Ep. 18 | From the Cockpit to the Cuckoo's Nest | F-18 Pilot Kegan Gill - Mind Body Mushroom

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
But
That's awesome.
And you said it was in Lima, Peru, or what partof Peru?
Tarapoto, Peru.
Gotcha.
We flew into Lima, and then it's, like, an houror so flight from there.
Right.
And it's, you know, it's pretty deep into theAmazon rainforest there.
No way.
So you kinda go away from the Andes, gettingout of the mountains, go down towards, like,

(00:22):
the Amazon.
You're in the jungle now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, you're in legit jungle, which is, like,the perfect place to experience all of that.
Were you a little intimidated by not just,like, obviously, the ayahuasca experience,
like, you know, like but also just, like, holdon.
What am I getting myself into?
Like, you know, what was that like?

(00:42):
Kind of the logistics of everything, and didyou have any sort of, like, second thoughts as
you were getting closer to the moment of truth?
You know, they say, like, a lot can starthappening in your life before you even show up
to a medicine.
Oh, really?
That a lot of transformation and things.
And I didn't have anything real crazy happen,but I definitely had some anticipation going to

(01:06):
as ex I was mostly excited.
I was really looking forward to the experience,especially after so many years of struggling in
the conventional mental health system.
Mhmm.
Getting this opportunity to have, you know,this incredible spiritual slash nervous system,
mind, body, soul healing experience in theheart of the jungle with the Shipibo shaman,

(01:31):
and it was just absolutely phenomenal.
So I was really excited for it for the mostpart.
There were other people in the group that Ithink were maybe a little more apprehensive
and, like, what am I getting myself into?
And, yeah, it was crazy intense, but I reallytried to
And the people that were feeling thatapprehension, did they still kinda go through

(01:54):
with it, or were there people encouraging them,or was it sort of just like, well, you know?
Yeah.
Everyone went through with it.
I think the people that showed up that were inmore of a state of fear and panic with it and
not at ease, like, accepting of what was gonnahappen, I think they had a more difficult time

(02:15):
with it.
Right.
Whereas if you can go into that experience justbeing open as much as possible, even when
things get terrifying, which they likely willat some point, you just gotta let go into it,
and that seems to be about the best way to getthrough it.
It's like when you try to resist the experienceor, like, oh, I shouldn't be here.
Why did I sign up?
Why did I take this?

(02:35):
And then, like, that panic just feeds it, andnow you're gonna go for a rough
ride.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No.
Dude, so I wanna ask you some more questionsabout this, but let me introduce you first.
So sure.
Sure.
I'm Jordan Ryan, and welcome to the Mind BodyMushroom, the podcast where we explore the
magic of mushrooms, adaptogens, and all theways you can naturally upgrade your health and

(02:56):
well-being.
Today's guest is a true testament to resilienceand the human spirit.
Lieutenant Keegan "Smurf" Gill, U.S.
Navy, is a former Navy F/A-18 Super Hornetpilot that survived the fastest ejection in
naval aviation history, a harrowing 695 mileper hour ordeal that left him with
life-altering injuries.

(03:16):
Despite enduring multiple surgeries, PTSD, anda traumatic brain injury, Keegan embarked on an
extraordinary journey of recovery, embracingholistic and psychedelic-assisted therapies to
achieve profound healing.
Transitioning from a decorated military careerto becoming an ultra-endurance athlete,
motivational speaker, and author, Keegan nowdedicates his life to advocating for veteran

(03:37):
health and resilience.

His forthcoming memoir, "Phoenix Revival (03:39):
The Aftermath of Naval Aviation's Fastest
Ejection," is set for release on January 21,2025.
Dude, that's coming up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're like, to the out.
I'm stoked, man.
I've so much to ask you about there, but hismemoir delves into the remarkable journey from
the cockpit to recovery, offering inspirationto all facing seemingly insurmountable

(04:01):
challenges.
We're honored to have Keegan here today toshare his insights, his story of perseverance,
and his mission to inspire others.
Keegan, thank you so much for coming on theshow.
Like I said, I learned I learned a little bitabout you just kinda from, like, your bio and
and coming online, and I'm like, hold on, dude.
Like, I'm I'm I'm in, in the presence of alegend right here.
I'm sorry about that, but it's a crazy story,and there's not many like it.

(04:26):
Yeah, dude.
I would love to hear, but before we hop intothe accident, let's rewind a little bit and
just kinda start maybe with your, you know,decision to join the Navy or, you know, coming
in as lieutenant, I'm guessing you had somecollege before.
Yeah.
So, I was probably, you know, I wasn't the mostlikely person to go into the military.

(04:48):
I kinda came from a very almost like hippiekinda background with my parents.
They were
She's very chill.
They they, you know, they were not I wasn'tallowed to have GI Joes.
I couldn't play Mortal Kombat.
Like, I had an uncle who was a Marine, and mygrandfather served in World War II.
But other than that, there was no, like, closefamily that was involved with the military.

(05:10):
And, but I had a really incredible professor incollege that was a Navy Huey gunship pilot back
in Vietnam era.
He helped start the Seawolves, which were,like, the first, you know, crazy special forces
helicopter unit that would go into anycondition.
Basically, their contract was, if we drop youoff, we're gonna pick you up no matter what.

(05:32):
Wow.
And he just had wild stories of his militarycareer.
And then, I ended up becoming a flightinstructor while I was in college.
And when I completed my four-year degree, Ispent a year flying as a corporate pilot.
And while the pay was really good and I wasgrateful to have that job, I found myself
wanting something more.

(05:53):
And I had a friend who was applying to go toNavy OCS.
And I was like, what's this OCS stuff?
I thought you had to have your dad be anadmiral and you had to go to the Naval Academy
and, like, I didn't understand, like, there wasanother option for, you know, some community
college kid, that was a freaking hippie
to
go into the military.
But, he kinda pointed me in the rightdirection, and I ended up going in through OCS

(06:17):
and got accepted and, yeah, before I moved
out of the looking were you looking to fly?
That's what you were coming in for for sure.
Yeah.
I applied specifically for a pilot slot.
Nothing else.
And that didn't mean I was gonna get to be apilot.
I still had to go through all the training, andI didn't know what I was gonna fly.
But if I could pass the training and themedical stuff and all of that, I was gonna get

(06:39):
an opportunity to go to flight school aftercompleting OCS.
Oh, and so you kinda you have to commit tobeing a pilot before you even know what type of
aircraft you're gonna be piloting?
Yeah.
So when you do an OCS application, I think youcan select up to three different pipelines.
Uh-huh.
I I only put pilot, nothing else.
I was, like, I don't wanna be in as a pilot, orI don't wanna be in at all.

(07:03):
Yeah.
They accepted it, and and, with my flightbackground, I think that that didn't hurt.
Mhmm.
I'm sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I still, you know, I still had to go throughall the regular training.
I had to go through the ground school, thesurvival training Uh-huh.
Primary flight training, intermediate.
And the whole way through, you're you'recompeting with your grades, and and at a
certain point, it becomes a very big characterinterview as well.

(07:26):
Mhmm.
You
get sat down in a a boardroom full of all thesedifferent naval aviators, and they talk about
why do you wanna select that aircraft?
Why do you wanna fly that?
What do you think it's gonna be like?
And, and I think the character part of it'salmost just as important as as your ability as
a pilot.
I saw guys in training that were betteracademics.
They were better in the aircraft.

(07:46):
But because their personality wasn't quite theright fit, they ended up not getting to select
into the strike fighter community.
But, yeah.
Now is the fighter community, I would imagineit would be fairly coveted spots.
You know, if you want to be a pilot, imaginemost people want to be a fighter pilot.
Is that pretty common?
Like
Yeah.

(08:06):
I mean, it's certainly, it's the most difficultto achieve.
You really gotta continue to score consistentlywell.
You gotta continue to be in the upper half ofyour grades, you know.
You don't get that because you were at thebottom of the class,
you know.
Right.
Right.
And even just to select the tailhook pipeline,you had to have had, you had to be in the top

(08:29):
half of the class or better.
Oh, wow.
And even if you're like the rock star of theclass, you can still have a class go through.
And the Navy doesn't have a need for anyfighter guys, and so, you won't get what you
want at all.
Wow.
But typically whoever's top in the classtypically gets their first pick, but
Choice.
You know, it's always needs in the Navy overeverything else.

(08:50):
Totally.
Totally.
So now regarding that character component, whatabout so let's say you have two people, equal
academics, equal everything.
The Navy needs two slots.
One guy gets picked for character.
The other guy gets overlooked for character.
What's going on in that character piece?
What's different?

(09:11):
I think a big thing is just being one, justbeing somebody who can operate on a team, that
that cares about the guys that he's gonna beserving with, someone who's not just an
arrogant asshole.
You know?
No no Ice Man is what you're saying.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, like, they they they want they wannatry to trim out the arrogance as much as
possible.
And it's an incredibly humbling career, andthen it tends to humble everybody.

(09:36):
Mhmm.
They they try to get rid of the people that aregonna be some sort of egomaniac, the people who
are gonna, like, Blue Falcon their buddies and,like Yeah.
I know there was one guy that went toselection, and I'm sure he still is kicking
himself for doing this.
But when they asked him why they should pickhim, he's like he just started, like, picking
out everybody else's why they were less thanhim.

(09:56):
Oh, shit.
No way.
Hasn't studied.
This guy, like and he just went through, like,his whole class and just, like, tore everybody
up, and they're, like, wow, man.
Got it.
Well, you you you told you told us volumesabout yourself, so thank you.
But, yeah.
There's there's so many different componentsand factors and and and it's not ever I don't
know that there's, like, a secret sauce recipeeven.

(10:18):
There's just it's very much, it's decided atthe in that moment with that individual with
with a group of aviators who are experiencedthat get to make that call.
So now you you make it to, you know, FA team.
You know, you're a fighter pilot now.
This is more of a general question because Iwanna go back to your career.

(10:39):
But is how do people kind of chart off fromthere?
Because there's, like, Top Gun School.
There's, you know, Blue Angels.
There's a few different, like, villains, Isuppose you could get.
Yeah.
So so you once you wing, before you get to eventouch an f 18, you've gone through it's a it
takes usually at least a couple years, if nottwo and a half to 3 years to go through primary

(11:04):
well, in the aviation preflight indoctrination,water survival, primary flight training in a
prop plane, and then you go to advancedintermediate first in a in a t 45 Charlie sauce
hawk.
Orange and white ones that they're gonna seesome I've seen those before.
Yeah.
Over at, like, North Island.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Cool.
We call them clown jets.

(11:26):
That's nuts.
The orange nose.
Is that the yeah.
That's funny.
But you go through that pipeline and then yougo through that whole character process that I
discussed and look at your grades andeverything and then you select advanced.
And that all takes about two to two and a halfyears typically.
And then you become a winged aviator, so youget your warfare insignia, and you're like,

(11:47):
yeah.
I'm a real I'm a big kid now.
Uh-huh.
But
then you show up to the F/A-18 RAG or the nowthey're called the FRS, the Fleet Replacement
Squadron, to go through the F/A-18 training.
And then you spend the next year just gettingkicked in the nuts again.
Yeah.
You're an
And then you get through that, and you're like,alright.
I kinda gotta have a handle on this, and youshow up to your first fleet squadron.

(12:09):
And now it's been probably at least threeyears, and you got all this training.
You got your wings.
You've been flying F-18s now for the past year.
And you show up and you realize, I still don'tknow anything.
And then you're the FNG again at the squadron.
Uh-huh.
And, but the whole way through, you know, onceyou do get to a fleet squadron, you go through
all these different syllabi to progress.

(12:32):
You become a combat-certified wingman, then youbecome a section lead.
So you can lead another aircraft in combat.
Then you become a division lead where you canlead a whole flight of four into combat.
Mhmm.
And typically, that's as far as guys get intheir first sea tour.
Mhmm.
And depending on how you perform, not only inthe cockpit, but also in your ground duties.

(12:54):
Because people may think once you're a pilot,like, all you get to focus on is flying, but
you have like an eight-hour to 12-hour groundjob every day where you're, you know, you're
working in the scheduling office.
You're running part of the maintenancedepartment.
There's all these ground jobs that you have to,you know, deal with as well.
And if you perform really well, that's whenyou're more likely to select something like Top

(13:16):
Gun or Test Pilot School.
But that split comes after you've done anentire sea tour.
At a sea tour with the squad.
And being with the squadron would be like beingat, like, VF-48 or something like that.
Is that, like, is that how it works?
Is that what a squadron is?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's, in the strike fighter community withthe F-18s, it's VFA squadron.

(13:37):
So yeah.
That's what I'm talking about.
I think there's about 15 or so out on the EastCoast at NAS Oceana.
Another 15 or 20 or so squadrons out at NASLemoore.
And then there's also several squadrons inJapan.
But you can be at any of those locations, gothrough your fleet tour, your sea tour, which
is, I think, three years.
You're in that squadron flying, you know,likely deploying, wherever the conflict is at

(14:03):
that time.
And then at the end of that, your skipper andyour leadership of your squadron gets to put in
for you where you go.
And your interest is part of that.
But,
Yeah.
So I'll use the Navy and shit like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now is the squadron itself attached to, like, acarrier group, or is it at the base, like NAS

(14:24):
or something
like that?
So so, being a Navy squadron, Navy fightersquadrons, you are attached to carrier air
groups.
And depending on where they are in theirdeployment cycle when you join Uh-huh.
You may be if it's during maintenance phase,you'll be primarily operating out of one of the
naval air stations, either Oceana, Lemoore, orpotentially out in Japan.

(14:46):
And so you'll be land-based while the aircraftcarrier's, you know, undergoing all its
refurbishment.
Then once the aircraft carrier's ready to go,you start doing detachments to prepare for
deployment.
So you'll get into a cycle where you're goingout and you're doing carrier qualifications,
then you're going and doing all theseair-to-air and air-to-ground training events.

(15:07):
And then your air wing comes together, and thenyou all jump on the aircraft carrier, and you
go out and you start doing more tactical stuffwith it.
And before you know it, you've spent a coupleof years and you're spooled up and then you
deploy.
And then for six to 10 months, you're out onthat aircraft carrier just nonstop go, go, go
and doing the real thing.

(15:28):
And then that cycle continues.
And it's, you know,
Yeah.
Then you, then as your time off, you go onleave for a little bit.
You'll do a little individual, like,qualification, something like this, and then
kinda get into that unit workup, and that'sthe, is that kind of the cycle a little bit?
Yep.
Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Coronado, do they not, what's going on withthat air station?

(15:48):
Because I noticed you said Lemoore and Oceana.
Yeah.
They don't fly
there.
Is that the deal?
So Miramar used to be the Navy base in SanDiego, but, I don't know if, like, the Navy,
like, lost a bet or something with the Marines,but the Marines got to have Miramar as their
base.

(16:09):
And then they moved the Navy to Lemoore, whichis in the Central Valley of California, which
is, all the way from San Diego.
Someone lost a bet.
There's still I mean, there's beautiful stuff,like, you're not far from Yosemite and Sequoia
and Big Sur, but it's, but where it's at itselfis pretty barren.
You know?

(16:29):
Pretty remote.
Now, before we get into I just have so manyquestions about aviation.
I did I so a little bit of my background, I wasa recon medic.
So, you know, I joined.
I went to BUD/S, you know, did that whole workup, washed out, went to a ship, and then fought
for billets to get to become a medic and wentscreens with MARSOC, got selected, went through

(16:57):
recon, and then through, in my pipeline inbetween schools, I blew out my back and that
kind of, like, sidelined my career in, youknow, kind of the MARSOC community.
But, yeah.
So the aviation side of things, like, I dude,I'm very familiar with, like, the Navy special
warfare, Marine Corps special warfare Oh, yeah.

(17:19):
And then, like, the fleet stuff.
But aviation is, like, such a it's a it's a newthing for me.
So I I this is all, like, really interesting.
And stuff like automated, you know, what's itcalled?
Autonomous flying, you know, the 6th genfighter jets, drone swarms, like, all the UFOs.

(17:39):
There's so much happening in the aviation spaceright now, that it's it really is it's super
relevant and just, like, interesting for me assomebody who, you know, follows geopolitics and
stuff like that.
Oh, yeah.
So regarding autonomous flying, like, how wherehow is the aviator community sort of

(18:02):
approaching that inevitability on some level?
You know, I think I think there's always gonnabe a place to have a human in a cockpit,
especially with the jamming capabilities of,some of our very formidable adversaries.
You know, you can have these remote drones, butit's all through data link.
And and and if that data link gets severed, nowyou just have a thing that's just gonna crash

(18:27):
into the ground.
And and I bet one of the first things that'sgonna go down, if we go into com if we go into
a war with, you know, one of these formidableadversaries, be it China or whatever, they're
gonna hit a button and all those drones arejust gonna fall out of the sky.
Totally.
Whereas if you have something like a SuperHornet that has its self-contained navigation
and a pilot, you potentially have somethingthat's still gonna be able to be in the air.

(18:52):
So I think there's always gonna be a place forhaving humans in the cockpit.
And as warfare evolves, rarely do we, like,just get rid of all the old technology and say
we don't need that anymore.
I mean, if you just look at, you know, you guysstill carry a knife.
You still carry, you know, like, just becausewe've developed better weapon systems, you
still gotta learn how to do hand-to-hand combatif you're an infantry soldier or Marine.

(19:17):
Totally.
I don't think the man in the cockpit thing isgonna go away.
Right.
Maybe there will be more and more of anunmanned presence.
And you know, already in the past 20 years ofthe global war on terror, there's a ton of
drone engagements.
But there's still, I think, gonna be a place.
And what I see happening, with things like theF-35 is now they're taking all these systems

(19:40):
and software that's drastically improved, andit's allowing the pilot to have more free brain
waves to do other things in higher-levelthinking.
And it's integrating with artificialintelligence in those cockpits.
So it's basically using technology to enhancethe human aspect of it, and then it's giving

(20:02):
them better technology and it's making an evenmore lethal platform.
That's very interesting.
Yeah.
That was kind of my next follow-on questionwas, like, these Gen 5 and 6th Gen aircraft
that, I mean, I don't even know really muchabout 6th Gen, but let's say 5th Gen.
Because that looks like the F-35.
Right?
Would that be
Yep.
Yeah.
The F-35 is 5th Gen.
Still a pilot, but obviously a lot more tech.

(20:25):
Do you think that these systems that implementmore of this technology, you know, are more
susceptible than, like, an F-18 to electronicwarfare, for example?
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
You know, I really don't know the particularsof those aircraft.
I never flew the F-35, and I'm sure even if Idid, I wouldn't be able to talk about any
of that stuff.
Right.

(20:46):
They keep those stuff.
Tell me.
Yeah.
They keep a lot of that stuff under wraps.
I'm sure.
Now did you go into test pilot?
Is that kind of you know, tell me I wanna hearabout your injury now, but you can walk me
through, like, maybe what your career path thatgot you to this place.
You know?
But let's move on to there.
Yeah.
Yeah.

(21:06):
So I had gone through all my flight training.
I had become a winged naval aviator.
I had completed a year of training at the RAG,learning how to fly the F-18 and operate it
with some basic tactics.
And then I joined my first fleet squadron,VFA-143, the Pukin Dogs out at NAS Oceana, a
part of CAG 7 attached to the Eisenhower, whichwas our aircraft carrier.

(21:30):
And I joined the squadron.
I became the fucking new guy, which in thePukin Dogs, you get called poop because you're
the most worthless part of the dog.
And you start back at the bottom of the totempole again.
But I played the, you know, small mouth, bigears card very well.
I didn't really stick out.
I'd been in my squadron for almost a year.
There were maybe four or five newer guys in thesquadron at that point, and a lot of them had

(21:54):
call signs, and I still hadn't earned a callsign.
On January 15, 2014, I walked into the readyroom just like a normal day at work, and I
looked up on one whiteboard, and there's, youknow, all these other guys got like a laundry
list of call signs written up on the whiteboardunder their name.
And I've got like two or three that are justlike, they're not going to stick because

(22:14):
they're so dumb.
Uh-huh.
And one of the more senior pilots in thesquadron even comes up to me and goes, man, you
just haven't done anything dumb enough yet toearn a call sign.
And I walk over to the SDO desk, the squadronduty desk, and my buddy, Fitty, is on duty.
And to keep things light in the squadron, hehad put up the airspace we were all gonna be
flying in that day out over the Atlantic in theWhiskey 72 airspace.

(22:39):
And he used the shark tracker app on his phoneto tag all these positions of GPS-tagged
sharks.
And it just so happened on this day, there wasa 16-foot, 3,500-pound great white shark named
Mary Lee right underneath my airspace.
And so Fissy's like, hey, man.
Today would be a terrible day to eject.
It's, it's, it's 37 degrees Fahrenheit at thenearby buoy.

(23:01):
So near freezing water temperatures, belowfreezing air temps, wind, churned up oceans,
and there's a great white shark under you.
Just we're like laughing about this.
And then about an hour after that conversation,I was out doing air combat maneuvering.
So dogfighting the jet, or we just call it BFM,basic fighter maneuvering.

(23:23):
Though like BUD/S, there's nothing terriblybasic about it.
It's incredibly complex and difficult, which Ithink the Navy has a thing where if it's
something that's really challenging, they putbasic in front of it.
Right.
Just to add insult to injury.
Yeah.
100%.
But we went out.
We did a lot of air-to-air refueling to startand just to check one of these pods that had

(23:45):
just come out of maintenance.
And then my flight lead and I broke away fromthe tanker jet, and we set up and did several
rounds of fighting.
And this is probably the epitome of what peoplethink when they think fighter pilot.
You're, you know, you're performing theaircraft at high G.
You're maneuvering really aggressively.
You're operating your weapon systems, defensivesystems.
You're in afterburner.

(24:06):
You're just ripping around.
You know, it's like playing 4-dimensional chesswhile multitasking on 4 radios and, you know,
doing all this stuff while in the middle of aHIIT workout.
You know?
Like right.
Your body, at times, is weighing, like, 1,600pounds just your head in your helmet.
You know, under that kind of G, it's likehaving a 150-pound person hanging out in your
head while you're looking around trying to keepsight of the other aircraft.

(24:29):
Like, there's a lot going on physically andmentally in those fights.
But it was my absolute most favorite thing todo in the jet.
But, you know,
it's also
incredibly difficult.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But we we got to joker fuel on this flight,meaning we had just enough fuel.
We reset our bingo bugs down to bingo before wewould have to head straight back to Oceana, and

(24:51):
we set up for one last flight.
We set up down at 12,500 feet at 450 knots,which is a little bit on the lower side of our
typical fights and quite a bit faster than wetypically would set up for a flight.
But we were kinda pressed on time.
Mhmm.
So we were just like, let's do it, make ithappen.
The flight lead called fights on.
We pitched in at each other.
And as I came to that merge, as we crossedpaths like a couple medieval dragon-mounted

(25:16):
knights heading at the speed of sound, we blastby each other.
I was already partially nose low and partiallyinverted.
So I just continued to roll the aircraftinverted and pull the aircraft in a dive
towards the ocean called a Split S maneuver.
Now this would have normally been alright, andnormally, an F/A-18 can do that vertical
maneuver in about 5,000 feet or less ofairspace.

(25:40):
So I was up at 10,500 feet when I started thatmaneuver, which gave me a 500-foot bubble
between me and the hard deck.
We set it 5,000 feet for training to give us alittle wiggle room in case something happens.
I pull the jet hard and this thing starts toperform.
I feel my body, you know, weighing 1,600pounds.
Just my head and helmet are like, you know,150-ish pounds and you can feel all that.

(26:04):
And I'm looking up to keep sight of the flightlead.
I'm straining my neck and I feel all thatforce.
The stick is in my lap.
This thing is carving through the sky, justripping G's.
And then all of a sudden, I just felt the jetease up and just stop turning.
And it was like going around a sharp corner ina sports car and having the steering wheel kick
back halfway.
Only instead of skidding off the road, now I'mjust stuck in a dive at the ocean.

(26:28):
Down.
Oh.
And I very quickly hear the radar altimetergoing off, letting me know I've just gone
through the hard deck at 5,000 feet.
I instinctively just pulled the throttle toidle, put out the speed brake in this desperate
attempt to slow the aircraft, but it was justnot enough.
And the aircraft, despite the stick beingcommanded into my lap telling it to pull as
hard as it would, it wasn't turning, and theocean just rushed up at me.

(26:52):
And I remember two seconds from impact, I couldsee the ripples of the white caps.
Like, the ocean was in my face, and there wasno way I was gonna get this jet out of the
dive.
Instinctively, I just reached between my handsand pulled the handle.
A normal ejection is incredibly violent.
It will cause spinal compressions that arepermanent.

(27:12):
It'll cause flail injuries.
Even if you're straight and level below 180knots, for guys that jump out of airplanes, you
know, 180 knots is still pretty freaking fastto come out of an aircraft.
And it's like a very explosive force when youjump into that airstream.
But I was well above that.
When I ejected, I was at 51 degrees nose low,two seconds from impact at 2,000 feet above the

(27:35):
ocean, traveling at 604 knots indicatedairspeed, which is 695 miles per hour or 0.95
indicated Mach at that altitude.
So, what we call the transonic region at thesound barrier just before breaking the speed of
sound.
And, oh my God.
As I came out
into 2,000 feet 2,000 feet above the water istwo seconds away from impact.

(27:59):
At that dive angle in there,
she crazy.
I I was just seconds from, just vaporizingalong with the aircraft.
But I pulled that handle, that ignited a rocketmotor under my ass.
The instantaneous g-force of that explosiongoing off is 50 g's.
So, you know, that just compresses
your spine.
Sixteen maybe before?

(28:19):
Like, is that when you're in, like, the peak ofthat turn, like, when you said you feel, like,
1,600 pounds on you, maybe that's what yousaid.
Well, how big is that?
About 7 to 7 and a half g pull is where wetypically are fighting, and that had eased down
to maybe 4 or 5 g's.
Oh my god.
When that aircraft system overrode my controlinput and put us in the dive situation to begin
with.

(28:40):
But that 50
And you get ejection from 50.
Oh my gosh.
In less than a half a second, 0.4 seconds, theejection sequence launches you out of that
cockpit.
So the canopy blows clear, blasts you out ofthe cockpit to get you out as fast as possible,
and then you go to about a 12 to 14 g sustainedrocket boost as you fly out of the aircraft.

(29:02):
Like on your seat,
basically.
So there was that incredible impact to my bodyand my brain.
Yeah.
And then I impacted that airflow impacting thesound barrier with my body, and the human body
is not terribly aerodynamic at that kind ofairspeed.
It was 100 times the force of a Category 1hurricane that instantaneously impacted my

(29:24):
body.
This explosive force blew off my helmet,traumatic brain injury, bashed my face.
It looked like I had gotten my ass kicked after15 rounds in boxing.
I broke my neck, my left shoulder, bilateralhumerus fractures.
My right humerus and my arm tore through theright brachial artery.
My radius and ulna shattered, severing themedian nerve that controls my hand.

(29:48):
My brachial plexus, the nerve that kind ofcontrols the upper body, was smashed and
damaged.
It is so fast that the dry suit I was wearingshredded open.
The gear on my vest all ripped off, my radio,my signaling equipment.
My feet were flailing so violently with steeltoe boots on that they became like medieval

(30:09):
maces and smashed open my tib-fibs and both mylower leg bones with open fractures.
Chunks of my bone were coming out.
And this is all just in, like, a split secondjust blown apart.
Are you even feeling anything yet?
Like, do you even have a physical sensation inyour body, or is this just like you're still
in, like, your nerve endings can't even computewhat's happening so fast?

(30:32):
So I remember vividly up to reaching to pullthe handle, but after that point, I don't have
a linear memory.
Everything's been able to be recreated throughthe investigation.
The people that were on scene overhead and downin the water as well as, over the course of the
years, I've gotten—well, for years, I wasdealing with night terrors, so I would get

(30:54):
flashbacks of being in the ocean.
I don't remember impacting.
I'm pretty sure I was unconscious, just fromthat force of the ejection impacting the sound
barrier.
Knocked me out.
But very quickly once I was in the water, I wascoming back to consciousness.
Oh, wow.
The parachute
How long before they were on-site?
Someone to get you.

(31:14):
I'm assuming they send people from the carriergroup, right?
You probably have like a small boat that comesout.
So first my flight lead spotted my parachuteopening.
Uh-huh.
And he was able to start the on-scenecommander.
He spotted a fishing vessel about a mile awayfrom his position, and so he tried to get them
on maritime guard.

(31:35):
When they wouldn't respond, he got down reallylow and really fast, and he thumped over their
bow to get their attention.
They got on maritime guard, and he was able todirect them over to my position.
At this point, you know, my helmet had rippedoff.
My beacon had malfunctioned.
I had no signaling equipment nor the ability touse it.
I had no radio.

(31:55):
I was just a little dark head that was now myparachute actually had failed to disconnect
automatically as it should have.
Yeah.
And it was now dragging me under the surface ofthe ocean.
And for anybody who's ever been held under thewater when you need a breath of air and you
can't get it, you know how terrifying thatfeeling is, especially when you start to, like,
guppy and just inhale water.
And that's where I was at.

(32:15):
I was unable to swim, bleeding out.
Yeah.
So your artery, arterial wound right there.
And now and now Jaws, you know, I got images ofJaws coming back.
Like, this shark is just gonna come.
It's like worst-case scenario.
And,
and almost the day that they were saying that,hey.
Don't have bad data eject.
This is this
It's like an hour after that conversation withFISTI.

(32:39):
But fortunately, that fishing vessel got closeenough.
They weren't actually able to really help, butthey at least provided a visual rough location
of me.
Because had they not shown up, I would havedrifted out into the ocean and never be seen
again.
But there was a, there was a Coast Guard vesselfrom Elizabeth City sent up.
There was an H-60 Seahawk sent off of HS-11from the nearby aircraft carrier, and there was

(33:05):
also a helicopter from Norfolk coming inboundfrom HSC-28.
The HS-11 actually showed up first.
There was a miscommunication, and the rescueswimmer jumped in and swam past me onto the
fishing vessel thinking I had been pulled ontothe fishing vessel.
There's actually a whole HAZREP just in the inthe rescue effort because there was so much
chaos.
Oh, wow.

(33:26):
Everybody was on different frequencies.
There
were multiple helicopters, multiple boats.
Like, everybody wanted to save my ass, but itwas chaotic.
But it was actually a blessing that that firsthelicopter didn't pick me up because, they had
been instructed to bring me back to theaircraft carrier, not realizing the extent of
my injuries.

(33:46):
Mhmm.
But fortunately, this other helicopter showedup from
Their rescue swimmer, Cheech, jumped in theocean.
He cut me free of the paracord and got me backinto the helicopter.
I coded several times en route to Norfolk,Virginia, but by the time they picked me up,
the reports vary between an hour and a half andtwo hours that I had been in the ocean, emerged

(34:08):
in 37-degree Fahrenheit ocean water.
So I was severely hypothermic.
When they got me to the hospital, luckily, theyhad just, like, the surgical dream team on that
day.
Yeah.
Of all these trauma surgeons.
They initially treated me for severehypothermia.
My core body temp was at 87 Fahrenheit, so Ishould have been dead from hypothermia, but
they said the hypothermia actually constrictedthe blood flow so that I didn't really

(34:32):
know.
Ask me that.
That was my literal next question.
I was like, dude, I wonder if the 37-degreewater actually kept you from bleeding out just
by, and I'm sure adrenaline and some otherstuff as well, just that constricting, but,
like, yeah, for I mean, that arterial bleed,you should have been gone a lot quicker than
somebody getting to you.
Yeah.
They're like, if your dry suit had actuallyfunctioned properly, you would have bled to

(34:53):
death warm and toasty way before anybody gotthere.
It also helped preserve the brain, they said.
Oh, interesting.
Now, did the star swimmer throw on a tourniquetor what they it was?
How did they kind of identify in that situationthat you had a severe hemorrhage?
I don't have a clear memory of in thehelicopter.
They said I was in and out of consciousness.

(35:13):
They were, you know, resuscitating me over andover as I coded again and again.
I don't know if they were able to get atourniquet on in the helicopter or not.
Wow.
But they were able to keep me alive long enoughto get me into that hospital.
That's incredible.
Yeah.
It's one thing.
I mean, you would think that with all of thetechnology and radars and, you know, eye in the

(35:35):
sky, all sorts of stuff that, like, findingsomebody that falls overboard when you, like,
somebody witnessed it happen.
Everyone's aware.
It's not like you fell off in the middle of thenight or something like that.
But, I mean, we would do man overboard drillsand stuff like that.
You realize, like, a, it's a bunch ofknuckleheads trying to find you most of the
time.
And, b, it's literally like a needle in ahaystack type of situation.

(35:58):
Those currents go and, like, you know, theprobabilistic, you know, it after a minute, you
know, could go to here.
The search area spreads to here.
It's exponential growth in terms of where youcould be.
So it would scare the shit out of me.
Like, I never I'm not afraid of water.
I'm a great swimmer, like but just being if youfall off one of these boats or you're out there

(36:19):
at sea I mean, dude, it happened to two SEALs,I think last year.
I don't know if you remember that.
They're off the coast of Yemen, maybe, butthere was a VBSS, like, a cert Visit Board
Search and Seizure.
They go on rough seas at night, to they wereboarding some Iranian, like, fishing vessel or

(36:39):
something like that, and two guys fell off.
Oh, well, one guy falls off the ladder.
His swim buddy kinda goes in after him.
Gone.
Never found again.
Yeah.
You know?
And so and that these are great swimmers.
You know what I mean?
Like, it happens that fast.
So the ocean can
swallow you up like you're nothing.

(37:00):
Swallow you up like nothing.
So then what?
What happens next?
You kinda come back in.
You're off in the hospital.
They're taking care of you.
Yeah.
They, you know, they're treating me for severehypothermia.
They're treating me with blood transfusions forall the blood loss.
I'm having rhabdo from my kidneys shutting downfrom the overwhelming amount of tissue that's
in my blood now that's just shutting my organsdown.

(37:24):
But they're able to get me semi-stable, andthen very quickly, they put me into an induced
coma and rushed me into trauma surgeries.
And I spent the next week undergoing over adozen different trauma surgeries to salvage my
extremities from amputation with fasciotomies.
They ended up putting titanium nails,intramedullary rods into my long bones of my

(37:48):
arms and legs, a steel plate on my leftforearm.
So now I've got like a legit Wolverineskeleton, you know.
Sick.
They, you know, after all that, a week in, theytransferred me to Portsmouth Naval Hospital,
and my squadron mates, my family are all in thewaiting room just hearing if I'm gonna be a

(38:11):
vegetable.
Am I gonna wake up?
And at this point, it doesn't look very good,you know.
It's miraculous that I'm still alive in anyway.
Right.
And the same pilot who before the flight hadsaid I hadn't done anything dumb enough to earn
a call sign kinda piped up and was like, he's ascrappy motherfucker.
He'll be fine.
And so the squadron took scrappy motherfucker,and they shortened it down into SMURF.

(38:34):
Oh, okay.
Makeshift acronym.
But because it's the military, you have to havea politically correct cover story.
So they said I was a short guy who turned bluefrom both
the Fermi.
Supposed to be.
Oh, you're coding blue?
But, at least I got a call sign out of allthis, you know.
Yeah.
I did.
Silver lining, I suppose.

(38:56):
But, I spent another, in total, I spent about 2weeks in that coma.
And as I came to in the ICU, I was justcompletely out of it between the head injury
and all the meds they had me on for painmanagement.
I was just loopy as could be.
But as I kinda came back, I remember the woolblanket that was laying over me, I thought was

(39:17):
made out of lead or something because Icouldn't move it, but it was because I was
paralyzed.
And, eventually, the medical staff came in andsaid, you know, you've been in a high-speed
ejection.
You'll likely never use your arms.
You're not gonna be able to walk again, andyour military flying career is over.
And I think they were just trying to be veryrealistic with me, but in the back of my mind,

(39:39):
I was like, well, I'm gonna prove you fuckerswrong.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it just became my mission to do so.
But it's so funny.
I have theories about that because there aremore stories that I know of of people who have
been told they will never blank again that thenblank again.

(40:01):
Right.
You know?
Then people and so I what I can't figure out,though, is it, like, is it is it some weird
sort of, like, reverse psychology?
Like, you know, you wanna prove them wrong, andthat's because I mean, that's I can't figure it
out.
But on the other hand, I also think I'm like,people defer to authority so much.

(40:25):
Like, they have so much, you know, trust theexperts.
These are the doctors.
Mhmm.
That when a doctor tells you that you're notgonna do something again, you know, and this is
their professional opinion, you know, I wouldthink that some not insignificant percentage of
the population's, like, oh, upset it.
Yeah.
You know?
And I really don't think that they were doingit to do a reverse psychology trick.

(40:48):
I really think they're just trying to be verydirect with you, and this is their medical
statistics that they, you know, based on yourinjuries, this is the likelihood of what's
gonna happen.
And I
think they're just trying to be very realisticwith me to just try to explain the situation I
was in.
I don't think they were intentionally trying toget me to be like, well, fuck you guys.
But yeah.
It worked for me.

(41:09):
And I spent the next three months undergoing,or living in an inpatient, polytrauma center in
Richmond, Virginia's VA.
And, you know, terrible food, shitty sleep.
They wake you up all night to give you pills soyou can sleep.
So kind of the foundation of healing isnonexistent, but the staff was incredible.

(41:30):
You know, you're getting access to a lot ofthese good therapies.
I mean, I was doing speech therapy, visiontherapy, occupational therapy, physical
therapy, kinesiotherapy, recreational therapy,aqua therapy, you name it.
Like yeah.
Everything.
And over the course of three months, I regainedenough function in my arms and legs that I
could again wipe my own ass, which was a hugemarker.

(41:51):
And,
and
I could get around on a walker.
Yeah.
Not being able to, you know, take care ofyourself is incredibly frustrating.
But I got through that.
I ended up doing more surgeries.
I spent over two years, well, almost two yearsto the date of the accident.
I had overcome prescription drug addiction toall the pain meds they had me on.

(42:14):
I gained a stack of medical waivers.
I was able to max out the Navy PRT again, and Ireturned to flying Super Hornets after all
that.
You're not up, dude.
No way.
How long between your injury and you gettingthat's incredible.
I didn't know that.
I thought you were done with the TV.
No.
I'm along for the ride.
I have no idea what your story is.
This is, yeah, insane, dude.

(42:36):
It, you know, it took almost exactly two yearsbefore I had class I class backed up to fly
F-18 again.
That is quick.
And this is sort of like where the happy endingDisney version of my story may be, but I'm here
to tell you it ends up getting much more wildafter that even.
Oh, man.
As I start to experience the residual effectsof brain injury, sure.

(42:59):
That start to exacerbate and come out indifferent ways.
And I had a flight down at Tyndall Air ForceBase after I'd been back flying about a year
and a half.
I was back in a fleet squadron, you know, like,feeling like on top of the world.
I actually had a call sign finally.
Like, I'm going places in my military career.
You know?
You only had to almost die to get it.
I mean,
And, and so I'm, you know, back in that world,I went on this weapons exercise in Tyndall Air

(43:24):
Force Base down in Florida.
I got to live fire an AIM-9 Mike Sidewinder anda drone and then break off and fight an F-22
Raptor that was from the Hawaiian RaptorSquadron.
These guys fly Raptors, and they're stationedon Oahu.
So that's all I have.
Right?
Yeah.
They've got a ton of, yep.
Is the F-22 like the F-18, like the Air Force'sequivalent of the F-18, or is it like a

(43:48):
different class of air?
No.
The F-22 is a 5th generation fighter, whereasthe F-18 is a 4th gen.
Gotcha.
So it's, you know, it's a far more capableair-to-air adversary, and if the F-18 ever had
to fight one, they'd be dead before they evensaw it on radar.
Oh, shit, dude.
Wow.
Because they, you know, they're super stealthy.
They've got better weapon systems, betterradars.

(44:10):
Yeah.
So it's a super sexy jet.
It's got directional thrust.
But I got to go out and me and some other youngdude about my age, a couple O-3s in the
military with millions and probably millions orhundreds of millions of equipment were fighting
each other.
And I
came back from the flight and, you know, I hadthis surreal memory of getting to be in this
dogfight with this thing that I had seen at

(44:31):
you know,
as a young guy and been like, holy shit.
I can't believe this is my job.
But in the debrief, I was watching my tapes forthe missile shoot and I realized that I had
these huge gaps in my memory and I wasn'tfeeling very good.
I was feeling kind of panic for no apparentreason.
Mhmm.
I went back.
I tried to sleep it off.
The next day, I was just on duty.
It just felt terrible the whole day.

(44:52):
Like, simple things were really difficult forme to do.
And I got back again that night, and I sat downon my bed in the hotel, and the room just spun
around me.
So I was getting vertigo.
I was panicking.
I was having panic attacks that I had neverexperienced before.
I remember I was trying to set my alarm clockon my phone because I had to get up in the

(45:13):
morning, and I couldn't figure out how to usethe alarm clock on my phone.
I couldn't do the math for what time I neededto get up, and I was like something is
seriously wrong.
And this was like it happened, like, over aday, kind of.
Like, a short period of time, you went fromflying planes to not being able to set your
alarm.
Yeah.
Very quickly, after that flight had progressed.
And there had been a number of issues in theF-18 community where we'd had this faulty

(45:38):
system in the environmental control systemcausing rapid cabin, pressure fluctuations.
Oh.
So I know as in the diving you've done, if youcome up quickly from depth Yeah.
You can get decompression sickness, which is,for people who aren't in I know you know, but
it's basically the little nitrogen bubbles inyour blood come out of solution.
And it's like opening a soda can or a bottleand you see all the bubbles come to the

(46:01):
surface.
That kinda can happen with your blood if youdecompress too quickly.
And so what's thought to have happened, whichhad happened to a number of other pilots and
aircrew in the F-18 community already to thepoint that they had started putting hyperbaric
treatment facilities on the aircraft carriers.
So when pilots came back with DCS, they couldrush them in.

(46:21):
There have been a number of people who'd been,you know, permanently put into a vegetative
state because of these bubbles.
You know?
If you get into your joints, it's painful.
You get the bends.
But if
you get that in your brain, it can kill you.
And it had killed other pilots.
And so they're like, well, we think you'veprobably got DCS, considering your symptoms.
So they rushed me to Mayport dive base, thatwas luckily just 20 minutes away.

(46:46):
They put me into a hyperbaric treatmentfacility, and I spent the night hanging out
with a Navy diver.
The engineers over there.
Yeah.
And he was telling me all about, like, horrorstories of those decompression systems
malfunctioning.
Oh, God.
They, like, open it and it's just like Oh, no.
Pink goo dripping because every single airmolecule in their body just rapidly expanded in

(47:08):
a split second.
No, dude.
So that's what we were talking about whilewe're in there.
You're like, oh, yeah.
Well, it won't happen today.
Right?
I think I think
he I think he knew I was a sick fuck.
So
Oh my God.
It it helped a little bit, Jordan.
So they're shaking air?
Yeah.
It helped, it helped a little bit, but the nextday, I came back in to see the dive doc, and

(47:31):
he's like, hey, man.
I looked at your medical record, you know,considering everything that you've been
through.
When you get back to Lemoore, which is where Iwas stationed at that point, he's like, you
need to, you should consider going in to seethe flight surgeon.
And, you know, in the military, once you got anup shit with your medical and a high-speed job,
the last thing you wanna do is to go in and sayyou've got something going on, especially

(47:52):
something with your mental abilities.
Yeah.
But I had gotten to the point and afterconsideration, I kind of reluctantly went in to
see medical and told them what was going on.
And, pretty quickly, I had a delayed onset PTSDdiagnosis, and the treatments, you know,
despite there being, you know, what ended uplater becoming very evident was this huge issue

(48:15):
with traumatic brain injury that I wasexperiencing.
That's right.
That's wrong.
I guess.
And I think I think there's a tendency to Ithink there's kind of a tendency to, you know,
we get these PTS or PTSD symptoms as they callthem, PTSD.
I guess, PTS now.
But, you get those symptoms and I really thinkthat's oftentimes because of this underlying

(48:38):
brain issues.
The physiology of your brain is not functioningproperly.
It's causing hormonal imbalances.
It's causing all this chaos.
And we see it as these symptoms that presentthemselves and they put a PTSD label on it.
Mhmm.
But unfortunately, mainstream medicine,typically the way they wanna deal with that is
through pharmaceuticals.
Yeah.
And I had this terrible experience of gettingoff all the pain meds they gave me.

(49:00):
And I was like, I don't want to do meds again.
But as time went on, you know, they had medoing cognitive behavioral therapy, cognitive
processing therapy, exposure therapy, all thissort of like sit down and let's talk about our
feelings stuff, and it wasn't going anywhere.
And it makes sense that it wasn't because thephysiology of my brain was so disrupted.

(49:21):
You know, maybe there's a point that that stuffwould be helpful, but it's not while your brain
is still on fire.
And unfortunately, what that led to was, allright, well, we need to try these SSRIs.
We need to try this antipsychotic calledSeroquel at low dose to help you sleep, which
it did knock me unconscious at night, but itwasn't restful sleep.

(49:42):
I was suffering from just persistent insomnia.
The panic stuff was getting worse.
I was starting to slip into more paranoidthinking, hypervigilance, which, you know, if
you don't sleep for even a few days, you'regonna start to experience stuff like that.
And this had started to turn into months of notgetting restful sleep.
And what they did is they just threw pills atit to mask those symptoms.

(50:03):
But meanwhile, that underlying brain injury wasjust getting worse and worse to the point
where, you know, I thought I was being huntedby government assassins.
My wife had just had our little boy.
You know, he's just a tiny little infant, andshe's having to manage me in and out of
psychosis along with our little baby.
You know, I would come into the room.

(50:24):
She'd be cooking dinner.
I'd run up and, like, dump everything in thegarbage.
I would, like, be like, you can't eat that.
You can't drink the water because I thoughteverything was being poisoned.
I'm, like, somebody has to be poisoning me.
Well, I was being poisoned, but it was in these
FDA-approved medications too.
You know?
Yeah.
It's government.
Yeah.
Poisoning with these FDA-approved pills givento me by people in lab coats with doctorate

(50:45):
degrees.
And, and and but that continued, you know, asthe only remedy.
It's not working because you need more of it,and I found myself in this insane cycle and
continuing to degrade.
I was eventually medically retired.
I moved back to northern Michigan with myfamily, and that treatment continued at the VA.
No, man.
It's you just gotta take more of the Seroquel.

(51:05):
You just gotta do this medicine.
And,
You know, there's if I could hop in for asecond, you know, there there is a, a history
of this too within the military.
I mean, I'm sure it goes back way further thanthis, but where it really kind of the first
time that this came on my radar was with GulfWar Syndrome.
So Gulf War Syndrome, for those who don't know,was after the Gulf War, which was like a very

(51:30):
short war.
I think it was only a couple months orsomething like that.
And we basically come in, during one of the, Ithink, Bush Senior.
We roll into Iraq and, like, kind of take Ithink I don't remember even the all the details
of the Gulf War, but it doesn't matter.
It's very short war, and we want it in a couplemonths.
And guys start coming back from the Gulf War,and they're experiencing these crazy, like,

(51:52):
PTSD, you know, symptoms.
And people are kinda like, that's reallystrange.
We don't exactly know why because, you know,yeah, maybe he went to combat.
It was a thing.
But it wasn't like it it just it kinda defiedwhat we understood.
I mean, prior to that, you have, like, Vietnam,you know, World War II, Korea.
These were like shell shocked.
You know, people were, like, truly messed upfrom from that for on a psychological basis and

(52:16):
I'm sure on a physiological basis.
But oh, yeah.
The psychological made sense.
So, anyway, Gulf War didn't make a whole lot ofsense.
Anyway, one of my best friends, that I went tohigh school with, he went into medical
research.
And one of the labs, in New Mexico at UNM thathe was, like, interning for was they were, long

(52:36):
story short, discovered that Gulf War syndromewas actually related to a gut bacteria.
Guys were going over there and they forwhatever reason, they weren't treating the
water to get rid of some type of micro, youknow, organism, and it would infect their gut,

(52:56):
and it was giving people PTSD symptoms from guthealth.
Fast forward to within the last five years.
I don't remember exactly when this happened,but it comes up again, not Gulf War syndrome,
but something similar related to TBI.
So there was, like, the Will Smith movie, CTE,you know, talking everyone talking about CTE.
We started seeing that, like, hey, maybe all ofthese people who are, like, losing their mind

(53:21):
and murdering their whole family, for someunknown reason, maybe there's something going
on with their brain, you know, and that's whythey're having these changes in behavior.
And it's not just a psychological thing.
So they find and they say, yeah.
Traumatic brain injury is causing all thisstuff.
You know, we everyone starts looking at NFL.
What can we do to change the safety of helmets?

(53:43):
Blah blah blah.
You know?
But within the last five years or so, again, Idon't remember exactly when this happened.
There was this guy.
He was in the Army.
He was an Army reservist, stationed somewhere.
I mean, he's an Army reservist.
So he's like a normal civilian, but he does,like, Army stuff, you know, a couple times a
month.
One of his, like, station duty at, like, hislittle NOSC or whatever they're called was

(54:07):
working the hand grenade range.
So that's just what he did.
Just throw hand grenades and teach people howto throw hand
exposure to that over and over.
Yeah.
So this guy never deployed overseas.
He never actually went to combat.
The extent of his whatever was just beingexposed to this low, low-impact blast trauma

(54:27):
from grenades.
What we thought, you know, based on these TBImodels and concussive, you know, old blast
patterns inside buildings, this should not havebeen causing him issues.
He eventually goes and shoots up a bunch ofpeople in, like, some, like, mass shooter type
deal.
They study his brain, CTE.
And so it is remapping how I mean, I don't knowwhat advances they have made, but it was like a

(54:54):
very important data point in that, like, maybewhat we think about is what causes TBI and CTE
is actually a lot less.
And then how do we know maybe that translatesto, belt-fed or, like, service weapons.
You know?
Like, maybe the .50 cal has enough concussivewhatever it could be causing over enough period

(55:15):
of time.
So it's just really interesting to, that thatwe keep getting over and over again.
You know, and it taking for whatever fuckingreason, the main all these people in lab coats,
like, I don't know.
Do we try more SSRIs?
Like, guys, it's maybe something else.
Conventional mental health treatment isinsanity.

(55:37):
It's doing the same thing, expecting differentresults, and it just doesn't work.
And they know it.
And it's because it supports a business model.
Yeah.
Is my theory of the only reason it continues.
100%.
If you can actually have somebody heal and theydon't need to take a pill the rest of their
life, well, that's a loss of profits.

(55:57):
It's a missed opportunity right there.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, unfortunately, the entire Western medicalsystem was really built around this business
model, which is to kind of give you remediesthat maybe make you feel better, but keep you
coming back for more and not really to fix theunderlying issues.
So it became incredibly frustrating andcontinued to worsen my condition.

(56:22):
Like I just kept getting worse and worse to thepoint my wife came home from a job interview.
She found me completely naked.
Oh my God.
I shaved off my eyebrows for some reason.
I shaved off all my hair in chunks, shaved offmy facial hair, and all I had on was a black
plastic garbage bag tied around my neck like acape because I thought I was like a superhero,

(56:43):
and I was gonna go out into the snowy Michiganweather and fight crime like Batman or
something.
Naked Batman.
So it was getting worse.
Why do you think you're getting worse?
I think because they just kept increasing thedosage of those medications, so the side
effects were getting worse.
Uh-huh.
And I was not getting restful sleep this entireduration.

(57:05):
Like, these things like the Seroquel wouldknock me unconscious, but I wasn't actually,
like, getting restful
sleep.
Right.
In that state.
It's like blacking out when you're, like, drunkor something like that.
You know?
Yeah.
And taking that stuff every day was poisoningmy body, you know.
I can feel it physically, like, I was losing,like, muscle definition.
I was losing, like, my athletic abilitiesdrastically.

(57:26):
I remember I was going out, like, I'd still tryto work out and I wasn't really changing that,
but it was like I'd go out and I could barelyrun a 12-minute mile.
Wow.
And it felt like I was running around with a100-pound pack on my back all the time and just
doing simple stuff.
So it was like, that stuff was just poisoningmy body.
Right.
And it just continued to get worse.

(57:48):
And it was actually when my wife found me withthat freaking naked Batman costume going on, it
was within a few days of going to the VA andhaving my dose of Seroquel
Oh, my
god.
From 300 milligrams a night up to 450milligrams a night, which is like a freaking
heroic dose of that crap.
And so I don't think there's any you know, it'snot a coincidence that that drove me into the

(58:14):
deepest psychosis I had been in
It makes me so upset to hear that because youare, this is a microcosm of what's happening to
millions of people, and it has been happeningto millions of people, you know, just going
through not only the VA.
I think we shit on the VA a lot, but this iseverything.
But yeah, it just like, five minutes of thisconversation with you, I'm like, oh, yeah.

(58:39):
It's probably the pills that are
That are, yeah.
I have, I, I'm a, I'm a medic, dude.
Like, you know, I'm not a doctor.
I'm not a psychologist, a psychiatrist, aneurologist.
How are all of these people who are supposed tobe experts, supposed to be smart, can't like,
just missing this?
They've been indoctrinated, man.

(59:00):
They've been indoctrinated by an industry thatis largely funded by the pharmaceutical
industry and has influence on their curriculumin medical school.
And they've been taught how to be drug pushers,basically.
And I think more and more of them are startingto wake up to that fact and take a different

(59:21):
path, but it often involves disconnecting fromanything that's supported by the insurance
industry.
Mhmm.
And having to take a lot more risk in theirbusiness model by only serving people who pay
out of pocket.
But there's a whole world of medicine that'savailable out there.
It's just not in the mainstream.
It's not at the VA.
It's not covered by TRICARE or health insuranceproviders for the most part, and it's because

(59:47):
that entire model, the pharmaceutical industry,the insurance industry, and the medical
community is all kind of tied in together.
And I don't think it's because the physiciansare in any way mean.
They want to help.
They became physicians because they want to beable to help people.
And I'm not saying they're malicious, but Ithink they've been put in and educated in a way

(01:00:07):
that has kind of closed their eyes to therealities of what they're doing.
And unfortunately, that's all too common.
And I think upwards of 90% of the people thatare put on these psychotropic medications have
adverse reactions, and it often just getsdismissed by the health care provider to keep
pushing them because that's what they'retrained to do.

(01:00:29):
Right.
Well, and when you're one of these health careproviders too, there's this, you know, when
you're guys like us, like, I yeah.
I understand there's doctors and there'straining and there's all these things, but,
like, I'm pretty open to whatever.
Like, if you have a good idea, I don't reallycare who you are so much if the idea is good.
But on some level, when you become, you know,top of your field in an industry, you're like,

(01:00:55):
I'm the guy.
Like, I'm the one who knows.
And if I need to learn something, it's there'sthat mountaintop is smaller and smaller of
people who you can learn from.
You know?
So there's probably an inherent sort ofskepticism to, like, oh, cool.
Oh, did you hear a podcast?
Is that where you know what I mean?
Like, yeah, I spent 25 years in school andpracticing this, but I'm sure Mr.

(01:01:18):
Podcast, you know, has the answer too.
You know?
So there's that arrogance is very alive.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
It's a kick on their ego to think how how couldthere be a better I know this better than
anybody.
Right.
I've
been studying it for years.
I've got hundreds of thousands of dollars ofdebt, you know, like, to show it.
Yeah.
Right.
But, but, yeah, it it it ended up my wife tookme to the emergency room.

(01:01:42):
Luckily, she's a trauma nurse, so she had dealtwith people in psychosis.
But she took me in.
I spent a couple nights just having anout-of-body experience in the emergency room,
and then I was transferred down to Battle CreekVA inpatient psych facility.
And as I came to in that place, man, I awokeinto a legitimate nightmare.

(01:02:03):
Like, the treatment of American veterans inthis facility, you know, it still breaks my
heart to know that there are people stuck inthis place, man.
And tell me a little bit about that.
Like, what did you what did you see that wasYou know?
There's, you know, I was initially in apsychosis, in and out of psychosis, but I
started to become more and more lucid thelonger I was there, and I started to really see

(01:02:26):
what was going on.
Mhmm.
And the realities of what they were doing,there's a policy if you're on one-to-one care
like I was in psychosis, that they're requiredevery 15 minutes to come into your room and
shine a flashlight in your face to make sureyou're safe and not hurting yourself.
Now, one, in this facility, it's incrediblydifficult to sleep to begin with because

(01:02:48):
there's all these other veterans that arecrammed in there with you having psychosis,
running up and down the hallways at night,screaming.
Everything is concrete walls and tile floors,fluorescent lighting.
It's just always necro-y.
Yeah.
And this white bright light's always blaring inon your room, and there's oftentimes other
people in your room with you.

(01:03:09):
It's just not a comforting place to sleep tobegin with.
And now you add on top of that, you actuallystart to fall asleep and they wake you up with
a flashlight in your face and come into yourroom.
Like you can hear someone open your door andbreathing, and you're already in a hyper-alert
state, with your nervous system beingcompletely out of whack.
So you're not sleeping.
The food that they're feeding you is thisultra-processed prison food, you know.

(01:03:33):
There's not real anything.
Everything is like the margarine that they giveyou.
It's not real butter.
It's got like 30-plus ingredients.
The food is just junk and it's not nourishing.
The water that comes out of the tap smells likeit's coming out of a broken hot tub.
And in order to make it semi-palatable, theyput this artificially colored, artificially

(01:03:54):
flavored raspberry lemonade tea powder into itto make the sort of concoction that's probably
even more toxic than whatever's in that tapwater.
So you're malnourished.
You're not drinking healthy things.
If you get to go outside once a week, you'repretty fortunate.
Sometimes less than that.
And then when you do go outside, you're goinginto a concrete yard that's surrounded by

(01:04:16):
high-rise brick buildings with metal fencingall around you.
There's no connection to nature.
There's no sunlight.
Now you take a military member and you put himthrough survival school, a perfectly capable,
physically, and mentally robust individualwithin a few days to a week of being in a
prisoner of war situation with sleepdeprivation, malnourishment, restriction, you

(01:04:42):
know, treating you less than human.
Well, these are all the exact same things,maybe unintentionally, that are being done at
the VA inpatient psych facility.
You are literally treated in a way that isdesigned in my mind to break you.
And maybe that's just being pessimistic, but
what they do have is
is they wanna put you on pharmaceutical drugs.

(01:05:03):
And that's what they have plenty of.
There's no way so many
you don't even know what all you're on.
There is no way that a health professional ofany stripe can see that situation, and I know
exactly what you're talking about.
I was in internal medicine.
I got sick in 2023.
I had sepsis, actually.
It was so random, but it doesn't matter.

(01:05:23):
I was in the hospital for four days, andeverything that you were describing, I mean,
like, dude, it was the worst experience of mylife.
Throw me back in the ocean.
Put me back in the buzz.
Put me back in the refills.
I'll do that all fucking day.
Four days.
That's it.
I'm a total bitch, dude.
I couldn't last more than four days?
I was like, I'm seriously gonna escape this.
Like, if you do not discharge me, you willnever see me again.

(01:05:45):
You know?
And I had all those same thoughts.
And I'm like, this has got to be intentional.
There's no way this is unintentional.
Like, I just I don't I don't I mean, I'm sureit is, and there's not gonna be proof of the
other.
Right.
But I'm like, it's so the opposite of what youshould be doing that it doesn't even pass,

(01:06:10):
like, the first glance sniff test, dude?
What about that would make somebody better?
It's completely nuts, and it's, you know, it'sall too common.
It's not just this.
I'm sure some of the VA inpatient facilitiesare maybe better.
I bet there's probably some that are worse.
But it's also outside of the VA system.
It's just the mainstream mental health systemis broken.

(01:06:33):
And I found myself as a prisoner of the war onmental health that is taking place in our
country.
And Wow.
It was nuts that just the people that weresupposed to be trained in health care
Right.
Somehow were so blind to the fundamentals ofhealth.
What do you need to recover?
You need restful sleep.

(01:06:53):
Right.
You need nutrition.
Nutrition.
It's actually providing nutrition to your body,not depleting your nutrients by eating it and
processing it like all that processed crap.
You need clean water, not stuff full ofchlorine and fluoride and all the artificial
colors and flavors that it came with there.
You need outdoor exposure, sunlight, likeexercise.

(01:07:16):
There's none of that.
Yeah.
And you don't need medical school to know that.
And there's you don't.
And there was a bizarre sort of, if you'refamiliar with the Stanford prison experiment.
Yeah.
Basically, that sort of dynamic was happeningthere where the staff members wore white lab
coats, whether they were a nurse, a physician,or just a volunteer.

(01:07:38):
And then we as the the I call them prisoners,but we had the veteran patients.
We wore prison scrubs, like the legit samescrubs that you get you see guys walking around
in prison.
And, and so there's a dynamic that that kind ofcreates.
Not with
everybody, you know, a lot of the staff wasreally good there, but there are also people

(01:07:59):
there that were not well trained, that werethere for the wrong reasons.
And right.
When you're in a psychosis on and off, peoplehave a way of treating you less than human.
And I assume that the person behind the eyesisn't there anymore.
Yeah.
And so, right.
That all came to the point where I got veryfrustrated in the facility, and I planned an
escape.
I was using, training training from SERE schoolto, like, let's help people get out of here.

(01:08:25):
And a lot of the people are already just infull up zombie mode in the facility, but there
were some of us that had, you know, the mentalwhereabouts of being like, we are stuck in a
fucking hell, and we need to get out of here.
So you're stuck there?
Like, they're there you are not allowed toleave on some level and can't, like, check the
account or anything?
And here's kind of a scary thing too, is I wasvoluntarily admitted to this facility.

(01:08:47):
Oh, God.
I hadn't committed any crime.
I was there on my own will because I wanted toget help.
Right.
When I saw it wasn't a helpful place, I beggedto leave.
I said, I don't wanna be here anymore.
I don't need to be here anymore.
I will do better.
I would rather go live in the woods than be inthis facility because it'll be a more healing
environment.
And, unfortunately, they would not let meleave.

(01:09:09):
They wouldn't let you leave.
It was not my decision.
It's like a catch 22 thing where it's like, ifyou're too crazy to if you're if you're not
crazy enough to know that you wanna leave, thenyou gotta go back to fight in the you know?
Oh my god, dude.
That is so unbelievably frustrating.
Oh, man.
I planned to escape.
Like, I stockpiled warm clothing.
I stockpiled snacks in my room.

(01:09:31):
Hell, yeah.
I was making weapons out of tube socks withpiled-up wet socks inside of it and, like,
showing other people there how to do thisstuff.
Hell, yeah.
And and
my plan was in the middle of the night, I wasgonna pull the fire alarm.
And when the fire alarm went off, we could makea run for it.
Well, I tried that plan, and I pulled the firealarm.
And I think somebody had already tried thisbefore, and they just let any of us go outside.

(01:09:53):
And they brought in base police, and theyfigured out that I was the one that pulled it.
And then I got forcibly injected with thisstuff called Haldol, which should just be
called hell.
It basically felt like there were insectstrying to crawl their way out from underneath
my skin.
This is an MK-Ultra movie.
Like, what the fuck?
All I wanted to do was rip my own skin off andrun and scream up and down the hallways.

(01:10:16):
And why would they inject you with that?
What would even ostensibly be
the point?
It's an antipsychotic, and they said I was, youknow, I was doing these erratic things.
Clearly, you'd be psychotic.
You wanna get out of here.
And, you know, I did have moments of being inpsychosis in there, but these things I'm

(01:10:37):
telling you now are things that were very real.
This isn't the stuff that I
was No.
No.
There's all sorts of crazy shit we can talkabout that I experienced when I was in the
psychosis, but this is the stuff that wasabsolutely very real.
And, well, anyways, I came to, like, maybe aday or two later from whatever they had all
injected into my body at that point.
And, I was literally drooling on myself.

(01:10:59):
I had become another one of these zombies.
Yeah.
Just
like, whoever you want me?
And they ended up taking me into a room andsitting me down with this individual who's
supposed to be my legal representation.
She put a pen in my hand, put my arm up on thetable with documents, and had me scribble.
I'm literally drooling on myself.

(01:11:19):
No idea what's going on.
That's what I was saying.
My hand, and I ended up signing documentationthat legally committed me to the facility,
which they wouldn't let me leave anyways.
But now I was actually legit committed, so Icouldn't go.
It stripped me of my Second Amendment right tobear arms.
I'm no longer allowed to purchase or own afirearm.
Ever.

(01:11:40):
No.
Ever.
And I also thanks, buddy.
I also hey.
Can I have that, buddy?
Leo, can I have that?
My books just showed up.
Thanks, buddy.
Oh, sick.
What is the cover?
Phoenix Revival.
Go buy this book, dude.

(01:12:00):
I'm, like, holy shit, dude.
This is one of the crazy I'm so glad I didn'tknow anything about this because I'm, like, on
for the ride.
I love it.
I don't love it.
Actually, I'm I'm actually very
wild story
right now.
Upset, dude.
I didn't think I was gonna be, like, upset fromthis conversation.
I'm I'm very upset, actually.

(01:12:22):
I think it's,
Yeah.
I was,
How how is that not how is that anything otherthan, at a minimum, criminal negligence?
Yeah.
But probably something like psychological,like, torture.
You know?
I was
It was it was legitimate torture.

(01:12:42):
I mean, that's the same thing you would do to aprisoner of war to get them to be compliant
with whatever you want.
Sleep deprived, malnourished, confined, treatless than
you pentothal.
Enough.
You take a perfectly healthy guy going throughsurvival training, and and they're gonna start
having visual auditory hallucinations anddelusional thinking.
That's a healthy person.
Right.
Now you take a person who's already trying tocome out of a psychosis dealing with severe TBI

(01:13:08):
and PTSD and you do all the same things tothem, it's I mean, if it's not intentional,
it's a level of incompetence that has seizedour medical system that is truly deplorable and
an embarrassment.
And just, you know, I eventually, with theadvocacy in my family, I think I ended up

(01:13:29):
spending about 40 days in that facility.
I ended up getting out with them.
Luckily, my parents were both in the medicalworld.
Oh, wow.
My wife is a trauma nurse who had experiencedealing with people in psychoses, and they took
me into custody after a battle with the peoplethat
Yes.
So how did they bust you out?
Like, what was the actual process?
I think they just had to show that they couldtake care of me, and

(01:13:54):
they had to go you out just like, hey.
You know?
And, well, let me pause for a second.
Could you communicate with them, like, viaphone or Yeah.
They can visit you or something?
Eventually, they were able to come and startvisiting me regularly.
Now can you access the Internet and stuff whileyou're in there?
There's one computer in the whole facility, andit often had a guy sitting on it that was
completely out of his mind, and he was just onthe slot machine online slot machine thing he

(01:14:18):
was doing all day.
But once in a while, he could get on there and,like, get on the Internet very briefly, but it
was
Didn't have your phone.
Couldn't get on your phone.
Phone.
But they eventually advocated and got me out,largely by showing that they could take care of
me and wanted to take care of me.
And so when they would come visit you, youwould tell them.
We'd be like, get me the fuck out of here.

(01:14:39):
Like, please.
Yeah.
They're killing me.
Yeah.
And I think, I think at first, they were kindalike, there's no way to expand.
Is this crazy?
Is this psycho?
Are you using psychosis?
Is this a yeah.
And I probably didn't help myself because Istarted to fuck with these people when I saw
what was going on.
Like, my body's covered in scars and so I took,like, this dark green marker that kinda like
looks like rotten flesh and I colored all of myscars.

(01:15:00):
And then I was, like, running around pretendingI was a zombie just to fuck with them because I
was so pissed off that I was trying to keep mysanity, but that probably didn't help my case
in the film.
But at the time, I was just like fuck thesepeople.
You gotta do what you gotta do, man.
Right.
But, they were eventually able to get me out.
And when I got home, man, I was just broken.
Like, I felt this deep sense of betrayal, forthe government that I had served.

(01:15:24):
Like, how can you be treating veterans likethis?
I mean, here I am.
I'm no, man.
I served my government in an honorable way.
I I, you know, I was just trying to get help,and here's what happens.
And, you know, I was miserable to be around.
You know, my sister and and by the way, now I'mon even more meds.

(01:15:45):
I'm still going to the VA, and the only answeris you just need more meds.
You know?
And I was very fortunate.
I had a friend that reached out to me that,that started to turn me in the path of more
holistic healing.
And and, eventually, I came across the book Howto Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, which
is, for those that aren't familiar, it's, theuse of psychedelic-assisted therapy for dealing

(01:16:08):
with, you know, things like I was dealing with.
And eventually, I was able to find a, you know,I started cleaning up my diet.
I started learning more and more about thetoxicity that's even in foods that seem kind of
innocuous, that should be healthy that are notanymore, and are, you know, I'd say probably
95-plus percent of the food in a normal grocerystore has got crap in it that's gonna make you

(01:16:32):
sick and mess you up, from glyphosate toartificial colors and flavors and food
additives.
And there's this whole just laundry list ofcrap that's in our food.
But I started to learn more about that world.
I started to, you know, get back on myexercise.
I started to cut out things that I was startingto use to mask all these awful experiences that

(01:16:54):
I was having, you know, drinking more, usingcannabis more, things that weren't helping me
necessarily, and I started to just get off ofthat stuff.
And then I was fortunate really to find a localguide that took me into a psilocybin ceremony.
And while that,
that didn't fix that yeah.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Sorry.
I'm stumbling on my words.

(01:17:15):
I wanna ask you about that specifically, butbefore we jump to that point, now you this was
your first sort of coming from, like, a hippieparent family kind of deal, was there not
really an emphasis or, like, sort of aknowledge that maybe these things could be used

(01:17:36):
therapeutically?
Or, you know, what was, yeah.
So, so in the back of my mind, yeah.
When I was 16, just sitting around a campfirewith some friends, had, you know, little
crunchy handful of mushrooms.
Yeah.
And I was kinda dealing with, I don't know.
I think I was largely just very disappointed inwhat society was gonna look like as I grew

(01:17:56):
older and older.
And I wasn't really, like I was a bit depressedreally, you know.
But after that night with those, you know,crunchy mushrooms, I came to the next morning
and just kinda had a renewed sense of hope inlife.
And I could feel the wind on my face andappreciate the colors of the leaves changing

(01:18:17):
and, like, I just felt alive again, which hadthat depression just faded and never came back.
And it was like
Uh-huh.
I didn't realize it at the time.
I didn't put it all together.
But then after reading Michael Pollan's book,it kinda gave me confirmation, like, there's
really something to this.
Because I remember when I was, you know
Gotcha.
That did something to me that had a profoundeffect, a positive effect on my life.

(01:18:39):
Right.
Right.
And so that was in the back of my mind forsure.
So now you meet this guide that's gonna takeyou through a psilocybin trip.
Now I have one of my best friends I grew upwith, not to go into a lot of detail, but, has
dealt with some alcohol and depression and, youknow, some suicidal, you know, whatever.

(01:19:00):
And I have been encouraging, you know,exploring psychedelic therapy as an option.
But I want, you know, I think, hey, you shouldgo down to Peru and do an Ayahuasca trip.
You'd be like, yeah.
Sure.
Okay.
Maybe.
But it's probably not gonna happen.
Like, you know what I mean?
Like, I'm like, what can we do in theintermediate time before, you know, and

(01:19:25):
psilocybin is just a little bit moreaccessible.
Oh, yeah.
So can you kind of walk me through what thattherapeutic, like, really approaching
psilocybin from a therapeutic standpoint waslike and how you did it and what you got out of
it?
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, the first in that pursuit was findingsomeone to trust with it because right.

(01:19:47):
I mean, you can go to the wrong person with thewrong set and setting with crap medicine, or
you just go buy this stuff out on the streetsomewhere by somebody you don't know, it might
have freaking fentanyl in it.
Who knows these days?
There's fentanyl in everything, it seems.
Yeah.
So you could absolutely get fucked up by doingthis the wrong way.
But I was fortunate to have reference through afriend who had been through the program and had

(01:20:10):
high regards for this individual, and it wasdone with reverence.
It was done in a ceremonial setting, and it wasdone by somebody who had a lot of experience
with it.
And while I think psilocybin is probably asafer option than some of the psychedelics out
there, I think you can probably still do somedamage if you go into the situation unprepared

(01:20:31):
or maybe on medications that can be interferingwith that.
So, for the most part, I had completely cut outalcohol and cannabis.
I think at this point, I had nearly weanedmyself completely off most of the medications.
I was still taking Seroquel at very low doses,but I skipped the dose prior to the ceremony,

(01:20:52):
so it wasn't in my system.
I went into the ceremony, spent the night withthat medicine, and just sort of had this
beautiful experience and this resetting of mynervous system.
From being in this constant state of fight orflight, I finally felt I had just switched back

(01:21:15):
into parasympathetic mode for a minute andcould breathe.
And to use Michael Pollan's analogy, it waslike a fresh snowfall over all these ruts of
negative emotions and behaviors that had becomewho I was.
And now with this fresh snowfall covering thoseruts, I could take a new path in my life.
And one of the things that I came by from thatceremony with was the clarity that those pills

(01:21:39):
they've been giving me is absolute insanity,because the more of that stuff I've taken, the
worse and worse I've continued to become.
And the more I say I'm worse, the more of itthey give me.
And so I then was able to wean myself the restof the way off Seroquel against the guidance of
the psychology and psychiatrist folks at theVA.

(01:22:00):
Even against the guidance of my family, whowere very worried.
They were all from sort of a conventionalmedical background, and so they're like, no.
You're supposed to do what the docs say.
But I was like, this is not working.
I'm not
You know a question the docs really hate?
If you ask them how many of the school shootersor mass shooters are actively being treated on

(01:22:22):
some sort of antipsychotic or yeah.
Yeah.
They don't like that question.
I wonder if there's a correlation to that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No.
No

(01:22:42):
Okay.
I think I took three, and then I took onepartway through the ceremony to boost it up a
little bit.
But it's about three or four grams.
So it wasn't a huge dose, kinda middle of theroad.
But it was enough to give me something comingout of it.
And,
gave me ceremony-like aspect of that?
So, typically,
it's done with a group of people, but it wasright in the heart of COVID.

(01:23:05):
You name it.
But the guide was nice enough.
Even though everybody else had pulled out, Iwas like, I still wanna do this.
I'm not afraid of all this crap.
Let's move forward.
And, and so it ended up just being me, theguide, and her significant other, and we just
sat outside.
She still had some sort of ceremony on it with,you know, using sage to cleanse, and we had a

(01:23:29):
fire, and there was a little bit of, sort ofceremonial input at the beginning.
And and
so it was largely
Oh, yeah.
Like, setting intentions, all of that.
But during it was largely just being withnature
and and dealing
with my thoughts.
And Mhmm.
The guide could come up to me and kinda sensewhen I was really tight and, like, teaching me
some breathing to kinda let go and open up.

(01:23:50):
And, like, it's okay to look around.
Like, I was just so, like, just, like, in myown little bubble.
But she was able to kind of push and push atthe right moments and allow me to open up into
the experience that much more.
And by the end of the night, I was just sittingaround the campfire, they were playing the
guitar, singing, and it was just thisbeautiful, like, wonderful experience.

(01:24:14):
There were thunderstorms in the air all aroundus that were supposed to have hit us, but we
never even got a single drop of water.
It was just lightning and everything out in thedistance and it was beautiful.
But it was like there's this little protectivebubble around us that protected us through the
night.
But, yeah.
I came out of that with, you know, this sort ofchange of mindset, and I continued to continue

(01:24:40):
with the holistic stuff with eating better, youknow, cutting the toxicity out of my life.
And then, eventually, I was able to get off ofthe Seroquel completely.
I still wasn't sleeping very well.
I ended up looking up Veterans Solutions, whichis psychedelic treatment through Marcus and
Amber Capone.
Yeah.
I applied to their program.

(01:25:01):
I didn't really meet their requirements, asyou're supposed to be, I think, two-time combat
deployed, special forces background.
I was neither of those.
So I applied anyways.
I didn't get in, but they put me in touch withanother organization that's since ceased to
exist, but it was called Warrior AngelsFoundation.
And, they were putting together a fundraiserfor this David Goggins Ultra Run.

(01:25:23):
It was a 4 by 4 by 48 challenge.
So you ran 4 miles every 4 hours for 48 hoursstraight.
Sounds very Goggins.
They were, yeah.
They were taking veterans down to their ranchin Texas, and they were gonna have this whole
event.
And so I was like, well, that sounds cool.
And there was kind of this calling to me, like,you should try to help out with this.
So, yeah.
I had never talked publicly about any of thisup to that point.

(01:25:46):
I thought I was a complete failure, that nobodycared about me.
I was in a very dark place still, but somethingwas telling me, you need to share a little of
the story, and maybe there's other people likeyou out there.
And I didn't have any social media even at thatpoint.
I'd, like, cut myself off from the world, whichis so common with that kind of stuff going on.

(01:26:06):
But I ended up texting it out to a few people Iknew and sending it out in emails, this
fundraiser page.
And it just had a little brief synopsis of someof what I've been telling you about.
And within a week, I had raised almost $10,000.
Wow.
There was an outpouring of support.
And the guys who ran it, Adam and Andrew Marr,called me, like, hey.
You wanna come down to Texas?
We're getting you a ticket.

(01:26:27):
And next thing I know, I show up in Texas, andI was welcomed into this community of other
veterans who had had almost the exact sameexperience that I had.
We had been these high-performing militarydudes.
You know, there were MARSOC guys.
There were Marines.
There were SEALs, Rangers, Green Berets, youknow, all these diverse high-speed jobs.

(01:26:50):
We'd been injured in the service, and then wehad had to deal with PTSD diagnosis.
And all of us have the same story.
We had gotten these pills, and then we foundourselves with our lives falling apart around
us and getting worse.
But we all came together, and that was thefirst day where I finally had a little bit of
hope again.
Like, I'm on the right path.

(01:27:11):
It was very affirming, like, those docs arewrong.
I am right.
I'm not crazy to think that this might help.
And, over the course of this run, you know, Igot to talk to all these different dudes and
women that were there and realized, like, wehave so much in common.
I can't believe this is so commonplace.
And nobody knows about

(01:27:31):
it.
Right.
Right.
And, late into the second night of running, wehad, like, 30-plus miles on our legs.
And, a Native American group was running theceremony for the event.
They invited us into their teepee for a peyoteceremony.
Oh, wow.
So we had this sort of peyote ceremony tiedinto the experience, and that was just

(01:27:55):
absolutely beautiful.
And at the end of the event, you know, we hadcompleted 48 miles of running.
There's just this big circle of freaking bigtattooed, burly, badass dudes just crying their
eyes out, and the Native American elder invitedus all to go place our intentions with this

(01:28:15):
elder tree that was in the middle of the field.
And as the crowd kind of cleared out, I walkedup to it.
And as I placed my forehead against that tree,I felt this shock wave of white energy just
blast through my body.
And I didn't have to think anything or sayanything.
Whatever that force was knew exactly who I was,and it reinvigorated me with a purpose.

(01:28:36):
It was like you are here for a reason.
You've gone through that because you couldendure it, and you need to share your story.
Because there's others like you stuck in thatdark place that you were, and you need to help
them guide out of it.
And I, you know, I was in tears just like Ithis all makes sense.
Like, this was all for a reason.

(01:28:58):
Dude, that's crazy.
I want to tell you three things.
First of all, I think at least 50% of soeveryone's acknowledging psychedelics are real
medicine.
They can absolutely fix your brain and fix yourlife and blah blah blah.
Okay.
I think that's 50% of it.
I think the other 50% of it is that connection,the fact that you're finding other people.

(01:29:21):
You're not alone, dude.
Yeah.
And your story is a story that we're alleveryone feels like they're alone, and then
they see that they're not alone, and they havea shoulder to, like, lean on.
You know, they got someone to their left andright.
And I think that in itself is empowering in aform of medicine, you know, that that kind of
goes hand in hand with the actual medicine.

(01:29:44):
And then, the other thing I wanted to say thatwas interesting when you said you put your head
on that tree.
So I went to Israel a few years ago, and it wasmy first time going to Israel.
I'm Jewish, but I didn't really grow up Jewish.
Like, I didn't you know, it's not really like Ijust like my blood and that.
But over at the Wailing Wall, you must separateit, men and women, and you go and you write

(01:30:06):
down a little prayer, and you roll it up in, ona piece of paper, and then you go and you stick
it in one of the cracks of the wall.
And so I'm I'm up there.
I ripped my little prayer down.
I'm kinda just, like, you know, takingeverything in.
It's it's really crazy.
And there's a lot of, like, very, like, HasidicOrthodox people.
I mean, guys that are, like, dirty.
Like, they don't change their clothes.
They don't wash.
Like, they look like homeless people, and theyjust go to the wall and pray.

(01:30:29):
That's what they do.
And it's it's trippy.
You're like, wow.
This is like what a what a crazy kinda thing.
I'm kinda taking pictures, you know, beingrespectful, but, like, you know, I'm not in the
moment.
I'm I'm, like, observing the moment.
And then I'm about to kinda walk away, and I'mlike, hey.
Let me just do my little prayer thing,whatever.
And I go and I go up to the wall, and samething that you just described.
You know?
I swear to God.

(01:30:50):
It was like electricity started coming throughme.
I felt vibration and, like, buzz in my teethand lips.
And then I started getting this, like, oh,like, almost like a constriction in, like, my
chest.
And then the wailing walk dude, I thoughtstarted wailing.
Like, immediately, I was, like, bawling myfucking eyes out over nothing.
I wasn't my prayer wasn't even, like, a sadthing.

(01:31:11):
It was, like, a fairly generic, but there'sthere that energy, that source of, like, energy
is a very real thing.
And you can tap into it in different ways, indifferent places.
It extends across cultures.
It extends across all sort all religions, allsorts.
But, you know, it's it's very real thatwhatever you felt right there, I've I've felt

(01:31:32):
it myself.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was absolutely.
You know?
And it's one of those things you just have toexperience in order to to know what it that
it's real.
You know?
At that point, I don't think I would havebelieved it if someone's like, oh, I just
wouldn't put my head on this tree, and now I'vebeen connected with divinity in the universe
again.
Like, yeah.
But once you experience, it's like, it'sundeniable, and it's beyond, like, having a

(01:31:54):
faith in something.
It's experiencing it firsthand.
And right.
But, yeah, that put me in touch with an entirenetwork of just healing modalities and
opportunities through nonprofit organizationsthat help me gain access to a wide variety of
modalities that are just off the beaten path.
Right.
But were incredibly effective despite theseverity of my case.

(01:32:17):
Right.
Giving me my life back.
Right.
That's incredible.
Now this is kind of an in-the-weeds question,but, experientially, how was the peyote
different from the psilocybin?
I found the peyote incredibly, like,sensory-enhancing.
I was even while I was on, like, man, thisstuff would be incredible if you could have a

(01:32:39):
small dose of this and then do night ops at theboat like special forces guys because it's
very, like, it's very energizing.
And
while
I was running legs of this run in the middle ofthe night after the ceremony, and I remember,
like, I turned off my head.
Like, something told me to turn off myheadlamp.
It was so black, like, at first I couldn't see,but as my eyes adjusted, it was like it was

(01:33:01):
like, and I just had, like, super night vision.
I could see the skyline and the stars and,like, and I just felt, physically also way
better.
It was so energizing.
Like, I was struggling.
I was sore, and from the point of that peyoteceremony, I just started running faster and
faster to the point Oh, what?
The last the last 4-mile leg, I was at, like, adead sprint and finished over the finish line.

(01:33:25):
I wasn't breathing hard.
I didn't feel fatigued.
I felt like I could go do it again.
It was, like, very invigorating.
That's really interesting.
Was there a purge, like, associated with it?
No.
I didn't have nausea or a purge or anythinglike that.
Sometimes even with mushrooms, you—I've feltthat before.
And I've got something I call it the sit, butit's like sometimes we take, like, mushroom

(01:33:45):
doses and you just kinda wanna, like, melt intowhatever, like, the thing is that you're
Yeah.
It wasn't anything upset.
It was very uplifting.
And interesting.
And just being in that ceremonial space withthese Native Americans and the healing that was
going on between the military community and thenatives that was happening was just like
That's so cool.
Something incredibly special happening thatday, and I felt it.

(01:34:09):
You know, we became these torchbearers of hopefor going forward in our society and helping to
lead others.
And I'm so grateful for podcasts like you thatare sharing these stories, man.
Because I know generations of warriors behindus, they didn't have that.
They just got whatever was on the mainstreamnews, and none of this was being talked about.

(01:34:31):
And we are so lucky that we live in a timewhere the freedom of speech has been preserved,
you know, and despite all the recent battles tokeep it.
So, but, the word is getting out, and there'san incredible evolution occurring right now,
you know.
It's not in the news.
It's not being talked about, but there issomething happening right now in our society.

(01:34:51):
Pulling the power back to the people.
You know?
And that's a very, like, trite, you know, kindof expression.
But if you think about it, that is what'shappening.
It's the information elite was, you know, themedia, and you had to go filter everything
through this one, you know, channel before itcould get disseminated out, and then that was

(01:35:14):
gospel and medicines.
Yeah.
The medical elite.
You know?
This is how you heal your thing.
You know?
Here this is what we know about those savagesback, you know, in the day and how backwards
they were.
Right.
You know?
Dude, we're pulling all that back.
We're taking the narrative, and we are, youknow, finding that everyone has a story to say.

(01:35:35):
I mean, I kinda got into podcasting on thesame, bro.
I was coming on as a guest, and I was like, itwas therapeutic talking through my story and
figuring out, like, why do I still have thisemotional baggage associated with my injury and
my military career?
And why should I feel ashamed on some level?

(01:35:56):
I should be fucking through the, you know, overthe moon proud of everything that I've
accomplished.
You know?
And I don't know the answer to that, buttalking through stuff and connecting with other
people like you has been part of my healingjourney as well.
Absolutely, man.
And people are reconnecting and they're findingthis shared whatever you wanna call it.

(01:36:18):
Divinity, love, and it's causing this massiveawakening, it feels like.
Yeah.
It's a very exciting time to be alive with itall.
So where does your story go from there?
You know, I guess if you wanna read the book,there's a lot more to all of this really in
greater detail.

(01:36:40):
But, you know, I made a massive transformation.
You know, there's a lot of challenges withrebuilding a family after going through all of
that, rebuilding a career, rebuilding myhealth.
Yeah, buddy?
Pretty soon, buddy.
Like, 10 minutes.
Can you just give a bit, like, full over 2hours?

(01:37:00):
I'll be up soon, buddy.
I'm getting recruited to go read some bedtimebooks here for
Sure.
I totally respect that.
Well, you wanna just kinda we can wrap up.
You wanna just tell people maybe where to findyou, how to reach you, what you're doing now,
and, you know, it'll be just a nice little noteto end on.
Yeah.
Yeah.

(01:37:21):
You can find me online.
I have a website.
It's just keegangill.com.
You spell that keegangill.com.
You can find links to all my social media inthere.
I'm on Instagram at keegangillsmurfgill.
You can find me on LinkedIn.
I'm a motivational speaker now.

(01:37:42):
So if you're ever in need of a motivationalspeaker, I've spoken at everything from
nonprofit fundraisers, universities, mastermindretreats, corporate events, high school
commencement ceremonies, and a little bit ofeverything in between from very intimate
settings to massive auditoriums full of people.
So, anybody who needs a speaker, I'd love tocome talk to your audience and help inspire

(01:38:05):
them.
That's incredible.
Yeah.
My book, Phoenix Revival, it's coming outJanuary 21.
It's gonna be on you can get it right onAmazon.
It'll be hardcover, paperback, ebook, and youcan get it on Audible.
But that's going to be dropping soon.
If you get in and preorder a copy, that helpsboost it up on Amazon.

(01:38:27):
And if you do decide to read it, please leaveme a review, to help get this thing visibility.
I've come to learn that the publishing world isa freaking racket with,
you know,
everything from the New York Times bestsellerlist, TED Talks, book awards.
It's all just how much money you want to pay toget.
That's so funny.
It's not meritoriously based in any way.

(01:38:48):
It's just give us money, and we'll put you onthere.
So help me do this the organic way.
Love it.
Spread it word-of-mouth, but, that's a Phoenix
revival.
And are you on Instagram or any socials?
Yeah.
I'm on Instagram at keegangillsmurfgill, andI'm on LinkedIn just under keegangillsmurfgill.

(01:39:10):
So you can find me on both of those platformsas well.
Give him a follow, guys.
Check out his stuff.
Pick up his book.
This is an incredible dude.
This is literally one of the best podcastepisodes I've been on.
I loved it.
Thank you so much.
Thanks for your help.
I'll be sending you a bag of coffee, so I'llget your info after.
But just for everybody else, this, Mind BodyMushroom is brought to you by the Wind and Sea

(01:39:36):
Coffee.
We make adaptogen-infused coffee and coffeeproducts.
We do CBD-infused.
We do mushroom-infused.
We have matcha, all sorts of so it's allfunctional stuff, not psychedelic.
I know we talked about psychedelics.
But, yeah, this is all legal.
You can order it.
You're not gonna pop on a drug test or anythinglike that.
But, anyway, that's the sponsor for the show.

(01:39:56):
And, Keegan, dude, this was an awesomeconversation.
Thank you so much, and better get back to thatbedtime story there soon.
Yeah.
You're being beckoned.
Yeah.
Thanks again for having me, Jordan.
Great to meet you.
Yeah, man.
You as well.
Alright.
Peace, man.

All Episodes

Ep. 18 | From the Cockpit to the Cuckoo's Nest | F-18 Pilot Kegan Gill

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Crime Junkie

24/7 News: The Latest

Stuff You Should Know

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep. 18 | From the Cockpit to the Cuckoo's Nest | F-18 Pilot Kegan Gill