This episode is sponsored by BeaverFit.
And as always, this is another company
that I've not only been aware of for several years,
but I also completely trust
and I know is a great fit for this audience.
Having not only been a firefighter in my career,
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And BeaverFit has solutions for so many of our challenges.
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purely on that one box.
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and you can then deploy racks and pull-up bars
on the outside.
They have gyms on trailers
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They have tactical boxes with breaching props
and collapse props.
And then on the flip side,
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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name's James Gearing
and this week it is my absolute honor
to welcome on the show
Tier One Navy Seal Officer Veteran
and member of the Nevada Coalition for Psychedelic Medicine,
John Dalton.
Now, as you've probably seen before you hit play,
this was a three hour conversation.
There was so much to discuss.
From John's early life,
his journey into the Navy in 1995,
9-11,
responding to Operation Red Wings,
Extortion 17,
his transition story,
the suicide epidemic in the Navy Seal community,
the healing power of psychedelics and so much more.
Now, before we get to this incredibly powerful
and important conversation,
as I say every week,
please just take a moment.
Go to whichever app you listen to this on,
subscribe to the show,
leave feedback and leave a rating.
Every single five star rating
truly does elevate this podcast,
therefore making it easier for others to find.
And this is a free library of over 1000 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, John Dalton.
Enjoy.
So John, I want to start by saying three things actually.
I don't really want to say two.
Firstly, we tried to sit down a few weeks ago
and there were gremlins in the works.
So I want to welcome you back
when we figured those things out.
Secondly, I want to thank you, Michael Booman,
our mutual friend for connecting us.
And then most importantly,
I want to welcome you onto the
Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thank you.
I'm happy to be here.
So where on planet Earth are we finding you this afternoon?
I am located in Northern Nevada
up at the foothills of the Sierra in Northwest Reno.
And not to be confused with Vegas,
I have friends that are like,
they'll fly into Vegas and be like,
hey, I flew into Vegas to the sphere.
Come check out this concert with us.
And I'm like, you know, I'm seven hours from there, right?
So I prefer to think about us.
We're the more outdoorsy part of Nevada.
I'm going to do a bizarre tangent right off the bat,
but while we're talking about Vegas
and with the background that people were here that you have,
what was your perspective of the horrendous Vegas attack?
The reason I asked that,
coming from near Orlando
and we had the pulse attacks here that were horrendous,
but I saw that story go on for a long, long time.
And eventually it was kind of told who this person was,
what were the most likely motivations.
And there was kind of a closure to that particular element.
When it comes to the Vegas shooting,
I feel like it abruptly stopped
and there was no real continuation or, you know,
unpacking of who this person was,
what their motivations were,
how they were able to get things into this particular building.
What was your kind of overview of that horrendous tragedy
that they saw in Las Vegas?
Yeah, well, thank you for bringing that up.
And, you know, we talk about being Vegas strong because of that.
And so I don't know, you know,
I'm certainly not a subject matter expert on the investigation
and on everything that happened.
I know nothing more than everybody else does at Washington News.
And I'll preface everything by saying that I'm a strong
Second Amendment guy, as you can imagine.
And I think that, you know, we have there's two, two, two issues
that seem to be that I see with a lot of these mass shootings
and that's probably one of them that are recurring.
And one is mental health crisis that we have in the United States.
And, you know, I look at guns the same way I look at money.
They're neither good nor bad.
It's it's what happens when they're when when those things are in the hands
of the of the user that determines that.
And so, you know, you could do all the laws you want to restrict weapons.
But if you have a mental health crisis, you simply have somebody
building bombs and Molotov cocktails.
And so I think that the number one issue we have is mental health.
I think there's an interesting conundrum with HIPAA
and, you know, privacy, personal privacy and mental health.
And if your doctor is recognizing threat
and I'm not going to be the guy to say where that line needs to be drawn.
But clearly, it's not right.
And we need to we need to better identify people
that have mental health crises because that is I mean,
just about every person that you see, you know, ultimately
what happened was a form of insanity.
And even if even if you just want to call that, you know, psychosis,
you know, but it's about a form of insanity.
And so we need to do a real better job of of identifying those people.
And again, I say this from the perspective of, you know, veterans.
We you know, you have veterans that have PTSD and, you know,
there's a lot of people that are very concerned
because the wrong impression could be given if a diagnosis of PTSD
is there with and their and gun ownership.
And it there, you know,
there are so many people with PTSD that are simply it's survivors guilt
or it's just, you know, the result is depression.
It doesn't turn somebody into a raving lunatic.
And so there's some real complexities there
that need to be addressed with politics aside
and just take a look at what is how to how to, you know, target that.
The other thing I think that's a problem that we see time and time again
is that, in fact, a lot of times phone calls were made,
you know, phone calls were made to the FBI or phone calls were made
to local authorities or in the case of school shootings to a school
and you see channelized siloed information,
you don't see the crosstalk or you see that it was outright ignored.
Now, in fairness, you got to you got to look at how many kind of reports
are probably given to an agency or a department.
And so, you know, it's not I'm not saying entirely like, oh, hey,
this is just all about them.
But shoot, there has to be something better because
so many times we hear somebody comes up, it's like, oh, yeah, I saw this happening.
Or, oh, I knew this would happen with this guy.
I contacted, you know, the police about him and they did nothing.
Or I contacted the FBI about them and they did nothing.
And so so then there's there's also the issue to be addressed
of understaffing in law enforcement.
There is the escalation of force of understanding, like when it should be
when when when a call is just a BS call and when there's needs to be some,
you know, somebody needs to be looked at and you do find out, oh, yeah,
this person was on a watch list.
And then that's the part where I'm just stymied
because that's not the overworked.
Somebody realized, you know, somebody in authority,
some sort of a law enforcement officer recognized, oh, yeah,
there may be a problem here and I put them on the watch list.
And then what happens?
You know, so I think those are the two issues.
It obviously impacted us tremendously.
Nevada, you know, we we enjoy hunting.
We you know, we enjoy our guns.
This is a you know, we have massive amounts of outdoor that we go,
you know, to play and shoot, whether that shooting is
shooting is Chuck or hunting, whether it's mule deer or whether it's shooting
steel, you know, of which I do all three.
And I just absolutely love it.
So there needs to be that that balance of making sure that people don't
infringe in my rights while we're also looking at how to how to handle
violent mental health, you know, individuals.
Absolutely. Well, thank you for that perspective.
I mean, we'll get to your story now, but I just thought that was an interesting
thing, because especially like I said, it didn't seem like it was.
I don't know the right way of saying like it didn't appear to get the airtime
that so many of these big events do.
And I was wondering how that affected the healing of Las Vegas as a city.
You know, we have, you know, obviously, Orlando strong for the the poll shooting.
But it feels like there was a conclusion to the whole thing.
But I just didn't feel maybe it's just because I'm disconnected
from the state of Nevada.
I didn't feel like that story got the same kind of closure
for the people in the city.
Well, I do know of some ketamine clinics
that some of the survivors of that have since sought out ketamine
as a form of of therapy to address their their PTSD.
You know, oftentimes usually combined with regular therapy,
so unassisted therapy kind of modality.
All right. Well, I want to go to the very beginning of your timeline now, then.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little about your family dynamic,
what your parents did, how many siblings.
OK. Yeah. So I was a New Englander.
I was born north of Boston
in a little town called Ipswich, Massachusetts.
I grew up I grew up rolling around in the North Atlantic Ocean,
you know, as a seven year old without my parents watching,
you know, being being pummeled by surf because, you know, we would go to Cranes
Beach and that's what we do.
The parents would let you go run off and you do all kinds of stuff.
And if you didn't drown, you came back and made it back alive.
So I look back on that now and realize, OK, this is probably why,
you know, surf torture felt kind of natural to me.
But I have one brother, he's a firefighter.
He's a firefighter in Ipswich, Massachusetts.
He's a career firefighter.
And and my parents are both alive.
They live with me.
Well, they don't live with me, but they moved out to here to Nevada
to a little town called Verdi.
And and they're you know, they're doing they're doing great as well.
They my dad was a small business owner, started with nothing
and built up a a company,
commercial construction in the pump and tank industry.
So when you think about gas stations and underground storage tanks
and car dealerships, we did stuff like that.
So and I grew up in that family.
And actually, it was my dad.
I grew up where on the weekends and everybody was going out and having fun.
I was working in the family business and.
Through summer vacation, I was working in the family business.
And at the time, there was probably a little bit of resentment, like, gosh, darn it.
I want to go kick some ass and have some fun with everybody else and do stupid shit.
And but but I later realized that
that what was being instilled in me was a work discipline, a work ethic.
And and that and my dad did that in all facets of our life.
In fact, I remember an example we you know, my dad was, like I say,
started working out of our home and then we got a business, you know,
a location headquarters and you know, he did well enough
that we got a little cottage up in Maine.
And I remember one particular November up in Maine on this lake, Thompson Lake.
And it was getting dark out and we were winterizing the camp.
And my dad told me, I want you to go down and pull the raft off the lake, bring it in.
So the raft is about 50 feet, probably more like actually 100 feet off the shore.
And so picture the environment.
It's Maine, it's middle of November.
So it's dark out.
And I am probably 12 or 13, probably 13 years old.
And, you know, my there was a lot of responsibilities given.
And yeah, at least 13, 13, 14.
And there was a canoe and I was to take the canoe and I was to take a line
of some nylon, nylon rope, tied to a tree, get out to the raft,
disconnect the the raft from its mooring, the chain that was there,
and then use that rope to pull the raft back in.
It was a little daunting for me.
And, and there was also a high wind and this is a larger lake.
So there's, there's white caps on this lake and it was pushing, pushing like a
north to south perspective on, on this lake.
So it was pushing down the lake.
So I go out there with the canoe, I'm paddling my butt off.
I still remember it very well.
And I get out there and I pop the board to access the, the clevis pin with the,
for the chain and I'm getting my hands down in there and I'm getting soaking wet
because this, this water is, which has got this, you know, the, the, the
beginnings of ice in the morning, the popping on the, on the shoreline.
So that gives you an idea of that water town.
And I, I'm going to shut this phone off here.
I apologize.
And I, I'm freezing my, my finger, my finger, my finger, my finger.
I'm freezing my, my finger, my scrawny little fingers off and I can't do it.
And so I, I can't break the pin.
This ice started form.
I get back in the canoe and I paddle back to my, to the shoreline and I go back up
and I see dad, I can't get that raft in.
My dad was just connecting the water system at the time.
And he looks at me and he says, if you don't do it, who's going to?
And I, it was not the answer I expected.
And I thought he was just going to be like, yeah, I'll go out and help you out.
And I turned around and I went back down and I cursed his name the whole way down.
And I, I was like, I'm going to die tonight.
I'm going to drown.
I'm going to freeze to death.
I'm going to get hypothermia and boy, boy, won't that show him.
And, and I believed it.
I was like, I don't think I'm going to make it out at the end of the night.
And, and so I went back out there and I, I, I just, I ignored the pain in my,
my hands from the cold and you know, I'm, I'm just jackhammering.
And like I said, I'm a scrawny little guy.
Like I'm not a big guy anyway, you know, but I was, and so I'm just
going after it all of a sudden.
I popped the clevis loose, the pin loose and I'm turning it and I'm, and I break
it loose and I, I grabbed the rope and I pulled the rope back in and I pull the
raft in and I pulled up to shore and I'm like, and I go up and I'm like, dad, I did
it and he's like, I know, I knew you could do it.
And that was a seminal moment for me because what he made me realize at that
point in time, that the, the ceiling that I thought I had my own threshold was
self-imposed and I didn't understand where it's like self-imposed then, but I,
I do now.
And I realized that what he made me do was realize that you don't quit and you
can accomplish a lot more than what you think you can accomplish.
So, you know, that obviously would wrap around to buds, but, but I, but I grew
up in, you know, I graduated high school and I, I was, I was a bit of a train
wreck.
I was all over the place and you know, I think at one point my parents probably
told me that, you know, they think, I think there was a conversation, as I was
being like, as the police were showing up to my house, like yet one more time for,
for high speed driving and, you know, breaking the law and doing the police
chases.
I think there was a conversation about, you know, John, we love you, but we're
not really sure where you're going because you're really not going in the
right direction.
And so, so, you know, things, things were, were, were not, you know, off to an
auspicious start as in a, as John Dalton's adulthood.
And, and I was doing a lot of stupid stuff in it with, with, with automobiles,
sports cars, dirt bikes, you know, and then later rock climbing and, and, and
I'm doing these things.
I'm pushing myself and I'm, and I'm not realizing that, Hey, this is me
looking for dopamine hits.
This is me being, you know, I knew what adrenaline was.
I sure as heck knew what that was.
And I liked it.
And, and I had, and so I continue on.
I had an environment, I started an environmental business doing
soil and groundwater remediation.
It's kind of like a sister company to my dad's company that was pulling tanks.
And, and, and so I was an entrepreneur before I joined the military and did
that for a little while, sold that business, moved down to the Caribbean,
started a water company, and then I went to the U.S.
and then I went to the Caribbean, started a water sports business and
a bungee jumping company and, and loved that.
Also was doing things with jet skis far enough from islands that, you know, I
probably should have, you know, been a, been a statistic, but Darwinism
kicked in and I still made it.
And all this time I was, I was starting to figure something out about myself.
I said I had an environmental business and during that environmental
business, that was the first Gulf War.
And I remember the, the, my buddies talking about the Iraqis.
Yeah, these Iraqis are hardened, you know, soldiers and they're going to kick our ass.
And if there's a draft, I'm moving to Canada and there's something about that,
that, well, it's not something about that.
I did not like that.
I was like, that's wrong.
That's not me.
I was raised as a patriot.
My dad did four years in the air force and he was a, you know, military
historian, so to speak, and, and we, as a family, we loved our country.
We understood, we understood, you know, the challenges of, of the United States,
but the, but how, how blessed we were to live in this country.
And I had this business, the Gulf War was happening.
I didn't know at the time that it was be so short, but it made me realize,
like I couldn't join up.
I wanted to join, but I was financially invested in a business.
I couldn't run that business in the bankruptcy and just go
walk over to the recruiter.
I was unable to do, to, to serve.
And, and that really, that, that set something in my heart and soul that
that, you know, later I ended up addressing.
And so back to St.
Martin, I had the jet ski business and the bunch of jumping company.
And I was, I had, I started up an importing business, bringing sports
cars and pickup trucks to the island of St.
Martin.
And, and I was, I knew a seal growing up that was from Vietnam.
And I knew that I really wanted to serve.
And I looked at, well, if I'm going to serve, and of course, you know,
I, Top Gun was like, what 87, 88, the movie.
So, you know, that looked cool.
And so I start digging in and I'm thinking, what's going to be my next move?
Well, I'm 25 now.
And so I, I looked at being a pilot, a naval aviator, and I looked at being a
seal and I'm like, and I don't know why I would think this, but I was like,
okay, so the pilots, they're flying around this air conditioned, air
conditioned cockpit and the seals.
Well, that looks pretty bad ass.
Like, like they're in the mud.
They're like doing the impossible.
They're these shadow warriors, you know, until we all wrote books, but before that.
And the choir professionals and, and so I started studying about the seals.
And I looked at this like a business venture and I'm like, this is amazing.
Like this dropout rate is insane.
And these guys in Vietnam, because that's what I was referencing.
They were, they were, they were like the power of like, they're like 10 guys in one.
It's because of this whole seal team.
And I was like, I'm going to go to Vietnam.
I'm going to go to the Navy.
It's because of this whole seal team thing.
I didn't do team sports growing up.
I did, I did a little bit of cross, but for the most part I did running.
I was also really hardcore into rock climbing and dirt bike race racing.
But you know, mostly individual sports.
And, and so I realized, I think this is where I want to go.
I don't want to see another Gulf war happen and not be able to have done my part.
Of course, this is 1994.
So well before nine 11 for context for 1995 and 94, I sell my businesses down there.
1995 I join up and there's my dad again.
And he's like, he's like, you know, John, you don't do too well with authority.
You realize what's going to happen if you don't make it as a seal, right?
What they're going to do to you and where you're going to, you're going to be on a ship.
And, you know, and he was trying, it wasn't talk, trying to talk me out of it, but he was.
Really trying to, you know, help me to face the fact and not just, you know, have some,
you know, have some, you know, flighty dream that, that, that that's not based in reality.
And I said, I know I said, I'm going to have to do it.
And so I started working out.
I started, I discovered I was really good with endurance and, and I also discovered
that pushups wasn't my strong point.
And, yeah, but I can run like a son of a bitch and I could do, I could do sit-ups all day long.
So, and I could do more pull-ups than just about anyone.
So, you know, I, I, I was, I was okay.
I'm in, I'm going to do this.
And, and at that point, by the way, he was, he, he was completely supportive.
He's like, well, then you're going to do it, you know?
And so I went into basic training and I got to see what basic training of the Navy was like,
which was both, both a little bit like, I was like, wow, this is, this is, this is the, this is a,
this is a slice of America I haven't seen, you know, because it was everyone.
Right. It was the entire, it's an entire society of America, culturally right in there.
And, and I also saw something pretty amazing.
I saw the Navy take people that didn't know how to make their beds and were crying behind their bunks
because it's the first time they've been away from home and turn them into nukes, turn them
into enlisted nuclear technicians and turn them into intelligence specialists and crypto techs.
And all this incredible stuff. And, and I was actually quite impressed with, with that process,
so to speak. So I went to Bud's and you want to keep on going like this?
Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to circle back on something, but there's no need to do it right now.
So please carry on.
Okay. So, so in, in that time and phase place in 1995, there was no special operation.
Special operator rating. So I went to Gunners Mate school and I thought, oh yeah, well,
that'll make me good at guns. Well, that's a seal thing. So that's way better. I'm going to do that.
And little did I know that out of the six month school, it was like robotics, hydraulics,
electronics, you know, electrical. And there was only like two weeks dedicated to small arms.
And, but, you know, all good. So I got really smart at, you know, I can, I can wire my house now.
So that's good. But I, I signed up as a Gunners Mate. I went to Gunners Mate A school and,
and, you know, I remember listening to a few guys and, you know, they were a couple, a couple
guys were all for it. And one of the chiefs, the Gunners Mate chiefs comes up to me and he says,
John, it's like, are you sure you want to go be a seal? Now, keep in mind, I'm not a big guy.
And I'd probably weighed about a buck 40 right then. And so he's got the stereotypical image
of what you see in a movie. And he's like, he's like, look at so-and-so. And this, and he talked
about a guy that was like, had a, was a wrestler's build, right? Really, really kind of looked apart.
And he's like, I think that guy's going to make it. And he's like, well, look at so-and-so. I,
I don't know if he's going to make it. And you, I'm just not sure that this is the right direction
that you should be going. And I'm like, okay, right on, you know, noted. And I put that guy in my head
as, so that when I was going through seal trading, he would pop up in my head whenever anything was
getting difficult. And I'd be like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, fuck you motherfucker. Watch this shit. As
I'm like, you know, cruising through surf, surf torture or something like that, you know? So,
made it through Gunners Made A School, went to, went to Bud's class 206. And there were about
220 guys that started, 220 is like prior to first phase. And we, you know, went through Bud's.
It was, and we started with 220, we finished with 17.
Eight of us started and finished together. This was a pretty decent attrition rate. I think that
was like probably 92, 93%. And I learned teamwork. I told, I said before, I hadn't been in team
sports. I ran businesses. I thought I knew what it meant to be in a team and I didn't. And candidly,
I was a little bit off guard on that. And I'm so grateful because it, that's where I learned
to be a team player. And that's where I learned like to help the other guy when he's down.
And also in Bud's, you kind of make the determination. Like if there's somebody that's,
that's, it's almost like a triage, right? Like there's some guys that you're like,
I'm not going to bother helping him. He's not going to make it. But then there's guys,
you're like, you know, let me help him. And I remember one guy in particular,
during the four mile run, he's a big guy, big dude. And we were, you know, we were, we were,
we were good friends as well. And, and he was having trouble making the four mile run because
he was so big. And I would run with him and, you know, I might even actually push him. And,
you know, I remember I failed that one run and instead of getting my, you know, 26 mile,
26 minute, you know, run time, I got like 32, you know, 30 or 31, 30, you know, as the phase
has progressed and you're, and 32 might've been the cutoff, right? And I remember the instructors
pulling me aside and say, Hey, you failed that run. So you got to sign this, but we want you to
know, we know why you failed that run. And, you know, right on good, good stuff, man. Good shit.
Inversely, that same guy, we were swimming and I wasn't doing so hot in the swims. And I was,
my swim buddy was a foreign national who's a, who's a, who's a phenomenal dude, but he just
wasn't strong in the swims. And, you know, at that point, you don't have the choice to like swim off
away from your swim buddy. That's a, that's a quick way to get, you know, shit can right.
And also you can't, but because you're like tied together, but, but, but, you know,
it's dumb, but, uh, I was failing a couple of swims because of that. And so he,
we, they, the instructors in their infinite wisdom, and I mean that in a positive way here,
they paired me with this guy, perhaps because of what happened in the runs.
And now we're doing the two mile swims and I'm kicking my ass off and I'm swimming like a
motherfucker as hard as I can. And it's still not as fast as this guy's going because he might've
been slow on, you know, on, on the land, but he was, he was a very fast swimmer and he would
grab my UDT vest and pull me along. And, um, and, and, you know, all of a sudden my swim time
skyrocketed in terms of, or rather dropped, right. In terms of the finishing. And so that's like the
beautiful example of like, on one hand, I'm helping him and then I'm struggling a little bit. He's
helping me. And, and I really, I understood like, I, this is where I started to really gel, but
understanding the value of a team and, and boy did I, boy did I, boy did I really love that idea,
you know? So yeah, so we graduated and, um, I, uh, I ended up getting honor grad and I only say that
I was, I joked that was honor grad by attrition because all the guys that really deserved it got
booted. But I mean, God, God had medical medical disquals, but, um, the relevancy to that is that
I, um, my dad was in the audience during graduation day. And so I took a moment to call out my dad in
this very same discipline that I had, that I had articulated to you earlier. I had put that out to
this entire audience. Um, and I, you know, I, I credited some of my, I credited my performance with
my team, with the, with the buds class, but also with my dad. And I said, if it wasn't for the
discipline instilled in me by my dad, I never would have made it through. And that's true. And, um,
at that moment, I saw tears run down his eyes and I'm like, yes,
that's a motherfucker. I'm making you cry in front of him because he wasn't a crier, you know, so,
well, but, uh, yeah. So that was, that was, um, that was buds.
Few questions. Firstly, the foreign national, it wasn't Drago, was it? I had him on the show.
Okay. No, no, no, no. Drago. I don't think would have been, I don't know. I don't know if Drago
was slow in the swim, but he definitely was a strong motherfucker. So, yeah. All right. Well,
then going back to, um, the attrition first, as we sit here in 2024, the many, many areas of the
U S are seeing recruitment crises in the first responder professions. You know, you've got
obviously the law enforcement and you've had a lot of, uh, arguably organizational betrayal behind
that particular profession. And then on the fire service side, really, if you kind of unpack it,
we've asked our first responders to work these insane work hours for a long time. And as, as the
recruitment crisis is getting worse, now we're getting mandatory over times. You've got
firefighters working 80 hours a week, you know, not sleeping every third or fourth day. Um, and,
you know, now these young intelligent recruits are looking at what it looks like to be a firefighter
and going, that doesn't look very good. And that's a shame, you know, but that is the reality that
we're in a very poor solution. In my opinion is that now they're bringing standards down with the
kind of fairy tale that that's going to attract more people. What I have seen working for four
different fire departments, arguably one of the worst and one of the best in the country is when
the bar was held high, that's when people were still lining up around the building because,
you know, the kind of person that wants to be a firefighter or a cop or, or a Navy seal wants to
be held at the highest standard. That's the challenge of being in that profession. What is
your perspective of, um, lowering standards versus maintaining them and, uh, you know, regardless of
the environment holding strong when it comes to that, because ultimately lives depend on those
people. Yeah. So that's, that's a great question. And I, I'm friends with firefighters and friends
with law enforcement. Uh, my ex-girlfriend's a Reno firefighter and, uh, she would discuss with me
some of the, some of the standards because she's the type of person that, uh, did not want to have
anything to do with a female standard. You know, she wanted to be meeting the male standard. Uh,
but, and I got cop friends that are like, dude, the types of people, this is, you know, after
the, um, you know, the riots and what have you and, and the BLM, you know, riots and whatever.
And he's like, the types of people we're getting now, we're not getting the good quality guys.
We're getting people that we would have never wanted to get. And so I think it all kind of is
related. And so I'm sure this is no surprise to you. It's, I think that changing standards is a
horrible thing. Those standards were designed to save lives. And those standards, whether it was
firefighter, law enforcement, special operations were written in the, those SOPs were written in
blood by our predecessors. They were put there for a reason and they were put there, not based on
recruiting, but they were put there based on the best chance of survival for that particular trade
and that in those individuals and that crew. And so, yeah, I think it's a terrible thing. I think,
I think, you know, this is one of those band-aid solutions that doesn't actually address the core
problem. And so, so the solution isn't to drop standards, the solution to address the core problem.
And that is that when we look at, when we look at, say firefighters and law enforcement,
it's, it is an information operations campaign to help people understand the good and the value
that first responders bring to the community. That's been lost. You know, you grow up
with kids wanting to be a firefighter or wanting to be a, you know, wanting to be a cop. And there's
all this good that's wrapped around it. And the reality is that those firefighters, those cops are
no different than firefighters and cops now. It was good, it was bad, and it was in between. And,
you know, there's also like every community has its own ship bags and it has its own rock stars,
right? We didn't have a 24 hour news cycle. So the ship bags did, you know, you kind of tried to
attract them out through the crew, through the teams and work to get them. And there might not have been
as well of a standard during, you know, previous times on your note, you need to leave the community.
I think that's changed, but it's changed to the point now that you could be a good and honorable dude
doing your job. And all of a sudden the spotlight's on you because of a mistake,
not a fuck up, right? You know, just for, just so everybody doesn't, might not understand the
difference, you know, mistake is, there's mistakes and fuck ups and mistakes. That's, that's, that's
what you want to make because that's, you make mistakes to get better. You make mistakes because
you're human. And then a fuck up is when you're doing something where there's probably some sort
of nefarious intent or cheating or you're screwing over your own team. And that's where that line is
drawn. And so, you know, now we target people that make the stakes and that's the same with cops and
shootings. It's so easy in this world that we live in where kids are playing Xbox and they're, you
know, whacking everybody and, you know, they don't, you know, don't whack the good guy. And they're
not really in the shoes of a cop who has had limited training, limited amount of ammunition allowed
to use towards, towards, towards his marksmanship and shooting skills. And, and
their understanding of escalation of force is, was taught at the academy, but it's maybe not
consistently there with training because of training budgets. And the same falls in the
firefighter category with, with, with their training budgets. So I won't go down the rabbit
hole of defund the police, but you're, you're, you're causing more problems by that. And so,
yeah, there's a big cultural change effort that needs to go underway on helping our society to
remember the good that our organizations do so that we can increase recruiting that way,
not by decreasing standards. I've had the same phrase said to me a couple of times in the last
few days, the answer to the recruitment crisis is retention. And I've, and the way they unpacked
that, which I thought was brilliant is, you know, when you have a happy workforce, they're your best
PR agency. They're saying, this is amazing. You should do this one day. You know, well, let me
help you train for it. Let me help you prepare for it. But the problem that we're having now is,
and it's heartbreaking. You know, you used to have this multi-generational element when it came to
fire service. You know, my father was, my grandfather was, whatever it was, same with the military.
Now I'm hearing far more first responders say, I tell my kids, don't do this job. So whether it's
within the family, whether it's just, you know, peers that you meet, when you allow a profession
to start decaying, like fire and police is at the moment, and you have the people in the profession
seeming physically and mentally like they're, they're, they're getting worse. There's your real
poster. And again, like you said, there's such an easy fix. It's the proactive invest in your people
fix. Give the first responders the rest and recovery between these shifts. Give them the training,
give them fitness standards, for Christ's sake, make them stay at a high standard, you know,
and then all of a sudden you will have that excitement. Because when I tested as a firefighter
only 20 years ago, I was up against thousands of people. Now these departments are taking the
entire list. Then they took the top five, 3% of the list. So this is what people are not understanding.
18 and a heartbeat does not mean the right candidate for that profession.
Yeah, absolutely. And in the military, we call the multi-generational military family, the warrior
caste, right? It's, it is, it is your dad did it. Your great granddad did it. Your great great
granddad did it. And thank God that in the South, we still have a strong warrior caste, but yeah,
no, it comes down to the, the cultural, the cultural perspective of what it means to join
the military or what it means to be a cop. And so that's, or firefighter. And so that's,
that's the start point. But then if you're then in there, and when there was, when, when our wars
were, you know, at max operational tempo, you couldn't get it. There were, there were so many,
there were so many young men signing up to be SEALs. And, you know, it wasn't just to meet the,
you had to do the, the SEAL qualification test. You had to just knock it out of the park against
a bunch of other people that were training for it that were really good. And it was our best time.
And even though, you know, our, our, our fatalities were at the highest, the, the camaraderie was
there. Everybody was doing the job, right. And you talk to guys now, and especially, and I don't
want to overemphasize this, but with the, with the, some of the woke culture that's been happening
and some of the DEI that's been injected in there, where instead of meritocracy, regardless of the
color of somebody's skin or religion or race or anything like that, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,
it's driving people away and it's driving people away for the wrong reasons. It's, it's, and so
when, when there's not a war to be fought, there's, and instead you're, you're looked down upon,
nobody wants to be in that environment. And that's, and so, yeah, that's, that's that,
I mean, the resiliency of the individual drops, then they see opportunity on the outside and
they're like, why am I putting up with this bullshit? And, you know, it could, and I can't
blame guys for, for leaving. It's just really, it's just really, we're, we're paying the price and,
and you know, we're going to continue to pay the price until we can change something.
When it comes to the diversity conversation, one of the solutions in the fire service specifically
that I absolutely love is a friend of mine started a mentorship program here where I live
and they have training at a central location, which is close to arguably some of the poorer
areas in the city. And if you can just physically make it to the station, they have equipment,
they have people training you, then there's, you know, scholarships for the fire academy,
which happens to be in my town as well. There's obviously fire departments begging for people.
If you come out the other side, but it's removed the barriers to entry to some of these underserved
populations. Cause there are certainly groups that, you know, it just wasn't even in their radar to
become a seal or a firefighter. But what they do is they set that bar and like, all right, group from
over here, which one of you are willing to come to this bar. And then you end up finding the best
candidates from these underserved areas. You're not just scooping them all up and say, you know,
we need 20 English guys come over here without seeing if they even want to be in this profession
in the first place. What's interesting on that kind of prep, prep class philosophy though,
is a few of, you know, your fellow seals have talked about them doing a sort of, not so much
of a diversity, but doing a prep class for buds. And when it was analyzed, it wasn't really making
a difference on the succession. What have you seen as far as that?
Well, I have not been in, as an instructor in basic seal training, and it's been a long time,
so I've been there. So things have changed. What I would say is, I think when you think about
something, say like inclusion, if you're able to access an untapped reserve of, you know, men and
women that are capable of doing the job, then that's a win. So if you're able to provide
resources to help, you know, get people involved where they otherwise either had no idea or they
didn't have the resources to be able to do so, that's a good thing. I think, but the one constant
is standards, right? You just need to make sure you don't change the standards.
You know, that's something that is, what that's going to do is it's going to cause resentment,
because nobody cares about who you are on the battlefield. They just care that you're able to
meet the standard and that if I get shot, somebody else is going to be able to pick me up and carry
me away. Even from a mental health point of view, when I think about the good academies or
orientations that I did in fire service versus the last one I did where there was no PT, nothing,
you just signed papers, drove around a lot and then put the uniform on and off you went, is that
shared suffering I think builds camaraderie and that forges a better mental health. When you lower
standards, it's actually detrimental to the mental health and camaraderie of your department too.
Yeah, 100%. I mean, you know, again, I, whether I look back at buds and I'm like carrying a boat
on my head and there's a, there's a little Filipino dude that is like, help carrying my weight,
you know, I'm like, thank God, you know, like, thank God for you, brother, you know, like,
I'll get you a beer this weekend, you know, like, and yeah, that, so that, that camaraderie is built
and, you know, when we, when we talk about things like race, I, there's a couple, there's several,
there's several minority leaders that I worked with both on the enlisted side and the officer side
and they, two in particular stick out and they were amazing humans. I learned so much from them
and my bond with them was tight. My respect for them was tight because they were dialed
and I learned from them. And so, you know, the more I learned from somebody else, the more I can
the more I can certainly appreciate that and, and, you know, and I did. So, yeah.
Vinay Prasad So you enter in 95, obviously that's a few years before 9-11, which part of the world
did you end up kind of protecting at that point? And then let's kind of go through to 9-11 through
your eyes.
Chris Bounds Okay. So I, so obviously, peace was, you know, we're a peacetime country at the time.
And however, I saw South America, I kept hearing the language was Colombia is a power keg waiting
to explode. And the FARC, which was a narco terrorist group, was running rampant and the
Sandero Luminosa was running rampant and, you know, another narco terrorist group and,
and the cartels were, you know, having their way with, with, you know, assassinating people left
and right. And so I went to SEAL Team 4 and that was a Central and South America team, primarily.
And this was before something called Force 21 when, when the teams became, each team became a
little bit more of a jack of all trades. And so that was, so my expertise at the time was, aside
from being a sniper, I was, I was, you know, a jungle warfare specialist. And, and so I worked
down in South America and I thought that was awesome. I loved it. But I also, you know,
we were doing a lot of what's called foreign internal defense, which means I'd go down there
and I would be living in an ex cartel leaders fortress that was over, you know, taken over by,
by the government. And we would be inside these safe walls. We might go party at night in, you
know, Cartagena or something like that, or Cali or, or Lima or anything like that. But, but we would
be training locals, local special operations units and they would go out at night and they would do
their thing and they would come back and they, you know, they might have casualties or what have you.
And for the most part, we would be behind the wall. They would occasionally, we could find an
excuse to get out and advise, but it was, that was more the exception than the rule. I found that
frustrating. I also understood these are the, these are the rules. And so whatever, you know,
but I was around 2000, I was going to get out. I was, I was looking at my, my enlistment was
going to be up in like, I think it was 2002. And so I started a business in New England,
a residential development business to start, you know, buying properties and building homes and,
and what have you. And that's, so I was, I would, on my leave time, I would go up to Massachusetts
and Maine to start working this. And I kind of, in my head, I was like, okay, I checked the block,
I'll be in a Navy SEAL. That's cool. I'm going to go do something else, make a bunch of money. And,
and then, you know, nine 11 happened. And my partner at the time, I, who was, you know, civilian,
I told him, I said, Hey, 9-11 happened. And he's like, I get it. He, I'm like, I'm not,
this is what I was built to do. And everything I trained for. And he's like,
go do it. And so I went to go back seat there. And it was at that point that I realized, okay,
well, if I'm going to do this, I'm going to screen for Dev group and try to get over there.
And so I did, I screened, I went over there and, and, you know, subsequently did like,
I think, I think I did his own 11 combat deployments.
What was the actual day of 9-11 for you through your eyes? Where were you? And what would you
remember? Okay. So I had a 1970 Corvette Mako shark, and I was doing a body off restoration
on it. So bear in mind SEAL team four is located at Virginia Beach. And so I was down in New York,
North Carolina, which later became the home actually right then it was the birthplace,
so Blackwater back when it was quite literally some portable shooting trailers and, you know,
their idea of a range back then, which is clearing away a road and we could, you know,
go shoot yard lines with it. But I was, I went down to check on my Corvette that was, that was,
you know, the body was off, it was down to the frame and all this. And talking to this,
the secretary that was at the at the counter, she was very well endowed,
gal with narrow hips, narrow waist rather, and long blonde hair, blue eyes. And, and I think I was
attempting to probably pick her up or do something to that effect. And it was, I was,
it was moving towards success. And then my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my,
buddy comes in that drove me down there and he's like, John, plane just hit one of the, one of the
towers. And candidly, my initial reaction was, jeez, what a fucking moron. I look, I just figured
that was a private aircraft and somebody had fucked up. And I didn't, I didn't think terrorist
attack. And so I'm like, right on man. Thanks. That's crazy. And I continue with my, with the
endeavor that I'm involved in and comes back in another plane hit the other world trade center.
And that's when it was obviously, you know, very, very obvious what happened. So I,
we jumped into the car. I'm like, I need you to take me to my seal team drove up to the seal team,
dropped me off. I went in and, you know, we were obviously the, the, the base was in full lockdown.
We were chomping at the bed on what, you know, what to do, how to get involved. And it was so,
you know, it was so early on. Now I do remember just a couple of, you know, probably a week
before that, maybe, maybe a month before that now, when
they, oh shoot, Mansour was a Mansour, the private, the president of Afghanistan with all the
president of the Northern Alliance, the guy that ran the Northern Alliance, Masood Masood. Thank
you. Thank you. They were doing an interview with him and, you know, they used a video camera,
of course, back then, the other cameras like this big, you know, with explosives and, and killed
them. And so we all knew, you know, that was the first time that we were going to be in a
room like this, you know, with explosives and, and killed them. And so we all knew
that was, that was a hotspot. But, you know, at team four, we didn't, we weren't expecting
this to happen. We were, you know, in terms of counter terror, we looked at the coal, which
happened, you know, not, not to just, you know, a few years prior. And so there's all these
onesy-twosy things. However, you know, the Clinton administration was in there at the
issue and, you know, and, and the, the resistance to actually do anything worthwhile, you know,
particularly when Black Hawk Down was happening. And so none of us would have expected, I think,
to go to the Middle East, certainly not team four guys, until that happened.
So what was the contrast between training? Obviously, the, the SEAL veterans that you
were learning from, certainly if they were Vietnam era, obviously there was a lot of
focus on jungle warfare. I know, you know, Bosnia, for example, was a, was an arena where
it was more urban warfare. What was the training prior? And then what, if anything, did you
suddenly have to start shifting to prepare for this new arena that you're going to be going to?
Yeah. So I completely shifted from jungle warfare stuff to understanding desert.
Fortunately, I'd always tried to have my fingers in mountain warfare. And, you know, that, that,
that obviously paid off. But it, but it shifted entirely towards a, you know, towards, towards
desert warfare with some amount warfare kicked, kicked in there. It was a, you know, completely
different, completely different environment. Now, obviously the group that you were in,
I'm not going to talk about where and when and all that kind of thing. So I'll throw something
at you and then obviously we'll talk about some of the tragedies that you responded to as well.
But for people that have been in combat, when we, the civilians are at home, I would argue we get
a very polarized view of war, either kill them all, let God sort them out, or they're all baby
killers. And obviously in the middle are the men and women that we serve, you know, that we send
overseas with our flag on their shoulder to go and, you know, protect and serve. It's a two-sided
story because you don't really hear either of these. The first one, was there a moment where
you realized, you know, you witnessed that there absolutely were some horrific people that needed
to be taken care of, regardless of the politics that maybe sent you there?
So when I was in Afghanistan for the first time, I, you know, I believed and I still do,
that, you know, I was involved in a noble effort, noble war. And, but I also, I also recognized that
what I didn't want to be was that, that guy that it was just, you know, take that hill and I'm
blindly charging it without understanding why. And so that was the first time I really started to
study foreign policy. And because I wanted to really understand the bigger picture as I was on
the cutting edge, you know, the kind of the pointy end of the kinetic side of foreign policy, so to
speak. Right. And I wanted to make sure I, you know, when I was, when I was civilian, I heard
other things, you know, I heard about the government doing things and, you know, all this,
all this stuff that was conspiratorial. And, you know, I, and, you know, you hear stories about,
you know, what happened in Vietnam. And I was, I was recognizing my own morality and getting a
pretty clear picture that whatever I did, I wanted to make sure that I wasn't going to be challenging
my own, you know, morals and values. What I could tell you is that I, you know, throughout my entire
career, that, that I was not challenged. I was, I was fully invested. My eyes were open. I knew
everything I was doing. And I was doing it for, for the greater good of, of America. And I realized,
too, and this was, you know, we're talking early part, you know, 2002, 2003, 2004. And
the, the, the news stations weren't quite as polarized as they are now. And yet I also
recognized that what I was seeing on the news was this small slice of the reality of what was
happening there. And some of that was because it's, it's a two minute snippet, but the other part is
because they just don't know. And yeah, it's great to have people embedded or whatever, but
you can't, that's not practical. That's not practical all the time. And that's not practical
most of the time. And in fact, a lot of times that's just plain dangerous and sometimes just
stupid because you don't, you're in a classified operation. You can't have somebody that's not,
doesn't have a clearance involved with that and understands the bigger picture. And so I saw that.
I saw, I saw slices of what we were doing in the news and I'm like, huh, that's how that was taken.
Okay. And, and I also realized, I started realizing that, that the Taliban, that their information
operations campaign and Al Qaeda and of course later ISIS, but that their IO campaigns were much
better than us, much better than us. And we would walk off a target and then we'd later be told
something to the effect of, you know, the, there were, there were, you know, civilian casualties on that target. And I know without it, you know, there's no question.
Nobody hides that from me. You don't walk up to a target, you know, and take down a target and then like,
not know if there was civilian casualties. And yet you would hear that and you would not see anything,
but you would hear it. And so I saw that there is, there was a, there was a very highly organized campaign to discredit,
you know, Americans, you know, in these locations, both to reduce morale at home and also to turn the, you know,
the locals, attempt to turn them against us. And sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.
What about the, the philosophy of the duration of the war? It seems like a lot of your community,
certainly the Greenberry community, when looking back now, and again, of course, you know, hindsight is 2020,
but there seems to be again, a common denominator of them initially thinking that you guys were going to go in,
you know, hit the main targets, shut down the training camps, and then leave again.
But from a complete layman's point of view, you can see how the longer that, you know, our forces are there,
after a while, that's going to create ultimately more opponents, more terrorists by that seemingly, you know,
occupation element of us being there.
Yeah, okay. So a couple things to bring up there. So one is more like a tactical short term thing,
and others to strategic long view, right, which, and then you overlay that with counterinsurgency,
as well as counter terror. And, and in fact, when you look at, excuse me, the
Afghanistan and you look at it from, when you look at the 20 year war that we did there,
and you look at why did Bush send us in in the first place, and that was to prevent any more strikes on American soil
from ever happening again. And so that couldn't be accomplished simply by counterinsurgency, or by
counter terror. And for the listeners who don't, who are maybe not familiar with coin, which is
counterinsurgency, that is the winning the hearts and minds, which is the, it's a stupid expression,
but it's, but basically it means to go in and, and, and, and influence, you know, the locals to turn
against an insurgent, which in this case would be the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
And force those insurgents out and, you know, make, replace it with a, a government that is, that is,
you know, ideally democratic, which is also one of the problems, because you might not have an
environment where that necessarily is how things work. We might have a more of a tribal, you know,
landscape. And so, you know, that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the
landscape. And, and so when we think about counterinsurgency, and we think about counter
terror, the counter terror mission, which is the mission that would prevent anyone from striking
American citizens on American soil ever again, that was a 100% success. And that's easy to see.
We never had another 9-11. Counter terror mission could not be solved and it could not be successful
without a counterinsurgency operation happening. Also, you needed to have some sort of a military,
you know, foreign military Afghan national army. You needed to have them to be able to also
undergo this so that, you know, they're taking the risks as opposed to Americans taking the risks.
And obviously, when we look at a 20-year war, there's a big sliding, you know, scale to that,
right? Like that certainly wasn't happening at all in the beginning. And, but what you don't have to
have is a 100% success in your counterinsurgency mission. And we didn't have success, 100% success
in that counterinsurgency mission. And there was, look, I'm not, I'm not, there's, there's a lot of
guys well above my pay grade that are masters at understanding this better than me. What I will say
from my perspective, and I was, you know, I was fortunately being in the, you know, different
units that I was in, I was able to, you know, access to information where you could see a bigger
picture. It wasn't just that, okay, you're going to go, you know, do a village stability operation
and check out a village. You're going to, or live there for a while, you're going to, you really
understand the bigger picture, which is also helpful when you spend, you know, six months there.
And you don't feel like you've accomplished shit, but you realize that you probably have.
So the counterinsurgency operation, I don't know, but we could just call it 50% successful
and 50% of failure. We could even call it 40% successful and 60% failure. But that was what was
required to have a 100% success on the counterterrorist mission. And then when we think about
counterinsurgency, there was definitely a learning curve for Americans and including myself, you know,
initially it was, it was, Hey, we're here and we're bad ass and we're Americans. We're going to make
your place like America. You're going to love it. Trust us. It's awesome. And then, you know, we
realized like, they give zero fucks about it looking like America. They only give like a half
a fuck about getting a road built from one village to another. You know, some of them were like, Oh,
that's awesome. Some of them don't even get it. And then a few of them are part of Taliban. They're
going to go blow the road up. So there's, you know, we, we had to do some learning on forcing
our culture onto them versus understanding their culture, you know, to use the expression I hear
these days, in the, you know, the world I'm in now is meeting them where they're at. And initially,
we struggled a lot with that. But in the end, what we saw was this dramatic decrease in,
in American casualties, an increase in Afghan casualties. And I'm not saying that is a good
thing, but the point being that we got to a point that near the end of that war, we weren't having
American casualties, we were, we were successfully prosecuting targets using their people, our people
would be involved in high risk operations, especially, you know, care what units and,
and special operations forces in general, we're still going to do that, because we knew that we
could go in, you know, that the chances very high of, of being able to do these things successfully
without casualty coming back, and not always, of course, but, but that that model, even a partially
successful counterinsurgency operation allowed us to be able to do that and get recruitment for
the armies, the Afghan National Army, for example, Iraqi armies and, and, you know, and we could
do that successfully, even if every once in a while, you'd look at one or two of those guys,
and they're looking at you like they want to kill you. And you're like, I'm not going to let that
guy get behind me, because I don't want to be shot in the back. So, you know, it had its own risks, too.
So the other side of that question, I'm so glad I asked that, because again, that's a totally
different perspective than I heard from before. And it also makes perfect sense, which is why I'm
asking not trying to convince the world that James Gearing has the answer who never served.
That would be ridiculous. The other side, though, I don't think gets anywhere near enough reporting
is simply the kindness and compassion that I hear over and over again, amidst some of these combat
zones. So throughout your career, wherever it's been, what were some of those moments of, of,
you know, of community and kindness that you witnessed in uniform?
I mean, there was absolutely the people that would come up and say thank you.
And how much it meant for us to be there. The challenge, though, wasn't the compassion
that we were showing them and the appreciation that they were showing us,
or the risks that some of them might be taking to help. You know, they would, you'd have an
individual that would come up to, you know, the intelligence unit to talk to them about something
going on. And, you know, they put their entire family and their family's family at risk doing
that. The challenge was, and this isn't what you asked, but this is what I'm going to tell you, is,
is when they would say, but how much longer are you going to be here for? You know, because America
has a history of, of, you know, just kind of picking up and taking off. And, and of course,
we didn't for 20 years, but then eventually we did. And, you know, we all know what a fuck up that was.
What have you seen personally, as far as, again, we touched on organizational betrayal earlier,
as far as the impact of that on our men and women that actually served and lost friends,
lost limbs and brought home trauma with them?
I think, you know, I talk to guys a lot these days and the majority of guys that I talk to are
conventional military guys. And one of the things that I hear a lot of times is a frustration
about what was going on. And in fact, often a, a, um,
desire to embrace like a conspiracy theory, to solve the answer, come up with the answers of why
they might not have been successful, why they didn't feel they were successful, so to speak.
I told you that from day one, I realized I needed to get involved in foreign policy and
really understand the importance of foreign policy. And I was, I was, I was, I was, I was
interested in foreign policy and really understand that I needed to read intelligence reports.
I had access to all of these things because of my clearances. And so whether it was unclassed,
you know, data that I was looking at, or whether it was classified data, I, I was,
I had a very similar picture to what our general officers were looking at. And, um, and that gave
me a, a, I saw the bigger picture and I saw that we weren't doing everything right. And I also,
you can't do everything right. And, but a lot of, I think the, a lot of guys, they didn't see any
of that. And so they're in the dark. They're exactly the type of person I told you about
tick that Hill. You're, you know, you're an E3, you know, you're, you're, you're a low ranking
individual that, that, you know, doesn't deserve to understand the whole thing. I'm not going to
bother wasting my time telling you. And it's, you know, you're not clear to know this anyway,
and they don't know. And so they're doing it without fully understanding the reasons why
they're doing it. And candidly, there's absolutely, there's times that, that the wrong
things were done, wrong, wrong decisions were made, whether that means something was a waste of time
and a waste in a, in a, in a tragedy of human life on either side or, or whether, you know,
in, in, in small, very small degrees, there could be, you know, it could be, you know, we go back
to that mistakes were suck ups. It could be fuck ups where, where, where people had the absolute
wrong reasons to be doing something. And so then, then you have, you have a, you know,
junior enlisted member who is faced with this and they, you know, they did four years
for the GI bill and, or four years because they wanted to serve their country. And they, this,
none of this was in the brochure. None of this was what they expected. They don't have the full
situational awareness and they don't have the emotional preparation. That's another thing
that's beautiful in special operations is, is you are, you are emotionally and spiritually
prepared. You, you know, you're going to face casualties. You know why you believe in your
mission. And, and, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't mean that the things like PTSD don't exist by any
man because they do, but you, because you have a stronger understanding of the bigger picture,
you have more resilience. And if you're only given this much information, you, you're not going to
have the resilience and you're going to find yourself out of that information, doing something,
not understanding why, questioning it, your buddy gets killed. You're frustrated about that as you
should be, and you're looking for an answer. And, and that's, I think where a lot of guys struggle
with, with, with trauma. Absolutely. Well, speaking of trauma, I mean, I mentioned too, you know,
big tragedies in your community. Let's talk about operation Redwings first.
Okay.
So, so I was over there at the time of operation Redwings and when it happened,
we were, we were hanging out on alert and heard that the Redwing guys were compromised
and that we started to spin up. We started to spin up to go be a quick reaction force for them.
And then we were told we've got, there's a QRF already in place, standby. I know, I know some
of the guys that were on that QRF. One of them in fact was, yeah, I went to sniper school with,
and, and so we were like, okay, cool. We'll just hang out clothes just in case, but,
you know, didn't really have much expectation. And, and then
the afternoon is kind of getting along and
then we got the call that, or we got the word that, that Turban 3-3 had gone down. And so Turban 3-3
was the QRF with the other SEALs that were going to do a combat search and rescue operation on,
on the, on the Redwing guys. And so we were, we were, we were, we were, we were, we were,
we were looking at it. We had a click stew on it. We were looking at all the SACs being
loaded on the Redwing guys. And that's when we, that's when we were called to
go, to work and go do a CESAR for everyone. For the QRF. And for the Redwing guys,
as it was after it crashed, was on the ground.
There's a lot of real hotspots on the imagery
because of the engines.
And it was difficult.
You couldn't identify, if you saw movement,
you couldn't identify if it was friend or foe or goat.
And we mobilized and we threw our gear on
to go do a CESAR.
And it was one of the most challenging operations
because it was the first time that I was involved
in something where there were guys I knew that,
I've been in plenty of CESARS and going in as QRFs
to help other elements like Ranger elements,
SF elements that were ambushed
and would need to be, they need backup.
But in this particular one, it was a lot of guys we knew.
And it was one of the most challenging operations
I'd ever done.
And part of that was because there were 19 guys
that had been killed.
There were the three or four of the guys on Red Wing
were killed.
And then there were SEALs that were in Turbine 33.
And then also there were Night Stalkers,
which is the 1 60th that were in there,
the flight crew.
So all total there were about 19 guys.
And that was the first time I'd ever really experienced
a, it was almost surreal in pulling that many body bags
off of the mountain and off the crash site.
You're pulling body bags that might weigh like 15 pounds
because it was just somebody's pelvis.
That's the only thing left, the rest is burned.
The challenge was also that some of the remains
were so bad.
And I know that firefighters are very familiar with this.
I was not, but the only way we could,
we have that motto of never leave a man behind
and we firmly stand behind that.
And so it wasn't enough to find the remains.
We needed to identify the DNA of the guys
that we couldn't find.
And so until we could identify that DNA,
so there was this mobilization of getting the remains,
getting them into another helo, getting that back,
getting those remains to a forensics location
that could analyze the DNA with the DNA
of the known service members to be able to say,
okay, you got this guy, you got this guy,
but you didn't get this guy.
He's still out there somewhere.
And that was a challenge.
Took about seven days to do that from,
it happened on June 28th, 2005.
And I think we were on the ground on the 29th.
We couldn't get in any earlier because the 160th
did not wanna fly during daytime
because they didn't want the possibility
of another helo going down.
I understand that, I understand that risk assessment.
And from my perspective back then,
it made me really furious.
I look back on it now and understand
why they wanted to do that.
But it was, the whole event was very challenging.
In fact, when you go through Hell Week,
they explain why you do Hell Week.
And as we were doing this, we had prepared,
I had a small Camelback mule, kind of a Camelback.
And it was enough for like a day or two worth of MREs,
cut down and water and just ammo.
And we were there for seven days.
So it was dramatically longer than we expected.
And that was just the result of the reality on the ground,
dictating and we experienced in one operation,
you experienced hypothermia and hyperthermia.
So you might be out as an element
and you're holding security in the middle of the night
and it's raining and you're at 8,000 feet of elevation
and it's down to like 40 degrees
and you're in one spot not moving, you're jackhammering.
But you're also amped, right?
You're dialed and you're like,
because this is like none other
and no other situation you've been in,
at least for me it wasn't.
And then you could be down in a valley the next day
and it's hot, you don't have enough water,
you're dehydrated and it's,
and you've got guys that are overheating.
So it was why they held me capits
and it was why we could push through.
I mentioned before we hit record, I had one of the Rangers,
I think it was a subject of the documentary Ranger,
but I don't wanna say the name
in case I got the wrong person,
but they were talking about that.
And like you said, a lot of us in the fire service
can think about the horrendous damage
that fired us to the human body,
but also that the span of where they were finding people
was extremely large.
And I think he mentioned one specific,
I don't know if it was a seal or part of the crew
that they found, I think it was after like a day of looking
because of the magnitude of the site
that you guys were having to search and then recover.
Yeah, it was massive, it was a massively large swath.
And what was crazy was also how far away from the crash site
you'd find the carbon fiber of the blades
and pieces of the aircraft.
And you just like, you think about the energy being expended
as those blades are coming into the ground
and the RPMs of whipping around
and just how far away some of this stuff was.
And you're like, it just was like,
just no idea that would be the case.
And also everyone, every unit,
regardless of whether SEALs, Rangers, SF, Marines,
because there was a ton of guys that were coming into there.
But you get a call that there was ISR picked up
some sort of a glint or reflection
and it could be a signal mirror, but it probably wasn't.
But you didn't know, so they would be like,
yeah, there's a possible sighting
five, only five kilometers from your area.
And yet five kilometers is a,
there's 8,000 feet of elevation change
between you and that location as the crow flies,
unless you wanna do 15 clicks around a mountain.
And we were wavered to not need body armor.
And so we didn't.
And because the risk of an increased chance of fatality
was outweighed by maneuverability.
And the majority of the forces on the ground
were wearing body armor.
And I remember one unit in particular,
and I won't name the name of the unit,
but I had a lot of sympathy for them
because we were running around without body armor.
They were, and I heard a particular officer on the radio
when they tasked this unit to go from one point to another,
and it represented that 8,000 feet of elevation change.
And it was the third or fourth time
that this unit was trying to go from one spot to another.
And I heard the words, we are combat ineffective.
And you just can't, you can only push the human body
just so much.
And that's the level that everyone out there was working
to try and make this more of a combat circuit.
Of a combat search and rescue rather than a recovery.
At that point, it already was clearly both,
but we all knew that time was running out.
And people were pushing themselves
to the point of being combat ineffective.
What do you remember about when Marcus was found?
Because I think that's the element of the book.
I think the movie did a little disservice to this,
but when you read the book,
you talked again about the courage of the indigenous people,
the courage that that village had to protect him
to the point where ultimately he was able to be rescued,
I think was kind of understated in the film,
but it was so powerful in the book.
So what do you remember about,
thinking you'd lost all the seals
and then discovering that one has survived?
Yeah, and so, I didn't recover him specifically.
And of course I am very acutely aware of it.
And I'm not an expert in Islam,
but there is a, I don't know if you call it a rule,
or a tenant, but there's that tenant
of helping someone in need.
And so, clearly the individual that found Marcus
was following this tenant.
And putting himself at risk for it.
And it almost seems contradictory to us,
but it's, it clearly was a positive thing.
It was the difference between being fatality and not,
because I think it would have been a lot easier
for that individual to just turn him over.
It certainly would have been,
a lot less than what his family had to deal with after that.
There was a lot of backlash on that guy.
And that's a real understatement.
I know that there were a lot of attempts on his life
and his family's life.
And the Taliban are pretty brutal when it comes to that.
So it's ironic that the Taliban claims,
that they're so close to,
to following Islam and all this.
And yet they just conveniently decide that,
that rule doesn't apply.
So it's just one more irony of, or hypocrisy,
I guess would be a better way to put it,
of how this Taliban operated over there.
Absolutely.
Well, going to sadly another huge tragedy in your community.
Talk to me about,
extortion 17.
Yeah. So, but, you know, Turban 3-3 represented the single largest loss of life
for Naval Special Warfare since World War II.
And, you know, that was bad enough.
And then extortion 1-7 happened and it,
and it, you know, it superseded Turban 3-3 in that statistic.
And, and in fact,
I think represented the single largest loss of life for any unit in Afghanistan
at any one point in time.
And as everyone knows,
there's something I'm saying here that isn't already out, you know,
all out there that, you know, that was a tier one unit that was,
that was, it was operating,
and acting as a QRRF at the time.
And from my personal perspective,
there were guys on that aircraft that,
that I knew several of the guys and one of them I considered a mentor.
As I, as I matured in, you know, the unit that I was in,
and this, you know, I looked up to this individual and I learned from him.
This, this person to me was the,
he was a warrior defined.
And I mean, like your read about,
he was everything when you think about, you know, a tier one operator that,
you know, he's, he was like the poster boy, you know, I mean,
an amazing individual, a, a incredible sense of humor.
His performance, his performance was,
it was everything you think about when you think about a tier one operator.
And, and, you know,
I'm sure that that individual had dramatically more impact on me than I did him.
I mean, I, I think that, you know,
I'm a very, very good friend of his and we worked together for,
for several years.
And we're in a couple of occasions.
In very small units.
Very small group of guys working, working together. And.
I can't begin to describe the.
The loss.
The group that was in that bird when it went down.
Everyone was like that.
They were, everyone was like that. They were all the constant warriors.
And, and at that point in our, in our progression.
For Naval Special Warfare and for JSOC, we had honed.
We had honed our, our operators. They, they were so good at their craft.
And so.
To see that and to know the families was devastating.
So, and there was another individual of significance to me because.
There was another guy that I mentored.
And so this was the opposite side.
And he was a new guy with me at SEAL Team Four.
And then.
And then he, you know, he progressed up through the ranks.
And he was a very, very good guy.
And his experience progressed and it's funny. Another.
Another interesting thing about it is.
Again, this guy's sense of humor was.
Hilarious.
And.
You know, and that's, I think a recurring thing, right?
That's how we deal with stresses.
With bizarre and dark humor.
Something commonly found in firefighters and law enforcement also.
And so.
He was the younger cat that was.
And by the way, he was a minority.
As well. And.
He.
He was.
Just.
It was beautiful to watch this guy progress and get better.
You get better and just be dialed. And, you know,
And he was a very, very good guy.
And I think I influenced this kid, you know, as he was.
When he, when he didn't know what the fuck he was doing.
You know, at least guided him in the right direction.
And now he's better than me. You know, that's good.
And so.
And.
But.
But yeah, it was.
It was.
It was like nothing that our community had.
Had ever seen.
And so.
The last thing that we lost.
Was the families.
Because.
You didn't lose.
What 38 guys or.
Whatever you lost.
You lost.
Entire families.
Who didn't know what to do, you know,
They were just broken and.
And.
And the least that we could do was to do everything we could to
help them.
And.
And help those families.
And.
But there's no.
There's no way to do that.
When a widow is handed a flag, when a widow is handed a flag,
there's.
There's.
I can only imagine how alone they feel.
And so.
You know, a lot of us, I think,
did everything we could from that point forward.
And so.
There was lots of fatalities, but, but in particular, this one.
And it.
It.
We realized that we, we needed to make sure that,
that those families were.
We're taking care of.
And so on that, I would say two things. One.
That those guys died doing something they loved.
And.
You know,
I believe there's a nobility in that.
And.
You know, I, I,
I still think about what it would be like if I was in that seat.
In that bird.
When that happened.
And that's as close as I can get. That's a, that's a, that's a far,
far perspective from the reality of what they were dealing with. But.
You know,
That is what we trained to do.
And I think we all knew that.
And.
That is.
If.
If a warrior is killed in combat,
that you don't want to be killed in combat in a helo because you're not on
the ground, but you know, you're still doing what you were.
Doing.
By going out there and it's actually that, that expression.
One seven was why we, why a group of small group of us created.
Another nonprofit called the seal legacy foundation.
And we.
We created that.
Directly as a result of.
Of.
That crash.
Because we saw all these.
You know,
The Americans that wanted to help that would be like, Hey,
how can I send money to your command to help? And of course,
you can't send money to a, to a, you know,
To a military unit like that. And.
So, you know, we,
we helped form one of the nonprofits that were out,
that are out there for seals to.
To help, to help families. And then all the families like them.
And then we were able to do that.
And the other thing I want to say though is.
That.
As bad as that was.
When that happened.
What I didn't know then.
And, you know, I, when I give you the answer about, you know, being,
you know, these guys died doing something they loved.
Albeit the Hilo.
They're a little bit different.
But there was a time when I was at a funeral.
And I was there.
When I was, when I went down.
Which was suicide.
And I draw a distinct line there because it's so much different.
Yeah.
When you talked about being given a folder flag of, you know,
a family being given the folder flag, this is what.
my friends and watching those flags being given to the spouse, watching the helmet being
given to the child.
And if it was a structure fire and someone made entry and it was a last-ditch attempt
and it was risk a lot to save a lot and then the house collapsed and that person was lost,
then that's one thing.
That's kind of the same as what you're talking about with Extortion 17, where I think it
angers me so much is when those flags and helmets are handed over from something that
was preventable.
Yeah, yeah.
And just to clarify, no flag was handed to me, but yes, to the families.
And when you talk about preventable, that's exactly why I brought up the suicide then,
because we're at a point right now where the amount of fatalities from veteran suicide
has superseded the amount of KIAs in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.
And it might be something like by an order of three or something to that effect.
I don't remember the exact specifics, but it's considerably more suicides than that.
And that's the part to me that's preventable.
There was a graph going a while ago, it was an animation of a graph and I think it showed
that.
It showed the KIA in the recent conflicts and then it showed suicide and suicide was
literally like a 45 degree line versus the other two were 10, 15 degrees.
So it was just such a powerful representation of what's actually happening at the moment.
Yeah, well, and so with, and I have this two organizations I'm part of, one is Seal Legacy
Foundation, the other is Nevada Coalition of Psychiatric Medicines, which I'm sure
we'll get into a little bit.
But when I would get, I get text messages with Seal Legacy Foundation that somebody
had been killed in a heel crash or they were mortally wounded in an assault.
And we go to work, help trying to do what we could to help the families.
We work with other nonprofits like the Navy Seal Foundation, for example, and we would
do everything we could to help not just in that point in time, but then follow on with
those families.
But what really started impacting me was when I started getting these text messages of seals
that were committing suicide.
And this was, when we look at a chart, this was in direct contrast.
You had fatalities, friendly KAs, you'd have fatalities from guys killed in action going
down because the wars were winding down.
And you'd see this.
I never saw it coming.
And I don't think anybody did.
And it's very emotionally impactful because you see guys that are these high functioning,
in the seal community, especially these guys, we react to stress pretty well.
And you would think that once the war is behind you, everything's going to be easier at that
point.
And when you get out and you're doing some easy job getting out, because anything's easier
than it was being a seal, which is also kind of relative, right?
But that the stress levels are going to be down.
So why is this happening?
And that's something that there's a lot of people now taking some really close looks
at.
What about you?
Before we go to the issue itself, and then I would argue the incredible amount of hope
that's in the psychedelic side now.
What was your mental health journey?
You touched on PTSD elements when you were in your teens.
So were there elements of trauma way, way back?
And then did you have any low lows yourself as you progressed through your career?
Yeah, I don't think I had PTSD as a child.
I described some challenging things, but certainly there's a lot worse out there.
And I also came from a loving family as well.
I also, I thought probably until about 2014, I thought that PTSD was actually something
that probably was experienced by people that weren't prepared, probably by people that
maybe didn't have the emotional resilience that they maybe were weaker.
But candidly, that was where I was at in my life at that point in time.
And I think I also didn't quite understand what PTSD meant back then quite as well.
And it's funny because I did something called Home Base, which was a four week traumatic
brain injury and PTSD inpatient program.
And I remember talking about a survivor's grief type of example and explained that I
don't have PTSD and that the psych said something to the effect of, if you've been at war as
long as you guys have and you don't have trauma in your life, you're probably a sociopath.
I'm like, okay, makes sense.
And so I think also PTSD can be well defined and it can also be a squishy term.
But I started to redefine what I saw and probably what I thought that is for people.
And also that I was probably way wrong, not probably, but I was way wrong on my initial
thought process on PTSD.
When I started having to come to grips with guys that were committing suicide and then
even talking to wives and understanding the challenges that they were going through very
personally that they weren't sharing.
And these again were guys that were highly trained.
So I think so much of it is, I mentioned preparation and that they do such a good job.
Of preparing you for those emotional challenges.
And yet also when you look at special operations and how much we are utilized, at one point
the commander of all of Naval Special Warfare stated that he would break the force if necessary
to accomplish the mission.
And well, I understand that statement.
I think it was probably not the right way to put it.
And so I think the result was special operators with years and years in which there was no
break and I think that impacts people dramatically.
And I think that there is a lot of factors in resilience and what makes someone resilient
because I think when you look at trauma, the overall majority of people, the overall majority
of special operators have trauma is how you deal with it.
That would say diagnose it as PTSD.
Because also PTSD is such a thing that technically you can have PTSD and then you work through
it and you no longer get the criteria.
And that's a good thing.
It's also in the minority, well in the minority, but there's a lot to it.
And I think if we're having the conversation about that, then the other part of that is,
which is not PTSD, is traumatic brain injury.
And a close relative to that is chronic traumatic and self-hypathy, CTE, which is a traumatic
brain injury, but it's on a level that is not necessarily, you can't see it except for
post-mortem.
And then most recently, hopefully I don't screw this up, but it's interface astroglial
scarring.
And so interface astroglial scarring is something that we're now recognizing.
And it's kind of like CTE, but it's the result of what's in my medical record, which my medical
record states that I've been exposed to thousands of subconcussive events.
And I know that the majority of special operators have that in their records.
And so we're recognizing that some of these suicides are absolutely the result of PTSD.
A lot of them are also a result of these more insidious forms of TBI, which is CTE and interface
astroglial scarring.
And in fact, a real close brother of mine that I did multiple platoons with who retired
is a wonderful family.
He had a great family life.
He had a great job after he retired.
And he started struggling.
And he started struggling to the point that he would try to like say put on his Sunday
dress to go to church.
And he couldn't do it.
And he would look to his wife and say, I don't know what to do.
I can't put my clothes on.
I don't know what to wear.
And he was having these challenges that she saw in retrospect, which was clearly something
going on neurologically.
And then one day he drives to work.
He's in the parking lot of the company that he's working for that does different government
work and contracting work with the military and special warfare, et cetera.
And he sends her a text and explains that he's not going to be able to pick up the kids
from school.
He's very sorry.
And he loves her very much.
And then he pulls a pistol out of his glove box and he shows it in his mouth and he pulls
the trigger.
And there's more like that.
There's so many stories like that.
This times when another team guy FaceTime his wife and did a very similar thing right
there on FaceTime.
Another close friend of mine suffering from an anxiety attack.
Another team guy.
Impressive individual.
Tier one operator.
One of the best guys I knew.
Successful made it through multiple combat tours without a scratch.
Had a good job in finance.
Guy got applied for an MBA at MIT Sloan School of Business without an undergrad and got accepted.
And he started developing anxiety attacks.
And he developed anxiety attack one day told his wife she needed to take him to the hospital.
And she's driving to the hospital in San Diego.
He said, stop the car.
Stop the car.
She pulls over, stops the car, he jumps out of the car and he runs in front of an 18 wheeler
traveling at full speed on the highway.
His kids saw the whole thing.
His wife saw the whole thing.
And the stories go on and on.
And yeah, so there's more to this.
And there's more to it than just PTSD.
There's these other insidious things happening to the brains of special operators and those
who are exposed with artillery, high explosives.
Like I have seven traumatic brain injuries, but that's really not what they are concerned
about going down the road.
It's the thousands of subconcussive events.
And those are mild, by the way.
But yeah, that's where we're at now.
Well, I mean, just here I am as an Englishman who became a firefighter at the start of the
podcast.
I had Sarah Wilkinson, Chad's widow on the show, had Jamie Metcalf on David's widow.
And again, there's CTE in both of those.
So yeah, and that was obviously Sarah and Chad that I'm referring to with the iPhones.
Yeah.
But this is what's so sad is, this is important.
And I had Chris Free on the show, the guy that came up with operator syndrome, which
I think one of the conversations that started pulling into this, but where my community
is, because obviously apart from maybe the SWAT team and law enforcement, the fire, we
don't tend to have concussions as much.
But what we do is every third day, 24 hours with interrupted or no sleep.
And if you look neurologically, and I had Kirk Parsley on years ago talking about this,
the demyelination of the myelin sheath is actually identical with sleep deprivation
as it is with head trauma.
So in your population, you've got a double effect.
You've got this damage and then the sleeplessness.
In my population, I would argue it's more chronic, but over decades, these men and women
are not sleeping, not sleeping.
And we're seeing the same thing manifest.
I know there's a California firefighter that jumped from a freeway bridge.
There's a female police officer that literally leapt out of her car on a freeway.
And so this is not, as you said, these are high performance used to a high level of stress.
How are they getting to this point?
Exactly.
And so, and I didn't know that about the myelin sheath like you just described.
And so this brings us back to the neurology of why so many of these things are probably
happening.
When you look at a neuron and a neuron has that cell membrane, it has the dendrites that
come off it.
It has an axon, which is where the myelin sheath is located, and you look at someone
with major depressive disorder versus a healthy normal neuron.
And the two pictures using an electron microscope show you much different.
It is so obvious that something is happening to cause this.
And so I'm talking about major depressive disorder, but it is what you described is
exactly the same.
And so it's the same because of these different things.
And so what you see is a neuron that shriveled.
It's the dendrites pull back in.
It looks like a dying tree versus a healthy one.
And the myelin sheath is shrunk down.
It looks wilted.
And that's the neuron.
Neurons are your brain.
That's your brain still trying to function in that environment.
Yeah, I was diagnosed with operator syndrome.
At least you're able to still do your job.
But yeah, I sometimes think about Jeremy Renner's character, the protagonist in The
Hurt Locker.
And that's kind of an example of it.
And that's the thing with career warriors, professional soldiers, where it's never-ending.
It's nonstop.
And yes, when you look at the sleep deprivation that firefighters have, that whole 48 on,
96 off, or 72 on, whatever off, it seems like a good idea at the time when it comes to being
able to go have some off time and go up in the mountains camping or something like that.
And it seems like a good idea, I guess, at the time when it comes to manpower management.
But it's not when it comes to what's going on with your brain.
And this is where we're starting to realize, okay, this is not that guy that is...
This is not the same guy.
This is the result of a brain that's been through physical trauma, through emotional
trauma, or in the case of what you're describing, what I would say, not a non-medical perspective,
is a lack of ability to repair itself and to come back.
And so, operative syndrome is that you just never come off and allow that regeneration,
whether that's physically, neurologically, emotionally.
And so, yeah, no, absolutely.
That's an interesting parallel, and I'm 100% sure that that's related.
I've heard the phrase, disposable heroes used a lot.
And I think they're absolutely right.
And I look at the conversation I have with Tulsi Gabbard, for example, and if you parallel
the health of this nation, you look at one of the areas where we're bleeding money, it's
healthcare.
And so, by the way we're doing it, and we'll not get into politics, but obviously there's
a lot of companies that make a lot of money making our people sick.
It's a complete false economy.
So this is what I think...
I don't know about the military, I'm not in it myself, but that proactive conversation,
and certainly in the fire service, is that you shouldn't have to do a 48-hour shift.
We should have a 24 and then a 72-hour period, which a lot of the sleep experts, neuroscientists,
psychologists I've had on here all say the same thing.
A 72-hour period is probably the bare minimum to reset from being up or being up part of
the night in the previous shift.
But you have this insane thing, 24-48, or a lot of the West Coast is a 48-96, which
as you pointed to, is pure insanity if you're looking at a performance point of view.
But there's this kind of stuck in the old ways mentality, and people don't realize that
the money to fund these things are already there, but they're downstream.
The VA and all the money that goes into that, imagine if some of that was put in at the
front and some of these initiatives...
Of course you can't stop concussive elements when it comes to combat, but putting the rest
in recovery, minimizing the amount of exposure during training, whatever it is, and in my
profession, simply adding more people so that A, they're not doing this ridiculous bare
minimum, but going back to the recruitment crisis, now they're not being told, you've
got to do yet another 24 hours because we've mismanaged it so much, we've got no one to
fill the hole.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And boy, you touched on something that is just an entire conversation in its own, which
is that our healthcare system is so broken and it is so...
It is now...
And again, I hate to use words like rigged, but it is so designed now to throw people
on meds.
You look at the number of kids that are pre-diabetic now and the desire just to throw kids on diabetes
medicine and you look at how the healthcare system is such a palliative care model where
you're simply treating symptoms, you're not going after the core issues, and so, so much
money is dedicated to that and of course, there's major profit behind that.
In a lot of instances, I'm sure there's a lot of good intention of trying to create
something and look, we created SSRI, this is going to be great.
And yet then you look at what SSRIs, the fact that most people who get on selective serotonin
reuptake inhibitors like Zoloft and Prozac and Sertraline and all these things, they're
never coming off them.
They may, but they're not the majority and they also will be shifted from one to another
to another to try and figure out the right one that works.
And yeah, and of course, the VA is terrible with that as well.
They're very much like throw a pill at it and see what that does.
Well, while we're on the pharmaceuticals, I want to get to the psychedelics, but either
our conversations with each other have spanned the FDA refusing to allow MDMA as a therapeutic
drug along with counseling.
As we spoke, when we talked last, I was so nauseated by that because this is the same
FDA that approved OxyContin, which we know lit an absolute fire on the opioid crisis
here.
So what was your take on that?
Yeah, so obviously that was a huge blow to America really in terms of being able to provide
the first real solution to PTSD.
It's been over, I think, 30 years since the FDA approved a drug that they felt would help
PTSD.
And when we think about this, putting it into perspective, five out of 100 adults or 13
million Americans suffer from PTSD.
Most of those are veterans, survivors of sexual assault, domestic abuse.
And PTSD is insidious.
PTSD is one of the few mental health disorders where there is a direct correlation from the
diagnosis of the disorder to predicting suicidal ideation, suicidal attempts, and suicide mortality.
It's one of the few psychiatric disorders that accurately predicts transition from suicidal
ideation to attempting suicide.
But to me, what this means is for many is a terminal illness.
When we think about the number of veterans that die from suicide, we've heard the numbers
17, that's what the VA says.
We've also heard 22 a day.
Recent study by something called Operation Deep Dive, which used several universities
to come up with data that shows that a more realistic figure may in fact be 44 a day.
This tells us that 6,000 to 16,000 veterans are committing suicide each year.
And so when we look at MDMA, this is something that has been groundbreaking.
And by the way, when I say MDMA, I'm going to consider that I'm referring to it as MDMA
assisted therapy.
And that's important because this isn't just about taking a pill and it's not just about
taking MDMA.
And that's one of the really, really critical things about MDMA assisted therapy and one
of the challenges that the FDA had with it because they're not set up to approve a drug
where it is combined with a therapeutic process to get fantastic results.
And so for the audience, when we think about what those results are, and I'm trying to
think about where SSRIs ended up laying, but SSRIs provide something to the effect of like,
ultimately, I think it's like 20 or 30%.
I don't remember the exact number, but even if it shows initial benefit, it tapers off.
It's not that effective.
And so to them, the 20 or 30% was considered a success.
MDMA, 86.5% of participants after three eight-hour sessions with MDMA assisted therapy achieved
meaningful, clinically meaningful benefit.
And then 71.2% of participants, and this is during what was called the phase three studies
by first maps or by Lycos, which is a for-profit arm or something called maps.
So 71.2% no longer qualified PTSD.
We never see these results anywhere.
And so MDMA assisted therapy is this.
Whether it's MDMA assisted therapy, ketamine assisted therapy, psychedelic assisted therapy,
what that means is this isn't where you throw somebody MDMA, but you throw somebody a handful
of mushrooms and say, take these over the weekend and you're going to be good.
It's where you start a therapeutic process.
It could be like cognitive behavioral therapy.
It could be exposure therapy.
There's a number of different therapeutic modalities that a licensed clinical professional
is going to be doing with that patient.
That could be one month.
That could be two months, and it helps that person to start to unpack what's going on,
maybe as far as they can because PTSD involves a lot of things, pain, shame, horrors.
It activates the amygdala, which is the fear network.
It's why it's such a hard, difficult thing to solve, to cure.
And so there's a ramp up process to it.
And then there's a treatment process to it.
And so in that treatment process, you're going to administer MDMA or you could be administrating
psilocybin or ibogaine to someone, which are those last two psychedelics.
And you've got two people, two trained professionals that are in the room in a controlled environment.
You're not throwing the stuff at somebody at a rave.
And then they are going through a therapeutic process during the six hours, eight hours
that they're there, probably a little less for MDMA than it is for psilocybin.
And so MDMA does this amazing thing for...
Do you want me to just go down this road right now?
Yeah, go for it.
Okay.
So MDMA does this amazing thing neurologically.
It dumps serotonin into the brain.
Now typically when serotonin is dumped into the brain and serotonin is a feel good chemical,
dopamine is low.
Okay.
If dopamine is high, serotonin is low.
When you take MDMA, serotonin is high, dopamine is high, acetylcholine is high, oxytocin is
high.
So they're all really valuable neurochemicals that are creating this very positive environment
in the brain.
And its behavior causes two things.
One is it's considered an entactogen.
And that is where if you're getting new age or whatever, but it's like you're getting
in touch with yourself, right?
You are recognizing your own feelings in a way that you wouldn't in a non-psychoactive
state.
And it's also in a pathogen.
So you are more susceptible.
It's kind of more simple as a suggestion, right?
Like this is also why you have to have two trained professionals there so that you make
sure that everything's on board.
You're in a vulnerable state.
But the point being that you've got this professional that's crossed the way talking to you and
you're talking about going into a building, pulling out the charred remains of a child.
You guys were through no fault of your own late getting onto the scene and there was
nothing you could do about it.
But you are now dealing with this.
Or in the case of a naval aviator, I know a guy named Slider who was given the wrong
ordinance to drop ordinance and he dropped on a family and killed the entire family.
And it wrecked him emotionally, right?
Because he's an ethical guy.
He's trying to do the right thing.
And this just destroyed him.
And so you've got this therapist on the other side saying to you, hey, first off, you're
able to talk about it when you weren't before because you've got these field of chemicals.
But what MDMA also does is it suppresses the amygdala.
And so the amygdala is the fear center of the brain.
So that fear center, which typically is the result of what you'd get, this anxiety that
would prevent you from having the conversation, fear, shame that's preventing you from having
the conversation, it's suppressed.
You're able to talk about things you would not normally be able to talk about.
And now you've got this therapist saying to you, you know that's not your fault, right?
Like talking through the situation to process it.
And so the amazing thing is, is it puts you into this very unique psychoactive, somewhat
altered state of consciousness where you are able to process something and go to the core
issue.
And that's the difference between MDMA, which is a non-traditional psychedelic, and regular
psychedelics, versus SSRIs, which are that palliative care, they treat the symptoms.
You get triggered because you see a cardboard box inside of the road, you think it's an
IED, and these neural pathways activate to create this hypervigilance, this anxiety.
And this is allowing you to reprocess and re-channel that kind of a thing in a way that's
not normally ever possible.
And so this is the reason why something like MDMA, assisted therapy, is so valuable to
veterans and first responders, but also that 13 million of Americans, women with sexual
assault, domestic abuse.
And so now what we're talking about is, you've got these people that are committing suicide,
and you've got the FDA that did this analysis, and they found several issues.
And one of them was called double-blind placebo-controlled studies, which is where one group of people
is given a placebo, the other group of people are given the actual psychoactive drug.
And with psychedelics, you can't fake it.
In MDMA being a non-traditional psychedelic, you can't fake it.
You know when it's happening, when you take the placebo effect, especially because it's
impossible to create a placebo that has a similar effect, the double-blind studies simply
aren't going to produce effective results.
Wouldn't that be the same with anesthesia though?
You can't fake that either, but that got approved.
Well, so it's the same with ketamine.
Ketamine went through the FDA process.
You can't fake ketamine, which is battlefield anesthetic.
You can't fake taking ketamine, but they approved that.
And there's several other drugs that you can't double-blind it, and they've approved it.
In fact, during the phase two study for MDMA-assisted therapy, they granted Lycos.
They approved the phase two study and said, move forward with phase three.
We understand what's going on with the double-blind.
And yet during the phase three, the advisory committee to the FDA called it out as a failure,
as if it's a failure to the drug and the inability to determine efficacy when the reality is
it's a failure of the testing process and a failure of a large organization, a bureaucratic
organization that is no longer agile, that arguably is never agile, that also has a lot
of conflicts of interest to people that were once part of Big Pharma that are now on that
advisory committee that are in the FDA.
And so I just lost my train of thought on that.
No, it's actually, I'll jump in as that's a let me to kind of...
Okay, fine.
...tell me that way.
So I was...
I'm going faster than I can think sometimes.
No, but it's brilliant though.
But I was just talking this morning, I've done two interviews today, and it was a Swedish
doctor, Dr. Anders Hansen, a Swedish psychiatrist and seemingly one of their brightest that
they have.
He's had TV shows and written multiple books.
But I was asking him about the traditional psychiatric meds, and he was saying that...
He mentioned that with the SSRIs and a lot of the psych drugs, the antidepressants.
He was like, there was 30, he said that it would work, 30 would be kind of meh, and 30%
that wouldn't work.
And so again, there's your 30% efficacy.
And he said with the ones that they work, we advise them that once you're feeling good,
don't immediately come off and wait six months and then come off them.
And this is what I've witnessed, and we touched on this earlier, with medicine in America.
And again, I'm not blaming all physicians because the structure they're asked to work
in is completely broken, eight minutes with the patient.
But when you have someone given drugs for hypertension or cholesterol or diabetes, there's
not, unless you're with a good physician, there's not that, I'll give you this for the
moment, but we need to look at your weight, your exercise, your sleep, your mindfulness,
all these things, because we need to get you off these meds.
And what I see with Clear Eyes, as you said, we all know the backstory of Oxycontin and
the corrupt element of the FDA there, that they're literally Purdue pharma people who
are working there.
If you have MDMA, and I had Dr. Ben Sessa from University of Bristol on a few years
ago, and we talked about this, you have free treatments.
You have the one, I think it was like the next one was two weeks later, and then four
or six weeks after that.
And he said, and that's it.
So you've got these three sessions, and then you're done.
Now you look at the profit from MDMA versus a lifetime in the American system on a bunch
of SSRIs that, from a business point of view, well, we've got to crush that thing that's
not going to make us very much money so that we can keep the thing that makes us money.
So I see it clearly.
This isn't about the benefit of the people.
This is purely about the profit margin.
No, no, you're absolutely right.
And so here's how we have to reframe that.
We have to reframe that with data, financial data, to show insurance companies the amount
of money we'd save them because they're the ones that are paying for the SSRIs.
And it's interesting because big pharma insurance companies, there's so much ancestry going
on there.
But if you can show an insurance company that you're going to save them over a period of
two, five, 10 years, money from not just the SSRIs, but also the potential possible ongoing
psychiatric or psychotherapy care, you look at all the different things it's going to
cost the insurance company.
This is the way that you can combat that because this is a titan that you're coming up against.
This big pharma is a titan.
And so you have to convince people that you're saving more money to be able to do it.
It's pretty clear.
Right now on the state level in Nevada, we're putting that actually together to show, for
example, all the different ways that you could potentially save the state money when it comes
to opioid addiction and the amount of resources that are going in law enforcement towards
opioid related crimes.
And just for the audience, because this part of this discussion, it would be that things
like psychedelics can break addiction, can break opioid addiction, in particular, ibogaine
and also psilocybin.
And so you have to look at the larger effect of how you can save money from the insurance
perspective and then on a state and federal level.
And when you put those kinds of numbers together, that's when you really can go at this to say
this is where you start deconstructing this crazy broken health care model of being on
something forever.
So the only way you can do it is if you can show the people who are spending money doing
that that you can save them money.
I want to talk about drug prohibition.
I went around the world with a load of Navy SEALs.
Ryan Parrott, Drago was on the trip.
There's a whole bunch of them.
And one of the stops was Cartagena.
I got to shoot with some SF guys and just it was purely an experience.
But now here we are, a bunch of Americans and Brits in a place that was arguably a lot
more dangerous probably when you were there.
And you look at the origin of the prohibition of drugs and Harry Anslinger and the reefer
madness and you learn that really it was about prejudice and it was about job justification.
And it came off the epic failure of alcohol prohibition, which is why we know the name
Al Capone, for example.
As I progressed through and did this podcast, it was interesting.
The first few years I talked about that to people that were over in Afghanistan, especially
and it was a very tight lipped element.
And something shifted literally about five, four years ago where all of a sudden the veterans
were talking about this.
And so, correct me if I'm wrong, there was a large amount of funding for a lot of the
people that you were fighting from the illicit drug trade.
So with this very interesting lens that you have of being in Colombia and obviously Afghanistan
and other places, what did you observe about the dark side of prohibition, the empowerment
of some of these people that were behind this?
So I didn't have the visibility I think some of those guys had.
One of the things I saw that always bothered me was that we knew where there were crops
of poppy fields and that our rules of engagement and our mission, the counter-terror, counter-insurgency
mission didn't include that.
I know the Brits would go eradicate fields and we had no say so in it.
And so I simply didn't have the visibility that some of those guys probably had.
In South America, we were consistently challenged because you're not allowed to go engage in
conflict and combat in a foreign nation without that nation granted permission.
That didn't happen.
I'm sure there's a lot of the wrong reasons behind it.
And so our hands were tied.
It was also one of the reasons I was looking getting out because I was like, well, this
sucks.
But I probably just didn't have the visibility that some of those guys had.
Interesting.
Well then, that being said, as you sit here now in 2024 and we're talking about the efficacy
of a lot of these drugs which are deemed class one and are going to murder everyone, what
is your perspective on the prohibition laws?
Because for me, spending the last 20 years, 14 years actually wearing the uniform, there's
no better witness to the failure of the war on drugs than the first responders because
we're the ones that scrape up the bodies over and over again.
We're the ones that find the dead hookers in the dumpsters and the homeless people,
the overdoses and all these things.
So for me, it's clear that this epic failure and then when you look at the origin story,
it should never have happened in the first place.
But as we sit here now realizing that these very substances, some of them are so therapeutic
that they're saving our first responders and military's lives, what is your kind of philosophy
on the actual prohibition itself?
Yeah, so speaking specifically to, because I see things that work, I see things that
don't work.
Of course, we know the Portugal model and then we look at Oregon's attempt at the Portugal
model which didn't really match that and so it was kind of doomed to failure.
And so my area of expertise is in psychedelics.
And so when we look at psychedelic medicine and we look at things like psilocybin and
DMT and ibogaine and 5-miodmt and ayahuasca, all of these things, so clued at non-traditionals
like MDMA and ketamine with the exception of ketamine.
I'm going to throw that to the side because it's technically legal.
But all these other things I described are what's on the Schedule I Controlled Substances
Act.
Schedule I is defined as highly abusive or highly addictive, you kind of hear it both
ways, and with no medical value.
And so what has this done?
It's prevented studies of this medicine which has recently changed.
You got neuroscientists with DEA licenses that can work on Schedule I stuff, but it's
very, you know, it's a challenge.
And nothing could be further from the truth.
When I say that, let me stress again, when, well, we didn't go over my experience, but
when I had another team guy hit me up and say, hey, man, you need to take a look at,
you know, ibogaine and you need to look at going down to Mexico to do this.
My first response was, and this was about three and a half years ago or so, my first
response was, that sounds like a bunch of hippie drugs with a bunch of hippie veterans
looking to go escape reality.
And he's like, no, give it, just do this for me, take a look at it.
And I respected this guy, so I did.
And you know, a product of the 80s, I saw the frying pan with the egg burning on it
from Nancy Reagan, and I believe that psychedelics would scramble your chromosomes and melt your
DNA and all this stuff.
And even in 2002 or whatever, I saw what MDMA supposedly did to primates.
And it turns out that it was actually, they accidentally gave them a straight amphetamine,
methamphetamine.
But I was very much against anything like this.
But once I started looking at the studies, I realized this was not the bill of goods
I was sold.
This is not what I thought.
In fact, these medicines were initially simply for therapeutic value.
They were initially being studied for therapeutic value, whether it was for depression, anxiety,
major depression disorder, things like that.
And in fact, they were not highly abusive.
They were actually anti-addictive.
In fact, you don't take these things and get addicted to them.
When things happen, number one, you take something like psilocybin, you immediately start building
a tolerance to where if you were going to take it the next day, which for anyone that's
taking psychedelics, I can tell you, it's an arduous experience.
You finish it feeling like you ran a marathon, you're smoked, and you're emotionally smoked.
Why would you want to do it the next day?
But even if you did, you'd have to take twice the amount, and then the next day you'd have
to take twice the amount of that.
There's also no withdrawal effects.
So when you take heroin, there is withdrawal effects to it, which currently you should
take more.
There's no withdrawal effects to this.
You don't have that drive to take more.
And then when we look at the medical value, the efficacy is not even challenged by anybody
that knows.
At this point, studies are out there to show that we need to reschedule this stuff.
So that was the thing with the MDMA-assisted therapy.
FDA decision was they were supposed to reschedule it to schedule two, schedule three.
And that's what we're looking at right now with psychedelics, attempting to get this
stuff rescheduled.
Because you look at this guy called David Nutt, he worked for Imperial College in England,
and the ministry there asked him to do an assessment on the 20 most common street drugs
and their harm to self and others.
And so he did this study.
And much to the chagrin of the alcoholics that asked him to do this, he discovered that
alcohol was the number one most dangerous drug of harm to self or others.
Next on the list was heroin.
And then below that was like crack, cocaine, et cetera.
All the way to the bottom, at the 20th, was psilocybin, harm to self or others.
And they didn't like that very much.
But the reality is that these things aren't causing the harm that we thought.
And in fact, they're incredibly effective when used correctly.
It's ironic that number one and two are the legal drugs.
Yes.
Yeah.
Well, heroin's not legal.
The abortion of heroin is very, very legal and prescribed like candy.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
Opioids, right?
So 100%.
And yeah.
And I mean, that's part of the irony here is that we look at Ibogaine and also psilocybin
to a degree, and we look at its ability to break opioid addiction.
And there's nothing in the world to compare to it.
In fact, Professor Nolan Williams described it as one of the most complex molecules he's
ever studied.
And that's in large part due to its ability to completely break withdrawal.
So you're addicted to hydrocodone or OxyContin, and you go into an Ibogaine treatment plan,
and you do the Ibogaine treatment once.
And maybe one more time depends, and it breaks withdrawals.
It rewires the brain to where you no longer have withdrawals from it and to where the
next day you can walk away feeling like you don't have that need anymore.
And I discovered the same thing with alcohol.
I did Ibogaine.
And what it did was it didn't make me feel like I needed to use willpower to not drink.
It made me just not care.
For example, I think in the last seven months I've had, I took one weekend where I was going
to go meet some people at a fundraising event.
And I was like, OK, I'm going to make this decision to have a couple of drinks.
And I did.
And that was it.
And I don't really care.
It's good.
I also feel a lot better because as I'm getting older, hangovers suck.
I had Dan Cirillo on the show probably sadly only about a year before he passed away.
But he was talking about that.
I mean, just a rampant alcoholism.
And he's like, James, literally the other end of this, I haven't touched a drink since.
So this again, what other compound or pill or anything can say that about opioid addiction,
about alcohol that you can go in and do this treatment?
And obviously, from the unpacking the mental health side, there's still work to be done.
But the addiction element, the biochemistry element, to break that cycle, to give you
now the ability to start healing the other elements, I mean, that should have been approved
right there and then once we saw efficacy for a while.
And this is what's so sad.
And people are going to continue to die and suffer.
And families are going to continue to be broken up.
And multigenerational trauma has continued to push another domino down, whilst such an
effective treatment is being prohibited.
And I've pointed this out so many times to the point where the men and women that fought
for our country have to go to a different country to get the therapy for it.
Yeah, it's incredible.
And yeah, I mean, this is one of the reasons why psychedelics have such promise.
There's nothing that we've seen out there that can cure.
There was this one study, and as far as I know, it's only one study, but it showed individuals
that people with a record that had a criminal record that were engaged in psychedelics,
there was a reduction in recidivism versus people that didn't.
And so that's an important factor, because I was talking to a sheriff of a county in
Nevada.
He talked about 80 or 90% of his inmates are in there for an opioid-related crime.
And he has treatment program in there for opioid treatment programs.
And this guy, he hates Big Pharma, because he sees, he's on the front lines.
He sees how it destroys humans.
And I was like, well, what if you could have a medicine that could treat these guys and
gals so that they can break that?
And you could see the gears turning when I was talking about that.
Well even again with the prohibition laws, and I've had the Dr. Zhao Guilao on a couple
of times.
I sat in with him in Lisbon a few years ago, and then we did a gun, I think, only about
six months ago.
But what they did is they viewed that.
They saw that a lot of their jails and prisons were full of people with drug-related charges.
So when they decided to decriminalize all addiction, and it's addiction, not selling,
not smuggling, but addiction, and invested, which is what Oregon obviously didn't do.
They piecemealed the shit out of it.
Invest in mental health counseling, addiction counseling, which obviously, I became would
be a great way of knocking that on the head, job creation, housing.
They went from one of the worst addiction rates in, I keep saying, and I look this up
and I haven't yet, it's either Europe or the world, I forget which one, to one of the lowest
in less than 10 years because they were proactive.
And so as you think about this, most of the crimes are committed either because people
think they can make money from illicit drugs and or they're addicted to illicit drugs.
So you take that, you cut the head off the snake by putting all the efforts into rehabilitation,
through rehabilitation.
Now you're left with a police force and a judicial system that can hunt the paedophiles
and the murderers and the burglars and all the true predators of the world because you've
eliminated that ability to make money from the criminality of drugs.
Yeah.
And you also keep those keep those enforcements in place for drug dealers, right?
Exactly.
Yeah, so you're not just reducing the demand, but you're going after the people who are
preying on other people.
Another area when we're talking about the TBIs that I've heard a lot of optimism about
is that psilocybin specifically seems to actually be healing or causing neurogenesis or healing
some of the damage from these TBIs, which I think it's early stages yet, but the potential
that these psychedelics could even be addressing the TBI side, I think is very exciting.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so this is, you know, as a guy that has a medical record that is very concerning for,
you know, if I'm going to start, you know, forgetting where I put my car keys, which
I'm actually already doing, but you know, you know, put my car keys in the refrigerator,
whatever.
Psilocybin and again, Ibogaine.
When we look at a recent study done by Professor Nolan Williams of Stanford University, he took
30 special operation veterans and put them in machines, put them in functional MRI machines,
so fMRIs, EEGs, positron emission tomography machines, you know, and then ran them through
a barrage of neuropsychological testing, sent them to Mexico where they could legally do
Ibogaine to a controlled professional location.
They're hooked up to an EKG because there's a cardiac risk with Ibogaine, another reason
why you wouldn't want that for illegal.
They, you know, put a port in and then gave them something called the magnesium Ibogaine
protocol, which mitigates cardiac risk along with proper screening, brought them back.
The results were insane in terms of putting them back in those machines.
And what they discovered was that these guys that were diagnosed as having a TBI disability
that were, you know, 30, 40% disabled, that had a 70% engagement in suicidal ideation,
had a super low quality of life.
I forgot what the term for that is, but they tested out of being clinically determined
to be neurologically disabled from traumatic brain injury.
They tested below the threshold.
And the amazing thing is the tests, the results were so remarkable, they brought a third party
in because they're like, there might be something wrong with our testing process here.
These results are, you know, they didn't want to be the lapping stock of the scientific
community.
And so this third party came in and said, no, everything seems like you did this right.
And so they, since published in Nature magazine.
And so if you Google like, you know, Nolan Williams, special operation veterans, Ibrahim
Gain, Stanford study, Nature magazine, then you'll pull up the study.
And it's absolutely amazing.
And they are showing similar things with, with, with, with psilocybin as well.
Remember, we're talking about neurons and we're talking about those dendrites and we're
talking about the myelin sheath.
What they're seeing is these, these neurons being built back up to a healthy neuron in
a way that's incredible.
And so there's, there's two things that are going on.
There's neurogenesis to a lesser degree.
And then there's also this neuroplastic adaptive neuroplasticity, which is causing the, which
is really the power, even more powerful than neurogenesis.
And then it's causing, you know, people to, to test out of being neurologically disabled
for, for TBIs.
Huge.
I was just talking to a friend of mine that was medically retired because he had an accident,
you know, as a firefighter, 19 years in his career.
And what's so sad is this kind of, again, that disposable heroes, you know, that they'll
fight them even for that, but that the whole ethos has proved to me that you're disabled.
Where I think there should be, and this is what I did in my own career, but again, I
was fortunate enough not to have the kind of injury or disease that would, you know,
would not allow this, but I rehab back from a back injury and then meniscus surgery on
one side and same on the other.
Because you know, that should be the ethos.
Let's get you back to as close as healthy as you can at the back end of your career
as a firefighter or a seal.
Let's not, you know, let's try and minimize the amount of disabled payments, you know,
and let them be healthy people when they leave.
So this is again, what's so exciting is even if you don't care about human life financially,
if you can take care of your people and get them back to being healthy, then there's not
going to be as much of a financial liability and they're going to go on and, you know,
use their military pension if they've, if they're vested or they're going to go and
create their own business and thrive there versus, you know, sitting in an apartment
building because, you know, their marriage fell apart because of the cumulative elements
and their addiction problem and now they just become another statistic in the VA.
Yeah.
And so, you know, Timothy Leary back in the 60s and 70s, who decided to sprinkle LSD all
over the hippie community and, you know, he went about it the absolute wrong way and he
had this expression, tune in, turn on and drop out.
And I believe I'm plagiarizing this expression.
I think I heard it on Huberman, but the reality is that what this does is it causes people
to tune in, turn on and lean forward and lean forward back into society.
And so you know, and that could be an active duty cop struggling with PTSD.
It could be a firefighter.
Same thing.
It could be a guy that's got, that's an active duty guy with traumatic brain injury and especially
that kind of TBI that we're talking about with those subconcussive events.
And this stuff, you know, done the way that I described with psychedelic assisted therapy,
it can cause people to move past something that can disable them to the point of being
nonproductive members to society, which also absolutely decimates their quality of life
because nobody wants to be in that spot.
And this is one of the reasons why, you know, this is so valuable.
And I'll say one last thing about that.
Going back to the MDMA, FDA decision, you know, we look at how many, we look at the
alternative, you know, the alternative of, so what happens when you say no?
Well, when they said no to rescheduling it, they condemned somewhere between 6,000 to
16,000 veterans a year who commit suicide.
A large percentage of that is a result of PTSD and TBI.
Okay, maybe not all of it, but it's a large percent of it.
And they condemn those guys to death.
There's going to be guys that you and I will know that won't be walking this planet next
year.
It's going to take over three years to do another phase three study, two to three years.
And so you're looking at over 32,000 people, that's 12,000, 32,000 people, veterans that
are going to be committing suicide, not including veterans and first responders, right?
And so what was the alternative?
Well, the alternative was to perhaps, because we know that these drugs, whether it's MDMA
or whether it's psychedelics, we know that they can save lives.
And we look at if somebody has cancer and there's that right to try piece that's in
effect that a drug that's not necessarily approved from the FDA can be used for somebody
during a terminal cancer.
Well, this could be terminal.
And so they could have said, well, we're going to start out by anyone who has a diagnosis
of PTSD that maybe has shown suicidal ideation.
And I'm really giving a lot here.
It shouldn't be this.
But an alternative could have been if they have this diagnosis, they've discussed suicidal
ideation, let them have the right to try.
God damn it, we're Americans.
Don't tell me as an adult what I should be able to do with my own body, particularly
in a controlled environment, you know, done the right way.
Don't tell me that I don't have the decision making authority to take care of myself.
I mean, we certainly like to say that about abortion, right?
No woman's right and all that.
So yet we have that women's right to decide, but I don't have the right to try.
And by the way, gender regardless, like female, male, you know, anybody deals, you know, the
sexual trauma is a horrific piece.
And you're telling her that, yeah, she's dealt with something that you could only imagine,
but that you're going to judge and say, well, you know, this could be dangerous.
We don't really explain why we could be dangerous, but you don't have the right to try that.
That's bullshit.
Well, I think what is so encouraging to me, and even though this is a hurdle at the moment,
is where, you know, where I see a common denominator over and over and over again, and I talk about
this all the time.
Firstly, that the brain is so miswired when these people are in crisis that they truly
believe that they are a burden to their family.
And that needs to be brought out into the front as well.
But that obviously is an element of hopelessness.
Where these conversations are, where pulling these, you know, this kind of devolution of
the mind, the psychosis that people find themselves into and identifying it early enough, but
then especially these treatments, this shows people, look, this toolbox is not pills and
talk therapy.
There's so much more available to you.
And by putting hope back in this conversation, I think that's what's really going to move
the needle.
I think if people hope, and I would argue, if you really do the work, for most people,
there's going to be a better version of yourself waiting on the other side.
That's even more exciting.
But these have to be in that toolbox.
The element of hope that the success that I've seen from MDMA, from ketamine, from,
you know, this ayahuasca, from the Ibogaine, I mean, I've heard story after story after
story.
So, you know, the push to make this more and more accessible, you know, puts hope in that
conversation because a veteran or a first responder doesn't want to be sitting in a
dark room drinking.
They want to be out there being a functioning member of their community.
Yeah, look, when in 2018, after I got out, I started getting anxiety, something I, you
know, I'm not used to.
And as a SEAL, I'm like, my SEALs don't give, I got anxiety, you know, what the fuck is
that all about?
And that's a hard thing to share with anybody.
So I was, you know, I was pretty silent about it at first.
And then I called the VA.
That was a mistake.
Called the VA and I said, hey, something's going on with me.
I don't know exactly what's happening.
A while ago, I went into a, you know, something called, you know, NICO and I did this neurological
testing.
I need to be tested again to see what's going on.
The answer I got from this woman on the phone was, oh, well, I see here in your records
that you recently got your MBA.
Is that, is that true?
And I'm like, yeah.
She's like, well, if you got your MBA, you couldn't have traumatic brain injury that
to the point that you're, you know, you wouldn't be able to function.
And I mean, what an insult.
Forget about the fact that I might have to reread the same page, you know, in my finance
class five fucking times to try to absorb that data.
But for you to judge me like that, when I'm saying, I even said, look, I got to tell you,
this isn't something I really, it's tough for me to actually make this phone call.
And then what they did was they put me on a whole bunch of SSRIs.
It was all bullshit.
And it was after the Ibogaine treatment that I came back to the States.
And to your point about this could help everybody.
I realized this could help everyone.
This could help all our veterans and first responders.
And yet it's illegal here.
And that's when I got together with a gallon and kick harder and started the Nevada coalition
for psychedelic medicines.
Well, that was the perfect segue.
So let's talk about that now.
So when I realized that, OK, this isn't, you know, using Obi-Wan Kenobi's thing when he
was on tattooing, like talking to the Stormtroopers, like these aren't the drugs you're looking
for.
It's like, I realized, OK, these aren't the drugs you're looking for.
Like these things really work.
And I started really digging in and understanding where we got to, how we got to this point
in our American history on these medicines and that we needed.
I owed it to our society.
I felt that, I guess, you know, this gave me purpose to work with a small team here
in Nevada.
We founded the Nevada Coalition for Psychiatric Medicines to work this on a state level.
I also work with the Veteran Mental Health Leadership Coalition, which works on a federal
level.
And, you know, we also we're in communications with MAPS and different national level organizations.
And one of the things we saw with MDMA in that recent FDA decision was exactly what
I've been kind of preaching the whole time, which is you can't wait for the federal government
to make these decisions.
They're going to fuck it up every time you look at cannabis.
There's over 38 states that have some sort of legalization going on.
And yet they're still schedule one, even after the Biden administration says, well, we're
rescheduled.
And yet nothing happens.
And so you have to push it down to the states.
Our founding fathers looked at our states as small countries.
Our founding fathers wanted our states to make these kinds of decisions.
And our states are the only ones that can be agile enough to really make these kinds
of decisions.
And so you look at like Colorado and you look at what they're doing and they're doing it
right there.
You look at what they you know, Oregon was a first, you know, they were they're leading
bleeding edge with this.
And they they they're working for it.
Massachusetts has a ballot initiative for MDMA right now.
And so we're working right now in Nevada to try and change law and work this through hopefully
the legislative process.
If not, we'll go to a ballot initiative.
But to work this psychedelic assisted therapy and to bring this to Nevadans.
And also, by the way, if you're a Californian, you can drive, you know, three or four or
five hours from San Diego, Los Angeles over to Vegas or San Francisco, Sacramento, Oakland
to Reno and, you know, and seek and get psychedelic assisted therapy here.
So what we're doing is we're working this on several fronts.
First, we've initiated a cultural change effort.
And so that is to help people in the state of Nevada understand what the medicines are,
what they're not, what we're trying to accomplish, who's good for it, who's who's a good candidate
for it because not everyone is and who's maybe not that these are not a panacea.
And they're also not just like take some psychedelics and you're better.
That's the other beauty of this is, is there's there's there's an expression we call do the
work and it's like really true.
It's it's really digging into what's going on.
So you can you can you can address the challenges that you've had and heal and move on.
So the cultural change effort is to get everyone in Nevada, whether it's in Vegas or Reno or
out in Eureka and Elko, which is, you know, these are very rural areas, to get them to
understand that this isn't the drugs that you thought from you might have heard about
in the 60s and 70s, break those false narratives and break the stigma.
And that's part of where we look at regulated legalized access, because if we do a strictly
decrim model, what you're saying is, OK, look, these are still these aren't you know, you're
not going to go to jail for having mushrooms in your closet.
But you can go get you can seek treatment in the underground.
But you know, don't tell everybody about it because it's still kind of illegal.
It's kind of not gray area.
That doesn't remove the stigma.
We believe in saying like, fuck, no, this shit needs to be legalized the right way.
We don't believe that you should have a psilocybin shelf in the cannabis dispensary where you
can go, you know, buy a bunch of stuff and then go, you know, hit the you know, go to
you to go to watch the you to movie at the sphere, you know, but that using psychedelic
assistance therapy, this should be legalized with trained professionals involved.
And also the other thing we're looking at the other that's one bill that we're going
to propose the other bill we're looking at proposing is reducing penalties because we
don't believe that they should be a felony offense.
We believe that they should be on par with any other schedule three, schedule four drug.
And so, you know, it should be certainly a defunding ization effort.
There should be an effort to bring it down to the misdemeanor, syphilis fraction.
These are dynamic things that we're looking at right now on the best way to do it because
each state is different and we have to look at what's right for our state and what's right.
What are what are what are what Nevadans are going to want to accept and what they're going
to be comfortable with because you've got to normalize psychedelics as not as a recreational
drug, but as a therapeutic medicine.
And that's going to come with some time.
That's going to come when your brother, your sister, your mother, your father, yourself
or your sister or your son or daughter who's struggling with a mental health disorder goes
and gets psychedelic assisted therapy.
And you see this remarkable change that James, you've just talked about.
You've seen with all these guys and that I've seen with these guys.
I mean, a lot of people don't know, but they've been over like fifteen hundred and I think
it's probably closer to eighteen hundred at this point.
Special operations guys that have gone down to Mexico to do this.
This isn't like a couple of a few dozen whack jobs.
They've like been like, yeah, this kind of worked for me, you know, and then they go,
you know, they're going nuts with this shit.
Like it's it's real.
There's a shitload of guys that are leaving the country to do this.
And people are finally at a point.
You know, I don't want anybody to know that I did this at first.
And it wasn't until I was testifying in front of the legislature that Nevada legislature
that I, you know, I kind of came out and was like, hey, here's the deal.
Here's here's what I did.
Here's why I did it.
And this is why we should legalize this in the state of Nevada.
So we look at this.
We have to fight this on a national level.
But we also have to bring this to the states because I'm not a big cannabis fan, but I'm
aware of some of the, you know, some of the benefits that it can have, you know, and what
have you.
But but that got changed on a state level.
And we're not looking at a cannabis model.
We're not looking at full legalization and recreational use.
But on a state level is where these changes can happen.
So we we that's what we're shooting for.
We also worked with several legislators, state legislators in Nevada last year, in the year
and a half ago to pass a bill SB 242.
And what that bill was, was called the psychedelic medicines working group.
This is for the governor and it's for the legislators.
And so we've been embarked on a research and analysis of psychedelic medicines so we can
put to compile this data and present this to the state and present this to the governor
so that we're having the conversation about psychedelics.
We're normalizing it, breaking those narratives and hopefully removing the stigmas because
Nevada bounces on the bottom for in our in our country for mental health and opioid addiction.
And and also our state pays a lot of money because of that, just like what we talked
about earlier.
And this is where we look at if you really want to try to make a difference, convince
people that you're going to save money.
And you know, that's when you can make a difference.
So that's what that's what we've been up to here and here in our state.
Beautiful.
Well, I mean, I appreciate what you've done.
I appreciate your your honesty now, and I've seen that the stigma slowly starts to come
away and the SEAL community, especially Tommy Aceto and so many people that come on here
all talking about the same thing.
And again, this is the beacon of hope.
This is the resilient human being that's come out the other side and said, that was so fucking
good.
You guys have got to do this.
And yeah, that's where the property comes from.
If people want to learn more about the coalition or reach out to you personally, where are
the best places online?
So Nevada CPM, so the state of Nevada and that CPM as in Nevada Coalition for Psychedelic
Medicine CPM.org is where they can find us.
And on there, there's a if you want to get involved, you can click on the link to get
involved and write in there that you heard me on the behind the shield podcast.
And I'll reach out to them directly.
Because what we're doing, we are genuinely building a coalition.
And that's when we think about organizational change.
And when I saw what worked right in Afghanistan and Iraq and when I saw what worked wrong
in Afghanistan and Iraq, it's that cultural change that needs to happen.
And so the more people we have on our coalition, regardless if you're a Nevadans or you're
a Pennsylvanian, then we need your help.
Beautiful.
Well, I know that you've got to go pick up your daughter.
I want to be mindful of your time.
But we've been talking for three hours and we could have done another three hours easily.
But I want to thank you so much.
Firstly, your courageous vulnerability, because again, tier one operator, these are the kind
of men and women that we need to hear this kind of conversation from.
Because to me, especially on the men's side, it debunks the whole I'm too tough for mental
health bullshit.
So that element I want to thank you for and then also just simply being so generous with
your time and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Absolutely.
It was a pleasure and honor to be here.