transcript

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[01:33] So you want me to take a psychedelic and I'm supposed to get better.

Speaker 3:
[01:37] Marcus and Amber Capone.

Speaker 4:
[01:39] A military family, they formed vets. In their quest for healing, Marcus' fellow Navy SEAL friend introduced them to Ibogaine.

Speaker 1:
[01:45] What is Ibogaine and what was the experience that you had?

Speaker 2:
[01:50] Think of it as a single molecule that gets extracted. It is extremely potent and what's actually helping the individual work through psychological issues. I was drinking extremely heavily, really struggling.

Speaker 3:
[02:01] He legitimately thought he would be doing us a favor by removing himself from the equation.

Speaker 2:
[02:07] I had been on pharmaceuticals for years, not getting better.

Speaker 3:
[02:11] I thought, I wonder if this Ibogaine thing could work.

Speaker 2:
[02:14] I went from thinking this was crazy to, wait, this is medical treatment.

Speaker 3:
[02:17] When he came around the corner, it truly was like being reunited with someone that I hadn't seen in over 15 years.

Speaker 2:
[02:24] This is exactly what the guys need. Civilians absolutely can relate to what we're doing, and mental health, brain health doesn't discriminate.

Speaker 1:
[02:34] Marcus, Amber, thank you so much for taking the time to be with me today. I'm very excited to talk to you both. People had been recommending the documentary In Waves and War to me for quite some time, and I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll get to it. No, no, no, you really need to see this. And I was on a plane about two weeks ago flying out of the country and I downloaded it to watch on the flight and watch this documentary was incredibly moved by it. All the more so because I was en route to doing my first Iboga ceremony and that was 19 days ago. So this is the first that I'm talking about it publicly. But it was a life-changing and incredibly profound experience that I don't think I'll ever forget. And just an incredible gift, not just to myself, but to my wife who happens to be here today, Julie, and to my kids. In the aftermath of that experience, I called Tyler, my stepson of my producer, who's here as well. And I said, we need to get Marcus and Amber on the podcast. And he said, we're already in an email exchange. Like, you know, we've already had some back and forth. And I think that illustrates like the, this sort of synergistic nature of the universe. So it's perfect that you guys are here today and now.

Speaker 3:
[04:04] Definitely.

Speaker 2:
[04:05] Well, Rich, thank you. Thank you. And it almost seems like after the medicine, all these things just happened to fall in place. Just like you said, having those email conversations and prior to them even talking to you about, hey, there's this couple that wants to be on the show and you met them halfway. And I think we've seen it happen all the time. I mean, we can go far out there and call it the universe or whatever, but I think you just become more aware of all these things and line up.

Speaker 3:
[04:31] Yeah, I don't think it's an accident we're here today. We're honored to be here today.

Speaker 1:
[04:35] I think it on a metaphor level, it also illustrates one of the reasons why I decided to have this experience, which is my insistence on just being willful in my life, this idea that you just always have to push, you can't take a break and the moment that you relax is a shame-inducing moment where you're not being productive and you're worthless unless you're accomplishing something. This is kind of like a core wound that I'm trying to unravel and this experience has gone a long way towards that. But when you're in that place of just being present and being allowing, like being in surrender, I suppose, I've been in recovery for a long time, so I'm not unfamiliar with that concept, but it's still a struggle and a practice. When you can just be and things come to you, it's like, of course, you guys were already, and you're here because I wasn't interfering and trying to make anything happen.

Speaker 3:
[05:35] That was such a huge part of, I think, what eventually presented itself as this opportunity for Marcus to experience Ibogaine. I thought that I should be able or would be able to fix it in my humanness, that I should be able to outthink it, to outsmart it, whatever the problem was, I was going to find a way to fix it. I realized that I couldn't do this on my own, that I had to completely surrender this idea that I could control, and in relinquishing all control, everything fell into place. And so I think that this notion of there's power in surrender, the truest form of strength is in vulnerability, et cetera, has been a big lesson for us to learn because we too are like, you know, just try harder and work faster.

Speaker 2:
[06:26] And we're working through that. I mean, I feel like we're in the throes of it right now. I mean, we are, I don't mean to use the term grinding, but we are in a way because we're just, there's a lot coming at us right now, and we're just trying to put one foot in front of the other and really just focus on the mission. I feel like if we can continue focusing on the mission, the other stuff will work itself out or we'll surround ourselves with the right people that will help us, help guide us. But since day one, I mean, from the second, I kind of was able to think a little bit clearer, my 24 hours after my IBGain. The first thing I said to Amber wasn't like, I'm better, we're good, I'm healed. I just said, this is exactly what the guys need. Like we have to figure out how to introduce this to them. So similar to you, which you're 19 days in your integration, I was 24 hours going, how do we pay this forward? And I think that's what we've been doing since day one.

Speaker 3:
[07:19] And to tie it all back to what you were saying, a lot has happened over the last eight years and it has been through the power of surrender that I've allowed it to come into our lives and had been obedient in continuing to walk the path, but it is all in surrender.

Speaker 1:
[07:38] Yeah. In the documentary, there's some pretty graphic illustration of the more harrowing kind of deployment experiences that you had. Obviously, that comes with PTSD and TBI, and this is something that is happening with all of your team members. From a kind of civilian perspective on this, as somebody who wasn't in the military, like my relationship, like probably most people, with what that experience is like is from movies and television. You watch Zero Dark Thirty or The Hurt Locker or American Sniper, and these creative expressions do a pretty good job of illustrating this internal experience of what it's like to deploy and then come back home, like that scene where Jeremy Renner is in the grocery store and he's just lost. What can you say about what that actually feels like? Are those accurate representations of what you were experiencing, or what can you say about what people might not understand about the loneliness, the depression, the loss of meaning and purpose that is part and parcel of what that's like?

Speaker 2:
[08:55] Yeah. I'd say the first thing is it's extremely subjective in nature. What I went through is maybe similar to what someone else went through, but how they're dealing with it is different. For me, I don't want to put a diagnosis on it, but I was diagnosed with clinical depression and I was depressed. There are days where I couldn't get out of bed, days, weeks. I just shut off. I didn't answer individuals for years. I didn't talk to people for years and just reconnecting and building those relationships back up. But trauma doesn't discriminate. And head trauma doesn't discriminate either. You can be in professions where it's more prevalent, so military around blast exposure or skydiving or IEDs or whatever, but that head trauma, many civilians have the same type of head trauma, so they're dealing with the same type of, let's say, brain issues. The same thing with, if you want to call it PTSD or post-traumatic stress, a civilian who may have been in a really traumatic car accident is the same trauma that a person has experienced on the battlefield. And the brain doesn't know the difference that it's a battlefield trauma or if it's a civilian trauma. So that's why mental health, brain health doesn't discriminate. It's all the same. We've been exposed to certain things, and civilians have been exposed. And that's why I never, there are many civilians go, well, hey, I haven't done what you have. And so this might be kindergarten to you. And I always say, not at all. I was like, what you dealt with and what you experienced is just as bad as what I dealt with and I experienced. And that's why we're dealing, that's why we both have anxiety. We're both depressed. We're both going to brain clinics. It's the same. We're just we just took different professions and different paths. And so I think civilians absolutely can relate to what we're doing. And we've really done a very diligent job and everything that we've done around Veterans. And granted, our nonprofit focuses on Veterans. But we're dealing with so many non-Veterans now because we all have the same issues. I mean, there's definitely a mental health crisis. In terms of outreach. In terms of, well, in terms of inbound, too. I mean, look at our text messages and our DMs. It's constant. Like, where do I go for... I mean, just can't answer them. There's so many individuals. And I'm talking about individuals that are just, not just, but like investment bankers or teachers or nurses. They're looking for the same thing. They're looking for healing somehow. They may be drinking too much or they may be coping with drugs. And how do they get help, right? It's the same help that my friends are asking for. And so it's similar. And so we've done a really good job, I think, of saying, hey, this isn't everyone problem. We're just right now, or initially, focused on the special operations community because that's where I came from.

Speaker 1:
[11:57] Yeah. And there may be quite a bit of shared experience, like to your point of like, well, if you were in a car accident, it's not that different. But there is something so extreme about the experiences that you have had. And when you see the results that are kind of illustrated in the documentary and in the work that you both have been doing, that is also very extreme. And I think that wakes people up and makes them pay attention versus the civilian who maybe is kind of slight depression, drinking a little bit. It's harder to kind of shine a spotlight on that situation in comparison to the veteran community.

Speaker 2:
[12:38] Yeah, we definitely put ourselves out there, but we also asked for it, right? It's a volunteer military. And sometimes we used to say, be careful what you wish for, right? Like I said initially, when we started this conversation, we couldn't wait to get over there and get in the fight. And then you don't realize potentially the toll it takes down the road. And we see it with Vietnam veterans. We saw it with World War II veterans. There was not a plan in place. It's better now. There's a lot of support now, but there was really no support back then. And I always go back to like, oh, hey, remember that crazy, crazy uncle or the grandfather who didn't talk to anybody, or the Vietnam dad that was distant? Well, now we know why.

Speaker 1:
[13:25] Sure, or even World War I, Shellshock. There's not even really understanding what was going on. You talk in the documentary about this idea of just feeling like you're, you want to just go and get bad guys. It's a Superman complex on some level. And then you are quickly disabused of that kind of romantic notion. But as a special operator who's continuing to go out on these deployments, there's this cognitive dissonance. Like, here's what I thought it was going to be. Here's what it actually is. I love these guys. I love so much of this life. But also some recognition of even on it, if it's on a somewhat unconscious level of what it's doing to you.

Speaker 2:
[14:07] And I don't think at the time we ever think of what it's doing to us. Even on deployment, even in bad scenarios or bad situations that have happened, you get over them pretty quickly because you just assume this is part of the job. And we used to talk about this. Like if we lost friends on a mission, we're like, hey, this happens. We signed up for this job. We knew it. We read all the books. We know we're going to lose friends. We drink, we cry, we remember our teammates, and then you wake up the next day and your next mission, here it comes. And you don't even think about what happened before. Maybe there's a little bit of that where you go, okay, lesson learned. I may not put my face in front of the door the same way that we put it in front last night, because last night we lost two guys by doing that. So there are lessons learned and you try to, we always make lessons off of bad things that happen. We call them after action reports, hot washes or whatever you want to call them. What can we do better? So we make sure we don't have this happen again. But that's all we're doing. We're fixing the problem so we can continue mission, right? So we can Charlie Mike and we can continue moving on. And like you just said, we compartmentalize everything very well.

Speaker 3:
[15:24] Master compartmentalizers, Rich, terrifyingly.

Speaker 1:
[15:29] Has that changed in the training now as a result of just the undeniable amount of evidence of the long-term mental health implications of people who go through this program?

Speaker 2:
[15:40] Yeah, Rich, change is slow, as we know. Bureaucracy is bureaucracy. They were talking about this. I remember it starting to be talked about in about 2010. The first individual stepped forward and said, hey, I was driving my car and the whole world just went black. Like he said, his tunnel vision came and he couldn't even barely see anything. It was just... And he had to pull over because he was going to get in a wreck. And he went to a brain clinic and they said, yeah, you have TBI. We would call them TBI, so parts of the brain that were knocked. And if you do them on certain scans, it looks like they're black or there's holes there. There's not really holes in your brain, but it just means that there's blood not circulating, those connections are not communicating. And now we're finding out, depression, anxiety, et cetera, because of those parts of the brain that are turned off. And so the first person stepped forward and honestly, the community shunned him. They're like, you're crazy. This is what are you talking about? He was like the first one who had, I would say, the gall or the courage to just raise his hand and say, you know what, I'm struggling here and I need help. And then after he did, you know, and then the next person and then the next person. And then I went to see a psychiatrist in 2011 on the West Coast when I was an instructor and I went in there and I just was like a little embarrassed. I'm like, hey, I'm this tough guy. I'm in this profession and I'm about, I need to talk to you because I'm not doing well. And he said, man, Marcus, he goes, you're about the 200th guy that's come in here over the last couple of years with the exact same story, with the exact same symptoms. So first off, there's, you're not a problem. And I'm glad you came in, you know, here's some antidepressants. No, but there was an issue and more guys were, were stepping forward because there was, there was a problem and guys wanted to fix it. And to your point, shift happened slowly, but it's happening. We were talking outside earlier, they put sensory deprivation tanks at some of the commands, just for people to bring their nervous system back to, you know, baseline, being present, being, you know, here, versus just redlining day in and day out, you know, all the time. Like there's only so much, if I pour this, this water into this cup, it gets to a point where it's going to start overflowing. And that's what we were doing. We could only take so much before our life starts overflowing.

Speaker 3:
[18:15] There was no release valve. The release valve was just copious amounts of alcohol. And I would just like to quickly add for further contextualization that in our program at Vets, we've seen hundreds, I mean, 1,300 special operations Veterans come through. And the documentary does a decent job of pointing this out. There is a common thread of childhood trauma that exists in the observations that I've made. And that trauma is used to fuel, I think, a lot of these states of high performance. And so it serves you to a point, and then you become like a Greek tragedy. What fuels you is now threatening to kill you. So I think that there's just a necessary component of the ideal recruit that they're looking for, that they need that sort of fueling. And then they also need that compartmentalization to be able to do the job. So it's like, how can you create a release valve that's enough to keep someone in the fight? And I think they're working on it, but it almost seems necessary.

Speaker 1:
[19:27] Yeah, that's very well put. Like it all tracks back to childhood trauma, I would imagine, you know, most unanimously, you know, on some level. Like the archetype of the person who seeks out buds and kind of wants this life is wired in a certain way from very early in their life. So it becomes a self-selecting process, right? And the military kind of understanding that archetype and how to work with that archetype. And then in the aftermath, when you're experiencing these issues, so much so that you're willing to suffer the, quote unquote, embarrassment of going to a psychiatrist. On top of that, there must also be this sense like, well, if I tell this person what I'm really feeling, then I'm going to lose my superpower. Then I won't be able to do my job. I'll be vulnerable in those high stakes environments.

Speaker 2:
[20:17] That is a huge concern of many of the folks. I mean, that's one of the concerns here with, for instance, if we're talking about ibogaine or psychedelic treatment for deep trauma or depression, that's a concern. If I reach out for help and I tell individuals I need help, am I gonna get sidelined? Same thing in athletic, pro sports. It's why they hide so many injuries, bad injuries, because they don't want to lose their contract, right? And in our world, it's losing the job that you literally love doing because it's not a job. It never was a job. It's just a passionate lifestyle that you chose. And so that's a real concern, is reaching out and actually going through a treatment. And not even Ibogaine, but let's just say simple talk therapy and prescriptions that may help you get through. I don't know if you're able to work again after you make those choices. So that's a big struggle too. So you know what? I'm not gonna go ask for help, and I'm just gonna continue overflowing my cup and trying to see how long that goes.

Speaker 3:
[21:24] Which of course then affects the family, and the ripple out effect is pretty significant.

Speaker 1:
[21:30] So in this semi-civilian sort of life, that you start to live where he's an instructor, and you think like everything's gonna kind of normalize and it's getting worse. One of the hardest parts of the documentary to watch is the home video footage with the kids, and like your interaction with the kids. It must be difficult for you to watch that now. To see how detached you are. And you, Amber, are like, God bless you. You're like trying to figure out like, okay, what can we do here, right? Like you're starting to try to see what you can do to help Marcus. You're going to brain clinics. You are, you do, there is enough recognition where you're like, okay, I need to like try some things, right? And there's this extended period where you're doing all sorts of stuff, but not really getting results.

Speaker 3:
[22:18] Well, yes, and naivete to the rescue again, I thought, well, if he just gets out of the military, because the command that he was at operates at an extremely high tempo. And leaving that command was really difficult for him because he thoroughly enjoyed being there. And I thought, well, if we go back to the command, it's like going back to the game of Russian roulette. So many friends died there. If we get out of the military, maybe then that gets him out of this limbo phase. And he, too, is looking for a change. Right before we made this decision, there was a helicopter crash in Afghanistan, where 31 members of the command were lost. And it felt like, in many of them, friends, it felt like we can't go back to that. And so getting out seemed like the only option that we had. He was 40 at the time-ish. And he had an opportunity to create an entirely new path. And still have a lot of his life left to live. He was put on antidepressants a year or two before that. And they were making him really numb, for the most part. So I still felt very disconnected, but thought maybe this change would be what we needed. He wanted to completely forget his time in the military, for the most part, and went into private banking. There was no bigger shift that could come from being part of the SEAL teams to a part of a private banking team in Beverly Hills. And that's when the wheels really started to come off, and it became pretty clear that we weren't going to make it. I didn't think I could survive as a single mom in California. It's very difficult to get out of the state once you're kind of trapped in it by the family court system. And so we agreed to move to Texas in 2014. We bought a beautiful dream home on the golf course. I'm still holding out hope that we can have a proper fresh start. And that's when things really escalated because it was this perfect storm of not having community identity, purpose, passion, now being stuck together, even without a guaranteed paycheck. The military is really good on that. And we were completely disconnected. So Marcus started drinking much more heavily. And right around that time, a friend took his life, one of the first SEAL suicides. His wife had the wherewithal to donate his brain because she said he was not himself in those final years. And his brain autopsy was shared with the community. It was the first time that I had heard terms like CTE or interface astroglial scarring. These are degenerative brain conditions that come from concussive, subconcussive, and blast type reverberations repeatedly. Marcus had played football. He had been a breacher in the SEAL teams working with explosives. And so suddenly my perspective shifted on what this actually was. Maybe this wasn't in his control as much as I thought it was. Maybe this cocktail of pharmaceuticals that were causing these highs and lows and just crazy things were not his, that wasn't entirely in his control. So I did shift my approach to more of a brain thing and less of a psychological thing. He went to many brain clinics. He did many sort of alternative treatments and they were making him worse. And with every failed treatment, he was becoming more and more hopeless. So I knew that he was battling with thoughts of suicide. And a suicide interventionalist explained it to me very effectively. I had never thought of this before. She said, when you have soldiers who are trained to identify the threat and they identify themselves as the threat, they're taught to eliminate the threat. That's when suicide is on the table. He legitimately thought he would be doing us a favor by removing himself from the equation. And I knew that time was ticking. You know, my human mind, this brain clinic, that therapy, da, da, da, da, da. I couldn't outthink this thing because despite my attempts to get him into all these places, he was becoming more and more despondent because things weren't working.

Speaker 1:
[27:07] When you went to these brain clinics and you got your brain scan, were you seeing the black spot? Like, did you get a diagnosis that provided any clarity or was it just increasingly confusing?

Speaker 2:
[27:18] I only went to one brain clinic that actually did a real scan that showed that I had many dark spots. And it finally just, I guess, solidified that there was something wrong with the brain or with my brain. And it wasn't just what I thought the whole time. This is just in my head. I'm just, you know, suck it up. You know, you're being soft and you're not making it, right? And so at least that gave us some relief to go, okay, I'm not crazy. There is something wrong here. How do we fix it? And at the same time, how do we fix it? I'm still really struggling, right? I'm still have thoughts of suicide. I thought many times I'm like, well, if I take myself out, you know, Amber, I mean, I thought through this a million times, Amber and the kids will go to the funeral and it'll be sad and I'll have a lot of people there. And then that'll go away and there'll be some sadness. And then eventually they'll be great, right? Because dad won't be here constantly causing the problems. And I just thought it would be some initial pain for future success for them. And I really contemplated that at the time. And that's just like a completely backwards wrong way of thinking, right? That's the, we call it the voice in the head. It's our voice in the head that is constantly telling us certain things, our ego. And our ego is trying to fix the problem. That's what it's for. And it's just not the way of thinking. We have a, you know, we thought about a campaign called Silence the Whisper, which is basically silencing that thought that's completely untrue. It's completely false. But that's how I was thinking at the time. And so finally get a brain scan that shows that, yeah, hey, you have something wrong with your brain. And so I think Amber, and at that point was really trying to figure out, okay, how do we fix these? How do we fix this brain?

Speaker 3:
[29:03] Right.

Speaker 2:
[29:03] And I think that's where I began kind of came into the conversation, even though.

Speaker 3:
[29:06] Not really, not really.

Speaker 2:
[29:08] No, but I mean, eventually it comes into the conversation.

Speaker 1:
[29:11] Just before that, before you share your thought Amber, I wanted to kind of highlight what you shared a moment ago. This notion of the soldier trained to be hypervigilant to identify the threat. And when they realize the threat is themself to take out that threat, I'd never heard that described in that way. Like, that's harrowing.

Speaker 3:
[29:35] Yeah. Yeah. And that's what we're up against. Coupled with the fact that Marcus and so many others are prescribed antidepressants as a first line of defense, many of them don't work. And there's always a label on the side of the bottle that says, can increase the risk of suicidality. So why are we treating veteran suicide with medications linked to suicide? It just didn't compute for me. There was a SEAL who knew that we were struggling. If you remember, there's a scene in the documentary about a gun and empty whiskey bottle. He had come over to our house that night. I had gone to bed and that's the only reason he knew that we were struggling because he was able to intervene in a situation that could have ended badly. And he too apparently was struggling and eventually went to Mexico and did Ibogaine and came back and immediately reached out and said, this could really help Marcus. So, a year before Marcus actually went, during this time where he was much more comfortable doing brain clinics and other interventional treatments here stateside, we knew about Ibogaine, but it sounded crazy. And so, he was very reluctant to go. Throughout that one year period when it was like failure, failure, failure, failure, I thought again, I wonder if this Ibogaine thing could work. I had nothing else. And I knew that I was going to have to leave because the kids had started to voice, you know, our daughter said, how much longer do we have to do this, mom? And, you know, just-

Speaker 1:
[31:20] How old were they at this point?

Speaker 3:
[31:23] That was 2016. So our daughter would have been 14, our son 16. You know, they were really tough ages. And I just, I thought, it doesn't matter how strong I am, because I am inadvertently affecting them by making them live through this craziness. And so it really felt to me like this ultimatum, like this is it or I am gone. But I had to approach him in a completely different way, a way of love and no longer using guilt, shame, condemnation, this sort of raw hurt that I was feeling. And just I approached him in a way that I hadn't before. And I said, I will fight with you every day for the rest of my life, but you have to fight with me and we have to fight differently. And that's where that surrender came in, just knowing that I was out of options.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[36:57] I think Amber was 17, I was 20 years old. I was a sophomore in college, I was playing football. I was a quarterback. Amber's dad had recruited me from New York to play. So I played ball for Amber's dad in college, which was a whole nother.

Speaker 1:
[37:11] Dating the coach's daughter. This is like right out of Friday Night Lights.

Speaker 2:
[37:15] The program, right? Remember the program that the backup quarterback was dating the coach's daughter, and so I used to get a lot of that from the team. We didn't meet when I was actually playing for him. He had left, coach was.

Speaker 3:
[37:29] Within a couple of months, we met.

Speaker 2:
[37:30] We met right after that. Then he got a phone call from one of the coaches saying, hey, Marcus is dating Amber. Then Amber and I took a road trip to visit him up at Northwestern. That was a bit awkward initially, but we have not separated since.

Speaker 3:
[37:46] 29 years in July.

Speaker 2:
[37:48] Wow.

Speaker 3:
[37:48] That we were in together.

Speaker 1:
[37:49] Quarterback, you're kind of like this giga-chad dude. I mean, the pictures of you, you're just like this strapping, super tall, incredibly fit guy, quarterback on a team. I mean, the doors are swinging wide open, you can do anything and you decide you want to go into the Navy SEALs. What year was that?

Speaker 2:
[38:12] That was 99 when I had the idea. I had the idea because I stayed up late one night and watched GI Jane on-

Speaker 1:
[38:20] That was it?

Speaker 2:
[38:21] That was really it.

Speaker 1:
[38:23] Shout out to me more.

Speaker 3:
[38:24] Yeah, she still got it.

Speaker 2:
[38:26] I mean, no, really. I didn't tell that story, by the way, for a very long time as everyone can imagine. Definitely not my SEAL buddies, like, oh, by the way, you got here from watching Charlie Sheen's Navy SEALs in the 90s or whatever. I was like, no, no, I watched GI Jane, and I had no connection to military growing up. I mean, I grew up in Long Island, very middle-class family. It wasn't like very extremely patriotic. Amber grew up more. She still has a note that she wrote at 10 years old about thanking veterans that we have in a frame, which I thought is super. It's cute. It's cute. I didn't grow up that way. So for me, when I saw GI Jane and they talked about, like, this is the best of the best, you know, what you were talking about, I've always, yes, I was a quarterback, but I was always like a struggling quarterback. You know, I always had to work for everything really hard. Nothing, in my opinion, nothing came naturally. I worked every day in the summer. I came in early, I stayed late, and I still do the same thing. And so when I watched GI Jane and they said, this is the best of the best, for me, it was like that, what you were talking about earlier, is that achievement. Can I achieve something that is greater than myself, the best of the best? And that's how I got interested in it.

Speaker 3:
[39:39] And it was a team thing too for you. He'd always been part of a team. And so this was kind of like America's team.

Speaker 1:
[39:45] Right, right, right.

Speaker 2:
[39:46] Yeah, I tried to get into surfing. I grew up in a beach town, which is an individual sport. My dad didn't really like surfing too much, but I was always part of a team. So I never played an individual sport, except swimming. I was a competitive swimmer from when I was four years old, like you.

Speaker 1:
[40:00] So you do the whole thing, the buds, the hell week, all of that. And you end up basically spending 13 years in service, in special operations, SEAL Team 10, SEAL Team 6. You become a BUDS instructor, correct?

Speaker 2:
[40:18] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[40:19] What is it that maybe people don't understand about what that experience is? I feel like we're in a period of time where there's a lot of SEALs out there doing podcasts and sharing their stories and writing books about this experience. It's in part like an illustration of the horrors of war, but there's also a public fascination with this lifestyle and a valorizing romantic lens on it. What can you say about what it was like?

Speaker 2:
[40:51] Well, I would say it is extremely tough. Definitely one of the hardest things I've done, which is get through training, both physically and mentally. I think physically, everyone prepares. And when you show up on day one, I had 175 individuals in my Buds class. And I looked around and I said, how am I supposed to be one out of every five here that are going to make it? We had some of the best collegiate athletes, prior Olympians, guys that were really fit. I was a bigger guy. They called me big and it was funny. I said, guys, you don't know what big is like. Like my offensive line was big. Those guys were six, seven, 300. So I was a bigger guy, which is usually a little bit tougher. You have to carry your weight. Guys that are 5'10, 180 pounds have an easier time. Even at Buds, I had to work. I had to work extremely hard. But what I had is grit and determination and can never fail attitude. I took that right to training and I got through Buds and I got through my teams. I guess I excelled and I did well. Going back to your question, what was that like? I would take the shirt off my back. I would give my last dollar to every individual that I served with. I think that's the part that draws people in, is that you're doing something that is much... Just take yourself completely out of the equation. This is about everybody else. I remember being home one time on break in New York. I was in a bathroom and some guys walked in and they were in the stall next to me. All they kept talking about was money, money, money, money, money, money. I remember just feeling kind of slimy. I remember going home and telling my dad, I said, Dad, I was in the bathroom at this club and all these guys kept talking about was money. I was like, I don't get it. That's not what drove me or drives me. I don't understand that part at all. You never join the military for money. For me and for Amber, it's always been about mission, even though I didn't think of it, I wouldn't call it at the time mission. Because for me, this was just another team sport that I can be a part of. I can be like-minded individuals and maybe excel at, but it was that brotherhood, it's the camaraderie, it's the togetherness that when I left the military, I lost and I spiraled.

Speaker 3:
[43:17] And purpose. You were serving a purpose. It wasn't like you were just on a team. It was like you were, especially after 9-11. So there was a gap in time there between Buds and him being in the teams where the towers came down a month before he became a seal. So things changed overnight. And even before that, for us as a couple, we had actually decided to break up when he decided to go into the military, despite me coming from a very patriotic family. I just didn't think that military spouse life was for me. And then lo and behold, a couple of weeks later, I found out that I was carrying our son. And that was a real inflection point for me as a woman, for us as a couple, we actually spent most of my pregnancy apart. And then in the 11th hour, Marcus said, like, we've got to do this as a family. And so we came back together, got married. I went with him to Bud's. He was one of probably two or three SEAL candidates that were married. So for him, he was juggling the daily grind of Bud's and then coming home and having to be dad and husband. It was a lot. And right as he's about to finish training, the towers come down. And so it was this constant adaptation cycle. And from that moment, there was just a fight in me. There was clearly a fight within our community to be part of a force of good. And that came with a lot of feelings of tremendous purpose.

Speaker 1:
[45:05] Right. With certain deployments on the near term horizon, like in the aftermath of 9-11, there must have been a sense of like, okay, well, we're going to get sent somewhere pretty soon here.

Speaker 2:
[45:16] And we wanted to. And that was the other part of it. When I first wanted to join the military and wanted to be a seal, I wanted to do it for just what I read. And at the time in 99, mostly books. So I read every book from Vietnam, literally everything I get my hand on. But the part that I found most interesting was all the bud stuff, because I think that's what everybody talks about is the difficulty of getting through training and it's such a high washout rate. And I was like, oh man, I can do that. And I would feel so good doing that. But then when it turned to war, that was the focus. I was like, well, now I want to use my training to go overseas and do something with this and go get bad guys, right? It would be like you training every day, swimming in the pool, biking and running, and never having the chance to compete. And that would probably be a struggle for you, right? If you never put your training to work, it'd be practicing football every day and never being able to play on Saturday or Friday night or whatever. And that's what we wanted to do. And then that was the focus. And there was such a shift in, we called it a paradigm shift, when the towers came down, I was in third phase, and we were, you know, we called it coking and joking and it was fun. But then we saw this shift from the instructors who'd been in for 10 or 15 years, like they knew what was happening. We didn't, we just, first we thought they were joking with us. We thought the towers didn't come down. We thought this was another gimmick that they were playing because there's so many mind games in Buds, right? They're trying to get in your mind and trying to make you quit. And we thought this was another joke, but obviously it wasn't. Yeah, we actually turned to each other and said, why do they keep fucking with us? We have three weeks left to graduate, but it was real. They brought us into the little TV room. We watched it for 30 seconds and we went right back out and we were doing, it's called the Grinder, where you do physical training, PT. And we went right back to doing pushups and flutter kicks and like nothing happened. But the shift in the perspective from the instructors, they had this demeanor of like, oh, we know what's happening now. Like we're going to war. This is a totally different perspective than what was happening before.

Speaker 1:
[47:26] A new level of intensity.

Speaker 2:
[47:28] It was a completely new level of intensity. Yeah. And then as you said, I couldn't wait to get on deployment. So I couldn't wait to go over to Afghanistan, Iraq and start working.

Speaker 1:
[47:37] And how are you processing that, Amber?

Speaker 3:
[47:41] At the time, I mean, I just felt like he needed to get over it. I completely supported him because, you know, there was a righteous anger that I was feeling. And I just wanted to, I wanted him to be able to do exactly what he just said, you know, use the training. And now did I think it would go on forever? Did I think that the shifts would happen after every deployment cycle where he would be, you know, feeling more and more distant from the family? No. But at least in the beginning, I was super supportive. I was always supportive. But, you know, certainly it's, even though humans have been fighting wars for millennia, I don't think the human psyche is really built for it. And when he would come home, you know, things had shifted. He didn't even want to be home after a certain period of time because he had to be always in that mindset. And if he wasn't deployed overseas, he was training to deploy. And so his focus was just not on the family.

Speaker 2:
[48:48] It's a very selfish profession, but maybe everything we do is selfish in a way, because, you know, there's a lot of talk around balance these days. And I think at our stage in life, I think we could have more balance. But when you're just starting out and you're trying to do, it's very difficult, I believe, to have balance. So imagine having a family, which again, Amber mentioned we were one of three families. The other two didn't make it through training. We were the only ones, and really we're the only ones that have stayed together for this whole time. Balance is hard. And I think you do have to put all your effort and focus into what you're doing to be really good. And that comes at a cost. As Amber mentioned, we were gone 300 days, you know, every year, whether it's training or whether it was deployment. And so you come home and you try to put a family life back together, but there really is none because you're only thinking about, what's my next training trip?

Speaker 1:
[49:47] You're biding your time.

Speaker 3:
[49:48] You're just like a guest in the house.

Speaker 1:
[49:50] You're never present.

Speaker 2:
[49:51] You're never present. There's no, you don't even know what the term present means at the time. You're just going, well, and I can't really do that because I have to go train or I'm going on this trip for three weeks. I can't take care of that. And of course, as soon as you step out the doors, when everything happens, so like air conditioning breaks, the toilet breaks, the house breaks, and then Amber has to raise two children.

Speaker 3:
[50:13] Which comes with a lot of resentment.

Speaker 2:
[50:15] Keep the family together.

Speaker 1:
[50:17] How many deployments?

Speaker 2:
[50:19] Six.

Speaker 1:
[50:19] Six deployments.

Speaker 2:
[50:20] Yeah, mostly combat to both war zones. Afghanistan and Iraq, two different fights, definitely. Afghanistan was extremely mountainous, tough terrain. And Iraq was kind of like city fighting in a way. So there are two different types of war, if you want to call it that. And they were both interesting. They were both, in my perspective, it was fun. I enjoyed every minute of what I did. But as Amber mentioned, every time I came home, I was a different person. Now, I didn't think so, but from the children and from her perspective, you just become, I don't know, like a machine or like an individual that's feelings. I had a friend once who told me, I went to see the psychologist, the command psychologist and first a few different things many years. And he told me once, he said, Marcus, he said, men have about 42 feelings. He said, women have 240, literally. And I told a friend that he goes, 40? He's like, that seems like a lie.

Speaker 1:
[51:26] It's pretty high.

Speaker 2:
[51:27] I have about two. He's like, I have two feelings. So, we just didn't feel, we just did.

Speaker 1:
[51:34] Well, you're specifically trained not to feel. I mean, you're like at the tip of the sphere of like, feelings are only going to become problematic in theater. Right?

Speaker 2:
[51:46] Sure.

Speaker 1:
[51:46] So, he's only home 65 days a year. And when he comes home, he's a stranger.

Speaker 3:
[51:54] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[51:55] You know, how are you, you know, trying to manage the confusion of that and trying to connect with him when he's, you know, essentially a ghost in the house?

Speaker 3:
[52:05] I think there was at some point just a complete cessation of trying to connect. I think we were married on paper. We were living completely separate lives. My parents were divorced and so I didn't want that for our kids because that comes with challenges and remarriage and blending families come with challenges. I've experienced that. And so for me, it was sort of a marriage of convenience. I did really love Marcus, but I loved a version of him that was no longer present. And I held out hope that I would see that guy again one day, but I knew it wasn't under the circumstances that we were currently living in. And so there came a point in time after many deployment cycles and many deaths in our community that we thought taking a break would be the best for our family. And that was actually when things really started to unravel because we had been accustomed to living this separate life. And I had become pretty good at it. Now, he was home all the time and we were strangers. And not only strangers, we just didn't like each other. So it caused issues with the kids to have him home. I think they created this mythical figure, especially our son, on what he would be. And what the kids were delivered back after these deployment cycles was not what they had envisioned in their mind, nor was it mine. I knew Marcus was really struggling. I felt really bad for him because his family had become his teammates. And I think at some point, it just was clearly unsustainable.

Speaker 1:
[53:53] What was it that prevented you from just ripping the band-aid off and saying, we're getting divorced?

Speaker 3:
[54:01] A few things. My dad, as a football coach, has always drilled in me, do not quit. And because the beginnings of our relationship were a bit controversial, he basically said, he's going to break your heart, and I'm going to break his neck. And I never wanted my dad to be right on some level.

Speaker 1:
[54:23] It all comes from not wanting to give your dad satisfaction.

Speaker 3:
[54:28] There was a part of that, but also just not wanting to quit, and also not wanting my kids to have to deal with the divorce. And ultimately, I really, really, really loved the Marcus that I met, but he had to become someone else to survive the circumstances that were put before us. And so I think I wanted to give it a go, give it a try, one last effort. When he became a BUDS instructor and we were home all the time, I held on to this hope that we would buy beach cruisers and ride down the street as a family and just everything would be great. And that was not the case.

Speaker 2:
[55:08] We did that too. We bought beach cruisers.

Speaker 3:
[55:10] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[55:10] And were you able to kind of hold that vision of the Marcus that you knew and some level of belief that he could find his way back to becoming that person? Or had you relinquished any kind of like expectation that that could ever happen?

Speaker 3:
[55:25] I got into this when I was 20. We had two kids right before I turned 23. I think my naivete at that time was a survival mechanism that I would not have today. There was a naivete hope, yeah. But there was also this naivete that like he would get through buds and then our life would be normal. That's when everything started or that they would capture Osama Bin Laden or kill Osama Bin Laden, and then we would just get back to normal. I didn't have a real notion of reality.

Speaker 1:
[56:03] It's sort of the frog being boiled slowly in water too, because initially, in the aftermath of 9-11, and this is kind of illustrated in the documentary, the idea was, oh, you're going to go over there, and it's all going to get taken care of pretty quickly, and then you'll come back, and life will be relatively normal. You couldn't have foreseen there's going to be all these deployments, and this is going to go on for a very long time.

Speaker 3:
[56:27] That's right, yeah. And so I think that same naivete that I could get him back one day was very accurate.

Speaker 1:
[56:34] And what was your support network like at that time? Did you have people to talk to about what you were going through, or were you just internalizing all of this?

Speaker 3:
[56:44] Yeah, I had become very close with the other spouses whose husbands Marcus worked with. And so we just took care of one another in ways that sort of filled the gap for having grandparents or having your spouse at home. So I had them. But I also had just this really unhealthy level of stubbornness that caused me to create massive walls around my heart and just not ask for help, not tell Marcus how I was feeling. And then that caused a lot of resentment.

Speaker 2:
[57:19] And same for us. I mean, we didn't talk about our feelings. And we would definitely talk about our problems at home because they were extremely common. I would say they were more common than not. And so that was a topic of discussion was, who's having issues at home? And it was many of us. There were definitely outliers and we always look at those folks and respect them because they were able to get through it without the struggles I think that we went through. But we were both dealing with the same thing just in a different light. I had my team, I had my guys, I had my cross-fit workouts with them in the morning. Amber did the same thing. She had her girls, she had her cross-fit gym that they went to and they'd go have coffee after and talk about all the things. So we were dealing with it in our own ways. They were waiting for us. We weren't waiting for anything. We were waiting to, again, go train, go back out. And so it was a different perspective of how we viewed life until I became an instructor. And then I was drinking extremely heavily and whether it was coping, probably a little bit of everything. It was a little bit of coping, it was numbing, numbing out.

Speaker 3:
[58:26] Yeah, a lot of, you know, celebrate with alcohol in the community, at least in the old days of the community. Celebrate with alcohol, you commiserate with alcohol, you... Everything sort of revolved around this drinking culture that only fueled the problems that we were having.

Speaker 2:
[58:43] And there are a lot of guys, Rich, that have stopped drinking for obvious reasons, right? It's just not productive, you know? I mean, right? We can go down the rabbit hole here if you want, at some point.

Speaker 3:
[58:54] Oh, today is two years since you stopped drinking, two day. Three?

Speaker 2:
[59:00] Oh, three years.

Speaker 1:
[59:01] Wow.

Speaker 3:
[59:02] Wow.

Speaker 1:
[59:03] To this day?

Speaker 2:
[59:03] You're off by a whole year.

Speaker 1:
[59:05] On this day?

Speaker 2:
[59:06] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[59:07] Oh, that's great.

Speaker 3:
[59:08] He's been very intentional about saying, I feel so much better this morning because I chose not to drink last night. So he's not even really like, at least in my observation, white-knuckling sobriety.

Speaker 1:
[59:21] It fell away.

Speaker 3:
[59:21] He has white-knuckled periods of sobriety in the past, never this long. But I truly feel that he's put healthy things in that void and had a much different perspective this time. And yes, it is to the day, to day.

Speaker 2:
[59:36] Yeah. Of course, preaching in the choir, I feel better. You just feel like you have this glow, your skin looks better, or just everything is better.

Speaker 1:
[59:44] Shocking how that works, right?

Speaker 2:
[59:46] It's wild. But I think it was early 2017 when she brought up Ibegain, and I-

Speaker 1:
[59:53] Yeah, so what's the pitch?

Speaker 2:
[59:54] I mean, the pitch was about Ibegain, and I said, so you want me to take a psychedelic, and I'm supposed to get better from that. Like, think about someone who's never touched a drug before.

Speaker 3:
[60:05] Yeah, this is not a topic that I know anything about.

Speaker 2:
[60:08] Right, and here, you're gonna go take this drug, drug, a psychedelic that is supposed to, is going to heal you, and it's gonna make you better. And I just imagine being approached with that, and just thinking, I mean, literally said, like, that's absolutely crazy. Like, that's insane. Like, what are we talking about here? Like, is this a joke? And at that point, again, you know, I had been on pharmaceuticals for years, not getting better. So I just thought, and this was a whole nother level. And all I could think about was psychedelics were like Woodstock and hippies, and it's supposed to heal this, you know, quote unquote warrior from, you know, brain injury and PTSD. And so it took, that was like a conversation, and that conversation, if I remember, it was kind of compartmentalized after that because...

Speaker 3:
[61:00] Well, he was just like, oh no, absolutely not.

Speaker 1:
[61:02] But you did have the team member who had had that experience.

Speaker 3:
[61:05] Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I think that probably really resonated with you, but you also were very uncomfortable with the idea.

Speaker 2:
[61:13] I was uncomfortable. But when it's crazy how this works, you can listen to every Western medicine doctor from Hopkins or Harvard or wherever. But your friend does something and it works. That's all you need. I actually had a call from an officer one time, a Naval Academy guy, just like an absolute stud, who said, Marcus, I have researched this topic. I've read every book. I know everything about it. I've talked to all the experts. He's like, I was still skeptical. He said, when I talked to you for 30 seconds on this call, he's like, I'm convinced, I'm ready to go. Here's a person who's extremely bright, who looked at all the research, still thought it was crazy, but talked to me, who said, dude, this saved my life.

Speaker 3:
[61:57] That's a trust that exists within the community.

Speaker 2:
[61:59] And that's how this whole thing was built, was really off of trust. Because think about trying to talk to your psych or go to an expert at an academic institution, going, hey, I'm thinking about going to do IBGain. First, they might say, especially in 2017, what is that? Right? Now it's a little bit, it's a lot different. I mean, actually they're recommending individuals to go do this and say, hey, we don't have anything for you. We're going to have to go do this somewhere else. But that's the trust in the community. And that's what I had from this individual who literally, life did a 180, changed his life, it saved his life. And so that's what convinced me to say, okay, maybe I'll give this a try. And then Rich, I did the research. There was a lot of papers and a lot of work done for many years. I mean, I think the drug was introduced in the thirties in France. So it had been out there commercialized and people utilizing it. The more you read about it, the more you go, you know what, this is something that I think potentially can help. So I went from thinking this was crazy to, hey, this is medical treatment. This is legitimate, even though it's not FDA approved here in the US. But we've been going to Mexico and Costa Rica for 20 or 30 years to do stem cells for a reason because we couldn't get them here. It doesn't mean that it's bad.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[66:50] That's tough now too. There's so many of the guys that-

Speaker 1:
[66:53] Well, you see these before and afters and you're like, okay, so if I come back and I'm not that, like, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[67:00] You feel like you're really going to tank at that point, right? Because you felt like you've tried everything and this is it.

Speaker 1:
[67:05] And if that doesn't work, then-

Speaker 2:
[67:06] Right. So the expectation, I almost think it's better not to have expectations because of course, this doesn't work. This is a treatment just like a cancer treatment or something else, or it doesn't work for everybody. But, I mean, arguably, it's extremely powerful and I laugh. I'm laughing now. I don't know if you know what I'm going to say, but we were at an event in Texas a few months ago, and there's this world-renowned cardiologist, and he's listening to Amber and I speak on stage, and he's like, this sounds like it's just kind of putting some band-aid on the symptoms. And Amber didn't know he was like this world-renowned cardiologist, older guy, he's like 85. And she's like, he's like, I'm going to challenge that when she goes on stage. She's like, I would consider this actually pretty curative.

Speaker 3:
[67:52] I said it's far more curative than palliative, and granted, this is my own hypothesis.

Speaker 1:
[67:57] Most of medicine is putting a band-aid on symptoms.

Speaker 3:
[68:00] Yeah, and we didn't know what. I mean, honestly, Rich, whenever I approached Marcus with this, he was in California. He was doing this sort of trifecta of things, like magnets on the brain and hyperbaric oxygen. He was a patient at another clinic. And I thought, this is it. If this trifecta of things doesn't work, then I don't have anything, anything left. And I came to visit him. The trip ended in absolute shambles. It was horrible. And at that point, I thought, it's over. I've got to make my plan to leave because he's going to run out of funding at this place. I've got to get the house on the market. I've got to know what I'm going to do. School is starting, da da da. I come home from that trip unexpectedly. I don't even tell him I'm leaving. I pack my bags while he's at Magnet Brain Therapy. And I go to the airport and I get on a flight back home. And I called my parents. It was, I'd come for I think for my birthday. I called my parents collectively and said, this is it. I told my dad I was quitting. And he just said, you're not disappointing, you're not quitting. You're choosing your children. And so there was like that whole reckoning. And there was peace for a moment. And then I was overcome with the reality of the fact that they would, I could move on with my life. They would be forced to live with probably losing their dad. And I had one thing left that I hadn't talked to him about in quite some time. So I re-approached him. He did run out of funding. He asked, you know, am I coming back home? And I said, yeah, come home. And that's when the surrender came in on a level that I didn't even know I was capable of. I just used sheer love, true, sheer love in approaching him and complete surrender. I don't know what this will do, but if you agree to do it, I will fight with you. And we made the appointment for him to leave, to go to the clinic. It kept getting pushed. And I just remember begging him to keep holding on for 10 more days, for eight more days. Oh wait, it's 12 more days now. It just, the time kept changing. I thought he was going to just say forget it. But when I finally did get him to the airport and he got out of the car, I realized that this is all I had. And if it didn't work, then we were completely out of options. And I flew in the next day to visit him. And I was so afraid to see him because I knew that I would know immediately if it had or hadn't worked. And so our friend was down there with him. His wife picked me up from San Diego Airport. And I got in the car and I said, I can't go. I can't go. This is crazy.

Speaker 1:
[70:59] You're gonna drive across the border and...

Speaker 3:
[71:01] Yeah, I was gonna go to the clinic where he had been dosed.

Speaker 2:
[71:04] And just to caveat that, when I got out of the car, I literally said, I don't think this is going to work.

Speaker 3:
[71:13] Like don't think I'm gonna come back.

Speaker 2:
[71:14] I don't think this is gonna work. I was like telling Amber. Don't get your hopes up. This is still, I think, a little bit crazy. We've tried all these things. Now I'm gonna go do this other thing. Just don't expect me to come back any different. And that's how I literally like.

Speaker 3:
[71:28] Which is probably why I was like, oh gosh.

Speaker 2:
[71:30] That was the goodbye, don't expect anything to change.

Speaker 3:
[71:33] Yeah. So the next day I fly in and I'm in the car saying, I can't go. And she said, trust me on this. He's always asking for one thing. He's asking for you. And I was like, how can that be like, like we hate each other on some level? Why is he asking for me? And so I had given him my word and I held to that. I did go and I heard him walking down the hall. And when he came around the corner, it truly was like being reunited with someone that I hadn't seen in over 15 years. And I knew immediately his countenance was exactly the way that it was when I met him, because I knew him before he was a SEAL. I knew him before 9-11, before the war deployments. I knew him before the insanity of all the shit that we had lived through following the military. And he was back. And it felt in those early days too good to be true. Like you don't want to believe this, or you find yourself letting the walls of your heart down and then immediately you're like, oh gosh, just don't get too comfortable there. It's all going to be taken out from underneath you any minute.

Speaker 1:
[72:50] Wow. So this is where we have to talk about what it is. Okay. So, I mean, that's amazing. I want to get more into that. But I want to understand what it is that you experience. So you have buy-in from Amber. There's a lot of pressure and expectations. You're going to go do this thing that you know very little about, very powerful psychedelic drug experience. You go in with trying to have no expectations about what's going to happen. What is Ibogaine and what was the experience that you had?

Speaker 2:
[73:29] Yeah. I mean, Ibogaine is just a single molecule that's extracted from the iboga plant, I guess, in West Gabon, Africa. It's been used forever for rites of passage, for stomach ailments, for mental health, for brain health. We just haven't been introduced to it really over here. Think of it as a single molecule that gets extracted and they found it to be the most potent, and what's actually helping the brain, helping the individual work through psychological issues. From my experience, it's taken just like any other drug. It's in a pill form. You do a ton of preparation before it. I was working with a psychotherapist, was also a psychedelic integration coach, was also a PhD in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. I had this trifecta of, she had a lot of different expertise and so would approach me in different ways. I had good preparation going in. Then because Ibogaine is one of the few psychedelics that have a potential cardiac risk, and so it's a true medical treatment. It needs to be handled that way. So you're doing blood work in your analysis and you're doing EKGs, and so you have to be good, medically cleared before you can go do that. You can't have any drugs in the system, you can't have alcohol in the system, you have to actually get titrated off of any antidepressants that you've been on. So think of individuals that have come in that have been on them for 10, 15 or 20 years and we get plenty of individuals, they have to work with a psych to get off those and it's very difficult. Those last couple of days, you're on these drugs for years and all of a sudden you're off them. That's at the point when you take Ibogaine, it's out of your system and you take it right away. So you take it in pill form, just like any other drug, 45 minutes to an hour, it starts to get in the bloodstream and it starts to affect you. And for me, it just started to get deeper and deeper and you start hearing a little bit of buzzing in your ears because your senses are awakened by about 400%, smell, touch, hearing. So you get this buzzing and then you're just slowly getting into the drug itself. And for me, it was a really, really, I told you Buds was a hard experience. This was the most challenging experience of my life. I probably puked for eight to 10 hours straight. The therapist who had been working with, I'd been for 20 years said, Marcus, I've been working with this for a really long time. She's like, I've never seen anybody struggle like you. I took it as a joke or a badge of honor. Kind of like that was my competitiveness. Like, oh yeah, I had the hardest experience.

Speaker 1:
[76:18] Yeah, I had a very unique. Terminally unique.

Speaker 2:
[76:20] Yeah, I won. But no, it was really challenging. And so I was constantly puking in a bucket and then I would have these visions all night. And the visions are, if you saw in the documentary, it's really a life review and it's subjective because it's your brain kind of and your unconscious kind of bringing forward things that you need to see. So I had some childhood issues that I was seeing with my dad and then I had some wartime issues that I had. I had lost my best friend. That was a big part of my journey. I had had a lot of guilt and shame that he was not here and I was still here. And then it had very light issues and those light times during the experience was always with Amber and the kids. And it would take me out of that really tough psychedelic experience, so the traumas that I was dealing with. And it gave me a bit of like light and whiteness. And it was always with Amber and the kids. And our arms were always interlocked. And. What it showed me was that I had everything right here. I didn't have to look external for anything, for life, for purpose, for striving to be better or to achieve something. I was like, wait a minute, you have everything that you need right in front of you. It's Amber and it's the kids. And those were my moments of lightness during my experience. And I loved them because it was like unconditional love. It was like perfect. It was like, if you want to be connected to the source, it was like everything that you needed was right there and that was it. And then that would dissipate. And then I would go back until I kind of dark, I had deeper traumatic experiences and it was very dark. Some of it was very ugly. Images that were ugly, scenes that were ugly, a lot of fighting, a lot of struggle. And as the night went on and I had more of these light experiences, it just felt like if you had a backpack on just filled with a thousand pounds of bricks, as the night went on, the bricks just kind of kept getting tossed out. You just felt lighter and you felt like the weight of the world that you were perceiving just was falling off your shoulders. So when I finally, the drug wore off, I was able to get some sleep and I woke up, I just felt like, wow, like the backpack is off completely. Like I just felt like I was healed. I just felt like any of the weight that I was carrying was gone completely. And all I wanted to do was see Amber because that was my moments of love during my really dark, traumatic, Ibogaine experience for me. And it's not traumatic for everybody, but for individuals who have trauma, there's parts of pain there. And so when I saw Amber, I just embraced it. I didn't say, I feel good, I'm better, I'm healed. I just said, literally, this is exactly what the guys need. Because I had friends at the time who were really struggling like I had been. And that was the start of it. It was just like, how do we pay this forward? Someone paid for my experience there. We were talking earlier about how expensive these treatments are, and how much struggle it was for us to get me down there, to get someone to pay for it. And I just thought, we got to figure out a way to get other people paid to do this. And that was the grassroots effort of us starting the work that we've been doing now for eight years.

Speaker 1:
[80:00] Amber, you were getting emotional when he was sharing that, and I was thinking, he tells this story all the time. You must have heard it many times. What were you experiencing listening to him share that?

Speaker 3:
[80:15] I feel like every time I give public testimony or even today, I get emotional because we walked up to such a line of no return, and it is just so overwhelmingly humbling to have a future in front of us. It's a reminder of those times and how difficult they were, how far we've come, how special our love story is, and how much we fought for one another, even despite all of the hardships that we've endured and the resentment that we've had towards one another previously. Yeah, I always wanted to fight for him. I just love him so much, and it's just a reminder of that.

Speaker 2:
[81:04] It's wild how different our relationship is now. I mean, it's literally 180. Where Amber mentioned before, we almost couldn't even be in the same room with each other. Now, we literally can't not be in the same room as each other. You know, it's just, it's wild. I tell Amber, if I go on the road for a day or two, I'm just like, why don't I go back? Or why isn't she here? You know, it's just, you know, we're doing everything together now. I mean, I consider us best friends. It's a different, definitely a long ways away from where we were before, Rich.

Speaker 1:
[81:37] So for this skeptical minded person who's listening to this and is like, come on, really? You know, did it have that significant of an impact? Like, what did it do? How is it possible that this could be that powerful?

Speaker 2:
[81:54] You know, I wish I had the answer to that, but I think it goes back to when I was done with the experience, where I just felt like I had guilt, I had shame, I had just real depression. I just felt like all that kind of floated away. And of course, that didn't last forever, but it lasted for a really long time. And it enabled me to build, if you want to call them, new neural pathways, new neural networks to allow myself to not have guilt, not have shame, not regret, not be upset that you treated Amber terribly for years or not have regret that you weren't present for our children. And so you kind of deal with that during the IBGain and it goes away. And the weeks and months after during your integration, you're trying to build those good habits and those good pathways in so you can continue healing and you can change them forever because you've just built up these really deep tracks that you couldn't get out of and now you're building kind of new tracks. And so that takes work. And so Amber, I think, has done a really good job of explaining it. It's similar to kind of like a stock market ticker where you always want to be going up, but after IBGain, you're kind of going straight up, but then there's some points where you hit, you have some low points, but those low points are so small now, and then you immediately tick back up. So as long as you're trending up, and that's what I feel like IBGain does, you heal, because life catches up and nobody doesn't have a bad moment, maybe a bad day. And that's how it was. It was five steps forward, one step back, five steps forward, one step back. And that continues on and it continues on today. I mean, I have to work every day to stay where I'm at. And for me now, it's not medicine work. I'll do medicine work if I need it, but I don't need it. And now it's breath work, it's meditation, it's sensory deprivation, it's being present. It's for some people, it's prayer, it's reconnecting back to their faith, it's having community, having purpose. And these are all the things I think you can build in once you heal.

Speaker 3:
[84:16] I have a lot of observations, you know, having lived through it, as well as having witnessed hundreds of others go through our program at VETS. And I think that ultimately what it boils down to and why it's so effective is a couple of things. It seems to give people a completely different perspective. So ego dissolution or ego death sometimes is referred to these treatments. And I think the ego is our protector, and it's our best friend and worst enemy. It's the voice that says, don't do that because you could be hurt. It's what put the walls up in my heart. It's stories that we tell ourselves, some of them, many of them, not even true. So it quiets the ego and gives someone a different perspective. So for example, Marcus was bullied as a kid by his dad, by his peers. And then in one of the Ibogaine experiences, correct me if I'm wrong, you saw your bullies being bullied and realized that it wasn't you. There wasn't something fundamentally wrong with you. It's that you became a target for someone who is also being bullied. And so that perspective shift, that rewriting of the narrative, that loss of ego helps someone show up in a way that's far more authentic. And then the connections are authentic. Now, that leads to what I think is probably the most important part of this, which is that feeling of connectedness. My observation has been that many that emerge from an Ibogaine or 5-MeO or really many psychedelic experiences with various compounds are feeling connected again to self, to purpose, to God, to family, to nature. And they are able to show up for people in a different way that allows further connection. And so we've had people say, I didn't realize an avocado was green. I'm feeling for the first time ever, oranges smell so beautiful. And these are things that because they were so in their minds before, they weren't feeling connected to anything on the outside world.

Speaker 2:
[86:19] Yeah, I had somebody recently who hasn't been able to smell for seven years, smelled at the retreat. They were, the chefs were making squeezing fresh orange juice, and they had like 50 oranges and you can smell it throughout the house. I was like, man, it smells good. Let's go over there. He just turned around and started bawling. He said, I haven't smelled anything in seven years. He's like, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever smelled in my life. This was two days after as I began experience, and that's what we're seeing all the time. Like what does it do? It's doing real physiological things to the body. I mean, if you want to get into a little bit of that, because you talked a little bit about the psychological aspect, but I think what Stanford has shown and what science is really excited about is the healing properties of the brain, the actual physiological, the biological makeup of the brain.

Speaker 3:
[87:09] Well, I'm happy to get into just a high level of review of that because the Stanford study is a big part of the film, thank goodness. So I thought that I began might buy a little bit of time. We were doing all these brain treatments because I had become afraid of what Marcus was dealing with on a physiological level from his history of football and blast exposure. And I thought this might be a temporary mandate, but what ended up happening, and I was observing, was the complete return of Marcus' neurological functioning. So an example of this, we had a discussion about filing an extension for our taxes one night before bed. The next morning, he says, hey, what are we going to do about our taxes, like tax days right around the corner? I'm like, we discussed this at length. It was clearly alarming. After that, he was reminding me, after Ibogaine, he was reminding me of things. Don't forget X, don't forget Y, what about Z? And so I was just astonished. And I reached out to anyone and everyone that I thought would care, researchers, doctors, pathologists, clinicians, military leaders. No one took me seriously. Finally, I was connected to Dr. Nolan Williams at Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab, and he said he would study this because he believed my hypothesis, what I was seeing in regards to the neurological function. And so that component of the film is really what validates so much of this work. What they observed in that study was both psychological and physiological. PTSD, depression, anxiety, effect sizes, improved 86 and 93% cognitive functioning. But then the brain imaging was what was really, really interesting. There was just this return of neurological capacity that they'd never seen before, which is-

Speaker 2:
[89:03] They'd never seen a drug do that for them.

Speaker 3:
[89:04] Obviously, more studies need to be done.

Speaker 1:
[89:06] Right. Nolan Williams, unfortunately and tragically has passed away. Is the work at Stanford ongoing in his absence?

Speaker 3:
[89:15] Yeah, his team, he became a very, very close personal friend of ours. And so his loss has just been tremendously impactful for us, especially because he was such a pioneer in this area of study. And yeah, his team is continuing, but I think everyone has taken a giant step back for just the grief process.

Speaker 1:
[89:39] The movie, the documentary opens with interviews with veterans who are participating in the Stanford study and kind of closes with them. And you're immediately struck with the vacancy in these people's eyes. Like they're just, these people are checked out, you know, and you can see to some extent like what they're like in the aftermath. And I was craving, like, I want to follow these guys. I want to see what happens with these guys. But it's basically telling the story of the birth of the scientific community starting to take this seriously and to look at it. The personal testimony is like so wild, you know, like that it could be this impactful from a neurological perspective with respect to TBI, the rewiring of the neural pathways, the impact on depression, PTSD, and also the very long tail of it. This isn't something that wears off in a week, like at 30 days, at 90, you know, a year later, you know, the significance of the impact is still very resonant, right? Like this has staying power in a way that other treatments.

Speaker 2:
[90:45] Right, duration, they talk about in the science world, and it seems to have a long duration. Many individuals do go back for re-treatment. It's still, you know, it's still a drug, it is still a treatment, and nothing works one time forever. I liken it to if you go to the gym for a month or two and you get in shape and you stop, you're probably gonna get out of shape, you're probably not gonna feel well. So this is something that you may have to continue. I know individuals that go back once a year just as a reset now, but it's never ever as difficult as the first time. That first time is a real purge. You know, I feel like the first time is like the 70 to 80% there, and then they may have 20 or 30% to clean up after that. And so, individuals now, some go back once a year just as a reset, reboot, just to continue cleaning out the filter and making themself better, and they're constantly improving. I never hear anyone going back and having like a bad experience after, like, oh yeah, I feel incredible again. You know, everything is good, and I'll go back again next year just as a reboot.

Speaker 3:
[91:54] Marcus has gone back I think six times total in eight years almost. It's about once every year. But I would say he started in the basement of his soul, and what he was experiencing there was so much darkness, was a reflection of what he was carrying on the inside. And so each year that he's gone back, I think he's gotten a floor higher. He's in a pretty tall skyscraper, but I think he's like standing on the roof now. I think that, you know, the experiences have gotten easier. The last one he called blissful, where before, you know, the first one was really dark and difficult.

Speaker 1:
[92:24] That's hard to imagine.

Speaker 2:
[92:25] The last one was, you know, my small periods of lightness that I had with Amber and the kids, my last experience was like six hours of nothing but pure bliss, unconventional love, complete kind of connection the whole time, right? And so that's where I'm at now, at least with that medicine. And I'll just continue doing the things I do every day to continue to heal and, you know, promote that there are treatments out there that, you know, may help individuals that are struggling. You know, I do definitely want to say this is something that should not be done on your own. I definitely, you know, we believe full heartedly that, or wholeheartedly, this needs to be regulated, be done carefully, or especially with the right experts and the right medical support. And when you put all those things together, then we have even, you know, more healing, right? If we do this kind of wonky, we're going to have bad outcomes and individuals can get hurt, but done the right way. This is true, true healing. And we're not just saving ourselves, we're saving our families, we're saving our children, and we're helping generations. And, you know, I mentioned it right from the start. This is the work that we can't get away from. We love doing what we're doing and we'll continue doing it.

Speaker 1:
[93:41] I want to get into the work that you're doing and the service aspect of this that has obviously gendered your lives with so much meaning and purpose. But this is the opportunity for me to share what I just went through a little bit.

Speaker 3:
[93:56] I was going to ask.

Speaker 1:
[93:57] I don't want to be indulgent about it, but I am in the early kind of aftermath of this experience that rocked me. I mean, I would say to your point about taking it seriously, like it's not nothing. Like this is not for everybody. Like this is an extremely intense experience. And I didn't take the opportunity lightly either. And it really rocked me. I went into it. Like it was different from what I saw in the documentary, what I went through because we did the Iboga route. So I'm curious around what you know around the differences there. So it's all however many alkaloids, not just the Ibogaine alkaloid. It was done, it was conducted in the Buwiti tradition for the most part. And it begins on Friday night. There's the indoctrination and kind of there's a lot of ceremony. And then from Friday night, all the way through the morning, just being just inundated with the, I hesitate to even call it music. Like it was just the most confronting, cacophony of sounds that made me feel like I was chained up in Guantanamo and couldn't escape. Like it was, and I had a head full of the documentary and I'm like, when am I getting the polaroids of my childhood? And like, when am I going to reconnect with my inner child? You know, like I went in for very much for those reasons. Like I've been sober for quite a while. I've been in 12 step. I've been in talk therapy for decades. I do a lot and I have healed a lot and grown and evolved and changed and transformed in so many ways. And yet I'm still hamstrung by early childhood stuff or deep grooves in these patterns that make me behave in a certain way that no matter what I've done, I'm still sort of like prey to them, right? And so this has the promise of hopefully rewiring some of that or helping me to kind of retell that childhood story. But because I was so attached to that, you know, and like, when am I going to get this? You know, and I'm not getting that. It's like the medicine, which is really this consciousness is provoking me and prodding me and trying to root out my defense mechanisms and you know, all of my resistance around this and like, I'm not doing it right. And I'm not seeing what Marcus saw, you know, and why is this not happening? It was extremely uncomfortable, like to the point of like, when is this going to end? And there was a lot of darkness and the hallucinations and the visuals after four spoonfuls of this stuff were coming at me so relentlessly, but I couldn't fixate on any of them and none of them were recognizable. And the moment I kind of focused on one, it would go away and something else was coming at me. So it was an experience of total disorientation and extreme discomfort. And even now, like I don't remember a lot of it. So it's not like, oh, I had this specific thing and I can tell you this story. And it helped me resolve this confusion that I had around that. It wasn't linear in that way at all. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[97:15] And the facilitators and the ones who've been doing this for a long time say about 15 to 20 percent don't see even any visuals at all. So they go through this whole tough experience without seeing anything, but they're getting the results from it. And so even though they haven't looked into those deep traumas on the drug, on Ibogaine or on Iboga, the weeks after with the integration, the brain's feeling better.

Speaker 3:
[97:46] Is that happening for you?

Speaker 2:
[97:48] Cause you're 19 days? You're 19?

Speaker 1:
[97:50] 19 days, yeah. So essentially, and then, you know, I was comatose the entire day. I couldn't move like the whole next day. And then it kicks up again. And this is more of a rebirthing and a reparenting process. And it was very beautiful and extremely healing. And it was overseen by women, you know, that in my case was good. Like there was this like beautiful maternal energy, you know, this like unconditional love that I found to be very helpful. And at the end of it, like it was really this magical experience of like coming home and having kind of, even though I didn't get like that kind of visual experience of confrontation with my past, a sense of completion and the beginning of telling a new story around that, that has left me feeling resolved in many ways over stuff that has caused me just anxiety. And, you know, at the root, similar to you, like I grew up in a household where it's like, if you're not achieving, like you're, you know, you have to earn love basically, you know, and the way you do that is by distinguishing yourself and going out in the world and conquering and accomplishing things. And so it's always this kind of external drive to be recognized, to be validated, or to feel like you're only as valuable as, you know, what you're able to kind of show other people in terms of like what you've done in the world. And that can be incredibly empowering when you're building a life. And as you were saying earlier, like these superpowers become your Achilles heels. And it's really a weakness now that has gotten in the way. I've built this incredible life. I have everything I ever wanted and then some. And yet I struggle to experience joy and gratitude and the ability to be present and the full extent of intimacy with my wife and, you know, the richness of my relationships with my children. Like these things are difficult for me to connect with. And I went and did this because I recognize that. And that's what I want, you know. And that's what my family deserves, you know, that I've been unable to completely fulfill. And like I said at the outset, I do feel like it has been this incredible gift to myself and to my family. But it's also not a panacea. Like my wife will tell you that I was crusty this morning, you know. I was working out in the gym and she came by to say hi. And I was a little like, you know, like, but I caught myself. And I'm like, hey, that you're off your game a little bit. But I would say overall, in the balance of things, I feel incredibly calm in comparison to how I'm usually just kind of like clenching and anxious and hurrying and rushing around. And then also, as somebody with a long history with alcoholism and addiction, just my relationship with craving has changed a lot. Like you were saying, like you can't do stint. You know, like I didn't have coffee for, I can't go a day without coffee. Like I had to go, you know, I didn't have coffee for a couple of days before the thing. Friday, you know, by the time it's Monday, like I'm still hallucinating. Like this is so powerful. It's not like psilocybin. Like it's in your system. I'm seeing stuff, you know, even though it's been a couple of days afterwards. But by Monday morning, I'm like, I'm going to have a cup of coffee. I'm so looking forward to this. I can't wait. Make the coffee.

Speaker 2:
[101:32] Take a couple of sips and I was like, You take it or leave it.

Speaker 1:
[101:35] Yeah, I was like, I'm really, you know, and I poured it down. And that's not to say like there's coffee in there. It's like, I have a quick coffee. Like I am not, you know, but I'm probably drinking 20% of what I was drinking. Like it's just, it's different. Like, I didn't expect that. And when you hear these stories of the impact on addiction, like now I can really understand that. Like I've never known what it's like to not feel that pull, you know.

Speaker 2:
[102:03] Coffee, tobacco, alcohol, these are all the things that most of the guys just get rid, like they're done once or after they go through the treatment. Do you feel like the bricks have been kind of pulled out of your backpack after?

Speaker 1:
[102:17] I do feel lighter. I just feel like it's fine.

Speaker 2:
[102:22] Right.

Speaker 1:
[102:22] You know, it's like, I don't, everything's good. I don't have to, I'm not, I don't feel that like attachment to things having to be a certain way in the same way. And like I said, like I'm not cured or anything like that. I'm just noticing it's subtle. And it's making me understand the importance of the integration process. So I've heard both of you talk about like, yeah, it's you got to do the work. It's about the, and it's like, those still sound like vague terms to me. Like, what does that mean? I don't know that I really have like a program locked in for how I'm practicing that. And I want to make sure, especially in this special time of neuroplasticity, that I'm doing what I need to do so that I'm taking full advantage of like this moment that I'm experiencing right now so that I can take the actions that will lead me towards the reason why I did it in the first place.

Speaker 2:
[103:21] Like you caught yourself quote unquote crusty in this morning. I think that's one of the biggest takes.

Speaker 3:
[103:25] I was gonna say that.

Speaker 2:
[103:26] That's one of the biggest takeaways is that I can catch myself now before I react, where before it was pure reaction off of like impulse, we're now impulse control or where you're just more aware before you say something that may hurt your wife or your children and I will catch myself now. And that's taken years to be able to do that, where before it just may happen.

Speaker 3:
[103:53] Even if he does it and acknowledges it to me, it sort of like erases the fact that it ever happened because he's never been able to acknowledge it. So he's not only aware he's apologizing or it's just not happening, but I think that those micro shifts are actually macro in the lives of those that they impact. So are you working with an integration coach?

Speaker 1:
[104:19] No.

Speaker 3:
[104:20] That's probably the number one recommendation.

Speaker 2:
[104:22] I would highly recommend that.

Speaker 1:
[104:23] You got to hook me up with him. For sure.

Speaker 2:
[104:25] We have plenty. I work with, again, a different person, but he works with a lot of first responders and veterans, licensed therapists, psychedelic integration coach, actual Buddhist monk. He was everything right after my last treatment. He goes right to the soul of it. So he's a surgeon. He's like, I don't want you as a client for the next three years. That's not what I'm doing here. Like I want for three weeks, I want to fix it, get you on the right path and then move on. And that's what we do. And we just work through cuts right to the heart of it. And I think that's would be, you know, someone like him is someone that I always feel everybody should work with because you're just kind of solving all the issues that you're kind of talking to us about right now and they're able to just get to that point. So I highly recommend healing compounds with the right integration coach after these experiences.

Speaker 3:
[105:18] It was explained to me that, and even though your experience wasn't exactly maybe how you had envisioned it, maybe the next one would be completely different. Yours have been completely different. Did you do 5-Me-O DMT as part of that?

Speaker 1:
[105:29] No, that was the other thing. So first of all, yeah, like I'm beating myself. I'm not doing it wrong. What am I missing? This is not working. I traveled all this distance. That's common, by the way.

Speaker 2:
[105:39] That's everybody, right?

Speaker 1:
[105:40] I've been told, you're not doing it wrong. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing, and you're going to get out of this what you need to be getting out of. So disabuse yourself of that. But this didn't have the 5-Me-O DMT aspect of it. So I'm curious around why that's part of the protocol that you did and that you take Veterans through and maybe did I miss something because I didn't have that.

Speaker 2:
[106:08] I don't think so. The Stanford study proved that you don't need 5-Me-O DMT after the IBGain because it did everything it needed to do in terms of when you-

Speaker 3:
[106:17] They just looked at IBGain.

Speaker 2:
[106:18] Right. So they did the imaging and then the symptom rating scales and everybody's scores literally just went down to practically nothing. That was without the five because we had to do an observational study and it was only on IBGain. What 5-Me-O does, there was a doctor in Mexico years ago that saw because IBGain could be so difficult, 5-Me-O is almost like the polishing. It's very spiritual psychedelic, extreme connected to oneness, source, unconditional love, however you want to do it. So if you have a very difficult IBGain experience, you have your gray day, 5-Me-O kind of brings you back to making sense of all the darkness that may have just happened. And so that's where the balance. However, again, going back to the Stanford study, it just shows as the weeks kind of pass by, you kind of get to that place anyway. So it's almost like doing it overnight or slowly getting there.

Speaker 3:
[107:16] I think that if I were to describe it, IBGain for those in our program anyway, has been really effective in closing the door on the past and no longer letting that impact how you're showing up in the world. But 5MEO tends to open a door to the future and really get someone into feeling more connected.

Speaker 2:
[107:34] Yeah, I mean, or I like what Trevor down at Ambio says. He says, the way he explains it to people is, IBGain kind of power washes you from the inside. And we know how hard power washing is. It takes the skin off of you. And 5MEO kind of polishes you after that. So you kind of have like the hard sandpaper initially to get to the root cause. And then 5 kind of just polishes you and kind of makes it final. That's a non-medical perspective, right?

Speaker 3:
[108:05] One of the coaches, I think, also described this to me, that we now have these deep rooted neural pathways. And Marcus' neural pathways, and actually mine for a long period of time, were just like, straight to the bottom of the hill. And so anything could have sent him just straight to the bottom of the hill. What Ibogaine did for him, and has done for so many others, is clear those, or not clear, cover those tracks. And then what working with an integration coach does is, whenever you're naturally wanting to get in them, they're covered, you can pivot, pivot and create new tracks. And so that makes a lot of sense to me. I think that it's been very intentional for those in our program to work with the coach to create those new tracks and really take advantage of that period of neuroplasticity.

Speaker 1:
[108:49] I can tell you that I do feel different and after decades of trying lots of different things. I mean, my situation is nowhere, it can't even be classified in the same universe in terms of the intensity of what you've experienced, but we all have our pain, right? We all have our lived experience and our challenges and it has been quite profound in that regard. And I just wanna say that this is something that I changed my mind about over an extended period of time. You know, I'm very, people who listen to this podcast have heard me say this before, but I'm so indoctrinated into 12-step. I mean, it saved my life, you know, and it continues to save my life. You know, and it's very binary. It's like, you're using or you're not using, you know what I mean? And there's no room for a conversation around like what we're talking about today. And the notion that an extremely powerful mind-altering substance has the answers to all the questions that you've been seeking your whole life, like is in and of itself a powerful intoxicant? And it's, you know, it's scary for somebody like me because it represents a potential portal back to the person you were before, you know? And it took me a long time to kind of overcome that idea and my resistance around this. And it happened because so many people have come on the podcast. And not because they were here to talk about this thing, it would just come up, you know, and they would share some experience. And so very slowly over a period of time, combined with all the, you know, evidence that is coming out from Johns Hopkins and Stanford, et cetera, it just became undeniable that there's really something here to look at and take seriously. And I'm so glad that I've had these experiences. And again, they're not, I don't know that they're for everybody. I don't want to be in a position where I'm recommending this to anybody.

Speaker 2:
[110:48] We never do. And I'm extremely careful about that. I don't preach this. I don't tell people when they come to me, like this is what you have to do. I say, hey, here's all the information. You should do your own research and decide whether it's for you because when you're saying earlier, this is not for everyone. It is sort of the nuclear option. You know, it's one of the hardest things you can do. Not everybody needs to do that. And so I think it's very important that you do your own research. You look into everything, the risks, the rewards. You know, if it's something that, hey, I've tried almost everything and it hasn't worked for me, then this is something I think that you can potentially explore further.

Speaker 3:
[111:28] How long were you sitting with the decision? Did it take a while?

Speaker 1:
[111:32] Well, I did a year and a handful of months ago, I did a psilocybin and MDMA experience. That was my first experience with psychedelics. So that kind of broke the seal.

Speaker 3:
[111:44] How was that?

Speaker 1:
[111:45] So it was many years building to that experience. And when I was drinking and using, I never did psychedelics. So I had no frame of reference.

Speaker 3:
[111:53] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[111:53] And I didn't really know what to expect going into that. And that was a very beautiful and life-changing experience. It was quite profound in many ways. And it was also, you were talking about ego death. Like I had that ego death and that disillusion of self and the merging and the oneness and the collapsing of linear time and birth and death. And it's all happening in multiple timelines. Like all of that, I had that experience, which was amazing. So I guess I went into the Iboga experience with some, because that was my only experience, like this will be some version of that. And I did not have ego death. Or I just felt like I was literally like a prisoner. You know, it was like, it was very difficult. It was very, very difficult and uncomfortable.

Speaker 3:
[112:45] Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that.

Speaker 1:
[112:48] No, but that's obviously what I needed.

Speaker 2:
[112:50] Well, I think you become more grateful, right? Because of that hard experience, say, okay, I don't want to ever do that again. I want to experience life again. And, you know, they say that when you do have these near near death experiences, that you come out the other side with this gratitude of just being able to breathe and being on Earth and being in a country and having a wife and children.

Speaker 3:
[113:11] The fact that you're not in prison.

Speaker 1:
[113:12] You're truly not in prison.

Speaker 2:
[113:14] You just have a new perspective on everything. And I think it allows you to connect with people more, to not be as angry, not be take things as seriously as you said, be able to let go a little bit.

Speaker 3:
[113:26] Also, like you are truly right in the smack dab of your integration period. At Betz, we recommend that for a period of 90 days that someone is just solely focused on them. Yeah, yeah, because so much shifts and changes.

Speaker 2:
[113:42] Yeah, we don't ask for any favors. We have a rule, like we don't ask you to go on a podcast or interviews.

Speaker 3:
[113:50] Someone can say, I've got a donor rudder to write a check for you.

Speaker 2:
[113:54] And we're like, go integrate.

Speaker 1:
[113:56] Let's talk to you in 90 days. I just flew back from South by Southwest last night. It was just insane for like the last five days. I haven't been in some kind of Shaolin monk repose.

Speaker 2:
[114:10] Century of deprivation might be a good thing.

Speaker 1:
[114:13] I want to talk more about the impact that you guys have had through the work that you've done. And maybe let's contextualize it by talking about the mental health crisis that is experienced by Veterans and first responders. What are the depression rates and the suicide rates? What are we actually contending with?

Speaker 2:
[114:35] We're just in the US alone. We'll just look at the statistics. One in five individuals have a mental health issue. I think those are the individuals that actually come forward. They're saying maybe closer to 30% of individuals are literally struggling with depression. About 30 to 50% of those individuals have something considered treatment resistant depression. And it has nothing to do with the individual. Like there's nothing wrong. It would be similar to a person taking a cancer drug and it just not working. Similar here, right? How we're treating individuals, really right now, the standard of care is antidepressants and some type of talk therapy. But when it doesn't work for millions of individuals in the population, what do you do? And so advanced treatments are slowly coming to market. They're slowly getting FDA approved. We know psychedelics are an answer to these individuals that don't respond. But this is a serious issue. I think with Veterans, the percentage to say you're likely to die four times greater by your own hand than in combat. Some numbers that are just astounding. We've lost just over 7,000 after 9-11. We've lost over 150,000 by individuals that died by suicide.

Speaker 1:
[115:50] 7,000 due to combat and 150,000 due to suicide.

Speaker 2:
[115:55] It might be over 155,000 due to suicide.

Speaker 1:
[115:57] That's shocking.

Speaker 2:
[115:59] It's a shocking number that we've known for all along. We've talked about it, but I don't think we've really highlighted it. And when individuals, civilians hear that number, they usually just go, wow, like I didn't know the issue was that strong. And it really is. I mean, we do have, and it's not just in the US., it's globally. There's a lot of factors, and I'm not going to make believe I know all the factors. Social media, there's just too many inputs and too many things out there telling us what we have to do to get better and what we shouldn't be doing. And so there's a ton of anxiety. I mean, you and I are wearing our whoops, and God forbid, we're not in the green one day. We tend to overanalyze that and think there's something wrong with us. So we might be even causing more anxiety on ourselves because of what's going on. And so we have to figure out a way to get to the root cause of that.

Speaker 3:
[116:49] You know, what started out, I think, as a quest to help our friends was accelerated by the suicide death of one of them. Like, you know, it's very non-customary in our community to say that you're struggling. And so I think the veteran community at large, especially once their civilians feel completely disconnected, and then there's a further issue there with not admitting that you need help. And so there's a lot of suffering and silence happening. One of our close friends took his life, and that really forced us to come out with our own struggles and basically have the courage to start a conversation that it was very taboo. In the eight years since, I think the conversation has become much more front and center. And we have to think of new ways, like war technology changes, the battlefield changes, the SSRI is over 30 years old, so it's like 35 or more years old. We would never be fighting a current day war with technology from 35 years ago. But yet that's what we're fighting this horrific suicide epidemic with. And so we hope that by advancing the conversation and changing the narrative around this new innovative way of looking at mental health, that it will eclipse the Veteran community.

Speaker 1:
[118:21] Ironically, though, it's the ancient way. That's so true. This isn't new. Yeah, and that was one reflection that I had on having done the Iboga route as opposed to Ibogaine and kind of reflecting on the Western insistence on like, okay, like the Bwiti, these people have been doing this for, I don't know, however many hundreds of thousands of years. Yeah, like in over that period of time have like developed a very specific ceremony. And then the Westerner comes in and says, okay, well, we'll take it from here. Like, yeah, we just need this. And then we're going to do it this way because we think we know better. You know what I mean? I think that's the danger in the commodification and the commercialization around this. Do you guys think about that aspect of it?

Speaker 2:
[119:12] We have, and we know that there's really good eboga operations that are going on throughout the world. And for us as a veteran 501C3 that's operating in the US, we've had to be very careful about how we've taken this to the public. And we've sat down with a ton of lawmakers in many states and Texas and federally. And it was a very common theme of saying, hey, this has to be done a certain way or we're not even going to talk to you. And so we've had to stay very hard lined on FDA-approved clinician-guided access to these medicines. And granted, going back, we know the traditional approaches work. Are we going to be able to get the traditional approaches here in the US?

Speaker 1:
[119:59] Is that going to be a model that we are going to be able to use? Or I just think that as these treatments get FDA-approved, it's just going to open up more of the traditional market outside the US for people to explore those and just at least feel more comfortable traveling out to do them.

Speaker 2:
[120:16] There's also an endangerment issue with the iboga plant. And from a scale issue, there's also a sustainability issue. And so I think that a synthetic drug offered in a VA setting, in a subsidized manner in a VA setting would be what's best for our constituency. But there's a lot of considerations.

Speaker 3:
[120:42] There's a multitude of issues. I mean, on the one hand, you're fighting the kind of legal regulatory landscape. This is illegal in the United States. You have to travel outside of the country to do it. And I'm sure there's good actors. I know there's good actors and there's, I'm sure there's a lot of bad actors, right? And the first hurdle is like FDA approval and kind of clearing the, clearing a path towards this becoming legal and taken seriously. And so much of your work is around the conversation, this conversation that's going on right now about how to achieve that. And we're seeing progress in places like Texas and Colorado where these discussions are happening right now. I think we're probably still a long way away from it. And, you know, not for nothing, like how is Big Pharma perceiving this? Like it's an existential threat to the SSRI market and how, you know, we've been traditionally treating mental health disorders. And perhaps at the same time, it's also an opportunity for them. And what does that look like for them? No pharmaceutical company wants a one-time treatment. They're never going to make money off that. And so, you know, that's a whole thing that's going on in the background that I'm sure you know a lot more about than I do. And yet, if that pathway gets cleared, and there is a regulatory framework for this becoming legal in the United States, what does that look like? How is it regulated so that, you know, there are guardrails and, you know, policies and processes so that it's administered in the way that you would like it to be administered? And then there's the accessibility issue, which I know you care a lot about. Like right now, you can go to certain clinics, and some of them are really expensive, you know, and this is obviously preventing the people who could benefit from this the most, access to these kinds of treatments.

Speaker 2:
[122:34] Yeah. There's so many issues, you're right. And Rich, there's an issue every which way you look. For us, we've chosen to stay so focused on our core constituency, which is Veterans. And so advocating for Veterans has actually proven to be a very bipartisan issue that we've been successful at achieving milestones that others thought would be impossible. One of the biggest challenges is that iboga grows in a completely different part of the world. And so because it's schedule one here in the United States, and because the cardiac risk exists and it's practically impossible to even research, you can't get it here even if research were approved. Well, if research were approved to the FDA, you could get it here. But the problem right now is that it can't be grown here and it is schedule one.

Speaker 1:
[123:29] The resources are starting to dwindle. We heard recently that this is not just a US issue, it's a global issue, but we've heard recently that there's a ton of Chinese influence now in Gabon and West Africa, and they're buying up as many aboga plants and aboga farms, and they're bringing it back to China, and this is just what happens. And so there are so many issues. When you stopped before, you had opened up a wide array of things that are happening. And so we're just trying to stay focused on what we do. We can't do everything, and so we picked a path, and that's the path. We support many different paths, but we do have to be careful about where we travel, especially with the individuals that we're dealing with.

Speaker 3:
[124:17] So in the aftermath of your first experience, you basically have this epiphany, we have to bring this to the people we know who could benefit from this. And you've realized that, you've manifested that. You have two organizations. You've got this organization, Vets, Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions. And that's the organization that you sort of get an inside look at in the documentary, where you're bringing other first responders and veterans, you know, through a version of what you experienced. A 501c3 that basically helps to bankroll these experiences and make them available. And then you also have this other organization, TARA Mind. Can you talk about what that is?

Speaker 1:
[125:00] Yeah, TARA Mind, I was approached by investors a number of years ago to just say, what you're doing with vets and veterans is amazing, and you've had so much success there. How do you take what you did for them and take it to the private sector? And so I was hired into a VC to try to figure out a business model to say, OK, how do we take what you did for veterans? How do we transfer that to the private sector? And it was really difficult to figure out because, first off, these drugs are not FDA approved, and so we can't really do that. And so we started out with what was FDA approved. And what the platform is is really it's a technology platform to be able to connect integrative clinics, psychiatrists, advanced psychiatry with patients, make that whole experience easy and accessible and like a white glove concierge approach. So similar to what we did with vets, where a person applies, they come in and we kind of handhold them the whole way. We give them therapy, we get them to treatment, and then we monitor their outcomes. It's the same exact thing that we're doing with TowerMind, except the business model as we take it to employers. So think of like JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs offers up healthcare benefits for their employees. This is a healthcare benefit. Today it's not Ibogaine or psilocybin, very soon. Today it's IV ketamine at an advanced psychiatry clinic, or it's the TMS Saint protocol that came out of Stanford that just was FDA approved and has a three-day remission rate for someone who has major depressive disorder. There are treatments out there that weren't here just four years ago, and that's what the platform does. It's a commercial business. We work with healthcare systems. We work with payers because the idea is we built the chassis now, so when Ibogaine comes through, when psilocybin comes through, we've built the network across the US working with employers, working with healthcare systems. We could just take those treatments and plug them into our system. If I'm an employee and I've struggled with antidepressants and talk therapy, and it don't respond, well, what's available? Then we step in and say, well, St. TMS is available, advanced TMS, or maybe IV ketamine because you have treatment-resistant depression, eventually it will be psilocybin-assisted therapy or MDMA-assisted therapy. That's the commercial business that Tar Mind is exploring. What I talked about earlier with subsidies, the reason we're doing that is because most people can't pay for these advanced treatments.

Speaker 2:
[127:23] I would love to talk about VETS. VETS is the grassroots effort which has since turned into a truly, I would say we have global reach 501c3 that came from Marcus' declaration immediately after I began was this is exactly what his teammates needed. Now, what we weren't prepared for was what was intended to help his friends and former teammates would have global impact. We are more or less three organizations operating under one umbrella. We provide programmatic services. We conduct research or partner with academic partners like Stanford. And then we have a very robust policy and advocacy department. When the three work together, they're in perfect coordination to take the voices from our programs paired alongside the data like from Stanford, to go to state capitals, to go to Washington, DC and educate and advocate and then actually put legislation together to unlock funding. What many don't realize is that it's practically impossible to get research going on a Schedule 1 substance. It's, you can do it, but it takes years and millions of dollars. So we work to reduce those barriers to research and expand access to care. Programmatically, we're providing a wide variety of services to the Veterans that come through our program. We do the integration support, the subsidy to go have the treatment. We have offerings every day of the week, workshops, spouse support, an ambassador program so they can plug in and give back. So we're really proud of that. But the way that we're going to reach scale is through the policy piece. And the difficulties around research are enough of a hurdle, but Veterans are largely excluded from those studies anyway because their health histories are too complex. So this is why we're so committed to the policy piece and giving Veterans access here in the United States. What we're doing is great. It's not sustainable from the vantage point of like the film, for example. We received a 500% spike in applications immediately after the film premiered on Netflix, when we were already only able to provide support for one out of every 10 that we received. So we were getting 45, 50, 60 applications a day and we can approve five per week.

Speaker 1:
[129:56] Right, so if we can, let's say, fund 300 special operations individuals in a year, and we are, and then we're saving 300 lives and families and generations, but what is 300 compared to the numbers we were seeing earlier, millions of Americans that we can't support at this time? To Amber's point, policy change, changing policy enables to open up that access for more individuals to receive treatment.

Speaker 2:
[130:22] 100% donor dependent. So at any time, the work could stop if we don't raise the funds to continue. So it's a serious...

Speaker 3:
[130:31] Has the documentary opened doors on the Hill? Do you have champions in the Senate or Congress who are fostering this conversation?

Speaker 2:
[130:40] Very much so.

Speaker 3:
[130:40] Or subcommittee hearings or anything like that? Very much.

Speaker 2:
[130:43] Yes. Marcus was actually part of the first ever Senate hearing on... Or it was a Senate roundtable on psychedelics.

Speaker 1:
[130:52] Psychedelic treatment. They had some of the top pharmaceutical companies there that are developing these drugs. psilocybin, MDMA. They had the VA there. We showed the documentary, which is an extremely powerful, moving, educational film. And we did that in Texas. We were able to get past a bill in Texas that appropriates $50 million, paired with a drug developer, so $100 million. But it was all from the film. We show the film, individuals or politicians who have never been exposed to any of this, see that and they go, I didn't know, right? Kind of like when I was approached with Ibogaine initially, like this is some hippie drug that they go, oh wow, this is like real and people were healing. Like we need to get behind this. We need to research it. And so the film has been such a powerful film.

Speaker 2:
[131:38] It's been shown in a number of states. We're working in this session alone. We're working in 22 states at various levels. Yeah, so.

Speaker 1:
[131:45] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[131:46] And we've unlocked, I think we've just got another 5 million. So we're probably around 130 million in research funding just in the last couple of years.

Speaker 1:
[131:55] Yeah. Wow. And not us, but like the different institutions and the studies.

Speaker 3:
[131:59] And it takes time, right? Like, and you still have to be patient. This is like, it just moves in a place of pace, right? But I do feel like you are approximating like an inflection point with this. It's reaching a kind of saturation point in terms of awareness. At least it feels like that to me. Maybe I'm in my bubble.

Speaker 2:
[132:17] I think you're right.

Speaker 1:
[132:18] No, you're right. And even if a politician doesn't necessarily today have the ability to, let's just say approve something, that same politician is sending us a friend or a veteran to go through treatment. So at the individual level, I think everybody gets it. But when you're talking about the system, the system has risks and they have to think of a lot more than just helping an individual. So those same individuals that are not sure yet are actually, they also actually send us individuals all the time and say, hey, this person tried X, Y, and Z. You really need to take care of them. So we're seeing that starting to happen.

Speaker 2:
[132:55] There's an open-mindedness gap.

Speaker 3:
[132:57] Yeah. You mentioned testifying on the hill or being part of a subcommittee hearing where there were pharmaceutical companies. Like what is the vibe from those organizations? Like are they seeing the future with this? Are they resisting it?

Speaker 1:
[133:12] They're seeing the future and what they're doing is just like many commercial businesses, you have the folks that are the startups. So you have the small pharmaceutical companies that are doing this with-

Speaker 2:
[133:23] Yeah, there were no big pharmaceutical companies.

Speaker 1:
[133:25] The pharmaceutical companies have stepped in and said, we're taking this through the FDA. So it's all the typical startup biotech companies. But then as they get through their clinical trials, maybe phase one, maybe now in phase two, that's what we usually see, they get to phase two. Now J&J steps in or Merck, more Eli Lilly. So they're jumping on once the risk has gone away and they're seeing that there's a possibility for this to get through. So the pharmaceutical companies are coming in, they're just coming in in later stages of what we're seeing.

Speaker 3:
[133:55] The corporate behemoths that stand to benefit the most though are the insurance companies. Because when you look at these statistics and the impact, you can imagine them seeing how much money they can save. Because if this is so effective, then they're not going to have to be paying out down the line on when these mental health problems metastasize into worse conditions. That's a very powerful lobby to have on your side, like this juggernaut that could actually help drive change.

Speaker 1:
[134:25] I think once the payers realize that this will save money in the long-term, and maybe not overnight because as we were talking about earlier, these are expensive treatments. They'll probably continue to be expensive. But saving an individual from years of suffering, the cost of that, the productivity, the absenteeism, if you're talking about in the workforce, the ER visits, the payers are eventually go, wait a minute, if we give this person like psilocybin, and all those problems go away, how much money do we save? So to your point, yes, I think the payers are starting to see that in the insurance companies that if they get behind this, then it will save them in the long run.

Speaker 2:
[135:02] Well, the entire system needs to level up. But I have hope that it's happening in treating root cause versus symptoms. There's so much of that happening and so much waste because of it, and delaying of the inevitable.

Speaker 3:
[135:14] But there's still a lot of baggage, and I say this from personal experience, when you talk about these kinds, it's like really, what are we doing here? So what is it that you want to say to the person who has been watching this whole thing and is still skeptical?

Speaker 2:
[135:32] I would say good for them for not ever having been in a place where they're willing to do anything to save someone they love. I would say, let's count your blessings, because when you're in that place, nothing is off the table.

Speaker 1:
[135:50] I would say be interested, be curious. I think we need to be life-long learners and grow. If we just put our hands over our mouth and over our ears and didn't see what's being innovated and what's being out there, then to me and Amber, it's always about growth and innovation. Those that are skeptical, just do your homework, do your research. Again, you're not here to preach, but you'll find out, you'll talk to enough people that have been through these type of treatments and had their life turned around completely. Don't believe us, believe everybody else. That's the same thing I do when people ask me, should I do this? I say, well, do you want to do this? Are you ready for it? Have you talked to anybody? I'm not going to convince you. I just give you all the information you need to make an informed decision. I think that's what we're trying to do with the film and with the work we're doing.

Speaker 3:
[136:42] With the Veterans that you've worked with, what is perhaps the most extreme example of before and after?

Speaker 2:
[136:49] I would say we try to not get involved in an active crisis situation because we just aren't equipped to handle. However, there have been a couple of situations and referrals, friends of friends or whatnot, that have had active suicide, intervention during suicide, that have come through the program and are some of our most ardent ambassadors today. To see that turnaround where one life that was on the cusp of being ended is now having such a positive impact on countless other lives is just the most gratifying thing. I look at Marcus' life and how close we probably were to losing him. Having him back for our family and generations would be more than enough. But I look at the fact that he's still here and how many other people have heard his story and help someone, gotten help for themselves or turned their lives around. It's just remarkable, the power of one life.

Speaker 1:
[137:59] To your point earlier about following individuals after treatment. Just the two guys in the movie and the documentary, Maddie and DJ, they're literally living their best lives right now. It's incredible to speak with them and just what they're doing. This is years later, right? They're just doing things that they've never done before. They're looking at the world completely different. Their lives are good, their families are good, and they just keep getting better. It's pretty wonderful.

Speaker 2:
[138:27] Living life, I think, is on this sort of like continuum of white knuckling and thriving. And most people who come through our program, us included, were white knuckling slash surviving. And you can take someone from surviving to thriving, and they show up for themselves and the world in such a different way. It just creates a ripple-out effect amongst humanity that holds so much promise.

Speaker 3:
[138:56] The ripple effect is something I've been thinking a lot about. Yeah, I mean, just both of you and, you know, the power of you together, like the extent to which you have effectuated change by taking this personal experience that you had and turning it into a service on behalf of humanity. And what has blossomed from that is really remarkable. But on the individual level, like the notion that you can leverage this medicine to heal a very old wound, a wound that has persisted through generations that you have inherited, you know, by dint of just being born into the life that you were born into, allows you to interrupt this pattern that would go on unabated. And so the ripple effect continues across future generations that aren't even born yet. And, you know, take somebody who has inherited, you know, a generational trauma wound, that's spilling into their kids and their, you know, it's like, and then it gets perpetuated, you know, on and on and on and on. And then to be the intervention and say, no more, this ends. Like, is there any more powerful, you know, thing that you could do with your life? Like, on some level, I think about, like, that's what we're here to do, right? We're here to spare the next generation our pain.

Speaker 1:
[140:17] Yeah. What I want to say, Rich, is, like, you know, we're doing our work. And I don't know if you've thought about this yet, but for you now speaking about this in your platform, think of how many thousands of people are going to start reaching out for treatment, are going to start looking into these, are going to get better just because of you. And that's kind of how we look at this, is that individuals who have platforms and have been, have had success, are able to perpetuate to everyone else that is seeking, searching for answers. And so just remember that, that now you're a person that has the ability to literally touch millions of people that are, you know, struggling like we were.

Speaker 3:
[141:02] On that note, for the person who now is thinking, all right, I'm excited to learn more. Where do I go? How do I get involved? How do I, how do I contribute to VETS? How do I learn more about what VETS is doing? How do I connect somebody who I know is suffering? Or if I'm suffering myself, how do I find the solution?

Speaker 2:
[141:18] There are a couple of things. Yeah, there are a couple of things. So the website of VETS is vetsolutions.org. And it's, you know, all about the organization itself, the nonprofit. We are donor-dependent, so always looking to partner with people who are willing to give whatever to the cause. And then Marcus and I have, you know, typically been pretty private and found ourselves sort of thrust out amongst this movement as leaders. And it hasn't always been comfortable for us, because, you know, we've been going through our own processes over the years, but also pretty private. We have recently decided to sort of, and we've been building, building companies, building movements, et cetera. We have recently decided to step out from behind the laptop and launch a podcast where we talk more about our story and things that have worked for us, both as a couple and individuals. I think one of the really important things about our story is that I had to get out of the caretaker mode and get on my own path of healing. This wasn't all Marcus. This was, you know, a lot of my own personal inner work as well. And when I got on my path and he got on his path as individuals, we finally met up. And in doing so, we've been able to carve out a whole new future for ourselves. And so we're really excited to share more about that on our podcast, which will be launching soon. So in addition to vetsolutions.org, our website is thecapones.com.

Speaker 3:
[142:47] Is the Capones, is that going to be the name of the podcast?

Speaker 2:
[142:50] Conversations with the Capones.

Speaker 3:
[142:52] The Capones, great. That's great. You can't possibly answer all the emails that you must be getting, especially in the aftermath of the documentary.

Speaker 2:
[142:58] Yeah, it's not possible. A lot of content opportunities, though, to speak to some of these things. I mean, it's so interesting to me how everyone is, if they're not personally dealing with something, they're one degree separated from someone who is. There's just this suffering in our society.

Speaker 3:
[143:16] Nobody's untouched from this in one way or another. When you hear the statistics around loneliness and just the average person who's just trying to live their life, we're all impacted by mental health considerations to one extent, to another, and the fact that there are other solutions out there beyond what we've been programmed to believe is the limit of what science is capable of is exciting, and it's courageous, I think, what you're doing, and it's a tremendous public service, and I feel like you're just at the very beginning of this fantastic journey.

Speaker 1:
[143:55] We do too. We feel like eight years has been a lot, and there's been struggle and a lot of late nights and weekends, but I agree with you that I tell everybody we're just getting started. There's so much more work to do, and it's okay. It doesn't feel like work.

Speaker 3:
[144:12] So final thought for you, Amber. You mentioned earlier that Vets, your organization, is careful not to work with somebody who's in the midst of a suicidal crisis like when they're in that crisis state. But for the person, the audience member who's watching right now, perhaps their partner is in that state, or somebody watching or listening to this right now who is having suicidal ideation and thoughts like that. In such a hyper-crisis state, is there a place that you can recommend, like a phone number they can call or a website or who they can talk to? Because obviously, you can't get that person in that state immediately into some kind of psychedelic therapy situation, and probably they shouldn't go into that situation in that state.

Speaker 2:
[145:01] There's the suicide crisis line, which is 9-8-8, and operates same as 9-1-1, but these are trained suicide interventionalists on the other end of the line. So if someone is in an immediate crisis, that number could be a lifeline truly. I would say start doing diligence because in some regard, just a glimmer of hope is enough to keep someone grounded and willing to take the next step in pursuing healing. Psychedelics hold a tremendous promise, and yet they're seemingly can feel impossible to access. Currently in the United States, ketamine treatments are available. It's an off-use label of ketamine, but incredibly effective for breaking cycles of treatment-resistant depression or active suicidal ideation. There are ketamine clinics in every major city across the world.

Speaker 1:
[145:56] I would argue a person in a suicidal state, the number one treatment right now is ketamine, is IV ketamine, intramuscular ketamine. Again, under a doctor's care, there is unfortunately too many reports of individuals that are getting these prescribed at home and doing them on your own. And that's not recommended, but for an individual that's really struggling or an immediate case, probably IV ketamine at one of these advanced mental health clinics is definitely a short-term fix, enough to put a tourniquet on that individual to get them stabilized to then be able to start looking into some of these more advanced treatments.

Speaker 3:
[146:31] So, this has been amazing. Thank you. As I said earlier, you're just remarkable examples of service. And it's so heartwarming and inspiring to see a couple on the precipice of going beyond a place of repair to not only repair your relationship, but build this really impactful, meaningful relationship with the ripple effects of helping so many lives. It's really quite something. And I salute you both, and I'm here to support you. So let me know what I can do to do that. I am at your service, and I can't wait to see how this continues to evolve for you.

Speaker 2:
[147:10] We're so grateful.

Speaker 1:
[147:11] Yeah, Rich, we are extremely grateful for being here and having an audience and hearing our story. And just thank you for what you're doing. And your story is inspirational. And everything that I read, I was just inspired. And a bit of me was like, well, why can't I do that? You know, it's just like, but coming from where you came from and like what you're doing today, like people should be able to see that.

Speaker 2:
[147:32] And I dare you to run an ultramarathon.

Speaker 1:
[147:35] No, no, I got to call me.

Speaker 3:
[147:37] I like clearly I need to learn something about how to work out in the gym. You know, we can trade notes at some point.

Speaker 1:
[147:43] For me, it's surfing and golf. It's about what I what I do now.

Speaker 3:
[147:47] So right on. Well, you're always welcome back here.

Speaker 1:
[147:50] Thank you.

Speaker 3:
[147:51] Thank you. You could keep me up to date on all you're doing.

Speaker 1:
[147:54] So thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 2:
[147:56] Sure.

Speaker 3:
[147:56] Well, see you.