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Rick Perry was the 47th governor of Texas and the 14th secretary of Energy in the first administration of President Donald Trump.https://x.com/GovernorPerry
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W. Bryan Hubbard was the 1st Chairman of the Kentucky Opioid Commission and currently leads the REID Foundation’s American Ibogaine Initiative.https://x.com/w_bryan_hubbardhttps://www.reid.foundation/texas-ibogaine-initiativehttps://www.reveilleadvisors.com/ibogaine/
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Gentlemen, great to see you.
Yeah, put him on, slap him on.
What's happening?
Good to see you gentlemen again.
Taking off.
Good to see you, William.
One more time.
Yeah, one more time.
Yeah.
So, what is the latest?
Give me the latest.
Where are we at?
Why don't you take it, Brian?
You're the most current on where we are, what's going on.
Man, there has been a lot of stuff happen in the 15 months since we were here.
I mean, like, stunning amount of stuff.
So, let's not waste any time.
Tell them where we're at.
All right.
Well, the last time we came to visit with you, I believe, was on December the
27th of 2024.
We were just on the front end of having organized 30 committed Texans whose own
families had had experiences related to trauma, addiction, alcoholism, and the
wounds of war.
Who, after hearing a plan that was developed for the state of Kentucky to bring
Ibogaine to the American people as an FDA-approved medication and breakthrough
treatment for addiction and trauma, committed themselves to using their time,
their talent, and their network to achieve what had never been done before.
And that was to convince an individual state to undertake drug development to
create a therapeutic medical breakthrough for public health crises within its
borders that are representative of the national reality.
After you released the interview with us on January 2nd, 2025, we pursued a
five-and-a-half-month blistering campaign to convince 188 blank-slate Texas
legislators to fund the single largest psychedelic research and medical
development project in history, that being the $50 million Texas Ibogaine
Initiative.
We had the assistance of some in-state allies, one of which was Texans for
Greater Mental Health, led by a dear friend and brother of mine, Logan Davidson,
who was my right hand, going to meet with legislators continuously.
While I set up shop at a hotel here in Halston and lived here just about part-time,
wearing the shoe leather off, sweating, and making sure that everybody who
needed to be introduced, educated, and motivated to get behind this would do so.
Well, at the end of this five-and-a-half months, we secured the votes of yes of
181 out of 188 legislators between the Texas House of Representatives and State
Senate.
There was one individual who we had to persuade at the 11th hour to get behind
this project.
On May the 14th, 2025, just 36 hours before the Texas budget was finalized,
this bill that would create the first unified FDA drug development trial with
Ibogaine in U.S. history was not funded.
I woke up that morning and I believe very much in keeping your prayers in the
closet, as Jesus taught, and not getting out there parading about it.
But on that morning, I got a call and it was, hey, we're getting to the 11th
hour.
We don't have money to secure this.
It may not make it.
We've done everything that we can.
And I just, I literally got down on my hands and knees and said, God, please
let this happen.
And if it cannot happen, help me understand why.
Three hours later, I got a telephone call asking if I could go and meet with
the Texas House Speaker and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.
I went at 4.30 in the afternoon on May the 14th and spent an hour with these
two gentlemen going back and forth about what this project was, why it was so
existentially necessary for Texas and the country.
And on Friday morning, May the 16th at 10 a.m., we got a text message from
Lieutenant Governor Patrick confirming that he would approve and fully fund the
Texas Ibogaine initiative.
As we walk in here today, literally just 10 minutes before we walked into your
studio, I can confirm that the great state of Texas is going to fully fund the
Texas Ibogaine initiative.
Originally intended to be a public-private partnership, but now has decided on
its own to commit a full $100 million to launch the development of Ibogaine all
the way through the FDA's drug development process for the benefit of the
American people.
To do so on its own, without any drug development partner, and to do it for the
good of humanity.
That's phenomenal.
So what did you have to say to Dan Patrick to convince him of this?
And kudos to him for doing this.
Well, I had some very wonderful advocates who preceded my meeting.
Was he skeptical?
Oh, he was completely disengaged from the process, highly skeptical, as we
learned through intermediaries.
But we had two wonderful brothers on mission who happened to be twins, Marcus
and Morgan Luttrell.
I know Marcus very well.
Marcus and Morgan Luttrell reached out to the lieutenant governor.
They spoke to him very movingly and personally about their own experiences with
Ibogaine, what it had done, not just to save their lives,
but what it was doing to save the lives of warfighters who had come to the end
of being able to live.
And as they explained to him what it did for them and what it has done for
their brothers and sisters-at-arms who've returned to war, to broken government
systems that can do nothing to cure what else them at their core.
He was persuaded to have an open-minded conversation.
And through that conversation on May the 14th, we essentially went through what
science suggests are the powers of the most sophisticated molecule on the
planet to resolve physiological substance dependence and thereby create
psychology within the human being,
whereby they believe they believe they have ownership of themselves and their
future and that that future will be one defined by choice rather than compulsion.
And the most powerful aspect of the Ibogaine argument, not just for the
lieutenant governor and house speaker, but for most of these legislators who
voted yes,
is the experience endorsed by many that Ibogaine confirms without question the
reality of our individual human divinity.
And that is the greatest truth conveyed by this fabulous plant.
Well put.
And I don't think it's just Ibogaine that confirms that.
I think you could say the same about many other psychedelic drugs that are
unjustly maligned and treated as if they're an escape from reality.
But in the interest of this being a standalone podcast where people don't know
what Ibogaine is and don't understand the efficacy of it and how unbelievably
effective it is at especially treating addiction,
could you please just go over that?
Yes, sir.
So Ibogaine is an alkaloid that is derived from the Iboga shrub.
The Iboga shrub originates in the central Congo Basin.
Its native country is modern-day Gabon.
It is the mother country of the Iboga shrub, which has been used for centuries
in the spiritual and cultural traditions of the Bwiti,
a group of spiritualists who include the Pygmies as well as the Bantu tribes
that live there in Gabon.
In the early 60s, it was discovered that Ibogaine and Iboga had a significant
interruption effect on opioid addiction.
There was an individual who had been addicted to heroin for a number of years.
They took Ibogaine, and not only did they not experience any withdrawal when
they stopped taking heroin,
they stopped having any desire to use any drug whatsoever.
This touched off 60 years of open-label field studies that are mountains high
and decades wide
that firmly established that Ibogaine has a unique and singular interruption
capacity on physiological substance dependency,
whether that's opioids, alcohol, methamphetamine, cocaine, or tobacco.
Recent evidence also suggests that it has a significant interruption effect on
compulsive behaviors.
Anything that kind of impacts that brain's dopamine system and produces a rush.
Particularly gambling.
Yes, sir.
Now, in 2018, U.S. Special Forces special operators started going to Mexico for
treatment of symptoms of traumatic brain injury,
expressed through treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, and suicidality.
Many of these veterans had gone through the VA system.
They had been given an unbelievable amount of synthetic pharmacology that, in
their end effect,
essentially anesthetizes the soul and slowly euthanizes the body.
And they were at the end.
So, as they were going to Mexico and would get Ibogaine treatment,
they came back with these just unbelievably, just powerful recovery results
that seemed too good to be true.
So, there were some scientists at Stanford University that were funded by a
philanthropist who wanted to understand what was going on.
And so, what we have come to learn through a Stanford research study on
traumatic brain injury for vets
is that Ibogaine has remarkable neuro-regenerative capacities on the brain that
are unheard of in the annals of Western science.
And while information is still very small in amount and preliminary,
there are individuals who have had Ibogaine treatment for not just traumatic
brain injury,
but for multiple sclerosis, Lyme disease, Parkinson's disease, post-surgical
complications related to the removal of brain tumor
who endorse a restoration of functionality and an ability to live that are
otherworldly.
And as we recognize that the opportunities to improve the human condition at
scale are multi-lifetime in appearing,
we believe that we have found one of those.
And if we're going to do justice to the human species,
it is incumbent upon us to take what appears to be a promising therapeutic
improvement
and deliver it with speed through the U.S. medical systems.
And that's what Governor Perry and I have founded Americans for Ibogaine to do.
Just that.
Achieve the moonshot of our time.
And that is to bring Ibogaine medicine to the American people as quickly as
possible.
Well said.
And thank you again, Governor Perry,
because if it wasn't for your involvement in this,
I think a lot of people would be far more skeptical.
You know, you being a former distinguished governor of the state who is a
Republican,
generally speaking, most people think of Republicans being anti-psychedelics
and that this whole thing is just a bunch of people trying to escape reality
and poison their mind and, you know, tune out of society and become losers.
That's the general consensus of people that are just, for lack of a better term,
ignorant of the effects of these substances.
They don't understand it.
But if it wasn't for you, your open-mindedness,
your willingness to engage in this and try to understand it
and to speak to these veterans,
I don't think people would be taken into seriously.
So thank you.
Well, and thank you.
As I've watched you over the last 15 months,
it seemed like ever six weeks or so,
you'd have a guest on here and you'd be talking about Ibogaine in particular
and what is the progress that we're making.
What comes up so often.
Yeah.
Well, and it should.
It should.
It should because this truly, I mean,
this is not what I came into the world for.
This is not what I came to politics for.
This is what, you know,
I got led to this through that relationship with Marcus and, in turn, Morgan Luttrell
and seeing those two boys literally, particularly Marcus,
on the doorstep of committing suicide.
When he came to live with us at the governor's mansion in 2007,
we had met the year before just by the grace of God.
And I told him, I said, if you're ever through Austin, come by and see me,
knowing that the chances of that would be pretty slim.
He knocked on that guard door in May of 2007 and said,
the governor said, if I was ever through here, come by and see him.
They called.
I let him in for dinner.
And my wife, who's a nurse,
she recognized this young man who was really troubled,
addicted to opioids,
masking it with alcohol,
really sick.
And for the next two and a half years,
he lived with us at the governor's residence.
Wow.
And that started this long journey,
literally,
with him
and trying to find ways to heal him.
We sent him to a host of different places,
Carrick Brain Center in Dallas.
We sent him to what's called now Axios,
Athletes Performance in those days,
but a great rehab facility down in the panhandle of Florida.
And they helped him conquer
or helped him manage the opioid addiction.
I will suggest to you until he was treated with Ibogaine,
which did clean that completely away from him some years later.
But the point is he really struggled.
And he has become like our son.
As a matter of fact, I talked to him this morning.
He said, be sure and tell Joe howdy for me.
He just thinks the world of you as well.
I talked to his brother the day before.
They understand how powerful this compound is
from the standpoint of treating post-traumatic stress,
traumatic brain injury, addictions.
And as I became convinced, one of the things that I will say that I've been
open to change,
just like criminal justice reform.
In the early 2000s, I was kind of like, lock their ass up, throw the key under
the jail.
You know, you break the law in the state of Texas, here's how we treat you.
And I had a district judge in Fort Worth, John Crusoe, a Democrat district
judge,
who I knew and had been friends with.
He said, Governor, we got a program here that allows these individuals who have
broken the law,
you know, they've maybe, you know, got caught with an illegal substance or what
have you.
And rather than sending them to jail, sending them to the penitentiary,
where they become professional criminals, we give them a second chance.
We put them in a rehab program.
We put them in a treatment center.
We put them in a boot camp.
You know, give them these options rather than sending them to prison
where they're going to become professional criminals.
And the recidivism rate is going to continue on.
You know, I'm kind of like, nope, I'm tough on crime.
That's what us Republicans do.
But it really got me thinking.
I mean, I am curious-minded about concepts and ideas.
So that brought me to having conversations, and, you know, long story short,
that single conversation led to Texas leading the nation with criminal justice
reform.
Texas Public Policy Foundation that now Secretary of Agriculture,
Brooke Rollins, was operating in the mid to late 2000s.
They came on board, saw this, supported it.
We passed it through a very Republican, very conservative legislature.
And Texas led the nation in criminal justice reform.
Saved us billions of dollars.
We stopped building prisons.
We stopped sending people to prison where they were becoming professional
criminals.
So that template, if you will, was what we took to Donald Trump in 2018.
And he was just like me initially.
I'm tough on crime.
But he was open.
He was curious.
Brooke Rollins, interestingly, had come up and was his domestic policy advisor
at that time.
And she made the pitch.
And he was open.
And that conversation led to him being open to federal criminal justice reform.
And today, there are people who, I mean, you know, you may have different ideas
about President Trump and what have you.
I know that's the case.
But on this issue of criminal justice reform, this man was curious.
He was open-minded.
And he's made a real difference in people's lives following the Texas model.
The reason I share that with you as an example, that's where I was on these
compounds, these drugs, these psychedelics.
I mean, I grew up in the 60s.
Timothy O'Leary, using LSD, marijuana, any of that kind of stuff.
I mean, it was anathema to me, absolutely and totally.
I don't have anything to do with it.
This is crazy stuff.
You get in trouble.
They'll throw you in jail.
You'll jump off of buildings.
I mean, every story that you can imagine that people.
And then think about from the 60s forward how, you know, I went into the Air
Force.
They, you know, we took drug tests at least monthly.
So the idea of being involved with a drug was just totally and absolutely not
on my radar screen.
These are bad things.
And we're reinforced in the 80s with Mrs. Reagan.
Just say no to drugs.
Here's your brain on drugs.
I mean, we have been browbeat as a society for 60 years.
And when you add to it what Nixon did, President Nixon did in the late 60s,
early 70s, with his war on drugs, he hated hippies, he hated blacks.
And one of the ways you could go after them was to go make these compounds
Schedule I, which he did.
Schedule I says there is no medical purpose for it, and it is highly addictive.
Ibogaine fits neither of those.
Ibogaine is not an addictive compound by any sense of the imagination.
It's also absolutely not a recreational compound.
No, at all.
It's not something that someone's going to do at a party.
And we are proving without a doubt to the Texas legislature, to legislatures
across this country, in Mississippi, in Tennessee, in Arizona, West Virginia,
that it does have a medical purpose.
That there are some extraordinary things that can happen for their citizens who
have PTSD, who have sexual trauma, who have addictions.
I mean, saving lives by the thousands, hundreds of thousands, I will suggest to
you, when this is approved across the country.
And we see it as a relatively easily studied and accessed by medical care
compound.
So that story of seeing these two young men, who have given everything,
literally, up to willing to give their lives, and a lot of their friends did,
for our freedoms and our liberties in this country.
And for us to say to them, oh, sorry, you can't have access to this because,
you know, they're, you know, President Nixon said this was bad stuff back 60
years ago.
And it was taken off the shelf as a schedule one drug, put over here, and for
60 years, Americans have suffered through so many different eras, the late 90s,
when the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma comes along.
And we literally, I think one of the most demonic things I've seen in my public
life is this family who used oxycodone and sold it to America as this be-all,
end-all, and then our federal government in the mid-2000s.
We didn't know how to deal with these young men who would be put in these
horrible conditions and positions of being at war time after time after time,
rotation after rotation, tempos that we'd never seen before.
In the history of mankind, I'll suggest to you, I mean, Joe, we were at war for
20 years, 20 years during that period of time.
There's, you know, special operators that were deployed eight, nine, 10 times,
and then they come home, and the government gives them a sack of opioids, and
that makes them feel crappy, and they mask it with alcohol.
And we sit around and go, why did Bobby kill himself?
Well, because the government failed in its great responsibility to take care of
these young men and women, in my opinion.
So we owe it to them.
As a matter of fact, a dear friend of mine who just passed away within the last
two days, he had worked with me for, gosh, 30 years.
And when he first saw that I was getting involved with this psychedelic drug,
this ibogaine compound, and we were having a conversation.
He said, you need to be really careful with that.
You know, you've got a great reputation.
You spent 40 years building that reputation up.
He said, you don't want to throw it away on some cockamamie idea here.
And I told him, I said, well, I don't think I'm doing that.
I've studied this pretty intently.
I've talked to a host of different people.
And I said, so I'm comfortable about the science here that I'm seeing and what
have you, and I think it's worth going forward with.
But I said, Ray, their lives are not worth more than my reputation.
And that's what kind of continues to drive me.
There are people that still kind of say, why are you doing this?
Because I believe in it.
I mean, I believe it to the point, Joe, that I'm willing to risk my reputation.
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I don't think you're risking your reputation at all.
I think that's foolish thinking.
I think it's people that don't understand the times.
This is a different world.
We're living in a world of information now, and you can't go by these false
narratives that were adopted in the 1970s.
And we're winning.
I mean, I'm telling you what Americans for Ibogaine has done.
And, you know, we started out, I tell people, I said, you talk about a small
group of people.
I think there were six of us.
He's the CEO.
I'm the chairman.
We got Dr. Rulon, who's the secretary.
Ann Clare Stapleton, the communications person.
And then Marcus and Melanie Luttrell, Marcus's wife, are the other two members
of our little board.
And we were this small little group kind of going along and doing what we were
doing.
We were successful in the Texas legislature and what have you.
But it's exploded now.
We have ambassadors, Americans for Ibogaine ambassadors, all over the United
States now.
People have seen what we've been able to do in Texas.
Mississippi followed suit.
They sent their governor a piece of legislation.
I want you to talk about that.
We're going to do the roll call here.
Yeah.
And just share with Joe and his audience just the great progress that's being
made.
And quite frankly, I think about Michael Dell when he was selling computers out
of the trunk of his car back in the late 80s and then his college dormitory.
AFI kind of found itself like that just a few months ago.
And I'm not trying to say that we're Dell Computer today, but we are growing at
such a leaps and bounds
and having the resources that we need to be able to put our people in various
places.
I mean, he travels all – you were in Cabo.
I want you to tell him about the group that you met with in Cabo.
I mean, just 200 of these extraordinary people down there.
He travels all over the country.
And we have to have the resources to be able to do that.
And so I hope the folks that are listening go to Americans for Ibogaine.
You know how to tell them how to do that and help this organization because
this is what I'm going to do the rest of my life.
I'm 76 years old, and this is what I hope the Lord gives me a lot of years to
make a difference
because I know for a fact that what we're doing today, what you're helping us
with, is making a difference.
And if we can get these clinical trials to the conclusion – and, you know,
thank you to the lieutenant governor
and to the speaker for what they committed to today.
I mean, to know that we're going to be able to go forward now with these
clinical trials,
to show the world exactly what we know so that the naysayers out there, the
skeptic, can look at that and go,
you know what?
You can get 85 percent of the people who are hooked on opioids clean in 72
hours.
Isn't that an amazing thing?
I mean, that's such a stunning thing to me.
Dr. Gull Dolan, we were at South by Southwest a week and a half ago.
She was sitting on the stage.
She's an MD, PhD, was at Johns Hopkins.
She's over at Cal Berkeley now.
And she gave a little primer, if you will, on the different psychedelics.
There's a critical period that the mind opens up and you're able to go in and,
if you will,
the medicine treats the mind, I think, from my Aggie, you know, non-pharmaceutical,
non-scientific mind here.
But to go in and repair, reset the brain, the technical word is neuroplasticity.
Ketamine has a critical period, I think she said 48 to 72 hours.
Psilocybin has a critical period from 14 to 28 days.
I think I'm pretty close on these.
But Ibogaine, the critical period, the time when that neuroplasticity is active
and the brain can be trained, healed, reset, is from 90 to 120 days.
And then with the addiction, opioids, which I happen to think is one of the
most addictive substances that's out there.
I mean, this is some horrible stuff.
You know, this very current event with Tiger Woods and Tiger's accident.
You know, he had Oxycontin in his – you know, I'm not judging here, but I'm
just kind of saying that may –
when I ran for president in 2011, I'd had major back surgery in July.
I announced that I was running for president in August.
I had six weeks to try to get over that major back surgery, and I had a
terrible condition called a neurological hyperfusion in my right leg.
I've never had a pain like that.
It felt like a blowtorch going down my right leg.
And they gave me Oxycontin.
And I was taking that to cover up the pain.
I was taking Ambien to go to sleep at night, and I was taking some stuff called
ProVigil to get back up in the morning and be focused.
I laugh about it now.
I'm surprised I did as well as I did in that presidential effort in 2011.
Hell, forgetting that one thing – that third thing in that debate.
Hell, I'm surprised I could remember any of them.
Knowing what I know now about Oxycontin and the incredibly nasty, addictive
nature that it has.
I mean, this stuff is just poison.
I mean, this stuff is just poison.
And Ibogaine, in 48 to 72 hours, after one dose, one oral application of this
compound,
and that addiction has gone, Joe, but Stanford has done functional MRIs on an
addicted opioid brain.
And then treatment with Ibogaine, and they have shown that brain from the
addicted look that those experts,
those postdocs that look at this, to a normal brain, a normal brain scan in 72
hours.
If you were to go through the normal process of healing yourself of opioid
addiction through an abstinence program,
it would take you 18 months.
And there are very few – I'm going to say single-digit people that are
successful in being able to do that.
But think about that.
We've got a compound here that has the ability to heal people of opioid
addiction in 48 to 72 hours.
And we're not doing everything that we can in our power to make that available?
I mean, what the hell is wrong with us?
How bad you got to hate people to not make that available?
And with two doses, it's even more spectacular.
98%.
That is amazing.
98%.
That is truly amazing.
There's nothing even remotely like it with standard practice addiction therapy.
Nothing.
Nothing.
You know, he mentioned the Americans for Ibogaine.
We have ambassadors.
And, Joe, what you really helped us do on January 2nd of 25 was create a
movement.
Our organization is the custodian of that movement.
We are a public policy and advocacy organization.
And Governor Perry mentions keeping me on the road.
Wherever there are state leaders, citizens of conviction and influence, whether
that is California, whether it's Massachusetts, or whether it's Alabama, we
exist to plant the seed of a scientific understanding, of a public policy
framework, and of a spiritual understanding of the significance of what we have
in our hands here.
And while we have talked about Ibogaine's impact on substance dependence on
substance dependence, and upon the wounds of war, our ambassadors reflect,
essentially, the universal human condition, and the way in which individuals
who have tried every way to overcome various forms of trauma and debility,
find as the last step, a redemptive restoration through Ibogaine treatment.
It is not for everybody.
It should not be a first resort.
It is an exceptionally powerful medication that comes with a series of side
effects that are highly unpleasant, as you previously mentioned.
Now, one of the selling points, ironically, in the Texas legislature was to say,
you know, if your idea of a good time is being in a state of semi-paralysis for
12 to 16 hours and throwing up continuously through the process, you're going
to have a real good time.
And if there is the equivalent of being brought to the judgment throne of God
on this side of life, it is an Ibogaine experience.
That seemed to motivate a lot of support, especially for those who subscribe to
puritanical notions of punishment for wrongdoing.
That's not what I'm here to advocate, but certainly it is not fun.
But what we know is that, for instance, we have two fashion model twins whose
father sexually abused them for a decade.
And the results of that horrific experience that they shared produced all kinds
of psychological maladies that included an eating disorder for one, persistent
neuroses in the other.
They tried every form of talk therapy.
They tried every psychotherapy modality known to try to overcome that.
And it was Ibogaine that restored their lives and their capacity to enjoy the
life that God has given them.
We have first responders who are emerging in numbers.
One who is a firefighter from Oklahoma who was demoted because of decades of
alcoholism.
His life has been restored by Ibogaine and he's back working full time.
We have a gentleman who was a Charlottesville police officer who was hit in the
face with a brick during the riots that occurred in Charlottesville.
His life was restored by a single Ibogaine treatment and he has attained a
level of functionality that he didn't think was possible, nor his doctors.
We have a gentleman who was a pilot who unfortunately did a bomb and run on a
village and killed a number of innocent people.
So he learned about this and this sent him into a spiral, as many war fighters
who are exposed to moral injury do.
Ibogaine has restored this gentleman's life.
We have a gentleman by the name of Robert Gallery, a former NFL player who
exhibited all the signs of CTE in his post-retirement years.
He was ready to kill himself so that he wouldn't harm his own family.
It was Ibogaine that restored his life.
There have been other NFL players who are as yet unnamed.
Some, incidentally, that have been in the paper who have gone for Ibogaine
treatment to address similar symptoms.
Players in the NHL.
Players in other contact sports that include soccer and rugby and the United
Kingdom where there is an emerging cohort of professional athletes who have
reached out to us to say,
we want the United Kingdom for Ibogaine.
I would love to get you guys connected with the UFC.
We would love to be connected to the UFC.
Because that is obviously an issue with professional fighters.
Hughes, Matt Hughes, and Matt had – I met Matt through Marcus, gosh, in like
2008 or so, and we went out for a fight.
And then subsequently, Matt had, I think, a car accident of which he really had
–
He's hit by a train.
Yeah, just an incredible traumatic brain injury.
And I just want to – I want to have that conversation with him.
And I'm sure you have great relationships with those.
We know for a fact that cumulative impacts on the brain are what lead to CTE.
I mean, that's – I don't think that's even a question of – here's how it
happens.
These multiple concussions have cumulative effect on the brain.
And at some point in time, that CTE has a long-time effect.
And this medicine has the ability to remove that trauma, to reset that brain,
to heal that brain.
I don't know how it works, Joe.
But that's the reason these clinical trials are going to be so important as we're
going forward.
And I can't tell you – I'm ecstatic that the lieutenant governor and the
speaker today announced their full Texas support behind these clinical trials.
We're fixing to become the epicenter for a movement that literally can change
the world.
And I know that sounds kind of a little bit over the top.
But if we have within our grasp here a compound that can heal our loved ones
who have an addiction, be it a substance addiction or be it a non-substance
addiction,
if we have the ability to heal people who have been traumatically impacted by
concussions,
if we have the ability to address PTSD in all the different forms that it comes
– I mean, the hope that that can give to the society that we live in.
And I'm not talking about just the United States.
You think about what's going on in Israel, in Ukraine, in the Middle East today,
in the trauma that people are facing.
I mean, this truly can be an extraordinary gift to the world.
And, you know, listen, I think it's really interesting you ask a leading
question about how did I come to this position of being able to be supportive
as I am.
And when I think about my growing up – and I grew up in a very conservative
Christian family.
And I think one of the challenges we still have in our society is that the
conservative Christian faith is like, stay away from that stuff.
I mean, that's bad.
Do not – and under any circumstances, don't be going there.
It's demonic.
And there's a book that's about to be published.
I think is it about – I think the first week in April.
So we're approaching it.
There's an author by the name of Wendy Reese, R-E-E-S, and Wendy with an I, W-E-N-D-I-R-E-E-S.
And she, not unlike the two twins, was sexually assaulted by her own father.
He was a pastor of a church.
Joe, I'm telling you, brother, I can't dream up in my worst nightmare a more
evil thing than a father that would sexually assault their –
A preacher father.
Their daughter.
And she dealt with it with Ibogaine and has come to the conclusion that her
great gift to give to the world out there is to write this book called A
Christian's Guide to Psychedelics.
Now, if you think that won't catch some people's attention when they're going
through the bookstore and they've got A Christian's Guide to Psychedelics, holy
mackerel.
But this is a book about her experience, but it's also a book that I would
suggest that every believe in Christian – go pick it up and read it because
it talks about chapter and verse and gives you scripture about where God talks
about these compounds, about these things that he's given the world.
He means them for good, all of them for good.
Are you aware of the scholars in Israel that are proposing that Moses seeing
the burning bush was the acacia tree?
Yeah.
There's an acacia tree.
The acacia tree, which is very common in the Middle East, is rich in dimethyltryptamine.
And they believe that what they're trying to relay in this story was that Moses
encountered God through the burning of this bush.
So the burning of this bush, releasing the psychedelic compound dimethyltryptamine,
allowed Moses to bring back the Ten Commandments.
You know, thank you for mentioning that.
I have been following scholarship around the use and the recognition that there's
a lot of psychedelic allegory in Holy Scripture.
That, I think, is the favorite, where that burning bush reveals the great I am.
And when Moses says, you know, who are you?
I am who I am.
And the beauty about Ibogaine and the other plant medicines are their capacity
to reveal the I am that is within each of us.
And that I am as our eternal creator who absolutely has engineered and placed
these plants on this earth so that we can be affirmed in what our true identity
and ultimate destiny is.
And praise God for it.
And then there's also the sacred mushroom in the cross, the John Marco Allegro
book, where he was one of the ordained ministers that was – his task was to
decode the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And he wrote this book that details what he believes is the use of psychedelic
drugs in ancient Christianity.
Hard for me to argue with.
I mean, I just think our modern perception of it, which is very tainted by what
happened during the Nixon administration, where they were trying to squash the
hippie movement, the anti-war movement, and the civil rights movement.
And that's why they demonized these drugs and these compounds.
And that's why they put them in this category of having no medicinal use, which
is clearly not accurate.
It doesn't mean that they should just be given to everyone and everyone should
do them with no restrictions and no regulations.
It just means we should understand that they have a long history of human use
and have spectacular results on all sorts of things that our society is
suffering from greatly.
And to just pretend that that's not the case based on what happened in the 1970s
is just insane.
It doesn't make any sense.
I would suggest that one of the greatest lessons learned by Americans who are
age 50 and younger, those of us who I call the bicentennial children, is that
the most morally depraved criminal in America today is power.
And the power of the human hand, when it is wielded in its most abusive context,
will always seek to deny any access to individual human divinity and the
liberty and autonomy that is conferred upon each of us as children of God.
And insofar as we find ourselves at the precipice of what I believe is the
emergence of a broad-based spiritual movement where all of us modernists within
the empiricism of modern American society are able to see through the fog of
all of our wealth and gadgetry and recognize we are in the midst of profound
spiritual famine in the United States.
You, I know, and forgive me for referencing age, remember back in the mid-80s
where we saw all these horrific images of starvation and dissension and fly-covered
death from mass famine in Ethiopia and Sudan,
where millions of millions of people starved to death because the malevolence
of power forbade the delivery of any relief sent by the outside world.
When we look at what's right in front of us in the United States today, there
is no denying that we are in the midst of a terrible spiritual famine.
And the malevolence of American power is feasting on our starvation.
This is an emancipation movement for the mind, body, and soul of every human
being in this country and across the globe who is lethally estranged from their
own spirituality.
The Ibogaine mission is a mission to foment dramatic medical breakthroughs
across a host of conditions that have no effective therapeutic answers.
But above and beyond that, it is about the affirmation of the spiritual essence
of life that can unify us as a species in a way that is necessary if we're
going to navigate these changes over the next 20 years.
Governor Perry mentioned this wonderful invitation that I received to go to
what was called the Earth One Summit.
Now, Joe, I come out of Hillbilly Holler, Virginia.
And it's a...
I do.
I introduce him from time to time.
I said, look, this guy, he looks like and he sounds like a hillbilly from
eastern Kentucky in the Appalachian Mountains.
And I said, he is.
But I said, he's one of the most brilliant people I've ever met in my life and
one of the most extraordinary orators I've ever had in my life.
So anyway, I wanted to...
I love you, brother, but you are a hillbilly.
Wow.
I'm much more comfortable with that than all that other stuff you said.
But, you know, when you come out of scratch, nothing sometimes there are
certain sophistications that you lack.
And I'm no exception to that.
So there was this Earth One Summit.
It was 200 thought leaders from across the world who came to basically discuss
the future.
And I was very honored to have received an invitation to come and attend the
gathering to speak about what Governor Perry and I are working on through
Americans for Ibogaine.
And they presented me with the honor of being the closing keynote speaker for
the gathering.
And as I listened over the course of four days, I heard individuals who
included Kimball and Christiana Musk.
And I've read interviews by Elon Musk speaking about the advent of AI and the
capacity of AI to solve the central dilemma that we as humans have had since we
emerged from the caves.
So as I was there listening to folks speak about being on the edge of a time
when we can automate the means of production and essentially create an
unlimited amount of abundance for every person on this planet,
I couldn't help but think about where we are right now as compared to where
these individuals see us being in 20 years.
You cannot create and deploy this kind of godlike technology, which has the
capacity to produce unlimited abundance, potentially usher in the age of Aquarius,
and drop it in to these Frankenstein monstrosity government systems that we
currently have that are enthroned upon the helplessness of powerless people,
that perpetuate problems that they are supposed to solve, and that monetize
sustained human misery.
So long as government makes its buck over keeping its foot on the necks of the
American people,
we are looking at a future that much more resembles Mad Max than we are Star
Trek.
And if we are going to create the degree of social cohesion that is necessary
to hold these systems accountable and to create a system that can truly
usher in that age of unlimited abundance to improve the human condition for all,
it begins with a spiritual reawakening that I began first and foremost and the
rest of the psychedelics concede and foment within American society.
To that end.
And then I'll be quiet for the next little bit.
No, no, you're good, man.
We love listening to you.
There is a six-part docu-series that will come out next year called Psychedelics
And.
And it is a series of interviews with a cross-section of leaders across the
United States where they speak about their own quest for meaning and how
psychedelics has helped them understand that we are more than just these
material beings that get up and go to work every day and are a productive
economic unit, go home and repeat.
That there is a much higher sense of purpose that we are here to serve and that
the plants themselves have the capacity to enlighten us at scale in a way that's
absolutely necessary if we're going to make that age of abundance happen as
those visionaries articulate and dream for.
What I think is fascinating about the age that we're living in is that change
comes very slowly, but it comes much faster when you have the kind of access to
information that people have today.
And I don't think this conversation was possible 20 years ago.
No, no way.
And that's kind of amazing.
No way.
It's kind of amazing.
And I don't think that there was a format for this conversation 20 years ago.
This format has occurred because of the age of information, because of the
Internet, and because there's no gatekeepers anymore, and because people have
the choice to decide what they want to consume, what they want to listen to.
And to be able to be a part of that, to me, is an incredible privilege, and to
be able to have you guys on and to have this conversation and to recognize that
the reason why this is possible is because, for lack of a better term, the
world's waking up.
Yes, sir.
It's just taking more time than we would like, but the world is waking up, and
change happens.
It just happens.
People have to change their opinions, and that's very difficult, because a lot
of people identify with their opinions.
Their opinions become a part of their ideology, and it's just very difficult to
get people to change their ideology.
They identify with this.
It is them.
And I've always tried to tell people, the way I try to approach things, you are
not your ideas.
You are not your opinions.
These are just thoughts, and if you identify with them, you are trapped in them,
and you will be held hostage by them.
You will try to defend them, even if they don't make sense.
You will try to ignore evidence that points you in a direction that's contrary
to what your current belief system is.
Don't be your opinions.
Don't be your ideas.
just sit in them be consistent be honest have ethics and morals that you adhere
to
but the ideas are just ideas and if you're wrong you should be proud to say
wrong it's a it's a
sign of growth it's a sign of intelligence and it's a sign of you being an
honest human being
who cares about the truth not about being right because there's too many people
in this world that
they don't really have conversations they have ideological sparring matches
where they just
involved in these little intellectual tugs of war where they're just trying to
be right
and this is not the time for that this it's just so my my going from hard no on
criminal justice reform
to literally a leader on criminal justice reform in the mid-2000s my going from
hard no on uh any psychedelic drugs that could be used in any way uh to now
being what i've
humorously referred to as the johnny apple seed of ibogaine um is to your point
you know be
be be open be willing to say you were wrong uh i know my wife would like to
hear me do that more
often but hey i i if you don't mind i want to take a minute and talk about how
far this movement has come and uh brian talked about americans for ibogaine and
our ambassadors all
across the country and the growth that that we've seen in this and i want to
give you one example of
to your point of that five years ago uh if you had had an institution uh that
had its own reputation
dealing with brain health and brain science and those kind of things uh they
would have just kind of
moved you off to the side and said you know no thanks but the center for brain
health in dallas
this is an extraordinary institution uh that's connected to the university of
texas dallas matter
of fact it's just next door to ut southwestern which is one of the great
medical facilities in the world
ut southwestern and dr uh sandy chapman heads up uh the center for brain health
uh and they've they've done
some some some great work we went up and presented to her i don't know probably
60 to 90 days ago and
and uh there was another uh organization called uh forward forward intent
forward intent uh just a
beautiful young uh man and his wife uh alex duran and and his wife uh who have
funded an effort and what
they're what they're doing with their resources they're sending i think 250
individuals down to mexico
uh to both i think a facility uh called transcend and to ambio uh and ambio is
the is that facility
that i've been to brian's been to uh marcus and and and uh morgan latrell have
been to i think you
know probably 2 000 more fighters been down to ambio now uh vets underwrites
them um and just as an aside
this has blown up so big and i'm talking about the the ibogaine effort the
education of ibogaine
people you know there's some hope out there and and people are rushing to find
where they can go to
you know to treat the addiction that their loved one hands or deal with their ptsd
and what have you
and and ambio uh is just covered up uh and i'm sure you know the other
facilities uh are as well down
there the the the organization vets which is really where i came into this uh i
think amber and marcus
capone um they don't have they don't have any openings anymore i mean they are
completely covered
up uh and and but i mean that's a good challenge i'm glad we have that
challenge but my point is you've
got a an institution in dallas texas that just like the state is getting the
signal it's okay to be out
there talking about this it's okay to uh to be a leader it's okay to get out
there and and and lead
the charge and i want to read to you uh what uh dr chapman um because i asked
her i said do you mind if
i talk about what you all are doing and she said absolutely and she said
governor great to talk with
you yesterday here are some comments to guide you and how to discuss our
existing collaboration
i'm excited to announce that we have begun a partnership with the center for
brain health
university of texas at dallas americans for ibogaine and forward intent to
create the largest research study
of ibogaine to date focused on understanding its impact on the brain among the
veteran community
dr francesca philby an expert in cognitive and translational neuroscience
especially the use of
neuroimaging to study brain behavior relationships will lead the research our
mission together is to move
beyond the question of does ibogaine help and instead answer the more practical
questions veterans and
clinicians need number one who benefits and why how long do the benefits last
which aspects of daily life
functioning ie cognition sleep substance use and overall well-being improve or
worsen following
treatment and how are these changes associated with brain uh alterations the
three-year study
will follow those treated with ibogaine over the course of 18 months which will
allow us to
create the first understanding of the sustained impacts of ibogaine on the
brain across various
treatment regimes we'll be diving more into this topic on november the 19th at
the center for brain
health brain health presents speaker series to share more by bringing world-class
scientific rigor to this
space we aren't just studying a substance we're creating a foundation of
knowledge that will expand safe
health informed access for those who need it most that is what americans for ibogaine
is really all about making that type of penetration having that type of success
seeing what brian
and and the other folks have created here in the state of texas i'm going to
tell you something brother
there is nothing
that i've been involved with
in my life
that gives me more pleasure
than to see
what we're doing and knowing
that there's a father out there
a mother out there
whose child's going to be saved
you mentioned dogma
people
are
in particular in american society there is a quest for identity
there is a quest for belonging
so much of what we see on social media and in broadcast media that is rage and
anger and disaffection
is tremendous loneliness and a tremendous lack of
of of belonging to something
and a tremendous amount of trauma related to having never having had anything
that resembles
unconditional affection within the context of a safe and stable familial
relationship
that's at scale within the united states
and the degree to which dogma can thwart evolution
is a hundred percent right on and i just use my own self as an example
i was a child of reagan's america i can remember i was about five years old
when he and president
carter had their first presidential debate in 1980 president reagan was like
the
mother goose to the goslin he just imprinted on me
and whereas other young boys had pictures of jill montana and michael jordan
and michael
jackson all over their rooms mine was wallpapered with ronald reagan
i was the president of the teenage republicans in high school i wrote him fan
letters all the
time he actually replied to one and i put it in a a frame in my room it was
written on my birthday
i was president of the college republicans at george mason university and i
mean
i aim to be the king of conservative republican conformity that was my whole
mission in life
and i used to joke that uh when people said well how did you get to this you
know and what do you
think about the fact that you're talking about it and you're so zealous in your
advocacy
i would kind of make a half statement and say well if 25 year old me could come
and see 50 year old me
he would look and say what in the world happened to you and i would kind of yuck
and yuck and laugh
about it well here's the answer if 25 year old me could come back and look at
50 year old me and say
what happened to you 50 year old me would look right back and say you happened
to me you happened to me
your youthful sense of certainty your belief that you had it all figured out
your belief that you had
no further greater evolution to achieve sir you and your insolence of youth you
happened to me
one of the things that i have so enjoyed learning about governor perry and as
he and i have built
relationship the first time i really started following him was when he ran for
president in
2012 and i believe that had he not had that back surgery would have we would
not have had a second
obama term he would have won that race and i think he would have won it handily
it's been remarkable to
listen to this gentleman who has been so firmly identified with the
conservative wing of the
republican party be so willing to be curious and to have that human value of
curiosity and a willingness
to hear and a willingness to know and a willingness to entertain that perhaps
everything that he had been
taught about this particular subject was not correct curiosity is a prime human
value and if you allow
dogma to shut off your curiosity you have hobbled yourself and i think it was
muhammad ali who said
if if if if a 50 year old man thinks the exact same way as a 20 year old man as
he did when he was
20 he's wasted 30 years of his life and that is that is dead on right dead on
right yeah i could attest to
that curiosity is my number one attribute that's the thing that's led me in
life and everything i've
ever done is just being open-minded and curious i'm very fortunate is that i
didn't think i had things
figured out when i was 20 at all i was sure that i was a moron i was good at
one thing kicking people
that's it and then uh from then i realized that there's a lot to learn and that
as much as i learned
about martial arts i could apply that sort of open-minded discipline because
you you have to be
open-minded to be good at martial arts because you have to be able to listen
you can't think you
already know you cannot you won't you won't grow and you won't get better you
you have to be listening
to coaches you have to be listening to instructors you have to be listening to
your teammates you have
to listen to everybody if you don't listen if you have don't tell me those
people don't go anywhere
and i learned that very early on it's very fortunate that i found that path
because i've applied that to
virtually everything that i've ever done in life instead of having this belief
that i have things
figured out i mean i've certainly like been more sure than i should have been
at many times in my life
but always willing to stop and go maybe i'm wrong and if it wasn't for this
podcast it would have never
gotten to where it is because i've fortunately been able to talk to brilliant
people and you know i grew
up in um i lived in california for 26 years before that i you know i lived in boston
in new york i i thought
of people that the southern accent in particular right then this is a standard
thing that a lot of people
on the coasts have you hear people talk with a southern accent you think they're
dumb and it's a it's a
terrible stereotype that actually came out because of hookworm parasites i'm
sure you're aware of that
story and i'm not you're not okay me the stereotype of the lazy dull-minded
southerner came out of the
fact that a large percentage of people in the south had contracted hookworms
from walking around barefoot
and hookworm parasites will rob you of your intellectual capacity they greatly
diminish your ability to
think and exhaust you you get slower and you know in quotes lazier but you're
really just infected with
the parasite and it's an enormous percentage of the population in the 1900s
where we're infected with
hookworm and in the south in particular hot climates and this is where this the
stereotype came from
when someone like you speaks with such insane recall like your recalls bananas
like your recall of dates
and names and times and i have a pretty good recall it's nothing like yours it's
extraordinary and i love
when i meet someone who's brilliant who still has a southern accent because it's
it's like like i said yeah
forget all your stereotypes let them all go baby because they're not real it's
not real none of that is
real individuals vary wildly and you know i've met brilliant people from um
coastal cities and i've
met fucking morons that talk like you know a person that you would assume would
be a highly educated
intelligent person but they're closed-minded and foolish in their ways and uh
having had this ability to have
all these different conversations with different people it's just like every
time i have another
conversation just expands my understanding just a little more and a little more
and a little more
and i love it and it's all out of curiosity and i'm i'm very happy that i've
been able to
make that curiosity infectious my favorite cities and i know we're getting off
the beaten path here a
little bit i love to get off the beaten path that's my favorite thing to do my
my favorite cities in america
or those that you can go to and not feel like you're in the country miami is
fabulous it's a wild place
you should have a passport to go to miami it is fabulous and uh i remember the
first time i went to
new york city one time when i was about five years old only thing i could
remember was the empire state
building and some dude with purple hair sticking his tongue out at me next time
was in 2019 and i'd always had
kind of that stereotypical southerners attitude a bunch of you know haughty
stuck up mean active yankee people
yeah uh living in an obnoxious locale that would just be hell on earth to have
to endure
so i had the opportunity to go and spend a day there and uh rolled into grand
central station on uh the
railway from uh i think it was new haven connecticut and just to watch the
dimensions of the architecture
as we rolled into the city crazy the expansion of scale of this place how old
were you uh well let's
see i was about to turn uh 44. i think i could hear the beverly hillbillies
music playing in my head when i
was going down through there so we get off our grand central station and i mean
i walked all through
that i walked from grand central station all the way down to the tip of uh
where the world trade center
was it was new york city is a monumental human accomplishment when you can have
the entire
world within 300 square miles and it is a a living affirmation of everything
the united states is
supposed to be as the last best hope of humankind on earth just to be in that
place anytime i've gone back
since i mean the minute that i uh go to get the uber at la guardia airport and
i see that skyline i mean
my heart just starts racing racing racing i would have never thought that i
would just fall in love
with new york city but it is fabulous san francisco is the same way uh just
there are so many wonderful
places in the united states where you wouldn't think that somebody necessarily
who sounded like me would
would endorse but one of the best things that i have done is stop watching
television news the last time
i watched television news was after the first obama press conference in january
of 2009 and i cut it off
wow aside from presidential debates and election returns i've never turned it
back on
the number i shouldn't tell this the number the number of times i've left my
front door wide open the
garage door open in my neighborhood and nothing has happened is remarkable this
country in terms of her
people is as much like it was back in 1950 as it has ever been the complexion
is a little different
we've got a lot more diversity now than we've ever had but once you take that
blinder of mass media mayhem
and all this fabricated division that is purposely put out there to keep us
divided to keep us tuning in
tuning in and and segregated yeah once you take yourself out of it and you just
start having a
conversation next time someone gets into an uber with someone who doesn't have
english as a secret
language strike up a conversation ask them how did you come to the united
states what brought you here
and your heart is going to feel with just the unbelievable amount of pride and
love to hear
those accents from the middle east and from africa speak about this country in
ways that take us right
back to 1776 it's a fabulous place and i'm able to say so much of this because
of what
the plans have helped clarify by way of that universal human divinity that we
all share
that this country is the cradle to protect and to honor which is what makes
this mission so incredibly
important and i do want to oh i'm sorry no go ahead please there's two people
that i left off of our
ambassador program that i think are really showstoppers i want to mention one
is a gentleman by the name
of rear admiral jim hancock this gentleman received ibogaine treatment for his
wounds of war
he was the navy medical corps chief and was the medical officer for the united
states marine corps
one of our other ambassadors is a gentleman by the name of general glenn curtis
he served in both gulf
wars he served in afghanistan his most recent stint of service was as the
commanding general for the
louisiana national guard and he is one of our prime spokespeople for
legislation that's pending in
louisiana right now to join texas as a partner in this ibogaine trial so that's
fantastic yeah please say
what you were going to because i'm curious i don't even remember hey well i
remember what i wanted to
talk about please so and and i want to get us back on uh the the track that we
were talking about um
you know brian's done a great job to discuss the uh the spiritual aspect of the
medicine and and what
i mean that's incredibly important don't don't get me wrong on that at all and
uh but what brought me
personally to the medicine obviously my relationship with marcus and morgan and
what have you and then
as i studied it i'm like if you're really going to be a legitimate spokesperson
for this if you're going
to uh you know put your reputation out there you need to be treated you need to
go through the treatment
and i'm going to get to you at the end of this conversation but i want to set
this up if i may
and in 2023 if my memory serves me correct this is the same time that nolan
williams was heading up
the uh 30 veteran study that stanford was going to oversee kind of the early
days if you will of of
some clinical trial type effort to have the data to have the background some
early day uh efforts to
start educating the public about that is how i i do this they had 30 vets i
think they were between
the ages of like 22 and 42 uh they all had moderate uh to severe ptsd uh they
were um some of them
addicted to alcohol uh they you know they were pretty classic veteran
population that had some real
challenges um they were sent well to stanford and they did baseline functional
mris and then they were
sent down to ambio uh just south of tijuana where they were given the the
treatment um and then
that last i think about a four day treatment protocol you go down you work your
way in
tuesday you get in preparation tuesday evening you get the compound wednesday's
a recovery day
thursday there's a five meo dmt treatment and then you go home
they went back to stanford after five days after the treatment and had follow-up
mris i think they
did an mri at 30 days and then a functional mri at six months so that there was
a you know good good
piece of of data there to look at just stunningly good results um and uh the
results i think there was
87 percent of them who six months now better than two years later uh but that
have zero ptsd uh the
addictions were at that level of reduction that we talked about in the high 80
percentiles i mean just
we've seen all this data before this is nothing new but the reason i share that
with you is that
i basically went down and followed the same protocol i wasn't part of the
clinical trial but and i only
wanted to be treated with ibogaine i did not want to take the five meo dmt so
what i was looking at and
i was interested in this from the brain regenerative side of it i had about as
bucolic a life as you've
ever had i never had anybody mistreat me to of anything that you could even get
close to calling traumatic
effect i had no trauma in my life i grew up on a dry land cotton farm you know
60 miles from abilene
texas 16 miles from closest place that had a post office in a part of texas
that there's just a
lovely wonderful loving place my mom and dad loved me and i knew it and you
know my scout master and my
principal and my superintendent and my sunday school class who by the way were
all the same person and he
drove the bus and was a football coach but i i had a as
non-traumatic growing up period as you can imagine so
i was concussed severely concussed three times twice in athletic events and i'm
talking about knocked out
completely for over one minute and those are severe concussions two times
athletic events one time
unloading horses knocked completely out so what i know now is that as i got to
pilot training
and i started noticing that i was having trouble sleeping and that this thing
that i
understood later in life was anxiety had crept into my life so i had i'm going
to put it in the mile
in the mile category anxiety and uh and uh insomnia
i went into a very odd line of work in politics to have those two kind of
things
and then and i'm i masked them rather well uh most people didn't know i had
that my wife did but
other than that even my you know senior staff in my
my offices through the year agriculture commissioner lieutenant governor
governor
they did not know that i had this challenge of you know maybe sleeping three
and a half four hours a
night um being anxious at times to the point of being never dysfunctional uh
but from my perspective my perspective i'm probably some people out there in
the political world said
hell pair you were dysfunctional the whole damn time what are you talking about
anyway beside the point
i had the treatment i had the
i had the brain scan going in i had the brain scan a week later and i had the
brain scan at six months
the first brain scan
they said look your brain looks pretty good for a 73 year old guy he said you
know you're you're
actually in in pretty good shape you don't have a lot of atrophy you got some
mild atrophy
but your brain looks pretty good
the week after scan showed a 27 percent increase in the prefrontal cortex of my
brain that's where
your focus your concentration your emotions reside at a 27 percent increase in
that prefrontal cortex
activity my six month scan
i have a dear friend who's a neurosurgeon from tyler
dr charlie gordon who is a 40 plus year neurosurgeon spine expert looked at
lots of brain scans
a respectful skeptic of this when i told him i was going to be
treated with this compound called ibogaine the psychoactive
compound he was recoiled a little bit he was like you need to be really careful
with that
he has now gone from being respectful skeptic
to looking at the data from the clinical trial that was done at stanford
talking to a fairly good
number of the veterans that went through that trial talking to dr williams
talking to other
specialists at the at stanford and he has gone from respectful skeptic to a
full-on believer in this
medicine i mean an absolute supporter that this medicine does what it says it
does it heals people
of of of uh addictions it heals from ptsd this medicine does what it does and
we're driving back
from the airport that day after the six month scan he had looked at it as it
came off of the machine
and he said governor i'm not going to blow smoke up your dress
your atrophy is gone he said i have no idea why this has happened but he said
the difference between
your initial baseline scan and six months later clearly the atrophy in your
brain is gone he said
your brain looks like a 40 year old now the reason i share that story with you
is because number one
that's partly what drives me about this is that there is a regenerative aspect
of this medicine that we
don't really understand yet and if it does what we think it's going to do and
that's the reason these
clinical trials are just so stunningly important that's the reason what the the
center for brain
health and what they're going to be doing and the data they're going to be
collecting i'm convinced
of what this data is going to show but for all of those individuals out there
who don't have
substance abuse problems who weren't traumatized as a child but who have been
concussed and we know that
that damage is is out there and that this that the cumulative side robert
gallery that great uh
professional football player who had really bad cte and he will tell you today
this medicine saved his
life my question for you joe rogan is how many times you think you've been concussed
in life
i don't know i have no idea dozens yeah i'd have to go back and think about
times um
most of it was from sparring or a few from fights but um but if we think about
that if there
if there is this cumulative effect yeah are you how old are you now 58
would joe rogan be willing to say you know what i've seen enough i believe that
this medicine does
what you say it will do and for a person like me that it could be incredibly
helpful to my um
my long-term plan of living a long and healthy and engaged life that joe rogan
would go
and be treated with ibogaine yeah i would definitely i would definitely do it i'm
very fascinated by it
cool i mean i've never heard anybody say i wish i didn't do it he mentioned his
brain scans uh post
treatment uh a couple of weeks ago while i was at that earth one earth
gathering i met a lady who i will
call lonnie and she had just returned from an ibogaine treatment in november of
25
she related an early life of just ungodly physical abuse by her father who was
addicted
to oxycontin you know we began this conversation about the realities of the
opioid epidemic in america
while death is the most terminal outcome is measured down about 700 000 americans
there is a much broader
web of hardcore travesty that exists around each of those death outcomes
and lonnie experienced that she had multiple concussions from her own father
like many individuals who experienced trauma of this nature she developed her
own drug addiction
she was in and out of jail she was homeless at different point in time
she managed to get recovered she had a separate traumatic brain injury that was
fairly severe in 2018
and then she was diagnosed with what i believe is called young onset parkinson's
parkinson's diagnosis
that is pre-age 50 her parkinson's had progressed to the point to where she
could not write because of
the tremulousness in her hands so when i saw her two weeks ago and she
introduced herself she had all of the
the appearance and affect of a perfectly healthy human being it was only after
we sat down and she explained
what her experience had been and where she was at now that the ibogaine
disclosure was made her hand
was just as calm as mine and she said that it had been essentially three months
and that she had been able
to resume a normal life and then her mind felt restored now based on the
responses we got after our first
interview with you i want to be very careful here this is truly the edge of
science and there is much
unknown about the variety of parkinson's that this can treat there's some
suggestion that
it is better for those who have a genetic predisposition for the disease that
it is for those who contract
parkinson's as the result of environmental exposure ibogaine does not appear to
have any impact
on parkinson's developed as a result of exposure to environmental toxin the
stage of the disease
at which you catch it also appears to make a big difference the earlier the
better it has also been
asserted that ibogaine does not cure parkinson's what it does is slows disease
progression and creates for
some a broad window of opportunity for the restoration of function that can
dramatically improve the quality
of life now i'm just given a number of qualifiers about its impact and efficacy
on one individual but
think about what we just said here this is a woman who was diagnosed with young
onset parkinson's she had
lost the ability to write because of the tremulousness in her hands she's four
months out from a treatment
and she's been able to resume her full normal life with a complete restoration
of function if we could
get a covid vaccine out in nine months there is no reason why with the focused
effort of texas and the
other states we'll discuss here momentarily that we cannot achieve the moonshot
of our time within three
years or less and that is the completion of an ibogaine medication that can be
fully integrated into the
u.s healthcare system and made just as universally available as every
ineffective opioid based treatment
that we currently deploy through the medical system at a cost of seven hundred
thousand dollars per patient
sponsored by indivior which is one of the chief pharmaceutical developers of
everything that we
have that fails 75 percent of the time
yeah i mean if we could do it it would be pretty extraordinary and if it is
done i really do believe
that it would have a complete changing of society when people have no hope and
there's nothing and then all
of a sudden there's something that comes along that you do it once and it's an
85 effective rate and
you do it twice and it's in the high 90s i mean change i mean how many people
are out there struggling
with something whether it's alcoholism whether it's obesity whether it's you
know that's another thing
like there's there's people that are calming themselves with food right and it's
masking that's
probably a sugar addiction don't you think i mean from the standpoint of it it
is but for a lot of
people it's there's something else you know for some people it's sexual abuse
when they're younger and
they they eat it's it's interesting there's it's an addiction yeah and then and
it's not just a
physical addiction it's a psychological addiction i brought up gambling because
i know a lot of people
that are addicted to gambling pornography yeah pornography be sure a lot of
there's a lot of things the
non-sumption models we mentioned are ones who had developed those eating
disorders one of which was
a compulsive eater as a result of that childhood sexual abuse and ibogaine was
the treatment of last
resort not the first option and their own recovery story which can be found on
the americans for ibogaine
website is truly extraordinary and speaking of extraordinary when we came in
here to push texas our belief was and still
is and is now playing out at scale that if texas did this it would be joined by
a number of other states
who are no longer willing to sit and wait on an inefficient often incompetent
and also incompetently
corrupt federal bureaucracy that will not move in response to the genuine needs
of the american people at
the pace that it needs to there are a variety of well-intentioned reformers
within the current
administration secretary kennedy secretary collins and others who have voiced
their support for the
advancement of plant medicine as breakthrough treatments primarily for u.s war
fighters but also for other
members of our society for whom these medications could help we believe that
these individuals are stymied
by two realities the first reality is the byzantine complexity of the federal
bureaucracy the degree
to which it has been compromised by the institutional capture of much of its
functioning by companies that
make money on keeping problems alive we think they're probably also stymied by
perhaps some other political
cross currents within the administration that view psychedelics with skepticism
and that are therefore
willing to be indiscriminate in their resistance to the advancement of any of
them when in fact the
advancement of this one is of existential critical importance as a breakthrough
treatment for millions
of americans who need it now and so to that end americans for ibogaine
following the texas success
convened a gathering of 200 people in aspen colorado in november of last year
these individuals were
invited appointed appointed and elected state officials from 22 individual
states and aligned citizens of
influence who would be willing as the texans were here to get behind efforts in
state legislatures to
create a partnership with texas that by end result will form the unstoppable
external force through the
states that can crash through the federal wall using not just their resources
but their political influence to
to execute one unified fda drug development trial and to force the federal
government to be responsive to
everything that is required to ensure it is successful so as we sit here today
we have been working with
elected officials in alabama georgia idaho maryland michigan new hampshire
south carolina vermont ohi
ohio pennsylvania florida south dakota and california each of whom have
legislators who are willing to
introduce and to pursue bills to join their states into texas as this trial
governor perry and i spoke to the
american legislative exchange council as keynote speakers on december 5th of
last year this is an umbrella think tank
organization for center right mostly republican legislatures from across the
country
in its entire existence alec has taken two positions when it comes on the war
on drugs more prison more
penalties more prison more penalties ad if and adam after we spoke about the
necessity of ibogaine's medical
integration into the united states and the capacity of the states to force this
reality into being
alec issued a formal position statement as well as model legislation endorsing
what we call the
american ibogaine initiative to bring the states all together to make this
happen with one unified voice
and so now as we sit here with you today in the state of tennessee there are
two bills one each in the
state house and the state senate that are making its way through that
legislature to join texas before we
walked in here this morning the tennessee senate finance committee voted 11 to
nothing to move tennessee's
bill forward to the full state senate for consideration and what will i believe
be passage and i would like
to give a shout out to a special sister by the name of ricky harris who has led
that tennessee campaign
right now there are two bills in the missouri legislature house bill 2817 and
senate bill 1581
which are receiving good considerate deliberative thought by legislators there
but frankly need a
little motivation so if you're in missouri and you want to see ibogaine
medicine for your family
member for your community for your state you call into the missouri legislature
and say move the ibogaine
bill forward to join missouri with texas oklahoma the oklahoma house of
representatives has passed its
ibogaine bill it is now pending in its senate in louisiana senate bill 43 has
been introduced to join
that state to texas and in what i can only describe as full circle justice the
kentucky senate passed senate
bill 77 by a margin of 35 to 2 to join kentucky where this all began with texas
as a state partner in this
ibogaine drug development trial it is now sitting in the kentucky house of
representatives so you if you are
at home please call the kentucky house of representatives and ask them to pass
the kentucky ibogaine initiative so
the state will not be left out now here are some just unbelievable words are
going to come out my mouth
the state of west virginia their house of delegates by a vote of 96 to nothing
and their state senate
unanimously passed their ibogaine bill to join texas and it has now been sent
to their governor for
signature and the one that is the most poignant and moving for all the obvious
reasons the state of
mississippi the crucible for the triumph of uniquely american hope over horror
and of the leadership of
representative sam creek moore its state house of representatives passed by a
margin of 111 to 1
and its state senate passed by a margin of 51 to 1 the mississippi ibogaine
initiative which will tie the
state of mississippi with a five million dollar appropriation from its opioid
fund to texas to develop the
most powerful psychedelic on the planet as a breakthrough treatment for trauma
and addiction for the people
of mississippi that's incredible it is going to be signed actually has been
legally signed by governor reeves
governor uh tate reese and governor perry and i have asked for a special sign
in ceremony with
representative creek moore his legislative leaders there to stand in jackson
mississippi and see that
signed into law as a matter of ceremonial formality what a wonderfully redemptive
opportunity that we
have here to shepherd and we hope and pray that our organization can be
sufficiently resourced and
sufficiently engaged over the next three years so that we can see this process
to conclusion i'll mention
a couple of others since we're talking about the capacity to make this a broad-based
humanitarian mission
that improves the human condition just friday before traveling down here on
sunday i received a letter
from the government of gabon naming americans for ibogaine as its official
partner for the advancement
of iboga medicine globally gabon has 2.3 million people it's got a hundred
thousand square miles of
territory that's the modern garden of eden i've had the opportunity to take a
trip there from and i mean
trip is in the geographic sense not the psycho not not the iboga trip though i
hope that that will be on
the agenda in the ceremonial way sometime within the next year we traveled
there from january 6th to january
20th and if someone would have said when you go to gabon you're going to have
one of the most down
home experiences you've ever had in my life it would have blown my mind but it
was a fabulous journey
one in which they were jubilant about our ability to demonstrate that what they
call the sacred wood
in fact it's one of the most scientifically advanced substances that has
perhaps ever been discovered
and we're honored that the government would choose us as their partner to move
this forward on monday
after a conference call with chief gary batten i can confirm that the choctaw
nation
will seek to join texas in the expansion of this ibogaine drug development
trial onto their sovereign
territory as the third largest native american tribe in the country on april
the 7th i will be traveling to
durant oklahoma for what is being called the intertribal council meeting of
what they describe as the five
civilized tribes that's their name not mine this is a gathering of the
leadership of the choctaw
choctaw the chickasaw the cherokee the moskegee and the seminole we expect a
passage of a resolution
that i will be there to lobby for for the five civilized tribes will declare
their solidarity with
americans for ibogaine for the integration of this divine emancipator into the
u.s healthcare system
as expeditiously as possible and make all of their resources available to
explore the extent to which
we can operationalize ibogaine medicine as quickly as possible and it's my hope
and aspiration that we
will see all of native america join this effort before the end of this year can
i stop you there would
that make it so that they would be able to immediately establish retreats there
so similar to the way they
have casinos because they don't have the same sort of regulations that some
states do tribal sovereignty
is an area of the law with which i am not familiar i would not be able to speak
to the degree to which they
could autonomously open a clinic the most immediate issue would be related to
the creation of a supply chain
because you have traveled through interstate commerce in the u.s states which
should theoretically
restrict it however there is one spectacular opportunity not just to expedite
the creation
of ibogaine treatment access for native america but for all of america and this
gets into federal right
right to try legislation authored by former u.s senator kirsten cinema and
signed by the president during his
first administration in 2018 and then what federal right to trial legislation
or the law provides is that
once any medication makes its way through phase one safety testing within the fda's
process
then anyone with a life-threatening condition for which that medication is
being developed
can request treatment with that medication and obtain it from a willing prescriber
what does that mean
that means that as soon as texas or as soon as one of the native tribes
effectively completes
a phase one safety study under the language of the law anyone who has a life-threatening
condition for which this
medication is being developed first and foremost opioid dependency can go and
request and get the treatment
right to the treatment we have one complication presently the drug enforcement
administration
in keeping with the practice of many government agencies that use their
arbitrary authority to interpret law
has asserted that federal right to try does not apply to schedule one
substances this means that based on
not the language of the law but on dea's interpretation preference of that law
once ibogaine clears through phase one it would be disqualified for access
under federal right to try
because the dea says that if schedule one substances were intended to be
included they would have been
specifically listed in the legislation when kirsten cinema the author of the
bill explained to them
that the language is unambiguous and it says any medication their response was
insolence and a
refusal to honor what the statute actually says which is one of these numerous
examples of the use of
fictitious legal realities to do violence to legitimate reality the dea needs
to be told to relent on its
misinterpretation and extrajudicial interpretation of federal right to try to
interpret it as written
so that once any phase one study on ibogaine is completed delivery can be
effectuated through
the medical system immediately and i might add one of the challenges that i've
seen over my 40 years of
being involved in government is that bureaucrats the easiest and the safest
answer for a bureaucrat is no
um and i think that's part of what we're running into in dc with the dea um one
of the issues that i i
certainly hope and and and pray and as we go through the summer and as we see
what's happened in texas and
mississippi and these other states that we'll have the opportunity to sit down
uh with president trump
and to just share with him what we're doing what we're seeing across the uh the
country and that
we could uh potentially have a conversation about the rescheduling of ibogaine
from one to three
two or three what you know just you get it out of that schedule one which there's
no reason in the
world you've talked about this many times joe that ibogaine is on schedule one
it does have medical
purposes i mean it's very clear it does and secondly it is not addictive so the
idea on its face
that ibogaine is um shown as this schedule one compound is just a fallacy well
the schedule one
the sweeping schedule one act of 1970 is just nuts they just threw a bunch of
stuff in there
many of the things that aren't even psychoactive uh a question uh the aboga
tree can it be grown in
the united states theoretically it could be is it climate dependent it's it's
climate dependent it's
soil dependent it is considered an entourage plant whereby it absorbs um
essentially the essence
not just of the soil around it but of the other botanicals one of the things we
learned in gabon
is that much like we have grape varietals in california for all the different
kinds of wine that they
produce there are different varieties of the iboga shrub how it grows in the
north of the country is very
different than how it grows in the south in terms of the amount of compound
that's in it or the type of
compound that's in it uh the potency the strength uh the nature of its effect
on the person uh the way
that it kind of uh facilitates the the spiritual journey there's some of it
that will kind of have a dark
angle there's some of it that has more of a light angle uh we are just really
scratching the surface of
knowledge as to all the the ways in which it can vary based on how it grows
naturally one of the most
fascinating things that we learned there and this is going to give you chills
we visited a five hectare
they use the metric system we visited a five hectare iboga plantation right in
the center of liberville
that is run by one of their former prime ministers it's an experimental farm to
kind of understand
how it grows the optimal ways in which to grow it and what different outcomes
are so as we were walking
along we came to these two small bushes it takes for about 10 years to come to
maturation
we come along this pathway and they were two shrubs identical growing just a
couple of feet apart from
each other and they pointed those out and said can now what does that look like
to you and i said well
those are eboga shrubs and they smiled and they said well it would appear so
because they are identical
they said but in nature when you find any bogus rub you're going to have to be
very careful to
determine which one's which because in nature it looks like they grow in pairs
one is the real deal the other is its poison imposter oh and they grow together
and they look identical
look identical how do you differentiate it's not until they get fully grown
into their 10th year one bears
fruit which is the real deal and the other does not wow now how does that do
you for the physical
communication of a mystical spiritual reality and so it takes 10 years for it
to come to fruition to the
point where it could be useful no though you could use it before then but you
don't know whether you're
getting the real deal or you're just killing yourself when you see them grow in
pairs wow so there's one
group of people who know how to differentiate one of the things that we learned
is that there is a healthy
underground international market for the bark just like we use vitamin b
complex or we use valerian
root to help us go to sleep people in gabon will use the the iboga bark for
mental acuity and just
like drinking a cup of coffee i mean to get the psychoactive effect you have to
eat like five big huge
heaping plates of this stuff over the course of time it's so bitter it will
burn your mouth i mean it's an
olympian ordeal yes sir it's an olympian ordeal to consume the amount of bark
that's necessary to get
that that mystical effect and you're sicker than a dog the whole time you're
doing it but apparently
piracy in the country for the shrub is is fairly prominent and they explained
that what poachers
will do is that they will take the poison imposter and basically like the
street supply where you put
pollutants in with you know cocaine or whatever here they put that imposter
bark in with the real because
you cannot visually differentiate the umbongo pygmy who we had the privilege of
meeting who hosted us
for an overnight ceremony of blessing and protection that was just phenomenal
they apparently can just
taste the bark even when it's mixed together and they can tell if it's adulterated
with the imposter
wow but to to know they're so like sommeliers of ibogaine yes that's a great
way to put it an
ibogaine sommelier might have to go over and get tutored uh yeah i wonder what
that process is like
boy well it's just it seems to me that with the incredible effectiveness of
this compound and it being
adopted by all these states you said it almost seems inevitable that change is
coming well here's what
we need to make change happen we need the dea to get on board well we need the
dea to get on board but
we need one man to get on board and that man is the president of the united
states we're here to
recognize america in her 250th year 25 of those 250 now 10 percent of time has
been spent at war
and there are conditions unique to war that only this medication can responsibly
address in a way that
nothing else can if there is an opportunity to improve the human condition at
scale particularly for
those who are even right now being marched in to go and fight yet another war
taking executive action that would direct ibogaine to be moved to schedule two
that the provisions of
the halt fentanyl act be applied to the texas multi-state ibogaine drug
development trial
that the dea be directed to interpret federal right to try so as to not exclude
schedule one medications that
are in drug development and that it be appropriately interpreted so that any
medication that makes it
through phase one can be accessed by a person with a life-threatening condition
and then directed
that federal scientific research agencies whether they be within health and
human services
or the pentagon come alongside the states in direct partnership to fund and
foster the accelerated
pharmacological development of ibogaine so that this medication can make its
way all the way through
the fda's process with their supportive guidance within three years or less it
is the moonshot of our time
and if there's a humanitarian legacy to be left for the ages by a president who
very much wishes to have a
legacy that is well reflected upon by posterity this is one of the most
monumental opportunities he has
to help folks at scale in a way that no president perhaps has before we're at
an inflection point in
history not just for this country but globally well i certainly hope that this
message reaches the president
and uh i will try to make sure that it does thank you sir i mean i think in
terms of the amount of people
that it can help in the crisis that our country is enduring with opiate
addiction with ptsd with all
sorts of trauma with cte with from sports from car accidents and and what have
you i mean this is i mean it's
astonishing that this is even a struggle when you consider the effectiveness of
this it's astonishing
that we have to plead and that you have to put in so much work and kudos to you
for doing that
and kudos to dan patrick for this recent adoption of it here in texas and i
mean i just can only hope
that momentum is on the side that's correct and that this this is implemented
through the entire country
and that people wake up and realize like we can help people and everyone at
this point in time
because the opioid crisis everyone is touched by this everyone has a family
member everyone knows
someone a friend a neighbor everyone everyone knows someone who's been hit by
this my friends that have
no problems with anything else and they had an injury and got hooked on opiates
and had a terrible
time kicking it opioids are i i'll use the word demonic i just i don't know any
other way to it's a good
word to describe people of their life and and and to have seen you know back in
kentucky uh where this
all started in my opinion uh in your work there uh and to have uh the success
that we're seeing now
in kentucky and having it blocked historically uh when you were there at the
opioid uh abatement
commission and and and the current governor being a part of that uh uh blockade
if you will former
employee of the of the sackler family uh and and today to have the opportunity
uh you know for for the
kentucky people of kentucky to finally get the opportunity to uh make right
what they got uh so
tragically impacted by uh back in the uh late 90s and the 2000s i just i mean
it did it gives me great
hope uh not just for this country but for the for the uh the side of
righteousness that uh this happens
in a big and a powerful way here here um he mentions the kentucky experience um
before we
rolled out the ibogaine initiative there and i ran the opioid stood up the
opioid commission
i thought our first job was to go and to hear from the people of the state you
know we were getting
a billion dollars in settlement funds this money was coming to us because
thousands of their family
members had died so recognizing that confidence in government is at an all-time
low i thought it was
important to go out and say hey here's who we are here's the job we've been
given here's the resource
we have tell us what need you have in your community that we can look to fund
this is something that
needs to be accessible to grassroots organizations it needs to be accountable
to you as people and we
need to make sure we're transparent with how we use this money but our first
job is to listen
well over the course of 20 town halls across the state tuesday evenings from 6
pm until we wrapped up
what began as a 15 minute technocratic presentation of what this state
commission does turned into
these these mass catharsis events were hundreds of people thousands over the
course of those 20 town
halls poured out the depths of their grief right at our feet and after they did
the sum total of their
our response to us was we don't think that you have the competence or the
integrity to do anything
that's going to make a meaningful difference in this life in our lives and we
don't expect one cent of
this money is going to make the least bit of difference for us at one of these
town halls i heard about
a young woman by the name of tamra and the woman who told tamra's story was a
volunteer at a clinic for
the survivors of child sexual abuse this particular clinic made sure that
children received appropriate
medical treatment that they received proper therapeutic counseling and that
they were placed in family
circumstances where they could perhaps have a chance to have a decent life
so this volunteer told about meeting a young woman by the name of tamra when
tamra was 10 years old had
been horrifically sexually abused by a family member tamra had to have a series
of reconstructive
surgeries because of how awful it was and she said that she worked with tamra
for about two or
three years and that she went to her adopted family and she hadn't been heard
from since and that she assumed that
that that was despite how awful her circumstances were when she came through
the door that she managed to get
well and go on and have a relatively functional and and happy life as happy as
one can to be a survivor of those circumstances
this same woman said that about 10 years later she was volunteering at the perry
county kentucky detention center in
the county seat of hazard and that she was offering mindfulness and yoga
classes to inmates there just
as a volunteer and she said she went in one evening to teach her class and that
she saw this young
woman sitting in the corner after herself kind of withdrawn she didn't want to
come participate in any of
the yoga exercises or anything and that she was looking at her and she said you
know even though
she was an adult she looked kind of like what this young woman appeared tamra
when she was 10 years
old she said so i walked up to her and knelt down beside her and i said is your
name tamra and she said
that young woman looked up at her and recognized and i asked brian she said yes
how'd you know she said
i'm a volunteer who worked with you when you came to our clinic when you were
10. what are you doing in
here and tamra explained that because of the surgeries that she had performed
to be reconstructed they had
given her opioids and that what began to treat her physical pain she continued
to rely upon to treat her
tremendous spiritual and emotional pain and she had gotten busted by an oxy on
the street by a deputy with the
parry county sheriff's department and put in jail now you think about what i
just said about how
this young woman's life got started off and the response of power to her was a
prison this is why
what we're doing is so necessary and governor perry mentions one other reality
that's important
some of your viewers may have seen a politico article published on sunday about
a presidential aspirant by the name of andy beshear who is the current kentucky
governor
andy beshear was the attorney general of kentucky before he was governor he is
the son of his father
steve beshear who was governor for eight years between 2007 and 2015. andy's
greatest accomplishment is being
andy beshear who was governor of andy beshear who was governor of andy beshear
who was governor of andy beshear who was governor of kentucky
the legislature in kentucky has been controlled by republican supermajorities
over the entirety of his term
and everything for which he claims credit actually belongs to them by way of
accomplishment
there are a few things for which he can claim credit one is shutting down the
state of kentucky harder than gavin newsom
shut down the state of california which resulted in the educational hobbling of
an entire generation of
kentucky children who were already well behind national average standards on
both reading and math
you could go to a liquor store or a strip club for months in kentucky before
you could send your child
to a public school andy beshear is responsible for that he shut down the state's
entire economy
he had an antiquated unemployment benefit system that he instructed the
director of to make sure that his
contributors and his family members were placed into the front of the line
while regular everyday people
at home got a busy signal for months on end and had no financial lifeline while
his family and friends
got valet treatment when this was discovered he scapegoated the director of the
unemployment system
for following his own instructions a guy by the name of muncie mcnamara and mr
mcnamara took his own life
but the most egregious reality about andy beshear and his father pertains to
the fact that they were
both law partners at the law firm that represented purdue pharma against the
people of kentucky
and the litigation over oxycontin while they were law partners there andy beshear
and his daddy drew
law partner paychecks off purdue pharma client bills while they were there and
the people of kentucky
should have received a billion dollars but instead received a measly 24 million
dollar payout from
purdue pharma because andy and his daddy's law firm malpracticed that case the
public record will
establish that as part of the purdue pharma settlement 17 million documents
were destroyed
the case was put under seal and as a condition of the settlement their law firm
was allowed to cure
their malpractice of the case which resulted in a 24 million dollar settlement
within days
of andy beshear becoming the attorney general or that's right the attorney
general i said i've been
republican all my life and i have my family's been republican going back to the
civil war
i don't care if it's gavin newsom kamala harris pete buddha judge that illinois
governor governor pritzker
any national democrat who needs my time my effort whatever i can offer by way
of volunteer resources
to make sure that andy beshear never sniffs the sewer grate of the white house
they've got it in this
politico article andy talks about in much the same way as other performative
public piety purveyors
that his life is guided by the golden rule and the good samaritan he likes to
wear his sunday
school and deacon affiliations on his sleeve as so many other performative
public piety figures do
if he were actually going to preach the part of the bible that he has lived he
would talk more about
judas and the 40 pieces of silver than he would any golden rule and the good
samaritan and i just want
to make sure that the people of home and the people of america know who this
man is as the national media takes up
kentucky media's grotesque narrative about his decency and tries to lie him
into the white house
thank you for letting me say that it's been a long time coming i understand um
anything else before
we wrap this up i think we covered it all i think we hit it good thank you joe
thank you thank you brian
really big uh supporter of this effort and well i think it's just incredible i
mean it's i can't
believe it's happening you know i'd always kind of given up hope that people
would wake up
to the powerful potential that a lot of these compounds have to change people's
lives yeah well
i'm sure there were uh some teachers of mine back in uh the 1950s that uh the
idea that that little
burr-headed kid uh that is you know obviously uh not paying a lot of attention
could somehow another
end up being the governor of the great state of texas and um there's probably a
long long list of
those as a matter of fact and i'm sure there's some people over the course of
the last uh uh 15 years
as i matriculated up through the political process has said you know the idea
that this guy is going
to be standing up uh uh putting his reputation on the line for something like
psychedelics is that
that ain't going to happen uh but it goes back to your point about be curious
be courageous and make a
difference all right and you're doing it joe rogan thank you man thank you
thank you too brian thank
you and do you mind if i share one last thing sure and because it is the 250th
anniversary of the
country this comes from the heart you know the bicentennial children have had
the blessing of
being the grandchildren of that greatest generation that overcame the great
depression defeated nazism
killed jim crow and crushed totalitarian communism that greatest generation
loved lived suffered bled and
died to leave us the shining city on the hill over the past 50 years the bicentennial
children or
those who are known as generation x have experienced the mass extinction of
family and community we are the
first generational cohort of mass refugees from obliterated biological families
who had to seek and
build new families of choice based on the salvation bond of unconditional
affection rejected only the
superficial socialized separatism of the skin suits into which we have been
born over the past 30 years
we have watched truth justice and the american way be overrun by institutional
deceit white-collar criminality
in the thieving tyrant's will an odious alignment of official depravity which
has produced
the opioid epidemic the gravest engineered humanitarian catastrophe to play out
within our borders since the
end of the 19th century in an epidemic which has disfigured this country the
2008 financial crisis
which forcibly dispossessed millions of us from the american dream including 52
percent of african-american
homeowners and sent us the bill for the cost of our dispossession a bill that
everyone under the age of 40
continues to pay through their lack of economic mobility and finally and most
deplorably 25 years
of unremitting warfare which has taken exponentially more service member lives
here at home by suicide
than have been lost at battlefields abroad over the last 10 years 1.5 million
americans have died
from drug overdose alcohol-related disease and suicide a figure that exceeds
the total number of war casualties
going all the way back to 1776 we've got 102 counties with life expectancies
less than that of north korea
18 percent of respondents to a recent pew research center poll said that they
believe the federal government
has the capacity to do the right thing a figure that hasn't been above 30
percent since 2007. 80 percent of
respondents to an october 2025 wall street journal poll have said that the
american dream is dead power has
answered these unconscionable realities with a maelstrom of bureaucratic absurdity
impudent incompetence
and predatory corruption all with the blessing of the law which has used its
power to bind torture and kill
the truth in the decades prior to july 14 1789 the french government had ruthlessly
imposed its burdens
abusively imposed its costs and ravenously consumed the future of its people
the arrogance of the aristocracy
ultimately answered to the desperate determination of the peasantry and its guillotine
blade
we are here to pursue one of the greatest humanitarian missions ever undertaken
to serve and exalt the primacy
of the human soul as we sit here right now there are millions of americans who
have no sense of greater
purpose or of even why they are alive who mourn to see the sunrise when it
comes up and through their windows
and what they need to know is that they are indeed divine there's only one
thing that is known to produce
iron and that's the supernova of a star the iron in our blood originated in a
supernova eons ago
every human being has stardust running through their blood
and the movement that governor perry and i are leading is one that aims to
recognize the reality
of that human divinity we are desperate and we are determined and we will crawl
the last mile to deliver
good tidings unto the meek to bind up the brokenhearted to proclaim liberty to
the captives
and the opening of the prison to them that are bound glory glory hallelujah the
truth is marching on and
thank you sir for letting us proclaim it right here on your platform the walter
cronkite of our age that was
a beautiful way to end it thank you thank you gentlemen
Thank you.