00:05:50.480And plus, as wrongfully, as misguided as I was, I wanted to get, you know, take a swing back at the person, in our mind, at the people that had taken a swing at us.
00:06:21.540Well, yeah, I got back to my unit and they weren't going to deploy.
00:06:26.000So, I volunteered for this other deployment because I just wanted to get there.
00:06:30.480And this artillery battalion needed a PSD team.
00:06:36.280So, they were a personal security detail.
00:06:38.700So, they were, you know, looking for guys.
00:06:40.480And we ended up with this kind of hodgepodge of random MOSs of just guys that wanted to do this job.
00:06:46.500So, we did a train up, learn how to do that.
00:06:49.180And it's funny, like in keynotes, I used to say, we're, to try to explain it, you know, if you're talking to bankers, they don't really know what PSD is.
00:06:56.460You know, they certainly know what EP is.
00:06:58.460But I would say we're kind of like the Army's idea of Secret Service, except for better trained or not as well trained, you know.
00:07:50.140You know, first you cross that border and, you know, there's oil wells on fire and, you know, busted up cars and then, like, you know, just poverty like you've never seen before.
00:08:01.900Busted up cars from the first Iraq war.
00:08:11.820And then we get to Scania and that night, well, I probably shouldn't tell that story, but we stayed with some Polish SF guys and they were fun.
00:18:48.200It's why the peace settlement after the First World War, you know, the Western nations wound up sending African peacekeepers to Germany to humiliate the Germans.
00:29:50.980Which might have been the only thing that kept me alive.
00:29:54.180Because I have, I mean, I can't even remember exactly how many holes it is, but between knee to hip on both quads is, like, 30 holes, something.
00:30:04.700So, had I not had that, it sort of acted like an internal tourniquet and kept me from bleeding out, probably.
00:30:11.900Because when they got my uniform cut off, you could, every time my heart would beat, you could see the blood kind of ooze out.
00:30:18.820But, um, of the through and throughs, I have some through and throughs, and you could just, it was like, I always describe it as, like, squeezing a water bottle, but with rhythm, you know, and it just kind of pour out like that.
00:30:35.320Yeah, and I had no, my, my blood pressure was so low, they weren't, weren't giving me any, and it was good that they didn't, but they weren't giving me any pain meds or anything.
00:30:44.260You know, morphine will kill you if you don't have enough blood pressure.
00:32:05.260And then there was one spot on my one quad where, my right side, where you could about put your fist in the hole, and there's been confusion since day one about whether that was a gunshot from an AK or just more ball bearings.
00:32:30.660So, sometimes when people sell products on TV, you know, I love this product, I use this product, there's the question in the mind of the viewer, does this guy really use the product?
00:34:59.420We were just all kids, you know, arm wrestling and screwing off and, you know, and punctuated every once in a while by war stuff, you know?
00:35:09.920And I think it's, I think that experience really matters.
00:35:15.180It's so easy to dehumanize people that you're fighting with at that level.
00:35:19.860And I think I was really blessed to have multiple experiences to remind me that they're all people, you know?
00:35:26.840How long did it take you to recover from all that?
00:35:32.020They retired me about a year and a half later.
00:35:37.020And then it took probably another eight years to get to where I could run.
00:35:42.200I didn't think I was ever going to be able to run again.
00:37:59.440The one guy, my civilian doctor, he was an MDDO.
00:38:03.840So he leaned away from drugs really hard, which was a blessing.
00:38:07.820Because I was, you know, leaving Walter Reed, they had me on some ridiculous amount of opioids, like 380 milligrams a day or something like that.
00:38:38.640So I was in a nice, a quarantined ICU unit for three or four weeks because I couldn't leave ICU until one, I was stable and two, I could be in a wheelchair of some kind.
00:38:51.380And they couldn't do that without putting rods in my legs because I had external fixators on those big cage deals.
00:39:00.520And you can't get the rods until you clear the infection, you know?
00:39:03.760So they were trying to clear this infection and there was some question about whether they were even going to be able to do that.
00:39:18.520Yeah, they were, I don't want to crap on Walter Reed, but they were doing some, some guys were doing their best and other guys were, like, changing through and through wounds with, like, the packing with, like, a number two pencil and shit like that, you know?
00:39:35.820It's in the United States at Walter Reed.
00:40:28.880You know, it was like a roller coaster experience at Walter Reed.
00:40:31.980But they, to back up even one more step, just to kind of give an idea of how fragile everything was at the time, they, I first went to Landstuhl.
00:40:42.780And my understanding, and this could be wrong.
00:40:47.080They're, they have a big medical hospital there.
00:40:49.680And my understanding, and this could be wrong, but what was, what they would try to do in Landstuhl is really get somebody very stable and do preliminary surgeries.
00:41:18.420All I want to do is be able to go take a piss by myself, man.
00:41:21.960You know, you're a couple of days ago, you'd been a proud, young, former athlete and soldier.
00:41:27.280And now you're this, you're basically in a hospice care, you know?
00:41:32.840Uh, and so, yeah, it starts to weigh on you.
00:41:36.120And I, I wanted to get rods in my legs so I could get a wheelchair and have some sense of independence.
00:41:41.900Uh, but I couldn't do that without clearing these infections.
00:41:46.220And then I finally get the rods in and they moved me up to a neural ward next to some other guys, uh, that had had like the same bug before.
00:41:56.540And then they put like a label on your door.
00:42:04.200But I'm up there next to this other guy and things are now it's better because I can talk to a guy, you know, at least room to room, uh, you know, we're kind of hollering at each other through the wall or, you know, the doorway and stuff.
00:42:18.340And, uh, then I had a pulmonary embolism and it collapsed, I think it was my left lung.
00:42:24.360And then right back into surgery emergency, you know, and they had to decide whether to put one of those IVC filter deals, uh, inferior and your inferior vena cava, I think is what it is.
00:42:37.900Like I say, I'm not good at anatomy, largest vein in your body.
00:42:40.700And if, uh, it's like, if you think of like a, an umbrella without a skirt on it and then some extra wiring to work as a filter, that's what it is.
00:42:52.040But they would deploy it like this and then it had some kind of legs that would then open up and stick into the vessel to hold it there.
00:42:59.740And it would break up blood clots because what they were trying to figure out is if I had had, because I had deep vein thrombosis already, which is like blood clots in your legs essentially.
00:43:11.380But they didn't, they weren't sure if I had had a claw originate in my lung or if it had traveled to my lung from my legs.
00:43:18.260So that's why they had to put that in.
00:43:20.420Uh, and then, you know, that was another, I can't even remember how long before I finally got into a position where they could even think about walking.
00:43:32.540Uh, and one day my, I'm pretty sure I wrote about this too, but I, so I'm sorry if I'm retelling stories, but, uh,
00:43:39.140an uncle of mine came out and he was really close to me and we used to bow hunt and fish together and then he got drafted by the Royals out of high school.
00:43:48.420And so he's kind of a neat guy and I always looked up to him, you know, and he came out to visit and he, I told him, I was like, they, they don't think I'm going to be able to walk, you know?
00:44:14.960That's like planning out what to work on next and triaging.
00:44:17.840And well, this guy got assigned, uh, on the ortho side and he was like 27 and right out of med school and really smart and just kind of a go getter type guy.
00:44:28.320And he said, I think you can do it, but you're going to have to get on your feet like now we don't want to risk atrophying your muscles anymore.
00:44:36.900And, you know, you're just going to have to start trying.
00:44:40.240So my physical, uh, therapist at Walter Reed, his name was, uh, Solomon and he was like, this giant black guy.
00:44:47.620He played defensive end or something with Phil Sims on the New York Giants.
00:44:51.960And then he just did this as a job, I think mostly to be a charitable guy.
00:45:06.760So he helped me up and my bones, I'm like, my right hand is all in this cast thing.
00:45:12.940And then I've got a, like a soft cast they put on my humerus because they were trying to let me have at least one ambulatory limb.
00:45:21.400Um, so I just put up my arms on those parallel bars and however long those are 10 feet or whatever and walked down and then back.
00:45:33.700And I was like shaking, you know, I mean, it hurt like hell.
00:45:37.140And anyway, I got to the end and then Solomon helped me to my wheelchair and he got my arms draped around him like a prom date or something.
00:45:47.920You know, he sat me down and that was my first time I walked and yeah.
00:45:55.480And so it's like the peaks and valleys at that point.
00:45:57.800You're, you know, you're riding really high feeling like I'm going to make it kind of thing.
00:46:02.720You know, what's it like to be in a hospital for four months?
00:53:09.260Well, yeah, I think you should be very careful tempering with, like, allowing things into your body.
00:53:22.780You know, the, the term spirits, that originated because it was, my understanding of this is that that term came from, people thought you were putting spirits into your body.
00:53:41.620So, opioids are just that in a different form is what I would think.
00:53:47.020And, you know, people get mad at me for this, but I think the same thing about other drugs.
00:53:51.220Like, if you're communicating with some entity because of something you've taken, I would, I think, I would take that pretty seriously because you, you probably are.
00:56:26.380Like, well, I, I wasn't the same guy at that period of my life.
00:56:30.860Well, think about what that actually means.
00:56:33.160Like, what do you mean you weren't the same guy?
00:56:36.000You know, if you believe in body, soul, spirit, or, or body, soul, mind, however you want to think of it, what do you mean when you say you were not the same person?
00:56:46.300Because, like, did your soul leave and go somewhere else?
00:57:05.760And that, you know, can be wrong, and I would sound like an idiot or whatever, but that is the way that I view it.
00:57:10.940You don't sound like an idiot at all, and you're clearly not wrong, and that's, like, a central piece of Christian theology.
00:57:15.980I mean, Paul says at great length in Romans, this is Paul, this is, like, the hero of the early church.
00:57:21.520This is, like, one of the, after Jesus, the founder of Christianity.
00:57:24.220And he's like, I do all these terrible things that I don't, I don't want to do, and that's because the sin, which he described as sin, is, like, taking control of me.
00:57:32.520Like, something from outside came into me and is making the decisions.
00:57:47.380And if you don't think about that, you're probably being driven by something, there's probably a reason you're not taking a step back to think about it, you know?
00:57:57.920So, when you say, what does it do to your spirit?
00:58:00.000I really believe that it's, you've given control over to something else, and so it changes you in every way.
00:58:06.340You know, you become dishonest, angry, bitter, deeply depressed.
01:05:27.840But I have three young boys and I've been caught up in some other BS for a minute.
01:05:34.560Well, but there's a difference between like the happy chaos of small children and the kind of, you know, multi-year, just like, I just don't give a shit at all.
01:08:14.560So, so that's, and I thank you for taking the time to tell that story.
01:08:18.400How'd you go from there to like being on Sean Ryan's show and like becoming a figure of, you know, public adulation and, you know, attacks as well.
01:08:29.460Like you become this like polarizing figure.
01:54:44.040If we can get them to understand that, then that is a huge accomplishment for posterity in the future because then they'll want to protect it forever.
01:54:55.340And that'll give us at least until they have grandchildren, which would be great.
01:54:59.020And then the second thing I think we have a real opportunity to do is shift the narrative in science back to people who actually want to do real science.
01:55:10.800I think COVID, for righteous reasons, made a lot of people very skeptical of any expert class.
01:55:20.620And that, I mean, I am one of those people.
01:55:22.420But there are scientists out there who genuinely really want to save this stuff.
01:55:29.800That's the guy that's trying to save the Gila trout or whatever.
01:55:33.120So I think we can help them establish some more credibility.
01:55:36.900Like, no, we actually, we as scientists, not me, but them as scientists don't actually want to pave over the Mojave Desert.
01:55:46.400So, you know, so we have an opportunity to shift two narratives that are really important.
01:55:51.720If we can do that, then I think we've got another couple generations of security, you know, from my children and your children and grandchildren.
01:56:01.900It's not an accident that the most articulate voice in this debate is you and you spend the most amount of time outside.
01:56:09.440And maybe part of it is convincing people that nature is more compelling than porn or video games or anything that's happening on your phone.
01:56:18.360And I mean, the decline in hunting and fishing licenses nationally, as much as I so enjoy being alone, you don't have to compete for a spot because there's nobody there.
01:57:44.540There was a funny, my brain is doing a squirrel thing, but one of the funniest tweets I ever saw.
01:57:50.600I don't, you know, me and this guy disagree at times, but right after that happened, first thing in the morning, Josh Hawley tweeted, I wonder who Loomis will shoot today.
01:58:02.240I laughed for like an hour about that.
01:58:06.400But yeah, we need to get those kids engaged.
01:58:08.720And there are some college programs that do this kind of thing.
01:58:11.220And a friend of mine runs one of these at a university in the West, takes kids out and teaches them how to hunt ducks and, you know, shoot.
01:58:19.860And so we need to do much, much more of that.
01:58:43.400There's one answer I think I would give to that that no one else does is we are a union.
01:58:47.560And even if you don't want to come out and enjoy the land that is yours, help support us because we support you with various policies that help protect your fisheries and your way of life up here.