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338 of Behind the Shield podcast with their CEO Francisco Morales.
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 search and rescue technician,
law enforcement officer and the man behind the ASM Foundation, Pete DePrez.
Now, in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from the TBI he had as a toddler,
his own powerful addiction story, his journey into law enforcement,
the unsung heroes in dispatch, the healing power of society,
the healing power of psychedelic assisted therapy, gut health,
the importance of fitness and so much more.
Now, before we get to this incredible 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 one thousand 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 Pete DePrez.
Enjoy.
Well, Pete, I want to start by saying thank you so much for taking the time
and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thank you for having me.
So where on planet Earth we finding you this afternoon?
I am in Steamboat, Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
Brilliant. Well, I would love to start the very beginning of your journey.
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 rural Indiana.
I first lived in a little town called Shelbyville, Indiana.
My father was an attorney.
My mother was at that time a fashion model.
I'm the oldest of now five children
in the context of not just my life, but certainly the story of of
kind of what I went through.
I had my first loss of consciousness, TBI at 18 months old.
I was in a walker and my mother stepped out of the room for a moment
to check on my newborn brother.
And I ran the walker into a
armoire type thing and went headfirst into it, knocked myself out.
I still have a little scar up here from it.
So that was the first time that I rang my bell.
And that being that would have been 1979.
And there's for better or worse, not.
I don't know that doctors would suggest
a mother today do anything different than they would have then.
In that it was just monitor him.
You know, if he goes to sleep for too long, try to wake him up,
they didn't have a protocol for treatment for head trauma.
And that progressed throughout the rest of my life to where
I was regularly incurring head trauma
without any recognition of the long term repercussions of it.
Going back to your parents, first of your dad,
what area of law was he practicing?
He was practicing at that time, kind of general family life.
Handling divorces and stuff like that.
And then eventually moved into more corporate style law.
Did you ever have any conversations with him
about the kind of frivolous lawsuit side of American law?
I mean, as an observation, when I first came to the U.S.,
I remember being in a hotel and one of the you know,
if you look at the the edge where the pages are, there was a massive
group that was a certain color and I was like, oh, that must be doctors.
And when I opened it up, it was lawyers.
And then as I lived here, you start to see, you know, the the abuse of law,
especially when you're in uniform and, you know,
you have 12 fricking pieces of paper to fill in,
not because it's right for the patient or the person you arrested,
but more so to cover your ass from lawsuits.
So did you ever have any conversations with him about that element of his profession?
Certainly, he was not focused on criminal law, but I have cousins and siblings
who eventually did move into more of the criminal side of it.
My my sister was actually a sex crimes prosecutor for a long time
and had a very successful career there.
So we covered a number of things.
Topics throughout the years and.
I think the general.
Their thought is they have more of a ability to affect the bigger picture
by being involved with it rather than being on the sideline,
but certainly acknowledge the frivolous nature and the fact that
our criminal justice system as a whole is wildly broken at this point.
Something that in my career, I noted was the.
We had a case where there was a couple who managed a ranch outside in the county
and over the course of a decade, they had embezzled around the country.
I think from the owner of the ranch and they were facing a minimum 10 to 15 year sentence.
Whereas sex offenders who had videotaped themselves with young children and I mean.
Six nine month old children doing sex acts on these children were getting
six years in prison, so that's a pretty stark contrast when we look at that.
The crime of embezzling the money is.
Very likely rehabilitable, these people are not going to repeat those actions.
The sex offender is a chronic issue that is not going to go away with prison.
Or jail sentences. We'll go into your sister for a second being exposed to only those cases over and over and over again.
What were the discussions you had with her as far as her own mental health and how she was able to kind of overcome the horrendous trauma she was exposed to days daily?
I think part of her process was that she was able to do that.
I think part of her process was.
Knowing that she was enacting what.
Penalties she could. She was doing her part. She was punishing these individuals to the greatest extent that she was capable of.
She she was not to the best of my knowledge, taking.
Steps to to seek therapy. I think her her her therapy was.
Processing the the crimes judicially.
So you mentioned the head trauma as a toddler. What sports and exercise were you doing when you were in the school age?
Well, I started.
Barefoot water skiing at nine years old, and that's the first sport that I can recall getting knocked out and coming to underwater and having to swim out.
But again, not registering the impact of those.
Concussive episodes, even through high school and into my 20s, I played contact football and.
You know, we thought about it as you just got your bell rung. It wasn't unusual to get walked off the field or carried off the field, and they put the smelling salts underneath your nose.
And as soon as you came back on, they'd ask you if you're OK to go back on the field and out you'd go so.
Substantially different protocol for recognition and treatment.
Back in the the 1900s and even early 2000s compared to today, where there is this concern and focus on making sure that there's enough time after a concussive episode, if it's recognized in the moment as having happened.
So we're getting to a better place with it.
But in those times we were just repeatedly getting getting our head smacked around and not taking any preventative steps after that.
I still can't get used to it when people refer to the era that I was born as the 1900s.
It makes me feel so old.
It's a fun game to play, right?
Well, going back again, school age, what were you actually dreaming of becoming back then? Was it law enforcement or did you have something else in mind?
When I was young, I was focused on a number of different things.
When I was a very young kid, I wanted to be a cop.
Law enforcement didn't really come around until I was in my later 20s and started recognizing that I had maybe missed the boat on going into the military and had some questions that I wanted to answer.
And so I was able to pursue law enforcement in maybe a different capacity than most people would go into it.
I started in search and rescue in Telluride, Colorado, which was a phenomenal experience.
But my childhood aspirations were really more involved in in writing.
But again, it's I can look back now in retrospect and recognize that I loved the art of writing.
I loved reading books and had favorite writers and loved how stories were constructed.
But I didn't recognize back then how cognitively impaired I was.
I knew it was difficult for me to remember.
And so in reading, I loved certain passages, but it was very difficult for me to retain most of the story beyond what I was reading in the moment.
So I had pretty substantial cognitive impairment going on from a young age.
And I was diagnosed with ADD and dyslexia and a myriad of different ailments that were kind of invisible.
And that I now attribute to this early head trauma that that was not being treated in any way.
We're going to obviously talk about the compounding element on the physiological side.
What about psychological?
As you look back now with this mature lens, understanding that a lot of people that struggled in uniform, you know, we brought trauma into the job.
When you reflect on your childhood, were there any elements that you think that fractured the foundation a little bit before you ever put the uniform on?
Yeah, so at three years old, I almost drowned, like sucked in water into my lungs and had given up and got snatched out of a pool.
But it was this early experience where I had kind of this profound moment of recognizing that I was I can't explain it beyond recognizing that I was going to be OK.
I just I knew in that moment as I was kind of drifting in the water that I was going to be OK.
Two years later, I got mauled by a couple of dogs and my old man saved me in that moment.
And then he and my mother split two days later.
So it was this strange situation of being attacked by these dogs.
My dad saving me as as he had in pulling me from the pool and then he was no longer with us on a day to day basis.
He was always in my life. I don't want to make it sound like he was just gone.
But it felt very vulnerable. At eight, I got my bike stolen while I was on.
I had a bunch of older kids jump me in and took my bike.
And at that point, after my parents split, we were constantly moving to to to new places, trying to reestablish my mother, trying to reestablish herself.
So I was fighting a lot.
And I think that combination of kind of early childhood trauma being the oldest of several kids and feeling this protective nature, especially in these new places, feeling like I had to to walk in and kind of
set an expectation amongst the new neighborhood kids of what was and was not OK as far as my my siblings went.
It created this protective nature within me that I think eventually led me to law enforcement being a really good fit.
On top of that, at at a young age and again, this is back to recognizing the impact of this early TBI and the trauma elements.
I stopped sleeping. I probably stopped sleeping more than five to six hours at any given time when I was five or six years old.
I would stay up late. Listening for for bad guys trying to break in and then I'd be grumpy and distracted for the rest of the day.
And that started a cycle to where when I went into law enforcement.
Nobody sleeps in the first responder community.
So I fit in very well into that element because I already wasn't sleeping.
And that slowly digressed as I got more and more sick to where I wasn't sleeping for more than 10 or 20 minutes at a time.
And then I had to fix that.
Well, you look at how much sleep children and then even teenagers, I think if I'm not mistaken, teenagers are actually supposed to sleep about 10 hours a day.
So if you've got a kid with whether they're just distracted with video games and they're taking ambient without the parents, sorry, ambient.
Adderall without their parents seeing or whatever it is, you know, that is detrimental.
But if you factor in a TBI, now you've got a compounding element where you're sleeping for half the time that you should have been as you got older.
Yeah. And once you introduce that lack of sleep, like the impact on us physiologically and neurologically in not getting adequate sleep, especially in those developmental years, is.
I can't think of a more detrimental.
Aspect of development in not sleeping, I mean, you and when I was 15 years old, 1516, I discovered alcohol and suddenly I found this tool to help me sleep.
So by the time I was a senior in high school, I was a latchkey kid in high school and my parents would work late.
I didn't wasn't being governed by them as most kids probably are.
So I would I would drink six, eight beers on weeknights just to be able to fall asleep.
And by the time I got to college, I was drinking a case of beer at night, if not more.
What did you study at college?
I study I was initially a theater major in college.
I had opportunities to play college football.
And again, this was 96 and they wanted me to take a postgraduate year and have surgery on my shoulders.
And I just didn't want to go through that.
It didn't matter to me that much to to play football.
I had been doing Shakespeare contests in high school and it was enough to earn me a theater scholarship for college.
So I did that for two years and then grew bored of that, transferred to a different college in New Hampshire for a semester, but didn't like that.
So then I bounced around New England for a while and finally finished school, getting a film degree in New York City in 05.
And again, didn't what are you going to do with a theater or a film degree?
I had horrible experiences with Hollywood and the film industry as a whole.
So by 08, I had an opportunity to move to Telluride and I jumped at it.
And my search and rescue career began probably six months later.
And again, that was by far the.
The experience of doing search and rescue in that environment, especially at that time where there had been such a downturn in the economy and places like Telluride were ghost towns.
So you had these really, really high level athletes that were coming out to do these big, epic projects in the mountains.
And if they got into trouble, we were the team that went to.
Help them out and get them down. So it was an incredible experience that eventually led me into becoming a patrol deputy and then transferring agencies and getting into SWAT and.
Leading to a lot of the problems that I eventually faced.
Well, I want to go back to the Hollywood conversation for a second.
I actually went to drama school for a year and then went to London and was pursuing acting.
Ended up working on TV and film a little bit, but not as an actor, more as a glorified extra.
But got into the stunt world instead. But I did have a really kind of interesting perspective on, you know, the I mean, every every profession has shadiness, but it really is such a judgmental profession.
It's also who you know, of course, but you're also just going in and people look at you going, no, I don't like you.
Probably something that your mom actually experienced early in her career as well.
So before we get to the law enforcement side, what were your experiences pursuing in that industry?
I was I realized in college that I had less interest in performing and more interest in the story itself.
And so I started pursuing writing when I went to film school, it was purely to study the the structure of understanding how to write a script.
Action, dialogue, act one, act two, act three, kind of the the all encompassing acts or elements of storytelling.
And it was a great experience and I got a number of different opportunities to work on large and small stuff and commercials and music videos.
When I came out, I had a feature length script that I worked on with a family friend of ours who was involved in the industry.
Long story short, it got sent to another producer that I had met and one of the networks was interested in it as a television series.
And they ultimately had me break it down into these twenty three episodes.
And as soon as they had the intellectual property, they ran with it.
I got a entertainment attorney who got the network to settle for it was a large amount, a life changing amount of money.
But I was told that I would be blackballed from the film and television industry permanently.
At that time, I was 26.
I was still drinking pretty heavily. I actually I think I was 27. And again, in retrospect, it's very easy for me to look back and recognize had I taken that that money, I would probably be dead now.
I would have just essentially taken that as a sign from God that I was I was doing things the right way.
So I look at it now as divine intervention. But I had a television series stolen and it felt so gross that I didn't want any involvement with the industry again.
Interesting perspective.
Plus, I'm just finishing up a book now that I hope to make into a TV show.
So I'll be wary after hearing that.
Just make sure that it's really I did not take the proper steps to protect myself going into that.
And I think if you do that, you'll have a much easier time.
OK, brilliant. We'll go into your journey into search and rescue then.
So what was that corner? You say you're drinking heavily at the moment.
You're you're kind of exploring the film industry.
Walk me through that transition.
So I had I got I quit drinking in when I was 29.
I had thought that it would be cute to drink Jim Beam all day and then run through the bedroom door of the apartment that I was sharing with my then girlfriend.
She did not find the same level of humor in it that I did and.
Basically gave me an ultimatum.
I saw the light and quit drinking and it was such an absolute decision at that point.
And I didn't go through AA or anything like that.
I just quit drinking.
And that ultimately in the next year led me to recognizing not just how much alcohol had.
How many problems alcohol created in my life, but also how much life I had not been living because of alcohol.
I wanted a change of scenery.
I knew I could stay in Indiana and actually had an opportunity for a really high paying job where I would probably be looking at retirement right now had I stayed with it.
But I just did not want that normal nine to five schedule and.
Staying in Indiana, so I moved to tell you, I'd and thankfully within a couple of months of moving there,
met a bunch of the guys that were involved in search and rescue and got thrown in headfirst to that.
There was kind of a changing of the guards.
A lot of the guys that have been there for a couple of decades at that point were starting families and businesses and kind of moving on from being really attached to the to the team.
So it opened a lot of opportunities for me to be really heavily involved right away.
And I it was trial by fire, to say the least.
So what were the scope of skills that you were assigned to in that that unit and then talk to me about any notable rescues during that time?
So they were all seasonally dependent in the winter, we would be responding to avalanche victims,
skiers that had gotten into a bad spot and needed to be rescued.
Helicopter and plane crash victims and then in the springtime summer, we would move.
We would still be doing high alpine stuff.
There were a number of different trophy for teeners in the area that people would climb.
There's three that the famous Coors Light Mountain that's on the can is Mount Wilson,
P, Canal de Ente, which are three trophy for teeners.
They're really loose and in Chausse, but people will try to connect the ridges of them and oftentimes fall off.
So then we're having to attempt high alpine rescues near near the summit ridge and utilizing National Guard,
Blackhawk helicopters and other air resources.
So we're sending we're dropping teams off up high, bringing them in low,
dependent on the location of the victim and either airlifting them out or going up and packaging them and doing really long line lowers to get them down to the base and where they can be flown out.
It really depended on the extent of their injuries in their location.
River rescues were big when the the rivers were high, lost hikers, climbers, hunting accidents.
We were covering a whole myriad of stuff.
And the first dead guy I ever had to deal with was a world class ice climber that had legitimately written the book on ice climbing and had taken a bad fall,
landed on a shelf and had an open book fracture of the pelvis and it bled out, unfortunately.
But that's what I mean.
The experience was such that that we were going and rescuing wildly capable people to help them.
But oftentimes that meant that they were trying to accomplish something in really precarious locations.
And, you know, it wasn't easy to get to them, to access them and then to get them them out.
Ultimately, if you could extrapolate takeaways, common denominators from some of these tragedies and deaths,
understanding, acknowledging that they're all skilled people that are probably trained diligently for what they're trying to do.
If you look over that portion of your career, what would be some of the lessons that we pulled from that that maybe would help someone listening avoid a similar thing?
Being prepared.
Oftentimes, we're sacrificing the trudgery of carrying additional weight and equipment that could make a bad experience more comfortable in the name of being lighter and faster.
The worst situations generally had to do with people being underprepared for the situation that they were in.
And that could be really, really highly accomplished athletes that were trying to move faster and be less.
You know, inhibited by gear or recreationalists who were underprepared both from an equipment and knowledge situation.
And we have seen this tremendously in the 16, 17 years that I've been here.
The increase in whether it's through social media or magazines and documentaries, people seem to think that they are capable of accomplishing feats that are far out of their wheelhouse and get themselves into really bad situations.
There was a we were on a rescue one time and we were up in an area called Navajo Basin, which is just below those those three large people, the Wilson Range.
And lightning storms in these areas are really dangerous when you're up high.
There's so much metal in the rocks that that people become conduits, essentially.
And we were in the basin, we were the low team coming up to a victim and stopped to take a break.
And all of a sudden, this 20 something year old gal with a boyfriend trudging along behind her came bebopping up and she was in a tank top and running shoes and shorts.
They were very, very underprepared for what they were trying to accomplish.
And there was a just black cloud moving in over us that that clearly had was going to be a storm.
And she stopped to ask us how much more time it was going to take them to reach the summit.
And I told her it was probably two hours, two plus hours and pointed at the storm and said, you're probably not going to make it.
And her response was, oh, I'd hate for you guys to have to rescue me again.
So she clearly had not learned her first lesson.
And thankfully, they turned around and made it back out.
But more often than not, it was people being unprepared for the circumstances that they were inevitably going to be finding themselves in.
So what was it made? What was it that made you transition out of the search and rescue specifically and enter the other side of law enforcement?
So in Colorado, the sheriff's office, more often than not, is in charge of the search and rescue team.
And in Telluride at this time, there was a position opening for another deputy to help run the team.
And I was able to fill that capacity.
So instead of just being a volunteer member of the team and working, doing trainings and being involved in call outs,
I was able to take more of a command position as a patrol deputy.
There's not the the county size in Colorado generally are enormous.
But in San Miguel County, which is where Telluride is, the population of the county, I think, as a whole, is somewhere around five thousand people.
Really, really small unpopulated county as a whole.
So we weren't there wasn't a high crime rate necessarily, but we were constantly responding to the search and rescue calls.
And you may be calling out helicopters one day and looking for victims and then the next day be out helping the FBI with a kidnapping investigation out in the middle of nowhere in the high desert.
So it was exciting in that element where you're getting this duality of both picking, helping people in legitimate need of help that are in bad circumstances from a recreational side and then also from from a criminal side.
The next day, it was.
From a team, the team standpoint, I always played football and hockey and team sports, but the dichotomy of working in a team with more of a tactical element.
Just where the. Repercussions for bad decisions is based on life and death, that experience could not have been more valuable for me.
And I grew up in rural Indiana, I grew up in the flat lands.
This vertical environment was very foreign to me, so I had to to learn quickly.
And that was really, really wildly exciting.
So I moved into a patrol deputy position where I was helping to coordinate the search and rescue team.
And after.
I think four years of doing that, I had an opportunity to move to a much larger agency in the roaring fork Valley and went there and was able to get into SWAT.
And which again, mirrored the team element a lot, as we all generally know, with SWAT, you're working in small, dynamic teams.
But, you know, my the equipment in my car in San Miguel County was generally backpacks full of ropes and in rescue gear and skis.
And then when I moved to Garfield County, it quickly became full of tactical gear for different SWAT call outs.
You mentioned earlier, I don't know if it was when we were recording or prior, but San Miguel County having a population of about five thousand versus, as you mentioned, the other one with a remote spread out population.
Did you see and this is per capita, did you see less nine one one abuse in that county than when you got to the densely populated county?
Unquestionably, yeah, yeah.
And for a myriad of everything from, you know, when you're in the more densely populated areas, you're dealing with people who abuse suicide calls.
They're they're they're calling in regularly for suicide. There's, you know, tweakers who are calling in because little green ninjas are crawling in and out of their outdoor shed.
That the myriad of calls that we were getting were both exciting and frustrating.
And it was a huge dynamic shift, but one that was really exciting and also going from large or from small agency to bigger agency.
The shifts I was working 10 hour shifts in San Miguel and shifted to 12 hour shifts in Garfield County, which doesn't sound like a huge difference.
But suddenly you're going from I might work from four p.m. to two a.m. in San Miguel County and in Garfield, it was either six a.m. to six p.m. or six p.m. to six a.m.
And within a year of transferring over there, I did a year of nights, which was incredible for my career.
A lot more activity, but it was detrimental to both my physical health and to my my marriage at the time.
There's so much information research about sleep deprivation and the huge detrimental element to physical health and mental health, which obviously then extends into relationships and other things
you mentioned or about already having some kind of insidious elements of the TBIs prior to that.
What were you noticing as far as the impact of that?
Because this is something I talk about a lot and I think if you're going to ask first responders to be awake all night, we've got to give them enough rest and recovery to be able to process that.
And the fire service does a horrendous job.
So what were you seeing in that year of nights as far as your decline?
Well, I to start off, I don't know anybody that sleeps well from our community.
Fire paramedics, law enforcement, it's almost a running joke.
I had stopped sleeping well at five or six years old and never slept well.
As I mentioned, found alcohol when I was 15 and that was this godsend because suddenly I could have what I thought was sleep.
I now know that it is not actual sleep.
But the biggest things that I noticed initially were cognitive impairment.
So the first real significant issue that I can remember coming to surface was at probably four o'clock in the morning, I got a call for a dead guy routine call, nothing out of the ordinary.
We clean him up.
I was excited because it had the whole call had taken place and we had wrapped it up in time for me to get home before going into overtime.
And as I'm talking to the other deputies were leaving, my rear overheads were still on.
It was dark out.
And as I'm talking to him, his face looked gray and wax and in debt.
And I remember at the time thinking, oh, this must just be what happens when you're dealing with dead people all the time.
But then in the morning, it happened when I was what my morning was two, three o'clock in the afternoon the next day or that same day.
I'm talking to my then wife and stepson and their faces appeared that same way.
And then as time progressed, it would just happen when I was carrying on conversation with anybody, their face eventually would start to look gray and wax and dead.
And in retrospect, I can look back on that and recognize that was my brain behaving in a way that I was no longer in control of.
And that was the beginning of the decline that I can recall as time progressed.
And mind you, when you're in the midst of the cycle of this work, that to me was just a signal that I needed to push harder and put in more training and try to absolve myself of these symptoms through sheer determination.
And that just made things worse.
So as time progressed, my short term memory really started to dissolve. And then eventually I got to a point where I couldn't sleep for more than 20 minutes at a time.
I'd been sober for over 12 years at that point and started drinking again just because I knew I didn't want to go on to pharmaceuticals.
I was steadfast that Ambien was not or the like of Ambien was not going to do anything beneficial for me.
I could not use cannabis products, even though I was a cop in Colorado.
And so the only it was like either a bottle of bourbon or a bottle of Nyquil.
And the bourbon sounded a little bit more fun.
So I started drinking again and that was OK for a little while. It seemed to be manageable.
And then one of my closest, oldest friends from childhood died abruptly.
And that was enough to send me over the edge into a quick descent.
And I could not get motivated.
I was a hard child. Like, I loved being proactive.
I loved getting into anything I could and being as active as possible.
And I just could not motivate myself to do anything.
So the wheels fell off shortly after that.
Where was the darkest place you found yourself?
March of 2021. So I left the agency in January of 2020.
And by 2021, I was having difficulty constructing since it was hard for me to carry on a conversation.
I went on a five day bender that I don't remember eating.
I don't remember drinking anything other than the bourbon.
I don't really remember any any of those five days.
Another friend of mine had died pretty abruptly.
And so we're in the midst of covid and the chaos.
And I reached a point where I was staring into the void.
And, you know, all the prejudices that I had developed over years of cleaning up suicides.
Vanished in that moment because suddenly I didn't think that I could I knew that I could not maintain the level of pain that I was dealing with.
And it's not a pain that is easy to describe. It was physical. It was mental.
It was the most terrifying thing. And if I was going to kind of sum it up in a single sentence,
it was the total abandonment of any level of bravery that I had to move forward in life.
And I actually went upstairs to try to tie ligature to just end it.
And I couldn't get my hands to tie the knot.
And I think as most people that have spent any amount of time in the first responder world,
we see suicides that are done effectively and we see them when they are done ineffectively.
And I knew if I was going to do it, I wanted to do it right.
I had plans to wrap myself in trash bags so that it would be easier for the guys to clean me up.
And I couldn't get my hands to tie the knot.
And that was one of the most defeating feelings I've ever had in my life.
And that was the worst day.
That feeling hung around for about three months where I woke up every morning and I knew
just by the way that I felt that at some point that day,
my brain was going to start trying to convince me that the world would be better without me there.
And that's the part that I don't think most people who have never experienced that level of
depression and mind you, all of this is subsequent to these components of
central nervous system dysfunction and neural inflammation,
which lead to the insomnia, which then leads to the drugs or alcohol abuse to try to self-medicate.
But you're in this place that feels so desperate.
The impulse that was telling me that the world would be better without me felt as innate as the impulse
that I would have that tells me I got to take a leak or that I'm hungry or thirsty.
It was that clear and distinct in my head that everything would be better if I just was no longer here.
I'm so glad that you mentioned that without me even asking anything.
The reason I say that when we reflect on how we viewed suicide,
I will put my hand on my heart, probably 10 years ago, 9 years ago,
most of us were guilty of going, it's cowardly.
How could they think of your family?
You know, you go into hell, insert whatever judgmental non-Christian
Buddhist philosophy that you can put in there.
But then eight years into a podcast and a thousand interviews later,
there are some glaring common denominators.
And what I realized is the problem with suicide is someone with a healthy brain is trying to comprehend
what someone with an unhealthy brain is doing.
And I'm say healthy again, compassionately or unhealthy.
When you look at the storyline of so many people, including yourself from 18 months onwards,
and you see the compounding element of in this particular case, TBI's shift work,
organizational betrayal, unaddressed childhood trauma, the side effects from alcohol, sleep deprivation, etc.
You see this perfect storm.
And what I'm realizing now is that there is a shift from a healthy brain to an unhealthy brain,
a kind of miswiring of the brain.
And that very innate feeling, like you said, the one about needing to go pee,
that says you have to survive, that one, that invisible hand that pushes you away from the edge of a tall building
when you're on the roof, that hand goes around and goes to your back.
And the feeling of burdensomeness or the burdensome is to me what needs to be front and center in all these suicide awareness campaigns.
Of course, there's the wanting to the suffering to end and that makes sense.
But if you look at it where that person truly believes, as real as we're sitting here having this conversation today,
that they are the reason for their family's pain, that their family will be better off without them.
All of a sudden, you realize that in that psychosis at that moment, suicide is a courageous and selfless act.
So if you say, think of your family in a sense, you're actually adding another nail to the coffin.
So what I've said, and again, you've just underlined this yet again, is the real message out there in mental health,
aside from the other things, is if you start feeling like you are a burden to the very people that love you, that is your red flag.
That is your time to pick up the phone and start talking to people.
The injury that what I can recognize now as being this injury to my overall physiology,
that chronic stress, the sleep deprivation and trauma.
And when we're talking about trauma, the second I say trauma to a group of knuckle draggers,
they all kind of plug their ears because there is this misconception about what trauma actually is.
And I had these misconceptions.
My idea of trauma would redirect my brain towards medical training that I had.
Is it a traumatic injury? Do we need to set a bone or how are we going to treat this injury?
Trauma is anything, and I think I stole this from Joe Dispensit, anything that's happened in the past that's still affecting me today is trauma.
And we know that the brain does not differentiate between physical and emotional pain as far as what chemicals it's releasing into the body.
So if we start healing the physical fallout, and what I mean by that is the neural inflammation and the central nervous system dysfunction,
do actionable practices, not only can we heal the real underlying issue and address causation, but we offer legitimate resolve.
And the sooner we start enacting these actionable practices like breathwork, something we already do for law enforcement, we already do breathwork on the range.
If you train any level of jujitsu or defensive tack, whatever you might practice, you're doing breathwork to maintain your stamina throughout that match.
We do breathwork. This is just taking those same tenants that we use on the range and using them at night to help lower our,
you know, bring our central nervous system into a down regulated state so that we can sleep.
And when we do that long term, we help to regulate the central nervous system.
We lower neural inflammation through helping to heal the central nervous system and supplementation and different acts like that,
that help alleviate a lot of the impacts of the brain issues.
One of the areas that I've kind of realized is a great way of addressing the mental health side to, let's just say, the denial.
You know, the alphas and I'm doing giant air quotes right now is shifting it from overcoming trauma.
And it's interesting because the phrase trauma, I had Eric Potter at on the show who was the lead psychologist for the Seals for years.
And he said he stopped using trauma, used the word struggles.
Now, obviously, some struggles are greater than others, but you're overcoming struggles.
You're getting away from that word trauma.
But understanding that to get into that flow state and you talk about breathwork, I used to breathe like box breathe basically on the way to bad calls.
You know, as we go in there, I'm trying to get that heart rate down so I can, you know, be more efficient in my mind when we get on scene.
So when you kind of hear about the elements that you need for flow state, you need, you know, thousands and thousands of hours of repetition.
You need a high level of stress.
Well, you should have both of those if you're a veteran in the first responder professions, but then you need a clear mind.
And so if you want to be a good SWAT operator or a paramedic or a firefighter or whatever it is,
that is also the performance side is also the exact same parallel conversation really as a mental health side.
You're clearing the cobwebs in your mind so that you can operate at a high level.
So I've always found that because an interesting way I know you've written the Knuckle Dragger's Guide.
It almost seems like it's the same kind of philosophy.
Like, let me rephrase it for you and we'll get to exactly the same place.
Yeah. So something that was really interesting to me when I mentioned that I was having difficulty speaking and communicating.
And in those moments, there would be this absolute chaos in my mind that was that was taking place when I was sick.
And then there would be these moments of kind of a sublime calm.
And in those moments, I was able to see things very clearly.
And it occurred to me how, one, how poorly human beings as a whole communicate,
but two, how important and how the voices that seem to resonate the most in on a broad level have figured out a way to communicate
messages most effectively. It's not that they're saying anything that somebody else might not be preaching.
They've just figured out a way to say it that resonates with the most people if they have something we're saying.
And so I recognized, especially in these communities, if you walk in and you're not putting your.
If you're not putting your message into contextual relevance that is going to resonate with the people that you want to take action,
you're just going to be talking to a room of nodding heads.
So the reason that I constructed the knuckle, Draggers guide to stress tolerance was so that it would resonate in a way.
And people would recognize if I can get somebody to do breath work alone.
There will they will create enough space internally to then want to grow that space and start taking more action to alleviate more of the impact that this work does.
We can call it being a hero, but being a hero comes with a price.
Whether you're a Blackhawk mechanic or a special operations operator or SWAT guy or a dispatcher or paramedic or whatever it might be,
you've taken on this role and. Your occupation comes with a price.
You get to determine how much you pay in that. But the easiest way to not have to pay long term is to start doing practices that alleviate the impact prior to them presenting with overwhelming symptoms.
Or debilitating symptoms, right? Absolutely.
Well, you mentioned about the 10 day binge drinking.
You mentioned about being in that dark place and those voices being there for 30 days.
Walk me through how you started to claw yourself out of that hole.
What were the tools that you used initially and then what are you still using today?
I got very lucky in my experience.
I was somehow introduced to two different people.
One is Emily Hightower, who's with Shift Adapt, and she helped me to start recognizing the benefits of doing breath work and just educating me kind of on the underlying issues that were taking place.
And then I met Dr. Kate Pate, who was really instrumental in explaining the overall problem, the impact of stress, sleep deprivation, all the different TB eyes that I had had.
And she ultimately introduced me to Dr. Mark Gordon, who was really, really focused at that time on veterans coming back from GWOT and addressing a lot of the fallout from that.
And when I first spoke to him, he asked me, how many concussions have you had?
And I said, you know, probably six, eight that I'm aware of. And he said, are you talking about loss of consciousness concussions?
And I said, yes. And he said, OK, well, how many times have you hit your head and seen stars or felt a little woozy or maybe seen a change of color or felt nauseous?
And I thought, Doc, I don't I wouldn't have the first idea how to quantify that hundreds, if not thousands of times.
I've hit my head and seen stars or felt a little funny afterwards.
And he explained that loss of consciousness is a macro concussion when you smack your head hard enough to see stars or feel a little funny or hear the ringing in your ears afterwards.
That's a micro concussion. And most people take preventative steps after a macro concussion to ensure that they don't incur further damage,
whereas with micro concussions, we just continue to accumulate them.
In SWOT, I had a flashbang go off about a foot and a half from my head one time that I was reeling afterwards, but had to move really quickly.
And I was able to move through it and didn't think a whole lot of it at the time.
But then maybe three or four days later, I had a high powered weapon go off about six inches from from my ear.
And that buckled my knees. And it was the first time that I could recall something buckling my knees and really ringing my bell.
And after those two incidents, things quickly kind of went downhill.
So I can recognize blast trauma, which is not something that we were ever educated on.
But when you stack up on a door and our breachers are getting ready to blow a door off its hinges, they tell us to open our mouths.
That's because it helps to disperse some of the impact of the shockwave.
And I don't know how many people within our communities, most people recognize the boom that you hear from a round being fired, a gun being fired, is not the gunpowder exploding.
It's the projectile breaking the sound barrier.
And that produces a sonic blast, which can penetrate bone, but is absorbed by our brains.
And especially with short-billed rifles in tight confines using large and small explosives, we are eating every one of those blasts.
So they accumulate. And especially if you've had any prior history of TBI, those really start to stack up.
So just understanding the why. The pieces started falling into place.
So Dr. Gordon put me on to a he focuses on endocrine therapy, did my blood panels, got me on started on TRT and then a pretty regimented
supplementation focusing on antioxidants and the anti-inflammatories.
Ten days into his protocol, I woke up, I had a thought, I processed the thought and I came to a conclusion and I thought, oh my God, my brain's working again.
It was a long, long road from there.
But ultimately, that was the beginning of me getting better.
Psilocybin helped a lot further down the road. That was probably the substance that rebounded me cognitively the most.
Obviously, active duty military and first responders can't explore that, but there are a number of really beneficial programs for them to explore.
Ketamine is a wonderful product that they can explore if they're still active. And there are other variants that I think will be available in the near future.
So those all helped a ton. Then there were, you know, throughout that process, I was constantly hearing this phrase, you got to do the work, you got to do the work.
And I can remember getting really frustrated at one point and thinking, I'm doing everything I can.
What's the work? And it was either Kate or Emily said, you know, that's what you got to figure out.
The way that I came up with the Knuckle Draggers Guide to Stress Tolerance was taking all of the work elements and putting them together so that somebody else didn't have to go through the process that I did.
Ultimately, what I had to do was take breath work, hot and cold exposure.
Diet supplementation and gut microbiome, which gut microbiome is something that most people in our communities are going to scoff at.
But for a community that relies on gas station burritos and MREs for diet staples, there's nobody that needs gut microbiotics, prebiotics more than these guys and gals.
Exercise, PT, mobility and yoga, kind of a combination of those, again, recognizing the brain doesn't recognize the difference between mental and physical pain.
Journaling practice, which I can't say enough about, especially when you're in that hole.
How many times have you had somebody call you crying from our community?
And you ask them what's wrong and they say, I don't know. Happens all the time.
Journaling is the easiest way to start developing a relationship with your own inner dialogue so that when you reach those spaces and you don't know what's wrong, you can start figuring it out.
I don't know how to do that in any other way.
The very act of putting paper or pencil to pen and having to write that out is difficult for a lot of people.
But the process itself, I can't say enough about it.
Even if you don't know how to start, there are guys that worry and girls that worry about their significant other finding it.
And if that's your worry, maybe you need to address some issues within your own relationship.
But don't let those barriers hold you up. Figure out a way.
There's a myriad of ways to start that process. And the benefits just can't really be measured.
The final thing is a faith and gratitude practice. And I don't care if somebody tells me that they are agnostic.
I want to know that they believe that so thoroughly that it will help to guide them through life.
Because when you get desperate, you need something beyond yourself to rely upon.
And it's faith. It has nothing to do, in my opinion, with one specific religion, religious belief.
It is what do you believe in beyond yourself?
And the gratitude practice is coupled with that faith practice. And that is just a shift in perspective.
If you are stranded on an island sometime and you don't know if you're ever going to get off and you got somebody with you who's telling you,
we're never going to get off, we're going to die of starvation, dehydration.
You're probably never going to get off if you have somebody with you that's saying, what do we have to do to get off this island?
At least you're going to die trying. And I would much rather die trying than just give in to the desperation of any given moment.
So that's how the whole Knuckle Draggers Guide came to be.
That's how I got better. And I'm still maintaining breathwork on a regular basis.
The one thing that I don't preach that helped me a tremendous amount and I don't know how to measure it either is Jujitsu.
And even when I was in my most desperate places, I would force myself to go to class.
And I knew I wasn't going to remember anything that I learned.
But there was something about the act of going in and being connected to my body, being forced to breathe,
being forced to think through the motion and the sequences and being entangled with another person that I felt like was absolutely necessary.
And it's something that I will never stop doing.
And I don't know how something like Jujitsu is not mandated in every law enforcement agency, but also as a whole, any first responder agent.
You guys have to deal with people getting violent and sideways.
You should know how to protect yourself. I can't say enough about it.
So, yeah, sorry, that was long.
No, no, it's good. It's good. I love it.
Now, Jujitsu, I mean, that comes up over and over again, and I couldn't agree more.
I mean, it's I always tell people, like when someone's trying to murder you, you're not anxious or depressed.
You're actually present.
You know, you're very aware that you might have to go unconscious.
But if your arm snaps off, you know, and obviously that's an extreme example.
But, you know, it is it is such a great tool.
And I've actually watched people that I do Jujitsu within the school that I go to go through dark places.
And, you know, I've talked to them at times, but they keep coming back to Jujitsu and now they're doing really well.
So, I mean, that in itself, like you said, the physicality, the community, you know, the the breathwork all kind of round into one of the discomfort and the physical discomfort, which I think is important for first responders.
When was the last time that you were really tired or in pain?
You know, just want to circle around, though, to endocrinology.
One of the big things that also kind of arose in this conversation, starting with Kirk Parsley, who's a sleep expert that came from the Navy Seals originally.
He was talking about how that original range was created and it was a small town near one of the Ivy League schools.
And they did this study on testosterone in the community.
And the nine fifty was the high school football player dripping with everything.
And then the two fifty was a sedentary 80 year old that was, you know, two steps from death.
And so then for the for so many years, you and I would go to the doctor and say, oh, you're fine.
You know, you're two hundred or you're two. You're two fifty one. You're within normal limits.
And then a complete disconnect of what should a 30 year old cop or firefighter actually have.
Arguably, they're going to be one of the more physically fit and more resilient members of that community.
But then there's this massive swing the other way, which really irks me at the moment, where now we have these men's clinics opening up,
just throwing TRT at everyone rather than talking about gut health and sleep and strength and conditioning and healing relationships and things that will restore somewhat their testosterone.
And I've got a company that's actually a sponsor now, but I hunted them down who are the middle ground.
They're actually they have the TRT, but they also have peptides and DHA and other things that will supplement your body to make their own testosterone.
That being said, when it comes to especially SWAT, the military side, there's also physiological damage that can suppress the body's ability to make TRT.
And that's definitely when that is needed.
What have you seen as far as the lens that you have with the first responders that you work with?
Because I see an epidemic of shift workers in uniform with testosterone that is in the absolute toilet.
And there's no question in my mind that the sleep deprivation, aside from concussive impacts, is the huge element in what's destroying these men and women.
I couldn't agree more.
I mean, we could go on all day about all of the endocrine disruptors that are in the water and the food and everything that we're exposed to.
But at the end of the day, I do agree that sleep deprivation.
And I think if you're listening to the Andrew Hubermans and the Peter Atiyahs and the really leading voices, Andy Galpin, to these topics, it is...
I'm hearing about guys in double digit testosterone levels that are from the first responder community.
What that's going to do to your mood alone, your decision making, is astronomical.
I know in the addiction community, testosterone, at least in the addiction treatment communities that I'm familiar with,
testosterone replacement therapy has been one of the biggest mood stabilizers that they have found and are advocating for.
They get a little sideways still when the psychedelic conversation comes up, which is a different topic.
But the benefits of testosterone...
And I'll be perfectly honest, when...
I didn't start taking testosterone until 2020.
So after my... Or 2021.
More than a year after I quit, I won a strongman competition.
I was pulling a tremendous amount of weight off the ground and squatting.
I was very strong, but my testosterone levels were in the toilet.
So somebody's body composition and their ability to exercise and work out is not necessarily a huge indicator of their testosterone levels.
It's how are they feeling? How are they healing? How are their moods?
How many first responders do you know that don't deal with irritability, that don't deal with sleep issues, cognitive impairment?
All of these are directly connected to endocrine related issues.
In fact, most of the symptoms that we associate with PTSD are the mirror images of TBI, endocrine dysfunction, and central nervous system dysfunction.
So if we're treating it from the problem that I have with labeling everything PTSD, which has become this kind of broad collective term,
first and foremost, most of the guys and girls that I know from these communities, whether it's the military or the first responder,
will quickly say I was never traumatized by the work, anything that I did at work.
It was part of the job. And I agreed to that. My brain stopped working.
So I don't know that it is necessarily intrusive thoughts or scary dreams.
The attributes that we generally associate with PTSD, it falls in line with TBI and central nervous system dysfunction as a result of the prolonged stress, trauma and sleep deprivation.
And when we look at PTSD, the general protocol for treatment are pharmaceutical drugs and talk therapy.
And that was the prognosis that they gave me or the protocol for treatment that they gave me.
I knew I had enough training and enough knowledge to recognize that neither one of those were going to heal the underlying issues that were taking place.
And if there's something that I really appreciate about the training that we get,
whatever tool you are given, whether it's a weapon system or a piece of gear, you're taught to break that down, understand how it works.
So if it malfunctions in the midst of chaos, you can kneel down, fix it and get back into the fight.
I wanted to understand what is the mechanical error taking place in my brain that's taken me from a high functioning operator to suddenly not being able to speak a congruent sentence.
The information that thankfully I was led to by people like Emily and Kate and Dr. Gordon, I was able to fix.
And to be sitting here today and passing this stuff on, I'm working one on one with guys that it takes two weeks and two weeks time.
If they do the work and they are focused on it, they feel like new people and all they have to do is continue doing the work.
It doesn't mean that they have to do everything every single day for the rest of their life.
They've got to figure out what works best for them of those practices and utilize them in a way that maintains their health long term.
Supplementation is something that people need to be maintaining on a day to day basis.
I would argue that journaling, if I didn't have the journals that I did throughout the time that I was in my most desperate moments,
I would not have been able to track my progress or lack thereof throughout that experience.
That was the easiest because there were days that I couldn't remember anything and there were some days that I could remember a lot.
And I could look back through those journals and any of the days that were kind of missing,
I could put the pieces back together and help me to track it as I was going along.
Exercise, obviously, I'm not suggesting that everybody goes out and becomes a CrossFit athlete,
but we know from a longevity standpoint, grip strength and core strength are two of the biggest elements that determine how long you're going to be around.
If you have trouble getting on and off the toilet, there's something wrong with your system.
PT and mobility, if you're impinged in some way, you are willingly dealing with discomfort that is unnecessary.
Gratitude and faith practices need to just be a shift in the way that you are constructing your thoughts.
And as you raise that awareness, your life will change.
We operate in a community that is just bombarded with negativity constantly.
If we give in to that and it starts becoming part of the cycle of our thoughts, that's going to be our reality.
The more we can find something in the midst of that ugliness to be grateful for,
the world starts to look a little different and it becomes an easier place to live, in my opinion.
Well, you mentioned about PTSD being this kind of stamp now, this rubber stamp that people are getting.
And I think I've had this conversation with a lot of people.
When I first entered this conversation on the microphone eight years ago and in person nine, ten years ago,
and we really started understanding it a little bit more, it was about the stigma.
And I get it. But that was almost 10 years ago now.
And I think where the conversation needs to shift is hope, hope of not only getting to where you were before,
but understanding that addressed struggles, trauma, whatever you want to label it as,
and diet, exercise, and even maybe some psilocybin or something is actually healing the TBI element,
that there's a more resilient version of yourself on the other side of the struggles.
So rather than being like, well, I'm just going to retire, I'm going to have a dog.
And there's a very kind of defeatist element to acknowledging that you have PTSD.
You are diagnosed. You are given a label once again, rather than what a beautiful opportunity
to take all of this struggle and trauma and create a much more resilient version of yourself.
And that gives hope. And even with the supplementation side, ironically,
because I was diligent and understood about the sleep side, even though I was on shift as a firefighter for 14 years,
my natural testosterone was 700. And you look at me, you do not think of me as a person who's dripping with testosterone,
you know, at 180 pounds. But again, it's about optimization.
So rather than looking at supplementation, well, oh, now I feel a bit better.
Like, what is the level that you actually need not to be, you know, dripping from the gills with tea and walking around bright orange.
But what is the best version of yourself at 30, at 40, at 50?
And that, again, gives hope like I'm going to find a way of getting back to being the person I should have been had I not worked shifts for 10, 20 years.
Yeah. Well, and you address something, if you think back to that when you were starting 10 years ago,
we did if there's anything that I am really grateful for, as far as the timeline of my experience,
it is the understanding that was coming to light. And mind you, I had in January of 2020 when I left the agency,
my singular mission was I want to understand what this is, what is this malfunction?
And it wasn't easy to find those answers. It took 10 months, maybe a year before I really had a grasp on it.
But in that time, I was deteriorating. So if we think back 10 years ago, when there really weren't as many answers as we had now,
that's the resistance to dealing with it. And the antiquated thoughts that I don't even.
And when I was active, the second PTSD came into the conversation. I plugged my ears.
I didn't want to hear about it. It felt like a viral conversation that could infect me if I even listened.
I get why people don't want to address it. There weren't and there hadn't been answers for a long time.
Now we have answers. We have ways to be proactive in not just healing it,
but also preventing it from the symptoms from becoming overwhelming. If you're doing these jobs,
if you're being if you are doing shift work, if you are exposed to traumatic shift,
regardless of whether you feel like it's impacting you or not, you are going to be physiologically and neurologically impacted by this stuff.
There are ways to stay in front of that impact and to manage it. And that takes personal discipline and responsibility,
which can be a hard sell, especially the fact that we don't have national standards for fitness, for fire and law enforcement nationwide is a travesty.
It's total insanity. I can remember somebody putting it really well when we were all in a meeting and somebody had come to try to impress upon everybody the importance of physical fitness.
And we had a lot of guys at the last agency I was in that were really fit. We had a lot of guys and girls that weren't.
And the person speaking said he was a fit guy and he said, let's say I'm getting into it with somebody and they are overwhelming me.
And I know I have limited time and you're coming screaming up because I'm calling out on the radio that I need help.
And there's a 10 foot chain link fence between us. How many of you know you're going to get over that 10 foot fence?
Because that's the difference between me living and not or having to use deadly force that I otherwise wouldn't have to use.
At the end of the day, a lot of the social issues that we're facing, a lot of the pushback from the communities that we are responsible for keeping safe,
are coming from a sense of disrespect that they have when they are seeing first responders that they know can't save them in a bad situation.
And that's our responsibility. That falls on our shoulders that we are not keeping up our end of the bargain.
I think it's sad and I don't understand why leadership isn't.
I mean, we know that unions are involved with some of the issues in preventing this stuff, but you know,
the odds of you making it through one of these careers without getting into a serious.
Altercation with somebody that can overwhelm you are slim to none.
I don't care where you're living at some point, you're going to have to fight somebody.
And if you are not highly trained and highly capable, that's going to feel like deep water really, really fast.
And the individual chooses how that experience goes.
But I see them and as covid swept through and all the social issues swept through,
we're seeing it where law enforcement fire are having to fill positions with people that never would have been hired prior to this.
And it's not going to do good things long term for our community, I don't believe.
I've I've talked about this a lot when you go to fire school in Florida, at least it's called minimum standards.
Now, in that academy, you're climbing multiple stores, stories with full bunker gear, tank on your back,
usually shouldering hoes and carrying a tool.
You're doing Bernie evolutions, you're doing maze evolutions, you're doing dummy drags and combat challenges.
That's what they call minimum standards.
And then you go out into the profession and there's no standards anymore.
And I've pointed out, we talk about the special operations community, which, by the way,
we're protecting their families when we're there overseas.
You know, these people that are kind of hero worshipping the seals will your their line of defense while they're deploying.
But to take another kind of first responder profession that does have standards, you look at the ocean lifeguards.
If you can't pass this fitness test, you can't pass the swim test, you are not a lifeguard anymore.
And what we've done in the first responder professions is basically as a ocean lifeguard department said,
you know what, if you can doggy paddle, that's fine, we're good, you know, and it's not.
But it's just absolute insanity because there is no downside to it.
Not only are you going to be able to be an efficient first responder,
but you're also making a huge dent on the cancers and the mental health and the heart attacks and,
you know, all the other things that are killing our first responders when they're not sticking a gun in their mouth.
So I don't understand the resistance, but I do understand the resistance.
And that is that we've got these self-serving fucking cowards in chief positions,
in union positions that know damn well that if they have to take their test, they're going to fail.
So rather than do what's right for an entire department,
the cowardice makes them oppose it because they don't have the fucking guts to actually step up to the plate themselves.
Absolutely. And who is more likely to fall into what we call being sick?
Somebody who's overweight, out of shape, likely drinking too much, stock full of pharmaceuticals.
Those are the people and what's interesting to me is those are also generally the people that are not hard charging.
So it's almost like they take a back seat to all the action and somehow skate through
versus the hard chargers that are more than likely trying to take care of themselves on some level and train.
But they're having to pick up the pieces for a lot of the people that aren't.
And as a result of that, they are overworked, they're run down, they're burdened and they're falling apart.
So I don't know what the answer is there, but if we want to clean up the image that we have and address a lot of the long term issues that are being faced from this community.
I mean, I see a lot of guys that make it 20, 30, 40 years through a career and then retire.
And retirement basically looks like a case of beer and a dog sitting by for the rest of their lives, not a happy existence.
There are better ways to do it.
And we owe that not just to our brothers and sisters in uniform, but also to the communities that we agreed to protect.
We're not going to clean it up any other way.
Absolutely. Well, I want to hit one more area before we go to some closing questions.
You find yourself in this dark place.
You start kind of collecting the tools that work for you.
What then made you start the ASM Foundation and then tell everyone listening what that actually offers?
Thank you.
So it seems like everybody that finds healing and ways through this mess then wants to offer it to everybody else.
So I started ASM very early in an effort to try to bring Dr.
Gordon's therapy to as many people as I could.
And we were able to help a handful of people, but I just stayed dynamic with the process and eventually felt like the most effective way for me to get to make an impact on the community was to get in front of people and tell my story, explain.
I had a really successful career.
I was I loved what I did.
I did not want it to end and certainly didn't want it to end the way that it did.
And I feel like had I had these practices prior to getting sick, I wouldn't have ended it the way that I did.
So speaking to agencies and to the credit of the fire departments, they have been way more receptive to this message than law enforcement has, honestly.
You guys have a lot more time to work out, so that might be part of the reason.
But that has been really encouraging to me, and there is still the stigma of I don't want anybody to know that I'm having the difficulties that I am.
And so they don't want to talk to a shrink.
I didn't want to talk to a shrink when I don't want to talk to somebody about the problems that I have from carrying a weapon for a living who's never carried a weapon for a living.
So I.
What I'm offering ultimately is an alternative to that.
I have a psychotherapist who works directly with us.
If I need to default to her on anything, I can do that.
But generally speaking, I'm working with one on one individually with guys and girls.
We are focusing on the breathwork element.
The hot and cold thing isn't something that we need a sauna and cold plunge for necessarily.
We're seeing a ton of benefit from 30 seconds of cold water at the end of a hot shower on a daily basis.
And a lot of that is just getting used to that discomfort.
How do I teach myself?
And in this case, the cold water forces you to learn how to comfortably breathe through that discomfort.
And there there's a myriad of benefits to accepting that discomfort on a daily basis.
Journaling breathwork, all these different things can feel like a discomfort when you're first incorporating them into your life.
But I work with people individually for for one month, generally after about two weeks and change.
They're feeling so much better that they they really don't need a lot more input from me.
So then it's just making sure that nothing falls out of line.
They're on a good track. If they want to work with me beyond that, I'm more than happy to do that.
But generally speaking, I haven't had many people that need me beyond two or three weeks.
We are putting on one and two day trainings at individual agencies where we go in and try to do more of an immersive.
Program and we can handle up to 10 students in a day program.
And then we're working on larger, immersive retreats that will be two or three days at a time here in Colorado and another one in Idaho,
which are really beneficial. And those are more train the trainer so that we can send people back to agencies and they can hold these trainings
with with with their their own people and pass this stuff on.
It's not something that I feel like should be mandated the second we mandate anything stuff good sideways,
but it's something that I hope leadership will start incorporating.
And when you see the benefit, you know, if I learned when I was still active that somebody else had figured out a way to sleep
that didn't involve drugs or. Pharmaceutical intervention, and it was legal, I would have jumped all over it.
So it's really just trying to spread the message through showing the efficacy firsthand of people taking action and doing it themselves.
So A.S.M. Foundation is my organization.
A lot of the all of the information is available at that website. And we're on Instagram.
Again, the one on one stuff is really, really beneficial.
I priced it all so that it's cheaper than working with a personal trainer for that month long program.
And it's proven to be really effective.
I'd love it if everybody could be here and steamboat with me, but I'm having a really easy time just having meetings like this over FaceTime or Zoom.
And we're maintaining it. People get back whatever they put in.
If they put in the work and maintain it, they get a ton of benefit from it.
If they don't put in the work, then they're going to stay where they are.
And that is what it is. But it works if you do the work.
Brilliant. I want to hit just one area quickly.
You mentioned about the psychedelic retreats and first responders in military being blocked from that because of the prohibition laws.
But there are I mean, I've had so many people on the show that have organizations that will either get you to one of the churches here in the U.S.
or help you get overseas for that, because if that is what is going to help you and especially people that are really deep in crisis,
that's such a powerful tool. And two of my firefighter friends literally were at their wits end and we're 100 percent about to end it.
And those retreats saved two firefighters, I know, specifically.
So I want to put that out there. That being said, another thing about psilocybin specifically that I've heard is that has shown so much
promise in neuro generation and starting to kind of reverse the damage from the TVI that we discussed today.
What have you learned about that? And do you microdose or anything to help with that side of it?
To the best of my knowledge, there is no substance that encourages cellular regeneration within the brain faster and more effectively than psilocybin.
Every neurodegenerative disease that we are aware of, whether it's Parkinson's, dementia, Alzheimer's, are all a result of cellular degeneration.
So most people are familiar with cirrhosis of the liver.
If somebody drinks or abuses their liver for prolonged periods of time, their liver will start to cellularly degenerate and develop scar tissue and eventually stop functioning.
The brain is very similar. And to further on that, if there is intervention and they stop drinking or doing whatever is affecting their liver,
the liver will, if done in time, cellularly regenerate back to a healthy organ and be operational again.
The brain does the same thing. The brain can be impacted a number of different ways and have cellular degeneration processes begin.
If given the opportunity and the proper nutrients and not further impact, it will cellularly regenerate back to a healthy organ.
CTE is the cirrhosis of the brain, if you will.
Once you've reached the point of CTE, you are not going to heal those injuries and we can't do a brain transplant the way that we would do a liver transplant.
So that's why testosterone is so beneficial.
Creatine is something that most of us in college and stuff, we're trying to get more bench presses taking creatine.
It is proving to be one of the most beneficial substances for brain health that we know of.
Vitamin D3, fish oils and krill oils, magnesium zinc.
Those are four that I, five counting the creatine that I implore my clients to take on a daily basis.
I think for men in particularly trying to get a gram of protein per gram of ideal body weight is also beneficial and has cognitive benefit.
But the psilocybin was an absolute game changer, not just from a cognitive enhancer, but also I had.
A wildly, I had a much more difficult time quitting drinking.
When I, this time when I was sick, so even once I started Gordon's protocol, I would go two, three weeks without drinking, and then I decided to drink again.
And throughout that process, I would get really disappointed in the fact that I could not just kick it as I had the first time when I was 29.
I did a hero's dose of psilocybin and very clearly in that experience could see myself on two paths simultaneously.
One path was if I kept drinking and that path was dark and had more obstacles and difficulty, and it wasn't doom and gloom and the end of the world.
It was just not as nice as the other path where I quit drinking and it was sunny and beautiful and enjoyable and without all the turmoil of the path with alcohol.
And I came out of that and it was the easiest decision I've ever made to go.
I'm not drinking alcohol ever again, and I haven't had a drink since.
So I have macro dose or micro dose intermittently since that time and think I probably always will.
I've had a few other macro experiences that were eye opening and a beautiful kind of view into areas of myself that I didn't even know exist.
I think psychedelics are a obviously not for everybody and there needs to be a screening process and you need to take that very seriously because there are certain people that will be more prone to psychotic episodes as a result of utilizing psychedelics.
But for people that are still active duty, I think ketamine therapy for some can be wildly beneficial.
I would implore anybody exploring that to do it with a trained psychotherapist who is going to guide you through the experience because that seems to be making all the difference in the world.
And then also ensuring that you are doing integrative work afterwards, like breath work, like journaling. Anybody can go ingest some psychedelics and have a enlightening experience.
How long that experience has a profound impact on your life is going to be determined by the amount of integrative work that you are doing prior to and after those experiences.
There are a number of different organizations likely all familiar with Herro Cartes Project, which is a phenomenal organization that was started by Jesse Gould, who's a ranger, and they are helping veterans and oftentimes, I believe, first responders go to Costa Rica and Peru to explore Ayahuasca.
I believe they're offering Ibogaine now, which has been life changing for a number of different people addicted to opiates for any number of reasons.
There's Veterans Solutions, which is a great organization.
I don't know that we're seeing many that are focused on first responders, but if anybody is interested in resources to explore that, they can reach out directly to me and I will be more than happy to help them find anything that they need.
Yeah, I've had Marcus from Vet Solutions on the show.
Jesse was on the show not too long ago.
There are so many organizations we can help people get domestically or internationally the help that they need.
And it's just the opposition to these psychedelics, to MDMA, even to CBD by government organizations that approved Oxycontin, for example, is nauseating, to be honest.
But I hope down the road there'll be an awakening and one day we'll actually have access to this.
But I also want to underline, like you said, I've heard people that said they didn't have much success with ketamine.
And I asked what it looked like.
Well, they put it in my arm and then they walked out.
That's like someone saying, here's the key to your door.
You got you coming with me?
Like, no.
So you open the door and all this shit starts coming out, but no one is there to help you start going through it.
So whether it's psilocybin, whether it's 5-MeO-DMT or ketamine or MDMA, if you're not aligned with a shaman or someone that you trust to guide you through that process,
then I urge you to question that particular organization.
A hundred percent.
And if you're not willing to, on a long term basis, continue to put in the work and do the self exploration,
you should probably I don't want to deter anybody from exploring the opportunities or the experiences within the different psychedelic options.
But it is not as simple as just taking the substance and boom, you're healed.
I am familiar with a number of different people that are putting in hours and hours and hours of work in these fields.
And it is a regular thing to hear people say, well, I took the mushrooms or I took the ketamine or I took and I don't feel any different today.
And they ask, what have you done since?
They're another. It takes more investment than that.
And I would, you know, something that most people I don't think are familiar with is if we look at SSRIs,
antidepressants, antidepressants were not ever designed, not a single one that I'm aware of were designed for long term indefinite use.
They were designed to be a bridge.
And that bridge was meant to offer you an opportunity to find more effective means of regulating yourself.
If you're not taking that action and you're just relying on the antidepressant,
you're not going to be any different when you quit using the antidepressant.
And the effects that you're feeling are really just a numbing and a suppression of those negative emotions.
Something if you talked much about stellate ganglion block, I've had one or two guests talking about it.
I think it is a obviously just like SSRIs and psychedelics and everything else,
it's not going to be effective for everyone, but it is a fantastic option for a lot of people and offers anywhere from six to seven months of
efficacy in alleviating the negative symptoms that we generally associate with mental illness.
But again, if you just take the shot and you don't do anything to process the causal aspects of your negative feelings,
then you're not going to get any better from taking that or not taking it.
You're going to end up in the same place.
Well, I think this is the problem with medicine in general, chronic disease management, physical and mental.
I've always asked people, they've said young firefighters in the station, they put me on the statins.
They said my cholesterol is high.
And then I get, so when do you come off?
Like, no, they're going to be on the rest of my life.
My cholesterol is high.
Like, well, that's bullshit.
Alongside a hypertensive med or a cholesterol med or a psychiatric med should be a plan, an exit strategy.
All right, we're going to get you down to this weight or we're going to work through some of these psychological interventions so that we can then get you off again.
But that's not how the drug industry is designed.
There's so much shame and guilt cast upon addiction to illicit drugs.
Yet the same exact model is front and center in Big Pharma, which is we'll give you free samples at the beginning and then you're going to be hooked for life.
But they mask it as obesity, hypertension, you know, whatever the term is.
And if your physician or your mental health practitioner is not, as you said, saying, all right, we need this right now because your blood pressure is dangerously high
or you're having these, you know, these psychotic episodes or depressive epitose.
But we're going to keep re-evaluate and we're going to go through all the tools.
And the toolbox is so much bigger than people realize that on this date, we want to start thinking about coming off.
And if they're not having a coming off the medicine conversation with you, unless it's something terminal, you know, outside the anomalies, if they're not having a coming off conversation, you're with the wrong person.
Yes, unfortunately, both our medical and pharmaceutical companies have become very motivated by recurrent treatment options.
And it's an unfortunate, but I can understand it from a business standpoint, a capitalistic standpoint.
But you look at the CPAC machine and it's kind of the ultimate example of how our methods of treatment have gone from, let's address the causation of the issue and find a route to legitimate healing to.
Let's just make them more comfortable in their unhealthy lifestyle.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right, well, I want to transition some closing questions. I'll be mindful of your time.
People listening, we had some technical difficulties yesterday.
So if this sounds like if we've overlapped a little bit, that's why this has actually been three separate conversations fused together.
The first of the closing questions, though, is there a book or are there books that you love to recommend?
It can be related to our discussion today or completely unrelated.
Yes. Waking the Tiger. Is it Waking the Tiger, Chasing the Tiger?
It's Peter Levine. I believe it's Waking the Tiger. I have it on my Instagram.
He are you familiar with this book?
I actually heard you talking about it on the Project Sapient podcast, but no one else did.
So please elaborate. I think I think I both said the wrong name and the wrong author.
So it is he studied predator prey response in the natural environment.
And he uses the example of if a cheetah is chasing a gazelle, it is Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine.
Waking the Tiger. If a cheetah is chasing a gazelle in the natural environment and the gazelle gets away,
a few minutes after the chase, you will see the gazelle do a little shiver.
And that is a trauma shiver. That's the gazelle releasing the memory of the experience from its mind.
And the message in that is if it didn't do that trauma shiver and release itself from that experience,
it would never put its head down to graze. It would remain hypervigilant.
It would starve and die. Humans are designed to do the same thing.
We have just forgotten how. We need to get better at processing trauma.
And if we if I was talking to a guy or girl from our community, I said,
if we're using that same example and you go back as far as you can remember and think of every time
that you've been chased by the cheetah and you've gotten away, but you haven't done a shiver,
how many of those experiences do you have backed up that you're just carrying behind you?
So I think that book is a phenomenal book in helping people to understand
kind of what is actually taking place naturally within their system,
even if they don't feel like they were impacted by a lot of these experiences,
how it might be impacting their central nervous system and brain.
I've talked about this a lot when it comes to our dispatchers.
If you are in a foot pursuit and then you have to tackle someone,
wrestle them with a bit and try and get them cuffed, there is a shiver.
There's a physical offload at that moment.
When I'm advancing a hose line or climbing to the roof and cutting a hole with a chainsaw
and then loading hose at the end, there's a physical release.
What really worries me is our dispatchers.
They're on the phone, someone's screaming, the man's trying to kick my door in
or my kid's not breathing and they just sit there.
And they've been there probably for 10, 12 hours.
They probably entered when it was dark, left when it was dark.
The whole world exists in a chair looking at a bunch of screens
and they don't have that shiver.
They don't have that physical offload.
A lot of times they don't even have closure.
They don't know what happened next.
So I think this is a really important conversation, especially for them
that don't have that physical offload that sometimes, not always,
but sometimes we do when we're out in the street.
And they're forgotten about in these conversations a lot.
I, in my first year, the first sheriff that I worked for, who is still in office,
he's been there for over 40 years, phenomenal guy, said, I will
I'll pay you to go to the academy if you will spend a year working in dispatch
in the jail to kind of learn the process.
And so I got that dispatch experience.
I was still exposed to sleep deprivation because we were working 12 hour shifts in there.
And the running joke was this job is 11 hours and 45 minutes of doldrum
and 15 minutes of excitement.
But that 15 minutes of excitement can change your life.
And it was the God's honest truth.
There is no processing.
You are sedentary, which I think is a horrible combination, at least
when you're on patrol or even when you're doing corrections,
you're moving throughout the day.
A dispatcher's responsibility is to sit still and wait.
I think they're under a tremendous amount of pressure.
And from a liability standpoint, if they don't go by the book on those calls,
they can be held responsible for the outcome.
So they absolutely need to be offered the same type of stress tolerance courses
that somebody on the road or somebody dragging hoses or a paramedic is going to be offered.
Absolutely. Well, we asked about books.
What about films and documentaries?
Any of those that you love?
Um, you know, I have found probably since Covid more than anything else
that watching films as a whole, like regular life seems to be so much more dramatic
than anything that Hollywood can produce at this point that it's it's kind of for not.
But I think How to Change Your Mind, the Michael Pollan documentary was fantastic.
Fantastic fungi, just from an education standpoint and starting to understand.
There are a number of different theories of how fungi even arrived into our natural environment,
whether they were transported here by asteroids or meteorites.
But they certainly do not seem to be of this planet.
So these are just different ways to start alleviating some of the prejudice that has.
You know, when Terrence McKenna and a lot of the leaders in the psychedelic realm
first began to suggest the benefits of these medicines, it was dispelled for reasons
that we could go down the rabbit hole with.
But or for at the end of the day.
I don't think we we're scraping the surface when it comes to how instrumental
these these different medicinal options can be in having a really legitimate impact
on healing the mental health ailments that seem to be riddling not just our community,
but society as a whole.
And the Michael Pollan documentary did a wonderful job of exploring that.
I thought the fantastic fungi with Paul Stamets was wonderful as well.
But those are two that I think would be really beneficial for anybody
who's curious about these topics to explore.
I've actually started using just the functional mushrooms as well as a company, Umbo.
I've had a few, Rashad Evans and Del Jolly have been on the show.
But even that, like I take the tincture in the morning and just the kind of acuity,
the mental acuity from that alone.
I've noticed, and actually, as we're talking, I'm drinking a mushroom cola,
so which I find helps with my sleep a little bit.
So there we go. But yeah, I mean, there's there's so much to it.
Yeah, Lion's Mane has been shown to be a really, really beneficial
cognitive enhancer. And when there's a misconception about ingesting psilocybin
that I know my mother had for a long time, that even the slightest amount
is going to lead to these psychedelic experiences.
If somebody's microdosing psilocybin and they're doing it in quantities
that are like one fifteenth of a single gram, they're not going to feel
the effects necessarily in the way that we would expect to from drinking alcohol
or ingesting other drugs.
There may be a little visual acuity.
And to me, it felt like there was a cognitive sharpness and a streamline
of my thoughts and how I wanted to communicate.
It brings everything down a level, almost like Adderall or Ritalin would have
when I prescribed those at 15 years old, which is still insane to me.
Brilliant. All right.
Well, you mentioned Kate Pate, who's been on the show.
Brian McKenzie has also been on the show.
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?
If you are interested in the trauma aspect, Ketamine, the psychotherapist
that works with us is Kristen Malia, who is based out of here in Steamboat,
and she works with Emerald Integrative Health.
And they have a process that I believe is really, really effective.
They integrate a lot of what we were talking about with the integrative tools
and ensuring that there's an understanding that this is not just ingesting
the lozenge or getting the show, however it might be administered.
There is a long-term game plan that needs to be put into place
to have effective benefits from these medicines.
She would be one.
I think there's a lot of stuff that I can't name names right now,
but in a few months, I think there would be a lot of really exciting developments
in these fields that will be worth bringing back up,
and I'd love to revisit that topic at a later date.
I think there's some really exciting developments that are coming in the near future.
Beautiful.
All right, well then the last question before we make sure where everyone can find the foundation
and you online, what do you do to decompress?
Breathwork.
I think breathwork is an understated benefit, and I'm talking about broadly.
I do breathwork when I wake up, and this doesn't need to be something where
I dim the lights and I need the environment just perfect, and I have to be doing...
I'm doing breathwork when I'm driving.
I'm doing it when I'm laying down to go to sleep.
I'm unquestionably doing it in jujitsu.
There's a reason that Hicks and Gracie wrote a book called Breathe.
His entire career revolved around his ability to control his diaphragm and subsequent his breathing.
It gave him an advantage and an edge.
I think the top special operations guys that you will speak to will collectively talk about the benefits of breathwork,
and I can't say enough about it.
When you start teaching yourself how to utilize your breath for your own benefit,
the world opens up in ways that you have never been familiar with before.
It's a beautiful process, and keep it simple.
Whether you're talking about you mentioned box breathing,
Huberman promotes the physiological sigh.
I love waterfall breathing, which is 369.
You don't need to go into the... you can if you want to go explore the Wim Hof and somatic elements,
all these different methodologies.
I think those are great.
In the beginning, just teach yourself how to do it and how to do it effectively,
and you will unquestionably reap the benefits.
Absolutely.
Even Headspace, which I've used for years, they have breathing programs that my wife will sit there,
and it's either a balloon or a bee or something, and it's smiling, and you just breathe with the bee.
But again, you find somewhere, it doesn't have to be anything crazy as you mentioned,
but find a corner, put your earbuds in, and just breathe for a couple of minutes.
It's amazing if you do that two or three times a day, how it helps to regulate.
All right, well then, you talked about the foundation.
Where can people find that?
ASM, that's Adam Sam Mary, foundation.com, at asmfoundation.com on Instagram,
and there are portals for messaging me.
You can direct message me on Instagram or through the website at my email address,
and I'm usually able to respond within a day or two pretty quickly.
Good stuff sketched.
Fantastic.
Are there any other places for you personally, LinkedIn, anywhere like that?
I've stayed away from...
I tried LinkedIn for a while.
I couldn't manage it.
I have personal stuff on Facebook, but I've...
So, I should mention with the...
What I've tried to do with Instagram is put up all the information.
If somebody, for whatever reason, could not afford one-on-one training,
their agency couldn't afford to bring us in to do the one-day trainings,
you can find all the information and methodology behind what I'm coaching
and training people on directly through the ASM Instagram site.
So, explore that.
It's all there.
If people need further information, I'm happy to share that.
Fantastic.
Well, Pete, I want to thank you.
It's such a great conversation again.
I mean, your journey into search and rescue and law enforcement,
and then also the kind of focus on the TBI side, because that's mentioned less.
A lot of people have trauma and unaddressed childhood trauma,
but I don't think the Fire Service is exposed to as many concussive events.
I did stunts for years, so I look back now and go,
oh, yeah, I probably clunked myself a lot of times just flinging myself on the stage.
But this collective picture, what was that thing that Chris Few talks about now,
the operator syndrome.
So, I had him and a firefighter on as a kind of comparative one
called firefighter syndrome that they developed.
But it's bringing all these pieces of the puzzle,
and that's what's been so great about this conversation.
So, I want to thank you so, so much for being so generous with your time
and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thank you for having me.