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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show firefighter, EMT and psychedelic journeyman, Michael Boomin.
Now in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from Michael's early life, his journey into the fire service, working Burning Man, his own powerful mental health story,
the healing elements of psychedelic assisted therapy, empty nest syndrome and so much more.
Now, before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment.
Go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for others to find.
And this is a free library of 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 Michael Boomin. Enjoy.
Well, Michael, I want to start by saying thank you so much for taking the time to come on the Behind the Shield podcast.
We did the recording a few weeks ago.
There's a really important and powerful reason why we're recording today.
So firstly, I want to welcome you. And secondly, I'd love to kind of break the ice with your thoughts on that.
Yeah, James, thanks for having me back and giving me another shot at this.
And as you and I have discussed, the reason for the first one is, is I was, man, I was in this incredibly dark place.
We had just taken our first, our oldest to college the day prior to us leaving to take her to San Diego.
Our 16 year old had flown out to Japan for her study abroad here.
And God, it impacted me much, much more powerfully, deeply than I expected.
And it really kind of as I've kind of worked through this and with the guidance and help of some really, really good friends,
really got it uncovered some of the history that it brought out in me and some of my own childhood stuff and some other things that
I was in such a dark place that as I shared with you, I barely remember the podcast.
Things were it was almost like a like a bad on a body experience.
So, yeah, thanks again for let me take another crack at this in a more conscious state.
No, absolutely. And we're going to get into all things, you know, obviously early life and then, you know, first respond to mental health.
But while we're on the subject, because we didn't talk about this last time, I think it's really important that empty nest element.
I'm 50 years old now. My son is 17. He's already been accepted to a college.
We're just going to make sure that obviously the financial side matches up, but chomping at the bit to be off on his own adventure.
And and my my my bonus boy, my stepson, he's local, but he's 23.
He moved out a few years ago now. But the thought of pouring yourself into a child or into children and really being a diligent parent.
And then one day they just walk out the door.
This is another chapter that I'm going to be faced with very, very soon.
So I'd love to kind of unpack that a little bit more, because it's not something you hear people talk about, especially not as a, you know,
from a kind of emotional mental health standpoint. But I can see how jarring it must be.
Yeah. And it's and taking nothing away from the impact on moms.
I think you hear more of it from the mom perspective.
And I think it's somewhat related to the way our society is.
But, yeah, we were and remain super involved, very close with our children,
thankful for the relationships that we have with all of them.
And it shows with both of them off on their own adventures and they're crushing it.
They immediately want to share that with us like they're it's not an obligation.
They don't feel like, oh, whatever, we don't have to try to get their attention or ask for updates.
That's their natural extension to want to do that.
And I think that's I think you'll probably find the same.
And there's a lot of relief that comes from that.
But, yeah, it's it's I wasn't prepared for it.
I don't think it's something you can be other than knowing that this is coming.
And the impact, again, that I had and went through and still go through was much more powerful than expected.
And then it's because we bring everything with them.
It's one, it's important.
This is all part of the process. Right.
I mean, if you think about just the numbers, 90 percent of our time we spend with our children is until they leave for college.
Right. You're going to know your children more as adults than as children.
But it's the if I could turn it more to any suggestions or tips, one is we just be present to it,
allow those feelings and emotions to come in and feel them.
And I remember sitting there, we were in San Diego and it was I think I'd probably just had a little crying jag in the shower.
My wife's like, oh, my God, are you going to make it?
And I said, you know, I got to be honest, honey.
I said, I'm I'm so thankful that I get to feel this like what a beautiful part of parenting to have this emotional response to your child moving on.
And the demarcation line for me was super like almost like a Hollywood moment where she walked away, we dropped her off.
And and that's like a childhood that is ended in her life is truly as an adult has begun.
And and to be present to that.
And and I give all credit to all the work I've done with my psychedelic medicine groups, the support I have of my friends,
which I think it was a council of men and that ability to be present and not like how I used to be where you didn't feel anything.
Everything was pushed aside, everything was pushed down.
And then it would manifest and bubble out days later, generally not in a great way.
Right. And and to be able to feel all of these emotions in real time is a gift.
And it's but it's still, dude, it's still hard, man.
I had a model on the show, Doris Mouse, who's from Holland, and she had a kind of addiction story and ended up going, you know,
finding sobriety from alcohol specifically.
And it was really interesting because it was such an obvious perspective.
But at the same time, it it you know, it it's not obvious to most of us.
And she was like the most beautiful thing about sobriety is you're forced to feel everything.
And I was like, that's that's that's perfect.
You know, you feel the good.
But obviously, when the bad comes, you feel it to the point where you're like, I need to deal with this.
Whereas when we dampen it with opioids or alcohol or distraction or overtime at the firehouse,
we're you know, we're sticking it back in the hole and throwing more dirt in it.
So is it fun? Is it comfortable?
Absolutely not. But is it really essential to you growing and healing?
Absolutely. Well, and it showed really the progress made.
And I remember talking with my friends because they were all aware this was coming.
It's something that I've been, you know, discussing with them and having trepidation towards knowing that this is a big thing that was coming.
And I just remember thinking, man, I'm doing a really good job of working through this.
Like I'm not I was additive to everyone's experience in San Diego,
additive to everyone's experience with Ella heading off to Japan where the old me,
the less healed, you know, not open, vulnerable, whatever version of me would have taken away from that.
And my my way of kind of dealing thing was was more with anger.
Like that's how I dealt with depression. It gave me that sense.
And as I've learned after the fact, that's what we tend to do because it gives us that sense of power and control.
And I wasn't any of those things, man. And it was it was really nice to be present and be calm with it and allowing things to happen
and not struggling with my own weight of of just not knowing how to deal with things appropriately.
So, yeah, I'm incredibly thankful that I have the experience and continue to have the experience I have.
Like it's as they're thriving in their respective environments.
Remember, the only sadness that I really feel is for myself. Right.
Like I don't have my kids with me that I want to have with me, and it's my own reaction to that.
Not and thankfully, they're doing great.
If they were having a negative experience, that would be a different set of things to work through.
But they're literally crushing it, man, and just thriving.
So, yeah, thanks for thanks for bringing that up.
That's an important thing to and I'll be there for you when you go through it, dude, because it's it's it's a thing.
Absolutely. I'm dreading it.
Again, like you said, it's an opportunity to cut the apron strings and let him kind of find his wings, but also,
you know, simultaneously let him know that if it all explodes in his face that he can come back.
There's no shame. There's none of this.
You know, when they're 18, I slam the door behind them.
Bullshit that you hear some some quotes men say.
I think that's absolute bullshit. You should always be there for your kids.
Hundred percent. I tell my kids three things. You're loved, you're enough and I'll always come for you.
And that means not only that I'll come and get you, but you always have a place.
And I agree with you. It's total bullshit to act this stiff up.
I've had that experience where I was on my own and had nowhere to go.
And it fucking sucks, man. Like, that's not what you want to have.
It's a rough world out there.
You know, go out and do things, but know that you have someone has your six. That's huge.
So I'm with you on that. Absolutely. Well, speaking of that, then let's get to the beginning of your timeline.
So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did.
How many siblings? I was born in Nebraska, moved to North Dakota early.
I was maybe six months, something like that. Clearly don't remember it.
I grew up in North Dakota, punched out of there three days out of high school, went back for some college, ended up in the Virgin Islands, which was huge.
Changed everything in my world. Mom and dad have I have two older siblings, a younger sibling dynamic house.
I mean, childhood wasn't great. I think it's part of how I ended up as the first responder as we've learned in our medicine groups.
Turns out it all comes from childhood. We all seem to.
I think our dads all could have been friends at one point.
I know your situation, by the way, having heard your story and I know your situation is different than that.
So I'm not in any way lumping you into that. Oh, no.
And trust me, you know, as I've unpacked, you know, mine, there are elements there, too.
And in fact, even in the first book, you know, I mean, four years old, almost dying in a house fire.
Yeah, you had a fucking house fire, dude. That's exactly.
I remember listening. We're going to talk about your book, by the way, because it's it's it's interesting how impactful your
writings are having in my world. And there's no coincidences, as we well know.
But I remember reading listening to that with my daughter.
And it really sparked an interesting conversation with her.
And so, yeah, that's yeah, that's a big one.
What about sports and exercise? What were you playing school age?
I was a hockey player. That was my main sport.
Played that actually all the way to living here in Tahoe until time has just gotten too much with kids and snowboarding and other things.
Played football up through high school to I think sophomore year. Played baseball.
I was a catcher. I was a goalie in high school or in hockey and a catcher in baseball.
And you can make whatever fetish jokes you deem appropriate with masks and whatever.
But those are the three that I did. We didn't have you know, Jiu Jitsu wasn't around back then.
They had wrestling. I think had I not been a hockey player, I probably would have been a wrestler.
That made sense to me, though the cutting weight part didn't look rad.
Absolutely not. I had the goalkeeper who got his throat cut in a hockey game on the show.
Clint Blanken was last name. I don't know why it's fallen on my head.
I remember seeing that. And he thank God they had good guys on the bench to, you know, tamponade that cut.
Yeah, I mean, his mental health story is so powerful, though.
Dude, I got to go back and listen to that. Thanks for letting me know.
That's one I'd like to always wondered.
I thought it's so interesting that I have thought about that probably because I play or played and didn't.
I wore neck protection, a dangler back in the day because we didn't have goalie helmets.
And then I didn't. I remember that for a while there, people were kind of like a neck thing.
But yeah, and surprise that that just happened to it's a fairly recent, I think another I think someone may have
been a fatality around that.
It was in England. It was a Canadian or American team, but they were playing in the UK.
Yeah, and they died on the ice, I think.
Yeah, that's yeah. So I'll go back. I'd like to hear his story and hear how that how that laid out for him.
Absolutely. I know it's Clinton and last name is something Chuck, but I'm just my brain is just not pulling out.
So hopefully by the time we're done recording, I'll pull the actual name out.
Well, you're right. It's the early stages of a hurricane. I think we can give you a little bit of slack.
Yeah, there is one impending. My house is completely clear of anything outside now and sandbags everywhere.
The show must go on though, as Freddie says.
All right. Well, then what about career aspirations?
What were you dreaming of becoming while you were in school?
Oh, that's so funny. One, I had no idea.
I was without guidance, forced really to figure everything out. And of course, none of that goes right the first half a dozen times.
Right. For a while there, I wanted to be a lawyer.
And I remember my college professors, those that were in the know, my economics professor was a practicing attorney.
My business law professor was in charge of all the attorneys in the Air Force when he was in and then was the administrator for the state supreme court.
And both of them were like, dude, you're so not a lawyer. Like, they all said the same thing. You need to go into business.
You'll have lawyers. It would be it's just not a good fit for you.
And so that's what I thought I would do. And then the Virgin Islands kind of changed that.
And then I ended up working at law firms when I came back, randomly doing investigations for Vale Resorts and ended up in the entrepreneurial space, which I kind of always was anyway.
I just didn't really have the vocabulary for it or the understanding and then started my own company in about circa 2004 and continue through the growth and iteration of that in the same financial space.
So I ended up as an entrepreneur, which is exactly where I should be.
When you reflect back now, and this is with the 2024 lens and all the journeys and other things that you found along the way to go through your emotional healing,
what were the elements of your early life that were contributing to some of the struggles you had later in life?
Oh, I mean, the amount of violence both in the home and just in the overall environment was probably the biggest.
And then that feeling of I'm just on my own, man, like it's on me to figure out whatever, like very, very early on recognizing that.
And that now it's it's funny. Again, no coincidence is so funny. It's not the word.
We have ceremony coming up on November 1st and 2nd. And part of what that will be is discussing how it serves you for a while.
And then it gets to a point where it doesn't. And a lot of the remnants of that, those elements of childhood and early stages aren't serving me anymore and need to go.
And so as my good friend, Andy's pointed out, he goes, hey, dude, kind of the vision I have of you is you take a machete to the jungle and chopped everything down.
And all you have left is this wall. And so let's just get to work on that.
So, yeah, it's I know very clearly that's what those things still remain and they can go.
I'd like to put those things down. Beautiful.
Well, talk to me about where you were prior to the Virgin Islands and why that was so pivotal for you on your journey.
Well, it was in North Dakota. And what was pivotal about it, of course, is just the manner in which I was brought up.
And of course, there's good and bad to all of it. Right. And I remember just talking with my son about childhood stuff.
They have some idea because I'm fairly open about my work with psychedelics, my healing, one of the struggles I've had.
I don't get into a lot of specifics with them. Right.
There's just certain things that that level of detail is not necessary.
And he asked, hey, daddy, what what happened to you in childhood?
And I said, well, you know, but maybe we'll get to that at some point.
I said, but here's the most important thing is if any of that was different, I wouldn't be your dad.
And I wouldn't I wouldn't trade one for the other.
So, yeah, I kind of wandered from your question, but North Dakota, then it was the Virgin Islands, Virgin Islands ended up in Colorado.
And then we've been from Colorado to Costa Rica, Costa Rica to Tahoe.
But what took you to Virgin Islands? What made you go there specifically?
Oh, I had a friend that said, hey, dude, we should we should transfer to the University of the Virgin Islands.
And you need to understand at this point, I haven't seen the ocean.
Right. Because I live literally 72 miles due east of the center of the North American continent.
And I'm like, dude, that sounds rad. Where are they?
And he goes, oh, they're 11, 1200 miles south, southeast of Miami, blah, blah, blah.
I'm like, cool, let's do that. Transfer to the University of the Virgin Islands lasted about three days and realize there's no way I'm going to go to college in the tropical in the tropics.
I'm I'm going to punch out and and probably just enjoy this experience.
I expected that to last about six months, turn into about three years with a little little side jaunt in the midst of all that.
But, yeah, I ended up there from that reason.
And it was interesting, the attorney I was working for at the time, great guy,
he goes, hey, man, if I was your age, I'd go with you.
And in fact, he goes, you have to go or I'm going to just probably fire you.
And he goes, and everything in your life will be different.
That will forever change the trajectory of your life.
And he was a hundred. He was unbelievably accurate in that in that explanation.
And it's it's it was such a big move that I can literally see how everything for my life changed from that point.
That was a it was a tremendous move.
There's a pivotal moment in my life where I was a lifeguard, kind of not going anywhere just because ironically the I talk about even in the book.
And I had these this medical done while I was still a schoolboy.
And they told me I was colorblind and I could never be a firefighter and all these things.
So I'm just lost now. All the things that I wanted to do were taken off the table.
And but one of these lifeguards had done an exchange program with a summer camp in America.
And so I'm like, that sounds great. So I just remember being in the community colleges library and just filled in the paperwork that filling that paperwork was pivotal for so much in my life.
So it's amazing how when you find yourself one of those and you're like, should I should I shouldn't I just just do it?
And obviously, if it's you know, there's a huge consequence, don't.
But otherwise, if you're teetering, do it because you just don't know where it's going to take you 100 percent.
We teach our kids that to like, you know, be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid, as they say.
And actually, one of our family core values is you're going to be a bear, be a grizzly bear.
And and we actually I share that origin story with us because I met my wife on the beach at the dive shop that I worked at as a school instructor
that Tuesday morning when she was she she was on island as doing a travel nursing contract.
And we actually took them back a few years ago for spring break and took them all scuba diving at the beach on the reef that I taught at that we met and really kind of hit it home.
Like, listen, the randomness of you is we had to meet on that particular morning that I was out of the water as an instructor because I had an ear infection on this particular beach on this particular Caribbean island.
I'm from North Dakota. She's from Missouri. The randomness of the two of us meeting on that Tuesday morning and we began dating the day that we met and have been together ever since.
Without that chance of all chance meetings, there is no you.
And then and to reiterate that with them standing on that Caribbean beach is that was pretty cool to kind of close that family origin story on that.
It was just cool. So yeah, man, those if you have a shot and we and we teach our kids this like, take it.
The answer is yes. Like, keep moving forward.
Absolutely. As we talked before, I spent 15 months in Japan.
So I know your daughter is going to probably love it there.
She's having and I'm not overstating this.
She's literally the happiest she's ever been.
And Jen and I, that's my wife, Jen and I are like, you know, man, she might not come home.
And we're like, ah, that's cool.
Like that's she's Ella's always I mean, that kid is so impressive what she's had to work through by the age of 16.
Some of the things that she's been through, man, other people, they sit in a room and cry forever.
I mean, this kid's got grit and resilience.
And she set it all up herself and it was almost an 18 month process through the rotary.
And she came to us with the idea.
First, she went to Jen because she knew Jen would say first and back then my hyper vigilance was still pretty much in full effect.
And I was like, oh, boy, I don't know if that's going to work.
Ended up. Then we said, you know what? Sounds great.
You have to do everything right. Like, I'm not going to take this on as my own personal project.
And she did it, man. She set it all up. And and the rotary does a great job.
Super, super thorough, which you want to see as a parent.
Right. Like, this shouldn't be easy. We better know what's up.
I've actually talked to Ella. I said, I think there's a book in here for you.
And she's journaling kind of with that sort of potential outcome of, you know, the I said, honey,
you've done the most epic and extreme adventure of anyone in our family.
You're 16, living on a different continent in a different country that you don't speak the language.
And she's got a flair for languages. So she's already doing speeches to hundreds of people in Japanese.
I mean, the kids amazing. And I think that she's got a book to come out of it.
I mean, what a small group of people that have one done a year abroad as a high school student,
done it as a female and then done it in Japan.
I'm like, there's six, seven billion people alive, let alone all that have passed prior.
How many people would fit in the room that would that would meet that criteria?
So, yeah, man, she may have to she may come asking you, what do you do to write a book?
I'd be happy to help. Which city is she in?
She's in Shibata. And I may be mispronouncing that, as you know, the way the island sits,
Tokyo would be down here, if you can see it.
She's up here and all this where all the ski resorts are.
So Shibata is what I think I'm saying.
And just having she's like, oh, my God, everybody here is kind.
And that was an issue that she had here in Tahoe was, you know, just a bit of bullying.
And not more than a bit.
And she really had struggles with that.
And she was, wow, it's and she always goes, daddy, I wonder if I don't have a little PTSD,
because I'm I'm getting used to having my guard down that people aren't going to make fun of me
or tease me or be mean, like everybody here is kind.
And it's it's almost like she's beginning to see herself as her mother and I see her.
And as a parent, it's like.
That's what you want, right?
Absolutely. I think that I've I've mentioned this before, and I can never remember the actual
the actual quote, but Mark Twain talks about the enemy of prejudice is traveling.
And I'm totally paraphrasing. It's way more articulate than that.
But it's so true. You know, you experience different cultures.
And if everyone traveled, there wouldn't be as many bullies in the world for a star
because that that kind of low self-esteem would be gone.
And people would realize that that, you know, humanity is a beautiful thing.
And we'd stop renaming French fries because we're, you know,
worried about them not supporting us in wars and all this ridiculous shit that happens in this country.
But, yeah, I mean, the Japanese, there's pros and cons, obviously.
But they are amazing people. I love absolutely loved that.
I didn't like the fact that it was just so populated, of course, you know, where Osaka is a kind of a concrete jungle,
just because I think if I'm not mistaken, it was bombed quite a lot in the war.
But some of the most beautiful souls, amazing, just so kind, so hospitable.
And then even if you look at the way I saw a video of school, like schools,
I don't know if it's a certain grade of school in Japan, they don't have a janitor.
The kids clean the school, they clean their own classroom, you know what I mean?
So what a beautiful concept that is.
Yeah. You look at the health care, some other, you know, I mean, they have so many things that they do so, so well.
Well, and their attention to doing things correctly, like follow through what you're doing, pride of ownership.
But ultimately, the thing that Ella keeps coming back to and I'll focus on is that they're kind, first and foremost.
They're well mannered, but they're kind.
They are such a much more, and you're spot on, that's actually been our family's thing, if you will, is that we travel extensively.
I think the kids have been to 30 some countries or 30 countries at this point. We spent a good portion,
a couple of years before we landed in Tahoe traveling. And it is the great equalizer.
Like, and we point that out to the kids. One, we've, we've taught our kids to move first.
So introduce yourself to people, be the one that moves, you be certain.
It's almost, it was incredibly rare that anybody responds negatively to you moving first with kindness and talking to them, right?
And, and it's rare. And also just how everybody's the same.
Like, no matter what we've had for rickshaws, taxis, water taxis, horseback, doesn't matter,
whomever we're interfacing with, I go, what do they all talk about? They're like their kids.
I go, exactly. Everybody talks about their kids.
Like every, no matter color, gender, socioeconomic, whatever part of the world that you've been, that we've been to,
everybody really, when you get down to people, the person, they're all the same, you know?
And I, and I heard this quote and I forget who said it.
And we've been discussing this of late is, is wars are fought by young men who don't know each other on behalf of old guys that do.
And, and as we, and Rotary, as I'm blending here, James, the reason for Rotary's study abroad program is to actually
take away the chance of war to allow people to get to know each other more.
Now those kids in rural Shibata, Japan are going to think of Americans, at least in some way, as my daughter and she of them or she of they.
And I think that's, to your point, what makes the difference.
You know, it's we have people in our family that speak of other cultures, other countries in less than healthy ways.
And it's like, hey, have you been out of the country? Oh, you haven't.
OK, you've never met any of those people, because I can tell you, I've been to that country or I've been to that area.
And I can tell you, let me tell you the stories I've had of how when we traveled Europe with our four young kids, how many people's kitchens that I ended up in as a result of my kids.
Neither of us spoke the other's language.
And it was one of the brand that most single serving friend moments that you have.
And you know it from from traveling these you're open to those adventures.
So, yeah, man, sorry, I kind of, again, wandered off your point.
But no, you know, I love about that.
I've never thought of it that way, that every one of us is a diplomat for another country.
And someone said to me recently, they said, you've got to remember that America is the advert for democracy to other countries.
So if you look at some of our bad statistics, you know, our obesity epidemic, education, where we stand, the number of incarcerated people, it's all doom and gloom.
And if your only perspective of the United States is Joe Biden or Donald Trump, then no wonder you fucking don't want to come here.
You know what I mean? But it's the real people, it's the Americans that travel to other countries and people see that we are nice people as well.
You know, and then that kind of really solidifies that humanity.
Well, and you raise the point of the responsibility then that comes with that.
When you think of it larger than you and we do, by the way, when we travel for those that don't.
And you see the ugly American in action.
And it's and then you see the results of that and overcoming it.
And we much prefer to travel to places that don't have cruise ships, say.
And that's an extreme example. But yeah, there's people that lose that understanding or don't recognize it.
And it comes down to parenting, I suspect, that you do represent something larger than yourself and act accordingly.
Even if it's not your country, you do represent your family.
And so how you act reflects on others. You are not, you know, an individual in that sense.
You're just taking it up to that macro level that we are, you know, all diplomats or ambassadors.
And to Ella, there she's for some folks, she's some of the first one of the first Americans that they've probably known,
like now are actually developing a relationship with and so and she's to her credit comments about that.
You know, there's and she had an interesting encounter where some Japanese girls needed to have cursive,
English cursive translated, and they couldn't read the cursive.
And it was about the bombing of Hiroshima.
And I just said, Ella, think of the depth of what is happening.
That's just in a way almost mind boggling. Right.
Like you've got here you are as an American study abroad student at their school and now your school for the time that you're there,
helping them to translate English cursive about us dropping a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima.
I got you can't even I go, please journal about that because that there's so much there to unpack.
You don't have to unpack it all now. But boy, what an example of bridging and overcoming.
Right. I mean, I mean, there's there's a lot going on in in that sort of encounter.
So, yeah, it's you'll find that we can find that example.
And if you travel as a traveler versus a tourist and we've we've been pressed on that on our kids to be a traveler and experience
where you are rather than try to make it be America. Right.
If you take that approach, that's that's that grassroots diplomacy, man.
Yeah, we could talk a long time on the value and benefits of travel,
both to the places that you go and and and much like the volunteer paradox, what you get from it.
I shared a few videos recently, and what's interesting is you would think that they were all from Hurricane Helene.
And the last one, actually, I caught someone shared it on an American firefighter site,
but they mislabeled it as Helene.
And someone had actually commented like, dude, what are you doing?
This is Dubai. And you see, I was looking at, you know, what is that on the back of the policeman's shirt?
And it was someone rescuing a cat in this particular case.
I just put it out a second ago. But this is the point.
Doesn't matter if it's Dubai or Thailand or, you know, the UK or America, you know, wherever it is,
it's the same people doing the same things, rescuing each other, rescuing animals,
you know, the selflessness, the courage. And that is the humanity.
And so if we can kind of hone in back on that and then, like you said, get more people out there seeing the world.
And I get, of course, that finances are, you know, a limiting factor sometimes.
But the more we interact with other cultures and faiths and sexualities and all these things,
you dispel these two dimensional, you know, negative caricatures and you go, oh, you're like me.
You know, you like you said, ultimately, you want to see your kids grow up, you want to feed them,
you want to put a rope over their head, you want to teach them to be kind and compassionate.
And then you in Afghanistan, you in Gaza, you in wherever are going to be a heartbroken dad
when your 18 year old walks out the door, just like we will be here in the US.
Right. And it's a good segue into fatherhood, which is its topic.
And really, I think what you're driving at, James, if I may, is is all of that comes to parenting.
And us as parents, it's our responsibility to show the way.
And like you said, travel, yes, there's a financial obligation or burden to that.
And I and I certainly recognize that and taking nothing away from those that wish they could.
And circumstances don't allow taking taking that away.
And I remember talking with our kids when we first started traveling, we moved to Costa Rica.
Alex was nine, Ella was seven, Tristan was five, and Ava was three.
And we early on would have them navigate through airports, through bus terminals,
any sort of any any kind of transportation, not to make it hard for them.
But what I what I kind of put forth to them was, you know, a lot of people don't travel when they're older
out of fear of the transportation process.
How do I get through an air? If you've not been to an airport before and you go and you're older,
there's a lot happening, right?
That can be overwhelming.
And it becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy of fear.
And so we'd always make them navigate to and fro.
You know, yes, you're going to get lost.
Congratulations to kinds of travelers, those that get lost and those that lie.
So what happens?
You can work the problem, right?
And there's no one's going to die.
Nothing's on fire.
What do you do to get out of it?
Like Ella, when when she was operating the tube in, I think we were in Paris.
Yeah, she was in Paris on that.
And maybe the tube is in the tubes, probably London.
And she got on the wrong color.
Yeah, she got on the wrong colored loop.
And I knew that she had chosen yellow versus red or whatever the colors were.
And so I knew that.
Right.
And I'm like, OK.
And I told Jen, I said, hey, she's got this on the wrong train, but let's play this out.
And as we're riding and you can see that it's changing and I can see her getting like, oh,
shit, like I can see it happening.
She's all of I mean, at this point, she was probably close to nine.
So still pretty young.
Right.
And so she's working.
I can see it working it out in her head.
And so we get to a point I go, hey, honey, everything OK.
And she goes, I think we're on the wrong train.
I said, OK, so what should we do?
She goes, well, I need to see a map.
I said, OK, well, let's where we're going to find one of those.
And she was like, well, let's get off at the next stop.
I said, sounds great.
So we get off and we get the little map on the wall.
And she's like, I said, OK, well, let's see where we are.
Where should we OK?
Well, what do we do to fix it?
And she's like, we'd have to do this, that and the other.
And I said, fantastic.
That's traveling.
That's departing the text where you're going to have these issues.
Congratulations.
You didn't panic.
Right.
Nothing bad happened.
You just worked it out.
And she still to this day remembers that it was a big, big.
And that's a perfect example of one of those.
But back to the point, I think it really does.
These are all learned behaviors from kids.
You have to learn to see people differently, to be an isolationist,
to think that your nationality is better than somebody else's
and not have that understanding.
That all comes from how you're raised.
100%.
Well, I want to shift over to your journey
into the first responder profession.
So you talked about being an entrepreneur.
What took you into the journey of fire and EMS?
Well, as it would be, like most big things and important things in my world,
being on St. Thomas and the Virgin Islands,
I as a first as a dive master and then as an instructor,
back in the late mid to late 90s, and I was there from 97 to 2000,
further date myself here a little bit.
We had Medic First Aid, which was their version of just first aid.
Right?
Some CPR, the ratios, what they were then,
and some unbelievably basic first aid, wildly overnamed as Medic First Aid.
And we were the second busiest beach in entirety of the Caribbean.
So we had a ton of visitors through.
And we became the de facto EMS on the beach.
And I was drawn to it.
And I was fortunate there was a continental paramedic on island,
and they would, of course, respond.
And I kept being the person kind of in the midst of things.
And he was like, OK, dude, you're clearly getting into this.
Let me actually show you some stuff.
And that really sparked my interest.
And then I was only interested in the medical side.
Like I hadn't hit any thought of fighting fire and just kind of was like,
I'm going to get my EMT.
This sounds rad.
And off we go.
Got back to the States.
9-11 happened.
Then I started thinking about the fire service and went, well, that makes sense to me.
And that's really 9-11 pushed me into the fire service.
And very clearly, it was that scene, one of many of these scenes where
they're watching the people run out and they're scared shitless.
And you see the guys going in and they're not.
The people running out have an idea of where they're going to safety.
And the guys going in have a pretty good idea of where they're going to.
And I remember very clearly going, man, I'd like to know if I have what it takes.
Could I run in?
And I had no sense of the brotherhood.
I had no sense of the larger service component to it.
I honestly just was like, I want to know if I could do it.
Like it just was the second time in my life I'd seen something.
The first was the first time I watched the goaltender in hockey.
And I went, that makes sense to me.
And I want to do that.
This was the second time that that happened to me.
And so yeah, 9-11, 100% pushed me into the fire service.
So where did you actually find yourself as far as which region, which department?
I was in Colorado, outside of Denver in a great little town called Evergreen.
And they had a really good volunteer department, top notch.
I want to say, and I might have this wrong, but it'll prove the point.
I think it was like the largest volunteer fire department west of the Mississippi.
There was like a hundred and some members.
It was sort of an affluent area.
And so the way, I forget how the bonds worked, the financing work.
We had a lot of taxpayer based property tax support.
So we had literally the best of everything.
Because of course, a lot of it wasn't being burnt up on salaries.
We had amazing equipment, unbelievably solid training.
And we caught really a pretty good number of fires for a volunteer department.
A lot of, I think we ran six, seven, eight, 10,000 calls a year, something like that.
I mean, a good quality.
And I get my numbers from years past, but enough where it was.
And the medics were phenomenal.
A lot of them were former DG medics, which was Denver general.
And so they ran back in the gun and knife days.
And they were exceptionally good teachers.
I didn't recognize that until later in my career, how fortunate I was to come under
the tutelage of both some unbelievably solid career firefighters and then some
unbelievably experienced medics.
And we were fortunate.
We had in our department, the ability to take out as an EMT.
And I've always been an EMT.
And I've always been an EMT, take out a third ambulance as the EMT in command, if you will.
So I think there were five of us on our department that went through the process to do that.
And so I, yeah, man, sorry, I'm off again, but yeah, it started there.
With that dynamic, you have such a high call load.
You have an affluent neighborhood.
One of the criticisms I have of the overuse of a volunteer fire department is if it's in an
area where they should have a career fire department, they should be paying these men
and women to actually be there.
Was that a similar dynamic in that particular one?
No.
And again, I didn't know any better.
Right.
So I was, I just got lucky now.
I was in the right place, right time.
We had a number and I'm going to blend these.
So there's no order of priority.
We just had a good number of career firefighters that were also volunteers.
And so we had a very professional culture and you started, you had the 80 20, you had certain
people that were always on calls.
And I was fortunate because I was pretty manic about it and actually started my company in
the firehouse back in the day when I ran a shit ton of calls and you could do that.
And so we didn't have a drop off in service.
We had an incredibly professional culture.
We had a top notch training.
We were very, very good at what we did and the leadership, those that were,
and there was a mix, right?
There were some folks in positions that in this, in any department, but we just had a core of very
solid firefighters, firefighters, and that were someone you could look to and go,
that's how that's done.
And they had that great leadership capacity of looking back and saying, but recognizing
themselves in you and saying, okay, dude, you're into this.
Let's support that.
And then the call load allowed you to get good at it.
We had good fires.
We had commercial fires.
We had a lot of structure fires.
Thankfully, we had other people that love wildland because I mostly don't.
And in mad respect to all the wildland people out there, that is double tough work.
And it's not, I way preferred doing truck work than, and I'm not, dude, I was never built for
wildland.
So back to the, we didn't have that in our department.
We did not at all.
We're community was exceptionally well supported.
The equipment was top notch equipment, both personal and rigs.
And we had 110 foot aerial truck.
That was everything was top notch.
That was everything was top of the line.
And we had some incredibly dedicated and experienced firefighters that brought those
and are coming up.
And there was a, there was a track for you.
If you were into it, you got tapped on the fires.
And that was, yeah, man, sorry.
I got to go on and on about what that kind of leadership looked like.
Yeah.
But that was, that was a high level of standards.
I'm talking about should those men and women have been paid by their community?
Because I feel like the Northeast, for example, there are volunteer fire departments in
densely populated suburban neighborhoods.
And I think at that point, you've just got your fucking priorities wrong and you should
be paying for a career.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I completely misunderstood your question.
No, but it was a good thing to hear though.
Yeah.
I, and I think, I don't know, I don't have an answer because it never came up because
the service was well provided.
And again, the culture was we were so thankful that we had this.
I couldn't have been more stoked to be, and I learned that later as it went along.
First, I got into it for the medical and did my OEC first with a local search and rescue
team.
I did my fire academy.
It took a year.
At the same time, I did my first responders so I could be on the rescue squad.
I also did my EMT all in the same year.
And so I was basically a professional full time, you know, volunteer firefighter and
training.
And it never, it never came up.
And I think people resist it because they were so well served.
And I'll give you an example.
So I live now in an Olympic Valley, California resort here is Palisades Tahoe.
And I would love to volunteer in my community.
There is no volunteer opportunity.
I did some volunteer work for a local nonprofit, had a call.
They came in, did my thing.
And the guy's like, okay, dude, what's your deal?
And I explained to him, he goes, hey, man, we're hiring.
And I'm like, I don't want to be paid.
Like, are there any volunteer spots?
It's like there aren't any in the Tahoe basin, any place for me to volunteer.
And I like nothing better than giving back my skill set to my community.
It comes with, you know, it's kind of tough to see people, you know, as patients, you
know, but there isn't that.
And so we, it just didn't come up for us, man, because everybody enjoys it.
And it was, it was a competitive assignment.
There was more people applying.
I don't know if that's the case now, because I know numbers are across, are down across
the country, both for paid and certainly for volunteer.
But we didn't have that.
But you're like Kentland 33 pops to mind when you mentioned that.
Now, I don't know if they would want to be paid, if that would take away some of their
roles or not, I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, I wish I could volunteer here.
I'd like nothing better.
Yeah, I mean, I think that's what would happen though.
If you, you know, made most of the places that should be career, career, and then opened
up volunteer opportunities when you just need more people, like for example, this hurricane
that's coming here, I'd love to be part of a team and like, all right, you were a firefighter
and a medic, we're going to use you now.
But there's a lot of red tape, you know, between you and I did volunteer for this county for
a bit, but I just felt like a fucking medic ride along.
I didn't feel like I was actually I wasn't able to practice, you know, so, so you have
that but um, but I just see such an abuse of volunteerism these days.
And I would ask was the mayor of volunteer?
No, it was unincorporated.
And again, it was a unique I came into a culture of this was exceptionally well established.
They've been around for almost 100 years.
And so it may have been an anomaly.
And I just, again, man, I just got a little bit of a
lucky right place, right time in a great department with, you know, rock star mentors.
But I know others that have been on hybrid departments, and the volunteers kind of get
shit on in some circumstances.
And then that drives a wedge, you see it with ski patrol where you have your nationals and
your careers.
And naturally, you get, you know, if you're the volley, you get the shit job, rather than
the career guys that are doing their things.
And, you know, I think that's the thing that's really important.
The career guys that are doing their things and yeah, I don't know, I just know that I
wish I could volunteer, I find other ways to volunteer and stay in the game and put
my skill set to use.
But I even tried during COVID, reach out to the chief.
I'm like, Hey, man, you're good.
I'm here.
And you got other guys, other retired firefighters in the valley too.
And he goes, tell you what, man, like we might need you to drive an ambulance.
I'm like, dude, I crush that, you know, if you don't have me doing patient care, and
I certainly can't go interior or anything, but I'm available if you need me.
And that would only in that sort of extreme example, I think, kind of, I kind of reeled
my way in a little bit, but I said, would you take a part time job?
I'm like, one, I don't need that level of additional in my world.
I said, two, if there's a guy that's using this as a stepping stone, guy or gal, as a
stepping stone into their career, I don't want to take that person's spot because I'm
wishing to have, you know, re relive my, my volunteer days or continue them.
So, yeah, I can't speak to, to, to that circumstance.
We didn't have that.
Okay.
I want to go then to any kind of career events that you had that, you know, that are memorable.
Doesn't have to be the worst thing you've seen, but just some memorable calls.
And then let's get to your kind of mental health journey.
And then we'll talk obviously about, about journeys themselves.
You know, I'm going to give you, it's, it's as if they're not early ones and they're,
and they're not even necessarily the most extreme or the hardest things.
It's unfortunate in that I've got such, I got such good friends.
I'm allowed to go back and staff a firehouse in Colorado with friends of mine that I go
to Burning Man with, and so I get to get back out on the street and I kind of float around
on an apparatus, whether I'm on a truck engine, on a bus, whatever.
But really the most memorable, I think that had come is I've, after doing medicine work
and all the work that I've done, I'm an empathetic and proficient firefighter EMT.
Now I can't call myself a firefighter anymore.
So, so EMT, because, you know, early on, I don't know, at least it was for me.
I was so internal because I don't want to screw up.
Remember this, do this, do this, don't screw up, don't screw up, don't anybody down it.
So you really kind of thinking of yourself.
And then by the time you get comfortable and proficient, you've had to been through so
much stuff that now those, what I think it was almost rolling doors or like a seawall
was up kind of blocking, or at least you think you're blocking what you're experiencing.
And so I was never until recently, both proficient and empathetic.
And so probably the most notable, it was kind of a couple, but I'm going to give you the
biggest one and I can't tell you where it was because it actually made national news,
which is random.
We did CPR on a gentleman for 25 minutes and I had the most unusual experience, got on
scene, me and another firefighter were on compression.
So we just did the rotation that you do.
And the first time I touched the patient, everything went white.
All I could see were the other responders and the patient, everything else, all the
spectators, all the other vehicles and whatever else, all disappeared.
And all I was aware of was us.
And it was surreal.
And as I'm doing compressions, I begin to think of the, what I think of as almost like
sorrow waves rolling out of this scene, because as it progressed, became kind of clear, like
this is probably not going to go out as a positive outcome.
Everyone's, it was one of the best cardiac calls I've ever been on.
It was run, God, so great.
But I started to think about the image of his wife getting the call of the patient.
Getting the call of his mom.
It's somehow in the East coast.
And I don't know, this is probably even accurate, but what I thought of is like sorrow
waves as I know the worst news first, you know, we always kind of that feeling of, I
know it's something that's going to blow a hole and so many lives.
And I think of them sort of radiating out.
And then, you know, three, four minutes of compressions, you cycle out.
And then when I stopped touching the patient, then the regular scenery came back.
And interesting enough, they actually took a photo at that moment.
And they did a great job.
You can't see the patient, all the hippo stuff's covered.
But what you see is me going with this look on my face, like, what the fuck,
which is what I was thinking is like, what the fuck is going on?
And my turn goes again, and I get down and everything, same thing happens.
Nothing like I'm thinking like matrix level white, like just the craziest thing.
And then I have a dialogue internally with myself of like, wow, man, are we,
are we okay with feeling this?
Or do we want to shut the doors?
And I remember saying to myself, no, man, I think we're good.
You know, let's lean into this.
And then I became 100% aware of what every rescuer was thinking and feeling.
I mean, full empathy.
I mean, it was startling.
And as all of this is, so I'm kind of in auto mode doing the doing compressions.
And I'm now thinking of and feeling what everybody else is thinking and feeling.
And this went on for the full 25 minutes.
And when the call was over and the doc ran it very smoothly, I remember I, I,
I talked to every member of the team and thanked them for the opportunity to
to work with them.
And it was interesting to see their reactions and, and the doc that was,
that was quarterbacking it was younger.
And I remember I went up to him and it stuck up my hand and introduced myself
and said, Hey doc, I just want to tell you, it was one of the best calls I've
ever ran.
You crushed it.
And you would have thought James that I'd flicked him in the nose.
He was like, like it had this impact on him.
And then it carried through later on that night, a friend of mine that was
there was on a call, had a remarkable job of saving this kid, completely
MacGyvered it and just shit conditions.
And that same doc then said to him, Hey man, you're a badass.
Like what you did and how you did it, save this patient.
And Odie was so kind of moved by that, that he shared, shared it with me when
he came back to camp, we were both in camp together.
And I said, Hey, is this what that dude, that guy, that guy, that guy,
look, and I shared my thing.
And he goes, dude, that was the continuation of what you said to him.
He shared them with me and really, I mean, it was dramatic and to close out
the story, um, I was relaying this to a friend of mine up in Oregon.
And when I described the whiteness, he burst into tears and I'm like, dude,
what's up?
And he goes, I had a near death experience and I was above my body
watching them do compressions on me.
And they shocked me with the AED.
And I came back.
He goes, what you described was what that place was like.
And he went on to extrapolate that perhaps there was some of that, that was
happening with, with that patient.
But away from the dramatic nature of my experience, really the underlying
thing that was impactful was that ability to be present and have empathy
and be proficient.
And it really, really gave me a true, maybe a truer understanding of what
the impact is on the things that we've seen and done where we think we've
got a wall up.
And that was the work where I'd use the, the, uh, the metaphor of a, of a
seawall where in the beginning, that's fine.
But then it gets up and over and it stays and piles up behind it.
Um, thinking that we've can put that away.
I guess I've, it's, it's the sum of that is, it's just how powerful those
experiences actually are, no matter how much callous we think we've built.
Um, and that's probably, I would say that one's probably one of the more,
just because of the breadth and the depth of that.
So.
Beautiful.
Yeah.
I had a call, didn't, didn't all go white, but it just one of those flow
state moments and it was a very tragic call.
It was a family that had gone to visit a theme park, um, and they were boarding
their dog right before and the young man, he was like late twenties, you know,
just fricking nose dived.
Um, and, but it was one of those, uh, you know, diagnoses that you're not
going to save them, but the way we didn't know that at the time, but the
way the code went was just so, so smooth, you know, and just remember
thinking that we, he didn't survive, but we gave him every single chance.
But I remember that just being so honed in.
And like you said, everyone was just, you know, like, like cogs in a machine,
they were all doing the bit they needed to do.
They were all asking the right questions and you know, it was, it was phenomenal.
So even though it wasn't all white, I had that kind of, you know, everything
coming together moment, which again, we felt as one cohesive unit, rather than
a bunch of individuals plugging away at that guy.
Yeah.
And we should, if we have time in this call, I'd love to talk about flow
state and what you describe as well.
I think you and I probably talked about that offline of, you know, that's one
of my things that I drive towards is flow, but we could, if we have time in
this call, if not perhaps we can just chat some other time, but let's talk
about it now.
Well, that what you're talking about is group flow, right?
And, and so flow state is where you're at your optimum and the, and the, and
it's a neurochemical state that we get to.
And I became fascinated with actually how I ended up at Burning Man.
I read a great book called stealing from the
plants, which they talk about how teams find group flow.
And they had a chapter on Burning Man and I finished reading it and called
the Oregon was like, Hey man, you know, do you need EMTs and stuff?
And, and they're like, yeah, you gotta have all these ICS certs.
I'm like, well, that's not a problem.
And, and I've just become absolutely fascinated with flow state.
And what we're both describing in our own way is group flow, which I've
I've experienced on unique and exceptionally well-run medical
calls.
And I remember finding it with my crew in structure fires.
And that was the most extreme example.
The biggest, deepest, most powerful flow state experiences
I've ever had was group flow in a structure fire.
And it's one of the books I'd recommend,
is Finding Superman by Steven Kotler, I believe,
is how you say his last name.
And he's got a whole series on flow state.
And he talks about his, he puts forth the sort of thesis
that the meaning of life is to be and to find flow state,
because you're at your optimum.
And if you rock climb, you probably
get some of that jujitsu, too, where everything works
and you have time dilation, where time either is too fast
or moves slower.
And you just have that great ability.
And we're both fortunate that we've
been in circumstances where we've been optimum.
I think what's so powerful about the flow state conversation
is that's what a lot of high performers are chasing,
whether they're special operations, men and women,
or whether they are elite sports performers.
But if you look at the way the fire service is set up
for many of us with the crazy work weeks
and then the mandatory overtime, I mean,
we're so far on the other side.
And actually, when we did the IHMC study,
they're a renowned international human performance
organization.
And it was them that did this kind of think tank
for Marion County here after they
lost two guys within 12 weeks of each other to suicide.
And the results showed that the first thing was
they need to change the work week.
And 2472 was the number one on the solutions.
Now they've since disregarded the results
of this internationally renowned study.
But yeah, because that would take courage
to follow through with that.
But that aside, the moment we had the first preamble,
he asked about what are we doing for human performance?
And they said, well, we've got this annual test that we do.
And then we've got this workout facility.
And he goes, that's not human performance.
I'll never forget that.
His reaction was almost disgust.
Like, what are you talking about?
And this is the problem is that of all the occupations,
the ones that are most likely going
to have lives handling in their balance,
aside from the military.
And even then, it's a small slice of the military.
It's actually front and center.
It's going to be police, fire, EMS, ultimately.
You can put corrections in there and obviously dispatch
from a chain of survival element.
But ultimately, it's just a very, very small handful
of professions that are truly search and rescue
in some of those.
And for us to be so far away from an environment that
would actually forge elite performance,
forge a flow state experience, this is what we need to do.
We're not trying to just not die.
We need to be all over here where, you know,
Grenfell fire.
You can climb 18 floors and then make entry
and do a primary search and then pull someone back down.
That is the flow state that we're chasing.
Right, right.
That's a great point.
And I didn't extrapolate it out that far.
I just thought of the experience.
And mostly from a sure wish I still
had it feeling of when you have that optimum
and everything's perfect.
And I remember, and I still dream about structure fires
now, not as frequently, unfortunately.
And in my dreams, I never have to come out
and change my bottles, which is great.
But you raise a great point.
And hats off to you for all the work that you're doing.
I see that on your posts and your updates
when you're calling out and catching departments doing well,
which is making that change.
And I think as the public becomes more aware
and platforms like yours doing that will help is, hey, man,
who do you want treating your child at 2 o'clock
in the morning, the guy that's well rested and squared away
or the dude who's been up for three days
and can't spell his own name and can't remember which.
And you guys as medics, I mean, the things
that you have to remember and the orders and the ratios
and all, dude, you guys should be, I don't know, man.
I'm glad, it's unfortunate, I guess,
that we even have to discuss it,
but it's absolutely worth being discussed.
And, and, God, you're fucking spot on, dude.
The zero fail environment that first responders are in
and everyone that you mentioned in there is there.
When you have that, I mean, you know what it's like, dude,
you're in a structure, no flat surfaces, no bright lights,
shit's going down, time is tissue, all of those things.
And you gotta work together,
not only keep your shit together, but then work as a team
in a hierarchical structure.
And most often than not, it's the medic that's running that.
And you want that person not only well rested,
well trained and like you said, with elite performance.
I think if more people, it's almost like, hey, dude,
if you're gonna be in a government position
where you can have an influence
and you choose not to do that, fantastic,
come set a set with us and come ride and run calls
and have a responsibility of doing something
and see then what that's like.
You know, that's what I, I don't know,
I tell people that all, people,
especially people that suggest
they're worried about their kids driving,
I'm like, well, have them do a third ride
with a busy urban department
and their respect for how to drive.
And so they'll pick up on that.
So anyway, yeah, I'm so glad that you're doing that.
And if there's anything I can do to be
in my own small way supportive of that, please let me know.
Just it's the right thing.
Absolutely, thank you.
Well, just doing this, being a guest on the show,
I mean, this is getting these stories out there.
I mean, all the things that we're gonna talk about today.
I wanna get to the mental health, please jump in, please.
On that part, remember, you're gonna talk to Odie.
Odie is a SAM officer at a Colorado department
and a absolute rock star.
And I would ask you to bring this up with him.
He'll have, I believe, some pretty good insight
and comment on that.
Cause he's, you know, at a busy house,
it would be the house that I would go to
in Westminster and Colorado and get to spend time
with a very busy crew where, you know,
sleep's broken up and all of those things.
I would invite you to talk to Odie about that.
He's the SAM, he's one of the SAM officers.
Absolutely, I will.
Well, I wanna get to the mental health side.
Just before we do, you touched on Burning Man.
What was some of the, you know, again,
the memorable moments?
I mean, it's quite a unique environment itself.
Obviously it became quite notorious
after the rain they had this last time.
But what was your experiences from an EMS perspective
protecting the people at Burning Man?
Well, my first reaction is that I loved it.
It was fantastic medicine.
And I remember going out there thinking,
cause I learned early on that having an EMT
is like a backstage pass, man.
Like you can do some really cool things with it.
I worked with what they called a stadium medic.
Of course I'm not a paramedic, but that was the title thing.
And we were just roving BLS, you know,
with vests on at concerts.
And I was like, crap, this is like almost,
it's really the best part.
You get to do a lot of patients,
you get austere environments,
you gotta figure out your jazz.
And then you hand them off to something else
and you go again without all the stuff
that's not as much fun, right?
And then, like I said, I read that book, Stealing Fire,
called the org, basically got in in a day
and they were just kind of worked out.
And I remember going in thinking,
okay, I've kind of seen everything, right?
Nope, first shift, I'm like, nope, never seen that before.
The thing about Burning Man,
and sometimes those that don't understand
or know Burning Man are gonna think
it's something that it's not.
I was guilty of the same.
It's the size of Manhattan.
It's exceptionally well run
from an emergency services standpoint.
I was on a QRV, which is a quick response vehicle.
We operated a BLS level,
almost a ski patrol BLS level, honestly,
which was exciting because the calls
were not equivalent to that.
So you had to be good at it.
And they required back then three years of licensure.
And I understand why,
like it's incredibly austere environment.
Folks tend to be on a number of mind altering substances.
They're all dehydrated.
They're all dressed up for Halloween
on the dark side of the moon.
And every call is almost like a national registry question.
And as I got more into understanding what Burning Man is,
and someone pointed this out to me, they said,
hey, you volunteering is both your gift,
because gifting is a big part
of the principles of Burning Man.
But it's also my art.
And so it was a very Burning Man thing to do
to volunteer that skillset to serve and protect,
nearly a hundred thousand people.
I think it becomes something like the fourth largest city
in Nevada for that week.
And I would recommend it to anybody,
because one, you get your assessment skills
diamond sharp again.
And it's an environment where your population
really appreciates you.
And you get to see just some of the raddest shit
on the planet.
And you get to cruise around and your little QRV
and you're a part of things.
I mean, it's, and I've, you know, as you tend to,
you go figure shit out your first day,
you have no idea what you're doing.
You go back, you kind of get the sense of it.
Then you turn into Pied Piper and I've done that.
Where now other people, and Odie can speak to this now.
He's actually taking over running the camp that we're in.
And I introduced him to it because we had a friend,
a mutual friend that died,
that wanted to come to Burning Man and volunteer with me.
And Odie reached out and said,
hey, we're finishing up Mikey's bucket list.
Can you get us in to Burning Man?
And most people don't know this.
Burning Man has a very strong firefighter strata
that runs through the organization.
And that brotherhood is in full fact.
And I remember reaching out to Fu,
who was deputy chief of the fireside.
And I said, hey man, here's what's going on.
Can you help us out?
And he was like, done.
And all the paperwork, all the bullshit,
what it takes again was handled.
The crew got in, no questions asked.
They handled it for us unbelievably.
And it then turned into this,
what was gonna be a one and done.
Mine was the same way.
I thought I would do that shit once.
And now there are lifers at it.
We'll probably see you there.
All right, well then let's go to,
we talked about psychedelics in that experience,
but let's go to it as a medicine.
So, before that, walk me through your own experience
of your kind of mental health downward spiral.
And then where was the lowest place
that you found yourself?
Oh shit, there's probably several.
And it's always kind of hard to know.
I mean, just like the last time we did this podcast,
I was in a pretty dark place
and didn't recognize how dark that was
until I came on of it.
So, growing up in the childhood that I had
and all of the sort of components of that,
I had mental health my whole life.
Didn't know it, we didn't have a term for it back then.
I didn't know I had depression
until my wife told me, she's like,
dude, of course you were.
I'm like, what are you talking about?
I don't have depression.
She goes, yeah.
I'm like, no, there's just this cycle that kind of happens
and that's just kind of part of it.
She's like, yeah, that's depression.
And I'm like, huh, really?
And that's how I wasn't aware.
And then having kids really kind of, really,
you can kind of get away with your own shit
when it's just you.
Then if you're trying to be a good parent as I was
and executed on, I recognized very quickly
I had things I needed to work on.
And I didn't know what to do, man.
Thankfully, I was never a drinker.
And I say thankfully because it just didn't,
it didn't bring me euphoria.
And I know others used it for numbing purposes.
And I take nothing away from those
that chose that approach.
I thankfully didn't because I've seen how that can go.
I just was really good at pushing things down.
I could absorb a lot of punishment.
And I prided myself on that ability
to kind of take punches, both literally and mentally.
And then I just ran out of space
and kids really exposed my limitations.
And I got lucky, man, like most things.
And back to the earlier thing that we said in the beginning
of being open to suggestions.
And believe it or not, it all started
because I got a tattoo when I started all of this work
which tells the story of my family
using Polynesian tattoo art.
That artist, about an hour in, stops and goes,
okay, dude, there's like something going on with you.
Like you've got some, this explorer thing
and I need to take you on a spirit walk.
I'm like, what the fuck is a spirit walk?
And he goes, we go up in this very special place.
It actually turns out here in the Valley
where the Washaw Native Americans used to do ceremonies
and we're gonna do psilocybin.
And I'm like, fuck is psilocybin?
And he's like, mushrooms.
I'm like, oh, like shrooms?
He goes, yes, but psilocybin.
I'm like, okay, cool.
So we go up and it was sort of the first time
I ever did, I did some LSD in college
for all the wrong reasons and all the wrong ways
and got nothing from it other than
you can do a bunch of it and not die.
This was the first time I did it with any kind of intention.
And it wasn't, it was an interesting,
it was a powerful in its own way.
And that led then to my doing solo high dose psilocybin.
It's starting to, as I researched it and did all that,
it started to unpack and like most things in my world,
I'm like, okay, dude, I got a pretty good handle
on this whole situation.
I couldn't have been more wrong.
And then I was introduced to group work
by now one of my very close friends.
And I was resistant at first where I'm like,
dude, I'm not really a fucking group guy with this.
I'm good.
And he said it in such a way that sort of yes man thing
where I'm like, dude, this sounds like an opportunity
I should be open to.
And I said, okay, you know,
and I talked to my wife about it and I went to try it.
And I remember talking with a facilitator
and explaining my background.
And then I had done from DMT with this same gentleman
that took me up on my first spirit walk
and kind of begin to explore psychedelics
from a therapeutic standpoint
and thought I was pretty dialed in.
And I remember telling him, I said, hey man,
I'm gonna come in kind of like a pro be.
And he goes, I don't know what that means.
I go, my mindset's gonna be, I'm looking to join the group.
The group is not joining me.
I'm gonna likely just keep a low profile
and see if I'm a fit for this.
And so understand I'm not here to be in charge or take over
or be my typical strong personality.
I'm here to see if I'm joining this group
and taking that mindset.
And I did, and it was super chill.
And I just remember thinking, wow, this is so not for me.
Man, like, and to your listeners that might be interested
in exploring psychedelic medicine groups,
I'm gonna share all of this
because it's a nice cautionary tale of not,
the importance first of all of a group
of like-minded individuals where that set and setting
is part of it, but also being open to things
not being perfect the first time.
So a lot of these guys were working on masculinity issues.
Like they didn't know how to be a man
in their relationships because they were raised
by women in broken homes or whatever.
And I didn't know that was a thing
and didn't, I felt uncomfortable.
And I was like, yeah, dude, I'm not sure if this is for me.
And my wife was like, what'd you think?
I go, yeah, I don't know.
And then I realized, you know,
that's probably just me being kind of the dick
and maybe I could be helpful.
And so let's go again.
And went and had a not a good experience
with some of the folks there that really looked at me
and said, hey, you know, you're everything I'm not.
You walk into a room and you own it.
I wish I was like that.
And we're all in our medicine at this point.
And I'm like, and I knew enough to know
that I didn't know what to do with that.
It's kind of like, if you're in a hole, don't dig.
And I was like, my first thought was, well, dude,
if you want what I want, then do what I've done.
Like, okay.
And I'm like, well, that's probably not helpful.
And since I don't know what to do
and you're in a vulnerable state,
I don't wanna make your shit worse, right?
By inadvertently doing something.
And then I started to govern myself and was like, yeah,
this is, so I went back to my friend
that had shared this group and invited me in
and I shared that with them.
And he goes, okay, dude, come to one more.
There's a guy I want you to meet.
He used to be a SWAT police officer.
I think the two of you will get along.
And we both show up at ceremony and immediately are like,
I know you.
And he goes, I know you too, dude.
And it was like two meat eaters kind of meeting
in this otherwise sort of environment.
And we hit it off.
And I remember at the end of ceremony, the next morning,
I walked up to him and I said, hey, fucker,
we're gonna be friends.
I just need you to know that.
And true, we'd become incredibly close
and remain to this day.
And then we did another ceremony
and another fireman came in and we kind of grouped up
where we had a group within that group.
And from that, my friend suggested
that we should just have our own group.
And that's kind of closing the loop
and would turn into a much longer rendition
of how this all started.
We ended up starting the first responder veteran group now
about three years ago.
And to anybody that might be listening
that's wondering or thinking about having one of these,
I would urge you to consider seriously
whom you have in the group.
And what we found is veterans and first responders
get along exceptionally well in these circumstances.
And we all kind of relax when we're with each other.
We don't feel like we have to respond to somebody else.
And we coined the phrase turning off the mechanism.
And I didn't, my friend that suggested the group did,
and he's fucking on point,
the importance of that cannot be overstated.
And so let me kind of stop there, James,
before I just continue to wander down the path on this thing.
Because there's a lot to unpack
with the benefits of psychedelic medicine groups,
how to set them up.
And then, and I'd like to get into this
is what actually came to be the most powerful part of it,
which is friendship and not the actual psychedelic medicines.
Yeah, I mean, I want you to carry on just to interject.
I think this is such an important part of the conversation
is just simply who, and you can remove the psychedelics.
I mean, you get people that go to the wrong counselors.
I mean, these EAP nightmare stories
that I hear all the time,
doesn't mean that the actual concept of counseling
or talk therapy doesn't work,
but are you sitting in front of the right person?
And then to be able to relax enough
and trust the medicine and go on that journey,
you've got to be around the right people.
And I think the other side that I hear, I'm sure,
with this probably integral with this group with you,
but if you go to somewhere where there is a guide,
some sort of shaman or whatever the title is
for that person, that's important too.
And I think the example is I know people,
I think, correct me if I'm wrong,
I don't know if it was you that told me,
but someone else, many people have,
but I wasn't sure if you tried this too,
but I've had people on the show,
I have people that I know that said,
I tried ketamine and it didn't work.
But actually when you get into it,
they were hooked up to ketamine
and then the person walked out.
Versus as you said, that friendship,
that guide with someone sitting with you
and actually guiding through or doing psychotherapy,
whatever that dynamic is, whilst you're on the medicine,
that's usually the missing piece even with ketamine.
Well, yeah, and ketamine being a disassociative
is its own sort of special thing.
But let's kind of break this down a little bit too.
What is the psychedelic medicine group?
And so to sort of define the term
is a collection of participants.
They call them ceremonies or journeys
and it's sort of the parlance of our time,
but what it is is a group of individuals.
And we always called in a facilitator professional
that had both the medicines and training and a skillset.
And we started out with the first facilitator that we had,
we outgrew him pretty quickly.
It really, and what we learned over time
is while there's somewhat of a hierarchical component to it,
there's the facilitator and the participants,
we're actually interchangeable.
Like they're on their journey as well
and we have an impact on them.
And what we ended up doing is exposing,
and I don't mean that in a negative way, just was,
exposing that facilitator's work left to be done.
He struggled with a group like ours.
He had a rougher childhood, he was raised by women,
was bullied, wasn't an alpha type.
And so having a group of folks like us
made him uncomfortable when we got past the,
holy shit, this is cool.
You know everything, dude, this is rad.
They're like, okay, wait a minute.
Like anyone, you get a group of us together over time,
and we're like, how do we make this better?
We need to have this and this is where this is going.
And if there's a power vacuum, we're gonna fill it.
And we created some tension and then we grew past it.
But yes, the point of having a good facilitator
and a process and some ceremonial aspect to it,
now if there's anything wrong with recreational use,
recreational doesn't mean reckless.
Recreational use can be like, hey, some of me
and some of my friends are gonna go do psilocybin
and go for a hike in the valley
and we're gonna enjoy that time together,
but it's not a ceremony, right?
Is that recreational?
Yes, is it reckless?
It is not.
But having a group like we do, the benefit,
the real impact, the medicines just allow you to revisit
whatever your issue or issues are,
and they will be just by being in existence,
you're going to have them,
is allows you to kind of reframe that.
But the real work is what they call integration.
And integration could be a formal next day process.
What we've discovered is the real benefit
is that our integration continues almost every day
because what this exposed to all of us
was how fucking lonely we were
because we had all left whatever our service was,
military, police, fire, EMS, whatever it was,
and we lost our high functioning zero fail teams.
And being back in just regular civilian life is hard
and very difficult to relate at certain levels
with people that don't share that history.
And recreating that in the aggregate in this group
really gave us friends again, like true friends.
And that's become really the most impactful thing
out of this because then we're constantly working,
call it the work, we're constantly working on being better
and what suits all of us because we're always training
and trying to be better in hacking and working out
and wanting to improve the version of ourselves.
That's very natural for those of us with the background
and then others too, don't get me wrong,
but I can speak more about folks like us.
And the ability to have this council of men,
and I'm only in a men's group, by the way,
there's co-ed groups and things of that nature
and those work for those, I don't do that.
That's, I like what works for me.
And that council of men, when you journey with somebody
in a medicine group like what we have,
boy, you cut through the bullshit.
I had friends where I was like, dude,
I know you better than guys I've known for 30 years
and I don't know your fucking last name.
I don't know what you do professionally.
I'm not exactly sure where you live,
but it doesn't matter because I actually know you
kind of like when you used to make friends
when you were eight years old
and you wanted to go build a fort, right?
Like, hey dude, you wanna go build a fort?
Yeah, cool, rad, I'll bring a hammer
and my dad's got some, whatever, right?
And you go off and you're friends first
before you have any idea of the rest of it.
And so taking it back to having a medicine group
like what we've had, the benefits aren't,
and the power isn't the medicine itself.
It's what it opens up and allows for.
And then the real power is that platform
and foundation of friendship
that really carries forward and continues.
And we continue to have ceremony about every quarter
and it's various sizes.
Sometimes the groups are smaller, sometimes they're larger,
sometimes there's new people, sometimes there's not,
but it's an upward trajectory, not linear,
but it's progress.
I'm really intrigued as well about the stacking.
So I've had a lot of the people on here,
especially the SEALs,
usually it's the Ibogaine and the 5-Meo DMT,
and then there's some people that have done
psilocybin specifically, and then like I said,
ketamine and NDMA and some of these other ones,
but usually it's somewhat singular.
But when you think about other things,
whether it's food, whether it's exercise, principles,
usually there's a kind of element of,
I have a bit of this and a bit of this,
especially as you progress in.
So talk to me about exploring,
layering some of these medications and or plant medicines
to tailor to the individuals
so that you don't age and orange them
and scare the shit out of them.
And first and foremost is having a good facilitator is key
because we're not, once you're on medicine and in the field,
you're not medicating yourself.
It's not, hey dude, let's try this, let's try that.
What do you have in your kit kind of a thing?
It's done with intention.
And so the stack, it always opens
with what we call heart medicine,
and that can be a version of MDMA,
which actually was designed for marriage therapy
because it got people to talk to each other and it works.
And especially for men, that ability to be open
and to talk and to, in MDMA,
some people consider it a psychedelic, I don't as much.
And Michael Pollan does a great job
in his book of discussing that
and how to change your mind,
which is a book I'd recommend to anybody interested
in exploring this is he does a great job
and narrates it kind of like you, like a fucking champ.
And so I'd recommend that to anybody,
but MDMA to open it up the hearts.
There's a sassafras kind too that we did
that I prefer over MDMA,
but you start with heart and that opens things up.
And there are some ceremonies, that's actually all you need
because it gets going in the just stult effect of the field
where it's a group of people having ceremony elevates it,
not unlike group flow where the combination of people
increases the impact and effect of it
rather than you would have on your own.
And then you can layer in psilocybin, some people do.
You can layer in more of a true psychedelic
in various doses.
We've done some interesting stacks
where we start out with heart.
We do liquid ketamine by IM,
which is kind of an inward process
because it's disassociative.
Like if you and I were in ceremony together
and the facilitator provided us an IM injection of ketamine,
you and I aren't talking about it in real time.
Under your eyeshades, having your experience,
I am near you having my experience.
If you're crying or being verbal, I'm aware of you,
but I'm not having your experience with you.
That allows kind of a evolution of the experience
and then it goes back to another communal experience
where it can be psilocybin or some other combination
and there's all kinds of medicines that can get you there.
And then you mentioned 5-MeO,
which is considered a kind of a capstone psychedelic.
That's a big one for your listeners that don't know.
5-MeO is often referred to as the toad,
which is often the synthesized version
of the Sonoran Desert Toad venom,
which is one of the most random things in the world
and one of the more recent psychedelics, by the way.
I think it was an American that looked
at the venom chemical compound and went, wait a minute,
that's similar to something else.
Let's go down and see if that's true.
And that person found out that 5-MeO is a big one.
And I've not sat with Ibogaine.
I've sat with Ayahuasca, MDMA, psilocybin, 5-MeO, ketamine,
and then there's a various sort of mixtures
within some medicine stacks that I've sat with as well.
And the big thing is having a skilled guide.
And you'd said, hey, you don't wanna get Agent Orange,
I think you said, or something.
And sometimes that happens.
I think it was, what's the statement?
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
That's definitely something you see in the rear view.
And sometimes that happens.
It's not exact science,
and this is where having a trained facilitator
helps you navigate through that
and figuring out where your boundaries and levels are.
And sometimes, well, I should say sometimes,
every time the medicine will give you what you need,
not necessarily what you want.
And as you get more experienced at it,
it really isn't a bad trip.
There are challenging trips,
but those experiences are generally
where your growth happens.
So.
I know a lot of the people that do the Ibogaine,
there's the purging elements,
some of the people do Ayahuasca, same thing.
Where I feel like this conversation is a lot more nuanced
is if there's a deep addiction,
if there's a strong suicide ideation,
I don't think there's anything wrong with that
because you're at a point now where that pales
into comparison of what you're dealing with at the moment.
And I know both of those have saved a lot of lives,
and people that are close to me, for example.
But what I love about these other elements,
like I did MDMA recreationally,
and I'll tell you, I had the time of my life.
I danced with Japanese people for hours on end.
I had deep conversations sitting by the lockers.
And it is, it has a cost.
The next day you feel like everything's gray.
So there's no perfect thing, but I didn't stab anyone,
didn't drive a car into a minivan full of kids.
I just danced and hugged people all night.
So that for me, and then I've done psilocybin,
mushrooms were actually legal in Japan when I lived there.
So Planet of the Apes, by the way,
was one of the most epic things to watch on the screen.
Especially when the lights come up
and everyone in the audience is a monkey as well.
But.
That makes perfect sense to me.
It was amazing.
But so those are things that I've tried,
and I'm like, I enjoyed that.
And I did open up and it did put me in a relaxed state.
So this is what I think is also important.
If people have heard that if you do psychedelic medicine,
you're gonna be throwing up and shitting.
If you are in a deep state of addiction,
that might be a bodily purge that needs to happen
as you're processing it.
But if you're wanting to open some doors,
for example, I quit drinking three and a half months ago now.
I had a guy on the show talking about it,
and he has a year, not even a year challenge,
just called No Beer for One Year.
And I was like, I'm gonna do that.
And boom, like that, I'd stopped.
And I talked about habitual drinking for a long time,
not binge drinking, but habitual.
So for me, it's like, all right, I don't have that.
I don't have a lot of the things
that haunt our men and women, I just don't.
So what is this lesser entry to this?
So I can just go in and explore it.
And as you said, and I love this last time we spoke,
sometimes it's just a case of taking a few hours
to escape, to enjoy, to just,
almost like you said, the recreational side.
So just see if anything comes up, but if it doesn't,
you just got to have that experience for a few hours.
I'm removing the stigma of that as well.
So yes, there's the Ibogaine,
and as Marcus Capone says, a nuclear option,
but now you've kind of underlined that there are
more gentle, subtle ones if you're kind of dipping your toe
and you wanna explore or increase your confidence.
Yeah, I'm really glad you mentioned the nuance of that.
And I didn't put that together this time,
even though we had talked about it previously,
is it's a more G rated experience.
And this is what I would, as people were learning,
and I'm very open about, and I'm fortunate,
given my circumstance that I can be open about this,
as you had mentioned, it's impacted me dramatically.
My kids even say that, like it's noticeable,
noticeable in you, the positive improvement.
And so it's literally helped me be the better version
of myself at every level in every aspect of my life.
And that's not superfluous, that is legit.
And I've known it to save people within my community,
and I've certainly heard of so many others that it has.
And so I'm fortunate that I can be open with it,
but you can have a G rated experience.
And when I would talk with people about it,
other first responders that,
I wouldn't say recruiting, but they would ask about it.
It wasn't, it's not something that you push
by any stretch, right?
But I'm open to it.
And I'd say, listen, man,
you're guaranteed to have a good time.
And my very first ceremony when I did it with our group,
and I was finally comfortable,
I had my big epiphany that lasted this day,
which is, you know what, man, it feels good to feel good.
And how long has it been since you've actually felt good?
And that's what I would tell guys, like, listen, man,
no matter what else happens,
and the chance of you having a big experience
your first time is pretty fucking small.
Like, unless you're doing IBO gain,
or you're doing the five,
or you're going with a bigger dose of something,
easing in and getting to know the medicine
and getting your footing a little bit,
you're not gonna have necessarily a big,
I certainly didn't,
I'm still working on basic shit in my group.
Like, I just am, it takes,
there's just certain levels to things.
But it's a very G-rated experience.
But using heart medicine, as we call it,
you're guaranteed to have a good time.
Not unlike, you know, dancing with Japanese
and hanging out by the lockers and being open.
That's what it does.
And you don't have to have a multi-day experience.
You don't have to worry about being on a diet,
is what they call that,
when you prepare what you eat,
and cleaning yourself out to be prepared for
if you have a purge.
And it's so funny, we're such dudes.
Like, the group of us did our ayahuasca weekend.
That's all we were concerned about,
is like, are we gonna shit ourselves?
Like, dude, I'm good, I can puke all day.
I do not wanna shit myself.
Are we gonna, where it depends,
like, that was a straight up topic in our Signal thread
of, dude, what are we doing about this?
Like, where's our head relative to shitting ourselves?
And you don't have to have those.
In fact, when I recommend to people,
if you're trying to have this become part
of your improvement path in your life,
don't start with the really nuclear option,
as Marcus calls it.
And he does a great job of describing that.
And he's doing what they're doing at Vets
and with TerraMind, it's big stuff.
You don't have to start there.
Just set yourself up for success to be with a facilitator
and then, dude, ease in, bro.
You know, crawl, walk, run, all that shit.
And it's hard when you got a bunch of meat eaters,
like the Seals, you know why they all do Ibogaine?
Because the fucking first group did Ibogaine.
And they said, like, that's why we do Ibogaine,
because that's what they go, whoa, I wanted what he had.
No, no, we had this other thing.
Yeah, I'm not doing that.
I want the hardest thing that that dude had.
And that, I believe, is Ibogaine works.
And I haven't sat with it yet.
It's finding its way to me.
And I think it's likely to happen
within the next 12 months for me.
But you don't have to do as you put it.
And I'm so glad you brought this up,
is it's a much easier entree into medicine work
that isn't the Navy SEAL, nuclear, deep sea option.
You can get there, and for some folks, that's appropriate.
And for some folks, they don't have to.
That doesn't serve them.
And it isn't a requirement.
It isn't, when you get into these groups,
boy, I'll tell you that ego shit goes out the door.
You're not gathering badges or certs
and comparing or any of that kind of stuff.
That goes, that's just not there.
Thanks for bringing that up.
That's an important, that's really important.
Absolutely.
Well, I'm just gonna tangent super quickly
when you saw me messing my phone.
The interview with the hockey goalkeeper
was Clint Malarchuk, and that was episode 277.
So for people listening, I think I just reposted that
not too long ago, so it should pop up even in Spotify
and some of those ones.
Thank you.
I'll take a listen, because I remember seeing that,
and I can still see it in my mind's eye,
the blood on the ice.
And then as I got into EMS, you do this where,
I was on the ice, and you're always doing the what ifs.
What would I do here?
What would I do there?
And all of that, and I remember thinking back to that stuff.
And so I was the only goalie in our leagues.
So there's a rule that a goalie can't go past
the center line in a game, because that's a penalty
because of whatever.
And I, as an EMT and stuff, would do that.
And I remember, I'm in a game where somebody got hurt,
and it was a significant thing, and I came down,
and the ref tried to stop me.
And I had to have a discussion with him.
He was young.
I'm like, dude, just so we're clear,
you're committing a felony right now.
I'm not here as a goalkeeper.
I'm here as an EMT.
I'm gonna need to, you have to let me.
And the other ref came over, like dude, he always,
because that would happen in these leagues.
And I remember very clearly,
I'm gonna go back and listen to that one.
And I hope he's doing well.
And maybe he's someone that would benefit from medicine work.
Yeah, quite possibly.
Yeah, I actually wanna get him back on again.
It was an amazing conversation.
And the thing is, the fine line with these people,
and I just had Guy on who,
I don't know if we were talking about this before.
I think it was with someone on the phone earlier,
but I just had Guy Miles wrongfully convicted,
19 years in prison.
He was in Las Vegas,
and the robbery was in Orange County, California,
and they still convicted him.
That he had eyewitnesses, alibis, all that stuff.
Horrendous, just because he was a street-
Did that scare the shit out of you?
But by the grace of God, go I.
I mean, dude, that could be,
I mean, just the randomness of that.
That is so frightening to me.
But I'll try going back to the goalkeeper.
I'm more than happy to talk to him if he'd like to about,
if he's having, if he's been,
you had made a comment about his mental health journey.
Anyway, if you feel it'd be beneficial,
you'd be more than welcome to connect us.
Yeah, absolutely.
I'll let him know,
because the reason I was talking about Guy
is that Guy in the conversation,
I use this as my promo for the episode,
he starts getting choked up and he's saying,
look, this is really hard for me to talk about.
I don't wanna talk about it anymore,
but I'm on here talking about it today
because it's important and we need to change it.
He said, but, and I forget how he phrased it,
he's like, after this, I'm gonna go climb into my bed
and my girlfriend's gonna hold me for a while.
And this is how crushed this guy is, you know what I mean?
But I remember Clint back to him,
you imagine you're near death,
and then the weeks after you're on all the television,
bleeding to death and then the anniversary
and you know what I mean?
Oh yeah.
So it's kind of the thing, it's this reoccurring thing.
Same as Chris Fields, the Oklahoma bombing
of him holding the dead toddler.
Every fucking anniversary,
they show him holding a dead toddler.
So we've gotta be cognizant of that.
He had a red helmet on too, man.
He had a red Metro helmet on, I can picture,
that guy run a Pulitzer Prize
or whatever you win for that photograph.
And I can picture that right now in my mind's eye,
the whole thing of it.
And God, it's so, I mean, those are people, you know?
And that poor dude, I can't even imagine.
I mean, you know that feeling, man, of just that,
yeah, man, fuck, that's so fucking much to carry.
That weight of that, and no matter how you do it,
it always comes out the same.
Yeah, it almost killed him.
I'm not the least bit surprised by that.
And again, my offer to him is the same.
If there's anything I could do to be of service,
he's welcome to be connected with me.
Beautiful.
That's a good segue to my very last kind of area
before we do some closing questions.
Barriers to entry,
especially if you wear a uniform for a living.
I've been very vocal about, you know,
and so have so many guests, which is beautiful.
When you get multiple, over and over again,
people with law enforcement, ATF,
talking about the epic failure of drug prohibition
and how it's caused so many problems.
And the irony now that it's, you know,
our men and women that serve,
they have to go overseas to get the medicine to heal them
for protecting this country.
I mean, you know, the hypocrisy is just insane.
But that being said, for the first responders, military,
you know, doctors, nurses that are listening,
what's your advice to circumnavigating the legal red tape
so they can get some of these therapies
and actually heal, maybe even save their own life?
Okay.
Do we have to do any disclaimers?
I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a doc,
I'm not any of those things.
I'm just a knuckle dragging firefighter
that's been through this.
And I like to, let me preface this
with the parable of the man that fell into the hole.
I don't know if you've heard this, James,
I think I've probably shared it with you.
When people ask me why I'm so open about my own experience,
both with my mental health struggles
and then finding improvement with psychedelic medicines,
which, you know, are illegal
and a lot of the places that we do them
and the medicines that we do, which I believe is wrong,
but the fact of the matter is it's true.
And the parable is this, the man's walking down the road,
falls in a hole and he can't get out.
The walls are too high and he's wondering what to do.
And a doctor walks by and our guy yells up,
hey doc, I'm in a hole, can you help me out?
And the doctor writes in a script,
throws it in the hole and he moves on.
And then a priest walks by, hey father, I'm in a hole.
Priest writes out a prayer,
throws it in the hole and he moves on.
And then a friend walks by, hey Joe, it's me,
can you help me out?
And the friend jumps in a hole.
And our guy goes, are you stupid?
Now we're both down here.
And the friend says, yeah, but I've been down here before
and I know the way out.
And so that's really sums up why one, we do this work,
but why I'm willing to be open about it.
And there's, yes, there's stigma, yes, there's blowback,
but to circumnavigate or sorry,
just to navigate the process,
one is to understand what your department does.
Are you a department that tests for substances?
If you're in a department that doesn't,
then you're much more open to explore MDMA
and other compounds.
Again, I recommend strongly urge that you do this
with a facilitator and not sort of on your own journey
of self-discovery, even though that's by the way,
how I started for the most part, I don't recommend that.
If your department tests for things and MDMA would trigger,
then don't do that.
Psilocybin, they can't test for as I understand it.
And again, I would verify this independently
cause you know, blah, blah, blah,
cause it's a fungus.
DMT, they can't test for it cause you and I tend,
and you and I and everybody listening,
makes DMT within your body.
And so there are certain things that won't trigger
any of those tests.
And I would proceed with caution to make sure
that you understand that ketamine is legal.
I believe in probably every state,
but maybe I'm honest, again, I don't wanna speak out of turn.
You wanna verify this.
Ketamine is its own situation.
Certainly helpful.
In fact, we actually did some private funding
for local law enforcement to have ketamine therapy
to help them with their situations
and they had tremendous success with it.
And that's under the care of a physician.
I know Terra Mind bringing Marcus back into the conversation.
They're making that available through employers
for people with treatment resistant depression.
So they're kind of staying on the FDA licensure side of that,
but working through that as well.
Ketamine, again, it's a full day experience,
even though you're gonna go and it's roughly in an hour
to have the experience, there is residual from it.
You're not going from a ketamine infusion therapy
to whatever you do professionally.
And you still have to get from the doctor's office
to your house and coming back into the real world
as its own sort of jarring situation,
but it's the best of what you can do.
And so there are options to it.
I know that psilocybin has been,
I've had success working with other first responders
that are still on the job with psilocybin
and not having any concern of triggering any of their tests.
But again, any listener interested,
they wanna verify anything I say,
cause there's lots of reasons I'm not a doc
or a lawyer or anybody else like that.
So please, please, please do your homework.
But there are ways to get into medicine work
without having to do the ones that can trigger certain tests.
And again, I'm not suggesting or pushing anybody to do this,
but if that's something that you're interested in,
you can find your way into medicine work
and not run afoul of some of your tests
where you can stay on the right side
of your department's policies.
And I wouldn't wanna put anybody at risk.
I know we've had other first responders
that wanted to come into ceremony
where we used a stack of medicines
and I had to advise them and not doing that for concern
that some of those might be close enough to an MDMA
or another substance that could trigger
and the risk of that's too high.
And so I would then tell them,
hey, this sort of ceremony and this sort of medicine stack
with this facilitator is not something I would suggest
given your circumstance.
There are ways to get there.
You just have to, I mean, just be heads up about it.
Just do the legal things like alcohol
and antidepressants and opioids.
Actually don't fucking do those.
Fuck, yeah, there's, I mean, this,
and you can get my soap box out on this one
to just look at something like this.
Like you made a comment of, I mean, I don't know
how many SEALs and other tier one operators
that have been through, I went through, fuck dude,
combat guilt, that's a whole nother level.
I've never had to like take a life.
My struggles have been trying just simply to save them
or see what happens when things don't go that way.
But I've got friends in our groups that, man,
the level of things that those guys are dealing with,
guys and gals are dealing with,
you can't even get your head wrapped around it at all.
Like the level and the depth and the weight of that
and the fact that then they go, hey, cool,
we got this thing that'll help you.
Just can't fucking do it here.
Sorry, bro, you're gonna have to go to Mexico.
You're gonna have to go to Costa Rica.
And, but that's, sorry, we can't help you here.
That's bullshit.
But they do have those options.
And here's to your other question.
I don't know how Ayahuasca sits on any of the testing scales.
I wanna say that it doesn't,
but again, that's something to verify.
And just be careful if you've got any listeners
that are going, hey, I'm gonna go do an Ayahuasca ceremony.
It's gotten popular enough now
that quality control is a concern.
Back in the earlier days
where it was very limited and very new,
you took so much effort to get to a true shaman
that you didn't have nearly the level of,
it's always a referral basis, right?
Now you can find them on the internet
and just be careful of larger groups of people
that you don't know.
Because once you're that far into it,
things can go sideways pretty quick.
I think another thing,
if people struggle with the morality side,
as well as the legality and the recent events,
I think underline how to remove that from your mind.
I'm not thinking of the right word, but it's not there.
Disprove or whatever the term would be.
Yeah, but I mean, just the story of the FDA
refusing to allow MDMA to be approved
for the exact reason that we've been talking about today
is the same FDA that approved OxyContin
that created the opioid crisis that we have now.
Do you know the story of how that happened?
The way they had that dude locked in a hotel room
for like three days and he used like,
I forget how the language was something about,
isn't shown to be addictive.
I mean, really use this strange language.
And the FDA, you think, is not some big organization.
Like it's a small group.
And right now you think about the efficacy of alcohol
wouldn't pass FDA approval.
So for those that are still in what I think of
the Nancy Reagan, just don't do drugs.
This is your brain on drugs bullshit.
And the Nixon hangover of all that.
If you wanna really kind of step away,
these are ancient medicines.
We're just a little late
and we've put our own Western spin on it.
The Puritan stuff, the Nixon part of things.
If you think about all the studies done on psychedelics
in the forties and fifties,
they're just recreating those by the way,
like people think this is a new thing.
It's just not.
Like this is back before color television.
And psilocybin and ayahuasca and all of,
these are ancient, ancient medicines.
And we ought to be, and another side is
we ought to be careful of how we're approaching this
and not over-Westernize the commercialization
of these medicines as well.
There's, for those that have been through medicine work,
this is powerful stuff that we are,
we're receiving benefit from,
but there's a lot more going on to it than just that.
And it's not a force to be treated lightly
or as just a commodity.
Yeah, if you're looking to your government
to make your moral decisions, you got other issues.
There's a phrase that always gets my fucking back up.
Oh, we need to see the data.
We need to see studies.
And you imagine Steve the Inca 2000 years ago going,
I'm not sure about this, this plant medicine.
I'm gonna need to see some research.
No, does it work or does it not work?
Has it got a trail of people that are dead now
because they took the wrong plant medicine?
No, okay.
You've got a lot of people that come back from wars
and now they do the ceremony and then they seem to be healed.
They seem to kind of progress and grow from it.
If it's literally thousands of years,
look at acupuncture, look at chiropractic,
really adjustment, manual adjustment of people.
Look at the way we eat.
Oh, we're gonna do some research
on whether organic food is healthy.
Or you could just not, you fucking idiot,
because it's common sense.
So this is what really gets my back.
I hope it's exciting in the psychedelic world
because the research is coming.
Yeah, we don't need the fucking research, mate.
If people have been doing it for thousands of years,
that means that it works.
So should you be studying it alongside?
Yes, should be waiting for research to tell you you can do it?
No, I don't need research for the acupuncturists I go to.
So if this is shown with high level of efficacy
and very, very low level of addiction and harm,
again, under the right situation with the right people,
that in itself should be enough.
But this whole we need research and data is purely,
so they're like, well, hold on, let's give enough time
so we can make a synthetic version of this,
abolish the natural one,
and then we'll sell it to you for a few thousand dollars.
Yeah, and you make a comment, I just want to,
for clarity's sake, and I still hear this from people,
and it's a good reminder that is well known
as the psychedelic medicines are and their benefits.
And I do have somewhat of an echo chamber, of course,
because the people in my life,
there are those that still think psychedelics are addictive
and they're not.
Ketamine has the potential to be addictive.
And I believe that to be the only one that has that.
Let me tell you, when you go do psychedelics,
you're not rocking the next day.
You're not, you're like, whoa, okay, I got to process that.
And so for any of your listeners that are still trying
to get their head wrapped around this,
there's more than enough research,
more than enough evidence, anecdotal people's testimonials,
but some of the misinformation is,
oh, these are addictive properties, they are not.
You don't get addicted to mushrooms,
you don't get addicted to ibogaine or ayahuasca
or any of those.
And so just to be clear on that,
that's not the one.
And yeah, and the fact that you can't,
there's a great chart out there
and you may want to add it into one of your links.
And I should be able to find it of like the,
what is it, the number of deaths attributed
to certain compounds.
And it's like alcohol, heroin, cigarettes, whatever.
And then you're like, and then down, it's like,
and there aren't any for psychedelics
because you basically can't die from it.
So it's marijuana.
I'm not a big fan of it myself personally,
as far as I don't like the experience,
but you look at marijuana related deaths,
it's basically zero as well.
Yeah, it leads to twinkie consumption and art.
And I'm not a THC in marijuana,
not a medicine that I don't care for either,
but I'm not against it by any stretch.
For those that they have a positive impact,
it just hasn't been the medicine that works for me.
But yeah, and to any of your listeners that are interested,
think for yourself, do some homework, have a good guide,
good facilitator, those words are sometimes
used interchangeably.
Not a fan of the word shaman, shaman,
unless they're in Peru or the Amazon somewhere
and they've earned that title.
I've never dealt with a shaman
and nobody I've ever dealt with calls themselves that.
It's kind of like if you meet Buddha on the trail,
kill him, right?
So if you think you've met a shaman, you haven't,
and I would probably steer clear of anyone
that uses that term to describe themselves.
Unless, and again, even I don't even think the,
I won't try to pronounce it in Spanish,
I don't even think they refer to themselves that way.
So that's probably a flag,
if someone's putting themselves out as a shaman,
it's like meeting Buddha, you didn't.
I'd say that word shaman is interchangeable
with the word leader.
Anyone who walks around calling themselves a leader,
usually you need to push them off the path too.
You're mostly not.
Yeah, and that's an important thing is you,
as this becomes, and I say this,
meaning psychedelic medicines and therapies,
and I mean, I went to the MAPS conference in 2023,
there were 10,000 people in Denver for that week,
and you're gonna get a mix of folks,
folks that are doing things the right way,
and certainly folks that are doing it for the other thing.
And you just have to be heads up about that
and not, you know, there's apples and there's oranges
and there's things like that.
So just like my experience, my first couple of times
in a group setting didn't go well,
even though it was the same facilitator
that we started our first responder group with,
first responder veteran group with, and it went fine.
You're gonna have some of that.
So if you're aiming for perfection,
you're probably not gonna find it.
Beautiful.
All right, well, I'd like to throw some closing questions
at you before I let you go, if you've got time.
100%.
Brilliant.
The first one I'd love to ask,
is there a book or are there books
that you love to recommend?
It can be related to our discussion today
or completely unrelated.
I have a number.
I consume books at a high rate and not to sound,
I recommend yours.
And I'll tell you why.
The first one, One More Light to me is special
because I listened to it with my youngest daughter
and it opened up a dialogue with her
because she has a lot of the things,
we have the same, she's a goalie in lacrosse,
that was a goalie in hockey and that's a special thing.
And she has EMS tendencies.
She's actually been on random calls with me,
like bike riding where she's like, daddy, I can help.
Like wants to be a part of that.
And in the beginning part of that book,
you describe the fire academy and that experience.
And I've never talked about that with my kids.
They knew I was a fireman,
but I don't even let them watch ladder 49, right?
Cause I don't need them to see the ending.
And by the way, I won't ruin the ending
for anybody who's not seen that movie, but you should.
And so it allowed us to have a dialogue about it
in a way that was super cool and created a connection point.
And I've recommended that book to a ton of people.
I think it should be in every fire academy.
And again, I'm not saying that because it's you
and it's probably weird for you to have to sit here
and listen to me suggest your book, but I do.
Anyone that's got a first responder in their life,
I would urge them to read that book
cause it really helps to show the impact of it.
And your second book, fucker, has been,
and I shared this with you offline.
So that's why we're chuckling is I started to read it.
I got it right away, right?
And I bought multiple copies of it
cause I've got some friends to give away the book.
And it came, it fucked me up, man.
It really, and I don't wanna use the word trigger
cause I think it's overused,
but it really brought back some stuff for me that was hard.
And raw and it's an impact.
I mean, it's a heavy book, man.
And I don't mean that in a bad way.
Like it's important book in the fact that it had
that level of impact on me where I was like, whoa, dude.
Okay. And it came of course, at the same time
that things were happening with my kids leaving
and all of that.
So the timing of it was there.
And so I do recommend both of those
and I will get through the second one as well.
And it's important for me to see that I'm not nearly
as far along as I thought I was
cause that really brought back some stuff for me.
I recommend Tribe from Sebastian Younger,
especially for those of us in any sort of service
or have been in service because it helps to explain
what we're truly missing when we leave it
and the importance of acknowledging that.
I remember reading once that leaving the fire service
is like having a death because you leave that family
and they move on that fire service continues
and you're not at the house anymore.
There's a lot to that.
The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer.
I've read that book probably 16 times.
I probably recommend that book the most out of anything
cause it applies to everybody.
And it will change with you as you're going
through your life.
And it's well, not maybe a full operating system.
It's a good one to remind us to get rid
of as much as we can the illusion of control
and just be accepting to what's being.
And once you get into flow of life
and you're doing what you're supposed to be,
those things present themselves.
Again, no coincidences, the universe will help you.
I'm a huge fan of that one.
And I mentioned earlier Michael Pollan's book,
How to Change Your Mind for those interested
in psychedelics and a nice way to see it.
And I'd prefer generally to read books.
The author is that narrate and get it done.
Michael Pollan is one of those you are as well.
I was glad to hear that you're gonna narrate
the second one, I thought you crushed the first one
even though you had to follow Josh Brolin's intro.
It made it, it's always better when the author narrates
and the author is capable of narrating.
I could go on and on, but I'll stop there for books.
Beautiful.
Well, I mean, you were the first person to tell me
that you had that visceral experience with Kinder.
And I think it was just a few days later,
one of my guests, I won't say his name,
but one of my guests has been on the show already,
a firefighter, he messaged me and said,
he got to about the same place that you did.
And it was again, that kind of mirror thing.
And obviously there's a lot more to the story
than just that, but it seems like those first few chapters
just really grab everyone.
And he ended up having like a dream,
like nightmares almost and woke up in a cold sweat
and he realized that this was,
because it was unpacking things, he talked to his wife
and now he's going to counseling.
And then he's finished the book since,
and the whole point is the book is actually about hope.
It's about post-traumatic growth ultimately.
But I literally, when he messaged me the second part of it,
I cried.
I'm like, this is why I wrote this book.
I mean, obviously there's so much within me
that I wanna get out there,
but ultimately it's just to tell that raw story
and give people hope that it's not a dead end,
that there is a way out.
This whatever has happened to you,
whether it's been in uniform, whether it was prior,
whether it was two or three generations prior,
whatever it was.
And so, I mean, yeah, I was moved to tears
because I'm like all that work,
because you write a book, you have no fucking idea
if people are gonna connect.
You just put a bunch of words on a piece of paper.
But so yeah, between you and the other firefighter,
it's very, very early days yet,
but I mean, I'm just so, so blown away
that it hit as hard as I wanted it to hit
because you get one shot.
You know, so thank you for telling me
and even trusting me to read the second one.
Well, I'll tell you, dude, that's such a rare thing.
I mean, let's just take a second with that.
Let's not gloss over too quickly.
Let's just look at what that takes
to be able to encapsulate in an act.
And just the art of writing alone is,
if folks haven't done writing that way,
and I've done just a little of it, it's such a skillset.
And it's true art to be able to accurately portray something
that nuanced and that deep and powerful and impactful
in a way that anybody that's been through that
immediately has, as you described,
and you're fucking right on, is a visceral reaction to it.
The power of that and the rareness of, yeah,
it's good on you, man,
because that is an incredibly powerful and rare thing.
Yeah, I can't even imagine what that must feel like.
I mean, it was, like I said, I was moved to tears.
And then the next step, and I've talked about this
to you and other people on the show as well,
but the next step is now streaming.
All right, now imagine if I can get that from a book,
what would it be with great acting
and the music in the background and flashbacks
to keep you kind of current as the story progresses?
And so, I just watched the Beekeeper with Jason Statham
and it was amazing because I'm watching it going,
if this shit could get made, then-
I watched the movie too and I was like,
well, this is about as cookie cutter as you can get.
And most people seem to phone in their performances
taking nothing away from that genre,
but boy, that's some pretty thin, that's not art.
Yeah, and I like Jason Statham a lot.
I'd love to get him on here.
Yeah, don't get me wrong, I do too.
And that guy has found, it's like if somebody comes on,
if you're selling cars and they want a red car,
you fucking sell them a red car.
He's found the thing that works for him to do.
And it serves its purpose, which I watched it
because I wanted just to take a break from everything.
And while I'm watching the Beekeeper,
I'm not trying to solve the world's problems
or any of my problems.
I'm simply taking a break from things for a while
and there's value in that.
So I'm not certainly taking away from him doing that,
but from the difference between entertainment
and the messaging and the power and the growth
that can come from your topic and your material,
those are different animals.
And thankfully, we live in a world
where we could have that spectrum.
Doesn't all have to be one nor the other.
We're allowed to have that.
And we've talked offline again,
I actually bought a copy of your book
to give to a person that might be able to offer some help
or guidance or insight into taking it into the next medium.
And I will see him soon.
And in fact, his copy is right there.
Fantastic, I need to get him on the show too, don't I?
You do actually, I'm gonna do the intro to the two of you.
And there's another guy I think you should talk to,
Rob Garnett, who's got One More Wave,
a great veteran nonprofit.
I think Rob was a SEAL as well.
He's got a documentary out by the same name
and I'm not to give it away,
but he decided, fuck it, I'm just gonna kill myself,
but let me go catch One More Wave
and went surfing and decided, you know what,
perhaps I shouldn't just eat a bullet.
And he's taken that and grown it into something pretty rad.
And Rob and I got introduced through the world
as you tend to.
And I watched a movie by Jeremy Jones
where he talks about surfing and snowboarding.
And I reached out to Rob and said, hey dude,
snowboarding is just like surfing, bro.
We should look to expand what you're offering
through surfing to include some snowboarding.
So I'm hoping Rob and I can continue
because I've seen the benefit of it here
when we did Military to the Mountains
and it's all I met Shay,
which I know you're gonna have on the show as well.
And he's, make sure you leave enough time for that dude.
He's got-
He definitely will.
He can hit, boy, he can bring it.
Shay, Sugar Shay as we like to call him.
Yeah, that guy's got, that guy could, he,
fuck dude, that guy is something else.
I'm looking forward to having him on,
but yeah, I'll get to,
I'll connect you with Rob and then Andy Sugarman
like we've talked about before.
Andy would be a great guy to have on the show as well.
Brilliant.
It's interesting.
I had a group of British police officers
that have a nonprofit called SurfWell
and they take cops surfing.
And then I think they're in the Cornwall area.
So the Southwest is where we have a lot of our surf.
And again, super therapeutic.
And then I've had Tom Hewitt, English surfer,
who moved to, I think it's Durban,
but anyway, South Africa and started a thing called
Surfers Not Street Children.
And all these orphans that they had,
they would teach them how to swim.
They would, I've said this on a few times,
but there were a lot of stories of these monsters
in the ocean, which there are in South Africa,
but I think it was also used.
True, they're called great whites.
Yeah, I think it was also used to keep certain groups
off the beach, back in the apartheid days.
So they're getting their confidence,
they're teaching them how to swim and then they're surfing.
And what was amazing is not only do you have
the whole sea, sand, ocean, the whole outside experience,
but then when they were tired,
and they learned these new skills
and had this kind of comradery,
they'd sit on the beach and then they would do the counseling.
So I've had a couple of episodes where surfing
has been incredibly powerful.
You know what you gotta do, man.
And because I like to get connected
into other first responder veteran groups
across the oceans and I don't see
why psychedelic medicine groups is a US thing.
And it probably isn't, I'm sure they're probably
doing their own, but why not cross populate that
and even bring it back to the earlier part
of our conversation where if you travel
and you break down those barriers of,
I meant to bring this up because you made the comment
of it was actually a policeman in Dubai
that was saving that cat is one of the things
I've taught my children is when you travel,
you can always find refuge at a firehouse
in anywhere in the fucking world.
If you're in trouble, you need a thing,
you go to a firehouse and if you have to,
you simply tell them your dad was a firefighter
and you will be welcomed in.
And I said you'd be welcomed in and cared for,
I'm pretty sure no matter what.
But if you need to play the daddy firefighter card,
that is an absolute guarantee.
And it goes back to that, we're all the same.
That's why you'll have your responders in every community.
As soon as you had fire, you had a firefighter.
Like it was immediate, like you go back to the guys
in the, in Ben Franklin's days and they had buckets
that they had on their horses.
And of course those buckets, they would dress up
because women like firefighters,
even ones from colonial days, I suspect.
Not to get off, but yeah, I'd like to talk to you
about that offline because I think you have
connections into people that I don't
and it'd be interesting to have a conversation
and see if there's anything to kind of be done
around that, you know what I mean?
Like it's not just an American thing, I wouldn't think.
Yeah, no, I agree.
Because again, the going back to what's forced to be illicit,
most countries have that, the prisons have that
for crying out loud.
So clearly if it's used in a negative way at the moment,
if we can especially force this conversation
in a positive light and maybe even remove
some of these ridiculous prohibition laws,
now all of a sudden you've opened the world
and country by country and some might be already ahead of us
and maybe they're the blueprint that we should be using.
So absolutely.
Excellent, I didn't think about it that way.
And you mentioned the word prisons.
When you have Andy Sugarman on,
make sure you ask him about his experience in prison work.
He and his wife Sarah had an unbelievably powerful
experience working with inmates.
And yeah, please make sure, because that is,
one, I didn't know that was a thing
in the way he described it was.
I think there's a show about it called The Work.
I don't wanna get that wrong, because it's not my area,
but be sure to have Andy share that with your listeners.
Absolutely.
All right, well then for people listening,
if they wanna reach out to you, just connect on social media,
whatever it is, where are the best places?
I would say my LinkedIn profile is probably the easiest.
It'll give you a pretty good show of what I'm about.
Again, I'm pretty open about my work
in psychedelic medicines.
And so your listeners are clear, I'm not a facilitator.
I don't organize groups, I don't organize trips.
I happen to have been one of the founders of our group.
Randomly, it just happened to be me.
It wasn't because of me.
And I guess you put me more on the consumer side of it.
And so the best way to connect with me is on LinkedIn,
but understand my limitations relative to that.
I mean, I'm giving folks my experience,
things that I would suggest
to try to recreate a positive experience,
but I don't have access to medicines.
I don't have access to lists of facilitators.
That would be something folks would have to source
on their own.
But if you're gonna go through that and you'll find them,
there's facilitators in every area.
And I think there's a gentleman,
and I don't wanna say his name.
If I can get this from him and it's okay,
I believe they're beginning to coalesce facilitators
in a group and I'll check in with him.
He might be someone you wanna have on the show as well.
But again, I don't wanna say his name
without his permission, but sorry, man,
I gave you more than just your simple,
hey dude, LinkedIn's fine.
No, no, but that's better, especially like you said,
underlining what you do and what you don't.
Well, I wanna say thank you so much.
It's been not only an amazing conversation
kind of exploring your journey
and some of the unique positions that you've held,
but also just really unpacking
the more nuanced conversation on the psychedelic side,
because the hope that I have seen,
the lives saved that I've witnessed with my own eyes,
with this as an option in the toolbox,
this isn't the magic pill,
it's not gonna work for everyone.
To me, it's like spirituality.
You gotta find what works from you
and it might be all this one religion
or it might be pure universe and nature
or whatever it is, but every single one of us is unique.
So understanding that that toolbox has these things
that we talked about in it as well,
I think puts so much hope into this conversation,
especially people that have tried.
And one of the lives saved was a guy that really was trying.
He did ketamine, he did all kinds of talk therapy, EMDR,
and it wasn't working,
but he did the ketamine
without any kind of person leading him through.
He did the first day of ayahuasca, nothing.
Just kind of resisted the medicine.
The second day, he had such a breakthrough
that he described it to me as more powerful,
even than the birth of his own children.
And it saved his life.
So I think that you coming on
and really storytelling these nuances
has been so, so important.
So I wanna thank you so, so much
for being so generous with your time
and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Well, listen, man, thank you for your kind words.
And I'm glad that it was seen that way.
It's always delicate when you're,
well, there's no like a convert, right?
Like you don't wanna overdo, over push.
And so you gave, and to make your platform available
to have these just open discussions about it
and showing people they can run the risk
of getting better in their own way.
So thank you for giving me that opportunity.
And you make, this is an easy conversation, man.
This is like any other conversation
that you and I tend to have
is that just happens to be recorded
for others to be aware of.
And so thanks for doing what you do
because it's a force multiplier.
So yeah, man, thanks for having me.
Had a great round and thanks for joining us.
Thanks for joining us.
Have a great friday.
Thanks for joining us.
And have a great weekend.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for ч 차돉ати,
I think this is the covering for today.
Yes, yes, thanks for joining us, bye.
Bye.
Take care.
Thanks for joining us.
And thank you for joining us today.
I'm getting nervous here,