Clay Martin On The Power of Psychedelics For Struggling Veterans
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All right, everybody. Today's show is something that is obviously very near and dear to my heart. It's a component of the last 20 plus years in the GWAT, and that's helping our brothers heal from what they've gone through. And so I really wanted to reach out and bring on not only one of my favorite shit talkers on X, but also one of the most...

dedicated guys that's leading the charge to really make a difference with soft members and their health and improving, and that's Clay Martin. So, Clay, welcome to the show, man. I'm so grateful that you came on. David, brother, thanks for having me, man. I can't thank you enough for having me on here, man. This is an awareness of this issue and what we're going to do about it now that we actually have a solution. Most important thing in my life.

All right. Let's just back up a little bit. Obviously, you know, when when you left service, you know, how long did it take before you realized that what you were dealing with was not just, you know, old age? Dude, a long, long time, actually. I was I was medically retired, too, which brings about its own issues.

There's all this mental stuff, like you weren't ready to go, and now you're kicked out the door and all this bullshit. But, man, I would say...

Probably five, six years. One of the problems with us, man, is we don't talk about this shit. We don't talk about weakness or, you know, I go to the gym and I get no gains or I can't. We don't tell each other that shit. We're trying to tough guy through it like we're still on a team for some reason. And there were a lot of things that I was experiencing that I didn't know. My teammates go through the exact same thing 200 miles away because we never talk about it.

Yeah. For me, it was this, it was when the suicide started to, to, to creep up like 08, 09, 2010. And, and that's when I was just like, all right, what's going on? And then by 2015, I just started feeling a ton of it. And for me in, in 2016 is when I met a guy named Dr. Chris free and he's the one who wrote the book operator syndrome. Yeah. Um, and, and,

Yeah, yeah. We've been friends a long time and he was the one who really brought to my attention because he does a lot of work with the Seal Future Foundation and they really promote the Vets program down in Mexico. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's a great one, by the way, yeah.

And then I started having all my buddies go through different forms of using natural medicine to help with that. When were you introduced to it and what was your primary reason you wanted to explore this? Okay, so...

it's probably around like 2019, 2020. All right. I just started having real like health problems too. Uh, I ended up in the hospital. This, uh, the shoulder had been repaired before I got a blood clot. That is both long level of fucking mess. By the time I got to the VA, it's been like a year and a half on blood thinners. And, uh,

I kind of fell apart more than two. So I had a year and a half where I wasn't even allowed to do cardio. They're like, hey, if your heart rate gets up, you might just jar this thing loose and you'll die. So just kind of lay there and let your wife do the hard part. It was that bad. I was like, whoa. So that caused like a, now that I can't do anything, I don't have any maintenance. When I got out of those blood thinners, I think I realized more than what a mess I was health wise. Cause now, I mean, I can't make up any ground.

And, uh, the, the term operators, and I don't even think I heard that term until maybe 2020, 2021, but it covered everything. It's like, Oh my God, somebody's like, but again, all this stuff that we're all going through, but nobody's talking to each other. We're trying to get a job or tough guy through this shit. And, uh,

So I was, I will say I was kind of looking for a solution. And actually one of my buddies called me and introduced me to trans, what do they call it? Transcranial magnetic stimulation. Okay. Yeah. So there was a charity that had it together and I went and did that and it did help. I mean, it was, it was a little, it was a little game. Like I say, it was like a 15% gain and they gave me all kinds of, you know,

supplements to go with it and testosterone if I wanted it, which I didn't actually take because I was afraid that if I took unnatural testosterone, it would damage my body's ability to make it. So it helped some, but I think actually what it did was it gave me enough of a boost. I'm like, okay, I've got to do something about my health and I got to look for something else. Around the same time,

I was actually teaching a group of like Bitcoin nerds out of Texas how to shoot. So these guys are all they're all successful, wealthy dudes. And there you're cutting edge and all this other stuff. And as they're they're talking to me or talking to each other offline, they're talking about like microdosing mushrooms and things like that, using it as a therapeutic tool.

And how much has helped them? So I finally asked them, like, hey, like hypothetically, like, what would that do? Like, oh, man, we've been waiting for your dog. And a couple of them had actually already donated like a big amount of money to like I like that thing. Some of these other places are doing the Mexico things like we're seeing like basically results that are like incredible. So like, yeah, if you wanted to give it a go, it would probably help you a lot.

And so that's actually where I got my first, you know, stash, if you will. But man, I was still scared of it, bro. That sat in my freezer for a year before I had the stones to do it.

wow wow had you ever done it before before you went in or yeah no i didn't touch a thing dude i'm like the most nancy reagan guy that you ever met like you know like i wanted to i want to go in the military like early age so uh yeah it's like oh no you'll cut your face off with razor blades if you do any of that stuff and i can't smoke weed because it's a gateway drug i i'd never smoked weed before i went in wow yeah i was that straight laced so uh i man i'd never even considered it and uh

I think to a degree that actually made it scarier. I'm like, wait a minute, man, this is a big, big step. Oh, it's massive. It's massive. I mean, there's so much mysticism, right? Is probably the best word affiliated with, you know, tripping your face off or, you know, whatever that is, right? It's all built up from the counterculture movement, Timothy Leary and all those guys. Right.

But, you know, I think for me, the big shift was, you know, I had these friends that it was crazy. Like when I used to do a show with some guys, Marcus Luttrell back in the day and and and he started talking a little bit about some of these therapeutics. And I was just like, wait, what? There's like people are taking hallucinogenic and it's helping and.

And and then what really kind of exploded, I remember reading an article about that guy, Tim Ferriss, the one of the first big podcasts. And he don't he raised like 17 million dollars to start a veteran research program at Johns Hopkins. Yes, yes.

And that was based on – there was a study that had done for using psilocybin to treat people that had terminal cancer and found immeasurable therapeutic effects to improve that – End of life care. Yes. End of life care. That's right. That was absolutely awesome, yeah.

And so now that's sitting in your freezer for a year, what was the threshold point for you? What was the thing that got you over the line? Man, this is actually hugely important. And this is part of the reason that I've been so vocal about it now is because a lot of those dudes, like, I didn't know. I had never heard, like, Marcus Rattel talk about it. Apparently, this is, like, more widespread than I knew. But...

Not a lot of those guys had talked about it yet, in my knowledge, and certainly none of my peers had, like my brother. It turns out that after I did this, a bunch of them were like, oh, yeah, man. Yeah, it's awesome. I just didn't tell you for some reason. Like, thanks, Dick. Well, it's that shame, right? It's like, oh, I'm a druggie or there's something wrong with me. It's that shame of ambition that's built in, right? Well, I think there's a couple other things that go along with it, too. I'd actually never considered that, but that is a piece of it.

The other parts are, man, this is true. This is definitely true for us soft guys. I was scared to do it because my thought process was something like this. I'm technically a mass murderer. I'm good at it. Do I really want to pour... Because you know what the fuck a hallucinogenic does? Never done it before. Am I going to pour that on this guy? What am I going to fucking do? Like,

If I decide that I'm going to go crazy, they're going to need to send like five counties over the SWAT teams to get me where I'm at. You know, it's going to be... They're going to call in a national guard for you, man. But you know what I mean? Like, seriously, it'd be ugly. Once that barbarian spirit is unleashed, they're going to find hatchets in five states. Right. Because you don't know. You don't know if you're going to weigh down and...

You just think from watching bad after-school specials and shit, I might go crazy. No, you're not, man.

But you don't know that. The second part, I've heard a number of my peers say this, too. They're afraid. I was afraid of this, too. They're afraid they're just going to turn them into a pussy, basically. Because we've seen all this hippie, you know, oh, peace and love bullshit. And we're kind of all afraid, like, I'm going to take this and I'm going to wake up and I'm not going to be able to kill a grasshopper again. I'm going to be like walking through life like a Buddhist monk. And I like that edge about me.

you know, that is part of us that like killer instinct, all those things. That's a piece of us that we don't, or we can't let go of really. Uh, so, I mean, I was a little bit concerned that maybe we'd take that away too. Um, let me see what else. Yeah. And then, you know, just like the standard for, he's like, I'm going to be an addict. I'm going to be a suicide. Like, yeah, that's not even a real thing, but you know, that could be. And, uh, yeah. So I was, I was, I mean, I was scared. I was honestly, I was afraid of it and that's why it sat for so long.

What would finally push it over the edge for me, like I got to do something. I was just kind of in this spot of like, I wasn't like deeply suicidal or anything like that. But I'm like, I just know now. And again, I think that TMS helped me get to this point. Like, I know I'm a fucking mess. I know that I'm not handling life well. I know that I'm not loving my kids as much as I could. And I've got this brain fog and this lack of empathy. I'm just a fucking disaster. I don't recognize myself anymore.

Wow. I mean, that's that I think in all the guys that I've talked to that have been in that's in our state, in that state where you're it's almost like you're that hope is dwindling. The reservoir of of that willpower to want to keep that edge right and work because you still have it in your head, but you it's not as easily attainable as it was when you're in. Right. Right.

You know, every day you wake up, there's, you know, from zero dark 30 till the middle of the night, there's it's planned out and you can just execute. Now you got to figure out it on your own. Right. Let me. So when when you I mean, obviously, if you don't mind, would you talk about would you talk about, you know, that first experience? Yeah, sure.

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Terms apply. This is LeVar Arrington from Two Pros and a Cup of Joe. The Toyota Tundra and Tacoma are designed to outlast and outlive, backed by Toyota's legendary reputation for reliability. So get in a Tundra with the available i-Force Max Hybrid engine, delivering exceptional torque and towing capacity. Or check out a Tacoma with available off-road features like

crawl control it can take you beyond the trails toyota trucks are built to last year after year mile after mile so don't wait get yours today visit buyatoyota.com for deals and more toyota let's go places when you're driving nothing's better than binging on a podcast

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But this is what happened. So I'm going to talk about it. So I don't even think I talked to my wife about me doing this. Maybe I'd like vaguely talk to her about it like months in the past. And my wife was wildly opposed to it for this reason of she did a lot of recreational hallucinogenics when she was way younger. She was a teenager long before we do each other.

And so she had this kind of fear to have seen the bad side of things. All right. What can happen? That's usually where it happens. So she wasn't really on board with it. And I was kind of like, you know, fuck, I have to do this. Like, I also don't think she understood, like, how bad of a spot I was in. We tend to mask that our wives. Absolutely. Yeah.

So finally, I'm like, hey, fuck it. I got to do this. I got to do something. So I basically waited for a night for her to go to bed early, which doesn't really happen that often. And I'm like, fuck, I'm going to go to my garage with its concrete floor and I make like a little nest out of fucking lawn chair cushions and shit.

And I'm like, I'll lock the door and hope I don't remember how to open it. And I'm going to do this. And whatever happens, happens. Hopefully I don't die in the fucking garage like a total dumbass. You know, man, I'm also scared of the mushroom. So I'm pretty like seerschool. At noon, I take something, I rub it on the inside of my arm. Like...

if I have an allergy like four like four hours before I take a little bite chew it up and spit it out make sure I don't like break out in hives or some shit yeah so true it is it's us man it's us so uh it's fucking ridiculous in retrospect but I did I did all this stuff

So I night come she's in bed. I'm like, Oh, I can't sleep. Go downstairs, lock the garage up. And I take like half of my dose, which is so I had, I had like four and a half grams around. I took like two and a half of it. And I'm kind of like, okay, here we go. Let's let's see what happens.

And it takes so long to kick into the first time you just be like, oh, I'm immune to this shit. Like nothing happens. I'm a team guy. I need 10 times the amount. And it turns out for me, quite the opposite is true. Like I probably could have just taken that two and a half and I'd have been fine. So like an hour and 20 minutes and I'm just like, everything's visual. I'm like, oh, fuck, here we go. And yeah, it was wild.

Can you describe some of what did you do to keep your mind engaged? Like, you know, you you you hear people talk about all the time. They say, all right, go into it with intention. You know, let you know the you know, let the medicine work on you and you don't try and work the medicine. You know, all these things. And had you done research prior to it as well?

Not really. I had I talked to my buddy who's who's he's one of the civilian guys, but he's got a lot of experience, like 10 years of experience. That's like, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars with like high level guys. So he's got, I mean, a lot of experience and he kind of talked me through it. So, you know, it's not like I was completely alone as far as what to do. But still, I didn't tell him I didn't like call him prior to or anything.

And this actually kind of crosses into the space where I'm at now. The difference between there's three ways that you can use these things. And that's recreationally, which I don't recommend for anyone, therapeutically, and then ritually. And honestly, most...

Most therapy is closer to ritual. There's times where you're like laying on the shrink's couch. That's different. All the things that the guys do in Mexico and things like that, like ayahuasca, is that a close mix of like ritual and medicine. It's kind of that gray area in between. Yeah, it's interesting. When I, for a little bit of time, I was, you know, I knew the Aubrey Marcus over at Onnit. He sponsored my podcast for a little bit. Nice.

And, you know, that was right when he was really breaking out. That's when Joe Rogan was having all, you know, the mushroom expert on all the time. And, and it really kind of like gained this, you know, momentum societally to where you started seeing it all over the place. And, but still there was this resistance within the veteran community, I think because of all those things you've already described, but

But it's like you said, somewhere around 2020, 21, 22, you know, kind of like after the COVID thing really woke everybody up and like, wait a minute, man, there's another approach. That's when it kind of exploded. So.

You know, I, I, when you, when I always hear about going down and I've had a lot of people go down to Peru and do the deep in the Amazon type of ritual stuff, you know, some guys were like, man, it was a lot. I'm not sure that was good. And then, you know, all the Mexico guys have all said they loved it. And I think I probably have, you know, 40 friends that have done it now. And,

But then there's this other aspect, this therapeutic side that I don't think gets a lot of attention. Can you talk a little bit about the therapeutic aspect of it? I can to a degree. I can talk about that personally with me. But in actually in a legal context, because of what I'm doing now, I cannot. We had to stay very firmly in the religious space.

But I will definitely say from my first time. So my my first experience was crazy. You know, that's part of the reason I wrote the book. It was absolutely it was absolutely bonkers. Very visual, very visceral. Can you tell the audience the name of the book, too, and when you wrote it? Sure. The name of the book is Barbarian Spirit. I actually just checked the date yesterday. It came out a year ago, June 29th. Congratulations on that, by the way. Thank you, brother.

So, in fact, you know what? I'll skip over the story part of that and get to what I saw as the benefit on the backside of it. So mine was intensely, I mean, super intensely visual. It was crazy. And it was also a very religious experience for me, which set a lot of these other things in motion. But on the side, like the health side, when I walked out of that the next day,

Man, for the first time in like, I can't even tell you how long I felt like me again, if that makes any sense. I felt like I had like hit the reset. I felt like I was 25 years old again mentally. Now, unfortunately, my body was still 25, but my head was so clear. I mean, I swore for like two weeks after I was done, I could feel like actually feel like my brain and like growing back together is what I felt like.

Had so much clarity. The brain fog was gone. Ambition. It's not like it wasn't like crazy. It wasn't like drugging, but it was like an ambition, you know, where it should be for where I'm at in life. I felt good. I slept amazing. This has been something I've seen a lot of other dudes do their first time to sleep. Guys haven't slept 20 years. Now they're sleeping like nine hours a night, like a baby.

And the biggest thing I would say on like the like the feeling side of things, I felt like a different connection to my kids that I'd never had before. Yeah. And that that that that alone was worth like the price of admission.

I love that. That's my favorite piece I hear the most, right, is that I can finally look at my child and connect with them on the level that they need. Yes, yes. As opposed to being the ultimate protector, the constant vigilance. Right, all this other shit, yeah. All that, you just let that go, and now all of a sudden you're communicating with them. Right.

And they feel it, right? They know the difference. Oh, yeah. Hell, yeah. When dad's got the armor on and then when dad's, you know, available. Right. That, I think, is the most positive aspect of it, I think. Oh, me too. It's changed my relationship with my wife so much, too. For the positive, like all for the positive.

I feel like it's like this. Uh, I remember if this was an original thought or some real incentive, it's relevant. It's almost like, like we turned off all these emotions and shit. We fought the war, right? We had to, uh, cause dudes were dying and it doesn't matter if your teammate got zapped yesterday, we're going to fuck it back out today. And you can mourn for him when we get home and, you know, people are getting fucked up. And, uh,

We do. It's a Western way of warfare, too. It's very cold, very calculated, and that's required. I mean, that's actually something they beat into us and something they select for so that we can be the guys that we are is, are you this kind of heartless fucking killing machine for the most part? And the war just makes that worse because we have to now actually do these things. We turn our emotions off.

And I think in a lot of ways, like we forget or we don't know how to turn them back on. Then that is something else. It's a side effect of the, of the, that's really what I felt like it was for me. It didn't like all come rushing back at once, but I did feel like I could actually have like a, like a real, like emotional connection to my children and wife after that. You know, it's, it's,

I never, like before I went in, man, you know, I always laugh when I tell people this, but you know, I was an art major in college, right? So, you know, I was a fucking, I'm a hippie who can kill you. Right. And, and, and I go in the teams and I was petrified that I was going to lose that aspect of myself. And,

And very quickly got to, you know, the transformation began and you just you have to you have to allow what it's it's almost like it's almost ritualistic in and of itself. Right. The training is ritual. Oh, yeah. Hell, yeah. Right. And you think about those bonds there.

not so much the bonds that are being laid down through those instructors. And then all of a sudden, you know, now then you go to war and now it's a whole nother level of that. Oh, yeah. You know, that that that barbarian spirit like you describe it.

Can, can you talk about what that, that, that means for people? Cause there's going to be a lot of, especially young, young men that listen to this, that they're infatuated with, with, you know, guys like us, they're infatuated is a hard word, but you know, they look up to us. They aspire to have that sense of, um, um, um, uh, confidence in the ability and breast fear. Can you describe that barbarian spirit a little bit? Sure. And this is, uh,

This is actually something else that came out of the psilocybin. It came from my first time, actually. Was this like deep, deep connection to like an ancient warrior tradition that I could not have fathomed in another way. But it showed me. It showed me what it called the blood bridge, which is back through DNA and back through time, back through history. Like this is who you are and this is who you're related to.

And that was amazing. And I think that's part of the calling now for me to help our brethren specifically with this is it wakes that up in them. And it's a good thing. It's all a positive thing. I think you have to have some... Well, let me rephrase that. I know you have to have...

some like real world experience and real world strength. You have to train these things. You have to be good with weapons in the real world, all this stuff. And this is also why I don't think, I cannot imagine giving this sacrament to like a 19 or 20 year old. They don't have the things that they need yet. No, not at all. If you spend your youth, all right, growing that, all right, when you pour this on top,

It does. It takes you to like a different place mentally. And it's very positive, too. It shows you it's basically almost like another selection process. Like, OK, you went up through these things and now you can have this to this kind of power on top of the spirit power on top of your physical power. So it is great. I mean, it's fantastic.

It's almost like an enhancer for all of the hardship, all of the sacrifice, all of the bloodshed, you know, because, you know, that's the one thing I, you know, I get into these kind of philosophical metaphysical discussions with civilians all the time. Yeah. And trying to help them understand, right, to create some link for them to maybe it's

they all have a degree of empathy, but they don't have a degree of understanding. Right. Yes. Right. Yeah. And so trying to say, Hey man, this stuff goes way, way back. I mean, not only the warrior spirit, but I mean, there's, there's all kinds of, of connections to, to plant medicine that, that goes back thousands of years. Oh, right. Yeah. Greeks, Romans, you know, pre those civilizations, all the South American civilizations, uh,

It's funny. They've been finding these little spoons on all the Germanic warriors. They're calling them basically their methamphetamine spoon. But they were attached to their war belt in front of their sword. And they've tested it now a few times. And that is for some substances like this. And it was such a part of their stuff that it's buried with them on that belt.

part of the ritual part of their burying right yes yeah yeah and it's it looks like they probably actually carried those to combat with them too like they bothered to take that along with the other sword and the axe it's wild uh all right do you think we can uh you know talk uh Sephardic into maybe like issuing yeah yeah sure that'd be totally well actually this is a funny thing this is real

We, I think that we have, I think all these things came together. We have a very slim window with this administration, that there's a possibility that we could see at least pilot programs of this as both a pre-deployment and a post-deployment kind of prophylactic, if you will.

And that would be so amazing because that's actually part historically with the warrior class of what this was used for too. For instance, I think it was Comanches or patches, but one or the other, when they came back from war parties, they didn't get to go back to the village. All right. They went outside of camp with the medicine man. All right. And he'd feed them some, whatever they had, peyote, whatever it was for a couple of days and kind of wash that shit off of them. And then they could go back to civilization. Yeah. The Han Blasea. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I,

It's actually thought that some of the crusaders had a ritual like this, too. They just kind of kept it quiet. So, yeah, it's not it's not without precedent.

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The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who did make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself.

And I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did.

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You know, one of the things that I find fascinating is when you dig into the history of how the government came crashing down and made all these things schedule one drugs back in the late 60s. Meanwhile, they're doing these experiments on people in Ashbury, giving them massive quantities of lysergic acid to see what happens to them. It's crazy. But

You know, I think now we are seeing my the most recent one was, you know, the Texas House and Senate overwhelmingly with that guy Hubbard, who is connected to Morgan Luttrell and Governor Perry to to really dig in a 50 million dollar allotment to begin researching Ibogaine as as as a substance to help this.

The only thing that scares me about that one is Ibogaine. And I have not used Ibogaine, but Ibogaine is incredibly powerful. But it actually comes with a health risk where they make those guys wear heart monitors and shit and have a real doctor around when they do it. I kind of wish they'd started with something else, but I'm glad they're A, doing something, and B, not.

So that's one of the things you discover, too, is all these sacraments have different uses. And for like, what is it, opioid addiction? Ibogaine is without question. It's the one. I mean, it's the one. And I guess ayahuasca is a close second. So, I mean, there's incredible value in these things. I hope that turns out great in Texas. You know, this is exactly what we need right now.

I agree. Can you talk a little bit about some of the reason why you're a proponent for psilocybin as opposed to the others for, you know, instead of going to the VA and what, getting your handful of psychotropics and your, you know, SSI uptake inhibitors and your Valium and all your shit, right? That's going to kill you, right? Why psilocybin?

Because in my opinion, most of those things mask problems. And it's actually the same thing that weed and alcohol does. I'm not coming down on weed and alcohol either. They have a use. But mostly those are an escape thing. You come home, drink a bottle of what I used to do because alcohol is not a drug and weed is. Drink a fifth. Get home from work or whatever. Crack open some booze.

I escaped my problems for eight hours. I wake up with a hangover. Now I got to deal with those problems again, cycle back through the day and do it again. Weirdly psilocybin, especially solves problems. They're over when, when you, when you do it after you've been through your ritual, whatever, it actually makes those problems go. It's a, it's a permanent lasting effect. Now, depending on how deep your problems go, you may need, you know, some more cycles of it over the, over the course of months and years, but,

But it actually makes things better. So you don't need that stuff anymore, which is I believe that's actually one of the reasons they've gone so hard in the paint about keeping it illegal is I mean, you're trying to upset a trillion dollar industry, you know, for big pharma. It's funny, actually, psilocybin was still legal in the UK up until 2005. Are you kidding me? No, you had to sell it in raw, not dried form. But yeah, it was totally illegal. You go to a farmer's market and buy psilocybin up until 2005.

That's insane to me. It is. It's wild. But that's what you're up against. You're up against people that they can't make any money off you. So they're going to keep you down. Well, I mean, that's actually that's really the funny thing, like with with our veterans program and what we're doing, the cost, almost all the cost is in bringing the guys out and keeping them fed for three days. Like the cost of the sacrament itself is like 50 bucks. I mean, it's nothing.

Wow. Well, tell us about the program you're running and first, like why you wanted to start it and then what what what what the program entails. Sure. And let me come for you also why I use psilocybin while we're talking about that, because I kind of skipped over that in the last question. So a while back, as soon as I did psilocybin the first time, I was like, I want a way to get this to my brothers. And I did, you know, off the books very quietly, like some of them, like my close old friends be like, all right, man, come on.

Or, you know, I started getting the calls that about like, man, I'm going to however it goes, I'm going to kill myself. Like, yeah, hold on. Let me add this one for like, if you, you have to phrase things differently depending on the guy, if he's going to kill himself, like, I'm just going to offer myself. It's me like, Hey man, you're gonna kill yourself anyway. Why don't you just hang out for a minute?

I'm going to come over. We're going to get high as fuck on some different stuff. And it's going to be totally cool. And if it's not, you know, whatever, I leave on Monday. You can offer yourself. I'll even wait in the parking lot. I'll call the cops so your wife doesn't find your body. It'd be great. Show up. Bam. Give him the sacrament. Eight hours later, it's like...

That was amazing. Holy shit. Do you want to kill yourself? And we're like, no, I know that life is too amazing. Awesome. I'm going home. So I knew that it is. And it is that intense. You see it on their faces. Yeah. And that's what's so insane. And, and it's that, what is it? It's, it's deeper than relief. It's, it's, it's a revelatory, right? Like, like it all kind of falls off them. And now all of a sudden there's like, Oh, wait,

You mean there's a solution? There's an opportunity? Exactly. No, it's 100% like that. You also know your job's done. You're like, yeah, this guy's good. He's straight. I can leave right now. He's good. So I wanted a way to get this to my guys.

And everyone actually, the suicide epidemic that we're seeing in the United States, period, not just amongst veterans. I mean, it's insane. Some cases it's gone up like 52% in the last 20 years. These are actually things that I wasn't thinking about, though, for probably the first year that I used psilocybin. And it was about maybe six or eight months ago that I felt the calling, like this kind of calling.

To to start this this this church, and it had to be this way for a variety of reasons. And it kind of in a weird way kind of had to be me, too, because I already wrote something that's very much counts as a holy book about psilocybin. And it's it's also weirdly, I think, why he gave me an odd path, like like why he came to me in this way.

Norse pagan tradition, which didn't make a lot of sense at the time. I was going to run with it because that's what happened.

When you're called, you're called. Right. When you're done with that, you should be like, couldn't you pick something that was a little easier? No, I can't. It doesn't work that way. You know that from a long time ago. Oh, yeah, yeah, exactly. Don't get the easy path, brother. But it does give us an ironclad link to a 10,000-year-old tradition of using psilocybin specifically.

So, you know, honestly too, I've, before I started this, I tried a couple other things. Like I tried LSD. Uh, I didn't really care for it. There are people that can use as a therapeutic or in a ritual manner. I won't, uh, just cause I don't think that it agrees with our systems. What we need, uh,

MDMA is also great. I do work with that one as well. But I firmly believe that psilocybin is the sacrament that you use first because it's such a wide spectrum thing. It helps with so many things as well as it's the one that turns suicidal thought off like a light switch. And it's funny because I didn't think of it as the suicide off switch until about six, eight months ago. I started putting the paperwork together to do this organization.

I had to go back and think, I'm like, wait, it does do that. And that actually did that for me. And it did it so well that I never thought about it again. Like I forgot that that was even, yeah, it was like an erased that it had ever been a thing forever. And I don't know how many dudes, you know, that have, that have, that have had this, I wasn't like hyper depressed. Like I'm going to kill myself. I did go through that phase. Like when I first got out for a minute, but I, you know, I wasn't going to go through with it.

uh the second one that i see amongst veterans is the uh they get to this point where they're just like wake up and they're like what am i doing man like i already did the the cool height you know i was riding helicopters now i'm going to work at the fuck crap macaroni and cheese factory maybe it's just all over uh i've seen help with that one and i've been through that one too now neither of those two were going to affect me after my sons were born because now i'm so committed to them but uh but

And the third one, I actually went through this one as well. I'm calling it suicide by other means. You see like that, like the weird shit, like there was an absolute legend of the special forces regiment that overdosed on heroin six months after he retired. No. Yeah. And at the time, I'm like, what the what the fuck? Like fucking heroin. And you don't get it.

But once you've been retired and you're out of the system and you're having all these things and all this flood and survivor's guilt, like it's like, oh, fuck, man. Yeah, I get it now. Like he offed himself. He just it just didn't. It's not going to show up in the stats. That's what he did. Or, you know, drinking and driving at incredibly high rates just because you don't fucking care. A lot of guys die that way, too. That should count in the suicide column. But, you know, I would say I was past that one, too. The one that I was still having, and this is so fucking weird, the impulsive thought. So, yeah.

I've been around guns my entire life. I did gun journalism for a while. I retired. I was a competitive shooter. There's fucking guns everywhere. There's 15 guns in my office right here. About, I don't know, two or three times a week, I would just be walking by something and I would have this impulsive thought. You should pick that gun up and shoot yourself. I'd be like, oh, fuck. Wait, hold on. No other symptoms, no depression. I don't know what the fuck it was, but

it was it was it was all the time you know it wasn't like every day but it was it was frequent psilocybin turned that off to the point that i forgot it even happened until i started looking at suicide statistics again i'm like oh man like how many guys have how many guys have a had that same impulse i didn't come from tbi uh i think it's actually like demonic whisper now maybe we're a little damaged from from being over in the land of jins or whatever

But how many dudes have gone through with it? And of course, there was no symptoms. It's just an impulsive fucking snap decision. But it makes that one completely go away. Yeah, I mean, some wild shit. So so what I did is I founded this organization. We're calling it Path of Barbarian Spirit, and it is a faith based organization. But what we're doing is we're going to build a small retreat on some land that I've already bought in the Ozarks.

Psilocybin itself, in my experience, also works best in nature anyway. It's very much like a primal enhancer. Absolutely. And then also we think about like us, like the hard shit that we did, especially like training. All right. When you were going through buds and I was going through acute course, it wasn't about like technology and goggles. It was doing hard shit in the woods with some bullshit and getting bit by ticks and chiggers, being in the cold as ocean, all this like nature stuff.

So we put veterans back in that type of environment and we're using yurts instead of buildings. So it's, it's still, it's like being in a fucking tent. Yep. It puts them back in this natural space that really helps the reset on the backside of the ritual. It is amazing. I, you know, the, what I love to hear is I love to hear that.

These stories like yours, because it means that dudes are, are not giving up there. And then not only are they not giving up, but you're in that same green beret spirit, right? You're, you're, you're freeing the oppressed, right? Yeah. Like in the oppressed is our brothers in their minds. The press is more importantly, the oppression of their souls from what, what they volunteered to do to expose themselves to. So, so,

I love the fact that you're it's a it's a religious in nature aspect to it, because, I mean, you know, you go back and you think about, you know, some of the greatest, you know, warrior cultures in history. They all have that component built into it. Yes.

But yet in the modern era, seeming – even post-World War I when you had all those guys rioting in D.C. because they're like, hey, you screwed us over. That's the commonplace now. And so once again, it's on us.

to take care of our brothers in a way that's ritualistic, that has that barbarian spirit, that has that warrior ethos still ingrained in it and getting rid of all the other... What is it? It's...

It's, it's, it's deeper than the lie or the, the, the illusion of support of the VA or whatever. It's just like, it's like, we're done with you. Yes. Like you've served your purpose. And, and for us now, it's like, no, no, no, no. Your purpose is even more important now. What are some of the things that you guys talk about in those retreats? Well, dude, this is actually, let me back up one step for a sec, right? This is hugely important.

This is one of the other ways that I know it was divine intervention is because I'm not this fucking smart. There is, there's actually an obstacle also. Like, I love what like, like Vets Inc is doing and Heroic Heart and some of these other, I love what they're doing, but there's a, there's a, there's a built-in problem with it. And that's that,

A lot of dudes will not go to Mexico and they will sure as fuck not go to Mexico to do drugs and a sketchy situation with people. They don't know. And that's what it sounds like. No matter how I, I, I church it up. If this was a healing retreat, that's how I would have thought about it. Honestly. Uh, like, uh, three years ago when I started, it's really been like, Hey man, we got to go to TJ and be like the fuck we are like, like we're not. Uh, and I understand why they've done this. I understand why they continue to do this, but, uh,

It's divine intervention in that he gave me a pathway that we can legally do this in the United States because we're not a therapy. We are First Amendment and a Restoring Religious Freedom Act protected religious activity. And so we can bring guys to us in the fucking woods in Arkansas, and we are 100% legit and able to do this. And I'm actually looking at us as like the paramedics of this thing.

We can give them this first little dose. All right. Some guys, this is going to be enough. Some guys are going to stick with the, the spiritual path that I'm on. That's cool. That's awesome. Some guys are going to, it's going to pass them just enough. They're going to know that they have, I mean, real fucking problems that we can't fix and they need to go to Mexico and get one of the other therapeutics or they need to go to a, a real like head shrink and not be religious guy and get some, some, some therapy.

And that's all totally cool. We're totally going to make that work. Yeah. So, I mean, it's, it's been amazing. Well, I mean, Clay, I just, once I, I just, it snapped in my head. I was like, oh my God, you know, he's, he's got this whole thing. It's a program. It's focused. He wrote the book.

I was just like, man, I just got to bring him on so he can share with the people out there and let people know what's going on and that they're, in particular, our brothers that are all struggling right now. So...

Thank you so much for coming on and for sharing what you're doing. Is there any way people can donate to your church? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So if you go over to barbarianspirit.com, there's a page for donations. We have a gifts that go up right now. We've actually developed some. In fact, we got some laying on the desk here.

We developed some merchandise specifically for this because yes, we need money. We need that. But the other thing we need to do is raise awareness that this is happening. So we made some stuff that is specifically for raising awareness that psilocybin solves this problem. So that's my 22 grams v 22 fish up sticker.

It's a twofold thing. Yeah, we need OpFund to build our shit out and bring guys in. We also need all the guys to know like this works because there's other ways to get it. And man, people are hurting right now. Fuck, bro. If you are hurting right now, probably start calling. Somebody's got something. Somebody can square you away.

And you're going to love this next part. This is, this is honestly, this is where we apply the green brain model to future for this, because this is not intended to be like one little church in the woods. We've got to build that first because we had to have a base of operations.

We are looking at the concept of training our own priest class to be able to do this and have their own franchises all over the United States. And honestly, after we fight the first couple of legal battles, it's not even denominational at that point. Like, we're going to have Christian priests that come out of this. We're going to have, you know, Buddhist priests that come out of this. That's fucking totally cool. All right. We will still keep you in our circle of protection here.

We will show you how to do these rituals and these focused things. It will help you raise funds for your franchise when you get there. We're also looking in the near future, building a parallel nonprofit. All right. There are things that we can do on the religious side and there are things that people can do on the medical research side. Never shall those two cross.

But if we build a nonprofit that's parallel that we can staff with some ex-officer nerds and neuroscientists and probably a shrink or two, they can't come over and dictate protocol in the church. I have to do that. But hypothetically, on the backside of this, if any of our guys, once they've gone through this or while they're going through this,

would like to come over and share their their brain scan data in an anonymous way or or talk with these people that do medical research very much off of my camp in the camp next door we can do a lot of damage in a very short amount of time wow

Well, Clay, I wish you all the best, man. I'm praying for you and your team. And I just can't thank you enough for coming on and sharing this. Where can people follow you and how can they get in touch? Mostly, we've got a contact point over at barbarianspirit.com. I spend a lot more time than I should on Twitter. I'm way off the list.

Please don't stop that. I can't. I'm an addict. Awesome. We're not great on the other social media platforms you have, but we're getting there. But yeah, I mean, yeah, please come check us out. Look at what we've done. Got a couple bucks. Help us out. Buy some merch. Just tell your friend. Tell your friends that this works. That's going to help us carry momentum into this. Awesome. Thank you, brother. God bless you. All right. Thank you, brother.

This is LeVar Arrington from Two Pros and a Cup of Joe. The Toyota Tundra and Tacoma are designed to outlast and outlive, backed by Toyota's legendary reputation for reliability. So get in a Tundra with the available i-Force Max Hybrid engine, delivering exceptional torque and towing capacity. Or check out a Tacoma with available off-road features like

We'll be right back.

Get yours today. Visit buyatoyota.com for deals and more. Toyota, let's go places. You're great at protecting your own personal information. You probably even use things like two-factor authentication, strong passwords, and a VPN. But as much as you try to be in control of how your information is protected, there are lots of places that also have it.

and they might not be as careful as you are. That's why LifeLock monitors millions of data points every second for identity threats. If your identity is stolen, a LifeLock U.S.-based restoration specialist will help solve identity theft issues on your behalf, guaranteed, or your money back. Plus, all LifeLock plans are backed by the Million Dollar Protection Package, meaning LifeLock will reimburse you up to the limits of your plan if you lose money due to identity theft.

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