No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
Inside the Psychedelic Therapy Movement: A Veteran’s Perspective with Jesse Gould
Can the war on drugs be responsible for the stigmatization of psychedelic therapies? Join us as we unravel the deep-seated impact of 1980s media and government campaigns on Generation X's perception of drugs, and how it contrasts with the evolving acceptance of psychedelics today. From Miami Vice to DARE, we navigate through a labyrinth of mixed messages, revealing the geopolitical motives behind the war on drugs and its ramifications on public opinion. Hear our candid recollections and firsthand stories that shed light on the intricate relationship between authority, control, and substance narratives.
Our guest, Jesse Gould, takes us on a compelling journey from skepticism to healing through psychedelic therapy. Initially influenced by the anti-drug sentiment of the 'Dare' era, Jesse opens up about his transformative experience with ayahuasca in Peru. This profound encounter not only alleviated his post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTS) but also inspired him to create the Heroic Hearts Project, a beacon of hope for fellow veterans. Discover the multiple-hit hypothesis and how individual backgrounds shape trauma responses, underscoring the need for personalized approaches in treating PTS.
Explore the emerging landscape of psychedelic therapy for veterans, including the financial hurdles and ethical considerations that come with it. We discuss the groundbreaking support from high-ranking military officials and the Department of Veterans Affairs, emphasizing the collective mission to revolutionize mental health treatment. From the strategic rebranding of psychedelics to the community-driven efforts to support veterans, this episode highlights the pivotal shift in perceptions and policies that promise transformative potential for those in need.
Heroic Hearts Project
Jesse Gould on LinkedIn
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Being here. So all of us grew up in the war on drugs era. Our Generation X, we're Generation Xers. It's a fantastic way to think about John Boyd's observe, orient, decide, act loop and how not just our government but many governments got inside of our orientation to shape the way we look at the world, specifically the world of psychedelic medicine, how we decide and how we act. The world of psychedelic medicine how we decide and how we act. And today there's a lot of fifth generation warfare going on trying to get in the minds of people, using social media, using media to change the perceptions of a population. So I want to hear from both of you, mark and Jesse, about how the fifth generation warfare known as the war on drugs affected your thought process in going into this psychedelic renaissance.
Jesse Gould:I'll start off. I mean growing up in the 80s, with shows like Miami Vice and other things, you know, you thought that drugs were evil, they were bad, they were for people. You remember when I was 10, len Bias died of a cocaine overdose and he was going to play for the Celtics and allegedly be the next Michael Jordan. So I remember all those things and thinking that anything drugs was bad, but psychedelics to me. With an uncle that went to Woodstock and coming from a very interesting family background, I thought that that's what they did when they went to Fillmore East or when they went to Woodstock. And it was another again illegal drug that had murky you know, illegal drugs that had murky origins and keeping those out, away from innocent all-American kids like us that just wanted to play basketball or whatever. That was the way to do it and the war on drugs was a very patriotic cause, I guess.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, I remember out of the DARE program in elementary school, right, and we had this officer come in. It was like fourth or fifth grade and this big jack dude with tattoos, super intense, and he was telling us about, you know, like, stay away from drugs, the normal spiel that we all kind of got. And you know, then after a month he no longer came and it turned out that he had either an addiction problem or an alcohol abuse problem himself, right, and so it was like this first lesson of something's wrong here. If, like, this is what they're teaching and this guy's struggling with his own thing, probably, you know the minimum, probably alcohol was involved as well, right, because that's the acceptable for first responders for us in the military Work hard, play hard. You know, don't talk about your problems but drown them out. As long as you can show up for the five-mile run on Monday, right. So that's kind of the tradition you get into, especially if you're high performing, that can really lend itself to, you know, hurting your body, bad behavior. That was kind of situation I got in after the military of like, okay, well, went super hard and, you know, hung over going into Monday but still super productive. So what's the problem here. I'm getting promotions and everything on the outside. I'm holding it together.
Mark McGrath:But yeah, I mean it's interesting with the psychedelics too, because, not to get too much in the weeds, but you're mentioning sort of this control thing and the war on drugs, and governments or institutions have always used certain things to control the populations or how they think, and psychedelics or drugs has always been that sort of dynamic and what people can and can't read. So you go back to hundreds, not thousands, of years ago. Like the church, for a while they wanted to be the only one that could read the Bible. That's why it was written in Latin right and the Gutenberg Press and the translation. These were huge revolutions because now the, the people had the word of the bible and it was the same sort of thing early on with indigenous tribes or that they had this sort of their own access to spirituality or even some to to the same version of the christian god. Uh, but you know that opens up the power, right, that limits the control, and so you see the same sort of stuff coming where there was noticeable fear in the 60s, 70s, of the population becoming unruly, of questioning the establishment with the advent of the hippie generation, all this stuff coming out. You know there's arguments there of like abuse and all this other kind of stuff, just because it did explode on the scene.
Mark McGrath:But there's also in the us been consistent history of the government using different drugs to control different populations. You can go back to reefer madness, and I was controlling a lot of african-amer, putting them in this sort of diabolical content, and then later in the 60s, 70s it was hitting the same sort of thing again these drugs to control youth movements or African-American movements that were starting the civil rights sort of thing. And then the other dynamic is what you see with the war on drugs is it also gave us this geopolitical excuse to go into other countries as well and have more governmental influence there, and so you see that across Latin America. So there's all these different things. It's not just drugs are bad. There's these multiple layers of how these have been used historically and what we're taught is all drugs are bad. You do drugs. You're either a druggie or you don't do drugs right, and that is across the board. And we even see that still now of heroin and fentanyl is lumped in with cannabis and psychedelics right, and that's just ridiculous.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So I want to talk about the warrior mindset, the warriors in general, and go back to our past, which is I joined the military in the mid-'90s. You know we've been at war already for five or six years. Not a lot of folks knew that at the time Spent the next 20-plus years in some type of capacity fighting a war somewhere in the world, which is a long time to be fighting wars.
Mark McGrath:Mark. Similar story. Jesse your background. When did you come in the military? 2010.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Okay, so here we are fighting. You know I'm a Gen Xer you're a different generation, I believe. But let's talk about what war is like and what other you know civilizations did when they sent their warriors off to war and brought them back, and what we lack in our society now. Can you talk a little bit about that, jesse? What was life like in other civilizations?
Mark McGrath:Yeah. So I feel like I guess I fall more in the millennial dynamic. I graduated from college in 2009, joined the military in 2010. We were already pretty deep in both Afghanistan and Iraq at that time and I went through Ranger Regiment, so kind of immediate off the training straight to deployment as quick as possible. You know, off the training straight to deployment as quick as possible. And so being in that regiment like you can see sort of the, the, the, the, the, the, the peel, the old romanticism of it in Ranger, you know you're surrounded by warriors, are surrounded by the best of class people who are just trying to get after it, who are super skilled, professional. When you see them in action you're like that person is meant to be a warrior and I'm sure we've all seen that with many other people Like this is what they were born to do.
Mark McGrath:But at the same time you have this complex like these two wars going on, with sort of dubious causes and why we're there, at the very least, why we're still there at that point, right and especially south afghanistan, is the, the degree that we remembered that we were there uh triggered how many people we had over there. So I was kind of in the research of oh yeah, we're here, let's actually, uh, do something about it. Never an exit strategy talked about, right, and so you go over there and so you for. For me that was kind of the biggest contrast. So you had these people that had this calling and they truly believe that they're, you know, going after bad guys, and obviously that was a lot of the cases that people were going after and protecting the country. But that was also coming into conflict with the longer we're there. Why are we still here and is this actually worth our time, worth the lives, worth the sacrifices that are being made?
Mark McGrath:And at the same time, when we got back home, we would come like straight to hunter army airfield in savannah, georgia. Uh, you know, debrief and then, within an hour, be in rowdy sav. You know super jacked, not having alcohol for the past five months and then, just you know, wreaking havoc on town. There's no transition. It was just like straight back home.
Mark McGrath:And also you're in this population that's so disconnected from the war too. So you have all these sort of things. That is very new in terms of a war kind of generation, where they just feel isolated. There's no deep processing, and that you know from different tribes, you know especially native americans. There was this thing where they'd stay isolated, uh, from their tribe before going back in. Or you even saw this in world war ii, where they would park the boat off for a while or stop in australia to kind of like like decompress before going back home. So there's much more of this understanding of you can't just transition from super high on and then going straight into civility, because it's just going to cause the, because you need to be a different person in both of those worlds those worlds?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, so what I understand is in other times not necessarily in the US, but psychedelics were used to bring back the warriors, to kind of decompress that recovery period right, because what they were doing in war and bringing that mindset back you didn't necessarily want in a civilization. So looking back at the history of psychedelic use, we discovered that even even the church has used psychedelics in the past to help people recover. So we lost that, we lost that ability as a result, in my opinion as a result of the war on drugs and maybe some other things that happened in our past. But can you talk a little bit about what you've seen as the founder of Heroic Hearts Project when it comes to other veterans accepting the idea of using psychedelic-assisted therapy to help them recover from post-traumatic syndromes?
Mark McGrath:Yeah. So just the quick intro into it. I got out of regiment, was going into finance, like I said, was doing well on the outside but was not processing some of the things, and it was that transition period. Right, like what's my purpose? What am I doing? Still kind of in this high-intensity mode, not dealing with the lingering issues of being in that constant shuffle of deployed and high intensity training, going to like Excel spreadsheets right, there was no real good transition there and so you could see that sort of affect me but, hardheaded, took me a while to accept that and I went to the VA. The VA was just sort of a you know, for a lot of us once you get that stamp of PTSD it's a life sentence. It's not taught that like oftentimes you can get over this, it's just okay. What's the medication that you need to kind of continue on. That didn't seem like the next best step.
Mark McGrath:So I heard about these psychedelics Because of this. I came into it when I first heard, uh, or if anybody told me about mushrooms, I'm like yeah, okay, kind of had that, fine for you, but like I don't need to talk to the walls or my cat or anything like that, I don't, I don't see the benefit in this, um, but when I heard about this ayahuasca thing, this psychedelic that has this rich indigenous history in peru goes back thousands of years, it planted this small seed in my brain that it was different, which then allowed me to get past my dare sort of mentality, you know, because before, again, it was like you either do drugs and you're a drug user or you don't, and I had pride in not doing drugs. I didn't see them like. I had my vice and alcohol, so I was a. It was escapism, right, that's how I just viewed it. All and all drugs that you, you're, it's all the same. So this ayahuasca thing, because there's this cultural thing, there was this dynamic to it. It allowed me to see it a little bit differently. Okay, this is not just me doing lsd at a concert, right, this is something different.
Mark McGrath:And when there was no other options and it was clear by that point that the professionals didn't really have a grasp on what, what was going on with me, uh, that's when I was like, okay, what do I got to lose? Right, like unconventional, uh, situations need unconventional tactics. So went to peru, vastly different than anything that I was told psychedelics, where it was definitely not fun uh was definitely not, you know, going to a concert uh with with psychedelics uh, very challenging, but then also had that reset. So that's why I started heroic arts project, because at that time there wasn't a lot of discussion about this in 2017 and, uh, I knew that, um, at least for me, this could help. But then I also wanted to tell other friends but then also provide them an access to it, so, but they just didn't end up in a random country, um, getting there.
Mark McGrath:And the reason I made this decision which goes back to your question is because I didn't tell anybody I was doing this. And then, when I started reaching out to friends and by that time, already lost double digit, people I served with to suicide and people I knew in my network were on that fast track or barely hanging on, and when I talked to them, I thought I was gonna be like that's crazy, are you doing drugs now? But instead the was going to be like that's crazy, like are you doing drugs now? But instead the reaction I got is like that's crazy, but if it works, it works Right.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, I think that's like a very veteran mentality. Again, you can, we plan every single contingency, but when you're on mission, you have to be, you have to adapt to the situation on the ground, you have to use the tools on the ground, and this seemed like that sort of case of like okay, I've never heard of it, but if it helps, then why not? Right? And that seems to be a big sort of veteran kind of thing of like overcoming that. We're in a mission, let's complete, let's get to the end of mission unconventional way of doing it.
Mark McGrath:And that really opened up that allowance of like hey, this is something that veterans might be open to, even though veteran and psychedelic don't, you know, initially seem to be, uh, aligned, and so that was that start of heroic hearts, and early on it was a little bit, you know, getting the word out there and slowly but surely, just because there wasn't prominent voice, but then really word of mouth, and then it just kind of spread like wildfire throughout the community.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So I want to talk a little bit about how PTS has actually developed, post-traumatic syndrome and maybe Mark can help us with this as well on the OODA loop. So we know that orientation, our orientation, shapes how we sense the external world, how we decide and act in it. And imagine we have you and I, or all of us are part of an accident or part of a military event where something doesn't go as planned and we all experience the same event, but the outcome is different for us. We all are traumatized by it differently.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:What I understand from some research from Dr Paul Conti Trauma, the Invisible Epidemic it's a book that came out about four years ago, about the time I was starting to become familiar with psychedelic-assisted therapy is he calls this thing the multiple-hit hypothesis, meaning that the three of us, like I said, we can experience the same car accident or event overseas, but it will affect us in different ways and the way it affects us is based off of three things.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:It's based off our genetics, our cultural heritage or tradition and our previous experience. So do we have another experience like that in the past or is this the first time seeing something like that? So that multiple hit hypothesis means that and I've heard this from friends too and that is how is it that you experienced this accident we had in 2003 or whenever it was, and so did they, but they had a different outcome. Right, and it's just to show us that we're all different, we all experience the world differently. So that genetic heritage, that cultural tradition, that previous experience that works in a way that shapes our orientation. And, mark, do you want to add any color to that? On what Boyd was talking about with that.
Jesse Gould:Well, the nature of ambiguity and that things have any one thing can be interpreted multiple ways. I mean, the three of us would be a really good example. Right, we have the common uh experience of being veterans, but we have a marine uh ranger regiment and we have fighter aviation from the navy. I mean those are three completely different worlds and we could all intersect at certain points. But but that experience and that frame of thinking that we have from those worlds is going to shape exactly how we see things. I think it's a massive advantage because, as Jesse was pointing out, I think veterans with that kind of thinking have an ability to quickly destigmatize things that are helping other veterans get these types of therapies. But that repository, that who we are, that what we think, what we believe is going to shape how we see things and every one event is open to multiple interpretations.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, and so I often use the term PTSD. I believe it's wrong. I think it's actually post-traumatic syndrome, right? I think there's multiple of them. That includes anxiety and a few other things.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So PTSD post-trauma syndromes can arise from acute, chronic and vicarious trauma, meaning that we could actually watch somebody, like a loved one, experience something and we can internalize that trauma as well. So I guess my point behind all this discussion is really to kind of frame what's going on when a veteran or a first responder or a mother, a mom, a sister, brother, whatever it may be, experiences some type of trauma. It's built off of their past, their genetics and the culture, which is pretty powerful. So within the military, within fighter aviation, today I even have friends that say, hey, I don't know, I'm perfectly fine, there's nothing wrong with me and I'm like man, you're about as jacked up as anybody I know, you know you're calling in a bottle every night.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:And then I have friends that and Jesse knows Slider Mark Keller. His story is pretty amazing having given the opportunity or blessing, or however you want to phrase it getting him help to go down to Mexico and sitting down with him in San Diego and him revealing his story scars on his arms and this is a buddy I went through officer candidate school with, I live with, when we were flight training. And to see somebody who is one of your best friends reveal to you that for the last 20 or 15 years, uh many events have traumatized me, including the events that traumatized um slider, which goes over to Iraq and and uh releasable weapon over there, and and more events too. So, jesse, can you walk us through what the current status is on veteran suicide and what the numbers are, so you can frame this in a way where people can start to maybe listen to veterans a little bit more?
Mark McGrath:Yeah, absolutely. And to get even more complex which, like, I think all these diagnoses are a good starting point and they're like commonalities of symptoms often, but it's the starting point, right. So even if somebody has PTS which you know the VA kind of does tend to rubber stamp after you know, pretty humorous 20 question survey. Humorous 20 question survey. But, like a lot of the veterans we serve, a lot of the trauma stem back from childhood, right, like childhood abuse, and then either makes them more susceptible to this or the military stuff actually slides right off of them. So that's the other complexity of this of like each person experiences trauma but then there's a accumulation of many different traumas and just to say you have this and therefore do this is kind of ridiculous which we're trying to see right now. But yeah, so for us with. Sorry, I lost my train of thought. What was the question again?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Just kind of frame the current condition, the current situation with veteran suicide.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, so with the veteran suicide, the current statistics and they tend to be all over the place, but I've seen the average tend to be between 17 and 24. I've seen some statistics making it all the way to 44 a day commit suicide by the at the very least day commit suicide At the very least. More veterans have committed suicide on the home turf by a factor of 15 than died in combat from the last 20 years, from Afghanistan and Iraq.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Those are veterans, those aren't just. I mean, I think there are active duty members that are not included in those numbers, right?
Mark McGrath:Right, yeah, generally that's just veterans. It's not just the global war on terror too.
Jesse Gould:These are Vietnam veterans that are not included in those numbers. Right, right, yeah, generally that's just veterans. It's not just the global war on terror, too. These are Vietnam veterans that are doing it. These are not just guys our age, they're guys that are older, even.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, and it tends to hit harder when you get to the 40, 50-year-old sort of thing, which is also worrying just because a lot of the younger generation are starting to get to that older age, which then, because of the natural chemical changes in your brain, it makes you far more susceptible to a lot of that. But yeah, basically for the last and this has been going on. This has been a trend that has not decreased, if anything. A lot of years it increases and the government has pumped in hundreds of billions of dollars into it and really have not found a resolution. And it's clear that for some SSRIs and these other medications can be quite helpful, but a huge percentage of those it is not.
Mark McGrath:And just so the VA's own estimations over 600,000 veterans have PTSD.
Mark McGrath:I think it's a much bigger number than that, but those are the ones that they're treating and if you look at the vast majority of those, they're going to be needing treatment for that for the majority of their lives.
Mark McGrath:So there's really not outside of psychedelics, which is why we're so excited about it, because they are so effective, but there's really not something on the pipeline behind it that's this magical cure all. And not saying psychedelics are either, because there's much more to it. It's the preparation, it's the integration, it's the psychedelic just unlocks it. It's a tool, but it's also having us rethink how we treat mental health, how we treat all this kind of stuff. So it is. We've been, you know a lot of the veterans ourselves and other amazing organizations have been at the front lines of this, trying to figure out, trying to help with TBI, trying to help with PTS, try to help with suicide and there's a lot of different tools out there and it's just unfortunate that it always falls on veterans once again to help others without the support of the government funding and you talk to politicians and you get the thank you for your service, but then you really don't get the follow-up or actual movement towards making some sort of change.
Jesse Gould:I think it's important to also frame and help people understand that PTS can take many different shapes and forms. You don't necessarily have to have been in direct combat sticking hand-to-hand, bayonet fighting and that kind of thing. It could be pain from an injury sustained in training. It could be post-trauma from sexual assault. Some of our sister veterans that have babies have postpartum stress. Sometimes people get killed in training accidents. There's lots of things that can cause so when we throw out big numbers it doesn't mean we had that many guys in direct combat. No, it's a broad sampling, I think, of a very diverse way of places that you can get it.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Jesse, you don't just work with veterans, do you? You work with first responders, is that correct?
Mark McGrath:We haven't really worked with first responders yet. I mean, we are moving to domestic access soon and so in the future we do want to work with first responders, because it's very similar. It's just right now the demand for what we're doing is so high that we just kind of have to focus on combat vets and military sexual trauma.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Okay, so we could focus on that now. The requirement is, you can't do that right now. You really can't do this in the United States, so our veterans that serve our country and are often thanked for their service don't have access to this here in the United States. So your organization and I want to make sure we talk about the legalities of this. What are we talking about here? We're talking about sending folks outside the United States to outside the United States where this is legal Right, where they can have doctor supervision or supervision to actually go through the preparation to set the setting and integration. Can you walk us through what that was like in setting it up to allow veterans to go overseas, and are you nervous about any? Um, yeah, what, what? What makes us legal, I guess? Yeah, I mean there.
Mark McGrath:There's always nervousness and cautiousness from the beginning, but it's also the people we're working with had no other options and didn't have a lot of time, so it was almost a ethical sort of solution, and I'd make all the same decisions again. Right, if somebody's tried everything else out there and this could potentially help save their life, then why not give them that opportunity to go if it's their choice, and I can also provide better harm reduction and make sure they get to the right spot? Right, that was the other thing. If I was going to speak about this. I want to make sure people have the right framework. So really always was this facilitation harm reduction dynamic not trying to replace the medical system, but a lot of these people, the medical system failed and so you know why not give them a compassionate one more shot or some other ways of going about this, and so that's really what we had to do, but also be as cautious as possible. Like what do we need to consider Contraindications, making sure that we're not just. It was never like the more psychedelics, the more people problem solved. We were really diligent, and still are, about who we send. Right now, our intake process is three steps, including evaluation of their health physical, mental medications because we don't have the ability to mess up with this. We want to make sure that people are getting the most out of it. So, yeah, so the way that we were able to work kind of almost a loophole.
Mark McGrath:Where these are Schedule I substances in the US, you can't just use them, or you have to use them underground, or yeah, otherwise you're risking getting arrested in prosecution. There are countries that have indigenous dynamics of this that have been legal for a while Peru, other countries, jamaica, now with mushrooms and so they have legal ways of doing it. And so connecting, facilitating veterans going to these countries, going under places that have been doing this for decades, with great supervision, safety and the actual expertise in this, and then making sure that they have the safe passage there, preparation, getting there and then coming back home. That's kind of how we've been able to facilitate. The same thing if you went to Europe that offered some sort of medical procedure that you didn't have here. So that's kind of what we've been able to do. But it's also, from my perspective, a huge embarrassment that our veterans have to go to other countries to get life-saving treatment, and they've done it in the thousands.
Jesse Gould:And, to be clear, just to restress because we did this on another podcast we're not talking about the recreational use of these things.
Mark McGrath:We're talking about the facilitated medical therapies to help people mitigate trauma that would otherwise lead to the things that you talk about self-harm and suicide and that kind of thing, yeah, and it's only improved too as this has caught on and the research backs it up and more therapists are getting on board when in the beginning we really had to extend our resources and find sort of the brave few that were real, because from a therapist standpoint they can risk losing their license if they know that you're going to do this and work with you in some cases. But now that's become more accepted that that risk is down. So early on we had to be very conscientious of that, but now there's more of that continuum of care. So even if they do go overseas, there's many more therapists or much more help and infrastructure that then they can tap on to continue their therapy or continue their healing and have a much more structured framework from that. And so that's the benefit of all this moving forward and getting to the US slowly but surely.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Can you share the numbers that are coming through Heroic Hearts Project? I talked to Doc Polanco about this a while ago too. His numbers were pretty amazing, but what are your numbers right now? How many veterans are actually going through this a week or month a year? Where are we at right now?
Mark McGrath:Yeah, to date. So we've been operational for seven years We've served over a thousand veterans in terms of getting treatments overseas. We also do spouse support. So we merged with an organization called the Hope Project so we do essentially full family support. So we've served over 300 spouses just with coaching. So every spouse gets a coach and then we've served a few dozen in terms of their own retreat. So we're ramping up the retreats for the spouses as well. It all depends on the economy and the economics, because we're a nonprofit, so we try to do multiple retreats a month and then that serves anywhere from 20 to 40 a month. We have the capacity to do more, but you know it's there's still a cost with with every veteran involved. So it's just I'm out there dancing for dollars to to make sure we, we, we hit those numbers.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:And does the veteran have to pay for this or how does that work? What can you get Like if I wanted to go with you next month? How does that work?
Mark McGrath:Yeah, generally and this tends to be across the board from most of the spots you're doing for these bigger programs, whether it's IBA, nioasca or SILS-IBN On average they tend to be $5,000 to $6,000 per person. The way we operate is we have veterans have some sort of skin in the game. Generally we have them pay into the system a little bit that way. One, you're getting them to invest in themselves. Two, it's almost like a pay it forward of like hey, you're not just getting this for free, you are paying into it. It also gives that sort of responsibility. If they can pay more than we do, a sliding scale, a lot of them will cover like or what have you. But we also don't want somebody to have to decide between paying rent and saving their own life right.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I think that's key. I didn't know this until a few years ago, but even retired 04s 05s who are suffering from PTSD and this is my experience is they could not afford to do this right. So we had to find money for them. And I know you do that too. But this is not to say if you need help and you reach out to Jesse and Heroic Hearts Project, we'll find a way to get you funded right. I mean, you're going to, is that true? Yeah, we're going to find a way to get you funded right. I mean, you're going to, is that true? Yeah, we're going to find a way to get you down there or out of the US to help you out if you qualify.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So don't be afraid of those numbers. And if you can't afford it this is my comment if you can't afford it, pay for it, all right. Don't take advantage of the context. Don't take advantage of anybody and say, hey, look, I'm going to save a couple thousand dollars. Take your fucking money out of your pocket and pay for it. Dude, you know sorry to say that, but I've seen people actually take advantage of the situation. So sorry about that, jesse.
Mark McGrath:I just want to make sure that it's very clear that if you need help and you're qualified, we're going to figure out a way to get you funded Right my team and you know this community where we're working day and night to to try to get more access to to more veterans and figure out better ways to scale it, and it's coming, you know, like we're finally in this spot where there is a light at the end of the tunnel. It's not just me waiting, like saying hey, wait for pfizer to come up with a new drug in the next 30, 40 years, like this is coming and a lot of us are working our asses off to change the stigma, to make sure it happens. So it really is like you know, work with us, get coaching. There is hope for for for a lot of us around around the corner. It's still going to take some time, but it's. There is hope.
Jesse Gould:In the de-stigmatizingizing has I've yet to see and I'm not aware of any. I'm not saying that there's not, but you know a lot of guys like us that were not at the flag officer or general officer level. You know who are the, who are the former retired chief of staff of whatever service or commandants or chief of naval operation Service or Commandants or Chief of Naval Operations. Are there any prominent admirals or generals, retired or even active duty, that are advocating this type of stuff, and who are they?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, we were talking about General Steele earlier, and then we have General Zanakis.
Mark McGrath:It's getting there.
Jesse Gould:I guess when I ask that again, we're about John Boyd and his stuff. This was a guy that was getting quashed by the establishment sort of Pentagon types. I just wonder if, when you talk about things like psychedelics or neurodiversity or other things that are real issues to these things, is there a lot of headwinds internally, I guess, or is there more hope in that respect?
Mark McGrath:There's far more hope, night and day, of that. So there are some prominent generals, admirals, that have come out. There's many more that have gone through this treatment and are quietly advocating behind the scenes but just obviously having to protect their own family or security or whatever. I was just two, three weeks ago, uh, at a conference and had a sit-down conversation with the current undersecretary of the va, uh, dr elena hall, and he was a proponent of like he's in, like he knew just as much as anybody that's been in it. He knew mdma, he knew still simon, he's like this is our goal, it's the va.
Mark McGrath:So there's a lot of headwinds, but like having somebody at that prominent level that is understanding of this, that wouldn't have happened five years ago, having these generals and all this kind of stuff. So the tide is turning. There still is the headwind, there still is a big education sort of thing, but we finally have the foundation of research, prominent individuals. We get called out from individuals within the BAs all the time just to understand how to better prepare for this. So internally there is, there's still going to be the stalwarts, the people that just be like ah, drugs, I mean that's inherent, but the traction that's been made is quite significant.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Hey, mark, there's a Martin excuse me, general Martin R Steele Marine Corps three-star. I believe. He is that Jesse and I know, and he's out there quite a bit talking about this. And, by the way, years ago General Steele used the OODA loop to explain how businesses can win in this type of environment. So he's a huge advocate of this right now and I'm not sure if you're familiar with his background, mark.
Jesse Gould:No, I'll have to do more. I can think of a couple I knew that were doing radical things that were interesting, that we're not allowed to talk about. Yeah, I guess the other thing, too is so. So, jesse, when you see the opposition that comes from the quote-unquote establishment, is most of it, oh, this is drugs. You know, this is the war on drugs and you know, um, or is it people that that have not, maybe not haven't had the experience with, with pts, that maybe they were in the military, far removed from, from people that had the, you know, veterans that had to deal with? Is that? Is that what most of the opposition sounds like?
Mark McGrath:You're going to get combinations. You're going to get people that just like hard entrenched of, like you know, drugs is just going to turn everybody into a hippie and, you know, be the death of American capitalism. You still get those. But you'd be surprised to like little by little. You know, like there's new generations doing cbd and cannabis that you never thought would be the ones taking an edible right like there, there is a changing perception. That does happen over time.
Mark McGrath:From a political standpoint, it depends. It's either that sort of knee-jerk reaction or it's like what's politically viable for them, right, so if they feel like this is too risky, then they might not stick their neck out there. So there's that. From the political standpoint, it's all that risk assessment of like what you know what's. Is this going to hurt my career or is this going to show I care about veterans? Can I play in between? From the other side, it's just really that education, you know, like uh, like uh. But we've seen bipartisan support, so to the degree that even you know, like pren shah and um a few other major republicans have come in support of this. There's a big federal bill that was pushed. Uh, some notable um, uh, like the trails are in favor of this and have been supportive. Uh, rick Perry, who's, like you know, well-known Republican. Uh, texas governor. So there is that there. So there's some lines.
Jesse Gould:He's a veteran too, by the way. Yeah, he was a pilot.
Mark McGrath:There's some lines that does fall under. But you can't just cause like we just had a bill in california and we just got as much opposition from more, maybe more conservative democrats as we did from certain republicans, like some of the republicans that you thought would never go for this did. Yeah, some of the democrats that you thought like this would be in their alley, uh, didn't go for it. You know, so it's. We're seeing that and I guess it. You know what their, their, their capacity is, but a lot of it, what you do see with a lot of these trends, especially when we go through different states, it's really just a lack of education. When you have and that's where the veteran voice really helps If you have the veterans speaking about it, you show the actual statistics coming out of Stanford, johns Hopkins, all this kind of stuff. The people who are willing to have their views challenged tend to come to that side.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:You've been on the Hill quite a bit to talk to different folks up there and having a military background and connecting with the veterans that are serving our Congress. For now they're coming around to this and I've seen I know Mark went up there a couple of times, slider went up there a couple of times to talk to folks Well, what's that? Can you walk us through what that's like to sit down with somebody who lived through the war on drugs, who pushed back on all of this? And now here's a story of a veteran who isn't a hippie, if you will. You know, no flowing robes coming in there, just a decent haircut and an interesting story telling them about what this did for them. Can you give us some firsthand experience, if possible, what that's like?
Mark McGrath:Yes, I've done a lot of speaking both on the Hill and then also in state. So you have like state senators, state representatives, and the state one's interesting as well, just because on that one you tend to get more access to the actual representatives, right, because it's a little bit smaller scale, so that one you can actually push the leverage buttons of like, hey, sir, ma'am, you say you support veterans, I'm giving you this on a silver platter, put your actions over your mouth, this kind of thing. So I think you can kind of play that a little bit more on there and we have changed minds pretty significantly with it. And then on DC, it's a little bit more complicated. Sometimes you'll actually meet the, the representatives, uh, but oftentimes you're meeting their staffers, or sometimes they'll come in and get debriefed afterwards, um, but.
Mark McGrath:And then on the dc it's really just like consistency, like consistent message keep going after it, keep talking, know what, like clear, concise ways that they can help in terms of bills and and and like what's the progress? Don't overreach. You know, there there's been an effort to not overly say psychedelics, because that could get the, the knee-jerk reaction, but maybe frame it in a different way, kind of thing. So that's all the the political stuff. That's beyond me or I don't really have too much interest but what is your?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:what is your preference instead of psychedelics? What do you, what do you use instead of the that word?
Mark McGrath:um, what I forget what they're using now, but they'll focus on like, either the, the, the actual substances like, okay, the, the ones coming up are like psilocybin and mdma, and just really focusing more of the messaging on hey, we're not trying to change policy around psychedelics, we're trying to change policy around these, um, you know, breakthrough therapies or these, these substances that, uh, have shown above and beyond results. So it's just kind of how you like, what do you put? What's the thing that's grabbing the most attention? Is it the substance and the results, or is it the word psychedelic? And that's all just like political gamemanship. But yeah, I mean, you do see that where, for a lot of them, especially that are open, that really do sincerely want to help the veterans, and it's not just like a slogan that they say that you know it's a passing phrase, a slogan that they say that you know it's a passing phrase, they're a lot, especially early on, they're like shocked of like oh, this is not what I expected. This is interesting, I'll look into it, and that's all we can ask. Right, if they just look into it and see what's there, then that's a huge victory and there's been a lot of.
Mark McGrath:You know, I just go there occasionally, but there's been a lot of others who have been doing amazing work and they're just, you know, consistently pushing that message. And this last trip I was there it really has changed the perception of psychedelics from the first time on the Hill where people were just like what are you doing? Like what's going on now, to now. A lot of the members in both the House and Senate actually have some degree of knowledge of this and a lot of them are actually somewhat open to it, or at least we're getting there right. And that's this whole thing of normalization the more we talk about it, the more it becomes a public discourse.
Mark McGrath:The more the average American talks about it, the less scary and the less of a big jump it seems. And that's really this process that we're in and that's just more consistency of message. Keep grinding down and keep getting that. But it is cool to see those that are willing to be open to hearing. There's some that are just straight up politicians and you can see that veneer and you talk to them and you're like, is this a real person? But there's some that are just straight up politicians and you know, like you can kind of see that veneer and you talk to them and you're like is this a real person? Uh, but there's others that you can tell that their their hearts in it, it seems ironic too.
Jesse Gould:If we were talking about psychotropics or psychoactives, no one would care. Like it's, like you can, you can do that. And you wonder, I've always wondered in veteran suicides, you know, were they on psychedelics or were they on psychoactives? Were they on antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, things like that? It seems like those oftentimes have a much more common correlation, whereas it seems from what I've learned of psychedelics is that they're not addictive, they don't have the damaging and lasting effects that those drugs can have, or even alcohol. You know, alcohol is the most pervasive drugs. That's in all of our service songs that we sing about. It's on, you know, the salute to the military from, uh, you know, liquor companies and things like that, and and the deaths of alcohol versus psychedelics, I would bet that there's a wide disparity. I bet psychedelics are probably like this and alcohol is is the opposite.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, absolutely. I mean you look at the actual statistics of, like, let's go with mushrooms or something like that, like there's no I don't know if there's a anybody who's ever been recorded as dying of an overdose from mushrooms they might have a really bad experience, but you there's always like you're going to throw it out before you even can get to that level, even can get to that level. It's not the same across the board but generally speaking, a lot of the organic or the plant-based psychedelics you can't overdose from them To certain doses, like anything in moderation actually show to have benefits physiologically as well. We're doing studies that there's actually repairing the brain from certain psychedelics, that restoring gut microbiomes. There's a lot of main health issues that people are actually looking at for psychedelics, beyond the just psychoactive or psychiatry sort of thing.
Mark McGrath:And yeah, to your point, you, you know ssris are psychoactives. If you look at the, the, the, um, what's the first uh, negative reaction or whatever you call it, and it's always like increased suicidal ideation. It's like the commercials where they just list like yeah, you know. Like yeah, yeah, your, your stomach's gonna explode and breathe blood out of the nose. All this kind of stuff.
Jesse Gould:I mean a lot of those, yeah, Well, again, this is like maybe it's just the Gen X skepticism, right, but I've, I'm a season ticket holder of an NFL team, right, and I go to games, and I've never, I've never, would think that anybody that I see causing fights and things are the the they're always on, it seems to me, is alcohol, not psychedelics or that kind of thing and that's you know.
Mark McGrath:And there is a caution of like, uh, and that's what we say, like don't take this in your own hands. Like, go with the support system, because they can be extremely helpful with pts. But if you have a lot of trauma, you're also opening up this pandora's box potentially, and so you need to have a support system, you need to know what you're getting into, and if you just take this in your own hands, then it can be somewhat risky, because then you're just like what the hell was that? Now I have to deal with all these emotions that I've been stuffing in a box for the past 20 years.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I want to talk about the dark side of psychedelics, and before we get to that, I want to point out something that just popped up on my radar today, and it's a new book called Trippie the Peril and Promise in Medicinal Psychedelics. It's by Ernesto Landono, I believe. It is Points out five things in today's quick brief here. The third thing he points out is veterans are on the front lines of psychedelic renaissance. That's what we talked about. We know that. But there's another element in here that we need to look at, and that is is the hype outpacing the science, and we've had some folks on here as well to look at that. I want to go a little bit deeper. Where has this gone wrong in your experience and where will? What are the barriers to this going forward? You know what. What's going to prevent in our, in our world? What's going to prevent this from happening where we have access, in the US?
Mark McGrath:Yeah, ernesto is actually a friend. He was a New York Times reporter and he joined us at a retreat back many years ago. So I'm glad his book is getting out there and it is notable cautions of what needs to come. And so this is sort of the dark side that we are seeing and I'll qualify it afterwards as well. But, like I said, these can be very beneficial for trauma. But if you have a lot of trauma and you just take it people who are at desperation, it really can leave you somewhat open-ended. That's why we do 4 to 6 weeks of preparation, because if you're not in the right mindset, that's where people get into this bad trip. And I really do think it's a big factor of preparation or selection too, because some people I just don't think are ready for it. And so this bad trip dynamic is when a very intense journey then brings new trauma or traumatizes the person even further, right Like they just get caught in this hell, or they get caught in this reoccurring sort of trauma state. And again, there's ways that if people are prepared that we really avoid that. And challenging trips can actually be quite beneficial. But that's not discounting that there's no case where it can just be super intense and super hard to deal with, but a lot of that's interpretation that you can help people get through. The other side of it is this is very People are vulnerable. In that spot. You are taking something that takes you out of your normal conscious state, uh, and you have to be in a trusting environment, trusting container, or when you're working, like with MDMA therapy, which is coming down the pipe, it opens you up and it makes you very connected and emotionally available and trusting. And if, if the therapist is, you know at all, um, you know at all, um, you know, in violation of anything like that can be a hard dynamic right, like there can be, um, people overstepping barriers and, and you know, unwarranted touch and all this kind of stuff. So this is a new way in a lot of ways of treating mental health. That does open people up and because of that it can be quite effective, but that also opens up people to being more vulnerable. So we do need to have those conversations and make sure a lot of this is thought out and the proper safety mechanisms are in place. And the same sort of thing.
Mark McGrath:Psychedelics can increase People that already have megalomania or high egos. It can increase that. That's why I've never been a believer that everybody should have psychedelics, and it's just gonna make them better. For some people. It gives them this like sort of godlike complex or they're already probably inclined to that. But it can just make it worse. And so you know there are. There are legitimate, you know, like churches and all this kind of stuff that have been used in psychedelics as sacrament for quite a while. But it does open up this dynamic of people using this from a spiritual or religious perspective.
Mark McGrath:The tale is old as time. What are you going to use to take advantage of people and control them? There's many other tools out there. This is just another one that we have to be cautious, but the way I'll qualify this is one. A lot of these things are worse when they're underground. When we talk about them, bring them above ground. It makes them safer because there's actually a conversation about it. If I talk to you, I'm not at risk of being declared a criminal. If there's pipelines for people to do it safe of like, hey, this person is trusted, noteworthy, there's forms about it. This person's not. When it's underground, it's so hard to call out the bad players. And then all this other infrastructure of support, that if somebody has a very challenging experience, we know what we're doing and we know where to get them. So, bringing this above ground, these are cautions that we shouldn't go back to know. These are cautions that, hey, this is going to get safer if we play it intelligently.
Mark McGrath:The other side of things, too, is we were in this because of the war on drugs. We're in this artificial state where we do have to. There's some hype that needs to happen. We wouldn't be here talking about this trying to push, uh, the research forward independently if it wasn't for the war on drugs. Like if the system worked, if it wasn't broken and preventing people from effective treatments for the last 50 plus years, then it could go smoothly, it could go efficiently, but we're not in that ideal system. So there is this balance of yeah, maybe it's a little bit overhyped, but in some sense, it needed to be overhyped to also break through some of the artificial restrictions.
Mark McGrath:So the things to watch out for, though, is there can be a big backlash If there are these cases of people doing crazy stuff on psychedelics or whatever the media.
Mark McGrath:Really, you can save 1000 people, and it just takes one person to have some sort of crazy story that the media latches onto and derails it, because that's what feeds the news cycle, right? Not the people that saved. So that's what we need to be very conscientious that, if we are doing this and again, it's not a numbers game, it's a quality game and it's an infrastructure game. So now that we're finally paying attention, that's where people need to look out and also be um as veterans, we need to look out for each other. If somebody is doing something in an inappropriate way or they're taking advantage of the system, then we need to call that out. It's the same thing in the nonprofit space. We've probably all come across nonprofits that were just not necessarily doing their tasks or just getting money off of it, and there's not good infrastructure to report that and so we need to protect our own and make sure that people are doing this in the correct way.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I'm wondering about the pharmaceutical industry. What do they think about this? And you know, mark, and I've had discussions about this with other guests. We know a lot about the military industrial congressional complex where, you know, we build things that cost a lot of money and we don't get a lot of value out of them. So the incentives of the system drive the behaviors and there's incentives behind keeping people on medic medicines or drugs, which is called drugs for now. If you find something, you can, if you find an illness, you can create a drug and then keep a person on that drug. So just kind of giving some context for the pharmaceutical industry how they make money. If the pharmaceutical industry was interested in psychedelics, can they make money off of it or would they lose customers? I want to get some thoughts on that.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, so it's tricky and that's actually been sort of evolution in the psychedelic space since I've been in and actually one of the things, and it's for good and for bad right. So there's this organization called Compass. They were a nonprofit. They really started pushing psilocybin for depression. They started out as a nonprofit, they ended up to be a for-profit. They got a lot of flack in the industry One just because there's kind of a pushback of these things that are natural and should be available to everybody, anybody trying to make profit off of it. On the other side, because they became like a billion-dollar company. That caused this huge influx of capital into the space, brought more attention, brought more funding for different sort of innovations and possibly nonprofits as well, and so it's kind of a dual ed sword. Right. There's bad stuff about it because people thought they took advantage of the goodwill with a nonprofit and then put patents on it, and that's the other thing. You can't patent a mushroom but they patent the process of synthesizing it. So that's the other thing. You can't patent a mushroom but they patent the process of synthesizing it. So that could still make money. So there's ways of doing it. But it's this fine dance of like. Is it just going into a system where, uh, now it's going to be so expensive that you can't even access it unless you have insurance, and then we're in the same sort of game where underserved communities continue. So that that's kind of been the dance with the psychedelic space.
Mark McGrath:I'd say, from the big pharma I haven't really heard too much from like the pfizers or anything like that. There can always be some of the you know behind the scenes lobbying from um congress side or the fda side, um, but nothing super notable. And then in terms of big pharma this tends to go more into the smaller startup biotech companies that will again try to find the same. Like psilocybin, you can slightly alter the formula and then if that new formula you can prove that it helps this or this treatment, then you can patent that formula. So there's a lot of them trying to do that or the process around it, and there's different ways of that. But at the end of the day, from my perspective, all that's just proving that the mushroom in the ground works. And then, as long as you're not preventing me from having a more cheap access community care model, then you guys can go try to make money there, and I'll do this. But a lot of these substances similar with cannabis, they're grown so they're not patentable.
Mark McGrath:But that kind of goes to a bigger issue too, beyond sort of the pharmaceutical complexes, our medical systems, our insurance systems. The FDA are not built necessarily for cures or for things that are not profitable. So the way you get through the FDA is by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on clinical studies, double blind, all this kind of stuff super expensive. But the reason it doesn't necessarily help with cures is because unless you charge an arm and a leg for that cure, it doesn't make sense for Pfizer to invest in it. And so that's the problem why this has all been crowdsourced, of MDMA going through that, because it's not patentable. So it's not going to be the billion dollar paycheck for Pfizer to do it, and so you really miss out on a lot of things that could actually be significantly better or you don't need that much. But if there's not that economic model for it, then it just can't go through the FDA unless you get more nonprofit money. And the same thing with insurance, the way the insurance model works.
Mark McGrath:The case in point is ketamine.
Mark McGrath:Ketamine has been generic for a while and super cheap, and more recently, in the past few decades, they've shown that it has really beneficial effects for some mental health things.
Mark McGrath:So in the military you use ketamine for anesthetic, like loss of limb. You put that on in the hospitals. But it can also have an immediate anti-depressive effect, immediate, uh, anti-suicidation, and they've been using that therapy quite effectively off label. But again, it doesn't make sense for you to go through the fda to prove that main ketamine is beneficial for ptsd because that would cost you tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars for something that you can't make money. And so Johnson, the company, slightly tweaked the formula of ketamine, got it through the FDA for depression, I believe. And now that's the main now far more expensive, essentially the same sort of chemical, but now they can charge much more. That's the thing that gets accepted by the VA, that's the thing that gets accepted by insurance, where genetic ketamine, which is like dollar you know cents on the dollar compared it won't get covered by insurance. So that's, there's this weird dynamic with the system where it encourages these extremely lofty prices and not necessarily cures unless you can find economic incentive for it.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:And I just want to point out today the FDA approved feed ingredients to cut dairy cow methane emissions. Here we are talking about saving the lives of veterans and somehow some way that this you know. Okay, we want to make sure cows reduce their farts, I guess, whatever. So, yeah, money drives a lot of things here.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Priorities, priorities, yeah yeah, and it's the incentives that are driving the whole system, as Jesse pointed out. We absolutely agree with that. Jesse, talk to us about what's going to happen in the United States in the near term. What's possible? Where can people actually go?
Mark McGrath:Yeah, so this is the most exciting thing for us. So the past seven years, like I mentioned, we've been sending people overseas to all sorts of different countries to get them these sort of treatments. Finally, last year we did the first ever in the US legal veteran retreat with psychedelics, which is pretty significant, and that was in Oregon. So Oregon and Colorado both passed laws. Colorado comes online next year officially. Oregon just came online this year after they passed their policy and it allows essentially government-approved, government health authority-approved access to psilocybin treatments in the state and it's going to be supervised by therapists and helpers and there's all to be, you know, supervised by therapists and and helpers and there's all these different regulations. But it is the first time people in the us can access a psychedelic. Uh, through legal above ground means it is a state's right versus a federal right. So they're still suicide and still federally illegal and so that causes some stuff. But there there there's there's very good assurance of like if you do it in Oregon like the cops are not going to like it's a state's rights issue and there's a lot of legal backing of that. We can bring it more to a community and that's what we're building. We're really trying to expand in Oregon, colorado and then the rest of the US, where not only do you have access to these treatments but then you also have other veterans, other first responders that have gone through this, that are your coaches, that are your facilitators in your hometown, that you can regularly meet up with. And so rebuilding these sort of fallen community structures because I don't know my generation, I don't know about the gen xers but we don't really go to vfw or american legion anymore doesn't mean it's beyond the pale, but we've really lost these, these community centers for veterans. And I think because we don't want to go to like a smoky old bar and just swap war stories, like if there's some place that actually encouraged us to, you know, have you have, you know, do better stuff, wellness, all this kind of stuff. I do think there's that mean, because every time we get veterans together it's just this palpable sense that they were missing it right, sometimes we avoid other veterans but like when you get them together they share the jokes. It's that in itself is therapeutic and there's just not the infrastructure for that.
Mark McGrath:The other big thing that people that should be on radar is MDMA. So MDMA is the chemical component of ecstasy, but that's been going through the FDA trials. It's actually shown quite phenomenal results 67% of patients that had treatment-resistant PTSD so the hardest of the hardest, like the cases that nothing else was working on 67%, after going through MDMA trials, no longer had PTSD. So that's a huge jump from anything else out there. And that's not to say the other. What is it? 33%? They also a lot of them, a big portion of them got benefits. So it wasn't just that all or nothing. Okay, so that they've. They went through all the FDA trials.
Mark McGrath:The FDA has to finally make a decision, uh, early August, of whether it will be an approved medication for PTSD. We have pretty good expectations that it will just based off of how good the results have been. And if that's the case, then all of a sudden that's going to reclassify it and then that is going to lead to a domino effect of MDMA potentially being available through the VA, through insurance, through clinics, and that's also going to be a great benefit. So what we see is parallel tracks, possibly starting the end of this year, of going through a clinic or the VA and hopefully you get access to MDMA or, if you want to be more, have more ceremonial or traditional community access. Then you'll have community access to psilocybin, and both can be you know, send messages differently. Both can be great healers. They're not mutually exclusive, but it is finally opening up effective mental health to not only veterans but the rest of the population.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:What about active duty? And I bring this up because I had a conversation with Dr Kaufman a couple of years ago where they were looking at possibility of allowing active duty members to go through a MDMA trial. Are you, are you tracking any of this?
Mark McGrath:Yeah, it's tricky, it's just one of those like hot topic issues. But I mean that is a case of like that's going to be growing discussion, right. Like why do? Because when I was in, you know there's platoon sergeants and sergeant majors who were clearly on that PTS spectrum, you know like if you looked at them wrong then you'd have fear of your life, right, and they were just kind of in this like they could make it happen with that nonstop deployment cycle. But the moment things settled down it just kind of went crazy.
Mark McGrath:So there's that question of like, why should we? Does it make better warriors to address their trauma earlier, right Before they get to those bad cycles or the bad habits or substance abuse or what have you, and make sure their family life is better? But then the other side of it too, which is sort of the tricky of like, is there a component? Does this make them a better warrior or will it make them rethink their service or their relationship with going over battle? Or will it make them rethink their service or their relationship with going over battle? Is there the potential of lessening the forces in terms of that? And then, just from a PR standpoint, it's a really hard political stance to when somebody can say like, oh, you're dosing active duty soldiers with psychedelics right, there's a bad history of that, active duty soldiers with psychedelics, right, like there's a bad history of that. And so anything that has that sort of association is just going to be a tricky sell from a political standpoint. So I think first let's just prove out that it helps with PTSD and there are models and then I think there is a the case where I think especially MDMA, first and foremost, will be increasingly accepted for active duty in the coming years.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Have you looked at how this could potentially help in performance? I know that athletes are using it to build out better performance, actually become better people, which leads to better performance. Have you looked at anything that's happening in the military or outside the military for actually creating higher performance in individuals and teams?
Mark McGrath:Yeah, to some degree. Nothing military-specific in terms of military funding. The main study with the military is trying to create. The DOZ is trying to create non-psychedelic psychedelics, so just trying to get the anti-inflammatory and other sort of things. But there is, from my perspective, a benefit of the actual journey from a to help you out psychologically.
Mark McGrath:But these things are so um, they're, they're they're hitting our brains and our bodies in such unique ways and they're allowing people to heal in so many unique ways that it's it's really this beginning Renaissance stage of what they will reveal for how the brain processes, how we process trauma, what is trauma? All these kinds of things that we just kind of have very black and white answers for, which is why our treatments have been so ineffective. And so I do think it's going to open up all sorts of better understanding, including performance, and because you don't need to be super traumatized to benefit from psychedelics, right, like it can just be quality of life or better connectivity or sort of resetting. And so there's a lot of things that are still unknown about how the brain works that I think these will help works, that I think these will help. But then there's other things, like performance studies around microdosing, because psychedelics do enhance your perceptions in a lot of ways. It makes you more sensitive or increases your senses in a lot of ways, so that could potentially be beneficial.
Mark McGrath:And then just the very basic If you are an athlete or what have you, and if there is trauma or there's self-doubt, or what have you and if there is trauma or their self doubt or what have you, you know there's ways of framing this that it can help you better connect and be keep that motivation. So I can see it across the board. Again, there's a lot of openings to. You know charlatans taking advantage of that and you know selling snake oil, but there there's absolutely ways that it can be used to benefit in a variety of different ways.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:If our listeners want to send some money your way to help with your nonprofit, how do they do that? Is that possible?
Mark McGrath:Yeah, so, like you said, we are a 501c3 nonprofit. All donations provide a tax write-off and the way we are able to serve veterans and there's more and more knocking on our door every day is through generous donations. That's how we get them to this life-saving treatment because, unfortunately, there's currently not government support for that. So our website HeroicHeartsProjectorg there's a big donate link. We are on the major social medias like Facebook and Instagram. So heroicheartsproject, if you are open to helping a vet, it costs about $6,000 per vet and we really do appreciate any support. It doesn't need to be to that level, it can be. Every little amount helps. We do appreciate that. It's really helping us change the game for veterans seeking this kind of care.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Well, I really appreciate you being here with us. Jesse, I know the first time you and I met, I think you and I saw Mike Tyson talk about 5-Me or DMT, for you know, 20 minutes straight with Daniel Carsello. It was kind of funny actually, but that was what three years ago down in Miami, yeah. So are you doing any events like that? Do you do any public speaking at those events still?
Mark McGrath:Yeah, occasionally I'll go, Just proof of life that I'm still out and active. You've got to show your face every once in a while. No major events coming up right now. We will be doing like a big, like charity gala in LA. We'll send it out through our website. People can sign up for the newsletter and then we you know people have communities that they think will be very supportive. We always like throwing together small dinners or informative events in different cities where we think that there might be donors or just a better education. So if people have an opportunity for that, we're happy to put together our heads and figure it out.
Jesse Gould:Now. We appreciate you coming on. It's good running into you the other week at a psychedelic event. It was very nice.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, absolutely, and thanks for giving us a voice, guys, always good to see you.
Jesse Gould:One thing I would say about that event and others around here in Manhattan, where both you and I are, is I've been really taken aback and delighted at the interest in helping veterans. It seems to be widespread and sincere and genuine, from people who have never been in the military, so it's really encouraging.
Mark McGrath:Yeah, yeah, we've been very blessed and honored by the support that's out there and I think it's a testament to a lot of the actual country. The Americans maybe not again always followed up by the politicians, but there are many people that are embarrassed and shocked that veterans have to go to other countries, and they've been the ones that help out. So it's cool to be in a time in a generation, in a country that really is supportive and they're willing to put their action behind their words. Yep, outstanding.
Jesse Gould:Thanks again for coming on and joining us, jesse. We really appreciate it Of Outstanding. Thanks again for uh for coming on and joining us. Jesse, really appreciate it.
Mark McGrath:Of course, guys.
