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

30:15I 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.

31:06I 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, how old were they at this point? That was 2016. So our daughter would have been 14, our son's 16, you know, they were really tough ages. And, um, 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.

32:07And 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.

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36:44For people that are listening or watching who don't know the story, let's set it up. Let's go back to the beginning. I mean, the two of you have been together since basically you were teenagers, right? Yes. 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 is a whole nother. And dating the coach's daughter. This is like right out of Friday Night Lights. Oh, was it the program, right? Remember the program that the backup quarterback was dating the coach's daughter?

37:20And so I used to get a lot of that from the team. And we didn't meet when I was actually playing for him. He had left Pop, Coach Watson. Within a couple of months, we met. We met right after that. And then he got a phone call from one of the coaches saying, hey, Marcus is dating Amber. And then Amber and I took a road trip to visit him up at Northwestern. And that was a bit awkward initially, but we have not separated since. So, yeah. 29 years in July. Wow. That we went together. Quarterback, you know, you're kind of like this giga-chad dude, you know? I mean, like the pictures of you when you're, I mean, you're just like this strapping, you know, super tall, incredibly fit guy, quarterback on a team.

38:02I mean, it's like the doors are swinging wide open. You can do anything and you decide you want to go into the Navy SEALs. Yeah. What year was that? That was 99 when I had the idea. And I had the idea because I stayed up late one night and watched G.I. Jane on - That was it? No, that was really - Shout out Demi Moore. Yeah, she still got it. I mean, no, really. I didn't tell that story, by the way, for a very long time as everyone can imagine. You know, 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.

38:40I watched G.I. 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 G.I. Jane and they talked about like, this is the best of the best, you know as you were talking about i've always yes i was a quarterback but i was always like a struggling quarterback you know i always had to work for everything really hard nothing in my opinion nothing came naturally like i i worked every day in the summer i stayed you know came in early i stayed stayed late and i still do the same thing and so when i watched gi jane and they said this is the best the best for me it was like that that that uh what you were talking about earlier is that achievement.

39:33Can I achieve something that is greater than myself, the best of the best? And that's how I got interested in it. And it was a team thing too for you. He'd always been part of a team. And so this was like, you know, kind of like America's team. Right, right, right. Yeah. I tried to get 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 like an individual sport, except swimming. I was always, I was a competitive swimmer when I was like four years old. So like you. So you do the whole thing, the buds, the hell week, all of that.

40:05And you end up basically spending 13 years in service, in special operations, SEAL team 10, SEAL team six, you become a buds instructor, correct? Yep. 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 kind of sharing their stories and writing books about this experience. And it's in part like an illustration of the horrors of war, but there's also like a sort of public fascination with this lifestyle and a sort of valorizing kind of romantic lens on it. And what can you say about what it was like?

40:51Well, I would say it is extremely tough. So definitely one of the hardest things I've done, which is get through training, both physically and mentally. And I think physically everyone prepares. 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. Like my offensive line was big.

41:28Those guys were six, seven, 300. But so I was a bigger guy, which is usually a little bit tougher. Um, you have to carry your weight, right? So guys that are five, 10, 180 pounds have an easier time. And so I always had, even at Buds, I had to work and I had to work extremely hard, but what I had is grit and determination and like can never fail attitude. And I took that, you know, right to training and I got through Buds and I got through my teams. And I, you know, I guess I excelled and I did well. And, you know, going back to your question, what was that like? I would take the shirt off my back.

42:04I would give my last dollar to every individual that I served with. And I think that's the part that draws people in, is that you're doing something that is much, just take yourself completely out of the equation. Like this is about everybody else. I remember being home one time on break in New York and I I was in a bathroom and some guys walked in and they were in the stall next to me and all they kept talking about was money, money, money, money, money, money. And I remember just feeling like kind of slimy. And I said, that's all. And I remember going home and telling my dad, I said, dad, I was in the bathroom at this club and all these guys kept talking about was money.

42:40And 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. So 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, right? 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. And purpose. You were serving a purpose. It wasn't like you were just on a team.

43:22It was like you were, especially after 9-11. So there was a gap in time there between Bud's 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.

44:09And then in the 11th hour, Marcus said, 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 feelings of tremendous purpose.

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

45:37And 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. It was like, well, now I want to use my training to go overseas and do something with this and go get bad guys, right? It would be like you training every day, swimming in the pool, biking and running and never having the chance to compete. And that would probably be a struggle for you, right? If you never like put your training to work, it'd be practicing football every day and never being able to play on Saturday or Friday night, you know, or whatever.

46:12And that's what we wanted to do. And then that was the focus. and there was such a shift in called it a paradigm shift when the towers came down i was in third phase and we were you know we call it 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 we thought the towers didn't come down we thought this was another uh gimmick that they were playing because you know there's so many mind games in Buds, right? They're trying to get in your mind and trying to make you quit.

46:47And we thought this was another joke, but obviously it wasn't. Yeah. We even said, 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 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 um perspective than what was happening before a new level of intensity it was a completely new level of intensity yeah and then as you said i couldn't wait to get on deployment so i couldn't wait to go over to afghanistan and iraq and and start working and how are you processing that amber at the time i mean i just felt like he needed to get over there i i completely supported him because um you know there was a righteous anger that i was feeling and i 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 feeling more and more distant from the family.

48:11No. But at least in the beginning, I was super supportive. I was always supportive. But certainly, 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, 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. It's a very selfish profession, but maybe everything we do is selfish in a way because there's a lot of talk around balance these days.

48:57And 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, give or take every year, whether it's training or whether it was deployment.

49:38And so you come home and you try to put a family life back together, but there really is none because you're, you're already thinking about what's my next training trip. What's my next? You're biding your time. You're just, yeah, you're just, you're never, you're never present. You're never present. 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 door is when everything happens. So like air conditioning breaks, the toilet breaks, the house breaks, and then Amber has to raise two children.

50:13Which comes with a lot of resentment. Keep the family together. How many deployments? six six deployments yeah mostly combat um to both war zones afghanistan and iraq two different fights definitely afghanistan was uh extremely mountainous tough terrain and iraq was you know kind of like city fighting in a way so they're two different types of war if you want to call it that and they were um they're both interesting they were both you know 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.

51:05I had a friend once who told me, I went to see the psychologist, the command psychologist, and for a few different things many years. And he told me once, he said, Marcus, he said, men have about 42 feelings. He said, women have 240. And when I literally, and I told a friend that and he goes, 40? He's like, that seems like a lie. It's pretty high. He goes, I have about two. He's like, I have two feelings. So, you know, we just didn't feel, we just did. Well, you're specifically trained not to feel. I mean, you're like at the tip of the spear of like, feelings are only going to become problematic in theater, right?

51:46Sure. So he's only home 65 days out of the year. And when he comes home, he's a stranger. Yeah. How are you trying to manage the confusion of that and trying to connect with him when he's essentially a ghost in the house? 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.

52:33I 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.

53:17So it caused issues with the kids to have him home. I think they created this mythical figure, especially our son, on what he would be. And what the kids were delivered back, you know, after these deployment cycles was not what they had, you know, envisioned in their mind, nor was it mine. I knew Marcus was really struggling. I felt really bad for him because his family had become his teammates. And I think at some point it just was clearly unsustainable. What was it that prevented you from just ripping the bandaid off and saying, like, we're getting divorced? A few things. My dad, as a football coach, has always drilled in me, do not quit.

54:09And 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. You don't want to. It all comes from not wanting to give your dad satisfaction. Well, there's competition. There's competition. 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, like I really, really, really loved the Marcus that I met, but he had to become someone else to survive the circumstances that were put before us.

54:46And 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. We did that too. We bought beach cruisers. Yeah. 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 expectation that that could ever happen? I got into this when I was 20.

55:29We 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 naive hope. Yeah. But there was also this naivete that like, you know, 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. 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 know 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.

56:22You couldn't have foreseen there's going to be all these deployments and this is going to go on for a very long time. That's right. Yeah. And so I think that same naivete that I could get him back one day, that's very accurate. 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? 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.

56:59I had them. But I also had just this really unhealthy level of stubbornness that caused me to create massive walls around my heart and just not ask for help, not tell Marcus how I was feeling. and then that caused a lot of resentment. And same for us. I mean, we didn't talk about our feelings or, 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, you know, 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 about the struggles I think that we went through, but, you know, we were both dealing with the same thing, just in a different, in a different, like I had my team, I had my guys, I had my CrossFit workouts with them in the morning.

57:54Amber did the same thing. She had her girls, she had her CrossFit gym that, you know, they went to and they'd go have coffee after and talk about all the things. So we were dealing with it in our own ways. They were waiting for us. We weren't waiting for anything. We were waiting to, again, go train, 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. Yeah. A lot of celebrate with alcohol in the community, at least in the old days of the community.

58:33You celebrate with alcohol. You commiserate with alcohol. Everything sort of revolved around this drinking culture that only fueled the problems that we were having. And there are a lot of guys, Rich, that have stopped drinking for obvious reasons, right? It's just not productive, you know? I mean, right? We can go down the rabbit hole here, you know, if you want at some point. Oh, today is two years since you stopped drinking two day three oh three years wow wow to this day by a whole year to this day yes that's great he's like been very intentional about saying you know i feel so much better this morning because i chose not to drink last night so it's not even really like at least in my observation been white knuckling sobriety fell away he has white knuckled periods of sobriety in the past never this long but I truly feel that he's put healthy things in that void and had a much different perspective this time and yes it is to the day today yeah of course you know preaching in the choir I feel better you know you just you feel like you have this glow your skin looks better or just everything is better shocking how that works right it's wild but I think it was early 2017 when she brought up Ibogaine.

59:52And I remember - Yeah, so what's the pitch? I mean, the pitch was about Ibogaine. And I said, so you want me to take a psychedelic and I'm supposed to get better from that. Think about someone who's never touched a drug before. Yeah, this is not a topic that I know anything about. Right. And here, you're going to go take this drug, a psychedelic that is going to heal you and it's going to make you better. And just imagine being approached with that and just thinking, I mean, literally said like, that's absolutely crazy. Like, that's insane. Like, what, what are we talking about here? Like, what, is this a joke?

1:00:30And at that point, again, you know, I had been on pharmaceuticals for years, not getting better. Um, so I just thought, and, and, and this was, this was a whole nother level. And all I could think about was psychedelics were like Woodstock and hippies and, and, and, 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. Well, he was just like, oh, no, absolutely not. But you did have the team member who had had that experience.

1:01:05Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And I think that probably really resonated with you, but you also were very uncomfortable with the idea. 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, 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's like, when I talked to you for 30 seconds on this call, he's like, I'm convinced, like I'm ready to go.

1:01:47So here's a person who's extremely bright, who looked at all the research and still thought it was crazy, but talked to me, who said, dude, this saved my life. That's a trust that exists within the community. 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 Ibogaine. first they might say especially in 2017 what is that right now now it's a little bit it's a lot different i mean actually they're they're recommending individuals to go do this they're saying hey we don't have anything for you you're gonna 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 to try.

1:02:39And then, Rich, I did the research. There was a lot of papers and a lot of work done for many years. I mean, I think the drug was introduced in the 30s in France. So it had been out there, commercialized, and people utilizing it. The more you read about it, the more you go, you know what, this is something that I think potentially can help. So I went from thinking this was crazy to, wait, this is medical treatment. This is legitimate, even though it's not FDA-approved here in the U.S. But, you know, we've been going to Mexico and Costa Rica for 20 or 30 years to do stem cells for a reason because we couldn't get them here.

1:03:15So it doesn't mean that it's bad.

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1:06:23so amber presents you with this the stakes are high your marriage and your relationship with your family is on the line is that and then you do this research you become convinced that maybe there's there's some there there right but at the same time it's like well if it doesn't work you know it's like what it's going to switch up it's going to just a switch is going to get flicked and you're going to be like the expectations that you're going to come back and it's all gonna be good. Like, you know, that's a lot. That's tough now too. There's so many of the guys that - Well, you see these before and afters and you're like, okay, so if I come back and I'm not that, like - I mean, you feel like you're really gonna tank at that point, right?

1:07:02Because you felt like you've tried everything and this is it. And if that doesn't work - Right. So the expectation, I almost think it's better not to have expectations because of course this doesn't work. This is a treatment, just like a cancer treatment or something else, or doesn't work for everybody but i mean arguably it's extremely powerful and um i laugh i'm laughing now i don't know if you know what i'm going to say but we were in we were at a event in texas a few months ago and there's this world-renowned cardiologist and he's listening to amber i speak on stage and he's like this sounds like it's just kind of putting some band-aid on on the symptoms and and amber didn't know he was like this world-renowned cardiologist older guy he's like 85 and she's like, I, he's like, I'm going to challenge that.

1:07:48And she goes on stage. She's like, I would consider this actually pretty curative from what we're seeing. I said it's far more curative than palliative. And I'm like, granted, this is my own hypothesis. Well, most of medicine is putting a Band-Aid on symptoms. 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 in another clinic. And I thought, this is it. If this trifecta of things doesn't work, then I don't have anything left.

1:08:22And 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. I come home from that trip unexpectedly. I don't even tell him I'm leaving. I pack my bags while he's a magnet brain therapy. And I go to the airport and I get on a flight back home. And I called my parents. I'd come for, I think, for my birthday. I called my parents collectively and said, this is it.

1:09:02I told my dad I was quitting. And he just said, you know you're not disappointing you're not quitting you're choosing your children and so there was like the whole reckoning and there was peace for a moment and then I was overcome with the reality of the fact that they would I could move on with my life they would be forced to live with probably losing their dad and um 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, 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.

1:09:50I 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. The time kept changing. And I thought he was going to just say, forget it. But when I finally did get him to the airport and he got out of the car, I realized that this is all I had. And if it didn't work, then we were completely out of options.

1:10:35And 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. You're going to drive across the border. Yeah, I was going to go to the clinic where he had been dosed. And just to caveat that, when I got out of the car, I literally said, I don't think this is going to work. Like, don't think I'm going to come back. I don't think this will work. I was like telling Amber.

1:11:16Don't get your hopes up. Don't get your hopes up. Like, this is still, I think, a little bit crazy. Like, do you think we've tried all these things. Now I'm going to go do this other thing. Just don't expect me to come back any different. And that's how I literally liked. Which was probably why I was like, oh, gosh. That was the goodbye, was don't expect anything to change. Yeah. So the next day I fly in and I'm in the car saying like, I can't go. And she said, trust me on this. He's only asking for one thing. He's asking for you. And I was like, how can that be? Like, we hate each other, you know, on some level.

1:11:52Why 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.

1:12:41And then immediately you're like, oh gosh, don't get too comfortable there. It's all going to be taken out from underneath you any minute. Wow. So this is where we have to talk about what it is. 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?

1:13:29Yeah. 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. And so think of it as a single molecule that gets extracted and they found it to be the most potent and what's actually helping the brain, helping the individual work through psychological issues. And so from my experience, it's taken just like any other drug. It's in a pill form. You do a ton of preparation before it.

1:14:09So I was working with a psychotherapist who's also a psychedelic integration coach, was also a PhD in Tibetan Buddhist philosophy. So I had like this kind of trifecta of, you know, she had a lot of different expertise and so would approach me in different ways. And so I had good preparation going in. And then because 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. And so you're doing blood work and urinalysis and you're doing EKGs. And so you have to be good, medically cleared before you can go do that.

1:14:51You 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 the psych to get off those. And it's very difficult those last couple of days. You're on these drugs for years and now all of a sudden you're off them. That's at the point when you take Ibogaine that'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.

1:15:25And 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 in my life. I probably puked for eight to 10 hours straight. The therapist who had been working with Ibogaine 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.

1:16:12I took it as a joke or a badge of honor, kind of like that was my competitiveness. Like, oh yeah, I had the hardest experience. Yeah. Terminally unique. Yeah, I won. 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 in 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.

1:16:50I had lost my best friend. That was a big part of my journey. I'd 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 light and whiteness. And it was always with Amber and the kids and our arms were always interlocked.

1:17:22What 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 into like kind of dark, deeper traumatic experiences.

1:18:08And 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.

1:18:53Like I'm, you know, I just felt like I was healed. I just felt like any of the weight that I was carrying was gone completely. And all I 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 were really struggling like I had been and that was the start of it it was just like how do we pay this forward someone paid for my experience there we were talking earlier about how expensive these these treatments are and how much struggle it was for us to get me down there to get someone to pay for it and I just thought we gotta figure out a way to get other people paid to do this you know and And that was the kind of grassroots effort of us starting the work that we've been doing now for eight years.

1:20:01Amber, 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? 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.

1:20:57Yeah, I always wanted to fight for him. I just love him so much, and it's just a reminder of that. It's wild how different our relationship is now. I mean, it's literally 180. Where Amber mentioned before, we almost couldn't even be in the same room with each other. Now, we literally can't not be in the same room as each other. you know it's just it's wild like i tell amber if i go on the road for a day or two i'm just like when do i go back or why isn't she here you know it's um it's just you know we're doing everything together now i mean i consider us best friends and um it's a different uh definitely a long ways away from where we were before rich so for this skeptical minded person who's listening to this and is like, come on, really?

1:21:43Did it have that significant of an impact? What did it do? How is it possible that this could be that powerful? 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 you know if you want to call them you know new neural pathways right new neural networks to allow myself to not have guilt not have shame not regret not be upset that you treated amber terribly for years or not have regret that you weren't present for you know our children.

1:22:37And so you kind of deal with that during the Ibogaine and it goes away. And, and, you know, the weeks and months after during your integration, you're trying to build those good habits and those good, good, uh, pathways in so you can continue healing and you can change them forever because you've, you've just built up these really deep tracks that you couldn't get out of. And now you're building kind of new tracks. And so that takes work. And so, um, 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 know, you always want to be going up, but after Ibogaine, you're kind of going straight up, but then there's some points where you hit, you know, you have some low points, but those low points are so small now, and then you immediately tick back up.

1:23:24So as long as you're trending up, and that's what I feel like Ibogaine does, you heal because life catches up and nobody doesn't have a bad moment, you know, maybe a bad day and that's how it was it was it was you know it was five steps forward one step back five steps forward one step back and that continues on and it continues on today i mean i have to work every day to stay where i'm at and for me now it's not medicine work i'll do medicine work if i need it but i don't need it and now it's you know it's breath work it's meditation it's it's sensory deprivation it's being present it's um for some people it's prayer It's reconnecting back to their faith.

1:24:07It's having community, having purpose. And these are all the things I think you can build in once you heal. I have a lot of observations, you know, having lived through it, as well as having witnessed hundreds of others go through our program at 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.

1:24:52It'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 was 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.

1:25:31And 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.

1:26:19Yeah, I had somebody recently who hasn't been able to smell for seven years, smelled at the retreat, the chefs were squeezing fresh orange juice and they had like 50 oranges. And you could smell it throughout the house. I was like, wow, that smells good. Let's go over there. He just turned around and started bawling. He said, I haven't smelled anything in seven years. He's like, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever smelled in my life. And this was, two days after as I began experiencing. And that's what we're seeing all the time. What does it do? It's doing real physiological things to the body.

1:26:54I 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 and biological makeup of the brain. Well, I'm happy to get into just a high level of review of that because the Stanford study is a big part of the film, thank goodness. So I thought that Ibogaine 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.

1:27:29And I thought this might be a temporary mandate, but what ended up happening and I was observing was the complete return of Marcus's neurological functioning. So an example of this, 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? 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.

1:28:17No 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 % to 93 % cognitive functioning. But then the brain imaging was what was really, really interesting. There was just this return of neurological capacity that they'd never seen before, which is obviously more studies need to be done.

1:29:06Nolan Williams, unfortunately and tragically, has passed away. Is the work at Stanford ongoing in his absence? 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. 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.

1:29:52These people are checked out. And you can see to some extent what they're like in the aftermath. And I was craving, 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, a year later, the significance of the impact is still very resonant, right?

1:30:42Like this has staying power in a way that other treatments - Yeah, I would say duration, right? Duration they talk about in the science world, and it seems to have long duration. Many individuals do go back for retreatment. 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.

1:31:22That first time is a real purge. I feel like the first time was like the 70 to 80 % there and then they may have 20 or 30 percent to clean up after that and so individuals now some go back once a year just as a reset reboot just to continue cleaning out the you know the filter and making themselves better and 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 marcus has gone back i think six times total in eight years almost. So about once every year.

1:32:01But 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 the experiences have gotten easier. The last one he called blissful, where before the first one was really dark and difficult. hard to imagine. The last one was 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.

1:32:39And 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 promote that there are treatments out there that may help individuals that are struggling. And I do definitely want to say this is something that should not be done on your own. We believe wholeheartedly that this needs to be regulated, be done carefully, especially with the right experts and the right medical support. And when you put all those things together, then we have even more healing. 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 and you know i mentioned it right from the start this is the work that we can't get away from we love doing what we're doing and we'll continue doing it i want to get into uh the work that you're doing the service aspect of this that has obviously engendered your lives with so much meaning and purpose.

1:33:50But this is the opportunity for me to share what I just went through a little bit. I was going to ask, actually. I don't want to be indulgent about it, but I am in the early aftermath of this experience that rocked me. I would say to your point about taking it seriously, it's not nothing. This is not for everybody. 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.

1:34:37So it's all however many alkaloids, not just the ibogaine alkaloid. And it was done, It was conducted in the Boiti tradition for the most part. And it begins on Friday night. There's the indoctrination and there's a lot of ceremony. And then from Friday night all the way through the morning, just being inundated with the, I hesitate to even call it music. It was just the most confronting cacophony of sounds that made me feel like I was chained up in Guantanamo and couldn't escape. And I had a head full of the documentary and I'm like, when am I getting the Polaroids of my childhood? And when am I going to reconnect with my inner child?

1:35:23I went in very much for those reasons. 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 some early childhood stuff or, you know, deep, deep grooves in these patterns that, you know, make me behave in a certain way that no matter what I've done, I'm still sort of like pray to them. Right. And so, you know, this has the promise of hopefully rewiring some of that or helping me to kind of retell that childhood story. But because I was so attached to that, you know, and like, when am I going to get this and I'm not getting that.

1:36:10It's like the medicine, which is really this consciousness is provoking me and prodding me and trying to root out my defense mechanisms and all of my resistance around this and like, I'm not doing it right. And I'm not seeing what Marcus saw. And why is this not happening? It was extremely uncomfortable to the point of 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.

1:36:54So it was an experience of total disorientation and extreme discomfort. And even now, 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. And the facilitators and the ones who've been doing this for a long time say about 15 to 20 % don't see even any visuals at all. So they to 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.

1:37:46Is that happening for you? Yeah, so - Because you're 19 days. You're 19 days. 19 days, yeah. So essentially, and then 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. uh and at the end of it like it was really this magical experience of like coming home and and having kind of even though i didn't get like that kind of visual experience of of confrontation with my past a sense of completion and the beginning of telling a new story around that that has left me

1:38:49feeling resolved in many ways over stuff that has caused me just anxiety. And at the root, similar to you, I grew up in a household where it's like, if you're not achieving, you have to earn love basically. 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 what you're able to kind of show other people in terms of what you've done in the world. And that can be incredibly empowering when you're building a life.

1:39:33And as you were saying earlier, these superpowers become your Achilles heels. And it's really a weakness now that has gotten in the, I've built this incredible life. I have everything I ever wanted and then some, and yet I struggle to experience joy and gratitude and, and, and the ability to be present and the full extent of intimacy with my wife and, you know, the richness of my relationships with my children. Like these, these things are difficult for me to connect with. And I went and did this because I, I recognize that. And that's what I, that's what I want, you know, and I, and, and, And that's what my family deserves, you know, that I've been unable to completely fulfill.

1:40:15And 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, 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, you know, alcoholism and addiction, just my relationship with craving has changed a lot.

1:41:03Like you were saying, like, you can't do stint. You know, like I didn't have coffee. I can't go a day without coffee. I didn't have coffee for a couple of days before the thing. Friday, by the time it's Monday, I'm still hallucinating. This is so powerful. It's not psilocybin. It's in your system. I'm seeing stuff, even though it's been a couple of days afterwards. But by Monday morning, I'm like, I'm going to have a cup of coffee. I'm so looking forward to this. I can't wait. Make the coffee, take a couple of sips. And I was like - You take it or leave it. Yeah, it was like, I'm really, you know, and I poured it down.

1:41:38And 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, 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. 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 treatment?

1:42:18I do feel lighter. I just feel like it's fine. Right, it's fine. 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, 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, you got to do the work. 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 a program locked in for how I'm practicing that.

1:43:01And 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 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. Like you caught yourself quote unquote crusty in this morning. I think that's one of the biggest. I was going to say that. That's one of the biggest takeaways is that I can catch myself now before I react where before it was pure reaction off of like impulse. We're now impulse control or where you're just more aware before you say something that may hurt your wife or your children.

1:43:45and I will catch myself now. And that has taken years to be able to do that where before it just may happen. Even if he does it and acknowledges it to me, it sort of like erases the fact that it ever happened because he's never been able to acknowledge it. So he's not only aware he's 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? No. That's probably the number one recommendation. I would highly recommend that. You got to hook me up with this. For sure. We have plenty.

1:44:26I 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. And he goes right to the soul of it. So he's a surgeon. He's like, I don't want you as a client for the next three years. That's not what I'm doing here. Like I want for three weeks, I want to fix it, get you on the right path and then move on. And that's what we do. And we just work through cuts right to the heart of it. And I think that's would be, you know, someone like him is someone that I always feel everybody should work with because you're just kind of solving all the issues that you're kind of talking to us about right now.

1:45:09they're able to just get to that point. So I highly recommend healing compounds with the right integration coach after these experiences. It was explained to me that, and even though your experience wasn't exactly maybe how you had envisioned it, maybe the next one would be completely different. Yours have been completely different. Did you do 5-MeO-DMT? 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. And that's common, by the way. This is a way. That's everybody, Rich. I've been told, like, you're not doing it wrong.

1:45:42Like, it's doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing. And you're going to get out of this what you need to be getting out of. So, you know, disabuse yourself of that. But I didn't do, yeah, this didn't have the five MEO DMT aspect of it. And so I'm curious around, like, why that's part of the protocol that you did and that you take veterans through. and maybe did I miss something? Because I didn't have that. I don't think so. The Stanford study proved that you don't need 5-MeO DMT after the Ibogaine because it did everything it needed to do in terms of when you - They just looked at Ibogaine.

1:46:18Right, 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 5 because we had to do an observational study and it was only on Ibogaine. What 5-MeO does, there was a doctor in Mexico years ago that saw because Ibogaine could be so difficult, 5-MeO is almost like the polishing. It's very, very spiritual, psychedelic, extreme connected to oneness, source, unconditional love, however you want to do it. So if you have a very difficult Ibogaine experience, you have your gray day, 5-MeO kind of brings you back to making sense of all the darkness that may have just happened.

1:47:02And 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. If I were to describe it, Ibogaine, 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 5-MEO tends to open a door to the future and really, you know, get someone into feeling more connected. Yeah. I mean, or, you know, I like what Trevor down at Ambio says.

1:47:37He says, the way he explains it to people is, I begin kind of power washes you from the inside and we know how hard power washing is. It can, you know, takes the skin off of you and 5-MEO kind of polishes you after that. So you kind of have like the hard sandpaper initially to, you know, get to the root cause. And then five kind of just polishes you and kind of makes it final. That's a non-medical perspective, right? One of the coaches I think also described this to me that like, you know, we naturally have these deep rooted neural pathways and Marcus's neural pathways and actually mine for a long period of time, we're just like straight to the bottom of the hill.

1:48:17And 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 a coach to create those new tracks and really take advantage of that period of neuroplasticity. I can tell you that I do feel different.

1:48:52And 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 want to say that this is something that I changed my mind about over an extended period of time. You know, 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.

1:49:31You 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 is in and of itself a powerful intoxicant. And 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, uh, overcome that, that idea and my resistance around this. And it happened because so many people had, 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.

1:50:22And so very slowly over, a period of time, combined with all the evidence that is coming out from Johns Hopkins and now Stanford, et cetera, it just became undeniable that there's really something here to look at and take seriously. And I'm so glad that I've had these experiences. And again, I don't know that they're for everybody. I don't want to be in a position where I'm recommending this to anybody. We never do. And I'm extremely careful about that. I don't preach this. I don't tell people when they come to me, like, this is what you have to do. I say, hey, here's all the information. You should do your own research and decide whether it's for you.

1:51:01Because when you were saying earlier, this is not for everyone. It is sort of the nuclear option. 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. 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. How long were you sitting with the decision? Did it take a while? Well, I did a year and a handful of months ago, I did a psilocybin and MDMA experience.

1:51:40And that was my first experience with psychedelics. So that kind of broke the seal. How was that? So it was many years building to that experience. And when I was drinking and using, I never did psychedelics. So I had no frame of reference. 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. 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.

1:52:18All 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, oh, this will be some version of that. And I did not have ego death. I just felt like I was literally a prisoner. Oh, no. It was very difficult. It was very, very difficult and uncomfortable. Oh. Yeah. I'm so sorry to hear that. No, but that's obviously what I needed. I think you become more grateful 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-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.

1:53:12You're not in prison. You're just not in prison. Right. And 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 take things as seriously as you said, be able to let go a little bit. Also, you are truly right in the smack dab of your integration period. At Betts, we recommend that for a period of 90 days that someone is just solely focused on them. Yeah. Yeah. Because so much shifts and changes. Yeah. We don't ask for any favors. We have a rule. We don't ask you to go on a podcast or interviews. Someone can say, I've got a donor ready to write a check for you.

1:53:54And we're always like, go integrate. Let's talk to you in 90 days. We'll talk in 90 days. That has not been my, I just flew back from South by Southwest last night. It was just insane for like the last five days. I've not, yeah, I haven't been like in some kind of Shaolin monk, you know. Yeah, yeah. Repose. Sensory deprivation might be a good thing. Yeah, I might be a good thing. 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?

1:54:29Like what are the depression rates and the suicide rates? Like what are we actually contending with? We're just in the U.S. alone, we'll just look at the statistics. One in five individuals have a mental health issue. I think those are the individuals that actually come forward. They're saying maybe closer to 30 % of individuals are literally struggling with depression. About 30 to 50 % of those individuals have something considered treatment-resistant depression. and 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.

1:55:01Similar 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, you're likely, 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.

1:55:45We've lost over 150 ,000 by individuals that died by suicide. 7 ,000 due to combat. Due to combat. And 150 ,000 due to - Over 150. Might be over 155 ,000 due to suicide. That's a shocking - 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 individual 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. us. It's globally, right? There's a lot of factors and I'm not going to make believe I know all the factors, social media, or 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.

1:56:31And 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. 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 they're civilians, feel completely disconnected.

1:57:09And then there's a further like 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 was very taboo. In the eight years since, I think the conversation has become much more front and center. and we have to think of new ways like you know war technology changes the battlefield changes the ssri was is over 30 years old so between like 35 or more years old we would never be fighting a current day war with technology from 35 years ago but yet that's what we're fighting this horrific suicide epidemic with and so we hope that by advancing the conversation and changing the narrative around this sort of new, innovative way of looking at mental health, that it will eclipse the veteran community.

1:58:21Ironically, though, it's the ancient way. That's so true. This isn't new. That's so true. 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, you know, like and over that period of time have like developed a very specific ceremony. And then the Westerner comes in and says, okay, we'll take it from here. Like, yeah, we just need this. And then we're, we're going to do it this way because we think we know better.

1:59:04You 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? We have, and we know that there's really good Iboga 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.

1:59:50And granted, going back, we know the traditional approaches work. Are we going to be able to get the traditional approaches here in the U.S., 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 U.S. for people to explore those and just at least feel more comfortable traveling out to do them. There's also an endangerment issue with the aboga plant. And from like a scale issue, there's also a sustainability issue. And so 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.

2:00:39But there's a lot of considerations. There's a multitude of issues. I mean, on the one hand, you're fighting the kind of legal regulatory landscape. This is 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 I'm sure there's a lot of bad actors, right? And the first hurdle is like FDA approval and kind of clearing a path towards this becoming legal and taken seriously. And so much of your work is around 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.

2:01:23I think we're probably still a long way away from it. And not for nothing, how is big pharma perceiving this? It's an existential threat to the SSRI market and how 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? And no pharmaceutical company wants a one-time treatment. They're never going to make any money off that. And so 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?

2:02:06How is it regulated so that there are guardrails and 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. Right now, you can go to certain clinics and some of them are really expensive. And this is obviously preventing the people who could benefit from this the most access to these kinds of treatments. Yeah. Yeah. There's so many issues. You're right. 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.

2:02:47And 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 to 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 through 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.

2:03:29The resources are starting to dwindle. You know, we heard recently that this is not just a U.S. issue, it's a global issue, but we've heard recently that there's a ton of Chinese influence now in Gabon and West Africa and they're buying up as many iboga plants and iboga farms and they're bringing it back to China. And, you know, this is just, you know, what happens. And so there are so many issues. Like when you stopped before, like you had opened up a wide array of things that are happening. And so we're just trying to stay focused like on what we do. You know, we can't do everything. And so we pick the path and that's the path.

2:04:06And, you know, we support many different paths, you know, but we do have to be careful about like where we travel, especially with the individuals that we're dealing with. So in the aftermath of your first experience, you basically have this epiphany like we have to bring this to, you know, the people we know who could benefit from this. And you've realized that you've manifested that you have two organizations. You've got this organization 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 through a version of what you experienced.

2:04:48A 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? Yeah, to our mind, I was approached by investors a number of years ago to just say, hey, what you're doing with vets and veterans is amazing and you've had so much success there. How do you take what you did for them and take it to the private sector? And so I was hired into a VC to try to figure out a business model to say, okay, how do we take what you did for veterans? How do we transfer that to the private sector? And it was really difficult to figure out because first off, these drugs are not FDA approved and so we can't really do that.

2:05:29And 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 like easy and accessible and like a white glove concierge approach. So similar to what we did with vets where a person applies, they come in and we kind of handhold them the whole way. We give them therapy, we get them to treatment and then we monitor their outcomes. It's the same exact thing that we're doing with Tar Mind except the business model is we take it to employers.

2:06:04So 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 a 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. So there are treatments out there that weren't here just four years ago, and that's what the platform does, right? And it's a commercial business. We work with healthcare systems. We work with payers, because the idea is we've built the chassis now.

2:06:43So 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. And so if I'm an employee and I've struggled with antidepressants and talk therapy and it don't respond, well, what's available? So then we step in and say, well, St. TMS is available, advanced TMS, or maybe IV ketamine because you have treatment-resistant depression. Eventually, it would be psilocybin-assisted therapy or MDMA-assisted therapy. So that's the commercial business that Tara Mind is exploring.

2:07:17And what I talked about earlier with subsidies, the reason we're doing that is because most people can't pay for these advanced treatments. I would love to talk about VETS. VETS is the grassroots effort, which has since turned into a truly, I'd say we have global reach 501c3 that came from Marcus's declaration immediately after Ibogaine 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.

2:07:55We 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, D.C., 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 I substance. You can do it, but it takes years and millions of dollars. So we work to reduce those barriers to research and expand access to care.

2:08:37Programmatically, 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, you know, we're really proud of that. But the way that we're going to reach scale is through the policy piece. And the difficulties around research are enough of 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.

2:09:28What 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. 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 saying earlier, millions of Americans that, you know, we can't support at this time.

2:10:15So as to Amber's point, policy change, changing policy enables to open up that access for more individuals to receive treatment. 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 - Has the documentary, Open Doors on the Hill, do you have champions in the Senate or Congress who are fostering this conversation or subcommittee hearings or anything like that? Very much. Like what's happening? Yes. Marcus was actually part of the first ever Senate hearing on, or it was a Senate roundtable On psychedelics. On psychedelic treatment. They had some of the top pharmaceutical companies there that are developing these drugs, psilocybin, MDMA.

2:10:58They 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 passed 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. It's 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 are healing. Like we need to get behind this.

2:11:35We need to research it. And so the film has been such a powerful. It's been shown in a number of states. And we're working in this session alone. We're working in 22 states at various levels. Yeah. Yeah. And we've unlocked, I think we just got another 5 million. So probably around 130 million in research funding just in the last couple of years. Yeah. Wow. And not us, but like the different institutions and studies. And it takes time, right? Like, and you still have to be patient. This is like, it just moves at a glacial pace, right? Oh yeah, it's a long time. It's a marathon. But I do feel like you are approximating like an inflection point with this.

2:12:10You know, it's reaching a kind of saturation point in terms of awareness. At least it feels like that to me, maybe I'm in my bubble. I think you're right. No, you're right. And even if a politician doesn't necessarily today have the ability to, let's just say approve something, that same politician is sending us a friend or a veteran to go through treatment. So 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.

2:12:51You really need to take care of them. So we're seeing that starting to happen. There's an open-mindedness. Yeah. You mentioned testifying on the Hill or being part of a subcommittee hearing where there were pharmaceutical companies. What is the vibe from those organizations? Are they seeing the future with this? Are they resisting it? They're seeing the future and what they're doing is just like many commercial businesses. You have the folks that are the startups. So you have the small pharmaceutical companies that are doing this with - Yeah, there were no big pharmaceutical companies. They're all very specific.

2:13:24No 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 the later stages of what we're seeing. The corporate behemoths that stand to benefit the most though are the insurance companies.

2:14:00Because 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, you know, when these mental health problems metastasize into, you know, worse conditions. And that's a very powerful lobby to like have on your side, you know, like this juggernaut that could actually, you know, help drive change. I think once the payers realize that this will save money in the long term, and maybe not overnight, because as we were talking about earlier, these are expensive treatments.

2:14:32They'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 going to eventually go, wait a minute, if we give this person 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. Well, the entire system needs to level up. But I have hope that it's happening in treating root cause versus symptoms.

2:15:09There's so much of that happening and so much waste because of it and delaying of the inevitable. But there's still a lot of baggage. And I say this from personal experience. When you talk about these, 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. 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 count your blessings because when you're in that place, nothing is off the table. And I would say be interested, be curious.

2:15:52I think we need to be lifelong learners and grow. And 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 we're just like, to me and Amber, it's always about growth and innovation. And so those that are skeptical, just do your homework, do your research. Again, we're not here to preach, but you'll find out, you'll talk to enough people that have been through these type of treatments that have had their life turned around completely and don't believe us, believe everybody else. And that's the same thing I do when people ask me, should I do this?

2:16:29I 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'll just give you all the information you need to make an informed decision. And I think that's what we're trying to do with the film and with the work we're doing. With the veterans that you've worked with, what is perhaps the most extreme example of before and after? I would say we try to not get involved in like an active crisis situation because we just aren't equipped to handle. However, there have been a couple of situations and referrals, friends of friends or whatnot, that have had active suicide, like intervention during suicide that have come through the program and are some of our most ardent ambassadors today.

2:17:19And to see that sort of 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. And I look at Marcus's 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 helped someone, gotten help for themselves or turned their lives around. And it's just remarkable, the power of one life. To your point earlier about following individuals after treatment.

2:18:02So just the two guys in the movie, in the documentary, Maddie and DJ, they're literally living their best lives right now. It's incredible to speak with them and just like kind of what they're doing. And this is years later, right? And they're just doing things that they'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. 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.

2:18:40When 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. The ripple effect is something I've been thinking a lot about. Well, yeah, I mean, just both of you and 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 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.

2:19:43And so the ripple effect continues across future generations that aren't even born yet. And take somebody who has inherited a generational trauma wound, And 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. Yeah. 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.

2:20:36And that's kind of how we look at this, is that individuals who have platforms that have had success are able to perpetuate to everyone else that is seeking, searching for answers. And so just remember that, that now you're a person that has the ability to literally touch, yeah, millions of people that are struggling like we were. 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 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?

2:21:20There are a couple of things. Yeah, there are a couple of things. So the website of Vets is vetsolutions.org and it's 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 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 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.

2:22:00We 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 a lot of my own personal inner work as well. And when I got on my path and he got on his path as individuals, we finally met up. And in doing so, we've been able to carve out a whole new future for ourselves. And so we're really excited to share more about that on our podcast, which we'll be launching soon.

2:22:42So in addition to vetsolutions.org, our website is thecapones.com. Is the Capones, is that going to be the name of the podcast? Conversations with the Capones. Okay, great. That's great. You can't possibly answer all the emails that you must be getting, especially in the aftermath of the documentary. Yeah, it's not possible. A lot of content opportunities though to speak to some of these things. 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. Nobody's untouched from this in one way or another.

2:23:19And when you hear the statistics around loneliness and just the mental health, like just the average person who's just trying to live their life, like we're all impacted by mental health considerations to one extent to another. And the fact that, you know, there are other solutions out there beyond like what we've been programmed to believe is the limit of, you know, what science is capable of is exciting. And it's courageous, I think, what you're doing. And it's a tremendous public service. And I feel like you're just at the very beginning of, you know, this fantastic journey. We do too. We feel like eight years has been a lot and there's been struggle and a lot of late nights and weekends.

2:24:04But 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. Final thought for you, Amber. You mentioned earlier that 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's watching or listening to this right now who is having suicidal ideation, thoughts like that. In such a hyper crisis state, is there a place that you can recommend 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.

2:25:01There's the suicide crisis line which is 988 and it operates same as 911 but these are trained suicide interventionalists on the other end of the line. So if someone is in immediate crisis that number could be a lifeline truly. I would say start doing diligence because in some regard, just a glimmer of hope is enough to keep someone grounded and willing to take the next step in pursuing healing. Psychedelics hold tremendous promise and yet they're seemingly, you know, can 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.

2:25:53There are ketamine clinics in every major city across America. I would argue a person in a suicidal state, the number one treatment right now is ketamine, is IV ketamine, intramuscular ketamine. But again - Under a doctor's care. 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 in 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.

2:26:31This 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. We're so grateful. Thank you. We are extremely grateful for being here and having an audience and hearing our story.

2:27:16And 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? But coming from where you came from and what you're doing today, people should be able to see that. and have a - I dare you to run an ultra marathon. No, don't. I dare you. I need to learn, like clearly I need to learn something about how to work out in the gym. You know, so maybe we can trade notes at some point. For me, it's surfing and golf. It's about what I do now, so. Right on. Well, you're always welcome back here.

2:27:50Thank you. I would love to, if you could keep me up to date on all you're doing. So thank you. Thank you. You sure will. Peace. See ya. Thank you.

2:28:02Thank you.