Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #190 Chris Bell

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

Chris Bell is back friends! We have been down the rabbit hole one physical optimization in previous conversations. In this one we dive into what’s alive in Chris right now, psychedelics. I absolutely loved it and you can hear/enjoy the enthusiasm in Chris’s new found perspective. Enjoy the episode and please if you’re called share with friends and family to spread the good word! Love fam  Connect with Chris: Instagram: @bigstrongfast Twitter: @bigstrongfast Sponsors: Four Sigmatic Not only are these my favorite fungus based superfoods because they work, but guess what?! They taste great too! The combo of lower caffeine levels and nootropic mushrooms like Lions Mane give me a strong steady energy for both mind and body. Head to the link below for the up to 40% discount they’re hooking you, my listeners up with! foursigmatic.com/KKP   Lucy I absolutely love this stuff! I’ve been using it to get a little juiced for workouts as well as recording episodes! To get 20% off Lucy Gum, go to https://lucy.co and use the code “KKP” at checkout.   AMP Human Check out the latest from AMP Human in their D+ Lotion! It’s a topical vitamin D3 supplement that will help boost immunity, sleep and cognitive performance! Shop at the link below and us code word KYLE15 at check out for 15% off your order. AMPHuman.com/KYLE   Organifi Go to organifi.com/kkp for some of the highest nutrient dense and easiest means of getting in your greens. Click that link and use code “KKP” at checkout for 20% off your order! Connect with Kyle:   Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys   Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com    Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn’t.

What's up, y'all? We are back with another one. Chris Bell has made his way back onto the show. Chris is a documentary filmmaker and brother to Mark Smelly Bell. I like to think of him as the more svelte and handsome version than Smells. Actually, I think Smells might have him beat there. But Chris has made documentary films such as Bigger, Stronger, Faster. Many of you have seen that on Netflix. Trophy Kids was gut-wrenching and fantastic at

the same time, and many others. He's got a couple more in the works. But the reason I wanted to have him on is Chris finally came to the dark side, if you will. He finally has done or dipped his feet into the water with plant medicine. And there's good reason for that. He has had his first three ceremonies with Ibogaine. And Ibogaine is the main active ingredient in Iboga, a very rare plant medicine from West Africa and Gabon that is possibly the most effective medicine on the planet for curing opiate addiction and other hardcore addictions. It's also really good for pain management and a whole host of other things that we dive into here on the podcast. So be sure to let us know what you think over at Living With The Kingsburys on Instagram. I am revamping my website right now, kingsbury.com. So expect a huge facelift there.

Much easier ways to get in contact with me and work with me directly. And also check out our sponsors because they make this show possible. This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic, a wellness company that is known for its delicious mushroom coffee. Four Sigmatic's mushroom coffee is real, organic, fair trade, single origin Arabica coffee with lion's mane mushroom for productivity and chaga mushroom for immune support. I've been starting my day with Four Sigmatic's ground mushroom coffee with lion's mane instead of regular coffee. And I love how it helps me focus so I can get shit done.

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Sometimes we mix the red with the green. We did that all holiday season just because they're Christmas colors. So lots of good stuff there. Thank you guys for tuning in. Check out my boy, Chris Bell. I'm so excited to talk to you because I want to talk to you about psychedelics, right? And I was here about three years ago. I had just started doing a carnivore diet.

I was talking to you about that. I told you I had a lot of chronic pain and all these things. And we just got into a conversation that was like off the topic at the time about Burning Man. And you and Tasha were talking about it and telling me how excited you were to go to it. And I was just thinking like, these people are so crazy. Why do they want to do all these like weird, crazy drugs? And I had no experience with psychedelics ever. When I was all growing up and when I was in high school, you know, Mark and I thought psychedelics were those for losers, people that would do LSD, people that would do magic mushrooms and all these things that you would hear about. And we're like, why do you want to walk around high all day? It doesn't make any sense.

But as you get older and you have all sorts of issues and stresses in life that come at you, and you realize that these things can be actually like very therapeutic and very healing, it's kind of amazing. And the one reason I wasn't really interested in it at first was because I had just gotten sober. So I was like, you know, kind of like totally against it. Like, you know, I think when we go through rehab and we go through sobriety from opioids and from alcohol and things like that. I had like six years of drug addiction, mainly stemming from a double hip replacement surgery, but also I have to take some accountability. It was my fault. I liked getting high. I liked the

way it felt better than being in pain. But just in passing, the weirdest things happen to me in life and the people that Mark and I know, I'm at my brother's gym, super training in Sacramento. And this guy, you might've heard, uh, Rogan was talking about him the other day, actually Tony huge doc,

Dr. Tony huge, right? He's like a steroid expert, like a guru almost of, uh, all these different anabolics, SARMs,

um, anything to do with human performance. He's, um, kind of like you, but in an illegal version, right? Everything he does. Depending on who your doctor is.

Yeah, everything's kind of shady, right? And so Tony Hughes just in passing was like, hey man, I know you have a lot of chronic pain. Have you ever thought of Ibogaine? And I said, dude, you're like way off. Ibogaine's for addiction and it's not for pain. It's like, you know, and he said, no, no. He goes, I don't know why, but for some reason,

it stuck in my head that I was talking to this guy that helps me with my bodybuilding stuff. And he was telling me he does Ibogaine treatments and he does it for people with pain. And it just kind of stuck in my head and I didn't think about it for a couple of weeks. And then I ended up picking up the phone and calling this guy and having a conversation with him.

And this guy promised me on the phone, which no one ever does. he's like, oh yeah, this will take all your pain away. I'm like, okay, this is a scam. Like I've tried everything, you know, I've tried Kratom, which actually really does help a lot and works really well, but it doesn't like take all your pain away and it doesn't take it away for an extended period of time. It's only a couple hours, you know, like that you get relief. And this guy was claiming that it would take my pain away, you know, for good. All this chronic pain that I had and inflammation. And I just decided like, well, why not? Let's, you know, let's give it a shot. And I didn't think that it was going to work at all. Like I had no faith, zero faith in the guy. Did you look up anything on it?

Did you start looking up trip reports? I looked up a lot of trip reports. Yeah. And I, what I found was a lot of negativity, a lot of like, this is really powerful. This is really crazy. You know, this many people have died on it. And so whenever I get to the death part, and this is just a documentary filmmaker in me, I had to investigate all the deaths. So from like, there was a certain period of time, I want to say it was from like 98 to like 2008 or something. Like it was a 10 or 20 year period of time where there was 19 people that had died from ibogaine. And every single person that died from ibogaine

was in some like unlicensed clinic in Mexico or something. And they were getting off of like 13 other drugs and they had other drugs in their system or they would do Ibogaine. And let me just go back and explain a little bit what Ibogaine is. Ibogaine, a lot of people do it for addiction, basically to get off of all the drugs that they were on.

It basically will kill any sort of opioid withdrawal in a matter of hours. And that's mostly people's problem getting off opioids is like, they don't want to go through the withdrawals. So they just want to get rid of it all. And, you know, it's, it does, it works great for addiction, but what it also does, and a lot of people don't know this, and it's the reason I wanted to talk to you is it kind of rewires your brain to.

Not kind of, 100% it does. Yeah, to just feel differently about pain, but you don't even notice it. So all these other things that I've tried, I've gone through all the work. I did a carnivore diet where I just ate meat for two years and it kind of sucks. I like it. I love eating that way, but you know how it is. When you have to do it because you're in pain or something, it's not fun. It's fun when you want to do it and you're experimenting and you're having fun. But once you're sort of stuck and I can just eat meat and that's it. It's not necessarily like every time I would eat something, I'm not going to go

that far as a lot of other people do. I wouldn't eat an apple and have my back hurt. That didn't happen to me. I know that that could happen to, you know, people claim that and it could happen to some people. I wasn't that bad off, but when I would eat heavy carbohydrates, bread, and when I would eat pasta or anything like that, then I would feel shitty like the next day or the next, you know, couple of days. And I just wanted to get rid of all that. I wanted to get rid of... So to be out of pain, I was taking Kratom. I just told you before, I was chewing tobacco every day, not to get out of pain, but it was just a habit. And Ibogaine, like I said, against what I thought this guy told me,

I thought he was full of shit. It actually took away all of my chronic pain that I've had for... Since I was 16, 17 years old. And I can remember in high school, just being in severe pain, like trying to play football and being on the football field. And I'd be in tears, like, you know, nobody could see them, but I was in tears because I was in so much pain just from running laps around the track, you know? And I would always have all these issues. And then when I was 35 years old, I had to have both my hips replaced. And I just sort of wanted it all to end. And sort of Ibogaine was a pathway to get there.

That's fucking incredible. Yeah, when you talked about the rewiring of the brain, one of the things that I found interesting when I started researching Iboga, which is where Ibogaine comes from, is the fact that for a long time, people in France actually microdosed this. And of all the plant medicines, the beauty of plant medicines is that as opposed to deleting receptor sites, like if you do, the body wants homeostasis, right? So if I was to pick up a cocaine habit, over time, I would need more cocaine to reach the same feeling, even over the course of a night, but over the course of every weekend throughout, say, four years in college, which is what it looked like, and a little beyond

that in fighting, over time, you need more just because the body's going to delete receptors. Whereas plant medicines like ayahuasca, iboga, psilocybin are actually creating more receptors for it. And what they found, and Amber Lyon talked about this years ago on Rogan's, was in looking at old ayahuasqueros who had been working with the medicine their entire lives, they had more receptors for serotonin, which is a tryptamine, which DMT is a tryptamine. And so you can house more of that feel-good neurochemical as well as DMT. So they actually need less ayahuasca to build the same bridge into their psychedelic experience. What they found in studying the French that were microdosing with Iboga was that it didn't only just work on the serotonin pathway, it worked on several other pathways, including

dopamine, which is fucking massive. Because long-time smokers, same deal. Your body starts to delete dopamine receptors and then you need more cigarettes to feel the same buzz. This is the opposite. So not only is it a way to clear out addiction and whatever you're a prisoner to, which is massive in its own right, but it is a way to literally rewire the brain so you actually feel a little go a long way again. They talk about that, like after ayahuasca, careful with your first cup of coffee, because it's like, you're a virgin to coffee. You know, I have a cup of decaf every time is how I bridge the gap back after ayahuasca. And it's like- It potentiates everything. Massively. Absolutely. Massively. Yeah. So, and you know, iboga of all the medicines is perhaps the hardest of all the ceremonies, the longest for sure.

And it's upbeat. It works differently. It's hitting a number of different receptors in the brain. Traditionally, with the Bwiti tribe in Gabon in West Africa, they're playing drums. It's very fast-paced. They're keeping you awake. And they're playing at a beat that is in tune with the resonance of the plant.

So it's not like these, you know, slow, you know, like that rhythm. I mean, it's loud and it's going and they're fucking keeping you in it. It might last 36 to 72 hours in an initiation with Iboga. Explain how the Ibogaine treatment was different because there's a variety of places you can go and and it's in a medical setting it's you know it's not like you've got people dancing around a fire drumming to you but was there music involved talk about the whole experience in in true fashion this was like a total chris bell experience where like everything's by the seat of his pants and it's kind of crazy and it happens last minute so

it was uh march 16th and the reason i remember that was that was the day the entire country shut down. So the day that the entire country shut down because of COVID, I had this guy who I've never met before from Boston fly out here, right? This guy, Jim, he flies out here from Boston basically just because he loved bigger, stronger, faster. He was an old bodybuilding coach and he had worked with with Mike Matarazzo and Paul DeMeo, some of the top bodybuilders. So I had a lot of respect for him in that capacity, but I had only talked to him on the phone briefly.

This guy shows up, and he's total bodybuilder. He's in his 50s. Jacked in tan. Jacked in tan. He looks awesome. He's all jacked. He's like, hey, brother, what's going on? How you doing? I'm like, this is the guy going to treat me. He starts telling me some of the craziest stories because he was a district attorney.

And this is what actually made me feel good about him. When he told me he was a district attorney, I'm like, okay, so before he was this crazy guy that he is now, he was a smart, well-educated attorney. So he must at least know what he's doing a little bit, right? So that made me feel a little bit better about him. But as we got talking, what I realized is this guy had the same thing as me. He was a bodybuilder. He loved doing it. He got into a bad car accident, had a lot of pain, got hooked on opioids, and had two problems. He had a lot of chronic pain and he also had a really bad opioid habit. And in the past, I think it's, he's been two years for him. He hasn't done any opioids and all he does is sort of like, he's pretty kind of like independently wealthy.

So he kind of just goes around and helps people, you know, and he charges them for it, but he doesn't, you know, like if you go to Mexico and do this, you could pay 10 to $30,000 to do this. And this guy's doing it at like a much discounted rate and kind of just doing it on the down low and like, yeah, it's illegal and stuff. But like, honestly, like we're helping people that are at the very end. So nobody that we've helped has been like, yeah, I just need a little touch up. You know, it hasn't been that these are people that are like at their wits end. But usually what I like to do is like, I don't do any of the treatments. I'm not qualified to do anything like that. But what I like to do is to find people who are in a lot of pain maybe, but don't really have an addiction problem because I don't feel

comfortable enough yet with it to be, you know, like I'm not a doctor or anything. I don't want to be telling people, oh, you should do this. So I try to take people who are like, hey, I got really serious pain and I tell them what this did for me. And that's sort of how I kind of like draw people in that want to do it. But I also kind of recommend to people a lot because I found a lot of pain relief with just psilocybin mushrooms. And so I think that, I don't know if you'd agree with this, I'm sure you probably would, but like psilocybin is just a lot more mellow of a way to get in to it than jumping right into ibogaine. So I think if somebody was looking to get into psychedelics and learn about them, maybe low doses of mushrooms are a good place to start and build up from there.

Yeah. Paul Stamets has talked quite a bit about that. You know, the rewiring of the brain from psilocybin, even on a microdosing level, which is sub, sub perceptual change, you know, like Jim Fadiman talked about that in the psychedelic explorers guide, the flowers don't smile at you, you know, the clouds don't look like angels. Um, but you think outside the box, you know, just a hundred milligrams or less can actually potentially, up to 200 milligrams, depending on where you're at. But that done on a schedule over time can have profound benefits. And macrodosing as well. Stamets talked about that. I think it was his hearing or his vision that improved from it. And they're looking into both because it's really-

They got really stuttering also, which is amazing. Yeah, massive, right? Yeah, and that was the whopper of a dose he did in his first experience, not really knowing what he was getting into, but- So I'll tell you the way I did it, just to get back to the question. Yeah, really. The question is, so you can do it in several ways. You can microdose it, like you were saying. I think microdosing might be a great way for a lot of people to get rid of like subtle,

like little addictions. Like I was saying, like it got rid of my chewing tobacco habit that was a 30-year habit. And then I just threw my chew in the garbage afterwards and I haven't chewed since. I do use some nicotine pouches here and there, but we know that nicotine

is actually really good for your brain. And nicotine like by itself doesn't have those harmful qualities that all the tobacco and all the chemicals that they put in chew and fiberglass and whatever else they throw in there to make you feel better. So for me, it massively helped. I think it can help a lot of people microdosing it with smaller stuff like that. For most people, what they do is they go to Mexico and they give you like a test dose to make sure you're not like allergic to it or anything.

And after 45 minutes or an hour, if you're still alive, you know, you shouldn't die from it because it's a small dose. So like if you did, you just get sick or something. And then they give you like what they call a flood dose. And a flood dose is like a, you know, big ass dose of ibogaine, boom, you're down. I think it's maybe 10 to 20 milligrams per kg of body weight is like the recommended dosing somewhere in there. And so basically somebody will take that one big dose at one time. Maybe it's like 800 milligrams or something. They'll just down that and then they go on this like crazy trip for, like you said, 24 to 36 hours, maybe even longer. The way that my guy does it is he likes to spread it out

because it stays in your system for quite a long time. It's got like a really long half-life. So what you can do is you start by, what he had me do was start by taking a test dose, just make sure I wasn't allergic to it. Nothing really happened. I didn't feel anything. Then I took like 200 milligrams

and I took 200 more milligrams. Like, and I didn't feel anything. Then I took like 200 milligrams and I took 200 more milligrams. Like, and I did that every hour. So every hour on the hour, I took another dose of Ibogaine and he kept me doing that all the way up until I reached my peak dose. And what was so crazy about it is it takes a really long time to kick in. It's not like, you know, mushrooms like 45 minutes later, you're like, you're in heaven. With marijuana, maybe even quicker, right? Especially if you're smoking it

and not using, if you're using edibles, it takes about an hour, but if you're smoking it, it's almost like instantaneous, right? So with Ibogaine though, I just kept taking the pills. I'm like, dude, I don't feel anything. I was kind of getting mad at the guy. Like, hey man, I don't feel any, like, you know, load me up. And I also,

this is my fault, but like the guy really like loved what I do. He was a big fan of like bigger, stronger, faster and stuff. And he loved what I do. So he was, he kind of like let me push him a little bit on it. And so I can, come on, give me a little bit more. So I made him go a little faster than normal. And I was probably taking it every 40 minutes instead of every hour. Cause I was like, come on, I don't feel nothing. Come on, keep going. And then just at one point, he's like, it's going to hit you, brother. Like you're going to feel it. And then it's going to be all over with. And I'm thinking like, whatever, I can take a lot. And then I was just like laying in bed and all of a sudden I feel like I'm going to vomit, but he had me fast. So I didn't start doing this just because of the situation. I didn't start

my first dose until about 11 o'clock at night, which I don't advise. So I had fasted all the way from the morning, from the day before. Typically they start at night though, because it's going to last a day. So you don't sleep that first night and then hopefully you get to bed the next day. But for me, it was more like the anxiety of doing it all day. I was like, man, I wish I just did this like when I woke up and could just, you know. But yeah, so I did it at night and it was a little bit weird because like you don't really sleep on it at all. So, you're kind of like really exhausted and stuff like that. But anyway, once it kicked in, I purged, you know, I vomited basically like crazy, but there was nothing to vomit, which I find really interesting. So I think you talked about

doing psychedelics on a fast. My personal opinion, like that's the best way to do it. If you're going to throw up, you don't really have anything to throw up. And as weird as it sounds, it's not that uncomfortable if you're just kind of like dry heaving. It's like not nearly as bad as like constantly vomiting stuff and not as messy either, right? And so I like that. I like fasting into it. But when it hit me, I got probably sicker than I've ever been in my life. So you imagine people talk about getting the flu or getting COVID or whatever.

And they're like, oh man, I was like on my deathbed. That's what I felt like. My stomach, I had gastric issues really bad with it. I was purging nonstop. I had like snot running down my face and tears running down my eyes. And then for whatever reason, it just whisked me away to a cloud. Like I felt like I was literally like floating on a cloud. And I started seeing like all these big flashes of light, like, right. And I could literally feel,

this is about three or four hours into the trip. I could literally feel all of my anxiety go like with these flashes of light, almost like a flashbulb of like an old, when they take those old pictures with the big giant flashbulb, it's like, right? And then like, there goes anxiety out the window. There goes depression out the window. There goes your pain out the window. I couldn't believe what was going on. I was totally blown away by it. I'd never felt anything so powerful in my entire life as that. And it's like when you feel that, you have to share it with other people. You just have to. And in all my excitement of sharing this with other people, I've met some really incredible

people that have had just crazy, crazy results. My friend Mike, he's actually a friend of my brother, Mark. He invented a product called the bicep board that Mark sells. And he was just at the gym one day and we're talking and he's like, yeah, man, my wife, she's got all this crazy PTSD and trauma from when I got shot because he was a police officer. He got shot. He shot a gang member and killed him. And there was people after his family and it traumatizes the wife. And she had, because of it, had some sort of mental issue where she lost 15 years of her memory. She couldn't even remember her own children being born.

And she was telling me, and she's kind of making light of it. She's like, it really sucks, but I don't even remember having my kids. And so Michael, I don't remember he did this. And I'll say, no, I don't remember that. And she's like, it's like all blocked out. I don't know why. I don't know how. And she's like, I've been to every single like neurologist.

I've been to all these people at Stanford, everywhere. So, well, you know, it wouldn't hurt to try Ibogaine. You know, it wouldn't hurt you. And she was like, I didn't think she was going to do it. I was just kind of in passing. Like a lot of these things are in passing and then people go home and they really like ruminate on it and they think about it. And she came back and she said, Hey, I really want to do the Ibogaine. I'm like, okay, cool. So I got my guy to come out, uh, out here again. And we, cause it's a good friend of mine. We

drove, I, I wanted to be there for it. And so I drove up to their house. They live about an hour away. She did the eyeball game and it was kind of like, it's kind of uneventful. Like it's not a fun drug. It's not a party drug. It's like, you literally just give people pills until they fall asleep and they don't actually ever fall asleep. They're in like a dreamlike lucid state, but that's all you do. So it's kind of uneventful. So we just gave Jill the pills. Here you go. Here you go. And I didn't hear anything back from these people afterwards. I texted Mike a couple times. How's Jill doing? Oh, she's doing okay, blah, blah, blah. So this was about a month before Christmas. When Christmas came around, she gave her husband a

gift. It was like a box. And he opened the box. And I don't know what you call them, but those Russian dolls that you kind of like, you open them and there's another one inside and there's another one inside. And it got all the way down to the bottom and he opens the last one and there's like a little tiny brain in there. And there's like a note like rolled up in it

and he pulls out the note and he reads it. And she's like, I love you so much. Thank you for giving me my brain back. And he's like, Jill, what is this? And she's like, I remember everything. And she waited till Christmas day to tell him. I'm getting chills just talking about it. She waited till Christmas day to tell him, you gave me my life back. I remember everything. I remember when Jacob was born. I remember when this guy was born. That guy was born. She has like six kids, right? So it's like, to me, just to be able to like, I don't know, give that

gift to somebody, you know, to be able to help somebody that couldn't remember the birth of their own children, you know, and her husband's a hero, you know, I just love to help people like that. And so to me, that's very satisfying seeing people do stuff like that. And then the other thing I read, which is like really recently, is that there's a navy seal i believe his name is marcus capone and he runs a thing called vets with that works with maps um those are kind of like vets is basically a veteran um based psychedelic uh advocate uh center you know basically uh they raise money and they they've treated like 70 patients i think that are veterans with this stuff. And those are the kind of people I like to help as well. But they actually are doing some studies at Stanford. And hopefully, since I live out there, I can get up there and talk to some of

these people. But they're doing some studies at Stanford for CTE. And it's like, they're saying that they've had so far, and I can't say too much about it yet because it's not done. It's like, science isn't there yet. But basically, this has been the most effective treatment that they've ever seen for CTE at this point. To me, that's a miracle. This is with Ibogaine. Ibogaine. So I think Ibogaine, we're going to see it in MMA. We're going to see it in the NFL. We're going to see it everywhere soon, I think. Yeah. Hopkins is, I talked with Cain Velasquez, my old teammate, heavyweight champ. Yeah. Hopkins is, I talked with Cain Velasquez, my old teammate, heavyweight champ. He's the best, yeah. And he, I believe, is going to be participating in a psilocybin study coming up at Johns Hopkins with some other guys, which is awesome. And Ian

McCall has been blazing the trail with a lot of fighters in that regard, Rashad Evans, guys like that. I think they were on Real Sports with Brian Gumbel recently, maybe not too recently. But I think all of these things that have the ability to upgrade the software on a mental, emotional, and spiritual level are also doing the same for the hardware. And it's just a matter of time before science understands that fully and then better. So once we realize, okay, we know THC helps the brain on the hardware level. We know psilocybin, LSD, and the list goes on, right? Ayahuasca, of course, and Iboga. How do they work differently from one another? And then we understand on a genetic level, I'm going to have a guy named Len May on the podcast to discuss the testing he's doing with genetics and cannabis,

not just on the genetics of cannabis, but how they correlate with one another between your personal genetic story and the genetics of cannabis. So that way you don't have a bad trip or you can minimize, you know, like, Hey, every time I have this strain, I get fucking anxiety. And I just want to go to bed at night, not think about shit. And it's like, okay, you need this strain instead, right? They're going to know that about cannabis probably before psychedelics, but you know, we're going to see that about cannabis probably before psychedelics, but we're going to see a ton of science come out very quickly over the next 10, 20 years. It's going to happen in our lifetime. Yeah, and it's really exciting.

I also tried several other psychedelics because once you get in, you're in. Yeah, buddy. I want to know. Give me fucking details. I just tend to be very lucky with the people that I know. And it's probably just because of Mark and I always out doing so much stuff. But we end up meeting all these weird people that just have the hookups, right? So I meet this guy who gives me orange sunshine LSD, which I'd never heard of it before.

But it's, I guess, one of the more potent forms of LSD. And I'll tell you what, man, for your physical pain, Ibogaine is amazing, but for your mental health and just even like being creative, you know, cause I'm a filmmaker. So I'm actually working on a movie right now called Meatheads and Meatheads is about, you know, Mark and I's journey through eating meat. It's not about a carnivore diet. Cause I don't really believe in that so much anymore as a diet, but I believe that meat is very important in our society and that we should be encouraging people to eat meat and encouraging people to learn more about where their meat comes from so that we can actually fix the environmental problems that are

associated with it. Some of them are true, some of them are false, but know which ones are true and which ones are false and which ones we can fix and which ones we cannot. And I was trying to put together a little teaser for it. And it was impossible. I just couldn't get it. When you're editing, couldn't get it, couldn't get it, couldn't figure it out. And I did this orange sunshine. And literally, I went and sat down and like turned on some music and it just, boom, it was just in my head. I sat down at my, this is like after the trip was over. So I did like this trip, it was like 12 hours. I sat down and just edited probably the best thing I've ever done. I can show it to you actually later on, but it's

probably one of the coolest like little trailers that I've ever done. It's like a five minute sort of teaser for this film that we want to do. And to me, that's incredible as far as like, it's almost like steroids for filmmakers, you know, or steroids for if you're like a writer or even, you know, what you're doing with like broadcasting and podcasting and everything. It's almost like a cheat, you know, in a way where you're like, oh, I actually get to use all of my brain what a wonderful feeling and my the most exciting thing that's happened recently is that um mark has some in his possession so i can't wait for him to try it my brother because i want to honestly he doesn't have any in his possession

he's going to go to a place and have some somewhere else well he's got he's got something he's got something um yeah i shouldn't say basically uh basically he he's got something. He's got something. Yeah, I shouldn't say that. Basically, he's going to try them. And to me, that's really exciting because I think that he's coming from the same space I was. Totally against it. Going to try it out and see how it works for him. But I think that that's going to be huge for him because I think he grew up with like learning disabilities. But he doesn't really have, he doesn't have the same issues I have.

Like he doesn't get insecure about things. So I think it'll help him a lot because I think it'll actually make, it'll just make him think even more outside the box than he already does, I think. Yeah. I'm. Yeah. Yeah. That was my, I was excited. That was my next question with, with you jumping down the rabbit hole and trying out different things and getting some equivalency of what these, how these can be used and work differently for one another. I was going to ask about Mark, you know,

cause it's, it's a constant question he has for me. Every time we podcast is like, you done anything, you done any crazy drugs lately, you know? And I could tell there's curiosity, but it always felt like it was at,

you know, like an arm's length away. But you're his brother. You know, it's a different scenario because you guys grew up together. You went through the same trials and tribulations. And, you know, you guys share some of the same traumas. And so to be able to unpack that and hear it from you, you know, is such a big one. Speaking of trauma, you know, like our hero, my mom, I was supposed to podcast with you back in November. And then, like, things were just a mess. My mom had died like a week before that, you know like our hero my my mom uh this is i was supposed to podcast with you back

in november and then like things were just a mess my mom had died like a week before that you know and it just sucked it was just it was uh sudden i couldn't say it was like totally unexpected she was really overweight and had a lot of health problems her whole life but she wasn't dying by any means like she was fine she just basically had a heart attack one night and died and my brother came in and said he just bluntly said, hey, mom's dead. And I just lost it. I just like, I couldn't control myself. And I just thought like, this is going to ruin me.

This is going to completely destroy me. Like, I don't, I don't know. That's my mom. I don't know what to do with that. Or like when people watch Bigger, Stronger, Faster, they ask about two people, Mad Dog and my mom. I don't know why. They love Bad Dog. They love my mom. People love my dad mom i don't know why they love bad dog they love

my mom people love my dad and they love smelly and they love me but like not like my mom for some reason my mom had this power uh to where everybody i think she reminded other people you know of their mom or the person that they wanted to be their mom you know she was just like a wonderful lady so i had an ibogaine trip so I've done Ibogaine three times, I should say, right? And the first time I did it was for chronic pain and it worked amazing. And people might say, well, why'd you do it three times? Well, I'm very into it. Like you, you've done Ayahuasca like 20, 26 times, 26 times. I almost nailed that. Actually, I was going to say 26, but I don't want to get wrong. So why would you do it that many times? Well, each time is different. And each time you

can have a different focus or intent and it can bring you to a different place. So the very first time I did it was simply for pain. And then after you do it, maybe like six months down the road, you might want to do what they call a booster, which is just basically taking like a single, you know, maybe dose of ibogaine, like a small dose of ibogaine, like a microdose almost somewhere down the road because it keeps kind of working in the background, like, you know, and it'll sort of like help to sort of reinvigorate what was there. And that seems to help a lot of people go on for more months. And then like, if it, you know, three or four months go by again, take another booster,

right? You don't have to, but a lot of people find that to be a very effective strategy. Other people say they just want to stay in touch with the plant, which is kind of fun. Like, you know, these things, you start getting weird.

Everything sounds woo-woo. Everything sounds so woo-woo, but it's not. Like you do, you're like, I love this plant. Like, you know, it really does become part of you. So the second time I did, I already had this trip planned and the trip was

mainly to help a couple other friends. Like I was going to go, so these things are decriminalized in Denver, in Colorado, right? So because I don't want to do it where it's illegal, I try to do it in places where it's legal. Like I did it in Oakland. I did it in Denver, you know, because I feel like that's, I might as well not get in trouble for it if you don't have to, you know. And so I went to Denver the day after my mom passed away. And I was actually going to kind of like help these other guys. But my guy was like, well, your mom just died. Maybe you should take kind of a smaller dose.

I'm like, okay, let's go. Let's rock. I had the craziest experiences and dreams and visions about my mom. And I came out of it and I said, my mom's not dead. My mom's going to live forever. She's a legend. My mom is the only mother that I know that everybody knows. People might know somebody's mother because maybe they're famous or something, but my mom wasn't famous. She was known for being a mom by everybody that we know. And I just don't know anybody else's mom that I'm friends with that's kind of like that, where they're like, oh yeah, she was in that movie. And we'd walk down the street and people would be

like, bigger, stronger, faster. And my mom would love it. I mean, we were in New York City one time and some guy was chasing her down the street, taking pictures because she like, bigger, stronger, faster. And my mom would love it. I mean, we were in New York City one time and some guy was chasing her down the street, taking pictures because she was in bigger, stronger, faster. Yeah, I was right next to her and he didn't even recognize me, which is just funny, right? And when I came out of that and I just said, man, my mom is so awesome.

My mom has helped so many people and she's just always been a saint and always been like a wonderful woman. And I have no problems with the fact that she's moved on to another place. No issue with it at all. So it was kind of weird because even like at the funeral

and the wake and stuff, like I wasn't that emotional. You know, I felt almost weird. Like I should be up here. I should be crying. I should be really sad. And I just wasn't, I wasn't sad. I was proud. And that's a weird feeling to feel at a funeral. Like I'm really proud of this lady, you know, like, yeah, she might not be here anymore, but her impact is

here. Yeah, brother. A hundred percent. So that was really helpful, you know? Yeah. That's huge. End of life. You know, it's, it's such a, it's, it's, that's, you a, of all the things in modern culture that we fuck up on, the list is many. How we handle death and the death process is up there. And because it's been removed from us as a culture, it's that much more jarring, right? There's a couple of angles I want to take this. One, I think it was Wayne Dyer was talking about, it might've been a spiritual solution to every problem or one of those books, but he was talking about either it was him or somebody else, and I'm already butchering this, but somebody died and there was a funeral. And then there was an after party and the person who had lost, I think the person

had lost his daughter, he started dancing on the dance floor. And a lot of people were like, you should be grieving right now. What are you doing? And he said that he can take as long as he needs to grieve, but his life will not start until he's able to put it past him and actually move on and start to live again. And it was just that ability, like, look, like the loss is already there. When do I start dancing? When do I start celebrating again? And it reminds me of Don Miguel Ruiz.

I forget which book it was. It was either him or fucking when he was a boy or maybe it was his boy, but somebody comes in and old man's on the deathbed and he fucking kicks him out of the room. You know, the boy comes in crying and he's like, get out of the room. Yeah, yeah. You know, the boy comes in crying and he's like, get out of the room and fix yourself.

Fix yourself until you can come back in here and understand what this is. Right? Because he knew he wasn't going anywhere. Like, yeah, my body is going to die, but I'm going to fucking be conscious somewhere. Don't worry about it. You know, fix yourself.

Yeah. And I think that's kind of a hard-nosed way to take it. But when that's alchemized and understood from within, then we really can move on into an expression of joy and celebration where we get to celebrate the life of a loved one. And that can be jarring for others, and we still need to have compassion for others in their grieving process. But the sooner we get to that space, the sooner we get back to living, the sooner we get back to the celebration and joy of life. And that's the fuck, that's the nature of the game.

And I'll tell you like on top of like what you're saying, right? Like with my family, for example, I had become so disconnected from the family unit. So I, when I was 18 years old, I moved from Poughkeepsie, New York to Los Angeles completely by myself with zero money. And I moved there because I wanted to be a filmmaker and I got into USC film school. It was an awesome opportunity for me as one of the best film schools in the country. I'm like, I'm going, I don't care. And I went and I had to try, it was like sink or swim. Like you

have to do this. Well, it ends, my whole family now lives in California. Like everybody had followed me out. Like first it was Smelly. He had, he's like, hey, I got to go check it out out there. And once I got him into Gold's Gym and moving around out there. And then, you know, a couple of years later, he met his wife there and that was it.

And then Mad Dog came out and then my mom and dad moved out. And yeah, I was just like like it's uh i forgot where i was going with that what we were just talking about well with the second you talked about poughkeepsie it made me think of my boy mike katz not the bodybuilder but i just want to give a shout out to mike katz uh it was on my head he's from poughkeepsie moved out um we're talking about the death process oh yeah being able to move through that. Yeah. So I was saying I got disconnected from my family unit, right? So I haven't really had a family until more recently, until I moved up to like Sacramento area to be by my family. And through this psychedelic, like

even when I was, when I first moved up there, I kind of didn't want to hang around with my family. But the first time I did Ibogaine, it was like back in March, I did Ibogaine. And then all I wanted to do was be around my family after that. And I realized like how important they were. And I realized, and it was great because it happened, you know, several months before my mom passed. So I had a lot of really good time with her before she passed away. But I don't think I would have ever had that time had I not done the psychedelics and brought that back. Because the way that it was explained to me,

and ironically, it was explained by a nutrition guy, Robert Lustig, is you have dopamine and serotonin. And dopamine is like your cigarette or your chewing tobacco. And serotonin is like that hug from your mother. And he's like, you can't even compare the two. And I'm thinking like, oh, wow, that's kind of amazing. Like actual like real love means a lot more than these little dopamine hits that I was getting. Or like from being in LA, you get all these dopamine hits, but you don't get any serotonin.

Not everybody in LA, but in my case, I was by myself and I didn't have a lot of really good people around me. And so getting back to that family unit was just really, really important. I mean, I think that psychedelics helped out a lot. Yeah, big time. There's a way that each of these tools navigate differently. And in any given experience, they're all different. They're all unique. But my first ayahuasca experience, I've talked about this before. First, I think it was the second vision that I had was of my mother as a 20-year-old growing me in her belly. And it was like time-lapse. I watched the belly slowly grow, but it was growing at like a fucking rapid pace to watch a belly grow in real time. And I could feel all of her nerves as my mother about to be a parent for the first time, wanting to do it right, being super nervous, not feeling ready, being really young. I could feel her love for me as unconditional, unconditional love. Like I could be a fucking

ax murderer and she would be disappointed in how my life turned out, but still love me no matter what. All parents, I don't know if all parents, but my parents always used to tell me like, you'll never understand how much I love you until you have kids of your own. Yeah. And having kids, I fucking get it. You know, like my kids, they could be, I mean, Wolf's too young, but Bear, you know, he's, he's, uh, he's cut from the same cloth me and my dad were just ball of energy. Doesn't want to listen. Yeah. He's an amazing kid. And at the same time, like at the end of the day, it doesn't, none of it matters. You know,. Yeah, he's an amazing kid. And at the same time, at the end of the day, none of it matters. There's nothing he can do to me. He could fucking kill me on accident. And in the afterlife, I'm not going to be upset about it. I absolutely love him unconditionally.

And so I got to feel that firsthand before having kids, my mother's love for me. And that just wiped the fucking slate clean. And at the time I was living in her garage, still fighting in the UFC and working, you know, 20 hours a week at the titty bar and trying to make ends meet. And we butted heads constantly, you know, it's like, how long are you going to do this for? That kind of shit. And it's like, as long as I fucking want, I'm in the UFC, you know, I'm trying to make it work. So what if I'm broke and I have to work at a titty bar? Like there was a lot of things where as a young adult, still not quite a man and a professional athlete, still not getting paid like a professional athlete, that there was areas of friction. And to have that just wiped clean

and to fully realize that we may not ever see eye to eye on many things, but at the very least, I understand how much she loves me and I can reciprocate that and know that there is common ground and let's meet there rather than in the disagreements and the things that we don't get along with. Yeah. You know, and that allowed me to show up in a way that previously wasn't available. Did you know anything about psychedelics when you were fighting? I, by my boxing coach who passed away recently, or a few years back rather, he was a medicine man and came from Mayan descent, Mexican dude. A lot of people who watched my fight saw him in my corner. He would bring me out to the reservation

for traditional sweat lodges and then psychedelics when I started asking. And we worked with psilocybin and then ayahuasca. And he was my bridge into the space. You know, he taught me how to work with medicines alone. He taught me, he gave me my foundation for all this stuff, you know, and really just, I mean, I owe it all to him. Yeah, I feel- Arturo Amara. I feel in some ways that these could actually be performance enhancing drugs, like in this

way of helping athletes like deal with anxiety and fear and depression and like a lot of the things that come with being a professional athlete. Like my best friend in life is six foot eight, 275 pounds. He's a monster. He played basketball at Michigan, big white kid from Boston, was just a stud athlete. And like right now, I'm still trying to get him back. He's just so lost because he was so good at basketball. And then he tried out for the NBA and then he broke his back.

And then he hasn't been the same since. And he's like 37 years old or something. He's just completely lost all the time. He's like a big, good looking kid. Like, hey, what is going on? And I just know that it's the wiring in his brain that's saying like, you're entitled, you deserve this and that, and you're not getting it. And the whole world, you know, it's like, it's playing tricks on him.

It's telling him the whole world's against him, but it's really not. Like he can walk into a room and he lights up the whole room and everybody wants to talk to him. And so like, it's things like that, that I see where like, I keep trying to get him to do it,

to like try it, try stuff. And he says like that that I see where, like, I keep trying to get him to do it, to, like, try it, try stuff. And he says, like, oh, no, man, I had a bad trip once and blah, blah, blah. And I think, like, that's a big stigma and a big problem for a lot of these things. I was talking to a friend of ours that had an amputation the other day. And I was telling him all about ibogaine. And I think when I tell people stuff that goes, well, Chris is a crazy meathead. Like, you know, he can't know. I think if I was like a nerdy scientist, they might believe me. But like when I tell them stuff, they're like, that just sounds, you know, so crazy. So I'm

trying to get this guy to believe in the fact that psychedelics, so he has phantom pain in the leg that was amputated. And I'm like, hey, look, here's a study on psilocybin and phantom pain. I'm telling you, I think this can help you. And he was like, no, no, I've had a bad trip. And I'm like, it's hard for me to get through my head. How bad was that trip? Was it worse than the pain in your leg? You have to try to, like I said before, you have to make some sacrifices with these things. Like it's like going in, like I said before, it's going in for a surgery or something. It's like, yeah, you might get a little banged up in the process, but for the most part,

you're going to come out the other end. And I actually don't think, I haven't had a bad trip, but, you know, regardless of that, I just, I haven't had an experience. I've had experiences that were better than others, but I haven't had anything that was like so bad that I'm like, I'm never doing that again or anything like that. Have you had those? Yeah. In fact, this is a great segue. I am actually going to drop a solo cast on the, by all accounts, worst experience of my life, the hardest trip. And I've been waiting and teasing, not teasing it out to keep people waiting, but waiting because I'm still alchemizing the experience. Because any ceremony doesn't end when you come out of it and

you're sober. It ends when you fully grasp and integrate what that medicine's teaching you. Up until that point, I've had really hard experiences. I mentioned this before on the podcast, but Dennis McKenna, Rick Doblin, all the greats, they say there's no such thing as a bad trip. There's only hard or challenging experiences. There's a right way and a wrong way or a better way to do things than not. If you are doing psychic surgery, have a good fucking surgeon at the helm. Make sure that the right set and setting is there, the container is set, all those things. We've talked about ad nauseum on this podcast in the past and anywhere else where you hear about that. It's almost like a disclaimer where people have to dive into that set and setting, the importance of that, the importance of the container.

Who's at the helm? Is it a babysitter or a black belt correndero? All of those things can help shape the experience. And then how is that integrated on the backend, right? All very important things. So you don't leave somebody less whole than when they started. They come out more whole than when they started. That said, I've had one of my first mushroom experiences.

I was down to 40 of old English and smoked a blunt in a fucking Honda Civic and was about to throw up before the mushrooms came. They were wet in the bag, which is stronger, not dried. I chopped them up, threw them on an entire large pizza, DiGiorno's, and ate the whole thing. Then the stripper showed up. I'm 19 years old. All my friends there are like, he's the birthday boy. And I was like, no, no, I'm not. They put a mask on me. She beats me with a dildo, shaves one ass cheek. And I run out of the room puking violently. And they stuffed me in a bed and I thought the bed was swallowing me. I thought I was going to suffocate and slowly die for six hours until

it wore off. That was a bad experience, right? When I was 19. I still came back to it. I was like, well, I haven't done this without alcohol and weed. Maybe there is a better way. Sure. There is always a better way, right? So that out of the bag, as I've done ceremonies, which have a container and a noble silence and are treated as such with, whether it's self-guided or with, you know, anywhere from a blue belt guide, a babysitter, all the way up to, you know, the expert level people I've worked with in the Amazon, everywhere in between when I've had those experiences, I've still had really fucking rattling experiences that made me say I'm good for a while. Yeah. This last one that I did,

you know, there was, you know, it was a five MEO DMT experience that kicked back in at night, reactivations. Oh, geez. And that's dose dependent. And I'm going to dive way more into this in the solo cast on what that experience was like. But as far as Ram Dass saying, when you get the call from God, hang up the phone, or Terrence McKenna towards the end of his life saying, I think the mushrooms turned on me, and then he backed off the throttle. I get it.

I get what they were saying at that point. It was the darkest experience that was relived for 17 nights, you know, like full blown. Not every medicine can do that to you. I didn't take more medicine. It just fucking kicked back on. For 17 nights? For 17 nights. And thankfully, you know, I called Paul check. Part of the reason I want to do this podcast is not as a warning or a deterrent, but as a, this is, you know, not many people have Paul check on speed dial, right? So let me give you the tools that he gave me to ground my ass back to reality so that I could live and show up for my family and fucking participate in the world again. Without that, I don't know where the fuck I'd be right now. Maybe in a fucking padded cell,

right? And that's how serious it was. And that is that with that medicine in particular, it's not with any other medicine, the idea of a flashback or reactivation or night school typically isn't seen. When I had 30 grams of psilocybin, that was the deepest experience of my life by far, but it ended and never came back. Right. So you can have challenging experiences. And I think part of the way you curtail that is with expert guidance on the front end during and on the back end. And it's the back end that can be more important than the front end or the during, right? The back end is where you say, you know, the back end fucking guide was Paul Cech. I'm out of the during, right? The backend is where you say, you know, the backend fucking guide was

Paul check. I'm out of the experience, but still experiencing it. I hit him up and we have a two hour conversation that brings me back to reality. That's great. And I, you know, like for me, my guide, like I said, he was kind of crazy, but he ended up, he's ended up being a really good friend of mine. And like, I just feel like, uh, he was very comforting and I feel like that, that was important because I because he just made me feel okay about it and, hey, you're going to be fine. He didn't really do much to tell you the truth. There was no chanting. There was none of that. It was the medicine doing it. And the other thing that he did that I feel is really, really important. I can't really stress this enough

because I find when I do them by myself from at I'm at home and I do mushrooms, like I'll get on my computer and it's like, try to not do that. You know what I mean? Like- That's creating a ceremonial container or not. Yeah, it's like probably a bad thing. You know, like don't, like, I don't know. I just tell people, because this is what I was told

and I actually feel it was good advice is try to stay away from technology. Like put your phone away, even just turn it off. Like don't, because you'll start texting people. You'll get all fired up. You know, you love everybody. is try to stay away from technology. Like put your phone away, even just turn it off. Like don't, because you'll start texting people, you'll get all fired up. You know, you love everybody. So you just, ah, I got an idea.

You know, it's like, maybe it's not a good idea right now. Just chill, you know? And so I think that that's really important too. One of the things that I've done is to even not even take notes during the ceremony. Because if one of the reasons you participate in the Noble Silence in ayahuasca and some of these different bigger medicines is the fact that you're only getting downloads,

you're only receiving when you're listening. So in the feminine aspect of the yin energy, when I quiet my mind and listen with a singular or multi-layered intention, as I focus my attention on the thing and listen for the answers, that's when it comes through. The second I start speaking to you, like Bob Costas giving the play-by-play, like, holy shit, did you see that? What's this thing here in the room? It takes me out of the receiving,

takes me out of the listening. Now I'm outward, I'm masculine. And the same can be said about writing. So holy shit, that's a good one. I got to write that down. I'm going to forget that one. Then you start writing. Well, that can become a loop and you get to have pages of fucking crazy notes that are unreadable when you come out of the experience six hours later. And you're like, I don't know what the fuck any of this means. Generally speaking, not going to be a big help.

You know, Tim Corcoran talked to me about that on the Soul Wander, which is medicine free, just a day in nature, fasted that, you know, if the download's big enough, it's going to be there waiting for you when you come back to it. And if you create space and you're quiet and you tune in through meditation or

breath work or any of these things, tobacco, organic tobacco can be a phenomenal bridge for that. Then you can start to piece that back together and take notes and really ground the experience. And that in itself is a way to integrate. After your experience, Tim does this as well, and many people do this, is a mirroring exercise where you speak out loud with the talking stick unedited, with no chiming in about your experience. You speak it into existence.

Oddly enough, that's another teaser for one of the ways that Paul helped me was to speak it into existence, everything I had learned, and then ask it out loud to work in a different way in teaching me going forward. And so, you know, as we do that, there's something about taking this shit from the astral etheric planes

and bringing it back to 3D through the spoken word, through the logos, the way this whole thing was fucking brought to be, you know, the word of God. And so when we speak that in, we bring it back to 3D reality. Writing it can be another way that we bring it back to 3D reality. And it's another way that we review everything that happened. And that can be a bridge point for us to create action steps because all this

shit's really cool. It's all really cool and it's fascinating experiences, but unless it changes our lives going forward, it's just a memory. So those are some big of many, a few of many that can help us integrate. And I think that that backend portion is just as important in how you go about setting your container and working with any medicine. Do you think that psychedelics have made you like a better person, a better dad? I mean, you fill in the fucking blank. Better everything. Fill in the blank.

Better husband, more compassionate. It's funny, I did a podcast with a guy out in Chandler, Arizona, who's been one of the longest ketamine doctors and psychiatrists. And he's talked to, he runs several tests, from the old Harvard psychology tests to CTE scans and different brain imaging to actually look at, see which brainwave state are you in predominantly, all this shit. Very comprehensive, like four hours worth of tests I did. And then we reviewed it on the podcast and he's got Q&A or

question and answers that you go through. And he's like, judging by some of the psychological tests that I had done, he said, the only thing you tested low in was compassion. And it was funny. And he's like, I think being a fighter, that has to be pretty low. Cultivating compassion is important. It sounds airy-fairy, but when you have kids, for the first couple of years,

when Bear would get an ouchie, I'd be like, you're fine. I wouldn't be like, suck it up, pussy, and, you know, get in his face about it. I'd pick him up, but I wasn't as compassionate as I am today. You know, whereas Tosh would be like, pal, you got to give him love first. And she'd grab him and hold him and give him a kiss and give him that motherly energy.

Well, fucking dads can do that too. And I do that now. You know, so it's nice to see that arc, even over the last five years, change as opposed to how I was before he was born. And before even my first psychedelic trip, where I really had guidance and got a lot healed and worked through

and different perspectives and all the things that come along with that in every given ceremony, my life has changed fucking so much. I don't think I would have a relationship with my wife and all the things that come along with that in every given ceremony, my life has changed fucking so much. I don't think I would have a relationship with my wife at this point with how I used to drink. It wouldn't have happened. Yeah.

And so that helped you cut down drinking a lot? Completely. Completely? Yeah. I went sober for two years from alcohol. At a certain point, I thought, I feel pretty healed from this. Can I use this without numbing? Yeah.

And since then, that's been the case. If I drink, it's dry farm wines. I drink organic stuff. And I don't drink to get drunk. There's nothing in me that wants to escape now. It's weird because ironically, it's made me not want to... I don't want to do anything else. There's nothing that compares... When I did that orange sunshine,

there's nothing that compares that in the world. So like. It's a far better drug. Alcohol is a shit drug compared to any of those. That's what I realized. I was an alcoholic for like six, seven years. And what I,

and probably longer than that, I just undiagnosed, but I just realized like, okay, we have all these drugs and all these things that we seek out. We seek out alcohol and we seek out tobacco. We seek out all these things and they're just shit drugs. Like they're crappy. Like then you have these psychedelics that can do like all these amazing things and they're actually way more fun, you know? And what I like about it is that there is several of them. Like

you can go on a little short trip with a little bit of mushrooms or you can go on a huge trip with, you know, some LSD or you can, you can kind of, um, pick and choose where you want to go because there are so many different, you know, forms. Have you found like a, you have like a favorite or do you have like, uh, or do you have like several favorites? Yeah. I mean, they're there. It says which tool is right for the job. You know, um, I've only done Iboga once. I am definitely drawn to having a proper Iboga initiation at some point, which would be the three floods over the course of three days. But I'd want that to be proper. So heading out to West Africa is anywhere on my timeline in the next five,

maybe in 10 years. I would love to do that too. Where I was at, I just didn't have the opportunity. I was in so much pain. I'm like, I would love to do that too. I just, you know, where I was at, I just didn't have the opportunity. I was like in so much pain. I'm like, I just need to do this, you know? Yeah. And hey, if it works great, then like maybe I will do it the proper way

one of these days, but right now I just need to get it done. Access, access is a big one, you know? And I think that's, if I have a favorite, it is psilocybin because of number one, it's versatility. Even on a micro range, you know, going from 100 milligrams to 300 milligrams,

which would be more concert dose than micro dose, it's so versatile there. It's versatile for thinking outside the box. And then on a gram for gram basis, I've had several ceremonies that were in the five gram range, seven gram range, and with variety of strains. As we come to find out more and more about psilocybin, there's hundreds, I think 118 different strains of psilocybin cubensis out there right now. And they're starting to do different genetics where they cross up different strains and see what potentiates there

and looking into the different alkaloids outside of psilocin. The future of this is really fascinating. I just sent you a text the other day. California is looking at decriminalizing everything. I think as things get decriminalized, we're going to see other things pop up. There'll be more science.

There'll be places where you can get access to them, hopefully. Hopefully, you can get them at a dispensary. I don't know if that's in the future pipeline, but it seems like it would make sense, right? People are going for relief. So I just can't wait to see where all this goes. Yeah, there's two movements that we want to be good about.

Number one, the movement of education and not necessarily the movement of science. We want science, but we don't want to. One of the issues that I talked with Paul Cech about in the last podcast was, if science takes this far enough, do we take out the spirit of the medicine? So in a study, they have to look at just the chemical structure of it. They're only going to study ibogaine.

They're only going to study psilocin from psilocybin. They're not going to study the whole plant of psilocybin, the whole fungus. Yeah, they're not going to, right? plant of psilocybin, the whole fungus. Yeah, they're not going to. Right. So we're looking at THC and we forgot about CBD, CGN, CBN, all the terpenes. There's a whole host of everything that goes into that medicine that makes what nature gave us. And that's just one strain, right? So we don't want to lose out on that by only studying DMT when ayahuasca has harming harmaline and everything else that's in there unyet discovered right so i think um that's one

thing to keep in mind when i talk about education i'm simply saying that we need to further our education from the indigenous and from the elders that carried these medicines for as long as they did yeah there's thousands of years that certain cultures have worked with these different medicines and that needs to be kept and it needs to be passed on. It needs to be understood. So it's not lost. Doesn't mean it's going to look the same for everyone, right? Your Ibogaine experience is different than how they do it in Gabon. And that's totally okay because look at the fucking results, right? Yeah, I got results. You got results. You got what you needed from it. And so we can bridge those things, but we want to be able to carry that as well. The lineages of that knowledge

needs to be kept. And I can imagine that these ceremonies, it's a whole vibe. It's about the whole feeling overall. And to me, it would just seem like it was much more serious and real if I was in a real setting. I took it in a hotel room. And so it wasn't that flashy. It wasn't that cool. But you see all these ceremonies, they're putting face paint on people and they're chanting and everybody's in the whole village is involved in it. Yeah, it can be a rite of passage. It just seems really cool. And it's something that hopefully one of these days I'll get to do. The first time, I mean, the first 10 ceremonies with Ayahuasca I did,

there was an iPod playing. And we were on a reservation, which was fantastic because the land, that's a special sacred land. No running water, no lights. And the music was phenomenal. You know, it's phenomenal. Music is incredible on any medicine for that matter. But Icaros that are sung, like sung, it's a whole different experience.

So when you have a true black belt curandero that has been working with the medicine for 30 plus years, and they're singing you through your experience and singing healing songs to each one of the people with tobacco prayers and different prayers for the different plants within the Amazon, it's night and day, the difference in that experience. And I get it. That, for me, was access. I needed access. I didn't have money to get to the Amazon. I did it locally. You go to the Amazon or you go to Sultara in Costa Rica,

where they fly different curanderos in from the Shipibo tribes out in Peru. It's a whole different experience. And I really encourage, if you're interested, man, Sultara is the place to go in Costa Rica. Really? For ayahuasca. And that's a powerful experience. I really want to try ayahuasca because what I hear is that it's a great compliment when you've done ibogaine or vice versa because they supposedly, and I don't, you would know way more than I do about this. They say that ibogaine is a really internal journey. You go inside and ayahuasca is more outward journey, I guess.

So I guess it's supposedly more introspective with Ibogaine and kind of, I guess, the opposite, which I don't really exactly know what that means. I think that'd be false. I think they're both introspective. So it's very interesting. Ayahuasca is also very interesting. The only external one that I'm aware of would be, you know, again, how you use it.

Like, you know, psilocybin at a concert or at Burning Man is going to be external. 30 grams for me in a dark room with, with East Forest Music for Mushrooms playing was 100% internal. I didn't move once. Right. With LSD, I want to move on LSD.

You know, like I want to be in nature. I want to do yoga. I want to dance. I want to open my body. I have run. I've run a fucking 5K on acid. It's awesome. It's awesome stuff. And you're connected to your body and it's very energetic.

So understanding that and leaning into it and saying yes to it is a good way to work with that. Also sitting with it. There's a variety of ways we can use all these medicines, but ayahuasca is definitely introspective. One big question I have for you is, so ayahuasca has DMT in it, correct?

Yeah. So what's the difference between doing DMT and doing ayahuasca? Well, again, we can talk about things on a scientific level where you have just DMT, and then this is NNDMT, what we produce in our body. And then you have NNDMT from charcuterie leaves or different variety of plants alongside the vine.

And the vine is purgative. It has harming and harmaline, which they originally wanted to name telepathy. Because the fact that as they studied it, they saw that people could have shared visions. That's the first time I saw bear. It happened to my wife twice back-to-back ceremonies where, you know, she was holding me while I was holding our firstborn child.

We weren't even married. And she's saying this to the group and closing circle. And I was like, yo, I had the same exact vision. And the next month, same thing. But now we see it's a boy and all my fear of being a dad came up and it fucking moved through me. And a month later, we're pregnant with Bear. Ayahuasca gave us that in advance. You're going to be parents. And it helped you with all the anxiety of being a dad. Massively. Massively. It prepared me mentally for the challenge that lied ahead

and showed us we're having a boy first and who that boy was and what his name was, all of that. Since I'm kind of new to this and you're a veteran, what would you say are the things that sort of, what should I be looking out for as far as like, hey, don't get into this or don't go here? What are the things that people are doing wrong with psychedelics, do you think? Yeah, there's a lot there. Briefly, I'll just say that DMT is a 15 to 20-minute experience. And you will come across entities and all sorts of shit. It's its own medicine, and it's a powerful medicine. Ayahuasca, especially with the right container, is different from anything else.

There's no head of the table, you know, in the King Arthur's round table, but ayahuasca and iboga are probably, you know, they're King Arthur and Lancelot. They're fucking, or Guinevere. They're way at the top

of those medicines. In terms of what's going wrong, again, like it's, I've had experiences with people playing an ipod that were fantastic yeah i've also seen you know shit go down where the container wasn't quite set and you know there's items there that people can get a hold of i've had a guy swing a shovel at me you know and other people during a ceremony aubrey experienced that and one of don howard's and don

howard was you know while he alive, one of the best ever. But there was a sword on the all-turn. The guy just felt very like he didn't belong. And so he grabbed the sword and was looking to cut himself or cut somebody else. And it took Aubrey and Don Howard to really talk this guy down and then remove the sword. So obviously there's things that can go right, even when the container is set perfectly. And then you have malpractice, which is a whole different ball game, right?

You could have somebody like, you look into ayahuasca enough, you find that there's raping, molestation, people die. There's all sorts of shit going on. It's not all the light side of it. There's, or the Jedi, there's the Sith Lords. There's people that are just looking to make money. And then there's issues with equivalency. There's issues with how long have you been practicing as a practitioner? Did you go to the Amazon for six

months and come back and say, I'm going to serve? Or did you spend five, 10 years there? And that's different for everybody. And like've had, like I said, I've had great experiences listening to iPods. I've had great experiences with guides who say themselves, like, I'm not a shaman, I'm just a guide. And those experiences were fantastic. And I've seen experiences go really wrong. So it's what you bring to the table and how that goes.

And then accepting like, yeah, but obviously you want to X off any chance of rape, any chance of death and make sure that that's there. But in terms of the psychic surgery and things like that, it's really important that you search out vetted places. That's why I mentioned a Sultara constantly because I went there for my last journey two years ago and sitting in our three-hour orientation,

which I really didn't want to be at. Like I've done this enough. I don't need to be here. I realized within the first hour, if we had started here, every one of our experiences would have been better because we would have understood how to work with the medicine better. And there was so much I was learning

in that three-hour orientation. And the way they integrate, they have, I think, three months of integration practice that comes after that in emails and different practices that they guide you through. There's very few places like that that really dial that in. And there's other places in Costa Rica where you might, fantastic, good places, but you might sit with 50 people instead of 18. And that's just a whole different ballgame. You've got a lot of energy being moved there as opposed to a smaller container.

So I've built up preferences and things like that over the years of doing it based on, you know, what's the skillset of the practitioner? How long have they been doing this? What is the container? And those are all different factors that go into who I want to seek out to do it with. Yeah. I was reading something from Tim Ferriss that was actually interesting.

He was talking about some of these plants sort of not being respected and actually impossibility of being endangered, of going away. Ibogaine is one of them. The interesting thing about ibogaine and what's good about that is that you can actually synthesize Ibogaine from another tree.

They figured out how to do that. The guy actually lives up by me in Davis that does that. So hopefully I'll get to talk to him soon. But they synthesize Ibogaine from like some other plant and it ends up being the same molecule. Yeah, so you can get, so that's what that's what there's, there's benefit there too, especially on the medical, right? So like if we're just looking at a medical treatment for pain or a medical treatment for opioid addiction, we can do that without, without, you know, there's no sustainability issues there. Right. And, and that's, you know, what, what is your intention

going into it? What do you need to get from it? Cool. This is how we can do it. It can be in a medical setting. We can, we can synthesize it. We can get everything you need from that experience. Or if we're just going to study psilocin, we can do that without worrying about running out of mushrooms. Obviously, mushrooms are, I shouldn't say obviously, but mushrooms are readily available to people. They're much easier to grow and they're just much easier to access. So there's never going to be an issue there. With things like ayahuasca, it takes three years for the vine to be ready to cut in order for it to keep growing. Yeah. So with things like that, that is a part of the conversation. It has to be, right? It definitely has to be a part of the conversation.

I think more and more, especially with legality changing, we're going to see places able to grow their own medicine. You know, one of the guys I worked with had started a facility called New Way Row down in Peru with the Amaringo family. So if you've looked at like a lot of the ayahuasca art, and we're here in Hobbs' office, we've got a really cool painting back there. And I've been staring at that the whole time.

Yeah, it's phenomenal. That Pablo Amaringo was one of the premier painters of ayahuasca vision space. And so Gabor Mate, who's been big into this space, he went down with a couple of different psychiatrist friends and they started working to learn. And they actually built New Erao and then gave it to the Amaringo family. And the Amaringo family said, all right, we're gonna help you guys be practitioners and your job will be to bring this out to the world. And I'm not speaking about Garber Mate,

I'm speaking about the guy whose name will remain nameless, who from Canada, same neck of the woods as Garber, is now able to practice that medicine. And I believe they have, what's the word I'm looking for? Some type of dome where they can grow biodynamic, organic ayahuasca. And they're growing that in British Columbia, Canada. So the fact that they can do that there, it's like a greenhouse.

You can grow it anywhere. And if they're using that to supply their own medicine, they're not taking it from the Amazon or from the rainforest. You don't have to worry about people over-consuming or taking it too early, those kinds of things. So I think more and more as people awaken and have that, the beautiful thing about these medicines that come from the earth

is that there's this very strong connection to Gaia. Like you understand that earth is conscious, a super conscious being that we are cells in the body of. And with that, a deeper relation to it. Like how am I contributing? How am I taking less than I'm giving? And how am I helping to restore this little pocket and area that I live in?

And as we start to think in that way, human ingenuity is already there. You know, we just start bridging that gap a little further. And I don't think we're going to run into sustainability issues with anything. Yeah, well, good. Yeah, because that was an article that Tim Ferriss wrote recently about how some of these things are like, hey, there's possibilities that they might go away. And it's like, we don't want that.

And I think when I first started doing it, to tell you the truth, I was a little bit not like reckless or anything, but I didn't care about that kind of stuff. I didn't give it any consideration. And then when I realized like how awesome these medicines can be and how much they can help people, I'm like, oh man, I got to take this serious, you know? And so I'm trying to talk to more scientists and more rather than just, I was just talking to people that did it because that's all I could find. But now that I'm getting more into it, I want to talk to more scientists. I want to get some, I want to like help or be part of helping to find people for studies and things like that because I have a lot of resources in those areas. And there's a lot of things I want to see studied.

Like I would love to know, for example, with my mom. My mom would never have done a Ibogaine trip. My mom's knee was so bad. She couldn't walk. So she was on a walker. She got heavier than she already was. She had lost like 80 pounds doing keto and carnivore and stuff. And she was all into it for a while. But then like anybody, you get depressed because your knee hurts and you can't walk. And hey, I'm just going to give up. And she started going back to eating the junk again and gained a lot of weight and the knee hurts a lot worse. She would have never done a full-on Ibogaine trip. She wouldn't probably be able to handle it. And also, it's not like the one

thing that I should stress is like, the only issue with Ibogaine really is your heart. So if you have a bad ticker, you might want to, you know, really seriously consider, you know, getting fully checked out and all that stuff before that and even doing it with a ekg if you decide to do it but i'd even say you'd probably want to forego it if you have any sort of heart issue um but the one thing that would be really interesting is like they found that like in more micro doses it's not affecting the people with heart issues they're actually giving it to like stroke patients in micro doses and they're giving it to people in chronic pain in microdoses. It seems to be helping, but there's

no real formal studies. Like that's what I want to see. Like if I could give somebody just a little bit of this, maybe where they don't even feel it, is it like working in the background, which we know psilocybin can do in a microdose, like, hey, you take it over the course of a month or whatever, and then you start feeling these effects. You just feel better overall. Could it be something that could heal these kinds of pains? In all honesty, and this is going to sound so crazy, but when I did the Ibogaine treatment, my knee was so bad, it just hurt to walk. I could literally not walk around the block. I just couldn't. It's too much. When I did it and Matt Vincent had the same experience, but on ayahuasca, Matt Vincent told me he had a conversation with his knee.

And I'm like, I had the same thing. I was talking to my good knee, I was asking my good knee, just help this guy out. Just help him. He just really needs help. You take some of this muscle over here, put it over here. And obviously that didn't happen. I know that that didn't happen, but that was what was going on in my head. And I was literally, I remember like actually talking to my knee and talking to my other knee. And when I was done with the experience, it was completely gone, you know? And I kept trying to stomp on my leg to make, you know, I went for a bunch of walks. The guy that did it with me could not believe it. He was like, I can't believe this. Cause I kept, you know, I went for a bunch of walks. The guy that did it with me could not believe it. He was like, I can't believe this. Cause I kept, you know, Mark and I like to do our 10 minute

walks. So I kept saying to the guy, Hey, let's go for a walk. He's like another walk. How many walks are you going to do? Cause by the third day I was like raring to go, you know, I was like, I was like, okay, let's go walk. And I just wanted to walk everywhere. I think like one day we walked like eight miles, you know, just like on a guy, from a guy who couldn't walk before that. So to me, like seeing these things play out in these ways is just, it's just amazing. And it's, it obviously was very helpful to me and hopefully it can help a lot of other people in the same way. Absolutely, brother. Yeah. And that's really cool on pain. Cause you asked me before we started, if I've ever been in chronic pain and I had busted my neck in 2012

pre-fight in a scooter accident before I fought Jimmy Manowar and just took time off because the road rash didn't ever really I was going to wait to check the neck injury until after the fight and I don't think I ever did and then I had a DEXA scan with Dr. Dan Stickler here in Austin. And he was like, oh, when did you break your neck? And I was like, huh, I didn't break my neck. I went to bed that night and I remembered the scooter accident going fucking 40 miles an hour face first into the gravel. And it's funny because it looked almost like an L, like right at the C7. And I was like, oh, fuck, man, that's no good.

Let's get that sorted. And I've had some different fascial work done. We got stem cells in it recently. So we're seeing how those take up. But the pain, pain's an issue, right? So really, there's structural shit that I need to get done, but that's a new, that's opened another reason for me to want to try Iboga and Ibogaine. So that's really cool. That's part of the conversation now. I'm always so curious on things like, so I've heard a million people talk about stem cells. I hear a million people talk about things like CBD. And the one difference I have to say,

and those things might be great, I don't know. But the one thing that I see that was just different than that is I haven't talked to anybody who's tried Ibogaine and said, I'm not really sure if it worked. You know what I mean? And that's to me, that's like the difference. It's like, well, does it work? It's like, well, I don't know. I talked to people that say they have really bad elbow pain and they take CBD every day and it works amazing.

I've also taken a thousand milligrams of CBD for 14 days straight. And I didn't feel any benefit from it at all. And I know it was from a good quality company because the guy that makes it is the one that gave it to me. So I just never personally, but also there is like a 20 to 30% non-response group and I could be in that group for CBD. And that's, I think, part of the conversation, hopefully I'll have, with Len May coming up is on the genetics specifically to cannabis and the alkaloids and terpenes. And that's where we see it go forward. You know what I'm saying? Like, Hey, this, you know, um, and at what dose, right?

Like, uh, uh, what's the old, the old adage? One man's, uh, one man's food is another man's poison or something like that. Depending on the, it's funny. I was fucking, I always regurgitate this shit to bear and I can't think of it now, but medicine is medicine only to a certain point. Yeah.

And then it becomes poison. Right. So at which point is in the dose, right? Yeah. So where, where is that? Where does that lie for each of us individually?

Yeah. You know? And, and, and I mean, that's fucking part of the main issue that I've had with vaccines and Del Bigtree as well. And some of these other guys we talked pre-podcast was like, there is no one size fits all anything with medicine. Why is that the fucking same for everybody?

Why is that not even a part of the conversation? Right? We're all different. There should be a dose difference for a five-year-old versus a 50-year-old. There should be, you know should be all these things. So I think that's where we see, without digressing too much down the rabbit hole there, where we see all the plant medicines and different things coming in the future is what's right and where it's going to put you to the place that you need based on your intention. And hopefully,

that's where we see this all come to fruition and curtail some of the issues that we've had around bad trips, bad experiences, hard, challenging things, and really just lay it out in a way that's more beautiful and leaves us more whole than when we started. I find it interesting too that there's plant medicine, but then there's also stuff that's like a little bit on the outside, like the LSD.

And ketamine. And ketamine, right? And they seem to be phenomenal also. Phenomenal. I also say like, don't throw it out just because it's not natural. Yeah, yeah. No doubt. A lot of times people are like,

well, I don't, I'd rather do mushrooms and LSD. It's like, like you said, tools for the job. What's your job? And then pick the tool. You know,

it's not like just because one's natural and the other one's not doesn't necessarily make it better or worse. Yeah. Yeah. I've had some of the deepest journeys

I've ever had in my life have been on ketamine, you know, and they lasted 45 minutes. You know, just fucking... Ketamine seems to be the one a lot of people are using for mental health.

Yeah, and we'll see. I mean, there's sticky shit around that too, right? It's the only addictive psychedelic. Access can be good for certain people. It can be really bad if you've had substance issues

in the past. Yeah. Or if you've got an addictive personality or you're like me and oh, if little's good, more is better, you know? So thankfully I've had enough,

you know, wherewithal through working with archetypes and working with the mentors that I have and all the things to understand, like my, my gauge is there if I'm leaning on something too often, those kinds of things. But shit, man,

I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to keep us going and have this thing shit out on us. We've been going without a power source. I think we got an hour and a half, brother. No, we talked. It was awesome. It's awesome to talk to you and actually get to share experiences with somebody else who knows what's going on. Because a lot of times I'm talking and the other person has no idea what I'm talking about. Fuck yeah, beautiful brother. Where can people find you? You're still podcasting, right? I've sort of paused it on podcasting right now, but I'm at big strong fast on Instagram. Right now, what I'm trying to do is just get another

film off the ground. Okay. And then the other thing is, and I should mention it here because why not, right? I want to make a movie about psychedelics. I think we can do what we did with Mark and I did for steroids, which is basically just get people to get over the stigma and not look so down on things and maybe just take a more educated look at them. And I think we can do the same thing with psychedelics as far as – and also I think psychedelics are the future of the fitness industry. We start seeing all this, and it kind of started with like the on it kind of stuff, like the shroom tax and this and that people starting to get into these mushroom kind of things. And right. And the what's the other four sigmatic.

And right. I think we're going to see that stuff really grow and explode coming up and then get in, you know, to the more psychedelic stuff like psilocybin and stuff eventually when they start legalizing stuff. But I feel it's going to be a real future just in health and fitness. Yeah, brother.

Well, I mean, all these things connect us back to our body and not just to the earth, but to our bodies, the inner earth. And they're impetus. If you've heard from a doctor, lose weight, or your wife, you put on fucking 30 pounds, come on, where's the guy I've married? Whatever the case is, and all the excuses and shit that you have there, like if you start to weed through the garden of what's bullshit and what's true, at the bare minimum, you're going to want to take care of yourself.

I mean, that seems to be a common trip report is that you actually give a shit about yourself again and you want to take better care of yourself. That seems to be damn near universal through these experiences, right? Yeah, that was one thing that happened with me because I had such depression. And when you come out of it, you're like, why was I depressed? You don't even know. You can't even see it anymore.

Yeah. Beautiful, brother. It's great to talk to you, buddy. Yeah, I love you, Chris. Son of a bitch. Thank you.