In Waves & War: Marcus & Amber Capone On Psychedelic Treatment For Veteran PTSD, Rebuilding Life After War & The Mission To Heal A Generation

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“your intuition. And otherwise hard things suddenly feel effortless. This is what”

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delivers. And no matter where it takes me, which is basically everywhere, I arrive, rechargeed. So you want me to take a psychedelic and I'm supposed to get better. Marcus and Amber Capelon, a military family, they formed vets in the quest for healing. Marcus's fellow Navy seal friend introduced them to

“Ibo game. What is Ibo game and what was the experience that you had? I think”

it is a single molecule that gets extracted. It is extremely potent and what's actually helping the individual work through psychological issues. I was drinking extremely heavily, really struggling. He legitimately thought he would be doing us a favor by removing himself from the equation. I've been on pharmaceuticals for years, not getting better. I thought I wonder if this Ibo game

thing could work. I went from thinking this was crazy too. Wait, this is medical treatment. When he came around the corner, it truly was like being reunited with someone that I hadn't seen in over 15 years. This is exactly what the guys need. Civilians absolutely can relate to what we're doing and mental health brain health doesn't discriminate. Marcus Amber, thank you so

much for taking the time to be with me today. I'm very excited to talk to you both. People had been recommending the documentary in waves and war for to me for quite some time. I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll get to it. No, no, no, you really need to see this. I was on a plane about two weeks ago flying out of the country and I downloaded it to watch on the flight and

watched this documentary was incredibly moved by it. All the more so because I was on route to doing my first Iboca ceremony and that was 19 days ago. So this is the first that I'm talking about it publicly, but it was a life-changing and incredibly profound experience that I don't think I'll ever forget and just

an incredible gift, not just to myself, but to my wife who happens to be here

today, Julie, and to my kids. In the aftermath of that experience, I called Tyler, my steps on my producer, who's here as well. And I said, we need to get Marcus and Amber on the podcast and he said, we're already in an email exchange.

“Like, you know, we've already had some back and forth and I think that illustrates”

like the sort of synergistic nature of the universe. So it's perfect that you guys are here today and now. Well, Rich, thank you. And it almost seems like after the medicine, all these things just happen to fall in place, just like you said, having those email conversations and prior to them, even talking you about, hey, there's this couple that wants to be on the show and you

you met them halfway. And I think we've seen it happen all the time. I mean, we can go far out there and call it, you know, the universe or whatever, but I think you just become more aware of all these things and you're going to line up and yeah, I don't think it's an accident where here today. We're honored to be here. Yeah, I think it kind of on a metaphor level. It also illustrates one of the

reasons why I decided to have this experience, which is my insistence on just

being willful in my life, you know, this idea that you just always have to push,

you know, if you can't take a break. And the moment that you relax is a shame inducing moment where you're not being productive and your worthless and less

trying to unravel and this experience has gone a long way towards that. But when

you're in that place of just being present and being allowing, you know, like being in surrender, I suppose I've been in recovery for a long time. So I'm not unfamiliar with that concept, but it's still a struggle and a practice. And when you can just be and things kind of come to you, it's like, of course, like you guys were already, you know, like in your here because I wasn't interfering and

trying to make anything happen. That was such a huge part of, I think what eventually presented itself as this experience and this opportunity for Marcus to experience. I began, I thought that I should be able or would be able to fix it in my humaneness that I should be able to outthink it to outsmart it. Whatever the problem was, I was going to find a way to fix it. And I realized that

I couldn't do this on my own, that I had to completely surrender this idea that I could control and in relinquishing all control, everything fell into place. And so

“I think that this notion of there's power in surrender, the truth is form of”

strength is invulnerability, et cetera, has been a big lesson for us to learn because we too are like, you know, just try harder and work faster. And we're working through that. I mean, I feel like we're in the throws of it right now. I mean, we are, I mean, he's tuned the grinding, but we are in a way because we're just, there's a lot coming out of us right now and we're just trying

to put one foot in front of the other and really just focus on the mission. I feel like if we can continue focusing on the mission, the other stuff will work itself out or we'll surround ourselves with the right people that will help us

help guide us. But since day one, I mean, from the second, I kind of was able to

think a little bit clearer, Mike, 24 hours after my eye began. The first thing I said to Amber wasn't like, I'm better, we're good. I'm healed. I just said, this is exactly what the guys need. Like we have to figure out how to introduce this to them. So similar to you, which you're 19 days in your integration, I was 24

“hours going, how do we pay this forward? And I think that's what we've been doing”

since, you know, day one and to tie it all back to what you're saying a lot has happened over the last eight years and it has been through the power of Surrender that I've allowed it to come into our lives and it had been obedient and continuing to walk the path, but it is all in Surrender. Yeah. In the documentary, there's some pretty graphic illustration of the, of the, of the

more heroine kind of deployment experiences that you had, you know, obviously, you know, that that comes with PTSD and TBI and, you know, this is something that is happening with all of your team members. And from a kind of civilian perspective on this as somebody who, you know, wasn't in the military, like my relationship, like probably most people with what that experience is like is

from movies and television, you know, you watch zero-dark 30 or the hurt locker or American sniper and, you know, these, you know, creative expressions do a pretty good job of kind of illustrating this internal experience of what it's like to deploy and then come back home, like that scene where Jeremy Renter is in the grocery store and he's just lost, you know. What can you say about what that

actually feels like? Like are those accurate representations of what you were experiencing or, you know, what, what can you say about what people might not understand about the loneliness, the depression, you know, the sense, the loss of meaning and purpose that is, you know, kind of part and parcel of what that's

like. Yeah, I say the first thing is it's extremely subjective in nature. So

what I, what I went through is maybe similar to what someone I was went through, but how they're dealing with it is different. And for me, I was, you know, I don't want to put a diagnosis on it, but I was diagnosed with clinical depression and I was depressed. Like, there are days where I couldn't get out of bed, you know, days, weeks. I wouldn't, I just shut off. I didn't answer individuals

for years. I didn't talk to people for years and just kind of reconnecting and building those relationships back up. But trauma doesn't discriminate. And so whether it's, um, and head trauma doesn't discriminate either, right? You can, you can be in professions where it's more prevalent. So military around blast exposure or skydiving or, you know, IEDs or whatever. But that head trauma, many civilians

have the same type of head trauma. So they're dealing with the same type of, let's

“say, brain issues. The same thing with, if you want to call a PTSD or post traumatic”

stress, a civilian who may may have been in a really traumatic car accident, is the

know the difference that it's a battlefield trauma or if it's a civilian trauma. So

“that's why, you know, mental health brain health doesn't discriminate. It's all”

the same. We've been exposed to certain things and civilians have been exposed. And

this is why I never, there are many civilians go, well, hey, you know, I haven't done

what you have. And so this might be kindergarten. And I always say like, not at all. I'm like, what you dealt with and what do you experience is just as bad as what I dealt with my experience. And that's why we're dealing, that's why we both have anxiety. We're both depressed. We're both going to brain clinics. It's the same. We're just, we just took different professions in different paths. And so I think civilians absolutely can relate to what

we're doing. And we've, we've really done a very diligent job and everything that we've done around veterans and granted our nonprofit focuses on veterans. But we're, we're dealing with so many non veterans now because we all have the same issues. I mean, there's definitely a mental health. In terms of outreach in terms of outreach in terms of, well, in terms of inbound too, I mean, you know, look at our, you know, text messages and our DMs. It's constant,

like, where do I go for, I mean, just can't answer them. There's so many individuals. And I'm talking about individuals that are just, you know, not just, but like investment bankers or teachers or nurses. They're looking for the same thing. They're looking for healing somehow. They may be drinking too much or they may be coping with, with drugs and how do they get help, right? And it's the same help that, you know, my friends are asking for. And so it's similar. And so I,

“we've done a really good job, I think, of saying, hey, this isn't everyone problem. We're just”

right now or initially focused on the special operations community because that's where I came from. Yeah. And there may be quite a bit of shared experience, like to your point of, like, well, if you weren't a car accident, it's not that different. But there is, you know, something so extreme about, you know, the experiences that you have had. And when you see the results that, you know, are kind of illustrated in the documentary and, you know, in the work that you've, you both have been

doing, that is also very extreme. And I think that wakes people up and makes them pay attention, you know, versus the civilian who maybe is, you know, kind of slight depression drinking a little bit. It's harder to kind of like shine a spotlight on that situation in comparison to, you know, the veteran community. Yeah. We definitely put ourselves out there. But we also asked, we asked for it, right? It's a volunteer military. And sometimes we used to say, be careful what you wish for.

Right? Like I said initially when we started this conversation, we couldn't wait to get over there and get in the fight and then you don't realize potentially the toll it takes down the road. I mean, we see it with Vietnam veterans. We saw it with World War II veterans. There was not a plan in place as, you know, it's better now. There's a lot of support now, but there was really no support

“back then. And I always go back to like, oh, hey, remember that crazy crazy uncle or the grandfather”

who didn't talk to anybody or the Vietnam dad that was distant when how we know why. Sure. Or even World War I shell shock. Yeah. There's not even really understanding what's going on. Right. You talk in the documentary about this idea of just feeling like you're, you want to just go and get bad guys. It's a Superman complex on some level. And then you are quickly disabused of that kind of romantic notion. But as a special operator who's, you know,

continuing to go out on these deployments, there's this cognitive dissonance. Like here's what I

thought it was going to be. Here's what it actually is. I love these guys. I love, you know, so much of this life. But also some recognition of, you know, even on it, if it's on a somewhat unconscious level of like what it's doing to you. And I don't think at the time we ever think of what it's doing to us, even on deployment, even in bad scenarios or bad situations that have happened. You get over them pretty quickly because you just assume this is part of the job.

And we used to talk about this. Like if we lost friends in a, on a mission, we're like, hey, this, this happens. You know, we signed up for this job. We knew it. We read all the books. We know we're going to lose friends. We drink. We cry. We remember our teammates. And then compartmental and wake up the next day and you're, you know, next mission here comes. And you don't even think about what happened before. Maybe there's a little bit of that. We go, okay, lesson learned and

may not put my face in front of the door the same way that we put it in front last night because last night we lost two guys by doing that. So there are lessons learned and you try to, you know,

we always make lessons off of bad things that happen. We call them after action reports, hot washes,

But that's all we're doing. We're, we're fixing the problem so we can continue mission, right? So you can Charlie Mike and we can continue moving on. And like you just said, we compartmentalized everything very well. Master compartmentalized. There's a red snake. Like, have terrifyingly. Yeah, has that changed in the training now as a result of, you know, kind of just the undeniable amount of evidence of the long-term mental health implications of chain change. We go through this program.

Yeah, Rich changes slow as we know bureaucracy is is bureaucracy. They were talking about this.

I remember it's starting to be talked about in about 2010. The first individual step forward

and said, hey, I was driving my car in the whole world just like went black. Like he said, his is a tunnel vision came and like he couldn't even barely see anything. It was just and he had a pullover because he was going to get in a wreck and he went to a brain clinic and they said, yeah, you have, you have TBI. We would call them TBI. So parts of the brain that were knocked and and if you do them on certain scans, it looks like they're black or there's holes there.

It's not really holes in your brain, but just means that there's blood not circulating. Those connections are not communicating and, you know, now we're finding out, you know, depression, anxiety, et cetera because of those parts of the brain that are turned off.

“And so the first person stepped forward and honestly, the community shunned him.”

They're like, you're crazy. This is, you know, what, what are you talking about? But he was like the

first one who had, I would say the, the gall or the courage to just raise his hand and say,

he, you know what, I'm struggling here and I need help. And then after he did, you know, then the next person and then the next person. And then I went to see Psychiatrist in 2011 on the West Coast when I was an instructor and I went in there and I just was like a little embarrassed. On my hand, this tough guy, I'm in this profession and I'm about, I'm going to, I need to talk to you because I'm not doing well. And he said, man, Marcus, he goes, you're about the 200th

guys coming here over the last couple of years with the exact same story, with the exact same symptoms. So first off, you're not a problem and I'm glad you came in, you know, here's some antidepressants. No, but there was an issue and more guys were stepping forward because there was a problem and guys wanted to fix it. So to your point, shift happens slowly, but it's happening. We were talking outside earlier. They put sensory deprivation tanks at some of the commands.

Just for people to bring their nervous system back to, you know, baseline, being present, being, you know, here versus just redlining day in and day out, you know, all the time. Like there's only so much, if I pour this, this water into this cup, it gets to a point where it's going to start

“overflowing. That's what we were doing. We could only take so much before our life starts overflowing.”

There was no release, Bob, the release valve was just copious amounts of alcohol and I would just like to quickly add for further contextualization that in our program, that's we've seen hundreds. I mean, 1300 special operations veterans come through and the documentary does a decent job of pointing this out. There's a common thread of childhood trauma that exists in the observations that I've made. And that trauma is used to fuel, I think, a lot of these states of high

performance. And so it serves you to a point and then it becomes, you become like a Greek tragedy, what fuels you is now threatening to kill you. So I think that there's just a necessary component of the ideal, you know, recruit that they're looking for, that they need that sort of fueling. And then they also need that compartmentalization to be able to do the job. So it's like,

“how can you create a release valve that's enough to keep someone in the fight? And I think they're”

working on it. Yeah, yeah. It almost seems necessary. Yeah, that's very well put. Like it all it all tracks back to childhood trauma. I would imagine, you know, almost unanimously, you know, on some level. Like the archetype of the person who seeks out buds and kind of wants this life is wired in a certain way from very early in their life. So it becomes a self-selecting process, right? And the military kind of understanding that archetype and how to work with that archetype.

And then in the aftermath, when you're experiencing these issues, so much so that you're willing

to suffer the incredible embarrassment of going to the psychiatrist. On top of that,

there must also be this sense like, well, if I tell this person like what I'm really feeling, then I'm going to lose my superpower. Like, then I won't be able to like do my job. I'll be vulnerable,

I mean, that's one of the concerns here with, for instance, uh, we're talking about eye behavior or psychedelic treatment for deep trauma or depression. That's a concern.

“If I reach out for help, and I tell individuals I need help, are am I going to get sideline?”

Same thing in athletic, you know, pro sports. It's why they hide so many injuries, bad injuries, because they don't want to lose their contract, right? And in our world, it's losing the job

that you literally love doing, because it's not a job. It never was a job. It's just a passion

at lifestyle that you chose. And so that's a real concern is reaching out and actually going through a treatment and not even eye-be-game, but just let's just say simple talk therapy and, you know, prescriptions that may help you get through. I don't know if you're able to work again after you make those choices. So it is a, that's a big struggle, too. So you know what? I'm not going to go ask for help, and I'm just going to continue overflowing my cup and trying to see how long that goes.

“Which, of course, then, you know, it backs the family and the rubble out of fact is pretty significant.”

So in this semi civilian sort of life that you start to live where he's an instructor and you

think like everything's going to kind of normalize and it's getting worse. One of the hardest parts of the documentary to watch is the home video footage of that with the kids, you know, and like your interaction with the kids, it must be difficult for you to watch that now, to see how detached you are. And you, Amber, are like, God bless you. You're like trying to figure out, like, okay, what can we do here, right? Like you're starting to try to see what you can do to help

Marcus. You're going to brain clinics, you aren't, you do, there is enough recognition where you're like, okay, I need to like try some things, right? And there's this extended period where you're doing all sorts

“of stuff, but not really getting results. Well, yes, and I have a day to the rescue again,”

I thought, well, if he just gets out of the military, because the command that he was operates at an extremely high tempo and leaving that command was really difficult for him, because he thoroughly enjoyed being there. And I thought, well, if we go back to the command, it's like going back to the game of Russian roulette, so many friends died there. If we get out of the military, maybe then that gets him out of this limbo phase. And he too is looking for a change. Right before

we made this decision, there was a helicopter crash in Afghanistan, we're 31 members of the command were lost. And it felt like, in many of them, you know, friends, it felt like we can't go back to that. And so getting out seemed like the only option that we had. He was, you know, 40 at the time, Ish. And he had an opportunity to create an entirely new path. And still, you know, have a lot of his life left to live. He was put on anti-depressants a year or two before that. And

they were making him really numb for the most part. So I still felt very disconnected, but I thought maybe this change would be what we needed. He wanted to completely forget his time in the military for the most part and went into private banking. There was like no bigger shift that could come from being a part of the sealed teams to a part of a private banking team and Beverly Hills. And that's when the wheels really started to come off. And it became pretty clear that we weren't

going to make it. I didn't think I could survive as a single mom in California. It's very difficult to get out of the state once you're kind of trapped in it by the the family court system. And so we agreed to move to Texas in 2014. We bought a beautiful dream home on the golf course. I'm still holding out hope that we can have, you know, a proper fresh start. And that's when things really escalated because it was this perfect storm of not having community identity, purpose,

passion. Now being stuck together, even without a guaranteed paycheck, the military, you know, it was really good on that. And we were completely disconnected. So Marcus started drinking much more

heavily and right around that time a friend took his life. One of the first seal suicides. His wife

had the wherewithal to donate his brain because she said he's not, he was not himself in those

terms like CTE or interface astrogelyl scarring. These are degenerative brain conditions that come from concussive sub-concussive and blast type of reverberations repeatedly. Marcus had played football. He had been a breacher in the seal teams working with explosives. And so suddenly my perspective shifted on what this actually was. Maybe this wasn't in his control as much as I thought it was. Maybe this cocktail of pharmaceuticals that were causing these highs and lows and just crazy,

things were not his, that that wasn't entirely in his control. So I did shift my approach to more of a brain thing and less of a psychological thing. He went to many brain clinics. He did many sort of alternative treatments. And they were making him worse and with every failed treatment, he was becoming more and more hopeless. So I knew that he was battling with thoughts of suicide.

And as suicide interventionist explained it to me very effectively. I'd never thought of this

before. She said when you have soldiers who are trained to identify the threat and they identify themselves as the threat, they're taught to eliminate the threat. That's when suicide is on the table. He legitimately thought he would be doing us a favor by removing himself from the equation. And I knew that time was ticking. In a my human mind, this brain clinic, that therapy. I couldn't think this thing because despite my attempts to get him into all these places, he was becoming

more and more despondent because things weren't working. When you went to these brain clinics and you got your brain scan, were you seeing the black spot? Did you get a diagnosis? They provided any clarity or was it just increasingly confusing? I only went to one brain clinic that actually did a real scan that showed that I had many dark spots. And it finally just, I guess, solidify that there was something wrong with the brain with my brain. And it wasn't just,

you know, what I thought the whole time, this is just in my head. I'm just, you know, suck it up, you know, you're being soft and you're not making it, right? And so at least that

“gave us some relief to go. Okay, I'm not crazy. There is something wrong here. How do we fix it?”

And at the same time, how do we fix it? I'm still really struggling, right? I'm still have thoughts of suicide. I thought many times. I'm like, well, if I take myself out,

you know, Amber, I mean, I thought through this a million times Amber and the kids will go to

the funeral and it'll be sad and I'll have a lot of people there. And then that'll go away and they'll be some sadness and then eventually they'll be great, right? Because dad won't be here, constantly causing the problems. And I just thought it would be some initial pain for future success for them. And, and, and I really contemplated that at the time. And that's just like a completely backwards wrong way of thinking, right? That's the, we call it the voice in the head.

It's our voice in the head that is constantly telling us certain things, our ego and our ego is

“trying to fix the problem. That's what it's for. And it's just not the way of thinking. We have a,”

you know, we, we thought about a campaign called Silence the Whisper, which is basically sourcing that thought that's completely untruthed, completely false. But that's how I was thinking at the time. And so, finally get a brain scan that shows that, yeah, hey, you have something wrong with your brain. And so, I think Amber, then at that point, was really trying to figure out, okay, how do we fix these, how do we fix this brain? I think that's where I begin kind of

came into the conversation, even though. Not really, not really. No, but I mean, eventually, it comes into the conversation. Just before that, before you share your thought, Amber, I wanted to kind of highlight what you shared a moment ago. This notion of the soldier trained to be hyper-vigilant to identify the threat and when the, when they realize the threat is

them self to take out that threat. I'd never heard that described in that way. Like, that's

“harrowing. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what we're up against. Coupled with the fact that Marcus and so”

many others are prescribed anti-depressants as a first sign of defense. Many of them don't work. And there's always a label on the side of the bottle that says can increase the risk of suicide alley. So why are we treating veteran suicide with medications like to suicide? It just didn't compute for me. There was a seal who knew that we were struggling. If you remember, there's a scene in the documentary about a gun and him do a ski bottle. He had come over to our house that night.

he was able to intervene in a situation that could have ended badly. And he too apparently was struggling.

“And eventually went to Mexico and did eye-begin and came back and immediately reached out and said”

this could really help Marcus. So a year before Marcus actually went during this time where he was much more comfortable doing brain clinics and out of the other interventional treatments here stateside, we knew about eye-begin, but it sounded crazy. And so he was very reluctant to go throughout that one year period where it was like failure failure failure failure failure. I thought, again, I wonder if this eye-begin thing could work. I had nothing else. And I knew that I was going

to have to leave because the kids had started to voice, you know, our daughter said, how much longer do we have to do this mom? And, you know, just how old were they at this point? That was 2016, so our daughter would have been 14, our son's 16, you know, they were really tough ages. And I just, I thought, it doesn't matter how strong I am because I am inadvertently affecting them by making them live through this craziness. And so it really felt to me like this

ultimatum, like this is it, or I am gone, but I had to approach him in a completely different way, a way of love and no longer using guilt-shame condemnation, this sort of raw hurt that I was feeling, and just, I approached him in a way that I hadn't before. And I said, I will fight with you every day

“for the rest of my life, but you have to fight with me. And we have to fight differently. And that's”

where that surrender came in, just knowing that I was out of options. This episode is brought to you by AG1, which is an acronym for awesome green goodness all in one delicious and simple, low lift daily habit that supports how you want to feel. How simple?

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“to the beginning. I mean, the two of you have been together since basically you were teenagers, right?”

Yeah. I think Amber was 17. I was 20 years old. I was a sophomore in college. I was playing football. I was a quarterback. Amber's dad had recruited me from New York to play, so I played ball for Amber's dad in college. I was a whole another day. The coaches didn't want her out. It was like right out of Friday night. I was at the post of the program, right? I remember the program that the back of quarterback was dating the coaches' daughter, and so I used to

get a lot of that from the team. And we didn't meet when I was actually playing for him. He had left pop coach-wise. Within a couple of months, we met. We met right after that. And then he got a phone call from one of the coaches saying, "Hey, you know, Marcus is dating Amber." And then Amber and I took a road trip to visit him up at Northwestern. And that was a bit awkward initially, but we have not separated since. So I don't know. 29 years in July. Wow. And we got a quarterback, you know, you're kind of like

this giga chat dude. I mean, like the pictures of you, I mean, you're just like this strapping, you know, a super tall, incredibly fit guy, quarterback on a team. I mean, like the doors are swinging

“wide open. You can do anything. And you decide you want to go into the Navy Seals. What year was that?”

That was 99 when I had the idea. And I had the idea because I stayed up late one night and watch GI Jane on that was it. Shout out to me more. I didn't tell that story by the way for a very long time as everyone could imagine, you know, I definitely not my seal buddies. Like, oh, by the way, oh, you got here from watching Charlie Sheen's Navy Seals in the 90s or whatever. I was like, no, no, I watched GI Jane. And I had no connection to military growing up. I could make a

group in Long Island, very middle class family. It wasn't like very extremely patriotic. Amber grew up more. She still has a note that she wrote at 10 years old about thanking veterans that we have in a frame, which I thought is super. It's cute. I didn't grow up that way. So for me, when I saw GI Jane and they talked about, like, this is the best of the best. You know, as you were talking about,

I've always, yes, I was a quarterback, but I was always like a struggling quarterback. You know,

I always had to work for everything really hard. Nothing. In my opinion, nothing came naturally. I got, I worked every day in the summer. I stayed, you know, came in early. I stayed, stayed late. And I still do the same thing. And so when I watched GI Jane and they said, this is the best of the best for me. It was like that, that, that, that what you were talking about early is that achievement.

“Can I achieve something that is greater than myself, the best of the best? And that's how I got”

interested in it. And it was a team thing to, for you. He'd always been part of a team. And so this was like, you know, kind of like America's team. Right. Right. Right. Yeah, I tried to get in the surfing. I grew up in a beach town, which is an individual sport. My dad didn't really like surfing too much.

And, but I was always part of a team. So I never played like an individual sport. Except swimming.

I was always, I was a competitive swimmer when I was like four years old. So, like you. So you do the whole thing, the buds, the hell week, all of that. And you end up basically spending 13 years in service in special operations. Seal team 10. Seal team 6. You become a buds instructor. Right. Yep. What is it that that maybe people don't understand about what that experience is?

kind of sharing their stories and writing books about this experience. And it's in part like an

“illustration of the horrors of war. But it's also, there's also like a sort of public fascination”

with this lifestyle and a sort of valorizing kind of romantic lens on it. And, you know, what can you say about what it was like? Well, I would say it is extremely tough. So definitely one of the hardest things I've done, which is get through training, both physically and mentally. And I think physically everyone prepares when you show up on day one. I had 175 individuals in my buds class. And I looked around and I said, how am I supposed to be one out of every five here that are going

to make it? We had some of the best collegiate athletes, prior Olympians, guys that were really fit. I was a bigger guy. They called me big and it was funny. I said, guys, you don't know what big is like. Like my offensive line was big. Those guys were six, seven, three hundred. But so I was a bigger

“guy, which is usually a little bit tougher. You have to carry your weight, right? So guys that are”

5, 10, 180 pounds have an easier time. And so I always had even at buds, I had to work and I had

to work extremely hard. But what I had is grit and determination and my can never fail attitude. And I took that right to training and I got through buds and I got through my teams. And I, you know, I guess I excelled and I did well. And you know, going back to your question, what was that like? I would take the shirt off my back. I would give my last dollar to every individual that I served with. And I think that's the part that draws people in, is that you're doing something

that is much just take yourself completely out of the equation. Like this is about everybody else. I remember being home one time on break in New York and I was in a bathroom and some guys walked in and they were in the salt next to me and all they kept talking about was money, money,

“money, money, money, money, money. And I remember just feeling like kind of slimy. And I said,”

oh, and I remember going home and telling my dad, I said, Dad, I was in the bathroom at this club and all these guys kept talking about was money and I was like, I don't get it. You know, like that's

not what drove me or drives me. I don't understand that part at all. You never joined the military

for money. So for for me and for Amber, it's always been about mission. Even though I didn't think of I wouldn't call it at the time mission, right? Because for me, this was just another team sport that I can be a part of. I can be like-minded individuals and, you know, maybe excel at but it was that brotherhood, it's the camaraderie, it's the togetherness that when I left the military, I lost and I spiraled in purpose and you were serving a purpose. It wasn't like you were just

on a team. It was like you were, especially after 9/11. So there was a, you know, gap in time there between buds and him being in the teams where the towers came down a month before he became a seal. So things changed overnight. And even before that, for us as a couple, we had actually decided to break up when he decided to go into the military despite me coming from a very patriotic family. I just didn't think that military spouse life was for me and then, though, and behold, a couple

of weeks later, I found out that I was carrying our son. And that was a real inflection point for me as a woman for us, as a couple. We actually spent most of my pregnancy apart. And then in the 11th hour, Marcus said, like, we've got to do this as a family. And so we came back together. Got married. I went with him to buds. He was one of probably two or three seal candidates that were married. So for him, he was juggling, you know, the daily grind of buds.

And then coming home and having to be dad and husband, it was a lot. And right as, you know, he's about to finish training the towers come down. And so it was this constant adaptation cycle. And from that moment, there was just a fight in me. There was a clearly a fight within our community to be part of a force of good. And that came with a lot with feelings of tremendous purpose. Right. With certain deployments on the near-term horizon, like in the aftermath of 9/11,

there must have been a sense of like, okay, well, we're going to get sent somewhere pretty soon here.

And we wanted to. And that was that was the other part of it. When I first wanted to join the military

wanted to be a seal, I wanted to do it for just what I read. And at the time in 99, mostly books.

most interesting was all the buds stuff. Because I think that's what everybody talks about is the difficulty of getting through training. And it's such a high washout rate. And I was like, oh, man, I can do that. I would feel so good doing that. But then when it turned to war, that was the focus. It was like, well, now I want to use my training to go overseas and do something with this and go get bad guys, right? It's just it would be like you training every day swimming

in the pool biking and running and never having the chance to compete. And that would probably

be a struggle for you, right? If you never like put your training to work, it'd be practicing football every day and never being able to play on Saturday or Friday night, you know, or whatever.

“And that's what we wanted to do. And then that was the focus. And there was such a shift in”

called it a paradigm shift when the towers came down. I was in third phase. And we were, you know, we call it cooking and joking. And it was fun. But then we saw this shift from the instructors who had been in for 10 or 15 years. Like they knew what was happening. We didn't. We just, first we thought they were joking with us. We thought, we thought the towers didn't come down. We thought this was another gimmick that they were playing because there's so many mind games in buttons, right? They're trying

to get in your mind and trying to make you quit. And we thought this was another joke. But obviously it wasn't. Yeah, we actually turned to a chance of why they keep talking with us. Like, you know, we have three weeks after graduating. But it was real. They brought us into the little TV room. We watched it for 30 seconds. And we went right back out. And we were doing, uh, it's called the grinder where you do physical training PT. And we went right back to doing push ups and flutter kicks

and like nothing happened. But the shift in the perspective from the instructors, they had this demeanor of like, oh, we know what's happening now. Like, we're going to war. This is a totally different perspective than what was happening before. A new level of intensity. It was a completely new level of intensity. Yeah. And then as you said, I couldn't wait to get on deployment. So I couldn't wait

“to go over to Afghanistan, Iraq, and start working. And how are you processing that, Amber?”

At the time, I mean, I just felt like he needed to get over the, I completely supported him. Because, um, you know, there was a righteous anger that I was feeling. And I just wanted to, I wanted him to be able to do exactly what he just said, you know, use the training. And now did I think it would go on forever. And I think that the shifts would happen after every deployment cycle where he would be, you know, feeling more and more distant from the family. No. But at least in the

beginning, I was super supportive. I was always supportive. But, you know, certainly it's, it's

even though humans have been fighting wars for millennia, I don't think the human psyche is really built for it. And when he would come home, you know, things had shifted. He didn't even want to be home after a certain period of time. Because he had to be always and not mindset. And if he wasn't deployed overseas, he was training to deploy. And so his focus was just not on the family. It's a very selfish profession. But maybe everything we do is selfish in a way.

“Because, you know, there's a lot of talk around balance these days. And I think at our stage in life,”

I think we could have more balance. But when you're just starting out, you're trying to do, it's very difficult, I believe, to have balance. So imagine having a family, which, again, Amber mentioned, we were one of three families. The other two didn't make it through training. We were the only ones. And really, we were the only ones that stayed together for, for this whole time. Balance is hard. And I think you do have to put all your effort and focus into what you're doing

to be really good. And that comes at a cost. As Amber mentioned, we were gone 300 days. You know, give her a take every year, whether it's training or whether it was deployment. And so you come home. And you try to put a family life back together. But there really is none. Because you're only thinking about what's my next training trip, what's my, you're biting your

time. You're just like the never, never present. You're never, you're never present. There's no,

you don't even know what the term present means at the time. You're just going, well, and I can't really do that because I have to go train or I'm going on this trip for three weeks. I can't take care of that. And of course, as soon as you step out the doors, when everything happens. So like air conditioning breaks, the toilet breaks, the house breaks. And then Amber has to, you know, raise two children. Which comes with a lot of resentments. Keep the family to share.

How many deployments? Six. Six deployments. Yeah, mostly combat. To both war zones, Afghanistan, interact, two different fights. Definitely Afghanistan is extremely

two different types of war. If you want to call that and they were, they're both interesting. They were both, you know, my perspective was fun. I enjoyed every minute of what I did. But as Amber mentioned, every time I came home, I was a different person. Now I didn't think so. But, you know, you can, you know, from the children and from her perspective, you just become, you know, I don't know, like a machine or like an individual that feelings had a friend once who told

me, I went to see the psychologist, the commensiologist, and first a few different things many years.

And he told me once he said, Marcus, he said, men have about 42 feelings. He said, women have 240, and when I literally, and I told a friend that he goes 40, he's like, that seems like a lot. It's pretty high. Yeah, it's about two. He's like, I have two feelings. So, you know, we just didn't feel, we just did. Well, you're specifically trained not to, not to feel. I mean, you're like at that tip of the spear of, like, like, feelings are only going to, you know, become problems with

you to know, in theater, right? Sure. So, he's only home 65 days a year. And when he comes home,

he's a stranger. Yeah. You know, how are you, you know, trying to manage the confusion of that,

and trying to connect with him when he's, you know, essentially a ghost in the house.

“I think there was, um, at some point, just a complete cessation of trying to connect. I think we were”

married on paper. We were living completely separate lives. My parents were divorced, and so I didn't want that for our kids, um, because that comes with challenges and remarriage and blending families, come with challenges. I've, you know, experienced that. And so, for me, it was sort of a marriage of convenience. I, I did really love Marcus, but I, I loved a version of him that was no longer present. And I held out hope that I would see that guy again one day, but I knew it wasn't under the circumstances

that we were currently living in. And so there came a point in time after many deployment cycles and many deaths in our community that we thought taking a break would be, um, the best for our family. And that was actually when things really started to unravel, because we had been accustomed to living this separate life. And I had become pretty good at it. Now it was home all the time, and we were strangers, and not only strangers, we just didn't like each other. So it caused

“issues with the kids to have him home. I think they created this mythical figure, especially our”

son on what he would be. And what the kids were delivered back, you know, after these deployment cycles was not what they had, you know, envisioned in their mind. Nor was it mine. I knew Marcus was really struggling. I felt really bad for him because his family had become his teammates. And, um, I think at some point it just was a, clearly unsustainable. What was it that prevented you from just ripping the bandaid off and saying like, we're getting divorced?

A few things. Um, my dad as a football coach has always drilled and made do not quit.

And because our, the beginnings of our relationship were a bit controversial, he basically said, he's going to break your heart. And I'm going to break his neck. And I never wanted my dad to be right on some level. You don't want to, it all comes from not wanting to give your dad's satisfaction. Yeah, well, there's competition there. There was a part of that, but also just not wanting to quit and also not wanting, you know, my kids to have to deal with the divorce.

And ultimately, like, I really, really, really loved the Marcus that I met, but he had to become someone

“else to survive the circumstances that were put before us. And so, um, I think I wanted to”

give it a go, give it a try. One last effort, when he became a buds instructor and we were home all the time, I held on to this hope that we would buy beach cruisers and ride down the street as a family and just everything would be great. And that was not the case. We did that too. We bought beach cruisers. Yeah. And we're able to kind of hold that vision of the Marcus that you knew and some level of belief that he could find his way back to becoming that person or had

you relinquished any kind of like expectation that that could ever happen. I got into this when I was 20. Um, we had two kids right before I turned 23. I think my naivotate at that time was a survival

that, like, you know, the way he would get through buds and then our life would be normal. That's

when everything started or that they would capture of some of the lawn and our kettle of some of the lawn. And then we would just get back to normal. I didn't have a real notion of reality. Mm-hmm. It's sort of the frog being boiled in slowly and water, too, because initially in the aftermath of 9/11, and this is kind of illustrated in the documentary, the idea was, oh, you know, you're gonna go over there and it's all gonna get taken care of pretty quickly. And then

you'll come back and life will be relatively normal. Like you couldn't have foreseen, there's gonna be all these deployments, and this is gonna go on for a very long time.

“That's right. Yeah. And so I think the same naivotate that I could get him back one day”

was very, that's very accurate. And what was your support network like at that time? Were you, did you have people to talk to about what you were going through or were you just internalizing all of this? Yeah, I had become very close with the other spouses whose husband's markets worked with. And so we just took care of one another in ways that sort of filled the gap for having grandparents or having your spouse in home. I had them. But I also had just this really

unhealthy level of stubbornness that caused me to create massive walls around my heart and just not ask for help, not tell Marcus how I was feeling. And then that caused a lot of resentment. And same for us, we didn't talk about our feelings or we would definitely talk about our problems at home because they were extremely common. I would say they were more common than not. And so that was a topic of discussion was you know, who's having issues at home when

it was many of us. There were definitely outliers and we always look at those folks and respect them

“because they were able to get through it without the struggles I think that we went through. But”

we were both dealing with the same thing just in a different, in a different like I had my team. I had my guys, I had my CrossFit workouts with them in the morning, Amber did the same thing. She had her girls, she had her CrossFit gym that you know they went to and they'd go have coffee after and talk about all the things. So we were dealing with it in our own ways. They were waiting for us. We weren't waiting for anything. We were waiting to again go train and

go back out. And so it was a different perspective of how we viewed life. And so I became an instructor and then I was drinking extremely heavily and you know whether it was coping, probably a little bit of everything, it was a little bit of coping, it was numbing, numbing out. Yeah, a lot of you know, celebrate with alcohol in the community. At least in the old days of the community celebrate with alcohol, you commiserate with alcohol, you, everything sort of revolved around

this drinking culture that only fueled the problems that we were having. And there are a lot of guys rich that have stopped drinking for obvious reasons, right? It's just not productive, you know? I mean, yeah, right? We can go down the rabbit hole here, you know, if you want at some point. Oh, today is two years since you stopped drinking two days. Three. Oh, three years. Wow. Wow. You took this game by a whole year to the end on this day.

Yeah, that's great. He's like been very intentional about saying, you know, I feel so much better this morning because I chose not to drink last night. So it's not even really like at least in my observation been white, knuckling, sobriety. He fell away. He has white knuckled periods of sobriety

in the past, never this long. But I truly feel that he's put healthy things in that void

and how to much different perspective this time. And yes, it is to the day, to the day, to day. Yeah, of course, you know, preaching in the choir, I feel better, you know, you just, you feel like you have this glow, your skin looks better, or everything is better, shocking. Yeah, it's great

“for you. But I think it was early 2017 when she brought up I began and I, you know, was the pitch.”

I mean, the pitch was about I began and I said, so you want me to take a psychedelic and I'm supposed to get better from that. Like, think about someone who's never touched a drug before. Yeah, this is not a topic that I know anything about. Right. And here, you're going to go take this drug, drug a psychedelic that is supposed to, is going to heal you and it's going to make you better. And I just imagine being a approach with that and just thinking, I mean, literally said, like,

that's absolutely crazy. Like, that's insane. Like, what, what are we talking about here? Like, what is this a joke? And at that point, again, you know, I had been on pharmaceuticals for years, not getting better. So I just thought, and then this is, this is a whole nother level. And I like

this, you know, quote unquote warrior from, you know, brain injury and PTSD. And so it took,

“that was like a conversation and that conversation, if I remember, I was kind of compartmentalized after”

that because, well, he was just like, no, absolutely not. But you did have the team member who had had that experience. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. And I think that probably really resonated with you, but you also were very uncomfortable with the idea. I wasn't comfortable. But when it's crazy how this works, you can listen to every Western medicine doctor from Hopkins or Harvard or wherever, but your friend does something and it works. That's all you need. I actually had a call

from an officer one time, Naval Academy guy, just like a absolute stud who said, Marcus, I have research this topic. I've read every book. I know everything about it. I've talked to all the experts. He's like, I was still skeptical. Is it going to talk to you for 30 seconds on this call? He's like, I'm convinced like I'm ready to go. So here's a person who's extremely bright who looked at all the research. Still thought it was crazy, but talk to me, who said, do this,

“just save my life. That's a trusted example. And that's how, that's how this whole thing was built.”

It was really off of trust. Because think about trying to talk to your psych or go to an expert

at academic institution going, hey, I'm thinking about going to do IVA. First, they might say,

especially in 2017, what is that? Right? Now it's a little bit, it's a lot different. I mean, actually, they're recommending individuals to go do this. They say, hey, we don't have anything for you. You're going to have to go do this somewhere else. But that's the trust in the community. And that's what I had from this individual who literally, life did a 180 changes life. It saved his life. And so that's what convinced me to say, okay, maybe I'll give this a try. And then Rich,

I did the research. There was a lot of papers and a lot of work done for many years. I mean, I think the drug was introduced in the 30s in France. So it had been out there, commercialized, and people utilizing it, the more you read about it, the more you go, you know what? This is

“something that I think potentially can help. So I went from thinking this was crazy too.”

Wait, this is a medical treatment. This is, this is legitimate, even though it's not FDA proved here in the US. But, you know, we've been going to Mexico and Costa Rica for 20 or 30 years to do stem cells for a reason because we couldn't get them here. So it doesn't mean that it's bad. This episode is brought to you by Noble Mobile because look, it's just so dang difficult to put the phone down. These things are useful. They're just too addictive and it's making us depressed. It's

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“hydration from something that I have to remember to do into something that I genuinely look forward to.”

So check it out, right now, all of you guys, my listeners will receive a free element sample pack with any order at drinklmnt.com/richroll. So Amber presents you with this, the stakes are high, your marriage and your relationship with your family is on the line. Is that, and then you do this research, you become convinced that maybe there's, there's some there there, right? But at the same time, it's like,

well, if it doesn't work, you know, it's like, what? It's going to switch up, it's going to just, a switch is going to get flipped, and you're going to be, like, the expectations that you're going to come back, and it's all going to be good, like, you know, that's, that's a lot. That's tough now, too. There's so many, so many of the guys that we see these before and after, and you're like, okay, so if I come back and I'm not that, like, I mean, yeah, you feel like

you're really going to tank at that point, right? Because you felt like you've tried everything, and this is it, and if that doesn't work, right? So the expectation, I almost think it's better, not to have expectations, because of course this doesn't work. This is a treatment, just like a cancer treatment or something else, or it doesn't work for everybody. But, I mean, arguably,

it's extremely powerful, and I laugh I'm laughing now. I don't know if you know what I'm going to say,

we were in, we read a event in Texas a few months ago, and there's this world-renowned cardiologist, and he's listening to Amirai speak on stage, and he's like, this sounds like it's just kind of putting some band-aid on, on the symptoms. And Amber didn't know he was like this world-renowned cardiologist, older guys, like 85, and she's like, hi, he's like, I'm going to challenge that, and she goes on stage. She's like, I would consider this actually pretty curative.

I'm more curative than palliative, and I'm like, granted, this is my own hypothesis.

“Most of medicine is putting a band-aid on symptoms. Yeah. And we didn't know what, I'm honestly”

rich, whenever I approached Marcus with this, he was in California, who was doing this sort of trifecta of things, like magnets on a brain, and hyperbaric oxygen, he was a patient and another clinic, and I thought this is it. If this trifecta of things doesn't work, then I don't have anything, anything left, and I came to visit him. The trip ended an absolute shambles. It was horrible, and at that point, I thought it's over. I've got to make my plan to leave because he's going to

run out of funding at this place. I've got to get the house on the market. I've got to know what I'm going to do. School is starting, dot it up. I come home from that trip unexpectedly. I don't even tell him I'm leaving. I pack my bags while he's a magnet brain therapy, and I go to the airport and I get on a flight back home. And I called my parents, it was, I'd come for I think for my birthday, I called my parents collectively and said, this is it, I told my dad, I was quitting.

And he just said, you know, you're not disappointing. You're not quitting. You're choosing your children. And so there was like the whole reckoning, and there was peace for a moment. And then I was overcome with the reality of the fact that I could move on with my life. They would be forced to live with probably losing their dad. And I had one thing left that I hadn't talked to him about in quite some time. So I re-oppression. He did run out of funding. He asked, you know,

am I coming back home? And I said, yeah, come home. And that's when the surrender came in on a level that I didn't even know. I was capable of. I just used sheer love, true, sheer love and approaching him and complete surrender. I don't know what this will do, but if you agree to do it, I will fight with you. And we made the appointment for him to leave to go to the clinic. It kept

“getting pushed. And I just remember begging him to keep holding on for 10 more days, for 8 more”

days, oh wait, it's 12 more days now. It just the time kept changing. And I thought he was going to

just say forget it. But when I finally did get him to the airport and he got out of the car,

I realized that this is all I had. And if it didn't work, then we were completely out of options. And I flew in the next day to visit him. And I was so afraid to see him because I knew that I would

me up from San Diego airport. And I got in the car and I said, I can't go. I can't go. This is crazy.

I'm going to drive across the border. And yeah, I was going to go to the clinic where he had been dose. And it just to caveat that when I got out of the car, I literally said, I don't think this is going to work. Like, don't think I'm going to come back. I don't think this work. I was like telling Amber, don't get your hopes up. Like, this is still, I think a little bit crazy. Like, do you think we've tried all these things? Now, I'm going to go do this other thing. Just don't expect me to come

“back any different. And that's how I literally, which was probably why I was like, oh, that was”

goodbye. Um, was don't expect anything to change. Yeah. So the next day, I fly in and I'm in the car saying, like, I can't go. And she said, trust me on this. He is asking for one thing. He's asking for you. And I was like, how can that be like, like, we hate each other, you know, on some level? How, why is he asking for me? And so I had given him my word. And I held to that. I did go. And I heard him walking down the hall. And when he came around the corner, it truly was like

being reunited with someone that I hadn't seen in, you know, over 15 years. And um, I knew immediately his countenance was exactly the way that it was when I met him. Because I knew him before he was the seal. I knew him before 9/11 before the war deployments. I knew him before the insanity of all

“the shit that we had lived through following the military. And he was back. And it felt in those”

early days too good to be true. Like, you don't want to believe this or you find yourself letting the walls of your heart down. And then immediately, um, you're like, oh, gosh, just, you know, don't get too comfortable there. It's all going to be taken out from underneath you any minute. Wow.

So this is where we have to talk about what it is. You know, okay. So, I mean, that's amazing.

I want to get more into that. But I want to understand like what it is that you experience. So you have buy-in from Amber. There's a lot of pressure and expectations. You're going to go do this thing that you know, very little about, very powerful psychedelic drug experience. You go in with trying to have no expectations about what's going to happen. What is I've again and what was the experience that you had? Yeah. I mean, I mean, I began as just a single molecule that's extracted from

the aboga plant, I guess, in in West Cabone, Africa. It's been used forever for rights of passage, for stomach ailments, for mental health, for brain health. We just haven't been introduced to it really over here. And so think of it as a single molecule that gets extracted and they found it to be the most potent and what's actually helping the brain, helping the individual work through psychological issues. And so from my experience, it's taken just like any other drug. It's in a

pill form. You do a ton of preparation before it. So I was working with a cyclotherapist who's also a psychedelic integration coach who's also a PhD in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. So I had like this kind of trifecta of, you know, she had a lot of different expertise and so would approach me in different ways. And so I had good preparation going in. And then because I began as one of the few psychedelics that have a potential cardiac risk. And so it's a true medical treatment.

It needs to be handled that way. And so you're doing blood work and your analysis and you're doing

“EKGs. And so you have to be good medically cleared before you can go do that. You can't have any”

drugs in the system. You can't have alcohol in the system. You have to actually get titrated off of any antidepressants that you've been on. So that's, and so think of individuals that have come in that have been on them for 10, 15 or 20 years. And we get plenty of individuals. They have to work with a psych to get off those. And it's very difficult. Those last couple days. You're on these drugs for years. And now I'll sudden you're off them. But that's at the point when you take eye

beginning. It's at your system and you take it right away. So you take it in pill form just like any other drug, 45 minutes to an hour. It starts to get in the bloodstream and it starts to affect you. And for me, it just started to get deeper and deeper and you start hearing a little bit of

buzzing in your ears because your your your senses are awakened by about 400 percent, you know,

smell, touch, you know, hearing. So you get this buzzing and then you're just slowly like getting

This was the most challenging experience in my life. I, I probably puked for 8 to 10 hours straight, the therapist who had been working with, I began for 20 years, said Marcus, I've been

having worked with this for a really long time. She's like, I've never seen anybody struggle like you.

I took it as a joke or a badge of honor, kind of like that was my competitiveness. Like, oh yeah, I had the hardest experience. Yeah. It was really challenging. And so I was constantly puking in a bucket and then I would have these visions all night. And the visions are if you saw in the documentary. So it's really a life review and it's subjective because it's your brain,

“kind of in your conscious kind of bring forward things that you need to see. So I had some”

childhood issues that I was seeing with my dad. And then I had some more time issues that I had. I let lost my best friend. That was a big part of my journey. I had a lot of guilt and shame that he was not here. And I was still here. And then it had very light issues. And those light times

during the experience was always with Amber and the kids. And it would take me out of that really

tough psychedelic experience. So the trauma that I was dealing with and it gave me a bit of like light and whiteness. And there's always with Amber and the kids. And our arms were always interlocked. And what it showed me was that I had everything right here. I didn't have to look external for for anything for for life, for purpose, for for striving to be better or to achieve something. I was like, wait a minute, you have everything that you need right in front of you.

It's Amber and it's the kids. And those were my moments of lightness during my experience. And I loved them because it was like unconditional love. It was like perfect. You know, it was like,

“you know, if you want to be called connected to the source, it was like everything that you needed”

was right there. And that was it. And then that would dissipate. And then I would go back into like kind of dark, you know, deeper, traumatic experiences. And they was very dark. It was some of it was very ugly. Images that were ugly, scenes that were ugly, a lot of fighting, you know, a lot of struggle. And as the night went on and I had more of these light experiences, I just felt like if you had a backpack on with just filled with a thousand pounds of bricks,

as the night went on, the bricks just kind of kept getting tossed out and you just felt lighter. And you felt like the weight of the world that you were perceiving just was falling off your shoulders.

So when I finally the drug war off, I was able to get some sleep and I woke up. I just felt like,

wow, like the backpack is off completely. Like I'm, you know, I just felt like I was healed. I just felt like any of the weight that I was carrying was gone completely. And all I can, all I want to do is see Amber because that was my moments of love during my really dark, traumatic. I began experience for me. And it's not traumatic for everybody, but, you know, for individuals who have trauma, there's parts of pain there. And so when I saw Amber, you know, I just embraced and I didn't

say, I feel good. I'm better. I'm healed. I just said, literally, this is exactly what the guys need. Because I had friends at the time were really struggling like I had been. And that was the start of it. It was just like, how do we pay this forward? Someone paid for my experience there. We were talking earlier about how expensive these these treatments are and how much struggle it was for us to get me down there to get someone to pay for it. And I just thought, we got to figure out

a way to get other people paid to do this, you know, and that was the kind of grassroots effort of us starting, you know, the work that we've been doing that for eight years. Amber, you were getting a emotional when he was sharing that. And I was thinking,

“he tells this story all the time. You must have heard it many times. Like, what were you”

experiencing listening to him, share that? I feel like, you know, every time I give public testimony or even today, I get emotional because we walked up to such a line of no return. And it is just so overwhelmingly humbling to have, you know, a future in front of us. It's a reminder of those times and how difficult they were, how far we've come, how special our love story is and, you know, how much we've fought for one another, even despite all of the hardships that we've, you know,

Yeah, I always wanted to fight for him. I love him so much and it's a reminder of that.

And it's wild how different our relationship is now. I mean, it's literally 180 where Amber mentioned before we almost couldn't even be in the same room with each other now. We literally can't not be in the same room as each other. You know, it's just, it's wild. Like, I tell Amber, if I go on the road for a day or two, I'm just like, why don't I go back or why isn't she here? You know, it's just, you know, we're doing everything together now. I mean, I consider us best friends.

Um, it's a different, uh, definitely a long ways away from where we were before, bridge. So for this skeptical, minded person who's listening to this and is like, come on, really, you know, did it, did it have that significant of an impact? Like, what did it do? How is it possible

that this could be that powerful? You know, I, I wish I had the answer to that, but I think

it goes back to when I was done with the experience where I just felt like I had guilt, I had shame, I had, which is real depression. I just felt like all that kind of floated away. And of course, I didn't last forever, but it lasted for a really long time. And it enabled me to build, you know,

“if you want to call them, you know, new neural pathways, right? New neural networks to allow myself”

to not have guilt, not have shame, not regret, not be upset that you treated Amber Terribly for years or not have regret that you weren't present for, you know, our children. And so you kind of deal with that during the I begin and it goes away. And, and, you know, the weeks and months after during your integration, you're trying to build those good habits and those good, uh, pathways and so you can continue healing and you can change them forever because you've, you've just built up

these really deep tracks that you couldn't get out of and now you're building kind of new tracks. And so that takes work. And so Amber, I think, has done a really good job of explaining it,

uh, it's similar to kind of like a stock market ticker where, you know, you always want to be going

up, but after I begin, you're kind of going straight up, but then there's some points where you hit, you know, you, you have some low points, but those low points are so small now and then you immediately

“tick back up. So as long as you're trending up and that's what I feel like I begin does,”

you, you heal because life catches up and nobody doesn't have a bad moment, you know, maybe a bad day and that's how it was. It was, it was, you know, it was five steps forward, one step back, five steps forward, one step back and that continues on and it continues on today. I mean, I have to work every day to stay where I'm at and for me now it's not medicine work. I'll do medicine work if I need it, but I don't need it. And now it's, you know, it's breath work, it's meditation,

it's, it's a sensory deprivation, it's being present, it's, um, for some people, it's prayer, it's reconnecting back to their faith. It's, um, having community, um, having purpose and these are all the things I think you can build in, which you heal. I have a lot of observations, you know, having lived through it as well as having witnessed hundreds of others go through our program at that. And I think that ultimately what it boils down to, why it's so effective, is a couple of things.

It seems to give people a completely different perspective. So ego, dissolution or, um, ego-dath sometimes, um, is referred to, um, these treatments. And I think the ego is our protector, and it's our best friend and worst enemy. It's the voice that that says don't do that because you could be hurt. It's what put the walls up in my heart. It's stories that we tell ourselves, some of them, many of them, not even true. So it quites the ego and gives someone a different perspective.

So, for example, Marcus was bullied as a kid by his dad by his peers. And then in one of the, I begin experiences, Craig, we've had wrong. You saw your bullies being bullied and realized that it wasn't you. There wasn't something fundamentally wrong with you. It's that you became a target for someone who is also being bullied. And so that perspective shift, that rewriting of the narrative, that loss of ego helps someone show up in a way that's far more authentic. And then

“the connections are authentic. Now, that leads to what I think is probably the most important part”

of this, which is that feeling of connectedness. My observation has been that many that emerged from an ibugain or 5MEO or really many psychedelic experiences, um, with various compounds are feeling connected again to self, to purpose, to God, to family, to nature. And they are able

say, um, I didn't realize, an avocado was green. I'm feeling for the first time ever, um,

oranges, smell so beautiful. And these are things that, because they are so in their minds, before they were feeling connected to anything on the outside world. Yeah, it's somebody recently who hasn't been able to smell for seven years, smelled at the retreat. They were, uh, the chefs were making, uh, squeezing fresh orange juice and they had like 50 oranges. And you could smell it throughout the house. I was like, wow, that smells good. Let's go over there. He just turned around and started

bawling. He said, I haven't smelled anything in seven years. He's like, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever smelled in my life. And this was, you know, two days after, as I began experiencing,

“and that's what we're seeing all the time. Like, what does it do? Like, it's doing real physiological”

things to the, to the body. I mean, if you want to get into a little bit of that, because you, you talked a little bit about the psychological aspect. But I think, you know, what Stanford is shown and what science is really excited about is the healing properties of the brain, the actual physiological, biological makeup of the brain. Well, I'm happy to get into just a high level of review of that, because the Stanford study is a big part of the film, thank goodness. So I thought

that I became my biolittle bit of time. We were doing on these brain treatments, because I had become afraid of what Marcus was dealing with on a physiological level from his history of football and last exposure. And I thought this, you know, might be a temporary mandate, but what ended up happening, and I was observing was the complete return of Marcus's neurological functioning.

“So, an example of this, he, we had a discussion about filing an extension for our taxes one night”

before bed. The next morning, he says, hey, what are we going to do about our taxes like tax days, you know, right on the corner? I'm like, we discussed this at length. It was clearly like alarming. After that, he was reminding me, after I began, he was reminding me of things. Don't forget, Axe, don't forget why. What about Z? And so I was just astonished. And I reached out to anyone and everyone that I thought would care, researchers, doctors, pathologists, clinicians,

military leaders. No one took me seriously. Finally, I was connected to Dr. Nolan Williams at Stanford brain stimulation lab. And he said, he would study this, because he believed my hypothesis, what I was seeing in regards to the neurological function. And so that component of the film, is really what validates so much of this work. The, the, what they observed in that study was both psychological and physiological PTSD, depression, anxiety, effect sizes,

improves 86 and 93% cognitive functioning. But then the brain imaging was what was really,

really interesting. There was just this return of neurological capacity that they'd never seen before,

which is obviously more studies need to be done. Right. Nolan Williams, unfortunately, and tragically has passed away, is the work at Stanford ongoing in his absence. Yeah, his team is, he became a very, very close personal friend of ours. And so his loss has just been tremendously impactful for us, especially because he was such a pioneer in this area of study

“and yeah, his team is continuing. But I think everyone has taken a giant step back for just”

the grief process. The movie, the documentary opens with interviews with, with veterans who are participating in the Stanford study and kind of closes with them. And you're immediately struck with the vacancy in, in these people's eyes. Like, they're just these people are checked out, you know, and you can see to some extent, like, what they're like in the aftermath, and I was craving,

like, I want to follow these guys. I want to see what happens with these guys. But it's basically

telling the story of the birth of the scientific community starting to take this seriously and until look at it. The personal testimony is like so wild, you know, like that that it could be this impactful from a neurological perspective with respect to TBI, the rewiring of the, you know, neural pathways, the impact on depression, PTSD, and also the very long tail of it. This isn't something that wears off in a week. Like, at 30 days, at 90, you know, a year later, you know,

the significance of the impact is still very resonant, right? Like this has staying power. Yeah, I would say that alterations, right? Yeah, alterations they talk about in the science world, and it seems to have a long duration. Many individuals do go back for retreatment. It's still you know, it's still a drug and it's still a treatment, and nothing works one time forever.

probably going to get out of shape, you're probably not going to feel well. So this is something

“that you may have to continue. I know individuals that go back once a year just as a reset now.”

But it's never ever as difficult as the first time. That first time is a real purge. You know,

I feel like the first time was like the 70 to 80% there. And then they may have 20 to 30% to clean up after that. And so individuals now, some go back once a year just as a reset, reboot, just to continue cleaning out the, you know, the filter and making themselves better and they're constantly improving. I never hear anyone going back and having like a bad experience after like, oh, yeah, I feel credible again, you know, everything is good. And I'll go back again next year just as a reboot.

Marcus has gone back. I think he's six times total in eight years, almost. So about once every year, but I would say he started in the basement of his soul and what he was experiencing there was so much darkness was a reflection of what he was carrying on the inside. And so each year, when he's gone back, I think he's gotten a floor higher. He's in a pretty tall sky scrapper, but I think he's like standing on the roof now. I think that, you know, the experiences

have gotten easier the last one he called "Blessful" where before, you know, the first one was really

“dark and that's what you imagine. The last one was, you know, my, my small periods of”

lightness that I had with Amber and the kids, my last experience was like six hours of nothing but pure bliss on conventional love, complete kind of connection, the whole time, right? And so that's where I'm at now, at least with that medicine. And I'll just continue doing the things I do every day to continue to heal and, you know, promote that there are treatments out there that, you know, may help individuals that are struggling. And, you know, I do definitely want to say, this is something that

should not be down on your own. I definitely, you know, we believe full heartedly that or

or audedly, this needs to be regulated, be done carefully or especially with the right experts and

the right medical support. And when you put all those things together, then we have even, you know, more healing, right? And if we do this kind of wonky, we're going to have bad outcomes and individuals can get hurt, but done the right way. This is true, true healing. And we're not just saving ourselves, we're saving our families, we're saving our children, we're helping generations. And, you know, I mentioned it right from the start. This is the work that we can't get away from. We love doing what

we're doing and we'll continue doing it. I want to get into the work that you're doing and the service aspect of this that has obviously gendered your lives with so much meaning and purpose. But this is the opportunity for me to share what I just went through. Yeah, a little bit. I was going to have things like that. I don't want to be indulgent about it, but, you know, I am in the early kind of aftermath of this, you know, experience that rock to me. I mean,

I would say to your point about taking it seriously, like it's not nothing, like this is not for everybody, like this is a extremely intense experience. And I didn't take the opportunity lightly, either. And it really rocked me. I went into it. It was different from what I saw on the documentary, what I went through because we did the Iboca route, so I'm curious around like what you know around the differences there. So it's all however many alkaloids, not just the Ibocaian alkaloid and it was

done. It was conducted in the Boeite tradition for the most part and it begins on Friday night. There's, you know, the indoctrination and kind of there's a lot of ceremony and and then from Friday night, you know, all the way through the morning, just being just inundated with the, I hesitate to even call it music. Like it was just the most

“confronting, you know, cacophony of sounds. If that's what made me feel like I was, you know,”

chained up in Guantanamau and couldn't escape. Like it was, and I had a head full of the documentary. And I'm like, when am I getting the polar rides of my childhood again? Like when am I going to reconnect with my inner child? You know, like I went in for very much for those reasons. Like I've been sober for quite a while. And then in 12 step, I've been in talk therapy for decades. I have a men, like I do a lot. Like and I have healed a lot and grown and evolved and changed and transformed

in so many ways. And yet I'm still hamstrung by some early childhood stuff or, you know, deep, deep grooves in these patterns that, you know, make me behave in a certain way that no matter what I've done, I'm still sort of like prey to them, right? And so, you know, this has the promise of hopefully rewiring some of that or helping me to kind of retell that childhood story.

you know, and I'm not getting that. It's like the medicine, which is really this consciousness is provoking me and prodding me and trying to root out my defense mechanisms and, you know, all of my resistance around this and like I'm not doing it right and I'm not seeing what Marcus saw and you know, and why is it not happening? You know, it was extremely uncomfortable like to the point of like when is this going to end and there was a lot of darkness and the hallucinations

in the visuals after four spoonfuls of this stuff were coming at me so relentlessly. But I couldn't I couldn't fixate on any of them and none of them were recognizable. And the moment I kind of focused on one, it would go away and something else was coming at me. So it was an

“experience of total disorientation and extreme discomfort. And even now, like I don't remember a lot”

of it. So it's not like, oh, I had this specific thing and I can tell you the story and it helped me resolve like this confusion that I had around that. It wasn't linear in that way at all. Yeah, and you know, the facilitators in the ones who've been doing this for a long time say about

15 to 20 percent don't see even any visuals at all. So they go through this whole

tough experience without seeing anything, but they're getting the results from them. And so even know they haven't looked into those deep traumas on the on the drug, on eye-be-game, or any boga the weeks after with the integration, you know, the brain's feeling better. Is that happening for you? Yeah, so yeah. So because you're 19, you're 19, 19 days. Yeah, so essentially, and then, you know, I was combatocian tired. I couldn't move like the whole

next day. And then it kicks up again. And this is more of a rebirthing and a repairing process. And it was very beautiful and and extremely healing. And it was overseen by women, you know, that in my case was was was good. Like there was this like beautiful maternal energy, you know, this like unconditional love that I found to be very helpful. And at the end of it, like it was really this magical experience of like coming home and and having kind of even though I didn't

get like that kind of visual experience of of confrontation with my past, a sense of completion, and the beginning of telling a new story around that has left me feeling resolved in many ways over stuff that has caused me just anxiety. And you know, at the root, similar to you, like I grew up in a household where it's like if you're not achieving like you're, you know,

“you have to earn love basically, you know, and the way you do that is by distinguishing yourself”

and going out in the world and conquering and accomplishing things. And so it's always this kind of

external drive to be recognized to be validated or to feel like you're only as valuable as, you know, what you're able to kind of show other people in terms of like what you've done in the world. And that can be incredibly empowering when you're building a life. And as you were saying earlier, like these superpowers become your Achilles heels. And it's really a weakness now that has gotten in the, I've built this incredible life. I have everything I ever wanted and then some.

And yet I struggle to experience joy and gratitude and, and the ability to be present and the full extent of intimacy with my wife and, you know, the richness of my relationships with my children. Like these, these things are difficult for me to connect with. And I went and did this

“because I, I recognize that and that's what I, that's what I want, you know, and that's what my”

family deserves, you know, that I've been unable to completely fulfill. And, and like I said at the

outset, I do feel like it has been this incredible gift to myself and to my family. But it's also

not a panacea, like my wife will tell you that I was crusty this morning, you know, I was working out in the gym and she came by to say hi and I was a little like, you know, like, but I caught myself and I'm like, hey, that you're off your, you're off your game a little bit. But I would say overall in the balance of things, I feel incredibly calm and comparison to how I'm usually just kind of like clutching and anxious and hurrying and rushing around. And then also as somebody with a long history

with, you know, alcoholism and addiction, just my relationship with craving has changed a lot. Like you were saying like you can't do stint, you know, like I, I didn't have coffee for, I can't go

the thing Friday, you know, by the time it's Monday, like I'm still hallucinating, like this is so powerful. It's not like civil assignment. Like it's in your system. I'm seeing stuff, you know, even though it's been a couple of days afterwards. But by Monday morning, I'm like, I'm going to have a cup of coffee. I'm so looking forward to this. I can't wait. Make the coffee, take a couple of sips. And I was like, let me take it early. Yeah, I was like, I'm really, you know,

and I poured it down. And that's not to say like there's coffee in there. It's like I'm not, you know, but I'm probably drinking 20% of what I was like, it's just, it's different. Like I didn't expect that. And when you hear these stories of the impact on addiction, like now I can really understand that,

like I've never known what it's, what it's like to not feel that pull, you know, coffee to

back out alcohol. These are all the things that most of the guys just get ripped like they're done once or after the they go through the treatment. Do you feel like the the bricks have been kind of pulled out of your backpack after I do feel lighter. I just feel like it's fine. Right. You know, it's like, I don't, everything's good. I don't have to, I'm not, I don't feel that like attachment to things having to be a certain way in the same way. And like I said, like I'm not

cured or anything like that. I'm just noticing it's subtle and it's making me understand the importance of the integration process. So I've heard both of you talk about like, yeah, it's, you got to do the work. It's about the end. And it's like, those still sound like vague terms to me. Like, what does that mean? I don't know that I really have like a program locked in for how I'm practicing that. And I want to make sure, especially in this special time of neuroplasticity that I'm doing

what I need to do so that I'm taking full advantage of like this moment that I'm experiencing right now so that I can take the actions that will lead me towards the reason why I did it in the first place.

“Well, like you, you caught yourself, quote unquote, "Cresty in this morning." I think that's one of”

the biggest, I was going to say that. That's one of the biggest takeaways is that I can catch myself now before I react, where before it was pure reaction off of like impulse, where now impulse control, or where you're just more aware before you say something that may hurt your wife or your children. And I will catch myself now and as taking years to be able to do that, where before it just may happen. Even if he does it and acknowledges it to me, it sort of like erases the fact that it ever happened

because he's never been able to acknowledge it. So he's not only aware, he's you know apologizing

or just not, it's just not happening, but I think that those micro shifts are actually macro in the lives of those that they impact. So are you working with an integration coach? No. That's probably. Yeah. I would highly recommend that. You're going to hook me up. For sure. We have plenty, I work with, again, a different person, but he's a, works with a lot of first responders and veterans, licensed therapists, psychedelic integration coach,

actual Buddhist monk. He was everything right after my last treatment. And he goes right to the soul of it. So he's a surgeon. He's like, I don't want you as a client for the next three years. That's not what I'm doing here. Like I want for three weeks. I want to fix it, get you on the right

“path and then move on. And that's what we do. And we just work through cuts right to the heart of it.”

And I think that's would be, you know, someone like him is someone that I always feel everybody should

work with because you're just kind of solving all the issues that you're kind of talking to us about right now. And they're able to just get to that point. So I highly recommend healing compounds with the right integration coach after these experiences. It was explained to me that and even though your experience wasn't exactly maybe how you had envisioned it, maybe the next one would be completely different. Here's a bit and completely different. Did you do five MEO DMT?

No, that was the other thing. So first of all, yeah, like I'm beating myself. I'm not doing it or what am I missing? This is not working. I, I traveled all this distance and it's kind of like the way that's everybody is. I've been told, like, you're not doing it wrong. Like it's doing

“exactly what it's supposed to be doing. And you're going to get out of this what you need to be”

getting out of. So, you know, just abuse yourself of that. But I didn't do, yeah, didn't this didn't have the five component of MEO DMT aspect of it. And so I'm curious around like why that's part of the protocol that you did and that you take veterans through and maybe did I miss something because I didn't have that. I don't think so. There's this sandwich study proved that you don't need

did. They just looked at it. Right. So they did the imaging and then the symptom rating scales

and everybody scores literally just went down to practically nothing. That was without the five because we had to do an observational study and it was only an I begin. What five MEO does there was a doctor in Mexico years ago that saw because I begin could be so difficult. Five MEO is almost like the polishing. It's very very spiritual. Psychedelic, you know, extreme connected to one-ness source. I'm conditioned to love however you want to do it. So if you have a very

difficult I begin experience. You have your grade day. Five MEO kind of brings you back to like making sense of all the darkness that may have just happened. And so that's where the balance. However, again, going back to the Stanford study, it just shows as the weeks kind of pass by. You kind of get to that place anyway. So it's almost like doing it overnight or

“I think if I were to describe it, I begin for those in our program. Anyway, has been really”

effective in closing the door on the past and no longer letting that impact. You're showing up in the world. But five MEO tends to open a door to the future and really, you know, get some one into feeling more connected. Yeah, I mean, or, you know, I like what Trevor down Ambio says, he says the way he explains it to people is I begin kind of power washes you from the inside and we know how hard power washing is. It can, you know, takes the skin off you. And five

MEO kind of pollishes you after that. So you kind of have like the hard sandpaper initially to to, you know, get to the root cause. And then five kind of just pollishes you and kind of makes it makes it final. Yeah. That's a non-medical perspective. Right. One of the coaches I think also described this to me that like, you know, we, we now shall have these deep rooted neural pathways and Marcus's neural pathways and actually mine for a long period of time. We're just like

frustrate to the bottom of the hill. And so, you know, anything kind of sent him just straight to the bottom of the hill. What I begin to do for him and as done for so many others is clear of those or not clear cover those tracks. And then what working with an integration coach does is whenever you're naturally wanting to get in them, they're covered. You can pivot, pivot, and create new

“tracks. And so that makes a lot of sense to me. I think that it's, you know, been very intentional”

for those in our program to work with the coach to create those new tracks. And really to give advantage of that period of your plasticity. I can tell you that I do feel different and, you know, after decades of trying lots of different things. I mean, my situation is nowhere, you can't even be classified in the same universe in terms of like the intensity of what you've experienced. But we all have our, our pain, right? We've all, we all have our lived experience and our challenges. And

it has been quite profound in that regard. And I just want to say that this is something that I changed my mind about over an extended period of time. You know, I'm very, people who listen as podcasts have heard me say this before, but I'm so indoctrinated into 12 staff. I mean, it saved my life, you know, and it continues to save my life. You know, and it's very binary. It's like, you don't, you're using or you're not using. You know what I mean? And there's no room for a conversation around

like what we're talking about today. And the notion that an extremely powerful mind altering substance

has the answers to all the questions that you've been seeking your whole life, like, is in and of itself a powerful intoxicant. And it's, you know, it's scary for somebody like me. Because it represents a potential portal back to the person you were before, you know. And it took me a long time to kind of overcome that, that idea and my resistance around this. And it happened because so many people have come on the podcast and not because they were here to talk about this thing, it would just

come up, you know, and they would share some experience. And so very slowly over, over a period of time combined with all the, you know, evidence that is coming out from Johns Hopkins and now Stanford, et cetera, it just became undeniable that there's really something here to look out and take seriously. And I'm so glad that I've had these experiences. And again, they're not, I don't know, that they're for everybody. I don't want to be in a position where I'm recommending this to anybody.

We never do. And I'm extremely careful about that. I don't

“preach this. I don't tell people when they come to me like, this is what you have to do. I say,”

hey, here's all the information. You should do your own research and decide whether it's for you. Because when you're saying earlier, there's not for everyone. It is sort of the nuclear option. You know, it's, it's, it's one of the hardest things you can do. Not everybody needs to do that. And so I think it's very important that you do your own research. You look into everything.

And it hasn't worked for me. You know, then this is something I think that you can potentially,

“you know, explore further. How long were you sitting with the decision? Did it?”

For Iva. To go out. Yeah. Well, I did a year and a handful of months ago. I did a psilocybin. psilocybin in MDMA. Experience that was my first experience with with psychedelics. So that kind of broke the seal. How is that? So it was many years building to that experience.

And when I was drinking and using, I never did psychedelics. So I had no frame of reference.

Yeah. I didn't really know what to expect going into that. And that was a very beautiful and, and life-changing experience. It was quite profound in many ways. And it was also, you were talking about ego death. Like I had that ego death and that disillusion of self and the, the merging and the oneness and the, the collapsing of of linear time and birth and death. And it's all happening in multiple timelines. Like all of that, you know, I had that experience,

which was amazing. So I guess I went into the, I boga experience with some, because that was my only experience. Like, oh, this will be some version of that. And it was, I did not have ego death.

Or I just felt like I was, you know, like a prisoner. It was very difficult. It was very,

very difficult and uncomfortable. Oh, yeah. I'm so sorry to hear that. But no, but that's,

“obviously, what I needed. Well, yeah. I think you become more grateful, right? Because so that”

hard experience say, okay, I don't want to ever do that again. I want to experience life again. And, you know, they say that when you do have these near, near death experiences that you come out the other side with this gratitude of just being able to breathe and be on earth and being in a country and having a life. But you're not in prison. You're not in prison. You just have a new perspective on everything. And I think it allows you to connect with people more to not be as angry,

not be, take things as seriously as you said, be able to let go a little bit. Also, like, you are truly right in the smack dab of your integration period. But we recommend that for a period of 90 days that someone is just solely focused on them. Yeah. Yeah, because so much shifts and changes. Yeah, we don't, we don't ask for any favors. We have a rule. Like, there's no, we don't ask you to even allow your cats or interviews. Someone could say, I've got a donor, a rudder, right, a jack

free, yeah. And we're always like, you know, bringing a great luck. Yeah, we'll talk to you in 90 days.

And I just flew back from South by Southwest last night. It was just insane for like the last five days. I've not yet haven't been like in some kind of shallow and monk, you know, yeah, yeah, repose sensory deprivation might be a good. Yeah, I might be a good thank you. I want to talk more about the impact that you guys have had through the work that you've done. And maybe let's contextualize it by talking about the mental health crisis that is experienced by veterans

in first responders. Like, what are the depression rates in the suicide rates? Like, what do we actually contending with? We're just in in the U.S. alone, we'll just look at the statistics,

“one in five individuals have a mental health issue. I think those are the individuals that”

actually come forward. They're saying maybe closer to 30% of individuals are literally struggling with depression. About 30 to 50% of those individuals have something considered treatment resistant depression and has nothing to do with the individual. Like, there's nothing wrong. It would be similar to a person taking a cancer drug and they're just not working. Similar here, right? How we're treating individuals really right now, the standard of care is anti-depressants and some type of

talk therapy. But when it doesn't work for millions of individuals in the population, what do you do? And so advance treatments are, you know, slowly coming to market, they're slowly getting FDA approved. We know psychedelics are an answer to these individuals that don't respond, but this is a serious issue. I think with veterans, you're you're likely the percentage of say you're likely to die four times greater by your own hand than in combat. Some numbers that are just astounding.

We've lost just over 7,000. After, you know, 9/11, we've lost over 150,000 by individuals that died by suicide. And so 7,000 due to combat, you've to combat 150,000. It's a shocking number that we've known for all along. We've talked about it, but I don't think we've really highlighted it. And when individuals, civilians hear that number, they usually just go, wow. Like I didn't know the issue was that strong. And it really is. I mean, we do have,

can make believe, I know all the factors, social media, there's just too many inputs and too many

things out there telling us what we have to do to get better and what we shouldn't be doing. And so there's a ton of anxiety, I mean, you know, we're wearing our loops and God forbid, we're not in the green one day. You know, we tend to overanalyze that and think there's something wrong with us. So we might be even causing more anxiety on ourselves because of what's going on. And so we have to figure out a way to get to the root cause of that.

“You know, what started out, I think is a quest to help our friends was accelerated by the suicide”

death of one of them. Like, you know, it's very non-customary in our community to say that you're struggling. And so I think the better in community out large, especially once their civilians feel completely disconnected. And then there's a further issue there with not admitting that you need help. And so there's a lot of suffering and silence happening. One of our close friends took his life and that really forced us to come out with our own struggles and basically have the courage to

start a conversation that it was very taboo. In the eight years since, I think the conversation has become much more front and center. And we have to think of new ways. Like, you know, war technology changes, the battlefield changes. The SSRI was over 30 years old, so could choose like 35

or more years old. We would never be fighting a current day war with technology from 35 years ago.

“But yet, that's what we're fighting this horrific suicide epidemic with. And so we hope that by”

advancing the conversation and changing the narrative around this sort of new innovative way of looking at mental health, that it will eclipse the better in community. Because ironically though, it's the ancient way. Like, this is better. This isn't new. Yeah. And that was one reflection that I had on, on having done the I-Boga route as opposed to I-Bugain and kind of reflecting on the Western insistence on like, okay, like, the Bawiti, these people have been doing this for,

I don't know, however many hundreds of thousands of years, you know, like an over that period of time have like developed a very specific ceremony. And then the Western art comes in and says, okay, well, we'll take it from here. Like, yeah, we, we just need this and then we'll, we're going to do it this way because we think we know better. You know what I mean? I think that's the danger in the commodification and the commercialization around this. Do you guys think about that? I'll expect of it.

We have, and we know that there's really good I-Boga operations that are going on throughout the world. And for us as a veteran 501c3 that's operating in the US, we've had to be very careful about how we've taken this to the public. And we've sat down with a ton of lawmakers in many states and Texas and federally. And you know, it was a very common theme of saying, hey, this has to be done a certain way or we're not even going to talk to you. And so we've had to stay very hard-lined on, you know,

FDA-proof, clinician-guided access to these medicines and granted, you know, going back, we know the traditional approaches work. You know, are we going to be able to get the traditional approaches here in the US? Is that going to be a model that we are going to be able to use? Or I just think that as as these treatments get FDA-proof, it's just going to open up more of the traditional market outside the US for people to explore those and just at least feel more

comfortable traveling out there. There's also an engagement issue with the Ebola plant. And from like a scale issue, there's also a sustainability issue. And so I think that, you know, a synthetic drug offered an VA setting and a subsidized manner in a VA setting would be, you know, what's best for our constituency. But there's a lot of considerations. There's a multitude of issues. I mean, on the one hand, you're fighting the kind of legal regulatory landscape. This is a legal

“in the United States. You have to travel outside of the country to do it. And I'm sure there's”

good actor. I know there's good actors. And there's, I'm sure there's a lot of bad actors, right?

And the first turtle is like FDA-approval and kind of clearing a path towards this becoming legal

and taking seriously. And so much of your work is around the conversation, this conversation that's going on right now about how to achieve that. And we're seeing progress in places like Texas and

from it. And, you know, not for nothing. Like how is big farm at perceiving this? Like yeah.

“It's an existential threat to the SSR. I, you know, market and how, you know, we've been traditionally”

treating mental health disorders. And perhaps at the same time, it's also an opportunity for them. And what does that look like for them? No pharmaceutical company wants a one-time treatment.

They're never putting money off that. And so, you know, that's a whole thing that's going on

in the background that I'm sure you know a lot more about than I do. And yet, if that pathway gets cleared, and there is a regulatory framework for this becoming legal in the United States, what does that look like? How is it regulated so that, you know, there are guardrails and, you know, policies and processes so that it's administered in the way that you would like it to be administered. And then there's the accessibility issue, which I know you care a lot

about, like, right now, you can go to certain clinics and some of them are really expensive, you know,

“and this is obviously preventing the people who could benefit from this the most access to these kinds”

of treatments. Yeah. There's so many issues here, right? I read it. There's, there's an issue everywhere which way you look for us. We've chosen to stay so focused on our cork constituency, which is veterans, and so advocating for veterans is actually proven to be a very bipartisan issue that we've been successful in achieving milestones that others thought would be impossible. One of the biggest challenges is that Iboca grows and a completely different part of the world,

and so because it's schedule one here in the United States and because the cardiac arrest exists and it's practically impossible to even research, you can't get it here, even if research were approved. Well, if research were approved to the FDA, you could get it here, but, you know, the problem right now is that it can't be grown here and it is schedule one. The resources are starting to do and all, you know, we've heard recently that this is not just a U.S. issue, it's a global issue,

but we've heard recently that there's a ton of Chinese influence now in Gaboan and West Africa and they're buying up as many Ebola plants and Ebola farms and they're bringing it back to China, and you know, this is just, you know, what happens. And so there are so many issues like, when you stopped before, you like, you would open up a wide array of things that are happening, and so we're just trying to stay focused on what we do, you know, we can't do everything,

and so we pick the path and that's the path. And, you know, we support many different paths, you know, but we do have to be careful about like where we travel, especially with the individuals

that we're dealing with. So in the aftermath of your first experience, you basically have this epiphany,

like, we have to bring this to, you know, the people we know who could benefit from this, and you've realized that you've manifested that you have two organizations. You've got this organization that's veterans exploring treatment solutions, and that's the organization that you sort of get inside look at in the documentary where you're bringing other first responders and veterans, you know, through a version of what you experienced. A 501c3 that basically helps to

bank roll these experiences and make them available. And then you also have this other organization, Tara Mind. Can you talk about what that is? Yeah, Tara Mind. I was approached by investors

a number of years ago to just say, hey, what you're doing with vets and veterans is amazing,

and you've had so much success there. How do you take what you did for them and take it to the private sector? And so I was hired into a VC to try to figure out a business model to say,

“okay, how do we take what you did for veterans? How do we transfer that to the private sector?”

And it's really difficult to figure out because first off, these drugs are not FDA approved, and so we can't really do that. And so we started out with what was FDA approved, and what the platform is is really, it's a technology platform to be able to connect integrated clinics, psychiatrists, advanced psychiatry with patients, make that whole experience like easy and accessible, and like a white glove concierge approach. So, similar to what we did with vets,

where a person applies, they come in and we kind of handhold them the whole way. We give them therapy, we get them to treatment, and then we monitor their outcomes. It's the same exact thing that we're doing with Tara Mind, except the business model as we take it to employers. So, think of like JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs offers up healthcare benefits for their employees. This is a healthcare benefit. Today it's not IV gain or psilocybin. Very soon. Today it's IV ketamine at a advanced psychiatry clinic,

a three-day remission rate for someone as major depressive disorder. So, there are treatments out there

“that weren't here just four years ago, and that's what the platform does, right? And it's a commercial”

business. We work with healthcare systems. We work with payers, because the idea is we've built the chassis now. So, when I begin comes through, when psilocybin comes through, we've built the network across the US, working with employers, working with healthcare systems. We could just take those treatments and plug them into our system. And so, if I'm an employee, and I have struggled with antidepressants and talk therapy, and it don't respond with what's available. So, then we step in and

say, well, St. TMS is available, advanced TMS, or maybe IV ketamine, because you have treatment resistant to pressure, eventually be psilocybin to assist that therapy, or MDMA assisted therapy. So, that's the commercial business that Tara Mind is exploring. And what I talked about early with subsidies, the reason we're doing that is because most people can't pay for these advanced

“treatments. I would love to talk about that. That's, that's is the grassroots effort, which is”

since turned into of truly, I'd say, we have global reach 501C3 that came from Marcus's declaration, and immediately after I began with this, this is exactly what his teammates needed. Now, what we weren't prepared for was what was intended to help his friends, and former teammates would have global impact. We are more or less the reorganizations operating under one umbrella. We provide programmatic services. We conduct research, or, you know, partner with academic

partners like Stanford, and then we have a very robust policy and advocacy department. When the three work together, they're in perfect coordination to take the voices from our programs, paired alongside the data, like from Stanford, to go to state capitals, to go to Washington, D.C., and educate and advocate, and then actually put legislation together to unlock funding. What many don't realize is that it's a practically impossible to get research going on

a schedule one substance. You can do it, but it takes years and millions of dollars. So we work to reduce those barriers to research and expand access to care. Programatically, we're providing wide variety of services to the veterans that come through our program. We do the integration support, the subsidy to go have the treatment. We have offerings every day of the week workshop, spouse support, and ambassador program so they can plug in and give back. So, you know, we're

really proud of that, but the way that we're going to reach scale is through the policy piece. And the difficulties around research are enough of our hurdle, but veterans are largely excluded from those studies anyway because their health histories are too complex. So this is why we're so committed to the policy piece and giving veterans access here in the United States. What we're doing is great. It's not sustainable from the vantage point of like the film, for example,

we received a 500 percent spike in applications immediately after the film premiered on Netflix.

When we were already only able to provide support for one out of 10 that we received. So we were getting 45, 50, 60 applications a day and we can approve five per week. Right. So if we can let's say fund 300 special operations and individuals in a year and we are and then we're saving 300 lies and families and generations, but what is 300 compared to the numbers we was saying earlier, millions of Americans that, you know, we can't support at this time. So as to Amber's point,

policy change, changing policy enables to open up that access for more individuals to receive treatment. 100 percent donor dependent. So at any time, you know, the work could stop if we don't

“raise the funds to continue. So, it's a serious. Has the documentary opened doors on the hill?”

Do you have champions in the Senate or Congress who are who are fostering this conversation? Very much. Some committee hearings or anything like that. We might's happening. Yes, Marcus is actually part of the first ever Senate hearing on or of the Senate round table. On second-legged treatment, they had some of the top pharmaceutical companies there that are developing these drugs. So aside from MDMA, they had the VA there. We showed the documentary,

which is a extremely powerful, moving educational film. And we did that in Texas.

We were able to get past a bill in Texas that appropriates $50 million, paired with a drug developer, $100 million, but it was all from the film. We showed the film individuals or

right? Kind of like when I was approached, but I began initially like, "This is some hippie drug that

they go, "Oh wow, this is like real and people were hearing like we need to get behind this. We need to research it." And so the film has been such a -- It's been shown in a number of states. And we're working in this session alone. We're working in 22 states. A various unfold. Yes,

“so. And we've unlocked, I think we just got another $5 million. So we're probably around $130 million”

in research funding just in the last couple of years, yeah. Wow. And not us, but like the different institutions and studies. It takes time, right? And you still have to be patient. This is like, it just moves away from things, right? But I do feel like you are approximating like an inflection point with this. It's reaching a kind of saturation point in terms of awareness. At least it feels like that to me, maybe I'm in my bubble. I think you're right. No, you're right. And even if a

politician doesn't necessarily today have the ability to, let's just say, approve something. That same politician is sending us a friend or a veteran to go through treatment. So the individual level, I think everybody gets it. But when you talk about the system, you know, the system has risks and they have to think of, you know, a lot more than just helping an individual. So those same individuals that are not sure yet are actually -- They also actually send us individuals all the

times and say, hey, this person tried x, y, and z, you really need to take care of them. So we're seeing that, you know, starting to happen. Do you think they've been minded to this? Yeah. You mentioned testifying on the hill or or being part of a subcommittee hearing where there were pharmaceutical companies. Like, what is the vibe, you know, from those organizations? And like, are they seeing the future with this or resisting it? They're seeing the future and what they're doing is just like

many commercial businesses. You have the folks that are the startups. So you have the small pharmaceutical companies that are doing this with -- Yeah. There were no big pharmaceutical companies that were there. I've stepped in and said we're taking this through the FDA. So it's all the typical start-up biotech companies. But then as they get through their clinical trials, maybe phase one, maybe now

“phase two. That's what we usually see. They get to phase two. Now, Jay and Jay steps in or Merck,”

more Eli Lilly. So they're jumping on once like the risk has gone away and they're seeing that there's a possibility for this to get through. So the pharmaceutical companies are coming in. They're just coming in and later stages at what we're seeing. The corporate behemoths that stand to benefit the most, though, are the insurance companies. Because when you look at these statistics and the impact, you can imagine them seeing like how much money they can save because if this is

so effective, then they're not going to have to be paying out down the line on, you know, when these mental health problems metastasize into, you know, worse, worse conditions. And that's a very

powerful lobby to like have on your side, you know, like this juggernaut that could actually, you know,

help drive change. I think once the payers realize that this will save money in the long term, and maybe not overnight because as we talked about earlier, these are expensive treatments. They'll probably continue to be expensive. But saving an individual from years of suffering, the cost of that, the productivity, the absenteeism, if you're talking about in the workforce, the ER visits, you know, the payers are going to eventually go away to me. If we give this person

like civil assignment and all those problems go away, how much money do we save? So two point. Yes,

“I think the payers are starting to see that in the insurance companies that you figure behind this,”

then, you know, it will save them in the long run. Well, the entire system needs to level up. But I have hope that it's happening in treating root cause versus symptoms, like there's so much of that happening in so much waste because of it and delaying of the inevitable. But there's still a lot of baggage. And I say this from personal experience, like when you talk about these kind of like, really, you know, what are we doing here? You know, so what is it that you want to say to the

person who has been watching this whole thing and is still skeptical? I would say good for them for not ever having been in a place where they're willing to do anything to save someone they'll love. They love. I would say, um, that's count your blessings because when you're in that place, nothing is off the table. And I would say be interested, be curious. I think we need to be lifelong learners and grow and, and if we just, you know, put our hands

over our mouth and over our ears and didn't see what's being innovated and what's being out there,

then we're just like, you know, to me and Amber, like it's always about growth and innovation. And so

those that are skeptical, like just do your homework, do your research. Again, we're not here to preach, but you'll find out you'll talk to enough people that have been through these type of treatments that have their life turned around completely and, you know, don't believe us,

I say, well, do you want to do this? Are you ready for it? Have you talked to anybody? Like,

I'm not going to convince you. I just give you all the information you need to make an informed

“decision. And I think that's what we're trying to do with the film and with the work we're doing.”

With the veterans that you've worked with, what is, what is perhaps the most extreme example of before and after? I would say, um, we try to not get involved in like an active crisis situation because we just aren't equipped to handle. However, there have been a couple of situations and referrals, friends of friends or whatnot that have had active suicide, like intervention during suicide, that have come through the program and are some of our most

ardent ambassadors today. And to see that sort of turnaround where one life that was on the cost of being ended is now having such a positive impact on countless other lives is just the most gratifying thing. And I look at Marcus's life and help close, you know, we probably were to losing him, having him back for our family and generations would be more than enough. But I look at the fact that he's still here and how many other people have heard his story and help someone

gotten help for themselves or turned their lives around. And it's just remarkable the power of one life. Two point earlier about, you know, following individuals after treatment. So just the two guys in the movie and the documentary Maddie and DJ, they're literally living their best lives right now. It's incredible to speak with them and just like kind of what they're doing. And this is years

later, right? And they're just doing things that they never done before, they're looking at the world

completely different. Their lives are good. Their families are good. And they just keep getting

“better. You know, it's pretty wonderful. Living life, I think, is on this sort of like continuum”

of white knuckling and thriving. And most people who come through our program us included were white knuckling/ surviving. When you can take someone from surviving to thriving and they show up for themselves in the world in such a different way, it just creates a ripple out effect amongst humanity that holds so much promise. The ripple effect is something I've been thinking a lot about. Yeah, I mean, just both of you and, you know, the power of you together like the extent to which you

have effectuated change by taking this personal experience that you had and turning it into, you know, a service on behalf of humanity and what has blossomed from that is really remarkable. But on the individual level, like the notion that you can leverage this, this medicine to heal a very old wound, a wound that has persisted through generations that you have inherited, you know, by dent of just being born into the life that you were born into allows you to interrupt this

pattern that would go on unabated. And so the ripple effect continues across future generations that aren't even born yet and, you know, take somebody who has inherited, you know, a generational trauma wound, that's spilling into their kids and they're, you know, it's like, and then it gets perpetuated, you know, on and on and on and on and on and on and then to be the intervention and say,

no more, this ends, like, is there any more powerful, you know, thing that you can do with your life?

“Like, on some level, I think about like, that's what we're here to do, right? We're here to”

spare the next generation, our pain. Yeah. Yeah. And what I want to say, Rich is like, you know, we're doing our work. And I don't know if you've thought about this yet, but for you, now speaking about this in your platform, think of how many thousands of people are going to start reaching out for treatment, are going to start looking into these, are going to get better just because of you. And that's kind of how we look at this is that individuals have platforms that have been

have had success are able to perpetuate to everyone else that is seeking, searching for answers. And so just remember that that now you're a person that has the ability to literally touch, yeah, millions of people that are, you know, struggling like we were. On that note, uh, for the person who now is thinking, all right, I'm excited to learn more. Where do I go? How do I get involved? How do I, how do I contribute to vets? How do I learn

more about what vets is doing? How do I connect somebody who I know is suffering or if I'm suffering myself? How do I? There are a couple of things. Yeah, there are a couple of things. So the website events is vetsolutions.org. And it's, you know, all about the organization itself, the nonprofit.

to the, to the cause. And then Marks and I have, you know, typically been pretty private. And found ourselves sort of thrust out amongst the smooth men as leaders. And, um, I know

it hasn't always been comfortable for us because, you know, we've been going through our processes

over the years, but also pretty private. We have recently decided to sort of, and we've been building, building companies, building movements, et cetera. We have recently decided to step out from behind the laptop and launch a podcast where we talk more about our story and things that have

“worked for us, both as a couple and individuals. I think one of the really important things about”

our story is that I had to, to get out of the caretaker mode and get on my own path of healing. This wasn't all markets. This was, you know, a lot of my own personal inner work as well. And when I got on my path and he got on his path as individuals, we finally met up. And in doing so, we've been

able to carve out a whole new future for ourselves. And so, we're really excited to share more about

that on our podcast, which we'll be launching soon. So, in addition to that solution, start or our website is thekepones.com. Is the kepones, that, is that going to be the name of the podcast? Conversations. Conversations. That's a good idea. Great. Um, that's great. You can't possibly answer all the emails that you must be getting, especially in the aftermath of the documentary. Yeah, it's not possible. A lot of content opportunities, though, to speak to some of these things.

So interesting to me how everyone is, if they're not personally dealing with something, they're one degree separated from someone who is. There's just this suffering in our society.

Nobody's untouched from one way or another. Yeah. And when you hear the statistics around

loneliness and, and, you know, just the mental health, like, just the average person who's just trying to live their life. Like, we're all impacted by mental health considerations to one, extent to another. And the fact that, you know, there are other solutions out there beyond, like, what we've been programmed to believe is the limit of, you know, what science is capable of,

“is exciting. And it's courageous, I think, what you're doing. And it's a tremendous public service.”

And I feel like you're just at the very beginning of, you know, this fantastic journey. We do too. We feel like eight years has been a lot. And, you know, there's been struggle and, and a lot of late nights and weekends. But I agree with you that I tell everybody we're just getting started. There's like so much more work to do. And it's okay. Doesn't feel like work. So final thought for you, Amber, you mentioned earlier that that's your organization is careful not to work

with somebody who's in the midst of a suicidal crisis, like when they're in that crisis state. But for the person, the audience member who's watching right now, perhaps they're, they're, their, their partner is in that state. Or, or somebody's watching or listening to this right now, who is having suicidal ideation, thoughts like that. In such a hyper crisis state,

“is there a place that you can recommend. They, they, like a phone number, they can call or a”

website or who they can talk to. Because obviously, you can't get that person in that state immediately into some kind of psychedelic therapy situation. And probably they shouldn't go into that situation in that state. There's the suicide crisis line, which is 988. And operates, same as 911, but these are trained suicide interventionalists on the other end of the line. So if someone is in immediate crisis, that number could be a lifeline, truly. I would say,

start doing diligence because in some regard, just a glimmer of hope is enough to keep someone grounded and willing to take the next step in pursuing healing. Psychedelics hold tremendous promise. And yet they're seemingly, you know, can, can feel impossible to access currently in the United States, ketamine treatments are available. It's an off-use label of ketamine, but incredibly effective for breaking cycles of treatment resistant depression or active suicidal ideation.

There are kind of in clinics in every major city. I would argue a person in a suicidal state. The number one treatment right now is ketamine is IV ketamine. It must get ketamine. But again, you know, under a doctor's can. Under doctors care, there is, unfortunately, two-minute reports of individuals that are getting these prescribed at home and doing them on your own. And that's not recommended. But for an individual that's really struggling or an immediate case,

probably IV ketamine at one of these, you know, advancement of health clinics is definitely a short-term fix. Enough to put a tourniquet on that individual to get them stabilized to them

Thank you as I said earlier. You're just remarkable examples of service. And it's so heartwarming and

“inspiring to see a couple on the precipice of, you know, like going beyond a place of repair to,”

you know, not only repair your relationship, but build this, you know, really impactful,

meaningful relationship with the ripple effects of helping so many lives. It's really quite something.

“And I salute you both and I'm here to support you. So let me know what I can do to do that.”

I am at your service and I can't wait to see how this continues to evolve for you. We're so grateful. Yeah, we are extremely grateful for being here and having an audience and here in our story and just thank you for what you're doing and your story is inspirational and, you know, everything that I read. I was just, you know, inspired and, you know, a bit of me was like, "Well, I can't I do that." You know, it was just like, but coming from where you came from and like,

“what you're doing today, like people should be able to see that and, and I dare you to run an ultra-marathon?”

No, I don't. I don't know. I can't even learn. I, like, clearly I need to learn something about how to work out in the gym. You know, we can trade notes at some point. For me, it's surfing and golf. That's about what I, what I do now.

Right on. Well, you're always welcome back here. Thank you. I would love to thank you. You could keep me up to date on all you're doing.

So, you're welcome. Thank you. I'll see you again.