Travis Bader: I'm Travis Bader, and this is the Silvercore podcast.
Silvercore has been providing its members with the skills and knowledge
necessary to be confident and proficient in the outdoors for over 20 years.
And we make it easier for people to deepen their connection to the natural world.
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If you'd like to learn more about becoming a member of the
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Today's guest is a good old Canadian boy who grew up hunting and fishing
and exploring the outdoors and now offers training programs on
marksmanship and self growth.
He's a well educated and passionate proponent for post traumatic
growth, the art of adversity and the expansion of consciousness.
All right.
And at some point in between, he was a sniper and assaulter with
Canada's tier one elite special forces joint task force too.
Welcome to the Silvercore podcast, Jeff Depatie.
Jeff Depatie: Thanks Trev.
Uh, it's always a pleasure to be on, uh, these shows, you know, a
lot of guys, uh, gals don't really.
Take it for granted how much effort goes into it, how much passion and drive.
So it's a pleasure being on and I see you got the poppy on there.
Travis Bader: Yes.
Yeah.
It'll, it'll date the show for sure, but it'll be coming out in a couple of days.
So, um, and yeah, a lot of passion and drive in order to just do whatever the
endeavor somebody is going to be into.
But it's not just a matter of picking up a microphone and, uh, and, and
chatting if you want it to be successful.
So I appreciate that.
And clearly you've been in this realm for a while and you understand that too.
Jeff Depatie: Yeah, yeah, it's a, it's a different space, you know, when
you're, when you're hustling from a bit of passion, not all the normal
constructs of society are there, right?
You don't, uh, you don't have the same streams that feed our normal system.
So, uh, I appreciate it.
Travis Bader: Well, you're sort of the, you know, looking at.
Other shows that you've done and work that's out there on the, on the old
interwebs, kind of a poster boy for, um, for wayward youth and adults who.
Didn't really have too much of a, um, uh, a goal perhaps in mind to begin
with, but you figured things out and you made things work in a system that
maybe wasn't entirely designed for you, which I think was pretty inspiring.
And of course you've got the whole flavor of, uh, love in the outdoors and the,
in the back hopper, which fits in great with, uh, what Silvercore Outdoors does.
Um, Can I ask you a little bit about what your youth was like, because I
know everyone's going to want to hear about selection and JTF2 and all of
these other things, but I, I want to obviously talk about that, but I'd
like to talk about what makes you.
Yeah.
Jeff Depatie: Um, well, I think just jumping right to selection might limit.
Some of the viewers, you know, maybe there's a chance, you know, for the
dads raising kids or the young men still developing themselves, you know, and
they miss out when they don't hear about how, in this case, myself, how I was as
a young man, because how I was as a young man certainly impacted the decisions
and the choices I made downstream.
Uh, I was, uh, originally from Northern Ontario in Canada.
Um, I was an outdoors guy.
I was always very drawn to the outdoors.
I still am.
I like being in nature.
I like touching nature.
Um, I interact very well with it.
We communicate deeply.
Uh, you know, I use the word communicate and exchange of wisdom,
but really, you know, that could be like, I like being out in its spores.
I like feeling its moisture, you know, like a very tactile sense of it.
Um, I was always very connected as a, even as a young guy.
Um, uh, drawn to its systems.
I'm a systems thinker.
And at the time, you know, like, I mean, there is no greater
system than mother earth.
Um, she's pretty perfect.
And yeah, we like to mess her up quite a bit.
Um, yeah, so.
It was pretty idyllic by and large idyllic in terms of idyllic, like a storybook in
a lot of ways where, uh, it wasn't, um, subject to abuses or anything like that.
I had supportive parents as much as they could, um, as we're seeing.
Things that my parents would have done in their generation are
now like, oh, no, that's crazy.
You can't do that kind of stuff, um, to this new, highly sensitive generation.
Um, but at the time they were using all the tools they had, right.
Um, different discipline methods, things like that.
Um, cause I, I feel like I was kind of on the transition one, you know, before cell
phones and during cell phones, internet, and now full on generation alpha.
Um, with a different kind of connectivity.
And that was one thing that nature really gave to me was, uh, the ability to
connect, connect with something outside of myself, learning how to do this
actually helped me connect with myself.
So we, you and I were kind of talking offline a little bit about, um,
emotions and being in touch with yourself and growth and all that.
The reason it's so important to mention developing that in your youth is because.
As we go through life, everything is going to attempt
to disconnect us from ourselves.
That's how it is.
Our systems are designed, they're built out of fear, um, and
they're going to automatically draw us away from connection.
Think of the news.
The news is almost always negative.
It's designed to isolate.
It's not designed like that intentionally per se.
I mean, there could be some minds out there doing it on purpose.
Um, But it's just the, it, the place it's built out of, you know, it shows fear,
it shows fear and fear disconnects us.
Um, and that's where, you know, to circle back to being in nature.
I didn't, I didn't fear that space, that system, that very natural space,
you know, and a lot of people now.
Are disconnected from nature because they're actually afraid of it.
You know, they're, they're it just, cause it's so unfamiliar, it's
not even necessarily like bears and wolves and cougars and stuff.
It's just like, it's so unfamiliar to them.
Um, to step into it as deeply outside their comfort zone.
So we kind of have, you know, people like the weekend warriors
that kind of dabble with that.
Um, but a lot of people disconnected from it.
Uh, I, I was, I, you know, I was always into hunting and fishing.
Um, I've hunting, I've kind of moved away from, uh, if I'm being
like completely honest, um, after, after you hunt people, the act of
hunting animals loses something.
I'm not sure what, uh, but it's draw for me wasn't there.
So now I, I, I, um, I do help other people with their hunting.
A small example, I have an online course called ultra long range shooting.
Um, and we just did our first in person.
But just through the online and through the community there, we had a trapper
set up a shot on a bear cross at lake.
So he baited this bear and, uh, he got, he tagged it, uh, it
was about 930 meters or yards.
I think it was.
It's probably close to a world record on a bear.
Holy crow.
So like, I have no problem bringing, uh, that's something
he does, you know, he, he.
Um, which has been kind of rewarding for me because, uh, you know, I
got out of shooting a little bit after the military and kind of
shied away from using those skills.
So it was really hard for me to find a place in that circle back to my youth.
Um, because I want men to understand this.
I said, by and large, it was mostly idyllic.
There was some things, you know, I still had more traditional parents that started
closing me off to my, my emotions.
And the reason I mentioned this is, um.
Because having access to these things actually makes us stronger, makes us more
resilient and resilience actually keeps our mind open, our consciousness expanded.
So it doesn't matter if you're hunting, fishing, whatever you're doing, you
know, if you want to draw it down to a skill, having access to more, um,
awareness, um, more, so when I use the word consciousness, it's just
like super quickly think of it as feedback loops right now, you've got
a bunch of feedback loops running.
You know, you're drinking something, so you're tasting, but like every cell in
your body is running millions of these small algorithms over and over and over.
And then we capture them subconsciously, unconsciously, unconsciously in our
mind, and then we filter through them.
So, you know, an example, me as a sniper, there I am behind a shot.
There's a lot going on, you know, um, Um, to say the least
to make this one thing happen.
Um, but the more I'm able to stay.
Fully present with the situation, which is part of that is your emotions, right?
Like as men, we're, we're shied away from our emotions, you know, men don't feel,
men don't feel men don't cry, whatever.
Um, you know, I'm, I'm, it's a bit antiquated now, you know, that's changing
in, in this kind of modern world, but it actually adds to our resiliency.
And then instead of like coming out the other end, like me and developing PTSD,
because everything's so compartmentalized.
Um, back in my youth, if that would have been nurtured more and more now,
and it's, it's nobody's fault, really, you know, I could start pointing my
finger at schooling and all these things that are in our systems that
tend us towards not doing these things.
Um, Anyhow, though, like I said, mostly idyllic, uh, it was a fun childhood, a lot
of winter snowmobiling, sports like that.
You know, I was a bit of an extremist.
I didn't really realize that I had started running away from myself,
running away from my insecurities.
Um, so what happens with some people, more likely men than women, um, you
start aggressively pushing against them or aggressively running away from them.
Um, and, um, And that eventually led me to the military and, uh, so on and so forth.
Travis Bader: When did you realize you're aggressively running away?
Jeff Depatie: Well, I wish I would have realized 20, 30 years ago.
Um, but it wasn't until, Oh, actually a couple of years ago that
I really, I started feeling into it.
So we have this thing, you know, that the Greeks called our psyche.
Uh, another word could be soul in science.
It might be called like the full expression of your DNA.
And it sits inside most people.
And especially, you know what?
Pretty much all over the world, because either there there's people
who are in a survival state where they're just trying to get groceries
in their belly, you know, and that's like half of the world's population.
Um, so they're, they're in this state of, of, uh, of running.
And so they don't ever really get to move on to the other side where you, you
sink into this and you start to feel it.
You want to express yourself, not like so much like right art or poetry
or anything like that, but you want to become authentically yourself.
Now, most people stifle this away their entire lives and get to their
deathbed and are like, Oh, I wish I would've had the courage to be me.
It's actually the number one.
Um, people's regret on their deathbed is they didn't have
the courage to be themselves.
Um, and right now there's a lot of people being like, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm,
I'm myself, but they don't realize that they're running the egoic algorithm.
You know, the one that's been programmed into them since childhood and then
programmed into them through school and then programmed into them through,
uh, the work atmosphere we have.
And so they think, cause the ego is a trickster, right?
It doesn't do this on purpose.
It's a survival mechanism.
So it wants to run patterns over and over.
Uh, and that was the thing until my pattern, which I thought was serving
me, you know, I was serving, I was a tier one operator, you know, like for
me, when I set out on that journey, there was nowhere I could have went.
I didn't want to be president.
I didn't want to be a doctor.
I wanted that.
That was my pinnacle.
And then I got there and you know, so on and so forth, but eventually that gear
ran out and um, once that started to happen, I had to go back in time and like,
where did these cycles begin to develop?
Because that's, that's, that can happen.
We go through life and every now and then there's these moments of like the, the
system starts to get tested big time.
And then, um, somewhere, you know, around middle ages or so, if these things
aren't tuned up sooner, they all come together and all these patterns that
aren't really serving us come to a head.
Um, some people call it like the dark night of their soul,
because what happens is if they're trying to express themselves.
But they get caught in this darkness and so one of them was looking back and
being like Man, you know, when I was a teenager, exploring drugs and alcohol
and abusive ways, I didn't even realize that one of the first things that
started me down that road is my, when I was about 13, 14, my mom got very sick.
She was hospitalized for about six months and I couldn't, I couldn't handle that.
You know, my mom was like very near and dear to me.
Um, I wasn't a mama's boy, but for some reason I was like super attached to her
mortality, couldn't care less about mine.
But super attached to hers, but then it started this pattern of running from
my feelings, running from my emotions.
And then over the years of running, they got collapsed down into this
very limited set, you know, basically anger, um, was like anger and
pride, you know, in the military pride comes up a lot, which means.
Acting within the box you're given and being proud of it, you know,
thinking that it is a good modality, but really what it is, is it's a system
tricking your ego into feeling safe.
Um, so yeah, I would say it wasn't until a couple of years ago that I really realized
like sometimes we informationally know.
And then sometimes we know, you know, it starts to set in and then other
times we do what they call embodiment.
The truth is embodied.
Now that could be a skill, you know, like, uh, like Tom Brady, he embodied football.
You know what I mean?
And then there's some people that are, they're really, really great
athletes or great shooters or great.
Great at hunting, you know, like they're really great at it.
And then there's other people kind of informationally known.
Then there's people who aren't maybe interested in any of that.
Um, but those who embody start to show, um, levels of genius, you know, within
their collector or their, their own realm.
Anyhow, I'm kind of like jumping back and forth there, but yeah,
I would say it wasn't until I.
The, the system started to collapse that I realized it.
Travis Bader: Well, just so you know, I kind of like it when it
jumps around back and forth, cause that's how my thought process works.
And I struggle to keep a linear thought process to work through
here just for the audience.
At a very young age is diagnosed with a severe ADHD and was put on a,
a high, high dosage of, uh, Ritalin was told at the time, highest in the
province, uh, experimental run, just to see how it, how it would work.
And, uh, I took myself off that cold turkey by the time
I was going into high school.
Cause I, I didn't like what the meds were doing and, uh, didn't like all
the kids calling them smart pills.
And, uh, so I'm like, that's it off.
But,
Jeff Depatie: um, yeah.
They numb a little bit of who we are.
Right.
And I think, you know, there's right and left brain thinking,
like kind of the antiquated.
Thoughts on it, I've started to diminish, but there is truth to it.
You know, one side is very logical and linear and one side
is very abstract and non linear.
And what we're doing is we're using language, which is a very linear
construct of trying to represent reality.
So we're mostly doing it from one side of our brain.
Now.
People who tend to work out of their right a little bit more, we'll do that.
And I saw you taking notes, you know, that's something we do as well, where
it's like, okay, let's try to build some conciliants to this pattern because the
overall of what's happening right now.
Yeah.
Maybe we could be really tidy and really linear and try
to like button it up a to B.
Uh, but that's not the nature of what's actually happening.
It's just the representation of it.
So I think people go, yeah, of course there's, there's, there's spectrums
and whatnot, but I think people.
Get put on these things and it's because you weren't fitting into a box.
Totally wasn't.
Psycho, you know, yeah.
Like a psychometric, that's what it is.
It's like this calculated box.
And if you follow either side, you're non normative.
And it's like, well, most of these are funded by school systems
or more so by big business.
So if you don't fall into those boxes.
You're, you're, we, we, we need to medicate it.
You know, it's a weird thing.
So anyways,
Travis Bader: I digress.
I have some, yeah, I got thoughts on the school system and the antiquated
approach of lumping children together, just based on age alone,
as opposed to aptitude or ability.
But, uh, maybe that's a completely different conversation, but you
mentioned, uh, dark night of our soul, I think it was Eckhart Tolle, didn't
he have something on that, that he, uh, talks about the dark night of our soul.
Jeff Depatie: Yeah.
So really where it starts is it's a, it's a, uh, a Catholic
priest, not priest, Saint.
I can't remember who it is off the top of my head.
You think I would know I have a documentary called
the dark night of our soul.
You do.
Um, so you'd think I would know by now.
Uh, but yeah, the truth is, is anywhere we look, that's the Herculean
labor going into the underworld.
So we inherit before we're even born.
Um, within our DNA, our wounds, their collective wounds, um, meaning they
will keep us from our full expression.
And like I said already, I've alluded, their tendrils have
made it into our systems.
And that's one of the things we're running into right now is a lot of
people feel kind of insane in this world because they're like, oh, there's,
there's something not right here.
We all kind of, we're all talking about it, but we're trying to continually
jam the square in the circle.
Um, then there's other ones that were given.
That we inherit along the road.
Um, and this is one of the great illusions of the ego is that people
believe they don't have them.
Everybody that's, that's part of the gift of the human experience.
And I believe it's actually part of our evolution is in order for
the universe to complexify, we have to tend to these things.
And when we tend to them, when we go into the dark night, cause it's
relative, you know, what wounded you or could be a wound is different than me.
Our thresholds are different, but it's not like a competition.
It's not like, Oh, I felt more, you felt more.
It could be, it's just energy you couldn't sit with.
So it's literally the, like the demons, the boogeyman's, the
dark that you couldn't be with.
And so the body stores it because it's like, I don't know how to displace this
energy throughout my nervous system.
So it'll store it there.
Um, but eventually, you know, the Piper comes and if we look at.
Anyone, you know, you mentioned Eckhart Tolle, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare.
It doesn't matter anyone who's been classified as wise or intelligent.
I don't mean intellectual intellectuals, more like left brain soul thinking.
I mean like solely thinking, but fully intelligent people who understand
the world differently, you know, philosophers and things like that.
They all talk about it.
We go through it many times.
Our, our.
our system will dip into stress multiple times during the day, multiple times.
Those are little mini acute moments, right?
But then, um, we're, we're not just playing out one pattern in life.
We're playing on many patterns and every now and then someone will go
courageously, plunge your hands into that muck and face something that has.
skewed them.
And when I say skew, I kind of like to think of us as tuning
forks to our environment.
Um, if you take a tuning fork and put it next to another tuning fork, it'll
resonate at that same vibration, right?
Um, that that's almost all things from a fundamental physical.
You know, it was super string theory up kind of idea of the universe.
Right.
And it's important.
A lot of people might, I don't know like what they're thinking here, but
this all comes into everything we do.
The more in tune we want to be, the more in tune we have to be.
And if my tuning fork is bent.
Which I would argue that everybody's is a little bent,
um, because we're not perfect.
If we were perfect, we wouldn't be destroying the earth.
If we were perfect, we'd be much more fulfilled.
And I'm using like a very general term, but suicide rates are on the rise.
You know, people live in apartment buildings and don't know their neighbor.
We're very disconnected.
So there is an issue, you know, we're, we're destroying the very
things that produce our food.
That's because we're in this survival mode.
So we're tuning forks are bent.
And that's the thing we have to go back and we have to repair them.
Um, and that's the dark night, the dark night, um, I think is best represented by
Joseph Campbell with the hero's journey.
Right.
He calls it the underworld, the underworld.
Um, but yeah, even like Carl Young, everybody, we talk about what's good about
that though, is when we do face that, that's where we gather actual wisdom.
Um, right now we're in the generation of Instagram and such.
So we have.
Unearned wisdom being talked about.
So we have these people who are taking things that they know are wise or
intelligent, and then they're parroting them for their own means and gain.
And it's creating a really, it's a house of cards is what it is.
Um, people like capitalizing on other people's emotional insecurity, um, which
could be brought on from like lack of money, lack of looks, lack of whatever,
whatever they perceive as an insecurity or an inadequacy, it's an inadequacy factory.
So anyhow, it's also.
Something that I believe we need to start approaching differently.
I think it's one of the reasons actually, like if I was to bring it back to
this is why men like hunting, they go, they know it's going to be difficult.
Um, you know, any real hunter knows they're going to put on
their backpack or they're going to go, they're going to be cold.
They're going to be wet.
They're going to be tired.
The animal's going to challenge them, whatever they're looking
for, the weather, the elements, everything's up against them.
Right.
And they go and they step into this hardship.
I believe in doing that.
I call it the art of adversity, um, in many different ways.
Um, but what we're kind of talking about with the dark night of the soul.
Or your soul, um, is doing it with your wounds, and that is the final front.
That's where the greatest Warriors go.
Um, it may not seem like it, but you know, if I, if I kind of like step on a bit
of a soapbox, I was a tier one sniper.
Um, I'm part of the group that gets to say they were the greatest warriors in all.
And I mean that we manage, make, manipulate, and condition people
to be the greatest detuned warriors on earth using the most amount
of equipment and technology.
But I can tell you, it wasn't until I started facing my own shadows that I
really realized what I was preparing for.
Um, and that's the realm that most people won't go.
So there's like smaller little micro shadows and wounds.
Then there's what I call like grand shadows.
Now, these are just like kind of fun semantic terms.
They don't really, they're deep, they're deep in our hippocampus and
then every now and then there's people who do collective or quantum level, um,
archetypal field shadows, and those are the, the, the great mystics, the great,
Travis Bader: the greatest warriors
Jeff Depatie: of our time and warriors is.
Travis Bader: Interesting that you use, uh, shadows, um, Who was it?
Not Socrates, the cave, the cave of shadows.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Jeff Depatie: And Socrates, or was it Plato?
Travis Bader: Plato's, Plato's cave.
That's right.
Plato's cave.
Yeah.
So for the people who haven't heard of Plato's cave, it's a thought
experiment of individuals who are chained to, they're chained up.
They can only face in one direction.
They have a wall, they're in a cave and they're looking at the end of
the cave and there's a fire on.
One side, which is casting a light and there's a bridge, which people
will traverse over with their animals and carts and carrying
packs and whatever else it is.
And the fire would cast shadows of these people.
And then these, uh, poor chained up individuals would be staring at the
wall and only see the shadows and their entire life of what they know
is a representation of these shadows.
And he talks about what if one of these guys got away and he took a look and says.
Hold on a second.
Everything that I've been looking at in life isn't
exactly what I thought it to be.
It's just, it's just a shadow of what I thought it was.
And he comes back and tries to tell the others what we're looking at here, guys.
This isn't, this isn't real life.
They'd be angry.
They'd cast them out.
And it was a allegory of.
Essentially in one way to look at it of education, of learning new
things and how that can separate an individual from others and be looked
upon perhaps with disdain by those who are ignorant to those facts.
That's one way of, of looking at that, but.
When these people, you talk about shadows, they're looking
at these shadows, they might not even realize how big a shadow is.
If it encompasses the entire wall, they don't even know
they're looking at a shadow.
So if you're talking about these massive shadows, there's going to be things out
there that people might not even be aware are affecting them that are essentially
taking up that whole wall on them.
Is that something that you've found?
Yeah.
Jeff Depatie: Um.
This is actually like my favorite topics in the world, like, because
one, it's really, it's not easy.
And like I alluded to, we do these things that we subconsciously, some people
think that we're actually, it's like preparing for the ultimate dark night,
which is your death, like physical death.
But I don't believe that.
I've easily, and many times in my life, accepted my physical death, and it was
much easier than accepting my egoic death.
The construct of what I am, the part that makes me, me, so called,
um, and props up my reality.
And it, it involves looking at those shadows.
Um, and it's, it's, it's an amazing thing because what it actually does is it.
You never get rid of fear, but you learn to like dance with it better.
You learn to remain calm in his presence.
So that's part of what resilience is, is remaining conscious in adversity.
So most people, like I could use an example of a buck fever, you know,
boom, their focus narrows and it's like, literally they're usually looking
through a tube and it's right there and that's their entire reality.
The thing is though, is if you can, one of the things I do on my
shooting course is if you open it up.
You know, so like on a, like a hundred meter shot, it's not such a big deal.
If you've got a scoped 308 or bigger, it's, you're probably not going
to miss if it's accurately put in there, but you need all the details.
If you're going to start making a thousand meter, 2000 meter shot.
Um, and that's, that's just like in a metaphor for life.
You know what I mean?
Most people don't really know they're looking through the tube.
So most people, like you said, have been looking at the shadow and that's
part of the process of waking up, um, said in a more modern way, but
not like fully modern, uh, Einstein called it the optical delusion.
Um, where we're brought in, we already have this thing called epigenetic
programming happening on our DNA that starts to shape us, but it starts to
shape up our constructs of reality and how we experience reality.
And it takes a lot of courage.
I don't use the word bravery.
I use the word courage to step into looking at these things because
usually we're boxed up and we're all looking at the shadows because
that's what everybody's doing.
He's doing it, she's doing it.
Okay, we're all going to do this.
Okay, let's keep doing this.
Right.
And then we get called insane or weird.
If we turn and we look the other way and see that it's just people
on a bridge and we've expanded.
Right.
So, um, like I said, that's kind of part of the, I use the term waking up,
but what it is, is really beginning to realize you're living a half life that's
gripped by fear and you start to shake that off your literal nervous system.
Um, and it's stored in our bodies.
Not everybody.
Again, I use like the terms generally are, you know,
everybody, all that kind of stuff.
Um, but really that my entire work.
That I've been doing is because it's time people, you know, nobody
else is coming to do this for us.
There is, there's nobody coming over the hill.
It's us.
And until we individually begin to hoist aboard this
responsibility, um, yeah, I get it.
It can be, it's a little frightening, right?
Um, what do I do?
Where do I go?
As we're like struggling just to figure out purpose or how do I make money or
what do I do, or how do I build skills?
Um, but that's the thing that's, that's, that's.
We've been proving one, that you can expand this consciousness on purpose.
Two, Um, we actually counterintuitively, we use fear to help people induce
higher states of consciousness because kind of counterintuitively,
a lot of people live in what's called apathy, you know, they, they probably
drink a few drinks every day, they go through life exactly the same.
They usually have that stirring in them and they're like, I want to break
free from it, but I have no clue how.
Um, but surprisingly, when you put them into a survival situation, it like.
Re orient their attention, right?
Cause that, that's what happens here.
So we talked about the constructs of reality, but if we look at our
nervous system, you know, they go by a lot of names, default mode network.
Um, I just was kind of using ego, the algorithm of ego earlier, but it just,
they want to play out the same and they want to crystallize and they want to
read, they want to stay structured.
That's that kind of the tendency.
Openness, open node thinking.
Um, Takes that courage because you have to say, okay, something
I'm doing is not right.
Something I'm doing is not aligned.
Something is not serving me.
And we have to be a little bit selfish here because if you don't take the time
to look at yourself, you're actually not going to show up really great for
the rest of the society, but you know, it behooves me for you to be your full
authentic self, whatever that is, you know, um, nobody can dictate that because.
You are unique.
I am unique.
I'm not the same as everyone else.
Cellularly on a quantum level on a fundamental level on what
I've experienced in my life.
Um, so that's, that's why I like, I kind of like bring it back to when you do turn
away from that wall, that cave, and you look at the other side of the shadows.
Um, Yeah, you might realize that it's actually a lot bigger because, um,
both Plato and Socrates realized that that's why they, they chose to live
life like they were, because it's, it's this giant moving machine called life.
Right.
Um, but anyhow, um,
Travis Bader: yeah, that's, that's funny that you talk about fear being
a destabilizer and, um, being used in a useful way when I was younger.
And even now, to some extent, I guess I, I still do because I want to make
sure my children know adversity and they know, um, not to shy away from
challenges or scary situations, but I would actively seek out situations, which
probably weren't the wisest to somebody else on the outside, looking at it out.
Um, a family friend was a head of the police academy here and justice Institute,
police academy here in British Columbia.
And, um, Ended up giving me a rope, which was decommissioned for that they used to
use for abseiling, but I guess it was end of life for them, but it was still better
than the rope that I was using when I was jumping off of bridges, uh, around here
and doing bridge swings or practicing abseiling or rafting down, almost died a
couple of times, actually, uh, with goofy little, uh, inflatable rafts of trying to
follow the commercial guys down the, um.
Uh, down the rivers there, but I found that I would seek those out because
nothing made you feel quite as alive as when you were in that situation and you
make it through number one and number two.
Um, maybe this is a case other people have pointed out.
They said, well, perhaps your outside environment was matching kind of
where your head was at, right?
What was going on in your head?
And.
I would feel an immense calm when I was in situations like that, as
opposed to the adverse, the inverse, which would be panicked or, uh,
or, or fearful, fearful, perhaps prior to going into that situation.
But once in the situation, everything was normal, everything was great.
Everything was calm.
So it's interesting.
You talk about seeking out fear as a tool to be able to, uh, to educate.
Jeff Depatie: Yeah.
Um, It's counterintuitive.
It brings us into the present moment is what it does.
So one of the things, when we developed our neocortex, we
started thinking into the future.
You know, we, we extrapolate, um, well, one of the things that happened is we,
we started to let this run away, right?
We add in coordinates, like on everything, everything has time and space and
it's geometry, you know, everything.
Everything in your room right now, you know the name of, and it's like, it's
up here and you know, potential futures.
And, and so it can be a lot, right?
Like we talked about the consciousness feedback loops.
That's an important part of it is being able to extrapolate into the future.
That's what we do.
We take the past and the present and we extrapolate into the future.
What we forget to do often though, is live in the present now.
You know, you use the word feel alive in that moment, you know, when you're
doing that one, I got to point out, like, what is it with guys and rope?
Um, I remember being a kid, like I used to wear rope around.
I was like, well, you know, I'm hanging off things that it's just like,
why, why is this so important to us?
But anyways, um, but to feel alive is, is one of the illusions, right?
So again, when I was talking about a few years ago, when my, uh, when I had to
re begin really rewriting my reality, really actually for the first time in
my life, talking to Like writing my story with like my own torch and my
own pen, you know, because I was, I was free from other people's fear patterns.
I was free from those things.
And I was finally courageous enough to be like, Hey, I can
do this and I can do this.
I'll be like this.
Um, we have to learn to feel more alive in all moments, you know,
like we, we, we, we do this.
And cause if we continue to just seek Novelty and stimulation for the future.
Um, we're kind of like writing checks.
Our bodies can't cash, you know?
Um, but yes, it can destabilize.
So what I say is it alters your state of consciousness, you know, it shakes you up.
It, uh, sends your nervous system.
What it does is it attempts to fire a new patterns.
Now this can be very short term.
Um, or it can be very long term.
Um, if you start doing it over a longer period of time, you'll actually start to
dream differently because what will happen is like, you're a finely in tune antenna
trying to make its way through this world.
And, um, when you start being gripped by certain conditioning, it's going
to start looking at different things.
So that's where like the responsibility of this comes in.
Right.
Um, think like a rite of passage or something, or whether your kids,
you know, you wouldn't want to.
Ever have it go too far where they're, you know, permanently
maimed in a negative way.
Right.
You know, so there's always like a governor on it, especially
once you start looking at the long term conditioning of it.
Now we do this all the time.
Anyways, you mentioned it, we do it as parents.
We're, we're.
We're, we're, we bring these lives into the world and we're conditioning
them from day one and we can, we're, we're constantly conditioning.
Right.
I think what we need to do a little bit better is be, and I'm using we,
again, I'm not seeing you necessarily or me necessarily or anyone, but
we have to be much more intentional because we have this really cool
effect of impacting our environment and our environment impacting us.
And I mean, environment, everything, our cityscapes or our nature.
Um, and we.
That's what, you know, harmony is.
That's what really being in tune with that is like the road to enlightenment,
understanding all those impacts, but we have to start being intentional with it.
Otherwise we're just going to outrun our headlights soon.
And, um, the last thing I wanted to touch on, you mentioned kind of like the chaotic
world and potentially being a projection of what's inside of you, you know,
like that's how you're expressing it.
Um, we just never really learn how to tune that in because
that's exactly what's happening.
If our internal world's chaotic, we're usually going to
project chaotically outwards.
Now that's, this is no bad or good, you know, that's a totally moral statement.
It's just, we need to look at that.
Because it probably was once you started really looking at that, you were like,
okay, I don't need to do it all the time.
You know, why am I chasing this?
Why am I climbing this mountain?
Why am I doing this?
Um, sometimes it's good, right?
You, you mentioned, um, it's good to step into a stressful situation.
Um, We just have to manage it well, you know, um, because there's
enough stress going on in life.
Travis Bader: Yeah.
I found that to be one of the difficult ones because I was always
sort of an all or nothing attitude.
If I'm into something, I'll go 110 percent into it.
And if I'm deciding not to do it, well, where's that threshold where
at, at what level do you not do that?
So that was always a difficult thing for me to kind of manage.
And it's probably something I'm still working on.
What level of, uh, risk reward should I be striving.
For a more harmonious lifestyle over the macro.
Cause in the micro, you can be sitting on the couch or you could be right
out there in a very risky situation.
But I try and look at it over a larger scale of how each one of those things
will, will, um, manage themselves and hopefully in a way that doesn't, uh,
uh, self put myself in a premature, dark, permanent, permanent dark night.
Yeah,
Jeff Depatie: well, that's, you know, um, that's the scales, right?
That we're constantly weighing.
That's, that's that consciousness, um, where.
Um, we tend to dualistically put the weight on one side or the other.
Right.
And really it's, it's more of a four or five potentially more, it's much
more dimensionally faceted than that.
Um, and, and it's funny you say like this, because right now a lot of our
youth is being pressured with the a hundred percent, go get it attitude.
Especially in the male realm.
And it's like, go get it.
And then they turn and they're like, okay, I'm going to go get this.
And it's like, they don't even know where they're projecting that.
No matter how old they are, they've already been shaped.
And you might be like, that might be your mom's inadequacy, you know,
your mom's, uh, fear of rejection.
It could be your dad's, whatever, fill it in with one of their shadows.
And you're actually just turning it now you're projecting it.
And it's like, you get there, oh, should I just spend five years doing this thing?
I don't even want, but that's, that's like the tune up we need, um, right now.
Yeah.
Most, like we talked about, our constructs are fear based.
They're, they're from a survival mindset.
That's, that's what they're created from.
Uh, we really need to learn to step into the next stage, which is love.
Um, that gives us a whole new set of tools.
It's not squishy.
That's for sure.
Love is a very painful teacher.
Um, probably worse than fear.
Fear is like quick.
Usually it's, it's, it's a lot more precise and where love is.
It can, it can cripple in a different way, so it's not,
it's not for the faint of heart.
Um, because what will happen is the more we step into that, the more we're actually
able to feel the other side as well.
Um, and tune into that risk reward, you know, cause those, those kind
of sit at opposite sides, right?
We risk for the reward or we reward for risk.
It depends on how you look at it.
Um, but instead of why is it, why is it that you and I?
Are still talking about things that Socrates or Plato said, we can go
even older into like the Upanishads or something from like the Vedics and
India, it's like very similar wisdom.
And it's like, why aren't we learning this?
And it's because we've kind of shackled ourselves to this modern world.
Um, and most people just don't even really see that it can be a very
different, you know, one, it doesn't have to be fucking zero sum game anymore.
Like that.
It competition's fine and it can be very healthy and it, and it's part of it.
Right.
But, uh, we need to like slow these things down or, and the reason
I'm saying this is just so like full disclosure to the audience.
I was on once upon a time, a very pointy end of a spear that did things that I
thought were a full service and it wasn't until later I was like, Oh my God, I'm
just manifesting fear in this universe.
I'm.
Doing something that doesn't actually serve Canadians as a whole.
It doesn't serve the planet as a whole.
There's little moments within it that, yeah, this is good.
That, you know, when we say things like, oh, well, school kids going or
kids going to school in these poor countries, that's not a good thing.
Of course, you know, the passing of knowledge is a good thing.
It's just.
What's the end game here?
What are we doing it for?
What's really the underlying chess pieces that we're moving?
Um, so I do have a little bit of like grudge in me, um, especially as I
still watch, um, people kind of fall victim to those services and that's,
that's what happens once we like.
Really tear apart why, you know, cops, for example, are having such a hard go at it.
It's because at a certain point, it's not just PTSD.
It's not just the traumas they saw.
It's like, Oh my God, I was upholding this system.
That's kind of been corrupted.
If you will, or it was always kind of corrupted.
We're, we're making it a little better.
It's just, um, that gets very hard.
That reality is very difficult to hoist a board comparatively.
Travis Bader: Yeah, I, I, you know, never underestimate the human frailty
in all of these large organizations.
I mean, they're all humans, institutions to begin with, and they're
corruptible by, by greed and power and ignorance or whatever it might be.
I think a lot of times see, and you bring up, man, there's so many different
things that I want to talk about, but you bring up, uh, the PTSD, like in policing.
And I think it's, um, it's Or even in the military, it's just, uh, the
individual's interpretation of the events that happened, sort of like that
old Victor Frankl one, you can, one thing you can't take away from me is
the way I choose to respond to what you do to me, last of life's great freedoms
is one's ability to choose their own attitude in any given circumstance.
So being able to choose an attitude, whether they realize they can
choose that or not, that they have that level of personal agency.
Um, but then the societal, um, sort of Expectations that the
individual thinks that are on them.
Um, if you go off to war and you come back as society hails you as a war hero,
uh, will you have less of a, uh, chance of getting PTSD than if you came back
from war and everyone looks at you like you're a war criminal, because maybe the,
uh, the war didn't go the way that, um.
Everybody wanted it to, I had one guest on here in the past and I said, well, did
you want to talk about your military time?
He's like, yeah, no, I wasn't really on the right side of history on this one.
I thought I was doing the right thing.
Um, but he was from a different country.
Um, but history unfolded in a different way.
Maybe we just leave that one on, on the back burner.
So I wonder if that, um, I guess to tie back to when you're talking about
love, how a person can actually, uh, get into that realm and self love or
at least understand where they're at and, um, whether that's got to come
all internal or if there's external factors that can, that can lead to that.
Yeah.
Um,
Jeff Depatie: well, one, him saying he's on the wrong side of history, uh,
I don't know anything about the story, but I'm going to venture this guess.
I like to think that he has an opportunity, you know, we all
have a choice on in the moment.
Yeah.
I think it's one of our, you use the word agency.
I don't think I don't even, I don't know anybody who has 100 percent agency,
you know, cause we're a collective and some of that is really good.
You know, we were really strong in some ways because we're a collective.
Like I said, I think we're a disconnected collective, but nonetheless, I mean,
we're populating the earth like crazy and, you know, we do kind of fascinating
things, you know, rockets and we put mines miles into the ground and we have
neutrino labs so we, we can do some pretty amazing things collectively.
Um, Transcribed But do we really have agency like fully, you know, cause from
day one, your patterns are being shaped.
And that's why, you know, the, you asked the question about childhood and whatnot.
It is so important for people to understand that, you know, that they're
going to probably project patterns onto their kids right from the get go.
And then eventually like.
We, we get to this point where you're this fella or myself, and you ask yourself, I'm
on the wrong side of history, or am I on the right side of history, or, but anyhow,
I'm over here on this side of something that I didn't really actually sign up
for, but I didn't know I didn't sign up for it because I didn't have that agency.
And that's, that's to go back to PTSD complex beast.
It's a complex beast that started millions of years ago in every one of us.
And most people have some level of PTSD sitting in them.
Now, technically PTSD sets in after a month and your symptoms become an issue.
That's like the kind of the DSM model of it.
But most people, hint, everybody is sitting on an
opportunity to resolve something.
Probably many things in their lives.
We call it karma potentially, you know, small karmic patterns.
Um, but it's, it's the big ones that sit there and PTSD is
the complete absence of love.
Now, fear and love are not just words that I juxtapose.
They're, they're innate, they're, they're on Maslow's hierarchy,
love and belonging is on the, the hierarchy, you know what I mean?
So wherever it's mostly fear, we find the absence of love and that's what happens.
PTSD is this deep need for love.
It's a deep need to connect because usually those people have pushed
everyone away and they're disconnected from themselves and they don't even
know how to move through life anymore.
Um, so you, you kind of like, you Touched on, you know, like, how
does one move into that realm?
It would be so nice if you just wake up and it was like, okay,
I'm just going to love today.
That'd be great.
Right.
Uh, Oh, good.
I'm going to feel joy today.
No problem.
Um, the, the thing is, is we, we can move more and more towards
that state as our default state.
Most kids, if they're kind of left to be their own devices and they have
like their survival needs met, like at a very young age, they'll usually
default to that stage, you know, they'll play a lot more and whatnot.
Um, But, but some of the signs, this is for anybody, this is this,
you know, we usually PTSD gets attached to like service men and
women, uh, much more than everybody.
Uh, but the corporate world is seeing a massive rise in its issues through
corporate burnout and disconnection, interpersonal dynamic issues.
And that, that's the, that's the first sign.
How connected are you?
How like really connected are you with yourself?
Like really?
Begin to ask yourself, do I feel my emotional toolbox that
includes things like joy and peace, like really being peaceful.
Most people haven't decompressed their nervous system if ever in
their life, like fully, I don't mean seven day all inclusive.
I mean really decompress their nervous system.
It takes a long time, um, to slow down your body and open up your arcs.
It really does.
Um, talking, talking is a very simple one, you know, but really talking.
So most people talk to.
Defend their opinion.
That's what they do.
If you really start listening, they're not genuinely trying to get
to the same place as you, they're trying to defend their opinion.
The reason they want to defend their opinion is because that's the ego being
like, okay, this is my reality, right?
This is my reality, right?
Okay, I'm good.
Um, and you know, so you kind of get into sickle, so you have to really
be open to hearing, to really hearing a new message, um, because I think.
To make sense of reality, it takes all of us.
You know, like nobody, there might be more intelligent people out there, but like, we
don't really fucking know what reality is.
You know, you talk to a physicist at some point, reality runs out.
You talk to any kind of mystic or religious person or people like
this, isn't me slandering any, and I think it's all a beautiful pursuit.
It's just like, we don't really know, you know, we don't, we're.
And we don't really know, so let's start with that.
And, but together we can, we understand that we can build these constructs.
So, you know, we really start to feel that on.
If I understand you more and you understand me more, well, we can start
to pull that taffy and we can start to move into that state a little bit more.
Um, look for rigidity in your life.
So, you know, we, we talked about, we'll use, we'll use the police force.
It's a very rigid world.
It's very rigid, you know, it's got, it's like code of ethics and it's got the book
that's been written for a thousand years.
And it's like, and then it follows this thing that we call the law.
And unfortunately, human beings are not actually like, we don't exist in
black and white and that's what law is.
It's black and white.
So I get it.
People are like, well, but how, how, how?
And it's like, well, we slowly move into these states of feeling more connected.
Lots of crimes will automatically go away.
When you are connected to someone, you are way less likely to hurt them
when you're connected to yourself.
You're way less likely to hurt other people.
It just, what happens is you expand your consciousness.
You understand the repercussions of your emotions and your projections
and you start working with them.
Um, big word, use it a few times because I really like it, but it's courage.
It's courage to be open.
It's courage to be vulnerable.
You know, that's, that's when we go into the underworld, whether it's like
a heroic undertaking, like a deployment or, um, kicking down a door or going
on an eight day in the mountains, sheep hunting, um, we're doing that
conversion, but we understand that we're becoming vulnerable to that environment.
We train and we practice and we build skills and tools, but we understand that.
That's why we like doing it.
Um, we have to get a little better.
We are getting good at it, but better at.
That vulnerability, um, I didn't realize that I wasn't what I
would call a man until I really learned how to be vulnerable.
And that gave me tools to be a psychological safe space for those
around me when they need that.
Um, and unfortunately for me, it took losing everything.
I mean, everything that was important to me, uh, losing my wife, losing
myself, pushing everything away.
It took all that loss, which.
Now, I, I believe we, there's parts of this journey we call life that we
have to walk alone, but I definitely don't think we have to keep learning
certain lessons over and over.
Um, but I think we have to be open.
Um, and the other thing is, is, is it's natural.
We're given this beautiful toolbox, um, the spectrum of
emotions, spectrums of feelings.
Um.
We just, we, we forget a little bit about it.
You know, we forget how to do it.
And we're starting to see it pop up more and more across the globe, in fact.
Um, but it's going to be stifled.
Like what the hell, man?
Why are we in more at war again?
Like what's going on?
Like we can't have a discussion, you know, like we, but we have
a society that doesn't want to let go of their old paradigms.
Um, and it comes up against another society that doesn't want
to let go of their paradigms.
And I can say this, if you're at war, you are not open and you are not, you're
not going to like accidentally we evolve because of war, but we can intentionally
evolve before we get to that point.
Like it's so antiquated and disgusting.
This, this.
It just blows my mind.
Like, I don't get me wrong.
Like for those who are putting themselves into that position of service, I get it.
I was there once upon a time and I know the call, you know, that's,
that's, I didn't know how to be of service of any other way.
It was actually called being of service, a serviceman, you know what I mean?
So I was like, oh, that's where I go be of service.
I feel like that's what I want to do.
And it's like, if that layer of people that kind of like
metaphorically puts down their guns.
Those ones that make most of the strategic level decisions, very
few people control a lot of things.
And again, it's not like a demonized thing.
It's like just, that's where most of the wounded people sit.
Like how much do you need?
You know?
Um, You'll see, it'll start to, to, to level these things out, but
that goes back to understanding that we all play our part.
Um, and the first place we should venture is inwards.
And although it's, it's pretty scary, but anyways, it's in our nature to want to
love it and it makes us more powerful.
That's the thing.
Um, it literally can stand down militaries.
You know what I mean?
It changes society for a positive all the time, whenever it pops up through
the kind of the annals of history.
Um, anyway, so, uh, you know, we're, we're, we're, that's why
I thanked you at the beginning, cause I know that indirectly
and directly, like we can go on.
Uh, hunting fishing show and people are doing it because
that's what we're looking for.
And it's guys like you tugging on the threads, you know?
Travis Bader: I appreciate that.
Um, you know, and I've, I have some questions here as well from, uh,
Silvercore club members in the, uh, maybe I'll get into those in a little bit,
but the, um, yeah, no, you, you raise a whole bunch of very interesting points.
I'm just trying to formulate my thoughts on them.
Maybe, maybe I'll just ask this one.
Um, Talking about the number one fear that individuals have on their death bed.
And I've read this as well.
They've got a, uh, palliative care nurses will make a list
of what people have to say.
And the number one regret was I just didn't have the courage to
live the life I wanted to live.
Um, you're saying really about two years ago, you just started to
come into a better realization as to the life that you want to live.
Is that a fair assessment?
Jeff Depatie: Okay.
What I would say is about seven years ago when I met, um, when I met Jess, Jessica
Webster, um, and fell deeply in love.
Uh, I had started having the stirrings before that.
But yeah, I would say that's when it really started, but it wasn't until, um,
I swallowed rock bottom smashing into it that I really fully realized, Oh man,
even though I'd already been doing work, I'd been like developing performance.
I'd been thinking that I was living myself out and I was honing myself.
Parts of it.
Yes.
True.
Right.
We, we, we, we have to do.
Experience is a great teacher, um, but it's also going to like
show us a lot of our, our follies.
Right.
But it takes both.
It takes messing up through experience.
Um, yeah.
And then it was, it was a couple of years ago that it was like, bam, I'm
like, I have, I actually can have agency.
I just have to really discover what what's pulling the strings.
You know, what
Travis Bader: did swallowing rock bottom look like to you?
Jeff Depatie: Um, Well, I suppose like, if we were to try to like
move it to like a single moment, I almost jumped off a balcony in Vegas.
Um, I'd never felt anything like that in my life where it was like, it wasn't a, or
like a, I didn't stop and think about it.
It was just like, I'm doing this.
It was just like this weird part of my mind was like, Nope.
This is how we're going to like exercise our last bit of your own
ability was, it was, it was awful.
Um, I started to have like a breakdown that day.
Um, and, and this is kind of common for a lot of people, you know, like there's
a lot of these symbols that show up and I, and I won't throw too many of them out
there, but it, cause it doesn't really matter because people know, they know
when the system's shutting down and, uh, Um, that was the beginning of it.
That's why I said, if I was to pick a moment, it started there.
But like, really it was when I lost my wife, when she left, um, what
I loved the most in the world, you know, I only could blame myself.
I can't blame everyone else.
I can't be like, Oh, why didn't the caveman evolve quicker?
And why didn't my parents, you know, why did, why couldn't they sort this out?
You know, it wasn't, it was, I only had myself to blame.
Um, but that gave me this opportunity to, um, take it, not develop
more shame or guilt with it.
Cause those will just compound it, but really be like, okay, what do
I want to do moving forward here?
You know?
And that's the thing, you know, we can feel these lows, um, but it's
when you lose what is most important to you that that should kick in.
Now I don't believe we have to do that.
Um, but that led to like a lot of sleepless nights for me.
That led to a lot of soul searching.
That led me to a giant walk about that.
You know, I, I was like, everything's on the table now, you know, everybody
here can be, you know, that everyone's a teacher, you know, everyone's there
can be a mentor kind of mentality.
Um, there was nothing I wasn't willing to try from plant medicine
to like past life, regression, psychotherapy, analysis, somatic stuff.
Um, That there was nothing that was off the table because I, for me, I
think that is if you decide there's a reason most people wait till their
deathbed to be like, you know what?
I was a pussy.
Um, I'm just kidding.
I know it's not funny.
Um, because it's that scary to turn and be like, okay, I'm going to go this way.
When you decide to not be that version of you.
And it's scary because people think it's like you're lighting the temple on fire.
Right.
And it's not really like that.
It's like, I, I, I still know how to shoot guns really well.
You know what I mean?
I still have a lot of attributes from being a JTF assault, or I
still have attributes before that, you know, I can still fly planes.
There's like, there's a lot of the skill stuff.
And then there's a lot of your experience that is actually good.
It's like, um, it's not.
A full on got a, you know, but it feels like a full rebuild from the bottom
up, because that's where we got to find the, the, the chinks in the mortar.
Right.
That's from that bottom up.
And, uh, usually I'm, I was kind of lucky because, you know, um, I had
financial support and I didn't have kids and I can only imagine, cause I
know this happens to guys and gals.
They get into the same sticky situation, but then it's like, well,
I have to keep going to this job.
I hate, I have to keep doing these things because I got a little mouse to feed.
You know what I mean?
And it's such a sad thing because if we had better real support systems
for it, because I think people should be rewarded for this journey.
If the medic, like on the other side of this, I'm healthier, you
know, I've, I've tended to wounds.
I'm less of a burden on society.
Yeah.
Literally, you know, I'm less likely to need to go to the hospital.
I'm less likely to burn out.
I'm much better at interacting with people.
So people should be rewarded on the other side of this
journey, because it's perilous.
It's, it's perilous.
Um, that's why, again, people wait till their deathbed to be like, you know,
maybe I should have did it differently, but we can, we can do it differently.
Um, and we're so lucky now because we have podcasts, we have
the internet to start looking.
Now, like I said earlier, there's still a lot of people who like to,
you know, dress up the peg if you will, or whatever, you know, and make
it shiny and like reuse the, the, the quote from the Roman emperor.
And you know what I mean?
Like all that kind of stuff.
And it's like, that's good, which is really start to tune into it.
Because what happens is you be, it's like.
Like I said, most people can really talk about how they sense reality through their
senses, but we have other senses that we're able to start tapping into where our
body knows things like it literally knows, Oh, I should go that way or not that way.
Now I'm using kind of like a direction just as like an easy metaphor, but it's
like, it really knows like, don't do this.
Don't do this.
Like a lot of people, like, uh, an example.
Um, everybody's heard this a long time.
People were like, yeah, I should have quit drinking five years ago.
I wanted to quit drinking five years ago.
It's like, well, why are you still drinking?
You know, it's like your body knows, you know, even your mind
knows, but it's a wall, you know, pressures and this and patterns and
whatnot, that happens all the time.
And, um, a lot of people want to build, but most of what
we have to do is tear down.
Um, once you tear down, burn off the droves, um, then you're
actually really free because then you can look at your values.
You can say for the first time in your life, I have a better
idea of what my values are.
They're not perfect because we're humans.
We're not meant to be perfect.
That's our existence to help complexify the universe is through imperfection.
Um, but that value, yeah, that's not mine.
That was my mom's.
Oh, that value.
No, that was.
Uh, and You know, that was school's value.
Okay.
These aren't actually my values.
Now, generally when someone has well thought out values, they overlap
very well with the rest of the world.
They look different, but my value set is probably not going to detract
from your authentic value set.
They're usually nurturing like that.
They can be divergent, but they're nurturing.
Um, and once you have that, You can start to look at the input outputs
that you do to nurture those.
And when I say input outputs, I literally mean, okay, to live a healthy existence.
I have to put good food and water and air in my body, you know, input
outputs, the relationships that are around me, what you action.
And then, you know, because we are, um, cerebral, our inputs
can be from inside too, right?
A lot of people have negative self talk.
It's like, well, where the fuck did that come from?
You know, like, um, but.
I, I, why do I say that about myself?
You know, but okay, that's an input.
You're actually inputting into the feedback loops, right?
Okay.
I can say that better about myself.
We call it language tech where you readjust your language.
It's not just, you know, sports psychology or it's, it's access to your own joy
as well, um, through these means.
Eckhart
Travis Bader: Tolle talked about wanting to take his own life.
And instead of following through, he experienced essentially a, uh,
metaphysical death of his ego.
Um, And then he started his journey from there in a, in a similar way, it
sounds like where your journey started, was there a bit of a death, ego death?
Did you feel that happening there?
Um, and of all the modalities that you, uh, endeavored down
afterwards, which ones did you find the most beneficial to yourself?
Jeff Depatie: I think.
This is just totally anecdotal, but I think this is accurate in evolution.
If we look, if we accept that, whether, you know, God created the world and the
universe or evolution or the matrix, it looks like it likes to build on itself.
You know, it looks like it liked hydrogen.
So then it like formed helium and then it looked like those became long
peptides and you know what I mean?
And it looks like.
That's what I, when I say complexification, that's
what I'm talking about.
The universe liked creating like that again, doesn't matter where it comes from.
If we just accept that it adds to that complexity, it likes to build on itself.
And I think one of the things it did is it took the sensation of physical death being
scared of like Like not scared because the body's actually not scared of death.
Like the body itself is not scared of death, but it wants to avoid death.
You know, the emotion of scared that's a, that's, that's where we'll get to.
Um, but that emotion of avoiding death and then our psychology got built on top of
that, you know, our upper, probably higher limbic system and then past the basal.
Um, um, not the basal ganglia.
Um, uh, I can't remember.
Anyways, into our newer systems are like kind of neocortex.
So we get confused.
Um, the ego wants to die, but it feels like physical death.
And so we equate that to feeling like suicide.
Cause as I tore it apart more, I realized like, I didn't
really actually want to die.
I just wanted that version of me to die.
And that's like the, I had to go to battle with that.
And that showed up in many ways, you know, it showed up in my journal, it showed
up in my dreams and things like that.
Um, and you know, for those who are listening, they might not like feel this.
It actually led to me being much more stable in my life.
These destabilizations, a lot of people want to like remain rigid because they
don't want to be seen as unstable.
And it's like, well.
Sometimes we're stable.
Sometimes we're unstable, man.
That's, that's the idea of community, you know, that's how life is.
And yeah, okay.
You know, dad or mom can't do it as much, but you still got to dig into it.
So I think when the ego is like, Oh, it's time to die, or I'm not going
to live out my full expression.
Um, it can feel like physical death and it very much is like that.
And I would say that the strongest modality that led to that, um,
Um, was my experimentation.
I say experimentation, but I worked with professional shaman, um, medicine
people was with ayahuasca or what I call Dime, which is just a variant of it.
And Bufalovirus.
And it was not like just one time.
You have to learn how to like work with these.
Your body has to learn how to process.
Just like I said, we have to relearn how to have emotions.
We have to learn how to have visual experiences and we have to learn how
to, um, grab the marrow from that.
I.
You can't really explain it in a way, because it's one, it's very personal,
especially like a, an ayahuasca is very, it's you, you know, it's like
your, everything you couldn't face and everything you feel living out, like in a
dream state, you know, um, But then when it came, so like I'd sat with that and
then I used something called combo, which is like, it's an amazing, it's a miracle.
It's one of the last miracles on earth for sure.
But it's a, it's, it's not a hallucinogen, uh, hallucinogenic.
It's, uh, it's much more like a traditional medicine, but like
awful, awful, it's awful, but it purges your lymphatic system.
It purges your body.
Physiologically and psychologically, and using these things along with other
techniques, simple techniques of self expression and, uh, reading, you know,
the more traditional ways of finding yourself adversity, not putting myself
into adversity, learning how to do that, you know, being like, am I just
doing this to numb myself, these things.
Um, Bufo, that was like, The term ego death gets used a lot with plant
medicines, but for me, it was with Bufo that I had the truest ego death and it
just basically felt like all my system shut off, but I still had like a backseat
of consciousness, the last little bit.
Um, and that's where, when people try to describe it, they're really
trying to describe what's called, I call undifferentiated consciousness.
So right now there's an illusion that you and I are separate, you know, through
time and space, those are, those are left brain constructs, but we're not separate
literally energetically atomically.
Cause we're on earth and there's a bunch of atoms around us.
We're not separated.
We're we're it's all connected.
Quantum link tangled.
And so we're connected on like fundamental levels and then subfundamental on a
quantum level exactly, and potentially even smaller levels than that, but
also on bigger levels, you know, we like to use the reductionist
approach on a cosmological level.
We're all spinning around this thing together.
Um, Um, but it's like, it's like almost like your senses kind of shut down,
but you're still existent in a way.
And I think that's like where people have near death experiences because I've
had them and it's very similar, uh, the way it feels, the way it looks, it just
looks like pure energy, but it looks like you're kind of in that pure energy.
Um, and people have tried to describe that as, you know, kneeling before God.
That's how like.
It depends on who I'm having the conversation with.
You know, if I was having it with a Christian, I would
say kneeling before God.
Um, if I was talking to a physicist, I would say something like exactly, I was
perceiving the snapshot of like quantum energy without any differentiation,
without my senses put on it.
Um, and I would say that was by far, people have been using this stuff
to have ego deaths for a long time in, in certain tribal societies.
They'll use it through a child's life.
They'll start to, they'll start to like, Oh, you know,
whatever they call their kids.
A little is starting to show ego issues and they'll use that to
help break that cycle early on.
Interesting.
Cause what happens is no matter what, we're going to get in patterns where
we get locked up in fear a little bit.
It's called survival and we got to go into survival sometimes, but the
key is to move back out of that.
Take the lesson because that like we talked about risk and reward.
That's what it's about.
It's about how do we bring back the reward, right?
I mean, we're really good at the risk and keeping our nervous
system to the floor in the West.
Um, but they'll start using it very early on where us, uh, most people
don't have access to therapies and things like that throughout their life.
So we get to a point where it's like the system is jank and broken.
All the way over here, you know, 35, 40 years later.
So there's a lot more undoing, a lot more revisiting, you know, the onion is like
got a lot of layers, um, at this point.
So I would say that I would say, um,
for me, real wild nature, just getting to be in that presence.
Like.
It almost like it re shows me how to just be in that place, you know, um,
where you're kind of absorbing the small and also the macro and you know,
When we're in real, like it's, it's kind of hard to find totally untapped
nature now, because you got jets dropping, um, exhaust fumes everywhere.
We got a 5g and all kinds of radioactive or not radioactive
radio signals everywhere.
So it's very hard to be fully untouched, but the more you can.
Um, there's a theory called, you know, it's the Schumann resonance, which is
mathematically provable, but it's kind of like the pulse of the earth and the closer
you can move yourself to vibrating at that resonance, you'll feel more in peace.
Um, you'll make better decisions.
So what happens is like the, what I like to do is I like to try to
move to that state and then I'll.
Reassess things in my own life.
And then I also look at like, what do I want to do?
So like I call it life's work when I'm learning these lessons, how
I implement them into the world.
I call that life's work.
Um, not purpose.
I think everyone's purpose is the same.
They should interest.
Your purpose is to build yourself up authentically and vibrate at
your best possible potential.
Um, but how do I want to bring this back into the world because
got to be careful, right?
I'm a human being and I filter my reality through all my filtration systems.
Um, so that's where you consciously bring it back.
Um, yeah, so I would, I would say natural plant medicine is like probably the
single greatest, but the thing is, is these are, these are tools that are, um,
Best use in tandem with other things.
Um, like
Travis Bader: talk therapy or
Jeff Depatie: like, yeah.
And, and, you know, this is not to like put a slight against talk
therapy, but just talking is enough.
So when we did the documentary dark night of our soul, every single intervention
basically started with one of two things.
It started prefrontal cortex saying like, I'm going to do this.
Um, but.
Almost everything involved another human being.
The first step to talk therapy is actually talking to someone.
The first step to ketamine therapy is talking to someone.
The first step to plant medicine is talking to some, the first step to going
and doing surf therapy, like you're interacting with another human because now
you're reconnecting where we have so much of our brain is designed to connect with
other humans, and if we're not doing that.
Like fully, um, well, it's just, it's atrofying and it probably feels like
an insanity, like a true insanity.
Travis Bader: It's interesting.
You talk about the matrix there, a friend of mine, Sean Taylor, we
spoke with him, spoke about him.
Uh, offline here, but he, prior to, uh, joint task force, we called JTF2, I think
he calls himself a plank holder, who is one of the original people on there.
Um, we're supposed to be recording an episode either on the Silvercore
podcast or on another friend's podcast, uh, talking about his
thoughts and our thoughts about do we live in the matrix or not?
Cause it's something he brings up and toys around with a fair bit.
Arr!
You experiencing the universe through yourself, Jeff, or is the universe
experiencing itself through you?
What are your thoughts?
Jeff Depatie: I think when we look at human truth, it's always a paradox,
which means it's always both.
So yes, the universe is.
I'm literally here to evolve the universe.
I know that sounds like God level work, but it is.
We're all part of God.
We're all part of the universe.
We're all part of the matrix.
There's a real responsibility to being human.
It's not just.
They come and kick it, you know what I mean?
Hang out, get drunk and whatever and do nothing.
Um, it's, it's to, it's to take these wounds, these shadows, these hard
earned lessons through risk and reward and develop it more and more and more.
That's the thing right now.
A lot of people don't really see that if we do this, we're going to evolve.
Um, but I am also experiencing it.
Now I mentioned undifferentiated consciousness.
I don't really putting an equal sign or a zero is a human thing to do.
There is nowhere in the universe where there is nothing.
Nothing doesn't exist everywhere in the universe.
There is neutrinos and there's light.
We just don't see it because it's not reflecting off everything.
There's quantum entangled energies.
There's there's zero is a construct of mankind.
So even saying universe through me or me through universe is like kind
of putting an equal sign or a zero.
It's just one paradoxical event happening.
But I do believe that we are.
An evolution of that, like, um, of it trying to push through and potentially.
It wants to see itself, you know, like how, like some people say, like, it's
like kind of like a really, uh, not Hindu, what kind of like, uh, a true
Tantra, like if we not, not Tantric, like, like the West likes to think of
it, but like a two true Tantra system or something, or like a real, like, um,
certain aspects of Buddhism or whatnot.
Um, trying to say that it's like trying to see itself.
I just think that we're actually, that's why I like when people are
like, ah, I'm born in the wrong time.
I'm like, no man, this is the best time because consciousness is wanting to
evolve here and you're a part of it.
Like any time, once you like kind of look at reality like that, because I
mentioned about input outputs and then I mentioned about values, there's one more
I put up there and that's your belief.
So like, just kind of like generally my belief.
So what I've learned is that the universe has a tendency towards complexity
and that we play our role in that.
I won't pretend to really know what our role is fully, but I do take it on as
a responsibility to aid the universe.
Cause, cause humans can create the universe.
You know, they might say it made this water bottle, but humans form that.
We formed it.
We can form like that.
Now we just.
Um, when we project from a place of love, we will form differently.
And when we do that, our minds will expand even more.
Um, and think about it.
If we can think on another level, like even 0.
5 percent more, that's like the difference between humans and chimps.
We will think on levels that we can't even imagine right now and create
in ways that we can't even imagine.
Um, I think when I think of the matrix, like the literal matrix more, I think
of our systems, I think of the illusion, you know, The Maya, it goes by a lot of
names, um, that is cast over us and that we're pressed into, and it makes sense.
Like these are actually old systems, you know, like we've been developing
monetary systems for a long time and the systems that it works around.
And it's like, it's high time.
Like we realized that.
We're not trying to vilify these things.
It's just like, it's time for them to grow, you know?
And in that, yeah, I believe many, many, most of the people on earth are either
trapped in the matrix, uh, at some level where they're either repressing people
from growing or repressing themselves or propping up other people, um, in a, in
a negative light, um, because, um, Well, it's, it's getting more and more obvious.
That's one of the cool things about technology.
Uh, but that's also the scary thing.
Now we've like unleashed AI, the builders of AI have put their human
essence into it and we've unleashed it in social medias and whatnot.
And it's like, it doesn't really know it's only going to project
from that level of consciousness.
It'll do it in ways that we can't even imagine, but it only ever
project from that level of conscience.
That's why we have to be more deliberate with what we're putting in there.
Otherwise.
We are literally casting the net more and more physiologically, like physically,
you know, with satellites and whatnot, we could like trap ourselves here on
earth literally, which would be crazy.
Um, but also psychologically we're tightening the net instead of actually
like letting expansion happen.
Um, So, yeah, I, I don't really differentiate myself separate from the
universe, uh, but that's not to say I'm like, I walk around like, Oh, I'm God.
You know what I mean?
I'm, I'm, I'm still consciousness in human form, um, but no different really
than a rock, you know, just, I have.
Access to higher levels of consciousness.
I have more feedback loops that I can interact with.
Therefore, my responsibility is a little higher than the rocks.
You know, the rock is responsible to hang out with gravity and the wind and
whatnot, you know, changes and erodes and we have tectonic plates and it does
shift and it is part of the evolution.
Um, I just have a little bit bigger part.
Um, so yeah.
Travis Bader: So one thing I'm not really doing too well is talking about
JTF2 and all the clickbait stuff that's going to get everybody to want to, uh,
to, uh, to click and get it out through YouTube and everything else, because,
uh, they quickly transitioned the second you said, this is one of my most
favorite things to talk about the world.
I'm like, I like to talk about this.
Let's talk about it.
Uh, did you want JTF2 a little bit?
Jeff Depatie: Sure.
Yeah.
My, uh, um.
There was a part of my life where I, I, I was like, ah, I don't really want to
be around that world, but I can't, I, I, it was an exceptional, exceptional
learning experience in my life.
And I got to be around people of a certain caliber.
Um, I've changed what my values are, so it doesn't align up the same way.
But, you know, as far as like a profession goes, it's amazing.
Like you get to see and do things that you just can't believe.
Um, Like going through selection and those courses taught me so much about
human conditioning, my own conditioning, taught me so much about myself, even
though some of the lessons didn't come till years later, um, on the other side.
Uh, and, you know, as far as what it is as a An op, um, a special forces
unit, a tier one special forces unit.
Canadian should feel really quite proud of that.
You know, I'm not, I don't really love using the word pride because it kind
of isolates and everything outside.
But I do feel like if that's what you're looking at, apples
to apples, it's a great unit.
It's, you know, it has amazing men and women there.
Um, and again, like I was saying, the projection of it, I might not agree
with, but we still do incredible things, you know, pull off incredible missions.
And, um, yeah, it was, uh, it was something, it was, it was something I'm
still like, I haven't fully processed what it is, you know, better part of a
decade and, you know, you see, and you do things and it's, I I'm, I don't know.
I'm kind of analytical.
I'm trying to be less analytical when I say analytical.
I just like to look at things.
I like to let them move around.
You know, I use the word contemplation for it.
I don't like try to categorize or label so much.
It's just like, what was it to me?
What did it mean to me?
How did it lead me here?
Um, And it gave me some great, great skills.
You know, we talked about ultra long range.
Um, I just ran my first in person shooting course, which the guys loved.
Um, but I, I wouldn't have been able to do any of that, um, without
that, that education and I'm able to put together two amazing things.
One, I believe that, uh, I think shooting is being way over vilified right now.
And I think it's.
Um, it's like, it's like a sport.
Let's just look at it like a sport.
You know, um, I've never seen a gun just get up and kill someone.
Um, and if we take away guns, people will still kill people and they'll, they'll,
they'll try to like throw stats around.
Oh, no, it's not going to happen.
It's like, it's the underlying consciousness.
That's the problem.
It's not the gun.
Um, I also think that.
In this world today, there is a lot of cowards.
There is a lot of scared, scared people.
I mean, scared.
They don't really even know how scared they are.
They can't even, they're so scared.
They don't even know they're scared.
You know, they're, they're, they're, they're caught in augmented survival.
And I think, um, men or women, um, but I'll just use men as an example, knowing
how to defend themselves if they ever need to, which is probably never, but
just knowing that you can be strong.
Yeah.
And have strength in a moment when needed or called upon, um, is something,
you know, there's something to be said about that, even if it's, it's a kind
of like that old kind of like Kung Fu mentality, you know, I learned it, so
I never need to use it kind of thing.
Right.
Um, it's like that, right.
Um, I also think that.
Although I don't do it, I, I probably should.
I think there's something really cool as long as it's managed properly,
which is getting tougher, um, to go harvest your own meat, you
know, to have real natural meat.
Um, I'm a big fan of that.
And, uh, so none of that would have been possible without like that education
and what I like to fold into it.
Is the human dynamics part of it.
The using it as a vessel to help expand consciousness, to make people more
aware of themselves, uh, more aware of what's going on inside of them.
What I call it in the shooting, what I've labeled it an ultra is
what I call cognitive ballistics.
So you have terminal ballistics.
That's what happens at the target.
You have.
External, you have transitional rate at the muzzle internal, and then
you have cognitive ballistics and cognitive ballistics is actually
the most important part of it.
Um, because it's the part that assesses everything around it, you know, all the
environmental, all the atmospherics, what you want to do, what's behind it.
What's this over here?
How am I going to be distracted?
Am I tired?
How do I check in?
Am I comfortable?
Is the shock good that build up like, you know, I mean, there's
so many different things when you're weighing the math of a shot.
Um, but also below that shot sits a lot of things.
Um, and you can see it in like PRS style shooting where, you
know, you let stress creep in.
You know, we see this in sports, that's where they manage stress.
So it's such an important thing because it's, it's a filter, it's
an unconscious filter to the sensory input that you're getting and the
less clogged that filter is, uh, the better it can absorb its environment.
Um, if you wanted to ask me anything in particular, because I don't really know
where to go when it comes to the unit.
Travis Bader: It's interesting to talk about cognitive ballistics,
um, did a couple parts series with, was it six time or seven time
national service rifle champion.
Sorry, Ryan, if I got that one wrong, um, Ryan Stacey, and he attributes his
success to mental marksmanship and.
The, the process essentially, it sounds similar to the cognitive
ballistics, but the, the mental process behind every single shot and
each shot should be subconscious.
And, uh, it's proven quite effective for him prior to service rifle or
politics, making that, uh, unattainable for anyone outside of the military now.
Um, interesting.
I think there's a whole thing that can be talked on that,
but specifically to, uh, JTF2.
Um.
Right now, the longest distance, uh, record kill is what, three,
three and a half kilometers, 3.
44 kilometers.
I think it was around there, uh, attributed to an unnamed soldier.
I don't know if that soldier was ever named.
Was that soldier ever named?
No, no, but I think you were present around at that time
when, um, when it happened.
Yeah,
Jeff Depatie: I, I, I was in the unit.
Yes.
Yep.
Yeah.
Um, Yeah, anything in particular you want to ask, or?
Travis Bader: Yeah, um...
What, um, I think I saw a video footage of that one, because
that one was caught on video.
Wasn't it?
I think it was, unless it
Jeff Depatie: was a fake YouTube thing.
No, no.
What I would like to do is I'd just like to back up to just one thing,
just to like put a cap or cross the Ts on the last conversation.
You mentioned, uh, subconscious like drills.
You were saying that everything should be subconscious in the shot.
There's parts that, yes.
So.
You build the shot, right?
And ideally, you know, you put the shot in a vice and everything's
the same over and over and over.
So the, the gun, the action never moves.
It's the same bullet all the way down to the atomic level, always
the same exact atomic powder loads, and then no atmospherics, right?
But then we add in atmospherics, we add in a different target,
we add in different distances.
We add in the gun is not in the same position, right?
So you're constantly calibrating those.
So it's.
Uh, in the unit, we worked with something called principles versus drills.
So you try to drill and skill everything, but then if you keep it a
principle, you remains more flexible.
Um, it filters through your mind a little bit differently.
Um, so I, I agree with the statement, but just like we talked
about, usually, uh, it's a yes.
And now to go to this shot, the reason I wanted to put a cap on that is in order to
start making these kinds of distant shots.
Um, they're not going to be the same every time you can imagine
over 10 seconds of flight time.
That bullet is going through multiple wins.
Depending on like, which way you're facing the target, like if it's east, west,
like the target's actually moving, the speed of the earth is rotating so fast
that you're like curving it that way.
So not only is there one arc you got to deal with, there's a second
arc and then there's spin on the bullet, which puts in another arc
that you got to compensate for.
So there's all these arcs that you got to compensate for that are changing, right.
And different, different throughout the whole flight.
Um, I was in the unit at the time.
Uh, I didn't do that shot.
Um, I w I was in the sniper troop.
Uh, I did see it.
There is videos of course, which is crazy because normally there isn't videos.
So it was just like amazing happenstance that the recce team that
was there captured the shot as well.
Um, there is another fantastic shot that's made mate that was made that day too.
Um, but it hasn't been released and I won't go into that.
Um, I'm sure.
Uh, someday the person will be named.
Um, I do know that there's a couple of technicalities around that, if you will.
Um, but either way, I think, um, it's a testament to how amazing JTF2 sniper
program is second to none in the world.
Um, and that's like, that's just fact.
It is the gold standard when it comes to putting a bullet long range, it's
no better anywhere else in the world.
And I think that that shot might be the longest shot ever in history for
a projectile fired from a shoulder.
Really?
Um,
Travis Bader: just everything lined up just so well, right
Jeff Depatie: then.
So it's with a 50 cal, okay.
Is the first thing.
You know, we're starting again, some rounds that are like a 0.
375 enabler round and stuff like that.
It's not quite as like big or punchy as a 50 Cal, but our
shoulder can only take so much.
Right.
So now we might be able to build guns that are kind of mounted that can shoot
farther, but from the shoulder, we're starting to run out of how far we can
flick a bullet through time and space.
So there's that, uh, two, when it comes to like, you know, Like in this case,
shooting a human being, there are so many factors that have to line up.
That person has to be in that situation.
You know what I mean?
And like, just think about how much people move around, you know, like,
Like just, just movement of people in general to be in that one space.
Um, so not only does the sniper have to be in that position, but the person has
to be in that position, you know, like if you think about hunting, very not,
you know, you can put out a salt lick for a deer, you can bait a beer, a bear
and that's bait a beer and that's, uh, maybe have a beer with, um, you know, you
kind of, you're controlling that and then you might be in a blind or something.
So you're controlling those two things.
Um, but with people.
It's a little trickier, you know, especially when you're nice is you
can't just put out a, a salt lick.
Um, so to have that just set up just literally that time and space, that
person and that target in that space, let alone that kind of distance.
And then the, the amount of skill it takes to make that shot, you know, now
we're starting to get, when you look at.
The adjustment in mills, or, well, we will use mills instead of MOA.
Sure.
Like it's massive.
Mm-Hmm.
feet become almost full mills of adjustment at that distance.
Mm-Hmm.
like the arc is so high, you know, um, that optics start to
run out even though we have like periscopes and stuff like that.
And we've got some pretty big powerful things.
Um, optics are starting to get.
They won't be the limiting factor compared to other things, but they're starting
to get pushed to their limits as well.
You know what I mean?
Like again, now we might build this big machine mounted gun with like a telescope
on top and whatnot, but it's like, is this a completely different beast now?
You know, where you fire it by a button instead of a trigger.
Um, So as far as like a man or woman, uh, making like a record kill, I just don't
see it being broken and then let alone, it'll never be on video like that again.
Like the, just like the stars to align like that, um, it's
pretty, pretty, pretty insane.
Travis Bader: 10 seconds.
Like, if I think about that, let me look at my watch one, 1000, two, 1000, three,
1000, four, 1000, five, six, seven.
Eight, nine, and there it is.
And if people listening here are like, Oh my God, why does he count in 10 seconds?
Get on with the next point.
That's a long time.
People think, Oh, it's just a couple of seconds.
10 seconds is a long time.
Jeff Depatie: Yeah.
Like, so like your target can't move in that, you know, like there's
just like all kinds of factors.
It's, it's pretty like, I don't want to like make shooting
another human a miracle.
It was an ISIS dude and they're about as bad as it gets.
Um, but it's like, kind of like a miracle, you know?
Travis Bader: Mm hmm.
I've got a, uh, a couple of questions here from, uh, Silvercore club members.
What was the most challenging moral dilemma you faced during your time?
With the joint task force and how did you navigate it?
Jeff Depatie: Hmm.
In JTF two, I don't feel, to be honest with you, I don't feel like I
was put in a position of deep moral dilemma, uh, in the regular Army I was.
But in JTF two, I didn't ever feel in deep moral dilemma, except when it came
to the part where I started to, my values started to change compared to the units.
Hmm.
Um.
Where I had to realize, okay, my don't align with that.
If I am put into certain situations, my morals might not line up, but I,
that's when I was exiting the unit.
So that wasn't an issue.
Um, by and large, I say this with a hand on my heart, uh, most
Canadian men and women in uniform.
Um, you know, we've had people mess up for, for certain.
When I think about ethics, and I'll use the word ethics
is kind of like morals land.
And we call these laws and rules and rules of engagement and all kinds of things.
And that's, that's what I'll call that.
Um, In the unit, I didn't feel like my morals had to diverge from that.
Um, I don't think ever really.
I think there was.
There was like some smaller moments, but nothing where I felt like,
Oh, I'm sacrificing something.
I'm about to do something, um, that I don't want to do.
Canada is pretty good about that.
We're, we're, we're a modern military, you know, with volunteers.
And I, I just don't think they need to do that.
There was stuff and it's not my place to speak about it because
it's a little bit of dirty laundry.
Um, and I do appreciate the question.
Um, cause I think.
A lot of people now more than ever are kind of looking at the military
and being like, I don't know if I line up with that because we're starting
to see the bigger picture, right?
We're starting to see that these might destabilize things.
I get that a lot from the young guys where, you know, they're worried
about giving up time with family and all these smaller things.
Those are actually moral dilemmas because they're like, oh, I love
this, but I have to give this up.
I love this and I have to get this up.
Um, so they start weighing out the compromises, but not in the unit.
I never.
It's a, it's a testament to, um, it's ethos and what it believes in.
Travis Bader: Another one in a might align with the other one, last question.
Can you describe a specific mission or operation that fundamentally
changed your understanding of warfare and its consequences?
Jeff Depatie: Um, uh, every deployment changes your perspective of warfare.
Um,
I think being deployed in Iraq really was a bit of a, here's the thing,
I've mentioned being on the pointy end of the spear that I didn't want to be on.
And that it became very obvious, very quickly, the cloak and
dagger of why we are there.
And this isn't like so much at the unit level, cause the unit is the unit
and it's employed by the government.
You know, but it became very obvious that we were, what the bigger purpose
we served was the very first things that were secured were oil fields, you
know, it was less about human lives.
Now we try to do our best with both.
Um, But those, those, instead of like us actually in the world, trying to
resolve the underlying nature of why we're doing these things, how we go
and we do these things, um, so that, that was, that was tricky, but I could
say that about any deployment anywhere where, you know, you sometimes get, you
have to make the best of what you got.
And then hope that there's some kind of benefit.
But that's, that's why I said, that's why I left the military, because I
felt like overall I was being more, I was bringing more fear into the world,
more destabilization, um, as opposed to actually adjusting the issues below this.
Um, and then there's a part of me, to be honest with you, Trav, I'm, I'm just
not going to air out any dirty laundry.
Um, there's certain stories that aren't mine to tell, and they're so, they're,
they're what we call context heavy.
If you don't actually know the context, like it could seem like, you know, there
was a guy, he, uh, when I was in the regular army, very early on, uh, first
appointment, um, he shot a kid, you know, and by the rules, he could light that
kid up all day by the rules, but then he shot a kid, you know what I mean?
Like a lot of people don't know that, uh, One, the context of the, that's
kind of situation to put someone in a position where they're going to have
to shoot a kid, let alone the weight of now knowing I just shot a kid, you know,
cause, and again, he was fully justified.
All the signs pointed to yes, but it was like, the situation is so context
heavy that, you know, we would have to have like a whole episode around
something to really get to the root of, of some of these questions.
I think they're great questions.
I just, um, And it's his story, that one.
And it's his story.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Travis Bader: Here's an easier one.
What are those tattoos on your right arm?
Jeff Depatie: My right arm, like this one here.
There you go.
Yeah.
So I have, those are ruins, a combination of German and Norma.
They're more like hieroglyphs, uh, as opposed to what we'd call letters, uh,
and they're all different forms of love.
Um, I said this very early on the greatest warriors in the world will
bring more love into the world because it's the hardest thing to do right now.
Um, and it kind of goes from like simple, like a man, how a man would love
a man, but like, think like a, like a brother, a father and a son, not like
so much, not sexual orientation all the way up through like companionship or
warriorship or love of the home, love of what we call eternal love, which is like.
Love of the universe, right?
The, the blanket that is kind of God or, you know, the nature has
for us, um, on this arm, I have what are called gene keys and that's
my, um, the image for my business, which is the SFE, uh, which stands
for self transcendence for everyone.
Um, and these are a representation of myself.
Um, I won't take off my shirt and show you the last one, but I have to
mention it because I, I just got it.
Uh, it's up on my bicep, but it, uh, it's, it's, uh, it's a kind of in a
tribal form, but it says respect love.
Um, and I think most people don't know how to really respect love right now.
Uh, and it's a, it's a, it's almost an urgency to me because I want to
be around people who understand.
What it means more.
And I think more people than ever really want to, they want to feel love.
Um, and we disrespect it all the time.
We shove it aside because I'm too busy or whatnot.
Um, and like I said, I lost my love and I lost it because I didn't
really know how to respect it.
Now there's all kinds of factors in that.
But at the end of the day, you know, I'm the one running this
meat suit and I didn't respect it.
And, um, yeah, uh, this one here, the one that was asked about on my right arm, um,
that was after a plant medicine ceremony in Costa Rica, where it was like, it just
the obviousness of how connected we are.
Um, and how important is the, this word is four letter word that kind
of encompasses so much is to me.
Um, yeah.
So thanks for asking.
Travis Bader: Now you talked about Jess previously as being a force multiplier.
And I love that term.
Um, one of the questions that came up was what do you feel are important
attributes to a successful marriage?
Jeff Depatie: Successful marriage.
Okay.
A lot of people will use this word, honesty.
Yeah.
Right?
It's almost like a no brainer.
Be honest in your relationship, but there's a secret.
Most people are dishonest and it's not because they're trying to be dishonest.
It's because they don't fully know themselves.
And so we get locked in a pattern in our relationship where we feel very
comfortable and we cease developing.
A lot of people, they'll get like kind of together with their
partner and they don't really grow.
They might.
Accumulate some material things, material, you know, a new house, new cars and stuff.
And yeah, they'll put their kids in sports and whatnot, but their own individual
growth doesn't really continue to happen.
And part of that is going back in time and understanding
where you're projecting from.
The more you can understand that, the more honest you can show up in a relationship.
And I don't mean, like I said, hiding truths or half secrets, it's just really.
Being your authentic self.
And, um, I think that's huge.
So I think really being honest with yourself, um, as a start point
and then accepting that, you know, that that'll go both ways, right?
That'll come up.
We'll be challenged in our relationship.
Um, I think if you are in a relationship, um, every now and then you should
take Almost like a break, if you will.
So we get so locked in that pattern that we don't step aside from it.
And, um, Um, we might not be showing up as the man or the woman that we want
to, or that our partner wants us to.
And I don't mean like nitpicky, like that kind of show up.
I just mean like showing up as that best version of yourself.
And you can do that when you separate a little bit for, it
doesn't have to be long, but like an authentic separation for a bit.
Um, like a sabbatical almost, you can start to see these
things play out and you're like, you get a little bit of space.
So I think that's important.
Um, I think if you do have love, Like I said, respect it, honor that love.
Don't put it in a jar.
Nothing, you can't contain it.
Don't try to contain your partner.
That's one of the things we, you know, provide, provide, preside, protect all
that kind of perimeter, you know, that man stuff, the way we try to do it is box.
We try to put security like that.
What really is wanted is psychological security.
Um, I'm going to assume this is a man asking so that our feminine partner
can express her full divine feminine.
So she can fully be a woman and then you can fully be a man.
And those energies play well together.
Now it doesn't mean we don't transfer them back and forth a little bit.
Um, but when she can do that, that's where real magic can come from.
Cause like, even if we think about like women's smiling, I mean, really smiling
and being happy that our authentic self.
Cause I think women are the most magical, like not just as a dude, I
think like as the epitome of creation in the universe, like here is.
Something that can create life.
They're so in tune with their world.
Um, but if we think of women smiling, um, and then we think when they don't,
so like you can be in a war torn country and kids can play, kids will play, but
if our women are actually really happy.
And I, I mean, joy filled, they have peace, they're stable, you
know, they're psychologically and physiologically provided for.
And again, that's not like a full man's responsibility.
Um, but if you can create that kind of container, like a, it's
almost like a non existent, it doesn't actually have perimeters.
It's designed to keep growing with the relationship.
If you can do that, provide psychological safety for a woman.
Um, This is from the man's perspective and the same thing,
you know, like the woman has to do the same for the man in other ways.
Um, I think that's, that's a great recipe for a successful relationship.
It's really well
Travis Bader: put.
How have your experiences in the joint task force affected your personal growth
and resilience and what coping mechanisms have you found effective in dealing with
emotional aftermath of military service?
Jeff Depatie: Okay.
Um, well, you know, I kind of alluded to it before, right?
I said, Mm-Hmm.
. If we look at resilience as your ability to stay conscious in adversity and not
collapse down, and not allow fear to take over, um, the unit's very good at that.
That's one thing.
They're very good at teaching.
Now, what they do though, is they do that through exposure and these
exposures start to snuff out.
Other feelings and emotions, um, mainly fear, but like, if we think
of it as a bank of it, um, it starts to snuff that out, right?
Like, um, you learn to do X, you snuff out these emotions that
sit below it in order to do that.
Now that starts to give the illusion of resiliency in that set of parameters.
What it does though, is it starts to shut off.
resiliency in other places and other environments, because you've started to
collapse down what you have access to.
This is called coping mechanisms.
Um, and some of them are good and some of them aren't.
Uh, most coping mechanisms we have are very avoidant, um, in the
military we have one called drinking.
I don't know if you've heard of it, um, but these are very short
term coping mechanisms that will not address longterm problems.
Uh, You know, a few years before I left, they did start bringing
in psychologists, um, for kind of just what we'll call talk therapy.
The problem is, is the nature of the beast closes down people and on a time scale.
It's, it's not accurate.
So what happens is you spend years becoming an operator and closing down
and it's actually frowned upon to be vulnerable, you know, to, to think
something like feel scared example.
Um, it came up for me a little while ago.
I didn't, I didn't think about it.
And then I kind of came to me and, uh, and then I felt this like rush of.
Pure fear, but I didn't really, I couldn't understand it at the moment, but, uh,
I was overseas, I was in a gunfight, head was over a wall and then I ducked
down and then a green tracer round came right above my head, like right here.
But I looked over at the guy beside me and he had this look of terror,
the look of terror that you'd give if you just about saw your buddy get his.
Face opened up by a bullet at the time we kind of laughed it off or
reloaded and we got back into gunfight.
Cause that's just what you do years later though, that moment, like,
cause what happens with humans is when we see other emotions in
people, we absorb them very quickly.
We're supposed to, right?
Like if someone's scared, you want to know, okay, I'm, I should be scared too,
because my survival could depend on it.
But there was all kinds of these moments that got stuffed away.
So what looked like resilience was just stuffing it away in a Pandora's
box that was going to get opened up and was going to be hopeless.
Um, So my coping mechanisms at the time weren't super great.
Like, like I said, avoidance, alcohol, um, try not really
even going to the therapist.
Cause that's the thing.
That's what I was saying.
They work against each other.
The therapist is trying to open you up and what might look soft and vulnerable.
And at that point it is now because it's kind of too late.
These things have to be done in tandem much earlier on, right from
selection onwards, um, in order to get the maximum resilience.
And then it's like downtime.
Um, if my, I remember like burnout's a big thing because your
nervous system is on all the time.
Every day you show up, not good enough.
You have to keep developing, you have to stay ahead of the tech, you
have to stay ahead of the enemy.
You have to be, you know, you're there.
It's like a competitive world, which it has to be.
But detune, decompress.
Um, and that takes a lot of time.
It's not a weekend.
It's not even a month off.
It's like almost tit for tat in time, but we don't do that.
Um, and that would be excellent.
Like real decompression, um, would be amazing.
Now on the other side.
Um, yeah, talking, talking with people, it could be therapy.
People shouldn't be ashamed of therapy.
There's nothing wrong with it.
Uh, it's tricky to find a good therapist or a good counselor that you jive with.
Um, finding containers where you can express yourself, uh,
is very important on this side.
One of the things that I found that I never thought I've been at it
for about 50 weeks now is piano.
Um, I wasn't really a musical person.
Like I like music, but I.
Um, but playing the piano has been amazing for me.
Um, yeah, so like I was, you know, I couldn't find like any kind of
artistic, if you will, um, expression like output, um, until that.
And we're really, one of the things I noticed is I, I missed.
Using my hands a lot.
I like using my hands.
I liked shooting a lot, but I just can't shoot like that much.
I used to shoot thousands of rounds all the time, you know, like, um, I can't
afford it and, um, I just, there's nowhere to do it, but using my hand,
eye coordination with the piano is amazing, but it just something about.
Uh, the sound, the feedback has been one of the most therapeutic things I have.
Um, like we talked about earlier, getting out in nature.
Uh, these are, you know, just, just kind of being, learning
to be more honest with myself.
Now
Travis Bader: you're putting together programs for first responders to provide
tools during the training phases, the pro providing them resiliency tools,
uh, before the fact rather than.
During or after, uh, something I looked at before.
Did you want to talk a bit about that?
Jeff Depatie: Yeah, I would love to.
I'd love to.
So, um, Through the art of adversity, we have a, it goes by a few things.
Uh, you can look it up as citizen green.
If you're a soldier, former soldier, or, you know, someone who's a veteran, uh,
it's, it's, uh, um, it's free access for those who sign up, who are already on the
cannabis program through veterans affairs.
Um, so if they sign up through the company that we have an agreement
with, they get the courses for free.
Um, eventually we would love to just give it.
So yes, what you're saying is true, but if we look at one single event, like, uh,
kind of a stereotypical bomb goes off, you see your buddy get blown up, right?
It's, it's like, it's literally seconds worth of time.
If we call that the event, okay.
There's, The baseline leading up to the event, there's the event,
and then there's post event.
Okay.
If we kind of like, like we talked about, if we put some equal
signs and zeros on a timeline, there's before, during, and after.
And the idea of this program is that people can use it at any time because
stress is happening all the time.
We always are constantly in an event in our lives, unless we're sleeping.
And even then some people are still going through it because we, we,
we, we surround ourselves with progress and busyness so much.
Okay.
Now the idea is.
Learning beforehand, how to deal with events and then how to walk through
the event with the least amount of catastrophic damage, and then come
out the other side and grow from it.
So in fact, the tools work at all parts of it, uh, but hopefully, uh,
folks start using it before, cause that is really the best time, um, to
understand this while you're navigating through these conditioning factories.
And then before you get out on the job, whether you're, you know, police,
fire, it doesn't matter wherever high tension, high stress jobs.
Um, learning tools to navigate that.
Some of those are, um, very archetypal, you know, just how to visualize,
how to, how to grow your ability to see and feel the world around you.
You know, if like all you ever saw was one image and you tried to express the world
as that one image, it just won't work.
Right.
So we have multiple images, we have all kinds of visuals.
Um, Um, once we start getting into the emotional range, it gets trickier
because we, we kind of pushed away from visualizing these things and feeling
them and, um, but, uh, and then some of them are really practical tools,
you know, how to really stream of consciousness journal, like really let
it flow and then how to pull information out of that, you know, so it goes
like really, um, through meditative, contemplative, and very, what we call
concentrative So those are engaging different brain wavelengths, you know,
concentrated ones are kind of alpha betas.
They're very focused.
Um, contemplation's a little bit more, you know, kind of theta dipping into
Delta, which is like your sleep pattern.
Um, meditation is even a little bit deeper there.
Right.
And so contemplation brings you in and out of these states of mind.
Meditation kind of hones you in one and tries to clear it.
Um, just a, just a, Thought, I think you're better off taking a nap.
Um, you know, people really right now are pushing meditation, but
if we look, there's these things called blue zones in the world where
people live to be a hundred more.
Um, they're more likely to live to be a hundred.
They don't do meditation.
They nap, all of them nap.
And that's a good point.
Makes sense, you know, cause it takes your brain through those
waves and then it readjusts.
Um, so if you can take a nap, um, well, it seems, it seems simple, but it's like, how
many days of your life have you not taken a nap when you're like, I could use a nap.
You know what I mean?
Travis Bader: The only time I ever nap is when I'm out hunting, I'm up early
and then midday, I'll just lie down out in the field and fall asleep and
hope that, uh, I hear something that wakes me up and I can take a shot.
Jeff Depatie: But, uh.
Yeah, but you know what, like, and it, it's You know, you go
into these really nice rhythms.
Um, but anyways, yeah.
So citizen green, um, is that program that's available to servicemen and women.
Um.
I can't even like, it's, it's 52 videos long, um, plus all the courseware.
So I can't even, and then we brought in people, all kinds of,
uh, scientists, uh, mythological people, just all different realms to
kind of compact this into a space.
Uh, not to be like the one stop shop.
And it's all there, but really help people start to get the conversation within
themselves going, build up the language.
You know, I mentioned language tech, we use that, but it like,
it really, it's designed for all kinds of personality types.
So we all have propensities towards certain personality types, you
know, introverted, extroverted.
Some people like to sense their world.
Some people intuit their world.
Uh, some people feel more, some people think more, you know, that's very MBTI.
That that's a broad range.
So we all approach life differently and we wanted to capture tools so that it starts
to interest people from all those, because certain people, there's certain things.
That, um, people have tendencies like an introverted sensing person is
statistically most likely to develop PTSD because they try to make sense of
the world through their senses only, and they're less likely to talk to people.
You know, those are like two of the things that we already talked about
that are going to probably stack the odds against you, but they're also
some of the toughest nuts to crack, which is good in certain situations.
Um, so, you know, you know, building it up for those, those different kinds of minds.
Yeah.
We're quite excited about it.
Travis Bader: So if they want to find more art of adversity.
com or citizen green.
io, if they're military, military
Jeff Depatie: first responder for citizen green.
Yeah.
Military first responder.
So right now, um, everyone is welcome.
Everybody is welcome.
The way it's set up though, is, uh, cause veterans affairs just like to pledge like
200 and some million dollars for cannabis.
So we partnered with a cannabis company and what happens is if people
go through that cannabis company, they get the course for free.
Um, Now that could be like a medical cannabis, like as for
if they're now a civilian, or it can be through veterans affairs.
And, um, that way there we can help take care of each other.
Cause I, for a long time, you know, veterans were asking, asking, um,
for some programs, you know, you mentioned for before something happens.
So before the worst sets in, um, but it's also for during,
and then it's also for after.
So part of that is like, there's also transition tools in it.
So, Part of the difficulty that gets lumped in with the term PTSD is you
have service man or woman who has dedicated their lives to being this mold.
And then they're out of that mold and it's like, well, who am I?
What am I, what am I supposed to do?
You know, like, um, so helping shift that identity because the brain,
um, likes to keep it structured to help make sense of reality, but
when your whole reality is gone now.
Um, it can be tricky.
So as different, you know, hormonal changes, you know, concussive damages,
um, patterns, you know, the traumas, all these things start to stir, you
know, part of that is the transition, the identity changes, all that.
So there's a whole bunch of factors that get kind of lumped in with
the term PTSD or a stress disorder.
And like I said, by the DSM, yeah, you know, like it shows up certain
ways, but there's all kinds of factors that we got to look at.
How, what were your childhood wounds, you know, what?
What are some of the coping mechanisms that you started way
back there that weren't serving you?
Yeah.
Travis Bader: I think that DSM, I'm sorry, I was going to say, I think
that DSM just scratches the tip of the iceberg there and they're
still, what are we at DSM five now?
Is it four or five?
Yeah.
Five.
And they've just changed criteria for like complex PTSD and.
Uh, a few other things, I don't even think we're close to
understanding any of this stuff to, to have to confine it with a DSM,
Jeff Depatie: uh, framework, right?
Because like, if you really zoom out, that's where I like to use the
term more post traumatic growth.
But if we look at them, they're just, it's like part of the human
experience, so we cannot reduce it down.
Um, now there's certain aspects of it, like, you know, like complex, like for
me, I had, uh, um, concussive damages, I had, uh, chemical toxins, you know, I
had experiential, I had the stuff from like, so there's so much, you know,
so, you know, we really would citizen green with, uh, the art of adverse, we,
we started to put that together, um, and, um, To, to bring those solutions
to, to certain bets, not certain bets to anybody who's interested.
The thing is, is like you can lead a horse to water, but you know,
it has to take its own drink.
Um, and for people it's, it's actually, to me, it's about realizing it's not a.
You're not broken.
It's actually this opportunity you've been given to break a pattern.
You know, go to war and we get traumatized because it's fucking traumatizing.
It's fucking war.
So come back, learn the lesson.
Even if it's like, you know what guys, I don't think we should go to war anymore.
And how does that manifest?
So you heal yourself and then, you know, Somehow you turn that into a
service, whether it's like through your children or through being better partner
with your wife, you know, et cetera.
It can be on a grander scale.
It can be giving talks or whatnot, you know, but the idea is people get really,
you know, you asked about moral wounds.
Cause that's part of it too.
Um, that, that gets them locked up in the cycle as well, you know, and
it's like, well, where do I do this?
How do I transmute it?
That's the idea of it.
We.
We want to learn how to walk to the apple tree without getting
hurt on the way to the apple tree.
Right.
Getting that reward.
But if we don't convey our message, then we're just going to keep getting hurt.
Travis Bader: I don't know if there's a better place to wrap
things up than right there.
Is there anything else that we haven't talked about that we should talk
Jeff Depatie: about?
No, you know what?
Um, I think that was a great chat, Trev.
I really appreciate it.
There's a million topics we could go down.
Um, but I really appreciate your time.
Travis Bader: Likewise to you, my brain's buzzing with all these other
ideas and thoughts, but, um, obviously conscious of your time as well.
I appreciate you taking this time and I'm sure, I'm sure there'll
be more in the future when you're over here on the West coast.
You'll, uh, you'll have a seat at the, uh, the table here
Jeff Depatie: for sure.
Anytime.
I appreciate that.