Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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 them on, slap them on. What's happening? Good to see you gentlemen again.
Taking off.
One more time.
Yeah, one more time. So what is the latest? Give me the latest. Where are we at? Why don't you take it, Brian?
You just kind of. You are 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,
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Chapter 2: What updates are shared about the Ibogaine initiative?
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 Advocate 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.
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.
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Chapter 3: How has the Texas legislature responded to the Ibogaine initiative?
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 being a former distinguished governor of the state who is a Republican, generally speaking, most people think of Republicans as being ā
anti-psychedelics and that this whole thing is just a bunch of people trying to escape reality and poison their mind and 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, seem 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 ā This is not what I came into the world for. This is not what I came to politics for. This is what ā 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 ā Chances of that would be pretty slim. He knocked on that guard door in May of 07 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.
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Chapter 4: What personal experiences do the guests share regarding addiction and recovery?
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. 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. Today, there are people who ā 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 ā 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 ā and then think about ā 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 one, which he did. Schedule one 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.
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Chapter 5: What scientific evidence supports the use of Ibogaine for addiction treatment?
But it's also a book that I would suggest that every believing 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, 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 is our eternal creator who absolutely has engineered and placed these plants on this earth so that we can be affirmed and what our true identity and ultimate destiny is, and praise God for it.
And then there's also the Sacred Mushroom and 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, these compounds. And that's why they put them in this category of having no medicinal use, which is clearly not accurate. Yeah.
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.
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Chapter 6: How does Ibogaine impact mental health and trauma recovery?
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 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're 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. It's just ā
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 any psychedelic drugs that could be used in any way to now being what I humorously refer to as the Johnny Appleseed of Ibogaine is to your point. Be open. Be willing to say you were wrong. I know my wife would like to hear me do that more often.
But, hey, if you don't mind, I want to take a minute and talk about how far this movement has come.
Yeah.
Brian talked about Americans for Ibogaine and our ambassadors all across the country and the growth that we've seen in this.
And I want to give you one example to your point that five years ago, if you had had an institution that had its own reputation dealing with brain health and brain science and those kind of things, 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 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. Sandy Chapman heads up the Center for Brain Health. And they've done some great work. We went up and presented to her, I don't know, probably 60 to 90 days ago.
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Chapter 7: What challenges does Ibogaine face in gaining acceptance in the medical community?
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 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 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 grow and you won't get better. 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.
Chapter 8: How is the movement for Ibogaine expanding across the United States?
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 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 I grew up in ā I lived in California for 26 years. Before that, I lived in Boston and New York. I thought of people ā the southern accent in particular, right? And this is a standard thing that a lot of people on the coast have.
You hear people talk with a southern accent. You think they're dumb. And it's a terrible stereotype that actually came out because of hookworm parasites. I'm sure you're aware of that story. I'm not. You're not? Educate 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. 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 were infected with hookworm. And in the South in particular, hot climates.
And this is where this stereotype came from. When someone like you speaks with such insane recall, like your recall is 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. Yeah.
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 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 having had this ability to have all these different conversations with different people, it's just like every time I have another conversation, it 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 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.
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