The Psychedelic SEAL with Diego Ugalde

Participant #1:

Welcome to the Get to Vet podcast, where we bridge the knowledge gaps in the military transition process so you can focus on what's ahead.

Participant #1:

Hey, Get to Vet listeners, this is Mike. And now from a personal a Disclaimer. Although I am active duty military, I'm not an official spokesperson of the United States Navy. Any of my views expressed on the Get to Vet podcast are based on my personal experience. Thanks for listening. Hey there, get Tibet. This is Trevor Maxwell. And with me as always, Mike Riggs. Back again from the old highest and number two. Yes. So we're on a podcast and binge this week for recording a whole bunch of episodes, trying to get ready for the fall season because we got other things to worry about, like mountaineer football is coming up soon. Absolutely. So today, this is a topic that I've wanted to learn a lot more about. And to our guests today, Diego Ugall Day. Did I say that right? I did say that right. Fair enough. Yeah, we'll go with that. Yeah. It's funny because Diego and I worked together way long time ago, like 15 years ago. But we brought him on to talk about something that I think is really cool and I'll let him tell you about it. So, Diego, go ahead and introduce yourself. My name is Diego. Some people pronounce it Ugalde, which is where the name comes from. It's kind of like the best region of Spain and France area.

Participant #1:

Yeah. So you and I were together in the Seal teams. I retired in 2018 and we started the Trident approach, which is personal team and leadership development organization. But we go very deep. And part of what allows us to go very deep is I, along with most of the rest of my team, have been thankfully exposed to psychedelic medicines. And so once we understood kind of what that was all about, it came about in a very kind of unusual way. But once we got introduced, we were like, man, there's nothing at all about what I ever heard about psychedelics in my life. And with deeper exploration, I just started to come to understand self awareness and awareness of things around me in a way that I never had before. Now with the Trident approach, we don't give psychedelic medicines, but what we do is we take the lessons learned that we got from the medicines. We help people understand themselves and other people on a deeper level, which is something that's been really helpful for us and for them as well. That's pretty cool. How did you get into that? One of my instructors is smacked up pretty good with posttraumatic stress. And then we have our weekly meetings and he's like, Diego, I'm not going to be able to make the meeting next week going down to Mexico. And there's an organization called Vets Veterans exploring treatment solutions that enables special operations guys who are recovering from either post traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury, chemical or behavioral addiction, and they treat them with the use of psychedelic medicines. I had never really heard much about it, to be honest. And I was like, all right, cool. We'll see when you come back if everything goes well. And he came back the following week and he's like, Man, I got to introduce you to these guys and happen. There is some sort of post career Seal influence that goes along with vets. And so the person that introduced me to was a former Seal as well. And we were talking all this time about the Trident approach. And I thought he wanted to work with the Trident approach. So at the end of the conversation, I was like, So what do you do? I was like, well, they actually wanted me to be there's a company that Bets also works with. It's called The Mission Within. The Mission Within actually wanted me to be the CEO of the organization. I was like, Bro, I don't know anything about this. Drugs isn't my thing. I don't know anything about it. So he's like, Why don't you come down to Mexico and see what we got going? And so it just so happens that my first day in the Seal teams, I heard about this kind of legendary Seal, this Seal that was more aggressive and more kind of a couple of steps above the rest of us in terms of just sheer aggression and almost violence. Some of the groups that we work with were some of the most aggressive guys in the teams. And even they were having to hold this guy back, dude, you can't do that. He's like, You're American. So here's the deal. He wasn't born American. He was born a foreign national, became an American citizen. And so when we were when they were in Iraq, they were like, Dude, you can't do that stuff here. It's like, you're Americans. You're here to play a padcake. I'm here to win the war. And so I'd never met the guy, never seen him or anything, but he just had this legend about him. And he happened to be there in Mexico that weekend that I went to go down. And he had just come off one of the medicines called Ibagame. And then he was just about to go into a second medicine called Five Meo. And the bottom line is with this guy is if there was anybody who had skeletons in her closet or experienced or seen or even done some of the worst things imaginable to other humans, it was this guy and seeing him go through his process and coming out, and he looked me straight in the face and said, I'm going to have a better life. And that blew me away. And so he wasn't the only one there. There were a few other guys that were there. And we went back on Monday where their families were kind of receiving them and I'll never forget this. There was a wife in the parking lot walking towards her husband and she just started crying in the parking lot. And she told me later was because she saw for the first time that she had her husband back. So the deal is these guys are showing up with the life is out of their eyes or skin is just not necessarily right. And they've got this gaze going on. It seems like who they really are is absent of them because of their experiences. And when the wife saw her husband after four days of anthiogenic treatment, she knew instantly just upon site that she had them back. And so it's really powerful stuff. And I was lucky enough to get connected with these guys. And I've been down there several weekends supporting just in a support mechanism. When you see what this is doing for guys, it just motivates you to get as involved as possible. It's pretty awesome. I'm trying to rack my brain of who that is that you're talking about. We'll talk about it offline. Yeah. I was just like, man, it's hard to say, like the most aggressive because there's a lot of aggressive guys. Yeah. That's part of the communities. When you think about you have your community that's fully aggressive. And then there's one guy, hey, you got to calm down. That says something. That's cool. I've heard a lot of stuff about I listen to Joe Rogan's podcast a lot and he talks about all that. And I don't think he probably listens to us as much as we listen to him, but

Participant #1:

I've heard lots of good things about that. But maybe you could talk a little bit about it too, because I continue to read more and more articles about how this is becoming like people are looking at this as a more popular, like a viable course of action as far as treatment goes for guys with PTSD. Yeah. So I think I can only ever speak for myself and what I think is going on with the guys that I'm sitting there over the course of these weekends. But I think probably the biggest thing that psychedelics offers is a truer perspective on what life really is. From what I can tell for sure in my own experience and from what I'm observing in the American culture or the Western culture, I'll say is that we're taught a lot of things that are very damaging to the self and to the mind and all these things. But we don't know. In fact, we think that that is like the litmus that's the goal of how to perform. So in terms of winning the rat race, somebody who wins the rat race, they're tremendously successful and really happy and all of these things. And at the end of the day, it's all ego driven. And I'll just say just really quickly, before psychedelic medicine, I didn't even realize that I had an ego when you know me, I never walked into a room and just thought that I was better than anybody never did. But Conversely, what I did was every time I walked into a room I didn't think that I belong there. I didn't think that I deserved to be there. I felt like I was in the company of superheroes when I was in the field teams and that I was just kind of lucky to be there. What I didn't realize at the time is that's how my ego was manifesting itself. And so psychedelics really kind of show you what these limiting factors are or what these may be, concepts that you may not necessarily be aware of or understand. And it gives you a glimpse into what really is important, which I have come to know for myself as being spiritually connected. And I hadn't a spiritual connection. I grew up religious, but I kind of fell out of the whole thing just because I was reading certain things in the Bible. And wait a minute, that doesn't make sense. And so over time I think I've been pretty heavily involved in the Church myself, absent of my family for probably about four or five years. And I was like, wait a minute, this just isn't right for me. So I was very spiritually disconnected. I didn't have any grounding in that way. I just didn't really know what was on. And I was actually kind of fine with that. But with psychedelics, you understand that there is something bigger and that what we see and what we understand is not all there is. There's way more unexplainable amount of more out there. And when it shows you that, then everything changes. And the hard thing I think to explain to people, especially if for people who have never done any kind of drug at all. Sometimes when you have these conversations, people say, dude, you were on a psychedelic drug. Like what do you expect? So they relate the experience to a complete hallucination that is completely driven in the drug. And it's just hard to have those conversations because the only thing I can say is what I've seen and what I've experienced in the medicine for sure, without a doubt is realer than anything I've ever experienced. Even in this conversation that we are having today is not as real as what you feel when you're in the medicine. Absolutely. I can go on for a long time about the benefits of it, but for sure, there are some medicines that actually heal the brain from traumatic brain. It decreases the swelling, it helps with correcting addictive behaviors. All of these things that we're really lucky to have. I think probably also another really important thing to mention is how and why does all this stuff get a bad rap the way that it does? And it actually came about from a pretty sinister way. Psychedelics have been around obviously for thousands of years and people have been doing it for thousands of years, but they've actually been studied since like the 20s and studied with respect to mental health and the effects and the power that they have

Participant #1:

Johnson was involved in. They're the ones that kind of created the pain scale. So you've been to the doctor's office, say, hey, on a scale of one to ten, how much does it hurt? Nobody knows what an eight is, but if you say eight, that gives the doctor an opportunity to prescribe you. Vicodin, which we all know is just like a bandaid doesn't really help anything. It doesn't cure anything. But what's worse is it has addictive properties to it. So you can get addicted to that stuff, but not necessarily be healed. But it was a way for them to make money. So they went ahead and did that. But the other thing that they did was they did the sweeping drug classification you guys might have heard of, like schedule one and schedule two. Well, what schedule one means is that it has no medicinal value and it has a high potential for abuse. So things like crack and heroin are schedule one. And also at the time that happened was kind of the post hippie era. So they were like, hey, psychedelics are bad. Hippies are doing it. So it's got to be addictive. And there is no medicinal value to this. And so they classified it as schedule one. The problem is for those who've done psychedelics, there's no explanation necessary. But for those who haven't, I can tell you that there's nothing addictive about these medicines. You get your ass kicked hard sometimes when there's healing that's involved, you've got to overcome things. These are not fun to do a lot of the times, and they have enormous medicinal value. I've been in very close contact with several people who were on a daily basis just trying to figure out whether or not they should continue to live every day. And they go through the medicine one time, not everybody, but a lot of guys one time, and it's not even a thing for them anymore. So if that's not medicinal value, I don't know what is. And then we already talked about how it can decrease the swelling of the brain, increase neuroplasticity in the brain, all of these things. So it was misclassified for a good reason, I think is because it can be a one and done treatment, and there's no money to be made in one and done treatments. They need to put people on Zoloft. They need to put people on Prozac these lifelong medicines. That's really where the money gets generated. So I've been talking for a while, but these are important things, I think, to talk about. So destigmatizing the medicine, I think is huge. Yes. I think it's important to point out too, you have a background in medicine as well. This isn't just you kind of like spouting off. So I know you have some knowledge about that. Yeah. I started out in the Navy as a Corman, and then I tried to become a Seal back in 1994. Couldn't pass any of the time run, so they threw me out. I eventually ended up getting out of the Navy. I became a civilian paramedic, and I worked all over the country as a paramedic. And then I went back into Seal training, became a medic again, and went through our pre hospital trauma courses and things like that, which is certainly not as hard as the OD, but pretty up there in terms of Scholastic difficulty. And I mentioned that because we do learn a lot about pharmacology and physiology and those types of things. So, yeah, you're right. Just understanding some of the influences and impacts that some of these medicines have on the body was not something unfamiliar to me. Very used to being in medicinal circles, for sure. Yeah. I was fortunate enough to get to go to Trap spirit Nico on my way out. At least it was a couple of years ago. Not yet. I got about 36 days left. And you see a little bit of departure from the traditional Western treat, the symptom and not the origin. Going through those types of programs, you get to see a little bit of acupuncture, you'd see a little bit of nontraditional. I mean, even some things that I was extremely skeptical of going to petting a freaking horse. I grew up in West Virginia. We had horses. I'm like, this is dumb. Why am I going to go pet a horse? And then I went and did it and did it in the context and the framing in which they conducted it. And it was extremely enlightening. I think the biggest problem with a lot of these things, especially the things you're talking about, is people just don't want to look at it in a different frame of mind. They want to go with what the FDA tells them. And that's just not you're looking at stuff like you said before, things that have been around since we've been humans, they've been figuring this out and been practicing it for millennia in some cases. And they've gotten pretty good at it. Probably a hell of a lot better than the FDA is going to get in a few more months. I think it's time that folks really start to embrace a lot of this stuff and really get off the path of get outside the box thinking on because we do in common Western medicine, it is just you have a headache. Well, let's give you something for the pain. What the hell does that do for you? It just masks the symptom for a certain period of time. It doesn't do a damn thing for the pain. And the same thing goes with a lot of stuff you're talking about, too, with us, especially in the operational circles. We ran it for the better part of a couple of decades. We can part minimalize the shit out of everything for so long. And then I don't care how many times you sit in front of a psyche for when it's got to be one. You have a really good relationship for even get close to starting to cut open the tape a little bit or getting the bow off of that compartment. At least that one you want to work on. But then I think what you're talking about is completely just blasting it wide open from some of the stuff like Trevor is talking about, like Joe Rogan talks about. And some of the guys at Andy Stumps had on his podcast. I mean, they're talking about that stuff is life changing and some of the results they've had has been phenomenal. And it'd be really interesting to I mean, from what I hear, kind of scares the shit out of me. But then again, nothing I've ever done has been worth a damn. Hasn't been not saying I'm in because I'm still on active duty. But

Participant #1:

go ahead, we'll record a follow up in 37 days. Yes, I'm sure if Pfizer was involved in this, it would probably be fast track through the whatever. So kind of like what you were saying, Diego? Well, I think so. There was a bunch of stuff that Mike was talking about. I think they're worth kind of digging in. But also what you were talking about, Trevor, is that there's a lot of pharmaceutical companies that are trying to figure out how they can get involved in this thing. I mean, it is for sure still illegal. I forget I'm not up to speed on this, but I know that like Oakland, Denver, all of Oregon and Chicago, at least at one point where they decriminalize the medicine and decriminalization and legalization are completely different things. I don't know if anybody has actually fully gone to legalization. I'm pretty sure the answer to that is no, but I'm not. So the differences with legalization is that it's government sanctioned and you can sell it and buy it and have it and no problems. And most importantly, it's regulated by the government. With decriminalization, it's still not necessarily legal to have, but it's way like on the most the bottom rung of what police officers are concerned with in terms of enforcement. So for example, if you got stopped on the sidewalk by a police officer and he found out that he had a bunch of Psilocybin or mushrooms in your pocket, he could choose to move forward with that, but it wouldn't be that big. He could probably just let you go and let you do your thing. So the reason why I mentioned that is because it's not legalized. I think that whatever their fiscal would be trying to do is they would be trying to head up before everything gets legalized so that when it does or if it does get legalized, that they're able to kind of pounce on this thing because they wouldn't be able to take Vicodin and do what they do with Vicodin, with any kind of anthropogenic medicine at this point. So ultimately what that means is money. And so they're not going to be willing to waste their money. But what I do know is that there are these strategic plans in place to figure out that when it does become legalized, how to make it long term, like basically give you a pill form of Ivagain that you would have to put in your medicine cabinet, which in my limited understanding is completely ludicrous because you don't need a medicine cabinet full of Ivagain. You take Ivagain one time. You don't need to do that. But so you can see already the trend and the effort and the focus and the strategy that they're trying to take, which is the reason why some people don't want psychedelics legalized at all, because they know kind of the fallout that's going to happen all the time. It's going to be like this chronic thing you got to take for the rest of your life. I know where Mike and I grew up in West Virginia. That was a hotspot for the opioid crisis. That's ridiculous. Like, some of the stuff people worry about. I'm like, look at this, dude. What's happening here is actually legal, right? Yeah. It's really sad state of affairs, the treatments that you're talking about. Could you maybe talk a little bit about the process here? Because I think when a lot of people hear this, they think you're like going down some dark alleyway and knocking on a door and using a secret password to go into some dungeon or something. But from what I understand, it's nothing like that. Right? Well, it's not so dramatic as that, but for sure, it can't be out in the open. I mean, it's illegal. So these companies have to do what they can to make sure, like for vets that I was mentioning in particular because of stuff. So what they do is they raise money so that it's free for the veterans to go through the treatment. And so they found out a legal way to get around this. So what they do is they raise money for these people to get treatment, and then they give it to the veteran and say, you can spend this money on whatever you want, but we highly suggest you spend it with this organization over here that's going to help treat you. And so in that way, because if they didn't do that, for example, if they raised so, for example, it cost like $5,000 or so for the entire weekend. That's like paying for doctors, food, housing, all this stuff. If they raise money specifically to give to these organizations that did that, then even the people who were donating money could get in legal trouble. So they've done their due diligence and they've got all they're protected by their lawyers and all of these things. But even having said that, they're not walking around with Slagged Elliott's meetings. It's not out necessarily out in the open because of that. And also, like you said, people are just afraid of this stuff. They don't understand it. I didn't understand it. When they were talking about me doing, I was like, dude, I've been really, really lucky all the time. I went to war. I don't have traumatic brain injury. I don't have PTSD or PTSD. I don't have any of that stuff. I just got really lucky. So I kind of felt like I didn't need it at all. But trying to get involved in the organization as much as I wanted to and as much as they wanted me to, I kind of had to. And when I came out of my first medicinal trip, I was like, everyone on Earth needs this. And I felt like that for years. I don't feel like that anymore. For sure are people. It's just not the right fit for them, and that's okay. But for most people, if you can get past the stigma and the fear of it, for sure. So, yeah, what it is well, I don't want to get too much into how it goes, but I can tell you that there is no cloak and dagger stuff going on. There's no like, dark alleys. There's no just like, if you can imagine any road trip that we took in the field teams, if we were going to go shooting or something like that, it was just like that. We meet up, we get vehicles, and we go there and place on our own and all the support mechanism, safety, medical, everything is all in place with the organization we work now. I know it's just like anything else. There are plenty of psychedelic treatment centers that are just people you should not be trusting in the process that you should not be trusting. There are some dark alleys and secret passwords. There are, yes, I've been really lucky. And this kind of goes to a point that Mike was talking about before about you've petted horses your whole life and like, what good is this going to do me? But everything changes with the context or what we would call the intention. I've had discussions with people who were hippies back in the 60s about psychedelics, and they don't have any idea what I'm talking about. What do you mean? I just saw colors and this is amazing, but there was no real spiritual development. So the same is true for psychedelics. I can say that I was lucky to be raised, if you will, by people who treated this as medicine and as a gift from the gods for us to expand and heal and all these things. So medicine use has been always very sacred to me. This is a serious thing. I'm not just like throwing down some tabs for the weekend to see how cool things get. I take this very seriously and very respectfully because I know the gifts that it has and I know the growth that I can obtain from it. So there are people who have done a lot more psychedelics than I have. They just have no idea what I'm talking about because they were all in it just for kicks, which is fine. There's nothing, nobody's going to die from this stuff, which is also important to understand. But I'm like, man, you've been doing this stuff for like 40 years and you still have this very powerful ego that you're not aware of. How's that I was very lucky to get involved with the guys that I was introduced to because they know how to do this right. And like I said, there are some contemporary treatment sites. They don't know how to protect you or it's not on their agenda, too. So if you do this, just make sure you're really doing your research on who's offering this and how they go about doing it and what the support mechanisms are and all those things, because things don't always end up well, even very terrible things, like women being taken advantage of while they're under the medicine. It's as shady as anything can be in some areas, and it is the best that anything could be in other areas. So just be careful in that sense. Yeah. So really no different than going to some whatever trailer somewhere in West Virginia and getting scripts for or in the best hospital in West Virginia there was talking about something like 650,000 deaths a year in hospital because of medical malpractice. So I think a lot of this has to do with kind of undoing the narrative that we've been kind of getting hammered with. We talked about gun deaths and the numbers are all over the place. From what I've seen gun deaths, I've seen like a couple of thousand to maybe 100 or more. But there's all this energy to get rid of guns and ban guns. But medical malpractice is like 100 something. The numbers are ridiculously higher than gundas. And people are like, oh, I got to go to a hospital in America because that's the only place I'm going to be safe. Are you sure about that? So there is a resistance of, oh, my God, mushrooms? Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? Okay, yeah, go ahead and walk in an emergency room. Nothing against. I work a lot of time in hospitals. I had dear friends that are the best professionals ever. I'm not discounting the profession or the industry at all. I'm just saying that we're wired to think hospitals are amazing and wired to think that psychedelics are bad. So we want to reverse that because psychedelics heal. So hospitals. But I think you know where I'm going with this. I was reading something this morning about, I guess it was like Norway Department of state or whatever. It was saying something about advising any of their citizens in the US not to go anywhere for medical treatment because they said poor quality healthcare systems like the US. It's not what we think it is. Yeah, it is strange where we can have this whole narrative on these things are like the devil. And this thing is as great as it can be and it's completely the opposite. Yeah. It's just strange how we get our information and it just turns into our reality. Then you get into the other side of the billing and the insurance and somehow they can send you a bill for like, I had a splendid me 20 some years ago with all my intensive care and all that stuff was like 45 grand. I think that was at e five at the time. And I'm like, well, I don't make this in a year. I'm screwed. And so I took it down to the TRICARE office and they're like, oh yeah, thanks, we'll take care of that. And then I got a bill back from whoever the folks were that sent me the bill. And out of that 45,000, they paid about $15,000 of that entire $45,000. But I owe nothing but try care. They have a deal. It's all the insurance. So if the surgeon thinks that his or her time was $8,000 to remove your spleen and the insurance says, well, we appreciate that, but we're going to pay you $3,500. That's what they pay them. And that's it. It's done. It's insane. But if you were go walk in the street with no insurance, you get that $45,000 bill, you get that $45,000 bill. It makes no sense to me how we've got to where at right now. And it's still confusing as hell. That was a complete tangent. But our health care system and I worked up in DC and it was just jacked up. It is so jacked up, I don't know how the hell will ever fix it. Yeah, we have to rewire our minds is what it is, which is not an easy thing to do. But I think that's the only way because we're so like hard driven to capitalize off of this whole thing. And a huge reason why doctors charge as much as they do is they're malpracticed out of this world for we already talked about how many deaths, but there are also many people who are getting sued for things that nothing went wrong, but they're losing all these suits. So all of these things contribute to driving up the price and stuff. And we're the ones who end up losing, especially if you can't afford insurance. I mean, you're in trouble. Absolutely. As somebody who works around insurance a lot, I can tell you that the premiums for malpractice, like any kind of errors and emissions or malpractice insurance, is pretty steep. And the amount of coverage that you're expected to carry is pretty ridiculous, too. But it's okay. They just pass those costs along to you. So the other thing, I don't know what you can or can't say about the process, but kind of like, based off of what I've read about this stuff is like you were saying you're not going out. Nobody's giving you something and saying like, you're going to take this and then wander off in the woods for four or five days. There's people there that kind of know how to guide you through and take care of you while you're there, because at least if you're going to somewhere that's a reputable establishment that's doing this treatment, there's a little bit more to it than that, right? Yeah. So psychedelics as a whole are off the charts safe. We hardly anyone dies from an overdose of psychedelics. You just feel really terrible for a really long time. But that's not true. For all the medicines I've mentioned, I began before that's about one of the more dangerous psychedelic medicines out there. But with proper screening, pre screening and assessment, there's no real danger with I regain either. So one of the things that I began can do is slow your heart rate down so much that you go into a rhythm yet, and I forget what the numbers are. But they're tiny about the recorded deaths of Ivagain. And you can imagine there's probably not very many people, hey, he died because of Ivagain, but now they'll just say it was because of COVID. Well, that's a whole other thing. Yeah, for sure. So what we do is we make sure the guys get a cardiac stress test. We understand their blood pressure and that thing. And then when we put them down before they get on the medicine, they've got an IV catheter in place and an EKG in place. All this stuff can sound really scary for people who are not used to this stuff, but it purely is just for precautionary things. And we've never, ever had a problem with the guys because we screen them. And the truth of the matter is people have heart attacks in their sleep. So you don't necessarily need to be running up Mount Kilmanjaro to expect something like that. But we take care of the guys. There are doctors that are on site the entire time they're under I began. We have nursing staff that's there, and we have medical plan. We've got a medic there sometimes I work there as a paramedic as well. So all those people are in place. And then what you were talking about before is we also do have therapists, and some of these are actual psychologists, some are licensed social workers. I go there from time to time as a psychedelic reintegration coach because you get so much, it's hard to understand what you just experienced. But all of those things that we have in place to make sure that everybody is as safe as can be and that everything's on the up and up because we don't. And from time to time we'll get new therapists and they'll be like, man, I've been, like, all over the place. And you guys are like, on a whole another level. And it's just like everything with naval special warfare, we take it to the degree to make sure that it's the best thing going for us. It's just kind of how things have always run. It's kind of how we always knew things should be. But apparently and I don't have any outside experience with any other organizations, I guess we're just different in that respect. But I can't say for sure. I just say I can just Echo the comments that I hear from other therapists coming in and seeing how we do business. That's good, man. What about so once somebody completes what do they call it? Is it like a cycle or whatever of treatment? We'll just call it they've completed a treatment.

Participant #1:

I'm sure it's different for every person, but as far as how long does that last? Are there people that sometimes they just do one treatment and they're fine or what's kind of like the long term effects of those treatments? Yeah. So it's different for everyone. For me, for example, I didn't feel like I needed any of it. And I continue to pursue psychedelic medicines because I just learned so much. And just by the factor of being a human being, I have these traumas or these experiences or these thoughts or whatever they are, and I want to get a deeper understanding of what that is so that I can become stronger and better. But for the most part, the folks that go down there for chemical addiction or posttraumatic stress or whatever, it is very easily, for the most part, it's one. And they don't want to do it anymore. They're thankful for it, they're better for it. But there's no interest in going back there and doing it again. I would say easily. That is the vast majority of people that go through it's a very powerful experience, but it's hard. I liken it, too. So I was 29 years old when I made it through Hell Week. So they let us go to sleep. And then when they woke us up the next day, we had to go for just to do sort of a muster head count roll call. It took me 15 minutes to stand up for my bed. My body just felt like I got run over by a steamroller and I was looking around all the 18 year olds, and they're all just smiling and eating pizza and stuff. But I was not doing well for a while with psychedelics. My mind and my brain feel like I felt after I woke up from my first sleep. After all week, it was punishing for me. Now, for example, the added game to last when you're really in the medicine, it can last about twelve to 16 hours or so. But it stays with you over the course of about three months. But you're actually in the experience for about twelve or 16 hours. So we'll take it at 08:00 at night or so, and then we'll be laying in these beds and it'll look like everyone's sleeping but knowing when is asleep. You're just in this awake dream state. And then somewhere around eight or nine in the morning, you'll be kind of completely free of the experience. And some guys, I don't know how they're downstairs and they want to eat breakfast and they're all happy and stuff because they experience, like, all this life changing stuff. For me, I can't even come downstairs until the following day because I'm so just, like, beat and dizzy and I can't stand up straight. I can't focus on anything. So it's different for everybody. So if we take it on Friday night, like, I won't make it downstairs sometimes until Sunday morning. It's very hard. And this is Abigail that we're talking about. We take another medicine. It's the most powerful psychedelic in the world. It's called five Meodmt, not to be confused with DMT, but that lasts about five to seven minutes and you can drive your car home after that, but it's just hard to explain. But it is where you go with five Meos is like nowhere or nothing else. So it just depends on the medicine. And for sure, if you take what people call, like, heroic doses, large doses of psilocybin or mushrooms, you can be in that experience for four, five or even 6 hours sometimes. So it just depends. Do you guys continue to follow up with people who go through the treatments or what kind of feedback have you gotten from them as far as, like, how they're doing long term after a treatment? If I was just going to generalize, it's really hard to, because the guys are going through, for the most part, they've got real serious stuff that they've got to work on. They were victims of suicide vests and all this really terrible, most horrible stuff you can imagine, or people dying through mistakes or whatever, just the cause of war, whatever it is, they go through some really terrible stuff. And then once they get into medicine, whatever lessons that they have to learn, they have to learn. But it's not like you're not given written, detailed, plain, simple, understand instructions on what to do or how to know or whatever it is. Psychedelics really kind of speak to you in the same ways that dreams do. If you believe that dreams have a purpose and that they are communicating lessons to you and that type of thing, it's the exact same way. So to understand a psychedelic experience, you have to kind of know how to really interpret your dreams, really. And if you don't know how to do that, it can be very, very hard. So, absolutely, we have people go through and then we give them follow up sessions because these saying you can go through iPad once, but you continue to get these lessons for like a lifetime. For example, like the first time I did, I began I think it was in 2019 or so. Just last week, something came across my mind where there was just this little fogginess of my first experience that I said, oh, that's what that meant. Wow. So it can continue giving you benefits and lessons throughout your life. So also, because of how hard these things can be, I needed somebody to talk to because I didn't know what to make of this. I didn't even know I was basically smashing my face because of my ego, which I didn't know existed. So I didn't know how to deal with that. I didn't know what was going on. So thanks to the people, the therapists that were there and they showed me what this was and what this meant and how to move forward, man, that made everything better. Because if I was left out to my own devices on that, I don't know where necessarily I would be in terms of clarity or what the use was of all that sort of punishment. But now it's clear as day. So I would say if you're going to go through this, make sure you connect with somebody who is a psychedelic reintegration coach or a psychedelic therapist or a psychologist or a psychiatrist who does understand psychedelics because not a lot of them do. You're not even allowed to know that kind of stuff, it seems like. But if you have somebody who knows and that can help you navigate your healing process and it really does make everything better. And one thing I think is important to also to mention what I'm talking about, psychologists and psychiatrists and things. There's a doctor's name is Dr. Stanislav Groff. He was a famous guy back in the 70s, and he was way deep in his. And he is quoted as saying that he learned more from 4 hours of doing psychedelics than he did in 20 years of psychotherapy, which is when I think about what that actually means, that just blows me away because then I think about what do other psychologists and psychiatrists know or think they know who haven't experienced psychedelic medicine? What is that another quote he has that he's really famous for saying is that psychedelics are to the mind what microscope is to biology, and telescopes are to astronomy. So really, in a way, I feel like it's hard to actually know how to really treat people and really how to help people with problems of the mind without knowing psychedelics. Now that's just Diego talking. Don't take that as gospel or anything like that. But I think that how could you really help people if you don't really fully understand what we're actually dealing with, especially when the default mode mechanism is to, hey, this person is struggling. I've counseled them as much as I can. I don't know what to do here's a lot. I think in most circles, psychedelic circles, the aim is never Pharmaceuticals. It's how do we get this person to actually understand what's actually going on? Because I think a lot of the benefits that come from psychedelics is simply awareness. Just knowing things that you never knew before is enough. Sometimes you don't need to put these people on the shelf and forget about them and then just cloud their minds with these drugs. Really. It's funny because now I call medicine drugs. I call psychedelics actual medicine, because I don't know. To me, they work. That's cool. Well, I remember last time we chatted, you were mentioning something about writing a book about this, right? Yeah, we're writing a book now. We've got all the data collection that we needed, and we're well into the manuscript process. We're hoping to release it next year. And it's not necessarily a book about psychedelics, but it's a book on our approach to personal team and leadership development. And so because we have a deeper understanding of things that we never understood before, we do talk about psychedelics in that in that respect. Like, hey, this is where we got this from. It's not coming from listening to Ted talks or reading other people's books. Like, this is information that we came into from the deepest parts of ourselves, which is where we think really. I mean, I absolutely believe that everything we need to heal or to understand or whatever we need is all within us. We just have to clear out all the static and all the noise that we've created in our contemporary lives so that we can hear what we are already familiar with. Good stuff. Yeah. I can't wait to actually you'll have to send me an advanced copy or I'll buy one. I'll pay for it. I don't mind paying for good. I'll send you the manuscript and you can go, this is stupid. And take this out or this doesn't make sense to me. That would be helpful. I love getting perspectives on things like that. Well, if somebody's interested in pursuing, like, that course of treatment, how do they go about doing that? It just starts with the Internet. I would definitely start to look at the people that you already know and see who you know that might be connected with psychedelics in any way and start connecting with those communities because they're everywhere. They're all over the world. There are some amazing places where no amount of money is too small, but they'll give you the experience of a lifetime. And there are people who will do this just out of the goodness of their hearts. They're everywhere. So just be careful and do your due diligence and researching who is offering this stuff. And just make sure that they're upstanding people, which can be hard because you're like, these guys are like druggies like. No, there are some of the best people that I've ever met in my life in terms of truly good people that only want to do good for the world are involved in psychedelics. So there are plenty of really amazing people out there. Just start I would say, start looking through your networks that you already have because people don't necessarily talk about it a lot. And you may know a lot more people in your own circles than you realize, and that could be a really good starting point. Yeah. Follow up question. Where can people get in touch with you? My email is Diego at thetridanteproach Diego@thetrideeproach.com. You can email me there. And I'm happy. Like, if you've gone through psychedelic experiences and you don't really know what to do, I can help you through those things. I do a lot of coaching with people who've never done psychedelics, but using psychedelic lessons learned. So for awareness and strengthening and empowerment and those types of things. So you're welcome to reach out happy to help in every way I possibly can. These conversations are not unusual. As we were going through this, I was thinking about another episode that Mike and I had recorded with another EOD guy, Chadman Rose. Spent a lot of time down the street, and he was talking about some of that. He was doing some stuff like Ketamine infusions. And he was like, dude, that helped me so much. Yeah. And I was like, well, that's cool. I didn't even know that that was the thing. My only experience with Ketamine was when I was on a medevac, Helo in Afghanistan, and the Doc showed me the syringe. I was like, oh, yeah. And then I just blasted off in the outer space and fell asleep on the Hill. All the guys were mad at me because it was like a British medevac, Helo. And there's all these cute medics on there. And I just remember walking on and sitting down, and they all came up to me. I was like, hey, what's up? And they said that I just, like, slumped over in the back, and they're like, yeah, they stopped paying attention to us, and they all went over there to you. That's funny. Sorry, man. And I woke up in the hospital and they were cutting all my clothes off the first time I've been in air conditioning in, like, four months. All right, well, Diego, I wanted to thank you for coming on here again and chatting with us. This is a pretty cool episode for me, like, learning about this because I hear people talk about it all the time, but I think you're the only person I know who's actually been through the treatment and can speak about it to me from first hand experience. So thanks again for coming on the show, man. Yeah, totally. By the way, for people who want to understand the self and healing on this level but have no interest in doing psychedelics, it's totally fine. There are so many other options out there, like holotropic breathing, like just really intense breathing that you can do on your own or with somebody else that can bring you to these places that psychedelics do completely absent of the medicine. The other thing that you can do is the float tanks where you are immersed in water that's so salty that you just float and it's the same body temperature and it's completely dark and completely quiet. That takes some training and it takes some time. I would say probably on average about seven to 10 hours of floating in the tank of just training. And then you can get to a place where just like with psychedelic medicines where you're really letting go. You're letting go of attachment and identifying with yourself and just letting go of that whole thing is probably not grounded conversation for people who are not used to this type of stuff, but really letting go of all your fears, letting go of all your inhibitions, letting go of all the things that kind of encapsulate you and hold you down, just letting it all go. You can absolutely experience all the healing mechanisms that psychedelics have to offer without any medicine just in those areas. And last but not least, meditation. For example, there was a Buddhist Monk who has what some of us would consider to be a master level understanding of meditation. And they're like, hey, we want to give you this acid. And he's like, okay. So he tries and he's like, oh, yeah, that's what happens when I meditate. There are all kinds of other pathways to seeing and understanding and experience in this type of healing on the deepest levels imaginable without psychedelic drugs. So there's all kinds of options. One story I think that's really cool we're wrapping up here, but I think it kind of puts things in perspective is if you imagine Lake Erickson, he's like the Viking that we think discovered North America about 500 years or so before Columbus, but he ended up landing in Canada. If you can imagine him being in the Atlantic Ocean on a ship with his crew and things and psychedelics kind of came and picked up lace and brought him to Canada and put the Earth in his hands. And he kind of looked around, he saw what was going on, and then psychedelics brought him back and put him on a ship and let them go. That's what psychic all up to. They show you what's possible, but it's still up to you to get there late still had a manager's crew. He still had to make sure that his boats were doing well. You still had to navigate the currents and the winds and the weather. He still had to do all that stuff. But imagine him doing that, knowing, hey, just over there is where we're trying to go. And I think that's really the big gift that psychedelics have. Instead of just being lost. I don't know what we're doing here or being maybe taught the wrong things. Growing up, like so many billions of us has been of like, this is what awaits us after death. Psychedelics can show you the way, but then again, it's up to you to continue what we call integrating it or really taking those lessons and applying them to the rest of your life as you go forward to really living a happier life of balance. I really appreciate you coming on And I really appreciate your insight in the out of the box perspective on the way they approach the healing, I think, especially for a lot of us, and what I really like to thank you for is continuing to help and give back to the community Because I think that's I have no doubt some of the stuff you're doing saving people's lives, not only theirs, but it's making their home life and their spouses and their kids. It's having an effect that's felt multigenerationally, so I applaud you on that. Thank you. Yeah, I think the best response to that is that it's my pleasure. It's amazing to be part of that stuff, to see these guys showing up the way they show up and see them leave the way they leave. It's an honor for me to even be involved in any way in that powerful situation, and I get that another perspective. It took me getting out of the military to realize how good it feels to help somebody else that has a problem with that. I just kind of never really thought about it while it was still active duty. We're like, we're doing this stuff and we're like, yeah, it's just our job and it amazes me I have a greater appreciation for myself When I help somebody else and other people when they help somebody else too. Awesome, man. Yeah. I'm glad you got the chance to come on here and talk about this, And I'm looking forward to seeing the book when it comes out. All right, buddy, you got it. All right, everybody, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. Yes, thank you. Have a good one. Everybody. Take care. Thank you for listening to the get to vet podcast. Make sure you subscribe to our channel and follow us on LinkedIn. If you'd like to come on the show, email us at Mike or trevor@gettobet.net. That's getthe two vet net and let's help you get to vet.