SUPPORT VETS

“I knew that he was he was battling with thoughts of suicide, and a suicide interventionist explained it to me very effectively. I'd never thought of this before. She said, when you have soldiers who are trained to identify the threat and they identify themselves as the threat, they're taught to eliminate the threat. That's when suicide is on the table. He legitimately thought he would be doing us a favor by removing himself from the equation.”

“It's crazy how this works. You can list to every western medicine doctor from Hopkins or Harvard or wherever, but your friend does something and it works, that's all you need. I actually had a call from an officer one time, Naval Academy guy, just like a absolute stud who said, Marcus, I have researched this topic. He said, when I talk to you for thirty seconds on this call, he's like, I'm convinced.”

“But trauma doesn't discriminate. And so whether it's, and head trauma doesn't discriminate either. The same thing with if you wanna call it, PTSD or post traumatic stress, a civilian who may may have been in a really traumatic, car accident is the same trauma that a person has experienced on the battlefield. And the brain doesn't know the difference that it's a battlefield trauma or if it's a civilian trauma.”

“I look at Marcus's life and how close, you know, we probably were to losing him. Having him back for our family and generations would be more than enough. But I look at the fact that he's still here and how many other people have heard his story and helped someone, gotten help for themselves, or turned their lives around. And it's just remarkable, the power of one life.”

“Marcus was bullied as a kid by his dad, by his peers. And then in one of the Ibogaine experiences, correct me if I'm wrong, you saw your bullies being bullied and realized that it wasn't you. There wasn't something fundamentally wrong with you. It's that you became a target for someone who is also being bullied. And so that perspective shift, that rewriting of the narrative, that loss of ego helps someone show up in a way that's far more authentic.”

“There's a common thread of childhood trauma that exists in the observations that I've made. And that trauma is used to fuel, I think, a lot of the these states of high performance. And so it serves you to a point, and then it becomes you become like a Greek tragedy. What fuels you is now threatening to kill you.”

“I thought that I should be able or would be able to fix it in my humanness, that I should be able to outthink it, to outsmart it. Whatever the problem was, I was gonna find a way to fix it. And I realized that I couldn't do this on my own, that I had to completely surrender this idea that I could control. And in relinquishing all control, everything fell into place.”

“That was '99 when I had the idea. And I had the idea because I stayed up late one night and watched GI Jane on TV. I didn't tell that story, by the way, for a very long time as everyone can imagine. Definitely not my SEAL buddies. Like, oh, by the way, oh, you got here from watching Charlie Sheen's Navy SEALs in the nineties or whatever. I was like, no. No. I watched GI Jane, and I had no connection to military growing up.”

“I heard him walking down the hall. And when he came around the corner, it truly was like being reunited with someone that I hadn't seen in, you know, over fifteen years. I knew immediately his countenance was exactly the way that it was when I met him because I knew him before he was a seal. I knew him before 09/11, before the war deployments. I knew him before the insanity of all the shit that we had lived through following the military, and he was back.”

“I think with veterans, you're you're likely the percentages say you're likely to die four times greater by your own hand than in combat. Some numbers that are just astounding, we've lost, just over seven thousand after, you know, nine eleven. We've lost over a 150,000 by individuals, that died by suicide. It's a shocking number that we've known for all along.”