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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  Kagan, welcome to the show, man.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me on, Sean. It's an honor.

• 1:10Shawn Ryan?

  Likewise, likewise.

• 1:15Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, holy shit.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Dude, we got so much-

• 1:17Shawn Ryan?

  Been through the wringer.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  So much good stuff to talk about.

• 1:20Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Like, wow. But, um, let me start you off with an introduction.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:29Shawn Ryan?

  Kagan Smurf Gill. You served as a US Navy F-818E Super Hornet pilot, flying high-performance combat aircraft in one of the most demanding professions in the military. In 2014, during a dogfighting training exercise, you survived the fastest ejection in naval aviation history, ejecting from your aircraft at nearly 700 miles an hour. The crash left you with catastrophic injuries, multiple surgeries, a traumatic brain injury in a long battle with PTSD, addiction, and the unseen wounds of war. Against overwhelming odds, you fought your way back, returning to the cockpit, and later becoming an advocate for veteran mental health.

• 2:14Shawn Ryan?

  In Phoenix Revival, you recount your journey of survival, recovery, and finding purpose after unimaginable adversity. Once again, welcome to the show, man.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Thank you so much.

• 2:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, we found, we saw, we saw a podcast you were on and some reels, and we were like, holy shit, dude. We gotta get this dude, we gotta get this dude in here. So, thank you for coming.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  Dude, it's, uh, it's really exciting to be here and get to share this story to such a massive audience, man. Because, as you know, like, you're sharing some incredible information with the world right now and waking people up. And, uh, it's much needed.

• 2:54Shawn Ryan?

  I'm trying, I'm trying. Yeah, no, it sounds like psychedelics is a huge part of your recovery journey.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  It was, it was a transformational experience, a spiritual awakening.

• 3:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  And just a connection to something greater than myself and a deep love that I found within. And, dude, it's changed everything in my life for the better.

• 3:16Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man. Yeah, it's, uh, I did, I began a little over four years ago. And, uh, regardless of how much booze is in the studio here, I haven't had a drop to drink since-

• 3:29Speaker 02

  It's for you.

• 3:30Shawn Ryan?

  Since right after that.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:32Shawn Ryan?

  It was pretty effortless.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Don't need to poison yourself. Don't need to numb yourself and poison yourself from, you know, from that hole we all had before it.

• 3:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I keep it all up here as a reminder that this shit doesn't have control over me anymore. It's pretty fucking cool. But I get a lot of shit for having it, too.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  It looks really cool.

• 3:52Shawn Ryan?

  That's what I think, that's what I think. But, um, all right, so a couple of things to knock out real quick before we get into your life story. So I have a Patreon account, and, uh, they've been with us since the beginning, and they're the reason that we both get to sit down here today. So this is from Christian Francis. What main components of TBI treatment do you feel need to be changed? What parts of living with a TBI and recovery from injury are currently being impeded by the medical system? And how can treatment of those with TBI be changed to better understanding the patient?

• 4:30Speaker 02

  That's a great question. There's, there's almost a disregard for the TBI. And through my, my experience, it was almost unacknowledged that I could even possibly have a TBI or what that was. So just acknowledging that it exists and how delicate the brain actually is, is really critical. And then, I think there's a tendency in the mainstream medical system to just hit the easy button, which is the PTSD button right now, which, you know, that gives you a diagnosis and then it opens this whole Pandora's box of all the different medications they can throw at you to try to deal with that. But, come to find out, it's a much broader issue when you do have TBI. And, uh, you know Dr. Chris Free?

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Ever heard of him and Operator Syndrome?

• 5:16Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, I've heard about this guy from like every single one of my fucking friends. And I have never met the guy. But I've heard amazing things about him.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  He really nailed it.

• 5:26Shawn Ryan?

  He wrote a book, right? Operator Syndrome? Yeah.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, he, he really nails it right on the head with what he did. He basically went out, he was the PTSD expert at the VA.

• 5:36Shawn Ryan?

  They kicked him out, right?

• 5:38Speaker 02

  I, I don't think he left, uh, you know, I think he just was frustrated. I don't know exactly, but, um, he ended up-

• 5:44Shawn Ryan?

  Probably misspoke on that, so.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  I'm not cer- I'm not certain. He might have or might have left just because he was so frustrated.

• 5:51Shawn Ryan?

  At least some staunch disagreements-

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm sure.

• 5:53Shawn Ryan?

  Happening between him and the VA.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, they want to put everything in that PTS box because that means pharmaceuticals, they can throw all the, all the money makers at it that just keep you sick and unhealthy. And, I mean, that's the way that whole conventional system is designed is to-

• 6:07Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, why do you think it's like that?

• 6:09Speaker 02

  Greed, greed.

• 6:11Shawn Ryan?

  Do they get paid? I, I never understood. You can't, you can't go to another pharmacy and get any of the prescriptions. I mean, I haven't been, I haven't been to the VA in over, probably close to 10 years now.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, the, um, the way I understand it is, basically, I talked to an admiral-level flight surgeon who's been at those meetings at the top of the VA. And he said, no matter how good the people are at the VA, because there's a lot of really good humans there that want to do good and want to serve the veterans. But he said, no matter how good the people are in the VA, at the end of the day, the pharmaceutical industry gets to dictate the policies that are applied. And all of their policies are designed to put the veterans on medications and keep them there until they are there in their own lives or, or just die miserably and, and feeding that machine the whole time. And it just comes down to greed. It's just, the business model of the medical system is built around kind of keeping you stuck,

• 7:08Speaker 02

  maybe alleviating some of the symptoms, but not actually curing the underlying issue.

• 7:13Shawn Ryan?

  Only the best for our veterans, right?

• 7:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:16Shawn Ryan?

  Only the best for our veterans.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  It's sad. It's the veterans, it's everybody. I mean, it's the whole conventional medical system is, is feeding off of the people that are sick. And you go to help, get help, you trust the people with the white lab coats, with the doctorate degrees that are supposed to know better. And I don't think most of them are malicious. I think they're just indoctrinated into a system that is, um, profit-driven and, and controlled by the pharmaceutical industry, from their medical school curriculums to their medical journals that they're reading are all influenced by the pharmaceutical industry. And the whole system is just corrupted by that greed.

• 7:52Shawn Ryan?

  Man, well, I know we're gonna dive into that all later.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:57Shawn Ryan?

  But, which will be an enraging segment. But, um, everybody gets a gift, too, so.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. So my buddy heard I was coming on, and he's like, dude, you gotta get me some of those gummy bears. I'm like, man, I will definitely share some gummy bears with you.

• 8:11Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, we'll load you up.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Sweet.

• 8:13Shawn Ryan?

  We'll load you up. They're made in Michigan. You're from Michigan, right?

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:17Shawn Ryan?

  They're made in Michigan.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Oh, cool.

• 8:18Shawn Ryan?

  And they're legal in all 50 states.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Sweet.

• 8:22Shawn Ryan?

  No funny business.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  My kids are gonna try to get them from me, too.

• 8:25Shawn Ryan?

  All right on, like I said, we'll load you up. But, uh, so I want to do-

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Actually, I got you a gift.

• 8:31Shawn Ryan?

  Oh.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  If you wanna.

• 8:32Shawn Ryan?

  I love gifts.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  All right. I got you a few.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  All right. Well, one, I gotta give you this first. This is a copy of my book. I've signed that one for you.

• 8:46Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  I hope you enjoy it. It's, it's a wild story, and I'm sure we'll get into a lot of it today.

• 8:50Shawn Ryan?

  We will, we will.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  And then my friend Bryce Hanson, who helped me design that cover, actually heard I was coming on the show, and he's like, I got a gift that you gotta give him, so.

• 9:00Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, tell me, is this a painting?

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Uh, he, he digitally did that. And then the, the publishing company helped kind of, uh, do the background on it. But he took a digital photo of me and my gear, and then he's able to do some cool magic to, to make it look frickin' rad.

• 9:17Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, you need to get this framed. That's fucking-

• 9:20Speaker 02

  I did, he sent me the, it was originally a painting that he did.

• 9:23Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, Bryce was a Green Beret. And now he does all sorts of really kick-ass art. But he made you these.

• 9:36Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit, that's awesome.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Heck yeah. Yeah, I thought those would look really good in here.

• 9:45Shawn Ryan?

  That is sick dude, thank you.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  And then one more small thing.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  I don't know if you remember Bill Filter and the guys at the Wisdom Dojo, or it used to be the Amp Dojo.

• 9:58Shawn Ryan?

  The meditation guys?

• 10:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, they wanted me to give you this. So Wisdom Dojo shirt and a Wisdom Dojo challenge coin.

• 10:09Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, thank you.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  I talked to Bill Filter.

• 10:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Who, uh, who said that he did some training with you.

• 10:15Shawn Ryan?

  He was my guy.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  And your dad.

• 10:17Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, he did.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  He said when he was working with you, you're still doing all this on your own.

• 10:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  No, it's pretty incredible what this has grown into.

• 10:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it all kind of changed after that I began experience, man.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Heck yeah.

• 10:29Shawn Ryan?

  So, literally like right after, but well, that's cool. Tell Bill I said what's up.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  I will.

• 10:35Shawn Ryan?

  What's up, Bill? But, um, let's get into your story.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  Alright.

• 10:40Shawn Ryan?

  Where'd you grow up?

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Um, I was born in Oklahoma, although I don't remember a whole lot from it. Uh, my mom was doing her medical residency there through the National Health Service. She'd earned a scholarship to pay for her med school. Um, and then when she finished her residency there, we moved to Colorado, to a little town called Alamosa down in the San Luis Valley.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Some of my earliest memories are skiing at Wolf Creek, being in powder that was over my head. Just always had a love for the outdoors. My dad was a big outdoorsman. He would take me out on his backpack. And he'd be out backcountry skiing with me out just in like some of the most beautiful blue sky days that you can imagine.

• 11:20Shawn Ryan?

  That's awesome.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  And then when I was about seven, we moved to Northern Michigan. And I grew up in a town called Traverse City. Beautiful little town right on Lake Michigan up there. Uh, and I was just a kid that spent most of my time outside barefoot, climbing trees, grabbing salmon out of the stream, hunting, just doing stuff little kids are supposed to be doing.

• 11:41Shawn Ryan?

  Nice. You don't hear that much anymore.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, man, we're getting too far away from where we're supposed to be.

• 11:48Shawn Ryan?

  I know.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  And I was the kid who didn't really belong in a classroom, you know, sitting under a fluorescent lighting, filling out Scantron bubbles was pretty soul draining and I was pretty disheartened by it and became a pretty angry young kid. I was getting a lot of fights. I was, I was always a small kid, so I'd get picked on. And my dad was a wrestler and was into judo and so he started teaching me how to fight and defend myself and.

• 12:13Shawn Ryan?

  What age?

• 12:14Speaker 02

  Um, I was probably like eight, seven or eight years old. He started teaching me to fight and, um,

• 12:21Speaker 02

  the next time the bullies came at me, man, I, I had something different for them than cowering down and just letting them do what they wanted and.

• 12:27Shawn Ryan?

  What was the first lesson?

• 12:29Speaker 02

  The first lesson for the bullies?

• 12:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Dude.

• 12:32Shawn Ryan?

  From your dad?

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Oh, well, the first lesson was the things I'm about to teach you are to defend yourself and defend others weaker than you. You never use this as an aggressor, as an aggressor. You use this to defend what's right and stand up for yourself. And, you know, he would wrestle around with me and he'd push me around and he would never let me win. And that just always kind of kept me pushing and, and I was really grateful for that.

• 12:56Shawn Ryan?

  He would never let you win?

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Never, man.

• 12:58Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, dude.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  He didn't take it easy on me, which I didn't always appreciate, but.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was, he's a good man. He, uh, he actually auditioned for one of the earliest, uh, Survivor shows that they were gonna do back when he thought it was actually about being a survivor.

• 13:13Shawn Ryan?

  No shit?

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Uh, for fun, he's the kind of guy that like, he'll carve his own bows and then he'll go out into the cold in the winter, make a snow cave, sleep out in the woods and then deer hunt from his snow cave in the morning.

• 13:24Shawn Ryan?

  No way.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's like.

• 13:26Shawn Ryan?

  What?

• 13:26Speaker 02

  He's from a different time.

• 13:27Shawn Ryan?

  I've never even heard of that.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  He doesn't really belong in this society and I mean as a, as a compliment to him.

• 13:32Shawn Ryan?

  What did he do?

• 13:34Speaker 02

  He, um, originally he was a health inspector when we were in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And then when we moved to Alamosa, it was so rural, he couldn't really get a job. So he kind of became, uh, dad, mom and taking care of us. Uh, later, when we moved back to Traverse City, which was where both my parents were from, he, um, he became a respiratory therapist. He was a teacher for a while. He, he taught biology and then became a respiratory therapist.

• 14:00Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. Are you a big hunter?

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, man. Deer hunting up there is a big part of how, uh, how we feed ourselves. We've got a little bit of farmland up there. We got chickens. My wife's got bees, so we do our own honey. Got some fruit trees and garden, a greenhouse.

• 14:17Shawn Ryan?

  Are you a prepper?

• 14:19Speaker 02

  You know, not so much, man. I'm not so much prepping. We're just kind of like building our own thing on the outskirts of society is what's happening right now is just kind of eating itself alive.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  But definitely making ourselves so we can be self-sufficient. Um, but not so much like we're not digging a bunker. Maybe we should, but.

• 14:42Shawn Ryan?

  It can hurt.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably not, man. When you see all the billionaires doing it.

• 14:46Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, yeah, right. Pretty wild how many of them are building fucking bunkers right now.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's.

• 14:54Shawn Ryan?

  I wonder what they're so scared of.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  I don't know. Probably us.

• 14:59Shawn Ryan?

  I bet, I'll bet they are. But yeah, well, I mean, self-sufficiency is pretty, uh, I mean, that, that's what prepping is all about, right?

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I guess, yeah, I'm a prepper. If that's the case.

• 15:12Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 15:16Shawn Ryan?

  In case you haven't noticed, I take preparedness seriously and water is one of the first things I look at. Not just emergency water, but the water my family is drinking every single day. A federal study found forever chemicals in nearly half the tap water in America. Because of that, I've tried a lot of filtration systems over the years. Most of them didn't make the cut. Either they were too complicated, they took up too much space, or I still didn't feel confident about what they were actually removing. That's when I found Rora. Rora's countertop system is third-party tested to reduce the contaminants people should actually be worried about,

• 15:57Shawn Ryan?

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• 16:34Shawn Ryan?

  And if you want worry-free drinking water for the people living under your roof, go to rorra.com/srs for an exclusive discount. That's R-O-R-R-A dot com slash S-R-S and tap into clean water today.

• 16:53Shawn Ryan?

  As you guys know, once upon a time I was a Navy SEAL and then I contracted for CIA. We were hunting ISIS, Taliban terrorist organizations, China was there, Russia was there, the Iranians were there, and everybody's kind of collecting on each other. One thing I learned is how important encryption and protecting your data is. That experience is just always made me extremely paranoid about what's being sucked out of my phone, what information are people getting? I wanted something that could protect everybody. And so we turned it into an application. We call it the Glacier App.

• 17:30Shawn Ryan?

  We have secure DNS. Now what's secure DNS? Well, very simply put, secure DNS keeps your phone from being exploited while you're browsing the internet. Just a couple of buttons, your phone's protected, you got yourself a burner number or more. You hit connect, done. You're protected. This is like the real James Bond shit. MI6 CIA level stuff. Made in the US. TheGlacierApp.com or just go on the App Store and look up the Glacier App. Take your privacy back. Download Glacier today.

• 18:08Shawn Ryan?

  Why were you picked on so much?

• 18:11Speaker 02

  I was just kind of a small nerdy kid.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  I think it was just mainly just being kind of small and scrawny and easy to push around until.

• 18:20Shawn Ryan?

  How long were you bullied before you stood up for yourself?

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Not really that long. I was, I was picked on for about one year at school and then uh, figured out a different way to handle bullies.

• 18:31Shawn Ryan?

  How'd you handle it?

• 18:33Speaker 02

  Usually punching them in the dick.

• 18:35Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Pretty good.

• 18:36Shawn Ryan?

  That'll work.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Didn't matter how much bigger they were. You punch somebody in the dick and uh, evens the playing field pretty quickly. Um, but uh, yeah, I was just kind of like an angry kid. Didn't want to be stuck in school. Moved around to a variety of different schools growing up from the public school. My parents put me in a charter school. Uh, that didn't really work out. Moved me to uh, like a farm school where all day, every day we were like moving chicken coops out in the field. We were uh, feeding the animals. We did some academics, but it was all outside or in a greenhouse. We built a yurt. We would like submerge ourselves in a, a culture and then we would like eat their food. We would build their buildings. We would, it was way better than being stuck in a classroom.

• 19:19Shawn Ryan?

  That's awesome.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  And uh, I really enjoyed that. Um, my dad got a job at a private school as the science teacher. And so he, we got free tuition. And so I went to this snooty private school for a year and got expelled from that because I didn't fit in there at all. I was getting in fights again and doing dumb shit. Um, found myself back at public school, kind of not liking it, getting in trouble, hanging out with the wrong people. Um, and then when I was 16, actually, um, around a campfire with some buddies, we put some of these little crunchy mushrooms in our mouth and I had this experience that night that connected me to something and I was uh, dealing with depression and anger that was pretty heavy and.

• 20:02Shawn Ryan?

  Why? Why were you, why were you so angry and so depressed?

• 20:06Speaker 02

  No.

• 20:07Shawn Ryan?

  Other than the bullying, it sounds like a pretty damn good childhood.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And, and, and a lot of it was and, and actually a lot of this I, I discovered through eboga later, um, through going back into repressed childhood memories. But for most of my life, I didn't understand where that anger really had come from. But what I discovered through eboga, which I don't know if you want to get into this later, but I can definitely get into it now with uh, what I experienced in one of those journeys was uh, I was back in my mother's womb. And I could, I could see through her stomach. I could see the veins of her skin. I could see this pink color. Um, and I remember being in there and just feeling her anxiety. Because she's a mother pretty far along in her pregnancy and she's running off Diet Coke,

• 20:52Speaker 02

  working ridiculous hours, stressed out, meanwhile trying to be a mother and actually before I was born, my mom had uh, um, a stillborn baby, my older sister Kate. And it kind of just like broke her soul to hold her own little baby. Um, that was dead on arrival and she was sort of not emotionally available to connect with me. And I remember when I was born being held, but very quickly she was back to work, back to the residency, not seeing my mom. Um, my dad was orphaned as a kid and he was also emotionally unavailable largely. I mean, they both cared a lot, but I think that they were really broken at their hearts from what they had been through.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  And so, you know, there's all these really wild childhood trauma stories, you know, I wasn't sexually abused. I wasn't beaten, nothing like that, but um, I don't know if you've ever heard of Gabor Maté? He's um,

• 21:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yes.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  Sort of like a trauma.

• 21:49Shawn Ryan?

  He's a Canadian doctor, right?

• 21:51Speaker 02

  I'm not sure what his.

• 21:53Shawn Ryan?

  I know who he is. He's big in the psychedelic community.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  He maybe, his, his big thing is trauma. He's like a trauma expert. And one thing he talks about is, is there's, there's the trauma on children, which is like the abuse, the physical abuse, the violence, the sexual abuse. But there's also an abuse of um, when you don't fulfill the needs of the child. And the need that I didn't get as that little boy and remembering it and vividly experiencing it again through eboga was, um, I just wasn't, I wasn't fully being loved as a child. And so I became, I remember I was in my crib crying and screaming for my parents to come get me as an infant and nobody came and just kind of feeling that disconnect. And, and it's not that my parents didn't care. They, they were great parents. They really did care. But there was emotional and physical

• 22:41Speaker 02

  detachment that I experienced as a really young kid that actually created an incredible amount of self-reliance. But also an anger that came from that. Like I wasn't good enough to be loved.

• 22:53Shawn Ryan?

  You, you remember this or this?

• 22:55Speaker 02

  Vividly. Yeah, I vividly remembered it through eboga. I worked with a trained psychotherapist. Uh, and he brought me back into all these repressed childhood memories. And uh, through that, I, I mean, I felt like the pain of my mom was experiencing of being divided and pulled away from her kid, the pain from her miscarriage. Um, and just the, the, you know, there's, there is this big push back then, which was women in the workforce and you can go and be a professional. And my mom absolutely did that. She, she broke through a lot of barriers to get to go and be a physician as a woman. Um, but it took a toll on her and it took a toll on her children because you know,

• 23:33Speaker 02

  that's, that was the trade-off. You know, she got to become a professional and do what she wanted, but at the same time, it was really hard on her to be separated from her children and it was really hard on the kids. Um,

• 23:44Shawn Ryan?

  How many siblings do you have?

• 23:46Speaker 02

  I have a, a younger sister. She's three years younger than me.

• 23:49Shawn Ryan?

  Are you guys tied?

• 23:50Speaker 02

  She lives out in Oregon. She's um, she works for the park service out there. She's like Ranger Rick, basically. She wears a Smokey Bear hat and patrols the forest and does some good stuff out there. Um, but yeah, we, we, we get, we get together on occasion. She usually comes back in the summers and we all go camping and hang out. She's got an awesome little girl. Um,

• 24:10Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  But overall I had, I had a great childhood, honestly. Um, but I definitely had this thing inside me that was just burning, this like feeling of angst that I wasn't enough. And uh, that drove me and it made me incredibly resilient, uh, which came in handy later in life. And uh, and I'm honestly grateful for that. Like it was like it was preparing me for something that was to come.

• 24:33Shawn Ryan?

  But something came.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. Big time, big time.

• 24:38Shawn Ryan?

  How did the military pop up on your radar?

• 24:40Speaker 02

  So, when I graduated high school, I wasn't totally certain what I wanted to do, but I, I got to go on a little discovery flight. We have a, there was a little uh, community college that had a flight program where I grew up in Traverse City, uh, called Northwestern Michigan College. And when I was a kid, my parents enrolled me in a flight program that they did. And you got to do like a ground school session and then you got to go up in a little Cessna. And I remembered flying this little Cessna 152, that's basically a flying lawnmower. And just absolutely loving it, man. It felt like a rocket ship. And that kind of stuck with me. And so when I graduated, I decided to go to the community college and start doing flight lessons. Uh, I enrolled in the program, started flying.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  And by the time I was a junior in college, I was a certified flight instructor, building hours.

• 25:27Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  I finished my degree. I got my bachelor's degree while I was working at the college and then uh, I actually got hired by one of my students who, fascinating dude named Larry Poneman. He was a, he was a forensic accountant in the Navy uh, back in the Vietnam era. He's like one of these ultra intelligent dudes with a photographic memory. And after the, the special forces or whoever would capture a, an underground bunker of the Vietcong, they would bring him in and he could go through their accounting records. He can learn a new language in like a few days. And then he would read through their accounting records and he could memorize it all. And then he'd go back and debrief

• 26:10Speaker 02

  the CIA or whoever of like, here's where they're getting their money. Here's where they're getting this. And he was able to basically point them where they needed to go to shut these guys down. And when he got out, he uh, started a think tank and a privacy research and consulting firm. But he came across me because he wanted to learn how to fly himself to all his business meetings. And uh, so I started flying with him. And he's like, hey man, you want to come work for my company? He ended up buying a brand new aircraft and ended up bringing me on as his uh, company pilot. And so I got to spend the next year just flying all over the country. Going to really big tech companies. We were at uh, Microsoft and Yahoo and uh, a bunch of others. And, and I kind of got to see the inner workings of the corporate world. I was getting paid really well.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  I was living a really nice lifestyle, having fancy dinners. People were dropping 500 bucks on a bottle of wine like it was nothing.

• 27:02Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of plane were you flying?

• 27:03Speaker 02

  I was flying a Mooney Acclaim, which is sort of like a little general aviation Ferrari.

• 27:08Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  Nice, like G1000 avionics, integrated autopilot, Bose headsets, super nice leather seats.

• 27:16Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  It was really cool job at such a young age.

• 27:19Shawn Ryan?

  Damn dude. That is pretty cool.

• 27:22Speaker 02

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

• 28:04Speaker 02

  And it was just fucking wild shit that these guys were doing. And so I looked into the coast guard, but it was like a six month wait to get into that board. And so while I was waiting, I put together a package and submitted it to the Navy and got picked up immediately. And so uh, I spent that last summer uh, going to a CrossFit gym, getting in really good shape. Had a great summer with my family and then that fall went off to the Navy and uh, showed up over-prepared.

• 28:31Shawn Ryan?

  How old were you?

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Uh, I was in my early twenties. It was 2009. Um, so I think I was like 23 or so.

• 28:39Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, 24.

• 28:41Shawn Ryan?

  Did you know what you wanted to fly? Did you care?

• 28:44Speaker 02

  You know, originally I thought I was going to fly helicopters after reading that Last Run book, but I always, growing up, the Blue Angels would come up to Traverse City and they'd fly uh, every so often. And I remember seeing those jets and be like, man, that's so cool. But I also had this disconnect. I was like, there's no way I could ever do that. For whatever reason, I just never, I always had this imposter syndrome. Like there's no way. I'm not that cool. But as I started going through the training, like really felt at home in that environment. People are getting yelled at and beaten and exhausted. And I was just like, fuck yeah.

• 29:17Shawn Ryan?

  You liked.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  Bring it on.

• 29:18Shawn Ryan?

  From, from college to OCA, you went straight to OCS? Or is it, is it OCA?

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, officer candidate school. So yeah, it's um, basically a three-month program. Uh, and you'd come out of it a butter bar. So, you know, the rank that shows everybody that you know absolutely fucking nothing.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Which I didn't. I didn't know shit about the military, but then started flight training after that, went down to Pensacola, Florida and started doing all the ground school, did some water survival training and actually had our, we normally go out into the ocean to do our ocean survival training when we're down in Pensacola, but the, there was the Horizon oil spill right at that time. So we couldn't go out in the ocean and do our survival training. We still did a bunch of stuff in the pool, but there was probably some stuff that we did in that ocean evolution that would have been helpful later.

• 30:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I was just thinking that. I've been, damn dude, you didn't, you didn't do that?

• 30:13Speaker 02

  No, we, I mean, there was a fair amount in the pool, but I don't think anything could have substituted for being out in the ocean.

• 30:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  Um, but did well through API, went to what's primary flight training, which was in Corpus Christi, Texas and flew a, a pretty sporty little turbine prop aircraft called the T-34 Charlie Turbo Mentor. They've since switched over to the T-6 Texan, which is even more badass.

• 30:38Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  But the prior flight experience definitely helped through that primary flight training. Like I already knew how to fly an airplane. I already knew how to talk on the radio. But the challenge was learning to do it the Navy way.

• 30:49Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, it's, in some ways it was probably more challenging because I had to forget my old ways and there's just a ton of memorization and, and all that, but did well through, well enough through that training that I got to select the Tailhook Pipeline coming out of that. And if you're in the top 50% of your class, you can select Tailhook. And then the Navy says yes or no, depending on whatever they need you for anyways, but...

• 31:11Shawn Ryan?

  What is a Tailhook?

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Um, it's any carrier-based aircraft.

• 31:14Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  So at the time, it would have been the Prowlers, the F-18 Hornets, the F-18 Super Hornets, um, and then the E2C2. So the Hawkeye with the big dish on top, prop plane, and then the C2, which is the onboard delivery aircraft. So all of those were kind of on the table at that point. The other option out of primary flight training is you can go fly the P3s at that time, which are now all just P8s, which is a seven, basically a 737. Um, they also had helicopter pipeline and a few people would go to the E9, which is like a surveillance communications aircraft. But I was kind of like, man, I'm going to take my shot and see if I can go fly fighter jets, which was the Tailhook Pipeline. And

• 31:57Speaker 02

  then I headed down to Kingsville, Texas, um, and started flying the T-45 Charlie Goshawk, which is like a small, single-engine jet, but super high-performance, fully aerobatic, and did intermediate, intermediate flight training and did really well at that. And so at the end of that intermediate training, uh, you go to a board and you have a bunch of the different instructors come in, you do a bunch of interviews and one, you have to have good grades and you have to be good in the aircraft, but more importantly, they're interviewing you to see if you have the personality and you're going to fit in like a fighter squadron.

• 32:32Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  Um, and, and I saw guys who were better pilots and smarter, but they would go into those interviews and they just weren't like a team player or whatever. And, and so...

• 32:43Shawn Ryan?

  What are they looking for in a fighter pilot?

• 32:45Speaker 02

  Well, one, I think they want people who know that this is going to be your life, that it's going to be all-consuming and every moment, every waking moment, you're basically going to be committed to that. Um, they want somebody who can function in a team environment. Um, and, uh, yeah, just kind of have that, that attitude of just being a good human being too, I think. Someone who's not an egomaniac and can be humble and, um, they do a really good job with it, really.

• 33:15Shawn Ryan?

  What are some of the questions they were asking you?

• 33:17Speaker 02

  Do you remember? I, I mean, one of the big ones was like, why do you want to be, why do you want to fly F-18s? And, um...

• 33:25Shawn Ryan?

  What'd you say?

• 33:27Speaker 02

  I mean, I think I just said something like, you know, I think it's an incredible opportunity. I want to be at the tip of the spear. I want to be doing the most difficult thing that the Navy has to offer for a pilot. And that's where I see myself. I want the challenge. I want the hardships and I want to be the best pilot I possibly can be. Um...

• 33:48Shawn Ryan?

  How do you, I'm just curious, how do you display that you're a team player flying a jet?

• 33:58Speaker 02

  I mean, it's really personality-based and I think the instructors get a good feel for that as you go through flight training. Are you the guy who's helping other guys in your class, like learn? Or are you the guy that's really selfish and hoarding the information and trying to do it all on your own? There are definitely people who are, you know, would go into those interviews and they go, well, why did, why do you want to be a fighter pilot? And they say, well, I'm better than everybody in my class. This guy does this, this guy sucks at this. And like, when someone comes in like that, they're like, all right, you're not going into the fighter community. Um, and there was a dude that did that when I was there.

• 34:36Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  Uh, and I think he was pretty heartbroken because he was, he was an excellent pilot, super smart, but, um, they want somebody who can play well with others, you know?

• 34:45Shawn Ryan?

  Makes sense. Why is that so important?

• 34:47Speaker 02

  Because you operate as a team. You know, you're, you're flying with other aircraft, sections, divisions, large force exercises, and it's a team sport. You know, you're flying your jet, but you're, you're, you're doing all these advanced tactics with a very large group of other people. And, and you gotta be able to function in a, in a, sort of like a sports team atmosphere that's in the squadron, in a fighter squadron, where you're high pressure, high stress, um, and you gotta work together with everybody to survive in that environment. In your day-to-day ground jobs and, and in the aircraft for what you're doing. Cause it is, it's like a very complex game of football or something, once you're up there. The flying is just like, that's just like learning to run and jump and be

• 35:28Speaker 02

  fast if you're going, but then the next jump is like going into the NFL and learning the sport and learning the tactics, operating at that high speed and working as a team, as a cohesive unit when chaos breaks out, you know?

• 35:41Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  So it's definitely a team sport.

• 35:44Shawn Ryan?

  Do you remember your first time in a jet?

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I, I remember vividly showing up. Once I had made it through the intermediate and advanced training and earning my wings at Kingsville, I selected the F-18. And I remember showing up in Virginia Beach at VFA 106 at Oceana and walking into the hangar and seeing all of those fricking Hornets and Super Hornets. And it was just like, holy shit, man. I can't believe I get to go do this. And the first flight was just like unreal, like climbing into that thing and starting it up. And you do a lot in the simulator, so you kind of know the basics, but it's nowhere near the real thing. Cause once you get in, you can feel the rumble of this fucking tank around you. And they're so much larger

• 36:28Speaker 02

  than they look when you just see them flying up in the sky. They're these massive contraptions. And I remember like initially starting to taxi this thing and you're, you're pushing up the throttles just a little bit. You got like 44,000 pounds of thrust behind you and you can feel it just, it feels like a tank that you're, you're taxiing in, especially after flying all those smaller aircraft. But I remember...

• 36:48Shawn Ryan?

  Single seat?

• 36:49Speaker 02

  Um, I eventually did fly the single seat, but your first few flights in the Super Hornet are in a two-seat with the, the instructor's got a stick in the back. But you only do like maybe three or four flights in that aircraft before you, you're flying it on your own.

• 37:03Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 37:04Speaker 02

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

• 37:44Speaker 02

  the coolest sensation, which was very quickly deterred because I realized that my mission card hadn't loaded properly and I didn't have any of my waypoints for where I was going. So as I take off, rotate, put the gear up and I'm just like, whoa. The instructor in the back's like, uh, it's called science squeezer, who actually later ended up being in my squadron. He's like, hey man, where are we going? Which is not the question you want to hear the instructor say on your first flight. And I looked down on the display and realized like, none of my working area, none of my waypoints were in there. He's like, all right, just take this heading. I got you. And he's in the back punching in GPS coordinates and was able to salvage the rest of that flight. So I didn't fail my first flight, but it was like a quick kick in the nuts.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  Like, dude, you got some work to do. You're in the big boy teams here.

• 38:34Shawn Ryan?

  Damn, that's fucking cool, dude.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, it was, it was unreal.

• 38:39Shawn Ryan?

  Where do we go from here?

• 38:41Speaker 02

  You know, um, from here, uh, I spent the next year training in the F-18 reg, which was the most challenging thing I've ever done in my life as far as professional career development, man. It's a very little tolerance for mistake. The standards are set extremely high.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  It was really, really friggin hard, man. You're just drinking from a fire hose, trying to learn the tactics as quickly as you can. And you're moving through these phases of from just the transition stays where you're learning how to fly the aircraft itself, navigate it, take it from point A to point B, operate with emergency procedures. And then very quickly you're off on a strike detachment, learning how to do close air support, bombing missions. And then very quickly you're into the air to air phase, learning how to dogfight the aircraft, learning air to air combat, which is probably the most complex thing we do.

• 39:35Shawn Ryan?

  I bet it is.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  With all of that. And then to kind of wrap up everything, after you've gone through all of this, over the course of the year, you go and you have to land this thing on the aircraft carrier day and night, which is, um, the highest point of failure for people, once they make it to that phase.

• 39:51Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  I actually disqualified at the boat, my first attempt at night. Landing a fighter jet on the back of a moving aircraft carrier in shitty weather is the hardest thing I've ever done as far as like a skill.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  And I ended up DQ and I, I just, I was coming in, everything looked great. And then within the last few seconds, the aircraft, I think I was just a little bit nervous to the point where I would just add just a nudge too much power. And this is just like a millimeter of movement too much in the wrong direction. And I would miss the wires and do what's called a bolter where I'd bounce off the deck. My hook would miss the wires and then I was back up in the pattern and had it fly back around. And I did that a few times around. And before I knew it, I was at bingo fuel, which meant I had to divert back to Oceana. Kind of the walk of shame. But luckily got another chance after that. They, they kind of, they do an assessment and see how you've been doing throughout the, the syllabus and, and if you got the attitude to go back and try again.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  And was very fortunate to get that opportunity and, uh, passed my, my second attempt at the boat.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  But the daytime carrier stuff, I, I always enjoyed and, and had fun with that. But the nighttime stuff is just stupid scary. You can go from being in a really good position where everything looks nice and suitcase to within a few seconds, you're, you can be eating it on the back of the ship, uh, and end your life really quickly. And of course they make you watch all those videos right before you go and do it. These guys eating it. But, uh, graduated through VFA 106 and, uh, selected VFA 143, the puking dogs out of Virginia Beach and headed my first real fleet squadron. So.

• 41:28Shawn Ryan?

  How damn chill.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  Oh man, it was awesome. It was like what I'd been working for, for so long. You know, you show up at the, the training reg for the F-18 at Oceana and you got your wings on your chest already and you're like, all right, I kind of know what I'm doing. And you very quickly realize that you don't know shit, that you're still a baby. And then you go through all that training. It's super intense. Like a lot of people don't make it through that. And then you get to your fleet squadron, like, all right, I gotta kind of have a little bit of an idea what I'm doing now. And you show up day one and you're like, nope, I'm still a baby and I don't know anything. So I took the small mouth, big ears approach, just shut the fuck up and listened and learned as much as I could, busted my ass, studied really hard. And over the course of the next eight months or so, I was just, just learning to survive

• 42:14Speaker 02

  in that environment, but started to fit in, started to, people noticed that I was a hard working dude and I was there and, and part of the team and was doing pretty well for my, for my experience level, I was doing really well.

• 42:27Shawn Ryan?

  What do your parents think of this?

• 42:29Speaker 02

  You know, um, my parents were actually pretty anti-military.

• 42:34Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 42:34Speaker 02

  They're kind of like, uh, peaceful hippie kind of folks. And, uh, when I first told my mom I was going to go into the military and fly, she was pretty heartbroken. She really came around though and was incredibly supportive, but I could tell it, it kind of hurt her because she was worried like, what's going to happen to my son? Is he going to get hurt?

• 42:53Speaker 02

  But they've, they became incredibly supportive. They were at my winging, uh, ceremony and, and always checking in.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  But man, it was, it was awesome to be part of that group and to be flying these fighter jets and doing the shit we got to do. Uh, and I'd been in my squadron about eight months, kind of starting to feel like this was becoming a little bit routine and kind of knew what I was doing and showed up January 15th, 2014, uh, for a flight that was going to change the rest of my life. And you don't know it at the time, you know? It's just kind of like another day at the office. I showed up to the ready room. My buddy Fisti was at the squadron duty desk, which all the pilots would rotate through, answering the radios, coordinating the flight schedule, kind of doing all the ground bullshit. And as a joke, Fisti put up on the whiteboard behind him, uh, all the working airspace that we were going to use that day off the coast of Virginia Beach in the whiskey 72,

• 43:47Speaker 02

  this massive warning area that's off the coast there. And he used the shark tracker app on his phone to put all these GPS positions of, uh, tagged sharks that researchers had tagged. And, uh, it just so happened on the day he, he was kind of laughing. He's like, hey man, today would be a terrible day to eject. The water temperature is at 37 degrees Fahrenheit at the nearby buoy. We had a really cold winter and the Chesapeake Bay was just washing down really frigid water to where we were training. Uh, the air temperature was below freezing with some wind. And he's like, and there's a 16 foot, 3,500 pound great white shark directly underneath your airspace.

• 44:22Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  May Mary Lee. And you know, you know how it is in the military, we're always joking about the dark shit.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  I go to my brief, everything's going good and smooth. And as I'm kind of walking out to go, uh, get my gear on and go fly, one of the more senior squad, uh, pilots in the squadron pulls me aside and he's like, man, you just haven't done anything dumb enough yet to earn a call sign. And on another whiteboard that was in the ready room, they had, uh, all the newer guys in the squadron. At this point, there was like five or six newer guys under me in the squadron and they all had like a laundry list of call signs. But I had just played the, the, the quiet man card so well that like, they didn't have any ammunition against me. And when you got to my name on that board, there was just like a couple throwaway options on there, just no good call signs. So as I get my gear on and go out and take off on this flight, we went out and did some, uh, air to air refueling, just to get proficiency in that.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  And then with extra fuel and airspace, my flight lead and I broke off, uh, to our own section of airspace and started doing, uh, basically my favorite thing to do in the jet and probably the epitome of what people think when they think fighter pilot, which is dog fighting. We call it BFM, basic fighter maneuvering. Just bending the jet, high G's, trying to shoot down another aircraft within the visual range. And, and while we're not actually hosing off live ammunition at each other, uh, live missiles, everything's pretty close to the real thing as far, all the, all the G's are very real.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  And it's an incredibly dynamic environment that I absolutely love.

• 45:50Shawn Ryan?

  I don't bet it is.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  It's, uh, you're, you're multitasking to the extreme. You're operating a high-performance aircraft, you're talking on multiple radios, you're operating weapon systems, defensive systems, uh, and you're under, you know, seven and a half G's oftentimes. So your body weighs like 1,600 pounds. So it's a high intensity interval training along with all that. And then having your brain function at its highest capability while doing all that. It was fucking awesome, but really challenging.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  We'd done several rounds of fighting, which, you know, you're fighting for a couple minutes. You get to where the other guys had an advantageous position, which I was always losing because I was fighting the most senior guy in my squadron and he was just whipping my ass. But that's how we learn, you know? Go in and, and get your ass kicked until you figure it out. And, uh, we got to the last fight of the day. We hit Joker fuel, which meant we had just enough fuel left for one quick set of fighting as we kind of exited the airspace. So we ended up setting up a bit lower and faster than we typically did. And flight lead called speed and angels left, speed and angels right, called fights on. And we went from this a beam position, pitched our jets in, in this kind of turning dive. And as our aircraft crossed paths, I was already about 30 degrees nose low and partially

• 47:04Speaker 02

  inverted. So I opted to continue to roll my aircraft fully inverted and pull down towards the ocean. My flight lead went up and I went down. And typically this maneuver would take about 5,000 feet of airspace vertically.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  And so that was kind of, we have a saying, live by the gouge, die by the gouge, which is learning the little shortcuts of things to think about when you have to think about stuff so quickly. But, um, I hadn't, in the heat of it all, I didn't quite realize how fast I had gotten. And I was well above the Top Gun recommended airspeed to maneuver nose low.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  But this all happens in a split second. I maneuver the aircraft in this dive, immediate pull the stick in my lap and I'm at about seven and a half G's diving down at the ocean. And I started this maneuver up at 10,500 feet. So in my quick math, I had 5,000 feet I could eat up and I would still have 500 feet above our 5,000 foot hard deck that we put there for training.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  But as I'm pulling this thing nose low, it's accelerating and it hits the transonic region, which is this basically right before you break the speed of sound. And the, the flight before me had put in a code into the, the weapon system on the aircraft that said that there were bombs on the wings that weren't actually there. And so as I'm pulling this thing as hard as I could, all of a sudden I hit what's called the G bucket, um, which is designed to prevent the aircraft from overstressing itself as you hit that transonic region where the drag is extremely, uh, forceful on the aircraft and prevent a minor over stress that it perceived. Basically overrode my control input. And I didn't realize all this in the few seconds that it took.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  All I knew is I was pointed straight at the ocean with the stick in my lap. And then all of a sudden the jet just stopped turning. I could feel the G's ease up and very quickly I heard the radar altimeter blaring, altitude, altitude. And the ocean is just rushing up at me. I've got the stick in my lap and it's not doing what I'm telling it, which we call all how to control flight. And anytime you're below 6,000 feet and the aircraft's not responding how you expect the instruction is to pull the ejection handle and eject.

• 49:11Speaker 02

  I heard altitude, altitude, pull up, pull up. The ocean was rushing up at me very quickly. I could see the white caps down below. I was so close and I just knew I wasn't getting out of that thing. And you could see the, in the HUD, in, in the displays, it's saying, pull up. And you can see an arrow and I'm just thinking, I already am pulling up. I can't pull up. I threw the throttles into idle. I put out the speed brake in this desperate attempt to slow down, but it was just too little, too late. And two seconds before I impacted the ocean, going 0.95 indicated Mach, so 95% the speed of sound at almost sea level, about 695 miles per hour, I yanked that ejection handle. And a normal ejection is incredibly violent.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  I mean, you get, as that rocket motor ignites, you get a 50G instantaneous boost that compresses your spine and then that eases to a 12 to 14G sustained boost out of the aircraft. From the time you pull the ejection handle to the time you exit the aircraft takes about 0.4 seconds.

• 50:13Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious? 24 seconds?

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, but for that to ignite and shoot you out, it's very quick. The canopy blows away and you're out. When I initiated the ejection, I was two seconds from impact. So by the time I had exited the aircraft, I had about a second and a half before I was going to impact the ocean. The jet flew right in the ocean and just vaporized into nothing. What jacked me up so bad was-

• 50:37Shawn Ryan?

  Did you see that happen?

• 50:39Speaker 02

  No, no, I don't remember briefly from the time I pulled the ejection handle till later when I was in the ocean. I think I got knocked unconscious.

• 50:45Shawn Ryan?

  I was wondering if you would-

• 50:46Speaker 02

  Just from the force of it all.

• 50:47Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  But what happened to my body while I was unconscious, that did so much damage, was impacting the sound barrier with my body, you know? We're not terribly aerodynamic at that speed. And it was like, it was an explosive force, 100 times the force of a category one hurricane, impacting my body instantaneously. For anybody's ever, you know, stuck your arm out a window going like 70 miles per hour down the highway, you felt that parasitic drag acting on you. But at 700 miles per hour, that force is exponentially stronger. And it just, I mean, it ripped my helmet off my head, traumatic brain injury from my head just smashing. I broke my C1 in my neck, my left scapula in my shoulder, bilateral humer fractures.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  This humerus broke through and cut my brachial artery internally. So I was bleeding internally here. My radius and ulna shattered on this arm and severed my nerve that controls my hand, the median nerve. The compression of my spine actually damaged the brachial plexus, which is the nerves that go to control a lot of your upper body. It was so fast that the dry suit I was wearing to protect me from that 37 degree Fahrenheit ocean water shredded apart. All the gear on my vest ripped off, my survival beacon, my radio, all my signaling equipment, not that I could have used any of it, because at this point my arms were just completely useless.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  And then the steel toe boots on my feet were flailing so violently that they became like fricking wrecking balls and smashed open both my over, my lower legs, open fractures of my tib fib, chunks of my tibia like falling out of my leg, bleeding out through my lower extremities. And this is all in like a split second, you know? And miraculously, in that time, the parachute was able to deploy and slow me enough so that I didn't die in impact with the ocean. And then I plunged into that icy-

• 52:37Shawn Ryan?

  What the fuck did you not die ejecting at 695 fucking miles an hour?

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Dude, I don't know, man. It was, I'm here for a reason, you know? I, I prepared a lot, you know? I was all through flight school and even before I went in the Navy, I was doing a lot of weight training. At that point I had about 20 more pounds on me. I was really strong, really short and compact, which I think was a benefit. But it fucked me up really good.

• 53:05Shawn Ryan?

  Sorry to cut you off there, keep going.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  No, no. I plummeted into that icy cold water and just pins and needles of feeling that freezing cold water on your body, no ability to swim. And then that parachute that had just saved my life sunk underneath that churning ocean swell and started to drag me under. And we have a system on our, on our vest that's supposed to disconnect you on your harness. It's called the Sea Wors. They're the saltwater activated explosive devices. Because upper body injuries are so common in high speed ejections, you oftentimes can't reach up and manually disconnect the coke fittings to get free from your parachute. But unfortunately, we've got like Vietnam era survival equipment and one of the Sea Wors fired but didn't disconnect.

• 53:52Speaker 02

  And then the other Sea Wors didn't even fire at all. They're supposed to, when they go into saltwater, set off this charge. So I remained connected to that parachute with no ability to disconnect with my arms being destroyed. And so very quickly was just getting pulled underwater. And I know you know what it feels like, but for anybody who's ever been held underwater when you need a breath of air, that feeling's pretty awful. And it was just teabagging me over and over again.

• 54:15Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit. I bet there's not, how many thousands of gallons of water? I mean, is it equivalent to a parachute?

• 54:23Speaker 02

  Dude, it was like a big bag of cinder blocks, you know, just yanking me under. Fortunately, the, the LPU, the life preserver unit automatically inflated around my neck, which gave me enough buoyancy to occasionally get to the surface where I would scream for help, take a big breath of air, cough up some water, and then it was immediately back down. Fortunately, my flight lead thought extremely quickly, he spotted my parachute opening and he dropped a GPS mark on my location, but now I'm in the ocean, which is moving very quickly. In the, in the fumes of fuel that he had remaining in his tank at this point, he spotted a fishing vessel about a mile away and he dialed up maritime guard and tried to get their attention on that, but they weren't responding.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  So he got down really low and really fast and he thumped over their bow. And so these guys are out there, commercial fishing, like, holy shit, what's going on? That got him to switch over to the radio frequency and he was able to direct him over to that GPS mark that he had dropped. And fortunately, those guys got there and provided a visual reference of my approximate location, because my flight lead had a bingo profile back to Oceania, he had so little fuel.

• 55:31Speaker 02

  And had he not done that in that moment, I would have been a little tiny dark head bobbing around out in the open Atlantic Ocean.

• 55:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it's like-

• 55:38Speaker 02

  Largely underwater and no one would ever find-

• 55:40Shawn Ryan?

  Raining of rice in the middle of a huge field.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. So really, you know, he saved my life in that moment. And then this fishing vessel got over there, they ended up throwing a rope out to me, but because my arms were so jacked up, I couldn't grab it and it ended up just getting tangled in the paracord. And so these guys kind of backed off, but were trying to keep an eye on me as the, as the rest of the rescue mission kind of went down, which there was a hazard report, a hazrep for all the rescue, because it was such a clown show, people on different frequencies. There was a near midair with a couple helicopters. They had a coast guard vessel, I believe, that showed up nearby. The first helicopter that showed up on scene was from HS11. They had actually just been launched from an aircraft carrier that was out nearby where we were operating.

• 56:28Speaker 02

  And they arrived on scene and there was a miscommunication that I was already on the fishing vessel. So they deployed their rescue swimmer. He swam over and got on that fishing vessel. Meanwhile, I had like drifted away from that position. And fortunately, there was another helicopter that was actually going down. They were about to do some weapons training with some SEAL Team guys down at, one of the ranges down in North Carolina. And they got this call that there had been a no shit ejection. They needed to turn this into a search and rescue mission. And one of the crew members, Joey, he's eaten this meatball sub for his lunch, thinking he's just going on like a chill, a chill training flight. And all of a sudden they get this call. He had to kind of throw his sandwich back in the remnants of the bag and put it kind of in the edge of the, you know, the cabin of the helicopter.

• 57:13Speaker 02

  And so these guys finally get over to where I'm at. And I think it was one of the pilots actually spotted me first. And they end up getting right over, hovering down. And then the rescue swimmer Cheech, who was about to jump in, dude in his twenties. It just so happened the week before this rescue mission, there was a Navy H53 Sea Dragon helicopter that had gone down, do it in electrical fire and ditched in a very nearby area to where I was that day. And while everybody on that crew survived the initial crash, they had to spend so long getting everybody onto a backboard, because the Navy policy at that time was, if you're in any sort of aircraft mishap into the water, you have to be put onto a backboard before being lifted into the helicopter.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  And to do that in the churning waves takes a lot of time. And it took so long for them to get the crew evacuated, several members of that crew perished from hypothermia before they could be rescued. And so Cheech was coming off just like the worst week in his career after having these people perished when he was trying to save them. Didn't get any time off, didn't get any counseling. He's already back, ready to jump in the water again. And he jumps in with that in the back of his head. And at this point, I'd been in the water for almost two hours, severely hypothermic. That dry suit had just filled up with the icy cold ocean water and I was severely hypothermic and he knew that in the back of his head. So when he got down, we had that, we got this titanium D-ring on the harness of our

• 58:41Speaker 02

  parachute harness. He clipped into that and he said the force of the parachute was so strong that it just pulled both of us under. And him being a super fit rescue swimmer, no matter how hard he could swim, it wouldn't, it didn't budge. And he had done this in a pool, he had said, but when you look down and you can see the bottom of a lit pool is very different than when you look down and you see just the dark abyss and a tangle of paracord and parachute just pulling you down and down and down. But he maintained his cool. He got out a knife and was able to cut me free of all the paracord and disentangle everything, get me back to the surface. And then he opted to just lift me right into the helicopter, not to fuck with a backboard. I did have a spinal injury. My neck was broken, but at this point, he's like, if we don't get this guy out, he's going to die from hypothermia for sure.

• 59:26Speaker 02

  It was a miracle I wasn't dead from hypothermia already. They got me into the helicopter.

• 59:31Shawn Ryan?

  Wait, hold on. Are you conscious during all this?

• 59:33Speaker 02

  I was in and out of consciousness. For most of it, I have retrograde amnesia, but for years I was getting back flashbacks of it through night tears of being in the water and experiencing it. But I've been able to recreate all this very accurately from the investigation they did, from talking to the rescue swimmer, from talking to the fisherman. We've been able to kind of compile exactly what happened and went down pretty accurately, despite having some big lapses in my memory personally.

• 1:00:05Shawn Ryan?

  If you spend any time off-road like I do, you already know how easy it is to end up second guessing where you're at, whether you're still on a legal trail, or if the route ahead is even worth taking. That's why I've been using OnX Offroad. It's an off-road navigation app that shows trails, public and private land boundaries, places to camp, and detailed trail info all in one place. And what makes it really useful is the amount of actual trail data. You can check difficulty ratings, terrain details, trail photos, even recent reports from other riders before you head out there. The other big thing is you can download maps ahead of time. Because once you lose service out there, your phone is pretty much useless.

• 1:00:48Shawn Ryan?

  But with OnX Offroad, everything still works offline. And if you're riding with a group, their location sharing feature lets everybody stay on the same map so nobody gets lost or separated. What I like most about it is it gives me a lot more confidence when I'm exploring somewhere new. I'm not wasting time backtracking, accidentally ending up on private land or trying to figure things out once I'm already deep into the trail system. I can plan ahead, know what I'm getting into, and spend more time actually enjoying the ride instead of worrying about navigation the whole time. Search OnX Offroad in the App Store or Google Play. Again, that's OnX Offroad in the App Store or Google Play.

• 1:01:34Shawn Ryan?

  What do you remember when you woke up in the water?

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  The feeling of absolute dread of just being completely helpless.

• 1:01:42Shawn Ryan?

  You knew what happened?

• 1:01:44Speaker 02

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

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  But from the rescue team, you know, they got me into that helicopter and they started resuscitating me. I was coding over and over again, so close to death. You know, they were doing sternum rubs and all these resuscitation techniques to try to keep me awake and alert and alive. And I would be alert and I'd be screaming for help, just completely disoriented and in shock. And then I'd be out again. And it was, I think, about a 40-ish minute flight to Norfolk General, which is a Level 1 trauma center. And in that time, you know, I just coded repeatedly the whole flight. And these guys were doing everything they could to keep me alive. And in that chaos, Joey's meatball sub had broken loose from the container and I ended up just fricking covered in meatball and marinara.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  So as these guys are landing at Norfolk General, the medical team's coming out and I'm obviously in bad shape, you know? They moved me over onto the gurney to pull me out of the helicopter and my arm was on the edge and it just flopped in half like right in the middle. It was just completely disconnected here. The bone was so broken, but it's still kind of dangling from the skin. And I'm covered in all this, what appears to be like blood and gore. And so the rescue crew is kind of explaining like, "Hey, he's in bad shape, but that's just Joey's lunch."

• 1:03:35Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit, dude.

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  But they end up rushing me into the hospital. They took my core body temperature upon arrival. I was at 87 degrees Fahrenheit core body temperature. So I should have been dead from hypothermia at this point. But later, they said, "That saved my life." That cold water actually prevented me from bleeding out through my brachial artery and my two open leg fractures. And they believe it helped preserve my brain function. So it was actually a blessing that my dry suit ripped apart. I wouldn't have lived had my dry suit functioned properly.

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  They gave me multiple blood transfusions. I had lost a massive amount of blood. They warmed me up. And then once they got me semi-stable, they pumped water out of my lungs and then they put me into an induced coma. And for the course of the next week, I went through over a dozen trauma surgeries. They performed fasciotomies on all four of my extremities to, basically because the limbs were so damaged, they were swelling up and that muscle's pushing so tight against the fascia that it was cutting off circulations to my arms and legs. And in the past, they would just chop your arms and legs off, you know? Once you got compartment syndrome. But fortunately, being in a Level 1 trauma center, they're able to open up that fascia tissue and relieve the pressure and get the blood circulating. So I had that on all four of my extremities.

• 1:04:56Speaker 02

  They rebuilt my skeleton with titanium rods and steel plate in both my arms and both my legs. So now I've got like a Wolverine X-rays. If you ever get to see it, it's pretty sweet.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  Just all metal bones on the inside. A bunch of screws, hundreds of stitches and staples to put everything back together. And then late one night, they came in and my hand was just like blue and cold to the touch. And they were about to amputate my arm, but they had this like top vascular surgeon that was able to get the blood flow by giving me a brachial artery bypass in my arm. But a lot of stuff that was, fortunately, I had like the medical dream team on that day of these surgeons that was able to put me back together. And after that week, they were trying to get me out of the induced coma and trying to get me back to consciousness, but I just wasn't waking up. And at this point, my mom, you know, her worst nightmare had happened.

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  Her little boy's in a coma, maybe not going to make it. A bunch of my squadron mates and friends from flight school are in the waiting room at the ICU. I'd been transferred over to Portsmouth Naval Hospital, where everybody was just kind of waiting to hear my fate. And it didn't look good, you know? Is this guy just going to be a vegetable the rest of his life? Is he going to wake up whatsoever? And when you get in a mishap like that, I'm guessing it's similar for your community, but you have to fill out this form of who you want to contact in the case of an emergency. And I had filled out my friend that I had been a kiteboard instructor with when I was in college, which was actually another good exposure to getting dragged through the water and being tangled in cords and being comfortable with it, that probably helped. But this is my friend Matt,

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  who kind of became like an older brother to me. And my nickname when we were in that crew was Scrappy. Everyone always called me Scrappy. And my commanding officer picked, opened this envelope and saw that number and called my friend Matt. And he's like, "You mean Scrappy? You're talking about Scrappy?" And my skipper thought that was a hilarious nickname. And so when he came back into the ICU waiting room, he kind of told everybody the story. Everybody thinks this guy's name's Scrappy. And so that same pilot that told me before my flight that I didn't do anything to earn a call sign yet, kind of piped up and he's like, "Oh, he's a scrappy motherfucker. He'll be all right." And that kind of lifted the mood of the room. And then all the guys' minds started churning and they came up with SMURF, sort of a makeshift acronym for scrappy motherfucker.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  And being the politically correct Navy that it has become, they had to come up with a cover story for it. So they said it was because I was a short guy that turned blue from hypothermia.

• 1:07:36Shawn Ryan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  That's how they got it approved anyway. So at least I got a call sign out, all this, you know? A hard-earned one.

• 1:07:43Shawn Ryan?

  Has any pilot ejected at 695 miles an hour?

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  It's the fastest survived ejection in the Navy. There, I know of an Air Force pilot that ejected faster than that. His call sign was Noodle. He ejected back in the early 90s. He was an F-15 pilot. And they had the instrumentation. I think it was like one of the gyroscopes or something stopped functioning. So they thought they were in straight and level flight when actually they were in a dive straight down. And the way he noticed it was they could hear the canopy noise. When you start going faster in the jet, you can hear the canopy. Just like when you go faster in your car, it gets louder. And just kind of getting spidey senses, like something's not right. And he was like, they were within a couple of seconds of impacting the ocean when they pulled the handle. I don't think the backseater made it out.

• 1:08:32Speaker 02

  He miraculously survived and actually went back to flying. I think he's actually an airline pilot now or maybe retired, but. Yeah, he miraculously survived that. But it doesn't happen very often where people go through that level of explosion, you know?

• 1:08:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, but not.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  Less than ideal. There's actually a chart in the NATOPS, the Aircraft Flight Manual, that shows the survivable envelope with the Martin Baker ejection seat. And we looked at the angle that I was at and the airspeed and it's not even on the chart.

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  Shouldn't have lived through it, for sure.

• 1:09:07Shawn Ryan?

  How often do you think about that? I mean, you survived an ejection that you probably should have never survived.

• 1:09:15Speaker 02

  I'm really grateful for it now.

• 1:09:17Shawn Ryan?

  You should have drowned. You should have died of hypothermia. You should have died of blood loss.

• 1:09:26Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe eaten by a shark.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, dude. Luckily, Mary Lee wasn't interested.

• 1:09:33Shawn Ryan?

  Your equipment malfunctioned. What do you chalk this up as?

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  Still here for a reason. God still needed me for something. And it really opened my eyes to that. And just a deep gratitude and love and appreciation for being here in this experience as a human. Like, got to do some good with that.

• 1:10:00Speaker 02

  But definitely here for a reason.

• 1:10:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'll say.

• 1:10:05Speaker 02

  Really grateful for that, man.

• 1:10:08Shawn Ryan?

  How long were you in surgeries?

• 1:10:10Speaker 02

  So that first week, they completed all the initial surgeries and then the next week, so now a total of two weeks, I was still in a coma. And eventually, the first thing I remembered was I could hear people talking, familiar voices. I could smell disinfectant.

• 1:10:28Shawn Ryan?

  You remember waking up?

• 1:10:30Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:31Shawn Ryan?

  After being out for two weeks?

• 1:10:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And then I remembered being able to open my eyes and look around and I could see familiar places, faces, but it was confusing. Cause I, at that point, I had zero memory of the ejection. I had zero memory of how I got in there. I had no idea. It was like waking up from a dream in your own bed, except why are there all these machines? Why do things not look like my bedroom? And between the brain injury and all the meds that they had me on, I was pretty out of it. Um, one of the first things I thought was that my, my squadron mates had been playing a prank on me because I tried to move and I thought they had like tied me down with the little wool blanket they had over me. But it was because I was paralyzed. I couldn't

• 1:11:16Speaker 02

  move it. I thought that they had like, were fucking with me for a minute. Um, but you know, I started seeing faces and kind of recognizing them. And then eventually the medical staff came in to kind of explain like, you've been in a high-speed ejection, you're lucky to be alive, but you're not ever going to be able to walk again. You're never going to be able to use your arms again. And your military flying career is over. And that was a pretty devastating moment to just be stuck there, trapped in my own body, confused, and be told like, everything that I'd worked for, for so long was now gone. And it was a pretty dark, a dark time for me internally.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

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

• 1:12:39Speaker 02

  the work consistently, you're not going to get there. And so I just started every day like, okay, I can't walk today. I can't use my arms. I can't wipe my own ass. Some poor corpsman who joined to go do cool shit in the Navy is in here stuck with me wiping my ass all day. But I'm going to fucking figure something out so I can start wiping my own ass again at least. And so those became my little missions daily was like, what can I move? Is there anything that does work? And little by little, like, things started to move a bit. Um, a few weeks had gone by in that ICU room and things were pretty dark, but still feeding that, that little fire that was in there. And one day I remember I was able to like, I was able to use my core muscles again,

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  even though my arms and legs didn't work. And I was able to sit up in the bed. And one of the nurses came in and I was kind of sitting up and she was just kind of like, whoa, this isn't supposed to be happening. Um, once I was fairly stable, they transferred me to Richmond, Virginia. Uh, there's a poly trauma center there at the Maguire VA. And that's where I started to do all my rehabilitation. And at this point, you know, I was completely bedridden, literally shitting on myself, had to be fed, had to have people brush my teeth, had it. That was really frustrating for me to be such a self-reliant person who now can do nothing for myself. Um, but I started doing

• 1:14:02Speaker 02

  therapy all day, every day. Uh, you know, I'd wake up, I'd get, uh, moved via wheelchair to my appointments, uh, in the VA there. I was doing, um, vision therapy from the head injury. One of my cranial nerves had been, uh, messed up. So my vision was all jacked up. I was doing speech therapy because of the brain injury. I was really struggling just with the basics of talking and, and, uh, as I progressed with that, I was doing occupational therapy to use my upper body a little bit. Um, physical therapy, kinesiotherapy, recreational therapy, aquather, like all the therapies. Um, and they had a really good staff there that really gave a shit and was helping me

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  out. Um, but I also saw a pretty dark side of the medical system while in there, which was, one, the food that they were giving us was absolute garbage. Ultra-processed, shitty, full of seed oils, like, didn't even, there, there wasn't a fresh fruit or vegetable to be found. And even if you did get a fresh fruit or vegetable, it was pretty shit quality. Um, you know, tons of like Frito-Lays and Nutter Butters and garbage food, but it was like, they were fueling these, they, they were putting all this money into this facility and all of these therapies and this facade that they were doing so much so that if you came in, the optics looked really good to be like, man, look at the VA. And I'm grateful for how much better it was than what the Vietnam era

• 1:15:29Speaker 02

  guys came back to where they're shoved 12 dudes in a room, pissing and shitting on themselves all day, getting pumped full of morphine and then just wheeled out onto the sidewalk like, good luck with your life and that morphine addiction. It's definitely improved since then, but it was still like, why are we not feeding people good food? That's like the most important thing. The other one was all night, every night, they're waking you up to take your vitals and then give you medication so that you can sleep. It's like, just let us sleep. That's like the most important thing we can do right now. Sleep and get nutrition in our body. Both of those things were non-existent.

• 1:16:06Speaker 02

  And then the thing that they had an abundance of was pharmaceutical drugs. Here, take your pills, take your pills. This one's not working well enough. We got you on all the opioids. We got you on Oxycontin, uh, Oxycoding, like all this shit. Let's try gabapentin. This one's going to be way better. It's non-addictive. And before long, I was on 2,400 milligrams a day of gabapentin, which, uh, initially helped a little bit, but ended up becoming the hardest addiction that I had to break. Um.

• 1:16:35Shawn Ryan?

  What is that again?

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  It's called gabapentin or norotin. It's, uh, originally was, I think it was for diabetic nerve pain. And they started as opioids were kind of getting a bad rep. They'd still give you the opioids, but now they'd give you a bunch of the gabapentin too, uh, to help deal with the nerve pain, which it didn't really do much, uh, honestly. It would, initially it made me fall asleep. Uh, but once my body acclimated to it, which was pretty quick, they just had to ramp, ramp, ramp the dose up until I was taking like the maximum daily dose that they would allow at that time. But it was all just pharmaceutical based, man. When you saw the doctor who was supposed to be your healer, it wasn't like, hey, let's get you better food. Let's deal with this. It was just, what pills do you want? What pills do you need? And also there's these cute girls floating around,

• 1:17:21Speaker 02

  uh, the poly trauma center, which is largely, um, special forces operators who'd been hit by RPGs or gunshots, lost, they'll use, you know, broken spines. There's Marines in there, a lot of infantry guys, um, a bunch of young men. And, uh, they've got these cute girls that are the pharma reps that come in and they flirt with you and they get you to sign up for clinical trials. And there were still, I overheard some of the staff members at the hospital talking about one of the trials that they had done. It was a nerve pain medication for, uh, people with permanent spinal injuries. And they would inject this stuff directly into their spinal fluid. And somehow, the batch of the

• 1:18:03Speaker 02

  medicine that they received had been, uh, contaminated because they were storing it, uh, cryogenically in, uh, liquid nitrogen in containers that weren't designed to be frozen. And so it was causing cracks. And then they were getting contaminated with some sort of fungus or something. And so the first time they started putting in this into these fucking legitimate heroes in wheelchairs, just trying to not feel pain all day, it immediately caused severe pain. And the staff was saying, you could hear them screaming at the top of their lungs to just end their lives. And they were paralyzed, so they couldn't kill themselves. And the only way that they could stop these guys from being in that level of pain was to put them into induced comas.

• 1:18:45Shawn Ryan?

  Get the fuck out of here, man. Are you serious?

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're, they're doing medical experimentation on American veterans, um, in the VA hospitals.

• 1:18:58Speaker 02

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

• 1:19:34Shawn Ryan?

  How much time had passed before?

• 1:19:38Speaker 02

  It was about two months before this hand started working and then another couple of weeks, one day this hand just, I started to feel it tingling.

• 1:19:46Shawn Ryan?

  And you were walking before that?

• 1:19:47Speaker 02

  No, no, this is before I could walk.

• 1:19:50Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, I thought I heard you say you were on a walk.

• 1:19:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, sorry, I jumped ahead there, but yeah, I couldn't use my arms, but once I started to get function in my arms, they could get me in a walker and start moving on that. They had me in the pool, walking assisted. They had me on this sort of treadmill with these suspension devices on me so it would take my body weight and I could relearn to walk that way. So there was a lot of good stuff with that. But after three months, I was good enough that I got to go back to Virginia Beach and continue outpatient therapy. And it was a huge relief to put that hospital in the rearview mirror. At this point, I still couldn't drive. I was pretty limited for my, you know, my, my functions of daily living.

• 1:20:33Speaker 02

  I was very reliant on others and ended up going back to Virginia Beach and continuing outpatient therapy at Portsmouth Naval Hospital. And that place was an absolute shit show. But just working really hard at my rehab, talking to the pain man, management docs, I'd be like, I don't want to be on these pain meds. I don't think they're doing anything for me. And the answer was always, well, they're, you don't feel you need them because they're working. And so they didn't want to help me get off of them. And so, you know, I was just kind of broken, isolated from a lot of my squadron mates. And I found myself one day sitting on the back patio where I lived on this lawn chair, you know, taking all my oxy and I had a big thing of whiskey, drinking that.

• 1:21:18Speaker 02

  And I'm just kind of like melting into the ground. And I remember being there just completely just melted and relaxed and thinking, man, I could just stay here the rest of my life. But there was this other part of me is like, is this what you want to be? And in that moment, I recognized, fuck no, I don't want to just be this the rest of my life, a drug addict, an alcoholic. And that, that, that moment was really powerful in that. That's when I really started to pursue, like, I need to get off these meds. And every doc I talked to was like, no, you need to stay on the meds. You need to stay on the meds. So I just started doing it myself and I just started titrating off. At this point, I was on over a dozen medications.

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  I was on oxycodone, oxycontin, gabapentin, tramadol, trazodone, amitriptyline, plus a bunch of other shit. And so I just started each day, cutting out a little bit of each one. I think I started with the amitriptyline, then the tramadol and the trazodone. And then I got to the oxycodone and I was able to cut that out. And then the oxycontin, which took several weeks of like, just feeling like absolute dog shit, but just kind of toughen it out. And if I got too bad, I would take a small dose just to kind of ease that. I didn't just go cold turkey because I think I would have fucking died. But then I got to the neuratin or the gabapentin, which was supposed to be non-addictive. And that became the hardest drug for me to get off of.

• 1:22:40Speaker 02

  As soon as I started cutting back on it, I felt extremely nauseous. I was shaking, just felt like I'd gotten punched in the gut. And so very gradually I cut down that dosage and it took about three months for me to wean myself off that medication. But as soon as I did and got all those meds out of my system, it was like the life came back into me. Even just like the way I looked, I was like, kind of pasty and pale and doughy, low energy, just didn't feel like myself at all. But as I got those meds out, it was like I had motivation again. And instead of just being exhausted, at the end of each day, I was like, ready to do stuff. And I was really fortunate to have really good friends that were taking care of me. Uh, you know, they were trying to get me to go out and go wake surfing when I was just

• 1:23:24Speaker 02

  barely walking, but they got me out there in the water and hang out on the boat. And sure enough, got me up on the wake surfing board and buddies taking me out surfing. Like my first experience back in the ocean, I was pretty nervous. I could barely put on the wet suit because my arms were still so weak, but ended up getting out into the waves and just got crushed by this wave out in the outer banks, held under, like bounced along the bottom, coming back up for a breath of air, held down again, and then pop back up with just a big smile on my face. Cause it was like, I had faced that demon of being held under the water and I was okay with it.

• 1:23:58Shawn Ryan?

  How long did it take from the crash to that, to surfing?

• 1:24:04Speaker 02

  Probably about a year and a half. I had been rehabbing about a year and a half when I was starting to get active with stuff like surfing. My buddy Spicoli took me out mountain biking. And I just started to get back in touch with the stuff I loved, with the people I enjoyed being around. And meanwhile, I was going through an investigation, which was pretty brutal. You know, I had just crashed an $89 million super hornet and the consequences could be pretty brutal. And some of those interviews were more like an interrogation, very tense, some dark moments of them asking me, do you think you still deserve to be a fighter pilot after this? You know, being in tears, like just kind of broken down, but pushing through that.

• 1:24:48Speaker 02

  The investigation lasted months and months and months. And it all culminated where I had to go to Norfolk and go see the admiral, uh, who would determine my fate after I'd been through all these proceedings. And I showed up for that. I think at this point I was still using a cane to walk around, uh, still limping, but I put on my summer white uniform and I walk into this room and it's a big room about the size of this with a, a table in it, about the size of this platform, big wooden table. And on either side, it's flanked by about a dozen other naval aviators, um, all kind of convened to determine my fate. And after they had done the preliminary, uh, hearing with me, the admiral comes in

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  and everybody stands up and he sits on the opposite end of this long table from me and tells us all to sit down. And I remember sitting down and he just looks across the table at me and goes, Lieutenant Gill, are you fearless? And like, what do you say when an admiral asks you that, you know? But the only thing that came out of my mouth, and I don't know where it came from, but I said, sir, I don't remember a lot from the ejection, but I'm certain what little seat cushioning there is on the ejection seat was puckered up inside me real tight. And he didn't blink, he didn't laugh, he just stood up and walked out of the room. And I was just like, well, there goes my flight career, you know? And, and everybody's just kind of like looking at each other like, what was that?

• 1:26:13Speaker 02

  And eventually everybody kind of clears out of this room and I walk out into the hallway and one of the captains, oh sixes pulls me into his office and he has me sit on the other side of his table and he's got this glass jar full of lifesaver mints. And he takes one and pops it in his mouth. He gives me one and I pop it in my mouth and we're sitting there just enjoying these little peppermints. And he goes, Lieutenant Gill, if you can get your body working again, we're going to get you back in a super hornet. And it was just like the biggest relief and just massive motivation to keep going. And so I did, man. Uh, I had to go through, I got to keep my wings. I got the opportunity to go back and fly, but now I had to figure out how to get medical waivers and, and get back flying physically. But that just drove my therapy, man.

• 1:26:58Speaker 02

  I was doing two a day workouts. I was doing all my therapy at Portsmouth, uh, and I just dedicated myself to all of that shit and started getting better and stronger and went through a, a medical waiver process with a bunch of different flight surgeons, which was a miracle in itself. I had to get a stack of all these waivers for all the injuries that I had.

• 1:27:19Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:29:32Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Kagan. I know that supposedly you may have had some UAP encounters.

• 1:29:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:39Shawn Ryan?

  So we have a hot question. You ready?

• 1:29:43Shawn Ryan?

  You flew the F-18 Super Hornet, the same jet off the same Virginia Beach coast that guys like Ryan Graves and Commander Fravor were flying when they reported objects they couldn't explain. And the Pentagon just started releasing its declassified UAP files over the past few weeks. So I have to ask you, in all of your time up there, did you ever see anything you could not explain? Or fly with somebody who did? And what's your honest take? Is any of this real?

• 1:30:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is an exciting topic.

• 1:30:19Speaker 02

  So while I was in my recovery, I lived down this road called Oyster Point Key. It's like a quiet little spot down on Rudy's Inlet area of Virginia Beach. Wooded, quiet, kind of outside the city a bit. And I was up on the second story of this room that I was staying at with my buddies, who kind of adopted me while I was recovering. Two of my friends were deployed, so their bedroom was open while they were gone. They let me stay there, but I'm asleep one night. And this bright light comes in through the second story room where I'm at, through the window. And I thought maybe a car had pulled up in the driveway and had their brights on or something.

• 1:31:02Speaker 02

  But I got out of bed and I walked over to the window and looked out the window. And right at eye level, there was this thing that looked like a massive set of stadium lightings. A bunch of different circular lights, all in the square, kind of rectangular pattern, just blasting in on me. And rather than being afraid, which I think would be a natural sensation when you witness something bizarre like that, I just got this overwhelming sense of calm. And I just walked back to the bed. I'd gotten up to go to the restroom. I didn't even do that. I just walked back to bed and fell asleep. And the next morning I woke up and I thought, that was just a dream. There's no way that was real.

• 1:31:41Speaker 02

  Fast forward into my recovery, towards the end of my recovery journey, I'm working a ground job, working a ground job at the Strike Fighter Wing Atlantic, which is sort of like the administrative command that coordinates everything between all the different fighter squadrons at Oceana. And I was doing a number of different ground jobs, answering emails, phone calls. And one day I got an email that was from a bunch of the more high-ranking individuals from various squadrons around Oceana. And they were saying that they were getting sightings of these objects out in the Whiskey 72 airspace where we do our training. And, you know, some of them were saying that, you know, we don't know what these are. I

• 1:32:25Speaker 02

  think there was one, he was either the XO or CO of one of the squadrons, I don't know if he was joking, but he's like, we should just strap some 9Xs on and go shoot these things down. So shoot them down with the heat-seeking missile.

• 1:32:37Speaker 02

  And at first I thought they were just messing with me. Like, there's so many shenanigans. I assumed they were just messing with me, being the guy at the wing. But they originally wanted me to kind of coordinate these reports. And so I responded to that first email, thinking that they were messing with me. Strike Fighter Wing Atlantic X-Files, Fox Mulder signing off, was the end of my email, thinking that these guys are just complete full of shit. And then I got a return email that said, we need to move these conversations over to SIPR. And for those that don't, that's the secure internet. And that's when I kind of realized, this isn't, this isn't a joke.

• 1:33:12Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit. What are you thinking?

• 1:33:16Speaker 02

  Dude, I was really excited. Because I had had that thing that I didn't know if it was a dream, and I still don't know if that was a dream or not, but it was so vivid. And I've always had curiosity on this topic, but to hear that, it was like, holy shit. This is, this is real. There's something out there. I don't know what it is, but there's something.

• 1:33:35Speaker 02

  I continued my recovery. One day I'm sitting at that computer answering emails and the Commodore, the Strike Fighter Wing Atlantic Commodore comes in. He goes, Lieutenant Gill, what are you doing today? I said, just answering emails, sir. And he goes, how about you go back and fly jets today? And it was like, holy shit. I get to go back to fly. And it was pretty overwhelming and exciting all at once that I actually got to do that. And so I kind of overcome all those odds, come over a lot of obstacles, and then I was back flying. And while I was back flying, going through my refresher training to get back to the fleet, I was out on a mission out in that same Whiskey 72 airspace. And we were doing long-range intercepts, so like, long-range fighting other aircraft.

• 1:34:21Speaker 02

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

• 1:35:00Shawn Ryan?

  No, it's good you're doing that for the audience.

• 1:35:04Speaker 02

  So I locked up my flare on this thing and pulled up the flare page to see what it was seeing. And it was, it was pretty far out and our flares are kind of shitty, so it's pretty grainy. But I could see this little spherical object out in the distance was putting off IR signature. And I'm primarily flying formation with my flight lead as we're kind of setting up for these, for these presentations. So I was constantly kind of looking back and flying the jet primarily, but occasionally glancing at this thing. And then I remembered, it was like, when I looked back up, that thing had moved much closer to my position. And I could see it a little better. It was still that kind of grainy circle spherical thing.

• 1:35:46Speaker 02

  But pretty quickly, the flight lead's like, we got to return to base. We're unable to complete this with the interlopers. So we had to cancel that day's flight, which is a pretty costly evolution, to get four jets up in that sky to do this. So we rejoin, we go back, we land, and I remember in the debrief expecting that we're going to talk about this thing that had just happened. And nobody said anything.

• 1:36:07Shawn Ryan?

  Nothing?

• 1:36:08Speaker 02

  Nothing. And so I knew, like, okay, there's likely some sort of program that we're not briefed into yet, so we're not allowed to talk about this.

• 1:36:19Speaker 02

  And that's when I knew, like, there's something out there. That was my personal experience, not terribly exciting, but then like Ryan Graves, he was in Virginia Beach the same time as I. I know Ryan. And he was seeing a lot of stuff. He had like, close encounters with one of those things passing right by and seeing it with his own eyes. But there was a lot of sightings of these spherical objects with a cube inside them, and sometimes moving instantaneously positions and changing directions in ways that didn't make sense.

• 1:36:51Speaker 02

  But, I mean, I totally believe that these are alien technologies that we've been re-engineering and rebuilding.

• 1:37:00Speaker 02

  I mean, there's no way we're alone in this massive universe.

• 1:37:06Shawn Ryan?

  We've hidden aircraft from the public for decades. The SR-71 is an example. Do you think the military's sitting on something further out, exotic propulsion, the anti-gravitic stuff and those Navy UFO patents? Do you think that's what this could be?

• 1:37:20Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:37:21Shawn Ryan?

  Or do you think it's aliens?

• 1:37:22Speaker 02

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

• 1:38:08Speaker 02

  And it would completely change the game. And I think the people that control these technologies and are running the show don't want that to happen.

• 1:38:17Speaker 02

  But I think, I think it's...

• 1:38:17Shawn Ryan?

  How high up do you think this goes?

• 1:38:21Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't know how much the presidency is in on any of this because I don't think that they're even the real decision makers in the world. I think it's like a reality TV show, what we see on TV politics to keep us divided and pissed off and at each other's throats while the real Caesars of the world are dividing and conquering everybody.

• 1:38:41Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think a lot of these politicians, people that bring this stuff up, former government officials, do you think this is a way for them to get their name in the media?

• 1:38:55Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 1:38:56Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's def- could be a big distraction.

• 1:39:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:01Shawn Ryan?

  Tactic as well, but I mean, if you want, if you're a politician and you want to get on the fucking news and you need press, I don't know if there's anything easier than to jump on the

• 1:39:16Speaker 02

  And surprisingly though-

• 1:39:17Shawn Ryan?

  U F O disclosure stuff.

• 1:39:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:20Shawn Ryan?

  It's immediate, it's immediate press.

• 1:39:22Speaker 02

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

• 1:39:50Shawn Ryan?

  I don't disagree with you on that at all.

• 1:39:53Speaker 02

  So, you know, I don't, I don't watch the news anymore. I think I've been misled and gotten my hopes up far too many times to, and now realize that that's just, that's not where the real decisions are being made and that's not who's in control. But are people using it for political gain? Probably.

• 1:40:10Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think they're using it as a big distraction thing? I mean, the last time this came up was in the middle, well, I mean, it's still being brought up. The, how do I say this? This is still drawn out from the first time it was brought up within this administration. Ironically, it was brought up right in the midst of all the Epstein shit.

• 1:40:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, it totally could be.

• 1:40:33Shawn Ryan?

  You give them U A Ps.

• 1:40:34Speaker 02

  It totally could be. Let's change the subject. Like, look over here.

• 1:40:37Shawn Ryan?

  Here's aliens. Don't worry about fucking little kids. Here's aliens.

• 1:40:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, and I think that's totally possible, but I still think it's very real. I think it's, I think there's enough reputable people that are talking about it and putting their careers on the line and destroying their livelihoods and even losing their lives to get this information out.

• 1:40:57Shawn Ryan?

  Who's destroying their livelihood to get this information out?

• 1:41:01Speaker 02

  I think it likely comes back to those people that are in control, that are making the money off of the defense industry.

• 1:41:07Shawn Ryan?

  No, no, no. I mean, who do you think is throwing their career in the trash?

• 1:41:12Shawn Ryan?

  For disclosure?

• 1:41:12Speaker 02

  You know, I, I forget a lot of the names of this, but there's been a lot of high level government officials coming forward and saying things. There's been military members, other Navy pilots coming forward and saying things and just talking to Ryan about that process and the congressional hearings. A lot of those people are under extreme duress, having their families threatened, losing everything in their careers. And why would they do that, you know, if this wasn't very real? And even just-

• 1:41:42Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know. I don't know who's throwing their career away. I've dove into this topic as you know.

• 1:41:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, you might be more knowledgeable on-

• 1:41:49Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not. I'm not saying I'm more knowledgeable. I'm, I am a, I am very skeptical.

• 1:41:57Speaker 02

  Very skeptical that it's real at all?

• 1:41:59Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, let me rephrase that.

• 1:42:12Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I think people are seeing something, but I think that the, I think there's a very good possibility the narrative has been totally manufactured.

• 1:42:27Shawn Ryan?

  I think it's spiritual. I think people are seeing spiritual things.

• 1:42:34Speaker 02

  Perhaps. Perhaps. I really don't know. I don't know a hundred percent what it is.

• 1:42:45Speaker 02

  Could be spiritual. Other dimensions.

• 1:42:49Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you have been, I don't know how many psychedelic journeys you've done, but you know, that kind of unlocks your mind to other possibilities.

• 1:42:57Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:42:57Shawn Ryan?

  And I don't know.

• 1:43:01Speaker 02

  I mean, everything's spiritual, really.

• 1:43:04Shawn Ryan?

  I'm with you. Are you a Christian?

• 1:43:07Speaker 02

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

• 1:43:45Speaker 02

  God is. That's part of this experience and this human existence is the mystery of it.

• 1:43:55Speaker 02

  But it's everywhere and everything. And it is love and connection. I know that much is true. And I think, I think Christianity, you know, does a really good job of explaining how to live a good life, knowing that we are all connected and, and God is love.

• 1:44:20Speaker 02

  But I think we're all trying to explain the infinite, that we can't possibly comprehend how great God is.

• 1:44:30Speaker 02

  I don't think we can explain it. I don't think we can comprehend it. We only have five senses. We can only see a limited spectrum of light. We can only hear a limited number of frequencies. We can only feel, smell, taste, touch the things that are immediately around us. Like, there's so much outside our spectrum of this experience as a human of what we can even interpret and comprehend.

• 1:44:55Speaker 02

  And I really believe God is infinite beyond our imaginations.

• 1:45:04Shawn Ryan?

  Kind of switching gears here. What was it like for you jumping back in a jet after you had ejected at 695 miles an hour, broken damn near every fucking bone in your body, almost died multiple different ways?

• 1:45:18Speaker 02

  You know, it felt really good.

• 1:45:20Shawn Ryan?

  It felt good.

• 1:45:21Speaker 02

  Like getting back on the horse that had bucked me off. It was like a massive, I'd been working for this for a couple of years, you know, and busting my ass and just had so many little things line up so I could do that. So I was really proud to be back, but at the same time, there was a part of me like, am I going to freak out when I put this thing into a dive at the ocean? Is something going to happen? And so one of the first things I did on my first solo back out in the jet was I went back out to that same airspace and I put that jet in a dive and pulled it down toward the ocean. Not nearly as fast as I was, but kind of did a similar maneuver and loved every moment of it. But then it kind of became like, oh shit, now I gotta actually do this thing again. And

• 1:46:04Speaker 02

  the pressure's back on. And it was right back into the, the stress of that world, man. And it was intense, but I was really stoked to be there.

• 1:46:15Shawn Ryan?

  What, what kept you going? I mean, I've interviewed a couple of gentlemen like yourself. I mean, one of them, Nick Lavery. Nick Lavery's a Green Beret, lost his leg.

• 1:46:32Shawn Ryan?

  The guy right up there in that painting, that piece of art up there. He's right down the road up in Cookeville, fifth group. And with the guy, you know, he lost his leg and then they told him he would have to redo everything, pass all the P T quals, even went through dive school, fucking made it.

• 1:46:52Speaker 02

  Badass.

• 1:46:53Shawn Ryan?

  You know, then this guy over here, that skull and crossbones up there, that's from a guy, Ryan Hendrickson, had his leg blown off by a pressure plate mine in Afghanistan.

• 1:47:02Speaker 02

  He does the landmine removals, right?

• 1:47:04Shawn Ryan?

  Now he goes over to Ukraine and he's like, dude, I don't have a, I don't have a side on this war. I don't give a shit. He's like, I give a shit about saving kids because I know what it's like to have your fucking leg blown off. And so he goes over there and D-mines like soccer fields and playgrounds and all by himself.

• 1:47:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know one of his, uh, someone who works with them there, Robby Robashaw, who's a Green Beret that I know was involved with his, I think it's a nonprofit that he has to run that operation.

• 1:47:33Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, he's got somebody going with him to do this?

• 1:47:35Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know if Robby went with him, but I know he was involved with Ryan.

• 1:47:39Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, right on.

• 1:47:40Speaker 02

  Helping support what he was doing.

• 1:47:42Shawn Ryan?

  So what, I mean, what was in your head? What got you through, what, what kept the drive going, the push?

• 1:47:50Speaker 02

  I think it was that fire that I had from a young age, man. It was like this, this need to prove to others that I was worthy of being loved. After sort of having a lack of emotional attachment at a very young age. I think I always strived to prove that I was worthy of love. And so I had to accomplish the impossible to do that. And after talking to a lot of people in special forces community and in high, high speed roles in the military, high accomplishing individuals, I think that's a common theme, is we often had something early in our life that made us feel like we had to prove that we deserved to be loved.

• 1:48:31Speaker 02

  You know, the people who have done the dives into that stuff. And I think that's what was fueling me. It was like, I needed to prove that I was worthy.

• 1:48:40Shawn Ryan?

  What advice do you have for the next guy that goes through something like this? Whether they're a pilot or a ground guy or whatever it is?

• 1:48:48Speaker 02

  You know, finding, finding that little spark of light in that darkness and then, and then feeding that fire is incredibly powerful. And also really asking yourself, what do I want and why do I want it? Because you can chase a goal because you think you want it and then get there and realize that's maybe not what you wanted to begin with. Why, why are you doing it? What's really important to you? And, and if it really is something that you want to pursue because it's so meaningful to you, just feed that little spark, man. Keep that hope alive and then do the work, you know? Be consistent with the work towards that goal because things aren't going to happen

• 1:49:32Speaker 02

  just because you hope they do. You gotta hope they do, visualize it and then move toward that goal every day. And, and I think we can overcome just about anything if we have that. If we have a good reason for it, we can visualize it. You know, some people say it manifest, but then you gotta actually walk the walk and, and do it and discipline is what gets you there.

• 1:49:56Shawn Ryan?

  Good advice. How much longer did you fly for?

• 1:50:02Speaker 02

  So I had been back flying for about 18 months and I was starting to notice that I was struggling mentally. I was stressed out. I was having a hard time remembering things. My sleep was really shitty. And initially, when I got back, I was like, I felt awesome. I was crushing it. I actually, I, as I went through my retraining, I graduated the top of my class. I was really doing well physically, mentally, I felt awesome and I was just so driven. But as I got back into that world of just constantly getting ground down, not sleeping, working long days, pulling more Gs, causing more damage to the brain that I didn't even

• 1:50:46Speaker 02

  know was there, things started to kind of fall apart for me. And I had a, a flight when I was down at Tyndall Air Force Base, we were doing a live weapons exercise. So I got to take off, fly out to the airspace over the ocean there and fire an AIM nine Mike Sidewinder at a, at a drone and shoot down this drone, which is a pretty cool opportunity. We don't get to shoot live missiles very frequently. Did that and then I broke off and I got to go some dissimilar air con combat training with a F-22 Raptor. So got to go dogfight an F-22 Raptor, which was like one of the coolest things I ever got to do. Just seeing this thing that I had just drooled over at air shows as a little kid and now

• 1:51:31Speaker 02

  being in the air with it, seeing the way this thing can move like a freak of nature. But when I got back from that flight, I remember I was in my debrief, watching my tapes to see what had happened in the missile shoot. And I remember being really confused by the symbology that I was intimately familiar with and I didn't quite feel right. Went through the debrief and that night just could not sleep. And I was like sitting in the hotel where I was staying in a perfectly quiet room, nothing happening and yet my heart was racing, like something terrible was about to happen. And I just kind of tried to tough it out. I ended up, I was on duty the next day, so just answering the radio and, and the phones

• 1:52:15Speaker 02

  and just not feeling right all day, just being confused and anxious and almost like hypervigilant. And that second night I got back to the hotel and I was like, something is not right. And I remember I was going to fly the next morning, I got my phone out to set my alarm and I couldn't figure out how to set my alarm clock on my cell phone. I was confused by the math. It was basically subtract a couple hours, like to give me enough time to get up in the morning from when I had to be at the briefing and I couldn't do that. And so there'd been a number of incidents in the F-18 community, a lot in the Hornet community, but some in the, in the Super Hornet community and Growler community as well, that people were getting, basically getting the bends.

• 1:52:58Speaker 02

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

• 1:53:42Speaker 02

  That's called the bends or type one decompression sickness. But what can be far more damaging is if you get those in your brain and it can block blood flow to your brain and even kill you, kind of like an aneur- you know, causing an aneurysm. And so the thought was maybe I was having one of these aneurysms, like that crew of Growlers had it. They'd become so frequent in the Hornet community, the legacy F-18s that were the predecessor to the Super Hornet, that they started putting hyperbaric facilities on the aircraft carriers so they could treat the pilots when they got the bends out at sea.

• 1:54:14Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit.

• 1:54:16Speaker 02

  So that had been an issue in our community at that time and that's kind of what we started to think maybe happened. I called the squadron safety officer, who was Squeezr, who was actually the, the pilot I had my first flight in the Super Hornet with. And he ended up driving me with our commanding officer to Mayport Dive Base. And they put me in that chamber overnight and squeezed me to try to get this, get the bubbles back into solution and, and heal the damage and get blood flow going normally. And I felt a little bit better after it, but I still, something was not right. And the, the doc that I saw the next day, when I came back in is like, considering your past, I think there's something more going on here than simply decompression sickness

• 1:55:01Speaker 02

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

• 1:55:44Speaker 02

  So reluctantly went in to see the flight surgeon. We got back from that detachment, still wasn't able to sleep for shit. And when I went in to see him, pretty quickly got a delayed onset PTSD diagnosis. They kind of hit the, the easy button. So this is PTSD. And so I was very quickly referred to the psych department and they started giving me meds, sleeping meds to try, anti-anxiety meds to try. And as things weren't really working very well, they ended up giving me a medication called Seriquil or Quatiopine, which is a pretty heavy duty antipsychotic medication that can be used in low doses for insomnia. And so that's what they started giving me.

• 1:56:27Speaker 02

  And it would knock me out, but it was like into this drug induced coma. It wasn't restful sleep and I still wasn't restoring and recovering. So I just feel like, like I got hit by a truck the next day. It just felt awful. Pretty, pretty quickly into it, it became apparent that I likely wasn't going to get the opportunity to go back and fly. As soon as this became a mental health issue, it, it shut that down pretty quickly. And so I was losing my community. I was losing my brotherhood and family that I had been in there. And I started feeling pretty shitty about myself and climbing into a very dark, deep spiral as I kind of just was losing everything, my sense of purpose and everything that I felt I had worked for.

• 1:57:12Speaker 02

  My wife, who I had recently married after the accident, had just had our brand, brand new little baby boy and he was just a little infant. And so she's busy taking care of this little boy and now she's dealing with me, starting to deal with heavier and heavier paranoia and hypervigilance, getting to the point where I would come into the house and I would hide underneath the windows because I thought I was, someone from the government was trying to kill me.

• 1:57:41Shawn Ryan?

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

• 1:58:24Shawn Ryan?

  stay locked in whether you're driving, training, or knocking things out around the house. With Amazon Music, you get music, podcasts and audiobooks all in one app. Try it today.

• 1:58:38Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think, why did you think that? How did you manufacture?

• 1:58:41Speaker 02

  Well, I felt I was being poisoned initially.

• 1:58:43Shawn Ryan?

  You felt you were being poisoned?

• 1:58:45Speaker 02

  I felt I was being poisoned and I was, it was just, it was in these FDA approved pills that I was taking from a white lab coat doc that I trusted. So I was actually being poisoned. Uh, it just wasn't in the way that I thought. I thought that they were poisoning my food and my water that was making me even worse. And once you get like so sleep deprived in conjunction with brain injury and everything else I was dealing with, it was like, I was just spiraling and it was just-

• 1:59:13Shawn Ryan?

  Do you know why? I mean, did you, did you manufactured? A narrative in your head on why they wanted to kill you? Why they wanted to poison you?

• 1:59:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I, dude, I was getting so delusional and I, I was starting to get to the point of borderline psychosis where I was just disconnected from reality and my imagination had become so real that it didn't even have to make sense anymore.

• 1:59:40Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 1:59:41Speaker 02

  But I felt very, very, very real, like people are trying to kill me. And my wife was making dinner, managing a newborn baby boy and I would come in the house and I would throw all the food in the garbage. I would dump the water out into the sink and say, they're poisoning us and just like freaking out.

• 1:59:58Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 1:59:59Speaker 02

  And my wife is having to deal with all this shit on her own while managing a baby. So it had become a complete nightmare for her.

• 2:00:09Speaker 02

  And that same treatment continues. Just, you just need more medication, more medication, more medication. And I just kept getting worse and worse and worse until we made the decision that I was going to go through a med board to get out of the military. And when this kind of all transpired, I was like so broken and I felt I had let everybody down that ever believed in me. I was so depressed that I found myself late one night laying in bed in the middle of the night, again, unable to sleep even with the meds. And I kept the Glock 19 next to my bed. And I pulled that out and I was wondering what the muzzle was going to feel like on my teeth? What the gun oil was going to taste like on my tongue?

• 2:00:51Speaker 02

  And as I go to do this, I look and my wife and my baby boy are asleep beside me. And I just thought I didn't want to wake them up in that moment to that. And I put the gun away, but had they not been right there? I wouldn't, I wouldn't be here to tell that story.

• 2:01:09Speaker 02

  And then I just continued to spiral worse and worse to where I was in a full blown psychosis, man. Completely, I mean, I thought my wife was Carrie Matheson from Homeland? That she was this blonde CIA agent sent to help save me from this dark military organization that was trying to exterminate me.

• 2:01:27Shawn Ryan?

  Are you serious?

• 2:01:28Speaker 02

  Like, everything was so real.

• 2:01:30Shawn Ryan?

  Did you have conversations with your wife about that?

• 2:01:34Speaker 02

  Later on I did after the fact, but at the time I was just, dude, it was like my eyes were just spinning in my head and, and I would just trust. Luckily I trusted her. I didn't trust anybody else through it, but I would do any things that she said.

• 2:01:48Speaker 02

  And, and, and dude, things just got really weird and confusing and it would jump like the, the delusion and the hallucinations would just jump from moment to moment. Like my wife had to take me with the baby to go into the commissary to get food on base. And I remember walking into the commissary and every single person I saw was like a demon ghoul. They had these black sunken eyes and fangs and plat, like just zombie skin, like falling off the bones and they're all just glaring at me. And it was so real, so real as I walked around just like cowering and afraid and, and my wife was okay, but as, cause in my mind, she's like, she's like the superhero sent to save me. And so I would just follow her around like a lost puppy.

• 2:02:31Speaker 02

  And as we're checking out, I remember the checkout lady who's just like working for tips, like reaching out for a tip. And I remember her doing that and it felt like she was like trying to suck my soul out of me. Like it was just crazy shit. Day in and day out and we got out to the car.

• 2:02:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was wild. Uh, we got out to the, to the, to the front of the commissary and my wife had forgotten to grab something. Cause she was like trying to manage me and a baby and all this shit. And so she's like, stay right here. I want you to stay right in front of this door so I can see you. Stay with the baby. And she goes in and for whatever reason in that I had like another freak out and I ran the cart with the baby and ran back to the back of the parking lot and was hiding behind a car. And my wife comes out and she's like, oh, fuck. You know, where did he go? And she's immediately thinking like, how long can the baby survive without me? Who do I need to call? And like, luckily she starts running through the parking lot yelling and looking and I pop my head up. And she's like, oh, thank God.

• 2:03:34Speaker 02

  But she was just like, dude, it was putting her through hell dealing with me.

• 2:03:41Speaker 02

  Eventually started doing the medical board process, which at Lamoore at that time, I describe as basically going through the bureaucratic equivalent of the Indiana Jones Temple of Doom. And it was like a complete shit show. The woman that they had just hired to be the Pablo, which is the liaison officer that helps get you through that process, had inherited like a six month backlog of people that weren't getting pushed through the med board on time. And she got into this office expecting that I think she was going to have a really cushy, easy job. And it was just chaos. She had such a backlog of records. And I remember my first meeting with her.

• 2:04:21Speaker 02

  I come into the office and there are stacks of paperwork on all the chairs, every horizontal surface just covered in shit. And I couldn't even sit down at the desk with her because there's so much paperwork just thrown in chaos around. And then we spent my allotted 15 minutes with this woman to discuss my case and she stopped after a couple of minutes and took a phone call with her daughter to shoot the shit about what she's doing in college and her new boyfriend right in front of me. And it became very obviously very quickly, even in my impaired state that I was going to have to man the helm on this process. And luckily my wife was helping, but she, this woman was just a complete shit show. And it was like, I needed to fill out certain paperwork and I'd get it into her and then she'd lose it and say, I need you to do that again.

• 2:05:06Speaker 02

  And it was just this for months and months and months. I ended up going to the VA in Fresno to get all my assessments for the disability rating. And my wife had to drive me, but I remember going into that and then going into more psychoses and the place becoming like this nightmarish funhouse. And they brought me in to assess me for how bad my PTSD was and I was explaining what was going on. You know, the psychoses and, and how bad I had gotten, how I'm not sleeping. I went in to see a TBI specialist and a nervous system specialist. And he, I remember he brought me into the room. And he just looked pissed off and he had me show my arms and he took this little thing that looked like a spiky pizza cutter.

• 2:05:49Speaker 02

  And he just zipped it up my arms really quick and he goes, you don't have any nerve damage and you don't have any TBI.

• 2:05:55Shawn Ryan?

  Holy-

• 2:05:56Speaker 02

  That was all he did. And then my, I came back out, he wouldn't let my wife in the room for that examination. And when I came back out to my wife, my wife's like, that was it? And, and he's like, yep, that's it. And so a lot of the stuff I did there, it was like, these people were just not even acknowledging what was going on.

• 2:06:13Shawn Ryan?

  Where is this again?

• 2:06:14Speaker 02

  Fresno VA in California. And I had a stack of medical records and I'd gotten it all put on the disc that they needed and like, they had so much medical information on me. And yet they were just completely ignoring it. Fortunately I found one guy there who was assessing me for the musculoskeletal injuries. And he actually read through the medical stuff and he's like, holy shit, man. He's like, listen, that, that neurologist that you saw won't give a rating to anybody. He's got a chip on his shoulder. He's pissed off. He doesn't want to be here. And it doesn't matter what you have going on. He's not going to look at you. He was like, I see what's going on with you and I'm going to help you the best I can.

• 2:06:55Speaker 02

  And so he helped me get a very robust, uh, package together for all my, uh, the muscle injuries related to the nervous system damage. And then everything was submitted and this process took about a year. Meanwhile, my wife is having to manage this shit show that is me in and out of psychoses day to day.

• 2:07:15Speaker 02

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

• 2:07:50Shawn Ryan?

  Fucking kidding?

• 2:07:51Speaker 02

  You're in active psychoses? You have all this other stuff and they completely disregarded it. So my only course of action was I had to fly out to Washington DC, still in and out of psychosis, still fucked up. Meanwhile, I was going to Stanford hospital and I was getting more surgeries on my leg that was really jacked up. That ended up just making my leg way worse in the long run. Because they actually, they use their medical students and they give a good discount or whatever it is to the military guys, but you get to go in and you get to be, you know, basically a lab rat for dissection for the medical students at Stanford and they fucked it up on me.

• 2:08:30Speaker 02

  I remember I got out of the surgery there and my throat hurt like a motherfucker and I'd been inundated before by others and normally it doesn't hurt that much. But dude, they must've had like, I remember that one of the, the residents that was going through training, coming in to get ready for that surgery. And he was like fumbling with the IV and he missed the IV and then actually he turned it on. And so I was just getting like doused in IV fluid. This dude was so nervous. And I, I'm pretty sure that they just fucked me up in that surgery. But anyways, I get my summer white uniform together and this is like, this becomes like a very formal, almost like disciplinary action.

• 2:09:11Speaker 02

  You feel like there, there, there's a lot of scrutiny against you, like you're lying. It's kind of how you're treated as you go into this process to, to do an appeal.

• 2:09:20Speaker 02

  But my wife and I fly out to DC with our baby boy. It's a shit show because again, I'm in and out of psychoses and I remember we go into this panel and you're in this little waiting room, waiting to see these three high ranking military individuals. I think they were all either oh five or oh six rank. And one was a flight surgeon, one was another naval aviator and one was a marine. And so you walk into this room, you have to stand at attention. They're up on an elevated platform behind these big, uh, big podiums. And they just kind of like look down at you and you have to state your name. And it's very like, you have to do this and this and this. So it's awkward and uncomfortable. And then they start grilling me. And the, the pilot that was on the panel thought I was just trying to get out of the military.

• 2:10:05Speaker 02

  So I could go fly for the airlines. Uh, it was very obvious. None of them had really even looked at my medical records or had any idea what was going on. Uh, except I think that marine had. And so those two like kind of reamed questions at me for probably about 10 minutes. And then the marine finally just kind of cut them off. And he's like, listen, you served your nation honorably and we're going to help you out. You and your family have a wonderful day. And so in that moment, they awarded me a hundred percent disability. But had that marine not been on that board and the panel is always rotating, uh, that the outcome could have come very differently. Luckily, at least one of these guys actually opened the folder in front of his face to see what was actually going on.

• 2:10:49Speaker 02

  Um, then, then I was out, man. Uh, it took several more months of waiting for the, the paperwork to go through. Uh, and then moved back to Northern Michigan with my family. We bought a small piece of property out in the middle of nowhere and, uh, continued that same treatment at the VA, which was just more problems, more pills, more pills, more problems. And that was the only solution. And when I said the Sarah quill is not helping, it's making me worse. It's making me feel shitty. It's not even helping my sleep anymore. The only answer is, well, that's because we need to give you a higher dose. And within three days of going in with that issue, they boosted me from 300 milligrams a night up to 450 milligrams a night of this medication.

• 2:11:34Speaker 02

  And within just a few days of that increase in the medication, my wife came home from an interview. Uh, she was getting a different job as a nurse. Uh, and so she left me at home with my mom and my son. So my mom could keep an eye on me because I was still in a bad spot. And when she got home, she kind of wondered where I was at. And she heard me rustling around in one of the rooms of the house. And when she came in, she found me, I was completely bare ass naked. At this point I had like shriveled up, like I had lost so much weight. I didn't even look like the same person. My skin was pale and placid. I had my body covered in all these scars. Uh, I had shaved off my hair in chunks for some reason. My eyebrows were missing. I had shaved off what facial hair I had.

• 2:12:17Speaker 02

  And the only thing I was wearing is I had a black garbage bag tied around my neck like a cape. Because I thought I was going to go out into the Northern Michigan snowy weather and fight crime like a superhero.

• 2:12:27Shawn Ryan?

  Um, holy shit.

• 2:12:29Speaker 02

  I was naked Batman. And so my wife, you know, being an ER doc and having dealt with psychotic patients was very calm. She called the VA and said what was happening. And they said, we're hanging up and we're calling the police. And very shortly thereafter, uh, this squad car pulls up in our driveway. This doughy looking police officer who looked like he had no idea what the fuck was going on, comes up to our house and tells my wife, he has to put me in the back of the squad car to take me to the hospital. And my wife's like, there's no way you're going to put him in the back of that car with what he has going on. So she loaded up our baby boy. My mom jumped in the backseat and then we drove, uh, towards the emergency room, which was about an hour drive from where we live.

• 2:13:11Speaker 02

  And on that ride, uh, I hallucinated that, uh, nuclear warhead had gone off at our home. And there was this plume of that nuclear blast like chasing us down. I, I hallucinated that there were trees and animals and vehicles flying through the sky, that the trees were like flopping over from the explosive force, like the, the sky was just like lightning. It was like fucking wildly vivid. And, um, eventually my wife gets me to the hospital. Apparently I got out of the vehicle and just started taking a leak on a bush in the front. And the security guard was right there. And he was trying to arrest me. And my wife's like, no, he's in a psychosis and we need to get him in there now.

• 2:13:55Speaker 02

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

• 2:14:40Speaker 02

  Eventually I came back to out of that. I had been driven by ambulance down to the VA inpatient psychiatric facility, uh, at Battle Creek. My family tried to get me in somewhere local, but the entire mental health facility, all the facilities are overrun right now because there's so many people dealing with psychological issues, um, that there was nothing available. And then they heard I was a veteran and they're like, well, we can send them to the VA. And so I was transferred by ambulance down to this facility. And when I came to on the floor of that cold room, uh, I thought I was in a prison cell. Um, and I also thought someone had chopped off my dick. Like I hallucinated that when I reached down there, it was just like mush and blood and gore.

• 2:15:24Speaker 02

  Uh, and I had a diaper on that where you could see the blood, which all was a hallucination, obviously. But it was like, I was still in and out of these hallucinations. Uh, but eventually I remember people kept walking up to what I thought was a locked prison door and looking through at me and I could see these eyeballs looking in. But eventually I kind of stood up and was able to open the door and walk out in this hallway. And it was just bright white fluorescent lighting and tile flooring. There's other veterans like moaning and murmuring, like basically human zombies walking around. And I walked down into like the, the little waiting area and it started having more moments of lucidity where I was actually realizing what was really going on.

• 2:16:07Speaker 02

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

• 2:16:52Speaker 02

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

• 2:17:34Speaker 02

  Yet every 15 minutes I was being awoken to make sure I was safe.

• 2:17:39Shawn Ryan?

  Um, that'll drive a motherfucker crazy in itself.

• 2:17:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:17:43Shawn Ryan?

  It's literally a technique.

• 2:17:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. So serious school, you get a little taste of that. You get, you get sleep deprived, you get malnourished, you get treated less than human. Uh, in perfectly healthy, robust humans, you know, SEALs, Marines, pilots, air crew, at the peak of their fitness and mental capabilities, go through that. And within, you know, a week of that experience, a few days of that experience, perfectly healthy people will have visual and auditory hallucinations. Now you take guys who are already in a really bad spot and you do the exact same shit to them? What the fuck do we think is going to happen? And my only thought is that it's intentional. It's intentionally designed to drive you into a hole to where you have to be overmedicated,

• 2:18:27Speaker 02

  which feeds that pharmaceutical machine that has control of the VA system. Uh, and it's just a cash cow for them. Drive people onto their meds, get you on the meds and keep you on your meds. That is their business model. And that's why things can't change at the moment. Uh, it is just that tentacle of fucking greed, uh, that is the pharmaceutical industry.

• 2:18:50Shawn Ryan?

  I used to dip all the time when I was in the SEAL teams. Nicotine was just part of the day. It was a ritual. So I understand why guys reach for it. You want that pouch, you want focus, you want something during work or training. But nicotine is addictive. And if you're using it around workouts, it can work against you in the gym. That's why I've been using Ultra pouches. Ultra gives you the pouch experience with zero nicotine and zero caffeine. And for training, that's huge because nicotine is a vasoconstrictor. It narrows your blood vessels and can work against the pump you're trying to get. Ultra uses clinically proven nootropics and adaptogens to deliver immediate focus

• 2:19:35Shawn Ryan?

  and smooth energy that lasts one to two hours. You pop one in about five minutes before a workout, run or work day, and it helps sharpen your mind and lift your energy without the nicotine, caffeine, crash or addiction. I keep these in my gym bag for that extra push before a workout. They're also great when you're working, fasting, or trying to stay locked in. And they have great flavors like cool mint, wintergreen, tropical, watermelon and blue raspberry. Lately I've been using the tropical flavor and I love it. Ultra is the ultimate guilt-free pouch, delivering instant focus and mental clarity without nicotine or caffeine.

• 2:20:18Shawn Ryan?

  New customers can use code SRS to get 15% off at takeultra.com. That's takeultra.com for 15% off with code SRS. After you purchase, they're going to ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you.

• 2:20:37Shawn Ryan?

  What year is this?

• 2:20:39Speaker 02

  This would have been early 2019.

• 2:20:42Shawn Ryan?

  Very recent.

• 2:20:45Speaker 02

  But as I, as I became more lucid and more frustrated seeing this treatment, I made a plan to escape. You know, I was making weapons with wet socks inside of other tube socks, tying them off, showing other, I call them prisoners, honestly, how to get out and how to make weapons. And my plan was late at night, I was gonna run out and pull this fire alarm. And when they took us outside for the fire, those of us that wanted to could run. So I had slowly been stockpiling like snacks and stuff and some warmer clothing because it's still like late winter in Michigan, so there's still snow on the ground. So I had kinda planned it all out and late at night, I snuck out to and pulled the fire alarm, thinking that they're gonna take us outside.

• 2:21:30Speaker 02

  But apparently somebody had already tried this trick. They immediately had the base security there, armed security, and they forced me into a room. And then Mike, who was a really good nurse that worked there, is like, he had a syringe and he goes, "Listen, man, we can either do this the easy way or the hard way." And I trusted him, I didn't trust much of the other staff. It was like, "All right, Mike, stick it in my ass." And he takes this thing and he shoves it in my butt cheek and injects me with what's called hell doll. And it should just be called hell. Because as this stuff entered my bloodstream, I felt like there were insects trying to crawl their way through my skin. I felt extremely restless, like all I wanted to do was tear my own skin off and run and scream.

• 2:22:11Speaker 02

  And Mike would pace up and down the hallways with me as I'm just like screaming and yelling and just trying to get this shit out of my system. And eventually I collapsed.

• 2:22:21Shawn Ryan?

  What the fuck is it?

• 2:22:23Speaker 02

  It's anti-psychotic medication that just basically, it's a fucking nightmare. It's a torturous experience, but it's what they use to like shut you down if you're being unruly. And I came to in just like a drug-induced stupor, like literally drooling on myself. And I had been voluntarily admitted to this facility. I had gone there on my own will. I wanted to be there to get help. And when I saw that this was the opposite of help, it was not a healing environment, I wanted to get the fuck out. And even though I was voluntary, and they should have released me when I wanted to be released, they refused. And now that this incident had happened, they used as an opportunity to commit me to the facility.

• 2:23:09Speaker 02

  And while I'm literally drooling on myself, I go in to see this female attorney who's supposed to be my legal representation. And she puts a pen in my hand, she moves my hand on the paper and says, "Just sign here." And I just kinda scribbled my hand, and then she moved the documents and I scribbled. Unknowingly, what I was doing was I had just committed myself to the facility without any trial, without any, any process really, other than this lady putting a pen in my impaired hand and having me somehow legally sign these documents. And by doing that, I was now committed to this facility. They could tell me when I could leave, which they already were doing illegally prior. And then it also stripped me of my constitutional right to bear arms.

• 2:23:54Speaker 02

  Immediately, I was put onto a list, the lean network, as if I committed a crime. So if I'm ever pulled over by the police, I pop up in their network. And this is, this is an American veteran just trying to get fucking help for severe psychological issues induced by the medication that I had been given. But I was broken, man. I was just a drooly zombie at that point. I became just another one of these dudes walking around the hallways, drooling on myself, murmuring to myself. And eventually with the advocacy of my family, my mom being in healthcare, my dad having been in healthcare, my wife being an ER nurse, they were able to advocate to get me out of the facility

• 2:24:36Speaker 02

  and bring me back to Northern Michigan, back to my little piece of property and reconnect with my family. But now the burden of taking care of me all comes back onto my family.

• 2:24:46Shawn Ryan?

  How long were you in there?

• 2:24:47Speaker 02

  I was in there for 40 days.

• 2:24:51Speaker 02

  Which dude, it was, it was a fucking nightmare, man.

• 2:24:54Shawn Ryan?

  Sounds like it.

• 2:24:55Speaker 02

  And I was so broken after that, man. I couldn't really read anymore. All the, I don't even know what all they had me on at this point. I was just confused and, and the only thing that would give me any relief was eating ice cream, drinking booze and smoking cannabis would give me like a little relief from like just the fucking misery I was feeling inside. I could barely do the dishes. It was miserable for my wife, like the only reason that we didn't get divorced was because she was afraid that I was pretty good, I was good at masking and acting like I was okay when I wasn't. And she was afraid that if it went to a custody hearing, I might earn custody of our children and then I would harm them in another unpredictable psychosis.

• 2:25:41Speaker 02

  So she was stuck in this fucking nightmare with me, afraid that I would harm her children.

• 2:25:48Speaker 02

  And it went on like that for years, man. It was dark. All I wanted to do was just wander off into the woods and in my own life, my little boy and little girl would come up to ask me to play and I would push them away and tell them to leave me alone. And I was just a fucking miserable, broken shell of a human being. All I could feel was betrayal for the government that I had served, anger and pain, man.

• 2:26:14Speaker 02

  And I had a friend who knew I was getting really bad, that same friend Matt, that had been like an older brother to me. And he reached out and he goes, "Hey, man, we're gonna go on a mountain bike trip up to Marquette, Michigan", which is phenomenal mountain biking, because he knew I was in a bad spot. And he planned it all out, he pulled up out front and he helped me load up my bike and he took me up to Marquette. And we spent a few days up there just riding bikes and being in nature. And when that trip was done, he gave me a book by Rich Roll. It's called Finding Ultra. It was basically his story of being, basically struggling with alcohol, being a corporate lawyer, like hating his life and finding his way back to health through endurance sports.

• 2:26:56Speaker 02

  And so I read that book and kind of like a little bit of flicker of hope came on. And so I started like mountain biking again. I couldn't really run at that time because my leg was still so jacked up from that botched surgery, but I could ride a mountain bike. And so I started riding and then I opened my eyes to some books by Michael Pollan. There's one called In Defense of Food. And I started reading how broken and corrupt the food system is. And so really cleaned up my diet. I already ate pretty healthy, but I didn't realize how much of the food that I was eating was still poisoning me. And then I read the book by Michael Pollan, which I was really struggling to read, but I could read like a paragraph or so at a time and listen to the audiobook at the same time and retain enough of information from it. But I started to see like there was another way forward.

• 2:27:41Speaker 02

  And the book that really changed it was In Defense of Food, or not In Defense of Food, How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, which is now a Netflix documentary on the use of psychedelic assisted therapy to treat mental health issues. And so it opened my eyes to that. The VA was still the same. You just gotta keep taking your meds, that's the only option. And they didn't understand how miserable I was, or maybe they did, they just didn't know what to do.

• 2:28:08Speaker 02

  But I started seeking out psychedelic assisted therapy. I reached out to Vet Solutions and I didn't really qualify for their program because I didn't have the combat experience and I wasn't from the special forces. And they were, I mean, as they've described it before, it's like Schindler's List for them. Marcus and Amber Capone are trying to serve everybody they possibly can, and there's so many people that need this. But I didn't really qualify, so I didn't get in originally. But they referred me to another nonprofit organization called Warrior Angels Foundation. And those guys were doing, it was called the Four by Four by Forty Eight Challenge, which is from David Goggins. It's basically you run four miles every four hours for 48 hours straight.

• 2:28:52Speaker 02

  So you end up running 48 miles over two days. And they were putting together a fundraiser for this thing that I had gotten an email about. And I was like, you know, I don't think I can run that, like, why would I even get involved in this? But it was something in me that was like, why don't you engage with it? And they were doing a fundraiser. And for the first time, I went onto their site where they were doing this fundraiser and I put a little bit about my story. It was the first time I had ever shared anything about what I was going through publicly. I felt internally that I was like a piece of shit, a letdown to everybody in my community. And I had isolated myself from everything and everybody.

• 2:29:27Speaker 02

  But for something called it, I needed to share a little of my story. And within a week of putting that up, they had, I had raised almost $10,000 on my fundraiser page. And so Adam Marr and Andrew Marr, who were running that foundation, reached out to me and said, "Hey, man, what are you doing this week? Do you wanna come down to Texas? We'll fly you down, put you up and you can be part of the event." And I was like, "All right, I'll come." So they flew me down to Texas where they put on this event. And dude, it was like finding a community of so many other individuals who had been through the same shit. There were Marine Raiders, there were SEALs, Rangers, Green Berets. Marcus and Amber Capone were there. Lieutenant General Christopher Miller was there, who had served as Defense, Secretary of Defense under Trump's first term.

• 2:30:12Speaker 02

  But a lot of really incredible people in this space. And every veteran that I talked to had such a similar story. They had been a high-performing, hard-charging individual in the military. Things started, the wheels started to fall off the bus from that operator syndromes that people are experiencing and the combination of mental health issues, the PTSD, the TBI, all these things compounding to where your life starts falling apart. And when we reached out for help, the answer was take these meds. And we all got sucked down into the same fucking dark hole where our fucking lives fell apart. We lost our minds and a lot of people fucking...

• 2:30:50Speaker 02

  Almost didn't make it. And there was every single guy I talked to as we were doing this run, phase by phase, had a similar story. And I realized like, this is, this isn't just me that's suffering through this. This is happening to all of these other veterans. And that's just the recipe that they're using to pump people on these meds. And it's so fucked. And it's poisoning these people. But dude, it was like being welcomed into a community where I finally fit in and gave me some hope. And in that, in that 48 hours, we had a peyote ceremony with a Native American group. And for the first time, I felt really connected to something again, after being disconnected for all those years. And it was something told me that I had a sense of purpose still. Like I needed to keep moving forward, that

• 2:31:31Speaker 02

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

• 2:32:15Speaker 02

  human being again. And I came back to my family. And I remember telling my wife how good I felt. And she just thought I was being manic. She didn't believe that this was genuine or gonna last. And it took years for her to start to see that I was actually getting better.

• 2:32:32Shawn Ryan?

  Years, huh?

• 2:32:33Speaker 02

  Years of integration. I got involved with the Wisdom Dojo, which was the AMP Dojo originally, and started doing meditation through them. I was originally hooked up with a dude named Moose, who was my integration coach from Heroic Hearts Project. I don't know if you know Moose?

• 2:32:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, he was mine.

• 2:32:49Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 2:32:49Shawn Ryan?

  He was my integration coach, too.

• 2:32:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he was, he was showing me this breath work. He was showing me Wim Hof breathing. At that point, I was like, this is some woo woo bullshit, you know. But here's a Navy SEAL who, who says he can hold his breath for four minutes after he blows all his air out. So I want to see what this is about. And that's kind of what pulled me into it. And I did the breath work and I felt good. And soon enough, after I had practiced with Moose a few times, like I was holding my breath for a really long time with the air blown out of my lungs. And I was like, holy shit, I feel really peaceful, too. And then he introduced me to the Wisdom Dojo. And I went through their meditation program, eventually becoming an instructor for them, and still am.

• 2:33:27Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, right on, man.

• 2:33:28Speaker 02

  And then that kind of gave me a sense of purpose. That gave me like a daily connection to the divine within, like without the need of medicine. I experienced a number of other psychedelic experiences over the course of those years. Iboga, which was incredibly powerful, the ultimate healing tool that I've ever experienced, healing my nervous system, healing my brain. A network of nonprofit organizations basically gave me access to all the things to get me better. Defenders of Freedom brought me down to Texas for a TBI treatment. A generous couple in Austin, Clay and Eleanor Womack invited me into their facility, where I received like state of the art lab work, hyperbaric oxygen therapy,

• 2:34:10Speaker 02

  stem cell therapy with that. And I came out of that month long program with them, just like, feeling like a fucking superhuman again. All these things were being healed, piece by piece, physically. And I started to gain a better understanding of what had been off all the time, which the physiology of my brain had been destroyed from that ejection. And then when I went back trying to charge at it hard again, it started to unravel even more. From the G forces, from the drinking culture, all these things, the not sleeping well, eroded the physiology of my brain. And it was a physical issue with my brain that led to all this detriment. But it's treated like it's purely psychology, purely

• 2:34:51Speaker 02

  just a PTSD rating. And it's actually, the physiology is off. The, you know, the hormones are out of whack. The brain is like, not firing the way it's supposed to. And it causes all this chaos that gets labeled as PTSD. But kind of came to understand that it was a much bigger whole human part, you know, it was physical, it was spiritual, emotional. And when I started to address those issues, I just fucking got my life back, man. I went from barely able to do the dishes, being told that I just had to take my pills for the rest of my life, to becoming a loving husband, a loving father of my two children,

• 2:35:33Speaker 02

  who I'm so lucky still to have after the hell that they went through. To writing my book, getting my story out to share what's going on, you know, underneath the medical system and behind the doors at the VA. Because I know this is something that's affecting people in the military and the VA, and, and in the entire healthcare community, man. Our, our medical system is so fucking broken. Like, if you need to get surgery and you need to get put back together, our medical system is awesome for that. But when it comes to chronic health conditions and long term health, it is, it is very broken, very broken.

• 2:36:09Shawn Ryan?

  Your wife stuck with you through all that?

• 2:36:13Speaker 02

  She did.

• 2:36:13Shawn Ryan?

  That's a saint.

• 2:36:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. She's an angel, man. She's an angel. And it, she fucking went down into the depths of hell to pull me out of that. And it fucking burned her wings off, man. And it scarred her.

• 2:36:25Shawn Ryan?

  How are you guys doing today?

• 2:36:27Speaker 02

  Dude, she, she fortunately got picked up by, by the Hope Project, which is a spinoff from Heroic Hearts Project that serves the spouses. And she recently got to go down to Mexico and experience medicine. And is starting to get to do her own healing. She's in the Vajra Ocean, which is part of the Wisdom, well, separate from the Wisdom Dojo, but a similar meditation program with the same folks that helps give the wives access to mindfulness, breathwork and meditation, to start to heal. And she's, I mean, she's a saint. She, she went through hell and she's, but it hurt her, man. It put her through a lot of hell. And for a while, I think there was a lot of resentment that I was getting

• 2:37:10Speaker 02

  help. And she wasn't. And she was seeing me starting to get better. And she was almost maybe a little angry about that, which is pretty common, I hear. Which is why they started the Hope Project, was like to give the women that had been through hell, some healing as well. But we're doing so much better, man. We, our relationship, I mean, not to say there's not still struggles, man. But from where it was, it's, it's a miracle that it's gotten to where we are now. To have love in our home, love with our children, dude, we got just two incredible little kids that are so bright, man. Really a gift. And now after being through all that, you know, I see that it's all been a gift. It's

• 2:37:55Speaker 02

  all been to put me where I am today, where I have so much love in my heart, such a purpose of service to so many people. It's all been a gift, man. Now, now I get to be a coach. I do integration coaching with people. I work for Sharp Performance with Steve Bunting, who he had.

• 2:38:16Shawn Ryan?

  You work with Sharp, too?

• 2:38:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:38:18Shawn Ryan?

  What a great organization.

• 2:38:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're kick ass, man. And it's helping a lot. It's helping a lot of people in the firefighter community, law enforcement, military.

• 2:38:27Shawn Ryan?

  I love what they're doing.

• 2:38:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's been a gift to get to be there and help them with that. I've been doing, uh, public speaking. I just got picked up by Jason Redman and their team over at Eagle Rise.

• 2:38:41Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 2:38:42Speaker 02

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

• 2:38:57Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 2:38:58Speaker 02

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

• 2:39:39Speaker 02

  I wanted to create something to serve those folks. But dude, just, yeah, doing a little bit of everything to try to help, man.

• 2:39:48Shawn Ryan?

  When's the last time you went to the VA?

• 2:39:50Speaker 02

  Years ago, man. I won't go back into that system.

• 2:39:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I don't blame you. I do, you know, I had Doug Collins on, he's the director of the VA right now.

• 2:40:04Speaker 02

  I think I listened to that episode.

• 2:40:05Shawn Ryan?

  I know he's trying like hell to make some changes. I don't know what all changes he's made, but he definitely gives a shit.

• 2:40:13Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:40:13Shawn Ryan?

  I will say that.

• 2:40:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I think those guys are just handcuffed, man. The fucking tentacles of the pharmaceutical industry get to control the show.

• 2:40:21Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that and just the bureaucracy itself. I mean, it's, it's horrible.

• 2:41:27Shawn Ryan?

  Have you heard of Envy Mind Health? I'm just curious.

• 2:41:29Speaker 02

  No, I don't think I've heard of that one.

• 2:41:31Shawn Ryan?

  This is, um, a friend of mine, SEAL Johnny Wilson.

• 2:41:36Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:41:37Shawn Ryan?

  Who started this company. Do you know Johnny?

• 2:41:38Speaker 02

  I've met Johnny before, yeah.

• 2:41:40Shawn Ryan?

  Great guy.

• 2:41:41Speaker 02

  Johnny Wilson, yeah, he's, uh, he was in a motorcycle accident not too long ago, right?

• 2:41:47Shawn Ryan?

  What? I think you're thinking of somebody else.

• 2:41:49Speaker 02

  He runs Coast to Coast?

• 2:41:51Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 2:41:52Speaker 02

  This is a different Johnny?

• 2:41:53Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 2:41:54Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:41:55Shawn Ryan?

  He started a couple of nonprofits in the SEAL community. I can't remember the ex. I think I know, but I don't want to say the wrong name. But, um, but, uh, then kind of turned that over. Uh, like it was up and running, turned it over. He, this is actually, I think this, I'm curious to hear what you think about this. Cause I think this is a pivotal moment and I think it is. I think it could be just as impactful as kind of the rediscovery of psychedelics within the veteran community. And, um, so he has come up with this.

• 2:42:38Shawn Ryan?

  This company where you wear the wearable devices like a whoop or the aura ring or do you wear any of those?

• 2:42:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. Um, I actually just got a aura ring from a nonprofit that's tracking my biometrics. But that's been really helpful just to see sleep quality and.

• 2:42:53Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so that's what this is.

• 2:42:55Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:42:56Shawn Ryan?

  This basically takes your, takes your health data and you kind of build your own network. So maybe, you know, it, whoever, for me, it might be guys that I was in a sniper hide with, or just friends of mine that were in service with me. And it puts you in a little network. And so it monitors, you know, I mean, obviously it monitors your, your, your, you know, your sleep, your, all your vitals, all that kind of stuff, right? And so what happens is, you know, they get a baseline and then as things start to deteriorate,

• 2:43:37Shawn Ryan?

  your network is alerted, you know, and they don't, they're alerted like, hey.

• 2:43:43Speaker 02

  That's clever.

• 2:43:44Shawn Ryan?

  Sean's health is, Sean's vitals is starting to, you know, he's losing sleep. His heart rate's a little elevated, whatever.

• 2:43:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:43:52Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and, and it doesn't tell, it doesn't tell everybody in the network like, hey, this is everything that's happening. It's just a little, hey, vitals are deteriorating a little bit. Maybe you want to check on Kagan.

• 2:44:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44:06Shawn Ryan?

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

• 2:44:17Speaker 02

  I think that's, that's a great idea.

• 2:44:19Shawn Ryan?

  I think that's a fucking really good idea too, because it's not anybody having to ask for help, having to be weak. It is triggered by biometrics.

• 2:44:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44:30Shawn Ryan?

  By vitals and then your buddies, your buddies that you want to check on you are the ones checking on you.

• 2:44:37Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, I think that can prevent a lot of issues.

• 2:44:39Shawn Ryan?

  I do too, man. I need to, I want to talk to Doug about this because I think this, I think this could be really big.

• 2:44:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:44:46Shawn Ryan?

  And, and you're not going to have to jump through the legal hoops to get that thing going like you are with psychedelics.

• 2:44:52Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 2:44:53Shawn Ryan?

  Not discarding psychedelics by any means.

• 2:44:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:44:56Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I think the push.

• 2:44:58Speaker 02

  We need quicker solutions though.

• 2:45:00Shawn Ryan?

  Exactly. And the push for psychedelics is, I mean, it's, it's just growing and growing that, that executive order. We, we just did a thing here in Tennessee where we all went up to the, the house in the Senate. I went with this woman, uh, Ricky Harris, guy Alex West, who was the youngest SEAL to ever get into development group. And we actually got the shit passed in the house and the Tennessee Senate. So they're going to reschedule IbaGain so that we can do research. Now we got to find funding, but.

• 2:45:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's exciting. What's happened in Texas too.

• 2:45:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, right. So that's the same initiative.

• 2:45:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:45:36Shawn Ryan?

  There's like Texans for IbaGain. This was Tennesseans for IbaGain. And then, then, then there's just Americans for IbaGain. But I think every state has one of these organizations and, um.

• 2:45:49Speaker 02

  Is that through the Veteran Mental Health Leadership Coalition that you guys are doing the advocacy for? I worked with them going out to DC when we were advocating for MDMA assisted therapy, which unfortunately got shut down. Uh, at that, at that one, um, but they've been doing a lot of good work.

• 2:46:06Shawn Ryan?

  I actually have not heard of that organization.

• 2:46:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, um, Adam Marr, who used to run the Warrior Angel Foundation that I did that run with. And first got me like in the door into the world, the nutraceuticals and lab work and all of that. Uh, he now runs this Veteran Mental Health Leadership Coalition, which is people from all over the veteran communities that have an interest in help and support, helps put people together to go when there is stuff on a ballot or something legal going down that we can get people there, uh, you know, talking to, talking to the legislators to try to get things moving in the right direction.

• 2:46:43Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man. Right on. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:46:49Shawn Ryan?

  You got any ideas? Anything else? Have you done MDMA assisted therapy?

• 2:46:54Speaker 02

  I have.

• 2:46:55Shawn Ryan?

  Have you done it with your wife?

• 2:46:56Speaker 02

  I did.

• 2:46:57Shawn Ryan?

  How was that?

• 2:46:58Speaker 02

  It was really helpful.

• 2:46:59Shawn Ryan?

  I'll bet you learned a lot.

• 2:47:01Speaker 02

  It was a resentment inoculator.

• 2:47:03Shawn Ryan?

  That's a good way to put it.

• 2:47:05Speaker 02

  That was, that was a big help. Um.

• 2:47:08Shawn Ryan?

  Do you guys continue to do that?

• 2:47:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we're, we're coming up on due for another session with it. We did it, uh, this winter. Um, but.

• 2:47:18Shawn Ryan?

  How do you guys do it?

• 2:47:20Speaker 02

  Um.

• 2:47:21Shawn Ryan?

  Do you do it with a therapist? Do you do it by yourself?

• 2:47:24Speaker 02

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

• 2:47:48Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I've done it like that with my wife and.

• 2:47:55Speaker 02

  That's the way to do it.

• 2:47:56Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, so much stuff to go through, stuff I didn't even, just like any psychedelic thing, right? All kinds of stuff comes up that you're not expecting, but it's, I always say, you know, it's, it's.

• 2:48:13Shawn Ryan?

  It seems to be the perfect way to receive and transmit information

• 2:48:20Shawn Ryan?

  to each other.

• 2:48:20Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:48:22Shawn Ryan?

  Where it all comes from a good place. You know, it's from a good place. You're able to receive. You're able to send and there is no resentment, no anger. Some of the shit can be kind of hard to hear, but.

• 2:48:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you're just like embraced by it.

• 2:48:41Shawn Ryan?

  But you know, like.

• 2:48:43Speaker 02

  Makes all those impossible.

• 2:48:44Shawn Ryan?

  You know, it all comes from a place of love. And so you're able to stomach it without,

• 2:48:51Shawn Ryan?

  without being defensive.

• 2:48:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. It makes those impossible conversations possible.

• 2:48:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:57Speaker 02

  All the stuff that just builds up and festers and turns into resentment and bad shit that comes from it. And it just clears that slate, man. It just, that was, yeah, that was really impactful for our, you know, cause she's been caring a lot with having seen me like that and like trying to fall back in love with somebody who was a fucking different person for years, um, has been really challenging as it would be for anybody. But allowing her to see who I am now, not the person that I was in that drug induced stupor for all those years.

• 2:49:38Speaker 02

  And allowing her to feel safe again with me, to open her heart back to me so she can see that guy that she married years ago, that I'm still here and I'm better than I've ever been in my life, like just so full of life and content. And, you know, she sees me with our kids. She sees me the way I love them and take care of them and. But sometimes like I try to reach out to her and it's, it's hard for her. Sometimes it's hard for her to want to reach back.

• 2:50:05Shawn Ryan?

  I can imagine.

• 2:50:06Speaker 02

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

• 2:50:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:29Speaker 02

  But, uh, yeah, it's been transformational for her and, and now we speak like the same language, uh, spiritually, which has been really helpful. Cause I think for a while it was a lot of kind of skepticism on her end and how genuine I was with all of this and her kind of wondering like, what's this meditation all about? But now she sees me go to these meditation retreats. I'll go do like a silent meditation retreat with the Wisdom Dojo and I'll come back and dude, it's like better than a psychedelic journey, just sitting with yourself in silence for a week straight. It's like a slow motion psychedelic experience with no medicine.

• 2:51:07Shawn Ryan?

  What is that like? I mean, do you literally just sit there for a week straight without any communication? No talking? What, what is it?

• 2:51:14Speaker 02

  No talking, no eye contact and just.

• 2:51:18Shawn Ryan?

  No eye contact?

• 2:51:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. And at this point to go on those retreats, you've, you've progressed through a lot of the training. So you're pretty decent at meditating, but man, when you sit for that duration, you're sitting for 12 hours a day just meditating, doing nothing else. Uh, and you can get up and go to the bathroom. There's still meals, but you don't interact with anybody else the whole time. So you're just kind of in your own head with your own thoughts. And the first few days can be kind of abrupt and harsh, like a lot of shit coming up, a lot of emotion, a lot of past stuff. Um, that can be really heavy when you're just sitting there. Um, but what I have found for myself at least, and everybody's a little different, but by the end of it, like, it's like the, the hard drive got, gets defragged.

• 2:52:02Speaker 02

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

• 2:52:45Speaker 02

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

• 2:53:27Speaker 02

  But um, dude, it is absolutely incredible to be able to just sit without any, any medicine and get to that place and check in with it daily if you want.

• 2:53:37Shawn Ryan?

  Do you see other people?

• 2:53:38Speaker 02

  Do you mean like?

• 2:53:40Shawn Ryan?

  What would be the difference to go into this retreat versus just going out in the woods for a week?

• 2:53:45Speaker 02

  I mean, you certainly could do it in the woods for a week. It's kind of nice to see how they do it.

• 2:53:50Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:53:51Speaker 02

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

• 2:54:33Speaker 02

  But in that stillness, you get to feel that you've always been exactly where you need to be, that you're already good enough, that you are love and light and that you don't have to strive anymore. You don't have to be grasping. And it's so healthy to just sit in that stillness, man. It, it's, it's something that is so undervalued in our civilization. But when you can learn to calm the body, to settle the nervous system, to allow the mind to settle. So there's not just that constant chatter of the ego. There is just so much peace and you hear people talk about enlightenment as it's like this destination that you have to go, this mountain that you have to climb, that's this

• 2:55:16Speaker 02

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

• 2:55:59Speaker 02

  And man, like, and it's the ultimate technology for finding peace and love within oneself.

• 2:56:05Shawn Ryan?

  I have not meditated in years.

• 2:56:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:56:09Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know.

• 2:56:10Speaker 02

  It's easy to fall away from. I'm guilty of it too, man. I'll have times in my life where I stop and then like life starts turning into a shit show again. And if I can reset and get back into it, it's like, it's just like living the day to day moments from a state of peace and it completely transforms everything that happens around me. All my interactions with people, all the things that would have been an argument or stressful or turn into just so much more peaceful when you can bring that presence into any situation. And I'm no pro, I still fuck it up. I still have bad days. I still sometimes want to murder people when I'm driving in my car, you know? But, but the more I can do that, you know, it really, it really helps a lot.

• 2:56:55Speaker 02

  It's really beautiful.

• 2:56:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, man. Well, we're wrapping up the interview here. So I got one question left for you.

• 2:57:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, fire away.

• 2:57:03Shawn Ryan?

  If your wife were sitting here right now, what would you say to her?

• 2:57:07Speaker 02

  And I would tell her how much I love her, that she's this angel that saved me from hell. And now that we've been through that hell, we get to, we get to thrive together. We have the two most beautiful little children. We have everything. And now it's her turn to get to enjoy what she, what she earned by pulling me through that darkness. And I would do just hold her, man. I love her so much.

• 2:57:35Shawn Ryan?

  Good for you, man. Well, Kagan, it was an honor, brother.

• 2:57:41Speaker 02

  Likewise.

• 2:57:42Shawn Ryan?

  It was an honor to interview you.

• 2:57:43Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me on this and let me share the story with the world, Sean.

• 2:57:48Shawn Ryan?

  My pleasure.

• 2:57:49Speaker 02

  It's incredible what you built and shining a lot of light on some dark fucking corners of the world, man, but it needs to come out. The only way to heal is to acknowledge that the wound is festering, man, and to clean it out. And yeah, it's a wild time to be alive, but I'm so glad the truth is coming out, man.

• 2:58:06Shawn Ryan?

  Me too. And I'm just huge props to what you're doing, especially the stuff with Sharp. Those guys are fucking awesome.

• 2:58:14Speaker 02

  Heck yeah.

• 2:58:15Shawn Ryan?

  So it's cool to know that you're a part of that.

• 2:58:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wish, I wish I had access to that coaching when I was, had my struggles, man. Cause had they coached me in the direction of holistic healing right off the bat, I'd still be flying fighter jets. Man, the amount of money that the military is probably losing by losing the experience and all these trained people as they burn out at such rapid rates and the CO communities and the fighter communities. If they would give guys access to that coaching and it could keep people so healthy and so strong for so much longer, man.

• 2:58:47Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe one day.

• 2:58:50Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 2:58:51Shawn Ryan?

  They gotta give a shit first, though.

• 2:58:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. The Navy, I don't think even wants to acknowledge that TBI is a thing.

• 2:58:57Shawn Ryan?

  They don't want to acknowledge it.

• 2:58:58Speaker 02

  Just opens a can of worms.

• 2:58:59Shawn Ryan?

  Cause then there's a problem.

• 2:59:00Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:59:01Shawn Ryan?

  But that talks for another day. All right, brother.

• 2:59:06Speaker 02

  Thank you, Sean.

• 2:59:07Shawn Ryan?

  No matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.