Ypadu

It's not a medicine I've ever felt called to, but I just felt intuitively that if I was going to make such a big shift, and I'm in a new environment, and I'm at kind of a turning point in terms of my work, uh, that microdosing iboga would be supportive.

So, uh, you know, once we land in Costa Rica, I, I disposed of the last of my ambiel, uh, tobacco paste and, uh, and Mambé, and then had, like, half a little tin of my, uh, you know, Lucy little nicotine pouches.

And I just thought, "Well, I'll kind of wean off," you know? Then the two or three days' worth maybe, and I started just doing fewer of the little pouches and just kind of getting used to what my brain and body feel like without a constant IV drip of nicotine.

And I felt decent the first couple days, and, um, and then started to realize that there was a lot of work that needed to be done in terms of the book marketing and promotion and things like that.

Um, we all have our own in- individual, individual relationships, but I, I just wanna be the guy who's like, "Yo, I did an experiment with nicotine that l- has lasted 40 years, and I wanna tell you, if you're using it a lot, um, and you have kind of the addictive personality as I seem to have, unfortunately, [chuckles] uh, it's, it's very difficult and downright scary to just quit." And so, um, where I am with it now is I'm i- I'm in a place of peace, and I've been able to resist the self-defeating, you know, hit to my self-esteem of, like, trying to do something and quote/unquote "fail" at it.

Um-

Well, you were successful with completing Mambé and Ambía.

Yeah, yeah.

And I just wonder if you see that as an important role of them and for the role of individuals as they begin working with these and or as societies and collectives.

Like many people, I think of would maybe say or have some inkling that like a lot of the the problems that we like even as we said earlier this lack of initiation um could be maybe seen as a microcosm of that but that so many of our issues potentially could be described as a loss of faith a loss of our place in the cosmovision i mean even You know, I think, I don't think this will get us censored from YouTube, but we were both working with Mambe Coca, and you know, you showed me the spoon you had with, has a little alien on it, and I was saying that's like obviously not such a strange thing to have on a spoon that you're working with Mambe, because in many of these origin stories, like with the Shipibo, another one of my teachers comes from a group of people called the Tubu and the Colombian Amazon, and Their origin story is that actually the spirits of all of these plants, these master plants or healing plants, originated from the stars.

So even in their own cosmovisions, there's something de facto spiritual about them.

And again, however we understand that word, but just in the literal sense that the essence of these plants are coming from spirit.