there's no money in healing. I'm just going to say that. Well, I had Paige Figge on the show. Her daughter, Charlotte, is the Charlotte's web story, the little girl with these basically fatal seizures. She sees for like 29 minutes, was post-ictal for a minute and then went to a seizure again, like every 30 minutes.

And it was just CBD. That's all they put into her stomach tube. And then she stopped seizing almost immediately. It diminished, diminished, diminished. And she lived for nine years, ended up having a febrile seizure in the night from COVID that killed her. But she got nine years.

She was on the hospital before and that was simply CBD. So this is what, you know, that they don't want you to hear is the, if these incredible success of something that you don't need to have insurance and a prescription for, you can literally buy it in your health food store. So, yeah. And so this is where I get into the gray area, because if I was to wait for someone to say it was legal before I started to do this work, then we will be waiting for a long time.

And I don't believe, again, I don't believe we were meant to survive. And I also believe in this concept called paying it forward. I only got this healing treatment because I was a SEAL. And I know that. And so it's my duty, which gives me purpose, because I'm a service guy. So in SEALs we're like, find the next job, find another job. This gives me my passion and my purpose. And I don't need anything else in this life. And so we are waking up a lot of things.

I think it's a 5,000 year gap on humanity that we're reaching right now. The other thing is when you start to, okay, so let's just talk about the nervous system for a second, right? Most of science, most of medicine is going to treat the physical manifestation of the body, the mechanisms. Why? Because that's how science works. You study a hypothesis and then you try to support it by your data. And even that's hijacked because we know who owns the medical journals.

So there's all these things that you have to look at if you're really going to try to figure this thing out. And the thing that kills me is that we're not focusing on the nervous system. And that nervous system is an energetic system. And it's okay for people to say, you have a NA node or SA node in your heart that generates an electrical impulse that you don't need any connection for. And that's okay. We can say that. We've been saying that for 50, 60 years probably.

But if I start talking about the nervous system being an energetic system, people go, you're crazy. That's woo woo talk. And I'm looking at people like Einstein, who was a psychonaut, who did LSD with Albert Hoffman, the one that found it in 1938. And they actually made LSD because they were trying to cauterize blood vessels. That was the whole

purpose. And they were synthesizing this molecule from a fungus called ergot, which they're now finding on the teeth of the molars next to the chalices in ancient Greece in the years 2500 BC to 392 AD. Come on. It's fungus. It grows on trees. It grows on barley. We have mushrooms all over the world. And you're telling me over the last millions of years that man was a hunter and gatherer, that they didn't come across this and all these ancient civilizations didn't have some

other intelligence. And I'm not buying it. And I'm proof that in five years, my brain has gotten smarter. I've gotten healthier. And I've beaten all my addictions to include alcohol, porn, and pills. And the middle one was the hardest because I started that when I was a kid to deal with my parents. See, we're always programming ourselves. We're always trying to find the dopamine. We're always trying to self-heal. And it's just because we weren't taught the right way to do

things that we're here. And so we need to bring awareness to what's a medicine, what's a drug, and know that the things that they're telling you could kill you because then they give you an SSRI. They say, you know, side effects, suicidal thoughts. They tell you and yet we still take it. Why? Because we're programmed because the person with the white coat comes in and we're in pain. Guess what? Give me, give me what I need because this is, I'm not feeling good. And this is,

you're the, you're the one with the white coat. Bullshit. It's bullshit. I mean, those, those drug side effects, some of them, you know, it's literally like having a femoral bleed and then someone handing you a tourniquet that says, Oh, my cause severe bleeding. Like you don't want to see that on a tourniquet. You want to see this will stop the bleeding. And the same, you know, with a mental health product, you know, it's gotta, it's gotta be an improvement.

But how many times have we heard whether it was suicide or homicide that psychiatric meds are involved? 93% as I'm sorry, as you're on board of 93% of our suicide. And that's just the ones that we know that were suicide. That's probably, I don't know, maybe a third of them because most of them are accidents. Here's the other thing. So we're talking about the energy system, the nervous

system, right? If I reset the energy, learn how to surrender, learn how to let go in a safe space, using my breath and the energy of my comrades around me. Do you, do you think that's a better model here? Heal the nervous system to reset and then rebuild. And the rebuild part is your integration tools. And that's the one that we need more awareness on because not everyone's going to do the psychedelics. It's not for everybody. Okay.

And I'm not trying to say that if you take psychedelics, your world is going to get better again. It's about the intention and the awareness that creates all this stuff. And it's about the belief system. So it starts with an intention. You have the right environment and you develop a belief system off of an experience and then a series of experiences.

That's what fires and rewires the nervous system. So can you use cold water to learn that you are not your nervous system and you learn how to surrender and you learn how to slip into the parasympathetic holding on to the exhale and the fake vagal response. You can do these things to support the psychedelic work or you can just do this without the psychedelic work and do holotropic breath work, which this book

is the real version of psychology. This takes in consideration the non-ordinary states of consciousness and the Freudian analysis and the animal research or whatever, like lab rat shit. But this book is written by Stan Goff, who had over 4,500 LSD sessions in Europe. You can do a lot with just a breath, but again, these are major concepts. These are big woo-woo terms for people that are just like, they're probably listening to this going, like, who is

this nutcase? But I don't want to do the normal thing. That's sick to me. I don't want to ever do that ever again. I want to be free. I want to help others heal and speak truth. That's it. Well, I want to hear your healing journey and then we'll actually get into some of the things that you're doing now. You talked about the decision to enter the Navy as a SEAL. Walk me through your journey, what allowed you to succeed when you went through BUDS and beyond, and then

how you found yourself as a medic specifically. Oh man. So I had a passion for medicine my whole life. That's really why I came into SEAL Teams. It was to be a healer. I thought I was trying to be a killer, but it was to be that guy when my friends got shot. That was what was driving me. And the affirmation of making it through training, right? Man camp, they call it. But I did real well in BUDS. I graduated top of my class. I think I was second in the rankings

for honor man, but we had a great class, class 252. And I felt like life just prepared me so much for BUDS. I was a good runner. I was a great PT guy. I had to do some work in swimming just because I wasn't a disciplined swimmer, but you put fins on me, then I turned into a motorboat. So I could swim with the fins. And it got through first time. I only failed. I never failed any physical evolutions in BUDS. I only failed a swim, a dive test. And it was because instructor kicked

me in the back of the head on my free ascent and I thought he'd tap me, but he kicked me. So I came up and they failed me for it. That was it. That's the only thing I failed. I went after BUDS, we went to SQT, which is another six months. It's where you really learn the skills after you beat the hell out of you for six months. And then after that, I went to SOT diver school. So I learned some dive medicine as a, cause I was already a corpsman. And after SOT, I went to jump school

at Fort Benning, which is like three weeks to show you how to jump out of a plane. It's like, you only need like three days to do that. And then after that, I went to 18 Delta, which is the, well, it was actually special operation medic course in Fort Bragg. And I did graduate top my class in that program. And I wanted to do the long course, but then I was like, after seven months, I think of being at Bragg, I was like, get me the hell out of here. Plus my buddies were all

going down range and I was like, I need to get back to the team. So I got back to the team. I went to team two, met up with a couple of BUDS instructors that were chiefs of platoons. And I just walked in to this little restaurant and I saw them on the table and I said, what can I do to get me, for you to get me in your platoon? And I said, I want to be an asset. And so I got into a platoon. They traded for me, which is cool. And got in a great platoon at SEAL team two. We ended

up going to Abani and Fallujah. We had sister platoons, so we just did both sets. But before that, I got to go to Al-Assad on that deployment in 2006 to work in the cache with our head surgeon for the Naval Special Warfare unit. So I got to go up to him and work on surgeries, do chest tubes and do all that. And it was there when I remembered I had some words with a Colonel who was running the ER there. And we were talking about innovating in a field and criking. And I was like, I don't

carry an innovation kit in the field. And they're like, why not? Why would you not? Because it doesn't make any sense. If I can get the thing in, get him air right away, I can preserve his brain. And by the way, we're getting shot at. This isn't like raise the table and pick your blade and do that. So it kind of showed me my mindset into trauma medicine. I was going to be against the

narrative or what they thought was good medicine. And I learned after 16 years as a SEAL medic and helped write some of the curriculum for TCCC and started the SEAL medic course that we broke away from BRAG and did our own SEAL medic course in Mississippi. I started to see like, man, this is cool because we're using our experience to drive medicine forward, especially trauma medicine. And you're right. There's two things that come out of war. Well, three, oil.

Medicine and weapons. Right? So medicine and weapons are what comes out of war. And we're seeing that now. I mean, we saw it with the amputations. We did more amputations in this last war than all wars combined. And partially it's because we had the ability to do them successfully. The awareness of a tourniquet. I mean, I remember in 2005, 2006, we'd be partying and somebody would get cut and the guy would put a tourniquet on his leg and the ER or the EMS guys would get here and they would

start yelling at us for putting tourniquets on them. And we're like, gotta preserve that shit. You only got so much in the body. And it's just that mentality. So yeah, so the trauma medicine was my background. And then I got into intelligence and I didn't want to do intelligence. I was

already paranoid. I was already like, I cared what people thought. And that's probably why I had some of the issues I had with addictions is that I was just subconsciously, I didn't feel, I guess I felt undervalued and it probably comes from my childhood traumas of my father kind of,

you know, digging into me a little bit or a lot. And so, yeah, so it was my identity. And so we were the shield and we had this trident and you look good jawlines and all that, you know, and so we're like showing this front and we're and when we get to the medicine at the end, when everything's gone to shit and everybody's got the same symptoms and they've mostly guys had a gun in their mouth or, you know, all these women, the families are dissolved and this just, this despair,

he's broken down soldiers and warriors and they're just, they don't got anywhere else to go. And I think that's part of the success is that when they come in like that, it's easier to surrender. And when you do, you see it, you see it when they come out of the medicine, the five MEO DMT, the protocol that I've been studying the most out of all the psychedelics is Ibogaine with the five MEO DMT a day off in between. And this is what we've been used.

The Stanford's been studying this, the University of Texas at Austin's been studying this protocol, which was developed by Dr. Martin Polanco from the Mission Within. And I want people to know that it's this gentleman, Mr. Dr. Martin Polanco, who is going to be the doctor to go down as the one to heal the seals. And he's a dear friend of mine. And when I did the five MEO a second time,

first time I had no clue what I was doing. They blindfolded me and took me to a mansion in Rancho, Santa Fe, where there was an MD and his wife, who was kind of like a shaman healer, and this Vietnam seal who was a friend of mine. And they blindfolded me to get to the house because I was still active at the time. And I reached my rock bottom and they just said, you know, just do this and whatever work you got to do, just surrender to it. And so I didn't know what that

meant. And so I fought it and locked up and it felt like eternity and it hurt like hell. And at that time, I just lost an approved medical retirement that was stripped from me in 10 days. My ex-wife put a restraining order on me. It was erroneous. I lost my four kids on Father's Day. And I was on Father's Day. Last time I talked to them was Father's Day 2019. So I lost all of these things in like, it was 10 days and that's how I showed up to the medicine. And so I didn't really want to

live anymore. It was just, it was so heavy. And I remember in that state, I thought, you know, this is the CIA. This is my ex-wife who had some big time connections that they were euthanizing me. And I was like, I came out of it. And so they say, if you're not done with the work, you can ask for more. So I sat back up and I took another inhale of this toad and went back down and did it again the third time. I said, okay, this is it. I surrender. I'm okay to leave.

And at that time it was like, wham. And I saw this glow and these little glows and something happened. And now I know what that is. It's the brain is tricked on this medicine. And if you surrender, it blasts you off into this near death experience, which sounds crazy. But again, it's about the experience. It doesn't matter if it's real or not. The body doesn't know the difference. The body doesn't know the difference. And so with that, you get a reset, you get a rebirth,

and you get this new life. And I swear to God, the people that do it, they know this. When you come out of this medicine, it's like you've de-aged 10 years. All the stress, all the anxiety for the first time in most people's lives, they've never experienced anything like this. And this is why I'm like, this has to be from God because there's nothing on the planet that can do that. But it

can't be done for you. You got to do the surrender. And that's why I say it's not for everybody. But for those that have been hijacked or massively programmed like we were in the SEAL teams, this is the best shot we got. It's the best medicine we got. I've heard this story over and over again. I had Marcus Capone on the show who obviously has been one of the voices from your community talking about this therapy. And I think I should get Dr. Blanco on the show. I think that would be a fun one.

Oh, yeah. He doesn't like to talk too much. He's pretty humble. It'd be tough. Maybe. We can try. I'll try. But I mean, literally, I've had a lot of your community on the show. Some of my, some of our come dear friends, Ryan Parrott, for example. And over and over and over again, I hear the same story. And with them, a lot of time it's Ibogaine. And you listen to them and there's alcoholism, there's a drug addiction, there's all these things. And then they walk out

not wanting it anymore. And again, like you said, it's not a magic pill one and done, but it's helped them process that. And then you've obviously got to keep doing the work after. But the number of lives that have been saved, the number of voices that I've heard on this podcast because that worked is absolutely incredible. Yeah, it is. I was at Marcus's house filming a little thing when he was about to go down there and I got to meet his wife, Melanie, I think her

name is in. And that's Amber Capone, you're probably thinking of. That's Marcus. Oh, you said Marcus Capone. Yes. Oh, I thought you said Marcus Luttrell. I'm sorry. Oh, no, but that's that's someone I'd love to get on the show. Yeah, I was at Luttrell's house when he was about to go down and do it. And his brother was there. So I got to talk to them and his brother Morgan is actually a politician out of Texas. And he's been essential actually in moving this thing called the Breakthrough

Therapies Act forward. But yeah, Marcus Capone actually was healed at the Mission Within under Dr. Martin Polanco. And so, yeah, I mean, I've known Marcus for a long time. You do, you see the same stories over and you're like, you know, it's all based on my perspective. Our reality is based off our perspective. So for me, I'm like, what the hell is going on here? But

for someone that has no idea that this even exists, it's different. One is it's the same facade that my community struggles with, that law enforcement struggles with, you know, is, and I heard this from so many of you, you know, you look at each other and you're going, why am I such a pussy? Why is everyone else okay? And I'm going through this shit. And the irony is they're looking at you thinking the same thing, because you need a mask to do what you do. I need a mask to do what

I do. As I always tell people, I can't go on the scene of a crumpled car with people bleeding everywhere and start queening out, oh my God, so much blood. You have to put on a mask, you know, but then at the end of it, God forbid, you know, the children killed, you have to process that too. So the more of the voices like yours that we hear these, these real alphas, and I use that term, you know, uh, affectionately that of being vulnerable now about their struggles and bringing

hope into the conversation, saying, here's some of the tools that I use to heal. That then debunks so many, especially men that tell themselves, oh, you know, I'm a, you know, only a pussy would, would have to go through that shit. Well, yeah, I don't think you're tougher than an SAS member or Navy seal or an elite firefighter or a SWAT operator. So, you know, look in the mirror, have some humility and realize that we all are going to struggle at some point.

Yeah. I think that the hardest thing to do sometimes in life is learning how to let go. It comes down to your want. And if the want is outweighs, you know, the fear, and then you can do it, but not everyone is strong enough to do it. And they're not all we're not, look, we're not going to save everybody. I know that, but there's a shit load of people we can save. And, you know, it's, it's not even about the medicine really. I mean, it is,

it's, it's a key, it's a tool, but it's more about the belief system. And I think that's the biggest thing about the belief system. And you're, you can change your belief systems by changing your experience. It takes energy. And that's why we're studying this stuff as an energy system, because whatever is in those plants, if it comes from, you know, whether you believe it comes from God or it just comes from nature, there's something in those molecules that interacts

with our nervous system. And the biggest crime against humanity, in my opinion, is the inability to do the research because they were placed in a box called the Controlled Substance Act, 1970, by Dick Nixon and the CIA and the FDA and the DOJ and all the other agencies. I don't call Dick, call him President Nixon because he was a fascist dictator being used in our country. So I don't, he doesn't get the respect to call him a president. He's killed more people because of this

Controlled Substance Act, which leads right into the war on drugs. And it wasn't a war on drugs. It was the business of drugs because people don't understand that the trade of opium that existed for thousands of years is one of the fuels that fuels our economy. And that under that trading of opium, which by the way, why do you think there were so many DA guys on our freaking missions

in Afghanistan? Well, tell me about it. So just to jump in for a second, because in the seven years that I had the podcast, when I asked the question about, because I've talked about this a lot, you know, the illicit drug trade as a paramedic, as a firefighter, we're the ones that pull the drugs, excuse me, pull the sheets over the teens, the children that are killed in these wars on our

streets over drugs. We're the ones that find the deceased overdoses. We're the ones that run on the homeless people that have been, you know, forced into the shadows because of their addiction, the prostitutes, et cetera, et cetera. So with this clear perspective, the war on drugs is a complete failure. And then I get people like Johann Hari on the show, who educates me through his book, Chasing the Scream, and Lost Addiction, Lost Connections.

And you learn about the origin of the prohibition, which actually goes back to the 30s and Harry Anslinger when it came to marijuana, and then it just kind of snowballed from there. But that's what's created so many problems. Why are we having problems at the border with Mexico? It's not because they hate tacos. You know what I mean? They're not running in here because we make delicious donuts. There's a backstory of Colombia. But I asked my Afghan veterans about that element

and what they see in Afghanistan. Very tight-lipped the first two or three years. But now they're talking about it. So talk to me about that when you're overseas. So about that border issue, put a pin in, go check out what Kennedy's saying about fixing the borders. It makes a hell of a lot more sense. And what we got right now in Texas with Biden threatening the state of Texas, that won't work out real well for anyone. And they know that. It's just a bluff. It's all part of the

bullshit narrative that they're playing for this election year. But to back, yeah, the Afghanistan peace and the DEA involvement, none of us were aware of it at the time. We didn't understand. We just thought, oh, these terrorists that we're going after, selling opium and selling it to whoever, which they are, they're selling it to Russia. They're selling it to whoever is the buyer. But make no mistake, when you declare war on anyone, there's no more rules. There's no more

like this thing where we're coming in and just taking kids and freeing them and doing it. It's not like that at all. I live on a Civil War battlefield. I'm from Detroit. I'm studying both sides of this war. And you know what I'm saying? Yes, they need a narrative to build a war. We will free the slaves. But what they didn't say is we're going to take all their freaking land and we're going to make sure that no one rises up again. You know why? Because we're going to drug

the shit out of them. And we're going to pump alcohol and opioids down their throats. And we're going to distract them so that they can never do that. In fact, you know how much money the VA makes on polypharmacia, 12 prescriptions for mental health, opioids? They're the fuel that drives this economy. And that's what people don't get. The opioids that come into our country, the ones that were under the medicinal value box in Schedule

2, right? So all the psychedelics, hemp, cannabis, CBD, that's all in Schedule 1. To include any other psychedelic compound that we might discover, that box in Schedule 1 says no medicinal value. And so in Schedule 2 is all their money makers. Opium, people don't understand that heroin, morphine, fentanyl, cocaine, all these drugs are in that box. And when you allow for drugs to come into your country, you are putting money

into the economy and creating a vortex. And you're making money this way and you're making money this way. And we know that they start addictions. They knew this when Purdue Pharma, if you haven't got a chance, check out Painkillers by Peter Berg and that podcast by Peter Berg and Joe Rogan is really what people need to understand how the government and how we allowed to make so much money on opioids because they weren't going after people in the war on drugs with psychedelics

or acid. It was rubbish. And so now we have this drug called Ibogaine that blocks the receptor sites in a heroin patient, no withdrawal symptoms. I know several heroin addicts who have been on heroin for a long time. I knew a lot that didn't make it. But what I've heard every single time is the pain that someone goes through on a withdrawal from heroin is so horrible that if they can't make it the first time, they don't ever want to go back to that again. So they overdose.

And so with this medicine, which is literally an antidote for opioid addiction, addictions in general, but really opioid addiction, a couple of thousand spec ops guys can't be wrong. Right? Yeah. You talked about Painkillers. Have you ever seen Dope Sick? It was the one that was on Hulu. Yeah. That to me, I think it's the one that was on the internet. I think it's the one that was on the internet. Yeah. I think Painkillers, it was entertaining, but it wasn't as raw as Dope Sick.

Dope Sick really told that insidious nature that a lot of us saw. And even, God, who was the guy that played the physician? Michael Keaton. Him just being a countryside physician, initially doing it for all the right reasons, kind of questioning the reps coming in at first and then ultimately becoming hooked himself. I mean, they told that story so beautifully. And I had another guy on Sam Quinones who wrote Dreamland about Ohio, Portsmouth, Ohio, and how the cartels are bringing pure

black tar heroin once the pill mills were shut down here in South Florida. So, you know, I mean, you hear all these voices and it's that Venn diagram and that line intersects and the war on drugs. And what's beautiful is I'm getting a lot of law enforcement now saying the same thing. It's a fucking epic failure. And the only way that we can fix it. And I've seen it. I've sat with a guy in Portugal who decriminalized, spearheaded the decriminalization of addiction.

That doesn't mean you can go to your grocery store and buy meth. It means that you're not arrested as an addict. And they put all their money into mental health counseling and addiction counseling and job creation and put them back as a functioning member of society. They had an incredible response. And again, proactive versus reactive. But as long as we buy this bullshit, this is your brain on

drugs, war on drugs narrative that only feeds certain deep pockets. We're going to keep losing people left, right and center, regardless of wealth, color or sexual orientation. I got this. You're going to really like this. This is kind of the stuff that most people don't get to hear because of the fact that I'm a part of a man. I tell you, it's like,

I never felt tip of the spear in my military service, but I do now. And being a part of the Veteran Mental Health Leadership Coalition has been an incredible experience because we're bringing together under this coalition, which was started by Brett Waters, the lawyer who wrote the Breakthrough Therapies Act, which is in Congress right now, him and General Steel. Now, General Steel is one of those guys that he's like, he's probably one of the best leaders I

ever been around. He went from an E1 Marine 17, first deployment to Vietnam at 20 years old. He was commissioned and served again as officer in Vietnam. He was the youngest Marine officer of all time. He went through a three-star Lieutenant General and helped run the FBI investigation of 9-11 because he was in charge of the aircraft carrier in New York City where he hosted the FBI. And so I was like, man, you probably wanted in on it, didn't you? He's like, you're damn right.

They had him in there and this guy knows so many world leaders and for him to come out of retirement at 77 years old to see this through, this guy had never done no psychedelics. He's never done, he never smoked weed or anything like that. But he understands that the system is corrupt and he turned down to run the VA twice by Trump, Trump's appointment. And he told Trump, he said, I won't be caught dead running that system in which you're making money and you're killing our veterans.

And so right now we have the VA about to release, we're setting up the members of this coalition, like Dr. Lynette Averell from Baylor School of Medicine. She's the head of psychedelics in Texas down there. We got Dr. Susie Sisley, who is one of the only persons to sue and win against the DOJ and the FDA for cannabis. And she's, I believe, the only person to, she can manufacture, she's licensed to manufacture psilocybin cannabis and I believe LSD for the government. She works with us.

She's awesome. She's actually starting a American Legion post. And if anybody is a veteran, she's going to pay for your American Legion membership to sign up in this post in Montana, which she's literally getting them to pass all this legislation through the American Legion. And we have full support from the American Legion. We have full support from the VFW and the Disabled Veterans Association. So this is how we're attacking this thing on the state level. It's fascinating. I mean,

this whole thing is, like I said, I'm like part of history. But what's even cooler is when we went to DC, we got an Airbnb and we got people like the author of The Immortality Key, Brian Merzekiou. He shows up to the house. We got these, you know, some are liberal, some are conservative, most of our independents like myself that are just patriots. And we're sitting in this house and we conducted 95 fly-in missions or meetings in DC last year and we're going back next month to do

it again. I've gotten to come back to my home state, talk about a hero's journey. Last year, I got to go back with a dear friend, Jesse McLaughlin, who started his political career in Connecticut. And he's responsible for a lot of this legislative paperwork on the state level to basically, we'll design something and then we'll give it to the state. Another state will call us and we'll work with them to set this up exponentially or faster. So I got to go back

to Michigan and we raised $1.3 million for psilocybin research in my home state. And just because I get to tell my testimony and how we plan to, you know, heal our veterans. In Kentucky, I spoke twice there, three times there. And Kentucky was the first state to set forth an opioid abatement commission, first state, where they were going to take their settlement from the Johnson and Johnson opioid settlement, which is $27 billion right now. It'll probably be

more. And each state gets a portion of that. So Kentucky got $900 million. And out of that $900 million, this chairman, his name is Mr. Brian Hubbard. He's a lawyer and he's just ruthless. I mean, he looks like Hale Billy Jim, long red hair, Johnny Rebel. And he is like, he is pissed because Kentucky is the second highest opioid abuse rate in the country next to West Virginia.

And I think Ohio is like number one in suicide opioid deaths or something. But anyway, so Brian is the commissioner and we worked with him and we were working under the former attorney general, Daniel J. Cameron, an African-American Republican football player, awesome guy. We had this, all this thing going, right? We had all these things that were going. What happens? They get a new attorney general. They put a former DEA guy in charge of the opioid abatement

commission. They kick Brian out, but we knew this was going to happen. So Brian goes up to, he's going up to Ohio where we're going to announce this, I think like in a couple of weeks, but they have $3 million in their budget from the Johnson and Johnson settlement and they got Ohio state. So we're working right now to go up there as a coalition to move this forward in Ohio. And we did $5 million in Illinois for the development of how we're going to allow for

our providers to use this medicine. So now there's so many things that we need to do because this ball is moving and what the biggest fear is that they're not going to be set up. And so we have to do, we have to have money allocated for the training, which isn't that hard because the medicine does the work. It's more about setting up the space and using this in conjunction. And I'm telling you the providers, I have the top neurosurgeons, heart doctors, people are looking

and they're going, you guys can heal more people than we can. And I'm like, what? And they're like, yeah, we fix them, but you guys are healing them. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is crazy that this is actually happening. So there's a lot of educating and training that has to happen in the system, but the VA really, this is the model right now. The VA is, we're hoping

if this all passes, the VA will do the research. And so why is this important is if we can have clinical trials run, that means we can start treating people under the clinical trial umbrella. And so it's a race to build awareness so that we can do the research and we need to get these drugs out of the schedule one box, which we're working on that and getting them rescheduled to schedule three. But none of this happens until they know

they can make their money. And that's just the way it is. It's a, we live in a kingdom, you know, and here's the other side. You don't have to wait. You can do it yourself if you're smart and you do it with intention. And, you know, there's another thing that I want to talk about there's another thing too. I see a lot of psychiatrists because they're kind of handcuffed. If someone says they're psychiatrists, hey, I don't want to be on these medicines anymore.

Well, if you have a moral doctor, which now you're about 50%, right? That person might, they're not going to want to tell you to go do this things because it's not good for them. It's not good for their business. They're going to lose clients. And if they do, if you do get in trouble or get, you could sue them because now they know you told them. So like there's a lot of things that have to happen in for this to work. But always the first step is to bring awareness

to the problem. Absolutely. Well, it's extremely exciting. And I think that there's a really a revolution even here now. I've, I know of several firefighter friends that I personally, in some, some of these cases have connected with ayahuasca retreats. So my community is starting to kind of be educated about this and understand that there are far more tools in the toolbox than they

realize. Because it's one thing if you've actually had the courage to ask for help, and now you've been put in front of a counselor and say they were even a culturally competent clinician, which is a hard task in itself. And you've done the talk therapy and you've done some EMDR, but you're still not right. Because again, it's way deeper than that. You know, some of us in the acute event might, you know, EMDR might help process, but most of us is death by a thousand

cuts psychologically, physiologically through shift work. And, you know, then you add in some organizational betrayal and you know, you've got this kind of toxic perfect storm that you're not going to be able to talk your way out. I'm a firm believer in that it takes energy to change your reality. I stole that from Dr. Joe Espenza and he stole it from someone else. So it's all fair in the world of writing. If you change your energy, you change your reality. What is energy? It's an

experience. So if you give someone an experience, it can change their reality by changing their belief system. And my, you know, I've, because of this work, I've had, I've gotten to, you know, I can text Dr. Andrew Huberman from Stanford and he'll get back to me in a day because he understands what we're doing from a neurological perspective. And I'm looking at my own path and I'm going, okay, I've been microdosing for five years. I haven't taken an NSAID or an anti-inflammatory

in four years. I take my Omegas. Momentum is a company that Dr. Huberman sponsors. So I take, you know, all the supplements. I take supplements, but I don't take any kind of medicine besides THC, psilocybin. And I've been microdosing Ibogaine, which is incredible because you only need seven milligrams. And to put that in perspective, my size, 210 pounds, the dosage for Ibogaine on a therapeutic dose is about 11 milligrams per kilogram and the ceiling about 1100 milligrams.

You can go a little over that. So for me, it's like 1100 milligrams for Ibogaine session. I take seven milligrams and I feel incredible. I don't feel like a danger to anything. I don't, you know, it's about the awareness of the environment. You can't just take something and go to your cubicle and expect everything to be better. You have to use it with intention. So like I'll go out to the waterfalls and I'll sit in the cold water and I'll have my Ibogaine on board. And that experience

is incredible. Like I feel like a million bucks and that's how I heal myself is I'm proactively putting this in my life. I'm not waiting to, I lose, you know, or I'm acting like an asshole or, you know, starting an addiction again. Like I don't wait. I'm proactive on my suffering. And it's again, it's like, it's just, it's really, it's dopamine fasting and it's creating the change by sustaining growth. And it's not rocket science. It just takes intention.

It takes hard work. It takes ability to feel both the good and the bad and knowing that it's okay to not be okay. But just don't sit in it too long. Like that's, that's the freeze part. You see that's people just freeze and it takes energy to get up and go to the gym when you don't feel like it. It takes energy to do the things. And I think there's medicine that can help us do that with intention. Absolutely. I want to ask you a couple of questions about your time overseas and then kind of walk

through your own personal kind of mental health story. The way I like to ask it is, well, the reason I'll ask this question the way I do is we have a very polarized view of war, the civilians of, especially here in the U S you either got the one side, kill them all. Like God saw them out. You got the other side. They're all baby killers and the middle, you know, you have a men and women, sometimes children that we send overseas with our flag on their shoulder to do the things that we

ask them to do. So it's a two part question. The first part, regardless of the politics that sent you to these combat zones, was there a moment where you witnessed, you realized that there were some horrific people that did need to be taken care of? Yeah, absolutely. Um, it's real easy. And it, I can understand both perspectives of this, of, of war. I don't, I didn't have the same perspective as I did when I was 23 years old and I decided to do this. I was pissed off. I reacted.

We got hit. I was in college when I watched that plane hit and I was angry. I told you I was a fighter. So it was logical for me to, to go do something. Um, that would give me affirmation that I felt was doing a service and, um, yeah, I wanted to be around brothers and do that thing.

So that was my intention for signing up when I got to Iraq first time and I got to work in the field because of my skillset as a medic and an intelligence guy, I could go, I've got to go out more than some of my guys in my platoon that were more seasoned because I had the skills and, you know, no one can pull Intel better than a medic because, because it's about, we know, we know this from the psychological stuff that if you feel safe, you get trust.

And when you get trust, you get vulnerability and you get information. And so if I go in there and I heal a kid or treat a goat or whatever, then they're going to open up to me more. And the fact is, here's a perfect example. When I went to a school, we were doing these things, which none of the guys wanted to go do. We call them hearts and mind missions. And you would go to these schools and we would get intelligence, but we would give them soccer balls and backpacks and

do med checks. And I would start handing out, um, backpacks and I gave this little girl soccer ball and I never forget her face. She looked at the ball and she looked at me and she just kind of cried. And I was like, what the hell's wrong with her? And the interpreter goes, you can't give her a ball. She, she's not allowed to play soccer. They're not allowed to do that. And they weren't even, they would, because some of the girls, I think they would go up to fifth grade and then

they weren't allowed to go to school anymore. And they were treated like slaves, uh, just used for, to have kids. And I did see some nasty things that, uh, you know, it's in the Bible. So it, nothing's new in the sun. There's bestiality over there. There's, um, you know, they say, this isn't for everyone. Like I'm not trying to make, you know, stereotype Iraqis because there were some incredible, uh, people over there that I met, but there was a lot of asshole guys that

were treating their women like shit and, um, having sex with men. Like, I mean, I don't know else to tell you that that's what I saw and it wasn't everyone, but there was so much things. And I remember reading the old Testament going, Oh my God, like what has changed? There's so many things there. And I feel like without getting into someone's, you know, culture and trying to change that, man, I just felt like my perspective of life was, it was more than that. And I, and you know,

I was like, why aren't these people, why aren't they aware? Like, why aren't they trying to get changes because they're programmed. That's their reality. That's it. That's all it is. And when you're paying, when you, when you kill one of their kids or whether, uh, somebody gets like killed in combat, you can give them $1,200 or $1,400 for their troubles, you know, but if you kill their goat or their animal, you give them more money because they're, they're like, the kid's not

making me money. The goat is, or the cow is, and it's like crazy. Like you're just trying to think about in your head, you're just trying to put it all together. Um, and it's, it's just, it's, it's, it's crazy. My trauma, my biggest trauma, and I'm blessed in this is, and I don't want to say this, I haven't really talked about this too much, but it's, it's, I look back and I go, I, I never had to take someone's life with my hands. I watched people take lives. I've,

I've watched people die. I've treated people, but I never had to do that. And for so long in the teams, that was your standard. And I would beat myself up and judge myself for not meeting that standard. And I look back and I go, thank you God, because some of those guys that took life when they didn't need to, they're not here anymore because they couldn't stand it. And it's the moral injury

that we see is being the culprit for a lot of PTSD. It's the things the guys were doing on the road away from their wives, the things they can't forgive themselves for it's trapped them there. And I know that the lowest, most destructive energy and emotions is shame because it attacks

your noun, which is your IM statement. And even if you know about it and you try to forgive yourself, sometimes we're neurologically hijacked by that shame, even though we know it's the reason we still can't get away from it because we're operating in the same energy, the same neurochemistry. And if you change that with an experience, you're going to be able to change that. If you change that with an experience, you can learn how to forgive yourself. And you can do this

thing called let go, which is so hard to do on the nervous system. So it's not as easy as just having the willpower to say, I'm going to stop drinking. It's not as easy just to say, I'm going to stop looking at porn. It's not. If it was that easy, people would do it and we wouldn't be here, but we are. And so you have to look at changing and what this means to change. And so with, besides the medicine and all that, that's the reset part. And I believe that that medicine, no one should

judge someone if they're using cannabis, if they're using psilocybin. I tell people all the time when I'm coaching them, this is not about what they think. It's about how you feel and how you use it with your own intention. And Dr. Martin Polanco had a wonderful quote. He said, we're teaching veterans how to create a safe container to heal themselves. And that's what like really, like that's it right there. And that involves change. So I got hooked up with Dr. Joe Dispenza. We were

so fortunate to get sponsored. This lady bought 25 tickets to an event, which was $2,300 per person. She bought 25 tickets and we were recipients. And my wife and I got to go and experience this Joe Dispenza stuff, this meditation, seven days of like black belt training. Like you did two meditations a day and you do breath work and he educates you on the mind. And so I'm like, this is it. Like I need to get into this because we need to teach this to veterans and service men and women

because it's not enough just to do the medicine. You can't rely on something outside of yourself. If you really have to get to a place where the healing comes from within. And Joe Dispenza says a lot, you have an internal pharmacy that you can restructure and you can create these neuro chemicals and you can heal yourself. And that's what he did when he got hit by a bike on a bike,

on a road bike and they wanted to fuse his back and he healed himself. So I'm thinking this is crazy, you know, and I'm watching these people, this one lady sat next to, she goes, I've been doing this work for four years, two years ago, I healed myself and my cancer. And she was a doctor and she went there and one kid was 15 years old and he had some trauma growing up and he had a brain injury and he had some trauma growing up and he couldn't hear on his ear and that was healed. And so it's

like, we have to look at belief systems. We have to look at changing your belief systems and it takes work and it takes the awareness that if you're in a wrong environment, it's going to be really hard for you to sustain growth. And that's where we're at now. It's like, okay, they go to the, they do the medicine. Some guys can't even last. They're so scared to go back to the world that they created after the reset that they'll start drinking in the airport, not even hours

after they just were like, kumbaya, I'm, you know, re-healed. They're already back drinking because the fear is that they can't go back into that environment. And we have to bring more awareness to what the environment is and these 12 cranial nerves in this computer system that is constantly downloading stuff and programming us. And if you don't change your environment, it's going to be

really hard, really hard to sustain growth. I've got another part to that two-part question, but before I do with you being a medic specifically and having not taken the life yourself, one of the things I wouldn't say even struggle with is that's not the right way of putting it, but when I look back now, I would identify as the biggest weight wasn't all the horrible things that I saw in 14 years, but it was the fact that when I went to school, they said, all right,

if you do intervention, a add drug B and, you know, use the monitor cardiovert or defibrillate C, you will have outcome D and the person will, you know, come around and they'll give you a hug and they'll bring a cake to the station a week later. And in 14 years, I never brought a single person back from a cardiac arrest had of course, pre-code saves and lots of, you know, many, many calls where you absolutely didn't save a life, whether it was just simply from the compassion of your words or

your medical interventions, but I'd never had that, you know, returned to spontaneous. And so that inability to save being that black cloud, having death after death after death, I identify it as a weight. Now, you know, you talk about, you know, criking in the field and some of these interventions that you have to do that are ultimately somewhat futile based on the injury or the wounds of the person that you're dealing with. When you look back now, was there an element of

that contributing to your trauma? Did you have times where you felt helpless, where you just couldn't bring someone back? Yeah. I mean, there was a lot of the times, you know, I lost a lot of friends in the 16 years. We just lost two seals. I think I put one of them through training in Somalia. They drowned. I lost a roommate on extortion 17. I lost a couple of guys on that one. And just over time, you would lose friends. I was friends with Mikey Mansoor, who was a

Medal of Honor winner. He graduated 250 and I was 252. Ryan Job was in 251. He had a crazy story. He got, he was the one that got hit, which made it, he got hit by AK-47, went through his head, took his eye out and they got him back. And then he went back out. And that's when they set up to hit Mark Lee, which was the first seal that died in Iraq. And he was in 251. So we were all together in the same Bud's era. And so I guess over time, like, you know, you lose a friend and you're like,

man, if I was there, I could have did this. I could have died. Why wasn't I there? You kind of beat yourself up and you see a lot of survivor guilt in this trauma stuff. For me, it was when we blew a door in, I was a breacher and we blew a door in and there was a kid sleeping on the other side of the door and he was messed up really bad. And I remember my OIC going, Tommy, fix him. And I, it was probably the first time I ever really kind of froze because I was so, oh man,

I was, I was like, I fucking did that, you know? And, you know, like bedside manner, you know, is important. It's like, Hey, stay with me and all that. And I just, it struggled so hard to find that aggressive medic approach, you know, where I'm in my flow state. And I did a lot of drugs after that. I did a lot of drugs to numb that. And I, you know, the nightmares would, you would see, I would see, you know, my kids faces on them in my sleep for years.

So it was, it's always, it tends to be the children that really bring out the trauma, I think as a, as a, someone that's a service member. And for, you said that like lack of ability to do something. I think, I think I was, I was so beating myself up for not going to, uh, seal team six, that, that kind of really started an avalanche to, which was, I was, I was groomed pretty well at seal team two. I was, I got like the highest, uh, evals as a new guy

there. And after our first combat deployment and I had my friends there, they were all, you're coming to gold, you're coming to this and that, and I live right across from Chick-Soy's, so I was like, what's the difference between this and that? And I live right across from Chick-Soy's, so I was bar in Virginia beach, which is like a huge team guy hangout. And so when I told my friends that I wasn't going to scream, they kind of,

they kind of read me the riot act. And soon after I did that, I realized I was starting to break away from this need to, um, be accepted. And I started to stop chasing that. And it got really hard after that. And I was still in the seal teams and I was writing the fence. I was trying to raise a family and do this job. Um, and it, it was just, everything was deteriorating. I wasn't, my heart wasn't in it anymore. I went to the West coast and I didn't feel like there's a difference

between mentalities on the coast. Not that one's better than the other. It's just, when you're on the East coast, you're kind of, you're not the creme de la creme because you got neck there. And when you're on the West coast, you're kind of our city. And so I felt like going from the East coast to the West coast, I was like, and then I got into the intelligence thing and yeah, just kind of fizzled out. Um, so I didn't have like this war hero, uh, career as a

seal. It wasn't like that. Um, but the saddest part was, and I didn't really get into this, but I met my, my first wife, uh, at the Naval Academy. They told me to go there and do a dog and pony show. She was the director that was rebranding the Naval Academy. I hooked up with her. She said that I got her pregnant. I didn't know if I did or not. And then I actually got married to her, um, out of wedlock. And it was on my first or second workup. I was training in Chaffee,

Arkansas, doing land warfare. Got a call. She said she lost the baby. I still didn't know if it was mine or not and went out there, um, flew out to California and she gave me the option to leave her and I didn't. And that was probably a big mistake, but I stayed with her and she had four kids in vitro. And it turns out that she wasn't who she said she was to me. She lied about her age. She lied about her background. She basically used me to have kids. And the whole time,

I was so stupid that I couldn't look at it. Even though people were telling me something was wrong, I wouldn't look at it. And then I learned this kind of through my medicine journey was it was my fear of failure that was really hijacking me to seeing clearly. And I know that was a product of my training of being a SEAL was we were programmed not to fail. And if you failed, you got so much shame and so much pain from failing that it does program you.

In fact, a good friend of mine, Dr. Dan Luna, a SEAL Team Six guy, and he got his PhD in education. He just wrote a 70, 750 page paper, a senior thesis on the fear of failure and how that's a contributing factor to PTSD. And so, yeah, so I, um, I ended up having four kids with this lady. I was never in love with her. I was only in love with the fact that I was trying to do a right thing by changing my life. And she might've kept me from dying over at SEAL Team Six,

maybe. I don't know. But what happened was after 11 years, she basically had a plan to steal my kids. And she did that. She went to the command, told them I was drug addict. And I was, I wasn't, I was, I think at the time I was only using cannabis sparingly to, I was off all my, all the meds and everything, but I was using cannabis for my mental health and I was keeping it from the command. And she told on me. And at the time I went to Mighty Oaks, which was a Christian

PTSD center run by Chad Robichard, which is incredible story. He was a police officer and a Marine Special Forces guy, world champion MMA fighter, found himself with a gun in his mouth. And he healed himself with his faith. And so at that thing, I quit smoking weed and I told her and she told the command. So I told the command on myself that I was doing this and they came in

and I took a piss test. I pissed negative and they still threw the book at me. And it was right on the heels of another friend of mine, Ed Gallagher, who you saw the news about the seal that was, he was my roommate and a classmate. And so at that time we said, you know, it never pays to be the second guy to get in trouble. And so I, they, they threw the book at me and I thought, well,

I'm going to be the second guy to get in trouble. And so they took the book at me and I told them, I'm in the middle of a medical retirement procedure or process, and that it's by law that you have to let me finish this because if you have a alcohol related incident or a drug incident and you have PTSD, then they have to allow you to, to, to finish. So they did, took like a year and a half where I was doing my ATC, my clearances, my Trident, everything. And I was basically a janitor for a

year at ATC, Advanced Training Command. It was, it was horrible. We call it the mushroom treatment. You put someone in a box and you feed them shit. And it, and yeah. And so I, it was crazy. I was waiting to get my, my information back from PSD and I was trying to figure out what, you know, anything. So I walked over to the personal department and on the base in Coronado and I got this message that said, you're retired. You're going to be medically retired in January, 2019.

I brought it back to my command and they took it to the JAG and they did something. And it went all the way to the top of the Navy where this guy basically overwritten it. And they said, you're out in 10 days. And by the way, you got a restraining order against you. And that was the last time I talked to my kids five years ago. And so I always say, I'm so grateful for even that in my life to lose poor kids, because if those things didn't happen, I wouldn't be able to do what I'm doing

right now. And I believe in life sometimes the final step of loving something is letting go. And you'll be amazed when you do that, how it had a tendency to come back to you. So that's it. Well, I'm, I'm so firstly, so sorry to hear about your kids. I mean, you mentioned it before, but I mean, that, that to me, that was the only plus thing about my divorce is there wasn't

an attempt to pull my child from him. It was funny. I mean, there was, there was infidelity on, on her side, not to talk shit now and way past it, but just to lay the facts out there. And my lawyer said, oh, great news. And there'd be some other stuff going on. You get 50 50. And I'm like, okay, that's great news that we're going to do car wheels because of the situation dictate at that point that maybe it should have been full cost at least temporarily, but it is what it is.

But that was my worst case story, which is, you know, a fricking, you know, dream compared to yours, but I've got, I've got friends who again, after a divorce, um, you know, their kids didn't speak to them for years, but just like you said, and then one day they did again, you know, one day they came back and I've got numerous stories of that. So, you know, I hope that's the case, you know, I hope that when they get to the age where they ask more questions, that they'll find

their way back in your life again. Yeah, thank you. And, and you know, I'm, like I said, I, I try not to talk about too much. Um, but I want people to be aware that even in our family court system has been very corrupted. This was in California and I can tell you just from crossing the border and Tijuana taking guys down to Mexico for the treatment. Um, and every time I have to go back, I have to go through security cause I have this, uh, restraining order, which I just got,

I dropped. This is crazy because of my work I'm doing to promote this, you know, this stuff, uh, this medicine it's given me connections to people that can make one call. And this happened in November. I was going to go back to California to the court to fight this, which I lost. I've spent like $50,000 doing this. So I had no more money. She had a trust again. She's the heir of Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator. So she's, she's connected. And, um, and so, um, in one call,

one of the guys I work with, can't say his name, but he knows who he is. He made one call and in three hours, my lawyer calls me and goes, I don't know what happened, but, um, uh, their lawyer, her lawyer's not taken this to court and he thinks it can be really bad for her. And I was like, what? So I got the two restraining orders dropped off my kids or I got the restraining drawers, uh, restraining orders dropped off my kids. She, I guess she keeps hers, but the big

thing is they allowed me to use a gun again, which I couldn't own a gun. I still can't, but I can use a gun to train people and make money. If I was going to train someone, um, with a gun, which is retarded, but it's, um, it's just part of this, this thing. And I, it's my cross that I bear, but, um, I, it's not about me. It's about the kids and they were stripped from having a really good father that they're never going to get back in those years. And that's the hardest thing for me is

just knowing that the trauma that one day I know I'm going to have to take on. Um, but I think they're, they're going to be smart enough to see who their dad is and what he's done. And, uh, you know, I used, my biggest fear was that I would leave this world and they would never know. I would leave this world and they would never know. And I think that's why I started to do this stuff and to start to tell my stories so that they would know one day.

So let's unpack that for a second. Then you, you mentioned about, um, you know, after that call, taking more drugs, um, you mentioned about drinking. So where was the lowest place that you found yourself and then what was that corner? However gentle that turn that led you towards this healing journey that now you're not only a part of, but you're actually spearheading. Yeah, I, well, the all lost moment was that was, was when I knew was, was I was sitting in the

courtroom and my ex-wife was staring into my eyes as she lied. And I don't know how this happened, but I had a rosary in my pocket and I was on the stand and I, I just held this thing. And I remember looking at her going, I don't know what it was, but like, God was just like, forgive her, forgive

her, forgive her, forgive her. And I just kept saying it in my head and like, I could feel my chest, like as they were, the judge was, you know, tell me that this is going to be my reality in my sentence. Um, I remember walking out of that courtroom and I got in my car and I started driving and I just lost it. Like I had like just snot bubbles, just like everything was just coming out and I could, I had a

nervous breakdown for sure. I've had a couple of my life, but that was a bad one. And, and then, and then it was like, really it was like, I think two days and I got on a phone call with Dr. Martin Polanco and he set up the treatment. And that's how I showed up to the medicine. Well, basically with losing everything, I lost my identity, like family, kids, um, you know, career of retirement. I had to go through, I got honorable discharge, which is crazy because

I had to fight for it. And one of the officers said if he doesn't get honorable discharge, that it will be a crime. And so they gave me that, but, which was great because it allowed me to get the GI bill and, and my disabilities. Um, but yeah, I mean, I've been paying $3,500 a month since nine, since 2019 and I haven't had a word of information about my kids. Do you even know which state they're in? Yeah, there's in California. Okay. Yeah. There's four

of them. Thomas is 13, Kayden is 11 and there's twin Max and Becca. Yeah. So it's, it's, you know, I, I always say I'm the most blessed man in the world. I like to do what I get to do. Um, I have an incredible wife. She's just, she's like a unicorn for sure. A horse whisperer. She's a horse gal from, from Houston area and, um, our corpus Christi she would say, she would say, um, but you know, I just, I try, I try to take, you know, the good and the bad and, and know that,

um, it's part of my story. Um, and it's all about contrast. So wherever there is, you know, injustice or trauma, if you allow yourself, you can turn your pain into passion. And that's one hell of a drug. Well, you mentioned about your wife being into the horse side. I actually had an incredible man on this a little while ago, but I'm actually going to repost it because it was such an incredibly powerful conversation, but his name is Buck Branham.

And I don't know if that name rings a bell, but he's, that's my wife's mentor. Like, oh, there we go. She loves, but I, yeah, I started, I, that's the one thing I didn't really get to learn in my life was this wonderful, uh, experience of the Western culture. Um, I live in Nashville, so it's sort of like it, but she's from Texas and she, like, this ain't the same, you know, this is rhinestone stuff. But so, um, but yeah, I think from, from a therapeutic perspective,

equine therapy is about probably the second most effective therapy that I can see. You know, we can expect any kind of dog training or animal, they get oxytocin, right? You get that thing. Um, you get the companionship, but a horse is different because a horse and, and what Buck teaches is a thing called natural horsemanship. It's where you're not dominating. You're just working with

and reading their energy. And I love this saying, um, that when a horse is a prey animal and they let you strap a carcass of their cousin on his back, and then they let the thing that can take, take it out by grab, jumping on his back and getting on his neck, they let you do that. And then, you know, they teach you about yourself. They can, they're like a mirror of your energy.

And I think that's so valuable for, uh, for so many reasons, but for someone that's trying to build awareness to their own energy, uh, I don't think there's anything more powerful than that, than that relationship. Yeah, that was amazing. I watched him, I was in Georgia, drove up there, um, watched him do like half, half a day of his clinic. Um, you know, and again, and I'm,

I grew up around horses. My dad's an equestrian vet. So, um, he, you know, I grew up around all, you know, the spectrum from the, you know, extended Royal family with their polo horses, all the way through the gypsies with, you know, their car horses and my dad would treat all of them. Um, and so, you know, I know what the horse world is like. Most of them are lovely. Some of them are obnoxious. Um, and you could see the personalities on the horses as Buck is teaching

them and the ones that are using, you know, the kicking too much. And, you know, you can just see their kind of frustrated energy. And then he comes along and he, you know, he chastised the rider, not the horse, you know, and tells them the change it. And, you know, it was amazing. So then we went to the trailer, did like about 45 minutes of conversation, and then he had a dinner appointment to go to. So then I think it was a month later, we carried on like we're doing now. We did the

rest over zoom. But I mean, that man's backstory of being, you got him on your show. Yes. Yeah. So I'll send you the episode, but yeah, incredible. And it was a really raw, like from early life, all the trauma that he endured all the way through. So yeah, it's like, that's why I said, if you really want to know someone, just learn about their trauma and what they do with it. And it's bucks a perfect example of how he created a, he literally changed the whole industry

on his technique. And when I'm out there with my wife and she's got like eight or nine clients out here, and I get to go out and start to, I got on one of her horses, bareback, it was a Tennessee Walker. And I got on bareback. I have probably rode a horse five times in my life. So like, it's amazing what you can do when you build that relationship with an animal and they can feel that safety and trust in you. And you know, like there's, when you're aware of that energy, it's,

well, you're operating in another dimension, I think. I'd never thought about this until a few minutes ago, but I'm laughing now because that matching of energy, whenever I got on the horse, we never had our own horses. We would ride the client's horses when they were, you know, boarding or if they were in the rehab process. And there was a couple and when I get on them, they would just fucking take off. And I would be, that's probably why I became a stunt man as well,

because I would just hang on. I did a parallel to my fire service career. And so, you know, my parents would be like, you had the worst technique for a rider, but the biggest balls of any of them. And they'd jump ditches and stuff. But looking back now, I had shit going on when I was young. And again, it was probably that energy. It was that kind of chaos that was probably inside my mind. And the horse is probably picking up and I go, oh, you want me to go crazy? All right,

we'll go crazy. I didn't realize I was eight, but you know, I'm sure even then there was that projection. So it's funny. I'd never thought of it that way before. Yeah, she, she, my wife, her name is MJ. She, she always says, I can tell way more about a horse owner than the horse with, you know, in the first five minutes. And, you know, you look at the horse and you can tell, you can tell, you know, about the owner. And they, and it's funny because like most people in general,

they're just like, what's wrong with my horse? You know, they're always looking at something else outside of them. And you're, and you're like, well, you know, maybe you should figure some shit out. And I, again, the biggest takeaway from it is it gives you awareness. And that's what people, human beings are lacking. They're lacking their emotional quotient, which is your ability to feel

emotions and their awareness. Like that, that's where you start. The other thing that's really cool in this whole thing of healing trauma or healing the mind is that when you start looking at creative art therapies and these other, uh, integrated skill sets that we are trying to push is that if you're an animal state mind, your energy is back into the stem cell or the brain stem.

And so we're seeing this because you can see it on the 3d MRIs is that if you push that energy up towards the frontal motor cortex over here, you start to access things like empathy and, um, these higher functioning, um, programs that make us human and creativity helps develop neuroplasticity, which falls in line with the psychedelics. It's like, okay, you look at our music and our arts and it's like, it's all over there. It's all over it, you know? And so, um, I work with, uh,

several nonprofits and try to help, um, this whole thing. And one of them is creative vets, which is a wonderful organization here in Nashville. They're actually in 40, I think 45 states and they'll do things like have veterans write songs with, uh, a singer songwriters in the rhyme in and do these really cool events that right now I'm taking a songwriting class at Vanderbilt and two incredible songwriting coaches, teachers, um, there's like

eight veterans and we're, we're, I was on it last night and it's just incredible. Like telling stories, making music, and you see like what lights up. It's that frontal motor cortex. And the power of storytelling. I think a lot of people have trauma if they can find an expressive way to express some of this stuff, you don't keep it inside and you can actually create something out of the trauma that resonates with other people. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we were talking

before hit record. Um, my second book now that I'm writing is a fiction and the goal is to have a powerful, powerful book for people that love to read. But I think arguably in 2024, most people consume stories through the screen now. Um, so I would love to not would love, I am going to make this into come hell or high water a series. I think, I think it would be compelling captivating and, you know, it's something that people need to see at this time.

So talk to me about your journey into storytelling and how you've been able to get your journey into storytelling and your kind of filmmaking side. So, um, I, I like to start, I usually start by saying, remember that feather from Forrest Gump? I try to model my life after that feather and just, just go and do and feel and experience, right? And, um, I was kind of like that with the seals and this whole thing. It's just been

one experience after another. And when I was, when COVID happened and I was, I just got out of the military, I had some really great friends in Southern California, my men's group. It was like Philip Rivers, Mike Sweeney from the Kansas city Royals. He's one of my biggest role models and brother. Um, Mike is just incredible, man. Jim Caviezel, all these other guys that I started out with in this really transformative part of my life. Um, and, uh, I was like, I need some money.

So I was like, I need to use this GI bill. And I'm like, what the hell am I going to do? I don't know where I don't want to go back to school. And so I, I found the highest BH places in the country for the GI bill. And then San Francisco was like way higher than everywhere else. So I'm like, I guess I'm going to San Francisco. And at the time they were allowing veterans to take classes remotely because of COVID. So I, um, I got in and I just said,

something in my head is saying, learn how to tell a story. It seals. I take a little bit of the bragging rights and say, we have pretty good stories. They're C stories. And there was always a joke, like there was a difference between Navy humor and army humor. And I was like, yeah, the difference is we have, we have it. They have none. It was a joke, you know, but we, I feel like there was a, it's a very, um, warrior type thing that you need to be able to tell a damn

good story if you want your brothers to listen to you. And so that culture, uh, really was something that kind of drive me to, to get a master's of fine arts and storytelling, which is, uh, directing and writing. Um, but I was a storyteller. I was a writer as a kid. See, I, I, I pushed everything into science because I thought that's what I was going to do. And I was a big science

guy, math and science. But if I look in my, my baby's box, which my mom just sent me, I'll see books that I wrote in second grade with, you know, Detroit Pistons player, Isaiah Thomas, like my first book, my day with Isaiah and he signed it, you know, I had all this writing and so it was always in me. I just never cultivated it. I was probably afraid because that wasn't my identity. And then I had this transform transformative period where I was like, and this I'm saying is

I'm blessed because I lost everything. Not many people can say that. And I got that opportunity to just be like, clean slate. What do you want to do? I don't know. Let's just do this. And so that curiosity got me into the program and I started to really dive into character, you know, fundamental character writing. What is a 3d character and how do you make them likable and relatable? And it's, you got to give them contrast. You got to give them, you can't make them all good and you can't

make them all bad. Even the antagonist you see in all the films, like they try to make them likable so that you can relate to them from their perspective. So I learned all these things and I was like, oh my gosh, all this stuff I'm learning about storytelling is helping me tell the story in my mind of what happened and how I got here. It's okay. And so I was like, oh wow, this is like therapeutic. It's therapeutic for me to learn how to tell my story and to learn story in general

because I believe that story is how the brain works. I mean, there's a reason why Jesus taught in parables. There's a reason why story is the only thing we leave behind. And so I was like, I want to get really good at telling stories and learning how to create story. And now like you said, like the whole media platform is shifting to this short form storytelling and your ability

to do that. And I think with the work I'm doing with kind of changing the narrative on what a drug is and what a medicine is and what trauma is and what emotional energy is and all this stuff, it's like, how do you do that? Well, you better tell a damn good story. So this kind of segues nicely into some of the closing questions that I ask. I want to make sure everyone knows where to find all the things that you do now. But before we do, while we're talking

about storytelling, are there any books that you love to recommend? It can be related to our discussion today or completely unrelated. Yeah, I'm more of an audio book guy. I would say the immortality key is a deep dive into this relationship between human beings and psychedelic compounds. And I think if you're interested in this, then it's a deep one, but it goes back a long time and it's got really good anecdotal, I can't say it, good evidence of what it is.

Yeah, good evidence. And he's got a really interesting story. He got to go in the basement of the Vatican and do two years of research in the archives with this Franciscan, see the eyebrows? Did he find anything else when he was down there? Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm sure. But so that's one that I think is important or interesting. This book here, this holotropic breathwork, this is by Stan Goff and his wife. And Stan is a pioneer, is a psychiatrist with over 60 years experience of

research in non-ordinary states of consciousness. And one of the founders and chief, he's a chief developer of transpersonal psychology. So I think if you really end up trying to heal your mind, you got to understand what the mind is. And I think that book can help do that. Oh man. And then I would say a couple of the books that we would actually issue out when they're starting the mission within protocol, we would have them read The Untethered Soul. I think that's

Michael Singer, How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan, which is a Netflix series. Michael Pollan actually is in charge of the new psychedelic society that integrates in Harvard. It integrates Harvard's School of Law, School of Medicine, and School of Divinity, which I'm trying to get into. And he's in charge of that. And the book Breathe, which was recommended to me by Laird Hamilton. Breathe is a great book because it talks about actual our society,

the lack of awareness on the breath. And you see so many kids literally having birth, their facial structures don't develop right because they're not breathing right. And if you have stress breathing, you're breathing in the chest, which that, and so you have less surface area, those intercostal muscles that are firing to do that. That's like what you're using

to get away from a lion. So like our lack of breathing into our diaphragm and pulling the belly out when you inhale and then squeezing it back, like doing that is a game changer. So breath is a good book too. Is that James Nestor? Is that the one? Yes. Yeah, okay. And you mentioned about how to change your mind. Any other films or documentaries that you love? Oh man, that's all we watch is documentaries. I love documentaries because it's more real. It's

still scripted, but it's more real. And I think it's a great way to get information about things of people. Documentaries, well, I mean, Fantastic Fungi, I'm kind of sticking on the psychedelic theme. My favorite movies growing up was Vision Quest, the wrestling movie kind of helped shape my life. And The Natural, those are like kind of my two. I say like in Rudy, those are my three.

All right. Well, then the next question, is there a person you'd recommend to come on this podcast as a guest to speak to the first responders, military and associated professions of the world? Andrew Huberman. He was actually supposed to be coming on. And then I got a message saying he wasn't going to be coming on anymore. So I did try and then I got rebuked. So maybe one day down the road. But yeah, that's, you know. Then Bobby Kennedy.

Yeah. I would love if you're able to help in any way, shape or form. That'd be amazing. I think this is who we need to hear. And I'm looking for the leaders, as we said earlier, I'm looking for the people who unite this country, the people that are proactive, not reactive or going to be selling some, you know, narrative that ultimately is not going to benefit the nation. So he seems like just someone who through his whole career has actually cared about people. So yeah, I think

he'd be amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Him. And then I hoist Gracie and or Laird Hamilton. Those guys are just really cool guys. I had hoist on. I just reposted it not too long ago, but Laird has been on my radar. I became friends with Josh Brolin. We did an interview years ago and they ended up writing the forward for my first book. And he's very, very good friends with Laird. So I've been fully aware of, you know, of him and obviously Gabby as well. So I need to reach out. I've never reached out before.

So I've never even tried to actually get them on, but I think they'd both be phenomenal. Luke is a good one too. Luca lives with them. He's kind of Laird's protege. He's the youngest surfer to ever surf the Maverick. And he's a basic really good friends with Christian McCaffrey, running back for the 49ers. So Luca is a great guy. He's really wise behind his years. He's only 21, I think, but he's just around really good people. And I'm a big believer in stacking your boat crew.

Like I'm a big believer in your environment and the people that you're around. Like if you don't seek people that you want to emulate to be like, then you're not programming yourself the most effective way. So I always say I never had a lot of money and I don't care if I do or don't get it. But what I do care about is my true currency is like my friendships in my network because it helps. 100%. I've watched it more over the last seven years. And then the people that were

my friends before are still my friends after. But that next layer, now I just have these incredible conversations with people, whether it's recording like this or just a simple phone call. And when you're surrounded by incredible people, it's not that you're networking and oh, this person could do something for me now. It's not. It's just that the conversation, I always leave these conversations better than I started versus let's say just talking two-dimensionally about politics or

sports or whatever it was. You've talked for an hour, but did you really gain anything? So I love this immersion that I found myself in now. It's so rewarding. For this work. Yeah. There's a reason why Bobby Kennedy is attacking the podcast because he's leading with voters 45 years and under, and this is the future. So now thank you for doing what you do. It's so important. And again, it goes back to like the

first thing we learned in SEAL school and Bud's was pass the word and it has to happen. If you want to help people, we need to pass the word. Absolutely. Well, one more closing question before we make sure everyone knows where to find you and the things that you offer. What do you do to decompress these days? I go to nature. I find healthy suffering and things that are uncomfortable. And I give myself permission to feel and to be curious, but nature is a way to escape the

environment of society that we can get manipulated by and we need to get outside of that system. So when I go into nature, I always have resistance. I don't want to go like getting a cold waterfall or do this, but I know like I'm trained now to where when I sit in that and I feel that resistance, it's like my awareness goes, okay, there it is. And here's the interesting, if my name on Instagram is flow state frog man, and I don't know exactly why I picked that name. I just felt like in that

time I was like flow state is like energy. And I think now as we study this thing called energy, everything has a wave and in that wave, you cannot get to your next high point unless you go through a low point, it's an energy thing. And so when you're at a low point, the fastest way to get to that top peak or that next wave is by going through the low. And I think what people do is they resist that low and they stay there for a long time. It's like the buffalo and the cow, the cows

run away from the storm and they're in it forever. But the buffalo goes through the storm because he knows he'll be at last time. Well, speaking of highs and lows, I just want to slide the other

part of that question. I realized I never asked you. So we hear about, you know, again, the dark side of war, what we don't hear are the stories of kindness and compassion that you guys encountered when you were seeing combat, whether it was by the men and or women to your left and right, or the indigenous populations that you were trying to protect while you were over there. Yeah, that's when you're over there. It's all about the guys to the left and the right and

the beautiful thing. And I'm biased. I know, like people look at seals and whatever they think of us as superheroes or this or that. And it's not true. Or we're broken boys, but we're badass warriors. And I think through the training and the adversity, you build these incredible relationships. And you know that the guys to your left and right is going to be there backing you up. That part of it, like, you know, I'm beyond blessed to experience that camaraderie.

But I've also been on the other side of the good old boy club getting thrown off into a ditch and, you know, kind of losing that. And I can look back and I'm not scarred by the betrayals or the, you know, the bullshit toxic masculinity that some guys still make tons of money by fabricating these hell weeks and people pay $15,000 to get their ass kicked for this toxic shit that I'm trying to heal. So I'm pretty authentic in how I feel about even my own community.

But I think the thing that I take away from any kind of combat experience is there's a divine need across the whole globe to believe in these things called freedom, liberty, and truth. And John Locke, the author that inspired our constitution, wrote, it is our God given birthright to be free. And those morals and those ideas that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin wrote our constitution are very under attack. And I know going over there and seeing those kids faces, whether Iraq, Afghanistan,

Africa, Europe, Thailand, and any other place I've been, there is one thing. They want to believe that America has the ability to represent those core values. They want it. People want that. And I just don't, I don't think we're doing it. I think it needs to be done. I think it needs to be done. I think we need to change. I couldn't agree more. I think we can. This is the thing. It's not about, oh, America sucks because it doesn't. America is one of the most beautiful

countries in the world. I don't think it's a competition. I don't think we need to say we're the best and be our chest. I think we have the humility to go, we do these things really well, but hey, other countries, can we borrow your ideas because you're doing those really well. I think, as I've said on here many times now, the rising tide lifts all ships, but what we do extremely well is what I would argue the original American dream, the ability that you can come

from here, from a country and go from nothing to something. And hopefully that's not driven by money and material items. I just watched Steve Aoki's documentary and his dad was the founder of Benihana. Amazing story, but it was chasing wealth the whole time. And I think that's the story, but it was chasing wealth the whole time and arguably at the expense of his family. But the immigrant stories that you hear in the US are incredible and that is the American value.

But when you allow us to be fragmented and set upon each other, we're still the same people. We just need to change who we're looking at for inspiration and remind ourselves that it's our own home and then outside our front door that we can actually impact with our own hands. And if we all do that, we'll shift back to the America that we really deserve to be. Yeah, America lost its innocence when they murdered John F. Kennedy and they shot him in the head from this way,

not from the back. And when that happened, we lost our innocence in that idea. And again, Mr. Kennedy Jr. is the one that understands how to get back there. And it's not going to be easy.

It will take divine intervention just to get him on the ballot. And when he's underfunded by maybe a billion dollars, if you want to look at the numbers between the Democrat campaign funds and the Republicans and what Bobby's been able to do on minimal funds is absolutely something that you just know that there's something else going on here that you can't really say. But he said it too. He's like, there's more roads, more buildings and more bridges named after John

F. Kennedy than any or all presidents in the United States combined in the world. I mean, in the world, there's more bridges, you know what I'm saying? And so there's something there. I think we're idealistic creatures and we do have belief systems. And I think psychologically, we want to feel safe. We want to feel connected to other humans. And I think the problem is fear. People remember fear more than they do love sometimes because fear leaves a sting. You always remember

a bad haircut over a good haircut. You remember punching a face over a hug. And these narratives that we see designed to keep the wealthy wealthy and the rich still suffering and basically distracted by their own survival is easily manipulated. And it takes people to go out there and go against the tide and become a champion. And I love that. Like, it's been me, you know? 100%. Well, I'm sure people listening are fascinated. Obviously, we've been all over the place in this conversation and

rightly so. But where are the best places to find your work and the things that you offer now and on social media as well? My flow state frog man on Instagram. And I would say follow the work that the veteran mental health leadership is doing because you'll see me with them. And that's it really, really right now. I don't have anything like formal. I kind of stay in the gray area. I'm up, they see me, I'm down. Beautiful. Well, Tommy, I want to thank you.

Please thank your wife as well. I've been talking for two and a half hours in the end. So even longer than we anticipated. But it's been such an incredible conversation and, you know, a different perspective again, coming from your community. And so many have been through the healing journey. But few of them actually then took the gauntlet and became part of that, that

healing family on the other end to bring, you know, their brothers in after that. So I want to thank you so much for being so generous and being courageously vulnerable and coming on the behind the shield podcast today. Oh, it's been a pleasure and an honor. And like I said earlier, there's two things that come out of war, it's weapons and medicine and it is anything I can do to help get this to our police officers and our firefighters and our medical providers. They need

this more than most people are aware of. And I'm an open book, whatever I got is yours. And I look forward to floating down this river of change with you.