Phoenix Revival: A Fighter Pilot's Journey Through Trauma & Alternative Healing with Kegan Gill

Former fighter pilot Kegan "SMurF" Gill takes us on a gripping journey through the skies and beyond in this revelatory episode. From the intense world of aerial combat to the harrowing experience of a high-speed ejection, SMurF shares his story of survival and resilience. We explore the critical decisions made in the split-second chaos of dogfighting and the profound impacts of traumatic brain injuries on his life. Smurf's candid recounting of his battle with severe injuries and mental health challenges unveils the stark realities faced by veterans and the potential pitfalls of conventional medical approaches.

In a bold exploration of alternative healing, SMurF discusses the transformative power of meditation and psychedelics, highlighting how these practices helped him reclaim his life after conventional treatments fell short. His experiences in a peyote ceremony and the support of organizations like the Heroic Hearts Project provide insight into unconventional paths to recovery. The episode addresses the urgent need for more humane mental health care for veterans, shedding light on the systemic issues within the current healthcare framework and offering hope for those seeking new avenues for healing.

As we express gratitude for the platform to discuss mental health challenges openly, we highlight the anticipation for SMurF's upcoming book, "Phoenix Revival: The Aftermath of Naval Aviation's Fastest Survived Ejection," poised to offer further insights and encouragement to those navigating their own struggles.

Phoenix Revival: The Aftermath of Naval Aviation's Fastest Ejection

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Chapters

• 0:00 Surviving Trauma and Mental Health Struggles
• 10:34 Unconventional Trauma Recovery
• 21:37 Fighter Jet Dogfighting and Brain Health
• 25:13 Combat Fighter Training and Critical Decisions
• 30:59 Dramatic High-Speed Ejection and Rescue
• 38:58 Recovery From High-Speed Ejection
• 51:05 Recovery and Flight Evaluation Board
• 1:00:35 Overcoming Military Trauma and Recovery
• 1:10:22 Healing Journey Through Psychedelic Therapy
• 1:14:49 Healing Through Meditation and Psychedelics
• 1:20:48 Veteran Shares Recovery and UAPs

Transcript

Ponch Rivera: 0:56

Yeah, yeah, I got a Zoom bag here.

Kegan Gill : 0:58

Got to wear your pens like an astronaut.

Ponch Rivera: 1:00

Yeah, so scrappy motherfucker, right. Is that where we get the call sign Smurf?

Kegan Gill : 1:05

Yeah. Yeah, you know there's a lot more to that story, but that's what it boiled down into.

Ponch Rivera: 1:10

And the reason is because you turned blue. Is that right? Because you ejected out an aircraft, or why Smurf?

Kegan Gill : 1:17

Yeah. So if you want I can get into a little bit about the story it yeah. So if you want I can get into a little bit about the story. It kind of ties into all of it actually how I got this call sign.

Ponch Rivera: 1:24

Yeah, so let me, let me give my my theory behind this. You were out there chasing uaps and, uh, you had to punch out of an aircraft and you're going supersonic, something like that. So where am I wrong on that part of the story?

Mark McGrath: 1:35

wait, can I guess? Can I guess, though, can the?

Ponch Rivera: 1:37

way, yeah, yeah the marine guess.

Mark McGrath: 1:38

See that I would guess. The marine would guess that your head got put into a toilet with blue color cleaner yeah, it made you blue and they call you smurf, but no yeah, that that would.

Kegan Gill : 1:50

Uh, that'd be a more disgusting way to get that one. But uh, you know, there's a little bit of what you said with uaps, but not involved in my, uh, in my call sign actually, you know who asked me to check in with you about UAPs.

Ponch Rivera: 2:03

You remember Slider, yeah.

Mark McGrath: 2:05

Yeah, yeah.

Ponch Rivera: 2:07

Well, let's save maybe another episode.

Ponch Rivera: 2:10

So, smurf, glad you're here. Man, you and I met back in March of 2022. A couple emails back and forth. There's some doctors inside the US government that were interested in contacting you that I was reaching out to you on behalf of. There's some doctors inside the US government that were interested in contacting you that I was reaching out to you on behalf of. You know, there's a psychedelic story in here. There's a mental health story. There's a brain injury story in here. There's an OODA loop story. There's a fighter pilot story. There's an ejection, there's sharks. There's all kinds of craziness in here. So please give us a. You've been on several podcasts lately, which is fantastic. You got a new book coming out here soon, but, smurf, please give us a quick rundown of you know why did I pick up that or why did you answer that email back in 2022 of March that I sent?

Kegan Gill : 2:48

Yeah, I mean just reaching back out to you about topic of mental health and the ejection like you alluded to. It's just a crazy, crazy story and I want to share it because it has a lot of things that tie in that anybody can apply to their lives. We all go through our struggles. We all go through challenges, whatever that may be physical, mental, spiritual challenges and I think it really is a message that will resonate with all your audience. Whatever you're going through, that can help inspire you, encourage you and let you see that we all have this potential inside of us. We have this sort of fiery human spirit within us that can endure far more than we really give it credit for a lot of the time, and sometimes you don't even find out what you can get through until you've gone through it. Yeah, that's kind of why I want to share this and be on here with you is get this message out to the world.

Kegan Gill : 3:38

And I know there was a time when I was in a really dark place where I was just, you know, literally had a pistol in my mouth and and I wish I knew what I know now. I wish I had heard my story and known that there was a different way to heal, and now that I know that, I want to share that with everybody. So if they find themselves in that dark place, even if it's just one guy listening to this, that's why I'm doing it. Yeah, are you in a bowling alley? Well, I have a three-year-old and a six-year-old and I'm pretty sure they just threw legos all over the floors that's great.

Mark McGrath: 4:09

It makes ejecting at mach one look easy.

Kegan Gill : 4:11

Yeah so right, the real challenge of the thunderdome here.

Ponch Rivera: 4:14

Yeah, we talk about you know mental health on here, quite a bit in psychedelics and the connection to John Boyd's Observer-Oriented Side, act, loop orientation, genetics, culture, previous experience in there, what we know from trauma, ptsd, tbi, post-traumatic syndrome, whatever it may be, what are the sources? Is that colors, how you observe, how you sense the world, how you perceive the world, how you decide and enact. Can we start there? You had a lot of contributing factors, not just the ejection, but maybe the system that we all live in, where the pharmaceutical industry feeds us or makes us believe that we need to take some type of medicine to improve ourselves. Can you talk about what trauma was like for you? What was happening in that dark time?

Kegan Gill : 4:55

Yeah, you know. So I went through this, this high speed ejection. I had sustained severe injuries. I mean traumatic brain injury, broken neck, multiple broken limbs, broken shoulder, extensive nerve damage, artery damage, just had my entire body wrecked. I spent some time paralyzed, underwent over a dozen trauma surgeries and was told I would never walk again, use my arms again. My flying career was over in the military. Never walk again, use my arms again. My flying career was over in the military.

Kegan Gill : 5:25

And eventually I was fortunate that I didn't believe the prognosis of the doctors. There's a saying which is you can believe the diagnoses like what you have going on is real when the doctors say it, but don't listen to the prognosis, because it's often very dark and gloomy and it's going to tell you you're not going to have a chance to get better. Luckily, I didn't listen to those doctors and I was able to physically recover through the surgeries and through two years of rehabilitation. But what started to catch up to me later and was exacerbated by another aircraft incident with decompression of the cockpit, was yet another brain injury and that brain injury piece, the injury that it caused inside the physiology of my brain, the neuroconnections, the production of hormones. It affects everything in your body, your mood, your behavior, your concentration. And when I sort of had this insult added to the injury that was already there, it threw me out of whack. That was in a way that became much more challenging than dealing with the actual, the physical recovery. Through the physical recovery I was able to get back. I was able to rebuild my body. You know I still have some areas of nerve damage and paralysis, numbness, but largely I was back physically.

Kegan Gill : 6:34

But then it became to this problem, to the mental health challenge, which was way more difficult, and unfortunately the conventional ways of dealing with that were here take this pill, take this SSRI, take this anti-psychotic medication that'll help you sleep, take this to help you sleep. And before I knew it I was on another cornucopia meds and from the physical recovery I had to wean myself off of all the opioids and gabapentin and all the stuff they'd given me for pain. But once they started throwing stuff in there, it was messing with my head, even more so with these psych meds. It was just adding even more damage to that physiology of my brain and it wasn't healing anything.

Kegan Gill : 7:15

What it did is it masked the symptoms. Initially it would make me feel a little better. I was just real groggy and out of it all the time, but at least I wasn't as anxious or hypervigilant or paranoid. But as time went on, this sort of insane cycle continued which was oh, it's not working anymore, you need more of these pills. And what that led to was me being in a full-blown psychosis, suicidal, just extremely dark times.

Ponch Rivera: 7:43

But you're under the care of the Veterans Administration at the time, or who's taking care of you here.

Kegan Gill : 7:47

Initially, while I was still active duty and going through the medical board process, which took almost two years. Call it the bureaucratic equivalent of the Indiana Jones Temple of Doom. The whole thing was riddled with booby traps to derail you from that process, it seemed, even with very well-documented issues and the advocacy of my command and all the medical staff on base and everything. Sorry, I lost track of myself there.

Ponch Rivera: 8:13

No, we were talking about the medical care that you were receiving from the actual DOD.

Kegan Gill : 8:17

So, yeah, it was still through the base I was at. I was stationed in Lemoore, california, at that time and so it was still through the DOD. But that transition, once I was medically retired and moved back to Northern Michigan with my family, then I was through the VA and that same care continued, which was the only option is you got to take this pill this is the one that's going to do it and that dosage just kept going up and, as a result, the side effects and all the problems that were underlying. It wasn't treating the underlying issue.

Ponch Rivera: 8:51

So I don't want to beat up on the VA or anything like that. That's not what this is about. We talk about how the system drives behaviors and we know that potentially the pharmaceutical industry drives behaviors and how we're treated in anything we do, the way our doctors give us prognosis and diagnosis. So it's not to say these folks are wrong, it's just to say that, hey, look, this is an accounting of what happened and I want to go a little bit deeper with you on this accounting but realize that the system needs to change. And that's kind of what we've seen with psychedelic therapy from the veteran community is those veterans are changing the way people view something that once was for the woo crowd, if you will.

Ponch Rivera: 9:26

So again, I just want to make it clear to our audience. We're not going to beat up on the VA here. That's not what this is about. But I do want to hear your story about how you got out of that cycle of I don't just call it the cocktails that you were taking or the multiple cocktails the VA was giving you, and so forth. How did you get out of that cycle? How'd you break that?

Kegan Gill : 9:46

Yeah, I mean, like I was mentioning earlier, it just kept getting worse and worse, and I totally agree. You know the VA provides a lot of beneficial things for people, especially the financial assistance for people going through these hard times to give them a chance, you know, to keep a roof over their head while they're going through things that otherwise would have them lose their families and their homes. So I'm not I also don't I don't want to tear apart the VA. I think it's a problem that's spread through all of our healthcare system in the United States. It's been built on a business model and the priority has unfortunately been making money, and so, over time, the policies and the medicine and everything has leaned towards creating a profit. And what they found to be profitable is giving you a pill that masks the symptoms that you have to take for the rest of your life, and they make a lot of money off of that model.

Kegan Gill : 10:34

And what I was fortunate to discover after years of struggling with just the conventional therapy of, you know, sit down, talk to a psychologist, take your Seroquel at higher and higher doses and then continue to get, number and number, to the point where I couldn't feel anything, you know, other than anger and rage on occasion. But just my mind shut down, my body was shutting down. I was just getting sicker and sicker. And the way I was able to get out of that cycle? My wife came home from a job interview and she found me. I had shaved off all my hair, all my eyebrows, all my facial hair. I was completely naked, except I had a black plastic garbage bag tied around my neck like a cape, because I thought I was going to go out into the cold, snowy weather in Northern Michigan and fight crime like Batman. And it was the deepest psychosis that I had gone into yet. And this was in a few days of having my dosage of quetiapine or Seroquel increased from 300 milligrams a night to 450 milligrams a night, which is a pretty heavy dose of this stuff, and I don't think that's any coincidence that it drove me over the edge into the deepest psychosis I had been into. Luckily, my wife is a ER trauma nurse. She's dealt with mental health patients in the ER. She knew exactly what was going on. She was able to get packed up, load up our little boy in the car and take me the hour drive into the emergency room. I spent a couple nights, just in an out-of-body experience. I'm pretty sure my soul left my body. It was just free-flying and had just a very vivid experience and unfortunately, what I saw there was, it was.

Kegan Gill : 12:11

It still is pretty discouraging to think that there's veterans in that kind of care. It is not something, it's not a situation where you're going to help heal people. It's a situation where you're going to maybe put a Band-Aid on people and at the end they're going to have a bigger issue. You know you're confined into a small room, into a small facility. It's packed with other veterans dealing with serious mental health issues. All night people are up in psychosis, yelling and screaming. You know it sounds like a nightmare. There's people stomping up and down the hallways, doors are slamming and every 15 minutes if you're on one-to-one care like I was coming out of a psychosis, they shine a flashlight in your face every 15 minutes to wake you up and make sure you're safe. So you're getting sleep deprived, you're being confined because you are in and out of psychosis.

Kegan Gill : 13:07

There's a natural human tendency to kind of treat you like you're not there. So you, in a way, you get treated like you're less than human. We're issued prison scrubs as if we're like a prisoner and in the staff all wear white lab coats. If anybody's ever heard of the Stanford prison experience experiments and kind of the dynamic that can be created simply by having this line of the medical professionals and then the patients that we were, the patient veterans, that creates an unusual interaction with a lot of people. The food is absolutely abysmal. It's just highly ultra processed. It's literally prison food. It's the same crap that unfortunately are even being fed to prisoners because it's making people sicker's. The same crap that unfortunately are even being fed to prisoners because it's making people sicker and worse instead of helping them heal. And another issue was we didn't get to go outside more than once a week maybe. Even when we did go outside, it was into a concrete yard with 10 foot metal fences on every side, a tall, high-rise brick buildings around you. There's no connection to sunlight or nature.

Kegan Gill : 14:03

Now you go through the military and you get a little bit of survival training and you might have gotten the opportunity to experience a little bit of what captivity would be like and the same things that we would do to an enemy combatant in a prisoner of war situation sleep, deprivation, confinement, malnourishment. These are all the exact same things that they were doing to American veterans who had just showed up to try to get help. We hadn't committed to crime. I had showed up there voluntarily to try to get help, and instead all these things unfolded.

Kegan Gill : 14:34

And when I started to see what was going on in this facility, initially I planned an escape. I tried to escape. I didn't want to take the pills. I was like this is not how you help people heal. The way you help people heal is you let them get good sleep, you feed them good food, you let them get outside, you give them a purpose in life. And what this place did was the complete opposite, and the one tool that they had in their chest was all the pharmaceuticals that they could give you. And before I knew it, they were trying to give me these little packets of pills several times a day, and I didn't even know what they were. And when I tried to resist that and I tried to escape, I ended up getting forcibly injected with a medicine called Heldol, which has got hell in it for a reason. This stuff is literally it's a torturous experience. It feels like there's insects trying to crawl their way out from underneath your skin. All I wanted to do was run and scream and rip my own skin off. If you've ever seen a movie about a psych ward and you see someone just screaming and yelling and getting strapped down onto a wooden table with leather straps, that's probably because they just got injected with Heldol.

Kegan Gill : 15:37

After I had come to from the Heldol, I don't know how many days had passed, but I found myself in a room with a woman who was supposed to be my attorney, my legal representation, and she had put a pen in my hand. And while I'm literally drooling on myself, she's moving my hand and having me sign my initials on these different documents that committed me to the facility, so I couldn't leave if I wanted to. These different documents that committed me to the facility so I couldn't leave if I wanted to Stripped me of my constitutional rights to bear arms, had my concealed carry license immediately revoked and I was a guy who had been trusted in the government, with a clearance and was entrusted with an $89 million aircraft, and now I wasn't even allowed to have a gun. As an American citizen. It put me on the law enforcement information network as if I committed a felony and I was just like all these other guys in the facility. I just showed up to try to get help and instead they drugged me, tortured me, confined me and stripped me of my rights as an American citizen, and I was pretty broken. I spent about 40 days in that facility before my family was able to advocate for me. Luckily, my wife is an ER nurse, my mom was a retired physician, my dad worked in healthcare and with the three of them coming together, they were able to eventually convince the facility to let me leave. Without their help, I mean, I think I would have probably just gone crazy in that place. I don't know what would have happened, but I don't think it was going to be any good.

Kegan Gill : 17:05

Luckily, I was able to get out of that. I still had family support, but things when I got home were a mess. My wife had just been through the ringer. She had been trying to raise our kids with me dealing with all of this and it was starting to take a toll. Things were falling apart and I was just getting darker and darker and the same treatment continued, which was just take the pills, that's it. That's the only thing out of all the medical system Just take these pills, there's nothing else. And I was fortunate I eventually stumbled across the book called how to Change your Mind by Michael Pollan, and it goes into the use of psychedelics for psychedelic assisted therapy and healing your body on a deeper level.

Kegan Gill : 17:42

And while at the time I could barely read, I could kind of stumble through enough of it to kind of get the idea that hey, there's something else out there and this might be it. And so I ended up going on the Internet and seeing what I could find, and I found Vet Solutions run by Marcus and Amber Capone. He's a former SEAL. Him and his wife put together a program because they were fed up with the traditional approach to DE. What year was that, by the way? Do you remember? This would have been in 2020, I want to say 2021.

Ponch Rivera: 18:11

Yeah, so it's been a few years About the same time Slider went down there. Okay, hey, thanks for sharing that story about the V. I know there's actually information now that resharing that type of lived experience can actually bring it back, but I think it's very important for our listeners to understand how important it is for somebody like you to come out and say this and I do want to explore the psychedelic assisted therapy space next but I think our listeners would be dying to hear the backstory, like how did you end up in this space? How did this TBI from an aircraft contribute to this? So can we rewind a little bit and let's talk about that.

Mark McGrath: 18:44

Yeah, what was the date? So we have an idea of the timeline.

Kegan Gill : 18:48

Sure, I guess the way the story began was January 15th 2014. I was a young Naval strike fighter pilot assigned to VFA 143, the Pukin Dogs, in Virginia Beach. I had completed two and a half years of flight training to get my wings as a naval aviator. I completed another year at the F-18 Super Hornet RAG, where I was assigned to F-18 Echo Super Hornet, and then I joined VFA 143, the Pukin Dogs. I'd been in the squadron just shy of a year on this day. Back to your question about my call sign On this day. I'd been through these years of flight training. I'd already been in the squadron for nearly a year, but I had been the guy who had a small mouth, big ears. I just did my work. I worked hard and I was doing a decent job at it. I was respected as an above average pilot for my experience level. I got my ground jobs done and I didn't really stick out in any way. So there's all these newer guys coming to the squadron and they all had already gotten call signs, but me I just on this day, even the senior pilot in the squadron came up to me the senior JO and he's like hey, man, you just haven't done anything dumb enough yet to earn a call sign and so pretty sure that jinxed me for the day because I'm going out to walk on this flight.

Kegan Gill : 20:01

My buddy's at the SDO desk and he also points out as a joke he had put up on the whiteboard behind him all the airspace that we were going to fly in that day in the whiskey 72, which is off the coast of Virginia beach, about 50 miles out to hundreds of miles off the shore, this huge piece of airspace. And he used the shark tracker app on his phone to point out all these positions of GPS tagged sharks. So it just so happened on this day, right underneath the airspace I'm about to go fly in, there's a 16-foot, 3,500-pound great white shark named Mary Lee. And so we're joking. You know he's looking at the water temps of the buoy out there and it's at 37 degrees Fahrenheit below freezing air temps. You know the ocean out there is pretty churned up. So he's joking hey, man, today would be a terrible day to eject. And we just laugh it off, you know, because at that point we kind of dissociate from the dangers of the job.

Mark McGrath: 20:51

Can't happen to me, right.

Ponch Rivera: 20:53

Yeah, right, so you were in a poopy suit that day too, right yeah, flight suit, oh, you mean the dry suit, yeah yeah, the dry suit, yeah yeah, and it's just to build more context. I don't think a lot of our listeners understand what that means, but can you tell us what that suit does?

Kegan Gill : 21:05

I mean, I've I put one on several times going to the whiskey, so uh, so, as you put it on, as an aviator you have to make sure you bitch about it. Uh, it's sweaty, it's hot. Most days you're walking out on the flight line is it turns into a sweatsuit. The dry suit's to protect you in case you have to go into cold water immersion and most of the time it's just another uncomfortable thing that you have to put on. But in the event that you have to go down in that cold water and you don't have one, you're not going to make it more than 20, 30 minutes, probably tops, if that before your body just shuts down with hypothermias. You put all your gear on. You got your dry suit on, you zip that thing up, squeeze the air out of it. Over that, you got your harness to hook into the ejection seat. You've got your survival vest, your G suit, your helmet, and that day I was wearing the Jehemix helmet. So you got this big old sort of visor on it. But super cool technology with magnets. It's able to track your head position. So wherever you look in the aircraft, your weapons systems and flight information go with you. So you got all this gear on. You know, 35, 40 pounds of stuff walk out to the aircraft. And it was still a surreal experience. Walking out I was a young dude in my knees, I get to go fly this fricking fighter jet it was. It was really surreal and I was like not that long ago I'd just been in this community college kid, you know, flying around in Cessna. So I was like not that long ago I'd just been this community college kid, you know, flying around in Cessnas. So it was really a dream come true. Took off, flew out to the area. We had done a little bit of air to air refueling to check out one of the ARS refueling pods that had just come out of maintenance and that all went smooth, got some plugs, got proficiency in that and then we headed out with extra fuel and airspace. My flight lead and I went to the Whiskey 72 and we set up to do some dogfighting.

Kegan Gill : 22:46

Bfm basic fighter maneuvering or air combat maneuvering it's probably what most people think of when they think. Fighter pilot is a couple of aircraft within the visual range trying to shoot each other down, and the way we train is as close to the real thing. You know, we're still maneuvering the aircraft at the upper limits of its capabilities. We're still engaging the weapons and the radar. We're just not actually hosing off a real missile or firing the real gun, but everything else is as close as possible and incredibly dynamic. Some people call it like four dimensional chest in a knife fight in a phone booth, with an elephant on your chest. Like you know, there's all these different analogies for it, but it's, it's incredibly high intensity. You know you're pulling a lot of G's. Uh, my say, your body weighs 200 pounds and now you're pulling almost eight G's. Well, now you weigh, you know, 1600 pounds, or whatever with your gear on.

Kegan Gill : 23:35

It's a pretty physically and mentally demanding. So it was actually my favorite thing to do.

Ponch Rivera: 23:39

It's a blast. When you get a little bit older. You stop turning around when you're an instructor. It's a thing we did in the jet. It's like I'm a 3G guy. So recently New York Times published something that Slider was in, mark Keller and some other folks that we know?

Kegan Gill : 23:49

Yeah, I read that article.

Ponch Rivera: 23:50

Yeah, it's great, and there's a connection here to how you and I connected with Dr Kaufman as well. That's another story. But here we have you're wearing a helmet that's newer. Is it any heavier than our traditional helmets?

Kegan Gill : 24:04

It is. It's significantly heavier. I think it weighs something like 11 or 12 pounds. That doesn't sound like a lot, but you add it under eight times that weight and now you got 150 pounds on your head.

Ponch Rivera: 24:16

So this article in New York Times explains what's going on in the brain. It's basically jello. You got this brain sitting in this jello space. It's getting pressed against the back, the side, whatever. Your blood is rushing out of your brain to your lower extremities and that's why the G-suit's on you so you can push it back up. So you're starving your brain of blood. You're putting a lot of pressure on it and this is happening quite a bit.

Ponch Rivera: 24:58

So we talk about TBI and potentially the dangers of flying fighter aircraft, which there may be we're not saying there is, but it could potentially damage the brain. So here you are and this is just an average flight up to this point. Right, you got this gear on, you got a poopy suit on, you're an $89 million strapping into an $89 million aircraft and you're having the time of your life. But that's the context we're in is, you're at the edge of consciousness, and I like to say that now, now that we know a little bit more about psychedelic assistant therapy, because that takes you to the consciousness edge. But this edge of consciousness fight that you're going through, I just want to make sure people understand what that, what's going on in the body blood leaving the brain jello slashing around is your brain and your head and your brain housing unit. So can you take us on or pick us up from that point and take us on to what happens next?

Kegan Gill : 25:48

Absolutely so yeah, like you said, your brain's smushing around in there. You're physically pushing your body to its limits, You're pushing this aircraft to its limits. You're breathing. You're doing the anti-G breathing, so you're breathing heavily, squeezing your legs, squeezing your core, everything to try to force that blood in your head. You're bending your neck around.

Kegan Gill : 26:09

You're not just sitting there still like this, you're looking over your shoulder and with your head and your helmet weighing over 20 pounds, combined now with that Jehemix helmet on there, that's like having a 150-pound person on your head as you crane up and look. I don't recommend doing that with a barbell or something on your head, but you get the idea. It's incredibly physically and mentally demanding. It's very common, especially as a newer guy, as you're trying to build all these things, to become intuitive you get what's called a helmet fire, which is there's just so much information coming in. You have to know exactly what to look at and when, because everything is happening so quickly while you're physically under this incredible stress and you know we had done several rounds of this fighting and my flight lead was you know he was a Top Gun graduate 15 plus years of doing this, just whooping my ass. But every time I'm learning a little bit more, but with this new piece of kit, the Jahemix helmet, it was still not intuitive for me. It was still something I had to think about doing, and that can be just a few seconds enough distraction that it can cause an issue. So we ended up getting through our fights. We hit Joker fuel so we had just enough fuel left for one more round of the fighting. So we ended up setting up a beam at 12,500 feet, going 450 knots, which was a bit lower and faster than we would typically set up for a beam set, like we were doing. But you know we were both good with it ready to rock. You know I'm leaning forward like I want to get better, I want to be a big kid. And Skipper calls three, two, one fights on and we pitch in at one another and we come to the merge a few seconds later. At this point we're down at 10,500 feet and I'm over, I'm guessing over 500 knots. I don't remember the exact airspeed, but pretty damn fast for a merge of that altitude. And in the distraction of trying to use this Jehemix helmet I didn't quite realize the airspeed and I had this gouge number in the back of my head 5,000 feet, which is all you need to go vertical in a Super Hornet in most conditions. But on this day when I did the math real quickly, I was like, oh, that'll still keep me above the hard deck at 5,000 feet and I'll be good to go.

Kegan Gill : 28:14

Pulled. The aircraft inverted because I was already nose low and partially inverted at the merge and just continued that pull. I was actually working on a low to high merge technique that day, so I wanted to get this sort of disadvantaged position as much as I could so I could get this timing reversal nailed, which is kind of a tricky thing to perfect. But I was always a guy who wanted to work on something that I was weak at. I didn't want to just go out there and do what I was good at, and so that's what was going through my decision-making in a split second I maneuver this aircraft nose low.

Kegan Gill : 28:45

As it comes, nose low in the dive, the aircraft starts accelerating even further. I've got the stick in my lap, I'm craning my neck up to see the other aircraft I'm under seven and a half G's just getting crushed by it. And then all of a sudden, as I'm looking up keeping sight of the other aircraft, my simulated adversary. I feel the aircraft just settle and so it was like going around a sharp corner in a sports car and then, all of a sudden, the steering wheel just kicked back halfway for no good reason that you can think of in the two seconds you have to figure it out and instead of skidding off the road. Now I'm just In short.

Kegan Gill : 29:20

What had happened is the aircraft thought there were bombs on the wings. That weren't there, and it enacted this G-bucket logic which is limiting the amount of G you can pull as you approach transonic airspeed where there's a lot of parasitic drag on the aircraft to prevent a minor overstress. Unfortunately, that system, while there for a good reason it doesn't communicate with the ground proximity warning system, as most other Gen 4 and Gen 5 fighters do. A lot of the new aircraft. Even if they sense a pending collision, they completely override all the G limiting automatically and will pull you out of a dive at 10 Gs. Even if it overstresses the aircraft a little bit, it's better than hitting the ground.

Ponch Rivera: 30:02

Again. That's another system limitation, right, the system driving the behavior of the aircraft. It will do exactly what. It's another system limitation, right, the system driving the behavior of the aircraft. It will do exactly what it's designed to do, which you said are not connected. So another great learning point there, thank you.

Kegan Gill : 30:12

And so you know this all just happens. In a few seconds I hear my radar altimeter going off, warning me that I just busted through the hard deck. My heart sinks. I pulled the throttle, the idle, I put out the speed brake Still not.

Kegan Gill : 30:24

You know, with the time that I had to process this, I couldn't figure out why the aircraft was doing this and before I knew it the ocean was just rushing up at me. I got this overwhelming sense of ground rush and I was just about to pound into the ocean. I could see the white caps on the ocean and at 2,000 feet above the ocean, going 695 miles per hour, which was 604 knots, indicated airspeed, 0.95 indicated Mach, so 95% the speed of sound at the transonic, basically the sound barrier. I pulled the ejection handle two seconds from impact. The ejection sequence takes 0.4 seconds in that seat. So by the time I had exited the aircraft, uh, you know I had a second and a half before my body was just going to smash into the ocean. A normal ejection is very violent, even if you slow below 180 knots. Any skydivers out there they know like if you jump out of an aircraft, even at 180 knots, that's, that's a fricking punch in the dick, and, uh, I was way outside that envelope though, though, but even at a regular ejection, you're still getting an initial 50 plus g initial burst as that rocket motor goes off underneath your ass, and that eases to a 12 to 14 g sustained rocket boost as you come out. So you imagine, like you mentioned earlier, your brain's just like a ball of jello or soft butter. Now you squeeze it at 50 G's, that thing squishes down. Who knows what kind of brain damage is done just from that impact. Then you ride out the aircraft, and then I smash into the sound barrier with my body, and that was an explosion force impact a hundred times the force of a level one, a category hurricane, all at once. The force of parasitic drag is exponentially stronger as you increase in airspeed. So if you've ever stuck your arm or your face out a car going 70 miles per hour down a highway, you felt the force of that. Now imagine that a hundred times stronger at 700 miles per hour, and uh, you know that force was so strong.

Kegan Gill : 32:21

Rip my helmet off my head, smash my face to hell, causing big black eyes, bruised up face, brain injury, broke my C1 spinal process, the top vertebrae of my neck. My left scapula shattered. My arms just ragdolled up into the air, shattering both my upper arms. My right humerus tore through my right brachial artery, causing rapid internal bleeding. My left forearm shattered both the radius and the ulna and severed the median nerve that controls my left hand. It was so fast that it shredded the gear off of my survival vest, ripped open my dry suit, so now I'm just in this tattered thing that's not going to protect me from the cold.

Kegan Gill : 32:59

My legs were flailing so violently in that high speed air that the steel-toed boots on my feet smashed open my tib-fibs and my lower legs. So I had chunks of my lower leg bones falling out in the ocean, bleeding out through the open fractures. And this all just happens in a split second. Just devastated. Do you remember pulling the handle? I remember, up to pulling the handle, I remember seeing the ocean at me and just getting that shit feeling of there's no other option and not even having an opportunity to think about like, what's this going to do to me? But I reached down and pulled the handle between my legs and it was, you know. I just remember that sense of dread. As this was a situation, there was no way to escape it at that.

Mark McGrath: 33:41

And then from the time that it ejected, you lost memory?

Kegan Gill : 33:50

Yeah, so I don't have any linear memory from the time I pulled the ejection handle due to the brain injury and the trauma of it all. But I have gotten clips back in the form of night tears over the course of years to kind of reconstruct, and most of what I've reconstructed has been from the investigation, the aircraft black box, the data recorder, so we're able to get all the specifics and build a big picture of what exactly went down from the rescue crew, the fishermen that showed up. Everything we've been able to reconstruct at all. But as far as my memory, I got clips of being drug underneath the ocean, my parachute system that's supposed to disconnect with what's called the seawars.

Kegan Gill : 34:24

Unfortunately, a lot of our gear is Vietnam era stuff and one of the seawars. What they're supposed to do is when you go into saltwater they set off a little device that explodes and disconnects your parachute. Because upper body injuries are so common in high speed ejections you can't reach up and disconnect manually like you normally would, so the system's supposed to help do that for you so you don't end up getting drowned alive by your parachute. Fortunately, one of the sewers didn't even fire at all. The other sewers fired, but it didn't disconnect. So I'm still trapped to the parachute and this thing that had just saved my life very quickly sunk underneath that churning ocean swell and started to pull me under. And for anybody who's ever been held under the water when you need a breath of air, you know that terrible sensation.

Mark McGrath: 35:10

And so, and at that point, your limbs are broken and everything too.

Kegan Gill : 35:13

I have no way to swim against it. My arms and legs are worthless. Fortunately the LPU, the life preserver unit around my neck, automatically inflated. There's been other instances of guys ejecting at high speed and that thing shreds apart. So I was lucky that it held up. But that provided enough buoyancy that at least on occasion I would randomly get up to the surface and be able to cough up water and get a quick breath of air before getting drugged back under. But I was inhaling a lot of salt water in and out of consciousness.

Kegan Gill : 35:40

Fortunately my flight lead spotted my parachute opening and knew there was an issue. He quickly coordinated the on-scene commander checklist and got air traffic control involved. He spotted a fishing vessel about a mile from my position, so he dialed up a button 16 to get him on maritime guard. Initially there wasn't any response. So on what fumes he had left in the aircraft? Because we started this fight at Joker. So just above having enough fuel to have to head directly back, he ends up getting down and he bumps over the bow of this fishing vessel. So imagine a Super Hornet coming over you real close, real fast. And that fortunately got their attention. He was able to get them over to my position. They had dropped the GPS mark, but there's currents in the ocean so that GPS position is very quickly changing and with my helmet having been ripped off and being underwater most of the time, my beacon failed. So other than just being a little dark head that would occasionally come up to the surface in the open ocean open Atlantic, I mean my chances of being found were really slim at that point. But fortunately this fishing vessel started coming over to my position. They got a rope out to me but because I was such a mess I couldn't grab it and ended up just getting tangled in the paracord. These guys kind of drifted away from my position, trying to just kind of didn't know what to do, but at least they provided a rough visual location of where I was at. Otherwise, had my flight lead not thought quickly to do that, there's no way they would have found me.

Kegan Gill : 37:07

But meanwhile there was a couple helicopters heading my way, one from HS-11 off a carrier nearby. They actually showed up first. They had orders, not realizing the extent of my injuries, to bring me directly back to the aircraft carrier for care. Their rescue swimmer jumped in and they had a miscommunication. There was actually a whole hazard report written on the whole rescue effort, just because it was a bit of a clown show People on different frequencies, multiple aircraft, multiple vessels. It was just in a situation like that things can go wrong real quickly. Their guy swam past me, which ended up being a blessing because had he gotten there first he would have gotten me back to the aircraft carrier quicker than I would have gotten to the other place but I would have died there because they wouldn't have had the care to take care of the level of trauma I was. There was another aircraft from HSC-28, another H-60 Seahawk had my way and the rescue swimmer on board that helicopter.

Kegan Gill : 38:01

The week prior there was a Navy H-53 Sea Dragon, one of these big heavy lift helicopters that had gone down and very close to the position that I had gone down in they had an onboard flyer. There's actually a whole documentary about that incident but I think everybody on the crew survived the initial impact of the ocean of the helicopter when they crashed in. They crashed in but because of the Navy policy at the time was, if anybody's ever been involved in an aircraft accident, we have to put them on a backboard to get them out of the water and into the helicopter in case they have a spinal injury, which seems like a pretty good idea. The problem was it took so long to put every crew member onto that backboard that several of the people perished from hypothermia in those icy, cold waters. And so this guy, cheech, this rescue swimmer, was just coming off that the week prior he didn't get any therapy, he didn't get any days off to process you know, having people die in his arms and he's out there ready to jump in the water again and he shows up with that in the back of his mind, gets in the ocean with me.

Kegan Gill : 38:59

Their pilot spotted my head first, if anybody actually hit the mishap, as this is all going down. They spotted me, they got down low. Cheech jumps in. He said he hooked into the carabiner on my harness and he said that force of the parachute, even with him being a fit rescue swimmer swimming as hard as he could, he couldn't fight that as it pulled us underneath to the parachute and he had done that in training in the pool. But he said he looked down and he saw this just tangled mess of paracord and parachute in the dark blue abyss below us and he's like. It's a lot different than doing it in a warm swimming pool.

Kegan Gill : 39:32

But despite all that, his training kicked in. He was able to cut loose the paracord, got me up to the surface and then he made the game time decision of hey, this dude's been in the water already for over an hour and a half it's amazing he's still alive but we need to get him out. And so he decided you know, at the risk of you know violating SOP and policy, he was just going to get me back into the helicopter without a backboard in case I had severe hypothermia, which I did. They got me up into the helicopter and it was about a 40-minute flight, but he said it seemed like it lasted forever. The whole flight.

Kegan Gill : 40:03

I was just coding again and again in and out of death, being resuscitated, bleeding out, severely hypothermic. But they got me to the level one trauma center in Norfolk, virginia, and fortunately got me into treatment there, treated me for severe hypothermia. My core body temp was at 87 degrees Fahrenheit, so you know, within a degree of being absolutely certain death from hypothermia. But that cold had actually preserved my body and my brain. Had I not actually had the dry suit ripped open, I would have bled to death before anybody got there, with my brachial artery and open leg fractures going. They pumped the water out of my lungs.

Kegan Gill : 40:40

Blood transfusions, my kidneys were shutting down with rhabdo from the overwhelming amount of tissue breakdown going on in my arms and legs. I was getting compartment syndrome and my arms and legs swelling up and cutting off the circulation. So they induced a coma, rushed me into surgery and I spent the next week undergoing over a dozen trauma surgeries Fasciotomies to open up all the fascia tissues that coat the muscles, to relieve that pressure and allow blood flow. Not that long ago I would have been a quadriplegic at best had I survived, because they would have just had to cut off my limbs with the level of damage. But with these skilled surgeons and the fasciotomies they were able to do these limb salvage procedures and save my arms and legs. They reconstructed my skeleton with titanium rods and steel plates, you know, artery bypass in my arm and all this different stuff Put me back together with hundreds and hundreds of staples and sutures.

Kegan Gill : 41:32

I was like fricking Frankenstein bionic man at this point. And at that point, you know, a week into this they're not sure that I'm going to wake up. My squadron mates are at the ICU. They transfer me over to Naval Hospital, portsmouth, nearby. At the Naval Hospital for recovery after all those surgeries, and my squadron mates are in the waiting room with my family just wondering like is he going to be a vegetable? Is he even going to wake up? But you know what's going to happen. And the same guy, basil, who before my flight had said I hadn't done anything to earn a call sign, yet piped up and he goes oh, he's a scrappy motherfucker, He'll be fine. And so they took scrappy motherfucker and they shorten it down to Smurf. And because it's the military and you have to be politically correct these days, the politically correct reason to get approved was I was a short dude who turned blue from hypothermia. So at least out of all this I got a call sign.

Ponch Rivera: 42:22

It's a tough way to get a call sign, yeah.

Mark McGrath: 42:34

Did you just from orientation, shaping and controlling your reflexes? I mean, you clearly had trained so many times to pull the handle. Did you feel like that was a reflexive action, or did you have to stop and think about it? Or was it just instantaneous?

Kegan Gill : 42:43

No, it was instantaneous. Stop and think about it, or was it just instantaneous? It was. It was instantaneous, didn't think about it, and as soon as I just sensed that dread in the ground rush of the ocean, at that point it was like it was a reflex yeah you know, if I had taken the time to make a conscious decision done, I wouldn't got out and we talk about.

Mark McGrath: 42:58

you know, the linear ooda loop. If you had done the linear ooda loop here's a real example, you example You'd be dead. You'd be dead, oh yeah.

Ponch Rivera: 43:03

Yeah, oh yeah.

Ponch Rivera: 43:04

Yeah, that intuition, that implicit guidance control kicked in. And that's why we train. That's the whole reason we go out to the whiskey area is to train and make that hard stuff implicit so we can see more and fight better. But I would say that training, well, clearly that training saved everybody's life. Or came into play here, no, or you know, came into play here, no doubt. So Smurf Recovery, and you know, when you and I first connected, I was shocked that you got back in the cockpit. So take us through that man, and then I think everybody was.

Kegan Gill : 43:33

You know, I came to out of all of that after two weeks in a coma, a week in induced coma, then another week in a non-induced coma and as I came to, you know, I was in la-la land from the brain injury, all the meds they had me on, you know, from the Dilaudid, fentanyl, oxycodone, amitriptyline, tramadol, there's just they're putting everything in me for all the severe nerve injuries and everything that I had going on. I was just completely out of it and I didn't realize what had happened. At that point I had no memory. I had no idea how I got there. It was like I just woke up in my bedroom, except I was kind of confused because it wasn't my bedroom. Why is it white? Why are there all these things stuck on me? One of the first things I thought was they had tied me down onto the bed with this thin wool blanket. I was like, is this thing made of metal or something? But it's because I was paralyzed, I couldn't move and eventually the doctors came in and said you know, here's kind of what happened. You've been in a high speed ejection, your body's been destroyed. You're likely never going to walk again. You're not going to have any use functional use of your arms ever again and your flying career is over.

Kegan Gill : 44:42

And in that moment I remember this there was something inside me that was basically like fuck that, I'm going to prove you wrong. You know, you want to have a military dude do something? Tell him that's impossible. And that's exactly where my mind went. Fortunately I didn't bite off. You know, there were still definitely some dark moments of depression and doubt, but I chose to stoke that flame of hope in that moment and go. But what if I do get better, even if maybe it's true, maybe my statistics on this are crap? There's no way. That's the same thing people told me when I wanted to go be a fighter pilot. You can't do that. Even my own mind. I was like what are the statistics and odds for me, a guy like me from community college, to go do that? Not good.

Kegan Gill : 45:25

But I took that same mindset that I think gave me success to get to be in the Super Hornet to begin with, and I started to apply that in my recovery efforts and I started just focusing on like, what can I do today? What can I move? How can I use my day in a productive way to get better and, little by little, over know over the course of the next two weeks. I remember the ICU nurse came in to check on me and they all basically said I wasn't going to move again and I was sitting up on the end of the bed. I still couldn't use my arms or legs but I had gotten enough use of my torso that I had, like, done this crazy belly flop thing and flopped myself up into a seated position. She was kind of stunned, but that at least got me transferred to a VA hospital to continue at a polytrauma center in Richmond, virginia.

Kegan Gill : 46:09

I spent the next three months there eating, you know, some of the worst quality food on the planet which again, like you're trying to recover your body at this facility. And they've got, you know, they got great staff, they've got all this equipment and so much money in the pharmaceuticals and you got every kind of pharmaceutical you can imagine and then some. But when it came to just giving you good food with any nutritional value, that was completely absent. You know you're not sleeping because every so often they're waking you up to give you meds so you can sleep and take your vitals and you barely get to go outside again. So all the fundamentals of sort of healing weren't really there in place. But despite all that, you know I was fortunate I had people bringing me food from the outside, which I think made a significant difference for me, seeing the other people who you know had less severe injuries than me but they were eating that shit food, ultra processed crap, and their body just can't. You can't heal without giving it the feel it needs and giving it rest. But eventually I got out of there. I was at least good enough. I could walk on a walker.

Kegan Gill : 47:09

And then I spent the next two years undergoing more surgeries and intense physical rehabilitation, not only in the clinic, but I started working outside the clinic really extensively to rebuild myself. Luckily, one of my squadron mates' wives Aunt Smugs, she's affectionately known she was a physical therapist and she spent her own time to come out and just kick my ass with more like CrossFit style workouts and just beat the hell out of me. But it gave me motivation to keep going. I had to overcome prescription drug addiction. From over a dozen meds they had me on all the oxys. How did you do that? From over a dozen meds, they had me on all the oxys. How did you do that? Again, just like, little by little, I pick one at a time and I'd go all right, I'm going to see what happens when I don't take. Because I approached the pain management clinic and said I wanted to get off of this stuff. I don't want to be on this the rest of my life. I don't think I need it.

Kegan Gill : 47:59

A big turning point was actually while I was in the facility, the Pollitt Trauma Center in Richmond. Still, this guy, this kind of hippie doctor, showed up one day out of the blue. He didn't look like the rest of the docs there. He had this real laid back personality, long hair. He's just like hey, what's up, man? He had a little leather bag with him. He's like hey, you want to try something that's called prolotherapy. It's experimental, so I'll need you to sign this. And he's kind of like sneaking around. So I don't know if this guy was even supposed to be there.

Kegan Gill : 48:30

But he comes into the room. He had me sign this document, you know, releasing liability, which I didn't have to sign any of that shit to get pumped full of meds or any of the other stuff that is going on. But in order to have this happen, I had to sign a special waiver and all he did was he took out a syringe and he filled it with glucose sugar water and then he injected the areas that I was having these extreme shooting nerve pain, like I mean it felt like someone was lighting my leg and foot on fire. It felt like they were electrocuting it. At times it felt like they were crushing it and sometimes it was all of those combined and it would just randomly hit me all throughout the day and night, making my life pretty miserable and a big reason. I was on all these pain meds but he, within 10 minutes, he had injected this stuff with prolotherapy. Just, it looked like a bunch of mosquitoes had bitten up my foot and my leg and 95% of that pain dissolved away and never returned All from a little bit of sugar water subcutaneously under the skin.

Kegan Gill : 49:23

But as time went on, they still kept giving me the pain meds. It was just like the way the system is built is to give you more of this stuff, and when it's working they're even like well, it's working, so you need more of it. We don't want to break that, and so I decided to break that cycle myself, on my own terms, and so I started just cutting one thing out at a time. Initially the amitriptyline. I spent about a week just slowly tapering down the dose and then feeling how it affected me each time, like if it got too rough on any of these, I would, you know, up the dose a little bit and just kind of micro decrease the dose as time went on. The amitriptyline, the tramadol, the trazodone, those went pretty quickly.

Kegan Gill : 50:00

I was expecting the oxycodone and oxycontin to be the most difficult, but that only took a couple of weeks. Really. The hardest one for me was actually one called gabapentin or neurotin, which is something that they give people to say this is a way safer option than taking any opioids. That was not the fact. I mean, this stuff was miserable to come off of and and even just slightly reducing the dose, it was putting me into, you know, just feeling like stressed and panicked and uncomfortable and like flu-like symptoms. It was just a miserable trudge for months and months and months of getting off that crap.

Kegan Gill : 50:34

But little by little I eventually got off that and once my body was free of all of those, all those meds, my cognitive abilities just immediately leaps and bounds of growth. I was doing the Lumosity app for the brain injury from the early stages and as soon as I got off all the drugs, all my stuff just jumped back up to like hey, I feel like I'm coming back again and I was feeling better physically, I looked better, my energy levels were coming back. I continued the physical rehabilitation. I had to go through a FNAB, the Field Naval Aviator Evaluation Board for the mishap and you know, that's a deep dive into your life, man Like looking at. I don't know if you want me to even get into that story.

Ponch Rivera: 51:16

No, that's human factors related. That's you know. So we've, you know, naval Aviation. We do that for a reason, to understand to prevent these things from happening in the future.

Ponch Rivera: 51:26

Now my question to you a little bit on that Up to this point, and this is before you got back in the cockpit and going back to growing up and going to school. You're talking about woo-ish things. You know, quote-unquote, this doctor coming into you and saying, hey, sign this and I'm going to help you out Probably something that's very natural. I'm not saying it is or not, but it could be. But my question to you up to this point is what was your experience with woo-ish?

Ponch Rivera: 51:52

things which includes psychedelics up to this point, things like natural medicine or anything like that. Where was this in your headspace?

Kegan Gill : 51:57

Yeah, I think, like most people, I was larger. Like that's just a bunch of hippie bullshit. I did have an experience when I was 16 years old. My buddies passed around a little baggie of these crunchy little mushrooms at a campfire and I had this experience, and at the time I was kind of dealing with some kind of dark times of just being a shitty teenager, mad at the world, kind of stuff. And after that night, though, man, it reconnected me to something and it opened my eyes, and I didn't know it at the time what any of it was, but I think it helped me become a pilot later in life.

Kegan Gill : 52:34

Really, to have that connection. It connected me to something spiritual that I didn't even know at that time was there. I even called myself an atheist and I was proud to be, but after that experience I started calling myself, I was an atheist and I was proud to be in, but after that experience I was like I felt, uh, you know, I started calling myself agnostic. I didn't know what was going on, but I was like there's definitely something more going on. And now we're seeing all this research come out about the way, you know, a lot of these psychedelics are helping to heal the brain and the nervous system and I undoubtedly got benefit from that.

Ponch Rivera: 53:02

But this is before you joined in the Navy and up to so you're not. You're not going to use psychedelics between the time of the ejection and time of the cockpit, right? So that's not even part of the equation yet, right no?

Kegan Gill : 53:11

there there was actually there was one surgery where they use ketamine. Because I'd had so many surgeries the general anesthetic was just not working anymore. They opted an anesthesiologist opted to use ketamine, so anesthesiologist opted to use ketamine. So I did have a little bit of a an unintended psychedelic experience from that ketamine on one of my surgeries during recovery.

Ponch Rivera: 53:34

Okay, so you, your recovery is pretty natural, and what I mean by that is you're not using plant medicine at this point, no, and you're going to get back in the cockpit. So so the fee, nab happens, the board happens, and what do they find, by the way?

Kegan Gill : 53:42

So you know that whole process tears your life apart. You know they want to look at everything and I think the general public thinks if you're a pilot and you crash an airplane they're going to just hang you out and rip your wings off your chest. Unfortunately, that's not the case. You know you get a whole board of seasoned naval aviators to look at it because they realize this is a dangerous job. It's incredibly complex and how can we learn from it so it doesn't happen again? Well, they go through my whole life, tear everything apart. There's all these causal factors.

Kegan Gill : 54:12

I was dealing with the relationship struggles at that point with my girlfriend who was dealing with serious mental health issues. That was a causal factor. My flight lead set us up in a way that was a non-standard, non-top gun recommended setup for the fight. That kind of put us in a dangerous situation. I had fault because I opted to maneuver the aircraft in this dive at a higher than recommended airspeed.

Kegan Gill : 54:34

There was the aircraft system that had unfortunately killed and injured people before me that were far more seasoned, and even I know a Top Gun graduate that was at the top of his career after my accident. That was on a low level in that same system kicked in and limited the G as he's going through a canyon and put them into the side of the canyon. So there were multiple causal factors, including my own fault, which I very openly admitted, which I think actually helped my case. I think sometimes pilots get into a FNAB situation and they're not able to admit their own wrongdoing in the situation and because of that they won't get the ability to go back to fly.

Ponch Rivera: 55:12

So this is important. We talk about complexity quite a bit in here. There is no root cause in a complex adaptive system. So you're flying the moment you get in a cockpit. You're a complex adaptive system. This is important because, having worked at the Naval Safety Center, now Naval Safety Command, we looked at these things to understand what John Boyd was looking at and that's complex adaptive system thinking. So the causal factors mean that there's the relationship between these things emerge into what happened, right? So what happens in a lot of accident investigations and they go looking for blame. And they go look for that one thing that they got assigned blame to, and they go, and that's not what the Navy's about, right, that's that's what we yeah, we don't want that.

Ponch Rivera: 55:52

We want to look at the causal factors and understand those previous experiences that you had. And this goes back to what we talked about on the show about orientation what you ate for dinner, your relationships, what's going on in your environment all those things factor into how you are, how you orient and see the world. That day Right and this is very important for those people that are listening to this who are in the safety world is that's why we do these things well, and I'll say we do them quite well in the Navy, because we want to improve future performance. But but so now you're going through recovery. You got the, you know, you finished up the board. What Admiral in their right mind would say hey, smurf, want to get back in the cockpit? Yeah, so that's.

Kegan Gill : 56:28

That's a funny story. Like you know, this is months and months of investigation, plus it had been postponed while I was in the hospital recovering with the brain injury Cause. I couldn't even put two and two together what was going on. But once I got better and went through that, it all culminated me getting in my summer white uniform, going on Norfolk base and then going to see an admiral and I walk into this final FNAB review board and this big wooden table is between me and the admiral, flanked by all these senior naval aviators from all different backgrounds in naval aviation and they get to decide what are they going to do with my case, considering all of this they've discovered. And the admiral walks in. We all stand up at attention. He has a sit and I'm sitting on the far end of this table from and takes a moment and he looks up at me and locks eyes and the only question he asked me was lieutenant gill, are you fearless? And you know.

Kegan Gill : 57:20

A million things run through the back of my head at this point, like what the hell do you say to that? And I don't know. I think there was some sort of divine intervention. The only thing that came out of my mouth was sir. I don't remember a lot from the ejection, but I'm certain what little cushion there is on the ejection seat was puckered up inside me real tight and you know he didn't laugh. He didn't have any expression whatsoever. All he did was he stood up and walked out of the room and my heart just sunk like shit. There goes my naval aviation career and as the room's full of these mint lifesavers, and so he takes one out, I take one out, open the wrapper, pop it in my mouth, still being like, okay, what the hell does this mean? And he looks across. He goes Lieutenant Gill, if you can get your body working again, congratulations. You're going to get to go back and fly super Hornets. And so that was just like fuel on the fire to motivate me to get back.

Kegan Gill : 58:23

And so I was back at it PT and even harder driving, even harder. Now my body's free of all these pharmaceuticals. I was feeling good, my body was looking better, my skin, everything was looking healthier and I was able to max out the Navy PRT going to command PT. I was literally running circles around the command. They're like holy shit, this guy is. How is he like that? He was paralyzed like a couple, not that long ago and fortunately, the Commodore at the Strike Fighter Wing Atlantic, you know, he came in one day and he's like, yeah, what are you doing today? It's like you want to go back fly. And I was like, yeah, expecting like this is going to be in a month or two, to like get ready. And he's like, no, you're classing up today. So you know, I'd been just sitting at a desk doing all this. You know bitch work that wasn't terribly fulfilling, and so I was beyond stoked to get the opportunity to actually go back.

Kegan Gill : 59:14

And at that point it had been almost two years exactly from the ejection. It was January 2016. And uh went back through training and F-18 and then got assigned to VFA 136 in L'Amour and was back flying fighter jets man at the fleet. And it was unreal.

Ponch Rivera: 59:30

Did you notice any problems in the cockpit while you're going back through? You're going through 106 at the time right.

Kegan Gill : 59:34

Yeah, I went back through 106. Most of the time I felt awesome, but there were little mental lapses in there. Now, looking back, I didn't know what was going on at the time and I largely just dismissed it and brush it off. But there would be moments in flights where I would just get these little you know something was going on. It wasn't right, Like my brain wasn't quite at full steam. There were little memory lapses, there were little like little dumb things. I caught myself doing nothing that was real blatant or even that had led to a dangerous situation. But there was times when I was like what was that?

Ponch Rivera: 1:00:05

Were the flight surgeons monitoring you at all? I mean, were they treating you any different or did you have to report?

Kegan Gill : 1:00:10

I had to go through all these medical waivers, which was one hell of a process. I've got a stack of all these medical waivers for everything and I had to go through all these evaluations and psych boards and all this stuff. But I got the stamp of approval for that and by all the testing that they had done I was good to go and I felt good. But there was definitely still something from that brain injury in there and it wasn't until I was on debt. Down at Tyndall Air Force Base doing in WESUP, which is the live fire exercise, I got to shoot an AIM-9 Mike Sidewinder, a heat-seeking missile, at a drone. And then I broke off and did some dissimilar air combat training and got to dogfight an F-22 Raptor against some other 20-year-old Air Force dude, which was super cool. And I came back from that flight and I realized in the debrief, as I'm watching my tapes to validate my missile shoot, that I didn't remember a lot from the missile shoot and I was getting really confused about basic stuff and I kind of caught myself being like, why do I feel like this? The next day I was just on duty at the SDO desk answering phones, the radio, running the flight schedule and just kind of not feeling super on top of things, almost like a bad hangover, but not being hung over, just cognitively lagging and kind of nervous for some reason. That didn't make sense.

Kegan Gill : 1:01:27

And that night when I got back to the hotel, I sat on my bed and it just felt this overwhelming sense of vertigo. The room was tumbling over me. I was panicking. I was getting panic attacks that I had never gotten before in my life. I picked up my phone because I had to fly early the next morning. I was trying to do the math to set my alarm clock on my phone, and I couldn't operate the phone or figure out what time I needed to get up, and so I realized something was seriously wrong and I just sat and stood in it in this sort of panic mode for a little bit. But I called the squadron safety officer and I said, hey, there'd been a rash of DCS issues in the jet of that in the super hornet community.

Kegan Gill : 1:02:04

In the hornets, especially, the pressurization systems had been malfunctioning on a fairly regular basis, causing a type 2 decompression sickness, which is, for those that aren't familiar, that's when a little bubble in nitrogen essentially comes out of solution in your blood from a decompression, the way when you open a soda bottle, how you see that fizz Well, your blood kind of does that when you get a rapid decompression. Or if you're a scuba diver and you come up from depth too quickly and those little bubbles suspectively got in my brain and there had been pilots that had been killed by it. There are guys that were permanently brain dead by it. They had started putting hyperbaric chambers on some of the aircraft carriers that actually supported the legacy hornets, because it was happening so frequently. That way you could take guys into the chamber. So this is 2017? Where are we at? This would have been 2017 at this point.

Ponch Rivera: 1:02:52

So at this time we're also having OBAC's concerns on the T-45 and the F-18 Super Hornet.

Ponch Rivera: 1:02:58

There's an emergence of I think it's called the PEAT team Physiological Episode Action Team or something that starts to come out of this, and this is I want to bring it connected back to the New York Times article and something that you and I connected on in 2022 through Dr Kaufman.

Ponch Rivera: 1:03:12

Dr Kaufman, who used to be a flight surgeon in the Navy and now is an advocate for psychedelic assistant therapy, asked me. He said, because I was doing some work at the Naval Safety Center at the time as a result of the accidents in 2017, different accidents and he said there is a potential that physiological episodes in an aircraft look like TBI, like what we're seeing with Navy SEALs, right? And he said do you know if anybody knows this? And I checked in and nobody knew this stuff. Dude, I mean and this is what's frustrating about working in a large bureaucracy is knuckleheads like us who are not experts in the field, if we bring that tidbit of information to somebody else it's dismissed because you're not an expert and we've got to change that attitude right and we've got the practical real-life experience with it.

Ponch Rivera: 1:03:57

Right, right, right. But here we have that article coming out in the last couple of weeks from New York Times and you know Slider did a great job.

Kegan Gill : 1:04:04

Yeah, that was a great article.

Ponch Rivera: 1:04:06

I mean it's just to say, hey, there's a possibility that this is happening, and then this is what you know. Did you have a DCS failure? Is that right In the cockpit?

Kegan Gill : 1:04:15

So it was suspected Maintenance went and they looked at an aircraft and the way those systems record. They couldn't see anything. But after my incident they issued every pilot in the squadron altitude watch to monitor it, because you can't be sure the way that monitoring system works if it happened or not. But the symptoms were definitely very in align with that being the case. It could also have been just the wear and tear of being back in the fleet life and working hard and being up all the time. And you know back in that fleet life and working hard and being up all the time and you know back in that high stress just triggered it. But it's also very likely that there was a component of DCS.

Kegan Gill : 1:04:50

They took me to a hyperbaric chamber at Mayport dive base.

Kegan Gill : 1:04:53

They squeezed me overnight I felt a little bit better and then the doc at the dive base is like hey, when you get back from this detachment, you know, considering your complex medical history, I really need you to go see the flight surgeon which, as you know, when you're in that kind of role, the last thing you want to go do is go talk to the doc more than you have to.

Kegan Gill : 1:05:12

But even as I got back after a few more days I still wasn't feeling right and didn't want to cause a mishap. I knew I was at a point where I couldn't safely operate a super hornet anymore and I needed to get it fixed. And when I went into the doc, you know, pretty quickly I got a delayed onset PTSD diagnosis thrown at it and the whole TBI component went completely overlooked, which led me on a several year misadventure into some pretty dark times that I, you know, kind of discussed earlier with you. But I was fortunate to come out the other side and stumble across the stuff people are putting out, like Dr Mark Gordon, dr Kurt Parsley did it for the SEAL community, bob Kaufman, you know. All these guys are starting to see, hey, there's this huge relationship to TBI and the PTSD diagnosis and that ended up being the route that was life-changing.

Ponch Rivera: 1:06:02

I want to shift gears Now. We want to come out of the VA story that we started off with and your connection to vets Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions. Marcus and Amber Capone I think you were experimenting with marijuana at the time and were you doing anything like peyote? I think you did that on your own too.

Kegan Gill : 1:06:20

So, yeah, while I was still really struggling and still on the pharmaceutical stuff, I had moved over to trying to use cannabis as well. I was drinking, not a ton, but I was still, every night I was having two or three heavy beers, smoking, taking the pills. Do you drink now? No, I don't. Yeah, rare occasion I'll have a you know, yeah, a beer on a special occasion, but it actually, especially since iboga, I have had pretty much zero interest in it and I feel so good the way I am now. The drinking feels makes me, it feels like it drags me down. Yeah, oh, absolutely used to. It used to be uplifting and leave the stress, but I I feel like that already now, thanks to all the treatments I've been fortunate to get the you know since joe roan's episode with Sean what's his name?

Kegan Gill : 1:07:07

Sean Ryan, sean Ryan.

Ponch Rivera: 1:07:07

Yeah, and he's talking about Ibogaine and you know people listen to that. My phone's been ringing off the hook from all the folks in our community saying you guys are right and I'm like did you think we were freaking wrong?

Kegan Gill : 1:07:18

I mean we're not exactly bullshit kind of guys. We're not making this shit up, we're just telling it to you straight.

Ponch Rivera: 1:07:23

So that's you didn't go down to Mexico. Where'd you end up going for no so?

Kegan Gill : 1:07:27

I initially reached out to VATS solution. I didn't qualify for their program. It's like Schindler's list for them. They have so many people that need this and limited funding. I wasn't a special operator, I didn't have two combat deployments their criteria but they put me in contact with Warrior Angel Foundation, run by Andrew and Adam Maher, two former army guys. Adam is a attack helicopter dude, great dude. His brother, andrew, was a green beret, and they went through the same struggle journey that I did, and so they had put together this event down in Texas called the 4x48 Challenge, which is this David Goggins creation, where you run four miles every four hours for 48 hours straight. And so they created a fundraiser around that, and something inside me told me I needed to get involved in this fundraiser, and so at first I wasn't even getting any treatment.

Kegan Gill : 1:08:14

I hadn't met these guys, but for the first time I had this calling to talk about what had happened to me At the time. You know, I was in a dark spot. I was drinking and smoking and taking these pills and just so depressed, my family's falling apart. I'm grumpy, pissed off all the time, depressed, suicidal, you name it. But I knew I needed to share my story to help this fundraiser. So I did a short summary you know it's just like this page long summary of what I'm telling you now and I didn't have social media or anything at the time, so I just kind of texted it, emailed it out to a few people that were in my contacts. Within a week I had raised over 10,000 or almost $10,000.

Kegan Gill : 1:08:51

And I got a call from Adam Marr and he's like hey man, what are you doing? You want to come down to Texas. We're going to buy you a ticket. You're going to come down, you're going to do the event with us and we're going to connect you with this community. And I was like, fuck, yeah, I want to come. And you know, at this point, the whole medicine system, you know they're still just telling me you just got to keep taking Seroquel the rest of your life and it's not working because you need more of it. So I go down to this event.

Kegan Gill : 1:09:15

I meet Marcus and Amber Capone, former secretary of defense, christopher Miller's there, all these SEALs and MARSOC dudes and Rangers and Green Berets and all these guys, and as I get talking to people and we all had all these same themes, which was we had high level jobs, we had been high level performers in the military. We had gone through injuries, be it shot, blown up, ejected brain injury component, and then when we went to try to get help because things started to fall apart down the road, we got a PTSD diagnoses and we got a bunch of pharmaceutical, psychotropic drugs thrown at us and that was it and it led all of us to have our lives fall apart. You know, drug addiction, homelessness, all this shit that comes with that route of treatment because it doesn't fix the problem, suicide, and I was so like touched because I was. I know I'm on the right track now because all these other dudes that I respect so much are seeing the same exact thing. And through that run, you know, running each of these legs, I'm getting to talk to all these dudes and incredible humans about their stories and so many parallels. And in the middle of the night on the second night we had like 30 plus miles of running on our legs. I'm hurting. I hadn't really been training for this kind of thing.

Kegan Gill : 1:10:30

They invited us into a Native American group, invited us into a peyote ceremony with them on this sacred native land that we were on the spirit of like Comanche warriors in the air and there was also this component of the military healing with the Native American communities with that backstory and through it they're passing around crazy horses pipes. So there's some very intense spiritual stuff going on that at that point I didn't understand whatsoever. But the peyote was very uplifting and at the end of the event we had the staking ceremony where they invited us to put our intentions with this old growth tree out in the field where we were doing the ceremony at, and when I put my forehead against this tree I just got this bolt. That somehow I had a purpose again, like I was supposed to still be here, and, you know, brought tears to my eyes, cause at this point I was like I was ready to put a gun to my mouth any day. But that that connected me with Jesse Gould at Heroic Hearts Project.

Mark McGrath: 1:11:26

Yeah, I got to go down. He's been on the show. Yeah, nice yeah.

Kegan Gill : 1:11:29

What a great human being man he's. He's healed like 1500 plus people with his program and I was fortunate to get to go to Peru with Ayahuasca. I got into Defenders of Freedom. They funded me to go to Resiliency Brain Health Clinic in Dallas, texas. I got into Defenders of Freedom. They funded me to go to Resiliency Brain Health Clinic in Dallas, texas.

Kegan Gill : 1:11:46

I got a nutraceutical protocol, I got blood work done, I got access to all these TBI treatments and that's where I really saw the link was like the problem is my brain's all jacked up from all the shit I've been doing. All the stress, all the intensity, all the physical impacts, all that stuff adds up and it wears you down. And once they start fixing that by actually taking measurements of your blood to see like, okay, where are your hormones off? Let's address that. Where is your physiology jacked up? Let's actually look at it instead of just going into a doc and being like, oh, how do you feel? Well, I don't feel great, here's your pills. Instead, let's, let's. What's the real issue, let's address it. And when that all started happening, you know I got access to transcranial magnetic stimulation, all these new modality, psychedelic assisted therapies, hbot with hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Once I started getting this stuff I was starting to get my brain back, I was starting to get my body back and then I found you know something else that got injured and all this was my fricking soul and you know it was beautiful. And because of all that, over the course of now, the past three plus years, I've gone from somebody from the verge of disaster of losing my family to, you know, being a dad again. I'm actually. I've had. I've had several people talk to me about it. There's nothing in writing yet, but you know it's in the works, potentially.

Kegan Gill : 1:13:07

My book releases January 21st. It's called Phoenix Revival the Aftermath of Naval Aviation's Fastest Survived Ejection. You can go check it out. It's on Ballast Books for sale right now. You can pre-order it. It should be on Amazon soon. I'm actually next week. I record the audible for it for the audio book. That thing should be hitting the ground January man this is an inspiring story.

Ponch Rivera: 1:13:30

You know I was familiar with your rejection years ago Then when you and I connected, and you know we had a lot of email exchanges and you and I know that there's a lot of people in our community that need this help and some are still flying either commercial or they're flying fighter jets right now. Don't be ashamed, right Don't? This is not. That's. The message right now is hey, man, there are guys like you or girls like you, women like you or whatever out there that are surviving this. They're not just surviving, they're thriving. Afterwards, psychedelic assist therapy is one modality. It's not for everybody. I do have a question about where you just came back from, because you went somewhere for a meditation retreat.

Kegan Gill : 1:14:09

Is that right? Yeah, yeah. So Vet Solutions, heroic Hearts and several other of the organizations that put guys military guys through psychedelic assisted therapy. A really important component of that experience is integrating. When you get back Like you can just go and do psychedelics without any preparation and not do anything after, you're going to maybe feel better for a little bit but you're going to fall right back into all your old habit patterns All the same shit's going to start happening again. But when you get a good integration, coaching with that, it makes a huge difference. You can change the way you think, you can change the way your behaviors and you can start to build new change the way you think you can change the way your behaviors and you can start to build new, healthier habit patterns to continue to grow yourself and heal.

Kegan Gill : 1:14:50

And fortunately, one of the things that heroic hearts did is they put me in touch, actually, with another dude named moose. He's a former seal and he was a meditation coach with this organization. It was then called veterans path, now it's called the wisdom dojo. I started doing meditation coaching with him after my well, a little before, and then after the ayahuasca experience, and at first I was like this stuff is nonsense, like meditation really. But I was kind of like here's a well, here's a Navy SEAL, though, dude, that's doing it, so those guys don't fuck around with stuff that doesn't work, like he's got to be something to it, and I was very hesitant to stick with it. But fortunately I did because I saw so much benefit from getting into meditating.

Mark McGrath: 1:15:30

So the other night here in Manhattan I was at the psychedelic assembly for a presentation and a panelist. There was a Buddhist monk, there was a Yale medical professor and two facilitators and an author and they said exactly what you just said about meditation that many people have the same effect of effective meditation as they would from a from a psychedelic. That people are getting very similar effects.

Kegan Gill : 1:15:55

And that that retreat I just went on was a 10 day silent meditation retreat up in Crestone, colorado, and so you're just on your own in like the most scenic, beautiful place. You're up at 8,000, some feet and uh, and at this point I've developed like once you start going through the program you burn it belt, sort of like a martial art, and once you get to a certain level you can start coming on these retreats and over the course of those days, without any psychedelic medicine. It was a full on psychedelic experience. Only the thing was I didn't need any medicine to do it and that's.

Kegan Gill : 1:16:28

You know, you go back to the Tibetans and the monks and all these guys who've found this sort of yogi path to enlightenment which is, you know, sitting for decades and decades and meditating, and meditating until you reach that point that you get to at the climax of a psychedelic experience. Well, now you take guys, you get them that view of the top of the mountain through a psychedelic experience. Well, now you take guys, you get them that view of the top of the mountain through a psychedelic experience, and then you put them in through a meditation program. It's like an accelerator for your advancement. So, instead of having to have spent 10, 20 years up in the mountains of the Himalayas meditating, you kind of start to get a much easier path up that mountain. And the further you pursue the meditation, the more joy, compassion, peace that you start to feel in your life.

Ponch Rivera: 1:17:07

Smurf, let's go back 20 years in your life. I don't know how old you are. Let's say 22-year-old you. If he heard you talk about this right now, what would he say? You're out of your fucking mind right, he'd say what?

Kegan Gill : 1:17:19

Who's this fucking hippie guy? Who's this dude? So what is he talking about? That stuff's a bunch of hippie nonsense and I wouldn't have believed any of this stuff. I'm telling you, with the spirituality and the meditation and all this non-pharmaceutical approach to healing, this non-medical system approach, I would have thought that's all nonsense.

Kegan Gill : 1:17:38

I was like you know what's the peer review? What did the medical professionals say? You know what's the peer review? What did the medical professionals say? You know, like that was the box I put myself in, I think so many other people. But then, once you step outside that box and you see this whole world of holistic healing in the way that it affects not only me but all these other dudes who've been through way worse shit than me that are now got their families back, their lives back their soul, back man, Like it's undeniable that this is.

Kegan Gill : 1:18:06

This is a healing method that has been lost in our society, unfortunately yeah, it's thousands of years old, like that's the back pre-history, people were doing stuff with psychedelics and and when you do those with reverence in a ceremonial setting with people, that, along with the preparation and the integration, and you incorporate it with some of these other modalities and the brain healing and peptides and all these things that are starting to come out that are very healing, and, of course, being cock blocked by the FDA because this stuff is all a huge competition for the pharmaceutical industry and they're looking at this. This is just business to them.

Mark McGrath: 1:18:38

Yeah.

Kegan Gill : 1:18:38

And if this is the competition, they're going to do what they can to knock it out and they've been making moves to cock block this stuff out of existence. No, doubt.

Ponch Rivera: 1:18:50

A question on neuroplasticity Are they looking at, have they studied what's changing in your brain at all? Are they anybody following? I haven't had.

Kegan Gill : 1:18:54

I haven't had anyone specifically. I, while I was in you know my medical board, I ended up going to Stanford University and they took some some very specific mris. I spent like hours in that tube as they documented my brain and and by the time I got out they had, like it looked like a whole classroom of students in there staring at the screen. They never shared what they were seeing. Maybe they were just fascinated because I've got a freaking wolverine skeleton, but there was something going on that they were seeing in the MRI that was fascinating and and they they won't share it with me, but no one in particular other than that has looked at my brain and I know you have to use a very specific type of MRI. If you do a normal MRI you're not going to see brain damage, but you have to have very specific.

Kegan Gill : 1:19:38

Hey Smurf hey, we're going to wrap it up here. I want to thank you.

Ponch Rivera: 1:19:41

I mean, I know you've been on several podcasts and I know a lot of people that you've been talking to and I appreciate you sharing the story over and over. It's very important that people they hear this, because this is really about a reorientation on how to approach life and I mean there's you know, for our listeners out there, what you take away from this. That's your own prerogative. You can say psychedelics are the worst thing ever. That's fine. There's proof here that that's not true. And then you and I know a lot of guys, a lot of folks that have gone through the protocols, gone through therapy, and they're changing the world right now. Man, it's mind-blowing, and you're one of those people.

Kegan Gill : 1:20:28

So thanks for being here today. Thanks, ponch. Yeah, you take guys that did these roles in the military with that life experience, and then you give them their lives back and maybe even more of themselves than they've ever gotten to experience. You're going to have some people making some change in the world and there is an unstoppable wave of goodness unfolding as a result of all of this.

Mark McGrath: 1:20:44

Yeah, Especially within the veteran community, if we could put a dent in the numbers of and we all know people that have done this, some of us even recently. The suicide stuff has got to stop and this is a path that works for a lot of people and it helps. And it's interesting too, a lot of the people that we know that are veterans like yourself that have talked about it. They've all come to the brink of that or been close to that and think that that would wake enough people up. So I'm really grateful for you sharing this, because you don't have to have been ripped from a jet to be a veteran that's susceptible to suicide.

Kegan Gill : 1:21:13

Or even just a soccer mom or whatever. We all go through this stressful situations and postpartum depression.

Mark McGrath: 1:21:19

You have all kinds of things.

Kegan Gill : 1:21:21

Supplies to humanity, and I'm really thankful that you guys are presenting this podcast. In a way, I think that's a really powerful tool that we have now that I don't think the vietnam era veterans had at all was. We have a way to get this word out whether the mainstream wants to listen to it or not. You know people are getting it and that's really powerful. So thank you for helping share my story.

Mark McGrath: 1:21:41

We hope you come back to talk about the book and that we keep moving it forward on this.

Ponch Rivera: 1:21:46

And the UAP. Oh yeah, that's a whole other episode. I got some cool stuff, we got two minutes man, give us a back, get us prepped up for the UAP story. What's that about?

Kegan Gill : 1:21:56

So folks that might've heard Lieutenant Ryan Graves he was on Rogan not that long ago talking about he was really kind of running the show. But while I was in my recovery I was working at a desk job and I got an email across my desk one day. I was kind of the coordinator between all the strike fighter squadrons at Oceana and I got this email that they wanted me to help coordinate and consolidate all this stuff because people were seeing these spheres out in the Whiskey 72 airspace and they had been causing safety of flight things because people have these exclusive airspace or non-exc 72 airspace and they had been causing a safety of flight things because people have these exclusive airspace or non-exclusive airspace and they're trying to train. And now there's this little aircraft or whatever the hell it is flying around in the middle of it not talking to anybody and and people are, you know, there's talks of putting some sidewinders on and go try to shoot these things down.

Kegan Gill : 1:22:37

Uh, you know, people don't know what's going on and at first I thought these guys are just fucking with me, like, and I even responded to some of the emails. I was signing off as Navy strike fighter wing Atlantic X files, fox mold or signing off, like I was just like, this is nonsense. But then people are like, uh, we need to move this conversation over to sipper to the secure internet. That was when I was like and then when I, when I got back to flying, I actually had a personal encounter up airborne seeing one of these crabs on the east coast or west coast, east coast, off the coast of virginia, beat is it?

Mark McGrath: 1:23:07

is it something we could talk about on the show? Yeah, all right, let's schedule that then. Let's let's schedule that. We'll do that. It will give you a break from talking about all the other stuff.

Ponch Rivera: 1:23:16

Yeah sure did you, and you knew eric right graves.

Kegan Gill : 1:23:20

Uh, yeah, I knew ryan, I still I'm sorry. Right, keep in touch with him. Actually, he's got the Merge podcast that I went on not too long ago talking to him about it. But yeah, he's been on the front lines of all this congressional stuff trying to get so people can talk about this stuff more openly, which has been a crazy story.

Mark McGrath: 1:23:37

They're all over New Jersey right now.

Kegan Gill : 1:23:39

Yeah, dude, the plot thickens with all of this stuff.

Mark McGrath: 1:23:43

Never a dull moment here in America, so anyway All right.

Ponch Rivera: 1:23:47

We're going to keep you on for a moment. Appreciate everything you're doing. We'll have you back on to talk about UAPs and then man looking forward to your book yeah, for sure, I want to get it signed by you if I can in the future. Yeah, absolutely, I'd love to. Awesome man.