Breaking the Silence: Brain Trauma, Blast Exposure & Veteran Mental Health

Hey folks, welcome to another edition of Broken Brains with your host Bruce Parkman sponsored by the Mac Parkman Foundation, where we look at the issue of repetitive brain trauma from two aspects - repetitive head impacts and how it affects our contact sports players and athletes, and repetitive blast exposure and how it impacts our veterans, and what these two conditions are doing to the brains and mental well-being of our athletes, soldiers and children. Why is this important? Because repetitive brain trauma is not caught in any nursing, psychological medical or suicide prevention course in this country, making you the first line of the fence, and that's why you must be informed because this affects millions of Americans that have played contact sports or have served in our military. Showing the show we bring on researchers, doctors, scientists, authors, veterans, everybody we can find to give you that 360 degree perspective on this issue, because it is basically the largest preventable cause of mental illness in our society today. Today on our show, another amazing guest, Mr. Daniel Pace, who is the CEO of Invicta Prospects Group. He brings a formidable blend of leadership and innovative thinking, shaped in the high stakes environment of special operations. Starting his career in the Australian Defense Force at 17, Daniel quickly distinguished himself, first as an electronics technician and later as his elite clearance diver. His experience in these pinnacle roles instilled a relentless pursuit of excellence and a drive for innovation, essential for success in demanding operation. Today, he flies these same principles to lead the Invicta Prospects Group, driving forward solutions like the Buddy Suite to tackle complex challenges faced by large organizations committed to giving back. Daniel continues to support the veteran and local communities through his support with the Australian Navy clearing diving trust, the clearance of diving trust, excuse me, and vice presidency of the Santa Sabina College PNF Association, and I have to ask you what PNF stands for later on. Thank you. Welcome to the show, sir. Thank you for the introduction of a little bit humbled, you sort of talking me up there. It's a no telling coach to do this yourself off. Yeah. Danny wrote it. So don't worry about it, man. Well, I'll blame Danny later on, man. So no, but it's very apropos, man, but welcome to the show. So I thought, I mean, you're one or the other few other men I know that joined the Army at the very, very young age of 17, much like myself. So what got you into the ADF, man? Would you grow up, man? Talk about your life, please support and all that. Yeah, I played a little bit of sport and growing up, but mainly I grew up in a poorer area of Western Sydney and actually grew up in housing commission home, which is similar to the projects in the US and I come from a, I guess you'd call it a broken family. My mother was 16 when she had me. My father was 17. My father was a heroin addict and, say, look, he passed away a few years now, but he died in, in my arms, but growing up, sort of living between houses, different grandparents and whatnot. And I guess I was fortunate enough to go to, they have police programs here and I think they have them in the US as well. So like almost like a bigger brother program, I was doing a bit of boxing when I was young up before I joined the Navy through the PC YC out at Paramatter and I think it's a fantastic organisation. I ended up volunteering there after I joined the Navy to help young kids learn boxing and teach them, you know, help them with their homework. But really, I think for me, living with my grandparents from the age of 13 to 17, I really felt like a big burden upon them and I didn't, I knew I couldn't stay living there and as much as I loved them and they loved me, I knew I had to stand on my own two feet and I guess running away and joining the Navy seemed like a pretty good option. And so I actually forged my grandfather's signature and joined the Navy when I was 17, I sort of disappeared for a month and I'm in the Navy, I've just finished recruit school and best decision I ever made. Thanks for saying to the dogs grandpa, I appreciate it, you know. Yeah. Yeah. So tell us, I'm sorry, no, no, go tell us about your Navy career. Yeah, well, I actually joined, sort of not knowing exactly what I wanted to do and I originally had aspirations to join the police force, but I was too young, it had to be 19. And so the Navy, you know, seemed like a good option and they initially funneled me into a tray that was a job I got accepted for as an electronics technician and I mean, this was fantastic, you know, sort of going away from home, getting this rate level of discipline, a really high level of education and in some sort of engineering mindset, this discipline mindset and just was fortunate enough to have really good mentors and and leaders in the Navy and but it was during that time that, you know, I didn't realise before joining that electronics technicians actually, you know, maintaining these heavy weapons systems, email canons on mind-hunter ships, you're some of the different weapon systems on the larger ships and not only do you get to maintain them, but you're there when they're, they're getting fired. And I'll tell you what, the shock wave from even on a 30 mil cannon, you feel that when you're sitting there and you're shaking on that thing and this, this, this gun's just firing round after round and even worse, so if you're actually in the ammunition like a loading the thing, well, it's firing and you're in the focus of a ship, you're getting blasted and I think you don't realise at the time that it's, you could be doing damage, it feels exhilarating, it's exciting, you're doing things that ordinary people don't ever get exposed to. But whilst I was actually working on, on one of the mind-hunter coastal ships which they're the Australian Navy's defence against mind warfare, I was working closely with Navy clearance divers and I guess when you're 18, you're old and you see these really fit tight group of young men who are doing this exciting job where they're diving in the middle of the night, disposing of bombs underwater, then they're parachuting and they're using guns and they're doing all these sort of different tactics and different roles. It was just extremely appealing and and one of my best friend and really good mentor encouraged me to have a lot of become a clear instalver and that ended up being the Popeye or went down and didn't look back, yeah. So you went from being around guns and taking that blast right there and then of course, you know, I don't, a lot of people have been on a Navy ship but those things do not move, right? You're talking, you know, you are on, you know, a couple inches of steel and if you're down in the hold and all that blast exposure is just bouncing off those walls. I mean, there's a two to three x increase in implant because it just keeps going around, right? I mean, it just doesn't stop. So and then now you're clearance divers. So like it sounds like you're kind of like an explosive ordinance kind of guy, right? Just manpling bombs or whatever. Yeah, look at a little bit. Clear install is, you know, where we're a jack of old trides, master of none, but it's too better than a master of one as we say, because we have a very small military, we do a lot of cross training. So on the basic clearance diving course, we get trained in explosive ordinance disposal on land and in border, deep sea diving and also maritime tactical operations. So there are tactical elements which I guess are more similar to Navy seals. And then there are the EOD elements similar to Navy EOD. And then we have the deep diving elements that are similar to to the US Navy divers. And once you're qualified, it's it's quite a long course. It's over 12 months. Your career path then dictates whether you go down a diving path, an EOD path or a tactical path. And in my career, I spent the majority of my career performing tactical roles. So in the Australian clearest diving teams, reconnaissance unit, and then in the special operations, hostage recovery and counterterrorism units. So whilst I was trained in explosive ordinance disposal, it wasn't my primary role, you know, mainly in that tactical environment and using demolitions, explosives. I performed as an explosive breacher whilst in the online counterterrorism units. So really have that first hand experience of what it's like to train in that special operations, high tempo environment, being exposed to blast, feeling that in urban environments and, you know, doing back-to-back training day after day. And then the next week you're at the range and you're doing copious amounts of small arms fire. And that's where I spent the second half of my career until I discharging. It was within the clearest diving teams and the counterterrorism units that, I guess, started noticing the cognitive decline of a few of my friends. And these were guys who had been psychologically screened, highly motivated, highly resilient. And they were developing mental health issues. And the math wasn't adding up for me. It didn't make sense that you could have all this screening and be clear to do a high stress, high performing job. And then all of a sudden start to fall off the rails and have it be put down to PTSD. My understanding at the time, which is now different, but my understanding at the time was that we'll PTSD surely must have seen something traumatic or experienced something. And a lot of my friends hadn't done anything vastly different from the group. Some had been deployed, some hadn't. But across the board there was this change in behavior that was that was really noticeable and it was worse in some than others. And that sort of led me down a rubber hole to think about, you know, what's going on? Why is this happening? And whilst I was serving, the Australian Defence Force started a blast monitoring program. And there was research out there. This was sort of been 2014 to 2017. There was emerging research that blast exposure was causing brain damage. I decided to look deeper into this and really went down this rabbit hole of, okay, you know, if this is the cause of the underlying mental health issue, why are they getting this wrong diagnosis? And the more I was speaking with people, the more I was speaking to doctors, the more I was speaking to researchers, the more I was reading, it became really, really sort of clear to me that the mental health symptoms overlapped with the physiological symptoms of brain injury. And that one of the issues with, I guess going and seeing a psychologist is that they will diagnose you depending on the symptoms. But those symptoms may have a very different cause. And what I saw anecdotally that was hurting my friends more than anything else was they were seeing a psychologist for a psychological injury when they're very likely, more than likely, had an underlying brain injury. And that actually increased the psychological damage because they're talking to a psychologist, they're not getting any better, they're thinking, geez, what's wrong with me? I'm wrecked, I'm broken, I don't know what's going on. And then they sort of get themselves into this vicious spiral. And so when I look at putting all things together, I sort of think there's three main things that cause the physiological injury, right? So you've got blast over pressure, being one of them, head trauma and drugs and alcohol. Now these things will cause mural inflammation and they will cause a traumatic brain injury, right? You then have traumatic events and just chronic stress, the stress of life, the stress of deployment, the stress of doing a dangerous and life threatening job. And they will cause a mental injury which has poor psychological health. Now they have these overlapping symptoms. And this spiral that I see people get into is that when they're their mental health declines and they're trying all the traditional things such as medications and speaking to a psychologist and it's not getting better, they resort to drugs and alcohol to help with the pain. The drugs and alcohol increases the inflammation, which increases the severity of the mental health issue and it's his vicious loop and it leads to suicide and it's devastating. It's absolutely heartbreaking. Our community, Bruce, I used to be a former green beret but our special operations community and just community of those who serve. We have far too high rates of suicide then is acceptable because they're all preventable after attending sort of the third and fourth funeral from men within my unit that I knew and then dozens more funerals of those that, you know, of guys I was aware of and seeing their families, their spouses, their children crying over their dead father's coffin. I knew something had to be done and I just really felt this calling that hey, you know, we could solve this. This issue, we can't bury our head in the sand. When I was serving and we were using the blast gauges, we were getting high readings, we were exceeding four PSI. Guys would just put them in the box because they didn't want to get pulled off deployment and I think that mentality is a war fighter is great in the right situation but we need to change the understanding what's going on and there's a time to be tactically aggressive. There's a time to go hard and be macho and there's a time to play it safe and booty skills and we need to increase that education amongst the operators and prevent this tragedy, this tragedy because it's absolutely devastating. Well, you just unpacked a whole bunch of stuff there, bro. Yeah. God dang, we got a bunch to talk about. No, I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean, first of all, thank God that you were noticing that you questioned, right, that you questioned not only the stability of people that you worked with but also the diagnoses that they're getting and people don't understand, you're in America right now, same problem exists. Our psychologists are not educated on the relationship between last exposure and brain damage and mental illness. They can't put it all together. So when you mentally ill, they're like, you're mentally ill. Somebody touched you as a child, you taught to start too many bodies, you know, divorce is driving you crazy, whatever it is, but nobody looks at your occupation and we have got 20 something years of war behind us. Just think of the carnage, if that is cause, by the misdiagnosis of these mental illnesses and then the mistreatment of it because, well, you mentally ill, what do we got? You got drugs and therapy, okay? But you have an injury and unless that injuries that hold try that that tripod, you just mentioned of drugs and alcohol and mental health issues and then a brain injury, the brain injury by healing that we can address it, but as long as we don't address the brain injury and, you know, then we can't do anything. So, I mean, and the suicide rate is crazy and what just kills me is probably the same thing that kills you when you watch these things is preventable, okay? And yeah, we have a military, we have to have a family, we've got to be the best in the world, but we are overtrained and look, once you know how to shoot an AT4, it really doesn't tell you don't have to practice that thing 30 times a day or three, you know, three times a month, right? You've shot an AT4, okay? But we're driven, and you said it the way it's exhilarating when you have that blast pressure pounding through you, you're like, yeah, you know, your fingers are tingling, you're like, dude, give me some more of that because you know that it was civilians out there doing that stuff. So, when you started questioning this whole scenario, right, this, I mean, your pop and open Pandora's box here, what was the response? I mean, who did you go to your command, or did you wait till you left the military before you started questioning it, or did you just start doing some research? Now, actually, my business partner who I served with, we were questioning, you know, what's going on, and whilst we did keep it close to the chest, we did reach out to our platoon commander and raises an issue and really tried to solve it from the inside out, and we found out very quickly that that just doesn't happen. You really get put back in your box, hey, you're an operator, what would you know? What's your qualification? You know, you're meant to be doing your job, let somebody else do their job, and that just didn't sit well with me. And I think one of the issues with defence and the military in general is that we do have a lot of experts out there in the world who don't get to see behind the curtain. It's almost like the Wizard of Oz. I think people see the military as this very effective fighting force, especially militaries like the US and Australia, who I think are very lethal, very capable fighting forces. And on the surface, I think we're great at what we do. Very capable war fighters, but when you look under the hood and you've been on the other side and sort of not to expose any secrets or anything, but it's not as functional and organizes what people think. You know, when I was serving, I left in 2019 and whenever we would go diving, it was all paper-based logbooks, manual calculations, referring to old dive tables. When we go parachute and we use a paper-based logbook, that's even if you fill the thing out, same with breaching, sometimes with explosive breaching, we wouldn't even record what we're exposed to breaching. We'd have literally a laminated piece of paper that we'd ride on with some China graph and put the breaching exercises almost as a you know, quick little smear-ac mission brief, go on breaching, rub it out and then put the next one on and really had no record of what we're exposed to. And again, I think there's a lot of inefficiencies in the way that the military does things and it's through no fault of their own. I think organisations that have been around for a long time tend to have a mentality of if it ain't broke, don't fix it and you just get the job done. And so, when we were sort of looking at this and ways we could solve it, I think I was sort of one of the first generation of soldiers to grow up using computers, you know, always had computers. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, I know from my commanders that were, you know, and bosses that were only five or six years older, they didn't have that. And so using computers weren't too comfortable to them. They were happy with the paper-based systems, they were happy with the logbooks and for a number of reasons. It was easy. It was familiar. They didn't have to learn something new. Everybody knows how to read and write in the military. And so, this sort of questioning what's going on, I was looking at okay, if we can measure the impact of the blast with the sensor and we can start to measure the response, simple dose and response model, then surely we can define the relationship between the dose and response and maybe start to work out what level safe. And I think it's possible to do, but really, it's, there's still a lot of research that needs to be done. And I guess over the last sort of three to four years, especially with the travel that I've done, speaking with the world's leading researchers, with operators, with representatives on the NATO TBI working group board, there's these common issues and themes that seem to keep popping up right. And so, what the, I think the biggest issue at the moment is that there is no agree-to-pon diagnostic for brain injury in general, let alone blast-related traumatic brain injury. But what we do know, and there are studies that show that blast-related brain injury is a unique injury. There's this interface, astroglyle scarring, and you can find this out post-mortem, right? But by then it's too late, right? So, until that, until we get a better diagnostic, it's very hard to diagnose. There have been other studies where soldiers have been exposed to blast. And you can see an immediate response with regards to neural inflammation. So, we know that upstream of most traumatic brain injuries, whether it's, you know, chronic trauma, blast or substance abuse, we do see this upstream inflammatory effect. And we know that we can measure inflammation, but again, there's no FDA-cleared agreed-upon single measure or biomarker for inflammation. And there's different ways we can measure inflammation. There's imaging, there's biomarker, you know, blood-based biomarkers, saliva-based biomarkers, pupilometry. We really need to find that diagnostic, right? And so, that's one of the issues that we see. The next issue that we see across the globe is this occupational exposure limit. Well, if we can't diagnose it, then how can we set a safe limit, right? And that makes things very difficult. What we have at the moment are these interim recommendations and they talk about using peak overpressure or impulse as a dose-based occupational safety limit. And again, I think if you, if you study any toxicology, the best measure for a safe limit is always on the response side because people respond differently. And so, as an operator, when I look at if I'm going to have a safety limit, no, we'll use alcohol as an example. I don't want to set the safe limit as you can have two alcoholic beverages before you drive. It's going to be very different if you're a 70-keylobe person compared to 120-keylobe person if you've got pre-existing conditions, right? And so, what we see, especially with alcohol, is that the safety limit is set on the response side. So, you drink the alcohol, but it's the blood alcohol concentration, which sets the benchmark for what is safe. And so, the science is working towards what is that response-based safe occupational exposure limit? And this sort of leads into some other issues, I guess, that we see across the board. Again, there's this research issue. And having spoke to the world's best researchers at the University of Uniform Services, having spoke with Dr. Michael Roy, Walter Carr, what we see after speaking with them is that they are really limited by the quality and quantity of the data that they're getting. So, much of the data they have is siloed, it's disconnected data sets, and they have to make sense analyzing these data sets that are disconnected on aggregate to come up with findings. And I think they've done a fantastic job. And so, for me, it's not an issue that the science is failing. I really see that the science and the research is being starved of the inputs they need to succeed at the speed that safety is demanding now, right? And then the last issue we see across the globe, when we see it here in Australia and we're seeing it in the US, it's this decision maker issue. And seeing your leaders, I guess, they're responsible for capability. I'm sorry, I would say they're accountable for capability. They're accountable for keeping their people safe. And they also have this responsibility to be prudent with how they spend taxpayer money. And when you put all that together, we've got something that we can't diagnose at the moment. There's no agreed upon diagnostic. We don't know what the safe limit is. And then we have these decision makers that need to be responsible when it comes to spending money. And it's really created this inertia, which is why I think the problem's not getting solved. I think senior commanders care, I spoke with the Australian chief of army, I've spoke with the heads of occupational health and safety in the US military. They all care, they care deeply. And they are faced with their own set of challenges about how to solve this. And I think that we need to break this inertia. And the way to break the inertia is to give the researchers what they need, to find the answers that the senior leaders need to implement organizational-wide solutions. And so I think there is a pathway forward. And what's really been the key thing stopping this is, is I don't think anyone's been able to pull all this together in a way that is digestible that people can can understand. I think there's too many, still now, there's too many silos. You have all these sensor companies doing their own thing. Then you have psychologists looking at cognitive assessment tests and doctors doing researchers into different biomarkers. And nobody's talking to each other. And so I think for us, it's about getting everybody to work together, giving the researchers the day that they need. And let's solve this damn thing. And I think we can do it very quickly. If we look at how the world pulled together with COVID, with developing vaccines, I mean, whether you agree with them or not, it just shows that if you put enough people and resource together, we can solve things quickly. And I think we can do the side he. And I think that's the problem you get when you have a very small segment of population that's affected by some of this, but a couple of your key points. Like, you know, I think things would move faster if, you know, it's like everything we do in the military and in society right now. Everybody wants to be so sure that this is the right move because they don't want to take the blame for it. Well, you know, we're supposed to be leaders that, you know, they have to make a decision. And without any decisions being made, this problem is probably five to seven years beyond where it needs to be right now. I mean, I agree. I got it. I know that, you know, when we started these wars, and I retired in early '01, I ended up doing both invasions anyways. You know, we didn't know. I mean, there was nobody even knew that this blast thing was a problem back in my days because we didn't train like we do after 9/11, okay? Am I day, cold war guy or right? You know, we trained hard. Don't get me wrong, but we didn't have all the bombs and explosives. We had as special force guy, we had access to everything we wanted, but when we hit the shoot house, we didn't have to hit it all the time. And then we had to rotate the shoot house and all this stuff. Now, after 9/11, everybody has a shoot house. You got unlimited explosives and you're either in training or in combat. So the relentless exposure is what I think, first of all, needs to be addressed. It's like, all right, it's not that we have too much, we know we have too much, and it's not that we can determine exactly what is the cutoff. Right now, we have to reduce exposure. How do you do that? Guess what? You're only going to be a clearance diver for three years or five years or you're going to go to the training units. I mean, we can make these easy decisions right now because in the end, we all know that lowered exposure is better than what we have going on right now. But to your point, somebody's going to make a decision. I certainly agree there. And again, the decision doesn't have to be at the level of the chief of army or the head of workplace health and safety. The decision can be the platoon commander or the team leader to go, hey, we are not going to do live breaching five days in a row. You would not go to the gym and train heavy squats five days in a row. You do damage, you do damage. But over a month, you could train breaching every Monday and achieve the same training effect, but you're giving your body that recovery time. You're letting your brain calm down. Getting the message out there, there's no need to perform explosive breaching or fire heavy weapons under extreme fatigue and training. There's no need. When you have lack of sleep, you dehydrate it and then you're doing things that are going to inflame the brain. You're going to make it worse. So there are things that that team leaders can do right now and platoon commanders can do right now to keep their people safe. You can do dry training. You can use less explosive weight when you're doing your explosive breaching during training. There are so many things you can do for free, for free. You don't have to save money. Yeah, you don't have to crack a door or a window on every run at the, I mean, the shoot house ain't changing. I mean, no matter how many times you go through it from different poor, the shoot house is there. The target's going to change. All right, do you have to shoot live fire inside those rooms? Do you have to frag each room? You know, these are, I mean, they did a study and just by moving around, I know we used to get on the door, right? I mean, we didn't even have legs sealed to my door. And you know, there's, we're eating charges on that door hinge all the time. You know, whether you're doing a shotgun breach or an explosive breach, you're right there on the door. Got it. Loved it. You know, did it. But in the end, if you just moved around the corner, you're exposed your drops to zero. Okay. So why can't we train? Yeah. In combat on the door, you're going in, but in training, let's, let's, all right, let's, let's get around the corner a little bit. Let's protect this. And I think to your point when we talk about the science, it's, it's, the science right now is just another self-lican ice cream color, right? Everybody wants money. If you look at the money we've spent researching concussions over and over at TBI's, over and the billions that have been spent on TBI, yet we have not done anything really to improve. I mean, we've improved the awareness that everybody knows that the TBI is, but we really have an impacted treatment. We still don't have a, you know, a, a, you know, any kind of really, you know, everybody's looking for biomarkers and all that's great, but it really doesn't get us where we need to be, which in your spot is, is, is a, is a safer military where people are going to retire with their brains intact. Or as I told General Fenton staff at US Silicon one day said, look, when I joined the military and I, when I became a green beret, I put that green hat on. I knew I was going to do crazy stuff, but I knew the VA was going to be there for me. Our veterans administration, when I got out, if my back was tweaked and my shoulders are broke or whatever was wrong with me, they were going to fix it. Okay. Got it. Right now, when it comes to blast exposure, that, that needs to happen. And as long as we do that, we're going to be able to get, because everybody's worried about retention and recruitment. What happens if people find out that being a clearance diver can impact your brain, who's going to want to be a clearance diver? Well, if everybody knows that we're mitigating exposure so that you can lead with a healthy brain and/or there are programs in place to take what damage has been done to your brain and repair it. Do. All right. Go have fun. Right. Jump out of planes. Blow things up. Chase pretty girls around the world. That's what we all joined the military for. Right. So let's have at it. Okay. But take care of me. That's why I joined the military to do my job. But you got to take care of me. And that's not happening right now. And that's, I think that's the big gap. Certainly. And I think there's, again, you hit the nail on the head before about this, this just make a decision. And one of the problems is, is maybe they don't want to emit liability. They're waiting for the perfect science. Every day we wait is another day people are getting exposed. Amen. And you're just making the problem bigger and bigger and bigger. So I think every organization, you know, faces a time when whiting becomes the biggest risk. And right now with blast over pressure, whiting is the biggest risk. They need action. And then they need it now. There, there. No, I mean, you look at our NFL and your Australian rules rugby and all those ruggers are run, they all the rugby clubs are running away. They know that we've got a problem with contact sports and mental health and suicide in this country. And there, and by the time they face it, the public outcry is going to say, how long have you been sitting on this? Now there is, in 2017, we were just understanding what repetitive blast exposure was all about. Now there is absolutely no doubt that we have a problem. And we are not affecting change. Now, I know the US military is doing, I would say a better job right now. They're identifying MOSs. But I would still say at the unit level, we're not making the change necessary to really, you know, protect our troops, right? Which is going to be, this is serious, you know, hierarchical, you know, change, right? That, hey, you can't be a adult operator for 10 years now. You're not going to hit that shoot house for 10 years, because we can't fix your brain. And I don't care what gimmicks are out there, what supplement programs are out there, cube collars, concussion caps, all this crap out there will not prevent this exposure. So guess what? You're going to be on a, on a team, an A team, Mr. Green Beret, you're going to be in a range of a tune, you're going to be a clearance diver for this amount of time, because we know that with this amount of rest, you can go back. But you're not going to be a macho man for 20 years anymore, because the outcome is poor quality of life, you know, loss of mental health, all these negative outcomes that you don't deserve is somebody that's, that's signed a dotted line. And, and that, now, are you familiar with talk about limits? Do you know what the GBA is? The generalized blast experience variable? Okay. So somebody has, you know, so I, I took that, I took that calculation. I put it on a, yeah, I put it on an Excel spreadsheet. So anybody can do it, right? They can just type in the numbers. And I, and somebody made a decision, at least somebody made a decision at 200,000 units. I came in at 1.8 million. We're, and I'm a cold war guy. We're, we're except that was the limit at which brain damage could start. Do you know where that 200,000 came from, except, I mean, at least somebody made a decision, you know? Yeah. Yeah. My understanding, I've read there's a few, there was a GBA and there was another survey. There was another one. Yeah, something. My understanding is that they just again, they looked at data sets on aggregate. And what they found was that out of the people that answered the survey, there was high instances of psychological diagnosis after 200,000. And so I think it was the sort of epidemiological studies. And again, they're better than nothing, but it's not going to stop going to find the answer. Yeah, we've, we've got to start. And, and I think, I guess the message that, that sort of from my perspective and having a look at this is, I don't think it's all doom and gloom. I think we can learn from other disciplines. And I think we can, we can really manage this. And, you know, part of what, we've been working on, you know, my business partner and I, we hired some very smart engineers and software developers. And I thought about, how do we save the, how do we save people's brains without compromising capability? Because I think if you're a researcher or scientist, you know, the easiest thing to do is just put a stop to it. But you can't, we need capability. We need to be able to fight and win wars. And we can't, we can't change that, right? But when I look at what a solution should have, it should be something that is easy to use, something that can prevent the injury from happening in the first place, something that is informative, something that doesn't add to the, to the load of the operator. So ideally, I don't want to have to give an operator something extra or heavy to carry. I don't want to give them more paperwork or more like, more like, wait here. I got a hundred pounds of lightweight gear in my Rucksack. Yeah. Yeah. That was a big joke in the 80s. Exactly. But, you know, all that lightweight, when, look, I'm not a big guy, right? I'm a vet, 80 kilos. So all that lightweight gear. Oh, man, it's heavy. That's up. Yeah. And, um, hold on, I'm going to be the background noise. Yeah, me too. Hey, Danny. Go ahead. Sorry. Yeah. And so, when we will tell me what you develop, man, because I won't Yeah. So we've developed a software application called BlastBuddy. And what BlastBuddy does, we're really trying to solve two problems. So the first problem is, is how do we give a tool to an operator that gives them instant feedback, helps them make decisions and hopefully proactive decisions, right? And so again, the Navy trained you probably a little bit too well. Having that electronics technician and engineering background, for me, it became a question of what is, what is the minimum number of variables that I need to know to accurately predict what an operator is going to be exposed to? And then if we can correlate the exposure to something that's measurable, whether it's a change in cognitive performance or a biomarker, we then have a system that can get you from when I'm planning. If I know the key variables, the environment, the target that they're breaching, the explosive weight of the charge, they're going to be detonating, all the weapon system, the ammunition nature. If I know these things, then I can start to make predictions about what they're going to be exposed to. And if I know how they respond at the very outset, we can predict their response to an acceptable level of of vacuracy that we can then inform a commander right with our software today. We can say that, you know, if you're going to go use 200 grams of explosives to do a door breach in an urban environment and your 4.5 meters away from detonating the charge, we will predict what your response is going to be and we can make a recommendation. Based on this person's recent exposures, how sensitive they are, this will put them over what you have set as a safe limit. Because again, I think every organisation right now needs to determine what they think is the safe limit because the science isn't there yet. But if we do go off the US DOD interim guidance, we can actually predict when the next exposure is going to be over 4 PSIP over pressure and we can accurately predict what the total positive impulse is for their cumulative load so we can say that your next exposure is going to put you over the limit. But if you change the variables, okay, instead of standing at 4 metres, let's stand at 8 metres with full cover, okay, you can proceed and go through the training. And so it's giving operators that proactive feedback before they hit a limit, right, but to be perfectly transparent. Blast modeling is complex and whilst you can put all the variables in, there are still things that happen that cause, I guess what you call outlier effects. There's human behaviours where maybe the variables that they put into the system are not actually what they're doing and I'll give you an example that when I was doing breaching, we had an extreme culture of tactical aggressiveness and so each team would want to be better than the next team and even during training, we might say that a safe distance could be 4 metres for a certain type of charge, right? We'd go and place the charge on the door, you'd take two steps back, your supervisor's giving you the squeeze and you're detonating that charge, you are right on there and you're eating that charge, picking up your weapon and going in and that. So whilst we might say that they were standing at 4 metres or the software thinks they're standing at 4 metres, they might have only been standing at 2. I guess the key thing is understanding how we actually actually measure these and we are integrated with an FDA-clear cognitive assessment test that's been widely used by the US military. This is the Dana test and that Dana test is actually one of the most studied tests when it comes to blast related brain injury and NATO's recommendation with regards to the 24-hour load is based off the Dana test which is integrated to our software and we also integrate with the B3 blast gauge. Okay, and so we can predict what they're exposed to, they'll go and get exposed, we know what they've been exposed to so we can now reproduce the change in cognitive performance but I think it does two things, what's happening now is that there's no accurate record keeping which is an issue because we can take test like, we can take test like the G-Bev, some people might grossly underestimate what they're exposed to or grossly overestimate, we really don't know. You can't compare it yet. But if we're keeping an accurate record of the event, so what caused the blast over pressure, was it a weapon, was it explosives, what were the variables, and then we can either have a sensor record of the exposure or we can have a predicted record of the exposure, in the future we can retrospectively go back and say actually you were exposed to too much, that limit we thought was safe, you know, it was not safe, world or conversely that might say, hey, we've actually kept you really, really safe. We know over the last five years, well, we've been researching this, we've kept you safe and so it might validate, you know, what people have been doing and so I think the key thing is we just need to start recording, we need to start adhering to the safety measures and really I think there's two big issues, there's the policy issue, we need to get the policy right but more importantly, we need to get the culture right and sometimes policy takes a while to change or a while to update and I'm appealing to every operator out there, if you're an operator and you're exposed to blast, if you're a team leader and you're supervising blast or platoon, commander, change your culture, make people aware of what's going on and do the little things now that will save your brain, don't drink 24 hours before exposure in 24 hours after, get a good night's sleep, don't do back-to-back days of training, you don't need to eat sort of 10 plus charges per day. Don't be a man. Yeah, exactly because all you're doing is damaging yourself and you're actually limiting capability. If your job is to provide capability and keep people safe, you can actually do both. And to that point, you know, it is now a very significant risk factor and I think if you wanted to really look at what a tolerable limitation was, my generation of soldiers, I retired in early '01, we didn't have suicide issues. And it wasn't because we were, you know, men or whatever, you know, what it was, we didn't have the total accurate exposure. Like in special forces, if you were in the SIF, I was in SIF, but I was not, I was not a thousand along here team doing some other stuff. But you know, I still had to be certified and I still hit the shoot house and I had an SOT team and then I, I set up a lot of stuff for my group up there. But it was like, here's three years in your military career, you're going to go into shoot house. And then you're going to go back to an A team, you're going to train like we used, and I think that we could probably go back to the 80s and 90s and say, right, how did we train back then? When we didn't have the mental health and suicide issues. Now, to that point, the one guy I do know that ended up taking his life, he was a master preacher instructor. He was a master. He was the breaching guy everywhere he was. And he is an example of what overexposure is. And we didn't even know when he was, we had to go try to rescue him because it was completely schizophrenic. He thought people were following him. We did our best. And this is before my son, we didn't even know, we're like, God, he's crazy. Why is he crazy? And now we look back and say, Oh, shit, man, Joe was our master preacher for decades, dude, you know, and now we, and he killed himself. So I think we can go back there and say, Look, how often did you guys train you old shit? And then, you know, look at that total exposure. Say, right, we know that we didn't have, you know, a lot of mental health problems. And that could, that could start to set like within your branch, you got three different fields, you can rotate through them. Then you got a school house, right? You always get to take a break. And by incorporating this, I think as the men and women become more aware, this is a serious risk to their life and their mental health, but they still love the job. Then we just got to do the job differently. And, and I think you're, you're, you're all over that stuff, man. So, so, so, how's things going with the software now? Are you deployed? Are you going to go on pilots? Or were you at with this? Yeah, we just completed a pilot with the Australian New Zealand counterterrorism committee, which is an encompass of 10 agencies. So, we have nine law enforcement agencies across Australian New Zealand and the Australian Defence Force. That was a highly successful pilot where we used the blast buddy software. There was regular cognitive testing with the Dana BrainVoidal Cognitive Assessment Test. All the operators were wearing the B3 blast gauge. And we also were doing biomarker testing for a novel biomarker, a blood-based biomarker from Glea Diagnostics, which measures inflammation of the brain. And I guess the outcome of the, the pilot was still finalising the report, but what we found was even though this training was conducted extremely safe and it was more of a tactical development rather than tactical training, there was a real big gap for Sassan. Let's try and learn what the minimum amount of explosives to use are to breach a certain type of target. So, they would effectively put an explosive on a wall or a door, stand very, very far away, complete cover, detonate the charge and keep producing the, the NEQ until failure. So, it was a really good sort of learning and scientific understanding. The one day they did do the tactical training, we had multiple soldiers exceed the NATO and US to hear the recommendations. And that was at the training safe distances. And I think it was just validating a few different things. It was validating that the software works in an operational environment. We designed the software to be agency-agnostic because when we, when we originally designed a blast buddy, it was under a project with the Australian Defence Force and it was very Australianised with Australian tactics, techniques and the way the Australians do things. And those Zs, you guys don't want those Zs. And the, I guess, we just really wanted to solve this problem as quick as possible. And so, we thought, well, how do we make one application that's applicable to all agencies? And so, we looked at the things that, what is it that all breaches or all people that are firing heavy weapons doing? What are the common elements? Because that's all we need. We don't want to overcook the software. We don't want to put too much in there. Our broader buddy's suite can do a lot of different things. But solving this issue is the most important thing, especially for us in our company. And so, you know, we showed the blast buddy was able to be used by 10 different agencies. That all do things slightly differently. And the next steps we are speaking with the US Department of War, we're in the process of getting a cooperative research and development agreement. No. Yeah, I have a few more meetings scheduled with members of the US Department of War towards the end of the year. But look, I think we can really work together with the US, with Australia, with New Zealand, with Canada. I'm actually speaking with a representative from Canadian Soft, I think, next week. And but ultimately, I think the key thing is just trying to get everybody on the same page. And for us as a business, it's, look, it's been very, very difficult. I think when you're, when you're starting something that's new and you're addressing a problem, that organisations didn't want to acknowledge, you've really got to, you've got to do more than just build a product or solve the problem. You need to raise awareness, you need to educate people, you need to show them that there is an answer, there is a solution. And we need to do things that minimise the risk for organisations that want to deal with us. And, you know, my business partner, and I, we've sacrificed absolutely everything. We've solved multiple investment properties, you know, and, and, and pulled all our personal life savings into this business. We've been completely bootstrapped. I don't know how we've survived this far, you know, we've got, we've got about a dozen staff, a number of volunteers that help us, we work with many great organisations. But we're at the point now where I think that the, a lot of the agencies that we're speaking to are starting to acknowledge a, there is a problem. The science says there's a problem, but the science isn't giving us the answer. And they're now starting to, to think about how they can close that gap. And for us to be ready to, to, to help these organisations do that, we, we are looking to speak with investors. If there's anybody out there that wants to support us, and we'd like to be part of our journey, please reach out. I'll give you my contact details after Bruce, but, you know, we want to work with the very, very best people and bring the best people among the journey for us. And, and, you know, I think the one thing you can be assured of is that, you know, by investing in us, we will make a difference. There is, there is no two ways about it. You know, we are leading the world when it comes to solving this issue. I think we've got the right blend of, of software engineers, veterans, engineers and the team that's just being thinking about this for so long and that actually cares about it. You know, I always tell people, if you're going to start a business and, and money's your motivator, don't do it because it's difficult. But even more so, I think if you're going to start a business and, and do something like this, you have to be so passionate and so driven about what you're doing. I don't, I don't want to see another death. It keeps me up at night. It gets me up in the morning. It makes me just go day in and day out. And, and so for me, I, I feel like this is a calling from God. I feel like it's a calling to solve this problem. And, I think, you know, put on my faith in Jesus Christ. And, and I know that, that this is what I'm meant to do. And I'll solve this. So, if you'd like to be part of us and part of our journey, please reach out. You know, I can always tell a good CEO because he never misses a chance to make a pitch, dude. Dude, I've been raising money for our analytics company and bootstrapping. So, I know you've been in, and yeah, I mean, send me a pitch deck, and I've got a network here. I can float that around for you. Absolutely. More than willing to give you a hand because, you know, we don't have any solutions for this yet. I mean, it's caused a, you know, through, we'll just say, you know, and, you know, through the, just the opt-tempo of war, the fog of war, the chaos of war, we have overlooked a huge contributing factor to our mental health problems that we have in the military. And we're just starting to get a hold of this on the mental health side. We still don't have really good novel solutions on the industry side to take to this. So, this is amazing. And I, you know, and that's great. And your trust in the Lord is well placed because you would be where you're at. You're right where the God wants you right now, man. You don't know if you notice it. This is where God wants you right now at this point. And you just keep, you just keep moving forward because he's got his hand at your back. Obviously, and I love what you're doing, man, because you're right. You know, a lot of people don't know this, but, you know, I'm on my eighth company. And I've been very blessed by the Lord, but my motive and all my companies has never been about making money. And so your approach on taking care of the customer, which is the soldier, then your employees, when profits tertiary, you're going to have a great company, man. And I will definitely pray for you and I will wish you all the best. And well, as we close out, always love to give people the chance to talk about themselves. All right. So, how do people find you, you know? And, and of course, obviously, how did they get a hold of that pitch deck, right? Now that you, you know, you're out there looking for money at this timing to everything, all right? And what's next for Daniel peace? And not only blush, buddy, what else do you got going on in the future? Go for it. Yeah. So I think the easiest way to contact me is via LinkedIn. Quite active on LinkedIn. It's the main social media platform that we use to raise awareness. And I guess the reason for that is that's where most of the policy and decision makers are. And I think they're the ones that are going to affect change and we need to reach out to them. And so anyone, reach out to me, I'll LinkedIn and I'll get back to you. If you want the pitch deck again, reach out. I'll share the pitch deck with you. And, you know, the pitch deck will go through our whole story and what we've done and what we're going to do. And I guess what's next for us is really now looking at how do we style this and get our business in a way that we can help everybody all at once. You know, I guess as Murphy's law hasn't been pushing hard for five years and it feels like it's being slow. And we've hit brick wall after brick wall and then one door opens and another door opens. And then all of a sudden we've got 10 agencies interested. The US has now mandated to have solutions by January 2027. And I think, look, if we're going to save our souls and our operators, we need to scale up. We need the best people, the best team and the right connections to help pull this off. So, yeah, that's really just skyling up this operation and, and, you know, winning the war against blaster land traumatic brain injury. Well, that's amazing, Daniel. And I think the Lord and Danny for putting you on this show, man, because I've suffered from this. I had to educate the VA on this and, you know, and put myself back together. And I had nowhere near the amount of exposure that your generation has had. And now the fact that we're dealing with it is kind of a tragedy about worrying about liability. But we have to write that check. Many women have signed a dotted line. They've supported their country. They did the jobs regardless of the impact on them as they were told to do. And we owe them a quality of life that they deserve. And you're going to help prevent that in the future. So we got to look back and take care of those that have already been through this and working with companies like you. I hope that your government, my government, can pave the way to protect the souls of the future. So thank you for what you're doing. May God bless you and your journey. And I guess we'll be in touch. And I would be remiss if I did not mention our common friend Paul Scanlon on this. I haven't talked to Paul in a couple of months. I used to get asked you and from, you know, I'll probably get one here pretty soon. But anyways, thanks for dialing in from the wonderful land down under. And I look forward to talking to you and being in a part of your journey whenever possible. Thank you, Bruce. God bless. God bless. All right, folks. Another amazing show. What an amazing show. Man, I don't know where Danny finds these people, but I love them. Anyways, all right. No, because we're going to be, you're going to be, this is going to be posted after our army, Navy game, huge celebration of events, veterans, mental health out there. Please go get the book. It's for free. It's on the website. Don't forget our app. It's on the Google and Apple Play Store. It's called head smart. It's got the only repetitive head impacts technology out there. There's a new technology we want to bring to America from Australia. Well called hit IQ. It's the first consumer focus, some concussive head impact monitor. We want to try and get that up here. We're going to have their CEO on the show here pretty soon. So look, take care of yourself when it comes to this issue. Become informed. If you have children, please take care of them. Read the book. Do your own research. If it's not on the internet, it doesn't make it's true, but you got to dig in there and find out for yourself and you only got one million. So please take care of it. God bless you all. We'll talk to you soon in another edition of Broken Brains with your host Bruce Parkman sponsored by the Back Parkman Foundation. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you very much.