Kava | The Science + Story: Revolutionizing Modern Mental Health?

The reason that kava is so good for so many people as an entry point catalyst for personal development is because you get a physiologic response that is pleasurable. And kava brings on a state of comfort which is accessible and relevant to anybody. No matter where you're at in your life and whether you're seeking to get those deeper psychological effects of mind integration and the induction of empathy, you don't even know that it's happening if you're someone that's not seeking it. But whenever you drink kava regularly. What we see in populations is people tend to become more introspective, reflective, more empathetic, in many cases more intelligent because of the neuroplasticity that we believe is happening from activating different parts of the brain to communicate into a more what I call systems thinking. But you're in this state that's more systemally integrated and orchestrated to where you can look at the circumstances of your life and put them on the table and be the observer, kind of zoom out.

Foreign.

Thanks for being here, Josh, man, thanks for having me.

You have been so cool. It's been like two years coming that we were wanting to do this podcast and there's so much misconception out there about plant medicine in general, but specifically kava, which has really come to be one of my favorite plants. Like, it's just this loving, warm hug from a grandma, but it doesn't blast me into the fifth dimension. For people that don't know anything about you, man, just Give us the 30,000 foot. Don't go super deep. Give us the 30,000 foot view of what is cava today? How is cava seen in the marketplace? And then we're going to dig so much into your story and all the things you've been through. I'm going to share y' all about how cava supported me during Car's birth with our, with our daughter Naya. So there's a lot to talk about here, man. It's a super important topic. But yeah, tell us about what cava is today and maybe just a quick brief history of cava. Let's, let's start there.

So very simple and, and practically there's a lot of things that cava is because kava, just like any other plant medicine, is a living organism, just like we're living organisms. And unlike pharmaceuticals that are just kind of like non intelligent single molecules extracted from nature, kava is a complete living system that has a multitude of different effects. So it's multidimensional, just like Cannabis is. There's all these effects and it's compatible to human biology because it comes out of the same ecosystem that we come out of, obviously, and the same intelligence, root intelligence. But very simply, kava is mostly a social, a plant based social drink that builds mental health and performance. Right. So that's basically, that's, you know, as far as the practicality of sort of like the modern uses, that's what it's most beloved for in the South Pacific islands. So it's a plant based elixir that's prepared from the roots of a shrub like plant from the pepper family called Piper methysticum. And. And it's from the South Pacific, like Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia. So it's from this, it's from Oceania, basically.

Right.

And it's been used in these cultures as sort of like the foundational fabric of the social structure in all of these cultures and really has helped to shape the communities and the spiritual framework even of these cultures. Right. It is their most sacred substance that has been used in individual villages that are more rural and some of the more urbanized areas that more Americanized, even in today's world. But it's sort of like the pillar of the social fabric. It's known as the drink of peace. It's known as the great connector in a sense. Right. Because that's probably its greatest identity as a living organism is that it is a protector, number one. It's a great protector. How it sort of embraces and protects and helps the body process built up stress and trauma in the body. It's also an opener, an expander of the mind, a heart opener, mind opener, as you would call it in more sort of non scientific terms. But then it's a connector. And that's the result, right, Is that whenever you're safe, whenever you're open, you can connect easier. Right? And then whenever you breathe deeper as well. Yes, exactly.

You can feel more safe in your body where you live, which the connection.

Facilitates creation, which is like really allows you to create better circumstances in your relationships, better circumstances in your life. There's a creativity aspect even to the integration of the mind that comes from kava. It kind of connects left and right brain hemispheres and so on, but it basically induces a kind of relaxed, enhanced state of natural sobriety. And that's key because although it is an altered state, kava probably is more unique than any other single plant compound that I've used. I've used an experiment that I've worked in the functional medicine Space for years. I went through my own health odyssey where I experimented voraciously for over a decade with anything and everything that would give me some small increment of improvement. But so I've worked with all of the very subtle non psychoactive adaptogenic herbs from Ayurvedic medicine, from traditional Chinese medicine, from Amazonian medicine, Native American folk medicine, go down the list, Tibetan medicine, all the ones, the rishis, the ginsengs, and I've worked with the super psychoactive sledgehammer compounds, your DMTs and stuff like that, the bufo like compounds and psilocybin, lsd, ayahuasca, those very, very powerful medicines, all have their application and all have their amazing usages in certain contexts. Context definitely matters. The more potent something is, right?

Oh man, that's so interesting. I gotta jump in. In Austin, there is a ceremony at every corner and when I say ceremony, sometimes there's people that actually use plant medicines, you know, the whole swath of them in a super heart based and integral way. Sometimes people just want to get high. Okay, so I love that you said context because, man, I got to say, if I was going to start with one plant medicine to actually bring me into the world of plant intelligence, it would be Kava.

Yep.

Because ayahuasca, dmt, bufo, all these other substrates, they're great, they have a time and a place and a purpose. But man, for a person who's just coming, let's say out of a regular cubicle, 9 to 5, beginning their journey post college 25, they need to start gently. There's an on ramp for this stuff. I have had my own psychic breaks with too much ayahuasca that I've shared about on the podcast down in Costa Rica. We have to have, and this is what I love about you and Trucava. We have to have some responsibility for the integrity of these plants and how we administer them to ourselves and other people. So I'd love for you to riff on that a little bit as we dive into this massive, complex subject.

The Chinese actually have one word that means both danger and opportunity, which is really, really interesting. Right. You know that, that's like, you know that those are seen into, those are kind of amalgamized into one.

It's in a movie called Finding Joe.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

That's where I learned about that.

Yeah, yeah.

The Chinese symbol is for crisis is danger and opportunity.

Exactly.

I love that.

And that's sort of at the epicenter. We kind of step into this Whole. Well, it actually is very representative of the time that we live in in general. There's a lot of big risk right now of this rapid acceleration, whatever you call it, singularity, acceleration of consciousness, transformation, et cetera. As we move into this technological age where a lot of things are converging and the rate at which things are converging and developing and quickening is accelerating as well, too. There's risk and opportunity there. But probably the most powerful tools that we have on this planet for quickly shifting a person's perspective and consciousness and expanding their sense of self and awareness in relation to the environment, other people and themselves and the universe existence are psychedelic compounds that we know of. Like, there is nothing that will switch you on and. And blow open your. Your. Your crown chakra. How. However you want to. You know, you characterize it.

It might make you. Your pants, too.

Absolutely. So be careful, y', all, now. And so a lot of know, the initial thought would be like, well, well, that's indiscriminately a good thing, but not necessarily. Context definitely matters, right? And they bring you into a state where there's great danger and opportunity. Right. So if a person is not grounded, is not very grounded, and doesn't have the potential for integration, doesn't have the perspective, the framework, the support, a kind of structural framework in place for integration, then you can see too much, and there's nowhere and nothing to integrate. There's nowhere to. To integrate it, and there's nothing to do with it. And so now you've seen certain truths that you can't properly. That you can't properly decode and interpret. And it can just be a bunch of noise, and it can also be tormenting to a person. Sure. A lot of people don't talk about this. A lot of people will go into ayahuasca ceremonies, you know, to deal with addiction and things like that. Or at least with the idea or the thought process of trying to, you know, address that. If a person is not in a place where they're actually ready to take on deep work and ready to confront very, very painful truths about themselves and explore their dark side and integrate those parts of their dark side and shed light on the dark, if they're not truly ready for that, then being shown, quote, unquote, certain things about what they're doing and how it's affecting themselves and everybody else around them can actually lead to greater addiction in some cases. Because if a person isn't willing to integrate and address it, then when they go back to their daily life, Then it torments them that much more. So they have to go farther into escapism in order to retreat from that, you know, so I've actually seen some people go farther into addiction, you know, because they lack integration after a psychedelic. So now, that being said, we don't blame the compound or the psychedelic. That's my viewpoint of it. These compounds are, like I said before, they're living organisms. Right. And they have certain characteristics, a certain pharmacology. And from my perspective, there's not necessarily a moral dimension to them. The moral dimension comes in with the application and the usage. Right. So it's like a tool, like a scalpel. You can save someone's life in surgery if it's very carefully, forensically targeted, or you can easily kill yourself with it. And so it's important to just understand that danger opportunity ratio whenever, in anything in your life, obviously, because in order to progress with anything, you have to take risks in your life. Right. We know that being too safe and being overly protected leads to weakness and atrophy.

That's the biggest risk in the world.

Absolutely.

Playing it safe your whole life.

I think, you know, Jordan Peterson talks about this a lot. You know, it's like there is no riskless path. It's like, what are the risks of doing nothing in your life? Right. What are the risks of not taking a risk?

No doubt. I want to. I want to steer us back because one other thing Jordan Peterson said that I love. I love that you bring up, like someone that. I've been reading all of his books for the past five years. He has such good wisdom. And he said something pertaining to exactly what you and I are talking about. He said when it comes to plant medicines and psychedelics in general, and by the way, kava is a plant medicine. So this is included in the conversation. Be careful of unearned wisdom.

Yep.

You actually have to earn your wisdom. You can't just be 21 years old, you know, did a bunch of acid and then go fly down to Costa Rica and drink plant medicine for five days. That's not going to get you the spiritual courage or maturity that one needs in order to deal with true trauma. And the reason I said that is because I think it's so important for people that are like, literally just maybe even hearing about the concept of plant medicine to know that there is actually a gentle starting path. The medicines of which you speak, in my opinion, are very advanced. I think that someone needs to bolster themselves and fortify their own nervous system and their own psyche and their Heart and their awareness about who they are and what they're here to do way before they go to those medicines. That's my opinion. We can jam on that later a little bit. But for somebody that is starting maybe just letting go of alcohol, letting go of marijuana addiction, letting go of addiction of any kind, which we know that it's something we're attached to outside of ourselves. It's a lack of safety that we feel in our body. That's what creates all addiction, whether it's mate or anyone else talking about it. So maybe talk about that. How kava can really help people at the stage of letting go of alcohol, letting go of a deleterious thing that's. That's actually harming their health for the long term. How does kava come into the nervous system and how does it actually work to give people this sobriety high? Right. Because you're really, you're sober with kava, but it's giving you a heart opening. It's doing something really special to the nervous system, which I feel every single time I drink. It's amazing.

No, it's amazing. I'm glad we brought it back to this here because so in the cultures in the South Pacific, like I mentioned before, kava is really their foundational, most sacred medicine in Polynesia. Right. And they have access to different things. They have access to psilocybin mushrooms and some of these harder hitting sledgehammer compounds. But they have a kind of wisdom and a kind of saying around kava that the most potent or the most powerful or therapeutic or relevant medicine isn't necessarily the one that hits you over the head with the sledgehammer the hardest. It's the one that's most versatile, that can be taken and integrated, that you can form a closer relationship with, and that a larger percentage of people can collectively use to be able to get on a collective wavelength of connection and understanding, to create the process and the opportunity for personal growth collectively. Right. As I was kind of alluding to before, I've worked with this huge spectrum of medicines and have a good amount of experience because of. Because of just the sort of destiny of my process that I didn't choose to get into this world. I was forced into it from being sick. But that led to a kind of desperation where my back was up against the wall, where I was just voraciously experimenting with anything and everything to get my own life back, which then evolved into an inspiration later on, once I got out of desperation mode, where I'm just. I see the transformation that can Occur. But. But so basically, out of all the plant compounds that I've used, of all these different living organisms, everything from ginseng to dmt. Right. From ginseng to ayahuasca. Right. Or even foods.

That's a big basket, dude.

Yeah, exactly. It's a lot there, I can't say. And I have the unique experience of getting to work clinically with thousands of physicians where I get these large pools of data where we're actually seeing it in the very sick and people who are very fragile. And that is a great. You know, that's a great sort of testing realm, because if you understand how the most sensitive interact with certain things, it's sort of like the canaries in the coal mine, then you get a really good understanding, not only from my personal experience from being really sensitive and sick, but you get sort of a large pool of data of how people respond to different things and what the likelihood is of success, you know, in the early stage, in the beginner stage. Like you're talking about when people first get into certain things versus whenever they're at it for a longer period of time. And I can't say that I've found a single organism or plant compound that has a greater therapeutic effect to drawback ratio than kava.

And what do you mean by drawback ratio?

So drawback meaning, you know, possible side effects or stipulations that could. That could bring about dangerous consequences. Right, so that danger piece. Right. So in other words, the risk profile. Right. So the risk, both physically, psychologically, and emotionally, is extremely low with kava, if you get the right stuff. And that's a stipulation, because there are ways that you can manipulate the structure, use the wrong parts of the plant. That have led to some belief systems, even around safety, which are all unfounded if you're actually working with kava as a food in its food form and medicine. But the risk profile is virtually nil. Kava is an extraordinarily safe medicine. Now, I mentioned before that I kind of view. I view all of these medicines as living organisms, and I view every single time you seek out a plant medicine of any kind, whether it be an adaptogenic herb that's supposed to be therapeutic for your immune system, like a reishi mushroom, or whether it be something that is less physically nourishing, but that could be very, very nourishing, or open up the opportunity for nourishment for your psyche, your emotions, and spiritually, like, say, ayahuasca. Each one of these compounds are living organisms. And when you Bring them into your life. I see it as forming a relationship with another organism, just like you and I would form a relationship as we get to know each other, right? And it's important to understand that just because something's natural doesn't mean that that thing is ready to have a relationship formed with it. Just like all people, right? We look at the landscape of people in the world. Is every person in the world someone you want to form a relationship with? No, they're natural. You know, it's like. But that doesn't mean certain people have certain boundaries and certain people have certain barriers that you have to break through as you sort of craft a relationship with them that can long term, when you get ready and you put in the work can be great and fruitful. And some people are just ready to go, like very, very easy to get along with right away and easy and just kind of sync with you very, very well. Kava is that medicine that has evolved and adapted to be very compatible relationship wise with both human biology and the human psychological emotional framework. So I see it as, it's kind of like an ambassador for the world of plant medicine and plant intelligence that is sort of that medium. I think a lot of these compounds can, especially the ones that affect our neurochemistry and affect our perception that can actually help to communicate to us through chemistry. I believe that everything in the psychedelic realm there's, at least theoretically, I like this model of these compounds acting as somewhat ambassadors between us and, and base consciousness and base ecological intelligence, meaning that they can't talk with us like higher vertebrates can and use these kind of sounds that you and I are making that our brains decode as language. But they communicate to us through chemistry. Whenever you take them, you have this very large percentage of people who take them have this undeniable feeling, whether it's true or not, undeniable feeling in experiential circumstance that I'm getting a message that's coming through, right? That it is acting as a medium that that's opening up, opening that link and regenerating and reconnecting that link between base intelligence and your ego. The sort of base framework of the ecology, the intelligence that we're all an.

Extension of, it's so wild because most human beings, and I did this for fucking sure in my 20s, they go to alcohol, because alcohol, even though it makes people, you know, drop their inhibitions, it's also a depressant. It radically shifts the liver and the gut biome and just health in general. I mean, everybody knows Like I personally go the rest of my life, I'll say this right now, without ever having one drop of alcohol ever again. And I would be the wiser and the healthier and the smarter for it. Yeah, I'm not anti alcohol. Just not for me. Maybe some people's constitution can take it, but why are people actually doing that in the fucking first place? They're doing it in the first place because they want to feel safe, they want to feel expressive, they want to feel connected. They need, in your terms, a liaison between this dimension, 3 and 4 and 5, where there can be this expression and creativity. Do you find that's the number one thing with people that come to kava? They've been drinking alcohol, they've been maybe addicted to other things, and they just want to have that same feeling but better and not have any deleterious health consequences.

Yeah. You know, the beautiful thing about kava, kind of like we touched on before, is that it is a therapeutic organism that really helps to nourish some of our core foundational needs, or at least help us to facilitate and rebuild and reclaim those ourselves. Right? Which is really what natural compounds do, right? They help to facilitate and work with the intelligence of the body instead of working against it and manipulating it, overriding it, contradicting it, or undermining it like a single synthetic molecule would that we extract and isolate from nature. Short term instant gratification at the cost of long term health, you know, physically, mentally and emotionally. What makes kava so unique and the reason why people like you said, tend to gravitate to alcohol, benzodiazepines, or drugs in general is this need to, number one, feel safe for sure. And then the need to open up and to reconnect with their existential core, who they really are, which is something that we all are longing for, whether we are willing to admit it, whether we're consciously aware of it or not. We are all longing for genuine human connection, both to our existential core, to finding ourself, to longing to be the person who we were meant to be, the person that's deep inside of us, the person that is at that foundational existential core that's connected with the intelligence that is everything, in my view. But we also, definitely, it's undeniable that we long for human connection with others. And if, and if you believe, I mean, whether you believe or not, but if you have entertained, you know, the concept of sort of the unity principle or sort of the guy in principle, in and of itself, is that we're we all, under that model, are all one collective consciousness experiencing itself subjectively anyways. And so really, it's about connection and sort of, you know, integration into that sort of unity thing. And that's real quick.

I love how you dropped in a physiological and psychological bomb that would blast open any spiritual teacher for, like, 10 years. I love how you just dropped that on us when I. When I asked you about alcohol. It's such an existential question, right? Like, what are we doing here? What's the purpose of this? Where do we come from? I think that's really cool. I like how your mind works, because I asked you a question about alcohol, and you brought in spiritual depth to it and the God principle. So I just wanted to point that out because, man, there is spirituality in everything, whether or not we want to admit it to ourselves. And I'm sure that's probably what fuels your path to go through your health journey. To be sitting here with me right now and to be serving hundreds of thousands of people. Is it globally or us?

Globally.

Globally, with kava. So I digress. I had to insert that real quick so that everybody was feeling what I was feeling. I just put words to it.

Yeah. Thanks, man. I appreciate. Yeah, a lot of that has come out of my. My personal experiences. And, you know, I'm a really huge believer in that. You know, the emergence of truth and authenticity comes out of immersion into darkness. Right. And I've been immersed in some really, really dark places. And I also believe that pressure makes diamonds. And you find yourself. The deepest, darkest places are actually where you find the truth about yourself. If you're open and willing and have the circumstances in place to where you're willing to look for it and develop that hunger for it. It came out of desperation, like I said. It turned into inspiration. But that sort of set the whole pathway. If you were to talk to the. The. The. The earlier version of me, you know, 20 years ago, if we were sitting at this table 20 years ago, that. That. I wouldn't have used any of that. That wouldn't.

What would you have said if you were sitting here 20 years ago? What might you have said if you were talking about how to feel good or how to live your life?

I probably would have just. I. I probably would have seen it in more from a more totally reductionist standpoint. Right. We're talking about kava. I would have just said, well, it probably. It feels like it most likely, you know, relaxes your nervous system or may have talked about the science of GABA receptors and this and that. And then said, well, alcohol does something similar. It makes you feel good, it opens you up. Mood, relaxation, mental clarity. Probably would have talked about it on those dimensions, which is all part of it. It's. That's. That's all part of it. But that's sort of like the extension that's like, you know, on the surface a little bit.

And that's where most people start. Right there.

Exactly.

And there's nothing like that.

Yeah.

How can I get a gratifying result about now?

Yes.

Which is why the product, I think, is doing so well. It does give people pretty much an immediate gratification. But the long tail, the long term, delayed gratification, comes more on the spiritual.

Path, which is funny because that's the thing that's beautiful about kava. And, and I'll. I'll get into alcohol too here in a second, so we can kind of unpack that. And, you know, the difference between the two and the relationship and sort of that on road, you know, trajectory from alcohol to kava, which I believe that culturally we're going to. In that direction for sure. It's just inevitable long term. The indigenous people of the South Pacific actually see kava as a mental and psychological and spiritual medicine. That's their. That's how they view it, mainly because they don't have a lot of the same physical ailments that we do. Right. The kind of anxiety, the kind of depression, things like that. Maybe because they use kava, but it's not just that. It's because they haven't historically had the level of processed food, or I would just call all expressions of nature divorcement syndrome, which is really what generates pretty much all disease. Right. Anytime you take steps away from the base intelligence of what you are, you're actually separating yourself from yourself and you're overlapping and working against yourself. And that is generating every expression of disharmony and dis. Ease, which leads to every kind of ailment and the manipulation of. Of your mind, body, spirit system. But the indigenous people see kava as a psychological and mental medicine that actually builds mental health and mental fortitude and emotional maturity over time. It builds wisdom in a person or creates the opportunity for wisdom to be built. The medicine doesn't do it itself, but it opens up the pathway and the doorway for you to increase your senses, to be able to, you know, develop as a human. They see it as a developer of the mind and a developer of the emotions. And, you know, that they see it as something that helps to bring out that authentic existential core in a person and to manifest itself collectively. And when you do that in individuals, remember, you know, healthy cultures are made up of healthy individuals, right? So it all starts with the sovereignty of the individual. That's another Jordan Peterson thing, right? It's like, I truly believe in that, right? Because in order to have a good healthy culture collectively, it starts from your internal paradigm, your perspective, your belief systems, your thoughts, which that's the place that you are internally. So, of course, there are these physiologic effects with kava. And the reason that kava is so good for so many people as an entry point to all aspects and a catalyst for personal development is because it gives anybody, even a person who's really not seeking personal development, or at least not consciously seeking, gives everybody. There's something in it for everybody. Whereas there's that sort of catalyst hook there where you get a physiologic response that is pleasurable and comfortable. Kava, in a lot of ways, brings on a state of comfort which is accessible and relevant to anybody, no matter where you're at in your life. And whether you're seeking to get those deeper psychological effects of mind integration and the induction of empathy, you don't even know that it's happening if you're someone that's not seeking it. But whenever you drink kava regularly, what we see in populations is people tend to become more introspective, reflective, more empathetic, and I would just say across the board, in many cases, more intelligent because of the neuroplasticity that we believe is happening from activating and allowing these different parts of these different hemispheres of the brain, left and right, the different parts of the brain, to communicate into a more, what I call systems thinking, where high doses of kava, Something similar happens that happens with all psychedelics, except for you maintain total sobriety and it's happening in the background, which leaves you functional. And you can use it more often and regularly. But you're in this state that's more systemally integrated and orchestrated to where you can kind of look at the circumstances of your life and put them on the table and kind of be the observer, kind of zoom out. And this is a characteristic of all psychedelic plant medicines. It's because they connect these parts of the brain. Normally you're in fight or flight, or you're in everyday waking sort of productivity consciousness, right? That's fueled more by, like, stimulants and caffeine that bring you into this monofocused, get things done and productivity very, very much Executive thinking kind of state of consciousness, which is very useful, but it is also incomplete if you don't have the sort of more introspective, reflective side, at least at some point, integrated into your daily life, which comes through meditation, many other things. Kava, in many cases, is kind of like meditation in a drink to some degree, but because it helps to bring on this sort of state of integrated systems thinking, where you can see the big picture and you can see the circumstances of your life like they're on the table, and you can start to connect dots, you start to see pictures instead of pixels. Right. And whenever you can do that, you start to look at your life in the same framework that an engineer would look at a schematic. Right. Where you can see the entire machine. Machine, instead of being focused in these individual compartmentalized parts of your life. And now you can start to see how everything fits together so you can start to work on it. And you're like, oh, making me think.

Of Tom Cruise in Minority Report, where he had that gloves and the windows.

Yeah.

What was that thing? Pre. Pre Contemplation.

Yeah.

They would arrest somebody. The Precogs.

Yeah.

I love that movie because I thought, wow, that's how all of our brains work. We all have these photos that are kind of flashing before our eyes at all times, but are we actually looking at them and really, like, do we even have the courage to look at them? Which is really why I think, think alcohol exists. I don't know when it started. I think it was in the 1300s or 1400s or whatever it is. But if you had to articulate maybe in a few sentences or more, why do you believe that so much of the populace and so much of our societal conditioning is around? Get drunk after work, get drunk on the weekends, so you can, quote, slog it through the week, literally. It's a societal continuum that is so unhealthy. And I fell into it for many years. Most people that go to college is all about drinking, keg stands, parties, stuff like that. It's literally woven into the fucking fabric of our culture. And it's very sad because I wonder how many more people would be empowered and free if they weren't literally in a jail cell shackled by. By partying and all these things that might give them a temporary high, but they're really just looking for reprieve from stressors they're not even aware of. So what do you make of this? Like, what do you make of our societal conditioning? And in this. In this almost tapestry that Everybody gets introduced to at like 18. Well, this is what life is. You go drink, you go party, you do these things. What the hell? Where did that even come from? What is the answer to that? Kava being one of them. What do you think about it?

Yeah, it's a model of reality, right. And we all there, there are collective models that, that, that, you know, that precipitate like a virus in a host. Right. You know, that it just becomes a collective idealistic sort of mentality or non idealistic mentality. That is a model that we kind of inhabit, you know, and partly what psychedelics do is they deconstruct that model and bring you back to the base of, you know, the base fabric of your intelligence and your consciousness, to where you can look at things objectively and kind of see them outside of the model that's been presented to you that, that your mind has been molded into. And you start to see everything, all of your belief systems, everything from the structures of how we're even taught to think, think about certain things, everything. Even from mathematics to science to, you know, to history to, you know, to everything. They're all models that we've been given and we've been integrated into these models. And some of the models are really good, some are incomplete and some are just totally nuts and probably are best to be broken or discarded, but they're all models. I think this is a really, really important thing to hit on. I'm so glad that you hit on it of like the discussion around, first of all, why we're drawn to alcohol and why we're drawn to altered states of consciousness to begin with. Now this is really important to understand historically, anthropologically and contextually, every single culture in the history of human civilization or even before human civilization, when we're talking about just being hunter gatherers, we are obsessed with altered states. Michael Pollan has written about this a lot. He's been on Rogan's podcast. He's talked about how we're obsessed with altered states of consciousness. When you, whenever you talked about psychedelics, many people have talked about it. Anybody who's gotten to the realm of psychedelics as they relate to anthropological circumstances has touched on this thing that every culture has their form of altered state. And I think that humans, as we evolved out of being less complex mammals, primates, or just this different thing where we're very different than any organism that exists on the planet with the level of complexity, once we had the self awareness to be able to manipulate our environment and had some level outside of Just our normal survival processes of just existing in the now. And we can actually experience a perception of the past and of the future and all these different things. Being in that state of mind and developing that is also one of those danger opportunity type of situations where it can drive you mad in trying to figure out, you know, how to exist and how to even stay sane with a level of consciousness that can perceive what the past is. Remember the past, live in the past or live in the future, anticipate the future, the anxieties of the future. So we live in this kind of situation. I think how humans have coped with that kind of development of developing a level of complexity that's gotten us to a point where we can perceive that. And there are almost certainly infinite levels that will change the game totally outside of this. But where we're at now is altered states. And I think that certain other organisms have co evolved with us to be compatible with us, to actually assist us, to get us on the same page with the rest of the ecology so that we don't get too crazy from being in those states and start to work against the whole system in the same way that a cell in the body can become disconnected from its collective community and unit and go rogue and turn into cancer and work against the entire body.

Why are those pieces assisting us? You said they're assisting us.

Why they're assisting us? Well, I think that, you know, just like everything else in evolution I look at from the Gaian principle and this is kind of the model, and I'm not saying that this is the absolute truth, but just from my perspective, this is an interesting thought exercise, you know, under the guy. In principle, if on this planet we all are one collection, collective consciousness, that is not individual units, but it's all one collective system. Just like, you know, if you've heard the principle as above. So below the microcosm, we are the microcosm of the macrocosm, right? You know, in this existence that whatever we live in a, you know, fractal holographical reality with where in everything is contained everything, a smaller version of everything, right? So let's just take say the collective mind of planet Earth, for example, being the, the macrocosm of the human brain, which is also a collective mind. And let's, let's look at the, you know, the collective mind. And we know about the human brain at least a decent amount about its structure and the individual units that make it up.

We think we do, but who knows.

We don't know much about the mind we at least know some level of measurement about that. There are units, subunits in there that call cells.

We know there's a prefrontal cortex. We know that the pfc, the blood flow shuts down for times of stress. We know like all these things. And there's literally brain scientists that dedicate their entire lives to it.

Yeah.

And, and if you sit with them, they. And I've had brain scientists on the show, even Dr. Judd Brewer and he's like, yeah, we're, we're learning literally new things every day and what we thought wasn't actually the truth. So we're just going to go ahead and be humble about that. So.

Yeah, exactly.

Please continue. Because like, you know, science, people forget science is actually a support Socratic method where it's a method of proving and disproving based on real facts that are non biased in intention. And unfortunately, because of the world which we're going to talk about pharma today because it's super important, there's so much bias that's injected, keyword, that's injected into pharmaceuticals and injected into society, that science now has become a God itself. Which is quite troubling to me because you've been mentioning a lot of concepts about God and about oneness and unity and unfortunately, where we are and why I think so many people are here with us on the podcast is like we feel it to be different than what we are told.

Yeah.

We just know that it's different in some way.

Yeah.

So go a little bit more.

But if we. Yeah, so. And there is a very distinct difference in my view between the scientific method, which is the objective method of, through the language of mathematics, you know, the process of building evidence towards a greater collective understanding of any part of reality which is not a destination. So any, any time that the conversation goes to the term the science is settled is actually the complete antithesis of what the scientific method is. And now we're in scientism.

These motherfuckers that say trust the science. I'm like, actually trust the money that trusted the science.

Exactly. And what is the science too?

What exactly does that even mean for.

You know, for any perspective or any, if you've ever, you know, read anything about any, any, you know, litigation or court case where someone is being sued, you know, for damaging a large percentage of people, like say Monsanto with glyphosate or non Hodgkin's lymphoma and so on and so forth. You always have two sides. You've got the prosecutor, you got the Defense and each one have scientific advisors that are presenting science. Right. And so it's one of those things, any kind of situation where there's scientific controversy now the quality of science is dictated about how much more complete it is and the variables that it addresses. Right. There's complete and incomplete. And unfortunately, you know, there's not necessarily. There's a lot most people don't know how to discern those two. If you have enough money and you put a nice shiny label on this stack of scientific literature, no matter how incomplete it is or how much it was structured to distort the perception of the reality by omitting certain details and leaving in others, say, I. E. Any kind of pharmaceutical drug that's led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Vioxx, for example, you know, that was later it came out in the discovery and in court, obviously, that Merck knowingly kept out a large percentage of studies that they had done because they're not legally required to submit those and only kept in studies that they funded and structured that left out certain details about cardiac events, et cetera. So they knew, they knew the 40% prevalence of cardiac events in X number of people, et cetera. It led to the. The death of over anywhere from 200 to 500,000 people.

Have you seen that documentary American Pain? You heard of it?

I've heard of it, yeah.

Okay, yeah. If you guys want to get your hair ripped back, watch that documentary and try not to get disturbed about how much literally hundreds of billions of dollars was made on oxycontin.

Yep.

Those pill mills that popped up on the east coast, specifically in like the. The Long Stem of Florida. It was insane to watch this, but I realized that it was just literally people being opportunists to something where they could take advantage of the pain of others. And that's actually what we're experiencing right now when this podcast comes out towards the tail end of 2023, like, it's a big deal for all of us to really pay attention to these concepts that we're describing today. We're not doctors, we're not scientists, but we are, it seems like a shared. We have a shared affinity for philosophy, for consciousness and for health. And with those things, for me being now 25 years, and for you, I assure, I assume the same at least 15, 20 years, your own health journey, me being 280 pounds, like walk a mile in somebody else's shoes, regardless of what letters are after their name and trust what you feel in your body compared to what the certificate on the Wall says about the applicability of the information that's being shared. In other words, sharpen your own intuition before you just outsource your health to pharma and doctors and all these people that, by the way, they're not the enemy. Right. There are good people in those industries. Unfortunately, there is a Watiko, to quote Paul Levy, that has been overshadowing so much of this in the name of finance, in the name of unconscious capitalism. I'm a conscious capitalist. I know you are. I think there's good that money can be used for, but it has to be clean with the intention, which is what you talked about with the tribes anyways.

Yeah.

Their intention is so pure as to why they even use the root, the kava, that the intention is actually medicine stacked right next to the plant medicine itself. So I wonder what could happen if that mindset you talked about could be applied to these industries and maybe that would make it that no pill mills would ever be created ever again.

Yeah. And that's really the higher purpose of a lot of these different treatments, therapies, modalities. And even in this conversation that we're talking about with this medicine specifically, anything that sort of feeds into the development and the integration of the human mind, body, spirit paradigm. Right. That leads to an opportunity for expanded consciousness and integration in an individual and can help to contribute to the process of that occurring and progressing collectively is going to improve the health of the entire culture. Just to go back to what I was saying, this segues right back into what I was saying kind of before with this sort of, with the guy in principle sort of mindset. And you're comparing microcosm of the human brain to the macrocosm of the collective mind of say the planet. Right. And it's directly relevant because if, if planet Earth is a collective mind, and what makes up that collective mind are individual units of consciousness that can work collectively to either create a healthy ecosystem or a non healthy ecosystem. The human brain is the exact same thing. There's 100 billion neurons, there's trillions of glial cells that are in there, and they either work in sync, in communication with each other, or they work against each other. And we call that disease. Now if, if all of those, all of those cells in the body and well, you know, the 70 trillion cells in the body, the hundred billion neurons in the brain, whenever they're connected to their base substrate of intelligence that runs the whole thing, right? Then they default into a state of symbiosis. They default into a state of you know, of, you know, essentially harmony and symbiosis where, you know, they go into the state where everything just works, right? And that's because there's a collective intelligence behind that, that's governing it. And that's undeniable regardless of you look at it from a scientific perspective or sort of more of an introspective philosophical perspective, because you don't have to tell your heart to beat. We don't have to do anything for our heart to beat. We don't have to tell our body to breathe. There is an intelligence that is naturally running this thing. Whenever we go out into our backyard, guard. You know, who's telling this grass to grow, right. You know, who's telling the bark on the tree to thicken? Who's telling even what's responsible for even instincts or all of the different species that, that are cohabiting together to create an ecology where everything sort of works in somewhat tandem and balance, if it's healthy. And when after, whenever it starts to go astray and manifest expressions of imbalance, that's whenever it starts to fall apart, right? So that ecology is going on inside of our human body as well, too, in the same way that it's going on outside in the world, right? So if individual units of consciousness that make up the health of the human brain would be, say, neurons, right? People and living organisms are also cohabiting. Organisms that are either in sync with each other, in sync with that substrate intelligence that governs everything, or we're out of sync with it, and then we start to manifest every expression of isolationism, which is the same thing a cancer cell does when it loses energetic and electrical communication in the body. That's what all disease is. It's the breakdown of cellular communication. When cells cease to be able to communicate and to jack in and to connect with that collective intelligence, they start to go rogue. And then they just start to take up space, generate inflammation, they start to mutate, and then that actually becomes contagious to some degree because they start secreting compounds that they're not supposed to, which affect other cells and make them go rogue, which, again, I'm describing cancer. But again, the same thing happens from the Gaian principle collectively on a planet. So you asked me earlier why certain organisms might actually surface through evolution to assist other organisms. If you walk outside right now or say you're playing like an intramural sport, like basketball or something like that, and you take a blow to the head and you get a brain injury, what's going to happen in your Brain, right. The collective intelligence of your brain is going to work together to ameliorate that injury. In other words, the brain, the intelligence in the body, the substrate intelligence, is going to recruit certain cells to come to the aid of others, right? And they're going to start secreting neutrophin factors and all of these different anti inflammatory compounds to try to heal that injury. And so the intelligence is governing one part of the system to assist, to re establish collective. Because if it's all one thing, it all is one thing to begin with, right underneath the tapestry. So if we extrapolate that and under this thought exercise, if we understand that our ecology is one collective mind as well too, that whenever certain organisms like neurons in the brain or cells in the body start to become cancerous, become disconnected, nature divorcement syndrome start to develop a level of consciousness that disconnects it from its understanding of the whole and how to work in tandem, make its contribution to the collective health of the whole. Then the system is going to recruit other organisms basically to be able to come to that aid, to develop characteristics, to be able to get that re establish the communication of that cell to the whole.

Right. It's wild. That is so wild. I love that you said divorcement. Nature, divorcement.

Yeah.

Because really, and I'll let you finish, really what you're describing is a divorcement from life itself. Life is nature.

Yes. And we are life.

And we are life.

There is no.

Yeah, the hippies had it right, by the way. I saw Michael Pollan at a church here in Austin in like 2018 and he said, you know, these platitudes that we hear about. The hippies had it right. Love is all there is. But it's platitudes are hidden in plain sight. Just like the emperor has no clothes. And so I love that you said that because really the divorcement from nature is actually the divorcement from ourselves, from our true nature. People think of nature as like trees and puppy dogs and rocks. That's part of it. But this table is nature. You and I are breath. Everything we're doing in this world is natural, nature itself. And when we get in the way of that, that is the cancer. Not just on a cellular level, but in relationships. Divorce rates for men and women, like the attack on the family, gender dysphoria, you name it. Cameron, this shit's happening because we are being reminded by a cosmic mirror that we are out of alignment with nature. Or you said divorcement from nature, a.

Deeper part of ourselves, the foundational part of ourselves that Actually is us, in my view. And we have a kind of consciousness that has developed a sense of individuality so that we can function as individuals and survive as individuals. And that plays a role. But if it starts to take over, if the ego starts to take over, it becomes a kind of severe mental illness or a neuroses that actually puts us into a state of pseudo psychosis, just like a cancer cell that ceases to believe at its level of consciousness, which is much simplified obviously from human, but it's the same as above, so below, type of, of, you know, model. It starts to believe that it is an individual and has no sense and kind of has that sort of cosmic amnesia, right, where it forgets what it actually is and therefore starts to become a complete, you know, disease to its circumstance and starts to sense that something is wrong on such a deep level and doesn't know how to cope with it and just starts to degenerate because it needs to be jacked into its collective intelligence to maintain health and life in a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose and a sense of self and, you know, and a sense of fulfillment. Because the fulfillment comes in understanding who and what we actually are, which we are an extension of the foundational fabric and intelligence that governs and creates and generates life.

Do you call that God?

I do, yeah. I mean, I have and I do. I think we could call it. Again, this gets back to human language, right. You know, it's like we could, we could call it God, we could call it universe, we could call it source, we call it all kinds of things. And I think that sometimes language is kind of what ends up dividing us because we get so fixated on the methodology and the labels and the language that we forget that they're, you know, you can come to an internal, conscious understanding of an existential truth and it's, it's. You can actually label it totally differently. Right. You know, but that's why I think that there is an underpinning underlying existential truth behind virtually all of the religions that exist on this planet. They're all pursuing truth, but so many of them end up kind of, first of all, getting take over by expressions of the ego that formulate, you know, bureaucratic structures.

The ego of the translator, by the way.

Yeah, exactly.

There was the divine wisdom, and then it got translated. Translated through man's ego?

Yes, exactly. And because it's translated through man's ego, then there's a type of mental neuroses and belief that they sense the power behind the substrate of the idea and the truth. And then they try to harness or control or to. Or to, you know, contain that truth and use that to dangle it in front of other people so that they sense that, and then they create a structure around it to then control them. Have you ever seen the movie the Book of Eli with.

I love it. That's one of my favorite.

That's the Gary Oldman character. You know, he wasn't interested in the pursuit of. Of truth or divine. Anything like that. But what was he after? He was after the Bible. In that case, they're talking about the Christian religion. He was after the Bible because he said it's control. You know, it's control because people sense something in it, that it has some level of control. And if I have this book, then I can build a structure around that and I can control people.

See that sense that you're talking about there. There's a. I remember we did a podcast with Busy Gold. Shout out to her. I love her work. It's linked below us where you're watching this or listening. And she talked about instinct versus intuition. When you said people feel something, that thing, that feeling, where does that even emanate from? There's something inside of us that does not require any words. There's something inside of us that you and I both feel. And we know truth when we see it or hear it or feel it. And there's no words that need to be spoken because it just sticks to your ribs. It's like, you know, it's there.

It permeates you at a cellular level.

Absolutely. So. So the question is.

Yeah.

How. How. How can kava. How can these plant medicines help us to sharpen that intuition?

Yeah, right. And that's. This is great, because it kind of brings us full circle to. I think some of that gives some interesting kind of context to the. At least I'm loving this value. Yeah.

And we're not at McDonald's. Do not go to McDonald's. I hate that. I hate that they took that phrase. I am loving this. Yeah, yeah, go ahead, Go ahead.

I'm loving. I'm loving it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I. I think that, you know, just to give context to that whole principle and about what we talked about with say, like that, you know, the guy and model and, you know, states of consciousness and all of these different. The strategies that you talk about on your show and everything we talk about in the world of health and wellness and personal development and just trying to make tomorrow better than today, be a better person. They're all strategies of really trying to dissolve the boundaries that we've developed between us and our existential core. Because that's where the authenticity is. That's where the, the truth is. That's what we really are, right? You know, these boundaries, you know, lead us into this neurosis where you're talking about where we go rogue. And when we're in there, that sense, that deep sense that we have, feels that that's wrong. And the farther divorced you are from nature, the farther divorced you are from your existential core, which is divorcement from nature, because that is nature. That same intelligence that makes your heart beat without you telling it to do so is the same that makes the grass grow, the same that makes the crow fly, same that makes the sun rise. And the same everything, right? It's all linked into this collective intelligence. You call it God, you call it universe, call it source, call it whatever you'd like, you know, and, but, but understanding that there is there, there is a deep, undeniable reality that we can't skirt, right? You know, it's, you know, that's, you know, and you could take that, you know, have you ever heard the term that, that, you know, saying that there's two ways to look at life. Either everything is a miracle or that nothing is. Well, the difference between that is how connected you are to your existential core. Or if you've gone rogue, then you have this mental neurosis where you, you, you lose the ability to see that collective intelligence, even though it's undeniable. You know, it's like, but dude, your heart is beating without you. You're breathing. You're this miracle of harmony where you're literally. You look in the mirror, you see an individual, but really you're a community of 70 trillion collective cells perfectly working in tandem without you doing a damn thing to make it happen as far as your ego is concerned or conscious. And you believe from this reductionist standpoint that you're just this individual, that you're just kind of this puppet that life pushes around, that this is just all just ridiculous randomness and that there's no meaning or existential power to it or anything like that. But anyways, from that perspective, whenever we talk about some of these tools, kind of back to plant medicine and sort of the spectrum, we're talking about the most powerful ones, like the psychedelics and where something like kava falls. And again, this kind of ties back into. Okay, well, so why do people, from the context of this specific uses, we talk about alcohol and Everything like that. We're talking about altered states and we're talking about why we're drawn to altered states, right? Which leads into why we're drawn to alcohol. Because like I was saying before, every culture in history of civilization has been drawn to altered states. And everything we just talked about is, I believe why is because we've evolved into these higher vertebrates where we have a level of complexity where we can perceive these. Our potential for going rogue is much greater than any other organism. We can go rogue like no other organism on this planet, right? And when we go rogue, that's when we get psychotic. And whenever we divorce from nature, we start expressing. Every alarm inside of our system is going off like something is wrong. And we have this, this purpose and meaning deficiency, right? Because the meaning is in being aligned and integrated with the process of life. And if you're not, if you believe that, that you're not, for some reason, you. You cease to have meaning. And so then in just to remain stable and sane, what you want to do is you're trying to find ways of hijacking your body's reward systems and chemistry to try to mimic meaning and purpose in your life, right? Because those same chemicals in your body at the physiologic layer are the end stage expression of the process of finding meaning and cultivating it in your life. And you have pleasure and you have all those things. That's the end stage part of it. But, you know, you've forgotten that the cake exists, so you're just looking for icing and you're trying to, you know, you're trying to gorge yourself on it over and over, and it melts like cotton. Whether it's food, whether it's sex, whether it's drugs, whether it's any of those things, it's all escapism. And it comes from that divorcement and that fundamental disconnection from self. If you've ever, I don't know if you've ever, you know, talked to or read the work of Gabor mate. He's, he's really brilliant man. He talks about trauma, right? And so trauma is really what causes stress, and trauma is what causes this divorcement, you know, in everybody. And, you know, trauma is not an event. Trauma is the impact of that event on you. That's why some person can be trauma. You know, person A can be just as traumatized from a breakup as person B is from an IED explosion in Iraq, you know, because it's. It's about how your system was set up. The Vulnerabilities, your sense of identity, your sense of self, everything.

And there's some epigenetics in there as well.

Exactly, the epigenetics and everything. But it's the impact of that event. But once trauma hits your system, whether it's being sexually abused as a child, whether it's things in the home that were present that shouldn't have been, or things that weren't present that should have been in the sense of like, love and compassion, things that we need to be. Because, you know, love is, is the self abandonment of one individual. And it's sort of like the. It's, it's. It's the recognition of. Of divine truth from one organism to another to some degree. There's something that gets opened up whenever love exists, because that's what we are at our existential core. And whenever someone expresses that to you, it brings you back from that state of rogue to what you are fundamentally, in my view.

But anyway, that's another platitude, by the way. Love is all there is. Love heals all things.

Yeah.

Because if we could just live that. Right?

Yeah.

How do we live that? It takes tools. It takes scaffolding. Kava's one of them. So I had to plant that in there because it's so easy to hear someone like you, super articulate, very intelligent, super knowledgeable talk about these things. But for it to actually land and embody in the nervous system and allow the unconscious mind to take it in and have the operating system, have a different path or guidance system, there takes like, some breaks for people to really feel like, wow, if love is all there is, curious question. How can I make that real for me? How can I make that real for you too? That's really at the core of what we're talking about. Because a lot of these concepts, they're so fun. They're so fun to talk about. Like, I can tell you, and I can intellectually jam for quite some. We could probably do a seven hour podcast, which that'd be like a world record. But I think we could do it if we took bathroom breaks. I had to interrupt you there because I get to. Because it's so important for us to have the gravity of, like, what we're really talking about here. This episode. Yes. It's an episode about lots of things. Kava and plant medicines and addiction and healing and so many things that we all experience to be human. But at the core of it, what I really want people to get right now and what I'm just feeling in my own system is like, why are we doing this for the first thing in the first place? What are we even doing all of this for? It's so that we can live our life well. That's the mission of the show. It's the mission of my company. That's what you're talking about. You're talking about living life. Well, it's much different than just a anthropomorphic ideation of, okay, well, I'm a human in a body and, like, I eat food and I defecate and then I live and die. No, we're so much fucking more than that. And in order for us to be that and to embody that wisdom, we have to actually take it in as real.

Yeah. And that's the, that is the end goal. Right? Is. So that's why whenever we're having any of these conversations where we're talking about any individual strategy or tools, the tool and the strategy is just a medium through which we can help to cultivate exactly what you're talking about. Right. The end result is we want tomorrow to be better than today. And how do we do that? We want to live more purposeful, meaningful and productive lives. We want better friendships. We want better relationships. We want a sense of meaning. We want to have the strategies and the wherewithal with all and the resources and the support in place to where we can build value in ourselves and develop as humans and we can grow. And this is a Tony Robbins thing. You know, the, you know, the two things. It's because this leads into this whole conversation and this plugs into the whole conversation about certain escapist, compensatory strategies that are, that, you know, that people use whenever they do go rogue, like we were talking about, you know, versus, you know, versus actual, you know, actual deep work. Right. That's actually going to get you the result and get you back to baseline and get you back to that, that highest level of who you are, you know, your highest, your highest potential and the, the, the you that was meant to be you, you know, your most authentic self, I guess you would say. But growth, you know, personal growth and giving are the two things that actually make people happy. And the social sciences even tell us that. All the studies actually show us that as well, too. There's a difference between happiness and pleasure, happiness being fulfillment, and happiness and fulfillment comes primarily from growing as a person, which is progressing and then giving. Right. You know, growing will make you actually happy in life if you're, if you're stagnant in any way. If you're not learning if you're not growing, if you're not progressing, if you're not moving to some kind of a next level, you're going to have some level of mental illness, right? You're going to be miserable. Because that is what the process of life is. In a process of constant change and growth and development, right? If you were to go and to tie a, you know, I don't know, you know, tie huge ropes around a tree and keep it from growing, it was. It would struggle and it would eventually break through. You couldn't contain it. But I mean, it's one of those things. Growth is crucial for not only human development, but for happiness and for true fulfillment and having a meaningful life. So growing will make you happy, but giving and contributing will make you 10 times as happy or more. We don't know exactly how much, let's say 10 times. And I believe that we're meant to grow so that we can give because we can't give what we don't have, right? So in other words, what you accumulate in life, or chasing emotion or chasing feelings connected to things that you accumulate or things that you can accumulate as far as materials you can just surround yourself with will never make you happy and fulfilled. Who you become and what you contribute will. Right? Those are the things that actually lead to happiness. And the more that you cultivate personal growth, true personal growth, and the more that you contribute and give to other people, that awakens that existential core inside of you and helps it come to the surface. And that kind that, that anything that you're doing in your life that helps to cultivate that process is just. It's. It's waking up every fundamental. Every fundamental unit of life inside of you to just express at a much, much higher level. Call it higher vibrational. There's all kinds of spiritual terms that people put on it, but you can feel it when it happens. Like we were talking about earlier, when someone tells you something that's ex. That's existentially true, it. It permeates you down to the cellular level or even to the energetic level to where you just. You feel like your body is resonating like a tuning fork. And it just. You. You know, it. You may not be able to fully interpret and articulate it and, you know, communicate it to other people always. Some people have developed that skill more than others. But there at least, you know, when everybody. You're in the ballpark of something that's existentially true. We talk about guys who have blown up in crazy Popularity in a time of, like, great need. Like guys like Jordan Peterson, we were talking about. How do you explain that phenomenon, the amount of people, the millions, the hundreds of millions of people who are listening to this person and their messages? Because you're talking about a person that, through his life is suffering, his circumstances, has developed into a realm of growth and a state of consciousness in a realm of thinking. Right. That is very, very. It's. It's. At least in. In a realm where there's a lot of existential truth, you know, that's. I mean, no one is right about everything or anything like that. But there's enough that has been proven out historically, enough that is based on, you know, certain just really powerful sort of timeless principles from storytelling or from Jungian principles or any of those kind of things where, you know, there's some powerful stuff going on there.

All these people you're mentioning, Jung, even Freud, by the way, people don't know this. Freud was a cocaine addict. He had wooden teeth.

Yeah.

He would actually meet with clients high on cocaine. Like, nobody's perfect. I don't care. You know?

Alan Watts was an alcoholic.

Alan Watts was alcoholic. He. All of his kids complained that he was, like, never really present for them. So I'm sure there's a laundry list for all contemporary and ancient masters where they fell short. But at the core of it all, though, they did have this quest. They had this thirst for what is the truth? What is the truth of being? What is the truth of being ness? And what is the truth of why we're here and what we're doing? And I love that you brought up Peterson again, because you share something with Peterson. I share something with Peterson, and so do you. I'm pointing at the camera right now. Or if you're listening on, you know, your car ride or wherever you are, we all share something with these masters, and that is we've all gone through our own process of pain. We've all gone through our own process of galvanization, being put in the fire and, like, having to come out and do something with it and actually be of service with it. I think about John Wineland, who sat right in that chair, and he said, you know, the wound is where I serve from.

Yeah.

You know, and I pray we all get to pray that our wounding doesn't cloud our wisdom. How we can serve from the wound but not have our wisdom be so messed up by our wounding that that gets projected into how we serve and how we teach.

Yeah.

So let's go back. Let's go back, because this is so good, man. And. And by the way, the reason that we can talk like this is, like, I feel a cool connection with you. This is the first time we've really ever sat and gotten to know one another. And I think it's because of the kava, the consciousness journey, the path of having, you know, pain and turning that into purpose. Like, there's a lot here for us. And I think that if the starting place is to take a deep breath, which is why I have students in the Breathe program to actually start using plant allies like kava to give us some bolstering, to give us, like, a gentle nudge, like, for the people that maybe weren't raised with loving parents, which leads to alcohol, for the people that were dealing with stress or trauma or just anything that's pulling us out rogue, as you say, I love that. Anything that's pulling us rogue. Is it like a once a day? Is it a twice a day? What's the optimal dose for kava in the form that you have it, that you've produced it? What does that even look like for someone?

Yeah, yeah. And so this is great. I mean, I think that this is all really great because this gives us, this. This conversation so much depth and context that I don't always get the opportunity to explore, you know, because a lot of times people really want to know and just ask me, okay, well, what. How does kava work pharmacologically? What are the wonderful. Yeah, yeah, it's great.

Yeah.

Because those are the really 10. Like we were talking about the beginning of the conversation. Those are the hooks that actually make kava as versatile, because those are the on ramps that sort of get people interested. And they don't even know that they're getting all these other benefits, and they don't even know that, you know, they start using something like this. And that's what's so beautiful about kava, is that it is actually a substance that can be a recreational substance, but a recreational substance that helps to cultivate personal growth, mental health, instead of detract from it like a vice. It's not an escape. That's what makes it so unique. And so whenever we kind of bring this back to the conversation about alcohol, so we talked a lot, I think, about the reasons why somebody would go into any form of escapism. They're trying to mimic that state of existential meaning by going to the same chemicals that are an end stage byproduct of that, because an end stage byproduct of Existential meaning in your life is you're going to have high dopamine levels, especially at times. You're going to go through intense suffering, but you're going to find meaning in the suffering. And then you're going to have times where you have incredible, highest, incredible reward from that being taken place. So what you're trying to do when you. With overexertion, especially totally synthetic compensatory strategies where you don't know what you're missing, you don't know that you're missing that authenticity, that existential course, you're going straight to try to push the pleasure button because it kind of gives you this feeling like you're going towards it, but then it melts like cotton candy in your mouth and it's gone. And then you feel twice as depressed, twice as the need for the next cigarette is really, or the next drink is really created and precipitated and extended by the last one. But whenever you do those things, you know, like when you talk about alcohol, when you talk about caffeine or even coffee to some degree, you know, overexertion of stimulants or caffeine, it's. It can end up being this process of dependency and habituation to just that sort of surface level chemical state, right? Which ultimately actually borrows from tomorrow's chemistry and bodily resources to pay for today, which leaves you more exhausted and creates a greater need for dipping into that ladle again or dipping into that bucket again and again and again. So not only does it deplete you physically, but it robs you emotionally because then it depletes you of your chemistry, which is your ticket or is your physical ability to get into those deep emotional states or those states that actually make you feel well rounded and comfortable as a human being, right? So alcohol has that, that connotation and context to it. So it has a similar. So when you talk about alcohol and you talk about kava, what's cool about it is that they actually have a similar initial feeling. So, like, you know, we say a lot that, that kava's like alcohol without the drunkenness. It's way more than that, like we've discussed, but it's without the drunkenness plus, you know, the sort of, you know, the sort of mental nourishment and mental well being and all of that, right? So but even though it gives you a similar feeling when you take it, like I said before, let's talk about the experience of it a little bit because it's just what you might expect to feel Whenever you take it, it is kind of like I said before, a calm, enhanced state of natural sobriety. It's sort of like a relaxed but not dulled state of mind at all. It opens the mind and clears the mind. It kind of puts you in almost an alpha state, right? A very, very sort of calm, focused and very comfortable state. And dosage dependent. You can take very much larger amounts to get more of a state of almost euphoria and comfort. But it feels, and the experience is very authentic and natural, like it is a natural high. It's not an altered state in the classic sense, which is what makes it more unique than any other compound that I've dealt with. Because even the natural compounds that are very psychoactive, the psychoactive ones, cannabis being included in that, right, can bring you into an altered state where it is a. It is a divorcement from what we would call sobriety, right, where your faculties are impaired. You need to be focused just on that experience if you're going to do it. And there's potential value in all of those compounds, but they're more limited because they take you in high dosages like THC, even, and certainly psychedelics can take you far outside of your centered, present functional state, where you can operate in this reality and be grounded, but then bring in those higher levels of consciousness and extend your higher emotional framework and access more of your emotions, more of your mind. That sort of systems, thinking, reflection. Kava is one of those compounds and really is the All Star compound that has developed evolutionarily to be biologically compatible. Like, from my perspective, what we talked about before, you know, from the ecology to actually sort of act as that sort of relationship. For us, it's available as a relationship that can really help reconnect us with the complexity of our emotional framework and our psychological framework. At the same time, is giving us that natural pleasure that we're seeking whenever we're going after something like alcohol. It's my perspective that the kava experience, or what it helps to facilitate, is really what people are looking for whenever they go after alcohol and other things. And alcohol gives you a shade of it and just enough of it to where it feels good, and then it kind of entices you back and entices you back, but it ends up actually taking from your consciousness. If kava is an entheogen, which I would say that it certainly is entheogen, the term entheogen means the divine within. I like the term entheogen in that sense is like we were talking about. It helps to surface the divine within. That's why that term exists is because that has always been understood about these compounds. I would, I would call, I would call alcohol an entheogen in the sense of, like that the more alcohol you drink, the more surface level and sort of primitive and animalistic your behavior actually gets. Right. We all know this. Right. You get horny, you get happy, you get this and you get that.

And you want a California burrito at three in the morning.

Exactly. And the depth and quality of your thought processes and conversations and the quality of the, the, the atmosphere of, of sociability that you're trying to connect with people, which is the main reason why people drink alcohol is of course, to soothe themselves. But it's really because we long for connection. We want. Everyone's doing it in every social circumstance, so we do it. But the quality of your state of mind is going to dictate the quality of the outcome in the relationship. How many times have you, you gone out and been drunk and whenever. We all have been this, obviously a million times, you know, and it feels really good the time. Then you wake up the next day. You don't feel like you developed any relationship with anybody.

No.

Because then you see that person you like, you've only been drunk with them and you're like, okay, I gotta start over. Because I don't, you know, I don't know, you.

Listen, listen, what you're saying is 100% truth. And I would actually, I'm gonna say this. Most of the people that you are, quote, friends with aren't actually your friends.

Yeah.

And this is very alarming to a lot of people, specifically in their 20s, maybe even early 30s, if they're still hanging onto that lifestyle. Most people that go drinking with you are not your fucking friend. They're only your friend because you go drinking together.

Yeah.

And that took me like a good 10 years to learn in my 20s in Pacific beach in California. It's a very party happy area. I don't know if you've been down to San Diego, but most people that are your drinking buddies will never come and lay on a track for you. Will not pick you up at 2 in the morning if you need it. Will not be there for your kids. Real relationships are built in sobriety. Relationships are not built. Being drunk at a bar on a weekend, spending money you don't have. That's not where relationships are built. Relationships are built in the now. You can't be in the now if you're floating somewhere else because of. Even if it, even if it is an entheogen with the improper intention behind it. There's just no way to cultivate truth and relationship and actual intimacy. How many. It breaks my heart. How many babies have been born that were brought into this world unintentionally that then had a life of pain and suffering because their parents got lured in by. Honestly, you can call it what you want. I think it's a dark spirit. I think it's a demonic Wetiko alcohol. Just like the whole gender dysphoria thing. Just like lots of hooks that are coming into children's minds and relationships and family. There's so much happening in the world right now. Maybe just that one kernel of truth is the most important thing for somebody to hear on this podcast. Cameron, like, people you drink with are not your friends. You can go a year and then really see who your friends are. If you are sober for one year, you can start using some of these plant allies to guide you on your path so that you actually figure out who your friends are. And then you can start knowing what giving and receiving, receiving real love and real intimacy actually feels like, which goes back to what we're talking about. Sharpening the intuition. Yeah, that's what this is all about.

Anybody, I mean, anybody who, you know, and your shared experiences are exclusively under the influence of alcohol or any other especially synthetic substance, then there's absolutely no way of knowing what is there and what isn't right. Now, of course, you could have people in your life that you also drink with, that you also have invested, you know, authentic time with people in your share that you might drink with as well.

True.

You know, and so that's. That's something that certainly can occur. But whenever we talk about, you know, people who. That is your shared experience, and you have to be under the influence of alcohol, and that's the only thing that you do, or primarily that it is, or if it's only fun or if it's only enjoyable whenever you're there under that circumstance, you know, then those are recreational acquaintances. Right? You know, it's.

That's a good way to say it.

You know, recreational acquaintances. Yeah, exactly. You know, you know, friends. You really, at the end of the day, most people, you know, really have very few very, very close friends in their life. You know, you start out your life and you think, you know, you know, you know, whenever you're young, that you're going to connect with endless people and you're going to have people that'll show up for you, and you're just. It's going to be this never ending, you know, but, you know, and then later in your life, you realize that it really only happens a few times.

Yeah.

Where someone is really going to show up for you. And that's not necessarily meaning that everyone you come across with. There's different degrees. Right. Like, it's. It's just, you know, for someone to be able to invest in you at the level that they would show up for you on, you know, on your worst day, it just requires a very deep connection and time spent together and stuff. You could have good people in your life that just have. That hasn't been formed. And they're not necessarily bad, bad people or toxic people. But then you also have plenty of people where that's not even possible because they're so in their rogue state. They're so isolated, they're so in escapism mode that they don't even have the actual ability to be an actual friend, to develop a real, fundamentally authentic relationship with somebody. Although they may be in what they call endless relationships and kind of go through the whole process of this or that or whatever. But a relationship is, you know, it's not a relationship until you become an adult, really, a true relationship. And you're not an adult just because you reach 18 years of age or whatever age it is in whatever country. Right. You're an adult whenever you value something else fundamentally more than yourself, and you adopt the responsibility to care for and to nourish that in your life. Yes.

You have kids yet?

I don't.

Okay. Do you want them at some point?

Yeah. Always have. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. You'd be a great dad. Here's why. Because you just said what you said. Because all my life is. Is service. From the time I wake up to the time I go to bed, it's service. The only time I get, like, service to me is self care, which is beautiful. But if you look at my day, it's all service. And it took me a long time to actually, just like. To quote Jordan Peters again, be a beast of burden. Took me a long time to be a true beast of burden. Because we all carry burden. And I think what we're looking for is a breath and some reprieve from that burden. Which is why some of these dark entities come in. The alcohol, the marijuana, the porn addiction, the shopping, the workaholism, they all come in. But what's really beautiful is on the other side of the coin, there's friends, there's allies. So tell us, like right here, this is actually what I had last night. I drank half of this last night. I want to share a quick story about this product. So Carrie was in labor, and I was watching my son, and it was a pretty long labor, almost day, half a day. And I watched him all night. I got no sleep because he's used to nursing with his mom. And there was this moment where I. I knew that I didn't need a coffee. I knew that I didn't need to be more awake. I actually just needed to chill the fuck out and just to relax. So I took this, and I noticed within less than 30 minutes, I felt completely different than how I'd felt before. Here's what I felt before. Nervousness, tension, lack of sleep. You name it, it was. It was coming in also, like, my daughter's literally about to be born. And I had some of this in my system, and I. There's no doubt in my mind that it allowed me to be more centered during the birth process. And I. I don't think CBD would have done the same thing. I mean, I have a lot of plant allies right here in the studio. The. This studio is full of plant allies, all kinds of. But there was something really special about this because it allowed me to show up in a more restful state, even though I hadn't rested a lot. And it allowed me to be calm but not be super whacked out or not be really tired either. So it was this beautiful. Almost like a. Like a midheaven, if I could even use that phrase. It was like a midheaven where I could just take some plant ally through kava and be there in a time where my lady and my family needed me the absolute most. Like, it actually makes me emotional right now, just talking about. I'm like, having the memory come back up. It was such a beautiful moment. And you'll. You'll be there. When you're a father one day and parents, you know what it feels like when your daughter, your son, comes down the birth canal. It's so emotional, so beautiful. And so having something to. To bolster my physiology, like, that was so impactful.

Yeah.

And so that's my testimonial. I don't know if we can fit that on your website, but. But honestly, this is something, you guys, that's so, so important. I know we're going to keep rolling on the podcast. I just have to tell you right now, if you're already feeling inspired, the code is Josh20. And you can go to joshtrend.com kava k a v a the code is Josh. 20. 20% off. That's awesome. Thank you for that. Because making this is not cheap. There's so much that goes into freaking producing products. So super grateful for that hookup. Let's keep rolling. Because my story is just probably a fractal of many stories.

Absolutely.

That people have written in on. Mine was pretty severe. It was like dirt a birth, you know, so.

That's true. Yeah.

Having Covid during a birth was like a really solid ally, but for people on different paths, like talk about that a little bit.

That's. That's, you know, I mean, that's arguably the most important day of your life, you know, or one of them, you know, make it as definitely. If you have other kids, you know, it'll be, you know, it's like that's. For most people that's going to be. And so yeah, I think it's. And I love that story. I love that's. That's one of my favorite parts of being involved in this and being on this path and everything is. Is just being able to get in and get other people's personal experiences with the medicine and how it plugs into a much larger conversation of the result that we're trying to get. Or again, Kava is a crucial part of what we do. Kava is a catalyst. And I said this to you before we even started rolling was to me and to us, Trukava, our company and our organization. It's really more of an organization and it's the foundation of it. That was an extension of years of me being sick and suffering significantly and Kava bringing both mental health and connection back into my life and rescuing me from being on medications and having seizures and all kinds of other stuff. That then extended to me when I worked with our thousands of doctors and created protocols and we reproduced those effects over and over, getting people safely off of benzodiazepine drugs, which Kava reduces withdrawal symptoms of, and alcohol and so on. And we just see it being an amazing adjunct to almost any chronic disease protocol because it's. It starts to nourish those basic needs to make it easier to implement all other treatments, therapies, modalities in people that are sick, but then also people. It's just such a turning point catalyst for me. Whenever someone starts, when someone is in any kind of state of rogue or disease or disjunction of any kind, it's never one thing that gets people well, it's just not right. It's a multi therapeutic approach and that's a big term. But Basically, what that means is, right, there's never just one ingredient. It's the synergy between bringing all of these expressions of nourishment back into your life to, you know, to give you the fundamental, authentic things that feed your body at its core and your mind at its core and at its base, and you become healthier mentally, physically, emotionally. And you can't divorce any of those because they all work in tandem. And sometimes the expression of disease expresses more in one. And so you kind of enter from different angles. But the good thing about something like kava is that every disease process, even if you don't consider a disease, even if you're just not well, or if you're just struggling internally, emotionally, whatever, which today, that's extreme, Extremely common. We all have trauma, we all have stress in our lives. And if you don't have it right now, then savor it and love it, because it's coming for you. Yeah, yeah, it's coming. It's coming, you know?

Yeah.

But something like kava is such a tremendous relationship you can form with the plant and ally because it comes in and offers immediate support and immediate comfort to bring you into a state to which you can clear up some of that noise and actually be able to approach and formulate a strategy to soundly address whatever problem that you're addressing. That's how it was for me. Right. Meaning it's like, it's so easy when we're any. In any kind of degenerative or isolated state. Right. We're struggling physically with disease emotionally because of whatever breakups, this and that, or just living on planet Earth, you know, in the world we live in, et cetera. Yeah. Or psychologically. It's so easy to get paralyzed by the stress and trauma and anxiety of it all, where we end up out of our higher selves. We were talking about in that sort of big picture thinking that we get into through meditation practices, good people, support systems, all that kind of stuff. It's so easy to get into that reactionary fight or flight, isolated, just try to survive. Who cares about all this spiritual, you know, like, look, I gotta pay my bills. And I'm. I might have all been there, dude. My. My spouse is dying from cancer or I've got, you know, and it's like. And it's one of those things whenever you start to hear all these deep strategies, people are just so paralyzed by, like, how do I even begin to start doing that? So what I noticed about a medicine like this was that we could give it to any patient that it would actually help them feel better and get more into that expanded state to where they can actually start strategizing and they feel it's inspired. You know, the. The three adjectives we use even on the. All the products are, you know, focused, relaxed, inspired. There's more that we could use, but it's basically, you know, because it. It helps to open the mind and focus the mind to clear. Also relaxes that sort of trauma response that keeps you in that. That paralyzing sort of fear like freeze or fight or flight or anything like that. And it opens up the mind to where you're kind of in this inspired state of mind. Right. Because you feel like more of yourself. And when you feel like more of yourself, you're inspired to. To express more of what's in you, you know, and to be. And to actualize your potential. Right. Which is the greatest ethical crime that anybody could commit against themselves is to not fulfill their potential as a human being and to be who they were meant to be. Fundamentally.

Yeah.

You know, and. And again, and. And, you know, yukava, as a tool and as a catalyst is a. A first sort of line of. Like, when you look at therapeutics, it is. It is a pharmacological intervention of the mind. That's a pattern interrupt, which is so cool, right? Because it's something that almost anyone can tolerate where you are. Like, again, like, if. If you've never. If you're atrophied and you're in terrible shape and you're. And someone says you need to. You need to go. You need to, you know, get in shape or whatever. Would it be smart to jump in the gym or, you know, jump in a marathon the next day, you know? No, that's kind of what, like, just taking ayahuasca can be for some people, you know, and it's like this is. It's such. This medicine is such an approachable medicine that kind of gives people what they think they want out of alcohol. But alcohol is like the big. The kind of unkept promise. It's kind of like the. You know, it's sort of like it is kind of in many ways the opposite of what it's portrayed to be or what we believe that it is, right? We believe that it's going to improve our sociability and improve our connection with others when really, in many cases, cases it does the opposite. And it detracts from physical health across the board. There is no physical, you know, contribution that it makes to you. It only detracts. Right.

It's and of course people right now are gonna be like, well, Cameron, what about like, you know, all these people that smoke cigarettes and drank soda and drank a beer a day and lived to 100. It's like in any kind of path of evolution, there's always going to be outliers. So I don't believe in that. Where people say, oh, well, what about so? And so it's like, well, yeah, what about like, like the literally 10 billion other people?

Well, but plus also that thing like we talked about, you know, all these inspirational figures that had these vices. What would their potential have been and what could they have reached as far as, well, roundedness in their life? You know, Alan Watts could have had, had his great wisdom and maybe what.

If he had 20 more years?

If he had 20 more years on Earth and he could have 50s, right?

50S, 60s.

Yeah. And maybe he could have had the best of both worlds of through his death, desperation, gotten that sort of peak at the wisdom, but then also been able to get a level of existential happiness from long term good relationships with his kids, from being more balanced and not having the weakness and the vice and the. I, I don't. I pretend like I knew Alan Watts. I'm just saying it as like, as a thought.

I mean, I feel like I know him. I've listened to him in the shower for like 10 years.

Yeah, yeah, me too. Right. So it's, it's, it's one of those things that when people say these kind of things, it's kind of like whenever people say, you know, you talk to people that still in 20, 23 are smoking cigarettes, which, you know, you know, to someone who's been down this road and is actually understands the, the magnitude and the impact, it was just like, it's like, what, you know. Yeah. Why would you, why would you ever do that? But, and I say that, but I fully understand for all the reasons that we've talked about whiteness. It's not a judgment in any way.

Yeah.

Because I have done things. I've been immersed in addiction in different parts of my life, et cetera. Right. But I've also been on both sides of this thing and trust me, I like this side a whole lot better.

That's so good. Okay, let me, let me ask you this. When you're at the throes of your deepest addiction. Now I'm actually going to refer the bulk of your story. Your story deserves like a good 45 minutes to an hour. We don't have that much time left. So I am Going to refer right now that everybody go and check out my buddy Luke Story. He's a great friend of mine here, and he did an amazing job telling your story. But I do think if you could just pull out the gems for us, maybe not so many details. One of the things that. When I was preparing for us, I noticed that Adderall was a huge deal for you and something you said that was really cool. It's like, be careful before you take any pill, because taking any pill is actually a contract. It's an emotional and spiritual and physical contract with you being outsourced to something outside of you. So then you can have an internal compass that'll guide you the right way. But it's such a paradox because your compass is built on something you're taking from the outside. It's not coming from you. It's the ultimate paradox.

Yeah.

So when you were at that peak point, which, you know, it's beautiful that now here you are, the founder of this company, and you're giving true medicine to people. We have to give a caveat, because we're not giving medical advice. Right. We're not doctors or therapists. But. But at the throes of addiction, maybe, was it addiction to Adderall? Was it addiction to something else? Could you ever, in your wildest dreams, imagine that you'd be sitting here right now? Did you have flashes of that, or did that come way down along the journey?

Take us to that point zero, I think just like you have to go into a state of complete chaos and insanity to really, really fundamentally find what's most true about yourself. And I wouldn't say that you have to. There are all different layers, and there's infinite, you know, expressions of these experiences. And everybody has their own path. But let's just say for me specifically, I definitely had a chapter of my life where I was immersed in such a deep, dark level of just absolutely seemingly infinite existential horror and chaos that it brought out of me a deep appreciation and an understanding for the antithesis of that. And this goes into duality, the duality principle. And we could go seven hours on duality in and of itself. But everything comes down to it, right? And we talk about, you know, spiritual traditions. We talked about, you know, you know, religions. Everybody on this planet. It's undeniable. Or even storytelling are our greatest stories in pop culture are superheroes, Star Wars, George Lucas, based on Joseph Campbell's work, which is based on Jung's work. It's duality. It's the light side. It's the dark side. Truth, illusion, masculine, feminine, all of those things. And you couldn't comprehend light without darkness, it would not exist. You could not have an experience of light or an appreciation or an understanding standing for it without the contrast of darkness, right? It's only as light as the dark is dark. And so, you know, if. If you're going to blame the circumstances in your life, the quote, unquote, seemingly bad circumstances in your life for bringing about such horror and terror and all the bad, then you better blame them for the good too, right? It doesn't mean that, though you want more of those. It doesn't mean that you want to relive your darkest days. It doesn't mean that, you know, the death of a loved one, you can say, man, I'm glad, you know, I'm totally. You know what I mean? Like, you can't say that. But the thing is, is that it goes back to that danger, opportunity thing, right inside every experience and inside the darkest of the dark, the most traumatic of the traumatic, the deepest horrors that human beings can experience. When you talk about losing your loved ones in horrible ways, losing children, losing the loss of some. Someone that you truly, truly love, it's like, it's like the. It's like the crashing down of the fabric of reality itself. At your deepest possible level, it ignites every fire inside of you. You know, it's inside every one of those experiences, there is opportunity. That's not easy to hear. In fact, you hate to hear that when you're in the middle of it. Anyone who tries to tell you that if you've, like, just say, like, say you've lost a child or, or say you're, you know, and, and, but that's okay, because that's where, that's what makes the experience real. But there is opportunity there. And I actually heard. I actually heard Bobby Kennedy, of all people say this recently when he was asked an interview about the death of. Of his uncle and his dad and everything that led to the announcement of his presidency and the path that he's on, all that kind of stuff. When he asked, I believe it was his aunt or one of his relatives or his mom or somebody because they had experienced so much tragedy in their family of people who were trying to do the right thing and they lost them because of it. And he asked them, does the hole that it leaves inside of you ever get any smaller? And she said, no, Bobby, it doesn't. To be honest with you, it doesn't. Whenever you truly love someone more than yourself, it doesn't get smaller, but what the goal is and what you learn is the greatest way you can honor somebody who you have lost and that you can actually make that hole proportionally smaller is by taking the best virtues that were in them and integrating them to grow and to build up yourself to make a contribution to the process of life and everything around you that gives meaning, which then gives a meaning to the passing of their death. Because it catalyzed this sort of inspiration inside of you. And so it makes everything in your paradigm and your growth bigger, everything in what you are. It helps you to grow around the whole, so it gets proportionally smaller. Right? And so my whole point in saying all that is that in everything there is opportunity. And the goal and everything in anything that's dark and horrific is to find the opportunity. So without going into crazy details about that, I was in a chapter of my life where everything that I knew completely broke down, including my physical health. And I lost all of my freedom, my ability to even walk at times. You know, I was watching people die all around me, you know, regularly. And drugs was, Was it drugs? Yeah, that was part of it, you know, but again, addiction is not the problem. Addiction is your attempt to solve a problem. Right. You know, again, that's that disconnection from self that happens from trauma. Whenever you're traumatized by something, your mind and your mind and psyche, automatically there's a disconnection from self that happens and you kind of go rogue like we were talking about before, because you want to disconnect from that most vulnerable part of you, which is the most authentic part that can be hurt, because you feel everything in that. So you disconnect. And the more that you're traumatized, you create these layers of disconnection and you go farther and farther away from it. And in that disconnection you try to mimic, you long for that reconnection to fundamental self, which has all of these feel good feelings. And so you want to feel safe. And so you're in the opposite of that. You're in stress hormone mode. So then you try to manipulate your physiology to mimic that state that is home. What I call it's home. It's familiarity, it's your existential core. It's the part that we're talking about, we're trying to get to. It's who you really are, it's nature, it's life, it's all those things. And you're trying to mimic that. Food, sex, drugs, etc, and you realize that you can, you can just dope yourself up into a mode to where you kind of get the, a little bit of the feeling, the artificially induced, like in stage feeling, but without the centerpiece that sustains it. So it's like it's fake.

Is that where you were? Were you in that consciousness realm right there?

Oh, for sure. Yeah, for sure. Addiction, amphetamines go down the list. A lot of that was, was part of that. But I had a, you know, a complete crisis from probably as a young person. I'm one of those people that probably came into the world a little bit more sensitive maybe than the average person.

Cool. Have you ever heard the term hsp? Highly sensitive person. Empath?

Yeah.

Yeah, I, I can identify with that as well. Ever since I was young, I was like, why do these adults treat each other so shitty? Why is this world such a gnarly place? Like, how do we make this easier for. I remember thinking that very early, probably when I was like single digit age.

And when you are like that and you're wired like that to some degree, then you kind of come into the world usually and kind of developed a little bit of an oppositional personality. Because you feel, not only you feel isolated because you're born, whether you're born it or it's developed early on or whatever, you come in, whatever, it's the progression of your soul, whatever theory you have behind it, you end up in this state where you know something, it's sort of like, it's sort of like the Morpheus Neo thing, right? You know, the big speech, the Matrix, the whole thing. What you know, you can't explain, but it's there. It's been there your entire life like a splinter in your mind driving you mad type of thing, right? Like the something is not right and you feel isolated because no matter what you do, no matter what you do to try to appease yourself or to feel good and usually those you become an addict. But because you know that something's not right, that you're not who you could be, you don't know that consciously you're not thinking what I'm saying right now. You just sense that something's wrong and you feel at unease.

Dude, there's a client I used to have back when I did business coaching. I don't do that anymore. But he had a massive YouTube channel. Amazing YouTube channel. Like super talented musician. But he was struggling so much with his father's death and just the things that happened for him. He did not know how to deal with it all. And we had a conversation similar to this this one many years ago, and I see him now, and it's heartbreaking for me because I see his potential. I see what he could be, and I know he knows it in himself. It's not my journey to figure it out for him, but that's the kind of things that I think many of us that are. I even hate to have the term identified as hsp. Whatever. HSP might be some of my construct, okay, I don't identify with it, but it's. It's part of my construct in life. So how do you look back on yourself with that kind of loving care, that leadership, that fatherhood, that. That parental energy that you can sit here and speak to us now from? In other words, if you had a dad back then that was giving you the great advice, what would you have said to, you know, young Cameron, who was in the throes of addiction, doing everything he could to try to scrap back to center? Like, what would you have told him back then?

Yeah, and the ironic thing was, is that I actually, of all the things, I definitely came into the world probably with some level of generational trauma. Right? I was different than my brothers. I had two brothers, and everybody goes through their challenges, but I had significant ones. And I was always prone to impulsivity and addiction and prone to all these things. And a lot of it was because of this internal turmoil and isolation that I just had, where I felt like even in a crowded room of hundreds of people, I felt totally alone. And when you have this kind of thing going on, you do, you know, because you sense something and you're at unease because of it. You're not who you could be. You're not connected. You feel like things are off, like, you know. And so then you try to. What I call compensatory strategies. You're trying to make yourself feel better because you start to feel really bad about yourself because you're isolated. Then you end up not being able to fit in with other people. So then it harms your. Your identity, sense of self, because then you don't feel accepted. Then that ends up too compensating to want to prove yourself, maybe, or to do this or to retreat, either one. It's very, very often that these type of people end up trying to compensate, to try to get that sense of self back, even though they don't know it, with doping themselves up in various different ways to give them the dopamine to feel more confident, to feel more in control, to feel more like things are right when they know they're not. And then whenever the substance or the behavior or the impulse wears off, you feel twice as bad because, oh my gosh, that didn't work. And now what do I have? I, you know, wow.

How could you. Okay. How could you distill that wisdom down into a sentence or two? For not just you at that age?

Yeah.

For somebody with us right now, I can actually feel their presence, whoever they are.

Yeah.

I can feel this person watching, listening right now. Can you, can you distill that down for them?

I would say the best piece of advice, if I were to talk to a 5, 10 year old version of myself. Don't chase feelings. Chase meaning? Chase things that matter. The feelings will come, the stability will come. You will become a better version of yourself and you will be more confident and you will, will fit in. And then the positive circumstances, the friends that you think you don't have will come to you and the right ones will come to you. Remember the movie Field of Dreams? If you build it, they will come. Remember that. You know, like that movie. What? Yeah. Go off on that for a while. No, but, but if it's, it's one of those things that I truly believe in. Don't chase in general and certainly don't chase feelings or states. That's, that's the biggest thing that as a young person, that's. You just naturally do it. You run towards pleasure and away from pain. What else do you know? Yeah, right. Do not chase feelings, no matter how good they feel. You know, chase things that matter. Chase developing yourself, developing your skill sets because you invest in yourself. You have abundance and you have value. You have something to offer yourself. You have something to offer everybody else. Where does confidence come from? Where does self esteem come from? It comes from overcoming difficult challenges and taking responsibility. Right. And so, you know, don't stay away from thinking that the world is against you like that You're a victim. You're not. You know, it's the fault, responsibility thing. It's not your fault that you feel this way. It's not your fault that maybe horrible things happen to you. It's not your fault. But it damn sure is your responsibility. Right? You know, sometimes it's your fault, but in many cases it's not. But it's your responsibility because you are the only one that can shift it. And you will not shift it by chasing feelings. You will shift it by building value and taking responsibility in your life.

I could advocate for the other side and say that nothing is absolutely our fault at all. It's just the fault of the copy consciousness that we previously held. That's a way to just, you know, maybe not so linearly look at our development. And, God, if I would have heard that distilled wisdom when I was, like, 18, 20, I totally would have listened. I might have told myself. Myself something very similar, too. I might have said something right in that same vein of like, hey, you know, all these feelings that you're feeling, it's okay that you're feeling them.

Yeah.

That would have been like the nugget I gave myself because so much anxiety and loneliness and depression and, I mean, I used to be 280 pounds. We're gonna put this on the screen right now. This was me when I was, like, 18 years old. And the craziest part about it is that when I was at 280, I thought that I was, like, having fun and I was doing cool stuff, but way deep down, and we all have this feeling, man, I'm sure you can relate to this. You go to bed at night and it's just you and your thoughts and your breath. That's all you get. And there was probably a good five years before I just tucked everything into a storage unit, sold everything I owned, and moved to Hawaii before I finally started to feel Josh, like, just be connected to him. And so this journey that you put yourself on, that you signed up for, otherwise it wouldn't happened with Adderall and with addiction and with so many things that happened to happen for you, you can absolutely look back now, I'm sure, as it being a total gift, because you wouldn't be here, you wouldn't be sitting right here if you hadn't have gone through stuff that I couldn't even imagine. Right. Adderall and addiction. And, like, I think there was even a massive spending spree at some point where I think you and Luke talked about you arrivaling the. What was the guy's name?

Well, it was a. My life devolved at one point. This is one of many things. It devolved into what could be considered a combination of Ace Ventura and Breaking Bad. Let's. Yeah, just think of that.

So. So can you. Can you feel the gravity of that and can you share the gravity of that? That. That. That actually did define you, but it didn't put you into a jail cell. What occurred?

Yeah, yeah. No, it's. It's. It's. The thing is. Is looking back on it now, whenever you're in the midst of it, like I was talking before, being immersed in just. Just the deepest, darkest, chaotic, absolute, you know, What. What seemingly feels like at the time is the biggest, just most belligerent smear of chaotic nonsense, of meaningless nonsense, of bullshit, you know, that you can imagine. And it's like, how could I ever. Especially once I got physically sick back to a certain point where literally every doctor around me was telling me, like, this is. This is it. You know, it's just not. You know, this is just to manage expectations. This is not something that people come back from. They get this sick kind of thing when you're in that place or even when you're. Far before it was. It was. It was mental and emotional long before it was physiological. And there was a very slow descent into hell. And there was multiple chapters that were very different. Some are comical, like the animal situation back then where I had, like, an apartment full of monkeys and dogs and piranhas and parrots and. And all kinds of stuff because I was tweaking on Adderall and, you know. You know, all kinds of stuff and. But whenever you're in the middle of it, it feels like that. And whenever you. We asked me earlier if I had, you know, clarity, you know, back. You know, during that time, I always sensed. I mean, well, there may have been a deeper part of myself, but what happens during trauma is you compartmentalize and you go into this. As you escape into certain parts, you lock my sensitive part, that sense that away because it was too painful to face the fundamental reality that I was committing. One of the. Like I talked about earlier, probably the greatest ethical crime that a person can commit on themselves is that I could be way more than I was being. You know, I could be. Felt that back then, infinitely more. I felt it at times, but then I locked it away. And the mind tries to do that. That's what we were talking about earlier of, like, people will double down and triple down on addiction to not face that reality. If they. Especially if they're a person that can sense it. A lot of times, the deepest addicts are the people that can sense that. And because they don't have the tools, they don't have the courage, they don't have the circumstances at that point to be able to start addressing it or even know how to. They start to believe that it's impossible to do it, but they have a sense that they are nowhere near what they could or should be or who they really are. And it torments them. And so they go deeper and deeper into escapism to try to run away from that, because that is always there, like a judge telling them, you Know, telling them that they are not who they're supposed to be. Like the, like being haunted by one of the ghosts in, in, in Dickens Christmas Carol, like Ebenezer Scrooge, you know, like the guy with the chains or whatever that comes in. I didn't experience this very much. Very much Dickens, like in that situation where I even had my first psychedelic experience was very much like that. You know, past, present and future. Visually going there, seeing it so on and so forth and being horrified and terrified. And it was a psilocybin experience that really changed the, you know, the entire trajectory.

Did that plant take you to this plant? Yes, that was the journey.

Yes.

And obviously we're linking that show because we don't have time to go into your full depth of story. I want to give the respect it deserves because it's a fucking awesome story. Like so good. But, but I'm just curious because to tie it back to why we're here, what we would do with these allies you found the ally from one plant to another. That's so amazing. It's so amazing that one plant told you about another plant. It's almost like they're all connected.

Well, it's like we were talking about earlier and we know that this. And again, I'm not saying that this is the reality and we're talking about some of these, you know, these, you know, theoretical principles as far as the guy in principle and as far as, you know, the, the. The plant intelligence and collective intelligence influencing in this specific way. But this is a very interesting thought exercise and in the sense of that this underpinning intelligence that orchestrates everything we know that it orchestrates multiple cells that are seemingly unrelated to coordinate together inside the human individual paradigm, which is just an extension like the apple on the tree for the collective base intelligence of this entire planet. And then that is an extension of the base intelligence of the galaxy, universe, et cetera, and the existence beyond. And never ending, probably never ending, you know, limitless loop. And even the idea or thought of boundary or time is really just a construct, an illusion anyways. You know, quantum physics is even tells that. So again, we could go down that whole thing. But like, but, but I really think that that's, that's an interesting way of thinking about it. At least to some degree or at some layer or expression of that. Because just understanding that there is no question that there is an interconnectedness to all things. And there is no question that an. A base substrate intelligence that governs nature. And we are. That we're not Something that just resides over nature, that we just kind of sit on top of this ball that is nature that's floating in the cosmos around this huge ball of fire. It's like that's miraculous and crazy to even think about on its face anyways, you know, But. But we're an extension of it. We're part of it. We're like the blade of grass. We're just a more complex extension of it that can walk around and do certain things. But that's all we are. We are an extension of that life process. And so whenever we talk about what cultivates health, it's expression, non manipulated, non divorced expressions of that collective intelligence. And that's why true medicine comes from nature unadulterated, right? Whenever we talk about integrating medicines, because again, we're just coordinating. Just like I would call on a therapist, right? Or I would call on another person who might be the perfect person to converge and be biologically and psychologically and emotionally compatible for me, to help break down certain boundaries and get over a certain negative trajectory, to reintegrate me with who I really am and ultimately nature, et cetera, calling on these plants is the same thing. And I think I actually truly believe that certain compounds and certain organisms surface at a time of great need, where there's a significant need for what that particular organism has to offer and how it's developed and the constitution of what it is. Right. As a protective substance, as a heart opener, as a mind opener. When in terms of kava, just like during an injury like which, what we're going through right now in this planet is a transformation where there's a lot of risk and opportunity, but there is a big injury that has occurred as well too, where there's collective trauma like we haven't seen.

We're in the middle of a cytokine storm.

Yes, exactly. So like brain injury in the brain, where the brain, where the system and the substrate intelligence that governs everything that we know is there, recruits certain cells to go to the side of injury and to secrete all of these factors to then basically rebalance the entire system. You know, everything in nature occurs whenever there is something that threatens the health of the system, then it will. The intelligence seeks to reestablish homeostasis. Just like. Like whenever you go in the gym and work out and you break down a muscle, it's going to mobilize its resources to balance it out and to create some sort of. Everything goes back to stress and adaptation. Adaptation occurs from the intelligence re establishing homeostasis. So that consciousness can persist at a sustainable and balanced state of being so that life can continue and to thrive and flourish. Right. And can continue to progress and grow. Life will find a way. Right, as the Jurassic park quote.

Absolutely. Another great movie. We've dropped some great movies on this podcast, y'.

All.

There be some good ones in the show notes. So as we round think about this, right now we're in a model where probably at the time this podcast comes out, I would even almost put money on it, that there's going to be some kind of mask mandate, there's going to be all these vaccine conversations. It's going to be pretty gnarly. And people may fall prey and people may not fall prey to the psychological war, the Watiko that's happening. We talked about this with the cytokine storm. We're going through like a. I guess you could say a growing pain. Because if you look at humanity, you know, we haven't been around for that long compared to the age of the Earth, we're kind of still an adolescent. So as we go into our young adulthood, I wonder what the wisdom you could share from the most inspired place about the narrative of pharmacological intervention versus something from the Earth. How can you articulate that in the most simplistic and powerful way so that somebody truly understands the paradigm, the dichotomy that we're in?

Yeah, yeah. And we. And you can actually go back. Anyone who's listening. Luke Story and I went into this pretty on, I think, our second podcast that we did, where. And this is a really important. I don't always get the chance to kind of go into things at this depth, which is what I love about. What I love about you and I love about this. This platform as well. But this is really important because again, whenever we talk about. And I said this, you know, before we started, and I said it, you know, midway through, I think that what Kava symbolizes is just as important as what it is. Okay. And so what we're doing, even with Tru Kava, it's an educational and advocacy campaign. It's a movement. But to. To kind of stimulate and catalyze this sort of plant medicine renaissance, this consciousness renaissance, that's to help us from one angle. There are many angles that we can come at it at, but feed into this process of getting through this growing pain and actually healing it. And then collectively, I think that these tools that intervene on our consciousness, on our perspective, are some of the most powerful tools for transformation. Because again, healthy cultures are made of Healthy individuals and healthy individuals are made from healthy mentality. It all starts with perspective. It all starts with mindset and how connected you are with what you really are to truth, you know, without an internal compass. Without an internal compass and a vision that extends off of that, that's in line with objective reality. Objective reality, meaning that substrate intelligence, just like in the body, the cell that's gone rogue, it has to get back online with objective reality, which is that the truth of the existence of that intelligence that's there. And once it believes that it's something separate, it acts against us. Right. So again, in order to do that, these compounds are some, in my view, some of the greatest tools for intervening in a human psyche and to catalyze cultural transformation in that regard. Michael Pollan, before, just real quick, I want to go into that, into the actual synthetic pharmacology thing, but to go back to the Michael Pollan thing for just a second to kind of set this up. Michael Pollan was on Joe Rogan's podcast, as many others, whenever he was doing a book tour for, I think not his last book, the one before it. But he did a really good job of articulating the fundamental reality and his perspective of it, of how caffeine he was using caffeine in this scenario, helped to reshape and structure the collective mind of Western civilization in the early 1900s. And he did a great job at making a fundamental philosophical point about the power of these substances. A lot of people just think, oh, it's just a food, come on. This is like, just something that you take. Like really, like, you know, the world's gonna be changed through politics or through this. That's like saying, you know, you know, you know, your, your, your chronic disease is gonna be corrected through a drug and, you know, manipulating your, your chemistry downstream, you know, which is just a byproduct, which is just a symptom of something. Your gin is just going to approach a symptom and so on. And there are things that can be done at all different levels to create transformation, but it starts with the sovereignty of the individual, and it starts with the sanity of the individual. Insanity being your connection to what you really are into objective reality and everything that we've talked about in this podcast. But he was talking about how caffeine helped to shape the collective mind of Western civilization into this more productivity driven and prioritized state of consciousness, which it was already moving towards that from a lot of different factors. But when we introduced the advent of coffee breaks to increase productivity that was part of sort of a corporate thing, obviously to increase output and so on. But when you have a large population or large collective group of people, which meaning an entire country at this point, or entire civilizations today, all using something that is psychoactive, that creates a certain collective state of consciousness that's within a certain range, then it totally makes a massive contribution to the development of what that collective group or civilization's values are, what their aspirations are, what their goals are, what their disciplines are, what their actions are, right? And then it can fundamentally actually change the culture, Right? Because that's why every culture, like we were talking about earlier, every culture, every tribe, even hunter gatherers, all have some altered state that they uphold, you know, because we're obsessed with altered states. We're obsessed with altered states for our own sanity, to connect with other people, to get clarity, to reflect, to do all these different things. And some of us choose better altered states than others. We've fallen into this thing where because of industry, because of a lot of different things, alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, have become the three that, that have ruled the roost for Western civilization. And really kind of the modern world, we still go to certain cultures, like in the South Pacific that have kava as their main one, or in the Amazon where we still have psychedelic medicines and those are their preferred altered states. And we actually see that all of these cultures that use these much more higher intelligent, living organism sort of based entheogens that bring it to a state of higher consciousness in the altered state instead of suppressed consciousness. When you study some of the results culturally, as far as levels of mental illness, when you talk about connection to the natural ecology, the value structure of sustainability, all of those things, right, that we're kind of divorced of today, where it's sort of like mass production, maximize profits, grow, grow, grow exponentially, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? And it's sort of like we're kind of in this productive game because we're locked into this one part of our consciousness which is useful, but without the other part that sees the big picture with integrating the mind, integrating the left and the right, the analytical, which is the practical and sort of daily this and that versus the introspective and the creative. You get too introspective and creative, then like we talked about, you're the hippie that's not really productive, but says a lot of things that are interesting and probably true. And then if you're too overly analytical, then you lose your connection to that bigger picture. It's more mundane and it's more just like productivity, etc. But anyways, the. So the idea was. And so what Michael Pollan was, was, was, you know, describing was how, you know, caffeine helped to shape. And I would say alcohol has also fed into that shaping big time. As far as the social structure, how we connect, it's like. I would say it's like the vast, overwhelmingly, like, majority of any social atmosphere alcohol is.

It's the focal points of every city. Oh, we're a great brewery town. It's like, who gives a shit?

Yeah. And where it's not, caffeine rules the roof. So caffeine is like daytime sociability. Meet someone for coffee. And caffeine is. I'm not on caffeine or anything like that because there's definitely times and places and coffee can be an amazing. Even, you know, food and stuff like that. But it is. It's not one of those things. It can be addictive, it can make you off your center, it can imbalance your. If over consuming caffeine. It's one of those. It's not. I wouldn't say that it's a bad guy, but it's just. It's one of those things you're learning how to work with.

It's a tool you can harm or hurt.

And kava's one of those that's more closer to the center of integrating and balancing the human mind. Left, right brain, hemisphere, which is why, again, we're so divided. You look at everything, we're divided left and right brain. That's what conservative and liberal is. Right. You know, we're locked in this part of consciousness that conserves the knowledge of the past as well. More about analytical and fact and blah, blah. And this over here is all about opening opportunity, big picture of the future, emotion, et cetera. And, you know, this people, these guys end up being locked away. And, you know, one side says rich people are greedy, the other side says poor people are lazy. You know, and it's. It's one of those. And it's like. It's like really. It's the integration.

Yeah.

Integration is the takeaway message, I think, as far as human development is concerned. We talk about psychedelic journeys, we talk about life, we talk about this and that. That integration is actually taking deep lessons and introspection and actually integrating them into the practical reality of you in this incarnation or this. Whatever you call it, this reality, you. It's action. It drives action. So the idea with this is that Kava, anywhere where you've seen kava. So that all being said in Polynesia, everywhere where you've seen Kaaba proliferate, it is done amazing things to develop very tight knit, authentic communities where mental illness is extremely low in the way that we see it today. And even instances of other metabolic diseases. And there's a whole other conversation as the physiological stress driven diseases, et cetera. Because you're talking about a substance that if a culture upholds a substance like this and chooses to form a relationship and appoint this substance as its main arbiter of altered state, right. We choose this altered state as our altered state. We know that we kind of need altered states for sanity as resets, et cetera. We're all drawn to them.

Like we said before, we all need a spiritual pressure washing now and then.

Yes, exactly.

We do.

And when we choose certain strategies or allies that deliver a higher quality altered state, and then collectively we start to enter into that in large numbers for a large period of time. It creates totally different atmospheres. Like what we noticed too. And we have, you know, tests for this because we have whole cultures in Polynesia with kava, for example, they have 20 times as many kava bars as they have regular bars in Fiji. Right? Why is that? Well, the only reason why they have regular bars is only because of tourists and stuff like that. They're like, why would we use that shit? You know, whenever we. We have this, the atmosphere at a kava bar is normally, unless they have low quality stuff, it's, it's. It's just this very authentic the state that people are in. It creates these amazing atmospheres where it's just like people are just there themselves. You will never see a fight break out at a kava bar that I've seen hard every. It just doesn't appeal to that. More animalistic. For everything that we've talked about where kava touches places, it tends to help to contribute to a much better atmosphere. So like I said earlier, the thing for the true Calvin initiative is more. It's what it symbolizes is just as important as what it is. And it symbolizes a mentality. It symbolizes a choice to invest in your mentality and to expand and to pursue authenticity and to pursue that part of you which is most natural and most authentic. Right? And it symbolizes connection, symbolizes hope in a lot of ways. It symbolizes a lot of things. And so even seeing it and using it, sometimes the act of using something, knowing that you're doing something good for yourself and investing in that is also a very powerful Thing, right, where you're taking this conscious choice and you're saying, I could go one way. And not to say that there's no way that people can adapt to alcohol to some degree, but it is a vice. You're just having to adapt to it and to try to keep things together while you're using it. It and kava is one of those things that we, we. I fully actually believe that everywhere where it's touched, we're going to see those same results if we get it proliferated and solidified. And I think it's coming no matter what. I think that it's emerging and we're just trying to act as, as arbiters for that.

If you had to wave a magic wand, how would you use kava to extinguish the unconscious drive for alcohol and pharmacological intervention?

Well, the interesting thing about this and what we've seen both in patient populations and just anthropologically in culture, we can look at data in my own personal experience, is that generally whenever people start to use a substance like kava, they naturally start to lose their taste for alcohol. And this is not an absolute statement. There are exceptions because there are all kinds of psychological things that will draw and create attachment to certain. Certain things for some. But in general terms, what I see, what we've seen, what we see anthropologically too, is that it's just your mind move towards something that gives less of a. Of a risk profile, less of a side effect profile. And you just notice that this gives me actually what I thought I was getting out of alcohol or what this is what I really wanted. You know, it's like I just feel more of myself. And it's smooth and I'm not addicted to it. It doesn't call to me the next day like I need it. In fact, it's really an off ramp. It's really. It's not only is it not a drug, Bacava is an antidrug. Because in the literature we actually see an upregulatory effect on all of the main neurotransmission systems, mainly GABA and these things instead of down regulatory. So pharmaceuticals in the conversation of that, like you mentioned before, pharmaceuticals fundamentally are isolated molecules or alcohol, which is a byproduct of certain types of metabolism, et cetera, certain processes. But it's not a plant organism, complex intelligent organism, but they're normally single molecules that are sort of isolated and ripped off from nature, meaning that they're divorced from nature, taken out of the context of a living being, just like an individual hormone is out of the human body instead of taking something from a human body. Human body, right. And they work by working on a very specific pathway obviously to target. And they're foreign molecules that just plug into a certain receptor because they're just synthesized to plug into a receptor and get an effect, even though it's not a molecule that's innate to the body. Some drugs are molecules that are innate to the body that just are synthesized. And some are just foreign molecules that plug in and trick a receptor. Either way, it's essentially like a hack to the body. I always say that alcohol and drugs, synthetic drugs, all pharmaceuticals are somewhat liver toxic, neurotoxic to some degree because they are not part of the innate intelligence. And they borrow from tomorrow to pay for today. That's why every drug, every drug commercial, see, here's the effects and here's the side effects, which are the effects. They're really the effects of the drug. And that's because they borrow from tomorrow. They hack a receptor. I like to think of the catalytic biochemical processes that govern every sequence in the body. Every process in the body like steps of an assembly line, right? They start from producing energy to producing hormones, to producing X, Y and Z. Communicating here and there or whatever. Like the steps of an assimilate a massive assembly line. Just infinitely complex, right? And a drug is basically like intervening at one step of the assembly line where you want to fix something at the level of symptoms. And you're saying like, it's like the product's already being produced, it's already down there and you want to. You wanted to change it right here. And so right there you can create a molecule that'll make a quick shift to where in that little space you get effects and results. I take Adderall, I focus today. Great. At what cost, right? Because you're not hiring a new manager and changing the standard operating procedure and coming at it from an intelligence where you tell everybody in the assembly line who's working on it what's going on, to change the process to make it more efficient. You're not doing that. That's what a plant medicine does because it's a biological organism that has all these molecules that act in that way, individual molecule. You skip all that. You take the intelligence out. You just hire one person to come in and change this one thing so you get what you think you want on that day, feeling better. Whatever the drug is, if it's a benzodiazepine, yeah, it relaxes the hell out of you. But it's optimizing for certain symptoms or metrics at the cost of the system long term. Now, your body will course correct and adapt to some degree, but the more that you do it, it steals from the system and it throws off. It's sort of like it's a hack. Also, for a computer analogy, a hacker understands that all a computer system is, is an assembly line of code that all is connected together. And you can hack in to change one thing to get a result, but that affects the entire sequence of code. And the more that you get spyware and the more that you get these hacks in your system, it slows up and distorts the whole system. It doesn't work. Eventually you just have to throw the damn thing away because it's so diseased, right? Because you haven't. The system is not working in synergistic harmony anymore. We're all systems. We're all complex systems that are governed by intelligence. We're all assembly lines.

I feel this like, at its at its most, most simple, pure form, we are either in harmony, in homeostasis, or we're not. It's not a shame thing, it's not a blame thing. It's more like if we're going to move forward here, if we choose to move forward as a collective society that loves each other, that cares about each other, that is consciously competent, then we can move to unconscious competence. We can just know everything without having to know that we even know it. That's the kind of world that I want to create. That's the kind of body I want to live in. And I think that's what these plant allies can teach us. Man, this has been an exceptional podcast, dude.

And it's amazing. Just to say one thing real quick. It's amazing whenever you feed the body, feed the mind, feed the spirit, feed the emotions, you feed the intelligence at its base and you just. Health is literally just dissolving the barriers that you've created between you and fundamentally who you really are. That's why nature divorcement syndrome, it's literally just removing the barriers. It's removing the interference. We talk about this in chronic illness and health. We say as a doctor, as a physician, as a health enthusiast, and anyone who's trying to give information to help how you heal is not through a synthetic intervention of this like we just described. You can play musical medications with your chemistry all day and borrow from Peter to pay Paul and end up in more debt with your body's chemistry because that's all you're doing. You can spend more money a day. It's just like charging on credit, right? You know, like, I can take Adderall, I'll focus today. There's no free lunch though. I'm gonna have to pay that shit back, you know, but, you know, you can do that. But how you, how people get well is by removing the interference and then supporting the innate intelligence, Feeding the innate intelligence, right? And then it moves back to a state of homeostatic balance. And then things just happen, miracles happen, you know, when you're in a state of true, when you're in your highest vibrational state of balance, right? Which there's probably no end, it's probably infinite to how you know, you know, because we're in a state of constant course correction, stuff like that. But as you get closer to that state, you can access more of objective reality. You become smarter, you become more introspective. You start to be able to sense truth around you. You can see the big picture and you can see pictures instead of pixels. And so you're smarter from a sense. Because ultimately that's really what smart people do. They can anticipate long term consequences of their actions and they can play the game of chess more efficiently, if that's what you call it in life. And you can make decisions to where you can dictate your circumstances and you can be. We don't have control ever in life, but we can have great influence if we can tap into that base intelligence that's orchestrating the whole thing and act as a conduit or an extension of that. The we are. That's who we are. It's our birthright. The farther we go rogue, the stupider we get. And we're just that cancer cell that can't do anything but just pump out inflammation and fuck up everybody else around us too in the process. But the more we get collective with the whole, we can summon the power of the entire system. Not as us as an individual, not an ego thing, but we can act as a conduit for that to do. It's like a. I kind of see this thing in personal development as things kind of go right and as I've been on my path, path to the kind of power that it gives you and the kind of opportunities that it opens up, the kind of relationships. My life was in this little sliver of opportunity and you know, back when I was in these horrible dark places and now I have all of this abundance and all this meaning and have different things and I just invest in that process and I What I've learned is, is that, you know, going down that path is like being a surfer, right? You understand that there is a collective intelligence and a force and an inertia behind that ocean. That is, you are an extension of right? But you are not that thing. Don't confuse yourself with that thing. Don't ever. No matter when things start going well, trust me, like, the red lights are coming. If you're getting green lights, they're coming. But if you can get in tune with that wave and understand that you are actually one thing and you learn how to sense it, how to see when that wave is coming and how to jack in and align yourself with it, then that the power of that wave will take you with it, you know, and then you're surfing that wave. And that's what happens in life as well, too, you know? Well, these medicines are just part of that, you know, I didn't know we.

Were going to solve so many of life's equations on this podcast, but I feel like we did. So I really appreciate, man, the. The gravity you bring. And just congratulations on all the success you've been having and you will have with true Kava. It's why we partner with you. I believe in you. I believe in this product. I shared with you my story about my daughter Naya being born, and that'll just forever be burned in my memory. So thank you so much for being on the podcast. Take the product, go for a dance instead of getting all drunk on vodka and stuff. This is where it's at. So it's joshtran.com K A V A. And the code is Josh. 20 for 20% off. Man, from my heart to yours and from the whole audience and everybody across the world, thank you for being here until we see each other again.

Absolutely, man.

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