Latest / Love Conquers Fear / #53: A Breakthrough Worth Fighting For: Psychedelics & the Future of Healing Trauma — Bryan Hubbard

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#53: A Breakthrough Worth Fighting For: Psychedelics & the Future of Healing Trauma — Bryan Hubbard · Love Conquers Fear

• 0:00
  If we are nihilist, if we think this is all just a random
• 0:03
  accident of astrophysics, it makes the achievement of the
• 0:06
  future that you reference much more difficult to achieve within
• 0:10
  the minds and hearts of people who think that this has no
• 0:12
  higher purpose than immediate physical indulgence and comfort.
• 0:16
  If we have the opportunity to platform, for instance, ibogaine
• 0:20
  as a breakthrough therapeutic in the most existential crises we
• 0:25
  have in front of us as American Society, and those are the twin
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  crises of addiction and trauma that are in existence at scale,
• 0:32
  then we offer up an opportunity for individuals to understand
• 0:36
  concretely, individually, persuasively, how they are
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  sacred, uniquely sacred, and how they are the ultimate expression
• 0:46
  of that benevolent love that our eternal Creator has at the very
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  heart of the Creator's essence. Welcome back everybody, to the
• 0:58
  Love Conquers Fear podcast. I am back from beautiful New
• 1:02
  Orleans. I've mentioned on prior episodes
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  that I was there receiving an award that I absolutely did not
• 1:09
  expect. I'm a proud UT Austin undergrad
• 1:13
  and I went to Warden for my MBA, but Tulane University decided to
• 1:19
  award me as Entrepreneur of the Year.
• 1:22
  This was something that President Fitz, who I absolutely
• 1:26
  love, decided to give me. And on the day that I gave the
• 1:32
  speech, I was thinking, you know, what am I going to speak
• 1:35
  about? I knew it was going to be
• 1:36
  something around love conquers fear, but I opened myself up to
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  the universe to to see what would come in.
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  And there were, there were a couple of things that floated
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  in, you know, the beautiful nature of consciousness 1 was a
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  memory that I just completely forgot about that it's about 20
• 1:55
  years old, which was rooted in a very magical occurrence, which
• 1:59
  happened for me personally in New Orleans, which helped lead
• 2:03
  to the launch of Bizarre Voice, which is the company that I
• 2:07
  started with Pop, popularized customer reviews all over the
• 2:10
  world and had over a billion dollar IPO that floated into my
• 2:13
  consciousness. I hadn't, I hadn't thought about
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  what happened in New Orleans related to me deciding to start
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  Bizarre Voice until that moment in 20 years.
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  And then another that floated in, which was just so beautiful
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  is I know that my mom's soul and dad's soul, you know, send me
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  messages. I've seen it many times in
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  meditation, sometimes in psychedelic journeys.
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  But my mom pushed into this, into my field of consciousness,
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  a song that she loved, which is by this band called America.
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  And the song is named Magic. And it's so, it's so funny if
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  you watch the video on YouTube of them singing this song,
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  they're actually singing it in heaven among the clouds.
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  And I knew that that that was my mom being playful with me.
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  And so I made my whole speech about magic, the magic of
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  beautiful New Orleans and all of the incredible things that have
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  happened there, including the birth of jazz, the magic of all
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  of my family moments that were centered around New Orleans,
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  starting with my dad taking me there when I was a young boy.
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  I grew up here in Austin and it was a very small town back then.
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  My dad loved to go there and eat, so we'd do Rd. trips there
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  and just so many great memories with him.
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  The first ever daddy daughter trip I did with with our
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  daughter who is at Tulane. She's 21 now and a junior was to
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  New Orleans. And all the magic that occurred
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  with that, and then the magic of what's going to happen with
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  humanity as we ascend to create abundance for everyone on this
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  planet. And it was just a, it was a
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  speech where I was really flowing with a lot of love.
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  It was an absolutely beautiful evening.
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  I was also there to speak at a number of classes, judge the
• 4:14
  startup competition. Huge Congrats to Dylan and the
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  Zactics team for winning the startup competition.
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  They're they're off on a great entrepreneurial journey.
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  And I was lucky enough to see Michael Lewis interview Michael
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  Pollan, who came out with his new book World Appears, which is
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  all on the nature of consciousness.
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  This was in conjunction with Walter Isaacson's book Fest,
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  which happens every year. This was his fifth year at
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  Tulane University and it's open to everybody in New Orleans.
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  And I think 40% of the people that actually flown in for it,
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  20,000 attendees. And it was just an incredible
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  conversation about the nature of consciousness.
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  That's a great book I've recommended before on the
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  podcast. But in that book specifically,
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  he really critiques the AI kind of tech crowd, which very
• 5:09
  quickly, you know, assumes that AI is either sentient or soon
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  will be sentient. In the critique that actually
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  consciousness and thinking is a full body exercise.
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  You know, it's not just about IQ, it's about feelings and it's
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  about, you know, the field of, of consciousness, which we've
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  discovered through Higgs boson, CERN.
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  And it's just a great book. And he, he really leaned into
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  that on stage, which I think was, was super helpful.
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  Anyways, it was amazing week and now I'm fully into South by
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  Southwest. I saw a speech last night given
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  by a guy who is working on decoding animal language and is
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  predicting that we're going to have that by 2029 or 2030.
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  And I actually wrote a short story back in November, which is
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  about how Doctor Alexander Bliss, who's the protagonist in
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  my science fiction novella The Lattice, decodes whale language
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  and what whales have to teach us because they've been around for
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  millions of years. You know, Homo sapiens have been
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  on this planet for 300,000 years, the planet's 4.54 billion
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  years old. And last night, Aza, who is
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  leading nonprofit focused on this, leaned into that as well.
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  He said, what are we going to learn from animals that have
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  been on the planet much, much longer than us?
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  And what is it going to teach us about unifying and really
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  ascending together and treating this planet as the beautiful
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  jewel that it deserves to be treated and having a love and
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  divinity in our heart for all things.
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  So it was a it was amazing evening.
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  And because it's South by Southwest, I had a great, great
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  magical thing happen. And that's that Brian Hubbard,
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  who is a Co founder of the Americans for I began initiative
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  is on the podcast today. You've heard me speak about that
• 7:10
  initiative many times on Love Conquers Fear.
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  We were very proud to host him and former Governor Rick Perry
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  at our home to raise money for this initiative.
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  And wow, what an honor to have him here with us.
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  Brian, it's good to be here with you, buddy.
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  Yeah, an honor to be with you, Brad.
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  Thank you for your hospitality and thoughtful invitation to
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  join you here in your home. Well, you bet I am.
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  I'm a such a big fan of you and I've described you to to many
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  friends as really a force of nature, someone who absolutely
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  is on this mission to save people that that need to be
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  saved. I mean, it's, it's kind of
• 7:54
  incredible and, and tragic to think about that we've lost four
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  times as many vets since the Iraq war to suicide in America.
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  Then we did the combat and, you know, we need to really have
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  more cures for them. And the fact that you and
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  Governor Perry were able to get $50 million of funding passed
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  here in the Texas House with the support of Governor Abbott is,
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  is really saying something. And I know it's been a journey
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  for you to, to get to that point.
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  So it maybe we just start out with why this?
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  Why is this your soul song? And and how does your especially
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  are there any elements of your childhood and growing up that
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  really connect to this? You asked the exact perfect
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  question to begin our interview together.
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  My journey toward Ibogaine began in my earliest of years.
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  I came up in one of Virginia's 5 coal mining counties, a working
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  class family. My parents were very young when
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  they married and I think a lot, a lot of young folk who come up
• 9:02
  in hard circumstances. They believe their love for each
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  other as they understood it in their youth was their escape
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  from the misery in which they lived, and they got married
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  young. By the time I came along, their
• 9:17
  marriage was coming to an end and my earliest memories were of
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  screaming and cussing and chaos between them.
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  I was very blessed to have two magnificent men who were my
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  grandfathers be very active and engage with me from those
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  earliest days where I grew up. You call your grandpa's Papaw.
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  So I had a Papaw Martin and a Papaw Hubbard and both of them
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  came out of large families. Both of them were the sons of
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  very hard drinking men. And while they had brothers,
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  they were very unique in that both of them were men of great
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  faith. And I can remember being a very
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  scared child and they knew it. And whenever I would go and
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  visit with them and they spent as much time with me as they
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  could, at some point before I would return home, whether that
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  was with mom and dad or subsequently mom or then it was
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  just dad, they would put me on their lap and put their arms
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  around me and say Papaw knows you're scared, but you need to
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  know a couple of things. First of all, Papaw loves you.
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  Papa prays for you every day. But the most important thing
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  that you have to know is that God loves you.
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  God has a special and unique purpose to achieve with your
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  life, and no matter how bad it gets, how scared you are, or how
• 11:01
  difficult things seem, don't you ever forget what Papa was
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  telling you. If you will hold on to that
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  truth, it's going to see you through now.
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  I was just three, about to turn 4 when I can remember these
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  conversations. My grandfather.
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  Had a huge impact on me growing up.
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  He was the oldest of of his siblings in the Depression, yes,
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  so and was deserted by his father, who is an alcoholic.
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  And he actually had to help his mother, my great grandmother,
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  raise his siblings, his oldest one.
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  And so I got lots of great memories with them that I've
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  talked about on the podcast. But sorry, it's already, it's
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  just, it's just, it really triggers that in me that that
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  I've had the same kind of force so.
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  You know, I don't, I would not make a guess as to you or anyone
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  else's age, but I think that we may be a part of the same
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  generational cohort what we would consider or call
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  Generation X. Yeah, I'm 54.
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  I turned 50 in October and I consider us to be among the most
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  magnificently blessed people because of the grandparents we
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  got to have, the folks who came out of that greatest generation
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  who faced both physical and spiritual deprivations that just
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  are are mind blowing and beyond our modern ability to
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  comprehend. That's where, you know, I think
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  about my papaws. Both of them are grade school
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  educated. One of them was pulled out of
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  school when he was 16, hadn't managed to get through the 6th
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  grade. The other one stopped when he
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  was in the third. They were both underground in
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  the coal mines, the age 16, and they spent 40 years of their
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  life down there facing death every day to keep their families
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  fed and both and housed. Neither one of them had a full
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  set of fingers, but they both were just tremendously gentle,
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  loving human beings who conveyed the light of that love to me and
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  everyone who was around them. And I would always be astounded,
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  especially in teenagers watching American politics, that not just
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  their individual lack of bitterness, but the lack of
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  bitterness within that generation.
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  They were thankful that they were able to overcome what they
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  did. They were thankful to have
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  fought for truly the existential survival of the country through
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  the depression, through World War 2, and ultimately got to see
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  the the fall of totalitarian communism.
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  They led all of that and they went out of this world with with
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  the salutation of honor they should have received.
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  I I'm so glad to know about your grandfather and the fact that
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  yours and mine came out of the same fabulous generational
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  timber. Yeah, yeah.
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  And shaped us. I mean, he he he grew up.
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  He he was very academic. So he actually became one of the
• 13:54
  greatest mathematics professors at UT Austin.
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  But he put himself through school, often by tutoring people
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  on subjects he didn't even know. How about?
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  That and, and he was a very, very giving professor.
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  Like really, I mean, he taught the hardest mathematics classes
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  and he quizzed me all the time on math growing up.
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  And I, I, it was kind of uncomfortable being around him
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  sometimes because of that, because it was things I hadn't
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  learned. But but it taught me a lot and
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  ultimately led to my best subject.
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  He he was training you well early on.
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  He. Was he really was?
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  If I had not had the two of them convey that most significant of
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  all truths, there's no question but that if I were alive at all,
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  I would certainly not be sitting here as I am today.
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  I tell folks all the time that the lesson that they taught me
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  about the sacred nature of life and unique individual purpose
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  are the things that kept me from being in some dark hole that I
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  might would look out from and wonder what someone who has held
• 15:07
  jobs like I had was going to come do to pull them out.
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  And as we recognize as fellow Gen.
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  Xers, and I hope you don't mind me being familiar, we truly are
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  the first generation at least of Americans to have experienced
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  the mass dissolution of family and community.
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  We were the first wave to go through everything that that
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  involved. What frightens me is to think
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  about the number of people our age and younger who never had
• 15:46
  anything which resembled sanctuary from chaos, the
• 15:51
  stability of an unconditionally loving relationship with an
• 15:56
  adult that they could trust and know would be there for them, or
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  an affirmation of their individual spiritual
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  significance. If I had to guesstimate, I would
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  say at least half of the country have never had one or perhaps
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  all of those three things, and it goes a long way to explaining
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  why we see what we see right in front of us every day.
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  The the Rise and loneliness and depression at a time where we
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  are supposedly the most connected Wiz ever been.
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  And a lot of that I think is I mean, family definitely starts
• 16:36
  with family, but but a lot of it is algorithmic manipulation too.
• 16:39
  It's a constant leveraging our base fears and the algorithm
• 16:44
  seeking to keep this just click, click, clicking in the maze,
• 16:47
  looking for cheese, whether it's social media, whether it's the
• 16:51
  media. And this is not a critique of
• 16:52
  the Free Press. It's a critique of the business
• 16:54
  model. Hey man, I've made the point on
• 16:57
  this podcast many times that people should rewire their
• 17:01
  brain, you know, deprogram and reprogram with news like the
• 17:04
  Progress Network, with news like Fix the News where it's all of
• 17:09
  the positive things that are constantly happening in the
• 17:12
  world that are algorithmically buried.
• 17:14
  I mean, it's every day we're having amazing scientific
• 17:17
  breakthroughs. Many reasons people should be
• 17:19
  hopeful. They just need to to tune into
• 17:24
  those because they really are just buried.
• 17:27
  You know, you talk about measures of hopefulness.
• 17:30
  I've always, since I was a child, I've been a close
• 17:33
  follower of American history and politics and just the general
• 17:38
  civic health of the society. And there have been 3
• 17:41
  statistical metrics of what we can kind of point to as the
• 17:45
  state of mind of the country collectively. 1 Is that what
• 17:50
  they called the wrong track? Right track number?
• 17:52
  The number of people in America who think things are going well
• 17:55
  and we're heading in the direction that we should be
• 17:57
  versus those that don't. We've not had a positive right
• 18:02
  track direction number going on 30 years, and at least over the
• 18:07
  past 20, it's not gotten much above 36% in terms of the right
• 18:11
  track. A recent Pew Center poll, which
• 18:15
  surveyed attitudes toward the federal government, found that
• 18:17
  exactly 18% of all citizens have confidence and federal
• 18:23
  leadership to do the right thing.
• 18:25
  And that was in December of 25. More shockingly, that number
• 18:30
  hasn't gone above 30% since 2007.
• 18:36
  And there was a Wall Street Journal poll that was published,
• 18:40
  it was before the end of last year in which 80% of respondents
• 18:45
  expressed their belief that the American dream is dead.
• 18:50
  So when we look at where we're at versus what you through a
• 18:56
  futurist lens can see, there is a wide gulf between what you're
• 19:02
  able to know through your discernment of information and
• 19:07
  what mass media is driving through that algorithmic
• 19:11
  conquest of the society that you observed.
• 19:14
  That's part of a business model separate and apart from what
• 19:17
  should be a free and vigorous press that educates the public
• 19:22
  as to their reality. Yeah, well, it is.
• 19:25
  It is a it's putting profits over people and it's because of
• 19:29
  the worship of money, which every spiritual tradition, every
• 19:36
  religious text talks about the fact that the only path to
• 19:41
  happiness is found within. And that's why this, that's why
• 19:45
  this is called love conquers fear.
• 19:46
  It's it's the unification between all the spiritual
• 19:49
  traditions are that we have to get to a point where we allow
• 19:54
  love to conquer fear within ourselves to act with extreme
• 19:58
  agency like you're doing with Americans for I begin initiative
• 20:02
  and then we can help others do that.
• 20:04
  And then if everybody did that humanity a sentence and and
• 20:07
  having an earth come together. Whether you look at that as
• 20:10
  mystically or metaphorically, and I look at it as both, both
• 20:14
  things can be true at the same time.
• 20:16
  Spirituality. And science can both be true.
• 20:19
  Yes, Sir, that I'll tell you that I'm not.
• 20:22
  I'm not shying away in my book, which coming out in June, love
• 20:28
  conquers fear with the subtitle humanity, AI and the age of
• 20:31
  abundance for all on the problems we have.
• 20:33
  It's not, it's not it's not shying away from from any of the
• 20:38
  problems we have, including even, you know, this is one that
• 20:43
  I don't hear a lot of people talk about, but it's a but it's
• 20:46
  a problem that's existed for millennia.
• 20:48
  The objectification of women. You know, I was raised by a very
• 20:53
  strong mom and all the love I have been in my heart, you know,
• 20:58
  started with her. And, you know, it wasn't until
• 21:01
  the night late 1970s in America that women have the right to
• 21:05
  have checking accounts when they have the right to vote until
• 21:08
  just over 100 years ago. And women of colors 50 years
• 21:12
  after that. And a lot of a lot of what you
• 21:17
  see around the world comes out of, of that in terms of the
• 21:21
  problems. And so we have to transcend that
• 21:26
  route as well. Realize that we're 99.9% the
• 21:30
  same across this beautiful planet.
• 21:31
  Women are the ultimate creators. They, they're, they literally
• 21:36
  give life. You know, I don't think God is
• 21:40
  gendered, but if God was, God would be female because birth
• 21:44
  the universe, you know, The Big Bang, that's the ultimate
• 21:48
  creator, the ultimate technologist.
• 21:52
  But yeah, I mean, getting getting back to, you know, your
• 21:54
  purpose. So, so having having that
• 21:56
  childhood and then leading up to this initiative, like what was
• 22:01
  the moment where you realize this initiative was your soul
• 22:06
  song, that it was what your grandfather was teaching you,
• 22:10
  that this was this was it, You know, this is where you're going
• 22:13
  to really make your mark for humanity.
• 22:16
  I heard a recent message, it's been within the past 18 months,
• 22:19
  which said that our Creator is never malicious and often settle
• 22:26
  and that we have to look for those repetitious patterns in
• 22:30
  our life that are there to get our attention and to teach us
• 22:34
  what it is to where to learn and perhaps to do with our lives.
• 22:38
  So I'm growing up, I had a very idealized presentation of
• 22:43
  American history and civics. I was told by some just fabulous
• 22:50
  teachers who had come of age during World War Two, who were
• 22:52
  part of that greatest generation or who had been trained by those
• 22:56
  ladies. They had high expectations.
• 22:58
  They were strict disciplinarians, and they were
• 23:01
  red, white, and blue all the way.
• 23:05
  My formative years coincided with the Reagan presidency, and
• 23:10
  regardless of what one may think from a partisan perspective, my
• 23:14
  recollection of that time was of a tremendous amount of optimism
• 23:18
  marked by essentially the the inverse statistical realities of
• 23:23
  public perception, of trust and belief in government, and of
• 23:26
  upward mobility that we see today.
• 23:31
  I believed growing up that going to law school would teach me how
• 23:36
  to defend truth, justice in the American way, that that's what
• 23:39
  the law was, was an instrument of, of justice.
• 23:42
  And boy, did I want to get in there and do everything I could
• 23:45
  to serve my country, which I adored.
• 23:49
  So I went to law school, and then the first thing that I
• 23:53
  learned was that law is not a synonym for truth, morality, or
• 24:00
  justice. And then I learned over the
• 24:03
  course of 16 years of practice that law is often nothing other
• 24:08
  than an instrument that is used by the hand that pays for the
• 24:13
  power to wield it, to bind, torture, and kill the truth.
• 24:19
  I had an accidental legal career, and I say accidental
• 24:23
  because it was not by design. I ended up practicing workers
• 24:27
  compensation law across Kentucky for 16 years, representing
• 24:32
  Walmart, Tennessee Valley Authority and Tyson Foods
• 24:36
  exclusively statewide. Now, your audience may say,
• 24:40
  well, those are three big powerful corporations That had
• 24:43
  to be the hand that was paying to use the law.
• 24:45
  Well, in fact, it was very much the opposite.
• 24:49
  At the time that I practiced, Kentucky had two governors who
• 24:55
  were very vigorously supported and funded in their campaigns by
• 24:59
  the plaintiffs personal injury bar.
• 25:02
  So ambulance chasers were a significant constituency of
• 25:06
  these two governors, one in particular who was in office for
• 25:10
  eight of my 16 practice years. And the way in which workers
• 25:15
  compensation law is practiced is you have administrative law
• 25:19
  judges who are appointed by the governor.
• 25:22
  The folks who nominate those judges are lawyers appointed by
• 25:27
  that governor. So you had a scenario whereby
• 25:30
  the donors to the governor were appointed to the Judicial
• 25:33
  nomination Committee, and then those lawyers selected the
• 25:37
  judges that they wanted that the governor would prove.
• 25:40
  He would then come and sit on their cases.
• 25:42
  And Brett, you know, I think probably most people from
• 25:47
  watching shows and through their own civic education think, well,
• 25:50
  the law is a set of rules, and these rules are applied by a
• 25:54
  judge who is impartial and fair to circumstances to get to a
• 25:57
  predictable outcome that's consistent with reality.
• 26:00
  And that's what we call justice. Well, most legal systems and
• 26:05
  legal outcomes don't bear any resemblance to that perceived
• 26:09
  expectation and understanding, certainly not in my practice
• 26:12
  life. I could look at the judge and
• 26:18
  the lawyer on my case and know exactly what was going to happen
• 26:22
  before I even looked at the facts of the case.
• 26:24
  Facts of the case were secondary.
• 26:27
  This was a political patronage system that masqueraded as a
• 26:33
  legitimate legal system. So what was its commodity?
• 26:37
  What did it trade well in years that coincided with the onset
• 26:42
  and explosion of the opioid epidemic, it traded in the
• 26:46
  misery of other human beings for the financial benefit of the
• 26:50
  volume practitioner of plaintiff's personal injury
• 26:52
  cases and the doctor's office that had as its boutique
• 26:58
  practice the delivery of treatments of chronosity to the
• 27:04
  personal injury claimant through either workers compensation,
• 27:08
  motor vehicle accident or Social Security disability.
• 27:13
  There is a I think it's on Apple TV.
• 27:18
  There's a documentary about a volume personal injury
• 27:21
  practitioner in Kentucky called. His name was Eric C Khan and I
• 27:25
  think the title of the documentary is called The Great
• 27:27
  Khan. OK, we'll put it in the show
• 27:28
  now, too. And it was about this, and I sat
• 27:31
  in this gentleman's office and took depositions there with one
• 27:33
  of his law partners. It was about this prolific
• 27:37
  practitioner of Social Security disability who was the single
• 27:42
  largest awardee of Social Security disability fees for a
• 27:45
  number of years. And what he had basically done
• 27:49
  was he bought a Social Security disability judge in West
• 27:52
  Virginia, put him on the payroll.
• 27:54
  He made a steady referral to one particular psychological expert
• 27:59
  who was essentially a payroll evaluator and he just funneled
• 28:04
  through this Social Security volume disability practice
• 28:08
  individuals through this rotation of disability
• 28:12
  evaluation award and then feedback to him.
• 28:16
  And oftentimes this this lawyer would specifically refer his
• 28:22
  clients to doctors who he knew would give them the right
• 28:24
  diagnosis along with the right medication.
• 28:28
  So what I observed emerge in Kentucky between 2000 and 2016
• 28:33
  was what I called the Doctor Logger disability Complex, which
• 28:37
  was a symbiotic relationship between plaintiff's personal
• 28:42
  injury lawyers and family physicians, pain treatment
• 28:46
  physicians and unscrupulous surgeons who knew exactly what
• 28:50
  they were doing in terms of trading desperate human beings
• 28:54
  back and forth. And on the logger side,
• 28:58
  collecting the fee and on the doctor side, creating a lifetime
• 29:01
  patient through either at a minimum, the administration of
• 29:06
  absolutely nuclear combinations of pharmacology.
• 29:10
  The Oxycontin Xanax combination was one I saw repeatedly.
• 29:15
  Now what were these conditions that merited this sort of
• 29:19
  trafficking of people through this treatment and and personal
• 29:22
  entry ecosystem? There was 1 deposition that I
• 29:26
  took probably 200 times. And what I'm going to describe
• 29:30
  to you is a an amalgamation of an individual.
• 29:35
  This person was usually a white female from Eastern Kentucky.
• 29:40
  Eastern Kentucky is for Lyndon Johnson kicked off the war on
• 29:43
  poverty in Martin County, Kentucky back in 1965.
• 29:47
  There's a picture of him sitting in a a Woodhouse with a tin roof
• 29:54
  and a dirt floor. And that was at home and not
• 29:57
  that long ago, just about 60 years.
• 30:00
  This woman from East Kentucky would be somewhere between the
• 30:03
  ages of 45 and 70. She would have worked like a dog
• 30:07
  her whole life. And usually, you know, entry
• 30:10
  level service jobs, a a cashier or a night manager at a
• 30:16
  convenience store, or if she was at Walmart, some equivalent
• 30:20
  position. She would have had a family.
• 30:24
  Her husband might have worked in the mines, was either disabled
• 30:28
  or chronically unemployed because there's not much there
• 30:31
  to put people to work. Then we give a a really a living
• 30:35
  wage. This woman would have made maybe
• 30:38
  work for, you know, a dozen or more different employers, but
• 30:42
  with ever out any substantial break in her work life.
• 30:46
  And then she would be at work and she would have picked up a
• 30:50
  box or she would have had a slip and fall.
• 30:53
  It would have produced, you know, there would have been an
• 30:55
  accident that would have produced an injury that should
• 30:57
  have been recoverable. But after she had it, she would
• 31:02
  have made her way either to a Doctor Who usually referred her
• 31:06
  to a lawyer or vice versa. By the time this woman got to me
• 31:11
  she would have had every diagnostic study that can be
• 31:15
  performed of her under the skin performed.
• 31:18
  CT scans, MRI scans, nerve conduction studies, whole body
• 31:26
  CT scans to understand what was the nature of what this lady
• 31:30
  would have described as an all-encompassing global head to
• 31:35
  toe debilitating pain that she could not overcome.
• 31:40
  She would inevitably be given high paired opioid medication
• 31:47
  combined with high-powered psychotropic medication, either
• 31:51
  antidepressants, anti anxieties, or a combination of both.
• 31:55
  When I would come and take this lady's deposition, she may have
• 31:59
  already already have undergone a surgery by a Doctor Who found
• 32:02
  some sort of minimal finding on the scan that justified opening
• 32:06
  her up, cutting on her spine, perhaps fusing her bones
• 32:09
  together. And this is worth noting.
• 32:13
  I never saw a successful surgery.
• 32:16
  Every person who underwent a surgery, if they were not
• 32:19
  endorsing total disability beforehand, they were endorsing
• 32:23
  it on the other hand. And yet despite these judges who
• 32:26
  would sit on these cases and heard hundreds of times people
• 32:29
  say, oh, well, my back hurt and I went and I got a fusion and
• 32:32
  now I really can't do anything. They just kept sniping those
• 32:35
  awards through over and over and over again, It's called.
• 32:38
  So when I would go and take this lady's deposition, I was never
• 32:43
  mean. I would always be very patient
• 32:46
  and I would want to hear him to understand as much as she would
• 32:49
  be willing to tell me on her own, I would get her to discuss
• 32:53
  in full extent the nature of her work history, you know, the kind
• 32:58
  of life she had had. Get her full personal background
• 33:01
  and then have her talk about her work accident.
• 33:03
  When she was done, I would ask her to tell me about all of her
• 33:07
  pain symptoms. And it was consistently this
• 33:10
  description of a globalized debilitate and pain which
• 33:15
  prevented her from hardly being able to put her clothes on.
• 33:19
  And then I would take out the results of her diagnostic
• 33:22
  studies and I would go through every single one.
• 33:25
  And I would just very patiently and persistently point out that
• 33:32
  none of her radio graphic studies, none of her diagnostic
• 33:37
  evaluations revealed the existence of any physical
• 33:42
  pathology which could possibly explain the unbelievable extent
• 33:47
  of her endorsed and described physical pain and ability.
• 33:52
  When I would make this observation, this woman would
• 33:55
  inevitably start to cry and she would look at me and she would
• 34:00
  say, Mr. Hubbard, I ain't a doctor.
• 34:05
  The only thing I can tell you is from the time I open my eyes of
• 34:09
  the morning until the time I lay down at night, I hurt from the
• 34:13
  top of my head to the bottom of my feet.
• 34:16
  And it is all I can do to make myself get up out of the bed and
• 34:21
  make myself a cup of coffee every single day.
• 34:25
  Now, Brett, as a young logger, you know, you're trying to be
• 34:27
  very skeptical and to aggressively defend your clients
• 34:31
  interests. And probably the first, you
• 34:36
  know, 2530, forty times I saw this.
• 34:39
  I thought it was just part of the performance preparation that
• 34:43
  the lawyer had given to make sure that the tears were turned
• 34:46
  on at the right strategic time in my question.
• 34:48
  I didn't believe it, but I saw this for years and I saw it
• 34:54
  across different lawyers offices where it wasn't just the volume
• 34:59
  practitioner who had made a trade in, in in doing this.
• 35:03
  It were it was lawyers that I knew were people of integrity
• 35:07
  who were not here to run a volume business, who were there
• 35:10
  to earnestly and sincerely pursue the very best outcome for
• 35:14
  their client. And I saw it so much.
• 35:16
  I just was like, you know, why is this such a ubiquitous
• 35:21
  dynamic in this caseload? And one day I can remember
• 35:24
  driving down the road and it was just like a light bulb went off.
• 35:29
  And I thought, you know, these women are truly, genuinely in
• 35:35
  pain. They feel it, but it's not their
• 35:39
  work accident. What I am seeing is a human
• 35:43
  being who has come to the total end of any hope for a life that
• 35:50
  resembles a life of dignity and autonomy and anything that would
• 35:56
  resemble just a basic level of prosperity that they can rest
• 36:00
  with this. These women's backs
• 36:05
  psychologically, spiritually have been broken.
• 36:10
  And what I am seeing is the physical manifestation of pain
• 36:14
  and ability that comes from a broken hearted, broken soul
• 36:18
  human being who cannot take any more of the punishment of the
• 36:22
  life they're having to live. And the response of our systems
• 36:26
  to that was to advertise lawyers, to advertise pain
• 36:32
  management clinics, advertise prescription drugs, and to
• 36:36
  answer their reality with lawsuits, surgeries and pain
• 36:41
  clinics. And if they weren't disabled
• 36:44
  when they entered into that system, they were disabled when
• 36:47
  they came out. And that was kind of the start
• 36:50
  of a lesson that I saw that that that was given to me hundreds of
• 36:55
  times over 16 years. The same repetitious pattern
• 37:00
  over and over and over again of what is supposed to be a legal
• 37:05
  slash justice system operating as a political patronage system.
• 37:10
  Not offering anything that is a genuine, true solution that is
• 37:13
  restorative of this individual's life, but rather something that
• 37:17
  is far more exploitive, far more predacious, and ends up with a
• 37:21
  ruined and broken human being and the end of the process that
• 37:26
  was the Lego career. Wow, that is super tragic and
• 37:31
  super infuriating and and I can see exactly how you're forged in
• 37:36
  the fire with that. For what your grandfather was
• 37:40
  telling you, which is I'm going to save, I'm going to say people
• 37:44
  that are broken like this. What was the moment that led to
• 37:47
  the introduction of your knowledge of ibogaine?
• 37:51
  You probably didn't even know about it at that point in your
• 37:55
  life. No.
• 37:56
  I I didn't know about it personally until recently even
• 37:59
  though I'm very pro psychedelic. I didn't even know it existed
• 38:04
  until maybe two years ago. So I'll give you kind of an
• 38:07
  abbreviated overview of my state government service that followed
• 38:10
  legal practice. I rotated out of representing
• 38:14
  those companies and workers compensation defense and I had a
• 38:17
  series of leadership positions in Kentucky State government.
• 38:21
  I led the state Social Security Disability system is child
• 38:24
  support enforcement system. I let a law enforcement agency
• 38:27
  called the Office of Medicaid Fraud and Abuse Control, which
• 38:30
  had as its job the investigation and prosecution of medical
• 38:35
  providers on the state's Medicaid system.
• 38:37
  Within that role, I had a caseload made-up of medically
• 38:42
  assisted treatment providers who were essentially charging
• 38:45
  Medicaid patients cash off the books in exchange for what were
• 38:50
  maximum dosage, maximum duration prescriptions of Suboxone or
• 38:56
  what's generically known as buprenorphine.
• 38:59
  Buprenorphine is the evidence based practice medication for
• 39:04
  the treatment of opioid dependency.
• 39:06
  It is an opioid with which to treat opioid.
• 39:11
  And I was receiving telephone calls from local officials all
• 39:14
  across the state saying our communities are flooded with
• 39:16
  these Suboxone pills. These doctors don't even bother
• 39:19
  to come into the clinic. They're just writing
• 39:21
  prescriptions right and left, and we're flooded with this.
• 39:25
  When I ran the state Social Security disability system, I
• 39:29
  was tasked with understanding by Kentucky with second only to
• 39:32
  West Virginia in terms of the percentage of its adult
• 39:35
  population getting this benefit. And I learned that 95% of people
• 39:41
  who go on to Social Security disability never come off.
• 39:44
  That is their life and that's where they stay.
• 39:47
  And we're talking about a life that doesn't resemble
• 39:49
  prosperity. We're talking about a
• 39:51
  subsistence hand to mouth check that comes with a state provided
• 39:56
  and federally funded medical card.
• 39:58
  That's your life and you likely have a housing subsidy if you
• 40:02
  don't own something or food stamps to kind of supplement
• 40:05
  that income. It is an impoverished existence
• 40:09
  that this person who supposedly can't do anything anymore is
• 40:12
  going to live if that's their safety net.
• 40:15
  So when I ran that system within my first month on the job, we
• 40:20
  had a administrator from the Social Security Administration
• 40:24
  who oversaw the state of Kentucky's state employee
• 40:27
  workforce that ran this come in and pay what's called the Home
• 40:30
  Office visit. I wish I had had a recording on
• 40:36
  to hear what was said right off the bat.
• 40:41
  This individual began the meeting with the top management
• 40:44
  team by saying folks, claims are down and that's bad because
• 40:50
  claims equal budget. And what I came to understand
• 40:54
  was that the Social Security Administration had as its
• 40:58
  primary preoccupation and concern it's own acquisition of
• 41:02
  budgetary appropriation from the federal government.
• 41:05
  And the surest way to do that was to make sure that the
• 41:07
  program grew and grew and grew as much as possible.
• 41:12
  So the governor of Kentucky at the time asked that we do what
• 41:16
  no state had ever done before, and that was to undertake a
• 41:19
  study to understand what was driving this program's growth.
• 41:23
  And we took a number of different statistical
• 41:25
  measurements. I assembled a team of policy
• 41:28
  experts. And just to kind of, and I, and
• 41:30
  I promise we'll get to Abergain here just as a minute because
• 41:32
  this is a springboard right into it.
• 41:36
  Kentucky's population between 1980 and 2015 grew 20%
• 41:41
  enrollment and the Social Security Disability program grew
• 41:45
  249%. Childhood enrollment in that
• 41:48
  program grew 449%. The issuance of opioid
• 41:53
  prescriptions on a per capita basis to every Social Security
• 41:58
  disability recipient in Kentucky grew 210% / 15 years, from 68
• 42:04
  doses per recipient to 168. The issuance of habituate and
• 42:10
  psychotropic medication to children grew 168% separately
• 42:17
  from let's see, what was that? It was 275 psychotropic pills
• 42:24
  per Social Security disability child up to 457 her Social
• 42:29
  Security disability child. Massive government systems are
• 42:37
  enthroned upon the helplessness of powerless people.
• 42:41
  They can modify problems that they are supposed to solve by
• 42:44
  monetizing sustained human misery.
• 42:47
  And this was Exhibit A for that reality.
• 42:51
  Because of the reputation that had kind of been established as
• 42:54
  no nonsense, get it done, public servant.
• 42:57
  I was asked to be the first chairman of the Kentucky Opioid
• 43:00
  Commission to stand the Commission up and to get it
• 43:03
  operating. And its job was to distribute
• 43:06
  and oversee the distribution of about $1 billion in settlement
• 43:10
  funds that would be used to combat the opioid epidemic at
• 43:14
  home. And Kentucky is where it began.
• 43:17
  I was asked what the Commission needed to achieve and I named
• 43:20
  some priorities and I said, look, our existing treatment
• 43:24
  options are opioids with which to treat opioids or abstinence
• 43:28
  based programs. They have unacceptably mediocre
• 43:31
  levels of success. We need to foster a therapeutic
• 43:35
  breakthrough for the treatment of opioid dependency.
• 43:38
  I come from a family that has a wicked generational relationship
• 43:43
  with alcohol, going all the way back to all of my great
• 43:46
  grandfathers. In 2018, I read in Scientific
• 43:51
  American that there had been a remarkable small observational
• 43:55
  study at NYU that demonstrated that the psilocybin mushroom had
• 44:02
  a dramatic impact on the reduction of alcohol consumption
• 44:06
  among people who have been Alcoholics for decades.
• 44:10
  This caught my attention. It piqued my curiosity.
• 44:14
  As I continued to follow reports around this really unbelievable
• 44:18
  discovery about what I always pejoratively considered to be a
• 44:22
  bunch of hippie drugs, I became independently curious.
• 44:28
  I happen to have a friend whose sister provided psilocybin
• 44:32
  within the underground, and despite having been president of
• 44:36
  the Teenage Republicans in high school and president of the
• 44:39
  College Republicans in college, I approached my buddy and I said
• 44:44
  I want to learn what this is, and I want to understand it.
• 44:48
  So between 2018 and 2022, when I first took home the Commission
• 44:53
  job, I had a series of psilocybin experiences which
• 44:57
  absolutely persuaded me that plant medicine is of divine
• 45:02
  origin and that they have a very specific role to play with an
• 45:08
  individual and collective human development.
• 45:12
  Had I not had that psilocybin experience or series thereof, I
• 45:16
  would not have picked up the phone in July of 2022, one month
• 45:21
  after I was on the job to reach out to an author, a lady by the
• 45:25
  name of Julia Reibelt. She had written beautifully over
• 45:29
  the course of years about her own individual journey with
• 45:34
  psychedelics and how they had helped her overcome a life of
• 45:40
  miserable treatment resistant depression, anxiety and a near
• 45:43
  fatal eating disorder. On July the 29th of 22, I spoke
• 45:48
  with her and I said, what can you tell me about the world of
• 45:51
  psychedelics and whether there is anything that has an impact
• 45:57
  on opioid dependency? And she said, have you ever
• 46:00
  heard of ibogaine? And I said, no, I have not.
• 46:04
  So July 29th of 2022 was the beginning of what has now
• 46:09
  brought us, almost four years later, to the point that the
• 46:15
  state of Texas adopted a plan that started on a legal pad in
• 46:20
  my dining room table in Lexington, KY.
• 46:23
  As the single largest public investment in psychedelic
• 46:28
  research and medical development in history.
• 46:31
  And the first time that an individual state has ever
• 46:35
  undertaken direct drug development to respond to
• 46:37
  multiple public health crises within its borders that are
• 46:40
  representative of the national reality.
• 46:43
  And that is $50,000,000 to create a public private
• 46:45
  partnership to drive ibogaine through the FDA's drug
• 46:48
  development process to conclusion.
• 46:51
  Yeah. Which is, which is incredible.
• 46:54
  And you know, no one could have predicted it would be scripted
• 47:00
  this way that I'm so happy that it has been scripted this way.
• 47:04
  You know, I mean, I had, I had dinner with Governor Perry when
• 47:09
  he was when he was our governor, you know, at, at the governor's
• 47:14
  mansion sitting right next to him.
• 47:17
  I just would have never guessed, you know, that night that like
• 47:20
  you Fast forward that he'd be at our house with you talking about
• 47:25
  the transformational aspect of ibogaine to save these vets.
• 47:32
  And, you know, that night you and him gave such passionate
• 47:36
  speeches. I mean, it was just really,
• 47:39
  really inspiring to everybody there and and, you know, raised
• 47:43
  raised some significant money and, you know, it LED eventually
• 47:47
  to Deborah and I supporting with some friends that that were
• 47:53
  really moved by that to save some hopefully save, you know,
• 47:57
  hopefully we know that this works most of the time.
• 47:59
  Some IDF, that's who. And Israel went through the
• 48:03
  horror of Hamas's attack on Israel October 7th with just
• 48:07
  unspeakable horrors. You know, I'm, I'm not, I'm
• 48:10
  Jewish and and I never even wondered watch any of the videos
• 48:15
  of what happened, but I read enough to have nightmares for a
• 48:19
  couple of months just, yeah, just just really unspeakable
• 48:24
  horrors. But you know, the, the fact that
• 48:27
  there is this plant that grows in Gabon, Africa that has been
• 48:35
  used for thousands of years is my understanding.
• 48:39
  I mean, maybe that's, is that right, thousands of years.
• 48:41
  That is my understanding as well.
• 48:43
  For for as long for longer than certainly the United States has
• 48:48
  been around, and longer than anyone can find in a written
• 48:52
  record. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 48:53
  And I had a, you know, Brian Marescu on the podcast for
• 48:56
  episode 48. He's the author of The
• 48:58
  Immortality Key and the Evidence.
• 49:02
  He was like a Indiana Jones professor, like going then
• 49:05
  spelunking and the Vatican and, and, and really trying to find
• 49:11
  what was in the magical chalice in the temple that helped spark
• 49:17
  religion and these mystical experiences.
• 49:21
  And they found that there was ergot in it.
• 49:23
  You know which, which is how you derive LSD.
• 49:26
  That's one way to derive LSD. And, and, and so it seems like,
• 49:31
  you know, divine connection, you know, spiritual connection has
• 49:36
  been happening with humanity for a long, long time, Typically an
• 49:41
  indigenous cultures with, with these plants, which is, which is
• 49:48
  fascinating. So this, and you know, his book
• 49:51
  covers how then the Catholic Church really tried to demonize
• 49:55
  those, those indigenous cultures because they want to control.
• 50:00
  This is what you need to think about God and heaven and
• 50:03
  etcetera versus a direct communion.
• 50:07
  So we we talked about that a lot on that, that episode.
• 50:09
  It's fantastic book. But I mean, it's it's it's
• 50:14
  really fascinating that, you know, God, you know, this, this,
• 50:21
  this, you know, mother guy, however he want to refer to
• 50:24
  this, this force that loves us all has provided us with a plant
• 50:29
  that is kind of a reset button on people's lives when they're
• 50:34
  really, really suffering. That's just incredible to think
• 50:37
  about. And and you when did you first
• 50:42
  start to see it actually transform, you know, either or
• 50:46
  void a Dicks or veterans. You know, the, the, at least
• 50:51
  with Governor Perry, I know that he's been primarily focused on
• 50:54
  vets and it's saving their lives from, you know, from really
• 51:01
  suicidal thoughts. You know.
• 51:05
  But but what was? What was the moment for you
• 51:07
  where you first actually saw it transform someone?
• 51:11
  Well, I've got to see it in real live action.
• 51:16
  When I traveled to one of the clinics in Mexico in November of
• 51:20
  23 to receive the Abigail Experience, I had been convinced
• 51:26
  from the time that I decided to go public with this initiative
• 51:30
  in Kentucky. Then if I were going to advocate
• 51:33
  for it, the only way I could properly do it, especially in
• 51:36
  light of the opposition and the fear mongering that was
• 51:41
  generated by that opposition, was to go and do it and to be
• 51:45
  able to understand, at least have it operate and, and, and
• 51:49
  work on me. I really didn't know the veteran
• 51:55
  reality first. My first exposure was through
• 51:59
  the voice and experience of people who had had terminal
• 52:02
  cases of opioid dependency. The first person I spoke with
• 52:07
  who shared their Abigail experience was a young woman by
• 52:10
  the name of Juliana Mulligan, who's currently a licensed
• 52:14
  clinical social worker in New York City.
• 52:17
  She also is a wonderful informational resource for
• 52:21
  people who are looking to receive ibogaine treatment and
• 52:24
  who can point them to the best resources as they exist in
• 52:28
  Mexico, where ibogaine is neither legal nor illegal, but
• 52:33
  within a legal Gray area, there are no uniform standards to
• 52:38
  ensure safety or efficacy for the delivery of of this
• 52:42
  medication. And it is a medicine or a divine
• 52:45
  medicine, of course. And I reached out to her and I
• 52:51
  said, Julia told me to call you and ask you about obligation.
• 52:55
  She told me her story. And then she said, well, I've
• 52:59
  been an opioid addict for about a decade.
• 53:02
  She she was used it all, you know, heroin, fentanyl, all of
• 53:07
  it in and out of every rehab form of rehab you can think of.
• 53:11
  She said tried abstinence programs and she said I went
• 53:16
  underwent medically assisted treatment with Suboxone.
• 53:19
  And she said what they won't tell you about Suboxone is that
• 53:22
  the withdrawal that you will experience if you try to take
• 53:24
  yourself off of it makes heroin seem like a cakewalk when you go
• 53:28
  through that withdrawal. She said it was the most
• 53:31
  horrific thing that she experienced over the course of
• 53:34
  her addiction or cause, we'll call it.
• 53:38
  She said that time she'd been in and out of jail.
• 53:41
  There's a time when she was homeless and that she became so
• 53:45
  fatigued with the life that she was having to laid in the US to
• 53:49
  secure her supply that she went to Colombia to teach English as
• 53:54
  a second language classes. And she said in Colombian they
• 53:58
  have open pharmacy, so you can go in and get whatever you want,
• 54:02
  as much as you want for as long as you want and don't have to
• 54:06
  worry about anybody looking over your shoulder or about to throw
• 54:09
  you in jail. And she said, I'll talk classes
• 54:12
  for about a year and a half and I use as much as I wanted.
• 54:18
  And she said, one day I got up out of bed and just looked in
• 54:21
  the mirror and I knew that I was going to die.
• 54:24
  I knew it. And she explained that she was
• 54:29
  desperate to give herself one more chance to live and to
• 54:32
  overcome it. And she just got on the Internet
• 54:35
  and started looking for, you know, any putting in any search
• 54:39
  term she could think of for a treatment for opioid dependency
• 54:43
  that was not what she had already been through.
• 54:46
  And this word abagaine, kept coming up.
• 54:51
  She said that she found a provider in Guatemala.
• 54:55
  And I'm just a regular individual.
• 54:58
  But then a word looking desperately found a contact,
• 55:02
  made contact and she said, what I didn't know was that ibogaine
• 55:06
  comes with a very specific risk to the heart.
• 55:11
  It can be cardio toxic. So if you give somebody too
• 55:14
  much, it can stop their heart. And she said that she
• 55:18
  unfortunately made her way to a practitioner in Guatemala who
• 55:23
  basically didn't know what they were doing, and they gave her
• 55:26
  twice the amount she should have received.
• 55:29
  And over the course of the next two days, she went into cardiac
• 55:33
  arrest 6 times, she said. I remember waking up in the
• 55:41
  intensive care unit of a Guatemalan hospital, and despite
• 55:46
  everything that had happened, when I opened my eyes, I felt
• 55:50
  the best I had ever felt in my life.
• 55:52
  I could tell that my opioid dependency was gone.
• 55:59
  I didn't want it. Not only did I not want it, but
• 56:02
  I never experienced any symptoms of withdrawal.
• 56:05
  And she said that she had spent years being told that she had a
• 56:10
  disease, that she would have this disease for the rest of her
• 56:13
  life. She could never overcome it.
• 56:15
  The best that she could ever hope for was to effectively
• 56:19
  treat it so that perhaps she could be functional.
• 56:21
  And she said, you know, for her, that was very demoralizing.
• 56:26
  She felt as if she had a personal defect that she would
• 56:29
  forever be hobbled by having to carry.
• 56:32
  And she said when she woke up, not only was she physiologically
• 56:36
  restored, but that she felt for the first time in her life in
• 56:42
  control of herself, in ownership of herself.
• 56:47
  And she had faith for the first time that she could have a life
• 56:51
  that would be defined by her choices rather than be driven by
• 56:54
  compulsion. But the most significant part
• 56:57
  for her was what she received by way of a concrete affirmation of
• 57:04
  her human divinity as the child of an eternal Creator whose
• 57:08
  essence is almighty unconditional love.
• 57:12
  And that that Creator had a special purpose to achieve with
• 57:15
  her life. The very lessons taught to me,
• 57:19
  life saving lessons taught to me by my grandfathers in those
• 57:24
  earliest years when I heard her articulate these realities and
• 57:29
  then spoke to dozens of people who had had terminal cases of
• 57:35
  opioid dependency, who endorsed very similar affirmations from
• 57:41
  their ibogaine treatment. I became convinced that we
• 57:45
  needed to give the development of ibogaine as a medication an
• 57:50
  opportunity to succeed in Kentucky.
• 57:53
  Not to replace and to take over an industry, not to become the
• 57:58
  new end all be all straight jacket treatment that everybody
• 58:02
  must matriculate through, but simply an additional therapeutic
• 58:05
  option that people might would choose if they were not being
• 58:09
  properly served by what we already have.
• 58:13
  That led to the announcement in Kentucky on the grounds of the
• 58:16
  state Capitol on May 31st, where we said we're going to explore
• 58:20
  the possibility of using 5% of this settlement money to drive
• 58:25
  ibogaine through the FDA's drug development process to treat
• 58:28
  opioid dependency. The very best of what we have
• 58:31
  has about a 25% success rate at the end of six months.
• 58:35
  We have to do better. And unfortunately, at that time,
• 58:40
  that drove the very pointed and vociferous opposition of current
• 58:46
  Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, as well as what then was the
• 58:51
  leadership of the University of Kentucky's Center for Drug and
• 58:54
  Alcohol Research. An organization which, by virtue
• 58:58
  of its name, you would think would be academically curious
• 59:00
  and and and and willing to engage, but in fact was very
• 59:06
  pointedly opposed to any notion that we would do this.
• 59:10
  Well, you were not going to be stopped And, and, and then how
• 59:14
  did you go from that to finding the home for it in Texas?
• 59:19
  Well, it was kind of a bumpy ride after the Commission
• 59:23
  announcement on May the 31st. You know, when I first took the
• 59:27
  job. Kentucky unfortunately has an
• 59:31
  inglorious history of public corruption that places it in
• 59:33
  Louisiana at kind of the top of the chain when it comes to
• 59:37
  corrupted systems of governance from the state and local levels.
• 59:42
  When I was recruited to do the opioid Commission, my first
• 59:47
  response was this is a very treacherous opportunity.
• 59:51
  There's a lot of vultures who are used to picking the bones of
• 59:53
  opportunity clean on something like this.
• 59:56
  If I'm going to take this job, it will be on the condition that
• 1:00:01
  we make sure that the Commission is accessible to everyday people
• 1:00:06
  and organizations that are in the trenches doing the frontline
• 1:00:09
  work of combatant opioid dependency.
• 1:00:12
  That we run it in a way that is transparent so that anybody who
• 1:00:17
  wants to know where we've sent the money can click on the
• 1:00:20
  interactive map and see where every cent has gone.
• 1:00:23
  And that we do so accountably. We present ourselves to the
• 1:00:26
  people of the state, we hear what it is that they need, and
• 1:00:28
  if we're not doing it right, we be willing to accept their
• 1:00:32
  criticism and redirection as to how we need to do better.
• 1:00:35
  So it was on these terms that the job was accepted.
• 1:00:38
  In keeping with that, I felt it incumbent upon us to have a
• 1:00:44
  public hearing framework where we would make ourselves publicly
• 1:00:48
  available. We would advertise through
• 1:00:50
  media. We would advertise as much as we
• 1:00:51
  could our intent to explore the science, the individual impact,
• 1:00:58
  and then finally, at the request to the University of Kentucky,
• 1:01:02
  whether the FDA would be willing to approve a drug development
• 1:01:05
  trial if we allocated these precious resources for this
• 1:01:08
  purpose. So between July and November, we
• 1:01:14
  conducted 3 very high profile public hearings on those
• 1:01:18
  subjects. This coincided with a statewide
• 1:01:22
  election year in which the guy who appointed me, who was
• 1:01:25
  Kentucky Attorney General, ran for governor unsuccessfully and
• 1:01:29
  was succeeded by a member of the same party.
• 1:01:32
  My boss was a Republican. The guy who was elected to be
• 1:01:34
  the new AG was a Republican. After the new guy was elected, I
• 1:01:38
  reached out and asked for a meeting to discuss with him the
• 1:01:42
  whole rationale of the project. He had been briefed before the
• 1:01:44
  Kentucky announcement, but since then we had received commitments
• 1:01:48
  from drug developers to come into the state and
• 1:01:51
  philanthropist to partner with the state to execute this entire
• 1:01:55
  project. So on December 15th, I was asked
• 1:01:59
  to attend a meeting at the state capitol in Frankfurt at 3:00 PM.
• 1:02:02
  It happened to be a Friday. They should have gave it away
• 1:02:05
  and I walked into what I thought was going to be a very open
• 1:02:10
  minded and collegial discussion about where the project stood
• 1:02:12
  and whether it could move forward.
• 1:02:14
  I took nothing for granted, but was instead met with what I can
• 1:02:18
  only describe as a very malevolent ambush and a demand
• 1:02:22
  that I resign my job for having undertaken this project.
• 1:02:26
  It happened to coincide with the screening of a documentary
• 1:02:29
  called Lamar Odom, My Story at the Muhammad Ali Center for
• 1:02:34
  Peace and Justice in Louisville, KY, where Mr. Odom was going to
• 1:02:38
  present to a primarily African American audience about his own
• 1:02:41
  recovery journey of ibogaine. And keeping with what I believe
• 1:02:44
  to be the racially unified nature of this mission is
• 1:02:48
  necessary if it's going to be successful.
• 1:02:50
  Wow, That's a interesting synchronicity.
• 1:02:52
  That's very, very Celestine prophecy that that was happening
• 1:02:56
  at the same time, Brent. That meeting happened at 3 PMI
• 1:03:02
  walked out at 3:45, crushed. And because this is a very high
• 1:03:06
  profile, you know, public sort of thing, and there was an
• 1:03:10
  expectation that, you know, there, this I'll be handled very
• 1:03:14
  quietly and generically with a resignation letter by the end of
• 1:03:18
  the year. I certainly, you know, I had to
• 1:03:20
  figure out what was going to happen.
• 1:03:22
  The most excruciating part of it was that night in Louisville at
• 1:03:28
  the end of that screening. It was probably 8:30 that night,
• 1:03:32
  just in roughly about 5 hours after I had left that meeting,
• 1:03:36
  watching that audience stand to their feet and ovation at the
• 1:03:42
  prospect that Kentucky could lead the nation in creating this
• 1:03:46
  sort of breakthrough for individuals like Mr. Odom, for
• 1:03:50
  ladies like Miss Mulligan, and for every strata of American
• 1:03:53
  Society that have been devastated by the opioid
• 1:03:56
  epidemic, knowing that it had just been killed.
• 1:04:00
  Wow. Oh my gosh.
• 1:04:02
  Thank goodness, thank God there was a gentleman who followed the
• 1:04:06
  work that I had done in Kentucky by the name of Rex Elsas.
• 1:04:11
  Rex had been a very successful ad producer for Republican
• 1:04:16
  candidates for Congress and Senate across the country as
• 1:04:19
  well as governor's, had participated in some
• 1:04:22
  presidential campaigns. He had very deep connections
• 1:04:26
  within the state of Ohio. His son Reed died tragically of
• 1:04:31
  an opioid overdose after it was actually a fentanyl overdose in
• 1:04:35
  2019 after struggling for a decade with drug addiction.
• 1:04:40
  And Rex had become convinced that had Abigail been available
• 1:04:44
  for his son, he very well may have been able to have a chance
• 1:04:48
  to overcome his dependency. So Rex helped sponsor that
• 1:04:53
  screening with Mr. Odom. I told him in route what had
• 1:04:55
  happened and when I got there he said if I can find a way for to
• 1:05:02
  open doors in the state of Ohio, would you work with her
• 1:05:04
  foundation to try to keep this alive?
• 1:05:06
  I said, Rex, I've put everything I am on the line for this and
• 1:05:10
  everything I'll do anything it takes or I try to keep it alive.
• 1:05:15
  So from January of 24 until May of 24, I worked extensively with
• 1:05:20
  the Reed Foundation, maintained a home in Kentucky, traveled
• 1:05:23
  extensively back and forth to Columbus, OH.
• 1:05:27
  Meeting with state legislators, Meeting with the leaders of
• 1:05:31
  their own opioid Commission. Meeting with members of the
• 1:05:34
  Dewine administration, including Governor Dewine, A gentleman by
• 1:05:38
  the name of Doctor Luan Phan, who is the chair of psychiatry
• 1:05:41
  at Ohio State University. Telling them everything about
• 1:05:45
  I'm a Game. Describing what the project was
• 1:05:47
  in Kentucky and imploring them to give it consideration in
• 1:05:51
  Ohio. They were always very polite.
• 1:05:56
  They were always very engaged in discussion, but there wasn't
• 1:05:59
  much by way of movement. In May of 24, I received
• 1:06:04
  outreach from then Governor Christie Gnome in South Dakota,
• 1:06:07
  who had heard about this. And I flew to Sioux City and met
• 1:06:12
  with her and members of her administration and some of her
• 1:06:15
  political advisors and gave her the whole presentation that I
• 1:06:18
  had given in Kentucky to the Attorney General to persuade him
• 1:06:21
  to do this project. That touched off another two
• 1:06:24
  months of meetings and discussions with her and her
• 1:06:28
  administration and two of the largest health systems in South
• 1:06:31
  Dakota. The thing which really made that
• 1:06:34
  opportunity so exciting was the presence of the Lakota Indian
• 1:06:39
  Tribe, Native tribe, and the fact that the Pine Ridge Native
• 1:06:44
  American Reservation is probably the most impoverished and
• 1:06:47
  decimated by such as dependency in the country.
• 1:06:50
  And in terms of some folks who should be right at the front of
• 1:06:54
  the line to receive this, having that opportunity to plant the
• 1:06:59
  project in South Dakota for that purpose had tremendous appeal.
• 1:07:06
  Toward the end of July, I got a call from her health services
• 1:07:11
  secretary. She said, Brian, I've got some
• 1:07:13
  bad news. We have a ballot measure that
• 1:07:19
  will be on the November election.
• 1:07:21
  This would be November of 24 that will reduce South Dakota
• 1:07:25
  sales tax substantially and we're looking at a minimum
• 1:07:29
  potential deficit of $150 million.
• 1:07:32
  We can't even begin to think of moving forward with the
• 1:07:34
  announcement of $42 million, and certainly not for a project like
• 1:07:38
  this. Wow.
• 1:07:41
  And at this point, I just thought that's.
• 1:07:44
  Just so frustrating, you know, I mean, especially given your
• 1:07:48
  background, this is so frustrating because you've seen
• 1:07:51
  people directly struggling, like really struggling, you know, and
• 1:07:56
  the use of these opioids just going off the charts.
• 1:07:59
  I mean, which which is a well known story right now that to be
• 1:08:04
  up close and personal like that and seeing it.
• 1:08:07
  I don't know what to do now. And it was probably about a week
• 1:08:12
  after that, maybe 10 days, enough for me to worry and have
• 1:08:16
  some sleepless nights and then to feel them.
• 1:08:19
  I got a call from the leaders of some organizations in Texas that
• 1:08:24
  have the advancement of mental health treatment and
• 1:08:27
  improvements within mental health treatment systems.
• 1:08:30
  They reached out to me, a gentleman by the name of Logan
• 1:08:33
  Davidson, an organization called Texans for Greater Mental
• 1:08:36
  Health. They said, hey, we've been
• 1:08:39
  following what you've been doing in Kentucky.
• 1:08:42
  Texas in 2021 passed a $2,000,000 psilocybin research
• 1:08:46
  bill attached to the Baylor College of Medicine.
• 1:08:49
  We think Texas is prime for its next big psychedelic project.
• 1:08:54
  We've got a $16 billion budget surplus in 2025.
• 1:08:59
  Do you have any recommendations as to what we should do?
• 1:09:02
  I said, well, it's Ederson, you ask, because I sure do.
• 1:09:07
  And I laid out what I had tried to do in Kentucky and said I
• 1:09:11
  think Texas needs to finish the job.
• 1:09:13
  I've again there. And they said, well, we'll go
• 1:09:16
  and talk to a couple of state legislators, give us about a
• 1:09:19
  week and we'll get back to you. I said, OK, now Brett, I really
• 1:09:23
  know you people all the time want their legislature to do
• 1:09:26
  something. And I had no idea what the lay
• 1:09:28
  of the landscape was here. A shy from the fact that
• 1:09:31
  Governor Perry, who had been introduced to me in June of 23,
• 1:09:34
  was a supporter of Abagaine. He had generously recorded a
• 1:09:39
  support video for my Commission back in that was played in
• 1:09:43
  September of 23. And he had drafted and signed on
• 1:09:49
  to an op-ed that appeared in Newsweek magazine along with
• 1:09:52
  Morgan and Marcus Luttrell and Dakota Meyer, who's a
• 1:09:55
  Congressional Medal of Honor winner in Kentucky native
• 1:09:58
  endorsing the Kentucky effort. And that was in Newsweek
• 1:10:01
  magazine in October of 23, just a little over a month before I
• 1:10:05
  was asked to to leave. So about a week later, I get a
• 1:10:10
  request for another call. And they said, hey, we've talked
• 1:10:13
  to some legislators and we think we got some sponsors.
• 1:10:16
  Would you be willing to help us do this?
• 1:10:19
  And so, well, I've got to make a phone call and I'll get back to
• 1:10:21
  you. I reached out to Governor Perry
• 1:10:24
  and I said, hey, I know you folks in Texas take great pride
• 1:10:29
  in who you are and I'm not from there, but I think there's an
• 1:10:34
  opportunity. And I described for him what it
• 1:10:36
  was. And I said, I think we can.
• 1:10:39
  I think we can get this Kentucky plant salvage to maybe re
• 1:10:42
  platform it right there in your back in your front yard.
• 1:10:44
  What do you think? So he discussed how he came to
• 1:10:48
  know Ivan Game, his own personal conviction that when it came to
• 1:10:52
  what he would do with the rest of his life, that there was
• 1:10:55
  nothing more important he could do than to try to bring it into
• 1:10:58
  medical reality within the United States.
• 1:11:01
  And he said, you know, I don't want to put anything more you on
• 1:11:04
  you than what you want to take. But if you're willing to come
• 1:11:08
  down here and, you know, be a president as much as possible,
• 1:11:12
  I'll be happy to coach the team if you'll be the quarterback and
• 1:11:15
  throw the ball down the field. And I said there's nothing I'd
• 1:11:18
  enjoy. More.
• 1:11:19
  Oh my gosh, that's beautiful. So that was how the entire Texas
• 1:11:24
  campaign started. And thanks to some wonderful
• 1:11:30
  U.S. special Forces veterans, Veterans who are not Special
• 1:11:34
  Forces veteran groups. Texas for greater mental health.
• 1:11:37
  My dear friend Logan Davidson, who was a suffering brother.
• 1:11:41
  Right shoulder to shoulder through every worry, anxiety and
• 1:11:44
  scrape on the knee that we got. We conducted A blistering pedal
• 1:11:51
  to the metal six month introduction, education and
• 1:11:57
  persuasion campaign of 188 Texas legislators, 181 of whom between
• 1:12:06
  the House and the Senate voted to approve this plan fully
• 1:12:11
  funded with $50 million at the end of the Texas Legislative
• 1:12:15
  session of 2025. Approved by Lieutenant Governor
• 1:12:20
  Dan Patrick, who was the toughest Nutcracker the bunch
• 1:12:25
  after a meeting I had with him on May the 14th and then signed
• 1:12:29
  by Governor Abbott on June the 9th of 2025.
• 1:12:32
  Incredible. It really incredible.
• 1:12:34
  And you know, Logan's been over to our home, but I actually did
• 1:12:38
  not know he's he's he's very rooted in humility.
• 1:12:41
  Like you. I did not know that he was the
• 1:12:44
  one that reached out to you to actually get this done.
• 1:12:47
  That is pretty, pretty damn cool.
• 1:12:49
  He was my right hand throughout the entire process.
• 1:12:54
  He and gentleman by the name of Louis Sanchez, they were able to
• 1:12:59
  get the appointments, get me on the calendar, get me in front of
• 1:13:02
  the folks who need to be talked to and persuaded.
• 1:13:05
  There was a beautiful group of Texans who so own families had
• 1:13:09
  been impacted by substance and alcohol dependency issues.
• 1:13:13
  Who as they learn what I've again can do, just said let us
• 1:13:17
  know who you need to talk to, when you need to talk to him,
• 1:13:22
  where we need to be, who we've got to make a call to.
• 1:13:26
  Let us know whatever you need, whenever you need it.
• 1:13:29
  And we will be there to make it happen.
• 1:13:31
  And it was a full court Press of aligned hearts and minds that
• 1:13:35
  wanted to see the improvement of the human condition for those
• 1:13:39
  who are at the very bottom of the existence barrel.
• 1:13:43
  And the fact that we pulled this off in Texas is what I hope will
• 1:13:47
  be just the beginning of a fundamental transformation that
• 1:13:51
  will play out at scale, not just within the American Medical
• 1:13:54
  system, but within American Society more broadly.
• 1:13:58
  Well, as someone who was actually born here in Austin,
• 1:14:02
  when I was born, it was the size of Anchorage, AK.
• 1:14:05
  Oh gosh, it was a very small town.
• 1:14:07
  It was a Willie Nelson was the biggest thing going on here.
• 1:14:10
  Those are the first concert I saw him when I was like 4 years
• 1:14:13
  old. And really the ethos of Austin,
• 1:14:18
  it's really well captured in the Dow Willie, which he wrote that
• 1:14:21
  book with. Turt Pipkin, who's a friend of
• 1:14:23
  mine. We're big supporters of his
• 1:14:26
  initiative in Kenya alongside his wife to build high schools
• 1:14:30
  and areas that didn't have them called the Nobility project.
• 1:14:35
  But the, the, the Dow of Willy like is very strong.
• 1:14:39
  And, you know, one thing that is really special about Willie
• 1:14:43
  Nelson, among many things, he's really the embodiment of love is
• 1:14:47
  he would always say, you know, it doesn't matter if you're
• 1:14:49
  Republican or Democrat. We just get together and talk
• 1:14:52
  about all the things we have in common and like, you know, get
• 1:14:55
  after it and, you know, work together and have a beer, you
• 1:14:58
  know, and that's, that's, that's, that's always been deep
• 1:15:02
  in the Austin ethos. And you know, what you feel
• 1:15:05
  here, you know, during South by Southwest or other events is, is
• 1:15:11
  really, you know, that embodiment of people saying,
• 1:15:15
  let's really, let's really work together, which is what humanity
• 1:15:19
  needs at large, you know, and what we need in America and, and
• 1:15:23
  what we need to ultimately unify around the most important
• 1:15:30
  development in human history, which is this rise of AI,
• 1:15:35
  quantum computing, robotics, brain computer interfaces and
• 1:15:38
  this exponential to exponential curves we're on which humanity
• 1:15:42
  is prioritized with now $7 trillion of money towards the
• 1:15:48
  development of AGI, artificial general intelligence, which can
• 1:15:52
  allow for all types of amazing medical breakthroughs, energy
• 1:15:56
  breakthroughs, you, you name it, to create a world of abundance
• 1:16:00
  for everyone. If we choose it right, If we, if
• 1:16:03
  we actually choose that with our free will.
• 1:16:06
  So this moment with AI, quantum computing, robotics, brand new
• 1:16:12
  computer interfaces, you know what, what I've seen in in my
• 1:16:18
  journeys is this is the penultimate for humanity to make
• 1:16:23
  a fateful choice to allow love, to conquer fear so that together
• 1:16:30
  we can rise and create abundance on this beautiful planet that
• 1:16:36
  you know, how do you, how do you see this moment?
• 1:16:39
  Well, there are certainly plenty of reason to be optimistic in
• 1:16:42
  terms of potential capacity to create abundance for all.
• 1:16:47
  But we have to be very we've got to be very candid about where we
• 1:16:52
  find ourselves as a society. Over the past 30 years, America
• 1:16:59
  has experienced the institutional criminality of
• 1:17:03
  systems that are supposed to serve and protect us, but that
• 1:17:06
  have instead produced the opioid epidemic, which is the single
• 1:17:13
  gravest engineered humanitarian catastrophe to play out within
• 1:17:17
  our borders since the end of the 19th century.
• 1:17:21
  The 2008 financial crisis, which cost millions of Americans their
• 1:17:26
  claim to the American dream and then sent them the bill for the
• 1:17:30
  expense of their dispossession, and then 25 years of unremittant
• 1:17:36
  warfare, which has cost exponentially more service
• 1:17:39
  member lives here at home by suicide that have been lost on
• 1:17:43
  battlefields abroad. Alexis de Tocqueville is known
• 1:17:46
  for democracy in America. He's lesser known for a book
• 1:17:50
  that is, in my opinion, of equal relevance to today, and it's
• 1:17:54
  called A History of the Ancient Regime.
• 1:17:56
  And it is about the conditions that prevailed in France before,
• 1:18:00
  during and after the French Revolution.
• 1:18:04
  And when we look at what de Tocqueville has to say about
• 1:18:09
  France prior to 1789 and the French Revolution, the parallels
• 1:18:14
  between it and the United States are eerie.
• 1:18:18
  Not because of any defect within our society.
• 1:18:21
  We live within the most beautifully dynamic
• 1:18:24
  multicultural society that has ever existed.
• 1:18:28
  Unfortunately, power, especially the power of officialdom, is the
• 1:18:35
  greatest criminal that we have among us.
• 1:18:39
  In pre revolutionary France, the government ruthlessly imposed
• 1:18:45
  its burdens, brutally extracted its costs and ravenously
• 1:18:52
  consumed the future of its people.
• 1:18:55
  That should sound familiar, because if it doesn't, then only
• 1:19:00
  thing need happen is go through a tour of everyday middle and
• 1:19:06
  small town America and look and and and feel where people are as
• 1:19:12
  measured by those metrics we talked about at the beginning of
• 1:19:15
  this podcast. If we're going to have this
• 1:19:18
  future of abundance, we have got to.
• 1:19:21
  Clear the rot out of the. People's Temple, and that is the
• 1:19:26
  civic system that is going to have to be competent and honest
• 1:19:33
  in order to help properly shepherd this future
• 1:19:35
  transformation as you see it. I completely agree with you and
• 1:19:40
  you know, one of the chapters in in in the book that I'm coming
• 1:19:44
  out with is on geopolitics and you know, these technologies.
• 1:19:49
  It is God working through us as the way it's it's come to me and
• 1:19:55
  we're the hands and it's it's a forcing function moment.
• 1:20:00
  You know, one, one thing that's difficult to talk about, which
• 1:20:04
  is which is an unfortunate history of the country is, you
• 1:20:08
  know, this country had slaves. A lot of places in the world had
• 1:20:11
  slaves and some some places still have slaves in the world.
• 1:20:15
  And it helped bootstrap capitalism prior to the age of
• 1:20:20
  machines and then the industrial revolution led to.
• 1:20:25
  That practice being unmasked for what it was, whereas an other,
• 1:20:30
  you know, you know, treating people as subhuman.
• 1:20:34
  And that led to this moment where that practice was no
• 1:20:40
  longer allowed. And obviously we had,
• 1:20:44
  unfortunately, a civil war to get to that point.
• 1:20:49
  And I think that this, this, this moment for humanity, the
• 1:20:54
  way it's going to go down, it's, it's murky, right?
• 1:20:57
  In terms of I wrote a science fiction novella, The Lattice,
• 1:21:01
  which I gave you today, which is a positive way of the way it
• 1:21:05
  could go down, which the protagonist, Dr. Alexander Bliss
• 1:21:10
  has this audacious idea to hook up everybody from psychonauts to
• 1:21:16
  spiritual teachers, you know, spiritual masters like the Dalai
• 1:21:19
  Lama, deep meditators, etcetera, to these interfaces to find what
• 1:21:24
  is the commonality in their experience.
• 1:21:26
  And they find that our actual reality is deeply rooted in love
• 1:21:30
  and connectedness. And we've all anybody that's had
• 1:21:35
  a a very intentional psychedelic experience.
• 1:21:39
  I'm not talking about parties or but you know, you go and you go
• 1:21:43
  with great intentionality usually finds that that's the
• 1:21:46
  reality that we're actually in. You know, John Mackey wrote
• 1:21:49
  about it in the first chapter of his book, The whole Story, that
• 1:21:53
  that's what got him over the fear of starting Whole Foods.
• 1:21:57
  He was on episode 30 of this podcast.
• 1:22:01
  And that's a positive way that could happen.
• 1:22:05
  But I think the way it's going to going to go down is that as
• 1:22:08
  these technologies manifest and we are manifesting them, but
• 1:22:12
  again, we're the hands, we're going to be able to see what
• 1:22:16
  abundance looks like. We're going to be able to see a
• 1:22:19
  future and this kind of all going to happen the next 10 to
• 1:22:21
  15 years of energy that's so abundant from the sun.
• 1:22:28
  You know, 18 seconds of the sun's rays, if we could just
• 1:22:31
  capture them through material science breakthrough would power
• 1:22:33
  the world's energy needs for over a year.
• 1:22:35
  You can desalinate everywhere in the world if you have abundant
• 1:22:39
  energy. You know, places like Chad, you
• 1:22:42
  know, we, we have, we have real problems here at home with,
• 1:22:46
  with, with, with America. As you pointed out, those are
• 1:22:49
  very real problems. Our GDP here is around $86,000 a
• 1:22:54
  person. We're the richest country in the
• 1:22:56
  world. Chad, it's $660 a person.
• 1:22:59
  And my book starts out with the personification of this Uber
• 1:23:04
  driver that picked me up. You're about to have an Uber
• 1:23:06
  driver pick you up here. And he was, he was from Chad.
• 1:23:10
  I didn't know anything about Chad, this country in Africa,
• 1:23:15
  I'm using Chachi PT to find out about it.
• 1:23:17
  I was, we, we both lit up, you know, we were just meant to
• 1:23:21
  really get to know each other. And I'm learning about it and
• 1:23:25
  I'm like, what does it feel like in a country with $660 GDP a
• 1:23:29
  person, you don't have stable electricity, you don't have
• 1:23:31
  clean water, you don't food, healthcare, etcetera.
• 1:23:35
  You know, the abundance we have here, you just, and not
• 1:23:38
  everybody here has abundance, of course, but but the abundance we
• 1:23:41
  have here is unimaginable in a place like Chad.
• 1:23:46
  And so I think what's going to happen here and the way to save
• 1:23:50
  a place like Chad is through robots and this acceleration,
• 1:23:55
  because we've got to get to a point where the cost of
• 1:23:57
  providing things goes way, way, way down.
• 1:24:00
  And and that is what this acceleration is going to lead
• 1:24:04
  to. But I think I think it's going
• 1:24:07
  to be us glimpsing it together and saying as humanity, let's
• 1:24:11
  choose that. And and that does mean that
• 1:24:15
  power structures are going to change.
• 1:24:16
  They have to change, they have to change.
• 1:24:19
  And so it's going to be bottoms up pressure and it's going to be
• 1:24:22
  tops down. And you know, think about India
• 1:24:24
  pre Gandhi, it was 15,000 British that were trying to
• 1:24:29
  trying to control them and through nonviolence.
• 1:24:32
  Gandhi, it was just like neo and the matrix.
• 1:24:34
  No, we're not going to take this.
• 1:24:35
  We are going to change the situation.
• 1:24:38
  And I think humanity is going to demand it.
• 1:24:41
  And I think the leaders and these power structures which,
• 1:24:46
  which focus on oppression and putting profits over people,
• 1:24:50
  whether that's corporations or government, are going to have to
• 1:24:55
  change. They're they're going to be
• 1:24:57
  forced to change. And it's it's going to be it's
• 1:25:01
  going to be a very, very interesting, you know, place to,
• 1:25:06
  I mean, it's going to be very interesting to see this play
• 1:25:08
  out. And that's that's why I'm
• 1:25:10
  putting all out there with this project with the book.
• 1:25:12
  It's like trying to help humanity have a hardship so that
• 1:25:16
  we allow love to conquer, fear, collectively unify and make it
• 1:25:21
  to that place where we're going to have heaven on earth.
• 1:25:24
  Well, this gets into the importance of the advancement of
• 1:25:28
  plant medicine broadly and abidine specifically.
• 1:25:33
  If we are nihilist, if we think this is all just a random
• 1:25:37
  accident of astrophysics, it makes the achievement of the
• 1:25:41
  future that you reference much more difficult to achieve within
• 1:25:45
  the minds and hearts of people who think that this has no
• 1:25:48
  higher purpose than immediate physical indulgence and comfort.
• 1:25:52
  If we have the opportunity to platform, for instance, ibogaine
• 1:25:57
  as a breakthrough therapeutic in the most existential crises we
• 1:26:02
  have in front of us as American Society, and those are the twin
• 1:26:06
  crises of addiction and trauma that are in existence at scale,
• 1:26:11
  then we offer up an opportunity for individuals to understand
• 1:26:15
  concretely, individually, persuasively, how they are
• 1:26:21
  sacred, uniquely sacred, and how they are the ultimate expression
• 1:26:30
  of that benevolent love that our eternal Creator has at the very
• 1:26:35
  heart of the Creator's essence. And into that, that's absolutely
• 1:26:40
  right. You can hear something, you can
• 1:26:43
  agree something and you can believe it.
• 1:26:46
  It's a whole order of magnitude different to know it, yeah.
• 1:26:50
  That's right. And thank God that these plants
• 1:26:53
  have been put here so that if we choose to know who we really
• 1:26:57
  are, we can have that opportunity.
• 1:27:00
  There's a tremendous amount of ferment, I think, not just
• 1:27:06
  within the United States, but but globally, where there is a
• 1:27:09
  recognition of the dire need for a fundamental shift to sword, a
• 1:27:15
  collective spiritual recognition of the sacredness of the human
• 1:27:18
  experience. And I hope and pray that
• 1:27:20
  Governor Perry and I will be good and faithful servants, have
• 1:27:25
  that opportunity as it continues to emerge, not just through
• 1:27:29
  volitional engagement, but by necessity in order to achieve
• 1:27:33
  the future that you can identify as possible.
• 1:27:36
  Yeah, Yeah. That's, that's exactly right.
• 1:27:38
  And that's that's why, you know, I've kind of joked around, but
• 1:27:42
  it's a very serious subject that, you know, you know,
• 1:27:47
  Ghostbusters, which came out in 1984, they always said don't
• 1:27:49
  cross the streams. And this podcast has crossed all
• 1:27:53
  the streams. And the reason why is that our
• 1:27:56
  actual reality matters for humanity to make it.
• 1:28:01
  And you know, Gary Zukov wrote about this and the book The Seed
• 1:28:05
  of the Soul, that if we stay locked into this 5 sensory
• 1:28:09
  framework, that this is all there is.
• 1:28:13
  Ignoring the fact that we have a soul, that we're actually in a
• 1:28:17
  spiritual reality, that we're souls having a physical
• 1:28:20
  experience right here that that does lead you to it can lead you
• 1:28:27
  to a more nihilistic worldview where it's like, well, let's get
• 1:28:31
  all we can, right? We only live once, you know, and
• 1:28:34
  it's every spiritual edition again that shows you that that
• 1:28:39
  never creates lasting happiness. There is no lasting happiness in
• 1:28:43
  any physical accumulation of goods.
• 1:28:47
  It's, it's, it's only through having an experience in this
• 1:28:53
  body where you are living your purpose and your mission and
• 1:28:57
  realize the divinity within you and can have a communion with
• 1:29:02
  your soul. And, you know, for me, I, I grew
• 1:29:06
  up, you know, mostly agnostic, to be honest.
• 1:29:10
  I, I definitely prayed and prayer has been a part of my
• 1:29:18
  studying practice to be an entrepreneur.
• 1:29:22
  I've, I've put myself under pretty extreme stress as a
• 1:29:26
  result of that, you know, lots of times where it wasn't clear
• 1:29:29
  if we're going to make payroll and, and all types of things.
• 1:29:33
  But I want to, I want to, I want to be very clear.
• 1:29:36
  This is not the type of stress of people working manual labor
• 1:29:40
  jobs just to make ends meet. It's, it's a different, it's a
• 1:29:44
  different type of stress. It's a lot of psychological
• 1:29:47
  stress of Oh my gosh, this may fail and I'm responsible for all
• 1:29:51
  these people's job type it stress and that power prayer and
• 1:29:57
  that that those experiences. I've had deep experiences with
• 1:30:01
  God where I knew God was present, but then actually
• 1:30:05
  having a direct communion through plant based medicine,
• 1:30:10
  it's a different thing. It's a different thing.
• 1:30:15
  And you know, after you've had that and you realize that your
• 1:30:17
  actual reality, it transformed you for the rest of your life.
• 1:30:23
  And I've told friends it's it is, it is like the matrix moment
• 1:30:28
  in the sense of I don't believe we live in a simulation.
• 1:30:31
  That's not, that's not, that's not why I'm referencing the
• 1:30:34
  matrix, but it is a matrix moment in terms of you take the
• 1:30:37
  red pill and you realize, Oh my gosh, like the prophets in all
• 1:30:44
  these spiritual texts were right?
• 1:30:46
  We are all interconnected. There is this divine force that
• 1:30:51
  cares about us, that loves us all unconditionally, that has
• 1:30:56
  infinite boundless love for us. And realizing that, I think, I
• 1:31:02
  think one thing, Brian, that you may not be thinking of because
• 1:31:07
  not a lot of people are talking about this, is that this
• 1:31:11
  exponential curve that we're in is not just about automation,
• 1:31:16
  abundance, you know, this barrier to creativity being
• 1:31:21
  shattered, all the beautiful things that are going to happen
• 1:31:23
  as a result of it. It's also about spiritual
• 1:31:25
  awakening because we only know what 4% of the universe is made
• 1:31:30
  of. We call that matter.
• 1:31:31
  We don't even know what the other 96 percent is.
• 1:31:34
  We call that dark energy and dark matter.
• 1:31:36
  And what we're going to find as we go through this exponential
• 1:31:40
  curve is it's going to allow us to decode what our actual
• 1:31:43
  reality is. And I'm not saying that we'll
• 1:31:46
  ever understand the, the, the, the full nature of God.
• 1:31:50
  I don't think that's possible to understand a creator that, you
• 1:31:55
  know, birth this universe and cares about us all.
• 1:32:00
  But we're going to understand more and more about the nature
• 1:32:05
  of our reality and that it is rooted deeply in spirituality
• 1:32:08
  because we know that's the truth.
• 1:32:09
  We've had that communion. Once you've had that communion,
• 1:32:12
  you know it's real. It's that is you know it near
• 1:32:15
  death experiences. I had to Evan Alexander on for
• 1:32:18
  episode 46. Then he calls out the ultra real
• 1:32:22
  that you know it's realer than this.
• 1:32:26
  And and so I think, I think that that's something that's
• 1:32:29
  underestimated how these, this exponential curve is actually
• 1:32:32
  going to take us into that too. Any Ave. that helps us to have a
• 1:32:36
  greater, more personal understanding of just how divine
• 1:32:41
  we are as an expression of that Creator whose mysteries will be
• 1:32:46
  even greater illuminated by that exponential curve, is a fabulous
• 1:32:51
  thing to celebrate. Yeah, it absolutely is.
• 1:32:53
  Well I highly recommend IF people have an interest in this
• 1:32:57
  to watch In Waves and War which is on Netflix that came out in
• 1:33:02
  October. That's a great documentary about
• 1:33:04
  Navy Seals that really are having transformational, you
• 1:33:09
  know, transcendent experiences with ibogaine and getting a new
• 1:33:12
  lease on life. I think that that probably is
• 1:33:15
  the best and late the latest and greatest of of any of the
• 1:33:20
  offerings that that I could individually recommend to
• 1:33:23
  anyone. Yeah, I've seen, I've seen one
• 1:33:24
  that's coming out, which is Doctor Martine Polanco has been
• 1:33:30
  working on which is fantastic. He he he leads mission within.
• 1:33:36
  So I can't wait for that one to come out.
• 1:33:38
  Not sure of the current status, but a lot of this contents going
• 1:33:42
  to be coming out to really show how this gives people a new
• 1:33:45
  lease on life. And and I'm just super proud
• 1:33:48
  that we support the Americans probably begin initiative.
• 1:33:51
  I mean, the goal here with with this is to get to the point
• 1:33:55
  where this becomes legal in more places, hopefully in the entire
• 1:34:02
  United States to give people this new lease on life that are
• 1:34:07
  really suffering. And it is part of the
• 1:34:10
  consciousness awakening without a doubt.
• 1:34:13
  Well, right now as we sit here on Saint Patrick's Day, March
• 1:34:17
  17th, 2026, there are approximately 9 states that have
• 1:34:24
  bills that have either been introduced or are about to
• 1:34:27
  introduce to directly find their partnership with Texas to expand
• 1:34:31
  the scope, scale and speed of this particular drug development
• 1:34:34
  trial. All of these states have been
• 1:34:36
  LED down this direction by Governor Perry and I as we
• 1:34:40
  shepherd what is a multi state coalition that will constitute
• 1:34:46
  the unstoppable external force that will make the federal
• 1:34:50
  government be dutifully responsive to making sure that
• 1:34:54
  we can medicalize this medicine as expeditiously and safely as
• 1:34:59
  possible. Nothing like this has been done
• 1:35:01
  in history and it is a fabulous honor to serve it.
• 1:35:05
  Thank you Brett for your support of Americans for Ibogaine.
• 1:35:08
  All of this takes an immense amount of resource and effort,
• 1:35:12
  and with the continued support of individuals like you who
• 1:35:16
  align in mind and heart with what we're doing, we will be
• 1:35:19
  successful. Well, thank you so much and and
• 1:35:21
  I would I would recommend the people that they watch you and
• 1:35:25
  Governor Perry on the Joe Rogan podcast.
• 1:35:27
  That was a that was a great episode where you talk a lot
• 1:35:31
  about the science and how much this can actually de age the
• 1:35:35
  brain. And it's it's just incredible
• 1:35:38
  like that. I I just love your heart,
• 1:35:40
  brother. Thank you so much.
• 1:35:42
  Yeah, you're a good man and I wish you much success in
• 1:35:47
  helping, helping humanity. You know, this is team humanity
• 1:35:50
  all the way. Thank you, Sir.
• 1:35:52
  Well, thanks again, everybody for tuning in to the Love
• 1:35:55
  Conquers Fear podcast. Wow, what an episode.
• 1:35:59
  I just absolutely love Brian's heart.
• 1:36:02
  It's been a dream to get him on ever since we've had the dinner
• 1:36:06
  here at our home. I hope that you support the
• 1:36:08
  Americans Pride Begin initiative.
• 1:36:11
  I'll put a link here in the show notes.
• 1:36:14
  This is part of the awakening that humanity needs.
• 1:36:17
  There's a lot of people out there suffering from opioid
• 1:36:21
  addiction, alcoholism, as well as from all types of suicidal
• 1:36:26
  thoughts from, you know, suffering during combat, serving
• 1:36:31
  this nation and around the world.
• 1:36:34
  And so hopefully you'll lean in and support and join us in that.
• 1:36:39
  And thanks again for all the shares, all the heart you're
• 1:36:42
  expressing to me. This is my love letter to
• 1:36:45
  humanity. It's going to take us all.
• 1:36:48
  Team Humanity all the way. We're in the penultimate moment
• 1:36:51
  and I appreciate you being on the Love Conquers Fear journey.
• 1:36:54
  Thank you.