Latest / Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman / Geoff Dardia on TBI, Toxic Exposure, and Functional Medicine for Veteran Brain Health | Broken Brains Podcast | EP 83

Transcript

Geoff Dardia on TBI, Toxic Exposure, and Functional Medicine for Veteran Brain Health | Broken Brains Podcast | EP 83 · Broken Brains with Bruce Parkman

0:08
SPEAKER_01: Hey folks, welcome to another edition of Broken Brains with your host, Bruce Parkman, the official podcast of the Mac Parkman Foundation, where we look at the issue of repetitive brain trauma from two angles repetitive ed impacts from contact sports and repetitive blast exposure for our military veterans and how these conditions are impacting the brain health and uh careers and mental health of our veterans, kids, and athletes.
0:32
SPEAKER_01: And why is this important?
0:33
SPEAKER_01: This is not trained in our nursing, medical, or psychological communities.
0:36
SPEAKER_01: That makes you the front line of defense.
0:39
SPEAKER_01: So we open up the podcast to researchers and veterans and doctors and players say you get that 360-degree approach to this condition so you can make informed decisions.
0:48
SPEAKER_01: On our show today, another amazing guest, Master Sergeant retired Jeff Dartia, is a 24-year U.S.
0:56
SPEAKER_01: Army Special Forces veteran and former member of 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group, where he served as a weapons, intelligence, and operations sergeant with extensive deployments across CENCCOM and Africa.
1:08
SPEAKER_01: He later served at US OCOM's Wounded Warrior Liaison.
1:12
SPEAKER_01: Jeff is the founder and program director of TDF Soft's Soft Health Initiatives Program, where he leads cutting-edge care for soft warriors and families addressing TBI, toxic exposures, hormonal dysfunction, and trauma.
1:25
SPEAKER_01: A functional medicine certified health coach, certified personal trainer, and a VA certified recovery care coordinator.
1:32
SPEAKER_01: He has a recognized expert in warfighting health, warfighter health, sorry, whose work has been featured in Men's Health, the New York Times, and Military Times.
1:41
SPEAKER_01: Jeff, welcome to the show, man.
1:43
SPEAKER_01: Appreciate you.
1:43
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for your service, by the way.
1:45
SPEAKER_01: Heck yeah, Bruce.
1:46
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, man.
1:47
SPEAKER_01: Good to see you.
1:56
SPEAKER_01: Did you come in like a lot of us and end up getting, you know, deciding to become a better man or however you want to.
2:05
SPEAKER_00: That was the plan all along since I was a little kid.
2:07
SPEAKER_00: Be a commando, be a frog man, is how it was supposed to start.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: And then right before the end of my training pipeline with the SEALs, I medically dropped, medically discharged out of the Navy a few weeks before graduation.
2:17
SPEAKER_00: And uh that was my come to Jesus, literally to figure out, you know, hey, I'm not invincible, better have a backup plan.
2:23
SPEAKER_00: Don't tire identity with under uniform.
2:26
SPEAKER_00: And then how do I get back?
2:27
SPEAKER_00: And that was kind of my story.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: That was, you know, that was how I was forged and got myself back in as an 18 X-ray four almost four years later and served 22 consecutive years running a gun and then, you know, took my purpose and my passion and turned it into a program back in 2012 for the foundation after started having health issues again that were absolutely related to what happened to me in the Navy.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: Kind of my figure it out moment of aha, I know what's going on here.
2:56
SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, come to find out I'm not the only person that's affected by their operational environment.
3:01
SPEAKER_00: And uh, and that's how I got into functional medicine, man.
3:04
SPEAKER_00: So that's it.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: That's how the program was born based off everything I went through.
3:08
SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of like the stigmata.
3:10
SPEAKER_00: That's what I always used to tell people.
3:11
SPEAKER_00: Like, why did I go through all this stuff and then figure it out?
3:13
SPEAKER_00: I was like, okay, so you can talk about it and help people and do so do something about it.
3:18
SPEAKER_00: And that's how I got where I am today.
3:21
SPEAKER_01: Wow, man.
3:22
SPEAKER_01: So you started out in uh in buds back in the day, man.
3:25
SPEAKER_01: What year was that?
3:26
SPEAKER_01: 97.
3:27
SPEAKER_01: I don't want to don't want to date yourself or anything like that.
3:29
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
3:31
SPEAKER_01: Class 214.
3:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
3:33
SPEAKER_01: Wow, man.
3:34
SPEAKER_01: That's uh, you know, and I think let's talk about that just a little bit because you experienced what many soft guys have never experienced in their life, which is failure.
3:43
SPEAKER_01: Okay, and I come across this all the time.
3:46
SPEAKER_01: Guys that break down, have done the baddest things in the world.
3:50
SPEAKER_01: But man, when they flunk something for the first time, they cannot, they they have to learn how to handle it.
3:57
SPEAKER_01: So talk a little bit about that because that's I mean, that's a hell of a blow to come back from and to you know, come back and then jump right into the x-ray program, which is you know, no easy, you know, right off the street, too, man.
4:09
SPEAKER_01: You still don't know much about anything, right?
4:11
SPEAKER_01: You know?
4:11
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, you don't know what you don't know.
4:13
SPEAKER_00: Coming in at, you know, I went delayed entry at 17 years old, you know, all you know is books and movies, or I'm gonna go do badass stuff.
4:20
SPEAKER_00: And then you start doing the badass stuff, and you're like, oh, this is not like the books or the movie, yet while you're going through training, and you know, like I said, I I put every all my eggs in that one basket.
4:31
SPEAKER_00: There was no, I burned my ships like Cortez, man.
4:34
SPEAKER_00: Like there's it was death or graduation.
4:37
SPEAKER_00: And guess what happened when graduation didn't come around, right?
4:41
SPEAKER_00: And that was a massive blow.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: That was like, that was like, oh, that's the humbling moment of my life where it was like, okay, um, what let's figure this out.
4:50
SPEAKER_00: What happened?
4:50
SPEAKER_00: I had no idea about post-traumatic stress disorder or anything.
4:53
SPEAKER_00: I just knew I was never right after Hell Week, I was never right ever again.
4:57
SPEAKER_00: And after I lost my identity, lost my purpose like that, I really figured things out of like, okay, what if what is the meaning to all this?
5:06
SPEAKER_00: And it was like, you know, do things for the right reasons, make sure you have a backup plan.
5:13
SPEAKER_00: Don't tie your identity to what you do for a job.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: All those lessons came one after another.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: But the biggest one was you might not always get what you want at that moment, you'll be redirected.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: And I always tell people when I, you know, doing coaching is that rejection is God's protection.
5:28
SPEAKER_00: I was getting redirected.
5:29
SPEAKER_00: I was getting moved in a different direction for a purpose.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: And I didn't see it at that time.
5:33
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't all unicorns and rainbows when I was going through all that.
5:36
SPEAKER_00: It was a very rough period of my life trying to figure out my way forward.
5:40
SPEAKER_00: But all I knew is that I had a desired end state.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: I'll go back to my old military training.
5:45
SPEAKER_00: I had an end state, I had a goal, I had a vision.
5:47
SPEAKER_00: And how I approached that the second time was a lot different than when I did the first time.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: First time was don't quit.
5:53
SPEAKER_00: Short term, just get through it, gut it out, you know.
5:57
SPEAKER_00: But there's a lot more after you go through training that it's not just don't quit.
6:01
SPEAKER_00: Um, you better know what you're signing up for and what that sacrifice entails, right?
6:07
SPEAKER_00: And when I finally got through the training, it was like, okay, bud, this is all the stuff you asked for.
6:13
SPEAKER_00: Here you go.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I graduated SEER school and went straight to Afghanistan.
6:17
SPEAKER_00: Like, see you later.
6:18
SPEAKER_00: Like, I went through a shooting school mid-south, and it was like high five, and I went straight to Afghanistan, did three rotations.
6:24
SPEAKER_00: We'll talk about all the TBI stuff in a minute, but it was non-stop from that moment on.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: So May of 2003, I came back in, volunteered to go through basic trading all over again, and then went through the entire Q course pipeline and then straight overseas, and then that was nonstop until I retired.
6:40
SPEAKER_00: And I had a halfway point where I started hitting the wall again and started having a lot of the same issues I had in the Navy that ended my career.
6:48
SPEAKER_00: But this time I was way better equipped how to deal with it and what to do about it.
6:52
SPEAKER_00: And before it was don't tell anybody, you know, don't show weakness, don't let them know you're sweating, just gut it through.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: And it didn't work out for me that time.
7:00
SPEAKER_00: And so the second time around, like I need to tell people, I need to do something about it, I need to get ahead of this before it becomes catastrophic and ends my career.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: So those lessons that I didn't see at the time shaped everything for the second time when I started hitting adversity again.
7:15
SPEAKER_00: But overcoming what happened to me in the Navy showed me that, okay, there's a way to post-traumatic growth.
7:20
SPEAKER_00: That's where I learned post-traumatic growth and about PTSD, how to overcome something that I thought was never going to recover from.
7:27
SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly what PTSD is: feeling like you can't recover from something.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: It's always going to cause that pain and that suffering.
7:34
SPEAKER_00: That's why people kill themselves.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: As when you can't get out of that cycle of pain and suffering, there's no way out, there's no hope, or you know, no way forward, people end their lives.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: And it it took me to get to the point where I was considering that to learn about it.
7:48
SPEAKER_00: And that's how I was able to empathize with people that were having those thoughts.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, hey man, I get it.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: Like I know without even anybody telling me anything, just knowing what had happened to them, I would be like, okay, this dude is probably gonna have X, Y, and Z going through his mind, and his this is his behavior patterns based off what he went through.
8:09
SPEAKER_00: And so I always tell people, it's not what's wrong with you, it's what happened to you.
8:13
SPEAKER_00: And if you can understand that with people and they're behaving certain ways, it's not, hey, what the fuck's the matter with this guy?
8:18
SPEAKER_00: It's what happened to him, why is he behaving this way?
8:22
SPEAKER_00: Why is he reacting this way?
8:24
SPEAKER_00: And then once you understand that, man, it's super simple.
8:26
SPEAKER_00: And you know, I've I I don't have to say why are people killing themselves.
8:30
SPEAKER_00: I 1,000% understand why people kill themselves.
8:32
SPEAKER_00: I get it.
8:33
SPEAKER_00: And I'm not saying it's a right answer, but I fully understand the problem.
8:37
SPEAKER_00: And to get to that problem, we have to address what's causing it, and that's pain and suffering.
8:41
SPEAKER_00: Number one cause of death in the United States or military fighting age males is opioids.
8:46
SPEAKER_00: What are opioids and escape from pain and suffering?
8:48
SPEAKER_00: And then what is the number two cause of death at the same suicide.
8:52
SPEAKER_00: Pretty much the same age group.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: What is suicide?
8:55
SPEAKER_00: That's the ultimate escape from pain and suffering.
8:58
SPEAKER_00: So we go back to that, and then tying this back into broken brains, guess what happens when your brain's not responding appropriately to your environment or your situation?
9:07
SPEAKER_00: You don't make the decision that you should be making to solve that problem.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: And so you think in your mind that, hey, the only way out of this problem is to end it.
9:16
SPEAKER_00: And so full circle.
9:18
SPEAKER_01: No, it is full circle.
9:20
SPEAKER_01: And and and then what happens in that broken brain is the cause of the pain and suffering that you're having the pain and suffering from, you know, and and you're not being treated for it.
9:28
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I mean, yeah, you yeah, that uh that those are a lot of lessons to carry on early in your military career that could only help you become a more effective leader as you as as as you get older.
9:40
SPEAKER_01: So you go you went right into third group and then right into the box.
9:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, literally straight in.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: And then uh, and then my only break, I didn't know what was wrong with me until I got pulled for instructor duty to be a Sephal instructor.
9:54
SPEAKER_00: I don't know your audience, but Special Forces Advanced Urban Combat course.
9:58
SPEAKER_00: But um, I got pulled for instructor duty, but leading up to that, I had done two Sephalics, Sephardic, uh like three PMTs and three deployments.
10:08
SPEAKER_00: My brain was smashed.
10:09
SPEAKER_00: Um, so imagine nine weeks of Sephardic, six weeks Sephalic, two of them in the same year, all the PMTs, all the spendexes, all the heavy weapons ranges, and then three spendex.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: Sitting out at range 44 with pallets of rockets, of munitions, and not and shooting for three days until they're all gone, right?
10:29
SPEAKER_00: AT4s, Gustoffs, mortars, 50 millimet, I mean 50 caliber, 40 mic mic, like all the machine gun stuff, just blast over pressure and inhaling toxic gases and heavy metals.
10:41
SPEAKER_00: Um, you're getting both, right?
10:42
SPEAKER_00: With TBI and toxic exposures, you're getting brain injury from both.
10:46
SPEAKER_00: And when when you have both in the environment, it's exasperating.
10:51
SPEAKER_00: Synergistic effect of it, it makes it a hundred times worse in the brain.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: And that's what I lived in from 2000, basically 2003 until 2011.
11:02
SPEAKER_00: And that's like 2011, I was ready to call it quits, going through a divorce.
11:06
SPEAKER_00: Like it was the end of my rope, and I'm like, what is going on here?
11:09
SPEAKER_00: I've got all the cool guy stuff.
11:10
SPEAKER_00: I did everything I wanted to do, but I was dragging around a shell of a body, a dead body.
11:15
SPEAKER_00: Just total autopilot, completely dissociated, and just completely 1,000% in survival mode, and didn't know what it was.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I was fine overseas.
11:24
SPEAKER_00: You kept me overseas, you know, running and gunning, training people.
11:28
SPEAKER_00: I was perfectly okay.
11:30
SPEAKER_00: When you took me back home, I was struggling.
11:32
SPEAKER_00: Garrison was not doing well, and nobody could figure it out.
11:34
SPEAKER_00: They're like, what the hell?
11:36
SPEAKER_00: I couldn't remember parts of my day.
11:37
SPEAKER_00: I'd get home at the end of the day, wouldn't know how I got there.
11:40
SPEAKER_00: And uh, I was just on the struggle bus, and I'm like, I gotta figure this out.
11:43
SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't until my daughter was born and I got handed a baby, and I was like, Well, can't leave her alone.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: You know, I'm gonna be a single dad, but I'm I'm not gonna be that guy that checks out and leaves her without a father, and not especially not at Fort Bragg.
11:56
SPEAKER_00: So um, so yeah, so that was the point where I was like, I have to do something about this, and that's when I started coming forward.
12:03
SPEAKER_00: 2009 is when I really started being like, hey, I need to get some stuff looked at.
12:07
SPEAKER_00: And everything pointed to TBI and toxic exposures.
12:11
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, go back to being a green bray, understand the operational environment.
12:15
SPEAKER_00: You know, I looked at all the things in my environment I was being exposed to, which was trauma, sleep deprivation, stress, uh, heavy metals, blast overpressure, and forced medications for stuff we took overseas from malaria.
12:28
SPEAKER_00: We'll talk about that later for brain damage.
12:30
SPEAKER_00: But I was like, I have all that, and all these things have known effects.
12:33
SPEAKER_00: And so everyone in science, no one ever looks at anything collectively.
12:37
SPEAKER_00: They're super specialists and they only look in silos at one little problem at a time.
12:41
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, I have all of these things at once, and all of these things have known effects.
12:47
SPEAKER_00: They increase your risk for trauma, for PTSD, for brain injury, for cancer, uh, depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation.
12:55
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, check, check, check.
12:56
SPEAKER_00: I literally went through and made a list of everything like IPE, intelligence preparation, the environment.
13:02
SPEAKER_00: I I did IPE on myself of exactly what I was, what my environment was and what I was being exposed to.
13:07
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, here it is.
13:08
SPEAKER_00: Here's my threat list.
13:10
SPEAKER_00: Went down the threat list and assessed them and put them and prioritized them.
13:13
SPEAKER_00: The worst ones up top, and then, you know, tiered them down.
13:16
SPEAKER_00: And then I went to the doctors and said, I've got all these things.
13:19
SPEAKER_00: Can you test for all these the damage and the stuff that's in me that I'm being exposed to?
13:24
SPEAKER_00: And they're like, What?
13:25
SPEAKER_00: Who the fuck are you, right?
13:26
SPEAKER_00: Like that's you know, and Danny and I did our thing.
13:28
SPEAKER_00: We talked about that.
13:29
SPEAKER_00: They were like, Where is this coming from?
13:31
SPEAKER_00: Where's your medical degree?
13:33
SPEAKER_00: Who who authorized you to talk about this?
13:35
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, talk my health?
13:36
SPEAKER_00: Like, that belongs to me, dude, not the guy or the fucking lab coat.
13:39
SPEAKER_00: Like, I'm in charge of this thing.
13:41
SPEAKER_00: This is my equipment.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: It's the only one I'm ever getting issued.
13:44
SPEAKER_00: I can't DX it.
13:46
SPEAKER_00: Like, I'd have to learn how to maintain it.
13:48
SPEAKER_00: Just like my weapon or my radio or my vehicle.
13:50
SPEAKER_00: Like, I'm learning how to fix this thing and protect it because no one's given me any training on this.
13:55
SPEAKER_00: I know more about my weapons and my radios and tactics than I do my health.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: And I focused all my energy on that.
14:01
SPEAKER_00: And that's when I became an SME on TBI.
14:04
SPEAKER_00: I wrote a paper about it, about neurotoxicity associated with blast overpressure, toxic exposures, methylquin.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: And that's how I made my mark was going into toxic exposures and TBI and methylquin.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: And I just and it's a neurotoxicity, neuroinflammation, neurodegeneration.
14:20
SPEAKER_00: And when the brain's not working, guess what you don't do?
14:23
SPEAKER_00: You don't adapt to your environment.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: You don't, you don't bounce back like you used to.
14:26
SPEAKER_00: You're not resilient psychologically and physiologically.
14:29
SPEAKER_00: And once I figured it out, I was like, why do we overcomplicate this?
14:33
SPEAKER_00: This is super simple.
14:35
SPEAKER_00: And as a society, we overcomplicate everything.
14:38
SPEAKER_00: And I was just, I made it so I could take PhD level stuff and turn it to GED level and communicate what was going on with me and then teach others how to do it so they could have the conversation.
14:48
SPEAKER_00: So we started training medical providers about the soft operational environment, what we're exposed to, and then we started teaching the soft operators about health and wellness so they knew how to take care of themselves and make themselves more resilient.
15:01
SPEAKER_00: Put it into a package, created a program, been doing that for over 14 years.
15:06
SPEAKER_01: So when you when you started the in in 2000 I think 11, you said your, I think your daughter, that's what uh so we're you were in in third group the whole time, right?
15:16
SPEAKER_01: Active duty the whole time, 24 years.
15:18
SPEAKER_01: So this program was actually a military program.
15:20
SPEAKER_00: So the health initiatives program, I started it for TF daggers, for Task Force Dagger in 2012.
15:27
SPEAKER_00: In 2009, I started telling the military what was going on, and I'm like, hey man, we got to look at blast overpressure, we need to look at heavy metals, we need to look at some of the medications we're forced to take, antibiotics and animalarial pills.
15:39
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, it's having an effect.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: Like, imagine what we know now about the microbiome, taking antibiotics daily for six to twelve months at a time for over 10 years, what that's gonna do to people.
15:50
SPEAKER_00: Think about this for a second.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: 95% of the serotonin is produced in your gut.
15:54
SPEAKER_00: If you're destroying the microbiome from overuse of antibiotics, do you think that's gonna have a psychological effect on you?
16:01
SPEAKER_00: As far as behavior, bouncing back, resilient sleep, hormone production.
16:05
SPEAKER_00: That's just one thing.
16:06
SPEAKER_00: Add the toxins, add the chronic stress, add the sleep deprivation.
16:10
SPEAKER_00: You see where I'm going.
16:11
SPEAKER_00: Alcohol, tobacco, females, and firearms, ATFs, all things fun.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: So like all of those things have a risk, associated, a known risk associated with mitochondrial dysfunction, DNA damage, right?
16:24
SPEAKER_00: Cancer and suicide, two leading causes of death in our community, not just a military problem, first responders, police, any high threat, high stress, high exposure, extremophile position, right?
16:34
SPEAKER_00: It's all the same outcomes.
16:37
SPEAKER_00: Why go back to understanding the operational environment, right?
16:40
SPEAKER_00: So once you developed that program, you still stayed in the military for another you know, 11, 12 years.
16:46
SPEAKER_00: The whole time.
16:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I was running that program for TFT as a volunteer the entire time I was operational.
16:52
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
16:52
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
16:53
SPEAKER_01: So let's talk about uh you know a little bit about you know TBIs, repetitive blast exposure, and repetitive impacts, because it sounds like you've had a couple of them, you know.
17:03
SPEAKER_01: Have you have you ever had a GBEV done?
17:06
SPEAKER_01: Generalized blast exposure variable?
17:08
SPEAKER_00: So I did the cache.
17:10
SPEAKER_00: I've been to Star, been to Nyco, but I'm I've never done the GBAV.
17:14
SPEAKER_01: Um that wasn't around when I, you know, it's it quantifies how much blast you have.
17:19
SPEAKER_01: And uh it's I'll send you, I'll send you the I took the Silcom equation, I put it in a spreadsheet.
17:23
SPEAKER_01: I'll send you the spreadsheet.
17:24
SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay.
17:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I've done the cache.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: But it's it's over thousands.
17:28
SPEAKER_00: Like just like I've got it documented while I was in.
17:30
SPEAKER_00: I I that was one of the things I did when I was a Safao constructor, is created exposure memo for munitions and explosives with it basically an estimated charge count for the time you were there as an instructor and a round count.
17:43
SPEAKER_00: Because we know what's in the munitions, right?
17:45
SPEAKER_00: There's an ingredient list for everything we blow up or go bang bang.
17:48
SPEAKER_00: Like it's it's all there listed out.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: They know exactly what's in that stuff.
17:52
SPEAKER_00: And so estimate a round count, and guess what also those rounds do?
17:55
SPEAKER_00: They blow up.
17:56
SPEAKER_00: What do we know now with blast gauge studies and all that that your munitions and shoot houses are also concussing you?
18:02
SPEAKER_00: So we got the round count and we got the charge count for every class, compiled it and made an estimate estimation for a year per instructor in what course.
18:11
SPEAKER_00: And then we we standardized standardized that at third group.
18:14
SPEAKER_00: Third group led the way with that and then range 37.
18:17
SPEAKER_00: So all the same people that we had in our team were pushing this.
18:29
SPEAKER_00: And finally it caught on.
18:32
SPEAKER_00: It's not everywhere yet.
18:33
SPEAKER_00: There's still systems in place that are supposed to be utilized, they're just not fully operational yet.
18:38
SPEAKER_00: But things started changing rapidly, probably about 2013.
18:42
SPEAKER_00: After the DOD-led policy came out, because of the big 2011 DoD study, that started giving us more I'll say, more oomph behind our effort is to get people to pay attention to what was going on.
18:56
SPEAKER_00: Because before they used to say, hey, 40 micrograms below, you're fine.
19:00
SPEAKER_00: No, no big deal.
19:01
SPEAKER_00: Come to find out, there's no safe amount.
19:03
SPEAKER_00: And in any even two to three to five micrograms per deciliter, you're getting effects.
19:10
SPEAKER_00: You're getting volatility issues.
19:12
SPEAKER_01: Let's go back and educate our uh our audience here, man.
19:15
SPEAKER_01: So when you talk microleads, we're talking about toxic exposure right now.
19:19
SPEAKER_01: Lead.
19:19
SPEAKER_01: I'm talking lead.
19:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
19:20
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so let's get all right.
19:22
SPEAKER_01: So first, and uh from an explosive and a round count, all right.
19:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, uh, you know, in a in a sephal course, you know, for an audience, a sephal course is well, it used to be in my day a three-week course that it was just all about in the in a shoot house, right?
19:36
SPEAKER_01: All you're doing is shooting and you're blowing stuff up every day.
19:38
SPEAKER_01: You're on the charge, you're on the gun, every day, hours and hours and hours.
19:42
SPEAKER_01: So, and if you're a range instructor, you're you know, as a team, you're going through iteratively the range instructors there eight hours a day, just eating this stuff.
19:51
SPEAKER_01: So good, Jeff, talk to us a little bit about um, you know, what with this, the the the toxic exposure part, because that's something we really don't we haven't talked about a lot in this show.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so think about this with the toxins.
20:03
SPEAKER_00: Like I'm gonna go, I'm gonna loop this together with TBI.
20:07
SPEAKER_00: When you get a traumatic brain injury, the secondary effect of TBI is that calcium influx in the brain, right?
20:12
SPEAKER_00: Excytotoxicity, neurotoxicity part.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: What do you your body thinks lead is calcium?
20:17
SPEAKER_00: So if you're in an environment with blast overpressure, triggering that secondary effect of TBI, which is that influx of glutamate and calcium in the brain, and your body's full of lead, which it thinks is calcium, and that blood-brain barrier gets disabled, and all of a sudden all the toxins that are in your blood shoot straight up in your brain, and they're taking that initial brain injury, it's like dumping gasoline on a fire.
20:40
SPEAKER_00: So that's what I wrote the paper about.
20:42
SPEAKER_00: Is it's not just TBI, it's not just toxic exposures, it's both of them at the same time.
20:48
SPEAKER_00: And being in that environment continually, not like you go deploy and you come back for six months.
20:53
SPEAKER_00: I was immersed.
20:55
SPEAKER_00: I was, as an instructor, as an 18 Bravo, I lived in shoot houses, I lived behind heavy weapons, I was breaching, I was an assaulter, Sephardic grad, on an assault team, you know, a DA dive team in Afghanistan doing kinetic operations.
21:10
SPEAKER_00: That's all I did.
21:11
SPEAKER_00: It was live in heavy metals and blast over pressure.
21:14
SPEAKER_00: And when you imagine, you know, shaking someone's head and beating against the wall over and over again.
21:20
SPEAKER_00: We did every class we did over 150 charges.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: And we did six classes a year, plus we were running Sabucus at that time, which was our support cephalic.
21:29
SPEAKER_00: It was our green team for enablers, where we would take them and run them through basic CQB, advanced combat marksmanship, heavy weapons, and stuff like that.
21:38
SPEAKER_00: So we ran, we only had a handful of instructors at that time, and we were we lived at range 65.
21:43
SPEAKER_00: That's all we did.
21:45
SPEAKER_00: And you know, that was my break coming out of combat with that.
21:48
SPEAKER_00: Was my break.
21:49
SPEAKER_00: That's when I broke the more.
21:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I was overexposed.
21:53
SPEAKER_00: So just as an instructor without any of my other classes or anything, logged over 2,400 explosive charges just in Sephora.
22:01
SPEAKER_00: And that doesn't include my Sephardics, my PMTs, my Sepharics as a student.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: So remember we talked about charge count, and you said the instructors stay in the house all day, the students roll through.
22:13
SPEAKER_00: So from 2007, I had two cephalics, Sephardix, three PMTs, two deployments, and then Sephardic.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: So uh and then it came back from Afghanistan in 09 and was like, Yeah, you're going to be a Sephardi instructor.
22:29
SPEAKER_00: So I was smashed.
22:31
SPEAKER_00: I was over any limit they have now, I was above and beyond that.
22:35
SPEAKER_01: So how you know, and then we talk about how that you know impacts the brain.
22:40
SPEAKER_01: And of course, the first indicator we have is you know psychological, behavioral, cognitive disorders.
22:47
SPEAKER_01: What were you experiencing at that time?
22:49
SPEAKER_01: Uh are you familiar with the sensory triad?
22:53
SPEAKER_00: I am not.
22:54
SPEAKER_00: So that's vestibular, that's vision, and that's um your auditory processing, right?
23:00
SPEAKER_00: So they call it a triad.
23:02
SPEAKER_00: So your eyes, your ears, and your vestibular system all work together to basically let you know where you are in time and space and what's around you at all times, how to react to it and respond to it.
23:12
SPEAKER_00: So typically like think of patrolling, you usually see movement, right?
23:16
SPEAKER_00: And then you track on it and then you listen.
23:18
SPEAKER_00: And your eyes and ears have to work together to make sense of what's in your environment, what's a threat and what's not a threat.
23:24
SPEAKER_00: And then your vestibular system has to let you know where you are to keep you on your feet and respond to those threats.
23:30
SPEAKER_00: When you get a TBI, all three of those systems get impacted, and all of a sudden you're not perceiving and responding appropriately to everything in your environment.
23:38
SPEAKER_00: And what the neat the nervous system defaults to when it doesn't, it there's no certainty is uncertainty and being unsafe.
23:45
SPEAKER_00: So you overreact to everything and everything becomes a threat, right?
23:49
SPEAKER_00: So when all you see is nail and you're the hammer, you're you're gonna want to whack everything you see, right?
23:55
SPEAKER_00: And so that's exactly what happens with that sensory triad when it goes off.
23:59
SPEAKER_00: And I would say about 75% of the time that gets diagnosed as PTSD.
24:03
SPEAKER_00: So I want you to think of this for a second, right?
24:05
SPEAKER_00: So imagine with auditory processing, you go to a crowded space, a bar, a party, and you walk in there and all you were calm when you walked in, and all of a sudden it's like it progressively gets louder and louder and louder, and it feels like someone cranks up the volume, and all of a sudden you're like, get me the hell out of here now, and you get mad.
24:22
SPEAKER_00: Or you're sitting at your desk trying to write an email and someone comes up beside you and starts trying to have a conversation with you.
24:28
SPEAKER_00: And you all of a sudden you get super angry and you snap.
24:30
SPEAKER_00: You're like, hey, dude, give me fucking five minutes, and you know, I'll I'll fix whatever the hell you got going on.
24:36
SPEAKER_00: But it causes you the most overreactive, unproportionate response there is, and it gets chalked up to that dude's an asshole or he's got PTSD.
24:46
SPEAKER_00: In reality, it's I can't make sense of my environment.
24:49
SPEAKER_00: There's too much going on, and I'm being distracted.
24:51
SPEAKER_00: So, easiest way to know if you have auditory processing disorder, besides the ones I just talked about at the bar or a party, is if you're in a class and someone's clicking a pen or tapping a foot and you want to choke the shit out of them, check.
25:03
SPEAKER_00: You have auditory processing, right?
25:06
SPEAKER_00: That's not just a tick.
25:07
SPEAKER_00: That means your brain, you're trying to focus on one thing and there's something else going on in the background, and it causes you to be angry.
25:13
SPEAKER_00: That's like a dead giveaway.
25:15
SPEAKER_00: And then the other stuff is with the vision as well.
25:18
SPEAKER_00: So imagine being an advanced combat marksmanship instructor and you have severe binocular vision disorder, meaning your eyes can't converge on a front sight post and the two back and get front sight focus because your eyes are doing this, jumping everywhere, or one's going here or one's shutting off and one's turning on.
25:35
SPEAKER_00: It causes the same level of frustration and anger because you can't make sense of what's going on.
25:41
SPEAKER_00: And so shooting, like they always shoot both eyes up, bullshit, close one eye and you still see this, right?
25:47
SPEAKER_00: And you're like, what is going on?
25:48
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you get a red dot and you're keyhole in every single round.
25:51
SPEAKER_00: But with iron sights, you're like, what the hell's going on here?
25:54
SPEAKER_00: Had no idea what that was until I figured out, I'm like, oh my God, I need to get tested for this.
25:58
SPEAKER_00: I had severe binocular vision disorder, I had vestibular disorder, and I had severe auditory processing disorder.
26:05
SPEAKER_00: I had all three, and I was getting everything else chalked up to behavior health issues.
26:11
SPEAKER_00: And once I started doing rehab and figuring out that was, you'll naturally compensate for that, by the way.
26:17
SPEAKER_00: You'll write things down, you'll tell people, hey, if you need to talk to me, I need to see your lips moving, that type of stuff.
26:22
SPEAKER_00: You'll you'll naturally compensate for it.
26:24
SPEAKER_00: It's frustrating as shit.
26:26
SPEAKER_00: But once you figure it out, it's a lot easier to navigate situations.
26:29
SPEAKER_00: But takes that anger level down.
26:31
SPEAKER_00: Expectation management for your loved ones to be like, hey man, remember that thing I told you that you never listen to me when I tell you what it is.
26:38
SPEAKER_00: I have no control over that.
26:39
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I ask you if you need my undivided attention, tell me that.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: Tell me so I can see your lips moving, and I'll give you that undivided attention.
26:47
SPEAKER_00: But if you never know that and you're just doing this all the time, it's adding so much stress.
26:52
SPEAKER_00: It's exhausting, and you're gonna feel like you're dragging around a dead body.
26:55
SPEAKER_00: Now, I didn't add in the other part of TBI, which is neuroendocrine dysfunction, NED, which how does what's the primary role of hormones and neurotransmitters in your body?
27:08
SPEAKER_00: Like that's how you adapt to your environment, right?
27:11
SPEAKER_00: That's allastasis.
27:13
SPEAKER_00: So that's how you respond to everything in your environment through hormones and neurotransmitters.
27:17
SPEAKER_00: Whether it's stress, physical, psychological, or it's your immune system or nervous system to say, that's a threat, that's not a threat, I engage it or I run away from it, right?
27:27
SPEAKER_00: When those hormones after TBI are impacted, guess what you don't do?
27:31
SPEAKER_00: You don't respond appropriately to your environment.
27:34
SPEAKER_00: So you're gonna have mood and behavior changes that are pretty significant.
27:38
SPEAKER_00: And they're gonna get chalked up as it's all in your head.
27:41
SPEAKER_00: Technically, it is all in your head, but it comes down to hypothalamus pituitary adrenal dysfunction or hypothalamus pituitary thyroid function.
27:50
SPEAKER_00: When those hormones and neurotransmitters are off, guess what you're not doing?
27:54
SPEAKER_00: You're not bouncing back like you used to.
27:56
SPEAKER_00: You're gonna get in survival mode and you're gonna overreact psychologically and physiologically to everything in your environment, cancer and suicide.
28:05
SPEAKER_01: So, what do you think, you know?
28:06
SPEAKER_01: I mean, in your in your estimation, we've had a whole bunch of good boys and girls get told to leave the military, you know, bad conduct discharges, other than honorable discharges, because they could no longer uh, you know, you know, act within, you know, I mean, uh they're not compatible with, you know, the military anymore because they're obviously mentally ill and making bad decisions.
28:29
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
28:30
SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean, is it fair to say that a significant amount of those could have been affected by you know the same topics you're talking about that, you know, we never really I mean, I mean, I don't think I don't I don't think the military for a long time was evaluating people for the impact of blast or you know TBI on their mental health as as part of their.
28:51
SPEAKER_01: They would just, if you're mentally ill, you're mentally ill, sorry, man.
28:54
SPEAKER_01: Oh, actually, you're not even mentally ill.
28:56
SPEAKER_01: We just don't want to deal with you anymore.
28:57
SPEAKER_01: So you know, here, you know, hit the street.
28:59
SPEAKER_01: These are the guys and girls we find in the bridges, we find in cars, but you know, it's uh we got to do a better job, I think.
29:05
SPEAKER_00: But uh goes back to my original point was it's not what's wrong with you, it's what happened to you.
29:11
SPEAKER_00: And when it comes to behavior and people getting booted out of the military, I see two camps.
29:16
SPEAKER_00: I see adverse childhood, unresolved childhood trauma, sexual abuse, physical abuse, mental abuse, right off the bat with substance abuse and adaptation behaviors.
29:25
SPEAKER_00: Way you're like 80% more predisposed to PTSD if you're abused as a child.
29:30
SPEAKER_00: And so the people I see that are trying to drink themselves to death, and no matter how many times people try to help them, it's either their brains rotting out of their head with CTE or they have severe childhood trauma or a combination of both.
29:44
SPEAKER_00: Um, what I see with blast overpressure is like a progressively slow process.
29:50
SPEAKER_00: And what I've seen with people like impact concussion and CTE type symptoms, where it's like this person no longer is that person I knew.
29:58
SPEAKER_00: They completely flipped.
29:59
SPEAKER_00: Like that's not the same person I used to know.
30:01
SPEAKER_00: That's like a when I'm dealing or see that or witnessing it and talking to people, when I see people that are like, hey, that's that person's not themselves.
30:09
SPEAKER_00: That's where I see CTE at, as far as like the brain rotting out, and then like no inhibition, saying inappropriate and doing inappropriate things, complete compulsive behavior, like no predictability.
30:21
SPEAKER_00: You know what I'm saying?
30:22
SPEAKER_00: That's where I see the brain rotting with the self-damaging, the alcohol, the cheating on your wife, and DUIs and all that stuff, I see that as childhood mostly.
30:32
SPEAKER_00: Um I've been doing this for a long time.
30:36
SPEAKER_00: And like I said, there's a combination with some people, it's both.
30:39
SPEAKER_00: It's damaged brain and childhood.
30:41
SPEAKER_00: And that's why I always, if you go to any program, whether it's uh substance abuse program, a behavior health program, or a TBI program, if they don't acknowledge all this in the same space, go to a new spot because they're all connected, right?
30:56
SPEAKER_00: If you do, if I can send you the best brain rehab facility in the world, if I don't address childhood trauma, guess what's gonna happen?
31:03
SPEAKER_00: Or moral injury.
31:05
SPEAKER_00: They're gonna default right back to survival behavior.
31:08
SPEAKER_00: Survival behavior is fighting, feeding, and fucking.
31:10
SPEAKER_00: It's three things.
31:11
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the military.
31:12
SPEAKER_00: If you're like I do all three of those things well, you're in survival mode because that's default behavior.
31:17
SPEAKER_00: And that's where our dudes get in trouble with women, with drugs, and alcohol.
31:21
SPEAKER_00: You're trying to get your needs met.
31:22
SPEAKER_00: You're in survival mode, you're not thinking long term.
31:25
SPEAKER_00: Big picture, you are dopamine and adrenaline.
31:27
SPEAKER_00: That's where you operate.
31:28
SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly where we operate in combat.
31:31
SPEAKER_00: Dopamine, adrenaline, and cortisol.
31:33
SPEAKER_00: And so that's the the highs and the lows, you know, getting on the back of the helicopter, flying into a target, then you come off and you're like, how do I how do I fill that void?
31:42
SPEAKER_00: I I know how.
31:43
SPEAKER_00: All right, let's go get some women, right?
31:45
SPEAKER_00: Like you're in survival behavior.
31:47
SPEAKER_00: Most people don't think they're gonna be alive long enough to see the the the fruit of their labor with bad behavior, right?
31:55
SPEAKER_00: Like, you don't see you're gonna be alive long enough to see the consequences of your actions.
31:59
SPEAKER_00: So when you make it out of that and you're like, oh shit, what do I do now?
32:02
SPEAKER_00: That's the dudes that drink themselves to death, get the DUIs with like, hey, get me deployed or get me out of here, I'm gonna get in trouble.
32:09
SPEAKER_00: That's where when you see that behavior, I already know what it is.
32:12
SPEAKER_00: I don't have to ask them what's wrong.
32:14
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, hey, dude, what happened?
32:16
SPEAKER_00: That's it.
32:17
SPEAKER_00: Once you understand this, as a you don't have to be a doctor, psychologist, psychiatrist.
32:22
SPEAKER_00: You could be a peer that says, hey man, what the hell happened?
32:25
SPEAKER_00: What's going on?
32:26
SPEAKER_00: How do what can I do to put to help you, right?
32:28
SPEAKER_00: Like, how do I help you help yourself?
32:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you've got brain injury.
32:32
SPEAKER_00: You don't do this job and walk out without a damaged brain.
32:34
SPEAKER_00: Impossible.
32:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, if you signed up to do this job and triple volunteer to put yourself in death and destruction on a daily basis, chances are you grew up with some adversity.
32:43
SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about it.
32:44
SPEAKER_00: And let's acknowledge it.
32:45
SPEAKER_00: Let's own it and get ahead of it and be like, hey, dude, this is par for the course here, man.
32:48
SPEAKER_00: You're not the only one.
32:50
SPEAKER_00: This is the resources we can do to help you out.
32:52
SPEAKER_00: See all those dudes over there?
32:53
SPEAKER_00: They used to be you, they all went and did shit, and guess what?
32:56
SPEAKER_00: They got their lives back, they got their families back.
32:58
SPEAKER_00: And that's what we're doing with our program now, is like, hey man, we got it.
33:02
SPEAKER_00: Like, this is par for the course.
33:03
SPEAKER_00: It's expected.
33:04
SPEAKER_00: You sign up to be a fireman, you're gonna go in burning buildings, right?
33:07
SPEAKER_00: You sign up for special operations, you're gonna be going to a shitstorm of stress, you know, depression, anger.
33:14
SPEAKER_00: You're gonna go through all the things.
33:16
SPEAKER_00: It's par for the course.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: You can't do this job and be Mr.
33:19
SPEAKER_00: Emotionally Available.
33:20
SPEAKER_00: You've got to compartmentalize.
33:21
SPEAKER_00: So when they assess and select us, they look for the ability to not show weakness, to compartmentalize, to push through pain psychologically and physiologically, never ask for help, never show weakness.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: That's exactly what they're looking for when they assess and select us.
33:34
SPEAKER_00: And what type of kids do you think you're gonna get to fit those requirements, right?
33:39
SPEAKER_00: Kids who grew up with something.
33:41
SPEAKER_00: And it's not all of it.
33:43
SPEAKER_00: You know, there's people that grew up in perfectly loving homes, everything was provided for them.
33:47
SPEAKER_00: They, you know, they learn healthy coping skills.
33:50
SPEAKER_00: Those are the dudes that become CSMs.
33:51
SPEAKER_00: They become colonels, you know, generals.
33:54
SPEAKER_00: They had, you know, when they came in the military, their bucket wasn't already full.
33:59
SPEAKER_00: If you have a dude that came from childhood and his bucket's already halfway full or full, and then you stack all the military shit on top of him, do you think they're gonna last 20 years?
34:07
SPEAKER_00: Or do you think they're gonna be suckarting a pistol or contemplating that or drinking and getting kicked out a lot earlier than they should have?
34:14
SPEAKER_01: Well, I I would, I mean, I'll I'll push back a little bit on as an abused, neglected child, you know, when I joined the army, you know, there's also a lot of evidence here that the that the neuro the neuroinflammation that's created by all that blast exposure, too.
34:29
SPEAKER_01: I mean, we just can't kick kick kick kick kick kick guys and girls out of the army because without without testing them for the impact of the jobs in the brain.
34:37
SPEAKER_01: Now, traumatic childhood, all right, got it.
34:40
SPEAKER_01: You know, you know, it's it's just that, you know, we're you know, we we we you know we we've overlooked the the it the impact of neuroinflammation, which is the root cause of CTE, right?
34:50
SPEAKER_01: Nobody's ever died from CTE, right?
34:52
SPEAKER_01: They die from the mental illness that's created by the damage to their brain.
34:57
SPEAKER_01: And that's all from neuroinflammation, those repetitive impacts that you took over and over again.
35:02
SPEAKER_01: And um, and and and that's what you know I think is important to recognize as we move forward with legislation and programs like yours.
35:08
SPEAKER_01: So talk to us about this program.
35:10
SPEAKER_01: I mean, obviously, pretty easy to find the dudes that are hurting out there, man.
35:14
SPEAKER_01: They find you, right?
35:15
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we don't have to advertise this.
35:17
SPEAKER_01: But I got a I got a waiting list.
35:19
SPEAKER_01: So yeah.
35:21
SPEAKER_01: Talk about this program.
35:22
SPEAKER_01: This sounds amazing, man.
35:23
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you this is what you put together as an active duty soldier.
35:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I mean, it's a full comprehensive program.
35:29
SPEAKER_00: Everything we just talked about.
35:30
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, we don't get you because everything's going well.
35:34
SPEAKER_00: We get the worst case scenarios.
35:35
SPEAKER_00: I've tried everything, it didn't work.
35:37
SPEAKER_00: My side, I get I get this every week.
35:38
SPEAKER_00: My psychiatrist told me to give you guys a call.
35:41
SPEAKER_00: Get on get on the list, sign up, you know.
35:44
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, you're beyond our level of what we can provide in the military setting.
35:48
SPEAKER_00: And so it's a fully comprehensive program.
35:50
SPEAKER_00: Everything we just talked about, operator syndrome, TBI, childhood, we address all of it right up front.
35:55
SPEAKER_00: You, you know, if you're coming in the program, if you're active duty, you got to have a care coalition advocate to give benevolent support.
36:01
SPEAKER_00: If you're a veteran, sign the link from the website, come on in, we get you squared away.
36:05
SPEAKER_00: But first thing we do is a discovery call.
36:07
SPEAKER_00: It's a history and a timeline on you.
36:09
SPEAKER_00: What have you been exposed to?
36:10
SPEAKER_00: What's what's affecting you the most?
36:12
SPEAKER_00: If you had a magic wand or a genie, which three things would you want to address up front?
36:16
SPEAKER_00: What's what's causing you the pain and the suffering?
36:18
SPEAKER_00: And then how do we alleviate that?
36:20
SPEAKER_00: And that's why I said this is where everything I'm telling you right now is that if you don't address all of it collectively together, you're just putting band-aids on things.
36:30
SPEAKER_00: Right.
36:30
SPEAKER_00: For example, like if I take a guy and I send him to NYCO and he's or I send him to Marcus Brain Institute or Share or some and they're doing drugs and they're drinking every day, how effective that the outcome is going to be that program.
36:45
SPEAKER_00: So step number one is suicidal ideation or addiction right up front.
36:51
SPEAKER_00: We look for that right off the bat.
36:52
SPEAKER_00: If though either one of those things or both are on the table, those are the first things that get addressed.
36:57
SPEAKER_00: We get the referrals, we get them into Warrior's Heart, we get them into all the different programs, we address that.
37:03
SPEAKER_00: And then they come back, we reassess.
37:05
SPEAKER_00: All right, let's go inpatient TBI polytrauma.
37:08
SPEAKER_00: Let's go look at, let's go look at the brain, let's go look at the trauma, the PTSD, let's go look at the ortho stuff all together collectively.
37:15
SPEAKER_00: You're gonna go get the 100,000 mile service that you should have had at 25,000 miles.
37:19
SPEAKER_00: And so the preventative maintenance that we always say that we do on our equipment, but we never do for ourselves, that's what our program is.
37:26
SPEAKER_00: Comprehensive operator maintenance program.
37:28
SPEAKER_00: And then we do that and then we reassess, okay, now that we've addressed what's driving you for those behaviors that you were having problems with, now let's focus on what's cog the cognitive stuff, the pain, the you know, the inflammation, the, you know, the neural fatigue that you got, not interacting with your family appropriately, let's fine-tune those.
37:49
SPEAKER_00: And then when you come out of the polytrauma, then we can do the H-BOT, the we can do the ketamine therapy, we can do the MERT, we can do all those things after we've addressed the lifestyle and the environment.
38:00
SPEAKER_00: Because if you don't address the environment that you came from and it's still part of the problem, you're gonna come out of those programs, go back to the environment.
38:08
SPEAKER_00: What do you think the nervous system's gonna do?
38:11
SPEAKER_00: It's gonna default back to survival mode.
38:12
SPEAKER_00: You're gonna go exactly slowly right back to where you started.
38:15
SPEAKER_00: You trigger.
38:16
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
38:16
SPEAKER_00: That's it.
38:17
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's literally your nervous system is hardwired to go to the familiar hell because it's what you know, it's what to expect.
38:24
SPEAKER_00: And so going into the unknown, which is the thriving part of your life that you've never had since a child, it's gonna be scary as hell, and you're not gonna want to do it.
38:33
SPEAKER_00: You're gonna default right back to where you knew.
38:35
SPEAKER_00: That's like a relationship, right?
38:37
SPEAKER_00: It's why people stay in abusive relationships because it's the familiar hell.
38:41
SPEAKER_00: They don't know anything else.
38:43
SPEAKER_00: So that's the nervous system gonna go back to right where it started.
38:46
SPEAKER_00: So if you don't address the root of what's driving the issues, you're gonna default right back to where you were.
38:51
SPEAKER_00: So comprehensive program, we come in, we assess all of this, whether it's toxic exposures, cancer, childhood stuff, TBI, we do it all.
39:00
SPEAKER_00: And then there's no one size fits all with all this, right?
39:03
SPEAKER_00: But if you don't address all of it collectively, you're gonna default right back to where you were.
39:07
SPEAKER_00: So the biggest part of all of this is understanding your situation.
39:11
SPEAKER_00: We don't just tell people you're fucked up because a lot of the TBI programs, that's all they do.
39:16
SPEAKER_00: They're at research and they're diagnosing, but they don't tell you how to do the rehab or where to do the rehab.
39:21
SPEAKER_00: They're like, yeah, here's your 26-page report.
39:24
SPEAKER_00: Go back to your unit, go back to home, whatever it is, and go figure it out.
39:28
SPEAKER_00: So polytraumas, they actually do the rehab there.
39:30
SPEAKER_00: Star prep, Nyco Pacer.
39:32
SPEAKER_00: Um, Nyco doesn't really do much rehab.
39:35
SPEAKER_00: They start it there and your unit's supposed to finish it.
39:37
SPEAKER_00: But the rehab is the most critical part.
39:39
SPEAKER_00: Reintegrating back with your family, changing your environment, controlling your controllables, right?
39:44
SPEAKER_00: That is sleep, that's stress management, that's relationships, finances, nutrition.
39:49
SPEAKER_00: All of those things have to be worked on.
39:52
SPEAKER_00: If not, you default right back to your environment, right?
39:54
SPEAKER_00: So it goes back to the first soft imperative and the first soft truth.
39:58
SPEAKER_00: Understand the operational environment.
40:00
SPEAKER_00: Humans are more important than hardware, right?
40:02
SPEAKER_00: So if you understand the environment, you know how it affects you, what to do to protect yourself from it.
40:07
SPEAKER_00: And if you treat your humans as well as your hardware and you're proactive and preventative with care and you're comprehensive, they're gonna last longer, they're gonna perform better, and they're gonna have be less expensive to maintain.
40:19
SPEAKER_00: And that's it.
40:20
SPEAKER_00: That's what my program is.
40:22
SPEAKER_00: I literally took everything I knew was a green brain and translated to health and wellness.
40:26
SPEAKER_00: So that's MDMP, mission analysis.
40:30
SPEAKER_00: That's you know, mission analysis, 18 Fox right here.
40:33
SPEAKER_00: Like IP, IPB, and risk management, composite risk management, right?
40:38
SPEAKER_00: That that's it.
40:39
SPEAKER_00: Identify hazards, assess, develop controls, implement controls, continually assess.
40:44
SPEAKER_00: So continual process.
40:45
SPEAKER_00: So don't do that with health and wellness.
40:47
SPEAKER_01: No, I I got it.
40:48
SPEAKER_01: And and and so, but when we're dealing with guys that have busted brains, okay, and and a lot of stuff, everything you're talking about needs to be done.
40:56
SPEAKER_01: You know, some of the issues I have with the NICO and the polytrauma units is they don't do a lot of this.
41:01
SPEAKER_01: They don't treat this a lot.
41:03
SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, I you know, you give you can give a guy a dog or a pony, right?
41:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you give them a lot of talk therapy.
41:09
SPEAKER_01: But when we know that whether it's lead exposure, toxic exposure, or repetitive blast exposure, or you know, repetitive impacts, either pick you one or a TBI combination of both.
41:20
SPEAKER_01: We don't address this, and we're and that's what the well, I think one of the issues that you know what your follow-on program is exactly what is missing out of most of these programs.
41:30
SPEAKER_01: I mean, yeah, you know, because I talk to these kids a lot.
41:33
SPEAKER_01: They get done with this, all right, they get three weeks of the best stuff.
41:35
SPEAKER_01: They go to the home base in Boston, then they go to Oklahoma, right?
41:39
SPEAKER_01: What what's up there, right?
41:41
SPEAKER_01: So I got for the for so for the the the my first question is, you know, um, you know, i the the the the fact that you're treating the brain, right, is I think is the most important.
41:51
SPEAKER_01: What are you doing for the toxic exposure?
41:53
SPEAKER_01: Is that just diet, or do you have some some nutraceuticals or something that can strip that stuff out, or are these guys you know carrying this around?
42:00
SPEAKER_00: I mean, to go back to your original point, you have to address inflammation, whether it's neuroinflammation in the brain or systemic.
42:06
SPEAKER_00: If you've got gut inflammation, you're gonna have brain inflammation, and vice versa.
42:09
SPEAKER_00: If you've got brain inflammation, you're gonna have gut inflammation.
42:12
SPEAKER_00: So both those things need to be addressed at the same time, and that is sleep, stress reduction, proper nutrition, hydration, and supplementation.
42:21
SPEAKER_00: Like all of the that's your controlling your control walls.
42:24
SPEAKER_00: So to reduce inflammation, you have to identify the source of the inflammation, right?
42:28
SPEAKER_00: So if you're in an environment causing neuroinflammation with blast overpressure and toxic exposures, the only way to heal that is to remove yourself from that exposure.
42:38
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
42:38
SPEAKER_00: All right.
42:39
SPEAKER_00: If you can't do that, then all you can do is manage the inflammation, which is done through optimizing your sleep, reducing your stress.
42:47
SPEAKER_00: Do not put carcinogens in your body that drive inflammation, oxidative stress, and mitochondrial dysfunction through the roof.
42:53
SPEAKER_00: It's putting supplements on board that help inflammation, omega-3s, pro-resolved mediators, all your antioxidants.
43:02
SPEAKER_00: And then the biggest one is sleep and hydration, right?
43:04
SPEAKER_00: Your body naturally detoxifies toxins through biotransformation.
43:09
SPEAKER_00: So turning fat-soluble shit into water-soluble sweat and piss, right?
43:14
SPEAKER_00: So if that system is disabled, there can be a genetic component, like with me, I was the canary in the coal mine, because that MTHFR, glutathione pathways are a little disturbed, not horrible, but I was more predisposed to hanging on to stuff.
43:28
SPEAKER_00: And if your diet is not under control and you're slowly absorbing and building up a toxic burden, not get rid of it, all of a sudden you got lipomas all over your body, you got you know a tire around your waist and everywhere else is veins sticking out.
43:42
SPEAKER_00: What the fuck's going on?
43:43
SPEAKER_00: Your body's full of toxins.
43:45
SPEAKER_00: And all of a sudden, where do you think your body gets rid of toxins besides the kidneys and the liver?
43:50
SPEAKER_00: Your colon, right?
43:52
SPEAKER_00: Where do you it's like your dumpster of your body to poop things out where toxins are accumulated?
43:57
SPEAKER_00: So you the primary source is to.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: pee it out and then sweat it out and then poop it out and then breathing.
44:03
SPEAKER_00: Breathing you're getting rid of toxin as well.
44:05
SPEAKER_00: And what yeah so every time you're that's why they do breath tests for like SIBO and stuff like that.
44:11
SPEAKER_00: There's byproducts that come out when you breathe.
44:13
SPEAKER_00: And so when you're when you assist all those systems and optimize those systems your body is more effective cleaning them out.
44:22
SPEAKER_00: But if you're chronically stressed all of those pathways are affected right off the bat.
44:27
SPEAKER_00: If you're not deep sleeping all of those pathways are affected right off the bat.
44:32
SPEAKER_00: And if you're putting things in your body that are full of toxins, ultra processed foods and alcohol you're disabling all those systems.
44:40
SPEAKER_00: So I just remember I th said all things fun?
44:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
44:43
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
44:44
SPEAKER_00: Right.
44:45
SPEAKER_00: So all day long you're being exposed to blast overpressure and toxins and there's inflammation like you're on fire and then you put gasoline on that fire when you come home to try to de-stress and calm down and then you eat I'm gonna the bag of chips that are over here or I'm gonna go to the restaurant eat a burger.
45:04
SPEAKER_00: You're literally everything you're putting in your body is either fighting inflammation or fueling inflammation.
45:08
SPEAKER_00: It's fighting disease or fueling disease.
45:12
SPEAKER_00: It's fighting cancer or it's fueling cancer.
45:15
SPEAKER_00: Once you can understand that all things fun become what am I doing to myself?
45:20
SPEAKER_00: What are the long-term impacts of that?
45:23
SPEAKER_00: And our dudes don't give a shit at first until they start having problems in one or two domains or both the bedroom and the battlefield.
45:32
SPEAKER_00: Once they can't perform on the battlefield and they can't recover, they can't keep pace with the younger dudes, then they're like, I need to do something.
45:40
SPEAKER_00: That's when they start paying attention.
45:41
SPEAKER_00: And then the other one is when they come out of combat and they try to go in the bedroom and that's not working, that's going to force them real quick.
45:47
SPEAKER_00: For me, that's exactly what it was.
45:49
SPEAKER_00: I didn't give a shit about everything else.
45:51
SPEAKER_01: But coming home in the bedroom is the only place I knew how to manage stress tap our identity bro man when that doesn't go down that yeah all things fun.
46:00
SPEAKER_00: So things fun so think of the bedroom in the battlefield and that was it.
46:03
SPEAKER_00: That's how I reached dudes how can I be a better operator overseas?
46:07
SPEAKER_00: How can I be a better operator in the bedroom?
46:09
SPEAKER_00: And once I got people to figure those things out and it came back to hormones, neurotransmitters, inflammation, nutrition, stress management, sleep that's when dudes started wearing wearables if we told them to wear wearables like I don't want to be tracked.
46:20
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to know that shit and then I could say hey man you know all that testosterone that you don't have well do you want to learn how to make it and produce it you got to learn how to manage stress and you got to learn how to eat and you got to learn how to recover and sleep.
46:32
SPEAKER_01: That's all you got to do yeah all you got to do is tell them hey if you wear this you're gonna have a hard on 24 hours a day.
46:39
SPEAKER_01: They'll wear that thing till it wears off their hand man that's that's how that works dude.
46:43
SPEAKER_01: That's it.
46:44
SPEAKER_00: I mean that was it my 18 Bravo brain I was like I got to figure this out and uh I did that's what it was and that's how I reached people it was simplifying it.
46:53
SPEAKER_00: I'm like look dude if you don't care about anything else I know you care about those two things.
46:57
SPEAKER_00: So let's focus there.
46:58
SPEAKER_00: And that's it man like you're not doing this job and walking out with a perfect brain.
47:02
SPEAKER_00: And when they were telling people that were leaving the military because they did they answered five questions like oh you don't have TBI that's a disservice man like if you look at Divic and TBI Co's numbers like they're highly skewed because not everyone got assessed for TBI getting out and we all know the ANAM is a crock of shit.
47:20
SPEAKER_00: And it's like if you did this job, that's where we're coming to now like you know I helped Jane Horton with the uh NDA and stuff as far as like language to go in there about TBI it was that if you're in a high risk occupation MOS or career field or whatever it is, we already know.
47:38
SPEAKER_00: We don't have to ask you anything.
47:40
SPEAKER_00: If you're in that environment if I throw you in a fire what happens you get burned.
47:44
SPEAKER_00: Okay so if you're SF, if you're infantry, if you're artillery, whatever it is, or a tanker especially like if you're in that environment with blast overpressure, it's a that's a presumptive condition.
47:56
SPEAKER_00: We already know what it does.
47:57
SPEAKER_00: There is no safe amount it's total bullshit all the stuff they thought they knew back then.
48:02
SPEAKER_00: Size all that crap dude yeah yeah that's five you're good to go anything under five you're fine total bullshit like every time we shoot a good stuff we know what happens.
48:11
SPEAKER_01: What happens when five happens a hundred times with a 50 cal in 30 seconds right I mean it's jump.
48:17
SPEAKER_01: So all right so your your follow on program the the ketamine the HBO you know all this you know stellate gangly and plant-based medicine plant based medicine I've been through every plant based medicine in the world right now except for uh I think there's only one left I just did the IBOCA couple months ago as as research I wanted to check it out I want to walk the walk dude and spiritually help me didn't need it from a you know a life perspective but you know how do we get the world to understand that you know we could give all these guys all this therapy all these pharmaceuticals all these evaluations but there's a when it comes to this if we don't start targeting this like you're doing right now we are actually doing a disservice to these men and they're they're finding their way to you but there is absolutely no reason why a veteran should not be able to pick the brain treatment they want whether it's brain supplementation electronic therapies psychedelics or plant medicine or acelic gangly blocks outpatient procedures and fix their brain.
49:16
SPEAKER_01: And so you know how do we get there?
49:18
SPEAKER_01: How do we get you know these that next step which is what most of these veterans that have been identified like you said MOS you know combat related you know functions you know how do we you know a lot you know what I that's what I'm working on right now with legislation I'm working with several VSOs right now trying to push this but on your asking you ms you know uh Sergeant Jodia as a you know as an expert subject matter expert um you know how effective are these treatments from a point of brain recovery brain healing neuroplasticity and and so on and reducing neuroinflammation so on and so on yeah I mean you you've seen it yourself right I'm I've done all the things too just like you and I've seen the results my family sees the results I can quantify this I can look at QEEGs I can look at brain volume I can look at look at you know the ventricles in the brain you know dilated perivascular white space white matter lesions when you see brain matter change after like psilocybin ketamine assisted therapy when you see more volume in the brain increase and more activity in the brain after that's indisputable that is not that is objective data that is objective data yeah you can see that we can measure it we can quantify it like we're beyond let's do more studies we've seen the data please thank you very much yeah and so it's time to get we all know why these things aren't mainstream it's pharmaceuticals it's the pharmaceutical industry bottom line is that until they patent a drug that says I can make money off this you're not gonna get it and they're gonna make it impossible to get to and you're gonna have to go to Mexico to do these things or to do a VA study or you know go to one of the other universities that's doing a study.
51:00
SPEAKER_00: I mean ketamine we can do right now this is something you could do while you're on active duty it's not a psychedelic it's a disorder so they allow you to do it.
51:08
SPEAKER_00: Excellent good to hear good to hear mate but there's two indicated conditions that the FDA recognizes and that's major depressive disorder treatment resistant depression and the other one is chronic pain.
51:20
SPEAKER_00: Find me two dudes in the military that don't have one or both right like so that comes down to a provider willing to take the risk to do it and then the individual to willing to admit that what they got going on.
51:33
SPEAKER_00: But uh Womac right now at Fort Bragg at the pain clinic is doing ketamine IV therapy they're doing IV infusions for chronic pain but they also have a secondary effect of I don't want to kill myself anymore.
51:44
SPEAKER_00: So we teach people how to navigate that um behavior health is referring people to us.
51:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah that's the gray area right that's what we do is green berets we find a way find a way to yes and then the other part of that is like if you want to get referred out to a ketamine clinic we always tell people hey you know run it through your behavior health get a letter of support that's all they got to do.
52:05
SPEAKER_00: That's all their behavior health provider has to do a lot of people don't want to take the risk to help somebody but you know they want to make them go through the friggin' I call it the Legend of Zelda the conventional medical system oh no we're gonna try the SSRIs we're gonna try the antipsychotics we're gonna do all this first it's like no dude like if you came in with suicidal ideation you why the fuck give me a drug that the side effect is suicidal ideation.
52:31
SPEAKER_00: Yep yeah no like they tried to put me on effects sir.
52:36
SPEAKER_00: I was like no joke so I you know it's it's right now there's no consistent across the board so what we need help with is nothing ever good comes from the top down.
52:46
SPEAKER_00: So that's why we're doing the bottom up educating the war fighters and the families to demand better care and not the bullshit that's been fed to us.
52:54
SPEAKER_00: But the other way is to educate medical providers about what's out there not just what's available.
52:59
SPEAKER_01: And so once you get the medical providers and the the commands on board and there's procedures there's safety implementations there's checklists and processes hey man a letter from the command you're gonna go do ketamine therapy up in Raleigh I've got a whole boatload of people going up there to do that that are active duty they come back they're like hey dude I'm off all my meds I can think clearly you know I I see what I'm doing to myself I see what I'm doing to my family I understand my situation I don't want to kill myself anymore I actually want to live and when you start seeing this over and over again it's not a fluke it's not any let me ask let me ask you a quick question right I ask I ask everybody that comes on to still I'll I'll psychedelics so what percentage of individuals that you have sent to ketamine assistant or any psychedelic use name how many of them and a percent just their guest percentage said that this positively impacted my brain health my mental health you know my my self-esteem what one one are all of the above I would say about 95% say they had a positive impact.
54:03
SPEAKER_00: 95% there's there are people that don't do well with psychedelics and we know those usually like borderline personality psychosis schizophrenia or something like that um or people that abuse drugs as a kid and they build up the tolerance for these types of things but I would say about 95% are like I would say 75 to 85% profound effects.
54:22
SPEAKER_00: Like this transformed my life I've never seen anyone that's like hey I wish I didn't do this.
54:26
SPEAKER_00: I've I've seen less than 5% are like that was terrifying I never want to do it again.
54:32
SPEAKER_00: And those are the ones that should go back tell you the truth the thing is we don't push psychedelic assist therapy on anybody they come to us when they're ready.
54:40
SPEAKER_00: The medicine talks you know that um we don't we don't advertise or push them towards it.
54:44
SPEAKER_00: We get them when they're ready right I always tell people hey you know the first step with healing anybody is re-regulating the nervous system down regulating SGB a little bit of ketamine therapy see where they're at once you turn that volume down on that old nervous system and you can start to see things clearly and figure out your situation all of a sudden the mind opened up starts working they're like I think I'm ready to go do that thing in Mexico.
55:10
SPEAKER_00: And then then we well we have that conversation but we don't push it.
55:14
SPEAKER_00: If you're not ready you're not ready right like but you know intent and setting are everything.
55:19
SPEAKER_00: You have to feel safe to heal trauma.
55:21
SPEAKER_00: And it's a giant leap of faith for especially someone who's never had safety their entire life and to trust and to let go and make that giant leap off the cliff to get to a better place can be terrifying.
55:34
SPEAKER_00: And what we don't want to do is cause more fear and more uncertainty and more pain and suffering to somebody who's already on that cliff.
55:41
SPEAKER_00: So stellate gangway bought try the ketamine out introduce them to the medicines and then after that hey man what are we ready for next?
55:49
SPEAKER_00: Obviously with active duty can't be out there doing that stuff right so there's things you have to look out for but with veterans people that are out it's choose your own adventure you know we assess you you know I'm not doing anything clinical I will go through their history their timeline their needs assessment you know and then I'll hand that off to a provider or a program that will go fully into all the things to see if they qualify for it.
56:15
SPEAKER_00: And then we give them grants or scholarships or pay for their treatments and then we bring them back and then we reassess them we put them in all the other stuff.
56:23
SPEAKER_00: So everybody comes through there's a unique pipeline that's personalized to their needs.
56:27
SPEAKER_00: It's not a one size fits all it's all personalized medicine performance medicine.
56:32
SPEAKER_00: And then yeah we optimize hormones we look at toxins we look at pathogens we look at all the known exposures we we look at everything but what we really want to do is help people to teach them how to operate and maintain this thing right here, right?
56:45
SPEAKER_01: Think of basic rifle marksmanship operate maintain function check identify and correct malfunctions do that with a human teach them the basics that's it that's good man that's that's it it's so needed it's it's uh you know I I I love the impact because I mean what you just stated is very profound.
57:04
SPEAKER_01: Every brain is different it's a snowflake and there is no not going to be any regimen to to put a man or a woman back in a good state of mind that's going to work for everybody.
57:15
SPEAKER_01: And that's where farmer needs to go jump off a cliff.
57:17
SPEAKER_01: There's not a pill for this it is a journey and every journey they you know people need to be empowered with knowledge to make the right decision for themselves.
57:25
SPEAKER_01: And and that I mean Jeff that's amazing that you guys are supporting this because we're also aware of other foundations that won't touch these other aspects of you know whether it's stelic ganglion blocks or brain supplementation programs or plant medicines and they're you know they're saying hey we're here to heal the veteran but you're you're you're you're basically stopping at the most critical point especially when there is you know neuroinflammation RHI RBE involved is you you're just leaving the veteran I mean you made him you know got you got him convinced that he's got a problem and then you're saying all right you got a problem go you know and and go to you right learn how to live with it or live with you.
58:03
SPEAKER_00: Learn how to live with it.
58:04
SPEAKER_00: Learn how this is the new you learn how to live with it.
58:06
SPEAKER_00: That's what they were telling people which is a death sentence but I mean go back to this man what does the brain need to flourish it needs fuel right it needs fluids it needs fats it needs vitamins micronutrients and if you provide all those things most importantly if you provide increased blood flow and oxygen to the brain exercise being outdoor in the sun infrared light like nature provides us everything we need to heal the brain.
58:31
SPEAKER_00: And it goes back to every other exposure there is out there.
58:34
SPEAKER_00: The first step to healing any type of exposure is to remove yourself from the source of the toxicity whether it's a relationship whether it's a burn pit whatever the hell it is shootout remove yourself identify the source remove yourself from it and then provide what's missing.
58:51
SPEAKER_00: Add what's missing take away what doesn't belong and balance go back to basics outdoors in nature moving sunlight proper good whole foods peace that's the biggest one man is the environment you go into you can't heal in the environment that's making you sick.
59:07
SPEAKER_00: So if you go back to the environment that's making you sick don't expect to be healed and there's no magic pill for that right and those mitigate it you can minimize it a little bit but you're going to be burned right I throw you in the fire you're getting burned.
59:20
SPEAKER_00: Just think of that analogy that's what inflammation is think of being in a flame you're on fire.
59:25
SPEAKER_00: Rapid oxidization and anything in your environment that turns the volume up on oxidative stress, you're gonna have inflammation that's think of a car.
59:34
SPEAKER_00: Do I want to buy a used car from Maine where I grew up or out in the desert New Mexico right?
59:39
SPEAKER_00: That's oxidative stress.
59:41
SPEAKER_00: Rapid oxidization is fire.
59:43
SPEAKER_00: So think of your body as a car and all that shit all things fun that we talk about is salt on the road and this is your only car you're gonna get you might want to do some maintenance right you might want to reduce being in that environment and don't put things to salt on the car if you don't need to right watch those roads man and if you can use that car analogy with yourself it's easy day man.
1:00:06
SPEAKER_00: It's easy changes little things over time add up but if you don't know if you go in blind you're not gonna know how to maintain operate this thing.
1:00:13
SPEAKER_00: And you're not going to know when it's malfunctioning what to do to fix it.
1:00:16
SPEAKER_01: Well Jeff let's let's let's close out with a couple things here man because this has been an amazing conversation.
1:00:21
SPEAKER_01: So uh the big one is um what I'd like you to do is for the next how take as much time as you want.
1:00:28
SPEAKER_01: Talk about you, your foundation what you're offering and how the heck do people find you because this is something that you know there's more than one veteran listening right now or wife right saying hey I'm sure you get a couple of referrals from the old lady circle right you know the wife spouses as well we help spouses and the kids too we're a family based organization.
1:00:50
SPEAKER_01: And and if you could put a statement on that too because sometimes being the caretaker is as toxic as taking care of the injured veteran too.
1:00:57
SPEAKER_00: You know so you can secondary PTS is real but going back to that environment right and we talk about safety what do women need emotional physical safety and so if you're walking I always call it the ticking time bomb if you never know what version of this person you're gonna get when they come home you're gonna be walking on eggshells constantly and that's you know in the beginning when I was talking about childhood I was going to remember I was telling you about predisposing to trauma you're also predisposing to brain injury and everything else because when the nervous system is hypervigilant hyperalys the volume knob is up your immune function is down and your hormone you're gonna be living off cortisol and adrenaline right and so just with being predisposed to childhood trauma increases your risk for brain injury and neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration.
1:01:42
SPEAKER_00: So there's a that component that's why I said if you don't address both of them you're doing yourself a disservice so going back to the family environment if when we come back wounded ill and injured the entire family unit is affected right we bleed off on everything in our environment at home and vice versa when the spouse if they don't get anything managed or taken care of or they're left in the dark how do you think they're going to be re interacting with their their spouse right so we collectively educate the entire family unit about all of this.
1:02:10
SPEAKER_00: When we do our events our dagger dive camp home fronts with all secure foundation we include the entire family on all of this we read them in on brain injury trauma toxic exposures cancer risk all the infectious diseases and then what we do is provide them the care as well we don't do it at the same time a lot with trauma we we're not going to send a traumatized couple on a retreat together if one of them is the source of their trauma, right?
1:02:33
SPEAKER_00: So we we have organizations and partner or phenomenal ones where we send the spouse to go do their work, their healing journey they'll do plant-based medicine, psychedelic asis therapy, cellate ganglion box, get their hormones looked at and then we send the operator to go do their thing a little bit of counseling and coaching then we reintegrate them with our events or adaptive events or dagger dive type stuff camp home fronts where we bring them back together and then hey guys you guys are looking at each other as the problem not the problem over there.
1:03:04
SPEAKER_00: And once you start doing that it's people come out of their shells they heal and they're not reacting all the time there they know how to respond.
1:03:12
SPEAKER_00: And that's a regulated nervous system is a responding nervous system, right?
1:03:16
SPEAKER_00: We don't call it respond to contact we call it react to contact for a reason because there's no thought involved it's an involuntary response right it's what we train you to do.
1:03:24
SPEAKER_00: So I want you to think of that like think of respond to contact versus react to contact because your whole life since childhood if you're in a high threat environment then you go in the military and we fine-tune that fuck around find out mode what do you think you're gonna default back to when someone threatens you then that your family right that's how you're gonna interact with your family and you feel threatened I'm not being respected I'm not being appreciated you're gonna go into react mode your your spouse is going to be in react mode and when two people in react mode like that, they're in survival, they're not thinking they're reacting down right nervous system heal some trauma do some work and then hey man yeah I'm acting this way because of this and there's no excuse for it.
1:04:04
SPEAKER_00: I know what I need to work on and the other person over here does the same thing then they can see themselves as finding a solution not each other the problem.
1:04:12
SPEAKER_00: And if you don't address that like I said all the cool TBI programs, all the retreats in Mexico, if you don't take care of both people in that relationship, the environment, they're gonna default back to where they were.
1:04:24
SPEAKER_00: And that's why it's equally important to send the spouses to do these things as it is the operators.
1:04:29
SPEAKER_00: So Task Force Dyer Special Operations Foundation is a family based organization.
1:04:34
SPEAKER_00: We help the entire family unit.
1:04:36
SPEAKER_00: We don't just look at operators and we are purple.
1:04:39
SPEAKER_00: So we help every branch of special operations all the enablers support personnel spouses kids and we do that through three programs immediate needs like every other organization does whether it's financial because you got an accident got cancer needed help needed a helmet for your kid because of developmental issues because of toxic exposures in the environment won't go into that but or you know the adaptive events programs which is reintegration sending the family to go do something together.
1:05:07
SPEAKER_00: And then the health initiatives program which is that's the maintenance the comprehensive operator maintenance program it's the PMCS for the human.
1:05:15
SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly what we're doing.
1:05:17
SPEAKER_00: So I mean simplified man that everything we did for our hardware in the military we're doing for humans.
1:05:23
SPEAKER_00: So go back to those two things we talked about first soft truth, first soft imperity.
1:05:27
SPEAKER_00: So that's it man to get to us website find me on LinkedIn Soft Health Initiatives on Instagram taskforcedagger.org task force dagger social media find us you know we we'll help everybody even if you're not special operations we're partnered with so many organizations that help everybody I'll get you where you need to go I do that every week with people like hey man I'm not a cool guy.
1:05:50
SPEAKER_00: I didn't do all those things but I want to kill myself hey man this is the organization that matches your needs right here.
1:05:56
SPEAKER_00: Here's the number get a hold of them right now.
1:05:59
SPEAKER_00: That's what we do It's not about being special.
1:06:01
SPEAKER_00: It's about helping humans.
1:06:02
SPEAKER_00: And that's what I came in the military to do.
1:06:04
SPEAKER_00: And that's what our program does.
1:06:06
SPEAKER_01: So well, Jeff, I can't tell you how much I appreciate this conversation.
1:06:11
SPEAKER_01: You are you know, you are uh the your analogies right now are changing how I'm talking about a lot of stuff.
1:06:17
SPEAKER_01: It's pretty cool.
1:06:18
SPEAKER_01: But I I appreciate not only you know your journey, but what you're doing for others and and what your foundation um is doing as well.
1:06:27
SPEAKER_01: And you can count us in at the foundation.
1:06:30
SPEAKER_01: I talk to Mark, you know, every now and then.
1:06:32
SPEAKER_01: Um highly recommend your foundation.
1:06:35
SPEAKER_01: You're one of the few that go the distance, and that's what we look for in our foundational partners is are you leaving people halfway to the to the goal line or you're taking them all the way?
1:06:43
SPEAKER_01: And you guys are taking them all the way, and I really appreciate that.
1:06:47
SPEAKER_01: So thank you so much for the time for uh for your comments.
1:06:51
SPEAKER_01: Um really appreciate uh what the foundation's doing.
1:06:54
SPEAKER_01: And uh thank you for your service, and may the Lord bless you and keep helping others, man.
1:06:59
SPEAKER_01: I serving others is is what you're doing, and uh you're doing an excellent job, sir.
1:07:03
SPEAKER_01: Appreciate it, brother.
1:07:04
SPEAKER_01: Thanks for the opportunity.
1:07:06
SPEAKER_01: All right, bro.
1:07:06
SPEAKER_01: Folks, another amazing episode.
1:07:09
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I hope you guys are taking notes on this one, man, because this was astounding.
1:07:13
SPEAKER_01: All right, remember, go to the website when this is released, download a copy of the podcast, look up Jeff, look up the foundation if you know anybody that's struggling right now.
1:07:22
SPEAKER_01: And like he said, they don't have to be in special operations, man.
1:07:25
SPEAKER_01: They got a network, and we'll we're definitely going to be relying on them for a lot of the folks that we get out here that we find that that have problems from their military service that you know just aren't soft guys.
1:07:36
SPEAKER_01: So remember, go to the website, get your copy of the free book, the only book for parents on the repetitive ed impacts.
1:07:41
SPEAKER_01: I just rewrote it.
1:07:42
SPEAKER_01: It'll be published by the end of next month, be in Spanish and be an audio book.
1:07:47
SPEAKER_01: Don't forget, uh, we'll be announcing the dates for the conference here.
1:07:50
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna be doing a pledge on Mac's birthday on the 10th of March, asking people to take a pledge to uh support BrainSave Contact Sports.
1:07:59
SPEAKER_01: Uh, we just got notice that next week they're gonna announce a Mac Parkman day uh and Ray Lewis, both uh Ray Lewis, the famous linebacker for the Ravens, lost his son.
1:08:08
SPEAKER_01: They're gonna do a dual announcement day.
1:08:09
SPEAKER_01: There's gonna be a permanent day in honor of repetitive impacts and repetitive blast poser here in the day state of Florida.
1:08:15
SPEAKER_01: Uh, we'll be more up on that for next week.
1:08:17
SPEAKER_01: So as you go like, as you go fourth in this life here, please pay attention to what we're talking about.
1:08:22
SPEAKER_01: This is the largest undiagnosed cause of mental illness, and there are treatments.
1:08:26
SPEAKER_01: There is hope out there.
1:08:27
SPEAKER_01: So come to us for more information.
1:08:29
SPEAKER_01: Please keep the questions coming.
1:08:30
SPEAKER_01: Love those little shorties that we're doing.
1:08:32
SPEAKER_01: And remember, uh, like us, spread us around, let people know about the podcast.
1:08:36
SPEAKER_01: And you only got one melon, please take care of it.
1:08:39
SPEAKER_01: God bless you all.
1:08:40
SPEAKER_01: We'll see you next time on uh broken brains.
1:08:43
SPEAKER_01: Take care.
1:08:45
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, brother.
1:08:46
SPEAKER_01: Jeff