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

Episode Date: July 30, 2026

Kegan "Smurf" Gill is a former U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot and the author of Phoenix Revival. In 2014, he survived the fastest ejection in naval aviation history, an event that left him facing devastating physical injuries and the invisible wounds of trauma. After battling PTSD, addiction, and a long road to recovery, Gill returned to the cockpit before ultimately dedicating himself to advocating for veteran mental health and alternative approaches to healing. Through his speaking, writing, and advocacy work, he shares a powerful message of resilience, purpose, and the possibility of rebuilding a life after profound adversity. Privacy isn't Paranoia, it's Protection. Download Glacier - https://srs.site/glacierapp Website - https://theglacierapp.com Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Go to https://rorra.com/SRS for an exclusive discount on the Rorra Countertop System and tap into clean water today. Search onX Offroad in the App Store or Google Play to access an off-road navigation app with trail maps, land boundaries, camping info, and offline capability. https://www.onxmaps.com/offroad/app Go to https://moinkbox.com/SRS to get free chicken wings in every box for a year as long as you’re a paying customer. Try Amazon Music Unlimited for music, podcasts, and audiobooks all in one app—learn more at https://music.amazon.com. Don’t sleep on [@ultrapouches]. New customers get 15% Off with code SRS at https://takeultra.com! #UltraPouches #ad Kegan Gill Links: Website - https://www.KeganGill.com Phoenix Revival - https://a.co/d/03IHVaV7 IG - https://www.instagram.com/kegansmurfgill LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kegan-gill-6986a4259 YouTube - https://youtube.com/@kegangill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Kagan, welcome to the show, man. Thanks for having me on Sean. It's an honor. Likewise, likewise. Dude, holy shit. Dude, we got so much good through the ringer. So much good stuff to talk about. Wow.

Wow. Like, wow. But let me start you up with an introduction. All right. Kagan Smirth Gill. You served as a U.S. Navy F-18E Super Hornet pilot. flying high-performance combat aircraft in one of the most demanding professions in the military. In 2014, during a dog-fighting training exercise, you survived the fastest ejection in naval aviation history,

ejecting from your aircraft at nearly 700 miles an hour. The crash left you with catastrophic injuries, multiple surgeries, a traumatic brain injury, in a long battle with PTSD, addiction, and the unseen wounds of war. Against overwhelming odds, you fought your way back, returning to the cockpit, and later becoming an advocate for veteran mental health. In Phoenix Revival, you recount your journey of survival, recovery, and finding purpose after unimaginable adversity. Once again, welcome to the show, man. Thank you so much.

Yeah, we found, we saw a podcast you were on and some reals, and we were like, holy shit, dude, we've got to get this. We got to get this dude in here. So thank you for coming. Dude, it's really exciting to be here and get to share this story to such a massive audience, man. Because as you know, like you're sharing some incredible information with the world right now and waking people up. And it's much needed. I'm trying. I'm trying.

Yeah, sounds like psychedelics is a huge part of your recovery journey. It was. It was a transformational experience. a spiritual awakening. Yeah. And just a connection to something greater than myself and a deep love that I found within. And dude, it's changed everything in my life for the better. Right.

Oh, man. Yeah, it's, uh, I did, I began a little over four years ago and, uh, regardless of how much booze is in the studio here. I haven't had a drop to drinks since, for you since right after that. Yeah. It was pretty effort. Do you poison yourself? Don't need to numb your.

numb yourself or poison yourself from, you know, from that hole we all had before it. Yeah. I keep it all up here as a reminder that this shit doesn't have control over me anymore. It's pretty fucking cool. But I get a lot of shit for having it too. It looks really cool. That's what I think. That's what I think. But, all right, so a couple things to knock out real quick before we get into your life story. So I have a Patreon account. And they've been with us since the beginning. And they're the reason. that we both get to sit down here today. So this is from Christian Francis.

What main components of TBI treatment do you feel need to be changed? What parts of living with the TBI and recovery from injury are currently being impeded by the medical system? And how can treatment of those would TBI be changed to better understanding the patient? That's a great question. There's almost a disregard for the TBI. And through my experience, it was almost unacknowledged that I could even possibly have a TBI or what that was. So just acknowledging that it exists and how delicate the brain actually is is really critical. And then I think there's a tendency in the mainstream medical system to just hit the easy button, which is the PTSD button right now, which, you know, that gives you a diagnosis and then it opens this whole Pandora's box of all the different medications.

they can throw at you to try to deal with that. But come to find out it's a much broader issue when you do have TBI. And do you know Dr. Chris Free ever heard of him in Operator Syndrome? Dude, I've heard about this guy from like every single one of my fucking friends. And I have never met the guy. Yeah. I've heard amazing things about him. And he really nailed that.

He wrote a book, right? Operator syndrome. Yeah. Yeah, he really nails it right on the head with what he did. He basically went out. He was the PTSD expert at the VA. They kicked him out, right? I don't think he left, you know, I think he just was frustrated.

I don't know exactly, but he ended up. Probably misspoke on that. I'm not certain. He might have or might have left just because he was still frustrated. At least some staunch disagreements. Oh, I'm sure. Happening between them and the VA. Yeah, they want to put everything in that PTSD box because that means pharmaceuticals.

They can throw all the money makers at it that just keep you sick and unhealthy. and I mean, that's the way that whole conventional system is designed is to... Dude, why do you think it's like that? Greed. Greed. Do they get paid? I never understood. You can't go to another pharmacy and get any of the prescriptions. I mean, I've been to the VA and over probably close to 10 years now.

Yeah, the way I understand it is basically I talked to an admiral level flight surgeon who's been at those meetings at the top of the VA. And he said, no matter how good the people are at the VA, because there's a lot of really good humans there that want to do good and want to serve the veterans. But he said, no matter how good the people are in the VA, at the end of the day, the pharmaceutical industry gets to dictate the policies that are applied. And all of their policies are designed to put the veterans on medications and keep them there until they either in their own lives or just die miserably and feeding that machine the whole time. And it just comes down to greed. It's just the business model of the medical system is built around kind of keeping you stuck, maybe alleviating some of the symptoms, but not actually curing the underlying issue. Only the best for our veterans, right?

Man. Only the best for our veterans. It's sad. It's the veterans. It's everybody. I mean, it's the whole conventional medical system is feeding off the people that are sick. And you go to help, get help. You trust the people with the white lab coats with the doctorate degrees that are supposed

to know better. And I don't think most of them are malicious. I think they're just indoctrinated into a system that is profit-driven and controlled by the pharmaceutical industry, from their medical school curriculums to their medical journals that they're reading are all influenced by the pharmaceutical industry. And the whole system is just corrupted by that greed. Man, well, I know we're going to dive into that all later. Oh, yeah. Which will be an enraging segment. But, um, everybody gets a gap too. Yeah. So my buddy heard I was coming on.

He's like, dude, you got to get me some of those gummy bears. I'm like, man, I will definitely share some gummy bears with you. Dude, we'll load you up. Sweet. We'll load you up. They're made in Michigan. You're from Michigan, right? Yeah, yeah.

They're made in Michigan. Oh, cool. And they're legal in all 50 states. Sweet. No funny business. My kids are going to try to get them from me, too. All right on. Like I said, we'll load you up.

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

Well, one, I got to give you this first. This is a copy of my book. I've signed that one for you. Thank you. I hope you enjoy it. It's a wild story, and I'm sure we'll get into a lot of it today. We will. And then my friend, Bryce Hansen, who helped me design that cover, actually heard I was coming on this show.

And he's like, I got a gift you got to give them. Dude. Tell me, is this a painting? He digitally did that, and then the publishing company helped kind of do the background on it. But he took a digital photo of me and my gear, and then he's able to do some cool magic to make it look freaking rad. Dude, you need to get this framed. That's fucking cool. He sent me the, it was originally a painting that he did. Really? Yeah, Bryce was a green beret, and now he does all sorts of really kick-ass art.

But he made you these. Holy shit, that's awesome. Heck yeah. Yeah, I thought those would look really good in here. That is sick, dude. Thank you. And then one more small thing. I don't know if you remember Bill Filter and the guys at the Wisdom Dojo,

or it used to be the Amp Dojo. The meditation guys. Yeah. Yeah, they wanted me to give you this. It's a Wisdom Dojo shirt and a Wisdom Dojo challenge coin. Dude, thank you. I talked to Bill Filter. Yeah.

Who said that he did some training with you. Who was my guy. And your dad. Yeah. He did. He said when he was working with you, you were still doing all this on your own. Yeah. No, it's pretty incredible what this has grown into.

Yeah, it all kind of changed after that I began experience, man. Heck yeah. So literally like right after. But, well, that's cool. Tell Bill I said, what's up? I will. What's up, Bill? But let's get into your story. All right.

Where did you grow up? I was born in Oklahoma, although I don't remember a whole lot from it. My mom was doing her medical residency there through the National Health Service. She'd earned a scholarship to pay for her med school. And then when she finished her residency there, we moved to Colorado to a little town called Alamosa down in the San Luis Valley. Some of my earliest memories are skiing at Wolf Creek, being in powder that was over my head, just always had a love for the outdoors.

My dad was a big outdoorsman. He would take me out on his backpack, and he'd be out backcountry skiing with me out just in some of the most beautiful blue sky days that you can imagine. That's awesome. And then when I was about seven, we moved to Northern Michigan,

and I grew up in a town called Traverse City. Beautiful little town right on Lake Michigan up there. And I was just a kid that spent most of my time outside, barefoot, climbing trees, grabbing salmon out of the stream, hunting, just doing stuff little kids are supposed to be doing. Nice. You don't hear that much anymore. Yeah, man, we're getting too far away from where we're supposed to be. I know.

I know who are. And I was the kid who didn't really belong in a classroom, you know, sitting under a fluorescent lighting filling out scantron bubbles was pretty soul draining and I was pretty disheartened by it. and became a pretty angry young kid that's getting a lot of fights i was i was always a small kid so i'd get picked on and my dad was a wrestler and was into judo and so he started teaching me how to fight and defend myself and what age um i was probably like eight seven or eight years old he started teaching me to fight and um the next time the bullies came at me man i i had something different for him than cowering down and just letting them do what they wanted and what was the first

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

As an aggressor, you use this to defend what's right and stand up for yourself. And he would wrestle around with me and he'd push me around and he would never let me win. And that just always kind of kept me pushing and I was really grateful for that. He would never let you win? Never, man. Right on, dude. He didn't take it easy on me, which I didn't always appreciate. Yeah, he's a good man.

He actually auditioned for one of the earliest survivor shows that they were going to do back when he thought it was actually about being a survivor. No shit. For fun, he's the kind of guy that, like, he'll carve his own bows, and then he'll go out into the cold in the winter, make a snow cave, sleep out in the woods, and then deer hunt from his snow cave in the morning. No way. Yeah, he's like... What? He's from a different time. I've never even heard of that.

He doesn't really belong in this society. And I mean, that's a compliment to him. What did he do? He, originally he was a health inspector when we were in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And then when we moved to Alamosa, it was so rural, he couldn't really get a job. So he kind of became dad mom and taken care of us.

Later, when we moved back to Traverse City, which was where both my parents were from, he became a respiratory therapist. He was a teacher for a teacher for a, a while. He taught biology and then became a respiratory therapist. Right on. Are you a big hunter? Yeah. Yeah, man. Deer hunting up there is a big part of how we feed ourselves. We got a little bit of farmland up there. We got chickens. My wife's got bees, so we do our own honey. Got some fruit trees and garden, a greenhouse. Are you a

prepper? You know, not so much, man. I'm not so much prepping. We're just kind of like building our own thing on the outskirts of society is what's happening right now is just kind of eating itself alive. But definitely making ourselves so we can be self-sufficient. But not so much like we're not digging a bunker. Maybe we should, but. It can't hurt. Yeah, probably not, man. When you see all the billionaires doing it.

I mean, yeah, pretty wild. How many of them are building fucking bunkers right now? Yeah, that's a scary. They're so scared of. I don't know. Probably us. I bet they are. But, yeah, well, I mean, self-sufficiency is pretty, I mean, that's what prepping's all about, right?

Yeah. So I guess, yeah, I'm a prepper. That's the case. Right on. Case you haven't noticed, I take preparedness seriously. And water is one of the first things I look at, not just emergency water, but the water my family is drinking every single day. A federal study found forever chemicals in nearly half the tap water in America.

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As you guys know, once upon a time, I was a Navy SEAL. And then I contracted for CIA. We were hunting ISIS, Taliban, terrorist organizations. China was there. Russia was there. The Iranians were there. And everybody's kind of collecting on each other. One thing I learned is how important encryption in protecting your data is.

That experience has just always made me extremely paranoid about what's being sucked out of my phone. What information are people getting? I wanted something that could protect everybody. And so we turned it into an application. We call it the Glacier App. We have Secure DNS. Now, what's Secure DNS? Well, very simply put, secure DNS,

keeps your phone from being exploited while you're browsing the internet. Just a couple of buttons, your phone's protected. You got yourself a burner number or more. You hit Connect, done. You're protected. This is like the real James Bond shit, MI6 CIA level stuff. made in the U.S.

The Glacier app.com or just go on the app store and look up the Glacier app. Take your privacy back. Download Glacier today. Why were you picked on so much? I was just kind of a small, nerdy kid. I think it was just mainly just being kind of small

and scrawny and easy to push around until... How long were you bullied before you stood up for yourself? Not really that long. I was picked on for about one year at school and then figured out a different way to handle bullies. How'd you handle it? Usually punching them in the dick. Nice.

Pretty good. That'll work. Didn't matter how much bigger they were. You punched somebody in the dick and evens the playing field pretty quickly. But yeah, it was just kind of like an angry kid. Didn't want to be stuck in school. Moved around to a variety of different schools growing up from the public school. My parents put me in a charter school.

That didn't really work out. move me to like a farm school where all day, every day we were like moving chicken coops out in the field. We were feeding the animals. We did some academics, but it was all outside or in a greenhouse. We built a yurt. We would like submerse ourselves in a culture and then we would like eat their food. We would build their buildings. We would, it was way better than being stuck in a classroom. That's awesome. And I really enjoyed that. My dad got a job at a private school as the science teacher. And so we got free tuition. And so I went to this snooty private school for a year and got expelled from that because I didn't fit in there at all. And I was getting

in fights again and doing dumb shit. Found myself back at public school kind of not liking it, getting in trouble, hanging out with the wrong people. And then when I was 16, actually, around a campfire with some buddies, we put some of these little crunchy mushrooms in our mouth and I had this experience that night that connected me to something. And I was dealing with depression and anger that was pretty heavy. Why? Why were you so angry and so depressed? Other than the bullying, it sounds like a pretty damn good childhood. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of it was. And actually, a lot of this I discovered through Iboga later through going back into repressed childhood memories. But for most of my life, I didn't understand where that anger really had come from.

But what I discovered through Iboga, which I don't know if you want to get into this later, but I can definitely get into it now with what I experienced in one of those journeys was I was back in my mother's womb. And I could see through her stomach. I could see the veins of her skin. I could see this pink color. And I remember being in there and just feeling her anxiety because she's a mother pretty far along in her pregnancy.

and she's running off diet coke, working ridiculous hours, stressed out, meanwhile trying to be a mother. And actually before I was born, my mom had a stillborn baby, my older sister, Kate. And it kind of just like broke her soul to hold her own little baby that was dead on arrival. And she was sort of not emotionally available to connect with me. And I remember when I was born being held, but very quickly she was. back to work, back to the residency, not seeing my mom. My dad was orphaned as a kid, and he was also emotionally unavailable, largely.

I mean, they both cared a lot, but I think that they were really broken at their hearts from what they had been through. And so, you know, there's all these really wild childhood trauma stories. You know, I wasn't sexually abused. I wasn't beaten. Nothing like that, but I don't know if you ever heard of Gaber Matae. He's sort of like a trauma. Canadian doctor, right?

I'm not sure what his... I know who he is. He's big in the psychedelic community. He may be... His big thing is trauma. He's like a trauma expert. And one thing he talks about is there's the trauma on children, which is like the abuse, the physical abuse, the violence, the sexual abuse.

But there's also an abuse of when you don't fulfill the needs of the child. And the need that I didn't get as that little boy in remembering it and vividly experiencing it, again, through Iboga was... I just wasn't, I wasn't fully being loved as a child. And so I became, I remember I was in my crib crying and screaming for my parents to come get me as an infant and nobody came and just kind of feeling that disconnect. And it's not that my parents didn't care. They were great parents.

They really did care. But there was emotional and physical detachment that I experienced as a really young kid that actually created an incredible amount of self-reliance, but also an anger. that came from that. Like, I wasn't good enough to be loved. You remember this? Vividly. Yeah, I vividly remembered it through Iboga. I worked with a trained psychotherapist, and he brought me back into all these repressed childhood memories. And through that, I mean, I felt like the pain of my mom was experiencing of being divided and pulled away from her kid,

the pain from her miscarriage. And just the, you know, there's this big push back then, which was women in the workforce and you can go and be a professional and my mom absolutely did that she she broke through a lot of barriers to get to go and be a physician as a woman um but it took a toll on her and it took a toll on her children because you know that's that was the trade off you know she got to become a professional and do what she wanted but at the same time it was really hard on her to be separated from her children and it was really hard on the kids um how many siblings do you have I have a younger sister. She's three years younger than me.

Are you guys tied? She lives out in Oregon. She works for the park service out there. She's like Ranger Rick, basically. She wears a smoky bear hat and patrols the forest and does some good stuff out there. But yeah, we get together on occasion. She usually comes back in the summers and we all go camping and hang out. She's got an awesome little girl.

Right on. Overall, I had a great childhood, honestly. But I definitely had this. thing inside me that was just burning, this like feeling of angst that I wasn't enough. And that drove me and it made me incredibly resilient, which came in handy later in life. I just, and I'm honestly grateful for that. Like, it was like it was preparing me for something that was to come. But something came. Yeah. Big time. Big time. How did the military pop up on your radar?

So when I graduated high school, I wasn't totally certain what I wanted to do. do, but I got to go on a little discovery flight. We have a, there was a little community college that had a flight program where I grew up in Traverse City called Northwestern Michigan College. And when I was a kid, my parents enrolled me in a flight program that they did. And you got to do like a ground school session

and then you got to go up in a little Cessna. And I remembered flying this little Cessna 152 that's basically a flying lawnmower and just absolutely loving it, man. It felt like a rocket ship. And that kind of stuck with me. And so when I graduated, I decided, to go to the community college and start doing flight lessons. I enrolled in the program,

started flying. And by the time I was a junior in college, I was a certified flight instructor building hours. I finished my degree. I got my bachelor's degree while I was working at the college. And then I actually got hired by one of my students who, a fascinating dude named Larry Poneman, he was a forensic accountant in the Navy back in the Vietnam era. He's like one of these ultra-intelligent dudes with a photographic memory. And after the special forces or whoever would capture an underground bunker of the Viet Cong, they would bring him in and he could go through their accounting records. He can learn a new language in like a few days.

And then he would read through their accounting records and he could memorize it all. And then he'd go back and debrief the CIA or whoever of like, here's where they're getting their money, here's where they're getting this. and he was able to basically point them where they need to go to shut these guys down. And when he got out, he started a think tank and a privacy research and consulting firm. But he came across me because he wanted to learn how to fly himself to all his business meetings. And so I started flying with him. And he's like, hey, man, you want to come work for my company?

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

What kind of plane were you flying? I was flying a Mooney Acclaim, which is sort of like a little general aviation Ferrari. Okay. Nice like G-1000 avionics, integrated all. autopilot, Bose headsets, super nice leather seats. Nice. It was really cool job at such a young age. Damn, dude.

That is pretty cool. But I found myself getting bored of how easy it was. And I recognized that I wanted more in my life than that. And so I had a buddy named Mark, who was a flight instructor at the college with me. And he had been in the military already, but he was putting together a package to go to officer candidate school for a pilot position. And I was like, wait, don't you have to go to the name? Naval Academy. Doesn't your dad have to be an admiral? Like community college kids don't get to just go into the Navy and fly stuff. And he's like, actually you can, man. As long as you have a bachelor's degree. And so I kind of looked into the service. And originally I thought I was going to go into the Coast Guard. I had read this book called The Last Run. And it's all about the rescue missions. Those guys are doing up in Alaska. And it was just fucking wild shit that these guys were doing. And so I looked into the Coast Guard, but it was like a six month wait to get into that board.

And so while I was waiting, I put together a package and submitted it to the Navy and got picked up immediately. And so I spent that last summer going to a CrossFit gym, getting in really good shape, had a great summer with my family. And then that fall went off to the Navy and showed up overprepared. How old were you? I was in my early 20s. It was 2009. So I think I was like 23 or so. Right on.

Yeah. 24. Did you know what you wanted to fly? Did you care? You know, originally I thought I was going to fly helicopters after reading that last run book, but I always growing up, the Blue Angels would come up to Traverse City and they'd fly every so often. And I remember seeing those jets and be like, man, that's so cool.

But I also had this disconnect. I was like, there's no way I could ever do that. For whatever reason, I just never, I always had this imposter syndrome. Like, there's no way. I'm not that cool. But as I started going through the training, like, really felt at home in that environment. getting yelled at and beaten and exhausted. And I was just like, fuck yeah.

You like it. Bring it on. Yeah. From college to OCS, you went straight to OCS? Or is it OCS? Yeah, officer can at school. So yeah, it's basically a three-month program. And you'd come out of it a butter bar.

So, you know, the rank that shows everybody that you know absolutely fucking nothing. Which I didn't. I didn't know shit about the military. But then started flight training after that. Went down to Pensacola, Florida. and started doing all the ground school, did some water survival training, and actually had our,

we normally got out into the ocean to do our ocean survival training when we're down in Pensacola, but there was the horizon oil spill right at that time. So we couldn't go out on the ocean and do our survival training. We still did a bunch of stuff in the pool, but there was probably some stuff

that we did in that ocean evolution that would have been helpful later in my career. Yeah, I was just thinking that. I mean, damn, dude, you didn't do it. that? No, I mean, there was a fair amount in the pool, but I don't think anything could have substituted for being out in the ocean. Yeah. But did well through API, went to what's primary flight training, which was in Corpus Christi, Texas, and flew a pretty sporty little turbine prop aircraft

called the T-34 Charlie Turbo Mentor. They've since switched over to the T6 Texan, which is even more badass. Nice. But the prior flight experience definitely helped through that primary flight training, Like I already knew how to fly an airplane, I already knew how to talk on the radio. But the challenge was learning to do it the Navy way. You know, it's, in some ways, it was probably more challenging because I had to forget my old ways. And there's just a ton of memorization and all that,

but did well enough through that training that I got to select the tail hook pipeline coming out of that. And if you're in the top 50% of your class, you can select tail hook. And then the Navy says yes or no, depending on whatever they need you for anyways. What is a tail hook? It's any carrier-based aircraft.

Okay. So at the time, it would have been the prowlers, the F-18 Hornets, the F-18 Super Hornets, and then the E2C2. So the Hawkeye with the big dish on top prop plane, and then the C-2, which is the onboard delivery aircraft. So all of those were kind of on the table at that point. The other option out of primary flight trainees, you can go fly the P3s at that time, which are now all just P8s, which is basically a 737. They also had helicopter pipeline, and a few people would go to the E9, which is like a surveillance

communications aircraft. But I was kind of like, man, I'm going to take my shot and see if I can go fly fighter jets, which was the tail hook pipeline. And then I headed down to Kingsville, Texas, and started flying the T-45 Charlie Gosshawk, which is like a small single-engine jet, but super high performance, fully aerobatic, and did intermediate, intermediate flight training and did really well at that. And so at the end of that intermediate training, you go to a board and you have a bunch of the different instructors come in. You do a bunch of interviews. And one, you have to have good grades and you have to be good in

the aircraft. But more importantly, they're interviewing you to see if you have the personality and you're going to fit in like a fighter squadron. And I saw guys who were better pilots and smarter, but they would go into those interviews and they just weren't like a team player or whatever. And so... What are they looking for at a fighter pilot? Well, one, I think they want people who know that this is going to be your life,

that it's going to be all consuming. And every moment, every waking moment, you're basically going to be committed to that. They want somebody who can function in a team environment. And, yeah, just kind of have that attitude of just being a good human, being too, I think. Someone who's not an egomaniac can be humble and they do a really good job with it, really.

What are some of the questions they were asking you? Do you remember? I mean, one of the big ones is like, why do you want to fly F-18s? What'd you say? I mean, I think I just said something like, you know, I think it's an incredible opportunity. I want to be at the tip of the spear. I want to be doing the most difficult thing that the Navy has to offer for a pilot. And that's where I see myself. I want the challenge.

I want the hardships. And I want to be the best pilot I possibly can be. How do you, I'm just curious, how do you display that you're a team player flying a jet? I mean, it's really personality based. And I think the instructors get a good feel for that as you go through flight training. Are you the guy who's helping other guys? in your class, like learn? Are you the guy that's really selfish

and hoarding the information and trying to do it all on your own? There are definitely people who were, you know, would go into those interviews and they go, well, why do you want to be a fighter pilot? And they say, well, I'm better than everybody in my class. This guy does this, this guy sucks at this. And like, when someone comes in like that, they're like, all right, you're not going into the fighter community.

And there was a dude that did that when I was there. Oh, shit. And I think he was pretty heartbroken, because he was an excellent pilot, super smart, but they want somebody who can play well with others. Makes sense. Why is that so important? Because you operate as a team. You know, you're flying with other aircraft, sections, divisions, large force exercises,

and it's a team sport. You know, you're flying your jet, but you're doing all these advanced tactics with a very large group of other people. And you've got to be able to function in a sort of like a sports team atmosphere. that's in the squadron in a fighter squadron where you're high pressure, high stress, and you've got to work together with everybody to survive in that environment in your day-to-day ground jobs

and in the aircraft for what you're doing. Because it is like a very complex game of football or something once you're up there. The flying is just like, that's just like learning to run and jump and be fast if you're going to, but then the next jump is like going into the NFL and learning the sport and learning the tactics operating at that high speed

and working as a team as a co-co-eastern, piece of unit when chaos breaks out, you know. Gotcha. So it's definitely a team sport. Do you remember your first time in a jet? Yeah, I mean, I remember vividly showing up once I had made it through the intermediate and advanced training and earning my wings at Kingsville. I selected the F-18.

And I remember showing up in Virginia Beach at VFA 106 at Oceana and walking into the hangar and seeing all of those frickin'niquin' hornets and super hornets. And it was just like, holy shit, man. I can't believe I get to go do this. And the first flight was just like, unreal, like climbing into that thing and starting it up. And you do a lot in a simulator, so you kind of know the basics, but it's nowhere near the real thing.

As once you get in, you can feel the rumble of this fucking tank around you. And there's so much larger than they look when you just see them flying up in the sky. There are these massive contraptions. And I remember, like, initially starting to taxi this thing and you're pushing up the throttles just a little bit. You got like 44,000 pounds of thrust behind you. And you can feel it just, it feels like a tank that you're taxying in,

especially after flying all those smaller aircraft. But I remember. Single seat? I eventually did fly the single seat, but your first few flights in the Super Hornet are in a two seat. Okay. The instructor's got a stick in the back. But you only do like maybe three or four flights in that aircraft before you're flying it on your own.

Damn. which is wild. But the simulator, the simulator's syllabus is really robust. So by the time you get in the jet, you've already done every single emergency procedure under the sun and you get pretty comfortable with it. But the coolest part was taxing onto the runway for the very first time, getting cleared for takeoff, and then just putting that thing in full afterburner with both engines, and you just feel it, just shove you back in the seat. And it's like, everything just happens so fast. You're immediately off the ground, you immediately get the gear up. You're immediately thousands of feet up in the air. And just everything comes so quickly. But you've been training little by little to make your mind

process things faster and faster. But dude, it was just the coolest sensation, which was very quickly deterred because I realized that my mission card hadn't loaded properly. And I didn't have any of my waypoints for where I was going. So as I take off, rotate, put the gear up and I'm just like, whoa. The instructor in the back's like, it's called sign Squeezer, who actually later ended up being in my squadron. He's like, hey man, where are we going? Which is not the question you want to hear the instructor say on your first flight. And I looked down on the display and realize like none of my working area, none of my

waypoints were in there. He's like, all right, just take this heading. I got you. And he's in the back punching in GPS coordinates and was able to salvage the rest of that flight. So I didn't fail my first flight. But it was like a quick kicking the nuts. Like, dude, you got some work to do. You're in the big boy, too.

teams here. Damn, that's fucking cool, dude. Yeah, yeah, it was, it was unreal. What do we go from here? You know, from here, I spent the next year training in the F-18 reg, which was the most challenging thing I've ever done in my life as far as professional career development, man, it's very little tolerance for mistake. The standards are set extremely high.

it was really, really freaking hard, man. You're just drinking from a fire hose, trying to learn the tactics as quickly as you can, and you're moving through these phases from just the transition stays where you're learning how to fly the aircraft itself, navigate it, take it from point A to point B, operate with emergency procedures,

and then very quickly you're off on a strike detachment, learning how to do close air support, bombing missions, and then very quickly you're into the air-to-air phase, learning how to dogfight the aircraft, learning air-to-air combat, which is probably the most complex thing we do. How bad it is.

With all of that. And then to kind of wrap up everything, after you've gone through all of this over the course of the year, you go and you have to land this thing on the aircraft carrier day and night, which is the highest point of failure for people once they make it to that phase. No kidding. I actually disqualified at the boat my first attempt at night.

Landing a fighter jet on the back of a moving aircraft carrier in shitty weather is. the hardest thing I've ever done as far as like a skill. And I end up DQ and I just, I was coming in. Everything looked great. And then within the last few seconds, the aircraft, I think I was just a little bit nervous to the point where I would just add just a nudge too much power.

And this is just like a millimeter of movement too much in the wrong direction. And I would miss the wires and do what's called a bolter where I'd bounce off the deck. My hook would miss the wires. And then I was back up in the pattern, had him fly back around. And I did that a few times around.

and before I knew it, I was at Bingo Fuel, which meant I had to divert back to Oceana, kind of the walk of shame. But luckily got another chance after that. They kind of, they do an assessment and see how you've been doing throughout the syllabus and if you got the attitude to go back and try again and was very fortunate to get that opportunity

and pass my second attempt at the boat. But the daytime carrier stuff I always enjoyed and had fun with that, but the nighttime stuff is just super, It's scary. You can go from being in a really good position where everything looks nice and suitcase to within a few seconds, you're, you can be eating it on the back of the ship and end your life really quickly. And of course, they make you watch all those videos right before you go and do it. I don't know if these guys eating it.

But graduated through VFA 106 and selected VFA 143, the Pukin Dogs, out of Virginia Beach and headed my first real flee squadron. So kind of feel up. Oh man, it was awesome. It was like what I'd been working for for so long. You know, you show up at the training reg for the F-18 at Oceana, and you got your wings on your chest already, and you're like, all right, I kind of know what I'm doing. And you very quickly realized that you don't know shit,

that you're still a baby. And then you go through all that training. It's super intense. Like a lot of people don't make it through that. And then you get to your fleet squadron. You're like, all right, I got to kind of have a little bit of an idea what I'm doing now. And you show up day one, and you're like, nope, I'm still a baby. and I don't know anything.

So I took the small mouth, big ears approach, just shut the fuck up and listened and learned as much as I could, busted my ass, studied really hard. And over the course of the next eight months or so, I was just learning to survive in that environment. But started to fit in, started to people notice that I was a hardworking dude and I was there and part of the team and was doing pretty well

for my experience level. I was doing really well. What do your parents think of this? You know, my parents were actually pretty anti-military. Really? They're kind of like peaceful hippie kind of folks. And when I first told my mom I was going to go into the military and fly, she was pretty heartbroken.

She really came around. No one was incredibly supportive. But I could tell it it kind of hurt her because she was worried like what's going to happen to my son. Is he going to get hurt? But they became incredibly supportive. They were at my winging ceremony and always. checking in.

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

My buddy Fisty was at the squadron duty desk, which all the pilots would rotate through, answering the radios, coordinating the flight schedule, kind of doing all the ground bullshit. And as a joke, Fistie put up on the whiteboard behind him all the working airspace that we were going to use that day off the coast of Virginia Beach and the Whiskey 72,

this massive warning area that's off the coast there. And he used the shark tracker app on his phone to put all these GPS positions of tagged sharks that researchers had tagged. And it just so happened on the day he was kind of laughing. He's like, hey, man, today would be a terrible day to eject. The water temperature is at 37 degrees Fahrenheit at the nearby buoy. We had a really cold winter, and the Chesapeake Bay was just washing down really frigid water to where we were training.

The air temperature was below freezing with some wind. And he's like, and there's a 16 foot 3,500 pound great white shark directly underneath your airspace. Holy shit. And you know, you know how it is in the military. We're always joking about the dark shit. I go to my brief. Everything's going good and smooth. And as I'm kind of walking out to go get my gear on and go fly,

one of the more senior pilots in the squadron pulls me aside. And he's like, man, you just haven't done anything dumb enough yet to earn a call sign. And on another whiteboard that was in the ready room, they had all the newer guys in the squadron. At this point, there was like five or six newer guys under me in the squadron. And they all had like a laundry list of call signs. But I had just played the Quiet Man card so well that, like, they didn't have any ammunition against me.

And when you got to my name on that board, there was just like a couple throwaway options on there, just no good call signs. So as I get my gear on and go out and take off on this flight, we went out and did some air-to-air refueling just to get proficiency in that. And then with extra fuel and airspace, my flight lead and I broke off to our own section of airspace and started doing basically my favorite thing to do in the jet. and probably the epitome of what people think when they think fighter pilot, which is dog fighting.

We call BFM basic fighter maneuvering. Just bend in the jet, high Gs, trying to shoot down another aircraft within the visual range. And while we're not actually hosing off live ammunition at each other, live missiles, everything's pretty close to the real thing as far as all the,

all the Gs are very real. And it's an incredibly dynamic environment that I absolutely love. It's, you're multitasking to the extreme. You're operating, high-performance aircraft, you're talking on multiple radios, you're operating weapons systems, defensive systems, and you're under, you know, seven and a half Gs oftentimes, so your body weighs like 1,600 pounds, so it's a high intensity interval training along with all that,

and then having your brain function at its highest capability while doing all that. It was fucking awesome, but really challenging. We've done several rounds of fighting, which, you know, you're fighting for a couple minutes, You get to where the other guys had an advantageous position, which I was always losing because I was fighting the most senior guy in my squadron. And he was just whooping my ass. But that's how we learn, you know, go in and get your ass kicked until you figure it out. And we got to the last fight of the day. We hit Joker fuel, which meant we had just enough fuel left for one quick set of fighting as we kind of exited the airspace.

So we ended up setting up a bit lower and faster than we typically did. And flight lead called Speed and Angels left, Speeding Angels right, called Fire. bites on and we went from this a beam position, pitched our jets in in this kind of turning dive. And as our aircraft crossed paths, I was already about 30 degrees nose low and partially inverted. So I opted to continue to roll my aircraft fully inverted and pull down towards the ocean. My flight lead went up and I went down. And typically this maneuver would take about 5,000 feet of airspace vertically. And so that was kind of, we have a saying, live by the gouge, die by the gouge,

which is learning the little shortcuts of things to think about when you have to think about stuff so quickly. But I hadn't, in the heat of it all, I didn't quite realize how fast I had gotten. And I was well above the top gun recommended airspeed to maneuver nose low. But this all happens in a split second. I maneuver the aircraft in this dive,

immediate pull the stick in my lap, and I'm in about seven and a half Gs, diving down at the ocean. And I started this maneuver up at 10,500 feet. So in my quick math, I had 5,000 feet I could eat up, and I would still have 500 feet above our 5,000 foot hard deck that we put there for training. But as I'm pulling this thing nose low, it's accelerating, and it hits the transonic region, which is basically right before you break the speed of sound. And the flight before me had put in a code into the weapon system on the aircraft that said that there were bombs on the wings that weren't actually there. And so as I'm pulling this thing as hard as I could, all of a sudden, I hit what's called the G bucket,

which is designed to prevent the aircraft from overstressing itself as you hit that transonic region where the drag is extremely forceful on the aircraft. And prevent a minor overstress that it perceived, it basically overrode my control input. And I didn't realize all this in the few seconds that it took. All I knew is I was pointed straight at the ocean with the stick in my lap, and then all of a sudden the jet just stopped turning. I could feel the G's ease up. And very quickly, I heard the radar altimeter blaring.

Altitude, altitude, and the ocean is just rushing up at me. I've got the stick in my lap and it's not doing what I'm telling it, which we call how to control flight. And anytime you're below 6,000 feet and the aircraft's not respying, how you expect the instruction is to pull the ejection handle and eject. I heard altitude, altitude, pull up, pull up. The ocean was rushing up at me. very quickly. I could see the white caps down below. I was so close. And I just knew I wasn't

getting out of that thing. And you could see the in the HUD and in the displays it's saying, pull up and you can see an arrow. I'm just thinking, I already am pulling up. I can't pull up. I threw the throttles into idle. I put out the speed break in this desperate attempt to slow down, but it was just too little too late. And two seconds before I impacted the ocean going 0.95 indicated mock, so 95% the speed of sound at almost sea level. about 695 miles per hour, I yank that ejection handle. And a normal ejection is incredibly violent. I mean, you get, as that rocket motor ignites, you get a 50G instantaneous boost that compresses

your spine, and then that eases to a 12 to 14G sustained boost out of the aircraft. From the time you pull the ejection handle to the time you exit the aircraft, takes about 0.4 seconds. Are you serious? Yep. It's very quick. Four seconds. Yeah, but for that to ignite and shoot you out. It's very quick. The canopy blows away and you're out. When I initiated the ejection, I was two seconds from impact. So by the time I had exited the aircraft, I had about a second and a half before I was going to impact the ocean. The jet flew right in the ocean and just vaporized into nothing. What jacked me up so bad was... Did you see that happen? No. No, I don't remember briefly from the time I pulled the ejection handle till later when I was in the ocean. ocean. I think I got knocked unconscious. I was wondering just from the force of it all.

Yeah. But what happened to my body while I was unconscious that did so much damage was impacting the sound barrier with my body. You know, we're not terribly aerodynamic at that speed. And it was like it was an explosive force, 100 times the force of a category one hurricane impacting my body instantaneously. For anybody's ever, you know, stuck your arm out a window going like 70 miles per hour down the highway, you felt that parasitic drag acting on you. But at 700, you know, at 700, you know, hundred miles per hour, that force is exponentially stronger. And it just, I mean, it ripped my helmet off my head, traumatic brain injury from my head just smashing. I broke my C-1 in my neck, my left scapula in my shoulder, bilateral humor fractures.

This humorous broke through and cut my brachial artery internally, so I was bleeding internally here. My radius and ulness shattered on this arm and severed my nerve that controls my hand, the median nerve. The compression of my spine actually damaged the brachial plexus, which is the nerves that go to control a lot of your upper body. It was so fast that the dry suit I was wearing to protect me from that 37 degree Fahrenheit ocean water shredded apart. All the gear on my vest ripped off, my survival beacon, my radio, all my signaling equipment, not that I could have used any of it because at this point my arms were just completely useless. And then the steel-toed boots on my feet were flailing so violent. that they became like freaking wrecking balls and smashed open both my over my lower legs,

open fractures of my tib fib, chunks of my tibia like falling out of my leg, bleeding out through my lower extremities. And this is all in like a split second, you know. And miraculously in that time, the parachute was able to deploy and slow me enough so that I didn't die an impact with the ocean.

And then I plunged into that- Fuck is you not die ejecting at 695 fucking miles an hour. Dude, I don't know. Man. it was uh i'm here for a reason you know i i prepared a lot you know i was all through flight school and even before i went in the navy i was uh doing a lot of weight training at that point i had about 20 more pounds on me i was really strong really short and compact which i think was a benefit

um but it fucked me up really good um sorry to cut you off or keep no no no um i plummeted into that icy cold water and just pins and needles of feeling that freezing cold water on your body, no ability to swim, and then that parachute that had just saved my life, sunk underneath that churning ocean swell and started to drag me under. And we have a system on our vest that's supposed to disconnect to you on your harness. It's called the Sea Wers. They're the saltwater activated explosive devices. Because upper body injuries are so common in high-speed ejections,

You oftentimes can't reach up and manually disconnect the Coke fittings to get free from your parachute. But unfortunately, we've got like Vietnam era survival equipment. And one of the sewers fired but didn't disconnect. And then the other sewers didn't even fire at all. They're supposed to, when they go into saltwater, set off this charge. So I remain connected to that parachute with no ability to disconnect with my arms being destroyed. And so very quickly was just getting pulled underwater. And I know you know what it feels like, but for anybody who's ever been held underwater, when you need a breath of air, that feeling's pretty awful. And it was just teabagging me over and over again.

Holy shit. I think there's not how many thousands of gallons of water? I mean, it was like a big bag of cinder blocks, you know, just yanking me under. Fortunately, the LPU, the life preserver unit automatically inflated around my neck, which gave me enough buoyancy to occasionally get to the surface, where I would scream for help, take a big breath of air, cough up some water, water and then it was immediately back down. Fortunately, my flight lead thought extremely quickly. He spotted my parachute opening and he dropped a GPS mark on my location, but now I'm in the ocean,

which is moving very quickly. In the fumes of fuel that he had remaining in his tank at this point, he spotted a fishing vessel about a mile away and he dialed up maritime guard and tried to get their attention on that, but they weren't responding. So he got down really low and really fast and he thumped over their bow. And so these guys are out there commercial fishing. Like, holy shit, what's going on? That got him to switch over to the radio frequency. And he was able to direct him over to that GPS mark that he had dropped. And fortunately, those guys got there and provided a visual reference of my approximate location because my flight lead had to bingo profile back to Oceana. He had so little fuel. And had he not done that in that moment, I would have been a little tiny

dark head bobbing around out in the open Atlantic Ocean. Yeah, it's like, large. under water. No one would ever found me. Brain of rice in the middle of a huge field. Yeah. So really, you know, he saved my life in that moment. And then this fishing vessel got over there. They ended up throwing a rope out to me. But because my arms were so jacked up, I couldn't grab it and it ended up just getting tangled in the paracord. And so these guys kind of backed off, but were trying to keep an eye on me as the as the rest of the rescue mission kind of went down, which there was a hazard report,

a Haz rep for all the rescue because it was such a clown show. People on different frequencies. There was a near midair with a couple helicopters. They had a Coast Guard vessel, I believe, that showed up nearby. The first helicopter that showed up on scene was from HS11. They had actually just been launched from an aircraft carrier that was out nearby where we were operating. And they arrived on scene and there was a miscommunication that I was already on the fishing vessel. So they deployed the rescue swimmer. He swam over and got on that fishing vessel. And they deployed the rescue swimmer. He swam over and got on that fishing vessel. Meanwhile, I had like drifted away from that position. And fortunately, there was another helicopter that was actually going down. They were about to do some weapons

training with some seal team guys down at one of the ranges down in North Carolina. And they got this call that there had been a no-shirt ejection. They needed to turn this into a search and rescue mission. And one of the crew members, Joey, he's eating this meatball sub for his lunch thinking he's just going on like a chill training flight and all of a sudden they get this call. He had to kind of throw his sandwich back in the remnants of the bag and put it kind of in the edge of the, you know, the cabin of the helicopter. And so these guys finally get over to where I'm at. And I think it was one of the pilots actually spotted me first. And they end up getting right over, hovering down. And then the rescue swimmer Cheech, who was about to jump in, a dude in his

20s, it just so happened the week before this rescue mission. There was a Navy H-53 C-Dragon helicopter that had gone down due to an electrical fire and ditched in a very nearby area to where I was that day. And while everybody on that crew survived the initial crash, they had to spend so long getting everybody onto a backboard because the Navy policy at that time was if you're in any sort of aircraft mishap into the water, you have to be put onto a backboard before being lifted into the helicopter. And to do that in the churning waves takes a lot of time.

And it took so long for them to get the crew evacuated. Several members of that crew perished from hypothermia before they could be rescued. And so Cheech was coming off just like the worst week in his career after having these people perished when he was trying to save him. Didn't get any time off, didn't get any counseling. He's already back ready to jump in the water again. And he jumps in with that in the back of his head. And at this point, I'd been in the water for almost two hours, severely hypothermic.

That dry suit had just filled up with the icy cold ocean water. And I was severely hypothermic. and he knew that in the back of his head. So when he got down, we got this titanium D-ring on the harness of our parachute harness. He clipped into that, and he said the force of the parachute was so strong that it just pulled both of us under.

And him being a super fit rescue swimmer, no matter how hard he could swim, it didn't budge. And he had done this in a pool, he had said. But when you look down and you can see the bottom of a lit pool is very different than when you look down and you see just the dark abyss

and a tangle of paracord and parricor shoot just pulling you down and down and down. But he maintained his cool. He got out a knife and was able to cut me free of all the paracord and disentangle everything, get me back to the surface. And then he opted to just lift me right into the helicopter not to fuck with a backboard. I did have a spinal injury. My neck was broken. But at this point, he's like, if we don't get this guy out, he's going to die from hypothermia for sure. It was a miracle I wasn't dead from hypothermia already. They got me into the helicopter. Hold on. Are you conscious during all this? I was in a out of consciousness. For most of it, I have retrograde amnesia, but for years I was getting

back flashbacks of it through night tears of being in the water and experiencing it. But I've been able to recreate all this very accurately from the investigation they did, from talking to the rescue swimmer, from talking to the fishermen. We've been able to kind of compile exactly what happened and went down pretty accurately, despite having some big lapses in my memory personally. If you spend any time off-road like I do, you already know how easy it is to end up second-guessing where you're at, whether you're still on a legal trail or if the route ahead is even worth taking. That's why I've been using On-X off-road. It's an off-road navigation app that shows trails, public and private land boundaries, places to camp,

and detailed trail info all in one place. And what makes it really useful is the amount of actual trail data. You can check difficulty ratings, terrain details, trail photos, even recent reports from other riders before you head out there. The other big thing is you can download maps ahead of time, because once you lose service out there, your phone is pretty much useless. But with OnX off-road, everything still works offline. And if you're riding with a group, their location sharing feature lets everybody stay on the same map so nobody gets lost or separated. What I like most about it is it gives me a lot more confidence when I'm exploring somewhere new. I'm not wasting time backtracking, accidentally ending up on private land,

or trying to figure things out once I'm already deep into the trail system. I can plan ahead, know what I'm getting into, and spend more time actually enjoying the ride instead of worrying about navigation the whole time. Search OnX off-road in the App Store or Google Play. Again, that's OnX Off Road in the App Store or Google Play. What do you remember when you woke up in the water? The feeling of absolute dread of just being completely helpless. You knew what happened?

I mean, I was so confused. All I knew was I was underwater and it was dark and I couldn't breathe. And I remember having hold my breaths for so long and it started to like, get those contractions. And I remember sucking in the water and the sting of the salt water going down in my chest and then wanting to call. and then that just making it worse. And then things being black, but then being at the surface, coughing and yelling. And then it was just that feeling of absolute helplessness

was just replayed, you know. But from the rescue team, you know, they got me into that helicopter and they started resuscitating me. I was coding over and over again so close to death. You know, they were doing sternum rubs and all these resuscitation techniques to try to keep me awake and all of all of them, alert and alive. And I would be alert and I'd be screaming for help, just completely disoriented

and in shock. And then I'd be out again. And it was, I think, about a 40-ish minute flight to Norfolk General, which is a level one trauma center. And in that time, you know, I just coded repeatedly the whole flight. And these guys were doing everything they could to keep me alive. And in that chaos, Joey's meatball sub had broken loose from the container. And I ended up just freaking covered in meatball and marinerra so as these guys are landing at norfolk general the medical team's coming out and i'm obviously in bad shape uh you know they said they moved me over onto the gurney to pull me out of the helicopter and my arm was on the edge and it just flopped in half like right in the middle it was just completely disconnected here uh the bone is so broken but it's still kind of dangling from the skin

and i'm covered in all this what appears to be like blood and gore and so the the the rescue crew is kind of explaining like, hey, he's in bad shape, but that's just Joey's lunch. Holy shit, dude. But they end up rushing me into the hospital. They took my core body temperature upon arrival. I was at 87 degrees Fahrenheit core body temperature. So I should have been dead from hypothermia at this point. But later, they said, that saved my life.

That cold water actually prevented me from bleeding out through my brachial artery and my two open leg fractures and they believe it helped save my, preserve my brain function. So it was actually a blessing that my dry suit ripped apart. I wouldn't have lived had my dry suit function properly. They gave me multiple blood transfusions. I had lost a massive amount of blood. They warmed me up and then once they got me semi-stable, they pumped water out of my lungs and then they put me into an induced coma. And for the course of the next week, I went through over a dozen trauma surgeries. They performed fasciotomies on all four of my extremities to basically because the limbs were so damaged, they were swelling up and that muscles pushing so tight against the fascia that it was cutting off circulation to my arms and legs. And in the past, they would just chop your arms and legs off, you know, once you got compartment syndrome.

But fortunately, being in a level one trauma center, they're able to open up that fascia tissue and relieve the pressure and get the blood circulating. So I had that on all four of my extremities. They rebuilt my skeleton with titanium rods and steel plate in both my arms and both my legs. So now I've got like Wolverine X-rays, if you ever get to see it. It's pretty sweet. Just all metal bones on the inside. A bunch of screws, hundreds of stitches and staples to put everything back together. And then late one night they came in and my hand was just like blue and cold to the touch.

And they were about to amputate my arm, but they, had this like top vascular surgeon that was able to get the blood flow by giving me a brachial artery bypass in my arm. But a lot of stuff that was fortunately I had like the medical dream team on that day of these surgeons that was able to put me back together. And after that week, they were trying to get me out of the induced coma and trying to get me back to consciousness, but I just wasn't waking up. And at this point, my mom, you know, her worst nightmare had happened.

Her little boys in a coma, maybe not going to make it. a bunch of my squadron mates and friends from flight school are in the waiting room at the ICU. I'd been transferred over to Portsmouth Naval Hospital where everybody was just kind of waiting to hear my fate. And it didn't look good, you know. Is this guy just going to be a vegetable the rest of his life? Is he going to wake up whatsoever?

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

to getting drug through the water and being tangled in cords and being comfortable with it that probably helped. But this is my friend Matt who kind of became like an older brother to me. And my nickname when we were in that crew was Scrappy.

Everyone always called me Scrappy. And my commanding officer opened this envelope and saw that number and called my friend Matt. And he's like, you mean Scrappy? You're talking about Scrappy? And my skipper thought that was a hilarious nickname. And so when he came back into the ICU waiting room,

he kind of told everybody the story. Everybody thinks this guy's name Scrappy. And so that same pilot that told me before my flight that I didn't do anything to earn a call sign yet, kind of piped up. And he's a scrappy motherfucker. He'll be all right. And I kind of lifted the mood of the room.

And then all the guys' minds started churning and they came up with Smurf, sort of a makeshift acronym for Scrappy motherfucker. And being the politically correct Navy that it has become, they had to come up with a cover story for it. So they said it was because I was a short guy that turned blue from hypothermia. That's awesome.

That's how they got it approved anyway. So at least I got a call sign out all this, you know? A hard-earned one. Has any pilot ejected at 695 miles an hour? It's the fastest survived ejection in the Navy. I know of an air. an Air Force pilot that ejected faster than that. His call sign was noodle. He ejected back in the early 90s. He was an F-15 pilot. And they had the instrumentation. I think it was like one of the

gyroscopes or something stopped functioning. So they thought they were in straight and level flight when actually they were in a dive straight down. And the way he noticed it was they could hear the canopy noise. When you start going faster in the jet, you can hear the canopy. Just like when you go faster in your car, it gets louder and just kind of getting spiked. He senses like something's not right. And he was like, they were within a couple of seconds of impacting the ocean when they pulled the handle. I don't think the backseater made it out.

He miraculously survived and actually went back to flying. I think he's actually an airline pilot now or maybe retired, but he yeah, he miraculously survived that. But it doesn't happen very often where people go through that level of explosion, you know. Yeah, but not. Less than ideal. It was actually a chart in the Natops, the aircraft flight manual that shows the survivable envelope with the Martin Baker ejection seat.

And we looked at the angle that I was at in the airspeed and it's not even on the chart. Shouldn't have lived through it for sure. How often do you think about that? I mean, you survived an ejection that you probably should have ever survived. I'm really grateful for it now. You should have drowned. You should have died of hypothermia. You should have died of blood loss.

Maybe eaten by a shark. Yeah, dude. Luckily, Mary Lee wasn't interested. Your equipment malfunctioned. What do you chalk this up as? Still here for a reason. God still needed me for something. And it really opened my eyes to that.

And just a deep, gratitude and love and appreciation for being here in this experience as a human like got to do some good with that but definitely here for a reason yeah i'll say i'm really grateful for that man how long were you in surgeries so that first week they completed all the initial surgeries and then the next week so now a total of two weeks i was still in a coma and eventually the first thing I remembered was I could hear people talking, familiar voices. I could smell disinfectant. You remember waking up after being out for two weeks. Yeah. Yeah. And then I remembered being able to open my eyes and look around and I could see familiar faces, but it was confusing. Because at

that point, I had zero memory of the ejection. I had zero memory of how I had gotten there. I had no idea. It was like waking up from a dream in your own bed, except why are there all these machines? Why do things not look like my bedroom? In between the brain injury and all the meds that they had me on, I was pretty out of it. One of the first things I thought was that my squadron mates had been playing a prank on me because I tried to move

and I thought they had like tied me down with the little wool blanket they had over me, but it was because I was paralyzed. I couldn't move, but I thought that they had. like we're fucking with me for a minute. But, you know, I started seeing faces and kind of recognizing them. And then eventually the medical staff came in to kind of explain like you've been in a high-speed

ejection. You're lucky to be alive. But you're not ever going to be able to walk again. You're never going to be able to use your arms again. And your military flying career is over. And that was a pretty devastating moment to just be stuck there, trapped in my own body, confused and be told like everything that I'd worked for for so long was now gone and it was a pretty dark a dark time for me internally but also in that moment there was this little spark which probably

comes from you know the shit I did in childhood that had that self-reliance but it was like fuck you you tell me I can't do that I'm going to prove you wrong and so that became the fire that I started to fuel and it started as a tiny little ember and a deep dark black pit that I was in. But I started to feed that and I imagined myself getting back into the cockpit what it was going to feel like when I was back in my flight suit with my wings back on my chest and taken off in that jet again. And that became something I looked at every day. And so my mission every day was how am I going to get there? You know, you can kind of imagine what you want to do, but unless you do the work consistently, you're not going to get there. And so I just started every day like, okay, I can't walk today.

I can't use my arms. I can't wipe my own ass. Some poor corpsmen who joined to go do cool shit in the navies in here stuck with me wiping my ass all day. But I'm going to fucking figure something out so I can start wiping my own ass again at least. And so those became my little missions daily was like, what can I move? Is there anything that does work? And little by little, like things started to move a bit.

A few weeks had gone by in that ICU room and things were pretty dark, but still feeding that little fire that was in there. And one day I remember I was able to like, I was able to use my core muscles again, even though my arms and legs didn't work. And I was able to sit up in the bed. And one of the nurses came in. I was kind of sitting up. And she was just kind of like, whoa, this isn't supposed to be happening.

Once I was fairly stable, they transferred me to Richmond, Virginia. There's a polytrauma center there at the McGuire VA. And that's where I started to do all my rehabilitation. And at this point, you know, I was completely bedridden, literally shitting on myself, had to be fed, had to have people brush my teeth, had to, that was really frustrating for me to be such a self-reliant person who now could do nothing for myself. But I started doing therapy all day, every day. You know, I'd wake up, I'd get moved via wheelchair to my appointments in the VA there. I was doing vision therapy from the head injury. One of my cranial nerves had been messed up.

So my vision was all jacked up. I was doing speech therapy because of the brain injury. I was really struggling just with the basics of talking. And as I progressed with that, I was doing occupational therapy to use my upper body a little bit. Physical therapy, kinesiotherapy, recreational therapy, aqua therapy, like all the therapies. And they had a really good staff there that really gave a shit and was helping me out.

But I also saw a pretty dark side of the medical system while in there, which was, one, the food that they were giving us was absolute garbage. Ultra-processed, shitty, full of seed oils, like didn't even, there wasn't a fresh fruit or vegetable to be found. And even if you did get a fresh fruit or vegetable, it was pretty shit quality. you know tons of like Frito lays and nutter butters and garbage food but it was like they were fueling these they were putting all this money into this facility and all of these therapies and this facade that they were doing so much so that if you came in the optics looked really good to be like man look at the VA and I'm grateful for how much better it was than what the Vietnam era guys came back to where they're shoved 12 dudes in a room pissing and shitting on themselves all day getting pumped full of morphine and then then just wheeled out onto the sidewalk, like, good luck with your life in that morphine addiction. It's definitely improved since then, but it was still like, why are we not feeding people good food?

That's like the most important thing. The other one was all night, every night, they're waking you up to take your vitals and then give you medication so that you can sleep. It's like, just let us sleep. That's like the most important thing we can do right now, sleep and get nutrition in our body. Both of those things were non-existent. And then the thing that they had an abundance of was pharmaceutical drugs. Here, take your pills. Take your pills. This one's not working well enough.

We got you on all the opioids. We got you on oxycontin, oxycodone, like all this shit. Let's try gabapentin. This one's going to be way better. It's non-addictive. And before long, I was on 2,400 milligrams a day of gabapentin, which initially helped a little bit, but ended up becoming the hardest addiction that I had to break. What is that again?

It's called gabapentin or neurotin. It originally was, I think it was for diabetic nerve pain. And they started as opioids were kind of getting a bad rep. They'd still give you the opioids, but now they'd give you a bunch of the gabapentin to to help deal with the nerve pain, which it didn't really do much, honestly. Initially it made me fall asleep. But once my body acclimated to it, which was pretty quick, they just had to ramp, ramp, ramp the dose up until I was taking like the max.

daily dose that they would allow at that time. But it was all just pharmaceutical base, man. When you saw the doctor who was supposed to be your healer, it wasn't like, hey, let's get you better food, let's deal with this. It was just what pills do you want? What pills do you need? And also there's these cute girls floating around the polytrauma center,

which is largely special forces operators who'd been hit by RPGs or gunshots, lost the broken spines. There's Marines in there, a lot of infantry guys. a bunch of young men and they've got these cute girls that are the pharma reps that come in and they flirt with you and they get you to sign up for clinical trials. And there were still, I overheard some of the staff members at the hospital talking about one of the trials that they had done.

It was a nerve pain medication for people with permanent spinal injuries and they would inject this stuff directly into their spinal fluid. and somehow the batch of the medicine that they received had been contaminated because they were storing it cryogenically in liquid nitrogen in containers that weren't designed to be frozen and so it was causing cracks and then they were getting contaminated with some sort of fungus or something and so the first time they started putting in this into these fucking legitimate heroes in wheelchairs just trying to not feel pain all day it immediately caused it. severe pain. And the staff was saying you could hear them screaming at the top of their lungs to just end their lives. And they were paralyzed so they couldn't kill themselves. And the only way that they could stop these guys from being in that level of pain was to put them into induce comas. Get the fuck out of here, man. Are you serious? Yeah, they're doing medical experimentation on American veterans in the VA hospitals. And I didn't, I didn't, I.

I didn't end up signing up for any clinical trials, but I'm guessing that still happens today where you just get to be a lab rat for them. But I was pretty frustrated in that place, seeing kind of the inner workings of it. But very fortunate to have people that cared and continuing to work really hard. I progressed to the point where I could get around on a walker. My arms weren't working for a long time. And then one day my left hand, I could start to move my pinky and my ring finger. So I eventually was able to move the.

this arm enough that I could brush my teeth. I could wipe my own ass again, which was a huge victory. And how much time had passed before? It was about two months before this hand started working and then another couple weeks. One day, this hand just, I started to feel it tingling. And you were walking before that. No. No, this is before I could walk. Okay. I thought I heard you say you were on a walk. Yeah, sorry, I jumped ahead there, but yeah, I couldn't use my arms. But once I started to get function of my arms, they could get me in a walker and start moving on that. They had me in the pool walking assisted. They had me on this sort of treadmill with these suspension devices on me, so it would take my body weight and I could

relearn to walk that way. So there was a lot of good stuff with that. But after three months, I was good enough that I got to go back to Virginia Beach and continue outpatient therapy. And it was a huge relief to put that hospital in the rearview mirror. At this point, I still couldn't drive. I was pretty limited for my, you know, my, my, my functions of daily living. I was very reliant on others and ended up going back to Virginia Beach and continuing outpatient therapy at Portsmouth Naval Hospital. And that place was an absolute shit show. But just working really hard at my rehab, talking to the pain management docs, I'd be like, I don't want to be on these pain meds. I don't think they're doing anything for me. And the answer was always, well, you don't feel you need

them because they're working. And so they didn't want to help me get off of them. And so, you know, I was just kind of broken, isolated from a lot of my squadron mates. And I found myself one day sitting on the back patio where I lived on this lawn chair, you know, taking all my oxy. And I had a big thing of whiskey drinking that. And I'm just kind of like melting into the ground. And I remember being there just completely just melted and relaxed and thinking, man, I could just stay here. The rest of my life. But there was this other part of me as like, is this what you want to be. And in that moment, I recognized, fuck no, I don't want to just be this the rest of my life, a drug addict, an alcoholic. And that moment was really powerful in that. That's when I really started

to pursue, like, I need to get off these meds. And every doc I talked to was like, no, you need to stay on the meds. You need to stay on the meds. So I just started doing it myself. And I just started titrating off. At this point, I was on over a dozen medications. I was on oxycodone, oxycontin, gabapentin, tramadol, tracodone, amatryptylene, plus a bunch of other shit. And so I just started each day cutting out a little bit of each one. I think I started with the amyptylene, then the tramadol and the tracodone. And then I got to the oxycodone and I was able to cut that out. And then the oxycontin, which took several weeks of like just feeling like absolute dog shit,

but just kind of toughen it out. And if I got too bad, I would take a small dose just to kind of, ease that I didn't just go cold turkey because I think I would have fucking died. But then I got to the neurotin or the gabapentin, which was supposed to be non-addictive. And that became the hardest drug for me to get off of. As soon as I started cutting back on it, I felt extremely nauseous. I was shaking. I just felt like I'd gotten punched in the gut. And so very gradually I cut down that dosage. And it took about three months for me to wean myself off that medication. But as soon as I did and got all those meds out of my system, it was like the life came back into me. Even just like the way I looked,

I was like kind of pasty and pale and doughy, low energy, just didn't feel like myself at all. But as I got those meds out, it was like I had motivation again. And instead of just being exhausted at the end of each day, I was like ready to do stuff. And I was really fortunate to have really good friends that were taking care of me. You know, they were trying to get me to go out and go wake surfing when I was just barely walking, but they got me out there in the water and hang out on the boat. And sure enough, got me up on the wake surfing board. And, um, buddy's taking me out surfing. Like my first experience back in the ocean, I was pretty nervous. I could barely put on the wetsuit because my arms were still so weak, but ended up getting out into the waves and just got crushed

by this wave out in the outer banks, held under, like bounced along the bottom, coming back up for a breath of air, held down again, and then pop back up with just a big smile on my my face because it was like I had faced that demon of being held under the water and I was okay with it. How long did it take from the crash to that to surfing? Probably about a year and a half. I had been rehabbing about a year and a half when I was starting to get active with stuff like surfing. My buddy Spicoli took me out mountain biking and I just started to get back in touch with the stuff I loved with the people I enjoy being around. And meanwhile I was going through an investigation.

which was pretty brutal. You know, I had just crashed an $89 million super hornet, and the consequences could be pretty brutal. And some of those interviews were more like an interrogation, very tense, some dark moments of them asking me, do you think you still deserve to be a fighter pilot after this? You know, being in tears, like just kind of broken down. But pushing through that, the investigation lasted months and months and months,

and it all culminated where I had to go to Norfolk, and go see the admiral who would determine my fate after I'd been through all these proceedings. And I showed up for that. I think at this point I was still using a cane to walk around, still limping. But I put on my summer white uniform, and I walk into this room, and it's a big room about the size of this with a table in it,

about the size of this platform, big wooden table. And on either side, it's flanked by about a dozen other naval aviators, all kind of convened to determine my fate. And after they had done the preliminary hearing with me, the admiral comes in and everybody stands up and he sits on the opposite into this long table from me and tells us all to sit down. And I remember sitting down and he just looks across the table at me

and goes, Lieutenant Gill, are you fearless? And like, what do you say when an admiral asks you that, you know? But the only thing that came out of my mouth and I don't know where it came from, but I said, sir, I don't remember a lot from the ejection, but I'm certain what little seat cushioning there is on the ejection seat was puckered up inside me real tight.

And he didn't blink. He didn't laugh. He just stood up and walked out of the room. And I was just like, well, there goes my flying career, you know. And everybody's just kind of like looking at each other, like, what was that? And eventually everybody kind of clears out of this room and I walk out into the hallway

in one of the, captain's 06 pulls me into his office. And he has me sit on the other side of his table. And he's got this glass jar full of lifesaver mints. And he takes one and pops it in his mouth. He gives me one and I pop it in my mouth. And we're sitting there just enjoying these little peppermints. And he goes, Lieutenant Gill, if you can get your body working again,

we're going to get you back in a Super Hornet. And it was just like the biggest relief and just massive motivation to keep going. And so I did, man. I had to go through. I got to keep my wings. I got the opportunity to go back and fly. But now I had to figure out how to get medical waivers and get back flying physically.

But that just drove my therapy, man. I was doing two-a-day workouts. I was doing all my therapy at Portsmouth. And I just dedicated myself to all of that shit and started getting better and stronger and went through a medical waiver process with a bunch of different flight surgeons, which was a miracle in itself.

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You flew the F-18 Super Hornet, the same jet. off the same Virginia Beach coast that guys like Ryan Graves and Commander Fravor were flying when they reported objects, they couldn't explain. And the Pentagon just started releasing its declassified UAP files over the past few weeks. So I have to ask you, in all of your time up there, did you ever see anything you could not explain? Or fly with somebody who did, and what's your honest take, is any of this real? Yeah, this is an exciting topic. So while I was in my recovery, I lived down this road called Oyster Point Key. It's like a quiet little spot down on the on Rudy's Inlet area of Virginia Beach, wooded, quiet, kind of outside the city a bit.

And I was up on the second story of this room that I was staying at with my buddies, who kind of adopted me while I was recovering. Two of my friends were deployed, so their bedroom was open while they were gone. They let me stay there. But I'm asleep one night, and this bright light comes in through the second-story room where I'm at, through the window. And I thought maybe a car had pulled up in the driveway and had their brights on or something. But I got out of bed, and I walked over to the window and looked out the window. And right at eye level, there was this thing that looked like a massive set of stadium lighting. a bunch of different circular lights

all in the square kind of rectangular pattern just blasting in on me. And rather than being afraid, which I think would be a natural sensation, when you witness something bizarre like that, I just got this overwhelming sense of calm. And I just walked back to the bed. I'd gotten up to go to the restroom.

I didn't even do that. I just walked back to bed and fell asleep. And the next morning, I woke up, and I thought that was just a dream. There's no way that was real. Fast forward, into my recovery, towards the end of my recovery journey, I'm working a ground job, working a ground job at the Strike Fighter Wing Atlantic, which is sort of like the administrative

command that coordinates everything between all the different fighter squadrons at Oceana. And I was doing a number of different ground jobs, answering emails, phone calls. And one day I got an email that was from a bunch of the more high-ranking individuals from various squadrons around Oceania, and they were saying that they were getting sightings of these objects out in the Whiskey 72 airspace where we do our training. And, you know, some of them were saying that, you know,

we don't know what these are. I think there was one, he was either the XO or CO of one of the squadrons was, I don't know if he was joking, but he's like, we should just strap some nine Xs on and go shoot these things down, so shoot them down with the heat-seeking missile. And at first I thought they were just messing with me. Like, there's so many.

shenanigans. I assume they were just messing with me being the guy at the wing. But they originally wanted me to kind of coordinate these reports. And so I responded to that first email thinking that they were messing with me. Strike Fighter Wing Atlantic X-Files, Fox Muller signing off was the end of my email thinking that these guys are just complete full of shit. And then I got a return email that said, we need to move these conversations over to SIPPER. And for those that know, that's the secure internet. And that's when I kind of realized this isn't this isn't a joke. Holy shit. What are you thinking? Dude, I was really excited because I had had that thing that I didn't know if it was a dream. I still don't know if that was a dream or not. But it was so

vivid. And I've always had curiosity on this topic. But to hear that, it was like, holy shit, this is, this is real. There's something out there. I don't know what it is, but there's something. I continued my recovery. One day I'm sitting at that computer answering emails and the Commodore, the Strike Fighter Wing Atlantic Commodore, comes in, he goes, Lieutenant Gill, what are you doing today? I said, just answer an email, sir, and he goes, how about you go back and fly jets today?

And it was like, holy shit, I get to go back to fly. And it was pretty overwhelming and exciting all at once that I actually got to do that. And so he kind of overcome all those odds, come over a lot of obstacles, I was back flying. And while I was back flying going through my refresher training to get back to the fleet, I was out on a mission out in that same whiskey 72 airspace. And we were doing long range intercepts, so like long range fighting other aircraft. And I think we took up a division that day,

so a flight of four aircraft. And two of the aircraft would split off and go to one side of the airspace and then me and my flight lead split off to the other. And we set up for these different presentations to practice our tactics. And as we're setting up in the airspace, people are using their radars and their fleers to kind of clear the airspace and make sure there's no interlopers. And the flight lead comes up over and says, we've got interlopers. And I remember getting that contact on my radar and then training my fleer to it, my forward-looking infrared, it's like a long-range infrared camera to look at that thing. I know you know all this shit is, but for people to go. Good, you're doing that for the audience.

So I locked up my fleer on this thing and pulled up the fleer page to see what it was seeing. And it was pretty far out and our fleas are kind of shitty. So it's pretty grainy. But I could see this little spherical object out in the distance was putting off our signature. And I'm primarily flying formation with my flight lead as we're kind of setting up for these, for these presentations. So I was constantly kind of looking back and flying the jet primarily. but occasionally glancing at this thing.

And then I remembered, it was like when I looked back up, that thing had moved much closer to my position. And I could see it a little better. It was still that kind of grainy circle, spherical thing. But pretty quickly, the flight leads like, we got to return to base, we're unable to complete this with the interlopers.

So we had to cancel that day's flight, which is a pretty costly evolution to get four jets up in that sky to do this. So we rejoined. we go back, we land, and I remember in the debrief, expecting that we're going to talk about this thing that had just happened, and nobody said anything. Nothing? Nothing.

And so I knew like, okay, there's likely some sort of program that we're not briefed into yet, so we're not allowed to talk about this. And that's when I knew like there's something out there. That was my personal experience, not terribly exciting, but then like Ryan Graves, he was in Virginia Beach the same time as I actually. I know Ryan and he was seeing a lot of stuff.

He had like close encounters with one of those things passing right by in it and seeing it with his own eyes. But there was a lot of sightings of these spherical objects with a cube inside them and sometimes moving instantaneously positions and changing directions in ways that didn't make sense. But I mean, I totally believe that these are alien technologies that we do reengineering and rebuilding. I mean, there's no way we're alone in this massive universe.

We've hit an aircraft from the public for decades. The SR 71 is an example. Do you think the military is sitting on something further out, exotic propulsion, the anti-gravidic stuff and those Navy UFO patents? Do you think that's what this could be? Absolutely. Or do you think it's aliens? I think it's both.

You think it's both. think I think that there is alien craft that have made contact and some of them being recovered. I mean, I've heard enough reputable people talking about these subjects, some of them on your show that have been in these recovery efforts to recover the craft. And I think it's all being bogarded by the defense industry and these technologies are being used and released in order the way to make the most profit for the people that are in control of things. I think the reason we don't see a lot of it is because of it.

some of these technologies could make so many of the things that we rely on completely obsolete, like propulsion technologies and energy technologies that could make the oil and gas industry crash. And we have an entire economy built on that, and it would completely change the game. And I think the people that control these technologies and are running the show don't want that to happen. But I think it's... How high do you think this goes? I mean, I don't know how much the presidency's in on any of this because I don't think that they're even the real decision makers in the world. I think it's like a reality TV

show what we see on TV politics to keep us divided and pissed off and at each other's throats while the real Cesar's of the world are dividing and conquering everybody. Do you think a lot of these politicians, people that bring this stuff up of former government officials, do you think this is a way for them to get their name in the media? I mean, other. Maybe. I mean, it's definitely, it could be a big distraction. Yeah. Tactic as well.

But, I mean, if you want, if you're a politician and you want to get on the fucking news and you need press, I don't know if there's anything easier than to jump on the. And surprisingly, though. And UFO disclosure stuff. Yeah. It's immediate, it's immediate press. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it might be, it might be that. I think there are some politicians that were genuinely interested in it. But, dude, all of that is such a fucking illusion, you know. I think it's just a show. And I don't think the real decisions that are being made are even being made by the politicians we see on TV. I think everything's done behind closed doors and out of the side of the public. And we've got this whole optic that there is this thing that is democracy that is just bullshit. I don't disagree with you on that at all.

So, you know, I don't watch the news anymore. I think I've been misled and gotten my hopes up far too many times to and now realize that that's just, that's not where the real decisions are being made and that's not who's in control. But are people using it for political gain, probably? Do you think they're using it as a big distraction thing? I mean, the last time this came up was in the middle. Well, I mean, it's still being brought up. How do I say this? This is still drawn out from the first time it was brought up within this,

administration. Ironically, it was brought up right in the midst of all the Epstein shit. Yeah, it totally could be. You give them you a piece. It totally could be. Let's change the subject. Like, look over here. Here's aliens. Don't worry about fucking little kids. Here's aliens. Yeah, I mean, and I think that's totally possible, but I still think it's very real. I think it's, I think there's enough reputable people that are talking about it and putting their careers on the line in destroying their livelihoods and even losing their lives to get this information out. Who's destroying their livelihood to get this information out? I think it likely comes back to those people that are in control,

that are making the money off of the defense industry. No, no, no, I mean, who do you think is throwing their career in the trash for disclosure? You know, I forget a lot of the names of this, but there's been a lot of high-level government officials coming forward and saying things. There's been military members, other nations. pilots coming forward and saying things and just talking to Ryan about that process and the congressional hearings a lot of those people are under extreme duress having their families threatened losing everything in their careers and why would they do that you know if this wasn't very real

and even just know i don't know who's throwing their career away i've i dove into this topic as you know yeah you might be more knowledgeable i'm not i'm not saying i'm more knowledgeable i'm i am a I am very skeptical. Very skeptical that it's real at all. Yeah. Well, let me rephrase that. I mean, I think people are seeing something. But I think that the, I think there's a very good possibility.

The narrative has been totally manufactured. I think it's spiritual. I think people are seeing. spiritual things. Perhaps. Perhaps I really don't know. I don't know 100% what it is. It could be spiritual.

Other dimensions. I mean, you have been, I don't know how many psychedelic journeys you've done, but you know, that kind of unlocks your mind to other possibilities. Oh, yeah. And I don't know. I mean, everything's spiritual, really. I'm with you. Are you a Christian?

Not strictly a Christian, although I believe there's a lot of really good lessons in that. I believe in God and love and connection of all beings and things. And I think that God is infinite, and I don't think we can possibly comprehend what infinite is with the human mind and the analytical mind and explain it in English language. I don't think we can. And I think a lot of people are trying to explain what God is. and there's a lot of different interpretations of what it is and I don't think any of them are 100% accurate because I don't know that we're supposed to know exactly what God is

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

knowing that we are all connected and God is love but I think we're all trying to explain the infinite that we can't possibly comprehend how great God is I don't think we can explain it I don't think we can comprehend it we only have five senses

we can only see a limited spectrum of light We can only hear a limited number of frequencies. We can only feel, smell, taste, touch the things that are immediately around us. There's so much outside our spectrum of this experience as a human of what we can even interpret and comprehend. And I really believe God is infinite beyond our imaginations. Kind of switching gears here. What was it like for you jumping back in a jet after you ejected it?

695 miles an hour broken damn near every fucking bone in your body almost died multiple different ways You know it felt really good Like getting back on the horse That had bucked me off It was like a mass I'd been working for this for a couple years

You know And busting my ass And just had so many little things line up So I could do that So I was really proud to be back But at the same time there was a part of me Like am I gonna freak out When I put this thing into a dive at the ocean

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

What kept you going? I mean, I've interviewed a couple of gentlemen like yourself. I mean, one of them, Nick Lavery. Nick Lavery is a green beret, lost his leg, the guy right up there in that painting. Oh, yeah. He's right down the road up in Cookville, Fifth Group. And the guy, you know, he lost. crossed his leg and then they told him he would have to redo everything, pass all the PT

qualls, even went through dive school. Fucked made it. Bad ass. You know, then this guy over here, that skull and crossbones up there, that's from a guy, Ryan Hendrickson, had his leg blown off by a pressure plate mine in Afghanistan. He does the landmine removal. Yeah, right? Now he goes over to Ukraine and he's like, dude, I don't have a side on this war.

I don't give a shit. He's like, I give a shit about saving kids because I know what it's like to have your fucking leg blown off. And so he goes over there and de-mines like soccer fields and playgrounds and all by himself. Yeah, I know one of his, someone who works with him there, Robeshaa, who's a green beret that I know was involved with his, I think it's a nonprofit that he has to run that operation. Oh, he's got somebody going with him to do this? Well, I don't know if Roby went with him, but I know he was involved with Ryan. Oh, right on. helping support what he was doing so what i mean what was in your head what got you through

what kept the drive going to push i think it was that fire that i had from a young age man it was like this this need to prove to others that i was worthy of being loved after sort of having a lack of emotional attachment at a very young age i think i always strived to prove that i was worthy of love And so I had to accomplish the impossible to do that. And after talking to a lot of people in special forces community and in high-speed roles in the military, high-accomplishing individuals, I think that's a common theme, is we often had something early in our life that made us feel like we had to prove that we deserve to be loved. You know, the people who have done the dives into that stuff. And I think that's what was feeling me.

It was like, I needed to prove that I was worthy. What advice do you have for the next guy that goes through something like this, whether they're a pilot or a ground guy or whatever it is? You know, finding that little spark of light in that darkness and then feeding that fire is incredibly powerful. And also really asking yourself, what do I want and why do I want it? Because you can chase a goal because you think you want it and then get there and realize, that's maybe not what you wanted to begin with. Why are you doing it? What's really important to you?

And if it really is something that you want to pursue because it's so meaningful to you, just feed that little spark, man, keep that hope alive. And then do the work, you know, be consistent with the work towards that goal. Because things aren't going to happen just because you hope they do. You got to hope they do, visualize it, and then move toward that goal.

every day and and i think we can overcome just about anything if we have that if we have a good reason for it we can visualize it you know some people say it manifest but then you got to actually walk to walk and do it and discipline is what gets you there good advice how much longer did you fly for so i had been back flying for about 18 months and i was was starting to notice that I was struggling mentally. I was stressed out. I was having a hard time remembering things. My sleep was really shitty. And initially when I got back, I was like, I felt awesome. I was crushing it. I actually, as I went through my retraining, I graduated at the top of my class. I was really doing well. Physically, mentally, I felt awesome. And I was just so driven.

But as I got back into that world of just constantly getting ground down, not sleeping, working long days, pulling more Gs, causing more damage to the brain that I didn't even know was there, things started to kind of fall apart for me. And I had a flight when I was down at Tyndall Air Force Base. We were doing a live weapons exercise. So I got to take off, fly out to the airspace over the ocean there and fire an Aim 9 Mike Sidewinder at 8. at a drone and shoot down this drone, which is a pretty cool opportunity. We don't get to shoot live missiles very frequently. Did that, and then I broke off, and I got to go some dissimilar air combat training with a F-22 Raptor.

So got to go dogfight an F-22 Raptor, which was like one of the coolest things I ever got to do, just seeing this thing that I had just drooled over at air shows as a little kid, and now being in the air with it, seeing the way this thing can move, like a freak of nature. But when I got back from that flight, I remember I was in my debrief watching my tapes to see what had happened in the missile shoot. And I remember being really confused by the symbology that I was intimately familiar with

and I didn't quite feel right. Went through the debrief and that night just could not sleep. And I was like sitting in the hotel where I was staying in a perfectly quiet room, nothing happening. And yet my heart was racing like something terrible. what was about to happen.

And I just kind of tried to tough it out. I ended up, I was on duty the next day, so just answering the radio and the phones and just not feeling right all day, just being confused and anxious and almost like hypervigilant. And that second night, I got back to the hotel and I was like, something is not right.

And I remember I was gonna fly the next morning, I got my phone out to set my alarm, and I couldn't figure out how to set my alarm clock on my cell phone. I was confused by the next morning. the math that was basically subtract a couple hours like to give me enough time to get up in the morning from when I had to be at the brief and and I couldn't do that. And so there had been a number of incidents in the F-18 community, a lot in the Hornet community, but some in the Super Hornet

community and Growler community as well, that people were getting basically getting the bends. They were getting aircraft fluctuations of pressure while flying. They had found a number of these faulty environmental control system, the ECS was basically just pressurizing and depressurizing the cockpits randomly. And it was causing guys to get decompression sickness. There had been a growler crew that was actually taxing out for takeoff. And it happened so violently that I think one of the guys made a partial recovery. And I think the other guy is like a complete vegetable because that compression jacked him up so bad. And I know you know DCS from diving in the Navy, you come up for those that don't basically if you come up from depth too quickly the nitrogen can come out a solution

that's in your blood and form little bubbles and if you get them in your joints it's painful that's called the bends or type 1 decompression sickness but what can be far more damaging is if you get those in your brain and it can block blood flow to your brain and even kill you kind of like an aneur you know causing an aneurism uh and so the thought was maybe i was having one of these aneurisms like that crew of growlers had it they'd become so frequent in the hornet community, the legacy F-18s that were the predecessor to the Super Hornet, that they started putting hyperbaric facilities on the aircraft carriers so they could treat the pilots when they got the bins out at sea. Oh, shit. So that had been an issue in our community at that time, and that's kind

of what we started to think maybe happened. I called the squadron safety officer who was Squeezer, who was actually the pilot I had my first flight in the Super Hornet with. And he ended up driving me with our commanding officer to Mayport dive base. And they put me in that chamber overnight and squeezed me to try to get this, get the bubbles back into solution and heal the damage and get blood flow going normally. And I felt a little bit better after it, but I still, something was not right. And the dock that I saw the next day when I came back in is like, considering your past, I think there's something more going on here than simply decompression sickness. And we need you to go see the flight surgeon when you get back from this detachment. And at this point,

I was stationed out in Lamar, California. And that was the last thing I wanted to have to do, was go talk to medical about something that wasn't right inside of me after going through all that to get back. But I knew also that I was not going to be able to function safely and fly a jet the way I was because I couldn't concentrate. I couldn't think clearly. My personality was shifting. I was becoming pretty dark and angry and mean. And I'd been such like a happy dude. Ever since that experience when I was 16, I'd just become like a very happy go-getter kind of dude.

And it was like something had shifted inside of who I was. So reluctantly went in to see the flight surgeon. We got back from that detachment. Still wasn't able to sleep for shit. And when I went in to see them pretty quickly got a delayed onset PTSD. diagnosis. They kind of hit the easy button. So this is PTSD. And so I was very quickly referred to the psych department. And they started giving me meds, sleeping meds to try, anti-anxiety meds to try. And as things weren't really working very well, they ended up giving me a medication called

Sarahquil or quatyapine, which is a pretty heavy-dutyuty anti-psychotic medication that can be used in low doses for insomnia. And so that's what they started giving me. And it would knock me out, but it was like into this drug-induced coma. It wasn't restful sleep. And I still wasn't restoring and recovering. So I just feel like I got hit by a truck the next day. It just felt awful. Pretty quickly into it, it became apparent that I likely

wasn't going to get the opportunity to go back and fly. As soon as this became a mental health issue, it shut that down pretty quickly. And so I was losing my community. I was losing my brotherhood and family. that I had been in there. And I started feeling pretty shitty about myself in climbing into a very dark deep spiral as I kind of just was losing everything,

my sense of purpose and everything that I felt I had worked for. My wife, who I had recently married after the accident, had just had our brand new little baby boy. And he was just a little infant. And so she's busy taking care of this little boy, and now she's dealing with me starting to deal with me, starting to deal with heavier and heavier paranoia and hypervigilance, getting to the point where I would come into the house and I would hide underneath the windows

because I thought I was someone from the government was trying to kill me. I'm always listening to something on the road, working out, walking around the house, traveling, or whatever it is. And what I like about Amazon music is it puts music, podcast, and audiobooks all in one app. So now with Amazon Music Unlimited, you're not just getting music and podcasts. Your subscription also includes access to audiobooks, which makes it easy to keep something good going no matter what you're doing. I've been listening to Project Hail Mary, and that's the kind of audiobook that really works in this format. Hearing the story in the narrator's voice pulls you in differently.

You get the pacing, the tension, the personality of the characters, and it makes it easy to stay locked in whether you're driving, training, or knocking, things out around the house. With Amazon Music, you get music, podcasts, and audiobooks, all in one app. Try it today. Why do you think, why did you think that? How did you manufacture? Well, I felt I was being poisoned initially. You felt you were being poisoned? I felt I was being poisoned. And I was, it was just, it was in these FDA approved pills that I was taking from a white lab coat doc that I trusted. So I was actually being poisoned. It just wasn't in the way that I thought. It was. It just wasn't in the way that I thought, I thought that they were poisoning my food and my water that was making me even worse. And once you get like so sleep deprived in conjunction with brain injury and everything else I was

dealing with, it was like, I was just spiraling. And it was just- Do you know why, I mean, did you, did you manufactured a narrative in your head on why they wanted to kill you? Why they wanted to poison you? Yeah, I, I, dude, I was getting so delusional. And I was starting to, you. get to the point of borderline psychosis where I was just disconnected from reality and my imagination had become so real that it didn't even have to make sense anymore. Holy shit. But I felt very, very, very real like people are trying to kill me.

And my wife was making dinner, managing a newborn baby boy and I would come in the house and I would throw all the food in the garbage. I would dump the water out into the sink and say, they're poisoning us and just like freaking out. Holy shit. And my wife is having to deal with all this shit on her own while managing a baby. So it had become a complete nightmare for her. And that same treatment continues. You just need more medication, more medication, more medication. And I just kept getting worse and worse and worse until we made the decision that I was going to go through a med board to get out of the military. And when this kind of all transpired, I was like so broken. And I felt I had let everybody

down that ever believed in me. I was so depressed that I found myself late one night, laying in bed in the middle of the night, again, unable to sleep even with the meds. And I kept the Glock 19 next to my bed. And I pulled that out. And I was wondering what the muzzle was going to feel like on my teeth, what the gun oil was going to taste like on my tongue. And as I go to do this, I look and my wife and my baby boy are asleep beside me. And I just thought I didn't want to want to wake them up in that moment to that. And I put the gun away. But had they not been right there, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be here to tell that story.

And then I just continued to spiral worse and worse to where I was in a full-blown psychosis, man. Completely, I mean, I thought my wife was Carrie Matheson from Homeland, that she was this blonde CIA agent sent to help save me from this dark military organization that was trying to exterminate me. Are you serious? Like everything was so real. Did you have conversations with your wife about that?

Later on I did after the fact. But at the time I was just, dude, it was like my eyes were just spinning in my head. And I would just trust, luckily I trusted her. I didn't trust anybody else through it, but I would do anything that she said. And, and dude, things just got really weird and confusing. And it would jump. Like the delusion and the hallucinations would just jump from moment to moment. Like my wife had to take me with the baby to go into the commissary to get food on base.

And I remember walking into the commissary and every single person I saw was like a demon ghoul. They had these black sunken eyes and fangs and plat like just zombie skin like falling off the bones. And they're all just glaring at me. And it was so real, so real as I walked around just like cowering and afraid. And my wife was okay. But it was because in my mind she's like, she's like the superhero sent to safety. me and so I would just follow her around like a lost puppy and as we're checking out I remember the checkout lady who's just like working for tips like reaching out for a tip

and I remember her doing that and it felt like she was like trying to suck my soul out of me like it was just crazy shit day in and day out and we got up to the car yeah it was wild we got out to the to the to the front of the commissary and my wife had forgotten to grab something because she was like trying to manage me and a baby and all this shit. And so she's like, stay right here. I want you to stay right in front of this door so I can see you. Stay with the baby. And she goes in. And for whatever reason in that, I had like another freak out and I ran the cart with the baby and ran back to the back of the parking lot and was hiding behind a car. And my wife comes out and she's like, oh, fuck, you know, where did he go? And she's immediately thinking like,

How long can the baby survive without me? Who do I need to call? And luckily she starts running through the parking lot, yelling and looking, and I pop my head up. And she's like, oh, thank God. But she was just like, dude, it was putting her through hell dealing with me. Eventually started doing the medical board process, which at Lomor at that time I described as basically going through the bureaucratic equivalent of the Indiana Jones Temple of Doom. man. It was like a complete shit show. The woman that they had just hired to be the Peblo, which is the liaison officer that helps get you through that process, had inherited like a six month backlog of people

that weren't getting pushed through the medboard on time. And she got into this office expecting that I think she was going to have a really cushy, easy job. And it was just chaos. She had such a backlog of records. And I remember my first meeting with her, I come into the office. and there are stacks of paperwork on all the chairs, every horizontal surface just covered in shit. And I couldn't even sit down at the desk with her because there's so much paperwork just thrown in chaos around. And then we spent my allotted 15 minutes with this woman

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

she'd lose it and say, I need you to do that again. And it was just this for months and months and months. I ended up going to the VA in Fresno to get all my assessments for the disability rating. And my wife had to drive me. But I remember going into that and then going into more psychoses and the place becoming like this nightmarish fun house. And they brought me in to assess me for how bad my PTSD was. And I was explaining what was going on, you know, the psychoses and how bad I had gotten, how I'm not sleeping. I went in to see a TBI specialist and a nervous system specialist.

And I remember he brought me into the room and he just looked pissed off. And he had me show my arms and he took this little thing that looked like a spiky pizza cutter. and he just zipped it up my arms really quick and he goes, you don't have any nerve damage and you don't have any TBI. That was all he did. And then I came back out. He wouldn't let my wife in the room for that examination. And when I came back out to my wife, my wife's like, that was it?

And he's like, yep, that's it. And so a lot of the stuff I did there, it was like these people were just not even acknowledging what was going on. Where is this again? Fresno VA in California. and I had a stack of medical records and I'd gotten it all put on the disc that they needed and like they had so much medical information on me and yet they were just completely ignoring it. Fortunately, I found one guy there who was assessing me for the musculoskeletal injuries

and he actually read through the medical stuff and he's like, holy shit, man. He's like, listen, that neurologist that you saw won't give a rating to anybody. He's got a chip on his shoulder. he's pissed off. He doesn't want to be here. And it doesn't matter what you have going on. He's not going to look at it. He was like, I see what's going on with you and I'm going to help you the best I can. And so he helped me get a very robust package together for all my, the muscle injuries related to the nervous system damage. And then everything was submitted. In this process took about a year. Meanwhile, my wife is having to manage this shit show that is me in and out of psychosis day to day.

again seeing the psychiatrist and the psychologist who are trying to manage this shit show recommending to my wife that I be put into an inpatient program but my wife is a trauma ER nurse and so she had dealt with psychotic patients and she knew how bad those inpatient facilities were and so she was doing everything she could to keep me out of it my parents ended up flying out to try to help her out but it was just fucking chaos and then the rating finally come back after months of waiting. And they gave me a 50% disability rating for PTSD, and that was it.

And my wife is like, what are you fuck? You're in active psychosis. You have all this other stuff, and they completely disregarded it. So my only course of action was I had to fly out to Washington, D.C., still in and out of psychosis, still fucked up. Meanwhile, I was going to Stanford Hospital, and I was getting more surgeries on my leg

that was really jacked up. that ended up just making my leg way worse in the long run because they actually, they use their medical students and they give a good discount or whatever it is to the military guys, but you get to go in and you get to be, you know, basically a lab rat for dissection for the medical students at Stanford and they fucked it up on me. I remember I got out of the surgery there

and my throat hurt like a motherfucker. And I had been intubated before by others and normally it doesn't hurt that much. But dude, they must have had, like I remember that one of the residents that was going through training coming in to get ready for that surgery. And he was like fumbling with the IV. And he missed the IV and then accidentally he turned it on. And so I was just getting like doused in IV fluid.

This dude was so nervous. And I'm pretty sure that they just fucked me up in that surgery. But anyways, I get my summer white uniform together. And this is like, this becomes like a very formal, almost like disciplinary action. You feel like there's a lot of scrutiny against you, like your lying is kind of how you're treated as you go into this process to do an appeal. But my wife and I fly out to D.C. with our baby boy. It's a shit show because, again, I'm in and out of psychosis. And I remember we go into this panel and you're in this little waiting room waiting to see these three high-ranking military individuals.

I think they were all either 05 or 06 rank. And one was a flight surgeon. one was another naval aviator and one was a Marine. And so you walk into this room and you have to stand at attention. They're up on an elevated platform behind these big podiums. And they just kind of like look down at you. And you have to state your name and it's very like you have to do this and this and this. So it's awkward and uncomfortable.

And then they start grilling me. And the pilot that was on the panel thought I was just trying to get out of the military so I could go fly for the airlines. It was very obvious. None of them had really even looked at my medical records or had any idea what was going on, except I think that Marine had. And so those two like kind of reamed questions at me for probably about 10 minutes. And then the Marine finally just kind of cut them off. And he's like, listen, you served your nation honorably and we're going to help you out. You and your family have a wonderful day. And so in that moment, they awarded me 100% disability. But had that Marine not been on that boy, and the panel is always rotating, that the outcome could have come very differently. Luckily, at least one of these guys actually opened the folder

in front of his face to see what was actually going on. Then I was out, man. It took several more months of waiting for the paperwork to go through and then moved back to Northern Michigan with my family. We bought a small piece of property out in the middle of nowhere and continued that same treatment at the VA, which was just more problems, more pills, more problems. And that was the only solution.

And when I said the Seroquel is not helping, it's making me worse, it's making me feel shitty, it's not even helping my sleep anymore. The only answer is, well, that's because we need to give you a higher dose. And within three days of going in with that issue, they boosted me from 300 milligrams a night, up to 450 milligrams a night of this medication. and within just a few days of that increase in the medication,

my wife came home from an interview. She was getting a different job as a nurse. And so she left me at home with my mom and my son so my mom could keep an eye on me because I was still in a bad spot. And when she got home, she kind of wondered where I was at and she heard me rustling around

in one of the rooms of the house. And when she came in, she found me, I was completely bare-ass naked. At this point, I had like shriveled up. Like I had lost so. much weight. I didn't even look like the same person. My skin was pale and placid. I had my body covered in all these scars. I had shaved off my hair in chunks for some reason. My eyebrows were missing. I had shaved off what facial hair I had. And the only thing I was wearing is I had a black

garbage bag tied around my neck like a cape because I thought I was going to go out into the northern Michigan snowy weather and fight crime like a superhero. Holy shit. I was naked Batman. And so my wife, you know, being an ER doc and having dealt with psychotic patients was very calm. She called the VA and said what was happening. And they said, we're hanging up and we're calling the police. And very shortly thereafter, this squad car pulls up in our driveway. This doughy-looking police officer who looked like he had no idea what the fuck was going on,

comes up to our house and tells my wife he has to put me in the back of the squad car to take me to the hospital. And my wife's like, there's no way you're going to put him in the back of that car with what he has going on. So she loaded up our baby boy. My mom jumped in the back seat and then we drove towards the emergency room, which was about an hour drive from where we live. And on that ride, I hallucinated that nuclear warhead had gone off at our home. And there was this plume of that nuclear blast like chasing us down. I hallucinated that there were trees and animals and vehicles flying through the sky, that the trees were like flopping over from the explosive force.

like the sky was just like lightning. It was like fucking wildly vivid. And eventually my wife gets me to the hospital. Apparently I got out of the vehicle and just started taking a leak on a bush in the front and the security guard was right there. And he was trying to arrest me. And my wife's like, no, he's in a psychosis

and we need to get him in there now. And he's like, I've seen worse. And luckily between my mom and my wife, they were able to talk this guy out of sending me to jail. And they got me in, checked me in, and then I got put in this plexiglass room where I had, over the course of the next two days, I had a completely out of body, almost like a psychedelic experience, except it was very dark and very disconnected. I think my soul had left my body and I was stuck in purgatory. I was traveling through space and time from the age of the dinosaurs to like all this different shit, traveling through space to the outer reaches of the galaxy. And I remember myself being trapped in this capsule,

just spinning out into deep space all alone and being so disconnected. Eventually, I came back too out of that. I had been driven by ambulance down to the VA inpatient psychiatric facility at Battle Creek. My family tried to get me in somewhere local, but the entire mental health facility, all the facilities are overrun right now because there's so many people dealing with psychological issues, that there was nothing available. And then they heard I was a veteran.

They're like, well, we can send them to the VA. And so I was transferred by ambulance down to this facility. And when I came to on the floor of that cold room, I thought I was in a prison cell. And I also thought someone had chopped off my dick. Like I hallucinated that when I reached down there, it was just like mush and blood and gore. And I had a diaper on that you could see the blood,

which all was a hallucination, obviously. but it was like I was still in and out of these hallucinations. But eventually, I remember people kept walking up to what I thought was a locked prison door and looking through at me. I could see these eyeballs looking in. But eventually I kind of stood up and was able to open the door

and walk out into this hallway. And it was just bright white fluorescent lighting and tile flooring. There's other veterans like moaning and murmuring, like basically human zombies walking around. And I walked down, into like the little waiting area and it started having more movements of lucidity where i was actually realizing what was really going on um but what i you know there's a ton of stuff i hallucinated

that wasn't real but as i started to see the real things that were going on i was pretty disinheartened by how bad it was um the food again was absolutely abysmal quality there were guys there that had been in and out of the prison system as they had been homeless and dealing with drug addiction and they all agreed that they would rather be in federal prison than in this facility because the food's better. You get to go outside every day at prison and there's more structure and care for prisoners than there are of people in this impatient psychiatric facility. The water that you could drink that came out of the tap, it tasted like it came out of a broken hot tub. In order to make it tolerable, people would mix it with this artificially flavored and colored. You could either have the

lemonade or raspberry lemonade flavor. And so that's what you did to make it. it tolerable, which was just more shit in your system. The only thing that they had an abundance of again was they were just throwing all sorts of different pills at you. And I remember becoming very frustrated because you only very rarely got to meet with the psychiatrist who would explain what medications they were going to put you on. But then very quickly, they would just be giving you a bunch of other shit. And I didn't know what it was and I didn't like that. And every 15 minutes at night, because I was on one-to-one care, they were required to come into my room. with the flashlight and shine the flashlight in my face.

So probably, again, the most important thing that I could do would just get some sleep. Yet every 15 minutes I was being awoken to make sure I was safe. That'll drive a motherfucker crazy in itself. Yeah. It's literally a technique. Yeah.

So Searschool, you get a little taste of that. You get sleep deprived, you get malnourished, you get treated less than human. And perfectly healthy, robust humans, you know, seals, Marines, pilots, aircrew, at the peak of their fitness and mental capabilities, go through that. And within a week of that experience, a few days of that experience, perfectly healthy people will have visual and auditory hallucinations.

Now you take guys who are already in a really bad spot and you do the exact same shit to them. What the fuck do we think is going to happen? And my only thought is that it's intentional. It's intentionally designed to drive you into a hole to where you have to be overmedicated. which feeds that pharmaceutical machine that has control of the VA system. And it's just a cash cow for them. Drive people onto their meds, get you on the meds, and keep you on your meds. That is their business model.

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Very recent. But as I became more lucid and more frustrated seeing this treatment, I made a plan to escape. You know, I was making weapons with wet socks inside of other tube socks, tying them off, showing other, I call them prisoners. honestly, how to get out and how to make weapons. And my plan was late at night, I was going to run out and pull this fire alarm.

And when they took us outside for the fire, those of us that wanted to could run. So I had slowly been stockpiling like snacks and stuff and some warmer clothing because it's still like late winter in Michigan. So there's still snow on the ground. So I'd kind of planned it all out. And late at night, I snuck out and pulled the fire alarm thinking that they're going to take us outside, but apparently somebody had already tried this trick. They immediately had the base security there, armed security, and they forced me into a room. And then Mike, who was a really good

nurse that worked there, is like, he had a syringe. And he goes, listen, man, we can either do this the easy way or the hard way. And I trusted him. I didn't trust much of the other staff. It was like, all right, Mike, stick it in my ass. And he takes this thing and he shoves into my butt cheek and injects me with what's called hell doll and it should just be called hell because as this stuff entered my bloodstream i felt like there were insects trying to crawl their way through my skin i felt extremely restless like all i wanted to do was tear my own skin off and run and scream uh and mike would pace up and down the hallways with me as i'm just like screaming and yelling and just trying to get this shit out of my system and eventually i collapsed um what the fuck is it it's a antipsychotic medication

that just basically, it's a fucking nightmare. It's a torturous experience, but it's what they use to like shut you down if you're being unruly. And I came to in just like a drug-induced stupor, like literally drooling on myself. And I had been voluntarily admitted to this facility. I had gone there on my own will.

I wanted to be there to get help. And when I saw that this was the opposite of help, it was not a healing environment. I wanted to get the fuck out. And even though I was voluntary, and they should have released me when I wanted to be released, they refused.

And now that this incident had happened, they use as an opportunity to commit me to the facility. And while I'm literally drooling on myself, I go in to see this female attorney who's supposed to be my legal representation. And she puts a pin in my hand. She moves my hand on the paper

and says, just sign here. And I just kind of scribbled my hand. And then she moved the documents and I scribble. unknowingly what I was doing was I had just committed myself to the facility without any trial, without any process really other than this lady putting a pin in my impaired hand in having me somehow legally signed these documents. And by doing that, I was now committed to this facility.

They could tell me when I could leave, which they already were doing illegally prior. And then it also stripped me of my constitutional right to bear arms. Immediately I was put onto a list the lien network as if I committed a crime. So if I'm ever pulled over by the police, I pop up in their network. And this is an American veteran just trying to get fucking help for severe psychological issues induced by the medication that I had been given. But I was broken, man. I was just a drooly zombie at that point. I became just another one of these dudes walking around the hallways, drooling on myself, murmur.

to myself and eventually with the advocacy of my family, my mom being in health care, my dad having been in health care, my wife being an ER nurse, they were able to advocate to get me out of the facility and bring me back to Northern Michigan back to my little piece of property and reconnect with my family. But now the burden of taking care of me all comes back onto my family. How long are you in there? I was in there for 40 days, which, dude, it was a fucking nightmare, man. Sounds like it.

And I was so broken after that, man. I couldn't really read anymore. All the, I don't even know what all they had me on at this point. I was just confused. And the only thing that would give me any relief was eating ice cream, drinking booze and smoking cannabis would give me like a little relief from like just the fucking misery I was feeling inside. I could barely do the dishes.

It was miserable for my wife. Like the only reason that we didn't, get divorced was because she was afraid that I was pretty good at, I was good at masking and acting like I was okay when I wasn't. And she was afraid that if it went to a custody hearing, I might earn custody of our children. And then I would harm them in another unpredictable psychosis. So she was stuck in this fucking nightmare with me, afraid that I would harm her children. And it went on like that for years, man. It was dark. All I wanted to do was just wander off into the woods and in my own life.

My little boy and little girl would come up to ask me to play and I would push him away and tell him to leave me alone. And I was just a fucking miserable, broken shell of a human being. All I could feel was betrayal for the government that I had served, anger and pain, man. And I had a friend who knew I was getting really bad, that same friend Matt that had been like an older brother to me. And he reached out and he goes,

hey man, we're going to go on a mountain bike trip up to Marquette. Michigan, which is phenomenal mountain biking because he knew I was in a bad spot. And he planned it all out. He pulled up out front and he helped me load up my bike and he took me up to Marquette. And we spent a few days up there just riding bikes and being in nature. And when that trip was done, he gave me a book by Rich Roll. It's called Finding Ultra. It was basically his story of being, basically struggling with alcohol, being a corporate

lawyer, like hating his life and finding his way back to health through. through endurance sports. And so I read that book and kind of like a little bit of flicker of hope came on. And so I started like mountain biking again. I couldn't really run at that time because my leg was still so jacked up from that botched surgery, but I could ride a mountain bike. And so I started riding and then I opened my eyes to some books by Michael Pollan. There's one called In Defensive Food and I started reading how broken and corrupt the food

system is and so really cleaned up my diet. I already ate pretty healthy but I didn't realize how much of the food that I was was eating was still poisoning me. And then I read the book by Michael Pollan, which I was really struggling to read, but I could read like a paragraph or so at a time and listen to the audiobook at the same time and retain enough of information from it that I started to see like there was another way forward. And the book that really changed it was in defense of food or not in defensive food, how to change your mind by Michael Pollan, which is now a Netflix documentary on the use of psychedelic assisted therapy to treat mental health issues.

And so it opened my eyes to that. The VA was still the same. You just got to keep taking your meds. That's the only option. And they didn't understand how miserable I was. Or maybe they did. They just didn't know what to do. But I started seeking out psychedelic assisted therapy.

I reached out to vet solutions. And I didn't really qualify for their program because I didn't have the combat experience and I wasn't from the special forces. And they were, I mean, as they've described it before, it's like Schindler's list for them. Marcus and Amber Capone are trying to serve everybody they possibly can. And there's so many people that need this. But I didn't really qualify, so I didn't get in originally.

But they referred me to another nonprofit organization called Warrior Angels Foundation. And those guys were doing, it was called the 4x4 by 48 Challenge, which is from David Goggins. It's basically you run four, miles every four hours for 48 hours straight. So you end up running 48 miles over two days. And they were putting together a fundraiser for this thing that I'd gotten an email about. And I was like, you know, I don't think I can run that. Like, why would I even get involved in this?

But it was something in me that was like, why don't you engage with it? And they were doing a fundraiser. And for the first time I went on to their site where they were doing this fundraiser and I put a little bit about my story. It was the first time I had ever shared anything about what I was going through publicly. I felt internally. that I was like a piece of shit, a let down to everybody in my community, and I had isolated myself from everything and everybody. But for something called that I needed to share a little of my story. And within a week of putting that up, I had raised almost $10,000 on my fundraiser page.

And so Adam Marr and Andrew Marr, who were running that foundation, reached out to me and said, hey man, what are you doing this week? Do you want to come down to Texas? We'll fly you down, put you up, and you can be part of the event. And I was like, all right, I'll come. So they flew me down to Texas where they put on this event and dude, it was like finding a community of so many other individuals who had been through the same shit. There were Marine Raiders. There were seals, Rangers, Green Berets, Marcus and Amber Capone were there.

Lieutenant General Christopher Miller was there who had served as Secretary of Defense under Trump's first term. But a lot of really incredible people in this space. And every veteran that I talked to had such a similar story. They had been a high performing, hard charging individual in the military. Things started to, the wheels started to fall off the bus from that operator syndromes that people are experiencing and the combination of mental health issues, the PTSD, the TBI, all these things compounding to where your life starts falling apart. And when we reached out for help, the answer was take these meds.

And we all got sucked down into the same fucking dark hole where our fucking lives. fell apart. We lost our minds and a lot of people fucking almost didn't make it. And there was every single guy I talked to as we were doing this run phase by phase had a similar story. And I realized like this isn't just me that's suffering through this. This is happening to all of these other veterans. And that's just the recipe that they're using to pump people on these meds. And it's so fucked and it's poisoning these people. But dude, it was like being welcomed into a community where I finally fit in and gave me some hope. And in that in that 48 hours we had a peyote ceremony with a Native American group. And for the first time, I felt really connected to something again after being

disconnected for all those years. And it was something told me that I had a sense of purpose still. Like I needed to keep moving forward, that I was still here for a reason. And that gave me hope. At that same event, I met Jesse Gould, who runs Heroic Hearts Project. And he hooked me up and sent me on a trip down to Peru where I experienced ayahuasca. And through that experience, I had this massive heart opening, massive connection to the divine that was beyond anything I had experienced to that point and came back just feeling like a whole human again. I became able to get off all of my medications before going on that trip. Again, I had to wean myself off and I had replaced it by good nutrition, exercise, sunlight, connection to nature.

And then the ayahuasca just like opened me right back up. So I felt like a fucking human being again. And I came back to my family and I remember telling my wife how good I felt and she just thought I was being manic. She didn't believe that this was genuine or going to last. And it took years for her to start to see that I was actually getting better. Years off. Years of integration.

I got involved with the Wisdom Dojo. which was the AMP Dojo originally and started doing meditation through them. I was originally hooked up with a dude named Moose, who was my integration coach from Perot Carc Project. I don't know if you know Moose. Yeah, he was mine. Nice. He was my integration coach too.

Yeah. And he was showing me this breathworks. He was showing me Wim Hof breathing. At that point, I was like, this is some woo-woo bullshit, you know. But here's a Navy SEAL who says he can hold his breath for four minutes after he blows all his air out. So I want to see what this is about. And that's kind of what pulled me into it. And then I did the breath work and I felt good.

And soon enough, after I had practiced with moose a few times, like I was holding my breath for a really long time with the air blown out of my lungs. I was like, holy shit, I feel really peaceful too. And then he introduced me to the wisdom dojo and I went through their meditation program, eventually becoming an instructor for them and still am. Oh, right on, man. And then that kind of gave me a sense of purpose. That gave me like a daily connection to the divine within, like without the need of medicine.

I experienced a number of other psychedelic experiences over the course of those years. Iboga, which was incredibly powerful, the ultimate healing tool that I've ever experienced, healing my nervous system, healing my brain. A network of nonprofit organizations basically gave me access to all the things to get me better. Defenders of freedom brought me down to Texas for a TBI treatment. A generous couple in Austin, Clay and Eleanor Womack invited me into their facility. where I received like state-of-the-art lab work, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, stem cell therapy with that.

And I came out of that month-long program with them just like feeling like a fucking superhuman again. All these things were being healed piece by piece physically. And I started to gain a better understanding of what had been off all the time, which the physiology of my brain had been destroyed from that ejection. And then when I went back trying to charge at it hard again,

it started to unravel even more. from the G forces, from the drinking culture, all these things, the not sleeping well, eroded the physiology in my brain. And it was a physical issue with my brain that led to all this detriment. But it's treated like it's purely psychology, purely just a PTSD rating. And it's actually, the physiology is off. The, you know, the hormones are out of whack. The brain is like not firing the way it's supposed to.

And it causes all this chaos that gets labeled as PTSD. but kind of came to understand that it was a much bigger whole human part, you know, it was physical, it was spiritual, emotional. And when I started to address those issues, I just fucking got my life back, man. I went from barely able to do the dishes being told that I just had to take my pills for the rest of my life to becoming a loving husband, a loving father and my two children, who I'm so lucky still to have after the hell that they went through. To writing my book, getting my story out to share what's going on, you know,

underneath the medical system and behind the doors at the VA, because I know this is something that's affecting people in the military and the VA and in the entire healthcare community, man. Our medical system is so fucking broken. Like if you need to get surgery and you need to put back together, our medical system is awesome for that. But when it comes to chronic health conditions, in long-term health, it is very broken, very broken.

Your wife stuck with you through all that. She did. That's a saint. Yeah. She's an angel, man. She's an angel and she fucking went down into the depths of hell to pull me out of that. And it fucking burned her wings off, man. And it scarred her.

How are you guys doing today? Dude, she fortunately got picked up by the Hope Project, which is a spinoff from Heroic Hart's project that serves the spouses. And she recently got to go down to Mexico and experience medicine and is starting to get to do her own healing. She's in the Vajra Ocean, which is part of the wisdom, well, separate from the wisdom dojo, but a similar meditation program with the same folks that helps give the wives access to mindfulness, breathwork and meditation to start to heal. And she's, I mean, she's a saint. She went through hell. And she's, But it hurt her, man.

It put her through a lot of hell. And for a while, I think there was a lot of resentment that I was getting help and she wasn't. And she was seeing me starting to get better and she was almost maybe a little angry about that, which is pretty common I hear, which is why they started the Hope Project was like to give the women that had been through hell

some healing as well. But we're doing so much better, man. Our relationship, I mean, not to say there's not still struggles, man, but from where it was it's it's a miracle that it's gotten to where we are now to have love in our home love with our children do we got just two incredible little kids that are so bright man really a gift and now after being through all that you know I see that it's all been a gift it's all been to put me where I am today where I have so much love in my heart

such a purpose of service to so many people. It's all been a gift, man. Now I get to be a coach. I do integration coaching with people. I work for Sharp Performance with Steve Bunting, who you had. You work with Sharp too? Yeah, yeah. What a great organization.

Yeah, they're kick-ass, man. And it's helping a lot. It's helping a lot of people in the firefighter community, law enforcement, military. I love what they're doing. Yeah, it's been a gift to get to be there and help them with that. I've been doing public speaking. I just got picked up by Jason Redmond and their team over at Eagle Rise.

Right on. So I got to join their speaking bureau. If anybody's looking for a professional speaker, I do motivational speaking and kind of help inspire a culture of health and nutrition. I work for a number of other nonprofits. Dude, I wear like a million hats right now. Right on. And then I started my own.

online coaching platform that I'm just launching because I see a lot of the veterans that come to me and reach out after they see me on a podcast or something, they just don't have the financial ability to pay for coaching. So I've created this online platform so they can still access videos, forum, a ton of resources, and still have monthly meetings with me in a group setting that's way more affordable for people in those tough situations. Because what I found with this coaching is there's so many people that need it that need this guidance in getting their lives back through holistic health. But dude, it's so hard for people in those struggle moments to afford it. So I wanted to create something to serve those folks. But dude, just, yeah, doing a little bit

of everything to try to help, man. When's the last time you went to the VA? Years ago, man. I won't go back into that system. Yeah. Yeah, I don't blame you. Yeah, I do, you know, I had Doug Collins on. He's the director of the VA right now. I think I listened to that episode. I know he's trying like hell to make some changes. I don't know what all changes he's made, but he definitely gives a shit. Oh, yeah.

I will say that. Yeah, I think those guys are just handcuffed, man. The fucking tentacles of the pharmaceutical industry get to control the show. Well, that and just the bureaucracy itself, I mean, it's horrible. She's got a breakaway. She's all alone. She's going. She's going!

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but your kid's stomach should be. Culturalile probiotics, the science of a boring gut. See website for details. Have you heard of envy mind health? I'm just curious. No, I don't think I've heard of that one. This is a friend of mine, see old Johnny Wilson. Oh, yeah. He started this country.

Do you know Johnny? I've met Johnny before, yeah. Great guy, man. Johnny Wilson, yeah, he was in a motorcycle accident not too long ago, right? What? I think you're thinking of somebody else. He runs coast to coast? No.

This is a different, Johnny. No. Okay. He started a couple of nonprofits in the SEAL community. I can't remember the ex. I think I know, but I don't want to say the wrong name. But then kind of turned that over, like it was up and run and turned it over. He, this is actually, I think this, I'm curious to hear what you think about this,

because I think this is a pivotal moment. And I think it is, I think it could be just as impactful as kind of, of the rediscovery of psychedelics within the veteran community. And so he has come up with this company where you wear the wearable devices like a whoop or the aura ring or do you wear any of those? Yeah, I know I actually just got an aura ring from a nonprofit that's tracking my biometrics, but that's been really helpful just to see sleep quality and... Okay, so that's what this is.

Okay, cool. This basically takes your health debt. of and you kind of build your own network. So maybe, you know, it, it, whoever, for me, it might be guys that I was in a sniper hide with, or just friends of mine that were in service with me. And it puts you in a little network. And so it monitors, you know, I mean, obviously it monitors

your, you know, your sleep, all your vitals, all that kind of stuff, right? And so what happens is, you know, they get a baseline and then as things start to deteriorate, your network is alerted. You know, and they don't, they're alerted like, hey, that's clever. Sean's health is, Sean's vitals is starting to, you know, he's losing sleep. His heart rate's a little elevated, whatever. Yeah. You know, and it doesn't tell everybody in the network, like, hey, this is everything that's happening. And it's just a little, hey, vitals are deteriorating a little bit.

Maybe you want to check on Kagan. Yeah. And then a phone call, you know what I mean? And then your buddies call up, hey, what's going on? I see, you know, we got the alert. Everything good. Is everything okay? What do you think of that?

I think that's a great idea. I think that's a fucking really good idea too because it's not anybody having to ask for help, having to be weak. it is triggered by biometrics. Yeah. By vitals. And then your buddies, your buddies that you want to check on you are the ones checking on you.

Oh yeah. I think that can prevent a lot of issues. I do too, man. I want to talk to Doug about this because I think this could be really big. Oh, yeah. And you're not going to have to jump through the legal hoops to get that thing going like you are with psychedelics. Yeah, for sure.

Not discarding psychedelics by any means. Right. I mean, I think the push. We need quicker solutions, though. Exactly. And the push for psychedelics is, I mean, it's just growing and growing that executive order. We just did a thing here in Tennessee where we all went up to the house and the Senate. I went with this woman, Riki Harris, guy, Alex West, who was the youngest sealed ever get into development group. And we actually got the shit passed in the house and the Tennessee Senate. So they're going to reschedule Ivogain so that we can do research.

Now you've got to find funding. Yeah, that's exciting what's happened in Texas too. Yeah, right? So that's the same initiative. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's like Texans for Ivaigaine, this was Tennesseans for Ivigain, and then there's just Americans for Ibegain. But I think every state has one of these organizations. And is that through the Veteran Mental Health Leadership Coalition

that you guys are doing the advocacy for? I worked with them going out. going out to DC when we're advocating for MDMA assisted therapy, which unfortunately got shut down at that one. But they've been doing a lot of good work. I actually have not heard of that organization. Yeah, it's Adam Marr, who used to run the Warrior Angel Foundation that I did that run with and first got me like in the door into the world, the nutraceuticals and lab work and all of that.

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

Anything else? Have you done MDMA assisted therapy? I have. Have you done it with your wife? I did. How was that? It was really helpful. I bet you learned a lot. It was a resentment inoculator. That's a good way to put it. That was a big help. Do you guys continue to do that? Yeah, I think we're coming up on due for another session with it. We did it this winter. How do you guys do it? Do you do it with a therapist? Do you do it by yourself? The first time I did it was

with the friend that I know through the Wisdom Dojo that offered to help her and I. But he, I think next time we'll probably try to do it just together. It was nice to kind of have his guidance on like the dosage and a little bit of guidance, but I think we could, it would be better for us to do it where it's just her and I connecting for the whole duration of it. Man, I've done it like that with my wife and...

That's the way to do it. Dude. So much stuff to go through. Stuff I didn't even, just like any psychedelic thing, right? All kinds of stuff comes up that you're not expecting. But it's, I always say, you know, it's, it seems to be the perfect way to receive and transmit information to each other. Oh, yeah.

Where it all comes from a good place. You know it's from a good place. You're able to receive, you're able to send. and there is no resentment, no anger. Some of the shit can be kind of hard to hear. But you're just like embraced by it. But you know like, you know it all comes from a place of love. And so you're able to stomach it without being defensive.

Yeah. Yeah, it makes those impossible conversations possible. Yeah. All the stuff that just builds up and festers and turns. into resentment and bad shit that comes from it and it just clears that slate, man. It just, that was, yeah, that was really impactful for our, you know, because she's been caring a lot with having seen me like that and like trying to fall back in love with somebody who was a fucking different person for years has been really challenging, as it would be for

anybody but allowing her to see who I am now not the person that I was in that drug-induced stupor for all those years and allowing her to feel safe again with me to open her heart back to me so she can see that guy that she married years ago that I'm still here and I'm better than I've ever been in my life like just so full of life and content and you know she sees me with our kids she sees me the way I love them and take care of them. But sometimes, like, I try to reach out to her and it's hard for her. Sometimes it's hard for her to want it reach back.

I can imagine. But the MDMA assisted therapy and then her trip through the Hope Project helped a lot. The Hope Project are actually giving them those aura rings too. And they had an extra one they let me use too. So they'll track their biometrics after they go through the program to see how things shift. But pretty exciting information. interesting information they're getting out of all of that. Yeah.

But yeah, it's been transformational for her. And now we speak like the same language spiritually, which has been really helpful. Because I think for a while it was a lot of kind of skepticism on her end and how genuine I was with all of this. And her kind of wondering like, what's this meditation all about? But now she sees me go to these meditation retreats. I'll go do like a silent meditation retreat with the Wisdom Dojointed. Joe, and I'll come back. And dude, it's like better than a psychedelic journey.

Just sitting with yourself in silence for a week straight. It's like a slow motion psychedelic experience with no medicine. What is that like? I mean, do you literally just sit there for a week straight without any communication, no talking? What is it? No talking, no eye contact and just. No eye contact?

Yeah. And at this point, to go on those retreats, you've progressed through a lot of the training. so you're pretty decent at meditating. But man, when you sit for that duration, you're sitting for 12 hours a day, just meditating, doing nothing else. And you can get up and go to the bathroom. There's still meals,

but you don't interact with anybody else the whole time. So you're just kind of in your own head with your own thoughts. And the first few days can be kind of an abrupt and a harsh, like a lot of shit coming up, a lot of emotion, a lot of past stuff that can be really heavy when you're just sitting there. But what I have found for myself, at least, and everybody's a little different, but by the end of it, like, it's like the hard drive got gets defragged.

And then you're just, you're just there. And instead of having your mind chattering, like the dude who just won't shut up in the room and can never hear anybody else talking, that mind finally like Peter's out. And there's just stillness. And in that stillness, you can hear the divine whispers of God, man. You can hear just something beautiful that's underneath that when you're able to get the ego to shut the fuck up for a little bit. When you shut the analytical mind up for a little bit, there's something so beautiful inside of us, this presence of God that is behind our eyes. And when we can just shut the fucking ego down by doing that, you know, a retreat like that or meditating. In the medicine, you get to experience that too.

But it brings you to that same place completely naturally. It's sort of this, it's the path of like the monk or you have the shamanic path to experiencing this awakening through medicine. Like we get to experience with Ibogaine or Iboga or ayahuasca where you get this, you get this glimpse of the divine and feeling connected to something greater than yourself. That's so deep and pure and true. And that's always there. And by meditating, you can get to that same exact place. It's just a different route, a different path up that mountain. And you can get to that path through the Bible.

There's so many different paths to bring you to connection with God. But, dude, it is absolutely incredible to be able to just sit without any medicine and get to that place and check in with it daily if you want. Do you see other people? What would you mean like in the- What would be the difference to go into this retreat versus just going out in the woods for a week? I mean, you certainly could do it in the woods for a week. for a week. It's kind of nice to see how they do it. Okay. And it's also kind of nice sometimes to be in community while you're meditating.

You can feel the energy of the others in that room. But you absolutely could just go out into the woods and bring a tent and live out in the woods and do it yourself. It's a really healthy experience, man. We have a society that is so fast and we're so driven to get the next to get the next accomplishment, to make this much money, and it's like we're always just reaching and grasping and going and to even feel that we have a sense of worth, we feel we have to do so much to prove that we're worthy. At least I know I did for so much of my life,

feel I had to prove that I deserved. But in that stillness, you get to feel that you've always been exactly where you need to be, that you're already good enough, that you are love and light, and that you don't have to strive anymore. You don't have to be grasping. And it's so healthy to just sit in that stillness, man. It's something that is so undervalued in our civilization.

But when you can learn to calm the body, to settle the nervous system, to allow the mind to settle, so there's not just that constant chatter or the ego. There is just so much peace. And you hear people talk about enlightenment is this like this destination that you have to go, this mountain that you have to climb, that's this impossible.

impossible journey to get there when really the secret is that's always been inside of us. That is like our baseline state is that peace and love. And you get a glimpse of it through psychedelics, but you don't even need the psychedelics once you've refined these techniques with meditation. And it helped me get there because I don't think I would even started meditating until I had my eyes open and the neuroplasticity. So I think they can really work very well in conjunction, which is what the wisdom dojo does. It takes people coming off of a retreat with vet solutions or the mission within or heroic hearts projects and then it helps them integrate and learn these techniques, which sounds like you did yourself. And man, it's the ultimate

technology for finding peace and love within oneself. I have not meditated in years. Yeah. I don't know. It's easy to fall away from. I'm guilty of it too, man. I'll have times in my life where I stop and then like life starts turning into a shit show again and if I can reset and get back into it it's like it's just like living the day to day moments from a state of peace and it completely transforms everything that happens around me all my interactions with people all the things that would have been an argument are stressful or turn into just so much more peaceful when you can bring that presence into any situation and I'm no pro I still fuck it up I still have bad days I still sometimes want to murder people when I'm driving in my car, you know, but the more I can do that,

you know, it really, it really helps a lot. It's really beautiful. Yeah, man. Well, we're wrapping up the interview here, so I got one question left for you. Yeah, fire away. If your wife were sitting here right now, what would you say to her? And I'd tell her how much I love her, that she's this angel that save me from hell. And now that we've been through that hell, we get to, we get to thrive together. We have the two most beautiful little children. We have everything. And now it's her turn to get to enjoy what she, what she earned by pulling me through that darkness. And I would, dude, just hold her, man. I love her so much. Good for you, man. Well, Kagan, it was an honor, brother. It was an honor to interview you.

Thank you so much for having me on this and let me share the story with the world, Sean. It's incredible what you built and shining a lot of light on some dark fucking corners of the world, man, but it needs to come out. The only way to heal is to acknowledge that the wound is festering, man,

and to clean it out. Yeah, it's a wild time to be alive, but I'm so glad the truth is coming out, man. Me too. And I'm just huge props to what you're doing, especially the stuff was sharp. Those guys are fucking awesome. Heck yeah.

So it's cool to know that you're a part of that. Yeah, I wish I had access to that coaching when I was having my struggles, man. Because had they coached me in the direction of holistic healing right off the bat, I'd still be flying fighter jets. Man, the amount of money that the military is probably losing by losing the experience and all these trained people as they burn out at such rapid rates and the CO communities and the fighter communities, if they would give guys access to that coaching

and it could keep people so healthy and so strong for so much longer, man. Maybe one day. Maybe. They got to give a shit first, though. Yeah, yeah, the Navy, I don't think even wants to acknowledge that TBI is a thing. They don't want to acknowledge it.

Just opens a can of worms. And there's a problem. But it talks for another day. All right, brother. Thank you, Sean. No matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.