No Way Out
Welcome to the No Way Out podcast where we examine the variety of domains and disciplines behind John R. Boyd’s OODA sketch and why, today, more than ever, it is an imperative to understand Boyd’s axiomatic sketch of how organisms, individuals, teams, corporations, and governments comprehend, shape, and adapt in our VUCA world.
No Way Out
Reorienting Trauma: Psychedelic Healing for Veterans with Trevor Millar & Jonathan Dickinson
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The conversation explores the world of psychedelic-assisted therapies and their potential benefits for veterans and individuals with PTSD. The guests, Trevor Millar and Jonathan Dickinson, share their experiences and insights into the use of psychedelics, particularly Ibogaine, in treating addiction and trauma. They discuss the role of orientation, including culture, genetics, and previous experiences, in shaping our perception and response to trauma. The conversation also touches on the concept of flow and how psychedelics can facilitate a state of heightened awareness and creativity.
Venture through the mind's complex labyrinth with us, where we challenge conventional psychiatric methodologies. Diving into the heart of alternative treatments, we unveil how psychedelics can reorganize unconscious material, potentially resetting mental clarity and offering solace where traditional medicine has fallen short. The episodes richly illustrate the roles of creativity, neuroplasticity, and the profound 'set and setting' in crafting a healing journey. Each story shared pulsates with the promise of reviving lost passions and igniting a new sense of purpose.
Our conversation unfurls the harsh realities of accessing these life-altering therapies come to the forefront. The barriers erected by the pharmaceutical industry and the complications of integrating novel treatments underscore the ongoing struggle. Yet, there is a beacon of hope in the support communities like Ambio Life provide, and the lives already transformed are a testament to the untapped potential within psychedelic therapies.
Ambio Life
No Fallen Heroes
Heroic Hearts Project
Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions
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Substack: The Whirl of ReOrientation
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Recent podcasts where you’ll also find Mark and Ponch:
So today's topic is going to really push the envelope on individual orientation. Perhaps we're going to dive into the world of psychedelic-assisted therapies. Just to be clear, here at AGLX we are not proponents of the recreational use of Schedule 1 drugs. Mainly because there's Schedule 1 drugs in the US. That means they're illegal. Our guests today are calling from outside the United States. I will talk a little bit more about who scheduled on drugs in the US. That means they're illegal. Our guests today are calling from outside the United States. I will talk a little bit more about who they are here in a moment.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:The reason we're talking about this let's talk about the external environment, what's happening around us. And, mark, I think you're aware that between 22 to 44 veterans take their lives every single day and that's absolutely unacceptable considering the technology that's out there, what we have access to. But there's a reason veterans, first responders and others are going outside the country to get treatment and that's because treatment is available to them in the form of psychedelic assist therapy, and we'll talk about that here in a second. Now I want to be really clear. I have participated in psychedelic assist therapy in the form of psychedelic assistive therapy, and we'll talk about that here in a second. Now I want to be really clear. I have participated in psychedelic assistive therapy in the past.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:We'll talk more about that specifically on a podcast in the future, probably with Trevor and Jonathan. Our guests Mark Slider, keller and I will do that down the road. Today we're going to really look at psychedelic assistive therapy from the lens both of the practitioners, those that are administering it, and then Mark and I will talk a little bit about the OODA loop and how that connects to all this. So, without further ado, I want to introduce our guest today. It's Trevor Millar. He's calling in from Tijuana, and Jonathan Dickinson. And Trevor, did I say your last name correctly? I?
Trevor Millar:just say Miller, as if there's an E there.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, okay, even better, yeah, all right. So, uh, trevor, um, when I first came across your profile, this is several years ago Now, you had a movie on Netflix. It's on Netflix called dosed Um, can you walk us through how you got introduced to psychedelic assistant therapies and what what that movie was about?
Trevor Millar:For sure. Um movie I think is technically on Amazon I don't think it ever made it to Netflix but DosedMoviecom. It's the story of one woman's journey using this powerful psychedelic we work with called Ibogaine, to help her come off of heroin. My experience, how I started in this, is kind of twofold. For one, I did have kind of early exposure to recreational psychedelics as a human being. There was just a big influx of LSD in the mid-90s in Canada because of some LSD chemists who were escaping San Francisco actually and were on the lam in Canada. So I initially was, you know, I was a just say no to drugs kind of kid. But I don't know just when it's kind of so pervasive and I was a super curious kid, I decided to give it a shot and while I had no idea about the therapeutic potential of it back then, I do remember saying to my buddies this is what adults have forgotten, that has made the world so screwed up.
Trevor Millar:I was hanging out at a store in Vancouver, bc, called the Urban Shaman which sold a bunch of legal entheogenic plants. There's a whole bunch of obscure plants that you can get your hands on and there was a bit of a community around there. That was the first time I heard about iboga. Iboga is a shrub that is native to west africa. The root bark of that shrug shrub has been used ceremonially for centuries uh, for initiation rites, for healing, and when I first heard about it it was the the 24 hour long psychedelic that costs 500, and I was broke at the time and I'm like that's the most unappealing thing I could imagine. So, ironically, I thought I would never give it a shot. But you know, the seed had been planted and then, on a parallel course, I was looking at how I might be able to help the world out. Post 9-11, I was pretty distraught with the state of the world and started to look at how I might be able to make the world a better place. Vancouver has a neighborhood called the Downtown Eastside, which is basically Skid Row, and I just started poking around there, starting to see if I might be able to help out in any way, and it basically turned into about a 10-year networking and research project.
Trevor Millar:But in 2009, ibogaine came on the radar as a way to potentially help. But in 2009, ibogaine came on the radar as a way to potentially help, and the reason for its potential to help is Ibogaine is incredibly good at helping people overcome opioid use disorder. You could take somebody in active heroin addiction. Give them a dose of Ibogaine, properly supported, and they essentially, you know, overcome their withdrawals and their cravings in about a 24-hour long period. So it's incredibly good at helping people come off opiates.
Trevor Millar:I started a business in Vancouver called Liberty Root Therapy Limited. We were able to legally work with Ibogaine in Vancouver. At the time I met my first business partner through a conference actually that Jonathan, who is on the call. He hosted that conference. Me and my old business partner made that connection and started working with Ibogaine in Vancouver, treated about 200 people in the time that we were able to legally do that, mostly for opioid use disorder. And yeah, through that I was introduced to this film crew who made the movie Dosed and that was a bit of a wild story that you can watch. It's a super entertaining story and, yeah, that brings us up to date on pre-moving down to Tijuana.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So how did you get involved with taking care of veterans? So I want to focus on that a little bit more. And we know several veterans from the Virginia Beach area, from Virginia, from California, from all over that are traveling out of country to get help. So can you give us the kind of current status on how many veterans you're treating, how many first responders you're treating and the results you're seeing?
Trevor Millar:For sure. So I was introduced to Amber and Marcus Capone. Marcus is a former Navy SEAL and he kind of in desperation. He had tried everything post-retirement to kind of fix what ailed him. They couldn't quite place their finger on what was wrong. He didn't really identify as somebody with post-traumatic stress disorder. He really loved his job but something wasn't right. He was drinking too much, he was having headaches, he was miserable and as a last-ditch effort he went down to Mexico to try Ibogaine and within a few days he went home and his wife, amber, says as soon as he walked in the door I knew I had my husband back. So they were very dedicated to getting this out to their community. So they set up a nonprofit called Vets Incorporated. Vetsolutionsorg is their website and yeah, they have now sent more than 1,000 US Special Forces veterans through for treatments like this, raised a lot of money, found a lot of very generous donors to help out and they're always looking for donors for MAPS Canada. Maps is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies and there's a little Canadian branch.
Trevor Millar:I served as chair for a couple of years, three years and the founder of MAPS called me one day and he said I have this lovely couple, amber and Marcus, in my living room. I think you guys should know each other. And from that point forward Amber was very diligent in calling every couple of months to see if there might be a way to work together. It was clear she was looking for another Ibogaine provider, so it took me a couple of years to see how serious she was. But then I started looking for a place where I might operate legally, because in the meantime Ibogaine had been rescheduled in Canada.
Trevor Millar:And my good friend Jonathan. Here we were on a call working on another project while I was in Costa Rica sussing out Costa Rica to give Ibogaine. And I happen to mention to Jonathan yeah, there's this veterans group that's keen to work with me. So he called me back a week later. He had been living in Tijuana for a little while. He called with our now other business partner, jose Nzunza, in the car with him and said why don't you move to Tijuana? We've got all the medical equipment required, we've got the medical staff that understands the medicine. We could find a house and dedicate it to veterans. So we did that.
Trevor Millar:July 2021. It has morphed into a company that is now called Ambio Life Sciences and that first year I think we treated probably, let's say, 95% veterans and probably 90% of those came through that nonprofit. And yeah, it's incredible, we knew about the near miraculous ability of Ibogaine to help people off opioids and overcome other addictions. But working with people in the shorter five-day protocol for whatever ails veterans upon retirement, the stuff that's leading to suicide, that's mission really is to end veteran suicide, because this is super effective at that. To end veteran suicide, because this is super effective at that. But whether it's PTSD or PTSD type symptoms, anxiety, depression, the traumatic brain injury, specifically Ibogaine seems to be helping with all of that in a very dramatic way.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:There's so much to unpack here and I'm going to try to get us back into what our listeners are used to about orientation, genetics, culture and previous experience. And before I do that, Jonathan, I was just up in New York and Connecticut where I got to meet with folks who are in the healthcare industry, looking at it from an investment standpoint, and the one thing that stood out to me was this view, and that is that stood out to me was this view, and that is there isn't compelling evidence that this works.
Jonathan Dickinson:Can you kind of talk about that and your background, jonathan, as a researcher and psychologist. Sure, so I mean, I've been working with Ibogaine since 2009. And at the time, in the early days, we were working in Mexico with folks who a lot of them were people who had come off of opioids, themselves using Ibogaine, and then saw opportunities to be able to improve the kind of care that they received. Know a lot of the um, the way that it spread was just that way, through word of mouth and personal experience and these kind of very, very personal stories we call anecdotal evidence right. But, um, there had been a previous effort in the 90s.
Jonathan Dickinson:In the early 90s, the nida and the, the FDA kind of got together with Howard Lotsoff, who was, you know, back in the 60s, a young man in New York and Staten Island and a chemist.
Jonathan Dickinson:Friend of his gave him Ibogaine and he was just so happened to be a person who used heroin and had been habituated to it, and so when he took the Ibogaine he realized that it helped him come off of opioids.
Jonathan Dickinson:So later he was able to file some patents and kind of, with a master's degree in film, went on this miraculous journey of getting all the way to the point where NIDA and the FDA were going to go and do clinical trials. So that went along until there was some intellectual property disputes and things kind of fell apart and for various reasons the project got abandoned and Suboxone got taken through the trial route instead of Ibogaine. That's what sort of NIDA sort of focused their funding on Suboxone afterwards, suboxone afterwards. But so for Howard what he saw as an opportunity was when these clinics went down to Mexico they could produce all of the safety data to eventually one day hopefully be able to go back to the FDA and convince them that actually Ibion can be provided safely and to reinitiate those trials and to make it available. So you know, to some degree, according to the standard that we've set, of what it takes to regulate a compound and make it into a medicine. Yeah, there's not compelling evidence because it hasn't been through double-blinded clinical trials and a regulatory assessment.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:And that's just ibogaine, right? We're not talking psilocybin, that's just ibogaine. Right? We're not talking psilocybin or any of the DMTs, right? We're just talking about ibogaine.
Jonathan Dickinson:Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, that's right.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:All right. So let's build this up a little bit more. When we talk about orientation, that it drives how we sense, decide and act. If you break down John Boyd's orientation down to its components their culture, previous experience and genetics I understand that there's something known as the triple hit hypothesis. That says all of us could experience or be part of the same horrible accident, but that doesn't mean we're all going to walk out of there with some type of post-traumatic syndrome. What determines that is the interaction between those experiences, that culture and genetics.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So when we're talking special operators and aviators that spent 20 years of their life fighting wars or more, they've had access to more I hate to say traumatic experiences, but experiences that go beyond what the normal person may have experienced. But that doesn't mean a mom sitting at home can't have the same level of anxiety or trauma. I just want to make sure I'm getting this right before we move into the meds. So the veterans that come down and to work with you, they've had. It could be sexual assault, it could be something from their childhood, it could be the compounding of all these things that end up creating this PTSD. And there's also the TBI traumatic brain injury that you're looking at down there as well. So, from an orientation standpoint, all those things culture, genetics, previous experiences they interact in a way that determines how we see the world, our ego, our sense of self, our default mode of operating. Can you add anything to that or clarify? Did I miss anything on how we kind of experience trauma?
Jonathan Dickinson:Yeah, I mean, I think when I. So when I first got interested in psychedelics, I was a young man in high school and was going through a hard time and I walked into the doctor's office and they gave me a 10 question questionnaire with Zoloft on the top. When I filled it out, lo and behold, I needed a Zoloft prescription right. So a lot of the time I think we you know the way that we've conceived of mental health in the past usually follows along behind the treatments that we have available to to treat them. So you know we've tried to develop medications that would regulate serotonin and you know that didn't work and I think you know it's been challenging since then and psychiatry has kind of struggled to define. You know how do we really talk about these kind of neuroses, and PTSD is actually a very good example of one that it's really tough to sort of pin down, because you can have people with completely different sets of symptoms but they still have enough of the symptoms that fall under the heading to call it PTSD. But that makes it incredibly difficult to treat. Then, because you know we're working exactly like you you said we're working with veterans who have gone to war and we're working with moms at home who have, you know, a completely different set of challenges, right? So, um, yeah, I think we process trauma differently, but it's it's.
Jonathan Dickinson:It's a difficult framework, like taking ptsd. For me, it's a very difficult framework to try to work with, so I found it more useful to try to find other frameworks. Like we've looked at flow as one potential way of describing what's going on, because it provides us with this like positive markers, rather than sort of measuring neuroses or problems that people are experiencing. It's sort of this positive framework that we're trying to measure. So if we're not in a state of flow, usually it doesn't feel very good and when we're in a state of flow, it actually feels extremely meaningful, like there's something about it that we have this innate drive towards.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So like, like, like meditation could be a state of flow. I mean yoga, working out, running on the beach. We're not just talking about psychedelic flow here. We're talking about flow in general, right.
Jonathan Dickinson:Yeah, absolutely.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I want to throw something at you, because if we can just go meditate and go do yoga, why even bother with psychedelics and go do yoga?
Jonathan Dickinson:Why even bother with psychedelics. Well, I think that we should. We should do all of those things, and I think that we don't necessarily need to do psychedelics. However, when people turn to psychedelics, usually it's because other things that they've tried haven't been effective or they reach some sort of insurmountable point. It helps to sort of dissolve barriers that we haven't been able to manage with the resources that we have internally.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So do SSRIs and forgive me for not actually knowing everything in the acronym, but SSRIs that are prescribed to folks that have anxiety or PTSD. Are they blocking access to something? I mean, what exactly are they doing? And compare that to what you're seeing with psychedelics.
Jonathan Dickinson:Yeah, I mean, it depends on who you ask about what they do. I mean, the biggest critics, the anti-psychiatry people, are going to say that what they do is they just put you in an altered state and that sometimes, at certain points, it's really useful to be in an altered state of consciousness, you know. But what they do is what they're designed to do is keep you in a very specific band of awareness and perception and so that, in a lot of ways, can be stabilizing for people, if that's something that they're struggling with. It helps to create an experience of stability, but it also does a lot of other things that, over time, can be unhelpful, like they can, um, prevent us from experiencing the high experience, the higher emotions. You know, there's people who and that's an ssri.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Is that correct that you're talking about?
Trevor Millar:yeah, if it's super common description is I don't get depressed as badly as I did before, but I can't feel happy like I once felt. Happy as well, along with you know, potential sexual dysfunction and a whole bunch of other you know whack of symptoms.
Trevor Millar:That could come Back to your meditation thing with psychedelics, so often we hear. I've tried sitting down to meditate, I haven't been able to get it, but after psychedelics, wow, I was finally able to sit with myself. So I think it kind of brings people to a base level that is maybe a little less uncluttered than hadn't they had the powerful psychedelic journey, the powerful psychedelic journey.
Jonathan Dickinson:So part of the reason is because, you know, freud had this really simplified version of the unconscious. Like we get the luxury now of looking back and saying he oversimplified, he broke a lot of ground. But there, you know, he had this idea of the unconscious as sort of like we would repress things down and then they would be unconscious. You know, at one point they were a perception, and then we repress things down and then they would be unconscious. You know, at one point they were a perception and then we repress them down. Now we know that's kind of how learning happens.
Jonathan Dickinson:Actually we need to be able to do that in order to achieve a flow state, because to get into a flow we have to be very well practiced at what we're doing, to the point where we don't have to be conscious about very much of what we're doing because it's kind of automatic and things are going on.
Jonathan Dickinson:But then there's moments when, if we've learned a certain pattern, a certain operating procedure that we're trying to run on, and it stops working in our life for one reason or another, we have to somehow be able to drudge up that unconscious material, to be able to reorganize it up, that unconscious material to be able to reorganize it Right.
Jonathan Dickinson:So you know where flow is, this kind of peak state that we get into, where we're coasting. It feels awesome because we've set it all up and now we're just in the groove. Then we have to be. It's a peak state. We have to be able to come down, rest, regroup, relearn, figure out what didn't work perfectly you know where things were a little shaky and then get back in focus. But I think that's what Ibogaine does is not necessarily that it puts us into this peak of flow, but that it takes us into that valley and into that unconscious and to deal with those shadow elements and to look at the patterns and things that aren't working and to be able to put something back together that then, as we start to slowly build back up, we can bring into a much more clear focus.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I've heard Robin Carhart-Harris talk about it as a snow globe. You shake it all up and all the flakes start moving around in there and you get to reconstruct your previous experiences and within the OODA loop. We look at the OODA loop as a way to help people understand how we perceive reality and one of the things we point out is that the we call it implicit guidance control. There's two pathways in the OODA loop. One of those goes from orient back to observe and what we can do with that is call that the default mode of operation. That's your ego. It's kind of rigid, low entropy thing. It's who you are right. So if you experienced something in the past, such as a war, you're going to have a heightened sense of anxiety because that's where you are right now. So what we need to do, if I understand this correctly, is kind of shake up that snow globe a little bit to gain access to a higher entropic state, more disorder, so we can re I hate to say relive the past, but look at the past in a way from a different perspective potentially, and have a different view about that, and reconstruct that implicit guidance and control pathway or default mode of operating, that ego, if you will. So that's ego suppression that really matters there.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:There's a model out there that so when we talk about the OODA loop, we separate internal states and external states. There's a model out there that I really like. It's from Dr Andrew Gallimore, who talks about the world space. Right, we have all this world space reality out there that's available to us, and then we have the consensus reality space. Right, we have all this world space reality out there that's available to us, and then we have the consensus reality space, which is kind of the space we live in right now. If I'm hearing you correctly, ibogaine and other psychedelics provide you access to the greater world space reality, the things that are out there. They open your brains. I'm not going to say provide more access to the external world, right, maybe through vibrations, through eyesights, through different things that are, through vision, different things that are out there. So does that sound about? Right If we were to construct, you know, make that connection between orientation, ego, default mode, network and what you discussed? Are there any gaps in that type of thinking right now?
Jonathan Dickinson:I think when we take Ibogaine I don't know that we get immediately this kind of access to external stimuli, but I think when people take it, there can be a couple of things that happen. One thing that can happen is that there can be this very clear beam of information, like a signal, that comes through and it's meaningful and it's helping us figure things out, and we can ride that thing and understand it and interpret what we're supposed to take from it, stand it and interpret what we're supposed to take from it. There can also be noise, just like kind of static, all the way to just chaos, just not interpretable, as maybe there's an emotion to it, but meaningless. And then there can also be, I think, we go through these states and then, with Ibogaine, there's this long period afterwards we go through the, we go through these states and then, with ibogaine, there's this long period afterwards that we call the gray day. You know, you take it, you're in there all night, all this stuff is happening, and the day afterwards you're still laid out and you're processing.
Jonathan Dickinson:But I think we most people I think arrive at a point where there's this sense of quiet in the mind. You know, because we, we dredge up all of this stuff and while that's happening, you know on brain scans what they're. What they're showing is we get less of this like top down sort of information flow in the brain and we get a lot of this like bottom-up processing that's going on instead, and so that's what's all the noise and all the problem solving that's going on. But then afterwards it's just like the quiet, and I think it's in the quiet and that hypersensitization. Afterwards, like we've had, people not like like improve their eyesight afterwards, improve their hearing and just also their ability to be able to feel and understand the emotions that they're feeling. And so I think we get to the point through going through that inner journey that we get to be able to experience the outer world a little bit more just as it is.
Jonathan Dickinson:Yeah, does that make the connection?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:that you were looking it does and you just triggered something else for me. So I went through steven kotler's um high flow, uh coaching course, um flow research collective and they have a flow cycle which struggle, release, flow and recovery. So, going back to to when I was down there, when slider was down there, I remember there you start with a struggle, right, and we before you, you know I think I fought the medicine for the longest time Um, if you guys remember, I was like I'm not getting this and I'm looking over to the slider and he's flying around mountains and playing with water and going through the universe and I'm like I want what he's having, right. And then I think you guys witnessed me go through that release where I just kind of let go, and that's when things hit. And then then I wasn't after until that moment where I had to get up and use the restroom and you told me what was going to happen if I did that, which is, you know, you're going to heave. And that happened.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:But that's when I got into state of flow and what I ended up becoming was like a I call it a tuning fork, right. Um, every hair on my body was receiving the vibrations in the environment, from the music, from all the stuff you're doing, uh, and I just was so relaxed then you know as relaxed you can be under Ibogaine after 10 hours, whatever it was. And then the recovery is that gray day. So that flow cycle I think it may be a great model for you guys to walk through. It is that struggle, that release, that flow state, and that gray day, that recovery, because that recovery is absolutely phenomenal. You need it right. I think the way it's done there allows you to do that. But I just want to throw that out there as some food for thought for you, as something that I think is a great model to use to explain how we use flow to our advantage. Mark, you have a question.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Well, ponch, it sounds like there's another component of orientation, which is analysis and synthesis, and I think we should coin the phrase the snowmobiles of perception, right? Because when you're talking about shaking up that snow globe, we have all those things inside of us that get shaken out and broken out, and then the pieces. We basically, through deduction, we've released these things, but that gray day, it sounds like a synthesis of things that I was able to reassemble in a different light and create something that was novel, that relaxation stick or whatever that was novel, that was new, and I was empowered to do that, or you were empowered to do that by having the ability to break all that free. I mean, again, that sounds right out of orientation. Is that the case?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:No it is. That sounds right out of orientation. No, it is. And the one thing the strength of the free energy principle and active inference in John Boyd's OODA loop is that counterfactual pathway that goes from act back to observe, and that's the what ifs right. And that's key to this is if we break that default mode of operating down. It doesn't matter if it's psychedelics or whatever it could be, but the experience I've seen with it is it pushes you down to have that counterfactual thought, to think back to things. So you're going through that process of creating uh, what do you call it? Snowmobiles of perception.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:That's exactly yeah, that's exactly what it is. Man, um, and, and, and Jonathan and Trevor. Uh, the idea behind the snowmobile is really simple. It's a synthesis of ideas, of ideas, right, you're grabbing from different places and you create a snowmobile, and that's something that john boyd talked about quite a bit.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Right, it's a little too, when you think of, when you think of psychedelics and you think of creativity. Only we were. We were talking with norman and I said well, it gives us sergeant pepper's lonely hearts club band, right?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I mean that that's that kind of uh, that novelty that can emerge from that synthesis of the things that we broke down and the pieces that we put together yeah, yeah, and the truth of it is, even when we're in organizations coaching them, we're trying to use things like red teaming techniques, and we'll talk about that for a second. What we're trying to do is break the the ego down of the organization so they have higher access to novelty, right? So when we talk about things being fractal, what Trevor and Jonathan are doing is really consistent with what we're learning from neuroscience and what we see in organizational science and things like that. It's all the same. It's break down the default mode of operating, gain access to something new, create these snowmobiles right, and then build new ways of working and you move on. So I just think the parallels here are fantastic.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Let's get back down to Can I ask a question real quick to Jonathan and Trevor while we're on this topic? So in that is I mean I think we could all say from popular culture, we would think that psychedelics have empowered people to be very creative, whether it's music or whatever. But is that something that you've observed is an uptick in creativity of people that go through these types of therapies?
Trevor Millar:It really depends. You know, a lot of the creativity that we're aiming towards is just, you know, how can you be more creative in your day-to-day life, with your day-to-day life, like you know, what kind of empowering habits can you implement now that we've interrupted the negative patterns? You know, can you incorporate meditation, can you incorporate, you know, even just getting on a call with our aftercare team week after week. You know what's it going to take to make your life something worth living. And then, yeah, definitely, I'm thinking of one woman in particular who messaged me after leaving. She's like I'm drawing again and she hadn't. I spoke to her just recently again to find out exactly what happened there. But she, she's an incredible artist. This, this pencil sketch that she sent, looked like a photo, realistic hand, but she hadn't been doing any of that for the last 10 years. Yeah and uh, just doing, doing the medicine. Yeah, broke up those patterns and and allowed her to see things in another way, whereby she's like let's get on this. So, yeah, that definitely is a potential.
Jonathan Dickinson:I would think if you were going to generalize, though it's not necessarily that people are coming out like firing on all cylinders, hitting these like higher peaks. I think what's more general to see is that people have higher lows.
Jonathan Dickinson:You know, like if flow is this sort of like sine wave and you're having higher lows. I think that has a lot more to do with how we feel, like how things are going in general, and it gives us a lot to work with. Like we raise baseline and then we have a lot of stability to be able to maneuver in our life. But you know the same thing that we're talking about, because I think what you guys are looking at and thinking about is like how I think a lot of the time it's a very cognitive model, like it's sort of how we navigate with the tool of the brain that we have.
Jonathan Dickinson:But the same thing is happening biologically right, like when you take Ibogaine. It goes into the cells, which not all drugs do, but it actually passes through the membrane into the cells and it somehow stimulates them to in this process of what's called cellular respiration. So it's like how cells process oxygen, which it's something that all the cells in our bodies need to do to be able to live. All living cells need to be able to do it. So somehow it's going to this very base function of living cells and somehow accelerating its process of respiration, which burns up all of this energy that it has Like it's. Whatever it does that cell, it does it like really fast. So that's part of the reason why we have this gray day afterwards, because we get depleted, because for some reason or another it burned up all the cellular energy so, john, I want to, uh, jonathan, I want to.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So we've had a lot of neuroscientists on here. We know that two percent of our body weight burns 20 of our energy or more. That's our brain, if I remember correctly. Going building on your point here, ibogaine isn't something that you're going to use recreationally. You're not going to go out and party with or anything that that. The reason for that is, as you point out, is draining energy from the rest of your body, right, and then, in order to keep the brain going, I'm going to say your body shuts down, because that may or may not be true, but you're just weak, the body's weak. When you're in any type of game. You're on the floor. It's not a lot of fun, if you will, but if I remember correctly, I believe your body is doing everything to push energy to the brain at that point because it's depleting energy everywhere else. Is that true?
Jonathan Dickinson:Well, I think it's the energy that it's burning up is energy that's already in the cells, and then what happens afterwards is the cells become more efficient In the process of being stimulated to do that, that workout. They get more efficient at being able to produce and manage energy going forward. So that's where we, you know, in support of the cognitive process that's going on, we see the actual physiology of the brain improves, like there's um the, the study that we did with Stanford University Navy SEAL guys were going up there doing MRIs, doing EEG work, doing a whole battery of psychological screens and everything Coming down, doing Ibogaine, going back doing another round of the same tests and then a month later going and do another round of the same tests and then a month later going and do another round of the same tests. So this paper was published in nature medicine and only showed, for now, the results in terms of ptsd and depression and all that.
Jonathan Dickinson:But there is this imaging data that hopefully eventually will come out and it's been presented at conferences a few times that shows that there was improvements in terms of like all these guys had to have been diagnosed with tbis and so there was areas of the brain that weren't getting blood flow and electrical activity. And afterwards you see those areas of the brain that were dark splotches on the mris before all of a sudden they're lit up and sort of acting like normal, and all the way to the point of the white matter in the brain was actually increased in size, which nothing should normally do that. So physiologically there's a support for that cognitive change that's going on and there's, I think, depending on the model that we look at it with. We can kind of see the same thing happening in the cell as we do in the cognitive model that we use to think about how we perceive that change.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Is that connected to neuroplasticity? Is that what you're talking about, the rewiring of the brain?
Jonathan Dickinson:Yeah, sure, plus. I mean plasticity is just the ability for the brain to be able to change its state, right.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So we know from flow, coaching, that yoga, working out, all that is helping with that plasticity, the neuroplasticity and reconstructing the brain and that's learning. Like you pointed out, in order to gain anything, you need that recovery time, which is a great day and beyond, and I think we may want to talk about integration as well, but that's critical to this recovery piece is that learning moment, or what we call recovery. I got a couple of questions Set and setting. Going back to John Boyd's do the loop we talked about control being outside and bottom up. Going back to John Boyd's OODA loop we talked about control being outside, in bottom up. That would be the setting I got to make sure I get these right, one's internal, one's external.
Trevor Millar:Which one's external Set is internal. Your mindset Setting is the room and the external environment.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Walk us through why that's so important for these therapies, both set and setting.
Trevor Millar:Well, I think you know preparation as far as mindset is concerned, I think is, I think both of these are pretty obvious once we frame them. But you know, you could take psychedelics and, you know, do what the CIA did and torture people on psychedelics. That would be, you know, a horrible setting as well as a horrible mindset to go into it with. Or you could take psychedelics at a festival and have fun and dance around. That's another kind of setting. What we're doing, the therapeutic use of this, is, for one, orienting the person's mindset towards. We are doing this for therapeutic reasons. We are going to work towards healing. What are your intentions? What would you ideally like to get rid of through this process? If everything went perfectly, what would you like to move towards? So we do a lot of coaching before arrival. So everybody gets at least two hour long coaching sessions prior to arrival to help work on that mindset.
Trevor Millar:And then the setting is just, you know the beautiful facilities we work out of, essentially making people feel very, you know, trust in it, as if they're in a place they can trust, a safe place. We're completely medicalized. We have, you know, I think, three physicians on staff. When we're giving medicine, we have at least a physician, plus you know two or three paramedics or nurses. So all that's part of the setting. You know a beautiful environment, which again just helps you relax, but the setting therapeutically might be. You know a doctor environment, which again just helps you relax, but the setting therapeutically might be. You know a doctor's office with a psychiatrist couch there. That would be a proper setting for something like psilocybin, for example. So yeah, it just is really about how do you prepare the person and then how do you make sure that the person is in a super safe environment as he goes through the journey.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:There's a couple of things in the environment there. One was the Bwiti ceremony or music, and two is the Johns Hopkins music he played. I think they have a psychedelic therapy playlist that is phenomenal. You always got to go back and listen to that. How important is that in what you do, the music.
Trevor Millar:I always say that music is kind of like this, the pathway that you're going to walk, so it can take you to places emotionally that maybe you didn't go if the music wasn't there. The Bwidi music you referenced too. Bwidi is the tradition that grew out of the use of Iboga in West Africa, countries like Gabon and Cameroon, and it is music that you know is very finely attuned to iboga, and ibogaine meaning people you know in that ancient culture took the medicine. The medicine told them what instruments to make and what songs to play on them, so very directly associated with iboga. And then we'll generally we have a playlist you can look it up, the Ambio Ibogaine playlist on Spotify. It's probably evolved a lot since you were here, ponch, but yeah, we play the Bwiti music for about two hours and then it'll just shift into kind of softer, more mellow, quote-unquote medicine music, which again just supports the journey and might elicit some emotion. That will enable people to dig in a little deeper and see what's under that emotion.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So Ibogaine is one, the way I was told it, and I've got a book in my hand called Iboga, the Root of All Healing. Before I went down and after I did a lot of research on it, I think I did or tried to figure it out. Uh, it's not a well-known um psychedelic right. It's in the way I was told is. Ibogaine is way at the top, and then there's a lot of things that may fall underneath that, and one of the things that fell underneath that, uh is is something we get from a toad a frog, if you will and it's called. Well, I think the chemical is 5-MeO-DMT. Again, I'm not going to be able to explain what the acronym stands for for the most part, but can you walk?
Trevor Millar:us through 5-Methoxy-Dimethyltryptamine.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Easy for you to say yeah, can you walk us through? And again, I'll share my experience real fast, after that gray day where the food started to taste phenomenal you could taste the earth in it, the conversations were phenomenal. The time on the beach, your sensory capabilities were through the roof. You could see more, you could experience the world more. You saw the beauty in it. And then we get ready for another ceremony is, uh, um, one we'll talk about with slider, which we have to talk about with slider down on another podcast.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:It's phenomenal what he went through, but that's the. Uh, um, I heard mike tyson talk about this live at a conference once. Um, I think he overuses it, but it's, it's ego death. It's you. You melt into the universe, you become one with the universe. Um, uh, it's the. Was the, I hate to say it was the highlight of my weekend there for a few days there. But can you walk us through what 5MEO DMT is doing and why it works?
Trevor Millar:No, I think Ibogaine is still very much a dualistic type experience. When you're on Ibogaine, you know where you are, you know what you're doing. It is the you you're used to. Like regular life you might be purging into a bucket or wobbling to the bathroom or having these intense visions, but you know where you are and what you're doing.
Trevor Millar:I think 5-MeO when people refer to an ego death which sounds scary but it's actually beautiful it's more of a non-dualistic type experience, meaning I like to describe that as if you were a drop of water or a drop of rain and all of a sudden you get to experience yourself as the whole ocean for a few minutes.
Trevor Millar:So it's kind of letting go of this smaller sense of identity as this little self to take on a greater sense of identity for a few minutes. So it's found naturally in nature from excretion on the back of the Sonoran Desert Toad, the Bufo Alvarius Toad, and in my understanding it's a relatively new discovery as a psychedelic, but the way you would harvest it is essentially this, uh, this excretion, and then you can take that and rub it on glass and then let that dry and then you vaporize that. So that's the kind of natural uh excretion. And then you, there's a synthesized version you can use as well, which is made in the lab and it's it's an an identical molecule, and that's actually what we use here, as a synthesized version of that.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So are these addictive. You know, alcohol I drank. I crawled in a bottle in my mid twenties and pulled out. Pulled out of that about 10 years ago or so in fighter aviation. I mean, we did alcohols on every base you could drink. We drink all the time We'd come back and drink from a day flying, we'd go to the Oak club.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Yeah, drink all the time. We'd come back and drink from a day's time We'd go to the Oak Club.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, it's everywhere. Right, it's in our service songs. Yeah, yeah, yeah it's in there. So how addictive are these substances?
Jonathan Dickinson:Well, I think there's a lot of evidence to show that they help us to resist addictions and break up patterns. I think that there's a way that we can misuse anything or become too reliant on anything, but I think that just the fact that they stimulate the sensitivity about our awareness to ourselves, usually it's quite a lot easier to be able to see the warning signs when they're coming up, that we're misusing this substance.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:We've become a little bit more sensitive to that than we would with alcohol or other things, that sort of dim part of our awareness and would allow us to sort of not pay attention. Just to add a little more context to that, I was just looking up crude statistics. But in America, 178,000 people per year die of alcohol, 80,000 or more over from opioids, 40,000 or more slightly more than 40,000 from suicide. And then tying it back to veterans, which of course I have an extreme interest in a veteran is 72% more likely to commit suicide than a non-veteran. There's been 7,000, 000 just over 7 000 combat deaths since september 11 2001 and there's been over 131 000 veteran suicides since then. Yeah, I think addiction there's also epidemics yeah, there's a.
Trevor Millar:A chart came out you can look it up. David Nutt from the Imperial College of London did a chart of drugs from dangerous to most dangerous and he included a whole bunch ofin is. After that, at the very far end of the other side, is the least dangerous, which is magic mushrooms, which is psilocybin mushrooms. So yeah, if you're kind of comparing apples to apples, there's a lot more things more dangerous than these substances that we're working with and I think you'd be pretty hard pressed to become an Ibogaine addict. That it, you know it's probably got the most dramatic anti-addictive qualities and it's very unappealing to to take Ibogaine generally 5-MeO maybe, you know, I think people could have an easier time abusing that. But, like Jonathan implied, it kind of brings you the wisdom with it, like wow, obviously I'm not living my life properly. It's kind of got that built-in purge or that built-in safety valve that should help you not abuse it and if you're abusing 5-MeO it's probably a lot healthier for you than abusing alcohol perhaps.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Can you talk about abusing?
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Can I just have a quick follow-up with Trevor there, I mean? So what is the answer then? When people say, oh, drugs are scary, these psychedelics, they're going to kill you, what are the raw numbers on these sorts of therapies versus, you know, 170,000 a year on alcohol, 80 more thousand a year on opioids Like? What are the actual numbers?
Trevor Millar:Yeah, well, you know, from what I understand, lsd, from what I understand, water is more dangerous than LSD. You could overdose on water sooner than you could on LSD is my understanding Mushrooms you would be super hard pressed. There's very little physical danger to most psychedelics. Ibogaine is the one that is potentially dangerous, which is why we do it in such a medicalized setting. It in such a medicalized setting.
Trevor Millar:But you know, even there's a wonderful paper published by Mark Hayden in Canada a few years ago. It was about accidental LSD overdoses and this is where people messed up a decimal place or two, sometimes took maybe a thousand times more LSD than you were supposed to, and I think he found six or seven cases and found those people years later to find out what happened and the results of that. And most people describe those experiences net positive, including one young woman who took way too much. She was bipolar, diagnosed bipolar prior to this accidental overdose, had a crazy night in the hospital but by the time her father arrived in the morning she said, dad, it's gone, referring to the bipolar, and that has never come back. They did a follow up on her. So it's pretty hard to abuse these substances, frankly.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So we're starting to see athletes not necessarily use Abigain but more towards, like ayahuasca and psilocybin, some microdosing going on. Can you talk a little bit about how these can potentially help out in human performance, like in athletes and even recovering SEALs and aviators? How do they, how can they help out, if they can help out at all?
Jonathan Dickinson:Well, I think it goes back to the experience of flow. I think a lot of times when people are using psychedelics, I think, when people are using substances in general, some way or another, we're looking to modulate our ability to achieve flow right, like, maybe drink alcohol at the end of the week to blow off steam and relax and you know whatever. But when people are using psychedelics, usually it's a little bit more targeted on feeling a little bit more creative, being able to have a little bit more of an edge. And there's all kinds of examples of this, like I've heard of guys who are backcountry skiers and keep a little bit of lsd in their avalanche kit in in case they have to draw on every last resource that they have to. You know outrun, you know Um, you probably wouldn't want that to be your first acid trip, but you know, once you know how to how to manage the state and you know what you're expecting, I could see where that would be helpful. Um, there's other. There's other stories. I mean the.
Jonathan Dickinson:The maybe the most entertaining one is Doc Ellis.
Jonathan Dickinson:I don't know if you guys know.
Jonathan Dickinson:He's like a baseball pitcher back in the 70s, I think, or the 60s, and he took some LSD in the morning forgot. He had a game later that day and he had to go pitch and he ended up pitching a no-hitter. So career highlight day for him and I think that there's all kinds of examples that you could look at all the way down to you know coders in Silicon Valley microdosing mushrooms or things to be able to get a little bit of an edge and just have a really good, really productive day. So I think a lot of times people are doing that and if they're not using it sort of in the context of the activity that they're trying to do, usually it's because, again, you've reached some sort of point where there's some aspect of your life that feels insolvent and you're trying to overcome some hurdle so that later you have access to more of yourself and more of that ability to be able to motivate yourself or push through obstacles or things like that there's a couple very entertaining youtube videos about that, doc ellis.
Trevor Millar:No, hitter, you should, yeah, you should, do a little searching, yeah I'm from.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:I'm from pittsburgh, so I'm strongly biased to that story because he was a Pittsburgh Pirate.
Jonathan Dickinson:I think there's a film called.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:No-No like pitching a no-no.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:One thing I would say, when I was a kid in college, my dad took me he was living in Rhode Island at the time and we went to a basketball game where University of Rhode Island was playing and they had a star named Lamar Odom and he went on to have a very successful NBA career and I know on your site you have a lot of information about the treatment that Lamar Odom did and there's a video and a podcast interview about what what he went through and I think a lot of our listeners can probably relate to that, so maybe would you share that story with us.
Jonathan Dickinson:Yeah, I mean Lamar had, you know, all kinds of things come to a head at one point and I think it culminated in a series of strokes and heart attacks after a drug overdose major wake up call for him. But then he also had the physical damage to be able to have to deal with, you know, and he'd been, he'd been using drugs and been habituated to them. So even sometimes when people get into those situations where you know death comes knocking out of the door, it's still sometimes hard to turn away because there's still a sense of habituation and craving that has teeth already sunk in. And so, you know, he had people around him who started to guide him towards psychedelics and he came down and did an Ibogaine treatment here in Tijuana and it helped him enough.
Jonathan Dickinson:Not only was he able to stop using, and he's been abstinent since. So when we did the podcast interview with him it was five years later, so he still had not gone back to using cocaine and he'd had opportunities. Um, you know that it had been offered to him in moments when he probably normally would have accepted and he had no desire to use. He said as quickly as the thought comes into my head, it goes out of my head. So he was able to sort of be free of that, and I think including his, his man, kobe bryant, dying and right he knew that would be.
Trevor Millar:The world would give him a pass if he wanted to use them, but he didn't but in terms of performance.
Jonathan Dickinson:I mean he went back to play professional basketball. I don't think he was playing an nba game, but he had a. He had a professional um return after all of that happened. So that was pretty remarkable and I mean it speaks a lot to his motivations, but it's what he was able to do with that transformation that he achieved.
Trevor Millar:Yeah, I guess on the way home from Tijuana after Ibogaine he said to everybody in the van with him I think I can play ball again. And everybody's like, yeah right, he trained and I think played in the Philippines or something like that for a couple seasons.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So can you give us a journey through where things were four or five years ago, where they are today, the number of veterans that you had coming through a week, what's the volume now, and maybe share some stories? I know you can't share who's been down, who's been through um the therapies, but are there athletes? Are there? Who else is coming to you right now?
Trevor Millar:we've had a couple. We've had three ufc people come through um, you know, one of them in particular was really in dire straits. He had tried everything, like there was some kind of a traumatic brain injury or CTE or something like that going on and could not shake it, and after a dose of Ibogaine he would probably say he's completely cured quote, unquote, cured. We've worked with some NFL players, former NFL players, kind of same thing. Miserable, can't really get things together and one guy in particular the first time doing Ibogaine was very helpful decided to come back a year later. He had started having kind of suicidal ideations again they were creeping in and did another dose of Ibogaine and then came back a year later and this was relatively recently. And he's like this is the first time I'm doing this because I'm not in crisis mode and first time I'm doing this not in crisis mode and it's wonderful. So he really took it. We look at it as there's the potential for the healing, there's the potential for the regeneration and then there's also the potential for optimization. So he was really here for that optimization piece this last time.
Trevor Millar:And then, yes, so many of these special forces veterans, there's so many stories. One guy in particular was part of the Stanford study, was very tightly wound going into Stanford, you know, kind of blew up. At the front desk at the hotel there I got a call from Stanford and the nonprofit saying are you sure we should be giving this guy Abigain? Like, yes, we should definitely be giving this guy Abigain, just get him down here. And he had a beautiful journey, including, you know, he had taken many lives over his years of service, but there was one that really stood out and this gentleman, you know, it was a couple of days of a standoff and then he eventually made the kill shot and for some reason this one just didn't sit right with him.
Trevor Millar:But during his Ibogaine journey, that person that he killed came up to him in the journey and said hey, man, I was trying to kill you too, you were just doing your job. And that's the kind of recontextualization that can happen through a journey like this. It's just, you know, maybe there was some childhood abuse that you suffered and you get this kind of third party perspective saying, oh man, I can see where mom was at that day. Mom was having a bad day, actually, she was having a bad year, and it just allows that, that shift that allows that forgiveness. I think these are really forgiveness medicines on a lot of levels the levels.
Jonathan Dickinson:Yeah, we've been. You know, had the opportunity because at first for you know, over a decade we were working almost exclusively but primarily with people coming off of opioids, and if they weren't, they were coming off of methamphetamine or some other drug, and very rarely there would be people coming down for other reasons or just curious, and so a lot of our experience was with people who were in active addiction and trying to enter into recovery. So it's been recently now working with so many people coming through from the military and for other reasons that we've really begun to see things that maybe we saw it happen before but we would have attributed it to the fact that people were coming off of drugs. So all of these other healing properties of vibigaine, um, and we've done like recently we published a case study about a gentleman who had severe neuropathic pain. Like there's a lot of guys who come down who have been in combat and have sustained injuries and have some degree of neuropathic pain and we've been able to see Ibogaine be helpful.
Jonathan Dickinson:But this guy's injury was a brachial plexus nerve root avulsion, which is like this is the nerve that connects down to the arm and the hand, and it was pulled out of the spinal cord and what makes it so severe is that if you look at a sensory map of the body, the lips and the hands are some of the most sensitive areas, that we get the most sense information from that part of the nervous system.
Jonathan Dickinson:So the fact that he had this extreme pain in his hand was sort of more severe than it would be, for example, if it was in your foot, Not to diminish, but it was just.
Jonathan Dickinson:He had a very severe injury and he was 20 years up the road and it had developed and progressed and gotten worse and worse.
Jonathan Dickinson:So we were able to develop a sort of special protocol for him. It involved taking a little bit more Ibogaine than we normally give, but he had his first pain-free days and even years later he he feels like he had a substantial like he was talking about 40, 50% overall reduction in his pain experience, which is crazy. There's nothing, no, no surgical process other than potentially amputation or whatever would have been able to do that. And so we've seen that, like I said, in less severe cases with a lot of guys who have specifically neuropathic pain, and then we've also been able to treat a couple of cases of multiple sclerosis and there's other things that we're sort of branching out into, and so that's getting us to the point now where we've got a university partner up in Canada and we're going into preclinical work with animals and trying to understand how Ibogaine works for multiple sclerosis and for people who have suffered strokes, and so there's a lot of work that we're able to dig into now.
Trevor Millar:So I think words really getting out. On the traumatic brain injury indication We've treated. You know a lovely professional businesswoman who fell down the stairs 10 years ago and smashed the back of her head and she has not been good since. It's been 10 years of hell essentially.
Trevor Millar:She was incredibly treatment resistant as well. She heard about the treatment through her husband. She said no at first and finally said all right, I'm going to do this. We do group work, so we'll bring up to five people at a time generally for these five-day treatments, and she was not an active part of the group, she just obviously didn't want to be there. She took Ibogaine. She even wanted to leave early, which we didn't recommend, but she got a night's sleep and then she headed home early. But then a couple of days later we get a call from her and her husband and her husband's got a list of 19 things that have improved in this woman's life already. So, even though she was entirely treatment resistant, her traumatic brain injury, as far as she's concerned, is completely healed. Her husband says this is the third version of his wife that he's gotten to meet and this is the best version yet. She's incredibly happy. She's incredibly social in ways that she has never been before.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So there's a lot of potentials with psychedelics and I want to project out, go forward about 10 to 15 years and do a quick premortem and look back. So there's a lot of potentials with psychedelics and I want to project out, go forward about 10 to 15 years and do a quick pre-mortem and look back so we'll project ourselves out there. Walk me through why these will not get rescheduled. What's going to prevent all of this from happening? And feel free to go as deep as you want. Let me just give you more context. We've had Norman Oler on the the on on the on the podcast recently we talked about the origins of LSD and war on drugs and, uh, basically fifth generation warfare, the misinformation that went out there to say that, hey, psychedelics are bad and we got to, um, prevent them from getting act or people getting access to them. So what? What is it that's going to prevent um more people of having access to these medicines?
Jonathan Dickinson:Well.
Trevor Millar:I think a big one is just the system is stacked against them. So I think, if you, I don't think there is some nefarious plan by the pharmaceutical companies to try and keep these things down. I just think the system is set up and I could be wrong, but I think the system is set up against something like a natural molecule like ibogaine, which you can't patent anymore. There's just not the financial incentive for big pharma, who generally has the deep pockets required to take these kind of things through clinical trials. They just don't have the incentive that they have for developing a new vaccine or whatever they do want to develop.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So I think that's a big piece against it, trevor. I want to. More on this, so that incentive is what. More on this, so that incentive is what. Billions of dollars in profit and they might look at this if you can't patent it, you can't make your billions of dollars. Potentially there could be a way around that, but it might be a longer play. Let me ask you this Is the purpose of the pharmaceutical industry to make sure they have sick people, because if they had healthy people, they wouldn't have any customers.
Trevor Millar:Well, you can look at opiates specifically. I call it the opioid racket. First of all, we'll get you all hooked on to the OxyContin. We're going to flood into the market and then, oh sorry, you can't have that anymore. But instead what you can have is suboxone or methadone, which doesn't fix your problem but it does maintain your habit in a in a sustainable way, or your physical dependence in a sustainable way. So people are making money off the oxy. People are making money off the oxy. People are making money off the suboxone, people are making money off the methadone. That's in perpetuity, basically. So what if you take something like Ibogaine and I can give you one dose over the course of 10 days and you're never going to need those opiate replacement drugs anymore? So the profit model is not as consistent, and you know, that's just one example.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Yeah, so it's not good business. However, in your perspective, now what you're doing is how many people come back for quote unquote retreatment or additional therapy. What's that look like?
Trevor Millar:We're seeing more and more.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I'm ready to come back.
Jonathan Dickinson:Nobody's, nobody's saying that Ibogaine didn't.
Trevor Millar:You know, very few people are saying that the first time didn't work, but it's more of that optimization thing, like there's another level to peel off here, or or you know, I, I, this worked so great for me the last time, let me try it again. But I'd say it's a relatively small percentage maybe maybe 10% of people come back again for this, but hard to say.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Hey, jonathan, do you have anything to add to the premortem?
Jonathan Dickinson:Um and yeah, I think that there's three main reasons that are going to three, three main hurdles, and the first one's going to be safety. So, like even with um, suboxone, that that's the argument for keeping people on suboxone is that it's safer. Because if you so when you're taking opiates, if you're taking heroin or you're taking oxycontin a lot, the risk is that you can overdose, right? So if you take somebody off of the drugs, eventually the tolerance goes down, whatever. If they go and they relapse which a lot of people do the chances are, if they're completely off of everything, that if they use the same amount they're going to relapse. They're just going to you know, potentially fatal, right. So this is actually a factor with Ibogaine, because Ibogaine rapidly resensitizes you. So we have to tell people you know if you're going to use opiates again when you go home, you have to use like you're a naive user, like you haven't used before. You got to use a small amount and then, if you have to work your way up from there, go, but don't go back and use like you were right before you came down. So when somebody is on Suboxone, it maintains them. That maintains the tolerance high so that when people relapse the risk of overdose is dramatically reduced.
Jonathan Dickinson:So this is the public health argument for keeping people on opioid maintenance drugs. So there's always this kind of safety issue that you have to overcome. So with opiates, that's going to be. The argument is now we're sensitizing people and potentially leaving them prone to fatal overdose, and just the fact that there's cardiac risks when people take ibogaine. You know, these are going to be the hurdles that we have to overcome in order to prove that it's worth, you know, including in the medical system. I personally think that we can prove that and I think that's what Ambio has shown is like you can provide this at scale, you know, in a very genuine and like loving way, and do it safely. The other thing that's going to be difficult about it is going to be the novelty of it. Like it's not you need to do it in a cardiac ICU in order to make it safe. You need to have people on a heart monitor the whole time and have a crash cart there and a medical team that knows how to do ACLS protocols and everything.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:But that's only for ibogaine, right? That's right, okay, yeah.
Jonathan Dickinson:But even so, if we're talking more generally, yeah, but even so, if we're talking more generally, even for other substances, this, you know, this factor that it's novel, still becomes a problem because, like when MDMA is getting submitted now to the FDA, people are coming back and saying, well, hang on a minute, because this is the first time that this is a drug plus therapy combo that's getting submitted. It's not just MDMA that's getting submitted as a treatment for PTSD, it's MDMA-assisted therapy. So that means that what's being reviewed is not just whether MDMA is a helpful drug, it's is that specific therapeutic protocol that they developed in conjunction with MDMA also helpful? So this is this is another sort of novel problem to overcome is, you know, that's the first time. It deserves scrutiny. You know, like this is something new for the FDA to look at, new for the FDA to look at. Maybe, you know, maybe they're going to accept MDMA and that will clear the way for other substances which require some kind of other support around them other than just medical support.
Jonathan Dickinson:But that's another problem. And the final problem, I think, is going to be the cost, because down here, you know, you know, coming to us costs just shy of eight thousand dollars, right trevor for for a five day. Five day treatment. I think if this was how we're providing the same level of service in the united states, you'd be looking at somewhere like a knee surgery or something. You'd be looking at like 50 or 60 thousand dollars for the same thing with the same level of medical care around it. So unless you're able to achieve like inclusion and some kind of an insurance package, it's going to be like you were asking what are the barriers to people being able to access these in the future, and I think that cost will be one of them.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:All right, I'd have to say this when I was down there with Mark and there's another person there, I'm not going to say who that was the protocol, you know, you making sure we weren't on any medicines and we weren't bringing anything, that we shouldn't have any contraband anything like that. That was a little uneasy because I'm not used to that, but I understand why I really do. But the service there was phenomenal, where we always had somebody around us 24, seven. Uh, you had EMTs there, you know, I think one concern was, uh, I forgot what it was about my heart, but we, we had that checked out.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Part of me going down there, um, the safety there with the doctor there, uh, monitoring us and monitoring my heart while while I'm going through this, uh was was comforting. You know the, the idea of going down to Tijuana to do drugs with your best friend, um is is kind of funny. But to be plugged into a, uh, a monitoring device makes it so much better, I guess. Uh, I mean, there were thoughts that, hey, I'm not coming back from this, you know, I might I might not make it back, but uh, that's that's. That did stick in my head a little bit, uh, based on, uh, what was going on with my heart at the time, uh. However, you guys really made that, uh uh, not easy, but just just comforting to be there, and we're like you were.
Trevor Millar:You are our second group. You are our second group of veterans. When you came down, that was almost three years ago. Now we are. If you were then it would blow your mind how dialed in we are now. We have some pretty fantastic houses that we work out of now, a little more spectacular than the one you came to. So it's yeah, it's come a long way since you were here, man. I don't even know if we have the chefs?
Jonathan Dickinson:No, we didn't have our chefs.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:You had phenomenal food there. I do recommend you know if there are any veterans that are going to go down there and do this we did this. The staff is phenomenal. We treated them like staff at a hotel, you know like we tipped them, we took care of them the best we could because they took care of us. But the food amazing experience it's something that one I'll never forget. And two, I definitely want to come back and do, but I don't think it'll ever be the same as the first time I did it. And I'm not saying I want to come back and do the full thing, but I don't need that. I mean, one time an Ibogaine is enough for me. I'm good, I'm happy. Maybe some 5-am-a-hour DMT or something like that, maybe just to hold space. Speaking of holding space, uh, let's talk about that. Why is that so important? What is holding space and why is that important in in this type of work?
Trevor Millar:Uh well, I think I loved uh, Claudio Naranjo was, uh, a psychedelic practitioner who has since deceased, but uh, Jonathan knew him a lot better than I was. But he wrote a wonderful book, the Healing Journey, and at the start of that he describes the psychedelic space holder. He makes a parallel between Dante and Virgil in Dante's Inferno. When Dante is going through the seven rings of hell, the poet Virgil is his guide, basically, and the way that works is, Dante reaches this next hellish scene and Virgil says, yeah, that's not great, is it? But let's keep moving, let's get through it. This is not our final destination, and I think that's a really important part of holding space for psychedelics is you're essentially, you know, just escorting people through what may be challenging situations, but kind of keeping the end goal in mind, keeping some peace about you, keeping you know, yeah, basically keeping your eye on the prize and helping people through those challenging situations as they may come up and, yeah, just be a loving, supporting presence. It's more of that setting. You're a part of that setting.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So I'm going to turn it over to Mark here in a second the. I'm going to make a connection here. After I left, uh, your place, I was able to write and synthesize some things that were in my mind that came from the free energy principle, active inference and all that. And today, all that stuff is starting to become true, right? So, uh, I'll finish that book, probably in 2025.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:The the connection that we talk about here on the podcast on no Way Out, between what John Boyd gave us through his work in cybernetics, quantum physics, physics and then biology, and even more connect to what's happening today from the world of neuroscience, and it's connected to AI, and that is the free energy principle. So when I read Carhartt Harris's entropic brain hypothesis, I applied that to what we're doing, and that's exactly what we talked about today on this podcast about orientation, external world, how we perceive reality, default mode, network and, of course, counterfactuals. Who gave us the OODA loop? Um was on this path and had he continued, he would never have settled with the OODA loop the way it was. Uh, we didn't modify it by any, by any means. We just kept it the same way it is. We put a boundary around it and, by the way, when you're on 5M ER, dmt, that boundary dissolves, right, um, for the most part, and there are no boundaries between us. That's what I learned here with this experience is we're all one, we're all connected, there are no boundaries.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:And, by the way, with the way we explained John Boyd's OODA loop, it's a statistical boundary, meaning it doesn't really exist, right? So there is no boundary in the OODA loop as well. We just put one in there so we can talk about the internal and external states. But this is where a lot of these ideas came from, and what we found on the podcast is, I'd say, quite a few authors who've been on the podcast have used psychedelics at some point near the time they wrote their books or books, and they got in a flow state and were able to do that. So we're learning more and more that this isn't just some taboo thing. This is actually happening at scale. And, mark, I want to get your thoughts on some of the things we heard today and what we've heard on the podcast in the past.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Yeah, it's certainly mind blowing. It is the type of novelty that we would expect that people that could not only analyze but to synthesize things and create uh, create snowmobiles, especially where there's a clear gap. I mean, if so many people are dying of alcohol and opioids and suicide, I think it's time to reorient right. We have to smash the model of what we, of what we thought we knew, and and revise those models, because these other things are out there and they're possible to help people, whether it's, you know, veterans with PTSD or women with postpartum depression.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:I mean, there's any number of things that affect a very wide panacea of people. So I think that I would challenge people that are listening to, sort of as Boyd would tell us, you know, challenge all assumptions, because you can't just take, you just can't assume doctrine, because that doctrine becomes dogma forever if we just assume that. So we have to keep challenging the status quo, because that's how, that's the conceptual spiral where we get new insights, and with new insights then we can take new initiative. I think you'd be right on board with that.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:So I have to ask Trevor and Jonathan, using Mark Keller's experience of 5MEO have you seen anything like that before and, if so, can you share more insights? And for those, those listeners, we'll have another podcast on that to talk about that, and there are some podcasts out there where mark and I talk about that. Uh, but is there anything like that that you've witnessed before or after?
Trevor Millar:he was a really exceptional case he's. He's spoken about it publicly before but in a. In a nutshell, he just very. He was very much liberated very quickly through the 5meo experience and was very vocal about how in love he was with everyone, and everything uh, very vocal in uh in a house within a small Tijuana neighborhood.
Trevor Millar:So anyway, the police are slow to act in Tijuana, thankfully, in cases like that. But no, he was super vocal. But we do see, you know, I think it's most people, when they do 5-MeO, they just lie there still and quietly. They do 5-MeO, they just lie there still and quietly. But we tell everybody preemptively that sometimes people make a lot of noise on 5-MeO.
Trevor Millar:They might scream, they might yell, they might sound as if they're on a roller coaster, they might swear a lot, they might laugh a lot, and my warning to those who are on deck is so, if you hear somebody screaming at the top of their lungs, don't worry about it.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:They might be experiencing sheer bliss and that's often the experience I think you put me in last. I can't I remember I, I went last and I went after mark and I was terrified, yeah after that, for sure, yeah, yeah, we'll talk, we'll bring that all up on another podcast with you guys, but that's that story is. We haven't recorded, actually, the audio, so we'll share that with everybody.
Trevor Millar:That's right, yeah, yeah yeah, that's fantastic.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Hey, before we leave today, anything else you want to share? Any you know how can veterans or anybody who needs help get in touch with you?
Trevor Millar:If you can share that here, we can share that. On the links, we have a website, ambiolife, so wwwambiolife Everybody's welcome. I think that's a really important thing to share is, you know, if you feel as though you're getting a call to medicines like this, then you should reach out. Don't think that this is only for special operators, don't think this is only for people who might use drugs. This is really for anybody who feels a call, and I think there's benefit for just about anybody to experience this. We have a new podcast as well, so the Ambio podcast, which Ponch, you and Mark are going to come on. So we'll you know. I think there's five or six episodes of that out right now. The first four episodes I think that we did was really just Jonathan, jose and I talking about Ibogaine, so there's a lot of general information, and then we've started now bringing guests on. So our first guest episode is a guy, marty Acosta. He was injured in an inside firefight as a special forces.
Trevor Millar:He is a special forces veteran. He was shot multiple times, lost the use of a leg. They didn't amputate it, though, but the sciatic nerve was completely severed. They didn't amputate it, though, but the sciatic nerve was completely severed.
Trevor Millar:He is one of these guys that was in seven to 10 out of 10 pain all the time before he came down for Ibogaine and after Ibogaine, the first time he started getting some use of his foot again and real motivation to get better. And he came down for a second time as well and there were tremendous benefits from that as well. So that's a beautiful podcast. I would highly recommend checking that one out.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:And on that podcast I'm sure I'll share with you and Mark will share and he shared this before what happened to him in Iraq. And then we'll go into more detail of the back, because everybody has a backstory and I think it's important to understand that backstory. I think Mark and I story or Slider, and my story is pretty unique. We kind of grew up together as adults. I was at his wedding is my wedding, um and then our lives started to diverge, including to the point where we were about ready to come across the border and he revealed more information with me.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:I think that story is just so powerful because you know, I'm not going to say it we all saved Mark's life right, and that's amazing, and there's nothing better in this world to have helped save the life of another. We've also failed quite a bit. We know here in our community we've lost a lot of brothers and sisters mainly brothers to suicide and that's just absolutely not depressing, it's wrong. You know we need to fix that. So we'll talk about that on the podcast. I'm looking forward to that. But man, this is guys. This has been awesome. It's been an awesome conversation and love to have you back and go a little bit deeper, if we can I don't know if we can't into everything and we look at mark, do you have any last?
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:thoughts mark uh.
Mark "Moose" McGrath:Well, I think it was illuminating in that uh also too, that we coined the uh phrase and we're going to own that phrase. The uh snowmobiles of perception yeah, I love that one thank you guys.
Jonathan Dickinson:It's been. It's been really enlightening too, and we like, uh, how you guys are, it's been it's been really enlightening too, and we like, uh, how you guys are thinking about things and the model that you're using, and I think it's really there's a lot of tracking and overlap with what we're doing, so it's really really cool to explore that.
Brian "Ponch" Rivera:Awesome, and we'll dive more into complexity theory with you. Like you and I were talking about a few years ago,
