#326 Kegan Gill - F-18 Pilot Survives Two Hours in the Atlantic With a Broken Neck

- Kagan, welcome to the show, man. - Thanks for having me on Sean. - It's an honor. - Likewise, likewise. - Dude, holy shit.

“- Dude, we got so much of it through the ringer.”

- So much good stuff to talk about. - Wow. - Wow. - Like, wow. - But, let me start job with the introduction.

- All right, Kagan, smearth, gill. You serve as a U.S. Navy F-18E Super Hornet pilot, flying high performance combat aircraft in one of the most demanding professions in the military. In 2014, during a dog fighting training exercise,

you survived the fastest ejection in naval aviation history, ejecting from your aircraft in nearly 700 miles an hour. The crash left you with catastrophic injuries,

multiple surgeries, a traumatic brain injury, in a long battle with PTSD, addiction, and the unseen wounds of war. Against overwhelming odds, you fought your way back, returning to the cockpit, and later becoming an advocate

for veteran mental health. In Phoenix Revival, you recount your journey of survival, recovery, and finding purpose after unimaginable adversity. Once again, welcome to the show, man.

- Thank you so much. - Yeah, we found, we saw a podcast you were on, and some rails, and we were like, holy shit, dude, we gotta get this, we gotta get this dude in here. So, thank you for coming.

- Dude, it's really exciting to be here, and get to share the story to such a massive audience, man, 'cause as you know, like you're sharing

some incredible information with the world right now

and waking people up, and it's much needed. - So, I'm trying, I'm trying. - Yeah, no, sounds like psychedelics is a huge part of your recovery journey. - It was a transformational experience,

a spiritual awakening, and just a connection to something greater than myself, and a deep love that I found within, and it's changed everything in my life for the better, right, man? Yeah, I did, I began a little over four years ago,

and we'll grow all those, how much booze is in the studio here, or haven't had a drop to drink since. - It's for you, since right after that. - Yeah, it was pretty different.

- Boys in yourself, don't need to numb yourself or poison yourself from that hole we all had. - Yeah, I keep it all up here as a reminder, that this shit doesn't have control over me anymore. It's pretty fucking cool, but I get a lot of shit

for having it, too.

“- It looks really cool, that's what I think.”

- Yeah, that's what I think, but, all right, so a couple things to knock out real quick, before we get into your life story, so I have a Patreon account, and they've been with us for a sense of the beginning

and they're the reason that we both get to sit down here today. So this is from Christian Francis, what main components of TBI treatment do you feel need to be changed? What parts of living with the TBI and recovery

from injury are currently being impeded by the medical system? And how can treatment of those with TBI be changed to better understanding the patient? - That's a great question, there's,

there's almost a disregard for the TBI, and through my experience, it was almost so unignolaged that I could even possibly have a TBI or what that was. So just acknowledging that it exists

and how delicate the brain actually is is really critical.

And then I think there's a tendency in the main stream medical system to just hit the easy button, which is the PTSD button right now, which, you know, that gives you a diagnosis and then it opens this whole Pandora's box

of all the different medications they can throw at you to try to deal with that. But come to find out it's a much broader issue when you do have TBI, and you know Dr. Chris Free ever heard of him in operator syndrome?

- Dude, I've heard about this guy from like every single one of my fucking friends and I have never met the guy. - Yeah. - I've heard amazing things about him.

- And he wrote a book, right? Operator syndrome? - Yeah. - Yeah, he really nails right on the head with what he did.

He basically went out, he was the PTSD expert at the VA.

- They kicked him out, right? - I don't think he left, you know,

“I think he just was frustrated, I don't know exactly,”

but he ended up probably most spoke on that. - So, I'm not certain of, he might have or might have left, I know there was some, at least some staunch disagreements. - Oh, I'm sure.

- I'm sure the VA. - Yeah, they wanna put everything in that PTSD box 'cause that means the pharmaceuticals

that just keep you sick and unhealthy, and I mean that's the way that whole conventional system is designed is to do. - Dude, why do you think it's like that? - Greed, Greed.

- Dude, they get paid, I never understood,

you can't, you can't go to another pharmacy and get any of the prescriptions. I mean, I'm admitted to the VA in over, probably close to 10 years now. - Yeah, the way I understand it is,

basically, I talked to an admiral level flight surgeon who's been at those meetings at the top of the VA, and he said, no matter how good the people are at the VA because there's a lot of really good humans there that want to do good and want to serve the veterans.

But he said, no matter how good the people are in the VA, at the end of the day, the pharmaceutical industry gets to dictate the policies that are applied. And all of their policies are designed to put the veterans on medications

and keep them there until they're in their own lives or just die miserably and feed in that machine the whole time. And it just comes down to Greed. It's just the business model of the medical system is built around kind of keeping you stuck,

maybe alleviating some of the symptoms, but not actually curing the underlying issue. Only the best for our veterans, right? Man, only the best for our veterans. It's sad, it's the veterans, it's everybody.

I mean, it's the whole conventional medical system is feeding off of the people that are sick. And you go to help, you trust the people with the white lab coats, with the doctorate degrees. They're supposed to know better.

And I don't think most of them are malicious.

“I think they're just indoctrinated into a system”

that is profit driven and controlled by the pharmaceutical industry from their medical school curriculums to their medical journals that they're reading are all influenced by the pharmaceutical industry.

And the whole system is just corrupted by that greed. Man, I know we're gonna dive into that all later. Oh yeah, but which will be an emraging segment. But everybody gets to get up too. So, some of my buddy heard I was coming on.

He's like, dude, you gotta get me some of those gummy bears. I'm like, man, I will definitely share some gummy bears with you. He will blow you up. So he will blow you up.

They're made in Michigan, you're from Michigan. Yeah, yeah. They're made in Michigan. Oh, cool. And they're legal in all 50 states.

No. Sweet. No one needs us. My kids are gonna try to get them from me too. All right, I'm like I said, we'll blow you up.

But so I want to do, I actually got you gift. Oh, you want to. I love gifts. All right. I got you a few.

All right.

Well, one, I gotta give you this first.

This is a copy of my book. I signed that one for you. Thank you. Hope you enjoyed it. It's a wild story.

And I'm sure we'll get into a lot of it today. We will. We will. And then my friend, Bryce Hanson, who helped me design that cover, actually, her that was coming on this show.

And he's like, I got a gift that you got to give him. So, dude, tell me, is this a painting? He digitally did that. And then the publishing company helped kind of do the background on it.

But he took a digital photo of me in my gear. And then he's able to do some cool magic to make it look for it can rad. You need to get this framed. That's fucked.

He sent me the, it was originally a painting that he did. Really? Yeah, Bryce was a green beret. And now he does all sorts of really good. Oh, yeah.

But he made you these. Hopefully, shit, that's awesome. Heck yeah. Yeah, I thought those would look really good in here. Yeah, that is sick, dude.

Thank you. And then one more small thing.

“I don't know if you remember Bill Filter and the guys”

that the wisdom dojo, or used to be the dojo, the meditation guys. Yeah. Yeah, they want to me to give you this. So wisdom dojo shirt and a wisdom dojo challenge coin.

Dude, thank you. I talked to Bill Filter. Yeah. Well, who said that he did some training with you. He was my guy.

And your dad. Yeah. He did. He said when he was working with you, you're still doing all this on your own.

Yeah.

No, it's pretty incredible what this has grown into.

Yeah, it all kind of changed after that. I began experience, man. Heck yeah. So literally like right after, but let's cool. Tell Bill, I said, what's up?

I will. What's up, Bill? But let's get into your story, where'd you go up? I was born in Oklahoma.

“Although I don't remember a whole lot from it.”

My mom was doing her medical residency there through the National Health Service. She earned a scholarship to pay for her med school. And then when she finished her residency there, we moved to Colorado to a little town called Alamosa,

down in the Samoise Valley.

being in powder that was over my head.

Just always had a love for the outdoors.

My dad was a big outdoors, man. He would take me out on his backpack. And he'd be out backcountry skiing with me out, just in like some of the most beautiful blue sky days that you can imagine.

That's awesome.

“And then what does about seven we moved to Northern Michigan?”

And I grew up in a town called Traverse City. Beautiful little town right on Lake Michigan up there. And I was just a kid that spent most of my time outside barefoot, climate trees, grabbing salmon out of the stream, hunting, just doing stuff a little kids are supposed

to be doing nice. You don't hear that much anymore. Yeah, man, we're getting too far away from where we're supposed to be. I know.

And I was the kid who didn't really belong in a classroom. Sitting under a fluorescent lighting, showing out scantron bubbles was pretty soul draining. And I was pretty disheartened by it. And became a pretty angry young kid.

Let's get in a lot of fights.

I was always a small kid, so I'd get picked on.

And my dad was a wrestler and was into judo. And so he started teaching me how to fight and defend myself and what age? Um, I was probably like a seven or eight years old. He started teaching me to fight.

And the next time the bullies came at me, man, I had something different from them, then cow ran down and just

“let them do what they wanted and what was the first lesson?”

The first lesson for the bullies? Yeah, dude from your dad. Oh, well, the first lesson was the things I'm about to teach you are to defend yourself and defend others weaker than you. You never use this as an aggressor, as an aggressor.

You use this to defend what's right and stand up for yourself. And, you know, he would wrestle around with me and he'd push me around and he would never let me win. And that just always kind of kept me pushing and was really grateful for that.

He would never let you win.

Never, man, right on, dude. He didn't take it easy on me. Which I don't always appreciate, but yeah, he was a good man. He actually auditioned for one of the earliest survivor shows that they were going to do back when he thought it was actually

about being a survivor. No, shit. For fun, he's the kind of guy that like, he'll carve his own bows and then he'll go out into the cold and the winner make a snow cave. Sleep out in the woods and then deer hunt from his snow cave in the morning.

No way. Yeah, he's like, what? He's from a different time. I've never even heard of that. He doesn't really belong in this society.

And I mean, as a compliment to him, what did he do? He originally, he was a health inspector when we were in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And then when we moved to Alamos, it was so rural. He couldn't really get a job. So he kind of became dad mom and taking care of us later when we moved

back to Traverse City, which was where both my parents were from. He became a respiratory therapist. He was a teacher for a while. He taught biology and then became a respiratory therapist. Right on, are you a big honor?

Yeah. Yeah, man, deer hunting up there is a big part of how we feed ourselves. We got a little bit of farm land up there. We got chickens. My wife's got bees, so we do our own honey.

Got some fruit trees and garden, a greenhouse. Are you a proper? You know, not so much, man, I'm not so much prepping. We're just kind of like building our own thing on the outskirts of society is what's happening right now is just kind of eating itself alive.

But definitely making ourselves so we can be self-sufficient. But not so much like we're not digging a bunker, maybe we should. But it can't hurt. Yeah, probably not, man. When you see all the billionaires doing it.

I mean, yeah, pretty wild, haven't any of them are building fucking bunkers around. Right. Yeah, that's a good idea. What are what they're so scared of? I don't know.

Probably us. I bet they are.

“But yeah, well, I mean, self-sufficiency is pretty, I mean, that's what prepping is all about,”

right? Yeah. So I guess, yeah, I'm a prepper. That's the case, right on. case you haven't noticed, I take preparedness seriously in water is one of the first things

I look at, not just emergency water, but the water my family is drinking every single day. A federal study found forever chemicals in nearly half the tap water in America. Because of that, I've tried a lot of filtration systems over the years. Most of them didn't make the cut. Either they were too complicated, they took up too much space, or I still didn't feel confident

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for an exclusive discount. That's r-o-r-r-a.com/s-r-s and tap into clean water today. As you guys know, once upon a time I was a Navy SEAL, and then I contracted for CIA. We were hunting ISIS, Taliban, terrorist organizations, China was there, Russia was there, the Iranians were there, and everybody's kind of collecting on each other.

“One thing I learned is how important encryption and protecting your data is.”

That experience is just always made me extremely paranoid about what's being sucked out

of my phone, what information are people getting? I wanted something that could protect everybody. And so we turned it into an application, we called the Glacier App. We have security NS, now what's security NS? Well, very simply put security NS keeps your phone from being exploited while you're browsing

the Internet. There's a couple of buttons, your phone's protected, you got yourself a burner number, or more. You hit "Connect" button, you're protected. This is like the real James Bond shit, MI6 CIA level stuff made in the U.S.

The Glacier App.com/sure.com/sure or just go on the App Store and look up the Glacier

App. Take your privacy back, download Glacier today. Why were you picked on so much? I was just kind of a small nerdy kid.

“I think it was just mainly just being kind of small and scrawny and easy to push around”

until how long were you bullied before you stood up for yourself. Not really that long. I was picked on for about one year at school and then figured out a different way to handle bullies. How'd you handle it?

You usually punch in them in the dick. How pretty good. It didn't matter how much bigger they were, you punch somebody in the dick and even the playing field pretty quickly. It was just kind of like an angry kid, didn't want to be stuck in school, moved around

to a variety of different schools growing up from the public school, my parents put me in a charter school, that didn't really work out, moved me to like a farm school where all day, every day we were like moving chicken coop, out in the field, we were feeding the animals. We did some academics, but it was all outside or in a greenhouse. We built a year, we would like some nurse ourselves and a culture and then we would like

eat their food, we would build their buildings, we would, it was way better than being stuck in a classroom. That's awesome and I really enjoyed that. My dad got a job at a private school as the science teacher and so we got free tuition. So I went to this snooty private school for a year and got expelled from that because I

didn't fit in there at all and I was getting in fights again and doing dumb shit. Found myself back at public school, kind of not liking it, getting in trouble, hanging out with a wrong people. Then when I was 16, actually around a campfire with some buddies, we put some of these little crunchy mushrooms in our mouth and I had this experience that night that connected

me to something and I was dealing with depression and anger that was pretty heavy and why were you, why were you so angry and so depressed? No. Other than the bullying, it sounds like a pretty damn good childhood. Yeah.

Yeah and a lot of it was and actually a lot of this, I discovered three bogalator through going back into repressed childhood memories. For most of my life, I didn't understand where that anger really had come from but what

“I discovered three bogal, which I don't know if you want to get into this later, but”

I can definitely get into it now with what I experienced in one of those journeys was. I was back in my mother's womb and I could, I could see through her stomach, I could see the veins of her skin, I could see this pink color and I remember being in there and just feeling her anxiety because she's a mother pretty far along in her pregnancy and she's running off diet coke, working ridiculous hours, stressed out, meanwhile trying to

be a mother and actually before I was born, my mom had a stillborn baby, my older sister

on arrival and she was sort of not emotionally available to connect with me and I remember when I was born being held, but very quickly she was back to work, back to the residency, not seeing my mom, my dad was orphaned as a kid and he was also emotionally unavailable

“largely, I mean, they both cared a lot, but I think that they were really broken at their”

hearts from what they had been through and so, you know, there's all these really wild childhood trauma stories, you know, I wasn't sexually abused, I wasn't beaten, nothing like that, but I don't know if you've ever heard a Gabermate, he's sort of like a dr. I'm not sure what his, originally is, he's big in the psychedelic community, he's big thing is trauma, he's like a trauma expert and one thing he talks about is there's, there's

the trauma on children which is like the abuse, the physical abuse, the violence, the sexual abuse, but there's also an abuse of, when you don't fulfill the needs of the child and the need that I didn't get as that little boy and remembering it and vividly experiencing again through eboga was, I just wasn't, I wasn't fully being loved as a child and so

“I remember I was in my crib crying and screaming for my parents to come get me as an infant”

and nobody came and just kind of feeling that disconnect and it's not that my parents didn't care, they're, they're great parents, they really did care, but there was emotional and

physical detachment that I experienced is a really young kid that actually created an incredible

amount of self-reliance, but also an anger that came from that, like I wasn't good enough to be loved, you remember this or physically, yeah I vividly remembered it through eboga, I worked with the trained psychotherapist and he brought me back into all these repressed childhood memories and through that I, I mean I felt like the pain of my mom was experiencing being divided and pulled away from her kid, the pain from her miscarriage and just the, you

know there's, there's this big push back then which was women in the workforce and you can go and be a professional and my mom actually did that, she, she broke through a lot of barriers to get to go and be a physician as a woman, but it took a toll on her and it took a toll on her children because, you know, that's that was the trade off, you know, she got to become a professional and do what she wanted, but at the same time it was really hard on her to be separated

from her children and it was really hard on the kids, how many children can actually have.

“I have a younger sister, she's three years younger than me, are you guys tired?”

She lives out in Oregon, she's, she works for the park service out there, she's like Ranger Rick

basically, she wears a smoky bear hat and patrols the forest and does some good stuff out there,

but yeah, we get together on occasion, she usually comes back in the summers and we all go camping and hang out, she's got an awesome little girl right on, but overall I had, I had a great child that, honestly, but I definitely had this thing inside me that was just burning, this like feeling of angst that I wasn't enough and that drove me and it made me incredibly resilient which came in handy later in life and I'm honestly grateful for that, like it was like it was preparing me

for something that was to come. That's open game. Yeah, it's on big time. How did the military pop up on your radar? So when I graduated high school, I wasn't totally certain what I wanted to do but I got to go on a little discovery flight, we have a, there was a little community college that had a flight program where I grew up in Traverse City called Northwestern Michigan College and when I was a kid my parents enrolled me in a flight program that they did.

And you got to do like a ground school session and then you got to go up in a little

session. I remember flying this little session in 152, this basically a flying lawnmower

and just absolutely loving it man, it felt like a rocket ship and that kind of stuck with me and so when I graduated I decided to go to the community college and start doing flight lessons. I enrolled in the program, started flying and by the time I was a junior and college I was a certified flight instructor, building hours. Okay. I finished my degree, got my bachelor's degree while I was working at the college and then I actually got hired by one of my students who

fascinating due, named Larry Pahneman. He was a forensic accountant in the navy back in the Vietnam era. He's like one of these ultra intelligent dudes with a photographic memory and after the special forces and whoever would capture an underground bunker of the Vietcong, they would bring him in and he could go through their accounting records. He can learn a new language in like a few days and then he would read through their accounting records and he could memorize it all and then

here's where they're getting this and he was able to basically point them where they need to go

to shut these guys down and when he got out he started a think tank and a privacy research and consulting firm but he came across me because he wanted to learn how to fly himself to all his business

“meetings and so I started flying with him and he's like, hey man, do you want to come work from my company?”

He ended up buying a brand new aircraft and ended up bringing me on his company pilot and so I got to spend the next year just flying all over the country, going to really big tech companies we're at Microsoft and Yahoo and a bunch of others and I kind of got to see the inner workings of the corporate world. I was getting paid really well. I was living a really nice lifestyle having fancy dinners. People were dropping 500 bucks on a bottle of wine like it was nothing.

What kind of plan were you flying? I was flying a mooney acclaim which is sort of like a

little general aviation Ferrari. Nice like G1000 avionics integrated autopilot, Bose headsets, super nice leather seats. It was a really cool job. It's such a young age. I think I have did. It is pretty cool. But I found myself getting bored of how easy it was and I recognize that I wanted more in my life than that and so I had a buddy named Mark who was a flight instructor at the college with me and he had been in the military already but he was putting together a package

“to go to Officer Candidate School for a pilot position and I was like, wait don't you have to”

go to the Naval Academy? Doesn't your dad have to be an admiral like community college kids don't get to just go into the Navy and fly stuff and he's like, actually you can and as long as you have a bachelor's degree and so I kind of looked into the service and originally I thought I was going to go into the Coast Guard. I had read this book called The Last Run and it's all about the rescue missions. Those guys are doing up in Alaska and it was just a wild shift that these guys

were doing and so I looked into the Coast Guard but it was like a six month wait to get into that board and so while I was waiting I put together a package and submitted it to the Navy and got picked up immediately and so I spent that last summer going to a CrossFit gym getting in really good shape had a great summer with my family and then that fall went off to the Navy and showed up over

“prepared. How old were you? I was in my early 20s it was 2009 so I think it was like 23 or so.”

Right on. Yeah, on 24. Did you know what you wanted to fly? Did you care? You know originally

I thought I was going to fly helicopters after reading that last run book but I always growing up

the blue angels would come up to Traverse City and they'd fly every so often and I remember seeing those jets and be like man that's so cool but I also had this disconnect as like there's no way I could ever do that for whatever reason I just never I always had this imposter syndrome like there's no way I'm not that cool but as I started going through the training like really felt at home in that environment people are getting yelled at and beaten and exhausted and I was just like fuck yeah you

like bring it on from college to OCS you went straight to OCS or is it OCS? Yeah officer can't at school so yeah it's basically a three month program and you come out of it a butter bar so you know the rank that shows everybody that you know absolutely fucking nothing. Which I didn't know shit about the military but then started flight training after that went down to Pensacola Florida and started doing all the ground school did some water survival training and actually had

our our we normally go out into the ocean to do our ocean survival training when we're down in Pensacola but the there's the horizon oil spill right at that time so we couldn't go out on the ocean and do our survival training we still did a bunch of stuff in the pool but there was probably some stuff that we did in that ocean evolution that would have been helpful later I was just thinking that I've been damn dude you didn't you didn't do that you know we I mean there was a fair amount

in the pool but I don't think anything could have substituted for being out in the ocean yeah but did well through API went to what's primary flight training which was in corpus christy Texas and flew a pretty sporty little turbine prop aircraft called the T-34 Charlie Turbo Mentor they've since switched over to the T-6 Texan which is even more badass but the prior flight experience definitely helped through that primary flight training like already knew how to fly

and airplane already knew how to talk on the radio but the challenge was learning to do it the navy way you know it's in some ways it was probably more challenging because I had to forget my old ways and there's just a ton of memorization and all that but did well through well enough through that training that I got to select the tail hook pipeline coming out of that and if you're in the top 50% of your class you can select tail hook and then the navy says yes or no depending on

okay so at the time it would have been the prowlers the F-18 hornets the F-18 super hornets and then the E-2 C-2 so the Hawkeye with the big dish on top prop plane and then the C-2 which is the onboard delivery aircraft so all of those were kind of on the table at that point the other option out of primary flight trainings you can go fly the P3s at that time which are now all

just P8s which is a 7 basically 737 um they also had helicopter pipeline and a few people

go to the E-9 which is like a surveillance communications aircraft but uh I was kind of like man I'm gonna take my shot and see if I can go fly fighter jets which was the tail hook pipeline and then I headed down to Kingsville, Texas um and started flying the T-45 Charlie Goss Hawk which is like a small single engine jet but super high performance fully aerobatic and uh did intermediate intermediate flight training and did really well at that and so at the end of that intermediate

training uh you go to a board and you have a bunch of the different instructors come in you do a

“bunch of interviews and one you have to have good grades and you have to be good in the aircraft but”

more importantly they're interviewing you to see if you have the personality and you're gonna fit and like a fighter squadron and and I saw guys who were better pilots and smarter but they would go into those interviews and they just weren't like a team player or whatever and and so what do they look at for or a fighter pilot? Well one I think they want people who know that this is gonna be your life that it's gonna be all consuming and every moment of every

waking moment you're basically gonna be committed to that um they want somebody who can function in

a team environment um and uh yeah just kind of have that that attitude of just being a good human being to I think someone who's not an ego maniac and can be humble and um they do a really good job with it really. What are some of the questions I were asking you? Do you remember? I mean one of the big ones is like why do you want to be why do you want to fly F-18s and um what

“you say? I mean I think I just said something like you know I think it's an incredible opportunity”

I want to be at the tip of the spear I want to be doing the most difficult thing that the Navy has to offer for a pilot and that's where I see myself I want the challenge I want the hardships and I want to be the best pilot I possibly can be um how do you I'm just curious how do you display that your team player flying a jet? I mean it's really personality based and I think the instructors get a good feel for that as you go through flight training are you the guy who's

helping other guys in your class like learn or you the guy that's really selfish and hoarding the information and trying to do it all on your own they're definitely people who were you know would go into those interviews and they go well why did why do you want to be a fighter pilot and they say well I'm better than everybody in my class this guy does this this guy sucks at this and like when someone comes in like that they're like all right you're not going into the

“fighter community and there's a dude that did that when I was there oh shit and I think he was”

pretty heartbroken because he was he was an excellent pilot super smart but they want somebody who can play well with others you know make sense why is it so important because you operate as a team you know you're you're flying with other aircraft sections divisions large force exercises and it's a team sport you know you're flying your jet but you're you're you're doing all these advanced tactics with a very large group of other people and you got to be able to function in a sort of like a sports team

atmosphere that's in the squadron in a fighter squadron where you're high pressure high stress and you got to work together with everybody to survive in that environment and your day to day ground jobs and and in the aircraft for what you're doing because it is it's like a very complex game of football or something once you're up there the flying is just like that's just like learning to run and jump and be fast if you're going but then the next jump is like going into the NFL

and learning the sport and learning the tactics operating at that high speed and working as a team as a cohesive unit when chaos breaks out you know got you so it's definitely a team sport

you remember your first time in a jet yeah I mean I remember vividly showing up once I had made it through

the intermediate in advanced training and earning my wings at King'sville I selected the F-18 and I remember showing up in Virginia Beach at a VFA106 at Oceana in walking into the hangar and seeing all of those brick and hornets and super hornets and it was just like holy shit man I can't believe I could to go do this and the first flight was just like

know the basics but it's nowhere near the real thing as once you get in you can feel the rumble of this fucking tank around you and there's so much larger than they look when you just see him flying

“up in the sky there these massive contraptions and I remember like initially starting to taxi this”

thing and you you're pushing up the throttles just a little bit you got like 44,000 pounds of thrust behind you and you can feel it just it feels like a tank that you're you're taxiing in especially after flying all those smaller aircraft but I remember single seat I eventually

did fly the single seat but your first few flights in the super hornet are in a two seat with

the instructors got a stick in the back but you only do like maybe three or four flights in that aircraft before you you're flying it on your own damn which is wild but the simulator the simulator syllabus is really robust so by the time you get in the jet you've already done every single emergency procedure under the sun and you get pretty comfortable with it but the coolest part was taxing on to the runway for the very first time getting cleared for take off

and then just putting that thing in full afterburner with both engines and you just feel it just shove you back in the seat and it's like everything just happened so fast you're immediately off the ground you immediately get the gear up you're immediately thousands of feet up in the air and it just everything comes so quickly but you've been training little by little to make your mind process things faster and faster but due to it was just the coolest sensation which was very

quickly deterred because I realized that my mission card hadn't loaded properly and I didn't have any of my weight points for where I was going so as I take off rotate put the gear up and I'm just like whoa the instructor in the backs like it's called science squeezer who actually later

“ended up being in my squadron is they hey man where are we going?”

Which is not the question you want to hear the instructor say on your first flight and I look

down on this plane realize like none of my working area none of my wave points were in there he's like I just take this heading I got you and he's in the back punching in GPS coordinates and was able to salvage the rest of that flight so I didn't fail my first flight but it was like a quick kick in the nuts like dude you got some work to do you're in the big boy team here damn that's fucking cool dude yeah yeah it was it was unreal what do we go from here

you know from here I spent the next year training in the F-18 rag which was the most challenging thing I've ever done in my life as far as a professional career development man it's very little tolerance from mistake the standards are set extremely high it was really really freaking hard man you're just drinking from a fire hose trying to learn the tactics as quickly as you can and you're moving through these phases of from just the transition stays where you're

learning how to fly the aircraft itself navigate it take it from point A to point B operate with emergency procedures and then very quickly you're off on a strike detachment learning how to do close air support bombing missions and then very quickly you're into the air to air phase learning how to dog fight the aircraft learning air to air combat which is probably the most complex thing we do all about tactics with all of that and then to kind of wrap up everything after you've

“gone through all of this so over the course of the year you go and you have to land the”

thing on the aircraft carrier day and night which is the highest point of failure for people once they make it to that phase okay I actually disqualified at the boat my first attempt at night landing a fighter jet on the back of a moving aircraft carrier and shitty weather is the hardest thing I've ever done as far as like a skill and I end up DQ and I just I was coming in everything look great and then within the last few seconds the aircraft I think I was just a little bit nervous

to the point where I would just add just a nudge too much power and this is just like a millimetre a movement too much in the wrong direction and I would miss the wires and do what's called a bolter where I'd bounce off the deck my hook would miss the wires and then I was back up in the pattern headed fly back around and I did that a few times around and before I knew it I was at Bingo Fuel which meant I had a divert back to Oceana kind of the walk a shame but luckily got another

chance after that they they kind of they do an assessment and see how you've been doing throughout the the syllabus and and if you got the attitude to go back and try again and was very fortunate to get that opportunity and pass my my second attempt at the boat. But the daytime carrier stuff

I always enjoyed and had fun with that but the nighttime stuff is just stupid scary you can go

from being in a really good position where everything looks nice and suitcase to within a few seconds you're you can be eating it on the back of the ship in your life really quickly and of course they make you watch all those videos right before you go and do it I don't know if these guys

and headed my first real fleece quadrant so I'll try to show it oh man it was awesome it was like

“what I'd been working for for so long you know you show up at the the training rig for the F-18”

at Oceana and you got your wings on your chest already and you're like all right I kind of know what I'm doing and you very quickly realize that you don't know shit that you're still a baby and then you go through all that training it's super intense like a lot of people don't make it through that and then you get to your fleece quadrant like all right I got to kind of have a little bit of an idea what I'm doing now and you show up day one and you're like nope I'm still a baby and I don't

know anything so I took the small mouth big ears approach just shut the fuck up and listened and learned as much as I could bust in my ass studied really hard and over the course of the next eight months or so I was just just learning to survive in that environment but started to fit in started to people notice that I was a hard work and dude and I was there and part of the team and was doing pretty well for my for my experience level I was doing really well what are your parents

“think of this you know my parents were actually pretty anti military really they're kind of like”

peaceful hippie kind of folks and when I first told my mom I was going to go into military and fly she was pretty heartbroken she really came around known was incredibly supportive but I could tell it kind of hurt her because she was worried like what's going to happen in my son is he going to get hurt

but they they became incredibly supportive they were at my winging ceremony and it always

checking in but man it was it was awesome to be part of that group and to be flying these fighter jets and doing the shit we got to do and I'd been in my squadron about eight months kind of starting to feel like this was becoming a little bit routine and kind of knew what I was doing and showed up January 15th 2014 for a flight that was going to change the rest of my life and you don't know at the time you know it's just kind of like another day at the office I showed

up to the ready room my buddy 50 was at the squadron duty desk which all the pilots would rotate

“through answering the radios coordinating flight schedule kind of doing all the ground bullshit”

and as a joke 50 put up on the whiteboard behind him all the working airspace that we're going to use that day off the coast of Virginia Beach in the whiskey 72 this massive warning area that's off the coast there and he used the shark tracker app on his phone to put all these GPS positions of tagged sharks that researchers had tagged and it just so happened on the day he he was kind of laughing he's like hey man today would be a terrible day to eject the water temperatures at 37

degrees Fahrenheit at the nearby buoy we had a really cold winter and the Chesapeake Bay was just washing down really frigid water to where we were training the air temperature was below freezing with some wind and he's like and there's a 16 foot 3500 pound great white shark directly underneath

your airspace nearly and you know you know how it is in the military we're always joking about

the dark shit um I go to my brief everything's going good and smooth and as I'm kind of walking out to go uh get my gear on and go fly one of the more senior squad pilots in the squadron pulls me aside and he's like man you just haven't done anything dumb enough yet to earn a call sign and on another whiteboard that was in the ready room they had all the newer guys in the squadron at this point there was like five or six newer guys under me in the squadron

and they all had like a laundry list of call signs but I had just played the quiet man card so well that like they didn't have any ammunition against me and when you got to my name on that board there was just like a couple for a way options on there just no good call signs so as I get my gear on and go on take off on this flight we went out and did some air to air refueling just to get proficiency in that and then with extra fuel and airspace my flight lead and I broke

off uh to our own section of airspace and started doing uh basically my favorite thing to do in the jet and probably the epitome of what people think when they think fighter pilot which is dogfighting called bfm basic fighter maneuvering just been in the jet high geez trying to shoot down another aircraft within the visual range and and while we're not actually hose and off live ammunition at each other uh live missiles everything's pretty close to the real thing as far all the all the

g's are very real um and it's an incredibly dynamic environment that I absolutely love it is it's uh your your multitasking to the extreme you're operating the high performance aircraft you're talking on multiple radios you're operating weapon systems defensive systems uh and you're under you know seven and a half geez oftentimes so your body weighs like 1600 pounds so it's a high intensity interval training along with all that and then having your brain function at its highest capability while doing

all that um there's fucking awesome but really challenging um we've done several rounds of fighting

advantageous position which I was always losing because I was fighting the most senior guy in my

“squadron and he was just whipping my ass but that's how we learn you know going in and get your”

ass kicked until you figure it out and uh we got to the last fight of the day we hit joker fuel which meant we had just enough fuel left for one quick set of fighting as we kind of exit at the air space so we ended up setting up a bit lower and faster than we typically did and flightly called speed and angels left speed and angels right called fights on and we went from this a beam position pitched our jets in and this kind of turning dive and as our aircraft crossed paths I was already

about 30 degrees nose low and partially inverted so I opted to continue to roll my aircraft fully inverted and pull down towards the ocean my flight lead went up and I went down and typically this maneuver would take about 5,000 feet of air space vertically um and so that was kind of we have a saying live by the gouge dive by the gouge which is learning the little shortcuts of things to

“think about when you have to think about stuff so quickly but um I hadn't in the heat of it all I didn't”

quite realize how fast I'd gotten and I was well above the top gun recommended air speed to maneuver

nose low um but this all happens in a split second I maneuvered the aircraft and it's dive

immediate pull the stick in my lap and I'm in about seven and a half g's dive and down at the ocean and I started this maneuver up at 10,500 feet so in my quick math I had 5,000 feet I could eat up and I would still have 500 feet above our 5,000 foot hard deck that we put there for training um but as I'm pulling this thing nose low it's accelerating and it hits the transonic region which is this basically right before you break the speed of sound and the the flight before me had put in a code

into the the weapon system on the aircraft that said that there were bombs on the wings that weren't actually there and so as I'm pulling this thing as hard as I could all the sudden I hit what's called the G bucket um which is designed to prevent the aircraft from overstressing itself as you hit that transonic region where the drag is extremely uh forceful on the aircraft

and prevent a minor overstress that it perceived I basically overwrote my control input

and I didn't realize all this in the few seconds that it took all I knew as I was pointed straight at the ocean with the stick in my lap and then all of a sudden the jet just stopped turning I could feel the G's ease up and very quickly I heard the radar-altimeter blaring altitude altitude and the ocean is just rushing up at me. I've got the stick in my lap and it's not doing what I'm telling it which we call all how to control flight and anytime you're below 6,000 feet

in the aircraft's not responding how you expect the instruction is to pull the objection handle eject um I heard altitude altitude pull up pull up the ocean was rushing up at me very quickly I could see the white caps down below I was so close and I just knew I wasn't getting out of that thing and you could see the in the hub and in the displays it's saying pull up and you can see an arrow I'm just thinking I already am pulling up I can't pull up I threw the throttles

into idle I put out the speed break in this desperate attempt to slow down but it was just two little two light and two seconds before I impacted the ocean going 0.95 indicated mocks of 95 percent of the speed of sound at almost sea level about 695 miles per hour I yanked that objection handle and a normal ejection is incredibly violent I mean you get as that rocket motor ignites you get a 50g instantaneous boost that compresses your spine and then that eases

to a 12 to 14g sustained boost out of the aircraft from the time you pull the ejection handle the time you exit the aircraft takes about 0.4 seconds but it's very quick for that to ignite and shoot you out it's very quick the canopy blows away and you're out when I initiated the ejection I was two seconds from impact so by the time I had exit of the aircraft I had about a second and a half before I was going to impact the ocean the jet flew right in the ocean and just

vaporized into nothing what jacked me up so bad was you see that happened now no I don't remember

“briefly from the time I pulled the ejection handle till later when I was in the ocean I think I”

got knocked unconscious I was wondering from the force of it all yeah but what happened in my body while I was unconscious that did so much damage was impacting the sound barrier with my body you know we're not terribly aerodynamic at that speed and it was like it was an explosive force 100 times the force of a category one hurricane impacting my body instantaneously for anybody's ever you know stuck your arm out of window go in like 70 miles per hour down the highway you felt

that parasitic drag acting on you but at 700 miles per hour that force is exponentially stronger and it just I mean it ripped my helmet off my head traumatic brain injury from my head just smashing

this humorous broke through and cut my brachial artery internally so I was bleeding internally here

my radius and all the shattered on this arm and severed my nerve that controls my hand the median nerve the compression of my spine actually damaged the brachial plexus which is the nerves that go to control a lot of your upper body it was so fast that the dry suit I was wearing to protect me from that 37 degree Fahrenheit ocean water shredded apart all the gear on my vest ripped off my survival beacon my radio all my signaling equipment not that I could use any of it because at this

point my arms were just completely useless and then the steel toe boots on my feet were flailing so violently that they became like frickin wrecking balls and smashed open both my

over my lower legs open fractures of my tib fib chunks of my tibia like falling out of my leg

bleeding out through my lower extremities and this is all in like a split segment you know and miraculously in that time the parachute was able to deploy and slow me enough so that I didn't die and impact with the ocean and then I plunged into that block I did not die ejecting it's 695 fucking miles an hour dude I don't know and it was I'm here for a reason you know I I prepared a lot you know I was all through flight school and even before I went in the navy I was

doing a lot of weight training at that point I had about 20 more pounds on me I was really strong

“really short and compact which I think was a benefit but it fucked me up really good”

sorry to cut you off for a cute no no I plummeted into the icy cold water and just pens and needles of feeling that freeze and cold water on your body no ability to swim and then that parachute that had just saved my life sunk underneath that churning ocean swell and started to drag me under and we have a system on our on our vest that's supposed to disconnect you on your harness it's called the seawers there the salt water activated explosive devices because upper body

injuries are so common in high-speed ejections you oftentimes can't reach up and manually disconnect the coke fittings to get free from your parachute but unfortunately we've got like Vietnam era survival equipment and one of the seawers fired but didn't disconnect and then the others seawers didn't even fire at all they're supposed to when they go into salt water set off this charge so I remain connected to that parachute with no ability to disconnect with my arms being

destroyed and so very quickly was just getting pulled underwater and I know you know what it feels like but for anybody who's ever been held underwater when you need a breath of air that

“feeling is pretty awful and it was just tea bagging me over and over and all the shit I think there's”

enough how many thousands of gallons of water I mean is it it was like a big bag of sender blocks you know just yanking me under fortunately the the LPU the life-preserver unit automatically inflated around my neck which gave me enough buoyancy to occasionally get to the surface where I would scream for help take a big breath of air cough up some water and then it was immediately back down fortunately my flight lead thought extremely quickly he spotted my parachute opening

and he dropped a GPS mark on my location but now I'm in the ocean which is moving very quickly in the in the fumes a fuel that he had remaining in his tank at this point he spotted a fishing vessel about a mile away and he dialed up maritime guard and tried to get their attention on that but they weren't responding so he got down really low and really fast and he bumped over their bow and so these guys are out there commercial fishing like holy shit what's going on

that got him to switch over to the radio frequency and he was able to direct him over to that GPS mark that he had dropped and fortunately those guys got there and provided a visual reference of my approximate location because my flight lead had a bingo profile back to ocean and he had so little fuel and had he not done that in that moment I would have been a little tiny dark head bobbing around out in the open Atlantic ocean yeah it's like largely underwater no one would

ever find a rice in the middle of a huge field yeah so really you know he saved my life in that moment and then this fishing vessel got over there they ended up throwing a rope out to me but because my arms were so jacked up I couldn't grab it and end up just getting tangled in the paracord and so these guys kind of backed off but we're trying to keep an eye on me as the as the rest of the rescue mission kind of went down which there was a hazard report a hazard

up for all the rescue because it was such a clown show people on different frequencies

“there was a near midair with a couple hillocopters they had a co-scard vessel I believe that showed”

up nearby the first hillocopter that showed up on scene was from HS 11 they had actually just been

scene and there was a miscommunication that I was already on the fishing vessel so they deployed

“the rescue swimmer he swam over and got on that fishing vessel meanwhile I had like drifted away”

from that position and fortunately there was another hillocopter that was actually going down they were about to do some weapons training with some seal team guys down at one of the ranges down in North Carolina and they got this call that there had been a no shit ejection they needed to turn this into a search and rescue mission and one of the crew members Joe he's eaten this meatball sub for his lunch thinking he's just going on like a chill training flight and also

they get this call he had to kind of throw his sand which back in the remnants of the bag and put it

kind of in the edge of the you know the cabin of the helicopter and so these guys finally get

over to where I'm at and I think it was one of the pilots actually spotted me first and they end up getting right over hovering down and then the rescue swimmer cheat who was about to jump in due to his 20s it just so happened the week before this rescue mission there was a navy h53 sea dragon helicopter that had gone down due to an electrical fire and ditched in a very nearby area where I was that day and while everybody on that crew survived the initial crash

they had to spend so long getting everybody onto a backboard because the navy policy at that time

“was if you're in any sort of aircraft misshap into the water you have to be put onto a backboard”

before being lifted into the helicopter and to do that in the turning waves takes a lot of time

and it took so long for them to get the crew evacuated several members of that crew

perished from hypothermia before they could be rescued and so cheat was coming off just like the worst week in his career after having these people perished when he was trying to save him didn't get any time off didn't get any counseling he's already back ready to jump in the water again and he jumps in with that in the back of his head and at this point I'd been in the water for almost two hours severely hypothermic that dry suit had just filled up with the icy cold ocean water

and I was severely hypothermic and he knew that in the back of his head so when he got down we have that we got this titanium deering on the harness of our parachute harness he clipped into that and he said the force of the parachute was so strong that it just pulled both of us under and him being a super fit rescue swimmer no matter how hard he could swim it wouldn't it didn't budge and he had done this in a pool he had said but when you look down and you can see the bottom of a

lip pool is very different than when you look down and you see just the dark of this and a tangle of paracord and parachute just pulling you down and down and down but he maintained his cool he got out of knife and was able to cut me free of all the paracord and disentangle everything get me back to the surface and then he opted to just lift me right into the helicopter not to fuck with a backboard I did have a spinal injury my neck was broken but at this point he's like if

we don't get this guy out he's gonna die from hypothermia for sure it was a miracle I wasn't dead from hypothermia already they got me into the helicopter were you hold on are you conscious during all this I was in and out of consciousness for most of it I have retrograde annesia and but for years I was getting back flashbacks of it through night tears of being in the water and experiencing it but I've been able to recreate all this very accurately from the investigation they did

from talking to the rescue swimmer from talking to the fisherman we've been able to kind of compile exactly what happened to it down preoccupially despite having some big lapses in my memory personally

if you spend any time off road like I do you already know how easy it is to end up second guessing

where you're at whether you're still on a legal trail or if the route ahead is even more taking

“that's why I've been using on X off road it's an off road navigation app that shows trails”

public and private land boundaries places to camp and detail trail info all in one place and what makes it really useful is the amount of actual trail data you can check difficulty ratings to rain details trail photos even recent reports from other writers before you head out there the other big thing is you can download maps ahead of time because once you lose service out there your phone is pretty much useless but with on X off road everything still works offline and if you're writing

with a group they're location sharing feature lets everybody stay on the same map so nobody gets lost or separated what I like most about it is it gives me a lot more confidence when I'm exploring somewhere new I'm not wasting time backtracking accidentally ending up on private land or trying to figure things out once I'm already deep into the trail system I can plan ahead know what I'm getting into and spend more time actually enjoying the ride instead of worrying about navigation the

whole time search on X off road in the app store or google play again that's on X off road in the

dread of just being completely helpless and knew what happened I mean I was so confused all I knew was

I was underwater and it was dark and I couldn't breathe and I remember having hold my breath through so long and it started to like get those contractions and I remember sucking in the water and the sting of the salt water going down my chest and then wanting to cough and then that just making it worse and then being black but then being at the surface coughing and yelling and then it was just that feeling of absolute helplessness it was just replayed you know

but from the from the rescue team you know they got me into that helicopter and they started resuscitating me I was I was coding over and over again so close to death you know they were

doing sternum robbs and all these resuscitation techniques to try to keep me awake and alert in

the live and then I would be alert and I'd be screaming for help just completely disoriented and

“in shock and then I'd be out again and it was I think about a 40-ish minute flight to Norfolk”

General which is a level one trauma center and in that time you know I just coded repeatedly the whole flight and these guys were doing everything they could to keep me alive and in that chaos joe is meatball sub had broke and loose from the container and I ended up just for it can cover it in meatball and marinara so as these guys are landing at Norfolk General the medical teams coming out and I'm obviously in bad shape you know they sat they they moved me over onto the gurney

to pull me out of the helicopter in my arm was on the edge and it just flopped in half like right in the middle it was just completely disconnected here the bone was so broken but it's still kind of dangling from the skin and I'm covered in all this what appears to be like blood and gore and so the the rescue crew is kind of explaining like hey he's in bad shape but that's just joe is

“lunch but they end up rushing me into the hospital they took my core body temperature upon arrival”

I was at 87 degrees Fahrenheit core body temperature so I should have been dead from hypothermia at this point but later they they said that saved my life that cold water actually prevented me from bleeding out through my break your artery my two open leg fractures and they believe it helped save my preserve my brain function so it was actually a blessing that my dry suit ripped apart I wouldn't have lived had my dry suit function properly they gave me multiple blood transfusions

I lost a massive amount of blood they wore me up and then once they got me semi-stable they pump water out of my lungs and then they put me into an induced coma and for the course of the next week I went through over a dozen trauma surgeries they performed fasciatebees on all four of my

extremities to basically because the limbs were so damaged they were swelling up and that muscles

pushing so tight against the fascia that it was cutting off circulations to my arms and legs and in the past they would just chop your arms and legs off you know once you got compartments syndrome but fortunately being in a level one trauma center they're able to open up that fascia tissue and relieve the pressure and get the blood circulating so I had that on all four of my extremities they rebuilt my skeleton with titanium rods and steel plate in both my arms and both

my legs so now I've got like a Wolverine x-rays if you ever get to see it it's pretty sweet just all metal bones on the inside bunch of screws hundreds of stitches and staples to put everything back together and then late one night they came in and my hand was just like blue and cold to the touch and they were about to amputate my arm but they had this like top vascular surgeon that was able to get the blood flow by giving me a brachial artery bypass in my arm

but a lot of stuff that was fortunately I had like the medical dream team on that day of these surgeons that was able to put me back together and after that week they were trying to get me out of the induced coma and trying to keep me back to consciousness but I just wasn't waking up and at this point my mom you know her worst nightmare had happened her little boys in a coma maybe not going to make it a bunch of my squadron mates and friends from flight school or in the

waiting room at the ICU I'd been transferred over to port Smith Naval Hospital where everybody was just kind of waiting to hear my fate and it didn't look good you know is this guy just going to be

“a vegetable the rest of his life is again wake up whatsoever and uh when you get in a misapp”

like that I'm I'm guessing it's similar for your community but you have to fill out this form of who they who you want to contact in the case of an emergency and I had filled out my friend that I had been a kite board instructor with when I was in college which was actually another

with it that probably helped but this is my my friend Matt who kind of became like an older brother to me

“and my nickname when we were in that crew was scrappy and we were just called me scrappy and my”

commanding officer picked open the sound below and saw that number and called my friend Matt and he's like you mean scrappy talking about scrappy and my skipper thought that was a hilarious nickname and so when he came back into the ICU waiting waiting room he kind of told everybody the story everybody thinks his guy's name scrappy and so that same pilot that told me before my flight that I didn't do anything to earn a call sign yet kind of piped up and he's like oh he's a scrappy

mother fucker he'll be alright and that kind of lifted the mood of the room and then all the guys mine started turning and they came up with smurf sort of a makeshift acronym for scrappy mother fucker and uh being being the politically correct navy that it has become they had to come up with a cover story for it so they said it was because I was a short guy that turned blue

“from hypothermia that's awesome that's how they got it approved in a way so at least I got a”

call sign out all this you know a harder and one his any pilot ejected it six hundred ninety five miles an hour it's the fastest survive ejection in the navy there I know of an Air Force pilot that ejected faster than that his call sign was noodle he ejected back in the early 90s he was an F-15 pilot and they had the the instrumentation I think it was like one of the gyroscopes or something stuff functioning so they thought they were in straight and level flight when actually

they were in a dive straight down and the way he noticed it was they could hear the canopy noise when you start going faster in the jet you can hear the canopy just like when you go faster in your car it gets louder and just kind of get in spite of senses like something's not right and he was like they were within a couple of seconds of impacting the ocean when they pulled the handle I don't think the back seeer made it out he miraculously survived and actually went back to flying

I think he's actually an airline pilot now or maybe retired but he yeah he miraculously survived that but it doesn't happen very often where people go through that level of explosion you know yeah but no less than ideal there's actually a chart in the the natops the aircraft flight manual that shows the survivable envelope with the the Martin Baker ejection seat and we looked at the angle that I was at in the airspeed and it's not even on the chart like shouldn't live through it for sure

how often do you think about that I mean you know I've did ejection that you probably should

“have survived I'm really grateful for it now you should have drowned you should have died a”

hypothermia you should have died a blood loss maybe eaten by shark he had dude luckily Maryly wasn't interested you're equipment malfunctioned what do you chalk this up as still here for a reason God God still needed me for something and it really opened my eyes to that and just a deep gratitude and love an appreciation for being here in this experience as a human like got to do some good with that but definitely here for a reason yeah also I'm really grateful for that

man how long were you on surgeries so that first week they completed all the initial surgeries and

then the next week so now total of two weeks I was still in a coma and eventually the first thing I remembered was I could hear people talking familiar voices I could smell disinfectant you remember waking up after being out for two weeks yeah yeah and then I remembered being able to open my eyes and look around and I could see familiar places but it was confusing because at that point I had zero memory of the ejection I had zero memory of how I got in there I had no idea it was like waking up

from a dream in your own bed except why are there all these machines why do things not look like my bedroom in between the brain injury and all the meds that they had me on I was pretty out of it one of the first things I thought was that my my squadron rates had been playing a prank on me because I tried to move and I thought they had like tied me down with the little wool blanket they had over me but it was because I was paralyzed I couldn't move but I thought that they had like

we're fucking with me but you know I started seeing faces and kind of recognizing them and then eventually the medical staff came into kind of explain like you've been in a high speed ejection

you're lucky to be alive but you're not ever going to be able to walk again you're never going to

moment to just be stuck there trapped in my own body confused and be told like everything that I had

“worked for for so long was now gone and it was a pretty dark a dark time for me internally”

but also in that moment there was this little spark which probably comes from you know the shit I did in childhood that had that self reliance but it was like fuck you you tell me I can't do that I'm going to prove you wrong and so that became the fire that I started to feel and it started as a tiny little ember and a deep dark black pit that I was in but I started to feed that and I imagined myself getting back into the cockpit what it was going to feel like when I was back in my

flight suit with my wings back on my chest and taken off in that jet again and that became something

I looked at every day and so my mission every day was how am I going to get there you know you can

kind of imagine what you want to do but unless you do the work consistently you're not going to get there and so I just started every day like okay I can't walk today I can't use my arms I can't wipe my own ass some poor corpsman who joined to go do cool shit in the navies in here stuck with me wiping my ass all day but I'm going to fucking figure something out so I can start wiping my

“own ass again at least and so those became my little missions daily was like what can I move?”

Is there anything that does work and little by little like things started to move a bit a few weeks had gone by in that ICU room and things were pretty dark but still feeding that that little fire that was in there and one day I remember I was able to like I was able to use my corps muscles again even though my arms and legs didn't work and I was able to sit up in the bed and one of the nurses came in and I was kind of sitting up and she was just kind of like whoa

this isn't supposed to be happening once I was fairly stable they transferred me to Richmond Virginia there's a poly trauma center there at the Maguire VA and that's where I started to do all my rehabilitation and at this point you know I was completely bedridden literally shooting on myself had to be fed had to have people brush my teeth had that was really frustrating for me to be such a self-reliant person who now could do nothing for myself but I started doing therapy all day

every day you know I'd wake up I'd get moved via wheelchair to my appointments in the VA there I was doing vision therapy from the head injury one of my cranial nerves had been messed up so my vision was all jacked up I was doing speech therapy because of the brain injury I was really struggling just with the basics of talking and and as I progressed with that I was doing occupational therapy to use my upper body a little bit physical therapy caneasyotherapy

recreational therapy like all the therapies and they had a really good staff there that really gave a shit and was helping me out but I also saw a pretty dark side of the medical system while in there which was one the food that they were giving us was absolute garbage ultra processed shitty full of seed oils like didn't even there there wasn't a fresh food or vegetable to be found and even if you did get a fresh food or vegetable it was pretty shit quality you know tons of

like fredo layers and nutter butters and garbage food but it was like they were feeling these they were putting all this money into this facility and all of these therapies in this facade that they were doing so much so that if you came in the optics looked really good to be like man look at the VA and I'm grateful for how much better it was than what the vet and i'm era guys came back to where their shoved 12 dudes in a room pissing and shooting on themselves

all day getting pumped full of morphine and then just wheeled out onto the sidewalk like good luck with your life in that morphine addiction it's definitely improved since then but it was still

“like why are we not feeding people good food that's like the most important thing the other one was”

all night every night they're waking you up to take your vitals and then give you medication so

that you can sleep it's like just let us sleep that's like the most important thing we can do

right now sleep and get nutrition in our body both of those things were non-existent and then the thing that they had an abundance of was pharmaceutical drugs here take your pills take your pills this one's not working well enough we got you on all the opioids we got you on oxycontin oxycoding like all this shit let's try gabapentin this one's gonna be way better it's not addictive and before long I was on 2400 milligrams a day of gabapentin which initially helped a little bit

but ended up becoming the hardest addiction that I had to break what is that again it's called

started as opioids were kind of getting a bad rep they'd still give you the opioids but now they'd

give you a bunch of the gabapentin to to help deal with the nerve pain which it didn't really do

“much honestly it would initially it made me fall asleep but once my body acclimated to which was”

pretty quick they just had to ramp ramp ramp the dose up until I was taking like the maximum daily dose that they would allow at that time but it was all just pharmaceutical based man when you saw the doctor who's supposed to be your healer it wasn't like hey let's get you better food let's do what this is just what pills do you want what pills do you need and also there's these cute girls floating around the poly trauma center which is largely um special forces operators who'd been hit

by RPGs or gunshots lost the you know broken spines there's marines in there a lot of infantry guys a bunch of young men and they got these cute girls that are the pharma reps that come in and they flirt with you and they get you to sign up for clinical trials and there were still I overheard some of the staff members at the hospital talking about one of the trials that they had done it was a nerve pain medication for people with permanent spinal injuries and they would

inject the stuff directly into their spinal fluid and somehow the batch of the medicine that they received had been contaminated because they were storing it cryogenically and liquid nitrogen and containers that weren't designed to be frozen and so it was causing cracks and then they were getting contaminated

with some sort of fungus or something and so the first time they started putting in this into these

fucking legitimate heroes and wheelchairs just trying to not feel pain all day it immediately caused severe pain and the staff was saying you could hear them screaming at the top of their lungs to just

“in their lives and they were paralyzed so they couldn't kill themselves and the only way that they could”

stop these guys from being in that level of pain was to put them into induced colmas. Do you have the fuck out of your manner? Are you serious? Yeah they're they're doing medical experimentation on American veterans in the VA hospitals and I didn't end up signing up for any clinical trials but I'm guessing that still happens today where you just get to be a lab rat form but I was pretty frustrated in that place seeing kind of the inner workings of it but very fortunate to have

people that cared and continuing to work really hard I progressed to the point where I could get around on a walker my arms weren't working for a long time and then one day my left hand I could start to move my pinky and my ring finger so I eventually was able to move this arm enough that I could brush my teeth I could wipe my own ass again which was a huge victory and a little much time had passed before it was about two months before this hand started working and then another

couple weeks one day this hand just I started to feel it tingling and you were walking before that. No no this is before I could walk. Okay I thought I heard you say you were on a walk. Yeah sorry I jumped ahead there but yeah I couldn't use my arms but once I started to get function of my arms they could get me in a walker and start moving on that they had me in the pool walking assisted they had me on this sort of treadmill with these suspension devices on me so it would take my body

weight and I could re-learn to walk that way so there was a lot of good stuff with that but after three months I was good enough that I got to go back to Virginia Beach and continue outpatient therapy and it was a huge relief to put that hospital in the rear view mirror but at this point I still couldn't drive I was pretty limited for my you know my my functions a daily living I was very reliant on others and end up going back to Virginia Beach and continuing

outpatient therapy at Portsmouth Naval Hospital and that place was an absolute shit show but just working really hard at my rehab talking to the pain man management docs I'd be like I don't want to be on these pain meds I don't think they're doing anything for me and the answer

was always well there you don't feel you need them because they're working and so they didn't want

to help me get off of them and so you know I was just kind of broken isolated from a lot of my squadron mates and I found myself one day sitting on the back patio where I lived on this lawn chair you know taking all my oxy and I had a big thing a whiskey drinking that and I'm just

“kind of like melting into the ground and I remember being there just completely just melted and”

relaxed and thinking man I could just stay here the rest of my life but there was this other part of me is like is this what you want to be and in that moment I recognized fuck no I don't want to just be this the rest of my life a drug addict an alcoholic and that that that moment was really

doc I talked to was like no you need to stay on the meds and you need to stay on the meds so I just

started doing it myself and I just started titrating off at this point I was on over a dozen medications as on oxycodone oxycontin, gabapentin, tramadol, trasodone, amitriptoline, plus a bunch of other shit and so I just started each day cutting out a little bit of each one and I started with the amitriptoline then the tramadol the trasodone and then I got to the oxycodone and I was able to cut that out and then the oxycontin which took several weeks of like just feeling like

absolute dog shit but just kind of toughen it out and if I got too bad I would take a small dose

“just to kind of ease that I didn't just go cold turkey because I think I would have fucking died”

but then I got to the merrottener the gabapentin which was supposed to be non-addictive and that became the hardest drug for me to get off of as soon as I started cutting back on it I felt extremely nauseous I was shaking just felt like I got punched in the gut and so very gradually I cut down that dosage and it took about three months for me to wean myself off that medication but as soon as I did and got all those meds out of my system it was like the life came back into me even just

like the way I looked I was like kind of pasty and pale and doy low energy just didn't feel like myself at all but as I got those meds out it was like I had motivation again and instead of just being exhausted at the end of each day I was like ready to do stuff and I was really fortunate to have really good friends that were taking care of me you know they were trying to get me to go out

“and go wake surfing when I was just barely walking but they got me out there in the water and”

hang out on the boat and sure enough got me up on the wake surfing board and buddies taking me

out surfing like my first experience back in the ocean I was pretty nervous I could barely put

on the wet suit because my arms were still so weak but ended up getting out into the waves and just got crushed by this wave out in the outer banks held under like bounced along the bottom coming back up for a breath air held down again and then pop back up with just a big smile on my face because it was like I had faced that demon of being held under the water and I was okay with it how long did it take from the crash to that to surf it probably about a year and a half

I had been rehabbing about a year and a half when I was starting to get active with stuff like surfing my buddy Spacoli took me out mountain biking and I just started to get back in touch with the stuff I loved with the people I enjoyed being around and meanwhile I was going through an

investigation which was pretty brutal you know I had just crashed in 89 million dollars super Hornet

and the consequences could be pretty brutal and some of those interviews were more like an interrogation very tense some dark moments of them asking me do you think you still deserve to be a fighter pilot after this you know being in tears like just kind of broken down but pushing through that the investigation lasted months and months and months and it all culminated where I had to go to Norfolk and go see the admiral who would determine my fate after I had been through

all these proceedings and I showed up for that I think at this point I was still using a cane to walk around still limping but I put on my summer white uniform and I walk into this room and it's a big room about the size of this with a table and it about the size of this platform big wooden table and on either side it's flanked by about a dozen other naval aviators all kind of convened to determine my fate and after they had done the preliminary

hearing with me the admiral comes in and everybody stands up and he sits on the opposite into this long table from me and tells us all the sit down and I remember sitting down and he just looks across the table at me and goes "lutin it Gil, are you fearless?" and like what do you say

“when an admiral asked you that you know but the only thing that came out of my mouth and I”

don't know where it came from but I said sir I don't remember a lot from the ejection but I'm certain what little seat cushioning there is on the ejection seat was puckered up inside me real tight and he didn't blink he didn't laugh he just stood up and walked out of the room and I was just like well there goes my flanker you know and and everybody's just kind of like looking at each other like what was that and eventually everybody kind of clears out of this room and I walk out into the

hallway and one of the captains oh six is pulls me into his office and he has me sit on the other side of his table and he's got this glass jar full of life-saverments and he takes one and pops it in his mouth he gives me one and I pop it in my mouth and we're sitting there just enjoying his little peppermint and he goes within a gill if you can get your body working again we're going to get you back in a super hornet and it was just like the biggest relief and just

the opportunity to go back and fly but now I had to figure out how to get medical waivers and get back

flying physically but that just drove my therapy man I was doing two a day workouts I was doing all my therapy at Port Smith and I just dedicated myself to all of that shit and started getting better and stronger and went through a medical waiver process with a bunch of different flight surgeons which was a miracle in itself I had to get a stack of all these waivers for all the injuries that I had. If you've been listening to the show for a while you know this is something I care about

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for us go to moinkbox dot com slash us or us and get free chicken wings in every box for a year as long as you're a pain customer that's moinkbox dot com slash us or us all right Kagan I know that supposedly may have had some UAP encounters yeah so we have a hot question you ready you flew the F-18 superhorned the same jet off the same Virginia Beach coast the guys like Ryan Graves and Commander Fraver were flying

when they reported objects they couldn't explain and the Pentagon just started releasing its declassified UAP files over the past few weeks so I have to ask you in all of your time up there did you ever see anything you could not explain or fly with somebody who did and what your honest take is any of this real yeah this is exciting topic so while I was in my recovery I lived

“down this road called oyster point key it's like quiet little spot down on the uh on Rudy's inlet”

area of Virginia Beach wooded quiet kind of outside the city a bit and I was up on the second story

of this room that I was staying at with my buddies who kind of adopted me while I was recovering two of my friends were deployed so their bedroom was open while they were gone let me stay there but I'm asleep one night and this bright light comes in through the second story room where I'm at through the window and I thought maybe a car had pulled up in the driveway and had their bright son or something but I got out of bed and I walked over to the window and looked

out the window and right at eye level there was this thing that looked like a massive set of stadium lighting a bunch of different circular lights all in the square kind of rectangular pattern

“just blasting in on me and rather than being afraid which I think would be a natural”

sensation when you witness something bizarre like that I just got this overwhelming sense of calm and I just walked back to the bed I would I'd gotten up to go to the restaurant I didn't even do that I just walked back to bed and fell asleep and the next morning I woke up and I thought that was just a dream there's no way that was real um fast forward into my recovery

Strike Fighter Wing Atlantic which is sort of like the administrative command that coordinates everything between all the different fighter squadrons at Oceana and I was doing a number of different ground jobs answering emails phone calls and one day I got an email that was from a bunch of the more high-ranking individuals from a various squadrons around Oceana and they were saying that they were getting sightings of these objects out in the whiskey 72 airspace where we do

“our training and you know some of them were saying that you know we don't know what these are I think”

there was one he was either the XO or CO one of the squadrons was I don't know if he was joking but he's like we should just strap some nine exes on and go shoot these things down so

shooting down with the heat-seeking missile and at first I thought they were just messing with me

like there's so many shenanigans I assume they were just messing with me being the guy at the wing but they originally wanted me to kind of coordinate these reports and so I responded to that first email thinking that they were messing with me strike fighter wing at Lannick X-Files, Fox Mull, they're signing off was the end of my email thinking that these guys are just complete full of shit and then I got a return email that said we need to move these conversations

over to sipper and for those that all that's the secure internet and that's when I kind of realized this isn't this isn't a joke Holy shit what do you think and dude I was really excited because I had had that thing that I didn't know if it was a dream I still don't know if that was a

dream or not but it was so vivid and I've always had curiosity on this topic but to hear that

it was like holy shit this is this is real there's something out there I don't know what it is but there's something um I continued my recovery one day I'm sitting at that computer answering emails and the comment or the strike fighter wing at Lannick, comment or it comes in it goes let's in and get what do you do in today I said just answer an email sir and he says how about you go back and fly jets today and it was like holy shit I get to go back to fly and it was pretty

overwhelming and exciting all at once that I actually got to do that and so it kind of overcome all those odds come over a lot of obstacles and then I was back flying and while I was back flying going through my refresher training to get back to the fleet I was out on a mission out in that same

whiskey 72 airspace and we were doing long range intercept so like long range fighting other aircraft

“and I think we took up a division that day so a flight of four aircraft and two of the aircraft”

would split off and go to one side of the airspace and then me and my flight leads split off to the other and we set up for these different presentations to practice our tactics and as we're setting up in the airspace people are using their radars and their flears to kind of clear the airspace and make sure there's no interlopers and the flight lead comes up over and says we've got interlopers and I remember getting that contact on my radar and then training my

fleer to it my forward looking infrared it's like a long range infrared camera to look at that thing I know you know all this shit is but no it's good you're doing that for the audience so I locked up my my fleer on this thing and pulled up the fleer page to see what it was seeing and it was it was pretty far out and our fleers are kind of shitty so it's pretty grainy but I could see this little spherical object out in the distance was put in off the air signature and I'm primarily

flying formation with my flight lead as we're kind of setting up for these for these presentations so I was constantly kind of looking back and flying the jet primarily but occasionally glancing at this thing and then I remembered it was like when I looked back up that thing had moved much closer to my position and I could see it a little better it was still that kind of grainy circle spherical thing but pretty quickly the flight leads like we got a return to base we're unable to

complete this with the interlopers so we had to cancel that day's flight which is a pretty costly evolution to get four jets up in that sky to do this so we rejoin we go back we

“land and I remember in the debrief expecting that we're going to talk about this thing that it just”

happened and nobody said anything nothing nothing and so I knew like okay there's likely some sort of program that we're not briefed into yet so we're not allowed to talk about this and that's when I knew like there's something out there that was my personal experience not terribly exciting but then like Ryan Graves he was in a Virginia Beach at the same time as I actually I know Ryan and he was seeing a lot of stuff he had like close encounters with one of those things passing right by and

it and seeing it with his own eyes but there was a lot of sightings of these spherical objects with a cube inside him and sometimes moving instantaneously positions and changing directions in ways

that we do reengineering and rebuilding I mean there's no way we're alone in this massive universe

we've hidden our craft from the public for decades the SR-71 is an example do you think the military sitting on something further out exotic propulsion the anti-grivitic stuff and those navy

“UFO patterns do you think that's what this could be absolutely or do you think it's aliens?”

I think it's both I think I think that there is alien craft that have made contact and some of them being recovered I mean I've heard enough reputable people talking about these subjects some of them on your show that have been in these recovery efforts to recover the craft and I think it's all being bow guarded by the defense industry and these technologies are being

used in released in order the way to make the most profit for the people that are in control of

things I think the reason we don't see a lot of it is because some of these technologies could make so many of the things that we rely on completely obsolete like propulsion technologies and energy technologies that could make the oil and gas industry crash and we have an entire economy

“built on that and it would completely change the game and I think the people that control these”

technologies and are running the show don't want that to happen but I think I think it's up to you think this goes I mean I don't know how much the the presidency's in on you this because I don't think that they're even the real decision makers in the world I think it's like a reality TV show what we see on TV politics to keep us divided and pissed off and at each other's throats while the real series of the world are dividing and conquering everybody do you think a lot of these

politicians people that bring this stuff up of former government officials do you think this is a way for them to get their name in the media I mean other maybe it's definitely could be a big distraction yeah tactic as well but I mean if you want if you're a politician and you want to get on the fucking nose and you need press I don't know if there's anything easier than to jump on the and surprisingly go to UFO disclosure stuff yeah it's immediate it's a

“immediate press yeah yeah I mean it might be it might be that I think there are some politicians”

that are genuinely interested in it but due to all of that is such a fucking illusion you know I think it's just a show and I don't think the real decisions that are being made are even being made by the politicians we see on TV I think everything's done behind closed doors and out of the side of the public and we've got this whole optic that there is this thing that is democracy that is just bullshit I don't disagree with it at all so you know I don't I don't watch the news anymore I think

I've been misled and gotten my hopes up far too many times to to and now realize that that's just that's not where the real decisions are being made and that's not who's in control but are people using it for political gain probably not where it is it is a big distraction thing I mean the last time this came up was in the middle well I mean it's still being brought up the how do I say this

this is still drawn out from the first time was brought up within this administration ironically it

was brought up right in the midst of all the abstinence yeah it totally would give them UAPs it totally could be let's change the subject like look over here here's aliens don't worry about fucking little kids here's aliens yeah I mean and I think that's totally possible but I still think it's very real I think it's I think there's enough reputable people that are talking about it and putting their careers on the line and destroying their livelihoods and even losing their lives

to get this information out who's destroying their livelihood to get this information out I think it likely comes back to those people that are in control that are making the money off of the defense industry no no I mean who do you think is throwing their career in the trash um for disclosure you know I forget a lot of the names of this but there's been a lot of high-level government officials coming forward saying things there's been military members other navy pilots coming forward and

saying things and just talking to Ryan about that process and the congressional hearings a lot of those people are under extreme duress um having their families threatened losing everything in their careers um and why would they do that you know if this wasn't very real and even just no I don't know who's throwing their career away I've I've dove into this topic as you know yeah you might be

very skeptical that it's real at all yeah well let me rephrase that

“I mean I think people are saying something but I think that the”

I think there's a very good possibility the narrative has been totally manufactured I think it's spiritual I think people are saying spiritual things perhaps perhaps I really don't know I don't know 100% what it is um could be spiritual other dimensions I mean you have been I don't know how many psychedelic journeys you've done but you know that kind of unlocks your mind other possibilities oh yeah and

I don't know I mean everything's spiritual really

what do you or your Christian not strictly a Christian although I believe there's a lot of really

“good lessons in that I believe in God and love and connection of all beings and things”

and I think that God is infinite and I don't think we can possibly comprehend what infinite is with the human mind and the analytical mind and are unexplained in English language I don't think we can and I think a lot of people are trying to explain what God is and there's a lot of different interpretations of what it is and I don't think any of them are 100% accurate because I don't know that we're supposed to know exactly what God is

that's part of this experience and this human existence is the mystery of it but it's everywhere in everything and it is love and connection I know that much is true and I think I think Christianity you know does a really good job of explaining how to live a good life knowing that we are all connected

“and in God is love but I think we're all trying to explain the infinite that we can't possibly”

comprehend how great God is I don't think we can explain it I don't think we can comprehend it we only have five senses we can only see a limited spectrum of light we can only hear a limited number of frequencies we can only feel smell taste touch the things that are immediately around us like there's so much outside our spectrum of this experience as a human of what we can even interpret in comprehend and I really believe God is infinite beyond our imaginations

kind of switching gears here what was it like for you jumping back and a jet after you ejected at 695 miles an hour broken down Mary fucking bone in your body almost died multiple different ways you know it felt really good it felt good like getting back on the horse that had bucked me off it was like a mass I'd been working for this for a couple of years you know impusting my ass and and just had so many little things line up so I could do that so I was really proud to be back

but at the same time there was a part of me like am I going to freak out when I put the

thing into a dive at the ocean is something going to happen and so one of the first things I did

on my first solo back out in the jet was I went back out to that same airspace and I put that jet in a dive and pulled it down toward the ocean not nearly as fast as I was but kind of did a similar maneuver and loved every moment of it but then it kind of became like oh shit now I got to actually do this thing again and the pressure is back on and it was right back into the distress of that world man and it was intense but I was really stoked to be there

well we what what kept you going I mean I've interviewed a couple of gentlemen like yourself from in one of them Niclavery Niclavery's a green beret lost his leg the guy right up there on that painting yeah he's right down the road up in Cookville with group and with a guy you know he lost his leg and then they told him he would have to redo everything pass all the PT calls even went through dive school

that's from a guy Ryan Hendrickson had his leg blown off by a pressure plate mine in afghanistan

he does the landmine removal yeah right now he goes over to Ukraine and he's like dude I don't have a I don't have a side on this war I don't give a shit he's like I give a shit about saving kids because I know what it's like to have your fucking leg blown off and so he goes over there and defines like soccer fields and playgrounds and it's all by himself yeah I know one of his someone who works with them there roby roba shot who's a green beret that I know was involved with his

“I think it's a nonprofit that he has to run that operation oh he's got somebody going what”

them to do this well I don't know for roby went with him but I know he was involved with Ryan oh right on we've helped him support what he was doing so look I mean what was in your head we got you through we'll keep the drive going the push I think it was that fire that I had from a young age man it was like this this need to prove to others that I was worthy of being loved

after sort of having a lack of emotional attachment at a very young age I think I always

strived to prove that I was worthy of love and so I had to accomplish the impossible to do that and after talking to a lot of people and special forces community and and in high per high speed roles in the military high accomplishing individuals I think that's a common theme is we often had something early in our life that made us feel like we had to prove that we deserve

“to be loved you know the people who've done the dives into that stuff and I think that's what was”

feeling me is like I needed to prove that I was worthy what advice do you have for the next guy the ghost or something like this whether they're a pilot or a ground guy or whatever it is you know finding finding that little spark of light in that darkness and then and then feeding

that fire is incredibly powerful it also really asking yourself what do I want and why do I want it

because you can chase a goal because you think you want it and then get there and realize that's maybe not what you wanted to begin with why why are you doing it what's really important to you and and if it really is something that you want to pursue because it's so meaningful to you just feed that little spark man keep that hope alive and then do the work you know be consistent with the work towards that goal because things aren't going to happen just because

you hope they do you got to hope they do visualize it and then move toward that goal every day

“and I think we can overcome just about anything if we have that we have a good reason for it”

we can visualize it you know some people say a manifest but then you got to actually walk the walk and do it in discipline is what gets you there do it advice how much longer did you fly for so I had been back flying for about 18 months and I was starting to notice that I was struggling mentally I was stressed out I was having a hard time remembering things my sleep was really shitty and initially when I got back I was like I felt awesome I was crushing it I actually as I

went through my retraining I graduated at the top of my class I was really doing well physically mentally I felt awesome and I was just so driven but as I got back into that world of just constantly getting ground down not sleeping working long days pull in more G's causing more damage to the brain that I didn't even know was there things started to kind of fall apart for me and I had a flight when I was down at Tindall Air Force Base we were doing a live weapons exercise

so I got to take off fly out to the airspace over the ocean there and fire an aim nine mic sidewinder it a drone and shoot down this drone which is a pretty cool opportunity we don't get to shoot live missiles very frequently did that and then I broke off and I got to go some dissimilar aircon combat training with a F22 Raptor so got to go dogfight and F22 Raptor which was like one of the coolest things I ever got to do just seeing this thing that I had just

drooled over at air shows as a little kid and now being in the air with it seeing the way this thing can move like a frequent nature but when I got back from that flight I remember I was in my debrief watching my tapes to see what had happened in the missile shoot and I remember being really confused by the symbology that I was intimately familiar with and I didn't quite feel right went through the debrief and that night just could not sleep and I was like sitting in the hotel where

something terrible was about to happen and I just kind of tried to tough it out I ended up I was on duty the next day so just answer in the radio and in the phones and just not feeling

right all day just being confused and anxious and almost like hyper vigilant and that second night

I got back to the hotel and I was like something is not right and I remember I was going to fly the next morning I got my phone out to set my alarm and I couldn't figure out how to set my alarm clock on my cell phone I was confused by the math it was basically subtracted a couple hours like to give me enough time to get up in the morning from when I had to be at the brief and I couldn't do that and so there had been a number of incidents in the F-18 community a lot in the hornet community

but some in the in the super hornet community and growler community as well that people were getting basically getting the bends they were getting aircraft fluctuations of pressure while flying

they had found a number of these faulty environmental control system the ECS was basically just

pressurizing and depressurizing the cockpits randomly and it was causing guys to get decompression sickness there had been a growler crew that was actually taxing out for takeoff and it happened so

“violently that I think one of the guys made a partial recovery and I think the other guys like a”

complete vegetable because that compression jacked them up so bad and I know you know DCS from diving in the navy you come up for those that don't basically you if you come up from depth too quickly the nitrogen can come out of solution that's in your blood and form little bubbles and if you get them in your joints it's painful that's called the bends or type one decompression sickness but what can be far more damaging is if you get those in your brain and it can block blood flow

to your brain and even kill you kind of like an annual you know causing an aneurysm and so the thought was maybe I was having one of these aneurysms like that crew of growlers had it they'd become so frequent in the hornet community the legacy F-18s that were the predecessor to the super hornet that they started putting hyperbaric facilities on the aircraft carriers so they could treat the pilots when they got the bends out at sea oh shit so that had been an issue in our

community at that time and that's kind of what we started to think maybe happened I called the

squadron safety officer who's squeezer who's actually the pilot I had my first flight in the

super hornet with and he ended up driving me with our commanding officer to Mayport dive base and they put me in that chamber overnight and squeeze me to try to get this get the bubbles back into solution and heal the damage and get blood flow going normally and I felt a little bit better after it but I still something was not right and the the dock that I saw the next day when I came back in

“is like considering your past I think there's something more going on here than simply decompression”

sickness and we need you to go see the flight surgeon when you get back from this detachment and at this point I was stationed out in Lamor, California and that was the last thing I wanted to have to was go talk to medical about something that wasn't right inside of me after going through all that to get back but I knew also that I was not going to be able to function safely and fly a jet the way I was because I couldn't concentrate I couldn't think clearly my personality was shifting I

was becoming pretty dark and angry and mean and I had been such like a happy dude ever since that experience when I was 16 I just become like a very happy go get her kind of dude and it was like something had shifted inside of who I was so reluctantly went in to see the flight surgeon we got back from that detachment still wasn't able to sleep for shit and when I went into see him pretty quickly got a delayed onset PTSD diagnosis they kind of hit the the easy button

which oh this is PTSD and so I was very quickly referred to the psych department and they started giving me meds sleeping meds to try anti anxiety meds to try and as things weren't really working very well they ended up giving me a medication called sarah quill or quattipine which is a pretty

“heavy-duty anti-psychotic medication that can be used in low doses for insomnia and so that's what”

they started giving me and it would knock me out but it was like into this drug-induced coma it wasn't restful sleep and I still wasn't restoring and recovering so I just feel like like I got hit by a truck the next day just felt awful pretty pretty quickly into it it became apparent that I likely wasn't gonna get the opportunity to go back and fly as soon as this became a mental health issue it it shot that down pretty quickly and so I was losing my community I was losing my brotherhood and family

that I had been in there and I started feeling pretty shitty about myself in climbing into a very

I felt I had worked for my wife who I had recently married after the accident to just had our

“brand new little baby boy and he was just a little infant and so she's busy taking care of this”

little boy and now she's dealing with me starting to deal with heavier and heavier paranoia and hyper vigilance getting to the point where I would come into the house and I would hide underneath the windows because I thought I was someone from the government was trying to kill me.

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Why do you think, why did you think that? How did you manage it? Well I felt I was being poisoned initially. You felt you were being poisoned. I felt I was being poisoned and I was it was just it was in these FDA approved pills that I was taking from a white lab coat dock that I trusted. So I was actually being poisoned. It just wasn't in the way that I thought I thought that they were poisoning my food and my water that was making me even worse and once you get like so sleep

deprived and conjunction with brain injury and everything else I was dealing with it was like I was just spiraling and if you know what, I mean did you do do manufactured

“a narrative in your head on why they wanted to kill you, why they wanted to poison you?”

Yeah, I did it. I was getting so delusional and I was starting to get to the point of border

line psychosis where I was just disconnected from reality and my imagination had become so real that it didn't even have to make sense anymore. But I felt very, very, very real like people are trying to kill me and my wife was making dinner managing a newborn baby boy and I would come in the house and I would throw all the food in the garbage. I would dump the water out into the sink and say they're poisoning us and just like freaking out. And my wife is having to deal with all this shit on

her own while managing a baby so it had become a complete nightmare for her and that same treatment continues. You just need more medication, more medication, more medication and I just kept getting worse and worse until we made the decision that I was going to go through a med board to get out of the military and when this kind of all transpired I was like so broken and I felt I had let everybody down that ever believed in me. I was so depressed that I found myself late one night laying in bed

in the middle of the night again unable to sleep even with the meds and I kept the clock 19 next to my bed and I pulled that out and I was wondering what the muzzle was going to feel like on my teeth what the gun oil was going to taste like on my tongue and as I go to do this I look in my wife and my baby boy are asleep beside me and I just thought I didn't want to wake them up in that moment to that and I put the gun away but had they not been right there I wouldn't I wouldn't be here to tell

that story and then I just continued to spiral. The person worse to where I was in a full blown psychosis man completely I mean I thought my wife was Carrie Mathison from homeland that she was this blonde CIA agent sent to help save me from this dark military organization that was trying to exterminate me. Are you serious? Like everything was so real. Do you have conversations with your wife about that? Later on I did after the fact but at the time I was just due to it was like my eyes

were just spinning in my head and I would just truck luckily I trusted her I didn't trust anybody else through it but I would do anything that she said and and and do things just got really weird and confusing and it would jump like the delusion and the hallucinations would just jump from moment to moment like

“my wife had to take me with the baby to go into the commissary to get food on base and I remember”

walking into the commissary and every single person I saw was like a demon ghoul they had these

just glaring at me and it was so real so real as I walked around just like cowering and afraid

and in my wife was okay but as because in my mind she's like she's like the superhero sent to save

“me and so I would just follow her around like a lost puppy and as we're checking out I remember”

the checkout lady who's just like working for tips like reaching out for a tip and I remember her doing that and it felt like she was like trying to suck my soul out of me like it was just crazy shit they in and they out and we got up to the car this yeah it was wild we got out to the to the to the front of the commissary and my wife had forgotten to grab something because she used like trying to manage me and a baby and all this shit and so she's like stay right here I want you

to stay right in front of the store so I can see you stay with the baby and she goes in and for whatever reason in that I had like another freak out and I ran the cart with the baby and ran back to the back of the parking lot and was hiding behind a car and my wife comes out and she's like oh fuck you know where did he go and she's immediately thinking like how long can the baby survive without me who do I need to call and like luckily she starts running through the parking lot

yelling and looking and I pop my head up and she's like oh thank god but she was just like dude it was putting her through hell dealing with me um eventually started doing the medical board process

which uh at the more at that time I describe as basically going through the bureaucratic equivalent

of the Indiana Jones Temple of Doom and it was like a complete shit show the woman that they had just hired to be the pebble which is the liaison officer that helps get you through that process head inherited like a six month backlog of people that weren't getting pushed through the med board

“on time and she got into this office expecting that I think she was going to have a really”

cushy easy job and it was just chaos she had such a backlog of records and I remember my first meeting with her I come into the office and there are stacks of paperwork on all the chairs every horizontal surface just covered in shit and I couldn't even sit down at the desk with her because

there's so much paperwork just thrown in chaos around and then we spent my a lot of 15 minutes with

this woman to discuss my case and she uh stopped after a couple minutes and took a phone call with her daughter to shoot the shit about what she's doing in college and her new boyfriend right in front of me and it became very obviously very quickly even in my impaired state that I was going to have to man the helm on this process and luckily my wife was helping but this woman was just a complete shit show and it was like I needed to fill out certain paperwork and I'd get it into her

and then she'd lose it and say I needed to do that again and it was just this for months and months and months I ended up going to the VA in Fresno to get all my assessments for the disability

“rating and my wife had to drive me but I remember going into that and then going into more”

psychoses in the place becoming like this night marriage funhouse and they brought me into a sesame for how bad my PTSD was and I was explaining what was going on you know the psychoses and how bad I had gotten how I'm not sleeping I went in to see a TBI specialist in a nervous system specialist and I remember he brought me into the room and he just looked pissed off and he had me show my arms and he took this little thing that looked like a spiky pizza cutter and he just

zipped it up my arms really quick and he goes you don't have any nerve damage and you don't have any TBI hold that was all he did and then my I came back out he wouldn't let my wife in the room for that examination and when I came back out to my wife my wife's like that was it and and he's like yep that's it and so a lot of the stuff I did there it was like these people were just not even acknowledging what was going on in Fresno V.A. in California and I had to stack a medical records and

I'd gotten it all put on the disc that they needed and like they had so much medical information on me and yet they were just completely ignoring it fortunately I found one guy there who was assessing me for the musculoskeletal injuries and he actually read through the medical stuff and he's like holy shit man he's like listen that that neurologist that you saw won't give a rating to anybody he's got a chip on his shoulder he's pissed off he hasn't want to be here and it doesn't matter

what you have going on he's not going to look at he was like I see what's going on with you and I'm going to help you the best I can and so he helped me get a very robust package together for all my the muscle injuries related to the nervous system damage and then everything was submitted and this process took about a year meanwhile my wife is having to manage the shit show that is me

trying to manage the shit show recommending to my wife that I'd be put into an inpatient program

“but my wife is a trauma ER nurse and so she had dealt with psychotic patients and she knew how”

bad those inpatient facilities were and so she was doing everything she could to keep me out of it my parents ended up flying out to try to help her out but it was just fucking chaos and then the

rating finally come back after months of waiting and they gave me a 50% disability rating for PTSD and

that was it in my wife is like what are you fucking kidding you're an active psychosis you have all this other stiff and they completely disregarded it so my only course of action was I had to fly out to Washington DC still in and out of psychosis he still fucked up meanwhile I was going to stand for hospital and I was getting more surgeries on my leg that was really jacked up that ended up just making my leg way worse in the long run because they actually they use their

medical students and they give a good discount or whatever it is to the military guys but you get to go in and you get to be you know basically a lab rat for dissection for the medical students at

Stanford and they fucked it up on me I remember I got out of the surgery there and my throat hurt

like a motherfucker and I had been indivated before by others and normally it doesn't hurt that much

“but they must have had like I remember that one of the the residents that was going through”

training coming in to get ready for that surgery and he was like fumbling with the IV and he missed the IV and then accidentally turned it on and so I was just getting like doused in IV fluid this dude was so nervous and I'm pretty sure that they fucked me up in that surgery but anyways I get my summer white uniform together and this is like this becomes like a very formal almost like disciplinary action you feel like there there's a lot of scrutiny against you like

your lying it's kind of how you're treated as you go into this process to to do an appeal but my wife and I fly out to DC with our baby boy it's a shit show because again I'm in and out of psychosis and I remember we go into this panel and you're in this little waiting room waiting to see these three high ranking military individuals I think they're all either O5 or O6 rank and one was a flight surgeon one was another naval aviator and one was a marine

“and so you walk into this room you have to stand a detention they're up on an elevated platform”

behind these big big podiums and they just kind of like look down at you and you have to state your name and it's very like you have to do this and this and this so it's awkward and uncomfortable and then they start grilling me and the pilot that was on the panel thought I was just trying to get out of the military so I could go fly for the airlines it was very obvious none of them had really even looked at my medical records or had any idea what was going on except I think that

marine had and so there's two like kind of room questions at me for probably about 10 minutes and then the marine finally just kind of cut them off and he's like listen you served your nation on our belief and we're going to help you out you and your family have a wonderful day and so in that moment they awarded me a hundred percent disability but had that marine not been on that board

and the panel as always rotating that the outcome could have come very differently luckily at least

one of these guys actually opened the folder in front of his face to see what was actually going on then then I was out man I took several more months of waiting for the the paperwork to go through and then moved back to northern Michigan with my family we bought a small piece of property out in the middle of nowhere and continued that same treatment at the VA which was just more problems more pills more pills more problems and that was the only solution and when I said the

Sarah Quill is not helping it's making me worse it's making me feel shitty it's not even helping my sleep anymore the only answer is well that's because we need to give you a higher dose and within three days of going in with that issue they boosted me from 300 milligrams a night up to 450 milligrams a night of this medication and within just a few days of that increase in the medication my wife came home from an interview she was getting a different job as a nurse

and so she left me at home with my mom in my son so my mom could keep an eye on me because I was still in a bad spot and when she got home she kind of wondered where I was at and she heard me rustling around in one of the rooms of the house and when she came in she found me I was completely embarrassed naked at this point I had like shriveled up like I had lost so much weight I didn't even look like the same person my skin was pale and placid I had my body covered in all these scars

I had shaved off my hair and chunks for some reason my eyebrows were missing I shaved off

neck like a cape because I thought I was going to go out into the northern Michigan snowy weather

and fight crime like a superhero I was naked Batman and so my wife you know being an ER doc and having dealt with psychotic patients was very calm she called the VA and said what was happening and they said we're hanging up and we're calling the police and very shortly thereafter this squad car pulls up in our driveway this doughy looking police officer who looked like he had no idea what the fuck was going on comes up to our house and tells my wife he has to put me in the

back of the squad car to take me to the hospital in my wife's like there's no way you're going to put him in the back of that car with what he has going on so she loaded up our baby boy my mom jumped

in the back seat and then we drove towards the emergency room which was about an hour drive from where

we live and on that ride I hallucinated that nuclear warhead had gone off at our home and there was this plume of that nuclear blast like chasing us down I hallucinated that there were trees and animals and vehicles flying through the sky that the trees were like flopping over from the explosive force like the this sky was just like lightning it was like fucking wildly vivid and eventually my wife gets me to the hospital apparently I got out of the vehicle and just started taking a leak on a

bush in the front and the security guard was right there and he was trying to arrest me in my wife's like no he's in a psychosis and we need to get him in there now and he's like I've seen worse and luckily between my mom and my wife they were able to talk this guy out of sending me to jail and they got me in check me in and then I got put in this plexiglass room where I had over the course of the next two days I had a completely out of body almost like a psychedelic experience except

“it was very dark and very disconnected I think I think my soul had left my body and I was stuck in”

purgatory I was traveling through space and time from the age of the dinosaurs to like all this different shit traveling through space to the outer reaches of the galaxy and I remember myself being trapped in this capsule just spinning out into deep space all alone and being so disconnected eventually I came back to out of that I had been driven by ambulance down to the VA impatient psychiatric facility at Battle Creek my family tried to get me in somewhere local

but the entire mental health that all the facilities are overrun right now because there's so many people dealing with psychological issues that there was nothing available and then they heard I was a veteran they're like well we can send them to the VA and so I was transferred by ambulance down to this facility and when I came to on the floor that cold room I thought I was in a prison cell and I also thought someone had chopped off my dick like I hallucinated that when I reached down there

it was just like mush and blood and and gore and I had a diaper on that way you could see the blood which all was a hallucination obviously but it was like I was still in and out of these hallucinations

“but eventually I remember people kept walking up to what I thought was a locked prison door”

and looking through at me and I could see these eyeballs looking in but eventually I kind of stood up and was able to open the door and walk out in this hallway and it was just bright white fluorescent

lighting and tile flooring there's other veterans like moaning and murmuring like basically

human zombies walking around and I walked down into like the little waiting area and started having more movements of lucidity where I was actually realizing what was really going on but what I you know there's a ton of stuff I hallucinated that wasn't real but as I started to see the real things that we're going on I was pretty disheartened by how bad it was um the food again was absolutely abysmal quality there were guys there that had been in and out of the prison system

as they had been homeless and dealing with drug addiction and they all agreed that they would rather be in federal prison than in this facility because the food's better you get to go outside every day at prison and there's more structure and care for prisoners than there are of people in this impatient psychiatric facility but water that you could drink that came out of the tap team like tasted like it came out of a broken hot tub in order to make it tolerable

people would mix it with this artificially flavored and colored you could either have the

“lemonade or raspberry lemonade flavor and so that's what you did to make it tolerable which was just”

more shit in your system the only thing that they had in abundance of again was they were just throwing all sorts of different pills at you and I remember becoming very frustrated because you only very rarely got to meet with the psychiatrist who would explain what medications they were going to put you on but then very quickly they would just be giving you a bunch of other shit

because I was on one to one care they were required to come into my room with the flashlight

“and shine the flashlight in my face so probably again the most important thing that I could do”

would just get some sleep yet every 15 minutes I was being awoken to make sure I was safe that'll drive above the fucker crazy and it's self yeah it's literally a technique yeah so Searschool you get a little taste of that you get you get sleep deprived you get malnourished you get treated less than human and perfectly healthy robust humans you know seals marines pilots aircrew at the peak of their fitness and mental capabilities go through that and within you know a

week of that experience a few days of that experience perfectly healthy people will have

visual and auditory hallucinations now you take guys who are ready in a really bad spot and you

do the exact same shit to them what the fuck do we think is going to happen and my only thought is that it's intentional it's intentionally designed to drive you into whole to where you have to be overmedicated which feeds that pharmaceutical machine that has controlled the VA system and it's just a cash cow for them drive people onto their meds get you on the meds and keep you on

“your meds that is their business model and that's why things can't change at the moment it is”

just that tentacle of fucking greed that is the pharmaceutical industry I used to dip all the time when I was on the seal teams nicotine was just part of the day it was a ritual so I understand why

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pouch delivering instant focus and mental clarity without nicotine or caffeine new customers can use code s or s to get 15% off it take ultra dot com that's take ultra dot com for 15% off with code s or s after you purchase they're gonna ask you where you heard about them please support our show and tell them we sent you what year is this this would have been early 2019 very recent but as I as I became more lucid and more frustrated seeing this treatment I made a plan to escape

you know I was making weapons with wet socks inside of other tube socks tying them off

“showing other I call them prisoners honestly how did get out and how to make weapons and my plan was”

late at night I was gonna run out and pull this fire alarm and when they took us outside for the fire those of us that wanted to could run so I had slowly been stockpiling like snacks and stuff and some warmer clothing because it's still like late winter and Michigan so there's still snow on the ground so I had kind of planted all out and late at night I snuck out to and pulled the fire alarm thinking that they're gonna take us outside but apparently somebody had already tried this trick

they immediately had the basic security there arm security and they forced me into a room and then Mike who was a really good nurse that worked there is like he had a syringe and he goes listen man we can either do this the easy way or the hard way and I trusted him I didn't trust much of the other staff it was like alright my stick it in my ass and he takes this thing and he shoves it in my butt cheek and injects me with what's called hell doll and it should just be called hell

because as this stuff entered my bloodstream I felt like there were insects trying to crawl their way through my skin I felt extremely restless like all I wanted to do was tear my own skin off and run in scream and Mike would pace up and down the hallways with me as I'm just like screaming and yelling and just trying to get the shit out of my system and eventually I collapsed

it's a fucking nightmare it's a torturous experience but it's what they use to like shut you down

“if you're being unruly and I came to and just like a drug and do stupor”

like literally drooling on myself and I had been voluntarily admitted to this facility I had gone there on my own will I wanted to be there to get help and when I saw that this was the opposite of help it was not a healing environment I wanted to get the fuck out and even though I was voluntary and they should have released me when I wanted to be released they refused and now that this incident had happened they use as an opportunity to commit me to the facility and while I'm literally

drooling on myself I go in to see this female attorney who's supposed to be my legal representation

and she puts a pin in my hand she moves my hand on the paper and says just sign here and I just

kind of scribbled my hand and then she moved the documents and I scribbled unknowingly what I was doing was I had just committed myself to the facility without any trial without any any process

“really other than this lady putting a pin in my impaired hand and having me somehow legally signed”

these documents and by doing that I was now committed to this facility they could tell me when I could leave which they already were doing illegally prior and then it also stripped me of my constitutional right to bear arms immediately I was put on to a list the lean network as if I committed a crime so if I'm ever pulled over by the police I pop up in their network and this is an American veteran just trying to get fucking help for severe psychological issues induced by the

medication I had been given but I was broken man I was just a drooling zombie at that point I became just another one of these dudes walking around the hallways drooling on myself murmur into myself and eventually with the advocacy of my family my mom being in health care my dad having been in health care my wife being a near nurse they were able to advocate to get me out of the facility and bring me back to northern Michigan back to my little piece of property and reconnect with

my family but now the burden of taking care of me all comes back onto my family long are you in there I was in there for 40 days which dude it was it was a fucking nightmare man so I was like um and I was so broken after that man I couldn't really read anymore all the I don't even know what all they had me on at this point I was just

“confused and the only thing that would give me any relief was eating ice cream drinking booze”

and smoking cannabis would give me like a little relief from like just the fucking misery I was feeling inside I could barely do the dishes it was miserable for my life like the only reason that we didn't get divorced was because she was afraid that I was pretty good I was good at masking and acting like I was okay when I wasn't and she was afraid that if it went to a custody hearing I might earn custody of our children and then I would harm them in another unpredictable

psychosis so she was stuck in this fucking nightmare with me afraid that I would harm her children and it went on like that for years man it was dark all I wanted to do was just wander off into the woods and in my own life my little boy and little girl would come up to ask me to play and I would push him away and tell him to leave me alone and I was just a fucking miserable broken shell of a human being all I could feel was betrayal for the government that I had

served anger and pain and um and I had a friend who knew I was getting really bad that same friend Matt that had been like an older brother to me and he reached out and he goes hey man we're going to go on a mountain bike trip up to market Michigan which is phenomenal mountain biking because he knew I was in a bad spot and he planted all out he pulled up out front and he helped me load up my bike and he took me up to market and we spent a few days up there

just riding bikes and being a nature and when that trip was done he gave me a book by um

rich role it's called Finding Ultra is basically his story of being basically struggling with alcohol

being a corporate lawyer like hating his life and finding his way back to health through endurance sports and so I read that book and kind of like a little bit of flicker a hope came on and so I started like mountain biking again I couldn't really run at that time because my leg was still so jacked up from that botch surgery but I could ride a mountain bike and so I started riding and then I opened my eyes to some books by Michael Pollen there's one called Indefensive Food

and I started reading how broken and corrupt the food system is and so really cleaned up my diet

still poisoning me and then I read the book by Michael Pollen which I was really struggling to read

“but I could read like a paragraph or so at a time and listen to the audio book at the same time”

and retain enough of information from it but I started to see like there was another way forward and the book that really changed it was indefensive food or not indefensive food how to change your mind by Michael Pollen which is now in Netflix documentary on the use of psychedelic assisted therapy to treat mental health issues and so it opened my eyes so that the VA was still the same you just gotta keep taking your meds that's the only option and they didn't understand how

miserable I was or maybe they did they just didn't know what to do but I started seeking out psychedelic assisted therapy I reached out to vet solutions and I didn't really qualify for their program because I didn't have the combat experience and I wasn't from the special forces and they were I mean as they've described it before it's like Schindler's list for them

“Mark is an amber component trying to serve everybody they possibly can and there's so many”

people that need this but I didn't really qualify so I didn't get in originally but they referred me to another non-profit organization called Warrior Angels Foundation and those guys were doing

it was called the 4x4x48 challenge which is from David Goggins is basically run 4 miles

every 4 hours for 48 hours straight so you end up running 48 miles over 2 days and they were putting together a fundraiser for this thing that I had gotten an email about and I was like you know I don't think I can run that like why would I even get involved in this but it was something in me that's like why don't you engage with it and they were doing a fundraiser and for the first time I went on to their site where they were doing this fundraiser and I put a little bit about my story

it was the first time I had ever shared anything about what I was going through publicly

“I felt internally that I was like a piece of shit, a let down to everybody in my community”

and I had isolated myself from everything and everybody but for something called that I needed to share a little of my story and within a week of putting that up I'd raised almost $10,000 on my fundraiser page and so Adam Mar and Andrew Mar who were running that foundation reached out to me and said hey man what are you doing this week you want to come down to Texas we'll fly you down put you up and you can be part of the event and I was like all right I'll come so they flew me down to Texas

where they put on this event and dude it was like finding a community of so many other individuals who had been through the same shit there were marine raiders there were seals, rangers, green merays, Marcus and Amber Capone were there, Lieutenant General Christopher Miller was there who had

served as defense secretary defense under Trump's first term but a lot of really incredible people

in this space and every veteran that I talked to had such a similar story they had been a high performing hard charging individual in the military things started the wheel started to fall off the bus from that operator syndromes that people are experiencing and the combination of mental health issues the PTSD the TBI all these things compounding to where your life starts falling apart and when we reached out for help the answer was take these meds and we all got sucked down into

the same fucking dark hole where our fucking lives fell apart we lost our minds and a lot of people fucking almost didn't make it and there was every single guy I talked to as we were doing this run phase by phase had a similar story and I realized like this isn't just me that's suffering through this this is happening to all of these other veterans and that's just the recipe that they're using to pump people on these meds and it's so fucked and it's poisoning these people

but dude it was like being welcomed into a community where I finally fit in and gave me some hope

and in that in that 48 hours we had a payouty ceremony with a Native American group and for the first time I felt really connected to something again after being disconnected for all those years and it was something told me that I had a sense of purpose still like I needed to keep moving forward that I was still here for a reason and that gave me hope at that same event I met Jesse Gould who runs her old carts project and he hooked me up and sent me on a trip down the Peru where

I experienced Iolasca and through that experience I had this massive heart opening, massive connection to the divine that was beyond anything I had experienced at that point and came back just feeling like a whole human again. I became able to get off all of my medications before going on that trip. Again I had to wean myself off and I had replaced it by good nutrition, exercise, sunlight, connection to nature and then the Iolasca just like opened me right back up so I felt like a

fucking human being again and I came back to my family and I remember telling my wife how good I

last and it took years for her to start to see that I was actually getting better years off years

“of integration I got involved with the wisdom dojo which was the amptojo and originally and started”

doing meditation through them as originally hooked up with a dude named Moose who was my integration coach from the Rokars project I don't know if you know Moose yeah he was mine that's my integration coach too and he was he was showing me this breath works he was showing me whim-hoff breathing at that point I was like this is some boo boo bullshit you know but here's a navy seal who says he can hold his breath for four minutes after he blows all his air out so I want to see what this is

about and that's kind of what pulled me into it and I did the breath work and I felt good and soon enough after I'd practice with Moose a few times like I was holding my breath for a really long time with the air blown out of my lungs as I call a shit I feel really peaceful too and then he introduced me to the wisdom dojo and I went through their meditation program eventually becoming an instructor for them and still them all right on and then that kind of gave me a sense of purpose

that gave me like a daily connection to the divine within like without the need of medicine I experienced a number of other psychedelic experiences over the course of those years

Iboa which was incredibly powerful the ultimate healing tool that I've ever experienced healing my

nervous system healing my brain a network of nonprofit organizations basically gave me access to all the things to get me better defenders of freedom brought me down to Texas for a TBI treatment a generous couple in Austin clay in Eleanor, Womack invited me into their facility where I received like state-of-the-art lab work hyperbaric oxygen therapy stem cell therapy with that and I came out of that month-long program with them just like feeling like a fucking superhuman again all these things were

being healed piece by piece physically and I started to gain a better understanding of what had been off all the time which the physiology of my brain had been destroyed from that ejection and then

when I went back trying to charge at it hard again it started to unravel even more from the G

forces from the drinking culture all these things they're not sleeping well eroded the physiology of my brain and it was a physical issue with my brain that led to all this detriment but it's treated like it's purely psychology purely just a PTSD rating and it's actually the physiology is off the you know the hormones are out of whack the brain is like not firing the way it's supposed to and it causes all this chaos that gets labeled as PTSD but kind of came to understand

that it was a much bigger whole human part you know it was physical it was spiritual emotional and when I started to address those issues I just fucking got my life back man I went from barely able to do the dishes being told that I just had to take my pills for the rest of my life to becoming a loving husband a loving father and my two children who I'm so lucky still to have after the hell that they went through it's a writing my book getting my story out to share what's

going on you know underneath the medical system and behind the doors at the VA because I know this is something that's affecting people in the military and the VA and and in the entire health care

“community man our our medical system is so fucking broken like if you need to get surgery and you need”

to put back together our medical system is awesome for that but when it comes to chronic health conditions and long-term health it is is very broken very broken but her wife stuck with you through all that she did that's a saint that is a yeah she's an angel man she's an angel and it she fucking went down into the depths of hell to pull me out of that and it fucking burned her wings off man and it scarred her and where you guys doing today do she she fortunately got picked up

by the hope project which is a spinoff from her old cart's project that serves the spouses and she recently got to go down to Mexico and experience medicine and is starting to get to do our own healing she's in the Vajra Ocean which is part of the wizard well a separate from the wisdom dojo but a similar meditation program with the same folks that helps give the wives access to mindfulness breath work and meditation to start to heal and she's I mean she's a saint she she went through

“hell and she's but it hurt her man put her through a lot of hell and for a while I think there was”

a lot of resentment that I was getting help and she wasn't and she was seeing me starting to get better and she was almost maybe a little angry about that which is pretty common I hear which is why they started the hope project was like to give the women that have been through hell

there's not still struggles man but from where it was it's it's a miracle that it's gotten to where

“we are now to have love in our home love with our children do we got just two incredible little”

kids that are so bright man really a gift and now after being through all that you know I see that it's all been a gift it's all been to put me where I am today where I have so much love in my heart such a purpose of service to so many people it's all been a gift man now now I get to be a coach I do integration coaching with people I work for sharp performance with Steve Bunting who you had a work with sharp too yeah yeah what a great organization yeah they're kickass man

it's helping a lot it's helping a lot of people in the firefighter community law enforcement military I love what they're doing yeah it's it's been a gift to get to be there and helping with that I've been doing public speaking I just got picked up by Jason Redmond and their team over at Eagle Rise so I got to join their speaking bureau if anybody's looking for a professional speaker I do motivational speaking and and kind of help inspire a culture of health and nutrition

I work for a number of other nonprofits dude I I wear like a million hats right now

right on and then I started my own online coaching platform that I'm just launching because I see a lot of the veterans that come to me and reach out after they see me on a podcast or something they just don't have the financial ability to pay for coaching so I've created this online platform so they can still access videos for a ton of resources and still have monthly meetings with me in a group setting that's way more affordable for people in those tough situations because what I found

with this coaching is there's so many people that need it that need this guidance and getting their lives back through holistic health but dude it's so hard for people in those struggle moments to afford it so I wanted to create something to serve those folks but dude just yeah doing a little bit of everything to try to help man one's the last time you went to the VA years ago man I won't go back into that system yeah yeah I don't blame you I do you know I had Doug Collins

“on he's a director of the VA right now I think I listened to that episode I know he's trying”

like hell to make some changes I don't know what all changes he's made but he definitely gives a shit oh yeah yeah yeah I think I think those guys are just handcuffed man the fucking tentacles of the pharmaceutical industry get to control the show well that and that just the bureaucracy itself I'm in it's horrible if you heard of envy mind health I'm just curious no I don't think I've heard of that one this is a friend of mine sealed Johnny Wilson oh yeah you started this kind do you know

Johnny I bet Johnny before yeah great guy Johnny Wilson yeah he's he was in a motorcycle accident not too long ago right um what I think you're thinking of somebody else he runs coast to coast but no this is a different Johnny okay he started a couple of nonprofits in the seal community I

“can't remember the eggs I think I know but I don't want to say the wrong name but um but then”

kind of turn that over like it was up and running turned it over he this is actually I think this I'm curious to hear what you think about this because I think this is a pivotal moment and I think it is I think it could be just as impactful as kind of the rediscovery of psychedelics within the veteran community and so he has come up with this this company where you wear the wearable devices like a woop or the horror of rain or do you earn you those yeah I know um I actually just

got a horror ring from a nonprofit that's tracking my biometrics but that's been really helpful

just to see sleep quality and okay so that's what this is okay this basically takes your

takes your health data and you kind of build your own network so maybe you know whoever for me it might be guys that I was in a sniper hide with or just friends of mine that were in service with me and it it puts you in a little network and so it monitors you know I mean obviously monitors you're you're you're you're you're sleep you're all your vitals all that kind of stuff right and

your network has alerted you know and they don't they they're alerted like hey that's clever Sean's health is Sean's vitals is starting to you know he's losing sleep his heart rates a little elevated whatever you know and and it doesn't tell you it doesn't tell everybody in the network like hey this is everything that's happened and it's just a little hey vitals are deteriorating a little bit maybe you want to check on Kagan yeah and then a phone call you know to me and

then your buddies call up hey what's going on I see you know we got the alert everything good

“there's everything okay what do you think of that I think that's that's a great idea”

I think that's a fucking really good idea too because it's not anybody having to ask for help having to be a week it is triggered by biometrics yeah by vitals and then your buddies your bro or buddies that you want to check on you are the ones checking on you oh yeah I think that can prevent a lot of issues I do too man I need to I want to talk to Doug about those because I think this I think this could be really big oh yeah and you're not going to have to jump through the legal

hoops to get that thing going like you are with psychedelics for sure not discarding psychedelics by any means right I mean I think the push we need quicker solutions though exactly and the push for psychedelics is I mean it's it's just growing and growing that that executive order we just did a thing here in Tennessee where we all went up to the the house and the son I went with this woman uh Riki Harris guy Alex West who is the youngest sealed ever get into development group and

we actually got the shit past and the house and the Tennessee son that so they're going to reschedule at the game so that we can do research now we got to find funding but yeah it's exciting what's happened in Texas too yeah right so that's the same initiative yeah there's like Texans for I've again this was Tennessee and for I've again and then then then there's just

“Americans for I've again but I think every state has one of these organizations and um”

is that through the veteran mental health leadership coalition that you guys are doing the advocacy for I work with them going out to DC when we're advocating for MDMA assisted therapy which unfortunately got shut down at that at that one um but they've been doing a lot of good work I actually have not heard of that organization yeah it's um Adam Mar who used to run the warrior angel foundation that

I did that run with and first got me like in the door into the world the neutrosuticles and lab work

and all of that uh he now runs this veteran mental health leadership coalition which is people from all over the veteran communities that have an interest in health and support helps put people together to go when there is stuff uh on a ballot or something legal going down that we can get people there uh you know talking to talking to the legislators to try to get things moving in the right direction right on man right on yeah yeah get any ideas anything else

if you done MDMA assisted therapy I have if you done it with your wife I did I was that it was really helpful about you learned a lot it was a resentment a not kill later that's a good way to

“put it that was that was a big help um do you guys continue to do that yeah I think we're”

we're coming up on do for another session with it we did it this winter um but how do you guys do

it um do you do it with a therapist do you do a by yourself first time I did it was uh with the

friend that I know through the wisdom dojo that offered to help her and I but he um I think next time we'll probably try to do it just together it was nice to kind of have his guidance unlike the dosage and and a little bit of guidance but I think we could it would be better for us to do it where it's just her and I connecting for the whole duration of it man I've done it like that like my wife and that's the way to do it yeah yeah so I'm not just enough to go through stuff I didn't even

just like any psychedelic thing right all kinds of stuff comes up that's not expecting but

it's I always say you know it's it's it seems to be the perfect way to receive and

transmit information to each other oh yeah where it all comes from a good place you know it's from a good place you're able to receive you're able to send and there is no resentment no anger

it makes all those know it all comes from a place of love and so you're able to stomach it without

“without being defensive yeah yeah it makes those impossible conversations possible yeah all the stuff”

that just builds up in festers and turns into resentment and bad shit that comes from it and it just clears that slate man it just that was yeah that was really impactful for our you know because she's been carrying a lot with having seen me like that and like trying to fall back and love with somebody who was a fucking different person for years has been really challenging is it would be for anybody but allowing her to see who I am now not the person that I was in that drug and do stupid for all

those years and allowing her to feel safe again with me to open her heart back to me so she can see that guy that she married years ago that I'm still here and I'm better than I've ever been in my life like just so full of life and content and you know she sees me with our kids she sees me the way I love them and take care of them and but sometimes like I try to reach out to her and it's it's hard for her sometimes it's hard for her to want it reach back like gonna imagine but the the MDMA is a

set therapy and then her trip through the hope project helped a lot the hope project are actually given them those or rings too and they they had an extra one they let me use too so they'll track their biometrics after they go through the program see how things shift but pretty exciting you're from interesting information they're getting out all of that yeah but yeah it's been transformational for her and and now we speak like the same language spiritually which has been really

“helpful because I think for a while it was a lot of kind of skepticism on her and how genuine I”

was with all of this and her kind of wondering like what's this meditation all about but now she sees me go to these meditation retreats I'll go do like a silent meditation retreat with the wisdom dojo and I'll come back and do it it's like better than a psychedelic journey just sitting with yourself and silence for a week straight it's like a slow motion psychedelic experience with no medicine what is that light I mean do you literally just sit there for a week straight without any communication

no talking what what is it no talking no eye contact in just no eye contact yeah and at this point to go on those retreats you've you've progressed through a lot of the training so you're pretty decent meditating but man when you sit for that duration you're sitting for 12 hours a day just meditating

“doing nothing else and you can get up and go to the bathroom there's still meals but you don't”

interact with anybody else the whole time so you're just kind of in your own head with your own thoughts and the first few days can be kind of a abrupt and a harsh like a lot of shit coming up a lot of emotion a lot of past stuff that can be really heavy when you're just sitting there but what I have found for myself at least in everybody's a little different but by the end of it like it's like the the hard drive got gets defragged and then you're just you're just there and

instead of having your mind chattering like the the dude who just won't shut up in the room and

can never hear anybody else talking that mind finally like Peter's out and there's just stillness

and in that stillness you can hear the divine whispers of God man you can hear just something beautiful that's underneath that when you're able to get the ego to shut the fuck up for a little bit when you shut the analytical mind up for a little bit there's something so beautiful inside of us this presence of God that is behind our eyes and when we can just shut the fucking ego down by doing that you know retreat like that or meditating in the medicine you get to experience that

too but it brings you to that same place completely naturally it's sort of this it's the it's the it's the path of like the monk or you you had the shamanic path to experiencing this awakening through medicine like we get to experience with ibagane or iboga or iosca where you get this you get this glimpse of the divine and feeling connected to something greater than yourself that's

so deep and pure and true and that's always there and by meditating you can get to that same

exact place it's just a different route a different path up that mountain and you can get to that path through the Bible you can there's so many different paths to bring you to connection with God but dude it is absolutely incredible to be able to just sit without any medicine and get to that place

it will be the difference to go into this retreat versus just going out in the woods for a week

“I mean you certainly could do it in the woods for a week it's kind of nice to see how they do it”

okay and it's also kind of nice sometimes to be in in community while you're meditating you can feel the energy of the others in that room but you absolutely could just go out into the woods and bring a tent and live out in the woods and do it yourself it's a it's a really healthy experience man we have we have a society that is so fast and we're so driven to to get the next

thing to get the next accomplishment to make this much money and it's like we're always just

reaching and grasping and going and and to even feel that we have a sense of worth we feel we have to do so much to prove that we're worthy at least I know I did for so much of my life feel I had to prove that I deserved but in that stillness you get to feel that you've always been exactly where you need to be that you're already good enough that you are love and light and that you don't have to strive anymore you don't have to be grasping and it's so healthy to just

sit in that stillness man it's it's something that is so undervalued in our civilization but when you can learn to calm the body to settle the nervous system to allow the mind to settle so there's not just that constant chatter that ego there is just so much peace and you hear people talk about enlightenment is it's like this destination that you have to go this

“mountain that you have to climb that's this impossible journey to get there when really the secret is”

that's always been inside of us that is like our baseline state is that peace and love and you

get a glimpse of it through psychedelics but you don't even need the psychedelics once you refine these techniques when meditation and it helped me get there because I don't think I would even start a meditating until I had my eyes open in the neuroplasticity so I think they can really work very well in conjunction which is what the wisdom dojo does it takes people coming off of a retreat with vet solutions or the mission within or heroic hearts projects and then it

helps them integrate and learn these techniques which sounds like you did yourself and man it like and it's the ultimate technology for finding peace and love within oneself I have not meditated in years yeah I don't know it's easy to follow away from I'm guilty of it too man I'll have times in my life where I stop and then like life starts turning into a shit show again and if I can reset and get back into it it's like it's just like living the day to day moments from a state of

peace and it completely transforms everything that happens around me all my interactions with people all the things that would have been an argument or stressful or turned into just so much more peaceful when you can bring that presence into any situation and I'm no pro I still fuck it up I still have bad days I still sometimes want to murder people when I'm driving in my car you know but but the more I can do that you know it really it really helps a lot it's really beautiful yeah

we'll wrap it up the interview here so I got one question love for you yeah if I were way if you're wife or sitting here right now what would you say to her and I'd tell her how much I love her that she's this angel that saved me from hell and now that we've been through that hell we get to we get to thrive together we have the two most beautiful little children we have everything and now it's her turn to get to enjoy what she what she earned by pulling me through that

darkness and and I would do just hold her man I love her so much good for you man okay again it was an honor brother like what's gonna do interview thank you so much for having me on this and letting me share the story with the world John it's my pleasure you built and shine in a lot

“a light on some dark fucking corners of the world man but it needs to come out the only way to heal”

is to acknowledge that the wound is festering man to clean it out yeah it's a wild time to be alive

but I'm so glad the truth is coming out man me too and I'm just huge props to what you're doing

especially the stuff was sharp thank you guys are fucking awesome thank you so it's cool to know that you're a part of that yeah I wish I had access to that coaching when I was I had my struggles man because had they coach me in the direction of holistic healing right off the bat I'd still be flying fighter jets man the amount of money that the military is probably losing by losing the experience in all these trained people as they burn out it's such rapid rates and the seal communities

people so healthy and so strong for so much longer and maybe one day maybe they got to give a

“shit first though yeah yeah the Navy I don't think even wants to acknowledge that TBI is a thing”

I don't want to open the can of worms is on there's a problem but it talks for another day

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