Reflecting on Integration and Lasting Change

This podcast is supported by Californians for energy independence. Iran halting oil shipments. Fuel prices surging. When crisis hits overseas, our state gets punched harder at the pump. That's because California's policies are pushing our refineries to close , forcing us to import fuel, handing control of our energy supply to volatile foreign countries. And as global conflict erupts, our access to energy is threatened and our prices spike. Californians are paying the price for our state's failed energy policies. From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroef. This is the Daily on Sunday. Well, I'm glad I was coaching. I actually just I I had to share this with you guys. Last fall, as I was finishing up an interview with my colleague, the politics reporter Robert Draper, he very casually mentioned I spent Thanksgiving in Tijuana, Mexico undergoing Ibigaine psychedelic therapy. That he just returned from a marathon hallucinogenic drug trip. This was the most radical thing. Ten hours. I felt nauseous, but they teach you these deep breathing exercises before you go in and you use that to stave off any kind of nausea. Now, I should just say, Robert isn't exactly the kind of guy I'd have expected to tell me something like this. He's a seemingly stayed veteran journalist who covers the American right and the MAGA movement? But he told me this drug was something he felt he had to try. Yeah. It was really, really interesting. I mean the whole ex- I have to find a way to write about it at some point the drug in question is called ibogaine and it's illegal in the United States but early research suggests it could be a game-changing treatment for a range of conditions, things like PTSD, addiction, even cognitive decline . So today, Robert Draper and I talk at length about his experience on Ibegaine. It's Sunday, April 12th . Robert, welcome to the Sunday Daily. It's great to have you here. It's great to be here. Thanks, Natalie. So I just want to start by saying that I have so many questions for you about how you wound up having this experience. I am very excited to talk with you about it. And I want to recognize that that might not totally be the case for you. This might be something slightly uncomfortable for someone who has made a singular career for himself as a journalist in profiling others. You are a reporter's reporter, Robert, and I recognize that talking about yourself is not something that you may be used to or find the most fun in the world. Is that fair to say? I mean I I think that my interest in learning about others is in inverse proportion to the interest I have in disclosing things about myself. Okay. Well we're gonna proceed with caution in that case, I want to just start with how you first came to know about Ibiga ine. Just talk about how this got onto your radar screen in the first place. Yeah, I I first heard of Ibiga in from a kind of unlikely source, a former United States Senator Kirsten Cinema of Arizona, who had become aware of its usage in treating military veterans for uh PTSD and traumatic brain injury. Cinema decided to try it herself. She said, and these are her words, that it was the opposite of a pleasant experience, but it was a really transformative one for her. She 'd been working to produce legislation in the state of Arizona to fund clinical research for Ivy Gain. And someone who'd done that right before her was I think an even more unlikely political advocate and that's the arch conservative, former Secretary of Energy, former presidential candidate and former governor of Texas Rick Perry. He was also into Ivy Gaines. Yes, he was into it. In fact, um he became interested for the same reason cinema did that in his capacity as governor, he'd met a lot of combat afflicted veterans who were sort of at the end of their rope and he saw what Iby gain had done for them and so he decided to try it himself. And um, you know, again, Perry like cinema emphasized to me that this was nobody's idea of a party drug. It was a very, very powerful substance. And I want to get into the power of that substance. Tell me about ibogaine. What is it and how does it work? Sure. It's a psychedelic, a drug that is derived from a natural source, actually from the bark of a West African shrub known as uh Tabernanth Iboga , found principally in the country of Gabon and used in initiation ceremonies in that and other African countries. But it had been circulating in Europe and the United States, really going back to the 1940s, but particularly so roughly around 1970 when, a heroin addict named Howard Lotsoff, kind of chasing the next high, had an opportunity to try IBAM and found that it cured him of his addiction to heroin. Wow. And uh he began then to advocate for the drug to help underwrite studies into the drug. And so it has continued to exist since then, Natalie, but in the underground, because it's a schedule one drug, meaning that uh It's illegal. That's right. The Controlled Substances Act stipulated that it, like LSD, has no accepted medical usage. And so you can't get it legally in the United States. You have to go elsewhere to try it. Aaron Powell And what do we know, Robert, about the way in which it actually functions, in which it has the impacts that Perry and Cinema were telling you about? Aaron Powell Yes. And I want to emphasize, Natalie, that there have been studies on this, but a lot more studying needs to be done. Stanford, in particular, in January of 2024, produced this clinical research of 30 combat veterans. And it seemed to activ ate in them a type of brainwave known as theta rhythms, which in turn promote uh neuroplasticity. There's also research indicating that IBGAM increases the signaling of particular molecules within the brain that have been linked to drug addiction as well as to depression. So all of these on top of the fact that that uh the study seemed to indicate that ibogaine treatment can reduce brain aging by 1.3 years per treatment. So there 's a lot of potential for iBegain um studies indicating that because it enhances neuroplasticity, that it could prove to be a cure for neuro degenerative diseases like dementia, ALS, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's. But again, I want to stress that there has been no conclusive reporting on this. No, totally fair caveats. It sounds like a lot of these potential benefits center on the idea of neuroplasticity. Can you quickly say what that is and how this drug potentially impacts it? Yeah. I mean, neuroplasticity basically means I mean to put it in sort of the rawest, crassest way, it it's sort of the opening and the flexibility making of the human brain. And where a brain may have shut down uh owing to a particular trauma, it will in effect lubricate or open the molecules of a brain and allow it to become more receptive. And that has kind of been the elixir enhancing neuroplasticity that scientists have chased for a while in grappling with these neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and for that matter, traumatic brain injury. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Fascinating. It's like the drug by affecting neuroplasticity kind of opens parts of your brain that were shut down up, allows you to work inside them. And Robert, is the current interest in ibogaine part of the gradual uptake that we've seen of psychedelics to treat mental illness. For example, I know about ketamine being used in therapeutic settings. I know people turn to ayahuasca, another plant from South America that is used ritualistically for similar reasons to kind of break out of mental health problems. Yes, I'd and I'd add to that microdosing of psilocybin and MDMA and I think that what we're talking about here are not only an exploration of psychedelic for therapeutic purposes, but an implicit skepticism, if not outright rejection, of a lot of traditional medic ations and a viewpoint that had been held for decades that whatever ails you, go to the pharmacist and grab these pills and that's your only hope. There have been intriguing studies done over the last decade indicating real therapeutic usage of these psychedelics, which of course definitionally then flies in the face of the notion that a drug like these should be Schedule I , which is kind of the conundrum that the Trump administration is supposedly grappling with a from what I understand though, this drug, Ibogaine, is much more intense than some of these other ones. I want you to just sketch out what's different about this drug from some of the others that we might be hearing of. Yeah. I mean, to put it candidly, I mean, this is it's not a party drug. You'd never go to the Burning Man Festival, you know, and do it and dance around a fire. It's in fact a drug that is so powerful that you run a real risk of cardiac arrest because it can it can cause arrhythmia, which is in a regular heartbeat. It can elongate the spacing between heartbeats. And so if you already have a heart condition, you absolutely should not be taking it. When you do take it, you should have heart monitors hooked up to you. You should have professionals nearby. So there is nothing about this that says, you know, woo woo, we're having fun on psychedelics. And in that sense, even before we get to what actually happens to you when you're on ibogaine, it sets itself apart from drugs like LSD or MDMA or psilocybin mushrooms. Aaron Powell Okay. So given that, given the intensity of the experience that we're talking about here, what made you want to try it for yourself? What was it that made you say like this could be of use for me? Sure. I mean, I admit this is not easy, you know, for me to talk about. But uh I had a very tormented relationship with a very tormented older sibling. Eli was his name, and when he was twenty three, he was killed in a vehicular accident. I was twenty-two. We were eighteen months apart. Wow. But he was kind of a human wrecking ball. How so? Well, uh I mean, my younger brother, who's a psychologist, believed that Eli was a sociopath. Oh, wow. He was brilliant in many ways, but unfocused. He was this phys ically immense person, six foot five, and misanthropic, uh alcoholic, prone to violence and generally a sullen person. And the household kind of trembled whenever he walked into it. And I was as the middle child, my parents weren't you know, they were just doing the best they could to manage, you know, a household, but I was often used as the intermediary, the the placator and the buffer. Yes. It sounds like. He and I shared a bedroom so that he would stay away from my younger brother, who he was terribly abusive towards. And uh he was abusive towards me too. But you know, his death and really even his life had left me with not only survivor's guilt, but just a kind of um in many ways a low self-esteem, feelings of lingering joyless ness. And I could see tangible ways in which those elements were showing up in my life. You know, that while they weren't like causing me to engage in destructive behavior, I do think that they were in many ways holding me back. They were deep thumbprints into my psyche that carried over into my personal relationships. And uh so I I had not explored this in any really, really fulsome way and saw IBGAIN as an opportunity maybe to do so . Can I ask, what were your hopes? Like as you're going into this process, what are you thinking would be the best case scenario to come out of this? What are your kind of dreams about this? What I mainly hoped was that the drug would sort of kind of open emotional apertures in me and connect me more to whatever is pleasant about life, whatever is pleasant about others, would maybe cause me to look at myself in less of a self-lacerating way. Trevor Burrus And to be clear, even though you did end up writing about this for the Times magazine, it sounds like you weren't originally doing this for journalism. Like that wasn't one of your motivations here. To be emphatic, I was not. And and uh had no intention of writing about this. So when a person, you, decides they want to try Ibogaine, what is the process? Given that it's illegal in the US, what are the logistics of making that happen? Well, I guess to begin with, you better be prepared to buy a ticket because as you say, you can't get it in the States, so you go elsewhere. And I think most people go to Mexico, though there are places all over Asia, Europe, and parts of Africa, some of them very kind of boutiquey, very spa-like. But the one that Cinema and Perry had gone to, and a number of veterans that I'd interviewed, was this place called MBO Life Science, located just south of Tijuana, Mexico. And it's it's not cheap. It costs um $8,3 50 unless you're a veteran or first responder, in which case they give you a $1,000 discount. That's significant. Yeah, yeah. And there are organizations such as a group called VET for veterans that can offer grants to allow military veterans to go there without having to pay so much money. So once I determined that MBO is where I'd like to go, I reached out to the people there and learned that they have a very long waiting list, but that they're frequently cancell ations if you're willing to be flexible. And I then said, you know, any chance you've got anything in in the month of November, this was in I suppose August that I reached out to them, and they said, Thanksgiving. Wow. You know, I I didn't have any plans anyway. So I said um okay, sure, sign me up . All right, we're gonna take a little break and then we'll talk about your experience on IBGAIN. We'll be right back . This podcast is supported by Californians for energy independence. Fuel prices surging. When crisis hits overseas, our state gets punched harder at the pump. That's because California's policies are pushing our refineries to close, forcing us to import fuel, handing control of our energy supply to volatile foreign countries. And as global conflict erupts, our access to energy is threatened and our prices spike. Californians are paying the price for our state's failed energy policies. Today, we'll attempt a feat once thought impossible, overcoming high-interest credit card debt. It requires merely one thing: a sofi personal loan. With it, you could save big on interest charges by consolidating into one low fixed rate monthly payment. Defy high interest debt with a SoFi personal loan. Visit sofi.com/slash stunt to learn more. Loans originated by SoFi Bank NA, member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891. Okay, Robert, you've made the decision that you're gonna go down to Mexico over Thanksgiving to take Ibogaine. Where does the story of this trip begin? I took a plane to San Diego Airport and spent the night in an airport hotel, as did the other ten people who would be part of my group. The next morning we all gathered in the lobby. Two SUVs picked us up, and we were ferried across the border, past Tiju ana , and then took a ride down sort of a rubble strown alley way that dead-ended into this compound that was looming over the Pacific Ocean. The place looks kind of like a southwest villa, you know, with a very, very gracious outdoor patio with a swimming pool overlooking the ocean. It's like a very, very nice Airbnb, I'm imagining. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. With a large kitchen set up to cook dinners for a dozen or so. And you have a sense of professionalism and efficiency from the very beginning. That people are friendly, but nonetheless, with their own agendas, the you know, the first thing they did after showing each of us to our rooms was to search all of our belongings to make sure we hadn't brought any drugs or alcohol. Our phones were eventually confiscated so that when when you're on Ivy gain, there's actually like a danger that you'll drunk dial and uh Oh wow. They're protecting you from yourself in this case. That's right. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. Everyone is screened in advance, not only to make sure that they don't have some kind of heart or other condition that could endanger their their welfare. But also just to make sure that they really kind of emotionally and psychologically know what they're doing. Right. They're ensuring you're committed to it, it sounds like. Yeah. That's right. And uh and and so thirty-six hours passed before we did the IBGAIN. And in those thirty-six hours, there were documentaries we watched, there were QA's, there were individual sessions , and there were group sessions, all of them designed in totality just to make us understand fully, you know, what we're getting ourselves into. There was a welcome tutorial documentary that we saw that was hosted by the co-founder of Ambio, Trevor Miller, in which he talked about what was likely to happen, but no guarantees with our IBGAIN journey. And he said that maybe seventy five to eighty percent of you will experience nausea and will end up vomiting. Um that's yeah, yeah, no I know. That it's I mean vomiting's not my thing. I don't enjoy it, but I also had figured, you know, if that's the price that I pay then, okay. And he equated IBGane to a roller coaster and he said, you know, there will there will be ups and there will be downs, but the one thing that you don't want to do is try to get off the roller coaster. Okay, so you're there, you're surrounded by these other people who have agreed based on the same premise. They are fully in. Can you just tell me about them if you're willing to talk about these other folks you were surrounded by? Did you learn why they were there? The majority of them were combat veterans, and uh a number of those suffered from substance abuse and suicidal ideation, in a couple of cases, traumatic brain injury. There was an Army ranger named Rick who was really, really quiet and had said that he he had undertaken ayahuasca and tried other things too, but the memories that he had in combat had really been bedeviling him for a long time. There was a a woman who was from Eritrea. She started talking about the war there and couldn't even finish her sentence and broke down in sobs. And so we were left to imagine whatever she had dealt with before she fled that country. Uh there was a fellow Texan uh woman named Erin, a corporate consultant who had experienced trauma that she didn't detail that took place in her childhood. And uh so they were you know very forthcoming in talking about in in most cases. And and I should say that like you could see they were wearing it in their physical posture . Just this great weight, not only of what had brought them there, but of all of the attempts that they had undertaken before to rid themselves of whatever demons, you know, possess them. I'm imagining people kind of hunched over inward. Yeah. It was a really, really somber first meeting. And I think that we were in essence saying to each other, you know, we're um we're all kind of a m ess, you know, and and um we're all here because we're pretty much at the end of our rope. Okay. So when the process of actually taking the drug begins, what does that look like? Take me through that start to finish. Yeah, the process really begins well before the drug is administered. We had blood tests, heart tests, we were all fitted with intravenous ports, each got a couple of IV bags filled with um a proprietary blend of vitamins that basically just keeps your body nourished in anticipation of a period when you're going to be fasting and' your bodys going to be undergoing this really, really rigorous experience. It's like you're about to run a marathon. Yeah. I mean, there I will say that MBO does so much of this out of an abundance of caution and as sort of elaborate and even daunting as it is on a certain level, it's reassuring because they're leaving nothing to chance. So you have this intense thirty six hour prep session. Now it's time to take the Ibiga So we were administered our first of four dosages of ibogaine. It came in the form of a capsule, big fat capsule, and we were then led down to the treatment room, which is in the basement and is this long rectangular room where there were eleven mats on the floor. How close are you sitting to everybody else? About roughly four feet apart. Okay. Something like that. And uh so where I was in a corner, the person to my right was the corporate consultant from Texas Aaron, and then directly behind me were two of the combat veterans . And situated in front of each mattress is a mirror and a maraca. A mirror and a maracca. Yeah. Wow. This is so you can like first sit and just kind of look at yourself, have a dialogue with yourself. The maracca is actually to synchronize yourself with the music that will soon be coming up. And then to the right of your mattress, in addition to the blanket and the pillow, to the right of it is the bucket for um for nausea . And so we all got on our respective mattress es and then in come the heart monitors and they put the patches on your chest. And so now you're you know, you've got a a machine that you're hooked up to. Does this sound appetizing to you, Natalie? Yeah, I'm I'm struggl ing to imagine wanting to be in a scenario where, you know, the first thing that happens is in come the heart monitors. But I I mean I'm impressed. I'm impressed that you didn't run out of the room, Frank. Nobody did. Nobody did. I mean, again, throughout the evening and early morning, there were people there, about a half a dozen or so of medics. And um just to keep an eye on, you know, your heart monitor, any other difficulty you may have. And then at around eleven PM or so, the lights were dimmed and the music was turned on. What was the music? It was the first couple of songs were music from the indigenous community where Ibegain is used, and the one telltale feature of that music is the bu ity mouth harp that's played uh in this very staccato fashion throughout . So I sat there and I started you know rattling the maraca along to the music, and I felt a little bit goofy doing this. And so after maybe 45 seconds or so I decided that I would stop. I also noticed I was beginning to get lightheaded. We were all equipped with these very heavy duty eye masks. So I la y back and slid on my eye mask. And the moment I did so, the hallucinations began in earnest. This is your first inkling, it sounds like that okay, this trip is really underway. Yes. And and as I even mentioned that, I'm actually getting goosebumps because it it remains so present to me, the sensation of realizing this is not at all what my imagination or what any of the available Yeah, well, the first were it's like a film strip, like six images, and they were all of what appeared to be tribal chiefs. And then those images dissolved, and then they were replaced by new images. And I don't remember all of them, but I remember very distinctly that some of them were quite troubling . There was a battlefield and there were bodies strewn across a battlefield. There was another one of what looked to be a lot of starving child ren. And all of these were static images. But then the next image that came up was the only one that was not static, which was a pile of rocks and then these long black snakes slithering out of the rocks. Ugh. Terrifying. Now, you know, a good therapist will tell you, Natalie, that actually snakes symbolize transformation. Terrifying transformation. Yes. Yeah,, right right. But I did think, yeah, this, you know, this this could be unpleasant. And while I was seeing these things, I was feeling something that again no one had quite prepared me for, then my whole body would feel like it was buzzing. It would feel like that I'd been strapped up to something that gave forth electrical currents and somebody just turned the knob a little bit. It didn't hurt, but it's just my whole body was beginning to feel like its neurons were firing. And I noticed my hands began to sweat. And so I realized the intensity of this experience is like nothing I could imagine. And were you were you anxious at this point? I mean for for I was not. Not for a second. I actually had this kind of almost clinical fascination as I saw all of this stuff, it was more wondrous than it was terrifying. And I actually welcomed the idea of just completely surrendering to the drug. When I realized how powerful it was, I thought, actually, this makes the job of surrendering easy because this is this is not a drug I can defeat. You don't have a choice. You must surrender. That's right. And and the thing about it is that your mind is very aware of everything. Nothing is muddled. Your mind is quite clear. And so I was having, you know, a dialogue with myself as I was seeing all of this stuff, you know, and asking myself, you know, what does this mean? I remember one that of the first things I saw that had obvious meaning to me was I saw a little piece of what looked like legal paper, and on it was some handwriting. And I instantly recognized that handwriting. It was my handwriting when I was in second grade and when I was just deciding to become a writer. And I remember saying to myself, you have to remember this. You know, the the experience you're describing where you are aware, it has the feeling to me of like being awake during your own surgery. You know what I mean? Like you're watching the thing happened. And and maybe that also explains why you remember so many of these images so well Well, it's a I tend to have a pretty good memory as it is. But look, this was a 10ur hour joney and I probably remember two hours of it. You know there's so a lot of it has been lost in in the recesses. But there were some things that were just unforgettable, particularly when ot phographic images came up of members of my family. Hmm . And you know, I saw my mother and I saw my father and I saw my younger brother and I saw my older brother. And there would be images of of each them and of them together. And some of them were of actual photographs in our family photo albums, and some of them were not . And then they would kind of crumble and the faces themselves would crumble. And then m an image of my wife Kirsten came up and uh Kirsten's mother died recently and she's been going through a lot of grief over that. So I remember actually having a dialogue with the Ivy gain, saying, Please don't make her face crumble. It's just to by another . Eventually I saw images of myself, and those were striking to me because they were definitely not photographs that exist . They were instead images of me in a state of almost preposterous self-assurance. I seemed so confident , not happy in a giddy way, but just pleased with my place in the world. And it was, you know, unquestionably me, but on a certain level, almost unrecognizable. And I realized, you know, in looking that that the Ivy game was trying to project for me an image of myself as I should have it . And to me, that was striking just as it was striking that when an image of my brother Eli came up, it went quickly away. And so did you you you saw Eli, you saw your brother? I did, but he was just one of one of many. And so, you know, it was as if I begin with saying, that's actually not what we're gonna talk about tonight. We're not gonna talk about your brother. We're gonna talk about you . And what did you if you remember, what were your feelings when you saw, for example, the images of your family or of you in this kind of confident state? I remember I've had the capacity to say that's that's an unmarred version of me . That's that's a me um I recognize and yet that I haven't seen before . I mean, an image of me that I recognize but haven't seen before is a really powerful idea. Yeah. Yeah. And now while all this is going on, I should say that that there were these interruptions. You know, that uh I'd hear the two veterans behind me were just like this sad Greek chorus of pukers. They it seemed it seemed like the the worst Greek chorus ever, but I also, you know, throughout it like heard things I heard Aaron next to me saying to the medics, this bed is not comfortable at all. I I need to move. It's not comfortable. I asked her later, you know, I'm so sorry about your discomfort, was you know, did they do anything about that? And she said, I don't know what you're talking about. I I I loved my bed. It was so comfortable. And so I just I you know So that was a hallucination. Yeah, yeah. And I was hearing I heard like another person scream that did not in my view detract from it. They weren't so powerful as to make me think, you know, I'm never gonna remember this 'cause all I remember is Derek behind me puking. But they were just sort of part of the whole um 10 hour psychodrama. So when does it end? It ended at let's see, I think at 8 30 in the morning when I heard a voice say, It's time for your magnesium. And I lifted up my eye mask and saw a shaft of light coming through a window. And I realized then, you know, okay, it's behind us now . And so there was certainly relief for me when it was over. And so they they hooked us up with a couple of IV bags of magnesium, and it took about two hours for them to drain. And I was ho isted up to my feet and a person allowed me to lean heavily on them until I made my way back to my room. And that's how I began Thanksgiving. All right. Well, let's take another short break and then we'll hear about what stayed with you after all this. We'll be right back My name is Audrey D. S. Birch and I am a national correspondent covering race and identity for the New York Times. Race coverage is complicated. It can be joyous and affirming. It can be uncomfortable, but I feel like it's still absolutely necessary. Race and identity are not just understanding who you are, but who the person in front of you is and wanting to understand more about them. We're trying to wrestle down these really hard subjects and maybe not answering the question, but asking the right questi ons and listening listening listening a lot. The Times is dedicated to ambitious and deeply reported coverage of race and identity and they're willing to back it up with resources. If you are curious about the world in which we live, if you're interested in who you are, where you come from, and how you relate to others, I would encourage you to subscribe to the New York Times . Okay, Robert, you had just gone on this trip for an entire night. How did you feel? Uh like crap. Uh I really I really felt terrible. I mean in fact I struggle to think of a day when I felt physically worse than the one I did on what they call with lovely understatement. Grayy da Day, a of introspection. Gray Day. Yeah, it was actually the only introspection I was undergoing was why the hell did I do this to myself? Because I mean you're um it felt as if you know I'd been kind of run through a shredder or something. When I closed my eyes, I was still seeing hallucinations. I was still seeing the film strips of images. Yikes. And I could barely stand on my own power. I could barely walk. And I thought, you know, tomorrow evening, you know, is gonna be my last evening here and then the morning after that I I head back and I if I'm like this, I can't function. The New York Times is gonna fire me, my wife is gonna divorce me. I mean I'm just gonna be like this worthless pineapple of a human being and and uh you're basically in the midst of what sounds like the worst hangover ever. You're struggling. You're struggling. I struggled and I ultimately after being unable to have dinner, went to sleep Thanksgiving evening and woke up the next morning at six thirty just feeling like a million dollars. I mean I was I was stunned by how good I feel and and uh my body no longer ate. There were no longer any hallucin ations. The drug had moved its way out of the system and really felt terrific. And as did all of the others. And so that afternoon we were given an opportunity on what would be our final day there to try yet another psychedelic. It is called 5MEO DMT, which is uh a drug that is derived from the toxic secretions of the Sonorin des ert toad. And it's a very, very intense but also short-lived drug. It only lasts about 10 minutes or so. Still, right when you're feeling better, they're they're offering you another opportunity. Well the truth is, you know, that that I mean, everyone felt better that day than they did on their gray day, but a number of the people didn't feel so well. They had a very, very rickety, to say the least, Ibegaine experience. And what 5MEODMT has been described as is it's almost a euphoria-inducing drug that has the effect of sanding off the very rough edges of your ibegaine experience. And so And is that what it was? What was it like? Well, it comes the the drug does in the form of something you smoke. Someone gives you this long stem pipe and you breathe in deeply and then you fall back with an eye mask on. And at first I didn't know what to make of the drug. I was still hyperconscious of the fact that I hadn't eaten much in the last day and a half. My mind was just, you know, racing about and at a certain point I I started rubbing my chest. And it's something that I do right around my solar plexus, mm-hmm. Almost as if I'm trying to kind of push away something or or protect myself from something. Yeah, I do that generally. But then I just then, while lying there, had this memory of a photograph that my younger brother had unearthed recently, which was a photo of me probably at the age of like four or three, and it was me and my brother Eli on the lawn of our house in Houston and he was lying on top of me. Whoa. My mother taken the photograph and it it was clear that she wouldn't be taking a photograph of me if he was like beating the crap out of me. But you can also see that my face looks alarmed and I look like I'm being suffocated. Whoa, Robert . But from there my mind suddenly jumped forward in time to my years as a say 12 or 13 year old when my older brother would have me on the ground his knees on my upper arms pinned to the ground and hitting me in the solar plexus with his fingers . Doing that repeatedly to me as hurting it done. Yes. And And I began to make this connection then, this very physical connection, to this thing that I often do. And it was really a startling rem inder of how present he was as a kind of physical and violent force in my life when I had spent so much time more thinking about the tragedy of him dying so young, rather than what he had inflicted on me and on my younger brother. And suddenly you're on this trip and you're having this vision that leads you to another vision and you're realizing all of this. Like that motion that I do to myself is connected to this experience of of what I mean you called it torture, what sounds like trauma. Yeah. And I can think about moments in the present day where I've rubbed my solar plexus, and it's usually in moments of stress or a moment where I'm feeling some discomfort. I'm feeling him on me, I'm now realizing. Wow . And so that was a pretty sort of startling thing. It felt very much like a kind of psychic bookend had been presented before meet So I have to ask, what was it like returning home after all this? I did feel in the first few days in particular, almost like walking around in a spacesuit, you know, on the moon or something, you know, just um still not quite sure how to relate the experience that I'd had to all the phenomena around me. And did you feel heavy? No., No no, I did not. No, I felt um sort of more gravity defying, but but recognizing that gravity is there and at some point I will have to succumb to it. The drug stays in your system in terms of what it does to your neural pathways for a period, you know, for over a month. And you're returning to invariably, you know, to real life with all that that means. And so I've just had to kind of let this integrate itself into the demands of my everyday existence. Aaron Powell What about that neuroplasticity piece that we talked about? Like do you feel that in yourself that you had parts of your own mind opened in some way? That you were