#104: Are Psychedelic Drugs the Next Medical Breakthrough?

Martin Polanco (@Martin_Polanco7 http://www.twitter.com/Martin_Polanco7), M. D., is the founder and program director of Crossroads Treatment Center https://crossroadsibogaine.com/, based in Rosarito, Mexico. Crossroads specializes in helping patients conquer powerful addictions (heroin, cocaine, etc.) by using the African hallucinogen ibogaine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-MeO-DMT, also referred to as "the God molecule." Martin's areas of expertise also include addiction medicine and therapeutic neurotechnologies. Dan Engle (@drdanengle http://twitter.com/drdanengle), M. D., is a psychiatrist and neurologist, who combines functional medicine with integrative psychiatry to enhance regenerative health and peak performance. His prior and relevant experience includes traumatic brain injury (TBI) and working in the Peruvian jungle with plant medicines such as ayahuasca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayahuasca. In this episode, we step outside the lines of traditional medicine to discuss impulse control, introspection, and self-awareness through the use of powerful psychedelic and hallucinogenic agents like iboga, ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT. We also discuss flotation tanks, which can simulate or even replicate many of the benefits that can result from the use of psychedelic and psychotropic agents. So you don't have to be willing to experiment with these medicines to receive something valuable from this episode. If you are interested in optimizing your psychological performance, emotional control and exploring alternative medicine, then this episode is for you. Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by TrunkClub http://trunkclub.com/tim. I hate shopping with a passion. And honestly I'm not good at it, which means I end up looking like I'm colorblind or homeless. Enter TrunkClub http://trunkclub.com/tim, which provides you with your own personal stylist and makes it easier than ever to shop for clothes that look great on your body. Just go to trunkclub.com/tim http://trunkclub.com/tim and answer a few questions, and then you'll be sent a trunk full of awesome clothes. They base this on your sizes, preferences, etc. The trunk is then delivered free of charge both ways, so you only pay for clothes that you keep. If you keep none, it costs you nothing. To get started, check it out at trunkclub.com/tim http://trunkclub.com/tim. This podcast is also brought to you by Vimeo Pro https://vimeo.com/business, which is the ideal video hosting platform for entrepreneurs. In fact, a bunch of my start-ups are already using Vimeo Pro https://vimeo.com/business. WealthFront https://www.wealthfront.com/ uses it to explain how WealthFront works. TaskRabbit https://www.taskrabbit.com/ uses it to tell the company's story. There are many other names who you would recognize among their customers (AirBnB, Etsy, etc.) Why do they use it? Vimeo Pro https://vimeo.com/business provides enterprise level video hosting for a fraction of the usual cost. Features include: Gorgeous high-quality playback with no ads Up to 20 GB of video storage every week Unlimited plays and views A fully customizable video player, which can include your company logo, custom outro, and more You get all this for just $199 per year (that's only $17 per/mo.) https://vimeo.com/business. There are no complicated bandwidth calculations or hidden fees. Try it risk-free for 30 days. Just go to Vimeo.com/business https://vimeo.com/business to check it out. If you like it, you can use the promo code "Tim" to get 25% off https://vimeo.com/business. This is a special discount just for you guys.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 00

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:22Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Vimeo Pro, which is the ideal video hosting platform for entrepreneurs. And in fact, a bunch of my startups already use Vimeo Pro, including Wealthfront, who uses it to explain how Wealthfront works. TaskRabbit uses it to tell their company's story. And there are many other names you would recognize among their customers: Airbnb, Etsy, etc. Why do they use it? Well, Vimeo Pro provides enterprise-level video hosting for a fraction of the usual cost. Features include gorgeous, high-quality playback with no ads, up to 20 gigabytes of video storage every week, unlimited plays and views, and a fully customizable video player, which can include your logo, custom outro, etc. You also get VIP support. And you get all of this for just $1.99 per year. That's $17 a month,

• 1:06Tim Ferriss?

  with no complicated bandwidth calculations or hidden fees. And you can try it risk-free for 30 days. So check it out: vimeo.com/business. That's V-I-M-E-O dot com forward slash business. And use promo code TIM to get 25% off. That's a special discount just for you guys. So check it out: vimeo.com/business, promo code TIM.

• 1:29Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Trunk Club. I hate shopping with a passion. Going shopping for fun to me is like, "Let's go do our taxes." I don't get it. It's something that I have to do, but I don't like it at all. And quite frankly, I'm not good at it. I always end up looking like I'm colorblind or homeless or something like that. So ROI, really sucky. And as a result, I decided to try Trunk Club. And I expected to dislike it, quite frankly. But here's how it works, and here's why I'm now a huge fan. And just as a prelude, the items that I kept from them, I've had more compliments from random women on like t-shirts and shorts and these funky green shoes that I got than ever before. Which proves that I don't know what I'm doing and they do.

• 2:13Tim Ferriss?

  You go to trunkclub.com/tim. You answer a couple of questions. Then you get assigned a personal stylist, so mine was Robin. Then they send you a trunk full of awesome stuff that they predict you will like and look good in based on your sizes, preferences, etc. That they've covered in this short phone call. It was really short and to the point. Then, this trunk is delivered to your home. It's free of charge both ways, so you only pay for clothes that you keep. If you keep none of them, that's fine. You mail the whole thing back with a prepaid label. They even include tape to shut the box. And you're good to go. Costs you nothing. There's no ongoing subscription. This is not a subscription service. So, only when you ask for a trunk, you will get a trunk. And I expected to keep maybe two items out of eight. You know, I didn't want a thousand things sent to me.

• 2:57Tim Ferriss?

  So I got about eight things sent to me and expected to keep two because they give you a preview online to show you what's coming. And I ended up keeping four. And I've been traveling with those. I have very minimalist luggage, but I've been traveling for a couple of weeks and I've brought everything with me because it's been so multipurpose and so well-received. It's kind of blown my mind, quite frankly. So trunkclub.com/tim. You get premium clothing, great advice for zero work. So it's a great trifecta. And the way they make money is really easy. I mean, they buy high-quality clothing at volume and they just charge you the normal retail pricing, but obviously they buy it at a cheaper price. So, there's no tricks, no hidden costs. It's really easy to be the best-dressed man in the room or on the street.

• 3:41Tim Ferriss?

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• 4:14Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, lemmers and leprechauns. 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, chess prodigy like Josh Waitzkin, or, in the case of this episode, two very interesting doctors who are innovating in a number of 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, et cetera. So in this case, we have two. It's a twofer.

• 4:55Tim Ferriss?

  Martin Polanco, but better said, Martine Polanco, M.D., is founder and program director of Crossroads Treatment Center, 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-MeodMT, 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 Engle, M.D., is board-certified in the U.S. for both psychiatry and neurology. His practice combines functional medicine with integrative psychiatry to enhance regenerative

• 5:38Tim Ferriss?

  health, for instance, as related to traumatic 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 Ibogaine, as well as 5-MeodMT, we talk about how that compares and contrasts to, say, an LSD or psilocybin or ayahuasca, which you guys have heard a bit about.

• 6:23Tim Ferriss?

  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, I'll allow 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.

• 7:06Tim Ferriss?

  So, I live in San Francisco, I have an allergy to sort of the hippie-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, explore these very powerful drugs without proper medical

• 7:51Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 8:28Tim Ferriss?

  Martine and Dan, welcome to the show.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Thanks, Tim.

• 8:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I have been looking forward to this for many different reasons, but one of which is I've been sort of 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?

• 9:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's always, 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. 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."

• 9:33Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. And where did you, where were you born and raised?

• 9:36Speaker 00

  Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, and 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.

• 9:49Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. 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?".

• 10:02Speaker 03

  I would answer the question with a brief statement. "I'm a medical doctor who helps people suffering from drug addiction get clean."

• 10:09Tim Ferriss?

  And what are the primary ways that you do that?

• 10:11Speaker 03

  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.

• 10:21Tim Ferriss?

  And what is your brief background? Where were you born and raised?

• 10:25Speaker 03

  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.

• 10:34Tim Ferriss?

  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. Martín, what was your first experience with? Tell me the story of your first experience with psychedelics.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  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.

• 11:45Tim Ferriss?

  And which was it? What was the context?

• 11:48Speaker 03

  The context was just us as teenagers wanting to explore our psyche. And we took mushrooms and 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.

• 12:13Tim Ferriss?

  And when did you decide to bridge to iboga or ibogaine?

• 12:19Speaker 03

  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. 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 they

• 13:02Speaker 03

  they're able to rationalize it. I was going to become an ophthalmologist and I had started my training, my residence in 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.

• 13:21Tim Ferriss?

  And what was the documentary? Do you recall what the name of the documentary was that you watched?

• 13:25Speaker 03

  It was a BBC documentary. I cannot remember the name, but it was, you know, 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. Ayahuasca is an obscure psychedelic in that it doesn't have a long history of recreational use because it's not a recreational experience.

• 13:48Tim Ferriss?

  It doesn't sound like a light recreational experience from what I've read at least.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is probably the least recreational psychedelic. Definitely not something you would take and socialize or go to a party or.

• 14:02Tim Ferriss?

  It's not a light, a light burning man, pre-evening experience. So on that point, I'd love to just ask, maybe, maybe Dan, we could have a bridge here. So Martin, you mentioned ayahuasca and that's come up before in my conversation with James Fodeman, who's done a lot of microdosing and LSD research. How would you characterize the primary differences between, say, use the, either the benefits or effects or both of ayahuasca versus ayahuasca or ayahuasca?

• 14:31Speaker 00

  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.

• 14:58Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 15:05Speaker 00

  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 has developed at that point. And some of the really early but good child developmental psychological studies suggest that eighty-five 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.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  The vast majority of that as that we experience as adults is set by our constitutional kind of genetic makeup and just who we are as our primordial soup when we're born and all the experiences that we have leading up to before we were even in elementary school.

• 16:02Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  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, that you can start to exhume many of those early experiences, but they're really difficult to track, to hold on to, to have like a consistent narrative and to heal.

• 16:30Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  So when you have something like ayahuasca that comes into the mainstream of the psyche through this 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 happen 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.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  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 becoming who we thought we could be, or who we were maybe scared to be, without this limitation of something like addiction.

• 17:47Tim Ferriss?

  Right, without the crutch, or without the mask, whatever that might be.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  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.

• 18:15Tim Ferriss?

  Not to interject, but what I found, just 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 by any stretch a Michael Jordan of hallucinogens, but I've probably had between fifty and a hundred experiences, somewhere in that, and 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, 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.

• 18:57Tim Ferriss?

  But things that very, 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 introduced to through competitive athletics. And through the ayahuasca, I was able to sort of revisit what pre-caffeine Tim looked like, which was very unusual and really powerful and compelling for me.

• 19:42Tim Ferriss?

  From a symptomatic standpoint, I think it'd be helpful perhaps to walk people through the experience of ayahuasca and then Martine, 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?

• 20:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:05Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  Ayahuasca is classically described as very visionary. And that being said, it's very different for everybody. Like one of my myasos that I sat with, he describes the medación 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.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  That's all very mental. It's also been very somatic. So classically, ayahuasca is very purgative, which means poop out a lot of toxins and debris and a lot of old emotional stuff.

• 21:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  It's like the gut holds so much of the lymphatic tissue and the lymphatic tissue is related to how we hold on to 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.

• 21:30Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  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, um, system in the body. It has the same, 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 where, and then we, 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.

• 22:08Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:08Speaker 00

  So so much, when the gut heals, when you release all of that duff, you start to think more clearly and it up-regulates all of our neurochemistry. So ayahuasca is classically described as an antidepressant, too.

• 22:20Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  Been very successful in helping people transition from chronic depression into what would be called euthenia or, or normal mood. And many people don't even know what that feels like, but optimism, faith, courage, strength, 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.

• 22:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I definitely want to come back and talk about that.

• 22:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:51Tim Ferriss?

  Because I, I think the risks are worth exploring, including, and we, 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.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  Um, that's a no-go.

• 23:10Tim Ferriss?

  That's a big, big no-go. So.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 23:12Tim Ferriss?

  We'll, we'll come back to that. Uh, thank you for that. Very helpful.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 23:15Tim Ferriss?

  And Martine, could you perhaps walk us through iboga and how it differs in, in your, from your perspective, the experience?

• 23:23Speaker 03

  Sure. So the first thing is I want to, um, just make clear that iboga is the plant which is used in Africa and ibogaine is the primary alkaloid. So it's one of the alkaloids. Of 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 onerofrenic, which means dream creating. A typical experience with ibogaine is long lasting. It has three major components and the first one is a visionary component which can last anywhere from three to 12 hours.

• 24:06Tim Ferriss?

  And by visionary, we mean visual.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  Visual.

• 24:09Tim Ferriss?

  Visual hallucinations, yeah.

• 24:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, and these hallucinations are perceived almost like watching a movie of your life. It's a life review and people 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.

• 24:55Speaker 03

  So it happens to people when they're before five years of age. 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.

• 25:26Speaker 03

  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 for your life. The second phase is the 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.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  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.

• 26:35Tim Ferriss?

  That's very interesting. Have you... If you had to guess what the commonalities are of those people who don't experience anything, is it just a... Do you think a purely genetic component? Or is there something else to it?

• 26:46Speaker 03

  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 go... They could have a seizure. So if they're on benzodiazepines, there's a high likelihood they won't have visions. But the 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.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:43Tim Ferriss?

  Right. No, that makes perfect sense. Now, benzodiazepines, what would be some common brand names for, or commonly prescribed benzodiazepines?

• 27:53Speaker 03

  So the commonly prescribed benzodiazepines would be Klonopin, Xanax, Valium. All of those are considered, all of those are classified as benzodiazepines.

• 28:02Tim Ferriss?

  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? Is that accurate, or am I off base there?

• 28:19Speaker 00

  No, I think that's a pretty good description. The benzodiazepines calm everything down, and it shuts down that psychic space.

• 28:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 28:28Speaker 00

  So it's a good safety hatch to use if you had to do it.

• 28:31Tim Ferriss?

  It's really, I mean, that's, I mean, on some level, it brings up all sorts of questions about, you know, what is, what is being shut down, right? Because...

• 28:39Speaker 00

  Right, very much so.

• 28:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so let's, this is, I'm really enjoying this, because I, I've had a lot of trepidation surrounding Ayahuasca and Ayogaine, and I think it's worth mentioning here, maybe Dan, we could talk about it 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. The way I've tried to describe it to people is, if, say, Ayahuasca is to Ayogaine as magic mushrooms is to psilocybin, right? And then you have ayahuasca, which is more like a cocktail, like an old fashioned, and you have these principal ingredients, which are the, I guess, the chacuna leaf, which

• 29:22Tim Ferriss?

  has the DMT in it, but then you have this vine that contains a mono-aminoxidase 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 toya, or a little bit of god knows what. So...

• 29:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:39Tim Ferriss?

  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 some... Something like psilocybin, or LSD, or ibogaine, or 5-MUODMT, 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 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

• 30:21Tim Ferriss?

  there was a point in time when I was experimenting with yohimbay 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 six to 12 hours, or even more.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  Right. And with iboga, it's more like 36 hours.

• 30:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right, which is like, I cannot imagine anything worse.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  I know. Iboga's like Everest, man. You know, it's climbing a huge mountain.

• 30:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and so, do you, I mean, does it produce that, like, salivary response from central nervous stimulation? Or is that, am I blowing that out of proportion?

• 30:58Speaker 03

  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 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 a less, less of a need for sleep. So, you could be, you know, having insomnia for days afterwards, and it could be that your brain doesn't need as much sleep as it did before.

• 31:31Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, REM is fascinating. I mean, this is, this is a phase where the brain kind of restructures itself and gets rid of kind of garbage and forms new memories. So, in a way, addiction... is a learned behavior and it can be considered a maladaptive learned behavior. So Ibogaine goes in and shakes up all these connections and kind of breaks the bonds between the triggers and the cues and the response because it's a habit as well. You know, when you, when you have somebody who smokes 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 Ibogaine makes them conscious. So, so this REM component is a big component of, of, of, of way it is that it works.

• 32:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Dan, have you personally used, have, have both of you, well, let me make this question less of a scatter brand, scatter shot approach. Uh, Dan, have you used, uh, Iboga or Ibogaine? Ibogaine, I have so much trouble saying the Ibogaine. Uh, have you used either?

• 32:53Speaker 00

  I've used both.

• 32:54Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. It, it, and how many times have you had that experience?

• 32:57Speaker 00

  I've had Iboga one, uh, no, twice and Ibogaine once.

• 33:02Tim Ferriss?

  What were your reasons for doing it?

• 33:03Speaker 00

  I, um, I suppose it's really pretty similar to you, um, in that I, I enjoy putting myself in the lab, having an experience, uh, 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, that's a whole book just by itself. And the summary statement was, okay, these medicines are important, 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.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  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 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, uh, when I first experienced, I had 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, um, 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 um, I checked in and it was really clear it was time for me to do that. So it'd always been there.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  And that's another thing that I think happens for people too is, you know, 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. And I think that's the best, it's a bit esoteric to describe it that way, but 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, like never working out or never going hiking and then, 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, in a gym rat for like 20 years, that's not a great idea.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  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 get off this medication because when I do have side effects, what do I do? And so we're, we're, 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 is like your developmental next step? What are you desiring to experience in your life? How can we help you access that? And, and oftentimes it comes down to working with the psychedelics because when you've

• 36:00Speaker 00

  built the container and, and, 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, you know, poor lifestyle practices that weren't allowing them to get ready for the medicine ceremony. Just because it's something is effective doesn't mean somebody's ready for it.

• 36:23Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And that's actually a very good segue to a question that I wanted to ask her, 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

• 37:06Tim Ferriss?

  that I was, my perception was being tuned to frequencies that allowed me to observe, and on some level, interact with entities that existed independently of myself. And this is where we get into, you know, 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, we're 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're gonna do it on Saturday. And I'm like, you guys are fucking insane. I mean, like, treat this like you

• 37:46Tim Ferriss?

  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 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, and, "La purga," "La purge," or whatever, you know, it has a lot of cool

• 38:29Tim Ferriss?

  nicknames, but it's become this very de jour

• 38:34Speaker 00

  Chic and hip and cool.

• 38:36Tim Ferriss?

  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, with a suitable level of respect. Anyway, I'm gonna stop now, but I'd love to hear your thoughts, because maybe I'm blowing it out of proportion.

• 39:00Speaker 00

  I think you're right on about that, and Martin, if you don't mind, I'll just, 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 into Schedule I. The Nixon administration clamped it down, and you had a whole lot going on with Vietnam, you had a whole lot of people waking up, you had like, you know, people revolting in the street against the administration, and you had people tripping balls, ending up in the ER, really messed up.

• 39:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  And LSD is different, and we could talk about the difference too, part of the difference is LSD's synthetic, and it will push you beyond the normal safe gaps of all the, of all the natural psychedelics, like iboga, psilocybin, ayahuasca, wauchuma, San Pedro, peyote, and five amiodamt. 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, you can go past the glass ceiling. I've had that experience. I've taken, 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

• 40:17Speaker 00

  it's a privilege to receive it as such.

• 40:20Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  Pray it up and really be grateful for the opportunity to receive it. And so, 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 than you're working with other plant medicines as teachers. But, yeah, you're right, ayahuasca has this kind of like chic flavor to it now. You've got sixty-plus circles just in the LA area alone.

• 40:54Tim Ferriss?

  That scares me to death.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  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. 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's going into phase three trials, because you have such success rate with people

• 41:41Speaker 00

  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.

• 41:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 42:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  They're serving the medicine for their own ego or power.

• 42:29Tim Ferriss?

  Or, yeah, or sexual conquest. I mean, let's be honest.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  Right.

• 42:32Tim Ferriss?

  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...

• 42:48Speaker 00

  I saw that totally firsthand.

• 42:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, sexual experiences with, you know, shamans who have less than pure motives. And, you know, I'm not trying to play the Reefer Madness scare reel for people, but I just, 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, 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. Does, let's jump over to Martín for a second. So, Martín, do you say iboga or iboga, or is it both?

• 43:31Speaker 03

  We say iboga, even though the proper pronunciation, according to the English language, would be iboga, but I think it's become a cultural norm and standard to call it ibegane and iboga.

• 43:44Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. With iboga, what are some of the scarier aspects aside of the experience for people other than seeing imagery of spirits or dead 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 it the Buiti 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?

• 44:13Speaker 03

  Correct. And then, when it's taken in the African context of the Buiti 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. 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

• 44:57Speaker 03

  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 that went off on a tangent.

• 45:07Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no, that's okay. I was just asking about the, what aspects of the iboga or ibogaine experience can be most terrifying to people going through it the first time?

• 45:18Speaker 03

  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 are, 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, you know, 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. And patients who are using opiates, they generally are trying to numb themselves.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  They don't want to think, they don't want to feel. And ibogaine really forces them to have that discussion, like, look, look what you've done, and, you know, look where you will end up if you continue using. So, it is not a fun experience for them.

• 46:15Tim Ferriss?

  And pharmacologically speaking, I was so fascinated when reading about iboga and its applications to opiate, and, for instance, you know, 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. Pharmacologically or biochemically, what is happening that allows that to work?

• 46:40Speaker 03

  Sure. So it's a very complex pharmacology that ibogaine has. So it works on fifty different neuroreceptors. In general pharmaceutical science, pharmaceutical companies want drugs that are clean. And by clean, they mean one drug, one receptor.

• 46:56Tim Ferriss?

  Highly specific, which is really very hard to do.

• 46:59Speaker 03

  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 and its effect on opiate withdrawal is really astounding, because it's not just masking the withdrawal, like, say, a substitution drug would.

• 47:20Tim Ferriss?

  Like a methadone.

• 47:21Speaker 03

  For example, if somebody'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. Ninety percent 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, you know, bringing back these systems in a more healthy and adaptive way.

• 47:52Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 48:06Speaker 03

  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 DTE, 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.

• 48:34Tim Ferriss?

  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's, who is on either prescription medications or addicted in some fashion, who wants to try to educate themselves. What would you suggest?

• 49:13Speaker 00

  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. 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.

• 49:50Tim Ferriss?

  That's wild.

• 49:51Speaker 00

  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.

• 50:17Tim Ferriss?

  And it's I-C-E-E-R-S?

• 50:19Speaker 00

  Yes, ICEERS.org. And that was started by a guy named Ben Deloan. And they just had the first international, really well-researched consortium of scientists come together for a conference called IAA 2014 Conference, and that was in Spain.

• 50:42Tim Ferriss?

  Ayo 2014.

• 50:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that that was really good. I think that stands for the International Consortium of Antihogenic 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. 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?

• 51:11Tim Ferriss?

  Right, right.

• 51:12Speaker 00

  Chocolate has like principal ingredients, but then everybody throws in their own stuff because their palate is different.

• 51:18Tim Ferriss?

  Right, and you're like, oh shit, I'm allergic to paprika, oops, like didn't realize it was in there, yeah.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  Right, or oops, I didn't know that guy put toi in there.

• 51:26Tim Ferriss?

  Which is not to be trifled with, yeah.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  Classically used in bruhudio, 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 to look at it scientifically, know its purity, its potency, and 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 when we take a scientific research approach to it, you can get that 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, right, for these kinds of psychedelics.

• 52:07Tim Ferriss?

  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 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 methful group or something to make psilocybin, you know, whatever, tetra methylfolate psilocybin, so that they can patent it and protect it. I would have to imagine that it's a slight variant of some type.

• 52:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, MAPS is doing their own independent research outside of the pharmaceutical industry and outside of government funding, largely private funding, and I think I think their MDMA trials... Going into phase three is something like seventeen million dollars that they're raising.

• 52:57Tim Ferriss?

  Great.

• 52:58Speaker 00

  It's pretty hefty and when you get into, and I think you're right. I think, I think there is a dual relationship that the pharmaceutical industry has to psychedelic sciences. There's fascination, complete fascination, just like the movie Limitless. How can we?

• 53:15Tim Ferriss?

  Everybody wants NZT, yeah.

• 53:16Speaker 00

  Alright, man, it's pretty freaking amazing. And sure, I think the first, the first hurdle is gonna be can we, can we patent this? Can we make it profitable? But also, on the other side of that, oftentimes, when, 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 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

• 54:00Speaker 00

  and the only thing you have available is a psychiatric medication, then use that. That's, 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.

• 54:18Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  And that's oftentimes what we're not taught as physicians, even in our schooling.

• 54:23Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I mean, not only taught, but I mean, not really incentivized, right? I mean, in so much as it's, 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...

• 54:43Speaker 00

  Totally. Like, the average interface with a client's like twelve minutes.

• 54:47Tim Ferriss?

  Right, exactly. But let's talk about another one of these tools because the, and Martine, I'm going to come back to you here, 5-MEO DMT. And Dan, I might come 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?

• 55:07Speaker 03

  Sure. So 5-MEO DMT is a cousin of DMT. DMT is found in ayahuasca, whereas a 5-MEO 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

• 55:49Speaker 03

  sense of 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.

• 56:33Speaker 03

  So it works on many levels, but I do see such a profound effect on patients when used in combination with ibogaine.

• 56:41Tim Ferriss?

  How are the ibogaine and 5-MEO DMT administered? So is the ibogaine oral? Is that intravenous? How is that administered or smoked? And then the 5-MEO DMT, same question.

• 56:52Speaker 03

  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 DMT is administered, it's smoked. So you vaporize it and then you inhale the vapors.

• 57:12Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. And do you always use them in combination? And if not, how do you choose which to use with whom?

• 57:19Speaker 03

  So for patients who come for the drug addiction treatment, it is part of the program. Some people, if they don't want to, they can decline to participate. The experience of the 5-MEO on its own is profound, so some people are just coming for that. But, you know, 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.

• 57:48Tim Ferriss?

  I see. So the 5-MEO is used after, typically, after the iboga. So the sequence then is iboga, ibogaine, 5-MEO DMT?

• 57:59Speaker 03

  Yes, actually ibogaine and then the 5-MEO. And then if they have any residual symptoms, we can give them some capsules of root bark, which would constitute the iboga.

• 58:08Tim Ferriss?

  I see, I see. And by residual symptoms, you mean addiction related?

• 58:14Speaker 03

  I was, yes, so withdrawal related. So sometimes some symptoms that remain after a detox with ibogaine can be restless legs, 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 diarrhea, and none of these are present after an ibogaine experience. But if there's some residual, you know, remaining symptoms, then these can be easily treated with, you know, conventional medications or with these small doses of iboga root bark.

• 58:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the symptoms sound like me if I have creatine and too many espressos on the way to the airport.

• 58:55Tim Ferriss?

  For some reason, they need to learn that lesson over and over again. But the 5-MEO DMT, for your purposes, what do you, what plant are you deriving that from? Or is it synthesized?

• 59:07Speaker 03

  So we're actually using the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad. So we use the dried venom.

• 59:13Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sorry to interrupt. Is that the same as Buphotenin or something? Is that, are those different compounds? I apologize, I'm throwing the monkey wrench into the... Sometimes there are like circles burned into the arms of subjects and they're sort of put venom or into the skin.

• 59:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a totally different experience in a totally different frog.

• 59:36Tim Ferriss?

  It is, okay.

• 59:37Speaker 00

  And, yeah, a totally different use.

• 59:39Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 59:40Speaker 00

  It's called Kambol.

• 59:40Speaker 03

  The one, exactly, the one that you're referring to, when they burn the skin and administer the poison, that's called Kambol.

• 59:47Tim Ferriss?

  Kambol. And where is that, is that, that's also Amazonian?

• 59:50Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 59:51Tim Ferriss?

  Got it. I'm very sorry to have interrupted, though. You were saying that you take the dried, the dried, what would it be, excretion or venom from the toad and you dry it?

• 1:00:00Speaker 03

  Correct. So there is a foundation in Sonora, which is northern Mexico, which is tasked with protecting the toad. So they, every time it rains, which is, you know, once, you know, there's one rainy season in the desert and the toads come up from their underground layers, they catch them, they squeeze the parotid gland, which contains the venom, then this is dried, that is the compound that is then smoked to administer the 5-MEO.

• 1:00:26Tim Ferriss?

  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 chacun leaf that's typically used in ayahuasca, the molecular structure is very, very similar to DMT, right? Or contains DMT. 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. Experience only lasted somewhere between five and fifteen minutes. Hard to track time accurately when you're on that stuff.

• 1:01:09Tim Ferriss?

  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 5MEO DMT experience. But for what applications or types of contexts would you use one or the other?

• 1:01:34Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:02:16Speaker 00

  And with 5MEO, there's so much being healed as well, much of which is not necessarily conscious. And, you know, just to play again devil's advocate, we're ninety-five percent of what's happening in our mindstream 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. 5MEO 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.

• 1:03:01Speaker 00

  5MEO 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.

• 1:03:22Speaker 00

  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. Um, there are other methodologies of DMT experience. Psilocybin is one. Um, that's why ninety-four percent 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? Ninety-four percent, that's huge. So you've got, you've got psilocybin as an orally active DMT, four phosphor oxal DMT. And you've got Yopo and Vilka, which are different seeds of plants from South America, um, Argentina, all the way over to Brazil.

• 1:04:04Speaker 00

  And those are also with bufotinine, five amino DMT. Those are snuff powders. They're ground up, uh, 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 a, somewhere between thirty and sixty minute experience. So it's like the Sonoran Desert Toad in the effect, but, and, 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, um, and that being said, I've experienced massive healing with five amino DMT. I've consistently, consistently seen massive healing be experienced.

• 1:04:46Speaker 00

  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. What does that mean? Like, hold the gold, like, keep that, that really private, keep that, that experience really close. That was super precious. And when it feels right to share, then share it with people who are very sensitive to the fact that you just went on a really strong, um, 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.

• 1:05:30Tim Ferriss?

  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, confess something that I feel very conflicted about internally, which perhaps people listening might or may not identify with. But I, for a very 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

• 1:06:15Tim Ferriss?

  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, 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. Not unlike, and this is gonna, 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,"

• 1:06:55Tim Ferriss?

  there's part of me that still kind of winces and squirms, but I don't have any better vocabulary.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:07:02Tim Ferriss?

  Does that make sense?

• 1:07:03Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 1:07:04Tim Ferriss?

  But I try, I usually try not to use those words because I feel like one of the pitfalls of 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 talk. Thanks, but no thanks." Right?

• 1:07:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Tim Ferriss?

  So...

• 1:07:38Speaker 00

  And that's a good example of the basis of the data that started this whole resurgence in psychedelic research with DMT and Rick Strassmann's work. Back at the University of New Mexico in the 90s.

• 1:07:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:07:50Speaker 00

  He wanted to, he wanted to research DMT and his mentor said, "Well, don't talk about spirit or any kind 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."

• 1:08:07Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:08:07Speaker 00

  People had these amazing experiences with what they would call spirit or, or something outside, i- intelligence and beauty outside themselves that they, they had no reference for. But when they went there, sometimes it was really kind of like unsettling because they, it was so unexpected.

• 1:08:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, but I, I do, uh, the reason I, you know, chuckled initially was that I, I think, and, 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, the relative importance of the, 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 that's, let's just call that sort of the work. And then you have the ceremony itself, but excluding the medicinal component, right? Just the, the ceremony. So in ayahuasca, it'd be like everyone's sitting in a circle and having the, the go dark and the, you know, the music and the icaros and all that stuff, the songs. And then in, uh, with iboga, it has its own thing. Uh, I'd be very curious to know what

• 1:09:07Tim Ferriss?

  you think, how you would weight the kind of importance of those. Um, and, and let's just, I'll, I'll, I'll leave it at that and then I'll come back to Dan because what I've, 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 Martine, that was a long-winded,

• 1:09:49Tim Ferriss?

  somewhat scattered question, but what do you think the most important components are? How do you rank, say, the, the prep work, the post-work, the actual medicine and the ceremony or ceremonies?

• 1:10:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I think because Ivegain 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 Ivegain, I think is even more important. Because many people can have this experience and come out of the other side clean, like they have no cravings and no withdrawal, but if they go back home and they haven't, you know, 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, if, if, you know, they didn't prepare, or they didn't integrate the experience afterwards? So I, I would say that, that, that is critical.

• 1:10:45Speaker 03

  And as with any plant medicines, the set in the setting is also very important. So, you know, you mentioned in the ayahuasca journeys, when they have the Icarus and, and with Ivegain 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, in, you know, preparing the space.

• 1:11:09Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. And Dan, what, what are your, what are your thoughts? Um, and maybe we could start with, you know, how you feel. I asked a very, very famous, um, Peruvian shaman at one point, you know, how much is too much? Now, that might be, you know, 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, not sure about that. Uh, I mean, what are your thoughts on, on frequency for this type of thing?

• 1:11:42Speaker 00

  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. When, before I ever was on the psychedelic path, I was into Lakota medicine. And sweating, and going on Vision Quest, and going to sundances and spirit dances and these sorts of things. And I went up on the vision, and I went up on the mountain, what they call Vision Quest. And I came back and I was talking with an elder.

• 1:12:16Tim Ferriss?

  That's no food, no water for a period of time?

• 1:12:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. You go with a prayer, you set a space, you stay in your circle. You sweat on the, on the beginning, you sweat at the end. And my, uh, 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. Well, come back in a year and tell me what happened, because it's gonna take you that long to figure it out." And I, and, 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 ibugan experience six months ago. I'm still learning some of what I did in my first series of dietas with ayahuasca, you

• 1:13:00Speaker 00

  know, and 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 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, 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.

• 1:13:40Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  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, and that's not to minimize their, you know, deep prayer and coming in for some healing, and the fact that they're probably receiving a lot of healing, but, 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, the preparation's important.

• 1:14:10Speaker 00

  And I think of maybe like two ceremonies out of several hundred that that I had an intention that is 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 ninety nine point five percent of the time, something completely different happens that I didn't expect. You know, so intention's good, preparation's good, cleaning out the physical vessel, you know, just being able to to be fairly self-contained and and be self-observant and these sorts of things are important. The setting is extraordinarily important, like we were talking about before, somebody that's in that's integrous, um, you know, I think.

• 1:14:49Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean by that?

• 1:14:50Speaker 00

  Um, they have a high degree of integrity and altruistic intention. I think of it as like, okay, it's like the E three check. What's the person's experience? Like, have they been pouring medicine for longer than, um, but, you know, a month?

• 1:15:02Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, you're talking about the person actually leading the experience?

• 1:15:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. What's the facilitation's experience? What's their energetic, like, you know, are they, do they hold us a good space? Are, 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 E M T? And do they know where the ripcord is? If you can't find it, like if shit really goes down.

• 1:15:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:28Speaker 00

  For example, like you were talking about with benzodiazepine. So there's a way to just kind of judge whether or not or perceive whether or not the the set and a setting is is good. And then the biggest piece still in making that gain actualize is the integration.

• 1:15:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:15:45Speaker 00

  And I think we're understanding more and more about how important that is, um, 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. Um, and that might just be also something that they need to work out and.

• 1:16:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:08Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 1:16:30Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:30Speaker 00

  For example.

• 1:16:31Tim Ferriss?

  No, absolutely. Yeah, and I, 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, just like, I had that kind of dog-like reaction to them 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 completely, I was, I remained completely sober. That was, that's another weird thing about some of this stuff, is it was completely

• 1:17:16Tim Ferriss?

  negated. My body just somehow, or mind, just negated the experience. Like, I could have done Sudoku and just driven home. And you do see people lose it. I mean, like, totally lose it, right? And you need someone, I remember this woman was telling me of this experience she had with a so-called shaman, shaman, like, what do they call it? Yoga waska, like, expert, who, like, 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, ten people doing 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.

• 1:17:58Tim Ferriss?

  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, this is actually something I've never heard of before.

• 1:18:18Speaker 03

  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 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, you know, 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

• 1:18:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:19:17Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, yeah, no, thank you. Dan, do you want to pick it up from there?

• 1:19:21Speaker 00

  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 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, which means something called BDNF, or brain-derived neurotrophic factor, oftentimes

• 1:20:03Speaker 00

  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. You took a whole lot of fMRI scans and you kind of like stacked them on top of one 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...

• 1:20:48Speaker 00

  You during and right after psilocybin, you saw the effect of what was happening on that cobweb and like ninety-five percent of the cobweb was highlighted. It was amazingly upregulated increase in neuronal activity and neuronal connections that wouldn't otherwise be made.

• 1:21:10Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:21:11Speaker 00

  Like cross-talk communication with different areas of the brain. And then, interestingly enough, too, when you look at that picture, like the brain on psilocybin, it looks really similar to the brain of a child.

• 1:21:24Tim Ferriss?

  Children are always tripping balls. That explains a lot.

• 1:21:28Speaker 00

  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. We hear that a lot, and they are, especially if you live with kids, and you just see how much their brains are aligned. 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, 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

• 1:22:08Speaker 00

  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, 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's 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

• 1:22:51Speaker 00

  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, 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 dove off a pier, broke my neck, and had a compression fracture of 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

• 1:23:31Speaker 00

  after the TBIs, I got really curious about psychedelic research when I had my first ayahuasca experience and I could feel my brain being healed.

• 1:23:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:23:41Speaker 00

  Literally. And so, now we're starting to see, okay, how can we bring in integrative psychiatry, anti-aging research, and traumatic brain injury recovery, as well as addiction recovery? Like, 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, I wouldn't, so to say, 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.

• 1:24:20Tim Ferriss?

  No, definitely. And, I mean, I think there's, it's just a pretty basic risk-benefit analysis, right? I mean, there's, there's very limited downside, and potentially high upside to starting slow, and there's the opposite for starting too fast.

• 1:24:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:35Tim Ferriss?

  It's like, "Oh, you tore your ACL, great, let's do some box jumps." It's like, "No, no, no. Let's, uh, let's not do the box jumps first."

• 1:24:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:24:42Tim Ferriss?

  And one thing, one thing you mentioned that was very, uh, resonated with me was, and again, we're getting, I would just ask everybody listening to just suspend your, like, 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 Gazali, who I had on this podcast, who's a world-class, very famous neuroscience researcher,

• 1:25:27Tim Ferriss?

  runs one of the top labs in the world at UCSF, has been on the cover of Nature and so on. And did, yeah, 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 has been, 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, so the neuroscience might be more readily accepted, but it doesn't make the medicinal

• 1:26:08Tim Ferriss?

  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 me, 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, we'll talk more about this, probably privately, and then potentially do a round two with this. But let me ask just a couple of questions for both of you. And maybe Dan will talk, 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?

• 1:26:51Speaker 00

  My first mentor, Roger Bell, who is a chiropractor.

• 1:26:55Tim Ferriss?

  And why is he the first person that comes to mind?

• 1:26:58Speaker 00

  He was such an, 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. He had just, he had cracked the code, so to speak, in, in the physician-to-client relationship, and what it takes to actually facilitate healing for another person. And it was, he's consistently been...

• 1:27:41Speaker 00

  Just one of the most inspiring people to me.

• 1:27:43Tim Ferriss?

  Is he, is he still practicing or has he passed?

• 1:27:46Speaker 00

  He's passed away.

• 1:27:47Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sorry to hear that. Martin, when you think of the word successful or hear the word successful, who's the first person who comes to mind for you?

• 1:27:55Speaker 03

  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, you know, come to the United States to fulfill his dreams and has changed various industries, so.

• 1:28:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, he's, he's very good at betting the farm repeatedly.

• 1:28:17Tim Ferriss?

  And one of the, 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 and 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, SolarCity, and Tesla. And rumor has it he had to borrow money to pay for his rent because, which, which seems unlikely, but it does make for a good story. Elon's amazing. Dan, what, 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.

• 1:28:57Speaker 00

  Well, most recently, Mating in Captivity. It's such a good book about just deconstructing the whole idea of success in relationships. The Jeremy Nardi book on ayahuasca was amazing for me.

• 1:29:14Tim Ferriss?

  Is that the Cosmic Serpent? Cosmic Serpent's interesting, yeah.

• 1:29:17Speaker 00

  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 the yogi by Yogananda.

• 1:29:37Tim Ferriss?

  Steve Jobs' favorite book.

• 1:29:39Speaker 00

  Wow, I didn't know that.

• 1:29:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, he had it, he had instructions before his death to give every attendee at his funeral, or might have been his wake, a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi.

• 1:29:50Speaker 00

  Wow, that's great.

• 1:29:52Tim Ferriss?

  Martine, do you have any books that in particular you have given to other people as gifts?

• 1:29:58Speaker 03

  Sure, I like gifting a book called The Journey Home. Most recently, I've given a lot of people a book called I begin Explained, which is a very brief introduction to I begin, 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 five Mio. experience from a Buddhist and a Hinduist perspective.

• 1:30:26Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's very cool. Yeah, that's a, 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 I begin Explained, do you know the name of the author for that? I could certainly look it up, but...

• 1:30:45Speaker 03

  I believe his last name is Frank. I can't remember what his first name is, might be Victor.

• 1:30:50Tim Ferriss?

  All right, perfect. I'll, I'll look that up and everyone, you'll be able to find links to all of this in the show notes at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. Just a few more questions for you guys. 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?

• 1:31:07Speaker 00

  Be curious. Everywhere.

• 1:31:10Tim Ferriss?

  Put it everywhere.

• 1:31:11Speaker 00

  Put it everywhere.

• 1:31:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I like it. Martine?

• 1:31:16Speaker 03

  Huh, I don't have an answer for that. I don't, I haven't really thought about that question.

• 1:31:21Tim Ferriss?

  No problem. It's not, not a mandatory. These are, these are all optionals. So, well, then Martine, I'll, I'll segue to a different one for, for you. What, what advice would you give your 30-year-old self?

• 1:31:32Speaker 03

  It would mainly 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, pretty standard.

• 1:31:47Speaker 03

  I guess it comes from personal experience of being burned.

• 1:31:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, no, for sure. And 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, 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, you know, 600-page book. This is a much easier read and very prescriptive. Dan, what advice would you give to your 30-year-old self?

• 1:32:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's always been an inclination for me to continue to drink from the fire hose. And there would be 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 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.

• 1:33:01Tim Ferriss?

  Man's Search for Meaning, great book.

• 1:33:02Speaker 00

  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, bam, and just laid it out like as a treatise for life. And the challenges that I've experienced, I think we all do for, you know, 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.

• 1:33:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:40Speaker 00

  And you can't rush it.

• 1:33:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's Man'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.

• 1:33:56Tim Ferriss?

  Which he recommended to me is actually a combination of two books. It's extremely powerful, written by Primo Levi. 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. 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?

• 1:34:24Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:34:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:36Speaker 03

  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 use for addictions. And that's not to say that people that don't have addictions don't derive benefit from it, but I do think that there's other modalities that they should explore first that are less risky.

• 1:35:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. No, 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 gonna 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?

• 1:35:30Speaker 00

  Flotation.

• 1:35:31Tim Ferriss?

  Or flotation tank or moderate dose psilocybin. So actually, you know what? Since we didn't... I was gonna ask you the same thing, and I know you have experience with flotation. So, Dan, would you mind just elaborating on that for a moment?

• 1:35:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm just about as excited about flotation therapy as I am about psychedelics, because not everybody's gonna do a psychedelic. And not everybody's... Maybe it's not actually in everybody's best interest to do it. The art and the 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. But everybody can float. And so it's gonna reach the masses in a different way. And when prepped well and when done consistently over time can be an extraordinary psychedelic arena.

• 1:36:30Speaker 00

  And by psychedelic I essentially mean, you know, coming back to a deeper connection with oneself.

• 1:36:37Tim Ferriss?

  And just for people who may not be familiar with the term, by flotation you mean floating in a, inside a tank where you've blocked out light and sound and the water has 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?

• 1:37:02Speaker 00

  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 brain's 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.

• 1:37:39Tim Ferriss?

  What is a... Oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.

• 1:37:41Speaker 00

  I was gonna say, 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, 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.

• 1:38:23Tim Ferriss?

  Probably in no small part due to Joe Rogan's carrying of the torch.

• 1:38:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally, right? I know it's interesting how he's been really big in that. 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 unknown and the mystery?

• 1:38:42Tim Ferriss?

  That's actually a really good point. It's like if you can't handle a flotation tank, you're not ready for being strapped, you're not ready to be strapped to a rocket ship that you can't turn off.

• 1:38:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Like one of my, one of my teachers, Don Howard, says the white knuckle flare ride, it can, it can get a little intense and, and the float and the tank can tell you like where you are in the midst of that. And so that's a great entry point. And then, 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 Grof did thousands of cases and then when it became illegal, he went to holotropic breath work.

• 1:39:27Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:39:28Speaker 00

  And that's another modality. I mean, there's, there's so much that's coming online right now and it's just a really exciting time in, in general to be in this field.

• 1:39:36Tim Ferriss?

  And absolutely. And I would say just a couple of things. So on the LSD front, not, not a substance that I use much, if at all, because I prefer to use the compounds that like you said, have that kind of natural, um, sort of dose dependent, like self-limiting aspect, because you'll puke your brains out or something like that with say like, you know, ayahuasca or, or fill in the blank with some of these plants that have existed for millennia, um, 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. Uh, in the, uh, the psychedelic explorers guide, I think is a very interesting read

• 1:40:16Tim Ferriss?

  for a lot of people who may not be familiar with the logistics and ideal or optimal logistics of, uh, A guided experience with supervision for some of these substances. And it looks in depth at the, as we said, the set and setting. In other words, the mindset and the prep work preceding 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. Yeah, I find it to be a pretty useful guide. And with the flotation, for my own, this is just for, this is for me, but I'm sure other people might be interested. I've noticed, for instance, with transcendental, transcendental meditation or other types

• 1:41:00Tim Ferriss?

  of meditation, there's, there's a, for me personally, kind of a, a trip point after a week of continual meditation at least once a day. So I'll have, you know, 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, right, like cortisol, subjective anxiety level, zero to 10 type of thing, they all sort of make this quantum leap in a better direction, but it takes about a week for me personally to, to jump from like non-boiling to boiling, right?

• 1:41:34Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:41:35Tim Ferriss?

  With, with the flotation tank, in your experience, what is the minimum effective dose? Like when you said doing it consistently, if you were prescribing it like medicine, what would that look like? Like how many days or how many weeks, how many times a week, how long are the sessions, et cetera?

• 1:41:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, great question. It depends a little bit on the target symptom. So for the mind, anxiety, insomnia.

• 1:42:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, let's, let's.

• 1:42:02Speaker 00

  Mental 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, you'd. The majority of people would see a significant benefit.

• 1:42:25Tim Ferriss?

  How long are the sessions?

• 1:42:27Speaker 00

  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 want to... are ready to get out. Yeah, right? And then for pain, it's actually a little bit further, like seven to 10 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, but we're starting to see some of the research

• 1:43:11Speaker 00

  show that this is true. Repair the body's own 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 10 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

• 1:43:56Speaker 00

  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, 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... I... if I'm gonna be extraordinarily surprised 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."

• 1:44:36Tim Ferriss?

  Don't shave an hour before you go to do a float session.

• 1:44:39Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:44:41Tim Ferriss?

  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 that be? And I'll start with you, Martine.

• 1:45:13Speaker 03

  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 or a loved one are a veteran suffering from opiate addiction and are interested in participating in this study, please get in touch with us.

• 1:45:37Tim Ferriss?

  And where is the best place for people to go to learn more about that?

• 1:45:41Speaker 03

  So our website is crossroadsibogaine.com and the number is 866-956-7756.

• 1:45:48Tim Ferriss?

  Great. And Ibogaine is I-B-O-G-A-I-N-E?

• 1:45:52Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:45:53Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 1:46:03Speaker 00

  I appreciate Martine's suggestion, and he kind of stole my thunder because that's the one I was going to say. And I think MAPS is doing some amazing work and being able to support those guys because it's, they're pushing the envelope forward in the arena of medicine as we know it that's going to be able to help 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.

• 1:46:45Speaker 00

  And when we become more and more integrated and we become more and more resolved of our trauma, and we've become stronger within our own personal empowerment, we just, 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.

• 1:47:13Tim Ferriss?

  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 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.

• 1:47:55Tim Ferriss?

  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 you'd like.

• 1:48:10Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:48:21Tim Ferriss?

  Great. And Dan, what about yourself?

• 1:48:24Speaker 00

  You can find me on Twitter, DrDanEngle, 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.

• 1:48:39Tim Ferriss?

  Fantastic. Well, guys, this has been great fun. 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 in a lot of ways.

• 1:49:19Tim Ferriss?

  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/podcast, all spelled out, and we will have all the links you could possibly want, including links to all the websites, Twitter handles, and so on. But gentlemen, thank you so much for the time. I really enjoyed it.

• 1:49:47Speaker 03

  Great. Thank you too so much, Tim. It's been great. Thank you, Tim.

• 1:49:50Tim Ferriss?

  All right, guys. Until next time, and everybody listening, thanks for listening, and talk to you soon.

• 1:49:59Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that 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. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends,

• 1:50:39Tim Ferriss?

  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. This episode is brought to you by Trunk Club. I hate shopping with a passion. Shopping for fun to me is like, "Let's go do our taxes." I don't get it. It's something that I have to do, but I don't like it at all. And quite frankly, I'm not good at it. I always end up looking like I'm colorblind or homeless or something like that. So ROI, really sucky. And as a result, I decided to try Trunk Club.

• 1:51:22Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:52:06Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:52:50Tim Ferriss?

  So it's a great trifecta. And the way they make money is really easy. I mean, they buy high-quality clothing at volume, and they just charge you the normal retail pricing. But obviously, they buy it at a cheaper price. So there's no tricks, no hidden costs. It's really easy to be the best-dressed man in the room or on the street. So their entire styling service is free for now. Like I mentioned, check it out, trunkclub.com/tim. Tim, they also have clubhouses, so you can check that out, which is pretty cool. So trunkclub.com/tim and you can get a trunk filled with sweet clothing very easily that will make the ladies want you and make the men want to be you. It is a good ROI and for someone who's always hated fashion, now I can actually look fashionable with next to no time expenditure.

• 1:53:35Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:54:20Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:54:48Speaker 04

  If you want more of The Tim Ferriss Show, you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or go to fourhourblog.com, F-O-U-R-H-O-U-R-B-L-O-G.com, where you'll find an award-winning blog, tons of audio and video interview stories with people like Warren Buffett and Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park, the books, plus much, much more. Follow Tim on Twitter, it's twitter.com/TFerriss, that's T-F-E-R-R-I-S-S, or on Facebook at facebook.com/TimFerriss. Until next time, thanks for listening.