Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Rewiring the Brain After War | Jonathan Dickinson | Ep. 449

Episode Date: May 25, 2026

Jonathan Dickinson is the co-founder and CEO of Ambio Life Sciences, one of the world's leading ibogaine clinics. He's spent more than fifteen years on this — apprenticing in Tijuana clinics, running the Global Ibogaine Therapy Alliance, and writing the field's first clinical safety guidelines. He's a Mexico-licensed psychologist. He holds the only active export license for iboga root and led the first Nagoya-compliant export out of Gabon, where he was initiated into two Bwiti traditions. His team co-authored the Stanford study in Nature Medicine on ibogaine and veteran traumatic brain injury. Ambio has now treated over 3,000 people. Most of what you think you know about ibogaine is probably wrong. It's not a high. It puts you flat on your back for twelve hours and asks for everything. It resets the body off opioids almost overnight. It seems to repair the brain in ways nobody fully understands yet — MS lesions shrinking, a guy walking in with a cane and leaving it behind.  We get into the cardiac risk, the deaths, the Trump executive order, and why the science and the ceremony might not survive being pulled apart. And we talk about the part nobody wants to hear: the medicine doesn't do the work for you. Pick up Jonathan's Book here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Ibogaine-and-the-Bicameral-Mind/Jonathan-Dickinson/9798888504680 Join the Cleared Hot Newsletter: https://www.clearedhotpodcast.com   Today's Sponsors: Black Rifle Coffee: https://www.blackriflecoffee.com LMNT: https://www.drinklmnt.com/clearedhot  

Good morning, everybody. Today is Memorial Day. And I did a social media post about this because people ask me what I think about Memorial Day or what they should do on that day. And if you saw the post, you know my thoughts. I don't think there is a right way or a wrong way. I don't think telling people what to do or say or think is really a good long-term path to do anything. It's way less influential than people would lead it to believe. So today on Memorial Day, I think the best way to open this episode, and this episode, by the way, I have a few that are recorded, and I wanted to pick one that was directly in line with the essence of what this day is about remembering those who are no longer here, who gave their life in the service of this nation. So today's guest is about steps that veterans can take if they are struggling, or a step, I should say. And it's not the right fix for everybody, and it's certainly not a magic button.

But it is a therapy that is having immense impact in the lives of veterans and first responders or those who have seen trauma or as Jonathan will talk about addiction as well. Before we get into that, a really good tribute to what this day means to Matt Best in Black Rifle Coffee is his newest song, Folded Flag. So we're going to open the episode with that. And I'm not going to say anything else about it because it speaks for itself. Let's just get into that. And then the episode will begin right. after the song. I road spots where I feel.

Truth hits hard in that folded flag. Your jacket still hanging on the back of that chair. Smells like smoke. He backs on day. The lawn's gold. Through the open gaze down the golden rows in that fold. So like I was saying on the way over, I don't have any experience at all with psychedelics. I would say if I'm being totally honest, there's a low level anxiety and fear.

around them. And I have no idea why. It could be probably based around watching movies, which I'm old enough now to realize. Most movies are not a very accurate representation of real life. But on the other side of that, I have, like I was telling you on the walk over here, countless friends now who have gone down that path and not all through a professional organization like yours. We're talking some backyard shamans who are Bob Monday through Friday and Ashka-Guonga or whatever their name is at a pool in Riverside, California on Saturday and Sunday. Heavy doses of mushrooms. I know some people have just, what did they call it, a heroic dose.

They just did that by themselves, which I don't know if that's a good idea or not. I hope they had parental supervision of some kind. But tremendous, tremendous changes in their life. Even in those kind of environments where they're just doing it themselves. Well, I don't know if those singular usages by themselves were all that they did. Oftentimes, that's the story that we will laugh about. I think quite a few of those people maybe knocked on the door of the progress that they were looking for with their, we'll call it self-treatment or unregulated treatment. And then because they saw a trend in the right direction pursue a higher level of care.

Okay. Some of those Sure. Backwood, heroic journey stories, though, are pretty funny. Yeah, I bet. Yeah.

It's just to say, I'm pretty sure there's no lethal dose of mushrooms, but I think I have a few friends that have tried. And they, maybe that's why I'm scared of it. There are stories of bending

the space time continuum. Well, it's interesting that you say that you're nervous about it because are any of these pictures you? That's me. I'm in the bottom right.

That's me. I'm over there. that one. Yeah. That stuff's not scary. So I mean, but yeah, I mean, those are kind of peak experiences. I would put it on par with that. Like you're going for the first time jumping out of a plane.

Resting heart rate in those photos. Yeah. It's not a P. That's, that's any, we can go do that right now. Okay. Do you want to go do that right now? I'll find an airplane right now. Really?

Yeah, but the first time you did it was their nerves? For sure. What there was more than nerves was tunnel vision that you didn't realize opened up until a lot of more time in the air. My first jump, I mean, you're responsible for pulling your parachute. You have an instructor holding on you both sides. Your parachute's going to be deployed into the air. If you need to use your reserve, you're going to be responsible for doing that,

but you have an altimeter. I remember looking at it. I couldn't have told you what the number and the needle were pointing at for, if you piled up money between our eyeballs on this table. Years later in skydiving, you're falling through air at terminal velocity, having the most non-sequitur, non-jumping thoughts about, oh, damn it.

I forgot to schedule the payment for the water bill. Remind myself to do that when we get down to the ground on my phone. Yeah. And the world just opens up. And the experience seems like the jumps are longer. You're processing. An ability to process it are enhanced, I would say, through experience. I don't know if that is like psychedelics.

I don't know if you can control it more. the more you do it, I know really nothing about it. I mean, I think I don't necessarily recommend everybody try to get to this point with it, but I feel maybe something like what you're describing. If I'm going to go do Ibegain now, what it's the 12th time or something. Yeah. I don't feel a whole lot of friction. There's not a lot of fear.

I do have to kind of lock on to what we're doing. So there's some prep to get into that space, just like you're packing your shoes. Being intentional about it? Yeah, and like clearing the slate. You know, for, like I do it at Ambio, too, just because it's a, it's the right space. Like, everything else is kind of tuned out. And there's the right kind of buffer around us and everything. But I would say it wouldn't be that word to me if I had thoughts about trying to do the water bill.

That's just there's something else going on. Like, I'm kind of just processing, like the medicine's processing through. Sometimes you can have really deep insightful thoughts, but sometimes not. And it doesn't really matter because where the work happens is, Like, that's just the initial, I don't know, Disney light show kind of Vegas strip thing that you're seeing. It's afterwards when you get back home and you're with the kids and you got to try to, you know, like put that into practice and put that into real life. So, yeah, I think that we get to the point where there's less friction or fear going in. Can do.

I wouldn't say that's necessarily the second time or the third time. Yeah. But there's a point. It's like anything else. 12 times seems like a lot. Yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong. And again, there's a lot of, oftentimes when people talk about psychedelics specifically in the veteran space, they are, the two things I've heard them talking about are ayahuasca and ibugane, which is very different.

Again, no experience, but I get lost sometimes when they're telling stories about the two. One of those I've heard described as a very relatively uncomfortable ride. And is that ibukin or is that ayahuasca, meaning? I think it depends who you ask. People will describe ayahuasca as very uncomfortable too. But having done ibegain, the few times that I've done ayahuasca, I just feel like kind of a gentle, nurturing, you know, motherly force. Ibegain is generally what people describe as a tougher ride.

I think there is a lot of resistance. And it's the kind of thing where you don't really know what it's, it is that you're going to have to be letting go of until you're asked to let go of it. It's a direct experience. We can sit there and talk about it, tell you, like try to front load all this information that might be useful. Some of it you might remember, 5, 10% of it you might actually be able to use in real time when you're in there.

But the reality is it's a direct experience. So there's some friction going between like our baseline state and the state that it's asking us to be in for a while. So I think, yeah, it can be a little rough. It asks us for a lot in that process, physically, emotionally. But what I would say, what I've seen with Ibegain, and this is after like thousands of treatments, is in some ways I think it's heavy and it's physically intense.

And in other ways, I think it's kind of easier than other psychedelics. I would think it would be easier maybe than doing a heroic dose of mushrooms and running through the woods. My friend said he wasn't able to run. Okay. He was in a hammock. That tracks. Yeah.

Okay. Sure. He was in a hammock. I think vapor locked in. My word's not his. For a good period of time. Okay. Yeah.

So in that case, maybe, yeah, it gets easier. Today's episode is brought to you by Black Rifle Coffee. Like I said in the beginning, this is Memorial Day. there is no right or wrong way to remember somebody or to memorialize somebody. I think the best we can do is be somebody worth sacrificing for and live your life to the fullest. Now, if you do want to support brands that are by design pillars of support for organizations in the veteran community, Black Rifle Coffee is one of those brands. Head over to black rifle coffee.com. You've heard me talk about them for years. I own one of the coffee shop. I've been involved with the brand. ran for years. And the reason is very, very simple. It has nothing to do with money and everything

to do with the fact that I believe at a very deep level in what they do as an organization and the individuals behind it, like the song that Matt put out that started this episode or the founders Evan and JT and Logan, who they were, who they are, I should say, what they did, not who they were, and what they are doing now. So if you go to the site, you'll see across the top banner, coffee and drinks and merchandise and a place to discover or subscribe or sale. And that's what I would recommend that you do if you're looking for brands to support that still and always will have an ingrained desire to give back and help those that are still serving. So if that's what you're into and you like coffee, even you weirdos out there who like decaf, head over to blackwifelcoffee.

and support them this Memorial Day weekend or any weekend after this, whatever suits your fancy. Back to the show. When I think people have a hard time with psychedelics and some of the stories that we hear about bad trips, it's usually a lot of times people are halfway between being in the psychedelic state and having to manage some kind of social situation. That would be tough. You know what I mean? like being at a party and not really knowing how this how to be in that state fully being able

to trust it and surrender to it or knowing how deep and weird it goes you know what I mean and so when you're in a position where you get to just lay in a hammock or you're completely surrounded by people caring for you and you're just wearing an eye mask and laying down you can go inward and there's a lot less friction that makes sense ibegame kind of forces you to be in that position like it's difficult to get up. Not to jump crazy fast forward, but it was in the news a few weeks ago, Trump signing an executive order. Yeah.

Which I think some people confused that it was, okay, this is going to be legal in the U.S. 100% not the case. Yeah. What are your thoughts on, can you pull up that executive order as well, Michael? I believe it was specific. I don't know the number, but it was specifically about IB gain. They mentioned it. I mean, it covers other psychedelics, but they mentioned.

mentioned, I began a lot very intentionally. What do you think that executive order will actually do, and do you think it will be beneficial? There's a couple of very practical things that it would do if you were going through the whole drug development process with the FDA, and you are getting closer to the end of that process. Which it is not because it hasn't been entered into it yet. It is not even close to the end of that process. Yeah. So, but it would accelerate things at the end of that process.

Okay. That's one of the things that it does. Things like Ibegain is a schedule one drug. So if it gets approved by the FDA, the DEA has to reschedule it. So one of the things that it does is it tries to accelerate the DEA rescheduling so that it happens sort of parallel to the FDA decisions so that there's... Less time perhaps? It saves a few months, yeah.

Something like that. So there's other things like that that it does closer to the end of the process. Okay. That's one of the things. However, it's not at that end of the process yet. It is not. One of the other things that it does is it specifically mentions that Ibegain should be implemented through the Right to Try program. Okay.

So Right to Try was set up for people who have... Terminal end of life, right? Terminal end of life chronic illnesses. So it's even not really sure how that applies to mental health. conditions. You know what I mean? Like it's not quite the same thing to say somebody has terminal cancer and they've expressed suicidality.

Yeah, those are very different things for sure. I mean, both very serious. Yeah. But serious for very different reasons. Yeah. And so there's people, I mean, over the last years, there's been debates about that. Like what kind of mental health conditions could you consider through right to try for good reason to because some of the existing treatments aren't great.

Yeah. I think that's one of the things they were trying to get at here. But what they've done, at least signaling is that there's two things with right to try. One is the DEA shouldn't limit right to try just because something's on schedule one. So you should still be able to access it. That shouldn't be the stopper. The other one is they're kind of pushing it in the direction of right to try should be available for people with serious mental health conditions. So it's not really clear how that gets worked out. That's not a super clear path.

The other complication with right to try is a drug product would have to have already been through a phase one safety trial at least. So that way the FDA will have determined here's the safe dose. And at least we know what the risks are so that they're able to try to weigh risk benefit patient to patient. There's no Ibigane product that's been through a phase one safety trial. So that would be a prerequisite for being able to access it through. How long would that even take? I know that Brian Hubbard, who you've had on podcast and who's a big driver behind what's going on in the States right now, a massive force. I could listen to him read the encyclopedia.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Just Mr. Hubbard, sit down, pick any book you like, and let's just go. I'm saying nothing. I'm just going to listen to your sweet, sweet voice. We should just let him rewrite that thing. It'll be way more interesting. So he thinks that they could be done with the program that he's pursuing there in Texas by September next year. Okay.

He said as early as, right? So there's some complications, and this is where I think, So Ambio has been working with veterans now for five years. And on top of that, we had like 10 years each, all the founders of clinical experience. So we know some of the technical problems that are going to show up down the road. So with a phase one safety trial, there's a bunch of little technical barriers that I'm not 100% sure what dose the FDA is going to approve. there's like the cardiac risk with ibogaine is pretty serious in lower doses you don't cross certain thresholds that the FDA is going to limit for acute prolongation and different

components of the heart rhythm you're trying to keep them within a certain range and not let them expand too much so there's certain barriers that I think would limit create a low upper limit for dosing through the FDA. And so then the question becomes, what life-threatening condition could you treat at those low doses? So even if they get through phase one, so there's still a lot to get worked out,

a lot in the details. Do you think it will be beneficial in the long run what was signed? Or sometimes I worry that things like this will get signed. It's peacocking and it's more for the image. And they know that behind the scenes that they might end up just spinning their tires

and soft sand, but they'll take the peaking. PR victory. And I'm not saying that that's what this is, but I'm not going to sit here and say that that didn't also cross my mind. It's definitely a PR victory. What else it is? I think that we're going to watch it play out. But one thing that it has done, like all those other things are potential future benefits and maybe you could say like marginal. Like right to trial would only apply to a very limited number of people if it does. You know, the other components of the order are going to save months at the end of a 10-year program. So marginal benefits, but one thing

that has for sure done is it's sent a signal to federal agencies and to state programs who are trying to support Ibegee and research and other psychedelic research. So it's sort of emboldened a lot of people in government and other institutions to take a closer look at it and not scrutinize so much. There's some clapback, but that's, I think, the effect that it's had immediately. Is there even enough Ibe gain around if this were to get approved to go around? It's not like stockpiled, so we'd have to make it, but I think we could make it. Can it be made synthetically at this point, or does it have to come from the plant? There's different ways of making IBE gain.

There's pathways to making it synthetically, but when they're doing that, they're making like grams at a time. Is that a lot or a little? No, it's a little. Like we're giving people maybe a gram at a time. Okay. You know, like if you came through based on your body weight,

you might take somewhere like a gram to a gram and a half, somewhere in the middle. It's like half a gram. Yeah. Take it easy. Yeah, one pill of time. Yeah. But yeah, I think gram scale is really just for preclin.

research and animals and stuff like that. That's all that they've mastered right now. And they've done substantial work to be able to synthesize it in way less steps than before. I think they're down to like seven steps. Before it was like 19. So they've done some great work. Okay. But it's small scale.

So all the stuff that's clinically used and all the stuff that is being considered to be able to go into the FDA trials and stuff is all plant-derived. Okay. Yeah. From my understanding, it's pretty slow growing, right? Yep. And aren't you one of the few people, if not the only person that has an actual export license for Iboga? Yeah, I was the first.

I don't think I'm any more the only one. But I would also say that it's a relatively small percentage of what we end up using in the clinic actually comes from Iboga from Gabon. Interesting. And then, yeah, because what happened was, you know, we've been. working on early stages of these problems for a long time already for decades, right? Like people have been using Ibegain building sort of clinical models outside the state since the like early 90s, mid-90s. So around like the 2010s, early 2010s, it started to become a little more obvious that

there was going to be sustainability issues in Gabon because there was no agriculture of Iboga. So people were just harvesting it from like near the village. And then as a naturally occurring plant that they would stumble across? Yeah, because it was more or less like a hunter-gatherer kind of situation. There was certain plants like cassava roots that villages would grow for sustenance. But other than that, there's so much abundance in the forest that you just have a, you know, a subsistence kind of arrangement with the forest. So what happened was as people started to.

like on their way to the big city crossing down the highway just start picking up more material because they would be able to sell it in the markets people started to over harvest close to the village and push back and push back and push back and eventually they got into the purview of like national parks and so gabon made efforts to try to protect the plant and um yeah try to control you know over harvesting and poaching and There's an amazing organization called Blessings of the Forest that's been around since before that time and has been very effective at advocating just in communities for them to plant for their own use and then even for there to be excess to be able to export or sell on the market. So that's been actually building and building and now a lot of communities actually are growing it. Okay.

But in the process, earlier on, when these issues kind of came to the surface, there was people who discovered alternate sources of ibup gain. So clinics actually leaned a lot onto those alternate sources. So there are other trees that you can derive ibogaine from. So most of the stuff that we use at Ambio, we call it semi-synthetic because it's not actually like we're extracting ibogaine out of a plant. We're extracting another precursor, Vocengen, and then converting it into Ibegene. We call it semi-synthetic. And those plants are far more abundant.

There's already a market for them, so they're grown agriculturally and whatnot. How long has Ibegene being used for the medicinal properties? I mean, obviously, this is well before the purview of the global war on terror and veterans finding relief for post-traumatic stress or chemical and substance abuse and addiction, nor are those things unique. to the veteran community for clarity.

But this wasn't discovered to treat veterans. How long has this been around? So it's really hard to do archaeology in the African rainforest because... That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. It's almost like it's rainforest. Yeah.

But there's samples of like Iboga, charcoal and caves from at least 3,000 years ago. So they were going on rides 3,000 years. ago. At least because it wouldn't have been that hard to find, figure it out. You know, like if you were, if you were in the forest and hunting animals, like animals eat it. And so if you see the animals have the same thing to animals. I mean, they have an affinity for it. So I don't know what it does for them. So animals are out there just going for a rip as well. Yeah, elephants, porcupines. Yeah, all kinds of animals. Monkeys. Yeah. The monkeys make sense. I wouldn't have guessed elephants. I feel like elephants would have to eat a tremendous amount. So that was one of the issues with the sustainability and the poaching was that elephants eat the fruits. And so they leave them along the elephant trails. So when people were going out to poach elephants, there was this sort of secondary products that they would pick up along the way.

Anyways, that was one of the problems of the gabineas, like conservation authorities we're dealing with. Anyways, animals have been using it for a long time. So if you were a hunter-gatherer in the forest 10,000 years ago, you know, we're talking about like people have been there since before the last Ice Age. So who knows? We don't really know. But I think what you're also asking is outside of the traditional context and outside of Africa. So it started getting taken out of Africa since like the early 19th century. for specifically medicinal and healing properties?

Well, there was obviously an awareness that people were using it in Africa for that. So that was what drew the curiosity to want to take it and go study it. You know, so, you know, like gentlemen scientists who were, you know, along in their boats would take some back with them as a curio. And that's how it started. But it, can you imagine being 8,000 years ago? with, I don't know what the language was like then, but going on a rocket ship ride and not having the language ability

to describe what happened to you. Yeah. Trying to draw it in a hieroglyph where your buddies are looking at you and maybe sharpening it up an arrow because they need to put you down because they think you've gone crazy. Again, no experience with any of this stuff,

but man, if your language was limited and you had that type of visceral physical experience, would you explain that to your buddies? Well, so interesting that you bring up language. Have you heard of the stoned ape theory? I feel like I have heard of it, but have no idea what it is. Okay. It's just the theory that psychedelics were a big part of our evolution from monkeys

into developing language. Yeah. Meaning it was a large leap essentially in the brain's capacity. from being an ape and moving towards being a homo sapian. Yeah. And so there's an author, Norman Oler. He was the one who sort of broke the news about the amphetamine use in the Nazi military and then about a lot of the psychedelic research that was going on the Nazis.

So he's got a couple of books like that. He's now writing a story where he tries to make the claim that Iboga is probably the thing. that the stoned apes were eating, not necessarily the mushrooms like Terrence McKenna and Joe are talking about. Or two things can be true at once. That's, you know, all of the above, you know, like some guys are eating both mushrooms in it,

so I wouldn't put it past them. Holy cow. Take it easy, people. Man, this one round the edges. They don't do that at the same time, do they? No, I don't know. I couldn't tell you what the monkeys were doing. But the point of the Stone Dave theory is that the thinking is that's how we actually developed language.

Okay. I can see that. Or is part of how we developed that because it would sort of enhance pattern recognition. And there's, I don't know, sometimes you get into these really weird trippy states deep into heroic dose of mushrooms where you're doing like glossolalia and like all these sounds coming out. I mean, I'm not a historian. I'm not a genealogist. I'm not a doctor, but it seems as if there were some leaps along the way that, depending on what you believe, if you believe the evolutionary theory, you know, that there were some big jumps that were made and they don't necessarily understand exactly why, because you can't go back in a time machine and look at it, I guess, unless, I don't know, you take a heroic dose, maybe you can't get a time machine. Whether or not what you see is real or not, I have no idea, but it would, I can buy that theory at least. It seems plausible to me. I don't know, but.

Yeah. It'll be difficult to prove. Yeah. Well, a lot of things are difficult to prove. Sure. But it's interesting. Yeah. Interesting to think about.

To wrap your head around. How did you get into this game? Well, I, there was different sort of threads that brought me to it. One of them was just literature. I liked reading. How did you find that particular topic, though? Yeah. A sea of other topics out there in literature.

There was a book that I came across. us in high school called writing on drugs. And it was basically somebody looking at historically all these sort of seminal works of fiction and poetry that were inspired by the drugs that were available to authors at that time. I get it. You know, like Frankenstein, like Mary Shelley was drinking Loudoun, which was like opium infused wine and, you know, there's different. Probably a wild ride. Yeah. I've enjoyed plenty of wine. Never had any opium? Yeah, I didn't mean either.

But yeah, lots of stories like that. So by the end of the book, you know, you started talking about like Ken Kese and some of the psychedelics. And I got really interested in the fact that literature was maybe tied to these actual experiences that people were having. And there's something that you could do to enhance the imagination. So that was what sort of drew me into it. How old were you at that time?

I was in high school. So I was like 17. Okay. Yeah. It drew you into it from, the perspective you wanted to explore them yourself? Because obviously what you have done for many years is treat other people with these things, which I probably, I'll assume that you didn't even realize was possible at that time. Yeah. No, there wasn't the kind of framework or idea. People

were starting to, in small circles, talk about an idea like a clinic, like what we have. Okay. But I didn't know about that. So, no, there was that that that. That I had. had this curiosity about literature and art and what it was doing. You know, it's easy to also see what it did for musicians. You know, it didn't hurt. But then at the same time in high school, I also got put on antidepressants. So I just had a little period of time where I was a little bit pissed off

and I got prescribed Zoloft. How many times did you talk with somebody before they made the prescription? I went into the general doctor. my family doctor, and they gave me a nine-item questionnaire with Zoloft written on the top, and I filled out the questionnaire like multiple choice, and then I got a Zoloft prescription. So that took, it didn't take very long. Okay. Yeah.

Man, they didn't explore any other options for a young man being frustrated and angry as somebody who was a young man at a point in time in my life and have raised two other young men. Guess what is very common? frustration and anger in young men. Yeah, you know, I mean, it wasn't, it wasn't just impacting me, right? Like, it was impacting my, you know, the school and my family and stuff. So it was an answer. Yeah.

It was an answer to the problem. It wasn't necessarily the right answer, but it was something concrete. How'd that answer treat you? Not well. Like, I had a really rough go. It just felt numb, you know, and I, it didn't want to be on them. So eventually, I realized when they kept switching me from one to the other because I couldn't sleep, I just decided to come off. And it was the withdrawal that was very bad for me. So I guess

some of the literature says that there's like 20 to 25 percent of people that have very bad withdrawal, and I was one of them. What does it feel like? So I just kind of went around for a couple of years. I didn't know if I was real or like the world around me was real. Years? Yeah, I kind of felt like I was in a in a bubble, like trapped somewhere inside, you know. How were you able to operate, but also be in that bubble wondering whether or not you were real yeah i mean i wasn't like not well i wasn't operating you weren't yeah you weren't uh what's the term looks maxing or you weren't performance you weren't you weren't performance maxing no i wasn't going to pass buds you know i was who it's you know most people can't yeah yeah maybe though the secret to buds is being in the bubble maybe but not that

bubble i don't think at least not for me like it wasn't helpful how long were you on them for um like two years. So a longer time in that bubble than you were actually on the medication itself. Yeah, I spent a couple years off of it. Like it was, that is a rough bargain. Nothing was getting better or changing. I just knew I didn't want to go back on them. Yeah. So anyways, because I was interested in psychedelics because of all the stuff I read about them, I took mushrooms one time and just came alive again. And I did it like in a park, you know, with some friends and we were going around and we thought we were being telepathic with each other.

We kind of were. We were just having a trip. Yeah. But then I felt amazing. For how long? Just while you were on the mushrooms or did that last beyond it? No, it was like something broke open and I could start to feel real again. You know, like kind of catch back up with my body.

That had to have been amazing. Yeah, it was amazing. I mean, I would like shed tears in front of a tree. and gave it a big hug. But the point was, like, afterwards, I felt like I had to figure out what to, what to do next, you know, because I had energy. What age were you? So I would have been, like, 22, 21, 22.

Okay. What was after that? Yeah, I mean, at that point, I was, like, pretty committed to psychedelics. As of that. Well, psychedelics as a personal treatment, or did you have the idea for Ambio in your head at that point? I knew that I wanted to do something with them, but my experience was so direct and so personal that the options available at that time were really limited.

Like, I could have maybe tried to go back to school and get a master's degree and maybe in my doctoral studies, some really forward-looking professor might have let me do a project on them or something. And that wasn't what I wanted. Yeah, that sounds like castrating yourself with a dull stone. Yeah.

So that's not what I went for. I got involved in drug policy advocacy. And I was really just interested in talking about psychedelics, but at the time, what people were talking about was opiates. They were talking about heroin overdoses. They were talking about, like in Canada at the time. Yeah, we should be clear. You were born and raised in Canada. That's right.

Yeah. So at the time, people were talking about the supervised injection site that had just opened up in the downtown east side of Vancouver, which, you know, which is. which is a very particular response to a very particular problem that is in the downtown east side of Vancouver. And they were turning out really good results preventing overdose because there was a massive crisis there. So there was all these kind of discussions going on. So I got involved learning about harm reduction and drug user rights and kind of very ground up peer-driven problems. And that is the world that I began. occupied. It's just that somebody had to sort of point me out, oh, you're also interested in

psychedelics. You should look at Ibegain because it sort of brings all these threads together. And so that's why I ended up around Ibegain. How'd you first experience it and where? I went to a conference and then I decided I wanted to go learn more and I got in touch with a clinic in Tijuana and I went down and just started to work and apprentice and learn. So at that time, it was, I called them like the second generation of Ibegain providers. They were all people who had been treated. Yeah. Because they were either on heroin or meth or a combination of things.

And they came off and then wanted to pass that forward and had a vision to improve the care that they received. So Ivy game, at least in the context that I have heard in talking with my peers, is almost always with TBI post-traumatic stress is a bumer. pocket. Alcohol, addiction, dependency, somewhere in that milieu, which can get really gnarly. Some opiates as well. People who have had a bunch of surgery, just the classic, I'll say, early 2000s model of your post, you know, you're going to get morphine during, you're going to get opiates after the opiate prescription ends. People find real world solutions to problems, which can, and if people don't know what I'm talking about, the jump between, uh,

you know, the opiates that you're prescribed and the opiates that you can find on the street is a jump that people will make if they need it to survive, as rough it that is. I didn't realize it had the effective nature, heroin and methamphetamine and all of those. Does it just addiction that it really helps deal with? So it's really well suited to helping with opiate withdrawal. Okay. In particular. Opiate withdrawal is famously difficult. Yeah.

You know, and there was a young gentleman in Staten Island, New York, named Howard Lotzoff, and it was 1962. At the time, people were experimenting with all kinds of things, and he was part of that. But he was also a habitual heroin user. And because he was well enough connected, I guess somebody showed him a vial of Ibogaine because it was floating around a little bit back in the 60s. What are they doing with it? I mean, I mean, we'd have to back up.

There was a, there was a whole history that brought it up to that point, including for decades it was a prescription drug in France. For what? In small doses, but they were using it to treat like, sort of like depression or malaise or whatever. Malays. You know, like very, there's a laundry list of things that they said. The term that I associate with Wacker over there. The athletes, apparently go really into it.

It was banned by the international psyche. Association because it was, I guess, enough of a problem. So people have been messing around with this for a while. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. People have been messing around with it for a while. So Howard took some Ibegain and realized that he didn't have any withdrawal from heroin and that he didn't have any desire to use heroin anymore, which was weird because he was addicted to heroin.

How does it do that? Um, I mean, I mean, we know a little bit. The proper answer is we don't fully and completely know exactly how it does. But one of the things that it does is, like, if you take opiates for the first time, you know, it's going to have a much stronger effect on you than somebody who's been taking it for a long time. So the body gets oversensitized to it. So you have to keep taking more and more and more and more.

Hence leading to overdoses. Yeah, exactly. Like if somebody were stop taking and then go back and use the same thing. same amount that they were taking, you can potentiate an overdose. So what Ibegain seems to do is it really quickly resensitizes the body so that you can come back to homeostasis without needing an external intervention. Which I feel like would be absolutely utterly life-changing. Yeah. So it's not only the fact that it's, you know, helping to assuage this three to seven days of acute fever.

But it's like even people go through that and then they can spend weeks or months or a year or more still kind of struggling. Like the body takes a long time to recover from a long opioid habit. Does it have the same effectiveness? Like you mentioned, heroin, methamphetamine. It's a helpful off ramp for them. Yeah. So with ibogaine and heroin, it's going to immediately help.

Okay. like immediately help with the withdrawal. And that's amazing for people. But then it helps with the cravings and stuff afterwards. With methamphetamine and cocaine and stuff, you don't have the same acute withdrawal, but it still helps with the cravings and stuff afterwards. What about fentanyl?

Fentanyl. Yeah, I mean, fentanyl is an opiate. It's just a stronger opiate. Okay. There's other kind of complications around it. But essentially, we can do the same thing. We can help people come off of fentanyl. when they're walking out of the ibegain treatment and the clinic they're no longer physically

dependent on opiates it means that they can go home like they're not sick in bed you know for days and weeks of time like unable to do anything else like they're able to go home yeah i've never been around somebody coming off of opiates but i can yeah it's rough i can only imagine yeah yeah then and the cravings afterwards as well it's the afterward that really is the challenge for people. Like if heroin, you know, recovery was just about being sick for a couple of days, it wouldn't be as difficult as it is. It's really the long, you know, stretch afterwards. And so Ibegan seems to do it. It's like if it puts people like six or nine months up the road. It's not a cure. Like it's, you know, you can still do what you could do whatever you want, you know. And if there was

good reasons, or maybe not good reasons, but at least a reason why you were using opium, that you still haven't completely put the bed. I mean, you can go back and be in the same situation. Yeah. Yeah, there's no up into this point in my life. I have not found, nor have I found anybody who has found the magic button that you can push that removes all work that the human being has to do to get to the place where they want to be. There's some tools that can accelerate the process.

And I think what you're talking about with IB gain is certainly one of those from a withdrawal, recovery, reorienting your mind. but that actually is a little bit of my fear as well that this particular medication will be perceived as some magic potion. Oh, I just super fucked up right now. It's okay, though, because I'm going to go down, I'll come back, and everything's going to be fine. And nowhere in that is the work that,

the people that I have talked to have had the most success do the work before, the work during, the work after. And even then, quite a few people, I know, we'll go back again just to top off, I feel like, is the term that they've used. Right on. Yeah. Sure. I mean, and also you get to the point where, you know, like if you learn how to master something at some point, you're doing smaller tweaks.

Yeah. But like, it's worth it. Yeah, for sure. You know. Yeah, you're polishing the blade a little bit. Yeah. So you went down. I would assume your first exposure to it then was in helping other people because you said that you were.

What was that like watching somebody? What does it look like as somebody is going through an IV gain treatment? Are they moving around a lot? Are they unable to move? I mean, I'm sure the experience has varied, but what did you see when you first went down there? I mean, opiate treatment takes a little while. Like you can't just give somebody ibogaine right away.

So people would come down and they'd have to stabilize. So the first sort of stage of the treatment is just actually going on more. Like whatever you were coming in on, we're going to put on morphine for a while. So you don't crash into that withdrawal phase? We're not trying to throw you into withdrawal. It's actually trying to make this humane and comfortable as possible. Sometimes switching off of fentanyl onto morphine is not the smoothest, but it definitely is not like being cold turkey. Like it helps.

Okay. So we're trying to stabilize people. And then just because of morphine is easier to deal with, we can treat people straight off of morphine. So people would take morphine, morphine, morphine, and then the day of the treatment, you may be like middle of the day, take your last dose of morphine. And that evening, by the time that you start to feel like the itchy sensation of withdrawal creeping in, we can start to administer ibigaine. And then people are just on the trip. The withdrawals kind of melt away in the first 30 minutes. Is this intervenous?

Do you drink it? Is it a pill? It's a pill. Yeah, it's a powder. So it gets encapsulated and then take a couple of those capsules. And so what it looks like when people are taking it is it really does ask you to lay down. Like it asks you physically for a lot of energy in higher doses. Yeah.

So, you know, in the clinical setting, there'd be comfortable beds and a heart monitor and a paramedic or a doctor kind of watching making sure people are okay. whole time. And if you need to get up and go to the bathroom or something like that, you can kind of put your hand up and let somebody know what you need. And with some help, you can walk over to the bathroom. And you just want to get back to bed as soon as you can, you know. You're not trying to go to a dance party or vision quest. No. Go stand and stare at a sunset. Yeah. And that's really, it really asks you to go inward. So from an outsider watching it, is, the person generally still? Are they moving around a bit? Because if it's an inward journey,

is it physically taxing? I mean, are people sweating? Are they twitching? Those are all sort of symptoms of withdrawal. So a lot of them are treated by the Ibe gain. It depends if you're getting the dose right and how the treatment's gone. But for the most part, yeah, people are prone to be still the whole time. What do you do if somebody is in the throes of alcohol dependency? How do you keep them from going into withdrawals if they come down there? So it depends because a lot of people are coming down and they've been drinking a lot and they're able to just stop. So we just say, like, you've got to be able to stop drinking alcohol for about five days before the treatment. And if you can do that, then we can treat you with ibup gain.

And then... What if they can't? If they can't, one of the reasons might be because the withdrawals are really severe. Yeah. And so we would put them on benzos, like Valium and Xanax or kinds of benzos. To that point where treatment is an actual option. Yeah. It's the same thing that morphine does for heroin is the benzos are going to stabilize them.

But that's the treatment for coming off of alcohol. Like if you went to a hospital, that's what they would do too. They would put benzos. So it stops the shakes and stuff. You only need to take benzos for a couple of days as the alcohol goes out your system and then you can stop taking them. What kind of results have you guys seen for alcohol? Well, I think it depends because alcohol is around and a lot of people find it for different reasons. So the reasons why I think that a lot of ear buddies and other seals have been getting benefit from it is pretty specific.

And a lot of guys have mild traumatic brain injury from being around. explosions and high caliber rough and fire. Yeah. So I think in that sense, if we're doing something to address some of the underlying condition, which we're just seeing like early signals of this and trying to understand what it all means. But it seems like that's the potential that's on the table is what's happening is it's doing something regenerative and treating the mild traumatic brain injury.

So if it's addressing some of the underlying condition, then you don't need as much of the the alcohol maybe or the other self-medication. It's the same thing with opiates. Like we didn't really get a good glimpse of what was going on until we started working with veterans. Really? Because I saw stuff. Like there was a case that I saw, I don't know, it was like 10 or 12 years ago, but somebody came down and had Tourette's, but was also a heroin user.

And actually, they were using. heroin was one of the only things that would help to control their ticks. I mean, okay. I would have looked for some other options, but I'm not here to tell people out of cannabis. They started with cannabis, you know, and cannabis was helpful, and they smoked a lot of cannabis and eventually somehow they got onto heroin. But we did a detox for them, and then they didn't have any more Tourette's symptoms.

Really? Yeah. So there was like little signals of that. Like, hey, maybe there's something else. Yeah, going on. going on, you know. But for the most part, when people started to feel better and look better and do better afterwards, you mostly attribute that to the fact that they're not on hardcore drugs anymore. It's fair. So it was hard to tease out what was exactly going on. And so now with,

you know, veterans coming down, it's been a little bit, it's different because people are not, some people are medicating a lot, but some people aren't. Yeah. You know, and so, We're able to get a better glimpse at something. Like, for example, one guy, we wrote a case study about this, but he was drinking a lot and he started getting vertigo. And he thought it had to do with the drinking. And so he came down and did a treatment and he stopped drinking and the vertigo stopped. And then I can't remember how many months later, it was like four or six months later or something,

the vertigo started to come back, but he wasn't drinking anymore. So he went into a neurologist and got tested and diagnosed for MS. So lucky for him, it probably accelerated his process of figuring out there was something going on. But then he also was able to put two and two together like, hey, the Ibogaine actually did something for the vertigo too. So it must have done something for the MS. So he came back down and did another treatment. And he's sort of, he's been one of the guys who's been not super regularly, but he's been down several times. How are the MS symptoms?

Much better. So after the second treatment, he went from, he couldn't sign his name on a check because of just motor problems. He had a hard time jogging because his legs would get crossed in front of one another. Afterwards, he went and ran an ultramarathon. I don't know why. He said, I'd never do that again. But the point was he could do it and he showed himself he could do it. That was a huge, huge gain.

Do you live in North America? Yeah. What are the, I don't know what other word to use other than traditional doctors that he was seeing for the MS. What are their thoughts on that? What are they? Like, why would that be after Ibegain? Yes. I mean, like you said, it's not necessarily understood how, but also if it's having the effect that you wanted to, maybe that's not the most important aspect of it is the explaining how.

I mean, if it's helping somebody right and they do an ultramarathon after not being able to jog, I'm going to say that's, a step in the right direction. I'm just curious how traditional medicine looks at that not being able to explain the mechanism of what's going on there. Well, you know, if we hadn't have published a case study,

I don't think medicine would have even, it wouldn't have even blipped on the radar. So we were lucky because when he came down for a second treatment, there was somebody else who came down for MSS who had more advanced MSS, like she needed a walker, sorry, a scooter to get around. She was less mobile.

But both of them, we had brain scans before and after. So he had a brain scan because he got diagnosed several months before. So he just had a follow-up scan. And his in particular, they were able to reveal the lesions in the white matter of his brain were reduced in size by about 71%. So demonstrable change. Yeah. Like structural change.

change in the white matter of the brain, which normally doesn't happen. Yeah. How did the woman fare? Did she have some improvement? She had improvement. It was more gradual. Her case was more advanced, but we didn't notice the same kind of reduction in lesions. And so we put them both together because we want to say, look, these are case studies.

Case studies have a place in medicine to try to initiate a conversation, but we're not able to make a claim that this is going to reduce MS. lesions. We've seen it since. It's an interesting thing to continue to study, you know, but we wouldn't have had that. I think what I was, what I was getting to was when we were just treating people for heroin addiction, things like that were probably going on underneath all the time and we just had no idea. Like there's all kinds of stuff that we don't know about. we just assume is happening. Like, for example, when somebody overdoses on whatever opiate fentanyl say,

they're sometimes stopping breathing for a little while. So you get cellular damage in your brain when that happens, right? Yeah, so somebody rolls up in Narcan. So then it becomes a compounding problem. Because if you're getting sort of neurological damage as you go, and that's your sort of main way of addressing discomfort. And it also becomes a bit of a trap because then you're not just dealing with withdrawal. You also have all these other symptoms that you can't even tease out what's happening anymore.

So we don't even know all the potential ways that Abigain might be helping, but it's definitely multi-layered. So when you ask, like, how does Abigail help for alcohol? I don't know. It's a little bit more complicated than that, I think. But we've seen a lot of people like you described when we're on the way here, you know, change their relationship with alcohol. Instantaneously. I would almost describe it as, and I don't know if this will make sense to people, their eyes were brighter. It was as if they were emerging from a cave perhaps and more light was just a clarity.

Again, and that has been with one exception, my buddy Dave. who and like I was saying on the way over here I am not sure if it was I began or ayahuasca I know he tried multiple avenues he is the only person I know of where it didn't have that impact in effect and his words not mine he ended up ended up making the decision to take his own life a few years ago and I'm okay talking about I wrote about it in the book it's one of the chapters and he was my he was the standard for what I thought a seal I still what I still think a seal is. He was a stud.

And to find out how much he was internally struggling was heartbreaking. Yeah. And he couldn't figure out why it would work for everybody else, but not for him. Yeah. It's tough. I think that is the problem with overblowing the success stories. It's not magic. There was a problem.

One of the problems that came up when the executive order happened was we got to, you got to send a text to Joe. Because he messaged the, the president saying that it was 80% effective for people coming off of opiates. Oh, you just should have told him 100. If we're going to make up numbers, let's go big. In the general neighborhood, right? 142% effective, sir.

Yeah. I'm sure he's heard it since because NBC challenged the FDA commissioner and whatnot. So anyways, I don't think we can put a great number on it. There are better numbers about what it's doing, but I don't think that's a good way of talking about what it does. I think as much as we need people to go and say, have this amazing experience, I'm running an ultra-marathon.

I have 71% less volume in my lesions that are causing my MS. Those are really cool stories. But we also need people to be able to come and tell the story about how it wasn't so straightforward. Like it was a journey. Yeah, a before, a during, and an after. Yeah. Again, the work, God, is human beings.

and I've caught myself in this trap so many times. You're just looking for the thing that helps you bridge or go around the hard work that you need to do. Yeah. And that's never, sorry, it's just never the answer. Yeah. Work has to be done. I mean, what you're talking about sounds like a fantastically amazing tool. Yeah.

But it doesn't do it for you. No. I mean, so the way that it's contextualized in Africa is as an initiation. But as you would know from. having been through kinds of rites of passage, you know, the initiation is just the beginning. It's not the end state. It's the beginning. It's just the start of the journey now.

Yeah. And so really that's, I think, what we're missing a kind of framework for. Like, we're looking at this to be, to fit into the framework of evidence-based medicine. But I think it's not evidence-based medicine. It's culture. like there's something going on underneath. There's something physiological that it's addressing. But I also can't discount that part of the reason why a lot of guys are coming back

and part of what they're doing is they're going through this kind of other right of passage that's reconnecting them with all the guys who have just been through it. And it's sort of weaving back a community and giving another mission to fight for. Or connecting them back with the person that they perhaps thought that they had lost, which was themselves. That person that looked for. ride of passage that looked for physically challenging things and mentally challenging things. And did them. And did them. And yeah, I mean, losing your purpose, losing your sense of yourself,

that is a dangerous place to be for anybody. Yeah. Yeah, you reconnect people with that. I know you've been through two of the traditional initiations. What was that like? And how did they view it? You know, you mentioned they view it as a beginning or an entry. Yeah. What does that look like when you go down there and you go through one of the traditional initiations. So by the time that I went to Africa, I had been working around the clinics in Mexico for like five years. Did you had experienced I began before that? Smaller doses. Okay. They gave you a little ride, did they? I had done smaller doses because so the clinic that I went to had several fatalities, not while I was there. It happened before I was there. I didn't know about when I went

down, but as I was there, kind of learned about that there's risks taking avidavine. There's cardiac risks. There's risks of drug interactions. Prior to a certain point, like, people didn't know anything about it. And then there was a gradual accumulation of knowledge about how to screen out potential problems. When you say cardiac, do you mean heart attack, essentially? So, no, it's very, I mean, heart attack could be a risk for it, like if people had previous heart attacks. But there's a very specific problem with the heart where Ibegain stops potassium from being absorbed into cardiac cells. And potassium is part of the electrical conduction of the heart. So if you stop being able to absorb potassium, there's part of the heart rhythm gets a little.

little bit extended. Gotcha. And if it extends too much, then you get closer and closer to an arrhythmia. Okay. And then you have to intervene. Okay. So there's other medications that also extend that same interval. So if you're taking any of those, you got to stop taking them.

Some people just have low potassium or they have an extended QT interval. So they're very specific problems that we have to be able to screen for. Some of them, you can just give people magnesium or potassium in it'll help to close the gap. so they can be ready for treatment. But you have to be able to identify it first. Gotcha. But those are all things that we learned from because there was professors

who were doing forensic studies on the autopsies of people that, you know, had passed away. So when I went down, the woman, Claire Wilkins was the director of the clinic. And she had been experimenting with other ways of dosing people to walk them off more slowly using smaller doses over time from opiates.

Okay. And so she had become more cautious about giving people high doses. And I didn't need a treatment as wanted one. So she started giving me small doses, which was actually a great education because I got to learn a little bit more gradually about Ibogaine's effects. There was part of me too that wanted this like sudden change in my life. but it sort of frustrated that urge and made me wait and be patient. So by the time I went to Africa, I'd been around for about five years,

and I kind of knew the terrain of what the I Begin experience was like, but it was the largest dose that I'd taken. Yeah. Talk to me about the setting of that. I'm assuming you were probably not in a clinical environment when they hooked you up with that one. No. It's a very different kind of environment. Very beautiful. Very poetic, very artistic. It's gorgeous. And then they shoot you into space? Yeah, yeah. One of the components of, I guess, because you call a set and setting going in, so like their set is like your expectations and your setting is everything around you. I had been organizing conferences because there was a, you know, I was working at one clinic.

There was several of them. There was people in other countries outside of Mexico who'd been working with Ibegin, developing clinical practices. And it was still a pretty small group of people. But I organized conferences that we came together and we would talk about the research that have been coming out. We talked about medical safety. And when I organized the first one of those, I got an email from a not-for-profit organizer in Gabon explaining the sustainability challenge that was happening there. So invited him to come and present about that. Anyways, it was him.

His name is Jan Gouillon. He's the strategic force behind blessings of the forest who I talked about who has been. advocating for communities to be able to grow and cultivate a boga. He invited me to go. So there was a little bit of, you know, I was organizing these conferences. I was sort of like one of the earlier Western people who was working with Ibegan who went. So they really wanted me to see something. So they really wanted me to have a good, strong experience.

Like that was a component of the setting for me. Okay. So. But yeah, I got to say the ritual is, it was beautiful. The first time I went, there's different traditions. There's different practices. Like oversimplify it a little bit and say the first one I did, they use really high doses. It looks a little bit more like what we do at the clinic.

Do really high doses and then you lay down and it's kind of you and the medicine. There was a ceremony going on around me. There's people playing music and singing and stuff. but I could hear them over there doing that and I was in another space sunk into the ground or just in a different experience. And that's where I was for a couple of days.

I just laying on the floor. A couple of days? Yeah, I think at least two days I was laid out. How much did they give you? A lot, yeah. Yeah, I tried to do the calculation later and I think it was somewhere in the range of like four to ten times what we would normally give somebody at the clinic and we

rock and roll at the clinic too yeah was this pills that you took no so in in gabon it's a it's a root bark so they take up the root of the tree and they peel off the bark of the roots wash it powder it and then it's dried and you eat that it's very bitter oh my god so you were just eating a lot of material yeah yeah Two days of just being rocked. Yeah, it was like that for two days. And then I got malaria. I had to treat it.

I eventually got back up. But I actually was helpful for me later. I didn't really see a whole lot. I had some kind of visions like at some point because the woods really bitter. It can actually kind of make your mouth numb if you eat a lot of it. So like I couldn't feel my face or my throat. but I would feel like the register of like the weight of the wood just like hit my tongue and then try to swallow it

but it would feel like a lightning bolt like like going down my spine and it would shudder. So I remember seeing certain stuff like that but it wasn't a journey and a tapestry of thing. It was really just I felt like what it did was like anchored me in Gabon, the jungle. Like it just showed me like, now this is what it sounds like actually the rattles kind of weave in with the sound of the

the jungle yeah you know what I mean like it's it's not necessarily just what people are doing it's that it's perfectly tuned with the environment that they're in you know I mean you can't you can't take that out the jungle anyways yeah I felt just anchored like the center for me of the story became that. How did that impact you when you went back to Mexico were treating people after you had that experience? So it was an initiation. It took time for me to really understand what that meant for me.

It was a lot to unpack. Yeah. It was a couple of years at least of kind of going through an arc of change and kind of renegotiating the direction that I was taking and how I had framed things. But eventually I kind of got onto a new track and then I felt like now I'm, now I just have a different set of work to do. But it was kind of asking me to try to integrate those changes of worldview into how we do things clinically. So there's aspects of that that I think show up at Ambio. So how did you come up with the idea for your own clinic?

Obviously you were apprenticing at somebody else's clinic. Like you said, there was a variety. Were they focusing mostly on addiction recovery, safe to say? Yeah. During that time? For sure. Mostly it was people who were coming off of opiates or sometimes other drugs. Okay.

That was the story about Ibegain for a long time, for decades. And it wasn't until a couple of Navy Seals went down and started to bring other guys down. How did the first ones find it? Do you know? No. But there may have been people who had been going down because of a day. as well. Okay.

So that might have been the thread. But I also know that one of the early adopters, I guess, that as a doctor in Tijuana named Martin Polenko, and there's a clinical psychologist that he worked with named Joseph Barsooglia, they're both still very active in the community and doing a lot of really good research. They realized that they could build a program for veterans. And so there was sort of an invitation that they built it up around some early interest they saw. So yeah, so it just sort of grew and grew.

And there was a point where Amber and Marcus Capone were looking for a place to send a stream now of people. And so my business partner Trevor Miller and myself and a college, of ours, Jose and Sunza, who's like our chief medical officer. He's super plugged into the whole medical and clinical network in Tijuana that had been there doing that for a long time. Came together and we put Ambio up. How was that process? It wasn't really quick for us because we knew exactly what it needed to look like. It was different than what existed before. How so? We started bringing people down in groups. You can't do that with opioids. You can't do that with addiction.

Really? No. Because you have to stabilize people. And when they're stabilizing, you don't know how long they're going to need to stabilize for. And also, if somebody is coming to try to get off of heroin, you can't say, okay, we've got a spot for you like three months from now. We'll get everybody down on a Monday.

It's going to take seven days. Like, it just doesn't work like that. You have to have more flexibility. But with the vats, we could do that. And it was better to do. do it like that. So when you had the design for Ambio in mind, it was veteran treatment focused? Yeah, that was the request we were responding to was can we build a program for veterans? How'd you do it? Mostly seals. I mean, what does it look like? Yeah. Yeah, so we, we established it would be a

five-day program. So Vets Inc. was the not-for-profit. It was actually, Amber and Marcus, yep. Yeah, Amber and Marcus. They're paying for a lot of people and they had a whole bunch of resources already built up around like before and after and whatnot. So we, um, we have people down for five days. People come down and then go through a bunch of the medical screening. And then we do something hard actually on the first day or, you know, that's what it's designed to be as like a bonding experience and you start getting in the mindset. So we bring people to a tema scouts, like a Mexican sweat lodge. And so you go in the heat in the dark and it's uncomfortable and you got to you got to stick it out but sort of gets you in the headspace of you know we're we're doing something this isn't the four seasons yeah but then you know

we go back to the five seasons and it's comfortable the beds are comfortable there too and the food's great but you know we we got to mix it in yeah and then so the next day we're doing a lot of prep so we show people some breathing techniques that you can use we we sort of set the stage I had a kind of a few ideas about how we could try to give people some tools that you can actually navigate in the experience a little bit and so we would try to lay some of that out

like how can you try to interact with it a little bit so for example we're encouraging people to go into some questions because it's very common people to be able to describe some kind of like So when if you take something like mushrooms or LSD or something like that, sometimes it kind of feels like the environment around you is sort of lit up. Okay.

Or saturated. From a colored perspective? Color, movement, breath. It kind of just feels like meaning maybe too. Okay. It's saturated. And then internally too, like your thoughts and feelings also feel the sense of like urgency and significance. They're big. And then so that makes it a little bit harder for you to

notice where's the normal boundary between yourself and what's around you because everything's sort of connecting. And with Ibegain, it's almost the opposites where like people are not very interested in what's going on in the room around them. Like you can kind of hear it maybe a little bit, but you're so involved in what's going on internally, really asks you to go inward. And then there, people often describe the sense of like, it showed me or like they're watching a movie or something. It's like you can be fairly aware of where you are and your body and stuff, but it's almost like something else is being presented to you.

As in a challenge or something that you need to face or hurdle or what's standing in your maybe all of those things or yeah maybe or it could even it could be maybe it could be part of a story it could be something that you're seeing it could be something of meaning the the thoughts that are coming to you kind of feel like they're orchestrated somehow you know what I mean sort of like you're interacting with something that's a little bit not you okay like something is showing you something and there's a bit of a sense often that you can interact with that. Like, people get to the point where they're having full-blown back-and-forth dialogues. But it can be as simple as, you know, like, sometimes when things are coming on

really fast at first, or if things feel really chaotic, you can kind of try to say, like, hey, hey, this is a lot. Can you just, you know, try to calm down a bit? Or like, I can't process this much. You know what I mean? But, like, literally, you can try to interact with it. So we'd try to set that up so that people feel like that you have a little bit of like agency inside of the experience to navigate with rather than just curling up and trying to ride it out. You know what I mean? Like you can kind of come and meet it where it is and try to engage it a little bit. Okay. You know, so we'd try to set that up.

That's a lot of the second days doing that. Get a massage. Just have some time. Back to the four seasons again. Yes. And then you go back and do some hard shit. So then we do the Ivagane at night. Okay.

Yeah. And it's at night because you're going to be up all night and you're going to be up all the next day. And then you hopefully sleep the following night. But this way, you know, nighttime is nice because when you're doing it, you just want to have your eyes closed and go inward. You don't want bright lights everywhere. But the big, heavy, acute phase is maybe eight to 12 hours.

So by the time you're coming out of that, the sun's broke to. the windows and it's kind of it's brighter and you know so it's nice are you know are you in an individual setting or is this a group setting it's a group okay yeah yeah and then so the day after is recovery day the day after people call it a gray day okay yeah for various reasons nobody calls it a rainbow day we've tried to see if that'll catch on but not so much no it's it's it's still going it's just like if you want to, you can get up and go to your room. Sometimes people are ready to have like bacon and eggs for breakfast, but for the most part, it's really just meditative. Like there's nothing to do.

You know, like mostly you're just laying there and still have your eyes closed or looking up at the ceiling and just riding it out. Okay. So hopefully you sleep that. What would that be the fourth night? Gray days the fourth day? Great day is the third night. Then you're going to hopefully sleep, yeah. Okay.

What about the fourth day? Yeah. So that day, I mean, at that point, you're more likely coming out of it. Like by the time that you've had some food and you've had a good night of sleep and you've had a shower, you sit to feel a little better. So you start kind of getting some energy back. That's when it's not still happening to you the same way so we can kind of talk about what happened. you know, we can look back at it and start to put it into words a little bit. And then people have the option of doing 5MEODMT.

I've heard quite a bit about that as well. What is the value of pairing those two? Well, what we've seen is that it, for some people, Ibegain leaves a sort of trailing ellipses, like not a sense of, a definite ending or conclusion. You know, like it's often not what people expected. I haven't heard anybody say, that's exactly what I thought it would be.

So there's a lot to process. Sometimes it doesn't really make sense the way that you expect that it might have. So 5MEO is a little bit more reliable as a psychedelic. There's also a certain number of people like, I don't know, 25, 30%, who like me don't see very much at all. On Ivy. Yeah. And so they're coming out with, there's still a lot to work with.

I know that everybody's going to be fine down the road, but they're still like not sure what to do with it. Anyways, FiveMEO is a lot more reliable as a psychedelic. And it's also in a lot of ways the opposite of Ibegain. One being, you know, it's shorter and whatnot. But what I was describing about Ibegain's like, you're you and then it's presenting you with something else. This is kind of like a duality.

It's like me and this thing that I'm interacting with back and forth. So there's a kind of a binary state. Five MEO people often talk about this kind of non-dual state. Yeah. It's like going into warp drive. Yeah. And like the boundary between you and everything else maybe dissolves. It's, again, no experience.

Michael, you can probably find videos on YouTube of people doing 5MEO DMT. You want to talk about orbit. Yeah. Holy cow. Yeah. It's strong. Yeah. And I mean, again, they say what, it lasts for, what, 10, 15 minutes on the long side,

but they feel like the experience is much longer than that? I would say 10, 15 minutes would be like the strongest acute phase. So even shorter than that? No, it's longer. Like there's still, then you're still coming out of it and kind of reconnecting with what's around you and stuff. But 40 minutes later, people are having snacks and, you know, talking about it. Not 15 minutes in. It seems like they're in a pixel-pixelated universe that they question the reality of it.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's not a trifle. Yeah. It's actually quite spiritual for a lot of people. That is how I've heard it described too. Yeah. The last friend of mine He was telling me They were talking through the process And it was

Essentially that last huge inhalation And then The Elon Musk Starlink rocket Just Full burn Yeah It's like when you dump it into warp drive

And you see the stars coming at And nobody Yet That I have seen Can describe it Truly accurately They're just like Yeah

It's kind of like that But also that doesn't do it justice at all. Yeah. And also, I don't know, I could try to put it into words and then the next person's going to have a different experience. There's probably a way that you could do it. But, yeah, it's, it's difficult to translate. It's a, it's a direct experience for sure. And you're intentionally introducing that because of the type of experience that ibugane is. What we've seen so clinically, ibogaine is a low. it's like you go into this valley of cognitive and physical function.

And then you have to rebuild back up out of it. So when you're getting some sort of sense of optimization, this is after. After you've physically recovered. 5MEO accelerates that process for a lot of people. And not only the physical part, but also the emotional and the cognitive part for people. So it helps to I think because of like the opposite force

of kind of reconnecting people back with the world so it's you know that unit of feeling that people have yeah it kind of helps to provide that sense of conclusion and so I was skeptical about it when I first heard about it too but what we've seen in practice you know like yeah it's a it it it's a very big help for a bunch of people and that's the fourth day yeah that's the fourth day and then that day is also it's just about sort of finding the sense of conclusion i think to the experience it would be too early to go home yeah so then

people are traveling home the next morning after that after another night of sleep and what do you send them home with or do they leave with whatever they learned from the experience and the homework that they got answers to or questions during the experience? Or do you send them back with a template of things they need to work on? Or is that part of the individual journey? Today's podcast is brought to you by Element. Let me ask you if any of these things sound good to you. Driving increased energy production, sharpening your focus and clarity, boosting recovery and sleep quality and protecting against cramping. I'm a hard yes on all of those. But also,

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exposed me to this product and then after. The best analogy that I have, if you're a fan. of movies and the old Tron movie where they took their disc off their back and they dipped it in some water and they started drinking out of it and they started glowing brighter. That's what it feels like. I get it. That's a goofy analogy and for younger people you're not going to understand what I'm saying, but that is what I feel like. It feels like you can almost have it coursing through your veins. So I showed you the box earlier. This little packet's what's inside of the box. These things are super travel friendly. I have my backpack on the table that's out of frame, but I always have some of these in my backpack.

often in my fanny pack. I'll do one gallon Ziploc bags full of these when I travel, especially to Costa Rica. But you could also get these now in bubbly, sparkling water. They make 16 and 12 ounce. The 16 ounces have the 1,200 and 60 sodium potassium magnesium. The 12 ounces have half of that. And so it's a way that you can cut or titrate. I finally had some of the 12 ounces show up at my house. So I think they're available for sale now. But the point of all this is is you can kind of get it in wherever you want to. My suggestion, head over to drink elemente.com slash cleared hot. One of the things you can do there is get a free sample pack.

So you can sample the flavors because everybody likes different stuff. But if you're ready to absolutely tackle your electrolyte and hydration game, element is the way to do it. They have the flavors that you want and the delivery mechanism that is the most convenient or pleasurable for you. Drink elementee.com slash cleared hot. back to the show. We have, you know, templates of things that people can work on optionally, you know,

like it's helpful sometimes to have a bit of a map of just ways to process what's going on, you know. There's also coaches that keep reaching out to people. There's groups that people can be a part of. I don't, I think that the value of having a community of other people have been through similar things is, impossible to understate, you know? So, yeah, I think it's, in some ways, I think it's more grounded, the kind of integration that people have to do. It's a little bit like once you get back home,

it's about sort of finding the routine again. You know what I mean? It's not, at least it is for, for most people. I mean, there's exceptions to every, to every rule. But I would say for most people, it's what it gives you is a little bit more of a sense of choice than what you had before. And that could be you were drinking a whole bunch and there was probably times when you didn't really want to drink. But, hey, you know, once you're in the in the habit you know by the time that you have the the thought that it's

maybe not something you want to do the train's already left the station like you're already doing it there's actually it's actually very difficult to not do it what you have afterwards i think what what we could say is like the common denominator is an increased sense of personal agency like being able to have those little micro decisions where we didn't have them before And so sometimes the afterwards, it is a little bit tedious and you're kind of focused on little minutia about what's happening, about the way that you're responding to your body or your wife or whatever. You know what I mean? And finally, and being able to find these little ways that you can sort of tweak your response, it gives you this opportunity to kind of learn and be adaptive. And so I think that's what people are working with.

Sometimes people are left with big spiritual questions, and I think the best way to figure that out is the community and talking about it and reconnecting with, you know, spiritual community around things like that. Give us some time, too. Yeah. What have you seen in working with vets, specifically from the special operations community that surprised you in this area,

if anything? I mean, when we when we started working with, I mean, for one, it was very easy because if we say, hey, you know, please do this list of things before you come. You're right. Every single person did every single thing. Directly in our wheelhouse. Yeah. So like, you know, willing to prepare and do the work, you know, had some discipline around that. Which I think gives a lot of traction.

And I just had no idea what we were going to find. Like, it's just been an opportunity to learn. You know what I mean? And we've been just trying to absorb everything that we can learn about what it is and what it's doing. Yeah. But that was the challenge that I had was trying to understand, like, if this is doing this for people with opiate addiction, what is it doing for vets?

You know what I mean? Like, what can we say about it that crosses this divide? And I think it is that. I think it is that sense of personal agency. So it sort of challenged us to try to look at and understand what is this. What are we doing? I've seen some very large behavioral shifts. I guess I would say it probably is based in personal agency.

I hadn't thought about that until you said that. But the person coming back from these experiences is very different in many ways than the person who went down there. how do you prep the family for that? Because that can be pretty jarring for the support network as well. Yeah, so we've got resources now. We've learned that from vets and from Humber and Marcus. They had support groups for family and they actually had programs for, you know,

significant others to be able to go and find care afterwards. Yeah. Because sometimes the complaint that we would hear about was guys would go back and they would be handling stuff better. And so then their spouse who was previously the anchor for everything and found potentially meaning and knew how to learn how to operate in that state, all of a sudden didn't need to have those same strategies. And so they kind of entered into their own process of reorienting and healing and adapting as well, you know. It could be disruptive in many ways. I'm hoping positive.

but there also is an essence of probably distrust of the person coming back, exhibiting perhaps behaviors that you've wanted to see forever, but it seems as if it would be impossible for them to do so. Sure. It can be pretty jarring. Yeah, I mean, trust is earned and built, so it takes time. But, yeah, we've had groups of women come down who, you know, all their husbands had been through before.

So I think it's been positive. What were their experiences like? What do they get out of that? Yeah, you know, I think it's, I think it's similar. I think it's the ability to be able to be adaptive. And I think, I think we overplay maybe what people talk about as PTSD. I don't know if I, like, I also feel a little bit sensitive about trying to challenge that because it's like not my experience.

Like I don't, I didn't go through a big trauma. But at the same time, like, I don't know. The way I think about it is that going into becoming a seal was really hard work. And it was a lot about rigorous training, about how to do something very specific at a very high level under very intense conditions. And that it was very group bonded and meaning making while you're doing it. And then so you get into, you must get into a wicked flow state. while you're doing your thing. Yeah, at times.

You know? And so, you know, there's a, I think flow is something that we pursue for its own sake. Yeah. It doesn't necessarily even make us feel joyful or whatever. It's just like when we're in it, it feels amazing. It feels like we're doing it right. It's detachment. Yeah, it's the effortlessness and accomplishing.

fill in the blank. I found a few mechanisms in my life. I didn't realize that I was, I don't know if I could say seeking it while I was in, but I enjoyed being in that state of 100% pure presence in the moment, past, future, gone, just. And you're performing well. And sometimes you can feel yourself slipping out of it. Oh, I suck now. But you can side your way back into it. I found that to be more difficult and also really difficult to find if you're actually searching for it. It's almost something where you have to allow the environment to facilitate into that. I was able to find that in all things. That's not a wings.

That's not a base jump because that's out of an aircraft, but wingsu base jumping off of cliffs in Switzerland. You're not thinking about three months into the future. Let me tell you, my friend. When you rock forward to the place where you realize you are going forward, there is no more way to go backwards even if you wanted to. so you just launch into the abyss, you're in a pretty nice flow state. That's actually what I enjoyed most about that activity.

But it comes with an immense risk. And I've lost at this point enough friends that, for me, the risk versus reward ratio is skewed. I found it in jiu-jitsu, where you're just rolling. I know people who find it in meditation. I know people find it in cooking. And that's, I actually write about that in the book, too, that you were flipping through. What I say is it doesn't need to be prescriptive. No.

But if you can find your way to that state, it is so mentally beneficial. Yeah. Because it is as if the static, it just drains for a little bit. Yeah. Tough to find it, though. Yeah, but I think what it is is when we're in that state, it feels like we're like using the machinery properly. For the short time you can stay in it. Yeah.

Because the brain is like a calorie preserving machine. like you don't want to have to think about everything you're doing. So when you can automate a whole bunch of processes that you have to run to do something great, and then all that you have to do is sort of orchestrate at a high level, that feels really good. You know, it feels like you're, you've kind of like offloaded a lot of the chore. Yeah.

And I think that, like physically it feels good. And that's why it would draw us to try to find it again, you know. It definitely was an aspect of that job, for sure. Yeah. So I think one of the challenges that we saw is that guys were just having a hard time retiring, you know. And with Ibogaine, it's also like what I was describing about, and I'm not saying that it's necessarily like heroin. It's just that heroin is a state where the body gets habituated to a certain type of stimulus over and over. So if you stop it, then you feel the withdrawal.

from that, right? So if you're trained yourself to do something like that, and it's such a big stimulus, then coming out of that, it's like harder maybe to find that sense of flow in something that's not as stimulating. And so if you can resensitize your body and your system to doing like finer tuned activities that aren't quite as intense or risky or whatever, then you can have maybe an easier time finding that sense of peace or joy when you when you when you're cooking or whatever yeah there's a obviously given the statistics they are what they are when it comes to suicide veteran suicide special operations community suicide it's uh i mean it paints an accurate picture one thing i have added to the conversation especially with people i used to work with is

less about actually doing the job and I started asking them a lot more about the environment that they grew up in. Yeah. And the reason I say that is it's so easy to focus on the trauma that can you can be exposed to and you will be exposed to in that line of work. Yeah. But what is often left out of the conversation is what people brought into that environment with them. And I probably because I was a shallow shell of a human being for most of my adult life, still working on it, by the way. Wouldn't say I'm a masterpiece yet. I didn't have conversations with my buddies in the cage next to me.

Tell me about, did your mom and dad love you? How was your upbringing? We didn't have those conversations. Yeah, we don't, right? We don't. Yeah. Well, I've started to have those with a lot of the guys that I've worked with. And it is shocking how many people brought sea bags worth of trauma with them

before going into a job that can 100% expose. you to a massive amount of trauma. Yeah. And that is not talked about often. And then I thought back on that job in particular, if you were on the receiving end of what you thought was either being bullied or being victimized when you were young, and maybe that was through parents that were completely detached, right? You were just abandoned, whatever it is.

You are going to seek a job where you can stand in the breach and prevent that from happening to other people. What a spectacular occupation to have. That doesn't mean you've dealt with this. shit that you brought with you going into that job. I think that adds to the complication of people exiting. Not only are they having, they're being tugged at from a purpose perspective, an identity perspective, an ego perspective, a relevance perspective. And you know, as well as I do, if you don't deal with your shit, it's going to deal with you at some point. It's, uh, it's kind of shocking

to me, the number of, not every guy, for sure, but more than I would have thought. Yeah. Yeah, it's complicated. Yeah. And it's multi-faceted for sure. I think where, so one of the challenges that we have, I think, watching the conversation move into like the U.S. health care system, for example, is we did a study with Stanford University. And we looked at 30 guys, Navy SEALs who came down through treatment. and they all screened into the study because they had mild traumatic brain injury. So as part of the measurements that they looked at was disability.

And then there was PTSD. As far as their VA rating? It was like a World Health Organization questionnaire about disability. Great. Yeah. Yeah. I would love to see that. Yeah.

And then PTSD symptoms. depression, anxiety. So the problem is the first paper came out and showed and it sort of focused on the secondary endpoint, which was the PTSD symptoms, resolving very quickly. So the story becomes about Ibigen is really amazing for PTSD. And it's just hard because I think probably operator syndrome is a better description because it's so many facets. but like going through the whole process that you go through as a seal and then retiring is very specific.

And there's a lot that guys share, you know, a whole like constellation of different things. Yeah. From the physiological brain injuries to what you're talking about, childhood stuff, and then meaning and identity and all these things. It's very specific about what's happening. And so I think that what we've seen so far is that I've been. is really good at somehow addressing multiple facets of this thing. But where it's not going to potentially do so great is somebody who just looks at it like, I've been diagnosed with PTSD, I have to come down and do this.

Unfortunately, right now, the way that we treat mental health, it's basically a way of triaging people into treatments. So if you get diagnosed with PTSD or you get diagnosed with depression, there's a set of protocol. Protocol. That's what I feel like I check, check, check, check. I have depression. Okay, I take the depression medication. But I think it's actually a lot more complicated than that, obviously. And what I begins doing to help with it is a lot more complicated than that.

So what I hope happens as we start to see it move into the healthcare system is that we start to have those deep. conversations because as much as even including all the things that we've talked about here we've seen guys come out of it and reestablish a connection with their faith like on top of other stuff like there's too many too many components of what's going on at the same time it's it's a complicated story and it's not something that we know about the tb i the tbi post-traumatic stress story is complicated in and of itself i forget it's 16 symptoms i think are recognized but there's an overlap of 13. So it's easy to misdiagnose one or associate one with the other.

Yeah. Yeah, as a species, I feel like we often err on the side of pretending we know a lot more about ourselves than we actually do. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, the PTSD or a lot of those DSM categories, the diagnostic and statistics manuals, like the psychiatric Bible of like how do you, how do you diagnose people? you can have somebody who like different people who have the same condition and they have they don't even have overlapping conditions like you'll have somebody with PTSD over here and someone PTSD over here and they're completely different sets of symptoms altogether yeah

but it's the best map I guess that we have about trying to navigate people through a system treating it like it's a health care problem when I think it's it's a little bit more complicated than How big is Ambio grown now? How big is the infrastructure? So we're now, I think we're up to a capacity of about 160 people a month. Damn. So it's compared to- I feel like you have a waiting list at this point.

We do. And we've been able to bring it down by adding capacity. Yeah. But it's still significant. There's been a lot of interest in Ivy game recently that's kind of come out of nowhere for us. I mean, I don't know if it's out of nowhere. There's some very prolific people, if you will. I mean, let's talk about the White House, you know.

It's come quickly. It's come quickly. Connor McGregor is a polarizing figure. Sure. Love him or hate him. I leave that on the table for people to do with what they will. When he talks about his experience, the platform is in the millions, tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions.

So that interest is going to come from there as well. Yeah. God damn it was the name of the documentary Waves of War In Waves and War On Netflix, yeah Huge, that's going to be of interest as well too Yeah Did they they follow them through the process at your facility, right?

Yep How many years ago did they shoot that? Three or four That's amazing how long it takes for stuff The Flash the Bang between filming and Yeah, they toured it for a whole year Around film festivals and stuff before it came out, yeah I mean, so those things...

Yeah, it's huge. Those are hundreds of millions of eyeballs. So it's not surprising to me that you guys have some interest headed your way. And I think it's cool. What I like about what's happening is that people are finding out about it through stories. Because what I don't know how it's going to translate into is going into the doctor's office and filling out a questionnaire and getting a prescription to go and do an ibogaine treatment. I just don't know if it's like that. I think you really need to hear long.

form what it took and not just the rosy bits like it was hard and then there was a process afterwards of relearning and integrating and you know some aspects of it worked miraculously maybe and some of them didn't you know but it gives you either way a lot to work with um i just think that those stories and the way that it moves through the culture like people telling long form you know what's what's going on for them the movie was a great exactly of that. I think it's a better way of preparing people for what it takes. Yeah, I think they need to hear. It's not an elevator pitch. The elevator pitch would be inaccurate. Maybe you could paint accurately, partially the end state or results that some people

have had, but not the journey, for sure. Yeah. So 160 people. So how many physical places do you guys have? Right now we have six places in Mexico, separate houses. So, when I described earlier was people are coming through in groups. So we have them like cohorts individually. The house is dedicated to that group going through that week. So we've got four places where there's the foundational program, like the one that we run for vets. We have one that's a detox house.

It's a little bit asynchronous. People come and go when their program, you know, depending on what they're using and how long they need to be there. And then we actually have another house that's set up for a neuroregenerative program. Interesting. Which is folks who have Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis. We've had a couple of other different conditions,

but it's targeting neurological repair in more advanced conditions, right? Are they often finding you because they feel like they have nowhere else to turn? And we'll call it traditional Western medicine. They're kind of smashing their head against the door. Yeah, with Parkinson's and MS. it's a lot about symptom control, but there's nothing that we know of or have access to that is a regenerative therapy

that would actually potentially reverse the condition to any degree. It would just sort of freeze it in place. You know, so, yes. And, you know, some people respond to it really well, you know, and have a massive improvement. And some people, it is a little bit more, gradual or specific, you know, like, I don't know, one example was a guy who had mobility issues

and more advanced Parkinson's, but he recovered his voice. Like, his voice became very soft. And even during the course of the days that he was there, we could hear him more clearly. But he's a psychotherapist. So it was a big deal for him to have been losing his voice and then be able to feel it come back. So, but, you know, other elements of his symptoms didn't. Yeah. So we're still learning, like, how to, how to treat it. But our framework is like, again, I can't say Ibegin is not evidence-based medicine, the way that we expect evidence-based medicine to work. It is, right, the way that we're structured and the way they're operating is we can inform you about what we know now. We can inform you about the risks and we can mitigate those risks to the greatest extent that we can.

And it's just from that framework that we're learning from the people who are coming through who are showing us the results. Yeah, I mean, it's certainly not risk-free. I was doing some research. I think there's been, what, in the low 30s reported deaths of people seeking treatment? I know you guys had a death involved in your... And here's the thing. There's nothing that's risk-free.

Sorry. Yeah. There isn't. And I don't want it to turn people off to the potential benefit that can come from that. But you also have to be transparent with the risk associated with it as well. Yeah. I mean, there's no biological free lunch. Like something that's going to go in and have a massive systemic effect is going to be touching a lot of different symptoms.

And there's complexity there. Yeah. And relative to what it does, I think it's very safe. Yeah. But there's obviously, you know, when people are using, I mean, the cases that we've seen. at Ambio and the cases that we've heard about recently are all related to people using fentanyl, which is we don't even know what that is anymore, exactly. It could be different things.

And so when you're working with street drugs, it introduces variables that are hard to control. Yeah. Yeah, if you ever get the risks down to zero, I think you might get the efficacy down close to that as well. How big would you want to grow it? What we're really trying to do is to present a model of something that's scalable as well as we can. I think if you strip down too much, it's not going to be the appropriate kind of environment. Like we've had, you know, people who want to do abigating drug development tell us, you know, this is going to have to be in a cardiac ICU. I try to tell them we do it in a cardiac ICU.

It's just there's a mirror in front of you and like candles and the light stem and there's music playing. You know, but you're on a on a cardiac monitor and there's an ACLS crew right behind you watching the monitor and recording everything. Also, maybe all cardiac ICUs should look more like candles and mirrors. Maybe the people would enjoy that a little bit more than the clinical setting with people walking around in sterile gowns. Yeah, I think I think that we. We could find a happy media between the two. Yeah, I think it's important that we, what I would hope for is that we were able to show this is what has been designed organically.

Yeah. Through the experience and through reflecting on the experience and feeding back into it. So don't just strip it out to what you imagine are the essential parts because we've been kind of doing that. Yeah. So what we're trying to do is show what a scalable model looks like. And then I think there could be a lot of that. I don't know, though. I don't know, like, at the end of the day,

I don't know how central it becomes in the health care system or... Yeah. I mean... And again, for somebody with no experience. Sometimes what you're describing sounds clinical. Mm-hmm. Sometimes it sounds spiritual. Sometimes it sounds communal.

Yeah. Yeah. I feel as if the Western medicine ideology like you described. Cardiac ICU is the way it's got to be. Stripping all those other things out of it, I don't know if that's the move, but I also don't know if it will ever be able to be accepted by the Western methodology of wanting to understand exactly what's happening

and having the explanation. I don't know if that's a bridge it can go across. It might just be two models that don't work well together. it's definitely complicated enough like it has enough weird edges you know to try to jam that into a square peg i don't know if it i mean some of what you're talking about is the people going in there having faith that the medicine that they're going to take is going to do what they need it to do for their body in their situation you don't hear that often when you go to the urgent care facility. It's kind of the opposite. What exactly is going wrong? This is exactly what we're going

to do to treat the exact symptoms. I'm not knocking that system by any stretch. I'm just wondering that the two, I wonder if there is an ecosystem where those worlds can cohabitate and overlap at a large Venn diagram level. I don't know. I think it's the problem is that it's cultural. It's not just evidence-based medicine. It's also cultural. That's where like the fact that like I'm sure if you ask guys who you know who have been down, part of the impetus for them going was other guys telling them that they needed to go down. Without a doubt every time.

Yeah. It's a it was a cultural thing. Like there was a story that was presented to them in a specific way. And I don't think it was that it's going to try. treat your MTBI or whatever. Or you're going to be hooked up to a sweet cardiac machine. And the guy said, oh, dope. I've always wanted that.

Sign me up. No, I think it's more complicated than that. And it is cultural. And I think it'll get easier for people to integrate their experiences when they're going back into a culture at large that better understands what it is. You know what I mean? I think that I don't know. What my hope is that it has enough of these weird edges and we need it enough that the institutions try to reshape themselves somewhat to be able to absorb this thing.

Because I think we'll get better for that. I don't know. I don't know if that's possible. Yeah. I could see the current system wanting to be the best way to be the best way to disallow. describe this. Wanting, let's say that they, I don't want to say a cookie cutter model because that, that's diminutive to the medical system and the medical professionals, but a model that has

square edges. I can see them trying to apply that to what it is that you are doing. And I think cultural aspects, the faith and not necessarily from a religious perspective, but the faith or the trust in the medicine itself, I could see some of those. being cut out to the point where the efficacy of it just nose dives, where they, where they try to make it an uber clinical experience and maybe that's not where it works. Yeah, I think it would, it would nose dive. I don't think it would go to zero. Yeah. But I think it would nose dive. For example, I don't know to what extent actually, because I haven't looked at it recently, but like in, at least

in Canada, I know. We've grappled with us and in the United States, a lot of people go to treatment for opioid use because it's court ordered. That's certainly a American issue as well. Yeah. So you will go get clean because we tell you too. So right now, a lot of, a lot of treatment centers use AA, which was designed as a peer support model. It's actually very beautiful. And I just think if you get a court ordered to go to it, it's going to be a very different experience that you have with that thing. Yeah. Then if you walk in there on your own, I think we.

Anybody who's ever done anything in their life that they wanted to. Yeah. Versus being told to do something by an authoritative figure where they said, Go to jail or. Yeah. I'm going to do this because there's a guillotine above my head versus somebody who's intrinsically motivated, the test results are in on these two cases. Yeah, I think we, I think we don't know how to grapple with that in the health care system about intentionality and agency. But I think when

we're talking about mental health, we cannot write out the issue of personal agency. Because I think a lot of the issues that we feel like depression is, I think one of the things that depression is, is realizing that we're not getting the kind of meaning that we hope for from the constellation of our life. And so something is pushing us to pull back and reexamine it and hopefully to be able to find a better vantage point to go forward. I think that's what it's supposed to be. Sometimes we just get stuck in it because we don't see a lot of options. Yeah. Or you see, because we're connected to the world, people putting up their successes while you're having none and it can create this.

just descending cycle of spiraling mental health. Yeah. So I don't think we can look at that as just a biochemical reaction or just a physiological problem. I think it's we have to be able to look at agency and how people approach things. I think that's where I think we have an opportunity and a lot of freedom with what we're doing right now, where it's set up in a way where you, you self-select. to come and do this. I mean, even if all your buddies are telling you to do it,

at the end of the day, you're the one that has to do it. There's no, yeah, there's no. I know some people who are physically helped down there. Were they? Okay. Well, okay. I mean, it's not the majority. But they were escorted. Okay. Lovingly by people who cared about them.

And then I tell you what, thank them profusely for saving their life afterwards. Yeah. I know more than one person like that. Yeah. didn't want to go. Yeah. And for a variety of reasons.

Yeah. Well, you know, maybe that just speaks to the community. I don't think that necessarily the healthcare institution always feels like that kind of community to people. Yeah. But yeah, if it's your brother kicking your ass to go and do something that you need to do, I mean, like I said, there's always an exception to the rule. But I think that those are the kind of conversations that we need to kind of wrestle with. how do you move that into a system? I think looking at it and talking about it,

like it's something like a rite of passage, like is one of these difficult things that we do to try to wrestle with our identity and who we are and what we believe and the direction we want to take in our life and all those things are as much a part of it as the physiological repair that's happening. If it is, let's hypothesize here for a bit, let's say the executive order,

does shorten things. It can get through whatever, however long the process is. Hopefully it's not 10 years, like you said. Let's say the lawmakers agree. The benefit outweighs the risk. We're going to allow this to become a legal treatment in the U.S. What do you think that would actually look like? Would they be able to integrate it into a clinical setting as it exists now?

Or for this to be successful, would they need to create a setting similar to what you guys have created down an EMBO just north of the border so people would potentially travel less. I don't know because honestly with what's going on right now, it's blowing my mind. Like I... What part? Oh, just the whole thing. Like, I mean, I was honestly down in Mexico when this was like a, the fringe of the fringe topics. You know what I mean?

So to see it enter into discourse as like a national priority in the Oval Office is mind bending. Like modern lexicon. People who have never heard or thought about this stuff are asking questions and talking about it. Yeah. It's pretty wild. It's wild. I don't know what's possible because I wouldn't know. I would have told you that was impossible.

So I don't know. I don't know what it looks like. All I can say is like what we're trying to do is develop something that's connected to this like organic growth and like the information that we, that has already been gathered and like hard earned, you know. and try to, yeah, make that into something scalable. I hope that it can just move straight into the, I don't see why it wouldn't be able to just move straight into the United States like that because as long as you show the clinical function underlying the treatment and you can comply with the regulations that way,

I don't know, maybe you're not allowed to put candles, but we can do soft lighting. You know what I mean? Like there's probably a way we can make it comfortable and beautiful. Yeah, but you need a pumpkin spice candle. Or do you guys go more lavender? I'm not going to tell you to party. You know, there's probably we'll have options.

You know, like it's like a little, little branded smorgasbord of flavors. Bring your own candle. Whatever flavor suits you, you know. Yeah, I don't think they're going to let you burn stuff at all. especially there's oxygen in the room. I don't know. Yeah, it's hard because you go to Africa and you say, doing it without fire would be impossible.

Like that there's some kind of elements that kind of speak to us somehow in this state that it's meaningful on a level that we kind of connect with but can't explain properly. So I don't know. I think hopefully that sense of, I don't know what this call it like, if it's like ritual or ceremony or just like poetry, you know, can can be part of it.

And it's just to acknowledge that it's something that we're doing also in the pursuit of meaning. It's not just a medical treatment. I feel like it has to be part of it. Yeah. And that's where I don't know the answer, but that's where I wonder if the two systems are, if they are going to be able to play well together, if it gets to a place where, that's possible. I think if you pull that stuff out of it, the ritual

and the origin, I mean, I guess maybe the medicine delivery would have the same potency, but I don't know if it would arrive at the same end state. I don't know. I mean, we put it in because it's nice. And we don't do it that much, you know. We're not like recreating what is in Africa. Like I said, I don't think you can you can take that out of the jungle.

Yeah. But we can design a space that has its own kind of integrity and makes sense for what it is. Maybe that's what the answer is. Maybe they repurposes. You know, a lot of my dad was looking to get in a surgery on his shoulder. And, you know, was it outpatient surgical wing, you know, outside of the traditional hospital. I mean, maybe they could just repurpose some infrastructure that they have. Do you get the sense that the tide is?

swelling in the right direction? Are you feeling the undercurrent of attention and support that you would like to? Yeah, things are definitely, it's definitely an interesting time for sure. Researchers are all over. Everybody wants to study this. I do think that for multiple different fields, it's going to help to break a lot of ground, like in terms of how we understand the brain and the body and the mind and, you know, things like lessons that'll be applicable to other research questions or, you know, the design of other drugs and therapies and who knows. I do think that it is that kind of thing. Like, it's that complex and that interesting that it'll help to teach us more. So, yeah, I think as those conversations

continue to grow, I don't know. I think as long as people are not just committed to compromising, like as long as there's a lot of people around that are really interested in trying to understand what it is, you know, and trying to understand the truth about it, that will build something beautiful around it to support it, you know? If it's just about we just have to compromise to fit it into the swear box, I think it's going to suck a little bit more than it has to. Yeah, I would agree.

We were talking about on the way over, you know, you've been at this for so long. You're kind of not detached from the boots on the ground, but you're more of a managerial position at this point. What are you looking at next now that Ambio is built? It has subject matter experts on the ground. What are you focusing your time on now? Well, for us, we came up as practitioners. And so it's been a process to learn how to manage something that's growing and scaling. And so we're just trying to, you know, build the procedures and not necessarily to standardize it, but to clarify, you know, all of the algorithms and the decisions that need to take place so that it can scale.

And we've had this experience now. We've been in Mexico for a long time. We just opened up in Malta in January. So it's the first time that we're operating intercontinately. and that's been going really well. And the design is to be able to scale, you know, elsewhere. So once those systems are kind of in place, then, you know, we've been talking with people in other parts of the world

and, you know, hopefuls in different parts of the U.S. and territories that would like to be able to do that more. And so that would be the goal, would be to try to help build what that infrastructure looks like. How does Canada currently view it? So in Canada, it's not a controlled drug, which would be the equivalent of what it is in the States. Okay. Schedule 1.

It's not a controlled drug. But it is on the prescription drug list, which means that it's subject to a lot of restrictions around who can import it. You can only distribute it to certain licensed centers. You can't really prescribe it unless it's approved. So it's not like, you know, I have a lab in Canada that's helping to extract and purify like a GMP product from the stuff, the root bark we're taken from Africa. And so we can do that in Canada really easily as long as. You can't treat people yet. We can't treat people.

No. There's programs that are the equivalent of right to try. There's something called the special access program. that we could try to make it available to a small number of individual patients through that. But doing what we're doing in Mexico, no. We can't build like a clinical space like that. If it becomes legal in the U.S., do you think that Canada would follow? Yeah, that's typically how it works.

And that's one of the reasons why, you know, nobody's gone to do clinical trials in Canada or somewhere else because it doesn't really have the same cost benefit. If you get it, like if we went to Health Canada and got it approved, the FDA doesn't care. You know. I believe that statement to be true. Yeah. But if once it's approved with the FDA, then all the doors open all over the world.

So it's really the cost benefit analysis. The ROI is you do it in the States. Yeah. That's why everybody's talking about FDA. FDA. Okay. Yeah. If it were to become legalized in the States, what do you think is an actual pure back of

the envelope estimate on time? Three years? Well, again, normally this would take like 10 years. Yeah. That's the standard timeline for getting a drug to market. Because even in Texas, you know, they put, now there's $100 million on the table, you know. they're I'm sure in conversations with the FDA about doing a phase one safety study but I wouldn't be surprised if they're making them go back and do some of the animal studies and the cellular work and you know do some other supportive research before they can even do the phase one so they really are close to the beginning of the process the only difference between this and another drug that a pharmaceutical company would be developing is that we know that we know that. what the answer is going to be.

Yeah. You know, normally pharmaceutical companies are shooting in the dark trying to find something that hits the target. And so there's a lot of misfires along the way. This is we already know that it's going to be positive. It's just that the data has to be structured to the FDA's evidentiary standards. It's fascinating. I mean, I'm not saying that it shouldn't be like that, but wild to know the end state.

and then essentially you got to make sure that the paperwork lines up. You got to make sure of paperwork. There's a lot of paperwork. Very expensive paperwork. I can only imagine. Dude, tell me about the book in front of you. You were saying this is the first time you've seen it in person,

which I have recently had that experience. Yeah. It's wild. It's true. How awesome is that, though, to be able to physically touch. You have a lot more words in yours. I can already tell it than mine. How many words are in that?

I probably could have done a couple books. Let me see this bad boy. That was like $120,000 something. Isn't it cool, though, to see the words. the physical product. Okay, tell me about the book, man. So, shockingly enough, it's about IBEan. Yeah, that's, spoiler alert.

That's what it's about. I mean, it's, it was an attempt to try to tell a story about where we've come from in the West, working with Ibegain. And some of the things that we can learn just from the direct experience. So the title is a non-obvious, I think, but the bicameral mind is a theory by, uh, Princeton scholar Julian Janes and he was saying that actually consciousness is not has not been the same throughout human history tell me more so his his thinking was that the way that we experienced consciousness now only started to evolve in the last like 3,000 years or so okay prior to that people experience something that he called the bicameral mind bycameral means there's two

cameras, two chambers, like the house and the Senate that are separate and they have to interact to make decisions. So the bicameral mind was, yeah, there's two parts of the brain. One where we sort of identify and have our experience. We carry out routine tasks and we kind of go through our day. And the other one that we don't experience is he said that. He said that. it would only really get activated in situations where we were confronted with something very novel. Like here we are going through like routine habits and tradition is enough to guide most of our decision making until we get to a situation that's brand new and creates a lot of stress and friction. And then so this other part of the brain would get activated and have to become really creative.

But we would hear it as though it was like an outside voice speaking. to us. And so, you know, it's his way of trying to describe why people talk about hearing the voice of God or hearing the spirits or the ancestors or all through history. And he goes back to like Homeric literature and earlier stuff. And just the way people write changed a lot. The way the people used to tell stories was way more indicative of this kind of decision making before. So, why I was drawn to it was because of how similar that sounded to me as like the the conversations that people have in this in the ibegain trance you know this back and forth dialogue and i'm not so fixated on the fact that maybe people are getting like perfect answers that they need to come

and tell us all about but that it's maybe showing that it's activating some kind of conscious decision-making, like ancestral sort of decision-making structures that we have. Because maybe we get into points where our, you know, frontal cortex kind of problem-solving isn't well-suited to every type of problem. It's like really good at trying to solve certain types of situations. And then we end up with a crisis of mental health because there's other things that it doesn't necessarily teach us or enable us to address. That makes sense.

Yeah. So it tries to unpack a little bit about Ibogaine and the experience and what it is and try to show some of those other edges. And it's basically what we're talking about, some of the challenges, I think, about trying to translate that into the healthcare system. How did you enjoy the process of writing the book? Yeah, I mean, you know, I told you when I was younger, I was really into literature, so it's always been an ambition to write. So by the time I actually knew what it was going to be and could sit down, it was great.

You're going to write more? I don't know. When I finished that, I was pretty good with having done that, you know? It's also a lot of work. But, you know, it's kind of like, you know, sometimes if I feel like I have to take Ibegain again, I'll be like, Okay, time to go. You know, like sometimes you got to do, you got to do something hard, but I have not yet had that drive to sit down and write a second book.

It's too early. For yourself personally, how do you know it's time to go take? I began again. What do you feel internally? I felt like one of the maybe simplistic ways that I understand it for myself is like every time I've done it, it's usually at a point when my life is kind of throwing me into the red. like my capacity to handle what's happening is getting challenged.

And then taking Ibegain helps me sort of figure out how to just change gears. And then all of a sudden, things calm down. We're actually going smoother, faster down the highway, but, you know, we're not pushing the RPM into the red. But then life, you know, because I'm more capable, I'm able to sort of, sort of step up to the challenge in a bigger way. So I get to the point again where now we're kind of redlining and need to see if there's a better, more efficient strategy, how to tackle stuff. And that's what it's been for me.

This is this process of trying to learn. It's like facilitated learning and adaptation. That's where I see it. I think it becomes a little bit more like fine tuning. I think that's the exact same thing that everybody's coming down to do with it. It's just that when you're, you know, life is pretty well at this point. It's going in a decent way. Like I enjoy it.

But there's still, I can still be a better father. I can still be, there's a lot of ways that I can be better. How many kids do you have? Two. I feel like that kids could be better kids. Yeah, well, you know, that's, we try. Bastards. Like maybe if I was a better father, I could help them.

Are you guys going to try any? Is this just all on me? Yeah, right. What's all this emphasis on the parenting? You guys need to do better. Yeah. Well, when there are certain age, they'll start giving them Ibe gain, I'm sure. Yeah.

What would, uh, so let's say somebody is interested in Ibegain and they don't have chemical or substance abuse issues. They don't come up from a place of trauma. Is there any benefit for somebody to? Yeah. What would, what would they likely? I mean, I'm sure you've had people come down and do it, but what is the change that have noticed? What do they get out of that experience if they don't even necessarily know why

they're there? I don't know that people come down completely blind to why they're there. Normally people have a reason, even if it's not all of the more serious reasons that we talked about. Yeah. So I think it does the same thing for everybody. I think we get into habitual ways of managing our life. And usually we have a pretty good intuition about what we should be doing. It's just that we get kind of stuck and the machinery gets kind of configured a certain way where we're not doing it like that. And it can kind of help to facilitate that transition. It makes hard transitions a little easier, I think.

So I think we've, yeah, we've seen people who just in general do hard things and are going through tough transitionary periods and benefit a lot from it. Whether it's, you know, not retirement, but just leveling up the business or something. I don't know that it's like, you know, for I Begin, people aren't always making the risk calculation that that's necessary to do. But some are. Some people are psychological cosmonauts. I'm not here to tell people out of party. As long as you're an adult and it's consensual behavior, pretty much, I'm going to stay out of your shit. What's the craziest transformation you've seen in your years, even before you started Ambio, but just, or doesn't have to be one particular person, but what's some of the crazier 180s that you've seen from people?

Or just course corrections. Maybe 180 isn't the right way to describe it. It'll just say course corrections. Yeah. Well, that's, yeah, that's good. I mean, we do try to talk about course correction. Like if you're trying to just do like a two to three degree little change in in trajectory. Over time, that's a huge distance.

You still end up in a very different place than where you work. Yeah. But the craziest story has still got to be this gentleman who came down who had been blown up overseas. It was in an armored vehicle that got blown up. So you got shaking around real good like that. Yeah. And then when he was back stateside, he got into a road rage incident and got shot in the head, survived it. But so this is an example of, you know, there's mild traumatic brain injuries that are cumulative, non-acute conditions that happen over time.

And then the other example of obviously acute penetration wound to the head, right? So he was to the point where he needed sunglasses inside in the dark because light sensitivity was so intense. He spent most of his time just laying around. Yeah, extreme headaches, just extreme neurological symptoms. He came in with a cane and left it with us when he left. He left his cane, he left his sunglasses. He didn't need him anymore. I'd never seen anything like that.

And this isn't what a 48-hour shift? Yeah. So, and I, you know, I can't say that that's what the next guy's going to experience. Yeah. You know, that's the unfortunate thing about telling these beautiful stories is that for some people it's more gradual or it's more subtle. But actually, maybe it's not so bad that it takes us down into like the minuscula or the subtleties because maybe that's where our attention will have the greatest benefit if we start to focus at that level. But for him, it did. You know, it was a wild story.

That is, I mean, so that is an amazing example of an incredible course correction. I think, and I'll say this based on my own experience in life, focusing on a smaller degree, single digit course correction and realizing that the work sustained work over time that you still will, your life will look completely different. That's probably more realistic to focus people on. And it's also more achievable. The story you just told, spectacular. not scalable. Yeah. Yeah. No refunds if that doesn't happen. Fair. You know. Well, also, that is a very

niche set of circumstances that you described leading up to that. So hopefully there's not that many people that need that criteria. I agree. But yeah, but that idea of the course correction, I think it's a good simple way to just describe. No, it's something that plays out over time. Yeah. You know. Nobody likes to hear that. want the 10-year overnight success. Yeah, except for, I think that we think we want that. But then actually, if we get to the point where we actually have a little bit of traction, that actually feels great.

I think it would feel better than arriving at an end state that you didn't work for because I don't know if it's possible to appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah. The self-generated momentum where you can look back and see the maybe microscopic, fruits of your labor. That is, to me, incredibly rewarding. Yeah. Yeah, I told a story about the case study that we wrote up, the two people who had multiple sclerosis and we did brain scans before and after. So I told you about the gentleman who went and ran an ultramarathon. You know,

great wild story. The other woman, she had smaller improvements, but huge in a different way. Like, she, before she came down, she wasn't able to do physiotherapy very well. So she had a lot of, just like deterioration of her muscles. Atchievous? Yeah. So she got to the point where she was able to go from, like, getting exhausted after five minutes of exercising to being able to do her whole hour-long physiotherapy exercises every day without, you know, emotionally and energetically just getting wiped out.

Yeah. So that is massive and gave her the capacity to be able to engage with, you know, the exercising she needed to do. There was no way it was going to come in and just start to repair the muscle mass overnight. Like she had to have some. That would be dope, though. I mean, yeah. When we find that one, it's probably deeper in the African jungle than where we've looked so far. But, yeah.

The jungle is such a gnarly environment. God, it will kill you so fast. Everything wants to bite you or sting you or rip you or claw you. It's gnarly. Yeah. The noise is deep in the jungle too. I'm sorry, but you just got to go experience. I'm not even going to attempt to describe it.

Yeah. What do you want to lead people with? We've been out for two and a half hours. Yeah. Well, I mean, I hope that, you know, people are able to absorb and appreciate some of the nuance of this discussion because I think, you know, it's great. It's a freaking incredible to be able to see what's going on and the headlines. There's still a lot of work. People can't forget that.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And there's, I do believe that I understand like the signal of hope that it, that it brings. And I think it's important. I just think that there's a lot of, a lot of nuance and it's going to take a lot to get us there. Yeah. Well, in the interim, you have a clinic. Where can people find your clinic? Yeah. So, you know, if people are interested in learning more about what treatment looks like for them or their loved ones, you know, Ambio is online at ambio.

And also on Netflix as in waves and war. Yeah. It's mostly about the guys coming down, which is the right way to set up the story. But you can see them going through the process at Ambio as well. And the book is not out yet. this is the first time I'm touching it, but it's out September 8th, so you can buy that. Pre-order it online. There you go.

Excuse me, that's a long way, wait. Yeah, yeah, you can pre-order it now, but yeah, I think it's just a much bigger, deeper discussion that we need to have, and so we're just at the beginning. Yeah. Yeah. I give a gift to podcast guests, but you live in Canada, and the gift that I give is a knife, and I don't want you to be considered a terrorist. Are you allowed to have pointy things that close to turn on to?

Yeah, yeah. All right. I'm going to give you one. Michael, save this portion so he was a consenting adult. I'm going to give you this. If you were stopped at the border. Thank you. That's very cool.

Yeah. Montana Knife Company Knife. It's one of their tactical blades. I don't. Yeah. Oh, it's all wrapped up. You can unwrap it if you want or just put it in your, checked luggage, please do not put that in your carry on or that will end up staying in Montana?

Yeah. Right. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. I'm not savvy. All right. Yeah, thank you. Are you allowed to carry that out of your house in Canada?

I'll have to check the authorities there. No, I was for a second had a little worry you were going to say a gun, but no, these are cool. Do you want a gun to take back with you? That's definitely. No, we'll leave that. part of the podcast out. No, I think that would get us both in trouble if I gave you gun and I knew you were going back to Canada.

That would be a real fast way. We could share a cell together. We could meditate and try to fund our flow state. Actually, we probably couldn't. Maybe we could get a, it wouldn't be a cell together because we would be imprisoned in different countries. But maybe we could be pen pals, you know? Yeah.

Well, I'm down. Yeah. Except for, this is a great gift. I really appreciate this. And I'm going to leave you with the first copy of the book. I got two of them. Okay. As long as you have one, because, again, having gone through this experience.

Yeah, no, it belongs on that shelf with all of that. I will put it on the shelf. But first, it has to be signed. I will do that. Apparently there is protocol, just so you know. So I, there is a blank front page on my book. And if they want me to write or personalize it, I write on that one. But apparently.

They filled mine up. The author place you're supposed to sign is near your name. You already have that printed with your signature on it. No, I sign it. I signed them all in the coffee shop. I just signed them all. Oh, that's a real signature. How dare you think that I do that?

Oh, you pre-sign it. You know how much time that took at least several seconds per. But I was chastised once because I signed this page and I was told, that's for the personalized message. The author's signature goes here. So there you go. I mean, do with it what you will, sir. It's your book. my theory is if you didn't write it shut the fuck up i'm going to sign it wherever the person wants me to sign it

well thank you for coming out man i deeply appreciate it hey i appreciate you thanks for having me yeah of course yeah sure right on