Unlocking the Healing Potential of Kava: A Journey with Cameron George

Tell us a little bit about your health journey.

Within a couple weeks, my seizure convulsatory activity that I was having, I was having like 10 seizures a day. They reduced by probably about 80, 90%, so just gone. Right. So that was important for me. That would be important for anybody, but it was especially important to me because I was getting seizures from everything that I was eating. So this relief from all these seizures allowed me to actually start eating again. Right. It allowed me to start taking supplements again. It was like a leverage tool that literally saved my life because like I was deteriorating so fast I could not stop these convulsions.

Okay, so let's get started. I'm super excited because I have on this episode Cameron George, Wonderful, wonderful person, a researcher, an entrepreneur and the founder of Trucava. So, so first one, I want to welcome you to the episode.

Thanks for having me.

Okay, so Cameron founded Trukava and that's a company that strives to set the industry standard for quality, safety and education around kava within the mass market. Trukava, which I've tasted, are absolutely delicious. They are focused on developing scalable, user friendly product that delivers the full therapeutic action of the traditional kava drink, which is the only form that has been highly priced in South Pacific islands for over 3,000 years. And in addition, Cameron has spent years working within a network of several thousand functional medicine physicians with whom he has conducted research, developed products and developed many protocols related to neuro rehabilitation and things related to chronic illnesses such as anxiety, mood disorders, PTSD, autoimmune conditions, etc. And so he, you know, I'll let him talk more about all this and, and also Cameron has extensive experience working with a wide range of psychoactive plant medicines which, you know, I'm very interested in, such as kava, cannabis, psilocybin, kraton, there, you know, ayahuasca, dmt, lsd, mdma. So a lot of interesting things that we talk about. And since discovering the amazing benefits of kava during his own chronic illness, Cameron spent many years investigating every aspect of kava and has collaborated with many of the most prominent experts in the world within the field of kava research and historical kava use. So the goal of the project is to provide the safest and most effective kava products on the market and also educate the public on the complex story surrounding the application of all plant medicine, including kava. So that's quite a big goal. So I want him to come on and explain a lot of this different myths and about the difference of quality of products on the market and delve a little bit deeper into Kaba, which I first heard of when I was a psychiatry resident. You know, I was giving my patients at the VA hospital benzodiazepines, antidepressants. And I remember one person said, I use kava kava. Do you know what that is? So I had to look that up. So that was, that was a long time ago. That was 2006, I think. Yeah, that's like 17 years ago. So. So the veterans, you know, they were looking for solutions. So anyhow, I would like to have Cameron explain a lot of all these, you know, the complex story. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about your health journey. I think that's how everything got started.

Yeah, yeah, that's the origin of it for sure. And I think that's how a lot of us who work in this field, in this world and sort of the alternative medicine or health and wellness biohacking world kind of get into it, right? You know, some, some yes and some not. But it's, it's, it's somewhat of a common tale that, you know, people will get really, really sick and kind of have their back up against the ropes and, you know, either be deathly ill or witness the death or the illness of a loved one and, you know, kind of out of desperation, kind of just delve into a whole nother side and perspective on life that they didn't know was possible in order to try to save their life or someone's that they love. And that was what happened to me. You know, I kind of. We always refer to it as. It's been a pain to purpose journey. Right. Where I kind of descended into pretty severe chronic disease early on in my life whenever I was just a young guy years ago. And, and you kind of developed one of these, what at the time, you know, especially in the part of the country that I'm from, which is kind of in the south, in Arkansas, not the most, most progressive area when it comes to medicine. Um, but it was kind of, you know, referred to as an unexplainable illness. Right. Meaning I had all of these symptoms that were just getting drastically worse and the bottom fell out on my health and I just completely became like essentially almost completely handicapped and ended up near death at one point, you know, with a severe, what I found to be an autoimmune component driven illness that was just driven by neurotoxicity, stress, trauma, all those kind of things. But, um, but it didn't, it didn't really have one label that we could give it. And it certainly was far progressed past the point of medicating or drugging my way out of it, right? Which it's like, you know, as I learned pretty early on during this process, was no more than just a band aid for the problem anyways, right? So I kind of went down that whole rabbit hole. Of course, I kind of exhausted the whole allopathic model and tried every medication under the sun, you know, for all of my symptoms, and got probably dozens of different diagnosis along the way, from psychiatric diagnosis to neurological diagnosis to gut, you know, digestive diagnosis. And it's like, how can I be just sick with all these different things when kind of realizing after going back to the base and spending probably eight years doing nothing but scouring medical and scientific literature and just going back to the base of like, what is health, what is disease? How did I get here? Especially as such a young guy, I sort of. I realized the truth and the reality that it wasn't all these different diseases. It was one disease process driven by a number of stressors and traumas as where, you know, we kind of look at it as kind of like a bucket metaphor, right? A lot of us have, you know, used this to talk about how people get chronically ill in general. And it's like, you know, everybody has a metaphorical stress bucket. Some people have genetically smaller or bigger buckets than others. And every stressor, whether it be emotional trauma, physical trauma, even chemical trauma, exposure to all kinds of different toxins in your life, is like a drop in the bucket. And then once the bucket fills up, you start expressing the symptoms of your genetic weakness, and you become chronically ill with any number of different diseases. And you can get all the labels that you want to for those diseases, you know, depression, anxiety, you know, you know, all kinds of stuff. But at the end of the day, it's, you know, all these diseases come from a combination of stressors and trauma. There are very rare diseases that have, you know, genetic components to them that are truly, you know, driven by that. But for the most part, it's epigenetics and it's. It's environmental stuff mixed with a susceptibility to those things, you know. And so for me, I think it was probably a perfect storm, Meaning I had some, you know, genetic susceptibilities and got hit by the right combinations of traumas and stressors and. And just had an explosion in my health and. Which was kind of rare at the time. Now it's not now it's actually Extremely common. You know, you have, like a. You know, epidemics exploding everywhere from everything that we're exposed to, as far as everything from glyphosate to, you know, problems with, you know, certain vaccines and things like that and, you know, other toxins and things, you know, traumas, et cetera, but. And then drugs as well. So, yeah, I mean, I just had a complete collapse in my health. And it led me on this long journey of kind of sort of rediscovering it from its base. Like, what was it? So I spent about. Probably about eight years or so just kind of rebuilding my health from scratch and trying a million different things and traveling all over the place to try to get help. And whenever I was at my worst, it was. I was pretty much completely handicapped. I mean, I. I developed this kind of reactive syndrome that a lot of people with autoimmune develop where you start violently reacting to everything in your environment, like everything that you're eating, even chemicals you're coming into contact with. It makes life extremely limiting and near impossible sometimes, because whenever you're getting exposed to, like, every food that you're eating is throwing you into, like, a seizure or like, an anaphylactic shock type of thing. It's. It gets really difficult to navigate. And then had all kinds of brain, neurological, you know, symptoms. And I could go on and on, but it was. It was a complete collapse of things. And after many years of, like, traveling around, kind of engaging in, like, medical tourism, right? Going, trying these different therapies, talking to different physicians and clinics, and just absorbing as much information as humanly possible, I finally got aligned and connected with a network of doctors and a couple that became really good friends of mine that brought me into this world as far as from a career standpoint, as I started to get well, but kind of helped me kind of assimilate everything that I had learned into sort of models and systems, right? Of like, okay, we need to first approach detox. We have to detox the body in the correct way, right on the cellular level, right? We got to address things here. And then once we clean up the landscape, then we can bring in the regenerative stuff and as sort of icing on the cake. And so I got in and have done many things like peptides and stem cells and hyperbaric oxygen, any number of different things. And that combination of things, doing the right combination of things over a long period of time was how I got my life back. And so it was. It's a miraculous recovery, because where I am today is is light years from where I was at, which seemed completely imp. Possible at one point. But so I, I got involved in this work and I got involved doing a lot of different things in health and wellness and sort of biohacking world, both on the clinical side, on the non clinical side, and the research side, a bunch of stuff. But, you know, a lot of people ask me today, sort of know me as, you know, you know, this person that focuses on this one plant, or I have this, this project specifically on true kava. And so the question always comes up, well, why kava? Okay, so you're involved in all this stuff. Why are you focusing so much energy on this one plant? And I definitely believe in prioritizing certain projects whenever they're needed, especially if they kind of help feed into a lot of other things from promoting certain ideas. And I came across kava serendipitously along my process when I was getting well, because when I was at my very worst, I finally had come into contact with the body of information that eventually got me well. But the problem was kind of, as I said, I was so reactive that I couldn't tolerate doing anything. I couldn't tolerate any of the therapies, I couldn't tolerate any foods. I had lost a large percentage of my body weight. Like, it wasn't good. I was very, very, very sick and frail, and it was difficult to know how to move or budge. And I was on heavy doses of benzodiazepines, you know, to kind of control this, the, the seizure and convulsatory activity. And that was going really bad place really fast. And I knew that I couldn't take those all the time because that would lead to a disaster really quick. Once I went into the withdrawal process and got tolerance and I would be. I was too fragile for that. So I, I came across kava. I had already come across it before in a form, an encapsulated form that a lot of people know about in the States. I kind of dug into it a little bit. I met a guy who was from the South Pacific islands, which is where kava comes from. Kava is the primary sort of social elixir, relaxation tonic in the form of a drink that comes from Oceania, which is basically like, you know, the Polynesian island culture. And it's been used there for 3,000 years. So I met a guy who was from actually Vanuatu, which is an island chain that's right next to Fiji. And that's basically where kava has been used the longest. It's like a core part of their culture there. They use it for everything there. Weddings, funerals, spiritual ceremonies, social gatherings. They use, like we use alcohol or coffee. It's a sacred thing to them for reasons that I'll get into. But.

But.

So I met a guy from. From Vanuatu, and he asked me when I was at my worst. I just happened to meet him serendipitously in the health and wellness world, and I was at my worst, and I was, like, literally near death. And I'm like. He's like, have you tried kava? Right, because to get rid of your convulsions. I'm like. I'm like, yeah, I tried these little capsules and bubble. And he's like, dude, that's not kava at all. Like, that's.

It's.

That's. That's like sort of a westernized, sort of, like, isolated, extracted version. That's not.

It doesn't.

The effects are not the same. The medicinal potency and the medicinal capabilities are just different there. And so I was like, okay, great. Well, how do I get. So I. Because I had read so much about traditional kava in the islands, and then I'm like, this little capsule that I tried doesn't reflect at all what I'm reading in these anthropological accounts. They. It's so sacred to them. It's like. So I was like, that makes sense. So he sent me some of the traditional preparation. He had, you know, a family farm where they grow these really old, really mature kava plants. Taught me how to prepare it, sent it to me, you know, and, you know, basically, I started drinking this stuff and got these miraculous benefits within, like, days to a couple weeks where it was like, I didn't expect to get anything like that off it. I'm like, okay, if it does anything, then I'm good. Right? But, like, not at all expecting to get effects that were that useful for me. Something that was natural. Yeah. So, I mean, basically within a couple weeks, my. My seizure convulsatory activity that I was having. I was having, like, 10 seizures a day. They went. They reduced by probably about 80, 90%.

Wow.

So just got gone. Right. So that was important for me. That would be important for anybody, but it was especially important to me because I was getting seizures from everything that I was eating. So this. This relief from all these seizures allowed me to actually start eating again. Right. It allowed me to start taking supplements again. It was like a leverage tool that literally saved my life because, like, I was deteriorating so fast. I could not stop these convulsions, and they were Weakening me every day, you know, so, so yeah, so that was, it was like a miracle for me. So right off the bat I was basically like praising the stuff, you know, I was, I was like, this is, this is, this is amazing. There's no way that it's like a natural compound was able to do what a drug wasn't able to do. And going in and looking and I just dove into the literature on it and basically realized that there's a body of research published on Cabo that's the most robust body of research on any plant compound outside of cannabis and ginseng and a couple of the other main herbs. So we know all the primary mechanisms as a huge affinity for this pathway in the brain called the GABA pathway. It affects serotonin and dopamine and a lot of the main neurotransmitters. It's a neuromodulator, an anti inflammatory for the brain as well too. And a lot of amazing neuro and tissue protective mechanisms. But it binds to receptors in the brain very similar to benzodiazepines, but in a non toxic way, in a non addictive way. In fact, what the studies are actually showing is that we see an uptick or an upregulation in, you know, the, the GABA receptor density and you know, the number of GABA receptors and you know, enough regulation on that system instead of a downregulation like you get with benzos. So with benzos you get addicted tolerance, you deplete that system and then you need the benzo more and more. You take it away, you can go into seizures because you've depleted your body's ability to reduce the, the firing in the brain, the glutamate firing. So with Kava, what it's appeared to be doing was actually not only giving an acute relief that was more potent to me than the benzo was, but it also helped to rehabilitate that system. So I took it over a number of, a couple of months and then I, I tested, I stopped at cold turkey. Not only did I not go into any withdrawal whatsoever, but I was actually still maintained, you know, everything that I had gained. And so it was, I was just completely blown away by this. And after talking to indigenous people, they already had knowledge of this. They just didn't explain it scientifically right in terms of these pathways. But they're like, I would tell them I got these effects. They're like, well, yeah, you know, like, they're like, yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, it fixes brain problems, mind Problems Medicine for the mind. So I mean, I was just completely blown away by it. And then after just sort of delving into it, getting immersed in the South Pacific culture, getting immersed in the industry culture of farmers and growers and scientists that had published a lot of the research, I spent a long time integrating my way into this network, both on the education side, the regulatory side, the the industry side, because I knew that I wanted to be involved in it. Because of what he was doing. I immediately kind of took this traditional preparation and kind of gave it to a few of the main doctors that were leading the network that I was in at the time. And we started creating these protocols for people in that same situation, started reproducing the same results over and over and over. And it just quickly became kind of like an indiscriminate sort of add on to almost any trauma based illness kind of protocol, right? Where it just made everybody, no matter what they were dealing with, it made them. Because all chronic disease, you have stress hormones elevated, you've got, you know, so it just made the process easier and it also made the patients more compliant because it gave them something that they could really feel right off the bat. So it got them kind of interested, like, oh, like you, like, they got this relief. So they're like, hey, what else you got? Type of thing. Which is one thing that I really like about it too, because it's got a really tangible effect where basically whenever you take traditional kava, there's different strains that do slightly different things. But it's all. The main theme is that it's this powerful anti anxiety agent. But it also, it's not like an anti anxiety, like it brings you down necessarily. It also opens the mind, it opens the heart and it gets you focused. It's like a nootropic. So it's more of like. It kind of puts you in this really amazing kind of flow state. And it actually is a psychedelic, not a classic psychedelic that brings you into an altered state. This is one thing that I'm so fascinated about, and this is something that's always been written anthropologically and that the indigenous people have always talked about, is that it's a. It's more of like a sober psychedelic. It's a. It's an entheogenic compound that it opens the mind and integrates the left and the right hemispheres of the brain and brings you into this state where you can kind of get into this kind of systems thinking state where you can just kind of reflect and see big picture in your life. A little bit more kind of like a lot of people report under, you know, any kind of plant medicine journey, but that those, the classic psychedelic psilocybin and LSD and ayahuasca, they're very visual. You have to be like, you're not doing that in the middle of your workday, right? It's, you know, unless you're, you know, microdosing protocols and that's another thing. But like, kava is one of those things that is just an optimizer that helps to open the mind. It tends to bring out a more empathetic side of you, a more creative side of you and a more productive side of you at all at the same time. So for me, I noticed, even though it helped me, like medically, right. With these initial effects, it also was just this very enjoyable thing to take that made me more productive. It made me more of myself.

Right.

And, you know, that's why it's this amazing social tonic. It's known as a kind of a great connector in the islands, right? So any. That's why they use it for weddings and funerals. And they've got kava bars everywhere, like we have regular bars. Because anywhere where kava seems to surface, it seems to create tighter knit communities and very healthy social atmospheres. Meaning it's not like alcohol, where you like, you'll never see a fight break out at a kava bar, right. It just doesn't happen, right. Like people get, people get in this very positive natural state of mind where they have this saying in Vanuatu. A man who drinks kava becomes a beast. A man who drinks, you know, a man who drinks alcohol becomes a beast. A person who drinks kava becomes more of who they really are kind of thing. And that's because it's. It basically I found that, you know, as a social tonic, a productivity agent, a neuro anti inflammatory, just a nervous system optimizer. It's something that's. It really just enhances and accentuates instead of detracting and taking away, like drugs and alcohol can. Right. And so it really is more efficient than alcohol in many different categories. I mean, there's still a time and a place, you know, for, you know, alcohol. And it's, it's like, you know, people can. But what we normally find is, is that anywhere where you have kava, especially the really potent stuff, there's all different levels of potency and strains. But people tend to, the more they drink kava, they tend to start to lose their taste for regular alcohol use. So they might still drink like maybe once in a week, or they might still drink, but they usually like more times than not, statistically, people will start to make like kava as their go to social beverage.

I've seen that with stem cell therapy and they've actually done research on animals, on alcoholic rats, and showing stem cell treatment can reduce their alcohol seeking behavior or relapse behavior. And their hypothesis is that they are reducing the inflammation in the brain which is driving the addictive behavior. So that could be part of it.

I think that it probably is part of it. I think that like any other plant medicine, the thing about using, harnessing the intelligence of, of nature, what you're doing with both plant medicine and with stem cells is that we're not like creating these synthetic, isolated, man made single kind of dumb compounds, right? Meaning like these little single floating compounds that were just influencing one little system in the body. And then it leads to all these other systems not knowing what's going on because we're kind of like hacking it. And it just creates confusion in the coding. Like if you hack a computer too much, it confuses the whole thing and hoses it up. You get a temporary effect, but at the cost of the system downstream. So you can, you can use drugs temporarily if you need to do something acutely, but, but it becomes problematic chronically. But like with, with stem cells, with plant medicine, the intelligence is in them, right? So they already are part of the base intelligence that is at the base of the body anyways, right. So like, you know, by just using that, you're not, it's like you're harnessing a type of medicine that's not contradicting or undermining the intelligence of the body, it's just helping to amplify it. Right. So then it just helps to revert back to kind of a state of being optimized and a balance. Right. So it's by doing that, I think a lot of these things, I mean, definitely stem cells and, and you know, kava has all of these mechanisms that work simultaneously. Reducing neural inflammation, upregulating and modulating certain chemicals in the brain that just take away the cravings. Because the cravings come from a state of desperation. There's something biologically wrong or emotionally wrong, meaning you're bankrupt and you're trying to run towards pleasure and away from pain. And that's created by some sort of accumulated dysregulation that's both emotional and physical. You're trying to escape one state and get to another. Right. In addiction, right. And so things that optimize your chemistry, help to bring that state back into optimized focus to where you just, you feel good already, right? You don't, you don't, you don't. Like, you're not trying to escape as much. And, and then cava gives you a little bit more of a, in high doses of a euphoric state, but not. That's imbalanced, right. It's more of just like, it feels like an enhanced. It feels like you at your natural best. It doesn't. It's not like a, it's just not like an altered state where you, like, are a different person, you say things you wouldn't say, or you're engaging in all this primitive behavior like people do when they get really drunk or whatever. Like conversation usually gets more interesting, more authentic. You know, it's, it's just good for. So whenever I got into this, so I got into it, obviously on the medicinal level, once I tried it and got those effects, we started building the base for what became cherkava, which was initially meant to be an ed, an educational and advocacy campaign for integrating kava into modern culture. Right. So it's, that's what true kava is at its base. And then we produced. We knew that there were some barriers because the traditional kava brew, the one that actually gives the real effects, it looks and tastes like mud. Right. So, so, so in order to integrate it into, you know, there's this barrier of the taste and self stability. So, you know, I spent, you know, several years optimizing and kind of, you know, developing a bioavailable form that didn't contradict or undermine the, the extraction process in any way. And that's very difficult to do to keep those effects intact. And you could, you know, the difference whenever you try it. But yeah, so there's, there was those two things obviously, and then trying to build a, you know, trying to figure out which part of the market that we needed to, you know, integrate into first. And, you know, we decided that we didn't want to. We could have gone heavily into the clinical side first, which we kind of started to in the beginning. But we are focusing on building out the lifestyle portion to popularize the concept as much as possible, because that's the way it's going to be fully embraced sort of by everybody. And then we have medicinal forms that we can go full medical with that or have a higher level of potency. So there's kind of something in it across the board for everybody, for just someone who would drink it like they drink Coffee, right. You know, having, you know, something to use that creates an atmosphere that's not toxic, that is very even family oriented, where you can just use at the end of your day or during, even at work or, you know, like almost anywhere. You know, kava is one of those things that like, just like people use coffee, you know, and perhaps even more efficient, you know, because it does really more things, you know, you know, it's, it's a, it just has so much potential because like anywhere where you see it in the, in the islands, it is their prime commodity that they use for everything. And it affects the way people think, it affects the way people show up in the world and it affects the way they communicate and connect with one another. So like I said, anywhere where you see kava, you see much, much better, you know, statistical markings of mental health. Right. And, and of, you know, connection, community. So whenever I looked at this all day.

I'm sorry to interrupt. Do people, do they just start it in the morning and start drinking it and you know, end the night with it? Like, how do they do it?

Well, it depends, right, because it's used all through the South Pacific. So it's used in Vanuatu and in Fiji and in Tonga and in Papua New guinea and in Hawaii some. So they have different practices, different places. Like, you know, Fiji, they like to drink all day basically, so they drink smaller amounts throughout the day and they use certain parts of the plant that are a little bit more daytime, a little bit more of that sort of uplift focus and less of the relaxing piece. And you know, we've, our strains, we've kind of got it in the middle to where it kind of gives you a little bit of everything to start with. But, but anyways, they in, but in Vanuatu, they drink theirs like, you know, three o' clock and on, like the end of the day. And they drink heavy, they drink a lot, you know, at one time. And it's sort of just like how they connect, how they come together and how they do, you know, most of what we associate with, with after work type of, type of, you know, connecting and everything. So it's, and then, so there's different practices everywhere, you know, kind of for different purposes. But it's one of those things that. So the reason, kind of back to the reasons like why I focus, why, you know, we're focusing so much time on this project is because it's very rare that you come across something that has as much broad spectrum versatility that's completely untapped and not integrated into Culture already, right. So like just like, you know, imagine whenever coffee was first integrated into western culture, how it helped to transform the, the, the collective mind of how we even function for better or for worse. Probably some for better, for worse, but it definitely helped to fuel this whole productivity minded type of thing when everybody is on caffeine. If you study cultures anthropologically, this is really interesting. This kind of comes back to the why and of, you know, why this is important. A lot of, you know, many cultures highest like values and aspirations are a direct reflection of the altered states that they choose to value and uphold. Because every culture really in history values some form of altered states, whether they're drug induced, alcohol induced, whether they're practice induced, meditation induced. We value altered states to kind of create a pattern interrupt to allow us to reflect, allow us to think, allow us to connect all those things to get out of our daily grind to some degree. And so the quality of those states a lot plays big into the development of our values and the way that we connect with one another. Right. So you know, in cultures where we uphold alcohol and nicotine as the top, we reflect that reflects a lot in mental illness and problems, right. And in cultures where say like in the Amazon where they value these deep medicines like ayahuasca and some other ones, they tend to have a much deeper connection to the natural ecology. They have a deeper connection to one another. They have an understanding of the human emotional framework. They have, there's, there's things that, that are void, you know, mental health wise in some of these cultures that do this, that, that, that are present here. So you know, the idea is, is trying to, you know, integrate this medicine that really is out of every. Because I've, I've worked with most of the psychoactive and non psychoactive plant medicines available, the adaptogenic herbs, obviously everything out of Chinese medicine and Ayurveda. All, all these things have their place all the way to the really heavy psychoactive psychedelics like 5MEO, DMT that literally it's a whole nother thing. And kava kind of has this perfect amazing balance. This is probably the greatest like therapeutic effect to drawback ratio that I've come across. Meaning that it does so much for the mind and for the body, but while having very little to no side effects. Right. So like you can, it has these effects on the mind and optimize the mind but it doesn't take you out of your mind. You know, it increases functionality. Right. And it's so tolerable, it's so therapeutic. So it's such a go to for people experiencing pain and inflammation and, and anxiety and all these things at least as a, not as a one stop shop. You know, ultimately people getting well is always a multi therapeutic approach but it's a great leverage tool to kind of get things started, you know. So it's, it's, it has all of those effects but without being addictive, without being toxic, without being, if you get the right parts of the plant in the right, you know, forms and everything. So it's. Yeah, so it just has huge therapeutic effect and its ability to, to have, you know, we believe a really, really positive net impact culturally if it's integrated properly. So kind of our mission is just like, you know, you've got organizations like Maps, you know, people that we know that are advocating big time for the clinical integration of psychedelic medicines and trying to build a framework for them. Psilocybin, lsd, dmt, Ayahuasca and we need frameworks for those. But that's going to take some time to really get solid, really effective frameworks. Because trying to understand the medicine and integrate it clinically and it's. And safely and to where you're create your solving more problems than you're creating and we're going to get there. But you know, Cava is this whole other thing that when I stepped into it, nobody was doing this right. Like it's basically just with this sort of this untapped. People in the South Pacific knew about it, been trying to tell people about it, you know, forever but it just had never escaped for a lot of reasons really. So that's basically what we are, is we're trying to integrate it culturally and trying to build out all these layers for it because it feeds into a lot of other discussions about mental health and things. So it's a worthy project for us. It's very fascinating for anybody, any clinician, any physician, any average person who knows someone who's dealing with addiction or you know, neurological issues of any kind. It's just one of many tools but it's a very powerful tool.

You know, it has definitely gained popularity right since you started. So now there are more and more kava drinks. I mean I even see some of them on Amazon. Right. So how do you distinguish, how do you know if a product is actually good? Do we know how they're prepared? Are they preserving some of the best qualities? Like what are your thoughts on that?

Well, this is a challenging part for us. We're on the kind of the cusp here of our big push that we're doing as far as really integrating and retail releases and different things. And for us, it's important. We've invested years in doing everything on the front end to build a body, a credible body of information that's research based and backed and, you know, pursuing things like grass approval on our products. And so, so we have everything done and proven, you know, on the front end as far as, you know, what we've done is completely transparent. And what we're doing is a true reflection of what real kava is. As this industry starts to emerge, there's only a few companies, there's a small handful of companies that are doing things and the, there's different levels of good. There are some things that I would disagree with totally that, that I've seen people do, like, you know, mixing it with, with other things that aren't, that don't have the same level of, of safety that, you know, and not telling people or, or not, you know, not being clear about. Okay, well, there's kava over here and then there's these other things, kratom, there's, there's a few other things that just don't have the same safety. And then people get confused. They think one is the other and they get side effects and then it's kind of, you know, So I think we want to be careful of that. We want to watch out for that. So if you're looking for kava, I can't actually say, and this is not, I mean, I support anybody in the industry who wants to emerge and wants to, you know, do things that are in full alignment with the, the, you know, traditional methodologies. But unfortunately, there really is nobody else that I know in the industry that is, that are doing traditional kava preparations. They're all extracts. They're all the ones that I kind of told you about before, like the capsules and stuff, which aren't, a lot of them aren't bad as long as the kava is sourced correctly. And it's, it's the roots of the plant. It's not aerial parts of the plant that's important because you don't want to consume other parts. So it's hard to vet those things out. It's hard to, for the customer to. Because you can't, they don't, you can't get that information on them. You almost have to, you know, do some really deep work on the front end and kind of go through word of mouth and talk to people that know these things. Because there's a lot of ways to kind of get fooled. But it's just important to understand that there's kava extracts and then there's kava. Right. Anything that has a kava extract in it, meaning that it was extracted with a solvent of some kind. Ethanol and even more egregious solvents, is not by definition kava. It's a kava like extract product. And so it's not going to give you the same kind or level of therapeutic effects that traditional kava would. So. And that's, that's difficult to do. Like I said, it was kind of years of R D of trying to stabilize it in this form and make it cost effective in the entire thing. Trismel Cobb is very. It's much harder to produce and stabilize. Right. And get the correct yields out of it and stuff. But it's got everything in it. It's got the full spectrum, got the life in it still. So as we start to see these things emerge, I would just, I'm not to say that any of these other products or some of them aren't bad, some of them are, but just kava extracts are a different thing. So, so just know that like kava extracts mainly are going to give you like more of just like a very mild sedative effect, kind of like chamomile tea. And if that's what you're looking for, then no, no harm, no foul, if it's a clean product, but it's not going to give you this expand this sort of like the, the nootropic effects, the mood lifting effects, the things that I've talked about that are outside of it. Some of that's dose dependent. You have to drink hard doses with some people. But, but yeah, so right now there's, there's nobody that I know of who's, who's doing traditional kava. But if you're interested in kava extracts, there's plenty of those, you know, or there's at least a small handful of them.

Yeah. And I know you have quite a line of the kava products. Right. Tell us about the, the types that you offer.

Yeah, right now we got a lot of stuff in the pipeline. We're trying to keep it focused because going into retail this year and stuff, it's, we're trying to keep the product line focused. We focused a lot on our, on our ready to drink line, which is you're putting in the drink form was, was important because that's how it's used socially the most. And that's really how from a lifestyle standpoint, just like People drink coffee, but that's like sort of. It's a canned carbonated drink that like whenever we're at conferences, we're serving it on tap. Now that's like, it has that kind of feel of like alcohol but without being alcohol at all.

What other ingredients are in there? You know, are they, you know, are they healthy? Right. So yeah, all about anti aging being healthy. You know, are there sugar? Are there, you know, additives? Like what's going on in there?

Yeah, so this, we've been very, very careful about this. So it's all traditional kava and we just did a reformulation where we had zero sugar in the original formula. We have probably about 2 grams in our current. And it's all sugar from juice. Because basically we've used a combination just to create a really, really good flavor profile that uses a little bit of like pineapple juice. We didn't want to use like synthetic, you know, flavors with that. And so it comes in a small component, but it's very, very small. So that's, that's good. And then everything else in there, we've got some monk fruit to round it out as far as, you know, that's concerned. And so there's no, there's no artificial preservatives, there's no anything like that. It's a very, very natural, authentic, both flavor profile and composition to it.

You don't put these so called natural flavors in there.

There's a few misconceptions about the category of natural flavors. So there's a lot of things that are actually synthetic that are under the umbrella of natural flavors. Right. Which is why you got to be careful with that. But then there's, but then there's, there's extracts, there's natural extracts of natural fruits, right? Where it's just, it's basically just powdered water extractions of these fruits, right, that are technically you just, you, you dry them down and then you put them in there. And so they technically are a natural flavor also. But then there are other things that are not like that at all. They're totally synthetic. So we don't use any synthetic flavorings. Everything is coming from the actual whole fruits that we're using. And then we have an original flavor that only, only has a hint of pineapple. And that's it. It just has this really nice, original kava flavor without the muddy flavor. And it actually tastes really, really good, you know, so it's, it's. We worked really hard on that because that was like incredibly important to me, you know, to make sure that these, that the, that all the ingredients were aligned with what Kava is. Right. And there's, there's some strategy in that.

Yeah, there's really comforted to hear because. Yeah, I, I love the drink. I remember at one conference we had a little cover party, right? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Great conversations.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And we, the new flavors that are coming out this year are pretty drastically improved from those two. I really, really love what we've come up with. So it's, it's. Yeah, I mean, I'm really excited about it. We just finished an entire sort of rebranding for the retail launch. And so we've got, we've got the drink line, we've got shots which are like, look like a five hour energy shot type of thing. It's just easier take with you. And then we've got the oil which is basically like, it comes in like a, a mirror on glass, like tincture, you know, where it's more of just sort of like 30 doses in a bottle where you sort of keep it around. We've also got instant powders that we're working on, you know, that are going to be in sachets, like packets. We've got a lot of different things that are going to be easier for like therapeutic use in the future, even higher potency for like sort of clinical application. So again, a lot of stuff in the pipeline, but that's, that's basically what we have right now.

Yeah. And you mentioned there may be some myths around Kava. What, what are there? What kind of myth?

Oh, there's a lot. You know, it's like any other plant medicine. Right. I mean, you. There's not a single, there's not a single plant medicine or effective therapy that doesn't have like a bucket full of misnomers and myths around it. Right. You know this, right. Going in. In everything in regenerative medicine, people believe all kinds of things and the FDA says all kinds of things or that, you know, there's all kinds of things that are said and most of it is usually nonsense and fear, marketing mongering or, or there's partial truth to it, but it's only in certain contexts. You know, so the devil's in the details and it's. Most of this stuff is ignorance and misperception when it comes to these natural therapies. Right. Because at the end of the day, all these natural therapies, any potential side effect at any dose pales in comparison to even like the most mild side effect that you get. From a drug, right? So, so there's, there's usually that to kind of preface it with. The main myths about kava are usually around its safety and its efficacy, which ties back into traditional kava versus like these, like these denatured products that aren't. If you Google kava on the Internet still today, you'll get some articles even to this day that used to be far, far greater in their circulation before we got started that the correlate kava with liver toxicity. Okay? So that's the most common thing. There's, there's this belief that kava causes liver toxicity. This was never a thing ever. It was never a belief system. It was never published anywhere ever until 2001, where the market was kind of at the precipice as of a kava boom. Which is why this kind of slowed down kava for a long time. And just like most, most situations in, you know, sort of like the natural therapeutics world, usually large companies, pharma companies, agriculture companies, whatever, food companies will try to come in and try to sort of commandeer an emerging industry, you know, and which is what kind of happened. You had this one company, you know, that was, that was out of Germany, this large pharmaceutical company that came in and was trying to make and patent kava based therapeutics in capsule form just like they do. They, they don't really pay homage or attention to, you know, traditional preparation methods. They think they know better than, than everybody. And they'll take a cookie cutter method that they use to refine or synthesize or extract something to make a pharmaceutical, to try to make an isolate out of it, right? So they try to find the active constituents in it and isolate them by themselves so they can patent them because they can't patent the whole plant, right? And by doing this, right, it's, it's the difference, that right there is the difference between, you know, coca tea from Peru and cocaine, right? You notice like one is medicinal. People drink it every day. No one's robbing convenience stores or, you know, and, and one, you know, and then you, you synthesize that or you isolate the constituent and you end up with cocaine and it's, you can it ruin your life over the weekend? Right? Like it's, you know, I guess it's good analogy.

Yeah.

It's clearly the, like one of the worst things you can put in your body, right? And it's the same thing with, with you know, many drugs or plant medicines too. Most drugs are made from plants, but they're isolates. They're synthetic isolates, so they no longer work with the intelligence of the body. So they create side effects and, and problems. So they were trying to do this. All they were paying attention to is a couple of the most known active constituents, the covalactones at the time, Kave and a couple other ones. So they try to make these isolates of them. They didn't pay attention to, like, where they were getting their material. And it's, it's also known traditionally in the South Pacific, the indigenous people. There are many plants in which you. You have certain parts of the plant that are medicinal and consumable and other parts of the plant that are toxic, right? Because plants produce defense defenses, right, to protect themselves. So, like, for example, you know, apple seeds have trace amounts of cyanide components in them, right? Rhubarb. You can make a nice pie out of like one part of the plant. The other part is toxic. There's, you know, most mushrooms that grow out of the ground, that don't grow on trees, you pick them up and eat them and they're toxic, right? Like there are some mushrooms that will kill you in 30 minutes if you eat them, right? But then there are others that are, that are medicine kava. The roots are the medicinal components. The underground portion that doesn't defend itself from pests because nothing is gnawing away at it. The above ground portion, the stems and the leaves produce plant defense alkaloids that make. They're not even that toxic, honestly. They just kind of create side effects and roughage and all kinds of stuff. You don't want to eat it. So the indigenous people figured this out literally like 3,000 years ago. They're like, we don't eat that, that shit at the top because, because it's. Because it's like it makes us sick that the roots are great. So obviously pharma companies, they're just looking to buy the cheapest material they can and extract because the aerial parts have kavalactones in them too. So, like, we're just going to take this. So then they take it. They use a synthetic process, right, with solvents to isolate and concentrate the alkaloids in there. And they also concentrate the plant defense toxins. So they create. They created a synthetic product that was by no definition or structure or form, kava by def. It was not kava. It was a synthetic derivative, isolated product that was not even the right parts. The plant was not kava. And then they gave it in a series of studies to a handful of patients, people, most of which were coming off of alcohol. That's why they were in the study that they were on high doses of acetaminophen, things that already deplete liver enzymes. So basically they created a handful of liver toxicity cases with this product. A couple cases of liver failure. So then we still think that there was some foul play in this because it just was too, you know, the way that it happened and it got all this media coverage and all these countries just banned it all at once, just based on this one sequence of events. So then it just became this sort of repeated story that kava causes liver toxicity. I mean, you see how the devil's with the information, right?

It's like a very similar story to the whole hormone replacement of, of the female hormones. Estrogen, progesterone. The replacement, they were using synthetic versions and then they were using the estrogen from horse urine. So the combination of the synthetic and then the horse urine, when they removed the synthetic part of progestin, then all the potential cancer causing effect and cardiac, all the side effect went away is because they are generalizing a synthetic form of, you know, what they put in the body to what a natural form is. And, and that set back the whole hormone replacement industry by at least 10 years. And all these women could have gotten relief from all their symptoms, could have protected their heart, their bones and their immune system. And they didn't because they got scared. Yeah. So it's. Yeah, a similar, similar tactic.

Very similar. Almost the exact same thing. It's. And then another example is it happened with, with the amino acid tryptophan in the early 90s. You know, a lot of people have heard about this, you know, where tryptophan was like off the market for like a number of years, like around 1990, 1991. And it was because like one company synthesized a version that was in by composition, had neurotoxins in it. It was a crappy process or something and it hurt some people. And it had nothing to do with tryptophan specifically or very little to do with, was in the methodology that they used. And then so Tripto had taken on them off the market for years because of that. Right. So like you couldn't buy like tryptophan at a, at a. And then finally that was vetted out and now you can get it anywhere. And it's not, you know, it's, it's just stuff like this happens. And another example is cannabis and cbd. Right? I mean like CBD was always a thing. It was always an available compound, but it was Always lumped in with, like, with this whole thing of like, there was no distinguishing. Of, like, there's. There's the CBD component versus, like, super high, like thc. That's psychoactive, right? And they both have their therapeutic potential, but THC is more limited because of what it does to you. But, like, it was all lumped in as one thing, right? Hemp and can't hemp was used to make rope and it was taken off the market. You know what I mean? It all got banned because of, well, just ignorance and misperception across the board. And like, this traditional kava is just as different as from these kava extracts as CBD is from synthetic hybridized marijuana. Right. You know, or super hybrid, like, you know what I mean? It's. It's very different. So it's a. It's been, you know, years after that thing happened where all that cava was banned, it was vetted out and the, The. There was such a lack of evidence across the board. And I mean, basically it was investigated by the German administrative courts and then overturned. And so much so that even the. WHO took a position on it. And they're, They're. They're, you know, a mess in a lot of cases. But, but, like, they took position on it of like, look, this was a quality control issue. They. There's now a. An international quality standard that a network of us, we're involved in it, along with a, you know, network of scientists that has published most of the research on kava in the South Pacific and in Europe, submitted a proposal to the, to the WHO Codex Alimentarius Commission, these guys did, and some years ago for an international quality standard that sets standards for. This is what kava is. If it doesn't meet this, then it's just a kava like, product that was finally passed back two years ago now in, in. Well, it was late 2020 that was passed. And so now not only has the. Have the bands been lifted in virtually every country that they're in, but now kava's classified not only as a supplement, but as a food, like coffee, right. In virtually most of these countries now. So it's a really, really great progress on that front because that's where it deserves to be. But that's. It's still a misnomer. People will still Google it even though it's classified as a food now. People will say, oh, kava causes liver toxicity. You know, we'll still have like, some of these, like, you know, like, you know, Instagram for like, our social Media account has locked us out a few times. PayPal has locked us out. It's like, dude, this is a food and you're in your, you're locking me. You know what I mean? Like, it's just, there's this gap between I know the scientific community and, and the just business and you know, and industry and clinical practice. And it's like, dude, the kind of.

Judgment, everyone's so self righteous, everyone has to, to be the boss and make a decision. And just like at one point I remember as QuickBooks do not want to release, you know, a treatment. What patient paid for it for treatments. And they classified stem cell therapy as miracle cures in the same category as snake oil. And I mean, who are these people at QuickBooks? Would they like me to share some articles with them? You know, let's, let's talk science. I mean, it's unbelievable. I mean, they made a decision that you are in that category. So it's just so funny. Everyone wants to jump to a judge.

Well, yeah, it's like, it's one of those things today where everybody has a position, everybody wants to be right. I don't mean everybody, but a large number of people are more interested about being right than finding out what's right, you know, and, and just, you know, guarding their own ego, their own whatever they're trying to do, their own individual. Like. It's just, there's a lot of that that's going on today. And there's a lot too. I think if people just ask themselves this, and if I was having a conversation with someone, if we want to have like a, a productive dialogue that actually goes somewhere that's based on reality, then when you have a perspective and you come to a conclusion about anything on any topic, if you can't show your work to some degree, if you can't even articulate why you believe what you believe or what has led to you believing that, if you're just regurgitating a headline of what somebody else has said, there's a problem there. You know, like, it's like, it's just, it's like you're not, it's, you know, that's like, it's not a conversation, right? It's like when someone says something that's as bold as stem cells or snake oil, there's no evidence for blah, blah. Well, it's like that doesn't mean. And you can say that because that's a headline, that's something that's been said to you. But have you actually, it's like you could, you could send them a drove of, of, you know, published papers, articles, everything that lines out mechanisms, that line. There's all of this amazing work that's been done. It's just, it's a straight up delusional lie because it's a childish thing to do, honestly.

Right.

You know, but yeah, you're on this.

Crusade to educate everybody and to, you know, to really bring this to the world because you see that this can benefit so many people.

You know, I think anybody who really, really cares about just finding what works and getting, getting as close to, to the truth in every topic and everything that they're involved in and just really try to have some, some sober, rational discussions and, and you know, subject everything to scrutiny. It's like, you know, we want to, we want to see all the evidence, but let's get all the evidence out there and let's like actually see what like tangibly works, you know, And I just, you know, I think we're, we're all four things because look, it's like this comes from a place I got into this, this world not through trying to build a career to make money. I get into it with a very specific need to find what actually works. And when you're in a position like that, which a lot of people are, a lot of people get into this kind of work through that mode. You know, you come from a place that, you come from a place that at one point, like the only thing that was going to save my life and then later on people around me was what's real? Right. You can't BS your way out of, out of life threatening disease. So like, no matter how much you want to be right or believe this or that because it feels good or whatever, or because you're used to thinking something or because you, you want to just go to an authority, an authority on something and have them do it for you. Like that's all well and good until, until you have no choice, until like your life is on the line and then it's like the only thing that matters is what's real, you know?

Right, right. The medicine spoke to you in no uncertain terms.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So how can people find this amazing product that you have created?

Yeah. So everything is going to be. You can go to trucava.com or follow us on social media. Everything is Tru Kava. As far as everything on the Kava project, my individual stuff, I'm, I'm still building out everything that's, that's going to be launching, you know, this year, it'll be under just my name, Cameron George. But yeah, so all the projects I'm involved in, but, you know, everything true kava is, you know, tru Kava. Just search that, search that anywhere and it'll all come up.

Yeah. It's a beautiful brand and I'm so excited for, for how, how much you are bringing this to, to the general public. So there's going to be lots of kava around in the society because of your efforts.

Yeah, exactly.

Whole Foods, right? Are they, are they at Whole Foods already?

No, no, no, not yet.

That's.

We're. We're dealing with that process right now. We are rebranding kind of slowed everything down a little bit. We wanted to make sure and have the new face of everything.

Okay.

Going, you know, so we're, we're. It'll be, you know, keep an eye on it, you know, towards the end of this year.

But yeah, amazing. Yeah, fantastic work. Thank you so much for coming on and educate everybody. It's fascinating.

Oh, yeah.

It's great to hear about your journey and great to hear just how much hope this can bring a lot of people and, and just, you know, what a great drink it can be for. For everybody to even just to enjoy. Yeah. So thank you very much for all your work.