Mark Bell's Power Project - Thomas Feegel - Is Ibogaine Treatment the Solution to Drug Addiction? || MBPP Ep. 842

Episode Date: November 23, 2022

In this Podcast Episode, Thomas Feegel, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about how ibogaine can be the solution to substance addiction. Thomas also gave us the best explanation of wha...t ibogiane is and how it works.  Visit the Beond Website for more info: https://www.beond.us/ New Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://hostagetape.com/powerproject Free shipping and free bedside tin! ➢https://www.naboso.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 15% off! ➢https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!! ➢Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject Code: POWERVIVO20 for 20% off Vivo Barefoot shoes! ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements! ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://eatlegendary.com Use Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori! ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject  ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok  FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en  Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz Stamps: 00:00 - Naboso Neuro ball 03:06 - Different mustache styles 05:48 - About today's guest 07:45 - Tom Feegel's intro & his work 09:59 - Psilocybin Mushrooms can help quit alcohol 12:31 - Most Pharmaceutical drugs have side effects 14:56 - Precision dosing 19:21 - Andrew's Jiu-jitsu experience 23:47 - Tom joins the show 24:47 - Beond & Tom Feegel's story 29:49 - Iboga: Overview & functions 36:48 - Inside controversial drug Ibogaine 44:52 - Ibogaine Microdosing experiment 48:38 - Success & monetization of Iboga 55:02 - Replacing old patterns with positive 1:03:52 - How Ibogaine works & it's experience 1:11:49 - What does Ibogaine feel like to have visions 1:17:33 - Marek health 1:18:06 - Is being addicted to any substance a choice? 1:24:38 - Will Ibogaine be used as a day to day performance enhancer for go getters? 1:28:34 - Spiritual Awakening with Ibogaine 1:32:50 - Preparing people & mitigating risks 1:37:54 - Intention behind Ibogaine treatment 1:42:00 - Ibogaine Treatment time & cost 1:50:11 - Barriers to widespread use of such substances 1:53:05 - Success rate of Ibogaine 1:56:57 - Sustainable abstinence rate 1:59:31 - Where can people find you & sign up for treatment 2:00:27 - Coping with chronic pain 2:02:48 - Does Ibogaine scrubs positive patterns in brain 2:06:20 - Thank You Tom! 2:06:35 - Mark's views on drugs, addiction & treatment 2:09:16 - Self-authoring Program 2:11:06 - Be open to go to therapy 2:14:17 - Andrew's breathwork experience 2:19:09 - Health care system is confusing 2:24:24 - Like, share, subscribe, comment, follow the podcast 2:24:49 - Power Sandals coming SOON 2:25:05 - Smelly's tip 2:26:10 - Outro #ibogaine  #PowerProject #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Paparazzi family, how's it going? Now, we've been working on straightening our feet for a while now, which is why we partnered with Niboso Technology. These are the mats, these are the balls, these are the things that you see us standing on during the podcast. And the main reason why is because of the texture
Starting point is 00:00:13 on the mats helps drive sensation and stimulation and blood flow to the bottoms of your feet, which is gonna be super important as you're trying to get more out of your feet over time. The NeuroBall, which is what they also have on their website, is two different balls connected together, but you can smash your feet against it while you're working, while you're sitting, while you're chilling. These are all things that you can do passively so you can get stronger in the long run. Andrew, how can they
Starting point is 00:00:36 learn more about it? To learn more, you guys got to head over to Naboso.com. That's N-A-B-O-S-O.com and at checkout, enter promo code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off your entire order. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Cool. Hey, I'm thinking about growing my hair out a bit. Quinn Bell, she's like, you need to do something with your hair. She's like, when's the last time you had a whole head of hair? And I was like, I don't know.
Starting point is 00:01:01 When is the last time you had a whole head of hair? Yeah, it's been a long time. Maybe like, I don't know what is the last time you had a whole head of hair yeah it's been a long time maybe like i don't know 16 something like that 18 really i swear i saw a wrestling picture with you and mad dog yeah yeah so yeah 20 that'd be like 25 26 okay and then i you know had it with the mustache thing where i did the... But that wasn't like hair hair. That was like a flat top. There it is, flat top, yeah. When you have hair, it's like a sergeant's haircut. It's like...
Starting point is 00:01:33 The guy from Street Fighter, blonde hair. Guile. Guy. Guile. Guile. Guile. It's kind of like guile, but shorter and brown. Pull up guile.
Starting point is 00:01:45 Guile is the fucking... The thing is, I don't know what would go on with my hair. It's like a whole thing to figure out. And I was telling her, I was like, I think in order to make this work, I have to get my hair cut a bunch. Because you go through weird... Remember you were making fun of your girlfriend for her hair a while back? Because you go through weird transitional phases, right? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:02:04 Dude, if you grew it out... That's sick. I mean, it wouldn't come out wide, but like... Actually, I think it could come out wide. Get that video game hair going. Look at that. Dude, that'd be so dope. Dude, I'd have to start fucking throwing kicks and punches at the heavy bag. Dog, I think you should...
Starting point is 00:02:20 Oh, is that a live action guile on the far right or the action figure? This one? Yeah. Oh, my. I don't know what that is. Okay. action figure? This one? Yeah. Oh, I don't know what that is. Okay. Man. Maybe that's the new, new one? I don't know. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:02:31 I think that'd be a look for you. You never know. I guess we'll work on it and see what happens. It's going to take a while, though, I think. Not for you. Your shit grows pretty quick, man. Yeah, it grows pretty quick. Yeah, but you can't leave us behind, though.
Starting point is 00:02:46 Probably take a little though. I can't choose to grow more hair. Kid, after the mission's complete, we can get you guys a wig or something. And we can do a whole show where we all have hair. I think we should. Okay, so
Starting point is 00:03:02 you're doing that with your hair. I don't know what you're going to do with your face, but you could do something with it. Andrew, why don't you do like a little Jordan? I don't know. The Jordan stache. Right? Oh, yeah, that Michael Jordan stache. I remember that.
Starting point is 00:03:15 Right? Do that. I might end up looking like Gomez Adams. Who's Gomez Adams? From the Adams family. Go on. No, pull him up I mean I know
Starting point is 00:03:25 I've watched it but it's you talking about the Charlie Chaplin mustache the Charlie yeah yeah like that
Starting point is 00:03:31 okay yeah yeah dude that's pretty popular or it was popular oh yeah that works too that works too
Starting point is 00:03:40 but I feel like Andrew you have such thick facial hair that you could do actually imagine if Andrew just came in with just a mustache. Just? I could just look at, I mean, I could. I'd sit right on his face.
Starting point is 00:03:52 Mustache rides. I could. I mean, and he knows how to defend it now, but I'd still try. Yeah. I mean, if it's that far in, I got not much, not many answers. Deep cheeks? Yeah, once you're already that far in yeah you know have you guys ever really paid attention to like in those marvel movies when they have the male
Starting point is 00:04:10 characters they always do wild beards and it's like just seen as normal oh yeah like falcon had some weird sharp shit going on he did have a weird thing yeah tony stark had some fucking wild lines going on but like it just works for some reason in end game you could do that yeah in end game when he like goes back in time to see his dad on accident but they kept saying like oh he's got some hippie beard it was just it was just funny and you could have like a wyatt erp thing going on like where the mustache takes up kind of the whole face i don't i don't know i haven't really ever got too creative with it so like uh wyatt erp um what's uh it's like uh it's got the handlebars what's uh god damn i'm uh drawing a blank on the dude's name but yeah uh wyatt erp in in tombstone he's got like a sick he's got a sick mustache this is the like actual wyatt erp
Starting point is 00:04:58 but dude you gotta have the biggest dick to pull that off and andrew i mean i think that's actually speaking for you like we know that's true okay Andrew, I mean, I think that's actually speaking for you. We know that's true. Okay, that might be a little too much. That's going to blow in the wind. But what about like Sam Elliott? Sam Elliott. Mm-hmm.
Starting point is 00:05:15 Sam Elliott. Oh, yeah. Okay. Dude, your wife would be, you know, I think. I mean, thankfully, I'm neutered, so i'm okay look at that dude andrew yeah once it uh because look at like how it's really pronounced right here right until it goes into the beard i don't know how to maintain it though like i can't like i don't know we just need a day or two for pictures that's it okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That works. Then we can move on.
Starting point is 00:05:46 I can dig that. I can get with that. I'm pretty excited about today's guests. Yeah. Who do we got? You know, I think if you look at like the explosion of TRT places around the country, I think we're going to find, I don't know, at some point, this whole thing will kind of level out. But I think on top of people just utilizing these hormone therapy places as a spot to just get steroids, basically, I think it will turn more into a route of people just utilizing them for like wellness in general because there's like there's literally you know hundreds of thousands of of different things you can do to help your situation to help yourself be healthier including you know using a some sort of cold hot therapy including you know getting sunlight in
Starting point is 00:06:38 the morning I heard Andrew Huberman talking with Scholes about the chewing gum, you know, and trying to increase the jaw and that can help with your sleep. And your sleep obviously helps with lots of hormones and so on. There's so many things you can do, right? And, you know, you're hearing more and more people talking about like psychedelics. I've heard multiple times i don't know if it's just the people i hang around but uh i've heard multiple people trying to figure out ways of opening up psychedelic churches which is a really interesting thing but i think because you call it a church then there's separation separation of church and state and you get to administer, you know, your, uh,
Starting point is 00:07:26 congregation. Yeah. Your communion, you know, you get to give them, instead of giving a little cracker and some wine or whatever you, I don't know, you give them some LSD or something. I think that's great. I think that is great. I go to that church. I know those exist for like smoking weed, like before it was legal, like that was a thing too. There you go. So it's worked. And today's guest, Thomas Fiegel, he has a facility in Mexico where he's able to treat people and it's, um, it's like a treatment center. It's, um, it's like a rehab center of sorts.
Starting point is 00:07:58 So hopefully you can explain it more to us and I don't have it. Some of my information jumbled up. Um, but it's like a resort that you can go to and you would get administered whatever psychedelics and whatever other things they think that you may need to get you through whatever psychological damage you may have discovered in your past. So things, you know, people that have like PTSD and people who have, I don't know, maybe other emotional problems or people who are just going through a tough divorce or whatever it may be, they can choose these other routes. We know
Starting point is 00:08:31 through even just some science, it appears that a lot of the drugs that are out there just aren't, a lot of the pharmaceuticals aren't nearly as effective as we would like. And so I think it's awesome to try to have people have alternative means. And in this particular case, Thomas Fiegel, I believe the main thing that they utilize is ibogaine, which I just think is a fascinating, a fascinating drug. It comes from like a tree bark. Maybe it's somewhat similar to like psilocybin mushrooms where it's, we'll have him explain it so I don't fuck it all up. But I don't know.
Starting point is 00:09:07 I just think these things are interesting. Maybe you can hit like a reset button on your life and where you're at. My brother has had some experiences with it and he was even telling me. He's like, I think it would be amazing for you to do. And I don't really feel like I have like a trauma of any kind, but he's like, I just think it's like, he's like, talk about performance enhancement. He's like, I think this is the ultimate performance enhancement. Yeah. And so one of the reasons why I wanted to have this guy on the show is that I think that this stuff will become so powerful. There'll be a
Starting point is 00:09:40 point where this is getting administered throughout the United States, similar in a way of like TRT clinics popping up. I don't know in what way or what manner or what fashion, but I do know that the pharmaceutical companies are trying to mimic things that work very similar to these psychedelic drugs. Yeah. It would be cool if it did become something that, like a TRT clinic or like a, like an HRT clinic. But the thing is, is I wonder because it's so powerful because psilocybin can make such a difference with such little drawback and then so few, you know,
Starting point is 00:10:15 bad things happening would, it's not easy to make money with that as like for pharmaceutical companies. It's so effective. And people aren't having to come back for more and more and more that it's like, it's not profitable pharmaceutical companies it's so effective and people aren't having to come back for more and more and more that it's like it's not profitable so it's like well will they be okay with yeah and you don't want to get like whatever conspiracy theorists you know whatever but right like if it's it's cheap to make and it's very effective to where you don't have to keep coming back then it's's like, where's the incentive to actually put this in practice?
Starting point is 00:10:46 I don't even think there's conspiracy behind what you said. I think it's just true. There's been some studies that have been done, and this was even mentioned on the Today Show, which you know things are moving quick when it's mentioned on a show like that. I believe it was mushrooms. Mushrooms are utilized, and it is regarded as a pretty well-done study. I want to say it was something like 50% of the people didn't want to drink anymore.
Starting point is 00:11:15 And there was something like 30% of people, it was like 30% of those people, they weren't even necessarily like that addicted to alcohol, but they drank occasionally and they just had no desire to drink. And then they follow it up. They had follow-up studies. Cause like, obviously like once you administer a treatment, it's like, it's easy to say, well, you know, look, it worked. We did this for 12 weeks, but I think they did follow-ups. I don't know how far later the follow-ups were done, but that kind of stuff is just fascinating. Like if even, even if those percentages are off by 10,
Starting point is 00:11:52 20%, like imagine if it's like, hey, we put people through utilizing these mushrooms for X amount of weeks and 20% of them got, I mean, there's so many things that happen with alcoholism that are so dangerous to the person that's drinking, to someone that might get behind a vehicle, to the way they treat their, to the relationships they have. So, I mean, to me, I think that this is a big breakthrough. And if there was a drug that they came up with, that someone came up with that had the similar result, I mean, I think we would throw this person up on our shoulders and we'd be parading around the streets with them because that's pretty profound. Even the bigger thing, though, is like, for example, that study, 50 percent. And let's just say it was even 20 percent, but no side effects.
Starting point is 00:12:38 OK, but it was 50 percent. No side effects. Majority of like pharmaceutical drugs do have side effects. No side effects. Majority of like pharmaceutical drugs do have side effects. I know a friend who uses antidepressants, but when they – if they forget to take anything like in the morning, then they'll start to like get tingles. And they'll start to get numbness in their fingers because they haven't taken it yet or they forgot to take it. Now, it does help them. It is effective.
Starting point is 00:13:05 But when not taken, their whole body starts to feel off. It's not something that happens with psilocybin. And I think that to say no side effects, like just the side effects are way less, right? And they're less known and stuff. Thank you for being responsible. And stuff like that, right? Thank you for being responsible. Well, we just have to be honest.
Starting point is 00:13:26 Anytime we talk about anything on this show, I heard somebody more recently talking about vegetables being cancerous. And it's like, well, all foods have a cancer association to them because a lot of people get cancer and we don't know
Starting point is 00:13:41 why. So we can point to so many different things for that. It's the kale. And yeah, as much as we love beef, you know, beef cooked a certain way is supposed to have T-A-O in it or T-O-A or whatever the fuck it is. Tomatoes. Tomatoes. Yeah. Beef turns into tomatoes, which then therefore.
Starting point is 00:13:59 No wonder. Is a carcinogen. This whole time. But, you know, I think that uh these things do uh lend themselves to being a great option to people and i'm i dig it i think it could be great a huge downside that i could potentially see is that you know people would do this without supervision and i believe that there probably could be a lot of people that could do it without supervision. However, there's a lot of people that when you take something like mushrooms, I don't know what ibogaine is like at all,
Starting point is 00:14:34 but when you take something like mushrooms, it's a trip, and you don't have a choice about which portal you kind of go down. And if you're somebody that had traumas, this could be awakening some stuff that is maybe really powerful. And it could be said that maybe like during that time that you would really panic and freak out. And I think you need someone there.
Starting point is 00:14:56 Dosing is important. I'm actually really happy you mentioned that because like, I mean, I slowly got myself to a higher dose, like over time. If you just blast it, you might find myself to a higher dose like over time. Yeah, if you just blast it, you might find yourself in a corner crying your eyes out. Yeah, dude. Like dosing is important.
Starting point is 00:15:11 When I did a big dose, like I kind of knew what to expect at that point because I've done smaller doses before. So I was like, okay, this is going to amplify. And it was great. But if I went straight into that, that would have been like, oh, shit. My dogs are going to kill me. I'm not not necessarily. Are these things wolves? Holy shit.
Starting point is 00:15:33 These are. Do I have an open wound? Why is he sniffing me? Does he smell blood? No, but yeah, you're totally right about the dosing. Dosing is important. And yes, having somebody that knows, that has experienced it, that maybe could be there if you're new to it could be really beneficial. Also, knowing not to operate a motor vehicle.
Starting point is 00:15:52 Because with a lot of these things, like people smoke weed and drive, right? But, and it's not like you should. If you think you can fly and you're driving a vehicle, it might not be a good idea. That's a ramp. I'm going to take it. If you did a big dose of mushrooms and you never, like,
Starting point is 00:16:06 some people are irresponsible. They don't get all the information, but then cars start moving in different lanes and shit. Oh, wow. You know, like this shit can be dangerous. Maybe don't operate your phone either.
Starting point is 00:16:18 Yeah, that's actually a great idea. You'll start messaging a lot of people. Start messaging like an ex-girlfriend or something. Laying it all on the line, leave a long ass message. Yeah, it's not good. Yeah, but it won't typically do something like that though, right? Like alcohol will make you text somebody at like 2 a.m. But like, I feel like mushrooms wouldn't do that. A big dose of mushrooms, it'll make you introspective.
Starting point is 00:16:45 And it'll make you think about people in your life. Everyone has different things that it brings them to. But like... There's always the potential. There's always the potential. And if you have things that you haven't resolved in your past with somebody, that might be the time that you're like, I need to text them my feelings. And that's not always the best idea.
Starting point is 00:17:04 You might want to just think and do that after. Yeah, do that some other time. Yeah, that's why our homie told us, put your phone away. Just turn it off. Right? And it was a good call. Let's see if we can get to Thomas, huh? Yeah, I sent him an email.
Starting point is 00:17:17 Okay, cool. Just waiting on him. So if you want to drop him a line. Mr. Fajal. Tell him we'd be here. It's interesting that your brother mentioned that you should do Iboga because Iboga is, I mean, I've watched people and seen people's experiences. Iboga is hard core. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:17:36 And I think that, again, has to do with the dosing. So my brother was like, I think you could just take like way less, you know, and you don't have to. Because, yeah, for my brother, it was like a multiple day, um, journey. Like he was wiped out for a couple of days and he just thinks that, um, you know, we have had another guest that came on the show and talked about, talked about it as well. Um, but he didn't have, uh, this was like – this dude's from New Jersey. Like this guy had like his own hardship, his own issues that he's had in the past, and it really did help him. But this – what Thomas has is a clinic, which is kind of nice because then you get to see like how is this going to work in this particular setting.
Starting point is 00:18:21 Not necessarily just like in a hotel in a state where it's legal and you're kind of like trying to shotgun this thing and you're, it's a little bit of the roll of the dice, you know, not saying that that's not effective too. Could probably could be probably could work great. People got to do what they got to do to, to figure out their life and to figure out a way to move forward. So whatever you got to do, but I think in a clinical setting, being able to observe people and for thomas to be able to see people over and over again have these results i mean that's gonna be interesting to talk to him about it i wonder how it compares to something like dmt because i've heard that's
Starting point is 00:18:55 pretty incredible too that's a toad drug right yeah yeah yeah that one apparently it just takes you into a warp zone for 15 minutes 10 10, 15 minutes, then you're out. But that warp zone is wild. Supposedly it somehow makes you cool with like dying and stuff. What's that? That sounds so strange. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have only dipped our toes into this.
Starting point is 00:19:20 So it should be interesting. Did you roll this morning, Andrew? No, I didn't. My body is feeling, it's be interesting. Did you roll this morning, Andrew? No, I didn't. My body is filling. It's filling it. So I have been going Monday, Wednesday, Friday. This week I went Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. And so today I'm like, it just wasn't there.
Starting point is 00:19:36 So I'm trying to recoup so that way I can go tomorrow. But you feel okay about missing because you know that you're going to be consistent with it. And that's just something you want to do for a long time, right? Absolutely. So, like I just said, you know, I want to be extremely consistent with Monday, Wednesday, Friday. If I get some extra days in there, cool. But as I quickly learned this week, like if I get the extra days in, then that's potentially like going to make me miss another day. And I'd rather miss like the Tuesday,s because those we don't have class those
Starting point is 00:20:05 days those are just open mats which I mean they're extremely beneficial like that's our Tuesday Thursday every day bro you feel good and you go five days in a row and then you're out for three weeks exactly and it's like the way my my it's actually my upper back and neck the way they feel right now I'm just like even just getting down to the floor like to kind of roll around i'm just like i gotta think about how new it all is to you yeah it's like so it's beyond like it's beyond new it's totally different like you probably i mean what's your experience with any sort of grappling i mean this is 100 it. Like I have never done any of it. Yeah. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:20:46 So that's crazy. It's not, it's not like running, like at least with, at least with a run, you're like, well, yeah, I used to run or I had to run for football or had to run for, you know, I did wrestling practice or whatever. Like that makes some sense. It's a natural human thing to do. Yeah, it very, very much is. But then to like get on a mat and have somebody else's weight and you got to manage somebody else's skill and their strength and their power.
Starting point is 00:21:09 And you're like being kind of driven into the ground. Then even if you're on top, even when you have advantages, there's shit that kind of hurts. Like if you're new, like if you're newer to jujitsu, somebody who's been doing it for a while won't notice any of these things. But when you're newer, even just when you're on top of somebody, there's pressure on your knees that – like you're not – we don't normally crawl around the ground a lot, you know. And so for somebody that's new, just that alone and then them getting on their elbows and trying to get different pressure and trying to move around, it all is fucking new. And different things are flexing and stretching and rotating. It's pretty brutal. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:21:48 You know, Jason Kalipa mentioned, like, the awkwardness of being so close to somebody else. And I guess when he said that, I didn't think much to it. But, I mean, when I started, that was weird because, like, the only other situations that you are that close or somebody's on top of you is you're fucking. Like, just real talk. Intimacy, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you said that, when you were just talking, I was just like, wait up. That's true.
Starting point is 00:22:17 Usually not this close to somebody else. Ever. No. And I'm just trying to think of when else would you move anything remotely close to that? Like there's – I can't think of a mimicker. I can't think of a sport where like, oh, yeah, basketball is kind of the same, you know? There's tackle football. I mean like you're having to tackle somebody, but it's like instances, bursts of it.
Starting point is 00:22:39 Yeah, it's interesting because like – so it would be the equivalent of like you tackle somebody, but then you try to figure out how to get your foot up by like where their shoulder pads are which would be really weird yeah yeah i'd be like what the fuck you yeah i was thinking like you know when you're when you're boxing someone out like trying to get a rebound like you literally are like fucking putting your ass like in their crotch area right like you're trying to like back them up but the other person's not he's not reaching over and like getting his hooks in and shit you know like i mean that'd be like dennis rodman back in the day and you'd be like terrified because like oh shit dennis rodman would have been a hell of a jujitsu he could probably do it right now and fuck everybody that'd actually
Starting point is 00:23:20 be awesome his hand size his length it's crazy that length yeah we look, it's length. It's crazy. That length. We look dark. That screen's a little dark over there. Hey! Looking handsome, as always. All of us. There we go. Look at that background. There we go.
Starting point is 00:23:40 We got you. We can hear you perfectly. My eyes are so bad I can barely see anything. All right. Wow. Great to meet you. Yeah, thank you so much. You said you sometimes listen to the show when you're working out,
Starting point is 00:23:58 when you're doing some runs and stuff like that? I do. I do. I've gone from working out, listening to business strategy stuff, uh, to like stuff that would really be meaningful. Um, you know, while I'm on the treadmill of life, right. I want to listen to things that get me off the treadmill of life. So it's been, uh, it's been a big, it's been, I found myself one day watching CNN, listening to business strategy and running on a treadmill. And I just went, what the fuck is
Starting point is 00:24:34 going on? Literally on the treadmill filled with fear. So many things going on at one time. Then you reached out and I started listening to your stuff and love it. Yeah, love it. That's great. Can you give us some details on the business that you have, the treatment center that you have and just how you got into some of that? Sure. So I'm the CEO of a company called Beyond. It's spelled B-E-O-N-D.
Starting point is 00:25:02 I'm the CEO of a company called BEYOND. It's spelled B-E-O-N-D. BEYOND operates a platform for psychedelic-assisted treatment for chemical dependency, depression, anxiety, and trauma. And we operate facilities in Mexico because Ibogaine, like cannabis, is a federally scheduled one substance in the United States. So we can't operate legally in the United States to provide this medication. It's a residential facility. People come. They stay with us. People come, they stay with us. They're treated by licensed credentialed physicians I got into it, well, I'm a recovered drug addict and alcoholic,
Starting point is 00:26:19 so I spent a lot of time denying that and learning about that through practice, wrecking a lot of relationships and really making my life incredibly difficult despite success in certain other areas. But I got off that stuff and began to live differently in a more conventional way. Went to 12-step programs, worked through a process of what I call awakening, where I had something better than substances. But someone in my life was a opioid addict. but someone in my life was a opioid addict. They were prescribed a prescription medication called Vicodin for a dental procedure in their late teens. And it hit them the way other substances hit me, which was, it wasn't just about getting rid of the pain they loved it they couldn't get off it
Starting point is 00:27:27 they eventually couldn't get enough of it legally and they turned to intravenous IV use of heroin to have the same effect then went to upwards of nine different conventional drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers in the United States spent nearly a million dollars in co-pays. And somewhere after they did what they were told and followed the program appropriately, they would relax. And a friend of theirs who was also a using buddy had discovered Ibogaine in Mexico and said, you got to try this. Well, the person in my life did. They went to Mexico. They went to the place.
Starting point is 00:28:12 And in about 12 hours of this intense psychedelic experience, they had no withdrawals, no cravings at all. And they ended up free of that habit, free of that behavior. However, the place itself was horrible. No medical infrastructure, no preparation, no nurses, no doctors, no therapists. And they literally escaped from this place after the treatment. And they literally escaped from this place after the treatment. And at one point in my life, I made a promise to them. If I ever could, I would try to build the place they should have gone.
Starting point is 00:29:08 That would have the right infrastructure, the right delivery model, the right philosophy and approach because it worked. I saw it work. I know it to have worked. And I really believe that people deserve, especially when they're most vulnerable, when they want to change the type of support they need to take full advantage of that. So in 2020, I started researching what would need to be true for that place to exist from a legal perspective, from a medical perspective, from a psychological perspective, and of course, from a hospitality perspective, what would it need to feel like for me to be willing to send someone I love? And in 2022, we opened in early 2022. So we're obviously, you're going to talk to us about a lot of different, and it's cool. You call them medications, actually. That was a, that was something that I noticed, but when it comes to Iboga, you just mentioned that it's something that compounds other treatments. What do you mean by that exactly? And also, I mean,
Starting point is 00:30:04 if you could explain to us how Iboga functions, cause exactly? And also, I mean, if you could explain to us how Iboga functions, because we've heard a bit about it, but you definitely know way more. Well, I'm still learning, but yes, I probably know a little bit more having seen hundreds of people do it and working with people that have treated thousands of people who've done it. So the first part of your question is it compounds. What is it compounding? So all intervention, all rehab, all sort of practices, whether it's conventional or unconventional, the process of getting somebody off something is pretty similar right there's some similar themes one you have to stop doing it we have to help you do that and then the other is we have to
Starting point is 00:30:52 help you stay stop and so that's the hard part the part of getting you off can be facilitated and it oftentimes is but in in a conventional model, the reason that it is, I think that industry in the United States in particular, which is about 35 to 45 billion dollars a year in revenue built on the back of two and a half million people who will go and try to get off something, some substance that's no longer working for them, the success rates are absolutely abysmal. Of the people who go, about 50% of them don't stay. They don't finish at all. And of those that stay, less than 10% report satisfactory results, meaning success. They feel clean or sober long enough for them to be satisfied. So with those statistics, you know, to my mind, I thought, well, what do they do that does work? And what do they do that doesn't work? And where might we be able to be superior in efficacy?
Starting point is 00:32:07 So the intervention part of stopping the use of a substance is pretty straightforward. There are ways to make it more comfortable. Yes. For example, prescription medications that essentially stabilize an individual so that they're not in withdrawals while you're trying to achieve the second part, which is helping them learn how to stay stopped or prevent relapse, as it's known. What's unique about Ibogaine in that type of delivery model is, that type of delivery model is, number one, Ibogaine is known to target three specific areas of the brain. One is the serotonin system. So this obviously contributes to the way people feel. This is the reason we've got a massive SSRI industry is we're regulating serotonin so that people feel up. They feel
Starting point is 00:33:10 more level. They have less peaks and valleys in their mood. But for a lot of people, SSRIs, while they're great inventions, have huge side effects, sexual dysfunction, weight gain, other things that are adverse to them. And another, say, third of the people that take them report no effect at all. So we're talking about, in my opinion, a technology that leaves a lot to be desired, a lot to be innovated upon. What Ibogaine does uniquely is it targets the serotonin system and it totally resets that so that it is functioning closer to normal or normally naturally. Ibogaine also targets something called the kappa opioid receptor in the brain, which is the part of the brain that is really craving and satisfied by opioids and other substances. So it completely resets that. The third is really the most interesting to me is the galil-derived neurotrophic factor, which is the part of the brain that is crucial to neurotransmission and the regulation
Starting point is 00:34:34 of that neurotransmission. And we know that when these neurotransmitters experience a regular kind of pattern of stimulus, they change. They essentially become damaged. And when they become damaged, they don't function very well at all. And so the need for dopamine is still there. It's a normal feeling. is still there. It's a normal feeling. When it's overstimulated, as we know from the work of Anna Lemke and others, Dopamine Nation, it's a wonderful book. We know that there are certain substances that really spike it thousands and thousands of times beyond normal. So now you have a damaged neuron, you have someone with an experience of huge spikes in dopamine. So if
Starting point is 00:35:26 you were to just take away the substance without helping to repair that neuron, they're going to have this feeling of craving. And that is one of the reasons why people relapse. So Ibogaine uniquely targets all three of those areas. And so therefore, we feel less depressed. We have less or no cravings, no withdrawals from the kappa opioid reset. And finally, we've got kind of a miracle grow for the brain up regulating this GDNF protein that causes people to feel not only lack of craving, but a desire to change, which is remarkable. This is why the combination of the innovation of this particular psychedelic medicine with psychotherapeutic intervention. So we do this, a lot of similar types of engagement in the delivery model, one-on-one therapy, group therapy, a lot of adjunct therapy to really understand
Starting point is 00:36:32 what is behind this behavior in the first place. But the difference is there's no desire on the part of the participant to re-engage in that behavior. I hope that helps. Yeah. What is iBulgain? Like, where does it come from? And also maybe, like, why has it been something that's a little swept under the rug? So this is actually incredibly interesting to me.
Starting point is 00:37:04 It's one of the reasons why I started what I'm doing with the idea of what would need to be true for it to exist. So, first, tested, pharmaceutical version of a substance that comes from an iboga plant, a root bark. So it's sort of, we take the, we don't, but a laboratory takes the root bark. It's treated in such a way. And then it's refined into a hyper concentrated, concentrated, purified version of it. I'm sorry. Can you, when you said root bark, we cut off for a second and I know that what you said there was kind of important. So root bark and then. Sure. So iboga comes from a plant, the root bark, the bark of the root of this shrub that
Starting point is 00:38:07 comes from West Africa in a country called Gabon is harvested, it's dried, it's refined outside of a laboratory. That material has psychoactive properties and is used traditionally, psychoactive properties and is used traditionally ceremonially in the Bwiti tribe for various reasons, which are fascinating in and of themselves. They use it at times of significant transition in life. They give it to, as a ceremony, as a community, to help people move from one age and stage of life to another, and for other reasons. What we use is Ibogaine, and Ibogaine is a highly purified, refined, pharmaceutical version of that that can be tested for purity, and therefore we have more accurate dosage data. So we know exactly what we're giving someone and we know exactly what's in it and how much of it is available to them. So that's the substance that's used to cause this.
Starting point is 00:39:28 A lot about that, the experience itself. It's known to be the most intense psychedelic substance. So among the spectrum of psychedelic substances, frequently referring to like psilocybin or MDMA or LSD or something like that. There's a spectrum of their intensity. And Ibogaine is thought to be kind of the most intense. And it also has the longest duration of the experience itself. So we're talking about 12 hours or more rather than two or four hours. And the depth, so the intensity of the experience. And I think there's, we think there are
Starting point is 00:40:12 specific benefits that result from those properties. The reason there's sort of, I forgot the word you used, Mark, but the reason there's kind of a, I would say dark side of this is because there's a lot of fear. And fear generally causes people to hide, causes them to not be transparent about what they're doing, not really admit to where they could get better and to miss opportunities, I think, to improve and deliver to themselves and to others a better experience, a better life experience. So Ibogaine was discovered accidentally by Howard Lotsoff, who was a heroin addict, but was really...
Starting point is 00:41:04 by Howard Lotsoff, who was a heroin addict, but was really, he had an incredible trip, as I just described. So did many people in that time period. There were, and he noticed he had no withdrawal symptoms, and he began to be extremely dedicated to really understanding how could it be utilized for that specific reason because he knew he himself experienced and he knew many people who no longer wanted to use an opioid or an opiate but they couldn't stop they're no longer getting high or enjoying anything at all about it. They just can't stop. And now we have an epidemic of that in the U.S. and around the world. in a way that was fully transparent or optimized for maximum efficacy.
Starting point is 00:42:07 They didn't talk about it. They were sketchy in terms of how they evaluated people. They were not clear on what their delivery methods and models and protocols were, how they were keeping people safe or ensuring the maximum benefit. And so there were these small kind of facilities, if you'll call them, largely people's houses, where it was being used in this way. And it was actually helping people, for sure. But I thought,
Starting point is 00:42:41 well, if we're really going to achieve a level of success that would be even remotely analogous with the need, then we're going to have to be as transparent as possible. We're going to have to really document everything, write the best, the world's best safety protocols, delivery model. We're going to have the best talent and we have to have people in the on the team that are not used to hiding. They're used to really doing research and sharing what they do. And so we just went into it with that intention. I mean, again, to be clear, 300 people will overdose and die today in the United States. One out of every five or 20% of everyone you see today has an addiction to a substance or a behavior. It touches every family, everyone that we know.
Starting point is 00:43:42 It doesn't discriminate, discriminate apparently in any regard. We see it on the paper. And in November of 2021, I saw an article that quoted a release, a press release from the CDC that said 100,000 people had overdosed and died for the first time in the U.S. history. And I thought, here I am benefiting from being off substances entirely. And I'm thinking about this, what then was a project. How can I not do this? How can I not try to do this at scale? Not to mention all the other people that benefit from this, the people with traumatic brain injury, depression, anxiety, who are veterans, who are first responders, their families, et cetera. We have a suicide epidemic as well. So we're getting up there in terms of the number of people per day
Starting point is 00:44:37 who have catastrophic, irreparable impact in their lives for generations because this access to the substance hasn't been made available. You see so many people nowadays kind of messing around with psychedelics, microdosing, and I guess doing a little bit of their own experimentation. What are some of your thoughts on that? And is that something that you could even do with iboga? Or is it too powerful of a substance to really kind of toy with in that way? Well, I encourage experimentation. I encourage experimentation.
Starting point is 00:45:46 I think that consciousness expansion and really experiencing a sense of life or life experience or a human connection to something more than what we can perceive with our eyes and ears is not only a benefit to deepening, enriching the life experience we have, but I think it has profoundly beneficial effects in how we connect with ourselves, with the natural environment around us, and of course, oftentimes, most importantly, other people. So I definitely think people should explore and many of us did explore kind of what else might there be in our mind, in our memory, in our perception no matter how hard we try to perfect it and improve it and make it high performance, it's still kind of the mind is the gateway to a lot of our experience, if not all of our experience that matters. And so I think people have experimented, they've tuned in, they've checked out, they've turned on, whatever the phrase is, and they've gotten a lot more. But of course, it has to be done with understanding what is safe. Iboga and Ibogaine happens to be extraordinarily powerful on the spectrum of substances that can cause that kind of
Starting point is 00:47:08 consciousness expansion. And it does it in a very unique way with a unique set of characteristics, which I think are important. But it also, like any substance, you know, 65,000 people will go under general anesthetic today in the United States. They'll be completely unconscious. And they consider that to be reasonably safe because the right training, the right talent, the right technology, the right risk mitigation strategy has been used to try to increase the likelihood that they'll be successful. That's exactly what we do. So no one would take a general anesthetic on their own. There's many things that people shouldn't do with a friend, no matter how much that friend claims to have benefited from it. So I think Ibogaine uniquely is extremely powerful and can have side effects. And I think to mitigate the adverse consequences
Starting point is 00:48:08 of those side effects, of course, it should be done in a way that is ensuring the maximum level of safety. But the general idea of experimenting, I'm all for, whether it's breath works, you know, whether it's ultra long distance running or, you know, weightlifting, powerlifting, whatever. I think experimentation and the effects on our mind and our body are great. You know, kind of following on that, and we can definitely get to the side effects soon, but before you came on, we were talking about how apparently Mark mentioned that there is a study with the use of psilocybin, and it was on the Today Show where 50% of the applicants
Starting point is 00:48:54 actually came out with success, right? Which is a pretty shockingly high number. And then we got to the idea of people have conspiracy theories about psilocybin and some of these other drugs where it doesn't seem that somebody getting off of medication and not needing it perpetually for the rest of their life is profitable. Do you find that because what you guys are doing is such a successful thing that because of that, there's a lack of profit? And because of the lack of profit, it's going to be very difficult for it to become widespread? Well, no. Okay, good. That's good.
Starting point is 00:49:42 But let me tell you why. Because I think that I believe that all healing is growth. That anytime we heal, we're growing something, we're repairing, and then ultimately maybe building something better or new. Not just the insights that come from the experience that needed to be repaired, whether it was a cut finger, oh, don't do that, you know, or whether it's a psychological trauma or a traumatic experience of living with depression or severe anxiety. And by the way, we should talk about the whole life optimization side eventually because it sounds very dark. But we're focusing on where the most acute need is appropriately.
Starting point is 00:50:31 So if one was to design a long-term, highly effective business model, one would want to be in the treatment business because you don't really want healing. You talk about improvement. You talk about feeling better. But if there's a renewable kind of relationship with either the therapy, therapist, or the substance, of course, that is conventionally perceived as a better business model, more profit. I think we're past that. Human consciousness and society is either past that or coming to be past that. I mean, there are, I know of, all kinds of innovative business models that are inconceivable when you look at them compared to the conventional business model. Look at fitness and gym ownership and management.
Starting point is 00:51:34 Who in their right mind would offer a free gym? Right. It just makes no sense. And yet we know that there are ways to monetize the service and the benefits that people derive from that, that is not kind of using the most rudimentary conventional methodology. And I think that's true in healing as well. I believe that we currently focus on a key stage of this transformation, which is healing, which is detox and preparation for life after detox. So compounding that effect, scaling that experience so that it has longevity and is enduring. Where we don't monetize yet at all is on the preparation or the work that has to be done or can be facilitated to optimize the experience before you begin.
Starting point is 00:52:37 We could do that. We don't monetize on the education, you know, the parts where we're helping people with decision-making support yet. We don't monetize on the aftercare, the long-term integration yet, where we would say, hey, you just got off a substance that has been causing you to crater your life and wreck everything in your relationship and you don't want that we can't just throw you right back into that lifestyle that apartment without therapy without occupational without psychotherapy without building a strong foundation so you can thrive we don't monetize that at all. I also think that long-term there's a lot of
Starting point is 00:53:28 motivational programming that could be developed to cause people to continually improve their sense of relationship with the change that's happened. So how do you wake up? How do you feel? How do you meditate? How do you eat? How do you relate? How do you have Thanksgiving dinner? All that stuff that you're going to encounter, which is a stressor in life for many people. How do you do that? Taking full advantage of the changes you've already invested in and made. We don't take, we don't, we don't do that, but we don't charge for it obviously either. There either. There's a lot of opportunity, I think, for one, the direct provision of services that help people heal and stay healed. And if healing is growth, which I believe it is, growth is cumulative. And so as you grow,
Starting point is 00:54:23 you need more growth, or you may want more growth. And so I think there's kind of a network effect of if you get better, but you don't get healed, you continually are on this treadmill or this hamster wheel of just keep coming back and we'll give you a pill and we'll charge you several hundred dollars for an hour or whatever, but keep coming back and we'll give you a pill and we'll we'll charge you several hundred dollars for an hour or whatever but keep coming back i think i see progress we're not in the progress business as a result of what we're doing we're in the progress business what you're doing you know does that help that that does help and it one one thing i'm curious about is um we we've had different people where we talked about addiction on the podcast.
Starting point is 00:55:07 And like I've never been addicted to opioids or drugs necessarily. But from 11 to 24, for 13 years, I was addicted to pornography. And it was something that like I'm 30 now. So I've been six years removed. But I remember at the time, like all the times that I would use it was because I need pleasure. I need dopamine. It was this strong drive for dopamine. Now, I also started jujitsu around that age. And I didn't realize it. Like me and my, for a long time, I think for six years of that time, since I was 18 or 19, I was trying to quit. And me and my friend, a close friend of my Brian, we would have tactics. We would share each other's phone passwords where we'd try to do these things
Starting point is 00:55:48 to mitigate our use. And it was beneficial. But for me, the time that I started jujitsu, this practice that just drove me into this physical side of things, slowly it became much easier not to have that drive. So I replaced the drive with pornography with a physical outlet of jujitsu. And that's something that I do super consistently. And I don't feel any drive back, but it was something that I didn't intend it to replace, but it did replace the habit. So now it makes me curious for people that come into your clinic that they have these different literally heroin different types of addictions which we can get into once you guys deal with huh fentanyl a thousand times more power right how do you guys handle the replacement approach
Starting point is 00:56:37 or and is it unless because if you bogo works on that galil derived neurotropic factor thing that is is the pattern i guess guess, recognition, right? How do you guys help people replace old patterns with something positive, if that's something you deal with? Absolutely have to. Of course we do. It won't work. Otherwise, it's a drive-through detox, right?
Starting point is 00:57:01 And again, if you want to talk about, you know, more cynical aspects of what might happen with, you know, conventionally commercialized type use of a substance, it would be a drive through kind of not literally, but a frequently reoccurring, recurring detox, rehab safely, you know, we'll clean you up, get you back out there. Come on back when you're ready. I don't believe in that. I think that that it does, you know, does a great disservice to people. And we have examples of that. We have examples of that in the pharmaceutical industry. We have examples of that in the pharmaceutical industry. So I love your story about, you know, a what I would call a, you know, maladaptive coping.
Starting point is 00:58:00 You're you're you're you're treating something with pornography, whether you know it or you don't. You're treating something and you need to get high. So needing to get high shouldn't be something that causes harm. Right. Everybody needs to get high. Everybody needs to feel many of the aspects of the experience that is often associated with illicit drug use or compulsive behaviors, there's many of them that are really great. Like you should be allowed to have certain secrets. You should be able to have certain adventures. You should be able to have time to yourself when you feel like nothing is wrong and life is great and you're all good, you know.
Starting point is 00:58:45 But if having those types of – or maybe even do that with somebody else. I'm all on my own, but I'm with you too. Like whatever. If you have to like take the risk of harming yourself or someone else or actually harming yourself or someone else to do that, I would say you're using the wrong medication at the wrong dose at the wrong frequency. Nothing wrong with the need, though.
Starting point is 00:59:08 The need is awesome. So you replace that with something that is known to be far less harmful and satisfying a need, and it worked. Now, you still are aware that this maladaptive behavior is out there. You just for some reason, it doesn't appeal to you anymore, partly because you don't have that acute need and partly because you've probably matured. And, you know, you see it differently as well. You see yourself differently, most importantly. um so i think that having this replacement is a fundamental requirement and gdnf causes people to be open and willing and even excited about participating so now it's not like think about this idea you take away my, my most pleasurable experience. And fine, if I don't take it, one might have severe withdrawals.
Starting point is 01:00:11 I get sick. I shit my pants. I'm sweating. I'm a nasty, awful person. No one wants to be around me. I don't want to be around anyone else. Okay, let's say we could take that piece of the puzzle off the table, but we still didn't replace it. What's the fucking reward? Okay, let's say we could take that piece of the puzzle off the table, but we still didn't replace it.
Starting point is 01:00:26 What's the fucking reward? Like, thanks a lot. So now the one thing that worked for me that made me feel great and eventually I needed to feel normal, you took away. But I don't have anything better. Like, where's my, it could be any type of jujitsu metaphorically or analogously. So we have to intervene and quickly focus on all the issue areas, family, self-esteem, money, career, self-image, sex, all the parts of our lives that first we see as kind of adversely impacted of this behavior. But the clue is those are the things that are important, right? Those are the relationships, the sense of self-love and self-esteem, worthiness, you know, a need of people that might use something like pornography might be to feel a human connection.
Starting point is 01:01:28 They're just reusing the wrong way to do it. So if you take away the pornography, they still have the profound need for human connection. We need to help them figure out how to get into a way of being first, change their thought system, right? What are your thoughts about human connection, your worthiness, your ability, the experience of it? And then the other is your belief system. If you think that you're going to fail and you're unworthy of connecting with people. Going out and meeting a friend or picking up someone or having an exciting, adventurous, satisfactory human connection is going to be extremely stressful and difficult. So we don't give dating coaching services. What we try to change is your relationship to the core of your sense of being, that that can't even begin without intervening, getting people off the substances and introducing this miracle grow for the brain and using the environment.
Starting point is 01:02:47 So one-on-one therapy, group therapy, a lot of writing, a lot of art, a lot of music, a lot of sound, a lot of fitness, high intensity interval training, all this stuff is causing people to do more than just sit in a room and go, well, wow, I feel like I'm not on heroin anymore. I'm not on meth. I'm not taking these drugs, but I miss them. You can't miss them. You can mourn them. This is fascinating. You can mourn them, but you can't miss them. Like I, because it's sort of like that part of your identity has to die. it's sort of like that part of your identity has to die and if it's dead but still living on the block in the bad neighborhood or wherever or on the internet on the dark web you're eventually
Starting point is 01:03:32 going to go see that side of yourself so we need it to actually be dead and we can mourn it we can say goodbye forever we don't have to forget it just think we don't forget somebody when they die. We want to learn from it. We want to grow. I said that all healing is growth, so we want to put it to work. What's the experience like and what do people report that are getting treated with Ibogaine? What are the sensations? What are the feelings? What are the things you've experienced?
Starting point is 01:04:03 Well, I did Ibogaine at Beyond. And, you know, I think I have to generalize first and then I can talk about some details. So first of all, it's a very long process. It's known to be, say, it starts early in the morning and it lasts into the night. So it might be 12 or more hours. In that process, of course, you're surrounded. You're basically in like a sexy ICU, if you can imagine that. Same technology, but it's warmer.
Starting point is 01:04:36 It's darker. Same staff, but they've all done Ibogaine too, which I love. We offer Ibogaine to all the team members um partially for empathy and partially because they have challenges too that they want to overcome not so much chemical dependency but um trauma childhood trauma um depression anxiety uh so you're around people that know what the fuck they're doing they have the skills they know how to work the tools we use the same tools as you would find in any class one medical facility in a, you know, urban environment in the U S but so you're wearing headphones, noise cancelling headphones.
Starting point is 01:05:15 You're listening to a custom playlist of music, but it's not like the music you probably listen to on your, on your phone or on Spotify. Though the playlist is available on Spotify. If you look at beyond, we give away the playlist so you can actually check it out. Cool. So you're listening to this music. You have an eye mask on.
Starting point is 01:05:40 And the beginning of it is you feel this kind of tingly feeling and a warmth in your body. And you start to hear a buzzing in your ears, though your ears are covered. You're listening to music. And then it begins. And for about six hours, we'll generalize, we'll say about half of the experience, what's reported and what I experienced was a very rapid presentation of visual imagery, almost cinematic imagery in various hues or colors, some black and white, some bright. For me, it was like I was traveling out into space. It looked like that. I wasn't imagining it. It looked like I was on the dash of a oblong spaceship flying into space at hyperspeed. But I knew,
Starting point is 01:06:37 and I wondered, how do I know this, that my eyes were covered. It was very clear visually. It was not something unrecognizable. It's something I'd never seen before, but it wasn't like a melting kaleidoscopic thing that was totally unmoored from my awareness. It was like, I'm going out into space. And then I realized that each of the little lights that I could see out in what appeared like a night sky, I could go to with my mind. I could cause my little metaphorical visual spaceship to go to it. And when I got there, it was a memory. We're going to Mexico.
Starting point is 01:07:22 Come on down. We're going to Mexico. It was a memory. It was a memory or a thought about a memory that I had had in the past. Now, so that's like a general overview. Then each of those little kind of blinkers, as I would label them, for lack of a better word, out the night sky they meant something to me they were like my dad or something i didn't understand like my ninth grade music teacher like i don't know when why would i see that but i had that experience and all of them thousands of them were related to my life experience as far back as I could reasonably remember and some people report going further back so imagine that your brain is sort of able to remember every thought you've ever had and ever certainly every experience you ever had and some of them are unpleasant and some of them are pleasant, but we're not attached
Starting point is 01:08:27 to, we don't re-experience them in the way that they occurred. We, I had the experience of seeing them as something that mattered, as something that's part of my life experience, not unmoored from reality at all. Then there's the second half, which is introspection. What does it all mean? Like the experience of beginning to connect the dots, but between those thoughts, memories, thoughts about memories, memories of thoughts, images, little movies that are being played to me as I described it in my own trip report as a black and white heavy metal music video of my life. But it wasn't like bad or scary. There was certainly trauma that I needed to look at. They say Ibogaine shows you what you need to see, not what you want to see the second half is the process
Starting point is 01:09:27 of introspection of reflection of beginning to learn and grow and make um make sense of it to some degree without this intention this egoic intention of like i have to master it that's not that's not it doesn't feel like that at all. It's more like, what does all that mean? And this feeling of like, how can I make sense of this experience called my life? And also this experience of revisiting this in a very thoughtful, rational, introspective way. Not one time did I ever feel like I was not present. I could easily call myself back into the current sense of reality simply by taking the eye mask off. And my vision was all kind of blurry. And I was what they call a taxic. I couldn't walk very well, but I could walk. I could
Starting point is 01:10:28 go to the bathroom. The nurses helped me. That's what they do. That's what they want to keep us safe. But after the second six or eight hours, I was totally wiped out. Just, just totally exhausted, physically, mentally, psychologically, emotionally wiped out. But I was also very clear about what had just happened. And then finally, because it's psychedelic, it shifts time. So when I took the eye mask off, I asked the nurse, how long have I been in here? And she said, we just finished dinner. So it had been approximately eight hours. And for me, it felt like about, I don't know, 45 minutes. Whoa. for most people, super intense visuals about their life experience that matter. And some of them can be very difficult, of course, things we did, things that were done to us that are lingering or in the
Starting point is 01:11:35 deepest, darkest, or maybe not so dark recesses of our mind. And then the other half of what does it all mean? That's generally the I begin experience. What is this story? Is it like Scrooged? You know, like it's like the ghost of Christmas past. Get to see how you really were, I guess. What do you think makes it undeniable? Like, you know, we wake up from dreams and, you know, we have all kinds of different weird dreams.
Starting point is 01:12:04 know, we wake up from dreams and, um, you know, we have all kinds of different weird dreams and it's easy just to kind of shove those off and just be like, oh, that was weird. That was really crazy. I don't know why I dreamt that. And you just kind of blow it off. What makes this, what makes this more real? What makes it something that you're, I mean, I know you're, you have people that are coming to treatment, so they want to get better, understand that side of it. But what do you think or feel that makes it something that you're like you know what i better understand this because
Starting point is 01:12:29 this will really help me moving forward yeah that's that's really interesting because it is very dreamlike that's a great reference it feels like a dream but imagine you could have a dream tonight and you ever have lucid dreaming where you know you're in a dream and you're kind of like this is terrifying and then you're like wait i'm having a dream this plane isn't going to crash i can i i was i taught that was taught this as a kid because i had these recurring nightmares of of crashing planes or falling and i was taught this as a kid because I had these recurring nightmares of crashing planes or falling. And I was taught to like, hey, just remember you're in a dream and then you can begin to sort of play a little bit. You can at least not be terrified. It's not a nightmare. And so there's some aspect of that, which is awareness and rationality in the experience. So again, while you can become
Starting point is 01:13:28 distracted and be like, I want to go in my spaceship out to the next dimension, that's a choice. I don't feel like I'm being pulled into the other dimension and I'm taken hostage. I can, I wouldn't say control, but I can be aware that it is a, something's happening and I'm not, I'm not totally unmoored from my own sense of all reality. And, and I didn't have any fear that I would never come back. That would be terrifying. The other piece of your question, which is interesting, is, you know, why does it result or oftentimes result in that feeling, what I would call a feeling of healing. Right. dream is so um weird uh that you know your teeth can fall out and you can be on you know running through a public place naked or whatever like it's provoking a subconscious uh something that needs to be um settled or put forward or addressed this is an experience remotely similar in so far as afterwards, you know, that it needs to be addressed through your change, through your choice to change your life.
Starting point is 01:14:53 When I wake up having a dream, when my teeth fell out, I don't go get artificial teeth. You know, what I do is I think, wow, I'm, I think that might be telling me something about how I perceive the way I look. And I should look at that maybe in a different way in meditation. I should think a little bit more about, you know, what does that dream, what is it telling me about me? But it doesn't make me want to change my life. That's like a premonition. You know, if someone has a dream about a lottery number and they run out by a ticket, that's a premonition. If someone has a dream about a lottery number and they run out by a ticket, that's a premonition or something. This is much more about the feeling. Remember,
Starting point is 01:15:33 the GDNF, that protein not only prepares the brain by causing that regeneration, that repair, by causing that regeneration, that repair, that growth. But it also has a sense of intense motivation. Now, obviously, intense for some people might be different from other people. But it's like I don't want to use. I don't miss it. I don't crave it. And I'm actually kind of more aware of the fact that I don't want it, meaning at a deeper level. It's not like I'm trying to make something bad go away only.
Starting point is 01:16:11 I'm trying to optimize for who could I be without that need, without that craving and also without that recurring experience, what my relationships look like and so on. out that recurring experience, what my relationships look like and so on. So this is where that intervention, that growth, that teaching, that learning, that desire to grow and change is truly unique from any other rehabilitative intervention that, that we know of. And, um, because have you ever heard of, you ever meet anybody who went to rehab? Yeah. Yeah. Did they come out like wanting to tell you all about it and how great it was? Absolutely not. And like brag to their friends, like I went to rehab. That was awesome.
Starting point is 01:16:53 I'm now gonna like change my whole life and I'm so excited. I can't wait to tell you all about it. No, it's kind of shameful. They usually leave early too. Like they have a designated, they usually leave early. They have a designated amount of time that they want to stay. They usually leave early too. Like they have a designated – they usually leave early. They have a designated amount of time that they want to stay. They usually leave early. A lot of things are unresolved.
Starting point is 01:17:11 They get kind of dumped back out into the quote-unquote real world and just are almost more lost than before because they had a coping mechanism. And now the coping mechanism isn't there or it's not supposed to be there and you're bad if you utilize that coping mechanism so it's hard for i think a lot of people to figure out a way to move forward power project family how's it going so no matter what diet you're on or no matter what supplements you take it's necessary as you get older to know what's going on under the hood that's why i've partnered with merrick health or the pimentel health clinic owned by derek from more plates more dates and we have a panel that will allow you to get all of your labs done and checked in a super easy fashion. Andrew, how can they get it? Yeah, you guys got to head over to merrickhealth.com slash power project. That's M-A-R-E-K health.com slash power project. And
Starting point is 01:17:58 at checkout, enter promo code power project to save $101 off of this comprehensive panel. Links to them down in the description, as well as the podcast show notes. Do you feel that ibogaine treatment in what you're doing, do you feel like maybe for yourself and maybe in the experience of some others that you've heard report, do you think it maybe just shows you that continuing with alcohol
Starting point is 01:18:22 or continuing with anything that you are addicted to or hooked on, even though it's powerfully wired into the body, that it still is a choice? Great question. Because here I am, you know, almost 20 years without any substance. you know, almost 20 years without any substance. And I still have parts of me that think some days, God, it would just be great to just go shut all this off. Or, you know, I used to have experiences where I was like, oh, whatever it was, it would be better if I was using,
Starting point is 01:19:03 you know, some substance. That didn't work out so well, but, um, so that, you know, I do think that, um, some of us respond differently to the introduction of substances, our brain, our bodies work differently. You know, I have a son, I have four sons, but one of them is addicted i'm sorry addicted is addicted to surfing but he's allergic to peanuts and you know and he's always known he was allergic to peanuts since one fateful halloween and um and and so he's always growing up feeling like i'm allergic to peanuts i'm not not going to eat peanuts. We go to a Thai restaurant. He's like, is there peanuts? Is there peanut sauce? I don't eat peanuts.
Starting point is 01:19:48 And he's not, his life isn't like ruined because he doesn't eat peanuts. He just knows he doesn't eat peanuts. I'm allergic to penicillin allegedly. I've never had it since I was two, but every time I go to the doctor, they say, what are you allergic to? And I say, penicillin. I don't usually, unless I'm trying to be provocative, say alcohol and drugs. But that's what I truly believe. My brain, my body reacts differently to a lot of different types of experiences, which I think creates an appetite for relief that is different from other people. And then also when I have what used to be the wrong medicine at the wrong dose, the wrong frequency, I had it. I was like, holy crap, this now I'm right now, like happy. I know what they mean by happy hour like it's really not just about getting together with friends it's about turning on right and so that reaction
Starting point is 01:20:56 I think is different and I think it is both environmental and biological for sure because my parents were the same way um they had less insight about the experience they kept sort of you know getting up early being hung over working their ass off and having relief wreck you know damaging things damaging relationships doing their best for sure but it was it's tough to be going through life, you know, with that kind of repetitive pattern of hangover or blackout or whatever. It doesn't mean they're not successful at certain things. They're not resilient, creative, passionate people. It just means they've got kind of a, I think of like a cartoon with a skillet banging me in the head. So that I think happens to me with a lot of substances. I think I react differently to sugar sometimes.
Starting point is 01:21:53 I react differently to not eating certain times or overeating certain times. Like it's certainly shifting my mood it is a mood altering experience that i can become dependent on very quickly and a wonderful example is apps like my kids have to use a language app called duolingo yeah to learn spanish And I'm like, what's that? Oh, I work in Mexico at Beyond. I want to learn Spanish. So I'm like, I'll try that. I'm like, wow, this is a really cool game.
Starting point is 01:22:33 Like I can do this. Two hours later, I'm like, I'm still doing this. Then like six weeks later, I'm up at two in the morning in the bathroom alone doing Duolingo because I'm getting high i'm getting high i want to beat that bitch in some other region that i will never meet who's about to prevent me from being on the emerald level i'm like no fucking way are you going to knock me out of the jade level or the emerald level. Like, fuck that.
Starting point is 01:23:07 I'm platinum. I'm platinum. And my kid said to me, like, they call me Papa. Papa, you've been on that for six hours. And I'm like, you're right. I'll delete it. So that's a choice. But you say that in Spanish.
Starting point is 01:23:23 And I learned some Spanish. It actually works. It's muy bien muy bueno muy bueno but here's the thing so i think certain people react to certain types of brain chemistry changes that can be caused through an external input or an internal shift. They wake up depressed. They crash. They have peaks and valleys and all of that. But the choice, so now that I know, here's what I would say. Now that I know that I have that reaction to these substances,
Starting point is 01:24:00 the choice to use them, I can make that for sure. But it's, you know, I'm ignoring all the evidence available to me. I'm basically saying, hey, I'm going to do something that I have allergic reaction to, and it's going to likely have consequences. And those consequences will eclipse responsible areas of my life. You know, I don't just have a beer. A lot of people don't, you know. Do you think that... The first time, I think it's a choice for sure.
Starting point is 01:24:35 You know, people don't know. Do you think that you'll have like a flood of people that just want to get ahead and, uh, entrepreneurs that are go-getters that want to come visit you and, and, uh, come experience Iboga to use as performance enhancement just in life. And do you think it works that way? Yeah.
Starting point is 01:24:59 That's like a nice reset button for anybody, regardless of addiction or not. Yeah. Look at our website, on be on d.us we have a program called reset um and it focuses on not addiction it doesn't focus on healing depression anxiety or trauma what it focuses on is shifting fundamentally your relationship with something. So the four categories that we focus on now, it's kind of in beta as media and your relationship to digital devices.
Starting point is 01:25:40 Like, come on, we know it's out of control. We all know. Not for me, bro. Okay. So, again, like people want to have a better relationship, a more meaningful, we'll call it healthier, more satisfying relationship with a bunch of different stuff. Sometimes that stuff is really causing them a great deal of stress, a great deal of disconnection. You know, it can be very expensive, you know, but it's not wrecking their life yet. And I really believe that that's a whole different population of participants for whom we can and we should be of service, whether it's your phone, not you, Mark, or food, not you, Mark, or, you know, a relationship. You know, like what if our relationship to ourselves need to be just fundamentally reset?
Starting point is 01:26:43 Because I feel because I should, I feel like I should feel joy. Things are great. My, you know, I've gone to the therapy and it got me better. I did the medication, but it got me better, but I didn't don't want to take it. I'm not wrecked, but like, I can't feel this sense of like worthiness or self-love or a connection to myself. Like I, like I want want to, like you read about. Or, you know, it could be grieving, you know, this sense of just a feeling of catastrophic
Starting point is 01:27:15 impact of something we know is going to happen. We know there's going to be loss in life, but it hits us really hard and we don't know how to get out of that. We have a need to reset the relationship with something that's causing us now this feeling that we can't shake. It's messing other stuff up and we don't want. Yeah, I think that's a great as long as they're medically qualified, as long as they're medically qualified, as long as they're capable of doing it, I think that would be a great group. Now, beyond that, if we said, what about all the other people who are just like, I just want to go deeper into my experience of consciousness expansion.
Starting point is 01:28:02 I just believe that maybe they did some mushrooms someday long in the past and they're like, it was great, but it didn't, I still think there's more. I felt, I still think there's more to my discovery, my learning, my growth, my relationship to my life experience. Absolutely. Why, why, why not? I think that that's the type of executive or athlete or high performance individual I'd want to be in, in my team. Andrew, you got anything? Yeah, yeah, I do. Actually. I wanted to ask, um, with that amazing experience that you were just
Starting point is 01:28:37 sharing with us about like, you know, flying in, in a spaceship and stuff, um, how stable are these experiences? And I asked this because I can have some really profound experiences by just doing breath work. Um, they're not, they're not too far off from what you explained, but they're definitely not as intense. Um, my, my consciousness or my, my, I guess, spiritual self is somewhere else. And then my physical form is kind of left behind. But what ends up happening is I'll become aware of the physical side and I'll be like, huh, am I even breathing right now? And then I'll check that and then wham, I come right back. And then wherever I was spiritually, I am no longer there.
Starting point is 01:29:15 I'm back into this like form here. So with Ibogaine, I'm curious, like when you do become, I mean, can you, I should say, become aware of your physical self? And then does that pull you back into where you were from? Or is it more stable to where you can actually, I'll say, get more work done on that spiritual side? Andrew, thanks for that question. I'm so glad to have the chance to talk about it. So I'm a huge meditator. I meditate twice a day. I've done it for decades. And I have what I thought was like
Starting point is 01:29:53 psychedelic experiences. I routinely leave my body, have a complete sense of being somewhere else. And I lose all awareness of awareness, right? So I'm not aware that I'm even unaware. And then I, through breath, will come back. Something, usually it's around a time because I do it for about 20 minutes. I use Transcendental Meditation TM, but I've done a lot of different modalities,
Starting point is 01:30:22 modern Buddhism, Vipassana, others. They're all awesome, walking meditation, et cetera. But so I can lose my mind through meditation, and I can leave my body through meditation. But because it's a practice that I do every day or extremely frequently, practice that i do every day or extremely frequently i'm there's a memory of it kind of coming to a conclusion that i'm used to i just call it muscle memory so to speak an experiential memory um and occasionally i've i've been in meditation where i thought i was hanging from the ceiling uh truly i when when the awareness came, I was like, wait, this is strange. I truly
Starting point is 01:31:07 don't know where I am anymore. I know I'm, I think I'm still in my body, but I'm not sitting upright. And then a couple of times I've had the experience where when I was about to open my eyes, I felt like I had to change my mind's orientation to the front of my face because I wasn't looking out of my face at all. I had to, I had to like reorient the perceivers, my eyes. So I get it for sure. When I was on, I began at beyond what I did was I had that sense of like, I remember it distinctly. It's like, I have no idea how long this has been going on, but I know when I came into here, I had hands. I have no idea how long this has been going on, but I know when I came into here, I had hands. I'm sure of it.
Starting point is 01:31:51 And now I can't even remember where they are. Like, where did I leave my arms and hands? And that for a moment was because I felt very safe, very medically safe, psychologically safe, emotionally safe, spiritually safe. You know, I felt safe. And I thought, this is very odd. And all I did was try to close my finger, my thumb to my index finger. And they were right there. I was like, oh, there you are.
Starting point is 01:32:16 I get it. You're right there. And then I was like, wait, but where are my feet? And so all I did was push my toes a little forward and they touched the end of the bed. I was like, oh, there it is. And then I could relax and go back to, you know, through the portal to the ninth dimension or to do that. I like what you said to do the work. I called it I think it's more of like a consciousness laboratory. Like, why waste it?
Starting point is 01:32:40 It's not a playground. It can be. There's playful aspects of it for sure. But it's more like a laboratory where i get to go do work you know i was curious about this because um our buddy chris bell has done ibogaine before and when uh chris showed us a video of his ibogaine experience and currently in my mind his experience seems so different from what you were talking about as a deep experience and it can be unpleasant if your mind takes you to certain things that you need to work through. I guess that aspect could be unpleasant, but it doesn't seem as unpleasant as I guess my perception of Ibogaine was before.
Starting point is 01:33:41 So my question is, you've probably had individuals that have come in with potentially maybe repressed memories or yeah, they are dealing with an addiction to fentanyl or something else. Um, but is it, uh, is it as hardcore as what we, I guess, were initially thinking it was? So I, I haven't seen the video you're referring to yeah um but i definitely discourage people from doing ibogaine in hotel rooms like we're already on on a path that that sounds like um maybe so we think about this as a whole continuum so one is preparation like set and setting pretty common term you know comes from terence mckenna, like the readiness of your mind and the place you're doing it is totally relevant. And, you know, I've seen a lot of great hotel rooms, but they're not great enough for me to trip for 12 hours in and potentially like become, you know, face to face with whatever dark, difficult past memories I might have. So I would, I would strongly suggest, or I would, I would suspect that
Starting point is 01:34:53 part of what's going on there is readiness. Like, have you been set up for success? However we want to call it now, success might not be the eliminating the possibility of barfing. Like, okay, so you barfed, but are you like, are you cared for? Do you feel cared for and supported through that difficult experience of, you know, your stomach's upset and your, your, your equilibrium's off and you're throwing up. Yeah. But, you know, who's there with you and who prepared you? What are you listening to? All that type of set and setting, I think, is a big part of how I would define success and readiness and really what I call safety. Okay.
Starting point is 01:35:39 But it's readiness. So that's one. I, you know, you use the term hardcore. I use the term intense. I think that there's nothing about the intensity of Ibogaine when done in a way that prepares you for that success that is so hardcore or so intense that someone can't handle it who's relatively psychologically healthy. Now, if you had a propensity to certain psychiatric disorders, what we call disorders or psychiatric problems, where that experience might cause some other reaction where you just run out of the room and you're unmoored.
Starting point is 01:36:35 Now you've got a real problem because the person might be, they're not reacting to the Ibogaine per se. They're reacting to the experience in a way that is uncontrolled or uncontrollable and now they're at risk for themselves and others that i would hate to see again so again that's why we have a purpose design platform facility training talent experience to kind of make sure that we've done everything is not only reasonably possible, but everything known to be possible to ensure that you're going to be ready and you're qualified. But the intensity itself, I mean, come on, there's, I think there's movies
Starting point is 01:37:21 that are incredibly intense and disturbing. There's experiences that we know to be disturbing and painful, problematic, that we survive through, that you get through. with the right set setting preparation and the absence of disqualifying conditions, it's hardcore and intense is okay. I was also curious about this. Now, when, for example, I smoke weed every now and then, but I do something weird and like before I smoke, like I make sure that I do have an intention for what I'm about to do. Like, it's like, I think, okay, uh, you know, I'm here hanging out with my girl. I want to make sure that I have good conversation with her. I'd be like, I try to have intent before I do anything right now. My question is,
Starting point is 01:38:19 cause Mark was mentioning, you know, with something like Ibogaine, some people may think, well, I don't have an addiction. I don't have a problem. Maybe I want to improve something. So I'm curious, like with the use of Ibogaine, how big of a difference does intent make or does, and I know there's so many different experiences, but does generally the medication take you to what you need or can you have an intent for something and it can take you towards your intent? Great. So a little bit of both and we don't entirely know. So first of all, like we don't call it intent. So first of all, like we don't call it intent. We're trying to in our pretreatment phase, which is second of five, we are focusing on what we call a personal psychedelic agenda. Right. Like a beyond intent.
Starting point is 01:39:25 This is where do we really want to go? What are we truly trying to elucidate and better understand, explore, et cetera. So it's like there's some real intention behind developing a deeply personal psychedelic agenda for sure. But it's more than i just want to be present i just don't want to smoke too much weed and and not connect with with my girl it's more like i'm intentionally going deeper than that would be and i and I want to like fish where the fish are, so to speak. I'm not, I might end up mapping the entire ocean, but I'm, I'm going to start with where do I think the types of fish that I want to fish for are relationships, you know, traumatic experiences,
Starting point is 01:40:29 you know traumatic experiences worthiness you know family maybe we feel just really unmotivated chronically unmotivated you know and the consequences you know a lot of people that that you know we get to work with we have the privilege and honor of working with but some we obviously many we don't they feel like they are a problem. Like they really identify with them. They're, they're a problem in their own life. And you know, like where does that come from? Like that's more than just setting an intention. That's some deep introspective work.
Starting point is 01:41:02 So the really interesting part of your question is, does the medicine sort of guarantee that if we have an agenda, are we going to stick to it? And the answer is no, for sure not. And, you know, the nice way of saying that is, well, the medicine shows you what you need to see, not what you want to see. And I think there's some truth to that, but it also probably shows you some stuff you don't even know you need to see. And you would never want to believe you needed to see. But, you know, but you saw it. You, you sort of witnessed it, not seeing it like a photo, witnessed it. Bearing witness is deeper than looking at a photo you can you were
Starting point is 01:41:46 able to contemplate it um it had meaning this is the difference i think the meaning behind the intention or the experience after the thing wears off what's uh what is this kind of treatment cost like what i'm sure there's different levels depending on how much care you get, how long you stay. What's kind of like the minimum dosage? You know, someone can go, like someone just goes there for a week. And what kind of cost may they incur? Yeah. So, you know, the cost ranges from $7,500 for 10 days.
Starting point is 01:42:29 So it's average 10 days. So we don't charge by the day. We charge by the treatment. So the only, the average is about 10 days. And the reason for that makes a ton of sense. Like you arrive, you need to get ready. So we do all our own labs, all our own blood work, all our own medical assessment, psychological assessment, largely to verify what we've already done remotely. So everyone's already filled out incredibly detailed health history, spoken with a certified psychedelic coach, probably spoken to our physicians and psychologists before they left their house. Then they come here, we want to verify everything, you know, because we don't know what you did last night. And sometimes there might be things you didn't report that are important, like you didn't know that certain types of health conditions exist. So we want to make sure we are seeing what we want to see to ensure your
Starting point is 01:43:26 highest level of safety. That takes a day or two. And then we talked about the psychedelic agenda. Like most people don't show up with that pre-written and they want to get oriented. They want to kind of go through a process of being prompted, like, okay, help me understand how deep is deep and how wide is wide. And, you know, what's this going to mean? What could this mean, et cetera. So, again, what they came up with, what they arrived with thinking is beginning to evolve. and then the treatment itself when they're when they feel ready and they are ready um you know it's like on day four three four there's no rush like to go fast and to go deep um it just feels to me like um counterintuitive we want to be safe we want it to be lasting
Starting point is 01:44:23 healing and change, right? So there's much more work that we could do before people come that might accelerate that front phase. But most people are not ready to do it. They're like working right up until the airplane, they're rushing to the airport, they fly down, they, you know, come on. So people that work with their own doctors and their own psychology, we had a lot of referrals from doctors, a lot of referrals from psychiatrists and psychologists. And of course they might have done some more work, but it still doesn't eliminate that phase. So that's four days. And then you do the Ibogaine. It takes all day, sometimes all day and all night.
Starting point is 01:45:02 The next day is, you know, you're on out there. You're not doing much that next day. You're kind of like parked or in a puddle on the couch. And it can be very emotional. It can be very hard is the word I would use. Like it's not a recreational experience by any stretch of the imagination. So there's that day, that's day say five roughly then you've got three days to do the introspection the aftercare planning the life visioning the the sort of um insight um um insight, understanding, and turning that into like a plan of action. Like insights without action, they're just like, they're just ideas. Like I should quit my job and become a poet or whatever.
Starting point is 01:45:58 But yeah, I've got to go back to work as a litigator. So we'll put that on. That's not the goal. That's not the goal. So it takes a few days to do that's not the goal that's not the goal so it takes a few days to do that and frankly it's not like boot camp right so we're not like up get up get out of bed you've got you owe us something for your own benefit you owe us something uh some workshop we we facilitate and it's definitely structured and it's definitely designed to discover and, and reveal the things we need to use in the agenda setting, the treatment and the aftercare and the aftercare planning,
Starting point is 01:46:35 because you'd leave with a written document that is the kind of roadmap of the change that you wanted to see. is the kind of roadmap of the change that you wanted to see. I think that that roadmap is worth $7,500 because it's pretty accurate and it's deep and it's meaningful. And you can, you know, one of the things I like to tell people is, you know, when they ask you, you get home and your loved one says, so what's your plan? You can literally hold it, hand it to him and go, here it is. And then you can retort with what's your plan.
Starting point is 01:47:19 But the range of prices, 7,500, 10 days, 9,000, still 10 days and 11,500. And here's the trick. Because we can only do right now about 20 treatments a month, what I tried to figure out was how do you be fair? How do you incentivize people to pay, but pay the lowest amount and then have capacity for people that aren't ready to make a decision? So the first 10 people that commit in any given month pay the lowest price. And then the next five pay the medium price, 9,000. And then when all those 15 are sold for that month, there's five left over for people who really like, they don't plan. They want to come right now. And we, of course they have to
Starting point is 01:47:56 be evaluated, but you know, they're for whatever reason that unable to plan in advance and it's either urgent or whatever they're on tour somewhere you know they're like a lead singer in some band or their movie's not over yet like they want to come right now because they go back back on tour something that happens we can accommodate that but i don't want to disincentivize people who can plan and want to save by charging them all the same amount. And I think that's the fair, that's the fairest way we've come up with to do pricing. And someday, you know, obviously we'd love to lower the prices. We'd love to be able to provide specialized services, extended care, which might increase the price, et cetera. specialized services extended care which might increase the price etc um there's a counterintuitive idea which is someday insurance might cover this it might be in the united states and it's always
Starting point is 01:48:53 assumed to be a good thing and then i remember the story my mom told me about going to the hospital she's like almost 90 just over 90 and she was a nurse her whole life. And she was like, it's hell. Like the, you know, she has a reasonable amount of means. She didn't go to like a veterinary hospital. She went to a normal hospital in her town. But the people were disincentivized to really take time. You know, there were costs cutting everywhere they could. Like they, it just seems like the involvement, obviously everyone should have access to quality medical care. I believe that to be true.
Starting point is 01:49:36 And some people don't have the means and they deserve to not have to be exploited or not get it or pay what they can't afford. However, and we should offer insurance for that, but when insurance reimbursement is the goal of a business, it seems to like really turn it into a mess for the people who want to go to work in care and the people who really show up needing a different type of care. It's not just McMedicine, you know? No offense to McDonald's.
Starting point is 01:50:10 You know, it is pretty rough, though, because, like, I mean, roughly it seems that you guys, it's probably a range, but the 240 people per year, or maybe more or a little less, but something around there. And then you think about the amount of people who have just so many addictive type of problems. And it's just something so beneficial like this, you'd hope that more people would be able to become exposed to it. But there seems to be just so many barriers.
Starting point is 01:50:38 So it's tough. Yeah, safety. I mean, it's, you know, the types of talent and tools that we need. Unfortunately, there isn't a supply chain of that that is like inexpensive. This isn't like yoga, you know, where somebody could give it to you for free and claim to be doing it the same way. way. And so there's sort of an economic model problem and there's a supply chain problem with the types of talent tools we need. On the other hand, what I think we can do, and frankly, every company in this sector and the related sector should do, is we do sponsorships. You know, we have sliding scales. We accelerate admission for certain people from very, you know, from underserved communities, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, you know, veterans, first responders, severely handicapped, you know, disabled, like we should make access available to many as many more people as we possibly can, especially those who are disproportionately represented. They don't even, you know, they're underrepresented and over oftentimes adversely impacted. Absolutely. But I agree with you. impacted absolutely but i agree with you like um it would be great and it will it will happen where the cost structure of any early stage um innovation does come down remember your first flat screen tv oh shit yeah so so like you nobody's, not many people are spending $40,000 or $10,000. I mean, they sell flat screen TVs and, you know, Radio Shack now,
Starting point is 01:52:31 like it's not, this, this is absolutely out of reach for too many people. And I personally, we do everything we can to make it accessible with the exception that we encourage people to do it by themselves. Like that's, you know, that's not, that's not, that's not a invitation to success. Success is defined as safe access, effective access. So. What's the like effectiveness rate that you got going over there? I know that's probably like a kind of bottom line question that people try to ask and it
Starting point is 01:53:11 might be tough to reference. Well, you know, again, so it's the inverse of conventional rehabilitation. You know, nearly everyone stays, but not everyone. Of course, some people say like, hey, I wasn't ready. I came here for a reason that I no longer believe in my parents, my spouse, whatever. Other people have profound stay. So most people stay high 90 percentile to high double digit percentage. So that's the inverse of conventional drug and alcohol rehabilitation counseling. The other is high 90 percent or over, let's say over 90 percent of people say, I'm satisfied. It worked. I feel free from the thing that I came here for. Now,
Starting point is 01:54:09 let's be fair to them and to us, to the degree we can be, because then life shows up. They might be like, shit, I felt great when I was with you, and now I can't't sleep and they have to do work. They have to change their life. Now, I didn't guarantee that we're going to change your life after you left. I can't control their behavior. We can't. We coach them. We counsel them. We give them the materials. We literally build a roadmap to what they can and should do to sustain and compound and amplify the changes that they experience. That's like high double-digit percentage success rate while they're with us. And of those, a small double-digit percentage of people, they don't stick it out there. You know, something happens and they decide, you know what? The, you know,
Starting point is 01:55:15 a substance or a behavior that they know is not in alignment with the way of being when they left, comes onto their radar and they do it. The good news is they don't keep doing it. Like this GDNF, this experience they had, this learning can't really be unlearned. It can be denied. You can say, oh, I did it because, you know,
Starting point is 01:55:42 I'm a chronic relapse or I'm an addict. But we know that that doesn't make you relapse again. That, you know, so they don't stay off their path as long. They don't go deep and, you know, as much as people do when it's like, when they're going to rage you. They went to rehab. They hated it. It was a terrible experience. They don't want to talk about it.
Starting point is 01:56:14 Still life shitty. And now they're going to really show you. People don't do that when they leave our facility. They call us right away and they say, I made a mistake. What should I do? How can you help? And, well, mistakes are pretty normal. We're like, great, you did exactly what I think. And we tell them what we think they should do. And sometimes they come back, you know, 45 days or more later, because they came for chemical dependency, treated that, learned about the trauma, but didn't have time or do the work for the trauma. They come back and do it again, but with a different agenda and intention. That's cool to see.
Starting point is 01:56:56 So I'm actually really cool to see. I know it's like you guys haven't been able to do like a direct study or anything, but, you know, so potentially potentially 90 something percent of people stay and stick it out. But I'm curious when you mentioned a double digit percentage, I wouldn't say fail, but let's say like they, that type of situation where like maybe they go back to the chemical, they're not as addicted now, but it happens. What would that range percentage be? Cause I know you mentioned double digit.
Starting point is 01:57:24 10%. Okay. I mean, okay. It's the lowest of the double digits, but I want to be honest. Yeah. Of course. It's,
Starting point is 01:57:30 it's, it's sub 10%. I would, I, you know, it's less than 10 and more than one. I, we,
Starting point is 01:57:38 we haven't done that many treats. We were in the hundreds. Right. So like having someone, you know, um, do that shifts our numbers, but, but we're going to be honest and tell you the truth. is something they have had while they're with us and they, uh, they can, and they do, um, continue over time.
Starting point is 01:58:10 Um, I don't know whether when they relapse, it's for a different cause or whatever, but I would say that, uh, the fact that they, they don't stay relapsed, that they have a different relationship to that experience, they want to correct it really quickly. And, you know, what's great is there are a lot of people that have come here now in touch with each other. And so they network off each other and they're like, hey, I'm having some difficulty with sleep or whatever. They talk to each other about it. We do alumni programs every two weeks. We do, you know, Zoom meetings and therapists are there and that's all free and people can come and talk about it.
Starting point is 01:58:59 And then they do group meditations and stuff. And all this stuff helps like we went from like a life experience which was truly um exceptionally difficult to now making significant progress so they've gained a lot of skills and experiences that help them shift, um, when things do go wrong. Um, Gotcha. Appreciate your time today.
Starting point is 01:59:31 Uh, how can people find out more information about you and where can people sign up and maybe come check out your treatment center? Thank you. Well, I, I really appreciate being here. I, I think you guys are,
Starting point is 01:59:43 um, are great for having us for inviting us. I appreciate it very much. Hope to come back. At beyond.us or beyond us, you can learn about stuff on the web, how we work. We're totally transparent. We give away clinical summaries. We tell you all the questions you should ask any facility. If you're considering this, ask these questions at a minimum. We'd give you the pricing, everything like that, and all the scholarship programs, etc. And then on Instagram at beyond us, you can learn more about the types of people that come and the benefits they experience. Great. I think Andrew and Seema have like one more question each here.
Starting point is 02:00:26 Yeah. Hopefully it doesn't run too much longer, but, um, and I'm sorry if I've been misinformed on Ibogaine, but I, um, from what I was told, it can be very, very beneficial for like helping, um, reduce or even eliminate chronic pain. So have you in the clinic, have you worked with anybody in reducing their pain with Ibogaine? Yeah. And I hope that wasn't a backhanded compliment by saying I'm running along. I apologize if my answers are too long. No, no, no, no. Okay, cool. So yes, we do. We've
Starting point is 02:00:59 had, remember pain and, and, and drugs oftentimes go hand in hand. People get hurt. They fall down the stairs of the subway. They have a surfing accident, a motorcycle accident, whatever. They get fixed up and then they can't get off the pain meds. That's absolutely the most common pattern. People who have chronic pain do find that the Ibogaine significantly reduces that pain and most importantly shifts their relationship to living with pain. It changes their, you know, they don't walk around saying, I am someone who's in pain all the time. I have pain. I feel pain. And of course, sometimes they
Starting point is 02:01:47 may need additional pain medications, remediation. There are types of therapies. They do come for that and it is successful. But I can't say that if your goal is eliminating all pain from some severe injury we had one guy a technical tech executive who had a surfing accident broke his neck it was dead and had a bunch of surgery was obviously resuscitated had had a bunch of surgery in his neck he's got a ton of hardware in his neck like that shit sucks it hurts and he. And he has pain, but he has, he came, he got off the opioids and replaced those pain medications with things that were not addictive. And now of course he still has some pain. He shouldn't ride his bike a hundred miles on the weekends, by the way, but you know, it causes some stress and pain. But yeah, it works for pain.
Starting point is 02:02:47 And then I had a question that is going to sound so dumb and so remedial, but I've heard so many people talk about Ibogaine. And one of the first descriptions I got of Ibogaine years ago, someone said it literally scrubs addictive patterns in the brain. So that made me wonder for a second. I'm like, scrubs addictive patterns. Well, there's a lot of positive patterns we also have, or maybe we perceive them as positive patterns. So if someone were to go and do Ibogaine, would some of those positive patterns that they've set and positive habits also be kind of scrubbed or is that just bro science of ibogaine no i mean first of all i'm curious who do you hang out with where they're talking about ibogaine all the time that's my kind of community yeah the um the second thing
Starting point is 02:03:42 is it what comes to mind is there is those magic bubbles when they go down. They're like animated bubbles going down the drain. And there's no scrubbing going on. There's a shift in the neurotransmitter, the neurons, where it's repairing. It's causing a natural repair to occur that normally happens, but just upregulating that. So causing that to happen more quickly and more comprehensively. So the damage that's happened to your neurons and neurotransmitters is repaired or remediated. The behavior itself isn't, you're not, there's not hypnotism where we're like, you will no longer eat donuts.
Starting point is 02:04:38 No, it's more like you don't want to put poison in your body and you've been reset. So now you're like, well, you know, maybe I don't want to do that anymore. Maybe I'll change, I'll find some other method to satisfy that need. The behavior doesn't change as a result of the Ibogaine. The conditions in which the behavior is performed change for sure. I hope that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. No, actually, my biggest fear when I did it, I mean, look at me. I went in and I was like i do not
Starting point is 02:05:06 want to come out please don't take this the wrong way i do not want to come out as a quote man bun wearing you know a tooth wearing like um guru kind of bro hippie shaman junior was the term i didn't want that i was like i want to i want all the rationality and my intellect to be intact i just want to shift my relationship to my life experience and look a lot of my friends some of my closest friends have some of those attributes and i love them dearly but that's not for me that's not for for me. And so I didn't want like to lose my sense of self. And I didn't. It improved my sense of self by letting me better understand and bear witness to some of the things that are no longer serving me.
Starting point is 02:05:59 We show up in Mexico to meet you and you're just there in some loincloth and you got one of those bowls and you're going, Yeah, I mean, hold on. Let me get my didgeridoo. I like didgeridoo. I mean, it's cool, but it's just not my thing. Thanks again for your time. And I can't wait to meet you one day in person. Thank you. Me too. I can't wait to see you guys in person too, hopefully in Mexico or in Sacramento. All right. Catch you later.
Starting point is 02:06:30 Thanks so much. Thank you. See you later. Cool stuff, man. Yo, yeah. It's a lot to get into, a lot to like interact with and it'll be great when we can get him here in person, kind of ask him a little bit more direct, like how does getting launched, you know, into fucking outer space, how does that get you to be like yeah man i'm good with alcohol
Starting point is 02:06:48 but you know we've had other guests on before that have talked about it it sounds like um it sounds like uh there's just a lot of a lot of work that needs to be done i could understand how if somebody had the correct care, how they could do these things and, and go through a lot of these things without drugs. And I think that I don't know if there's other treatment centers that do that, but that would make a lot of sense. You know, addiction,
Starting point is 02:07:19 the focus is always on the substance and it's like, it's not, you know, that's an interesting word substance. It's like, it's not, you know, it's an interesting word, substance. It's like lack of substance that makes you do that thing. There's some sort of hole there that you're trying to fill in and you keep trying to fill it in, but you're kind of filling it in with the wrong stuff. It feels like the right stuff because it feels fucking great. There's a reason why people love cocaine.
Starting point is 02:07:40 There's a reason why people love heroin. The shit works when you, it's like, it's like food, you know, when you're really love ice cream and you have ice cream, it works. You love French fries, eat French fries, fucking works, make you, makes you, quote unquote, makes you feel great, you know, kind of temporarily. But it seemed like these kinds of drugs and this kind of treatment makes you go in deep to working on yourself. And Sima, you brought this up before. Jordan Peterson has the thing where you can go in and you kind of.
Starting point is 02:08:12 Self-authoring. You're like writing your own story. To me, this sounds like a psychedelic trip of self-authoring where it's like, I'm going to read you a bunch of verses from what you wrote, but it's going to be just picking up your story in a bunch of random spots. You're not going to know what to do with any of it, but here we go. And it's like, just read off to you. That's what it sounds like in his description. It's just read off to you in this spurt of maybe an hour, two hours. He said he was kind of on this voyage for half the day basically, but kind of reminds me of that. And so I think for people out there that don't have hope, I think if I ran into an issue, I probably wouldn't get help. I'd probably
Starting point is 02:08:58 be just like anybody else in those situations. I'd probably be in denial. But if I had some people close to me that were kind enough to tell me, motherfucker, you need to go get help. I would literally love to explore psychological help. That's where I think I would start because I think that's the biggest issue. That was massively perceptive in terms of the self-authoring pullout, because what that program does is first off, it takes the whole program takes more than a day to finish the whole thing. It's like you're writing and like writing within this journal type sequence for multiple weeks because you go to your future authoring, what you want your future. You pay attention to your present and then you dive deep into your past and it prompts you with certain questions about things that happened to you in your past. It gives you things that you need to think about and try to remember. And what he
Starting point is 02:09:48 was talking about here is he was launched into space, but then he was able to remember these things that came up in his life where then he was thinking about it. And that's what that self-authoring program has you do. It's like you think about a situation in your past and you write about it, you author about it. And most of the time we may have had things that happened to us, but we don't take the time to analyze them, write them out, and truly think about them to see how they're affecting us in our current present. And that's – you're right. you know ibogaine right but if from when you brought up the self-improvement aspect of just like you know because with a lot of these things some people are like well i don't have a problem so i don't need to do shrooms or i don't have a problem so i need to do this but but at the end of the day like you might not feel like you have a problem but maybe it could help you improve
Starting point is 02:10:38 something we all got a problem we all have problems of all sorts buried somewhere in there that's not allowing you to like anyone can be better at anything, right? Exactly. Everybody can improve on some aspect. Yeah. Even Elon Musk, who people put on a pedestal or The Rock or whomever we're talking about. Those guys will admit, yeah, man, I'm really weak. They'll probably give you a list.
Starting point is 02:11:03 Here's all the spots I'm weak because they're so self-aware of a lot of these things. But what comes to mind is the therapy thing. Like just, and I'm talking about just pure, you know, therapist to individual. When therapy is brought up to many individuals, it's like, well, I don't have, I don't have issues. I don't have a problem. I don't need therapy, but I could go into therapy and get a lot of help with a lot of shit, you know, and I don't perceive myself as having huge issues, but I probably do. Look at the exercise selection that we have now. A lot of the stuff we're doing is rehabilitation work. What are we rehabilitating from?
Starting point is 02:11:38 Like we're not injured. But these things have great utility. They have great use. They're allowing us to, uh, work on stuff that we're like, Oh my God, I feel that in my knee. And you and I don't necessarily have a deep rooted like knee thing at the moment. We feel good. We feel strong. Oh my God, I feel that in my oblique. I'm not thinking like, Oh, I need to work my obliques, but these rehab exercises are kind of connecting the whole body together.
Starting point is 02:12:03 And I think if you self author, if you go through and you scrub through your life and what you want your life to look like and what you want your life to not look like, you can really, I mean, maybe you can think of people in your own family. And you could say, what would my life look like if I acted this way? If I acted like my oldest brother? You know, what would my life look like if I acted this way? If I acted like my oldest brother, you know, what would my life look like? What would my life look like? What would happen to me if I cheated on my wife? Fucking write that out for a minute. And then you might think twice about
Starting point is 02:12:37 whatever actions that might precede that because it's like, wow, not only am I cheating on my wife, but I'm cheating on my entire family, cheating on only am i cheating on my wife but i'm cheating my entire family cheating on my daughter cheating on my son you know it's that's like some real deep shit you couldn't write some of that out before that fucking freight train comes and runs your ass over before you even get close to it the program oh by the way the program does have you write out an alternative really future yes yes it literally prompts to – because you'll write out all the things that you might be doing that are negative and then it will prompt you to write what happens if you maintain this.
Starting point is 02:13:13 Think about what your future would be if you maintain this habit. What does that future look like? And when you write that shit out, you immediately realize it's not the greatest future. Like you might think, oh, man, I really like alcohol. I love it. You know, it's awesome. And then you write out, well, my dad passes away, unfortunately, out of nowhere. And then, boom, I'm down this path of drinking too much and not being able to handle life.
Starting point is 02:13:40 And now that's my mitigator of stress instead of running or whatever it might be. I mean, you can kind of walk yourself through some of this. And most of us, unfortunately, have either rubbed up against this ourselves or we've seen other family members or friends go through it. And we know exactly what it all looks like. So you could write it out pretty far. Yeah. Yeah. That's like what I call a pre-grit.
Starting point is 02:14:02 So it's like you kind of you feel the regret of what could potentially happen. And then you're just like, fuck, that feels terrible. I'm going to make sure I don't do that. You know, it's like a preventative measure. with breathwork i've done so much dude but i've never had your experiences and when you mentioned it the first time like really and then you're like and then you do it over and over i'm just like damn andrew is a fucking guru i'm gonna i'm gonna have the the long beard and just like wear the loincloth and all that but and i you know i don't know it feels weird like to brag about it but like when he was talking about how like like oh i was hanging from the ceiling uh-huh i've done that too yeah i've been like laying down on the floor and it's like oh shit i'm actually on the ceiling upside down looking down at the floor and it's like huh how am i gonna get down from here and it's just all through breath i gotta
Starting point is 02:15:00 give you guys this um this link that a friend of ours, a friend of my brother sent me, this guy JP, who we're going to have on the show. If we try his breath work and we dig it, he said you got to try it first. It's different than some other stuff, but he just sent me a link the other day. Okay. And he wants me to give it a go so we can give that a try and see if we have different. He's like, I'm going to tell you it's going to be a different experience than what you you've experienced before and i tried to tell him like we've done some of this stuff before but he swears it's gonna be different so we'll give it a shot i cannot wait because yeah when i when i did it with um with belisa vranich i had a different type of experience than what what i've
Starting point is 02:15:40 had with like uh justin lovato's program but it was pretty close i get a little bit of it in the cold plunge oh man especially especially listening to wim hof so he puts he's suggestive you know you may hear feel your hands and feet you know getting warm or whatever i'm like they are i really feel warm i'm not even cold anymore the The water's boiling. I can't believe this. But you know, Andrew, it's like people have different propensities to have different experiences at levels. Like that guy was talking about Duolingo became a fucking addiction for him. He was like spending six hours on Duolingo. Like it just seems that like there are certain things for him that he'll just take it there.
Starting point is 02:16:25 And he has the ability to take it there and it seems like for you when it comes to like a lot of this breath work stuff you just have this ability to go somewhere where someone like me will have to try so hard but probably the aspect of it is because i'm trying so hard i can't yeah i'm just not you know there was one time where i was like all right i'm gonna have going to have a freaking just, we're going all in. So I took like a gram of mushrooms and then I was waiting and it kicked in and all of a sudden like things were looking weird. I'm like, all right, let's do this. I started breath work and it was so fucked up. The whatever entity that I run into on a regular basis in the spirit realm was like, we know what you're doing and it's not going to work.
Starting point is 02:17:04 You are trying to shortcut this thing when instead you need to just frequently visit us more yeah and so they kicked me out and i got nothing and i was like fuck it totally just were like you're not cool today sorry you can't come in with this like cheap ass shortcut i'm like dang it and so then after that it was pretty cool but yeah it's fucking wild. Where are we going to Mexico, guys? Yeah, I know, right? Yeah, what part of Mexico?
Starting point is 02:17:30 That looks like fun. We'll have some family over there. We can fucking just... Potentially, depending on where it is. Yeah. Yeah, I thought that was really cool. And I hope that more things like this get kind of, I guess, allowed, I guess you'd say. Because there's a lot of people that are suffering i think people need alternative means seems like some of the things that we have in
Starting point is 02:17:49 this country uh don't work great most things are just like pharmaceutical or most things are like just through uh this giant scam of ours that we call insurance which is a fucking whole nother topic and a whole nother mess in and of itself insurance is a weird thing because people think like i'll just like i'll see if my insurance but like you still you always pay like you always pay like no matter no matter what i guess it's just all fucked up because you know like uh these the hospitals you know they pay for these machines like an mri machine or x-ray machine it's like how much does it really fucking cost to have a couple of these things um why can't some regular people buy one like why can't i have one in the gym and if you wanted to get an mri i can't buy
Starting point is 02:18:34 one though like even if i had the money to buy one you can't really buy one because you need to be like a medical professional for that but like how great would it be to be like i don't know i think something wrong happened to my ankle and you just fucking take a look at it take a look under the hood but you know people don't want us poking around and looking at stuff you got to go to the uh the experts and then they put giant price tags on it that don't really make sense and they will never tell you how much something costs like hey is it 700 bucks is it it 2,500 bucks? Can you please just let me know how much it fucking costs so I can come and get that shit checked out. You know, what's actually kind of cool. And I, I wish I, I saw this a few weeks ago. Um,
Starting point is 02:19:15 but there are a few things that people can do. Like if someone goes to an emergency room or they get some type, they have to be in a hospital. And usually sometimes people come back with these massive bills. There are ways to dispute those things. And it takes like this thing, most people don't know. And I didn't know, but you can like be like, wait, this was $8,300. How much of this medication was I given? How much of this medication? Did you guys give me this? And then somehow the bill is actually like ends up being, okay, well you only have to pay $1,500. But no one knows, including myself, I didn't know this either. No one knows to go and dispute.
Starting point is 02:19:52 Because if you dispute, a lot of the charges that you're given at hospitals, sometimes you can get a lot of that taken off. And people have come back and been like, well, I had this $9,000 medical bill that's now, for some reason, $1,600. Because I was charged for a lot of shit that really wasn't given to me so like there's a lot of shit in this system that will overcharge you and also have you guys seen the good nurse oh yeah the movie yeah that was crazy there's also a documentary you haven't seen it doesn't that kind of fucking make you mad yeah it was insane it's the hospitals or that that those hospitals were literally because it was a true story those hospitals were trying to protect a killer so that they didn't have to pay the legal bills of turning this guy in like they'd get sued and they did get sued but they get the, they're protecting somebody who was killing patients.
Starting point is 02:20:48 This nurse was going through and giving and, and, and, and this guy may have killed like 1500 people or something. It was nuts by putting shit into their, um, their IV bag. It's like a drug called digoxin or something. And he,
Starting point is 02:20:58 the hospital literally like when they saw him doing it, they just transferred him to another hospital and then transfer him to another hospital. If transferred him to another hospital if he got found out there. Because if it came back and it was like, you know, they would owe, and they do owe so much money to the victims. And there's so many people that like he,
Starting point is 02:21:15 they know he killed, but like Mark mentioned so many more, but the hospital was protecting him. And I'm not saying hospitals are bad, but I'm saying that not everything that is supposed to be good for you is always good for you. I'm going to see if I have a friend of mine who's a doctor who's pretty high up. I'm going to see if I can get him. It's hard, you know, because it's hard to get people to like when they're in the medical field, it's hard to get them to open up and talk
Starting point is 02:21:38 authentically about much of anything because they're fearful of criticism, you know. I'll see if he'll come on the show because I also think that there's a whole other side of the medical thing where people really do want to help. People do. They do want to meet somebody. They do want to shake their hand. They do want the person and the family to know you're in safe care. I'm performing open heart surgery.
Starting point is 02:22:00 I'm going to save your life. So we talk about doctors and we talk about these visits all the time on the show, kind of in a negative light. And, uh, you know, the first person I'm going to go to, if something catastrophic happens to me out of nowhere is to the fucking hospital. And I'm going to go to a doctor and I'm going to try to get the best help and care that I can get. I'm not going to go to my brother and be like, yo, can you, can you cut me open and take a look inside? So there are a lot of people that really care. It's just some of the system that we have is a little bit confusing on like just even something as simple as just having a doctor that you see every other year so that you can have preventative care instead of just what we have, which is kind of more of sick care, which is just kind of unfortunate. what we have, which is kind of more of sick care, which is just kind of unfortunate.
Starting point is 02:22:44 Yeah. No, I was just going to say, it's just one of those things where like, right, the person could have all good intentions, but once they get in, somebody's like, it doesn't work like that. Like you have to get approval. You got to get at the referral and, you know, this whole thing of like, well, you know, we're not going to, we're not going to pay to cover the patient stuff, right? We have to get paid and then we can take care of it. Because like when I got my vasectomy,
Starting point is 02:23:06 it got canceled because the insurance didn't approve it. And I was like, but my balls are nice and shaved and I've been nervous all day for this thing. What do you mean it's not going to go through? Like it was a weird thing where I was like. Oh, wait, wait, wait. Sir, you shaved your balls already? Yeah, they're like, bring him in.
Starting point is 02:23:21 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go ahead and dump him in here. Yes. And I guess guess you have like nurse he shaved his balls like all right yeah bring him in yeah it was not the good nurse all right let's go she was old yeah she didn't paint my toenails though mr kruger yeah that was great like is your wife listening and he's like yeah yeah no it's all good that was a little
Starting point is 02:23:49 peculiar I'll say yeah if some if some nah I'd never let some random woman paint my toe
Starting point is 02:23:58 like that's just there's too many questions to answer there it's like I put myself in a bad situation imagine that imagine if your girl's like yeah my feet kind of hurt so the steward guy he just
Starting point is 02:24:09 started rubbing my feet really excuse me like and how many times did you come during this andrew take us on out of here 19 times uh thank you. Thank you, everybody, for checking out today's episode. Please drop some comments down below. Let us know what you guys think about today's conversation. Hit the like button and subscribe if you guys have not subscribed already. Follow the podcast at MBPowerProject on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. My Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter is at IamAndrewZN. Seema, where are you at?
Starting point is 02:24:38 PowerProject Discord down below. The website, at this point, will probably have some new stuff oh so uh pay attention to that and then also guys these those black friday nice sandals our power sandals are coming out so keep an eye out for them you've been seeing us wear them you've been seeing us running and walking them they're coming soon so keep an eye out mark all right i got smelly's tip for you what you got big one this is really simple just encourage other people to maybe pick up on something that you're doing so you guys you guys uh have been jujitsuing fucking all over the place jujitsu chops and throws and laser beams and everything all over the place yeah whatever it is that
Starting point is 02:25:23 someone just took up whether it's uh fucking running, lifting, jiu-jitsu, see if you can get someone else to go with you. See if you can grab somebody and maybe they'll go for a walk with you. Maybe they'll go for a run with you. I know Thanksgiving is coming up. Maybe during the holidays when you, a lot of people when they get together, their families get together and sometimes there's younger people that have some energy. Maybe you can convince some of those younger people to go on a walk with you or to do something.
Starting point is 02:25:50 But if it's like a little kid, you can't just go on a walk with them because they're like to wear. So you might have to, I don't know, be creative and make up some bullshit or something. But anyway, I just want to encourage people to do that, to get people to move. Motion is the lotion. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.
Starting point is 02:26:13 Bye.

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