TrueLife - Nick Murray - Full Time Bio-Hacker/CEO of Wake

Episode Date: January 14, 2023

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/https://wake.net/https://advancedcare.com/Nick Murray is a tech entrepreneur, full-time biohacker, and co-founder/CEO of WAKE.His passion for health was first ignited when his former partner was diagnosed with cancer, and he's been immersed in Eastern medicine and a holistic approach to healing ever since.Nick is committed to bringing well-researched fungi medicine to the forefront of the health and science community.He personally splits his time between Jamaica and North America, applying his experience in technology and research to the goal of revolutionizing how the world sees fungi medicine. One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark. fumbling, furious through ruins

maze, lights my war cry Born from the blaze The poem is Angels with Rifles The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Kodak Serafini Check out the entire song at the end of the cast Ladies and gentlemen,

welcome back to the True Life podcast We got a special for a day This is part one of a multi-part series We're here with Nick from wake he is a a tech entrepreneur a full-time biohacker co-founder CEO of wake a really cool individual that's interested in figuring out how we can measure the performance of people and how we can heal people with psychedelics and he's doing some really interesting work i want to share with everybody today nick did i leave anything out did you want to introduce yourself in any other ways right there i think you did a great job thank you for the introduction it's great to be here thanks so much Oh, the pleasure's all mine, man. I've been reading a little bit about your work, Anna. It seems to me your company, Wake is taking like a three-pronged approach at solving a lot of problems we see today, a bioscience, a therapeutics, and a wellness aspect to this world of psychedelics. And it's fascinating what you're doing. What do you want to start with today? I mean, we could go anywhere. Wake is vertically integrated, so we do everything from the lab work to the actual growing of the mushroom.

to the processing, putting it into some cool products like capsules, chocolates, doing exports all over the world, legally, of course. And then we have people come down to our retreats here in Jamaica and soon to be also British Virgin Islands. And they go through the process with us and with our wonderful guides. And we get a lot of data. And so I'm a geek that made a mushroom company over COVID. That's probably the easiest way to put it. That's so awesome. And you know what?

you're doing something that I haven't seen anybody else to do. And I want to bring that to the attention of the audience. You know, one of the problems we see in the world of psychedelics today, whether it's through insurance companies or doctors or just self-practitioners, is the measuring of data. The question, the problem is, how can you manage what you don't measure? And it seems to me you're bridging that gap. It seems to me that you have found a way to measure using genomics and using that with. treatments. Can you explain that process a little bit? Yeah. So as I mentioned, I'm a geek. My background is all in tech and health and health tech, really. And so I saw this as an opportunity to try and

help to quantify some of the differences pre and post psychedelics. And there's a lot of great stories and a lot of healing that people have been able to achieve. But without data, the regulators, the research community, the medical community, unfortunately doesn't take it at its best glance. and says that mainly it's anecdotal. Now, what we thought of was, how can we quantify this with FDA regulated devices? So we take their heart rate, their blood pressure, their pulse oxymetry. We also read their brains with some amazing devices,

including EEG as well as FNIRs. We've got a great partnership with Kernel. That's KER, NEL. They make an amazing helmet that is able to read your brain and the hemoglobin concentration that's going on. And then we have scales, which are basically validated tools by the medical community to say, if you score this number on this form,

then you will get a, then unfortunately you are diagnosed with something like depression or something like anxiety. So we mix all that together, and then we allow for not only the person who comes down, our clients to see the data, as well as the research community, their medical providers, so that we can actually make sense of maybe what is,

how is this working, how is it helping them, and then show to regulators that this is working and then hopefully insurers as well to see that it's not just anecdotal. So we saw it as an opportunity for us to bring something to the community just based on my background with tech to say this is working and maybe this is why, but at least it gives us data that we can start from. Now on the genomic side of things, we're working with the Lieber Institute where we're looking to really find a good marker. within the genomics that says this person might be a good candidate for something like psilocybin and if so how much psilocybin would they require which is really depending on the the receptor site

in their brain so it's early days we're doing a number of studies where we take their saliva we take their blood the blood goes off to uc davis the saliva as i said goes to the leber institute which is based at johns hopkins and then we really try and make sense of of it. So we're on a mission to get an N of 300, an N in clinical trials is a number of people. And from that, we should have enough data to actually try and make some signal from the noise. Yeah, that's fascinating to me. You had mentioned in an earlier part of the conversation before we went live that there's different gaps in receptor sites or there's different sizes of receptors. Can you explain that a little bit? I've never heard that before.

Yeah, so some people require more psilocybin than others, and it's not based on your body weight, like some other things. And so it's really around the 5HT 2A receptor site itself. And some people will require more because they have a difference in their receptor site. And so that will affect the amount that they have, that they require. We've had people come through our retreats that are small in BMI and body mass index, but require twice as much than somebody much bigger. than them. And that's really down to the receptor site, not to their bodies. And how do you measure something like that?

Well, that's what we're working on with the Libre Institute. That's really what we're going for. So at this point, there's no measurement. We give them what they've discussed with their medical provider as well as our medical providers. And then what we're trying to get to is, will you be a good candidate, is number one. And then if so, how much psilocybin or another compound will you require. So that's really what we're working on. Yeah, that's fascinating. And I think that this is exactly what's needed. Another sort of divide that we see, or at least that I've been reading about, is that, you know, psychedelics can help us do a lot. But I think it's fair to say the psychedelics, even though Matt Zeeman, great guy who has a great book, he says, psychedelics are for

everyone. Even if you ask him, he'll say, well, they're not really for everyone. And the people that it wouldn't be for maybe people that have had psychotic breaks or, you know, some, some sort of episodes like that. And it seems to me that you guys are filtering out for that. I don't know what the answer is. And I'm not sure anybody does, but there's something to be aware of there. Like there are some kind of psychotic breaks that may make using psychedelics worse. What are your thoughts on that? Or is there any way to move around that particular area? Or what do you think about that? No, you're absolutely right. And it's something that really needs. needs to be said because we don't want to suffer some of the things that happened in the 70s

where everything got cast backwards because of that kind of mentality. Everybody needs to come into it and have medical advisory and their medical professionals be informed of what they're trying to do or would like to do. Things like schizophrenia, bipolar, and if you have it in your family. So not necessarily if you always have it, but also if it's in your family, it is something to talk to a medical provider about if you look at the clinical trials on psilocybin it's usually an exemption sorry a exclusionary criteria that people that have either bipolar or schizophrenia are unfortunately not able to be a part of the studies and so it's it's tough to say that they should not try psychedelics because it's really for a medical provider to say that and we have had

people reach out to us that have actually had success with their bipolar. So it's not for us to say. We're really here as a provider. We grow it. We provide the medicine itself. We provide the safe space for them to do it. But really, we have medical providers on staff that talk to them.

We talked to them prior to them being able to book. Nobody's able to just book a ticket. They have to go through our process where we do screen out. Unfortunately, not everybody can come down. But really, the more we learn, the more people that we're able to learn from, so not just people that come through ours, but other clinical trials in the world, other retreats that are also doing data gathering, we're going to get to a better place where we can make better assumptions and really give better guidance. At this point, unfortunately, it's usually exclusionary criteria that, yeah, if they've had psychotic breaks in the past or schizophrenia or bipolar, unfortunately, they're not able to, uh, to come down and that's just airing on the side of safety. We really want people to have access, but we also don't want to make anything worse. So at this point, it's just out of precaution.

I do think we'll get to a smarter place as a society, as a psychedelic industry where we can provide particular compounds for people that have those kind of things in their medical history or their family medical history. But at this point, abundance of caution, unfortunately that's, that's where it really stands. Yeah, and it's important. And I think you guys are, like I said, it seems to me that you're at the forefront of, you know, working with the Libre Institute and actually finding a way to individualize this process and take the subjectivity out and actually begin to measure.

And when you can measure, then you can manage. You know, I read an interesting article at Rolling Stone that talked about one of the Philadelphia Flyers that you guys were mentioned in. That was a tremendous article. And I think it speaks volumes of the way in which psychedelics, particularly mushrooms and particularly what you guys at wake are doing. Can you share some background on helping out some of the people that have come down there? Or I know I know you have some NDAs probably and stuff like that. But maybe you can share some stories about people that have come down and you've been able to help.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, Riley Cote, I think is who you're mentioning. And he's a wonderful advisor of ours. So he wouldn't be too bothered if I mentioned his name. We're really good buddies. You know, he's been on this journey longer than I have and has seen the benefit. And we linked up right in the beginning of Wake. So he was actually on our very first retreat pre-COVID.

And it was quite a magical moment of creation. And so what we've seen is that traumatic brain injury, whether it's from sports or veterans coming from the theater of war, unfortunately, that have traumatic brain injury, it affects them in more ways than they know. And they call it the invisible injuries. And what we've learned now is that it affects them with their hormones as well as obviously with the brain activity itself. And so we've worked with a number of doctors, Dr. Mark Gordon being one of them, to really find how we can personalize their therapy, where we blend in a blood sample for their hormones.

and then we supplement them with hormones naturally with hormone therapy. And we also use our brain scanning technology to really see, okay, which area the brain is being affected by the one or many traumatic brain injuries you've been, you've experienced. And then how can we tailor your therapy accordingly? And so it's been really interesting to work with a number of different well-known athletes that have suffered from TBI. So that's from the NFL, the NHL, from boxing, UFC.

And how do we tailor it working with people like Dr. Gordon's team? Wonderful guy. And what's interesting and a lot of people don't realize, and it's thanks to Dr. Gordon really that this has come to light, is that TBI affects obviously the brain, but it affects the pituitary gland. And the pituitary gland is responsible for your hormone regulation. And if that is, if that's injured,

now your hormone regulation is is out of whack. And we don't know exactly what causes particular hormones not to produce. It's really, it's just dysregulated. So it's not that everybody with the TBI will have this hormone issue. It's, it could be a different one for everybody. But that makes you more susceptible to things like depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress. And so our traditional model of giving people pills for their depression, but not addressing the hormones obviously hasn't worked.

And that is what we hear time and time again from the athletes, from the veterans that come down, is that they're usually from their alumni associations. They're given all the pharmaceuticals that they could ever ask for or not ask for, but they're not working and it's not helping them. And it's frustrating because they want to get better. They want to get back to their normal self. And unfortunately, no matter how much therapy or pills they're taking is just not working.

And so it's a bit of a fresh look when they, when they come through our program, when they work with the, the likes of Dr. Gordon within our program because they see and they understand a little more what's causing things. And within six months, it's an amazing, remarkable change in most of these individuals where the understanding and then the actual clarification by the results is just profound. So it's something that we're hoping to bring to more and more people. when you blend that with psychedelics, you're giving a fresh look on life. You're giving them the neuroplasticity that's generated from psychedelics. And it really, it really helps. So Riley's been a wonderful contributor to us. He's brought us a lot of his friends.

We've got an ESPN documentary coming out in April where he came back with a really close friend of his. And they went through the therapy together. So we're very much looking forward to showing the world that this works. It is for people to respect and to learn about. As you said, it's not for everybody, but it is something that really needs to be explored. Yeah, there's so many great points there. And I think that another area that you guys seem to be pioneering, at least in the literature that I've read,

is the merging and the managing of psilocybin or psychedelics with different hormones. I as an individual have been experimenting, and this is, I'm not, I'm not a doctor, I'm not anything's, but I'm just saying that I have noticed an incredible amount of positive reinforcement and an incredible amount of synergy if you take something like psilocybin and HGH. I think that those things work in harmony together. And this is Nick, Nick from Wake is not saying this is just George from True Life saying this. But I think you're on to something when you start talking about the regulating of hormones in synergistic fashion with psilocybin. And it seems to me you're on the forefront of that.

I'm wondering, are you guys able to take, obviously you can't publish information from clients that come down, but you can write scientific studies that show here is this individual that has used this hormone. here is this individual that has that we have seen a different sort of you're able to take the clients that have come down and show the feedback that they have had it are you guys going to be publishing studies later with different doctors that have shown randomized studies and you're able to show the progress of these different individuals yeah yeah what you're talking about is a retrospective and so it's a it's not an rCT a randomized clinical trial those are you know, the best and those unfortunately are the most expensive and tough to get approved. But if you are able to do a look back, as you called it, then you can. And those are powerful and it's down to the end. The more people in something like a retrospective, the more weight, the more power it has. And so, yes, we will be. We take this opportunity really seriously. And we're glad that we can provide things like a study like this based on our help that we're giving people down here.

We're really focused on doing the whole vertical of the mushroom so that we know what goes in them. So we grow here at a large 50-acre farm. And I'm hoping in our next podcast we can introduce Terry, who's a wonderful friend that we've been working on this journey together with. And then we administer it and we give it to people at our retreats. As I mentioned, I think earlier, we do exports. So we've done exports to the U.S. and Canada with our friends at the DEA and Health Canada. But we really, we want to produce data so that people can make informed decisions. And that's everybody from the medical community to the research community to the regulators.

The more data that we can provide through the work that we do, the better. It's awesome to hear. You guys are like a farm to table kind of a sort of outfit. Like you have, you're growing everything down there. Let's talk about what you're partly in Canada, but you're partly in Jamaica too. What's the connection there? Yeah. So I'm a Canadian.

You can probably tell from some of my twang. We are started in Canada, and I came down to Jamaica because of the legalities or the lack of illegality around silozybin. So we're able to grow, we're able to sell, we're able to do our retreats. And the government has been a really strong supporter of ours. We've had a number of government representatives come through and tour the farm and be public about it, put us on the front page. and really they're not trying to hide it.

They're very much hoping to explore and expand their existing tourism market with medical tourism and allow for people to come down. And it's been a really interesting, exciting journey. We came down initially to do our retreats and to work with growers. And then thanks to COVID, I stayed and made a wonderful friendship and partnership with our growers here. and I sleep on the farm most nights when I'm here, and it's been a lot of fun. So we will continue to do it.

Now, Jamaica and Canada has a long-standing relationship going way back to the 70s with Castro and our current prime minister's father. And they made friends in school, and they started to help each other out. And so at that time, I'm giving you a little history lesson side. But that started a very close bond between Jamaica and Canada, where a lot of Canadians come down to Jamaica, a lot of Jamaicans come up to Canada. It's a very close bond where we have, I think we have more Jamaicans in Canada than Jamaica has Jamaicans.

So it's really interesting the friendship, but it allows for us to work together, for our country's governments to work together. So when we do our exports, they're very open and helpful for us to bring our Salis Iban into Canada. And then our Canadians that come down for our retreats, there's many, many flights. And so it's helped to build it here for cargo, for people. You know, there's a lot of other countries that didn't make Salisibin illegal, but they're a lot harder to get to. And so the existing friendship between our countries and then also the ability to easily travel was was two main things that really supported it. And then once I got here, I mean, you easily fall in love with the country.

It's a very beautiful country with some really wonderful people. Yeah, that sounds amazing to me. You know, and I wanted to ask you this. It seems to me that there is sort of this new cottage industry where people want to get help and they find themselves wanting an authentic experience. But I've often wondered, you know, I don't know. anything about Brazil. I don't know anything about ayahuasca. And it seems to me that sometimes the help gets lost in translation. And everything is different. What does it look like? If someone

wanted to come down to a retreat down there, Nick, can you walk us through what that, what, what, what it might look like for them or why it might be beneficial to them? Or why, why is your retreat or why is a retreat the right thing for some people? For some people, yeah. Well, we, We like to make it simple for them. So we pick you up. We bring you in a private shuttle directly to our retreat space. It's about 85 minutes from either airport, which is nice.

So it's in the center in the north coast. So you can come in from Antigo Bay or you can come in from Kingston. Once you arrive, you're brought to your room. You have a private onsuit room. And then everybody gathers. Everybody's met before through our service. secure telemedicine. Everybody knows each other.

They've met our wonderful staff that is here. The providers is a mixture of North American providers as well as on the ground. We have a wonderful team that we've really just fostered. And we understand each other. We get each other. It's very much a family feel between everybody that will be helping our guests that come down. And so they have an easy, simple night.

They have a meal. nice rest depending on where they've come from. Sometimes it's a long journey. So not much happens other than a meet and greet, a wonderful dinner and a nice early night. And then the next morning, it's yoga in the morning. And then they are connected one-on-one with our medical providers as well as our ceremony leader.

And they discuss what brought them in, what they're hoping to achieve, their intention, how much silo cylis ibn they they feel comfortable with some recommendations and then we we we basically prepare for their their dose and their doses between 11 and 12 usually and we set it up usually outside depending on weather of course and we have live music which is done by an amazing musician that's local and it's it's magical every single time is magical it's one of my good buddies who works with us, he's in film and he says it's just like kind of a production. It really is that you have people coming in. Everybody has particular particulars, whether it's dietary or requests.

And then you have the setup and then you have a very intentional space that must be protected. And then obviously the take down of the space and then we do it all again. So day two and day three are our dose days, very similar. day three is a longer integration than day two and and then day four is an integration in a fun day and usually we go to the ocean or we go to these waterfalls and and everybody seems to have a wonderful time at those and then day five is is either if they're traveling home it's day it's it's travel home time or sometimes they want to see the rest of the island so that they they explore a little more and we help them with that travel getting to the next destination

on their journey. I like that sound of that, like the next destination on their journey. You know, for some of us, that might be, you know, integration or the next destination.

It just sounds so beautiful to me. Is there a difference in, like if I come down and I'm severely depressed, is there a difference in the modalities versus someone that's coming down that may have an issue with abuse? Or is there something like different? the way people get treated or is there a difference in the way the medicine is described or is there a difference in the way you guys hold space for people between the different problems people may have?

Well, I mean, our providers are particularly going to help them out. So there's a lot of one-on-ones prior and then obviously after post. The actual protocol of the day is not that much different for each person, depending on their dietary requirements, depending on their comfort levels. Some people bring cute things into the space with them. One guy I just absolutely loved, he brought a little grinch, a little stuffed grinch.

There was like an inside joke between him and his wife. But that's not a major difference. That's just some neat things that they bring. Other than that, no, everybody has a different story, of course. And it's taught me personally a lot. by seeing people from all walks of life, everybody's different stories, everybody's different things that they're grappling and wrestling with. You know, the connectivity has been the biggest thing that people are looking for and it helps

them. And being kind of locked down during COVID certainly made it worse for a lot of people. And we've seen that and we've heard that. A lot of people have kind of shut themselves. away, even post-COVID and coming down here is some of their first times traveling, first times being in space with people that weren't, you know, direct relatives for a long time. And so that alone has helped a lot of people not only learn that, you know, we all have a story. We all have something that's happened, something that was painful.

And we're all on this wild journey together. And it doesn't, you know, doesn't need to be, you know, the, the, painful story that they know doesn't need to be their life it doesn't need to be that's it and that's who i am they learn that by by meeting you know total strangers sometimes sometimes they come down with a friend or a family member but a lot of the time they come down alone and they're uh they're a little you can see they're they're obviously a little worried a little they've got a little anxiety when they come through the door and then when they're leaving it's all hugs and and family and and and we We have private, secure chat rooms that they all share for months, for years after we have people that reach out.

So it very much is a family vibe at the end of it. So I hope that answers your question. I mean, it's tough to, we try and personalize everything for everybody. That's dietary, of course. That's the hormonal work that I told you about. And we give them a report after their treatment so that they can see their report from the actual retreat. itself. And then we do help them with tracking their sleep and their activity through some of the wearable partners that we have so that they can continue to monitor their well-being even for months

after because the integration is the most important. The medicine is one thing and the space that we provide them with. You know, we try and do our best. But the integration is key. And that can't be kind of, can't be underestimated at all. It's really what you do with the medicine and how you kind of take it and then and then stay, um, stay on top of it and, and bring what you've learned and what you've kind of processed at the retreat, what you need to bring it into your life and,

and basically, you know, hold yourself accountable. Yeah, I like that. It's, it's this idea of holding yourself accountable and doing the work. Because a lot of the times you can provide people with medicine. You can provide people with the space. But if they don't continue to do the hard work, which is confronting,

the issues confronting the demons or confronting that which brought them to you, then the long-term benefits of that are pale in comparison to someone that does do the work and makes it that way. Yeah, you answered a lot of my questions. My next question was going to be, are there some long-term relationship benefits that you guys offer? Like if someone wanted to come back for a follow-up or do you guys continue to treat them with some of the, you know, your relationship with Lieber Labs and, you know, do you guys continue to provide treatment or provide follow-ups for people in the future?

Yeah, absolutely, George. Yeah, and we've got a wonderful partnership in the U.S. So for our U.S. guests, they can be seen by licensed therapists, and that is usually covered by insurance as well. So they're able to carry on. It's a wonderful group over at Revitalist that we've been partnered. off for the last six months on. And it's really allowed for anybody, but our veteran population specifically, to try salicybin. They've been able to work with the VA so that their ketamine

treatments are covered. This is revitalis specifically. And but sometimes it's not enough or they want to explore other compounds. And so we've trained their staff on psilocybin therapy. And then they'll bring some of their guests down. And those guests are. are obviously covered by the VA for the therapy post. So obviously it doesn't pay for them to come to Jamaica, but their therapy after they go back to the U.S. is covered. And we open up their therapist group to anybody that comes down. So if they do have insurance, then they can cover it and they're seen.

Yeah, it seems that, you know, obviously psilocybin is doing a tremendous amount of work and it has provided a tremendous amount of therapy for people that are facing critical issues. And it seems that a lot of veterans are some of the people that have not only needed therapy the most, but have benefited from it the most. I'm wondering, is there any particular individuals that may have been veterans that stand out to you that have a story that you can share? You know, it's funny you say that because the gentleman I was mentioning earlier is exactly who I was thinking. of. Wonderful guy, big guy, six, seven, maybe six, eight. And, uh, but so jovial and had really had a, had a tough time. Um, he, he was, he was going to, uh, he was going to take his life, unfortunately,

and posted it on, on Facebook and is, I think it was his wife saw it and, uh, reached out to him as well as his mom. And he was just at that, you know, It's very tough time where, you know, you want to be the person you were and you're not. And no matter what you do and, you know, whatever pills you take, it's just not working. And so he had really got to the end of his rope, unfortunately. And so they were able to talk him into driving to a hospital. And they, you know, were able to take his firearm from him. and then he got into a wonderful program with a therapist as well as ketamine treatment.

And they put him on suicide watch and that's the VA. And there's a whole protocol, as you could expect, with the VA if you're on suicide watch. And without going into all of it, it's quite onerous, but it's important that, you know, that people that are at risk are obviously taken care of. and there's particular protocols around that. And then he was offered to come to Jamaica with the team at Revitalist. And he did. And he came in and he was just instantly loved.

I mean, he's just a big teddy bear. But he was wrestling with quite a few things. And so he went through his first dose. And usually the first dose is one where people are a little nervous. They're still holding on. They're, you know, it's understandably worrying. And so he did okay there. Didn't have any major breakthroughs.

And so then he went through his second dose with a higher, higher dose. He was actually one of the higher on our scale of administration. He was over 10 grams. He was 12 grams total. And we don't administer that all at once. And they're monitored. But yeah, he was, as I mentioned earlier,

some people do require more. and it's not just the size. And that second dose really allowed him to break through. And the next day, so day three, he was, or sorry, day four, he was, he was, you could see that something had really kind of changed. And he, he was less angry, less full of anxiety and was very much processing. There's a lot of processing that happens after. So I don't want it to sound like it's a panacea at all.

but you can you could see with him that something had changed and a week after he got home he wrote us a wonderful email and said that he had he had been taken off of suicide watch and was was forever grateful and thankful and it was just so profound for me to to see because we always are asked about other compounds and I can't speak to them because really psilocybin is our world and that's where we are focused natural silocybin and um but i'm open to to all of them because i think that everybody should have you know the access to the safe compounds that that are out there but it was a really good example of um ketamine versus silocybin and different places that they're doing them um and and it was just a good example so he still sees

his therapist he still i think is uh is taking kind of boosters of ketamine um But for the VA to take him off, suicide watch and such a wonderful post, I'll ask him if he's okay with me sharing if you want to put it in the show notes because it was so powerful. It really, it really just confirmed to stay on this path because it's incredibly rewarding. Yeah, that's a tremendous story. And I would be stoked if you could ask him if we can share the, share him more about it. to put in the show notes. I'm curious. That brings up another set of questions that that's a huge that that's trying to think of the right word like that is a lot of responsibility, Nick. There's a huge responsibility to have someone that you know is in that situation and then to

provide them with the psilocybin for that. What does the retreat? Like it seems to me that, like how do you set something up like that? Like if you know, this person is coming to you and you know that there's issues there, what steps do you take to ensure that person's safety? Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of work before they even booked the ticket. Right. And that's most important. We have one-on-ones with our medical provider. We usually have a referral from their provider, whether that's a therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist, we want to really get to know them. And then we have our own one-on-one calls with them so that we understand why are you coming down here? We're really here to help people. You know, there's other

ones if you want to just kind of come down for some silas Ivan, but we're here to hopefully help people along their journey and then also gathers data that we can provide to the community. I mean, that's truly kind of why we're doing this. We do have medical staff, of course, on site. They have privileges at the hospital locally. The hospital is about 20 minutes away, if ever needed. Thank God we've never have. I'll knock on wood. And but, you know, it's preparation. And then it's really there's always anybody in our staff can say, you know,

they don't feel comfortable. And then we have a protocol for that. So we've really worked on trying not to shy away from helping people that that might have contemplated suicide previously because it's more common than you'd think. but at the same time, where are they at in their journey towards, you know, trying to get better? And so there's people that, you know, are still, unfortunately, in a particular space where, you know, we're not a good fit at this time. But if people are really, really wanting to change and they're really at that part of their journey, we're usually a good fit. So, you know, the medical side of things is very important.

Thankfully, salisalcine has a very good safety record on overdose, on addiction. You know, there isn't. So that's good. But of course, you know, you've got to be very careful. And we try to screen as much up front. And then even once they're on site, you know, there's some screening going on as well. And then we do have all of the medical providers that can help them if needed as well on site. Yeah, that makes me happy to hear.

And I really think that the feeling of feeling rewarded comes from being responsible. And from what I've spoken to you guys about and the research I've looked at, I'm thankful you guys are out there. I think you guys are doing awesome things. And, you know, when you help people, you help yourself and you help your community. And this may sound crazy, but I think you help make the world a little bit better by making people around. you better. And it, I'm stoked you guys are out there, Nick. From everything that I've read and from talking to you, I get the sense that you guys care a lot about, you know, making people better. And by making people better, I mean, making people aware of their problems and helping them focus on getting

their own results to their problems by doing the work. And I'm stoked on it, man. I really enjoy talking to you. And I'm looking forward to the next set of talks that we have because I think it's important. And I think that right now is a time where the science and the medicine are being married and we're pioneering some new areas. And I think we have a lot of opportunities if we do things right. So thanks for what you're doing out there. Let me ask you this. I like to ask people three questions before we start landing the plane. And that is what is it that you have coming up? Where can people find you? And what are you excited about? Well, thanks for the kind words there, George. That was really nice of you.

What do we have coming up? We have another retreat coming up, end of February, February 23rd. We have a wonderful documentary coming out, thanks to the folks at ESPN that came down. That's coming out in April, mid-April, I think it is. We have our Wake Jamaica website that's launching next week, so that'll allow for people to order. It's exciting for me because it's like the future, I feel like, you know, where you can go online, and you can order Silas Iban and it gets delivered to your door same day. That's going to be, so wakejamaica.com is going to be online next week.

And what am I excited about? You know, the genies out of the bottle, you know, then nothing's more powerful than an idea is which time has come. Yes. It is. It's here. And the more that we can respect it and the more that we can understand that it shouldn't be done in a party setting and it should be done with the right people and it should be done safety,

the more powerful it will be. So it's something that needs to be respected and then provided to people that are looking for it, whether they're looking to get better or they're looking to get out of, you know, a hole. So, yeah, that's what I'm most excited about. And where can they find us? wake.net is the website. and then we're on the Twitters and the LinkedIn's and all of that under Wake Network as well. Fantastic. And I'll put all that in the show notes.

And ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for hanging out with Nick and I and look forward to some more conversations coming up. I'll be posting those for those who are curious. Look up, Nick. Reach out to him if you're curious about learning more. He's a cool person. Reach out to the True Life podcast. All this stuff will be in the show notes.

That's what we got for today, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much for spending time with us. And we'll talk to you soon. Aloha. Thanks a lot, George. Appreciate it. No problem. I'm going to hang up.

Hang on one second after I end this broadcast here. Hey, buddy.