The Tim Ferriss Show - #104: Are Psychedelic Drugs the Next Medical Breakthrough?

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Starting point is 00:03:04 This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, to identify people who are very, very, very, very good at what they do, whether that's an actor like Arnold Schwarzenegger, a military strategist or general like Stanley McChrystal, a chess prodigy like Josh Waitzkin, or, in the case of this episode, two very interesting doctors who are innovating in a number of

Starting point is 00:03:27 different fields. And let's just jump right into it. And these topics are by popular demand. You guys wanted follow-ups to, for instance, the Jim Fadiman episode where we talked about LSD and microdosing for creative problem solving, anxiety reduction, etc. So in this case, we have two. It's a twofer. Martin Polanco, but better said, Martin Polanco, MD, is founder and program director of Crossroads Treatment Center,

Starting point is 00:03:51 which is based in Rosarito, Mexico. Crossroads specializes in helping patients conquer extremely difficult addictions like heroin and cocaine using the African hallucinogen ibogaine, as well as 5-MeO-DMT, which is sometimes referred to as the God molecule, and we'll get very much into that. His other areas of expertise, which are complementary, include addiction medicine, obviously highly relevant, and therapeutic neurotechnologies. The second, Dan Engel, MD, is board certified in the US for both psychiatry and neurology. His practice combines functional medicine with integrative psychiatry to enhance regenerative health, for instance, as related to traumatic

Starting point is 00:04:28 brain injury, among other things, and peak performance, even in normal subjects. His prior and relevant experience, like I mentioned, includes the PTSD, traumatic brain injury, as well as work in the Peruvian jungle with plant medicines, as they say, such as ayahuasca. So in this episode, we don't just talk about addiction. We talk about impulse, impulse control, introspection, developing self-awareness. And this is within the context of a number of tools, not only these massively powerful psychedelics and hallucinogens like iboga or ibogaine, as well as 5-MeO-DMT. We talk about how that compares and contrasts to,

Starting point is 00:05:06 say, an LSD or psilocybin or ayahuasca, which you guys have heard a bit about in previous episodes, just mentioned in passing, and we'll dig into that. But it's not just about smoking or imbibing things. We also talk about, for instance, using flotation tanks to simulate or even replicate many of the benefits that can be found when doing this deep psychedelic psychotropic work. So you don't have to be a drug user or a plant medicine user to get something out of this episode. We cover a lot of ground. So if you are interested in optimizing your psychological performance, emotional control, a lot of the stoics and many other things that I've talked about before, this is a very useful episode to listen to. Two caveats. The first is we get into some pretty major woo-woo shit in this one. So

Starting point is 00:05:54 I live in San Francisco. I have an allergy to sort of the hippy-dippy, burner, holier-than-thou, ultra-spiritual types. Check out ultra-spiritual. Google that on YouTube and you'll find something entertaining. But at the same time, it's very hard to delve into some of the subjects that we touch upon with the vocabulary that we're limited to when talking about mystical experiences, and we get way out there. So, you may end up thinking that I'm totally crazy and due to be taken away in a white jacket, and that's okay. But I think you will find it interesting. The second caveat, closely related. Woo-woo stuff is not necessarily safe. And you cannot, you cannot, I will repeat,

Starting point is 00:06:42 explore these very powerful drugs without proper medical supervision. You need that. I am not a doctor. Don't play one on the internet, nor do I play one in the podcast sphere. So do not use any of these substances without proper medical supervision and approval. There can be some very, very dangerous interactions with common drugs like SSRIs, for instance, like Prozac. So caveat emptor, be smart. Don't kill yourself. That'll be terrible for everybody. Get proper medical supervision. You can see how excited I am about presenting this episode to you. So all that said, without further ado, please enjoy this very wide ranging, very deep conversation with many applications involving Martine and Dan. Martine and Dan, welcome to the show. Thanks, Tim. Yeah, I have been looking forward to this for many different reasons, but one of which is I've been sort of

Starting point is 00:07:25 surfing this resurgence of interest in psychedelics, which I've been interested in for several decades now, even in undergrad, looking at it from a sort of psychological neuroscience perspective. And you both have areas of expertise that I've not yet had a chance to dig into. So I'm really looking forward to this and I hope people enjoy it as much as I suspect I will. But let's start with some of the basics. So Dan, I'll ask you this first. When people ask you, what do you do? How do you answer that question? Yeah, it kind of depends on the setting and the conversation that I'm in because usually it's a variety of things. The summary statement is I'm an integrative psychiatrist.

Starting point is 00:08:04 I've in the past run centers that help people transition off of psychiatric medications, experience psychotic states, rehab, traumatic brain injury, and essentially all of those things are helping to awaken our remembering of who we are and what we're here to do. Got it. And where did you, where were you born and raised? Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. And I went to college in Austin, med school back in San Antonio, and then started to venture out of Texas and did my residency in Denver and my fellowships in Portland. Got it.

Starting point is 00:08:39 Okay. I want to bookmark that remembering who we are statement, because I think that's an interesting way to phrase it. So we'll come back to that. Martine, what about yourself? How do you answer the question, what do you do? I would answer the question with a brief statement. I'm a medical doctor who helps people suffering from drug addiction get clean. And what are the primary ways that you do that? We work with a substance called ibogaine, which is an African psychedelic that has been used for decades to treat opiate addiction and other types of substance abuse disorders.

Starting point is 00:09:10 And what is your brief background? Where were you born and raised? I was born in Austria, and I moved to Mexico when I was a baby. So I have dual citizenship, but I feel more Mexican than Austrian. Let's do a follow-up. So I know next to nothing about Ibogaine. In fact, the first time I ever heard of Ibogaine or Iboga, and I think it was pronounced Iboga by Hunter S. Thompson, who created this PR campaign, which was half of a joke, but basically accusing this politician of being an Iboga addict, which I think is kind of funny for many, many different reasons. But let's talk about psychedelics more broadly speaking. Martin, what was your first experience with, tell me the story of your first experience

Starting point is 00:09:57 with psychedelics. So, I became exposed to psychedelics as a teenager. You know, growing up in Mexico, it was something which was part of the culture in certain areas of the country. Mexican law allows tribal groups to partake in ceremonies, whether it's with the mushrooms or with peyote. So it was just around in terms of circles that used this ceremoniously. And the first experience, I didn't feel anything. I think I was 14 when I was invited to participate. It wasn't until I was 21 that I had a earth-shattering experience with one of the plant medicines. And which was it? What was the context? The context was just us as teenagers wanting to explore our psyche. And we took mushrooms and

Starting point is 00:10:43 went to a mountain. And before we got to our destination, we just, we could not continue because of the strength of the experience. It was extremely beautiful seeing that everything was alive, that rocks were alive, the sky was alive, and really being able to see and feel our emotions in a way that we had never been able to. And when did you decide to bridge to Iboga or Ibogaine? So I was finishing medical school when a very close family member was suffering from addiction. And, you know, we saw her struggle. We had tried all types of different rehab.

Starting point is 00:11:16 We had kicked her out of the house and tried the 12-step model and put her in different institutions. And I came across a documentary where they were discussing ayahuasca and Ibogaine. And I became intrigued and looked it up on the internet and saw that this was real and that there was a wealth of clinical research backing up the claims that were being made about the substance. So I took her to see a provider and I was astounded by the change that she went through. From one day to another, she had a realization that her direct use was a problem, which might seem, you know, not surprising, but for most addicts, they are in an addictive mindset where they cannot even see that this is a problem and

Starting point is 00:11:50 they're able to rationalize it. I was going to become an ophthalmologist and I had started my training, my residency training in eye surgery, but it always stuck with me how potent this transformation was. So I took a year off to try to open a clinic with another doctor and we did well and we saw success with patients. So we just kept on going. And what was the documentary? Do you recall what the name of the documentary was that you watched? It was a BBC documentary. I cannot remember the name, but it was just focused on plant medicines. And it was just a brief snippet that I managed to see from the corner of my eye that caught my attention. I wasn't really watching it. It was just a substance I'd never heard of. Ibogaine is an obscure psychedelic in that it doesn't have a long history of recreational use

Starting point is 00:12:35 because it's not a recreational experience. It doesn't sound like a light recreational experience from what I've read, at least. Yeah, it is probably the least recreational psychedelic. Definitely not something you would take and socialize or go to a party or... It's not a light burning man, pre-evening experience. So on that point, I'd love to just ask, maybe Dan, we could have a bridge here. So Martin, you mentioned ayahuasca, and that's come up before in my conversation with James Fadiman, who's done a lot of microdosing and LSD research. How would you characterize the primary differences between, say, either the benefits or effects

Starting point is 00:13:16 or both of ayahuasca versus iboga or ibogaine? Yeah, they're very different. The outcome can be somewhat similar, but the process that you get to that outcome is very different. Ayahuasca is done in a group setting, but it's a very solo inward journey. Typically done in the dark, in the jungle. You go through deep psychological healing, oftentimes pre-verbal healing around traumatic issues. What do you mean by pre-verbal? Do you just mean like on a nervous system, like integrative level? Or what do you mean by pre-verbal?

Starting point is 00:13:53 Pre-verbal is typically before those years of, say, five or so. So between birth and four, between birth and five, we don't even really have the language centers connected to the memory centers in the way our brain is developed at that point. And some of the really early but good child developmental psychological studies suggest that 85 or so percent of the personality is set by the time we're five years old. So that means the majority of who makes us who we are, how we see the world, how we see ourselves, how we see others, how we form our relationships, the vast majority of that that we experience as adults is set by our constitutional and kind of genetic makeup and just who we are as our primordial soup when we're born and all the experience that we have leading up to before we were even in elementary school.

Starting point is 00:14:51 Got it. So there's so much that happens in the psyche that you can't easily access in psychotherapy. That's one of the reasons that psychotherapy is so challenging to get to the early root. There are ways to do that. There are ways to massage the psyche, massage the egos. You can start to exhume many of those early experiences, but they're really difficult to track, to hold on to, to have a consistent narrative, and to heal. When you have something like ayahuasca that comes into the mainstream of the psyche through this

Starting point is 00:15:26 psychedelic experience, you gain a witness perspective. The fear centers relax. The trauma is brought back up onto the screen of the mind site, and you oftentimes get this replay of very early things, and maybe not even just early things. Sometimes there's traumas that happened that people thought they had dealt with. So all of this stuff that has been in the background, but still shaping how we experience life and how we experience ourselves, comes up to the forefront to be healed. And Iboga can do that similarly. However, iboga is such a mind medicine. It will ride the psyche relentlessly until you essentially give up. And oftentimes it's described as this controlled death experience. There's a lot of the psyche that will die or that will be released, that will be surrendered to the greater experience of the

Starting point is 00:16:27 becoming who we thought we could be or who we were maybe scared to be without this limitation of something like addiction. Right. Without the crutch or without the mask, whatever that might be. Right. And so, so much that drives what might be addiction is these early developmental, oftentimes traumas, that we find various ways as adults to try and compensate for, or to medicate, or to essentially, through our own trials and tribulations, just try and find a way to make it more palatable, easier to be human not to interject but what i what i found just from a to maybe give people a concrete example also in my own experience with ayahuasca and i won't go too deep into it but you know i'm not a by any stretch a michael jordan of hallucinogens but i've probably had between 50 and 100 uh experiences somewhere in that and then for at least the last four years have recorded and journaled all of those. My experience with ayahuasca has been that it's, just to reiterate a few things you said,

Starting point is 00:17:33 number one, it's brought back into sort of present state awareness things that happened that I'd completely forgotten about or thought I couldn't even access from very, very early in childhood. But things that most certainly did happen that after being reminded of them, I could kind of explore in greater detail. But also, for me at least, showed me different versions of normal. And what I mean by that is when you said medicate, one of my means of self-medication has always been caffeine or stimulants. And I think some people are drawn to opiates or depressants, and I was always drawn to stimulants. And I think that was fed by an early sort of heavy use of pre-workout stimulants that I was able to sort of revisit what pre-caffeine Tim looked like,

Starting point is 00:18:26 which was very unusual and really powerful and compelling for me. From a symptomatic standpoint, I think it'd be helpful perhaps to walk people through the experience of ayahuasca. And then Martina, I'm going to come back to you to talk about Ibogaine. But if we look at ayahuasca, like you said, it's a group experience. Oftentimes, it's done at night in the dark. And what would you say? It lasts like four to seven hours for most people? Yeah. And could you describe what the onset feels like and maybe some of the common characteristics that people report? And then I'd love to just kind of get a comparison after that from Martine on Ibogaine, which I've never used. Ayahuasca is classically described as very visionary.

Starting point is 00:19:11 And that being said, it's very different for everybody. Like one of my maestros that I sat with, he describes the medacion, or the time where you're experiencing the medicine, as being a state that could include three different phases, or three different types. And one is visionary, one is mental, and one is kinesthetic or body. So for example, for me, what oftentimes happens is I get a lot of ideas. I see the network of interrelated factors and potentials. And my mind starts to understand how things have affected me, how things are affecting the world, potentially the next step for me to take in my journey. That's all very mental.

Starting point is 00:19:52 It's also been very somatic. So classically, ayahuasca is very purgative, which means you poop out a lot of toxins and debris and a lot of old emotional stuff. It's like the gut holds so much of the lymphatic tissue and the lymphatic tissue is related to how we hold onto things, those being emotional things and those being physical or toxins. So it flushes out the GI system. You poop out a lot or you purge, you puke out a lot. And so you're releasing the entire GI system from what it's been holding on to. And the GI system is the earliest formed system in the body. It has the same dermal structure as the skin or the ectoderm. And when we start to unravel so many of these early psychological traumas, we realize so much of that is connected to the gut and how people experience their own mind.

Starting point is 00:20:43 And then we take more of a cross-lateral comparative to the second brain research, and we see that most of the neurotransmitters that are produced and stored are in the gut, not in the brain. They get transferred to the brain. So much, when the gut heals, when you release all of that duff, you start to think more clearly, and it upregulates all of our neurochemistry. So ayahuasca is classically described as an antidepressant too. It's been very successful in helping people transition from chronic depression into what would be called euthymia or normal mood. Many people don't even know what that feels like, but optimism, faith, courage, strength,

Starting point is 00:21:24 personal empowerment, then we also get into the whole set and settings of that too. And I think that's an important thing because there's a lot of medicine being offered worldwide now by many people who are not very experienced. Yeah. I definitely want to come back and talk about that because I think the risks are worth exploring, including, and we'll come back to this, but you mentioned going from depression or chronic depression to a more normative state. But if people are, say, on heavy regimens of SSRIs like Prozac and they go straight into ayahuasca, that's a big, big no-go. So we'll come back to that. Thank you for that.

Starting point is 00:22:03 Very helpful. And Martine, could you perhaps walk us through Iboga and how it differs from your perspective, the experience? Ibogaine is the primary alkaloid. So it's one of the active components in the plant. So at our clinic, we use Ibogaine to detox patients, and then we use Iboga as boosters or supplementary medication after the treatment. Although Ibogaine and Iboga are classified as psychedelics, the more accurate description of their effects would be oneirophrenic, which means dream creating. A typical experience with Ibogaine is long lasting. It has three major components. And the first one is the visionary component, which can last anywhere from three to 12 hours. And by visionary, we mean visual. Visual. Visual hallucinations. Yeah. Yeah. And these hallucinations are perceived almost like watching a movie of your life. It's a life review and people

Starting point is 00:23:05 report that in the back of their eyelids they have these gigantic screens where they see images from their childhood. They see opportunities they missed, people they've hurt, and unfinished business that they need to resolve. Many cases of addiction are linked to post-traumatic stress disorder and this can also be resolved by Ibogaine because it allows a person to go back to that traumatic event and experience it without any emotional pain. So one is able to go back and let go of the experience, come to terms with the experience, or just recontextualize the experience. Like Dr. Dan was saying, a lot of trauma that happens is pre-verbal. So it happens to people when they're before five years of age.

Starting point is 00:23:47 And the brain stores this just as an emotional charge because there's no words associated with the experience. So Ibogaine allows them to go back and see what happened, almost like they're floating in the room as an observer. And because they're seeing this experience through the eyes of an adult, it allows them to put it in a different context. Other imagery that comes up during the Ibogaine experience is related to the sentience or intelligence of plant life, the creation and the fate of the universe, our own mortality. There are certain images which can be disturbing to patients. I mean, you do see spirits and see images of dead people, which oftentimes can be explained by, in Africa, what they say is that Ibogaine is a controlled death experience. So you go into the land of the dead and you're given information by your ancestors, which you can then take back into this world and apply it for your life. The second phase

Starting point is 00:24:42 is a phase of introspection, and this can last up to 24 hours. Most patients that come through, they're experiencing opiate withdrawal, and this is pretty much gone, as well as the craving. Ibogaine has a very potent antidepressant effect, so people that take it, they feel an elevated mood for a period of time afterwards. In terms of the differences between Ibogaine and Ayahuasca, I think that introspective life review is more pronounced with Ibogaine, although only 70% of people have it. So there's a full 30% of people that experience no visions at all. I don't know the statistics with Ayahuasca, but it might be more reliably psychedelic than Ibogaine is in that regard. That's very interesting. If you had to

Starting point is 00:25:26 guess what the commonalities are of those people who don't experience anything, is it just, do you think, a purely genetic component or is there something else to it? Well, there's definitely a genetic component. I mean, we have different ways that we metabolize drugs. And there are 70% of people, well, there's 7% of people that are ultra-fast metabolizers and there's genetic tests that we can use to determine this. And that also tells us how much we have to give them. In terms of the people that don't have visions, it's often related to what drugs they're on. So when somebody comes to us and they're taking benzodiazepines, we can't just ask them to stop taking those because they could have a seizure. So if they're on benzodiazepines,

Starting point is 00:26:05 there's a high likelihood they won't have visions. But so people that are coming off of methamphetamine, they're so depleted in terms of their neurotransmitters being washed out that they oftentimes don't have the building blocks to create these experiences. So they just sleep through the experience. So we stabilize people and we have them stay for seven days until they are well hydrated and they're able to replete these essential building blocks. Right. No, that makes perfect sense. Now, by benzodiazepines, what would be some common brand names for commonly prescribed benzodiazepines? So the commonly prescribed benzodiazepines would be Klonopin, Xanax, Valium. All of those are considered, all of those are classified as benzodiazepines. And that's why, is that why, for instance, some therapists who work with, and correct me if I'm wrong, either of you guys, but who use MDMA in a clinical setting will use Klonopin to knock people, to basically turn off the music if it's overwhelming.

Starting point is 00:27:05 Is that accurate, or am I off base there? No, I think that's a pretty good description. The benzodiazepines calm everything down, and it shuts down that psychic space. Yeah. So it's a good safety hatch to use if you had to do it. It's really, I mean, that's, I mean, on some level, it brings up all sorts of questions about, you know, what is being shut down, right? Right.

Starting point is 00:27:27 Very much so. Yeah. So let's, this is, I'm really enjoying this because I've had a lot of trepidation surrounding Iboga and Ibogaine. And I think it's worth mentioning here, maybe Dan, we could talk about a little bit, but you can, please correct me if I'm wrong here. But for people who are wondering like, what the hell is ayahuasca? Or they think of it as a single drug or alkaloid. Uh, the way I've, I've tried to describe it to people is, uh, if, if, if say, uh, iboga is to ibogaine as magic mushrooms is to psilocybin, right? And then you have

Starting point is 00:28:01 ayahuasca, which is more like a cocktail, like an old-fashioned. And you have these principal ingredients, which are, I guess, the chacruna leaf, which has the DMT in it. But then you have this vine that contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, which allows the DMT to be absorbed orally. But then you have people, I mean, depending on the person you're working with, who kind of throw in a little bit of toy or a little bit of God knows what. So it's very hard. It's hard to standardize in a therapeutic session ayahuasca, whereas you can more easily sort of standardize and therefore gather reliable data on dosing, for instance, with something like psilocybin or LSD or Ibogaine or 5-MeO-DMT, which we'll get into. With the Ibogaine experience, and this is just something I've heard because I haven't looked at it very closely after hearing this, which is kind of silly since I should have

Starting point is 00:28:56 probably verified with someone like yourself, but does Ibogaine have a very strong central nervous system stimulatory effect? Someone had told me that, and I'm very sensitive to, say, certain types of beta agonists. Like there was a point in time when I was experimenting with yohimbe bark and yohimbine for fat loss, which made me feel literally like I was going to have a heart attack and die, even on a moderate dose. And so the idea of having that experience for 6 to 12 hours or even more. Right. And with Iboga, it's more like 36 hours. Yeah, right, which is like I cannot imagine anything worse.

Starting point is 00:29:33 Iboga is like Everest, man. It's climbing a huge mountain. Yeah. I mean, does it produce that salivary response from central nervous stimulation, or am I blowing that out of proportion? Well, there is a stimulant effect, but it's very mild. And mainly what it does at low doses, it increases awareness and focus. At higher doses, I mean, you're so overwhelmed with the visionary and the visual experience that you're not really feeling the stimulant effect. It does

Starting point is 00:30:01 keep you up for a couple of days. And some of the theories are that because it is stimulating rapid eye movement phases in the brain that you have less of a need for sleep. So you could be having insomnia for days afterwards, and it could be that your brain doesn't need as much sleep as it did before. That's really interesting. So just as a side note, when I was doing my undergrad at Princeton, I wanted to specifically work in a lab with a guy named Barry Jacobs because he did LSD research. And the junior paper I wrote was on similarities between LSD states, induced states and REM sleep. So this is really, really cool stuff. Yeah. I mean, REM is fascinating. I mean, this is a phase where the brain kind of restructures itself and gets rid of kind of garbage and forms new memories. So in cues and the response because it's a habit as

Starting point is 00:31:06 well you know when you when you have somebody you smoke cigarettes and you give them a cigarette automatically they will reach for it and they will light it without even thinking because they become unconscious behaviors and i begin make them conscious so so this rem component is a big component of the way it is that it works yeah Dan, have you personally used, have both of you, well, let me make this question less of a scatterbrained, scattershot approach. Dan, have you used Iboga or Ibogaine? Ibogaine, I have so much trouble saying the Ibogaine. Have you used either?

Starting point is 00:31:42 I've used both. Okay, and how many times have you had that experience? I've had Iboga twice and Ibogaine once. What were your reasons for doing it? I suppose it's pretty similar to you in that I enjoy putting myself in the lab, having an experience, taking my own personal growth to its highest state. And when I was first introduced to ayahuasca, there was such an immediate healing on so many different levels, and that's a whole book just by itself. And the summary statement was, okay, these medicines are important.

Starting point is 00:32:17 Their massively healing potential is obvious, and I'm going to be dedicating the significant portion of my coming years to understanding the nuances of how they work, why they work, and how we can utilize them well in the best way possible for the maximum benefit of everybody involved. And that's when you get into a lot of different discussions about right practices, safe use, sustainable means. And in order to get to that point, then we have to talk

Starting point is 00:32:45 about the data and the studies and how to really set up the studies that show their efficacy, because it's important to be able to do that. And when I first experienced, I heard about Iboga like 10 years ago from an underground clinic that asked me to come on board as the medical director. And at that point, I was working so intensely with ayahuasca that I didn't want to do both at the same time. And about 10 years later, all of a sudden it was in my field and I heard about it three times within about three or four days from just different people. And I checked in and it was really clear it was time for me to do that. So it always been there. And that's another thing that I think happens for people, too, is we hear about things, and they kind of seed into the depth of the consciousness. And then all of a sudden, those seeds sprout, and it's time to go to work.

Starting point is 00:33:34 And I think that's the best. It's a bit esoteric to describe it that way. And so many people, when you ask them about what led them to the medicine path, much of it was around personal development, inquiry, and then there was a clear, it's time to get to work. It's time to do that. And as opposed to trying to force it, you know, like never working out or never going hiking and then starting with Everest. That's a bad idea. Never working out and then starting at like your level of peak performance or somebody that's been in the gym and a gym rat for like 20 years, that's not a great idea. But to be able to take slow approximation. So a lot of what has just happened naturally over time is that when we get into discussions around, okay, like if I'm on a psychiatric medication and I desire to have an experience because my life is stuck and I can't

Starting point is 00:34:20 get off this medication because when I do have side effects, what do I do? And so there are really good safe practices for helping people transition off of psychiatric medications. And then when that happens in a good way, then we get to ask the next question, what would you enjoy experiencing now as like your developmental next step? What are you desiring to experience in your life? How can we help you access that? And oftentimes it comes down to working with the psychedelics because when you've built the container, and by the container, I mean the right mindset, and you've built the body, you've started to put plugs in areas that were leaking energy or where somebody had poor

Starting point is 00:35:02 lifestyle practices that weren't allowing them to get ready for the medicine ceremony. Just because something is effective doesn't mean somebody's ready for it. Right. And that's actually a very good segue to a question that I wanted to ask or the topic I wanted to explore, which is, and let's start with ayahuasca, just because it's something I'm more familiar with. So I've had a number of extremely intense ayahuasca experiences. And this is where we're going to go into, for a lot of people listening, kind of cuckoo land, but that's okay. So my experience was so intense, and I had the distinct perception, and this is where we get out there a bit, but unlike with even heroic doses of mushrooms or higher doses of other psychedelics, the experience that I was, my perception was being tuned to frequencies that allowed me to observe

Starting point is 00:36:01 and on some level interact with entities that existed independently of myself. And this is where we get into Peter Thiel's question of like, what do you believe that other people would think or do think is entirely insane? This would probably fall in that category. And I'm paraphrasing his question. But when I came out of that experience and talked to a lot of friends were like, yeah, I'm going to my friend's place in Utah. And she bought some ayahuasca and had it shipped from Hawaii. And we we're gonna do it on saturday and i'm like you guys are fucking insane i mean like treat this like you would having a brain tumor removed by a brain surgeon it's like you would spend months if you had the luxury of time to research all of

Starting point is 00:36:44 the best doctors treating it like a life and death decision because of what could go wrong if it were done incorrectly. And maybe I'm being a drama queen about this, but I came out of it really feeling like it deserved, it warranted that level of caution and preparation and due diligence. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that because it's become such a sort of, it helps it has a very cool sounding name to English speakers, like, ooh, ayahuasca. You know, they just love saying it. Or la purga, the purge, or whatever.

Starting point is 00:37:17 It has a lot of cool nicknames. But it's become this very du jour, top chic, hip conversation. And it scares the shit out of me when i think about people treating this like a pseudo recreational drug because i just feel like people could go off a cliff and lose their tether to reality and just like never come back if they if they if they really just don't treat it with a suitable level of respect. Anyway, I'm going to stop now, but I'd love to hear your thoughts, because maybe I'm blowing it out of proportion.

Starting point is 00:37:49 I think you're right on about that. And, Martin, if you don't mind, I'll get in on that discussion, and I'd love for you to come in, too. I think you're right on with that. And I think that's exactly what happened in the 70s when LSD and all the other psychedelics were put in the Schedule 1. The Nixon administration clamped it down. You had a whole lot going on with Vietnam.

Starting point is 00:38:10 You had a whole lot of people waking up. You had people revolting in the street against the administration. And you had people tripping balls, ending up in the ER, really messed up. And LSD is different. And we could talk about the difference too. Part of the difference is LSD is synthetic and it will push you beyond the normal safe gaps of all the natural psychedelics, like Iboga, psilocybin, ayahuasca, huachuma, san pedro, peyote, and 5-amio DMT. I believe that the natural psychedelics have safe gaps and guards kind of put into place. If you do something like LSD and you do too much,

Starting point is 00:38:46 you can go past the glass ceiling. I've had that experience. I've received, not taken so much, and there's a big difference between the two. And I didn't know that until I went down. And I was just walking in. I was like, okay, I'm taking this medicine. And this is a reverent medicine that's been used for eons in very sacred ceremony, and it's a privilege to receive it as such. Pray it up and really be grateful for the opportunity to receive it. And I've experienced a lot of different psychedelics in a lot of different arenas, including ayahuasca. And I lived down in the jungle for a little while, for about a year, just doing a series of dietas because that was my apprenticeship path. And the dieta is a bit of a stronger ceremony and a longer ceremony. You're working with other plant medicines as teachers. But yeah,

Starting point is 00:39:34 you're right. Ayahuasca has this kind of like chic flavor to it. Now you've got 60 plus circles just in the LA area alone. That scares me to death. Right. I know it's crazy. It really is. So I'm glad we're having these levels of conversation. It's a natural consumer driven movement. We're having another resurgence of the research and the interest, which is super exciting.

Starting point is 00:39:58 And the psychedelics are showing very clearly many of the areas that psychiatry, the way it's practiced now, is very weak. For example, with addictions. And iboga is four to five orders of magnitude above anything in the general psychiatric rehab arena as far as efficacy. And you have that same thing with post-traumatic stress disorder resolution, chronic PTSD with MDMA. That's why MDMA is going into phase three trials. Psilocybin is going into phase three trials because you have such success rate

Starting point is 00:40:29 with people having spiritual experiences and going through end of life transitions and being relieved of their anxiety and really being able to walk through death with dignity and strength. Yeah. So there's so many different arenas where it's really exciting. And I think your example of heart, you know, brain surgery, spot on. Really accurate and really, and because it puts into a person's mental construct the order of importance of being able to know that when you are in the midst of that facilitation, that it's done with somebody who's, for me, number one, is integrity. Because in that space, you can really get screwed up by people who aren't serving the medicine with an altruistic intention. They're serving the medicine for their own ego or power. Or sexual conquest.

Starting point is 00:41:19 I mean, let's be honest. There's a lot of bad behavior, and it's turned into a cottage tourist industry in Peru where, well, not always Western, but non-native tourist women who want to have ayahuasca experiences, not always, of course, but with not a very low frequency, end up having these— I saw that totally firsthand. Yes, sexual experiences with shamans who have less than pure motives. And I'm not trying to play the reefer madness scare reel for people, but I think it's important for us to, and I appreciate you just underscoring that this stuff really needs to be taken seriously. And I'll just give another personal example,

Starting point is 00:41:59 which is whether it's localized or sort of full body seizures are not that uncommon on tremors, if you want to call it something less scary, is really not that uncommon on, say, ayahuasca. I don't know. Let's jump over to Martin for a second. So, Martin, do you say iboga or iboga, or is it both? We say iboga, even though the proper pronunciation pronunciation according to the English language would be ib people, which I should say, from the photos I've seen, it seems like to just kind of layer on the terror aspect, it's the, isn't

Starting point is 00:42:52 it the Bwiti tribe that uses Iboga principally or are there others? But they paint their faces white, do they not, when they're surrounding people who are having that experience? Correct. And then when it's taken in the African context of the Buddhist religion, it is a communal experience. So the person undergoing the iboga experience is requested and required to participate, whether it's dancing or sharing the visions. And for a Westerner, it's very difficult because these are such personal images that are coming up.

Starting point is 00:43:24 And I want to circle back to what you said about brain surgery. I think it is a type of psychic, spiritual surgery. And that's why it's so critical to have preparation before the experience and then a period of integration afterwards, because you are in this opened up and receptive state and more suggestible and whatever habits you incorporate in the weeks afterwards, they can stick and these can be good or bad. I don't remember exactly what the question was. I went off on a tangent. Oh, no, that's okay. I was just asking about what aspects of the iboga or ibogaine experience can be most terrifying to people going through it the

Starting point is 00:44:06 first time? Sure. So, I mean, from a medical standpoint, for us on the other side, looking at somebody going through the experience, I mean, we see a drop in the heart rate. We see some drug interactions, which can be problematic. So, for example, somebody who is taking antidepressants or certain antibiotics that use the same pathway in the liver that metabolizes ibogaine, they can have arrhythmias. And as a medical professional, this is not something you want to see. So that can be scary for the patient undergoing the experience. I think just being confronted with who they really are and not being able to look away can be difficult.

Starting point is 00:44:47 And patients who are using opiates, they generally are trying to numb themselves. They don't want to think. They don't want to feel. And Ibogaine really forces them to have that discussion, like, look what you've done and look where you will end up if you continue using. So it is not a fun experience for them. And pharmacologically speaking, I was so fascinated when reading about Iboga and its applications to opiate, for instance, heroin addiction, and how it seems to mask the withdrawal symptoms because those can be so severe. And I was just so puzzled and kind of amazed by this.

Starting point is 00:45:24 Pharmacologically or biochemically, what is happening that allows that to work? Sure. So it's a very complex pharmacology that Ibogaine has. So it works on 50 different neuroreceptors. In general pharmaceutical science, pharmaceutical companies want drugs that are clean. And by clean, they mean one drug, one receptor. Right. Highly specific, which is really very hard to do. Yeah, very hard to do. And it will never address the complexities of addiction. I mean, when you're dealing with addiction, you have to hit it at multiple levels. So it has a very complex pharmacology. And what it's doing at the opiate receptor

Starting point is 00:46:00 and its effect on opiate withdrawal is really astounding because it's not just masking the withdrawal like, say, a substitution drug would. For example, somebody who's on heroin and they take methadone for a period of time, they will not have withdrawal. But as soon as the methadone leaves the system, the withdrawal comes back. This is not something that happens on ibogaine. You take ibogaine and the withdrawal is gone. 90% of the withdrawal is completely gone. So what that's telling us is that the ibogaine is actually changing the shape of the receptor to the way it was before the person started using. So it's actually restructuring it and healing it and bringing back these systems in a more healthy and adaptive way.

Starting point is 00:46:40 Have you observed cases of ibogaine preventing with other types of withdrawal, say caffeine withdrawal, alcohol withdrawal shakes, or things like that? Or does it seem to be opiate-specific? It's opiate-specific. We have seen some benefits for certain psychiatric medications, but not for benzodiazepine withdrawal or for alcohol withdrawal. These two withdrawals are actually dangerous. When somebody gets the shakes, I mean, that's DT and that can be deadly. So it's a very delicate process. And somebody who's physically addicted to alcohol should not take Ibogaine. They need to detox first, and then they can take Ibogaine for the psychological anti-addictive benefits.

Starting point is 00:47:23 And let's just, I want to take a pause. We're going to keep going, obviously, but I want to just ask both of you, and maybe Dan, I'll ask you this first. What are some resources for people who want to read more and read more from qualified sources or good sources? Because there's so much garbage out there on all of this. What might you suggest? It doesn't have to be Iboga or Ayahuasca specific, but let's just say there's someone out there who is on either prescription medications

Starting point is 00:47:55 or addicted in some fashion who wants to try to educate themselves. What would you suggest? Great question. Great question. Because there is so much information out there. The first two websites that I point people towards are maps.org, M-A-P-S.org. That was started by Rick Doblin in the early 80s.

Starting point is 00:48:19 And they've really pioneered a lot of the research that has been pushing psilocybin and MDMA into phase three trials. And what I mean by that is that we're only a handful of years away from those being prescription available to trained professionals for therapeutic use here in the state, which is amazing. That's wild. So maps.org and then iceers.org and that's I-C-E-E-R-S. MAPS stands for the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies. And ICEERS is based in Spain. And their primary studies and their library of research is around both ayahuasca and iboga or ibogaine. And it's I-C-E-E-R-S?

Starting point is 00:49:08 Yeah, it's I-C-E-E-R-S dot org. And that was started by a guy named Ben DeLowen. And they just had the first international, really well-researched consortium of scientists come together for a conference called the AYA 2014 conference in Spain. AYA 2014. Yeah, and that was really good. I think that stands for the International Consortium of Anthogenic Education and Research Sciences or something like that. And they're doing essentially kind of what you talked about earlier, which is part of the challenge with ayahuasca is to make it clean, consistent over time.

Starting point is 00:49:50 And until you can get to that, you can't really study it very well because in the jungle, you've got all these guys making up different kinds of brews. It's kind of like how we make chocolate, you know? Chocolate has like principal ingredients, but then everybody throws in their own stuff because their palate is different. Right. And you're like, oh, shit, I'm allergic to paprika. Oops. Like I didn't realize it was in there.

Starting point is 00:50:10 Yeah. Right. Or, oops, I didn't know that guy put toy in there. Which is not to be trifled with. Yeah. Classically used in brujo or like we were talking about, you know, being able to like actively manipulate people. So you really have to know who you're getting the medicine from, and then to be able to look at it scientifically,

Starting point is 00:50:29 know its purity, its potency, its consistency over time. And with ayahuasca, you're principally using two different plants, like you said, the vine and the leaf. So when we take a scientific research approach to it, you can get that purity and potency quantified and consistent over time and therefore really start to research it. But there's not a whole lot of pharmaceutical industry funding for these kinds of psychedelics. Well, I would imagine, I'll just play devil's advocate here. It's not so much that it's threatening, it's not profitable, right? So

Starting point is 00:51:04 it's a subtle difference, but I would imagine it's not profitable, right? So it's a slightly, it's a subtle difference, but I would imagine these phase three trials, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I mean, these trials cost money. So I would have to imagine that they're being funded by some pharma company who's like thrown on a methyl group or something to make psilocybin, you know, whatever, tetramethylfolate psilocybin, so that they can patent it and protect it. I would have to imagine that it's a slight variant of some type. Yeah. MAPS is doing their own independent research outside of the pharmaceutical industry and outside of government funding, largely private funding. And I think their MDMA trials

Starting point is 00:51:41 going into phase three is something like $17 million that they're raising. Great. It's pretty hefty. And when you get into, and I think you're right. I think there is a dual relationship that the pharmaceutical industry has to psychedelic sciences. There's a fascination, complete fascination, just like the movie Limitless. How can we? Everybody wants NZT, yeah.

Starting point is 00:52:05 All right, man, it's pretty freaking amazing. And sure, I think the first hurdle is going to be, can we patent this, can we make it profitable? But also, on the other side of that, oftentimes when we become self-realized, when we become more integrated as a whole being on all levels, then we become more available to tolerate and experience and grow with the bumps and bruises of being human. And we're less likely to utilize something to numb us out or down. And that's not

Starting point is 00:52:40 to make psychiatric medications bad. I did that for a long time, and every medicine has its place. And sometimes when the psychological suffering is so bad and the only thing you have available is a psychiatric medication, then use that. That's what the medications are for. And when they're used, they should be used with mindfulness for a particular period of time with a very clear plan on how to successfully titrate them off. That's oftentimes what we're not taught as physicians, even in our schooling. Well, I mean, not only taught, but I mean, not really incentivized, right? I mean,

Starting point is 00:53:14 in so much as you have limited time and resources to allocate to each patient. And if you're within a traditional sort of HMO, PPO structure, it's as much as you might want to, to have a financially viable career. It's very difficult to build that in, right? I mean, where you're... Totally. Like the average interface with a client's like 12 minutes. Right, exactly. But let's talk about another one of these tools because the, and Martina, I'm going to come back to you here. 5-MeO-DMT. And Dan, I might ask you to add to this because you, I think, threw a Fido at the beginning of that, which I'm very interested in. But Martine, could you explain what 5-MeO-DMT is and why and how you use it?

Starting point is 00:53:56 Sure. So 5-MeO-DMT is a cousin of DMT. DMT is found in ayahuasca, whereas the 5-Ameo DMT is naturally found in certain plants and in the venom of the Sonoran Desert Toad. This is a toad that lives in northern Mexico and southern Arizona, and it's been used for thousands of years by Mexican indigenous cultures to induce states of mystical consciousness. What we like about this medicine and what is particularly useful for drug addiction is that it reliably occasions mystical experiences. So I would say the majority of people that take it have this sense of unitary consciousness, that all is one, that we're all love, this sense of

Starting point is 00:54:38 your heart being open. So by incorporating it into the treatment program, we can help patients who've had the Ibogaine experience to feel a certain sense of release from the material that came up and of motivation and inspiration to move on with their life. As described, Ibogaine can bring up a lot of stuff from the subconscious and people are overwhelmed after the experience, you know, just thinking about like, oh my God, this is my life and what am I going to do now? And then they have the 5-MeO experience and all of those preoccupations are just blown away because they realize that they are divine beings. And when you have this realization that you're indestructible and infinite and divine, then it's very hard to put a needle in your arm and continue using. So, it works on many levels, but I do see such a profound effect on patients when used in combination with Ibogaine. How are the Ibogaine and 5-MeO DMT

Starting point is 00:55:32 administered? So is the Ibogaine oral? Is that intravenous? How is that administered or smoked? And then the 5-MeO DMT, same question. So the Iboga is oral. Ibogaine is also administered orally. It's given in capsule form depending on a patient's body weight and the severity of the addiction and what kind of drug they're trying to detox from. Whereas the 5-MeO BNT is administered, it's smoked. So you vaporize it and then you inhale the vapors. Got it. And do you always use them in combination? And if not, how do you choose which to use with whom? is profound. So, some people are just coming for that. But our main treatment is treating drug addiction with Ibogaine and we use the 5-MeO at the tail end of the experience. So, they're not used at the same time, but during the same week that patients are with us. So, the 5-MeO is used typically after the Iboga. So, the sequence then is iboga, ibogaine, 5-MU-DMT. Yes, actually, ibogaine and then the 5-MU-DMT. And then if they have any residual symptoms,

Starting point is 00:56:53 we can give them some capsules of root bark, which would constitute the iboga. I see. I see. And by residual symptoms, you mean addiction-related? I was, yeah, so withdrawal-related. So sometimes some symptoms that remain after a detox with Ibogaine can be restless legs, a little bit of anxiety, some tearing. But these are minor. Generally, when people are going through withdrawal without any assistance, they have intense anxiety, they have vomiting, they have vomiting they have diarrhea and none of these are present after an ibogaine experience but if there's some residual uh you know remaining symptoms then these can be easily treated with you know conventional medications or with these small doses of iboga root bark yeah the symptoms sound like me if i have creatine and too many espressos on the way to the airport but right for some, I need to learn that lesson over and over again.

Starting point is 00:57:46 But the 5-MeO DMT, for your purposes, what plant are you deriving that from, or is it synthesized? So we're actually using the venom of the Sonoran Desert Toad. So we use the dried venom. I'm sorry to interrupt. Is that the same as bufotinin or something? Are those different compounds? I apologize, I'm throwing the monkey wrench into the...

Starting point is 00:58:11 Sometimes there are circles burned into the arms of subjects, and they're sort of put venom or into the skin. Yeah, that's a totally different experience and a totally different frog. It is, okay. And, yeah, a totally different experience and a totally different frog. It is, okay. And yeah, a totally different use. Okay. It's called the cambo. Exactly. The one that you're referring to, when they burn the skin and administer the poison, that's called cambo. Cambo. And where is that? That's also Amazonian? Correct. Got it. I'm very sorry to have interrupted though. You were saying that you take the dried,

Starting point is 00:58:44 the dried, what would it be? Excretion or venom from the toad, and you dry it? Correct. So there is a foundation in Sonora, which is northern Mexico, which is tasked with protecting the toad. So every time it rains, which is once there's one rainy season in the desert, and the toads come up from their underground layers, they catch them, they squeeze the peritid gland, which contains the venom. Then this is dried. That is the compound that is then smoked to administer the 5-MeO. I see. Dan, in your experience, how do you think of the applications of, say, 5-MeO DMT versus ayahuasca? Because, of course, I shouldn't say of course, but my understanding is whether you're looking at psilocybin or the chacruna leaf that's typically used in ayahuasca, the molecular structure is very, very similar to DMT, right? Or contains DMT.

Starting point is 00:59:40 So how do you think about the use of ayahuasca versus 5-MeO DMT? And so in full disclosure, I should say I have smoked 5-MeO DMT once. The experience only lasted somewhere between 5 and 15 minutes. Hard to track time accurately when you're on that stuff. And I didn't find that it allowed me to do the work and the introspective kind of analysis and have the realizations that ayahuasca provided over a much longer period of time. That could be a very individual experience. I mean, that's only an N of one and it's one 5-MeO-DMT experience, but for what applications or types of context would you use one or the other?

Starting point is 01:00:22 Personally, I think your description of the difference is accurate. When we're engaging the process more consciously, a bit more slowly, a bit more in our body, when we can really see the traumas that are resolving, when our stuff, when the subconscious material comes up onto the projection screen and we can really see it and dance with it, understand it, engage it, have compassion for it. We have this complete corrective experience. So ayahuasca, what the vine and the leaf do together, they upregulate the neurochemistry while you're going through these reparative traumatic experiences. So you're healing so much consciously. And with 5-MeO, there's so much being healed as well, much of which is not necessarily conscious.

Starting point is 01:01:13 And, you know, just to play again devil's advocate, 95% of what's happening in our mind stream at any one time is subconscious material anyway. So we're typically not totally aware of what the majority of our mind, including our brain, are doing at any given time. 5-MeO is one of those that the experience is so strong, it's so direct back to source consciousness. It's extraordinarily strong in its flavor as a rocket ship back to God. That's why it's called the God molecule. DMT is called the spirit molecule. 5-MeO-DMT is called the God molecule. It does take you back to source. Sometimes it's really difficult to come back and know fully what happened, but that doesn't mean just because we don't know what happened and there wasn't a whole lot of healing that did happen. I tend to be a researcher like yourself, and I get curious to know what's happening and to be able to dance with it more consciously. So my preference is to take a bit of a slower approach.

Starting point is 01:02:18 There are other methodologies of DMT experience. Psilocybin is one. That's why 94% of psychedelic naive people say that their first time use of psilocybin was in the top five spiritual experiences that they had ever had. Those are big numbers, right? 94%. That's huge. So you've got psilocybin as an orally active DMT for phosphoroxal DMT. And you've got Yopo and Vilca, which are different seeds of plants from South America, Argentina, all the way over to Brazil. And those are also with bufotinine, 5-amino DMT. Those are snuff powders. They're ground up seeds. You add a little bit of ash, you add a little bit of water, you have to prepare it just right. And that snuff is about somewhere between a 30- and 60-minute experience.

Starting point is 01:03:10 So it's like the Sonoran Desert Toad in the effect, and it's not quite the robust rocket ship, so you have this more slow engagement with it. You can understand a bit more about what's happening. And that being said, I've experienced massive healing with five and a half DMT. I've consistently, consistently seen massive healing, the experience. And when people come back and, and, you know, first, first thing I do, or we do is just encourage them to hold the gold, so to speak, like, what does that mean? Like hold the gold, like keep speak. What does that mean? Hold the gold. Keep that really private. Keep that experience really close. That was super precious. And when it feels right to share,

Starting point is 01:03:52 then share it with people who are very sensitive to the fact that you just went on a really strong life-altering journey, and they're going to be supportive of that, and they're not going to ridicule it or judge it or persecute it because all of that flavors that person's primary experience with it. So many people, when they have a big experience, they want to go share it. And sometimes the response they get isn't always supportive. And then that alters the healing that they just received. No, no, I'm sorry. The reason I'm laughing is, you know, after I had my first ayahuasca experience, I was like, I can probably never try to verbalize this to anyone because I will be, have people in white jackets come and take me away and commit me. And I think, allow me to just sort of confess something that I feel very conflicted about internally, which perhaps people listening might or may not identify with. But I, for a very

Starting point is 01:04:46 long time, have considered myself an atheist. And I think that agnostic is usually a cop-out, because a theist is someone who says, I believe in God, or I believe in gods. And if you can't make one of those two statements, or both, then you are an atheist. If you don't know, then you're an atheist, right? So, I always put myself pretty firmly in that camp. And it's been very challenging to have some of these experiences, these direct first person experiences that I've detailed meticulously in journaling. And I've had some extremely unusual interactions with friends and other people during and after these experiences that defy any type of immediate explanation, but that can be corroborated by sober people. So just some very unusual stuff,

Starting point is 01:05:31 not unlike, and this is going to again, get into crazy town, but like some of the sort of semi telepathic seeming experiences that people have on psilocybin. And so I still, when I hear God or spirit, there's part of me that still kind of winces and squirms, but I don't have any better vocabulary. Does that make sense? Totally. hallucinogenic research and one of the achilles heels in a way is that the let's just call them conventional formal medical establishments or pharmaceutical regulatory bodies and so on do not respond well to talk of oneness and returning to god and the spirit molecule they're like that is a bunch of woo woo fucking crazy crazy talk. Thanks, but no thanks, right?

Starting point is 01:06:25 Yeah. And that's a good example of the basis of the data that started this whole resurgence in psychedelic research with DMT and Rick Strassman's work back at the University of New Mexico in the 90s. Yep. He wanted to research DMT, and his mentor said, well, don't talk about spirit or any kind of spiritual experience of spiritual experience just stay with oh let's see what happens at heart rate and blood pressure and just like physiologic measures the spiritual stuff may come as a just natural secondary and it inevitably did right people have these amazing experiences with what they would call spirit or or something outside intelligence and beauty outside themselves that they had no reference for.

Starting point is 01:07:06 But when they went there, sometimes it was really kind of like unsettling because it was so unexpected. Yeah, but I do, the reason I chuckled initially was that I think, and I'd love to ask, you know, Martine, I'll ask you this first, and then Dan will come back to you, is the relative importance of the treatment. Let's just call it plant medicine. So you have plant medicine, then you have pre-experience work and post-experience integration. So let's just call that sort of the work. And then you have the ceremony itself, but excluding the medicinal component, right? Just the ceremony. So in ayahuasca, it'd be like everyone's sitting in a circle and having the go dark and the music and the icaros and all that stuff, the songs.

Starting point is 01:07:50 And then with iboga, it has its own thing. I'd be very curious to know what you think, how you would weight the kind of importance of those. And let's just, I'll leave it at that. And then I'll come back to Dan, because what I've observed, which I find very troubling, is as, for instance, ayahuasca has become very popular, there are people who do ayahuasca on a two or three times a month and don't seem to do any prep work or post experience kind of integration. And I'm not really convinced that much is happening other than rolling, you know, going to the casino and kind of rolling the dice biochemically two or three times a month. So, Martin, that was a long winded, somewhat scattered

Starting point is 01:08:38 question. But what do you think the most important components are? How do you rank, say, the prep work, the post work, the actual medicine, and the ceremony or ceremonies? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I think because Ibogaine has such a strong biological component, that is important. But in terms of the relative importance of the experience, like what goes on before and after the administration of Ibogaine, I think is even more important because many people can have this experience and come out of the other side clean. They have no cravings and no withdrawal, but if they go back home and they haven't changed certain elements of their lifestyle or learned new tools or techniques to deal with stress or anxiety, when they come up, they can relapse. And then what was the purpose of taking the treatment if they didn't prepare or they didn't integrate the experience afterwards? So I would say that that is critical. And as with any plant medicines, the set and the setting is

Starting point is 01:09:36 also very important. So you mentioned in the ayahuasca journeys when they have the icaros, and with Ibogaine as well, I mean, we try to provide a safe container where people feel safe to have these mystical type experiences. And, you know, that involves lighting and sounds and smells and all these other things that are involved in preparing the space. Thank you. And Dan, what are your thoughts? And maybe we could start with, you feel. I asked a very, very famous Peruvian shaman at one point, how much is too much? Now, that might be how often is too often. And this might be asking a barber if you need a haircut to quote Warren Buffett, right? And he's like, oh yeah, you can do it every week, no problem. And I was like, nah, I'm not sure about that.

Starting point is 01:10:25 I mean, what are your thoughts on frequency for this type of thing? Well, the biggest hole in the whole system that I see as far as the medicines becoming more and more available is exactly what Martine is describing in the integration work. We're occasioned with so much, and I'll use another example. Before I ever was on the psychedelic path, I was into Lakota medicine and sweating and going on vision quest and going to sun dances and spirit dances and these sorts of things. And I went up on the mountain, which they call vision quest, and I came back and I was- That's no food, no water for a period of time?

Starting point is 01:11:06 Yeah. You go with a prayer. You set a space. You stay in your circle. You sweat on the beginning. You sweat at the end. And one of the elders who was holding the fire for me, when I came down, he said, Great, you had a good experience on the mountain.

Starting point is 01:11:20 Well, come back in a year and tell me what happened because it's going to take you that long to figure it out. And I didn't really know what he meant at that time, and I certainly knew what he meant a year later. And there are still things that I'm working out from my iboga, the first time I did iboga a year and a half ago. I'm still learning about that ceremony. I'm still learning about my Ibogaine experience six months ago. I'm still learning some of what I did in my first series of dietas with ayahuasca. You know, I mean, there's so much that just continues to unfold. And if we are going to ceremony and going to the medicine as a crutch to avoid doing our own work, because the medicines do help us feel better. They upregulate neurochemistry. They will help you feel better in the short term. And if you keep coming back without doing the necessary

Starting point is 01:12:09 integration work and taking that, another example is taking that yoga off your mat into your life or your meditation off the cushion into your life, well, let's take ceremony. Let's receive the medicine work out of ceremony and put it into our lives. That's integration. And that's when our lives significantly start to change. And most people are not talking about integration. Most people are really excited about this new kind of, you know, chic thing to do. And that's not to minimize their, you know, deep prayer and coming in for some healing.

Starting point is 01:12:40 And the fact that they're probably receiving a lot of healing. And we still know that the maximum benefit that comes from any healing ceremony like that is the integration and making it actualized deeply in a person's life. And so for me, the preparation's important. And I think of maybe like two ceremonies out of several hundred that that i had an intention that that is that was exactly what happened in ceremony or that was like realized in ceremony like i'll go in with a particular intention but 99.5 percent of the time something completely different happens that i didn't expect you know so intentions good preparation is good cleaning out the physical

Starting point is 01:13:22 vessel you know just being able to to be fairly self-contained and be self-observant. These sorts of things are important. The setting is extraordinarily important, like we were talking about before, somebody that's integrous. What do you mean by that? They have a high degree of integrity and altruistic intention. I think of it as like, okay, it's like the E3 check. What's the person's experience? Like, have they been pouring medicine for longer than, you know, a month?

Starting point is 01:13:51 And you're talking about the person actually leading the experience. Yeah, exactly. What's the facilitation's experience? What's their energetic, kind of like, you know, do they hold a good space? Is their energy clean? Or do they feel like they're kind of manipulating the space or getting something out of it? And then third is, do they know how to work as a spiritual EMT? And do they know where the ripcord is if you can't find it, like if shit really goes down? For example, like you were talking about with benzodiazepines. So there's a way to just kind of judge whether or not or perceive whether or not that the set and the setting is

Starting point is 01:14:25 good. And then the biggest piece still in making that gain actualized is the integration. Yeah. And I think we're understanding more and more about how important that is because I've seen exactly what you've seen, which is people just keep kind of circling around the ceremony space and dropping in and dropping in and dropping in, and they don't seem to be getting significantly better. And that might just be also something that they need to work out. And they're in a holding pattern until the external support comes. And a last point that I'll say in that regard is that the medicines are typically,

Starting point is 01:15:07 when held right, extraordinarily safe. And there is a threshold of going too far. There is a potential downside of drinking from the fire hose a little too strongly. Yeah. No, absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, I would just say to people, I mean, you mentioned, you know, clean energy. And again, we get into sort of a set of words and vocabulary and adjectives that are not commonly combined. So people are like, what the fuck is this? But I will say like, I've been in settings where you can tell people are kind of offloading some really dark shit. And I had an ayahuasca experience where there were six or seven people in the room and two or three of them, I had that kind of dog-like reaction to them.

Starting point is 01:15:50 As soon as I met them, I was like, not good, not good at all. And sat down and I drank a heavy dose of medicine and I remained completely sober. That's another weird thing about some of this stuff is it was completely negated. My body just somehow or mind just negated the experience. Like I could have done Sudoku and just driven home. Um, and, um, you do see people lose it. I mean, like totally lose it. Right. And you need someone, I remember this woman was telling me this experience she had with a so-called shaman, shaman, like a, what do they call it? A yoga wasca expert who decides like, yeah, I've done some Bikram yoga and read a couple of Carlos Castaneda books. Sure, I'll be a shaman. And the woman leading the entire experience for like 10 people doing

Starting point is 01:16:36 their first ayahuasca experience freaked out and went and locked herself in the bathroom. Like, that is a fucking disaster. You do not want that to happen. But the total rough segue, but I'll do it anyway, because it's kind of my specialty, traumatic brain injuries. So maybe, Martine, if you want to just maybe open the door on this a little bit, how can you use some of these treatments for traumatic brain injuries? Because this is actually something I've never heard of before. Yeah, so this is an area of expertise for Dr. Dan. I mean, what I can talk about is my experience with war veterans. We get more and more referrals from physicians at the Veterans Affairs

Starting point is 01:17:17 who are sending us people who are addicted to opiates. And these are war veterans that often are suffering from traumatic brain injuries and PTSD. And there's no studies that back up the things that we're seeing, but Ibogaine does have a neurogenetic effect. So it causes neurogenesis, and this is new brain cell growth. And that has been documented in preclinical studies. So some of the benefits we're seeing are likely attributed to that. The main benefits we see for war veterans is this resolution of the opiate addiction and the reduction in their symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. I would let Dr. Dan talk about the effects of different plant medicines on TBI as that is his area of expertise.

Starting point is 01:18:05 Sure. Yeah. No, thank you. Dan, do you want to pick it up from there? Yeah, I think Martine's exactly right. There's going to be multiple levels and layers in which these medicines help heal. We're looking at the whole self. Okay, you're helping to heal the psyche, the mental experience of trauma that's in PTSD. You're helping to heal the psyche, the mental experience of trauma that's in PTSD. You're helping to heal the physical structure of the brain through neurogenesis and reparative mechanisms that upregulate neurochemistry and have this healing effect. We're not exactly sure, to be honest with you, we're not exactly sure how they work outside of that neurogenesis component,

Starting point is 01:18:46 which means something called BDNF or brain-derived neurotrophic factor oftentimes gets stimulated and produced by the psychedelics. Ayahuasca will do that. Psilocybin will do that. Psilocybin's got some amazing research. When they just did these LSD trials. I think the Royal College of London, where they were looking at a new compilation of fMRI scans. When you took a whole lot of fMRI scans and you kind of like stack them on top of one

Starting point is 01:19:15 another, they were curious to see what's happening in the brain. And when you look at a before and after picture, it's similar if you were looking at a cobweb and a really beautifully ornate designed cobweb and say maybe 10% of the lines in that cobweb were neon and you could see them on the scan. That was before psilocybin. And then after psilocybin, you during and right after psilocybin, you saw the effect of what was happening on that cobweb and like 95 percent of the cobweb was highlighted it was amazingly upregulated increase in neuronal activity and neuronal connections that wouldn't otherwise be made like crosstalk communication with different areas of the brain and then

Starting point is 01:20:03 interestingly enough too when you look at that picture, like the brain on psilocybin, it looks really similar to the brain of a child. Children are always tripping balls. That explains a lot. Right, totally. Totally. Like, okay, what's the child? You know, the child's brain is open, curious, accessing all this information, like little sponges, like kids are little sponges.

Starting point is 01:20:30 We hear that a lot in AR, especially if you live with kids. You just see how much their brains are alive. And they're always taking in new information. They're always making up stuff, and they're always in this like really amazing growth phase. So that's just one good example of how we've seen in small clinical case studies and with people that we've worked with, we've seen extraordinarily potent and impressive healing that happens with the brain, brain trauma, as well as the physical and the mental construct of that. And now we're seeing, because we have had the advance of science in brain imaging technology,

Starting point is 01:21:16 be able to help us see what's actually happening under the skull, so to speak, during these experiences. All of that is on the plus side. What I will say, too, is it's also important to pace. Somebody fresh out of a TBI or traumatic brain injury, I wouldn't necessarily say, oh, well, you know, ayahuasca or psilocybin is your first gateway to healing. I would say, well, first let's stabilize the trauma. Let's make sure that you're getting all of the supported necessary therapeutics to make sure that the healing is also happening and there's not an acute potential exacerbation of that trauma. This is still a really new area of research, and I tend to play it.

Starting point is 01:21:52 I tend to be a bit of a renegade and cavalier in some respects, and I also tend to play it safe in other respects. If I don't know, I'll tend to put myself in the laboratory first. I've had a half a dozen severe brain injuries through competitive athletics, one of which I drove off a pier, broke my neck, and had a compression fracture, C5. That's how I started med school in a halo. So I, in the midst of that, seeing the downregulation of hormones and the downregulation of my neurochemistry after the TBIs, I got really curious about psychedelic research when I had my first ayahuasca experience

Starting point is 01:22:26 and I could feel my brain being healed, literally. And so now we're starting to see, okay, how can we bring in integrative psychiatry, entheogenic research, and traumatic brain injury recovery, as well as addiction recovery. That's a really amazing interweaving of new medicine. That's why we're seeing this renaissance in psychiatry as well as in rehab medicine. So, again, that's kind of a long-winded way of saying it's important the psychedelics have their place for TBI repair after we've done the stabilization protocols and somebody's resolved from their acute injury and in the midst of a supported multi-layered integrative approach. No, definitely. And I mean, I think it's just a pretty basic risk-benefit analysis, right? I mean, there's very limited downside and potentially high upside to starting slow and there's the opposite for starting too fast. It's like, oh, you tore your ACL. Great.

Starting point is 01:23:25 Let's do some box jumps. It's like, no, no, no. Let's not do the box jumps first. And one thing you mentioned that resonated with me was, and again, I would just ask everybody listening to just suspend your scoff reflex because I've been in that position also. But when you have the first person experience, just from a sensory perspective, you described, you know, your brain being healed, right? And it's kind of like, well, come on, like, how would you know that? But I had a very similar experience once where I felt this cooling sensation directly on my right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, like exactly there. And the reason I know that location is because I've done some experimentation as a subject, also as an experimenter with Adam Ghazali, who I had on this podcast, who's a world-class, very famous neuroscience researcher, runs one of

Starting point is 01:24:16 the top labs in the world at UCSF, has been on the cover of Nature and so on, and did transcranial direct current stimulation, so TDCS. And when you place, I think it's the anode on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, it's a very, very similar sensation, interestingly enough. And that is also implicated for potential use in PTSD. So it's really fascinating when you start to spot these potential parallels or synergies between these different modalities, right? And of course, the language is different,

Starting point is 01:24:52 so the neuroscience might be more readily accepted, but it doesn't make the medicinal path any less valid. It just is harder to sort of capture, potentially, and to measure in the way that you might measure, say, voltage or wattage or whatever it might be doing something like TDCS. So let's do this. I want to ask just a couple of rapid-fire questions. You guys have been very generous with your time, and I'm sure we'll talk more about this

Starting point is 01:25:21 probably privately and potentially do a round two with this. But let me ask just a couple of questions for both of you. And maybe Dan, we'll start with you and we'll just go back and forth here. So when you think of the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind? My first mentor, Roger Bell, who is a chiropractor. And why is he the first person that comes to mind? He was just such a gifted man in multiple areas of his life, principally being that of facilitating healing for others and just consistently saw people who were wrecked from a variety of issues come out of his space healed, better, at peace, whatever they were in the midst of trying to resolve.

Starting point is 01:26:13 He had cracked the code, so to speak, in the physician-to-client relationship and what it takes to actually facilitate healing for another person. And it was, he's consistently been just one of the most inspiring people to me. Is he still practicing or has he passed? He's passed away. I'm sorry to hear that. Martine, when you think of the word successful or hear the word successful, who's the first person who comes to mind for you?

Starting point is 01:26:43 I would say Elon Musk. I really admire entrepreneurships and entrepreneurs and kind of the change that they bring about in the world. And he's definitely a visionary that has come to the United States to fulfill his dreams and has changed various industries. Yeah, he's very good at betting the farm repeatedly. I heard, I might be getting the numbers wrong i think it was something like i want to say 180 million but it might have been 300 something million after his exit from paypal and he took pretty much all of it and plowed it into his three new companies you know spacex solar city and tesla and uh rumor has it he had to borrow money to pay for his rent, which seems unlikely, but it does make for a good story. Yeah, Elon's amazing.

Starting point is 01:27:35 Dan, what books have you given most as gifts? And this doesn't have to be related to psychedelics, but certainly you could throw one of those in if you wanted. Mm-hmm. Well, most recently, Mating in Captivity. It's such a good book about just deconstructing the whole idea of success in relationships. The Jeremy Narby book on ayahuasca was amazing for me. Is that the Cosmic Serpent? Cosmic Serpent. Yeah. It's interesting, yeah.

Starting point is 01:28:06 Yeah, yeah. And then I suppose at the time that I was reading it, one of the more impactful books for me when I was living down in the jungle and experiencing more of the deeper reflections through the medicine space was Autobiography of a Yogi by Yogananda. Steve Jobs' favorite book. Wow, I didn't know that. Yeah, he had instructions before his death to give every attendee at his funeral,

Starting point is 01:28:35 or it might have been his wake, a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi. Wow, that's great. Martine, do you have any books that, in particular particular you have given to other people as gifts? Sure. I like gifting a book called The Journey Home. Most recently, I've given a lot of people a book called Ibogaine Explained, which is a very brief introduction to Ibogaine that is very accurate and scientific and just sound. And the other book would be Tryptamine Palace, which is fantastic because it looks at the 5-Amyo experience from a Buddhist and a Hinduist perspective.

Starting point is 01:29:14 Oh, that's very cool. Yeah, that's a whole separate conversation that we could dig into. The purported psychedelic use in many of these traditions that have existed for millennia. Is the Ibogaine explained, do you know the name of the author for that? I could certainly look it up, but... I believe his last name is Frank. I can't remember what his first name is. Might be Victor. All right. Perfect. I'll look that up and everyone, you'll be able to find links to all of this in the show notes at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. Just a few more questions for you guys.

Starting point is 01:29:49 All right. So Dan, if you could have one billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say and where would you put it? Be curious. Everywhere. Put it everywhere. Put it everywhere. Yeah, I like it. Martin? I don't have an answer for that. I haven't really thought about that question.

Starting point is 01:30:09 No problem. It's not a mandatory. These are all optionals. Well, then, Martin, I'll segue to a different one for you. What advice would you give your 30-year-old self? It would be business advice. Be careful who you hire. Hire the right people. Be really diligent in your exploration of their backgrounds. So it's just pretty standard. I guess it comes from personal experience of being burned. I'll just throw out a recommendation for those people who have maybe had the same experience or are looking to avoid that. There's a very good book called Who, W-H-O, that a number of my startups have used for hiring practices,

Starting point is 01:30:51 which is basically a streamlined, they won't like this description, but a streamlined version of top grading, which is a very, very big, fat, 600-page book. This is a much easier read and very prescriptive. Dan, what advice would you give to your 30-year-old self? Yeah, it's always been an inclination for me to continue to drink from the fire hose. And there was some coaching around pacing and knowing that so much of what we get called to do at the time that we're getting called to do it, we don't even understand why. So really, it involves our faith and knowing that we have the power to be able to shift our mindset at any given time. There's a great quote by Viktor Frankl, the last of the great human freedoms is the opportunity

Starting point is 01:31:40 and the ability to choose one's own mindset in any given circumstance. And he was a guy, an Austrian psychiatrist that wrote the book, Man's Search for Meaning. Great book. Yeah, yeah. Right? I mean, somebody being able to go through that experience and come back and write that. He wrote that book in like nine days after he got out of the camp.

Starting point is 01:31:58 Bam. And just laid it out as a treatise for life. And the challenges that I've experienced, that I think we all do in a variety of different ways, is when our faith is being called in at a deeper level. And for me, it's patience, faith and patience, just recognizing that it's all moving exactly in the speed that it's supposed to. And you can't rush it.

Starting point is 01:32:29 Yeah, it's Men's Search for Meaning, highly recommended for those who haven't read it by Viktor Frankl. If you have read that and you're looking for perhaps a way to expand your thinking on those topics, David Blaine's favorite book, which he recommended to me is actually a combination of two books. It's extremely powerful written by Primo Levy. This is a man and the truce, and those are usually found in one volume, but it is, I asked David what he learned from it and he said everything. It is a really powerful book for those people who are interested in exploring that further.

Starting point is 01:33:13 Martine, what have I not asked or what would you like to say that I haven't given you a chance to say to the people listening to this? I would say you did ask it, although maybe we didn't go into the full depth of it. Like who is a good candidate for Ibogaine and who isn't. I often get requests from people who just want to explore their psyche or they have depression or they want to deal with some childhood trauma. And I often direct them towards ayahuasca because I do think that Ibogaine is like the big gun and it is generally best used for addictions. And that's not to say that people that don't have addictions don't derive benefit from it,

Starting point is 01:33:49 but I do think that there's other modalities that they should explore first that are less risky. Yeah, no, that's, I'm really glad you brought that up. And for what it's worth, when I have people come to me and they're like, I've never done any hallucinogens, but my buddy's going to his friend's house. They're going to do ayahuasca this weekend. I'm like, do not start with ayahuasca. It's like, if Ibogaine is Everest, like let's just say ayahuasca is like Kilimanjaro or something. It's like, it's still a serious fucking expedition. Like why don't you start with lucid dreaming or the moderate flotation tank or

Starting point is 01:34:22 moderate dose psilocybin. So actually, you know what, since we didn't, I was going to ask you the same thing and I know you have a experience with flotation. So Dan, would you mind just elaborating on that for a moment? Yeah, I'm just about as excited about flotation therapy as I'm about psychedelics because not everybody's going to do a psychedelic. And not everybody's, maybe it's not actually in everybody's best interest to do it. The art and alchemy comes into one of the questions you asked earlier, which is how do we know which one to recommend to a given person at a given time? And that takes a lot of understanding and nuanced assessment and also intuition.

Starting point is 01:35:04 But everybody can float. And so it's going to reach the masses in a different way. And when prepped well and when done consistently over time, it can be an extraordinary psychedelic arena. And by psychedelic, I essentially mean, you know, coming back to a deeper connection with oneself. And just to, just for people who may not be familiar with the term, by flotation, you mean floating in a, inside a tank where you've, you've blocked out light and sound and the water has

Starting point is 01:35:41 enough salt in it, like the Dead Sea, to keep you sort of in this embryonic fluid so you don't feel gravity. Is that a fair description? Right. Yeah. It's the first time that we've been without sensory experience, sensory environmental stimulus since we were conceived. There's no sound, no sight, no temperature gradient, and no gravity, right? So all of the brains and mechanisms and energy and searching and gating information from the environment is relaxed so that everything that was in the background, kind of behind the curtain, can now be exposed. And when done consistently over time, it's essentially like meditation on steroids. What is a...

Starting point is 01:36:29 Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. It starts to recalibrate the entire neuroendocrine system. So most people running in stress mode or sympathetic overdrive, start to relax that over time, and you get this bleed-over effect. It's not just what happens in the tank. It continues outside of the tank. You see heart rate normalize, hypertension normalize, cortisol normalize,

Starting point is 01:37:02 pain starts to resolve, metabolic issues start to resolve. It's a really phenomenal modality, and there's another resurgence of that now up in the mainstream on flotation therapy and it's myriad of benefits probably in no small part due to Joe Rogan's carrying of the torch yeah totally right he's been really big in that

Starting point is 01:37:20 and it's a nice entry point for people who have never done a psychedelic because it starts to get you close with your stuff. And are you comfortable in the dark and the unknown and the mystery? That's actually a really good point. It's like if you can't handle a flotation tank, you're not ready to be strapped to a rocket ship that you can't turn off. Yeah. Like one of my teachers, Don Howard, says the white knuckle sleigh ride, it can get a little intense.

Starting point is 01:37:46 And the float and the tank can tell you where you are in the midst of that. And so that's a great entry point. And then there's some more entry-level psychedelic experiences to have, too, like LSD and MDMA and psilocybin when held well. And LSD has thousands of case reports in the 50s, 60s, and 70s of being used as a psychotherapeutic aid. Like, wow, it was amazing. Like, Stan Groft did thousands of cases. And then when it became illegal, he went to holotropic breath work.

Starting point is 01:38:16 Right. And that's another modality. I mean, there's so much that's coming online right now. And it's just a really exciting time in general to be in this field. Absolutely. And I would say just a really exciting time in general to be in this field and uh absolutely and i would say just a couple things so on the lsd front not not a substance that i use much uh if at all uh because i prefer to use the compounds that like you said have that kind of natural sort of dose dependent like self-limiting aspect because you'll puke your brains out or something like that with, say, ayahuasca or fill in the blank with some of these plants that have existed

Starting point is 01:38:52 for millennia, been used probably for just as long, or they've existed for longer than millennia, but they've been used by humans for that long. The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide, I think, is a very interesting read for a lot of people who may not be familiar with the logistics and ideal or optimal logisticsing the experience, but then also the setting, the actual physical setting, having a chaperone or sitter of some type and how to sort of format the experience to minimize downsides and so on. I find to be people might be interested. I've noticed, for instance, with transcendental meditation or other types of meditation, there's a, for me personally, kind of a trip point after a week of continual meditation at least once a day. So I'll have 20 minutes the first day, 20 minutes the second day, all the way up to day five, six, or seven. And then there's kind of a phase shift where all of my measurables, like cortisol, subjective anxiety level, zero to 10 type of thing, they all sort of make this quantum leap

Starting point is 01:40:15 in a better direction. But it takes about a week for me personally to jump from non-boiling to boiling. With the flotation tank, in your experience, what is the minimum effective dose? When you said doing it consistently, if you were prescribing it like medicine, what would that look like? How many days or how many weeks, how many times a week, how long are the sessions, et cetera? Yeah, great question it depends a little bit on the target symptom so for the mind anxiety insomnia yeah let's let's definitely chattering that can be supported and significantly improved in anywhere between three and seven sessions and those stacked two to three a week so if you did two to three a week for three or four weeks and you really compressed upwards of seven to eight sessions in that time, the majority of people would see a significant benefit.

Starting point is 01:41:13 How long are the sessions? Typically an hour, but that's just for ease of scheduling. I recommend if people are able to get in there, do a two-hour float. Most people find a lot of benefit exponentially more so between one hour and two hour. And two hour can be a bit of a threshold. You get into a three-hour float, some people start to get a little antsy and are ready to get out. And then for pain, it's actually a little bit further like seven to ten sessions because there's there it starts to repair the body's relationship with itself it's as well as and this is again some of the theory um but we're starting to see some of the research show

Starting point is 01:42:00 that this is true repair the body's uh opioid production, its own pain molecule production. And then I've had clients and friends and family that have talked about significant trauma resolution in the midst of that too, like replaying old traumatic patterns similarly to what you would see potentially experienced in an ayahuasca ceremony. Now, that might take a bit more of the floats, maybe between like five and ten floats to really start to get in there. And then spaced relatively close together, you might get the benefit of like maybe one super strong, very potent, and really well-held ceremony of something like ayahuasca. But you can start to see benefits in the same kind of arena because when the body just starts to relax its constant survey of the environment,

Starting point is 01:42:53 then the natural exploration is inward, and then it starts to go deeper and deeper into the psyche and into the mental constructs and the subconscious, and then it gets really juicy. So I typically say two to three floats, however much your schedule is able to squeeze in there and do that for a month and then see what happens. And I'm going to be extraordinarily surprised

Starting point is 01:43:19 if you didn't see anything happen and it wasn't beneficial. And I've never had anybody come back and say, yeah, that didn't work. Don't shave an hour before you go to do a float session. You will feel that and it won't be pleasant. It will interrupt the experience. So guys, I want to let you get on with your evening. So I will finish with a question that I ask pretty much everyone, which is, do you have any ask or request for my audience? And we're going to get to where they can find more about what you're up to and so on. But if you could ask the people listening to do anything or make a recommendation, what would

Starting point is 01:43:58 that be? And I'll start with you, Martin. The specific ask would be to support a study that we're doing on war veterans and Ibogaine. We're doing some pre-Ibogaine brain scans. We're doing a type of scanning called SPECT scanning, and then we're going to look at their brains afterwards. So if you are a loved one or a veteran suffering from opiate addiction and are interested in participating in the study, to please get in touch with us. And where is the best place for people to go to learn more about that? So our website is crossroadsibogaine.com and the number is 866-956-7756. Great. And Ibogaine is I-B-O-G-A-I-N-E?

Starting point is 01:44:40 Correct. Crossroadsibogaine.com. And I'll put these all in the show notes, everybody, and I'll give that URL in just a moment. But, Dan, what ask or recommendation would you have? I appreciate Martin's suggestion, and he kind of stole my guys because they're pushing the envelope forward in the arena of medicine as we know it. a huge number of people have an entry point into the psychedelic sciences and understand the benefit of some of these medicines that have been culturally prejudiced against for so long. And when we become more and more integrated and we become more and more resolved of our trauma

Starting point is 01:45:39 and we become stronger within our own personal empowerment, we see the next evolution of our experience as a culture, which is essentially moving to a place where we remember how to all live well together. And I think there's still a lot of healing worldwide in that regard. And people see us in the States as a leader in the field of personal development. Well, what's so interesting to me also is the, irony is overused here, but how far the pendulum has swung from a sort of innate tribal social existence

Starting point is 01:46:15 to a digitally connected, highly isolated, anxiety-ridden existence and how we're using tools from these kind of pre-industrial societies to, in some capacity, return to a communal tribal mindset. It's just, I don't know, it's very interesting to see that kind of gravitational or even sort of genetic pull in that direction. It's really, really, really interesting. I'll close out with asking you both where people listening can find you online, where they can find you on social, whatever you want to offer. Martine, let's go with you again and feel free to give out whatever

Starting point is 01:46:57 you'd like. So again, our website is crossroadsibogaine.com, the word Crossroads, and then Ibogaine, I-B-O-G-A-I-N-E. And our number is 866-956-7756. Great. And Dan, what about yourself? You can find me on Twitter, Dr. Dan Engel, D-R-D-A-N-E-N-G-L-E. And I'm also affiliated with Crossroads, the Temple of the Way of Light, and Onnit Labs in Austin. And I have contacts through each of those websites too. Fantastic. Well, guys, this has been great fun.

Starting point is 01:47:31 For those of you listening, if you think I'm a complete nutcase and this is our last time interacting, then thanks for listening up to this point in my life. And for those of you who found this fascinating and hopefully explore this alongside the three of us who are chatting right now and try to apply a sort of inquisitive, rational and skeptical mind, but an open mind to these things that I think represent very powerful and flexible tools for a whole host of problems, and also taking people from sort of normal to optimal

Starting point is 01:48:06 in a lot of ways, then I wholeheartedly thank you for listening this far and invite you to join the conversation and check out everything that we discussed in this call, whether that's Maps, Crossroads, or others. Be sure to check out the show notes, fourhourworkweek.com forward slash podcast, all spelled out and we'll have all the links you could possibly want including links to all the websites, twitter handles and so on but gentlemen

Starting point is 01:48:33 thank you so much for the time I really enjoyed it great thank you too so much Tim it's been great thank you Tim until next time and everybody listening thanks for listening and talk to you soon. provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend. And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do.

Starting point is 01:49:21 It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

The Tim Ferriss Show - #104: Are Psychedelic Drugs the Next Medical Breakthrough?

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