keywords:

cannabis, iboga, ayahuasca, veterans, healing, trauma, plant medicine, psychedelics, mental health, personal growth

summary:

In this conversation, Mitch Schultz and Ian Benouis explore the transformative power of plant medicines, particularly in the context of healing trauma experienced by veterans. They discuss their personal journeys with psychedelics, the importance of community and support in the healing process, and the potential for these medicines to help individuals reconnect with their true selves. The conversation emphasizes the need for a holistic approach to healing that integrates both traditional and modern practices, and the role of veterans in leading this change in society.

takeaways

• Veterans are the outputs of the war machine and need healing.
• Plant medicines can help individuals reconnect with their true selves.
• Letting go is essential for personal transformation.
• Community support is crucial in the healing process.
• Ayahuasca and other plant medicines can facilitate deep emotional healing.
• The journey of healing is ongoing and requires commitment.
• Trauma from military service can manifest in various ways.
• Integrating plant medicine into society can help address larger issues of trauma.
• Hope is a powerful motivator for change and healing.
• The experience of using plant medicines can vary greatly among individuals.

titles

• Veterans Leading the Way in Healing
• The Transformative Power of Ayahuasca

Sound Bites

• “This stuff is hope to get your life back.”
• “You have to be called to the medicine.”
• “Letting go is where all the magic happens.”

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Military Journey

03:03 The West Point Experience

06:10 Transitioning to Flight School and Early Military Service

09:11 Military Experience and Early Insights

12:03 Deployment and Mission Overview

12:16 The Drug War and Its Evolution

15:28 Personal Journey with Cannabis and Plant Medicine

19:02 Mushroom Activism and Personal Healing

19:52 Exploring Relationships Through Psychedelics

20:15 Introduction to Plant Medicine Journey

23:26 Life-Altering Experiences and Spiritual Awakening

26:23 The Role of Psychedelics in Healing

29:03 Exploration and Mastery of Mushroom Identification

29:59 Possession and Shadow Work

32:52 Healing Through Plant Medicine

36:03 Veterans and Trauma Healing

38:51 Connecting with the Community

39:24 The Transformative Power of Ibogaine

41:39 Comparing Experiences: Ibogaine vs. Ayahuasca

49:12 Healing Journeys: The Call to Ayahuasca

51:59 The Preparation: Logistics and Emotional Readiness

55:19 Experiencing Ayahuasca: The First Ceremony

58:05 Processing Trauma: Insights from the Journey

01:08:33 Accessing Healing Through Plant Medicines

01:09:23 Empowering Veterans and Communities

Ian Benouis (00:00.248)
Roll it. Roll it. Will you give me a clap in front of your face? Awesome. Thank you.

Ian Benouis (00:09.422)
Well, let’s just pretend like we haven’t met. let’s just start, obviously tell me your name, but then let’s get into some of your military history and as much as you want to cover there and if there’s anything specific. Sure, sure. So my name is Ian Benouis and my military history begins with going to West Point. I…

Ian Benouis (00:31.606)
wanted to maximize my potential and knew that in high school. I’m like where can I go and you know I’ve got these smarts, got these skills, where can I go to kind of finishing school and manifest that stuff and really you know try to realize my full potential. So West Point seemed to be the conduit to do that where I could serve my country, get a good education, get some good leadership and discipline skills and so I took that and everyone of course out of West Point.

Ian Benouis (01:00.61)
becomes a second lieutenant in the army and so I I probably like a lot of people I wanted to go infantry to start and then you find out how hard that is and it’s not as quite as glamorous as TV and the movies have made it out to be so I looked and I said what’s you know what’s cool but it’s kind of high-tech and aviation seemed to be that pathway for me so I graduated from West Point and then went to flight school for basically a year

Ian Benouis (01:30.904)
So was that right out of high school at 18, 19 years old into West Point? Yeah, exactly, I 17 years old. And yeah, that was a big, big change. What would you say about that West Point experience? What was the of the crux or the biggest thing that you felt like you got out of it? You mentioned leadership and kind of discipline aspects, but was there something you can pinpoint? One of the big, it’s kind of like this big Stanford prison experience. It’s crazy.

Ian Benouis (02:00.324)
social experiment that you go through there where you’re super controlled and where you can be and what you can do. Kind like the military at large where you give up a lot of these rights, ostensibly, to go and do this thing that’s protecting rights for other people. So I’d say the biggest thing I got out of it was sort of how to live and operate in a program, in a sort of matrix as it were because you knew on what level it’s like, this is serious, this is real.

Ian Benouis (02:30.224)
real consequences.

Ian Benouis (02:33.39)
from my actions, but at the same time it’s a big game. It’s this big social experiment, kind of like having people in prison for four years with a certain different set of rules. But yeah, so think just understanding that this thing we do called life with other people is a big video game simulation matrix, and that’s definitely helped me in my life.

Ian Benouis (03:03.324)
there at West Point and leading us into your military service then because I know that’s a big part of what goes on. Sure I think that the military provide in general provides this whole bonding experience through

Ian Benouis (03:18.094)
the difficulty of what you’re doing together. it’s, you have a bonding experience if you’re in a fraternity or a sorority in college. And this is just like that. Super intense, you know, on steroids as it were. So you really bond with the other people that you’re there with because of the intensity of the experience and because you really need those other people to pull it off. The unofficial motto for the cadets was cooperate and graduate. And the only way you were

Ian Benouis (03:48.068)
on to make it through there, no matter how skilled or good or smart or anything in your discipline you were, was to work with other people. So you really come out of there with that bonding experience, just no different than somebody would serving in combat together, just that intensity of the experience and depending on each other to get through. Again, in West Point, it’s more like a video game where you can respawn, but in combat, of course, the consequences are quite binary if you don’t pull it off.

Ian Benouis (04:17.968)
you mentioned you’ve got to remove some of your personal rights to go to a place where you can bond with people to make this a group effort to whatever that may be going into combat or just the camaraderie that’s an interesting aspect to me I don’t know if you have anything to kind of breaking yourself down to become part of a group. Yeah it’s kind of a shamanic model in that way similar what someone would get into basic training which is a shorter version of that in this case it’s four years where they’re gonna

Ian Benouis (04:47.978)
break you down and build you back up to be a leader, right, so that you can lead other people as an officer in the military. But exactly, but your identity, your identity isn’t as an individual. It’s your identity that they’ve broken you down and rebuilt you. So it’s a shamanic model though where you’re part of this larger super organism.

Ian Benouis (05:11.074)
You know, and yeah, that definitely works. The big challenge in the military is once you no longer have that structure, whether it’s West Point or the Army or whatever in the military, what do you do then? Because you’ve been programmed and built to operate as part of the superorganism and when that superorganism’s taken away from you, it’s really hard for a lot of people. What, can you describe what that is like a little bit? Like what that feeling might be like or the emptiness or the lack of whatever?

Ian Benouis (05:41.248)
Yeah, well, I mean I can just say like is a helicopter pilot I wasn’t really a helicopter pilot as much as I was The left or right hemisphere of this dragonfly like bug that flew around in the middle of the night in Central America, you know with other people on board it operated different parts of this big thing it never felt like I’m a helicopter pilot while you were doing it. It was completely psychedelic, know, you’re up flying around at a hundred

Ian Benouis (06:10.928)
20 miles an hour, you in the jungle looking through these night vision goggles and yeah, it was so so when you’re not doing that anymore and you’ve been programmed like that you’re like what’s my whole purpose for existence? What’s the meaning here? I had this high-level mission to you know save the planet to

Ian Benouis (06:32.898)
protect, you know, for freedom, whatever, whatever kind of stuff, you you’re looking at it and when that’s taken away, it’s like you really don’t have a mission anymore. I think that’s a big challenge for people coming back from wars.

Ian Benouis (06:47.726)
Well, back up just a touch, coming out of West Point, you said that you went into flight school, that right? Maybe you could just describe a little bit of that, and then you mentioned going out into Central America. Where did that lead you after into flight school and beyond into the military? Yeah, so basically flight school is about nine months, and right before that you do a short officer basic, but the real training of course is flight school itself. For us, coming from West Point to officer basic was, you

Ian Benouis (07:13.806)
Kind of a joke, frankly, but it was necessary to bring everyone in and get everyone standardized. And flight school is nine months. Back then we started in these little beach helicopters, know, the little fish bowls. And then you transition to a Huey, and that’s where we did most of our training. Now anyone going through flight school will be all in a Huey. And that was nine months long. And so you’re learning the basics of flying. You’re learning how to fly instruments in sort of cloudy weather. You’re learning how to fly at night.

Ian Benouis (07:45.201)
night vision, in the flight school you don’t really do night vision goggles while I was there a lot, just a little bit to get you exposed to it. And then if you’re gonna fly a different aircraft, then you learn how to do that. So I actually was assigned to Fort Lord, California, and then immediately went out there, got a place to stay, and moved back to get my Black Hawk transition, which was six or eight weeks. And then I was qualified

Ian Benouis (08:13.68)
to fly a Blackhawk and then I went back out to Fort Ord, joined my unit and immediately began training and flying with my unit. It was only there a couple months before we got the initial deployment down to Panama. yes, we deployed there in the spring of 87, a whole two and a half years before Operation Just Cause actually happened.

Ian Benouis (08:43.341)
Sir, can you describe a little bit about what that mission was and I don’t know how much detail you got into Yeah, yeah. So, it was basically a show of force mission in that first off the Black Hawk unit on the ground in Panama could not keep enough of their aircraft properly maintained and flying. And they probably needed more aircraft out and about for the show of force mission and really the show of force mission sort of…

Psilo Toad (09:11.65)
that you kind of got the understanding of being there over time that that’s what was going to happen, even though, of course, that wasn’t a topic of public conversation. I still remember once flying a guy that had been an instructor at West Point that I’d known there. He was a major, and he was talking to somebody else on the plane, and I was just flying them wherever they wanted to go in the canal zone.

Psilo Toad (09:37.314)
And they were talking about all these things that were gonna happen, and I was like, this sounds like the war. I’m like, don’t think I, even though I had a top secret clearance, I’m like, I don’t think I have a need to know this stuff. But I think everyone, like I said, sort of figured that out. So we’d be rotating down there to Panama, and then when we were back in the field, we’d be back at Fort Ord, we’d be back in the field. And we were just really completely overextended where my unit had the highest resignation rate for commission officers in the entire army because you were in Panama, and then when came

Psilo Toad (10:07.268)
back from Panama, you were in the field training with a unit back there. And so you were down there for what you said, two and a half years or back and forth? Yeah, back and forth, exactly. Over that two and a half year period. So half of our unit would be down in Panama, half would be at Fort Ord and we’d just rotate back and forth. And what, after that two and a half years of going back and forth, being at the base and being down in Panama, what was your military service after that? Or was that kind of the end of it there? Well, first off, what it allowed,

Psilo Toad (10:37.188)
allowed me to do being in Panama was become a pilot in command, which you know, got warrant officers in the army and they’re the sort of primary pilots and commission officers are more secondary, but because I was in Panama and because of that mission, I got to fly a ton where I wouldn’t have otherwise and I got to become a pilot in command and I got to fly more night vision goggle hours, our unit did, than anyone in the army except for the task force 160, you know, the special ops, the Black Hawk guys and when they shut down my unit and rolled it up into

Psilo Toad (11:07.108)
Fort Lewis up in Washington State, they rolled us into the Task Force 160, my unit became them. So what Panama did for me was allow me to fly a lot more than I would have and become a good pilot who knew how to fly night vision goggles. yeah, then Panama itself, mean Operation Just Cause itself,

Psilo Toad (11:33.058)
Half our unit was already down there. I joined them with the rest of the half of our unit a couple days later when the thing kicked off. And really the fighting happened the first day. We went out and secured the rest of the country. I’ve seen if anyone wanted to fight with us as it were. And of course they didn’t. So obviously nothing like Iraq or Afghanistan as far as the things that went on there. But this was a big drug war mission. It was the world’s largest

Ian Benous (12:03.012)
unbeknownst to us on a more conscious level, he of began to understand it on a subconscious level was preparing for just cause. It was just basically a whole run up for that impending operation.

Psilo Toad (12:16.088)
counterinsurgency operation. It was an opportunity to test out all these new pieces of equipment, the stealth fighter, know, do a counterinsurgency operation. yeah, so it was, know, Noriega was our guy and then he kind of went a little bit rogue and, you know, went a little bit…

Psilo Toad (12:39.606)
took the leash off and then we said, okay, we’ve got to reel you in, know? Regime change, just like we do with all our other guys that we put in and you need to be reeled back in. Well, it’s interesting, it touched on the idea of this drug war. Right. And that…

Psilo Toad (12:57.353)
where we are now and what this movie’s about and everything else. What sort of things can you talk about there? mean, looking back at your mission there to where you are now and what’s starting to go on with, it’s not cocaine, but just the entire drug war and what that’s done. Yeah, I think for me, I’d back up to Hawaii. So I grew up in Hawaii in the 70s where cannabis was totally decriminalized. It was part of the culture. And there was no drug trade, even though drugs came in because it was

Psilo Toad (13:27.407)
grown and it was great. Cannabis was a, know, Hawaii was a cannabis mecca. I was three years there behind Obama, you know, and then what happened is in the, I think right in the early 80s, Green, Operation Green Harvest. So you had all this whole military, you know, machine that you’d built and

Psilo Toad (13:54.613)
like, well, okay, now is the sort of, at that time, seemed like the military thing was winding down. How do we repurpose and how do we use these resources? And they started to use military helicopters for the first time in civilian drug operations in Hawaii for Operation Green Harvest. So, and then they started doing that in California. So basically, had the Blackhawk pilots who, let’s say, had been flying in Panama, some of them, you know, for Operation Just Cause now were redeployed, repurposed to fighting the drug war in the

Psilo Toad (14:24.597)
US. What you got in Hawaii was…

Psilo Toad (14:28.245)
the nation’s first and worst meth epidemic. So you suppressed cannabis and then meth, which came from Japan, which is kind of culturally integrated there, use it for the, you know, in the business world to work the long hours and everything, is it just naturally came into Hawaii to fill that void. And yeah, now you can see across rest of the country what they gave us. you know, it was the first time again where they were, you know, violating posse comitatus, which is you’re not supposed to use US military.

Psilo Toad (14:58.199)
for civilian operations. The only way that comes close is if you’re in the National Guard, you know, for national emergencies. So we’re basically using the military machine to fight the drug war. We did it in Panama, that was part of the drug war, and then it continued on. Yeah, and the drug war, what has it gotten us at this point, right? I mean, how, spending these trillions of dollars over the last 20, 30 years, 40 years even, and not…

Psilo Toad (15:28.149)
treating people, but treating everybody as criminals, especially with just marijuana. What that does. You wanna give us a little bit of a brief history on your introduction to cannabis and kind of plant medicine in general and what started happening there for you? Yeah, so like I said, cannabis was totally decriminalized. think I probably…

Psilo Toad (15:52.277)
May have tried to get high, I think maybe probably in middle school, unsuccessfully I think, you know. But I remember the first time I really got high was in ninth grade with a bunch of guys on my soccer team, you know. And it was actually brownies. But you know, just that classic lesson of even though that was strong, eating brownies, I was with people that cared about me that I cared about, that I loved, who I trusted. yeah, so I had a great time.

Psilo Toad (16:22.321)
know Hawaii was like on the weekends going and playing soccer and going to you know like these beautiful creeks and waterfalls and stuff in Hawaii and you know smoking some myrrh, drinking some beers and then mushrooms grew around my high school. Where I went to high school there was cow pastures all around so yeah had a mushroom experience in high school that didn’t get…

Psilo Toad (16:51.283)
Well, it had an interesting end. I was already probably…

Psilo Toad (16:57.065)
Probably consumed too much alcohol, probably too high, and then friend had mushrooms that he picked right around the, like I said, my high school. No supervision, no guidance, no nothing. Just took too many mushrooms and somehow managed to make it home with my best friend. Then I got home and I was just free-form hallucinating. you know, animals from the African savanna, rhinoceroses, giraffes.

Psilo Toad (17:25.205)
And in retrospect, without those other things, the alcohol and cannabis, who knows? It could have been just an amazing, awesome experience. But I had a negative reaction to it when the bathroom started throwing up. Of course, my parents didn’t know what to do. So their solution was, let’s take him to the hospital. He’s overdosed on drugs. And so they did. And think fortunately, I had somebody that I had to go all the way to Honolulu who worked in Haight-Ashbury.

Psilo Toad (17:55.209)
and knew at least how to take care of people and not demonize them. But basically they gave me…

Psilo Toad (18:05.853)
Something that just completely knocked me out. Thorazine maybe I think. Yeah, Thorazine back then. This would have been like 81 around there. Yeah, Thorazine and I woke up a day and a half. That was Friday night. I woke up Sunday. So my parents were free just because they didn’t, you know, this is not in their worldview. And I was totally fine. You know, and didn’t stop me from coming back to plant medicines, but definitely.

Psilo Toad (18:31.209)
was a significant experience. But in the Army, they started drug testing, so I had to watch out for that. And really, at West Point in the Army, stayed away from any of that, and even alcohol, because saw how people were abusing it, especially down in Panama. Go down there and…

Psilo Toad (18:50.635)
have a couple girlfriends down there and hit the alcohol lot and could see the dangers there. for me, it wasn’t until I got out of the military that I really…

Psilo Toad (19:02.465)
One gram doses went to Austin, Texas from 94 to 97, where I said the name of God over each one of them. That was my political activism, but yeah, that was my mushroom scholarship for law school.

Psilo Toad (19:22.547)
and that was kind of the healing part, guess, back to your film, or how much you want to get into that. Yeah, so, right, so I’m taking these mushrooms not at all thinking I have this trauma that I have to work on, but like here’s an example of a story that happens. It’s me and my wife, our first three years of marriage, we were taking mushrooms probably at least every other week for three years, just, know, and other medicines as well, but mushrooms is the primary focus. I was taking them with Syrian roux a lot. Kind of now I know, but

Psilo Toad (19:52.474)
idea why that made sense then you know and so I remember one night it was New Year’s Eve I was with my wife my brother and my best friend taking a lot of mushrooms you know and I was giving my wife this like soul massage where I was physically massaging her body but telling her how much I loved her not just in

Psilo Toad (20:15.96)
got on the plant path. So you had that introduction at an early age, or at least in high school, do you feel like that led you back to it, or least if you may not have had that introduction, who knows if you would have been back into it? Yeah, exactly. So cannabis was a positive thing. can’t say that I was using it.

Psilo Toad (20:37.164)
medicinally but certainly therapeutically where I was like this makes me feel good, you know? And so I had no negative viewpoints, reaction around cannabis and even with the mushroom experience I didn’t blame the mushrooms, know? If anything I blame the person, me, you know, how I consume them. So what happened for me was that, let’s see, so I,

Psilo Toad (21:05.402)
trending the sequence here my house was burned down in california town home by an ex-military guy who had mental health issues he thought somehow he was helping us out you know we heard me and my previous wife had money issues and in his world he thought that if he stole stuff from us and burned our house down our town down

Psilo Toad (21:31.926)
somehow that would help us, know, which of course we were underinsured and it didn’t help us, but basically my house burned down, then he ended up, this is a year later, he went and got mental health treatment, and then when he was deemed fit to stand trial the night before he was supposed to stand trial, he killed himself. So, but basically my house burning down, going to Panama, I almost drowned, body surfing off Santa Cruz, and I think that was after Panama, but basically I went out

Psilo Toad (22:01.84)
some friends in the winter time and they were surfing and the kid from Hawaii, you know, I didn’t have fins on, I had a wetsuit, I was not accustomed to swimming in that cold water in the winter time and I got stuck in the tow and basically had to decide that I wanted to live to get out of that and so…

Psilo Toad (22:19.032)
Those things happening to me really got my attention from a spiritual perspective. I basically looked at said, do I want to make this a career? And I looked at the promotion rates to major and they were…

Psilo Toad (22:34.514)
around sixty percent i said that’s almost fifty percent and that’s kind of fifty fifty shot to spend twelve fourteen years and all the programming and then not have any not a retirement to show for and try to kind of reintegrate yourself after all that experience programming into the civilian world and i said i don’t see me making a career this so i should i should get out now and so i got out and decided to move to texas seemed to worry

Psilo Toad (23:02.116)
you growing part of the country nice weather hot land of opportunity been its own you know republic and yet moved out here and then my first wife on top all those other things happen left me and i’d really married her as someone to she represented my own trauma that i didn’t realize i had her parents are both alcoholics she’s been sexually abused and

Psilo Toad (23:26.106)
She had a good heart and I think me in trying to love her and help her, was just trying to choose a proxy as far as me not fixing myself. So those were kind of the impetus for you to kind of find this spiritual aspect and just start looking back at plant medicines? Absolutely, absolutely. how that happened was my brother, who he ran away from home, became an emancipated minor, got himself into high school, I mean finished high school and got himself

Psilo Toad (23:56.11)
community college, joined the National Guard, got himself in University of Illinois. then got into some trouble with the cops, being a young college student motorcycle and being crazy and moved from there here to Austin. My wife left me and he’d been hanging out with his friends that he’d all grown up with for a couple years where they were doing ecstasy and he was hanging out with them and nothing against it but just was in that sober mode, kind of like I did myself.

Psilo Toad (24:26.03)
or it was just a safer mode to be in. At West Point, you could get yourself in real trouble with alcohol. And then I saw the same thing in the Army, and I’m like, I just need to put that aside. But he finally did it with them. This was in 1990, you know? And this is still a couple years later, right, after Dallas and everything, Austin being kind of an epicenter of all this. And he was like, yeah, dude, you gotta try this. And so I took MDMA with him, and of course, was a life-altering experience.

Psilo Toad (24:56.34)
was my reentry, as it were, into the plant medicine path. And it went from there to LSD, and then I didn’t know how lucky it was. The thyme mescaline was available here in Austin. Then it to mushrooms, yeah, and it just kept going. So compared to your early times where you’re smoking in high school, you tried your mushrooms, what came out of this second phase now of your consumption of plant medicines or even psychedelics in general?

Psilo Toad (25:25.82)
what was the new approach or what came out of that? Yeah, well first off, right, it’s just that the world is, the universe is more strange and beautiful and powerful and amazing than I could have ever imagined or understood before. And I was just, I really dove into it because of, I certainly, the healing wasn’t sort of like foremost on my mind or in my heart. It was,

Psilo Toad (25:55.652)
guess this information, just this amazing information about the beauty of the universe. And I remember kind of the first time I had what I was calling a transcendental experience where I’m mescaline. And I remember calling my brother, was like, dude, I just had this transcendental experience. He’s like, what are you talking about? It was just amazing. All the barriers, all the boundaries just dissolved and all this.

Psilo Toad (26:23.33)
interchange of experience information with other people that I was around in this, know, transcending my ego, all that kind of classic stuff. I just, yeah, wanted more of that. I intuitively knew that there was something there and I just threw myself into it. I didn’t know that there was, you know…

Psilo Toad (26:46.126)
this thing called trauma, that you could, these medicines could help you with trauma, but at a rational level, at an intuitive and a heart level, that’s definitely what’s going on. But for me, it’s much more of a, from an intelligence and an information standpoint, I would definitely say that that’s what drew me in to start. I’m gonna flip this off, is that? Sure, yeah. Well, actually, it’s not bad. Are you sure? It’s pretty directional, huh?

Psilo Toad (27:15.258)
Yeah, it’s not bad. Just in case. I don’t want Charles going, what the fuck is that? You guys comfortable? Yeah, yeah. AC wise and stuff? Okay, cool. Yeah, this chair is just a lot easier to have. You got your feet on the ground.

Psilo Toad (27:34.234)
Yeah, so guess getting, having that transcendental experience, coming through different plant medicines or psychedelics, where did it start to come up that, I can start to heal myself? And did you start to realize, shit, okay, I’ve got some trauma, I’ve got some things in me that I need to address, and I think I can address it with this. Yeah, so, well first off, like I said, I didn’t know how lucky I was with the mescaline. This was the early 90s, and I happened to just be connected to the guy who was the dealer for the person.

Psilo Toad (28:04.188)
who was making it and I was like, this is amazing stuff. And then when that eventually ran out, kind of not knowing, like I said, how good I had it, I’m like, well this is great, this path, but I’m gonna start being costed. I was about to go to law school, you know, I’m like, how do I make this happen where I can get access to the stuff that it doesn’t, that I have access to, period. And of course, that’s tied into being able to afford it as well. And so this was, started law school in 94, university.

Psilo Toad (28:34.128)
Houston. This is kind of right early internet really hasn’t taken off and so trying to find information about let’s see how to find mushrooms. I knew that there’s a mushroom seemed to be the inevitable solution to all this. It’s like I’m here in Texas, mushrooms if I can get them then there’s an unlimited supply. not paying for them and you know I understood even at that point whether it was mushrooms or LSD or you know.

Psilo Toad (29:03.514)
Mescaline or whatever these were all these plant and psychedelic medicines that could all do the same kind of work and so I started Trying to find mushrooms I was you know in in Houston and so I just knew to drive south through down towards the coast and I still remember it was Hurricane Rosa in 94 she came through in September and you know I’ve been going down there doing some some recon trying to figure out some feels and you know Places that were viable and yeah, she she Rosa brought in

Psilo Toad (29:33.501)
mushrooms. I found like the fields and found the mushrooms and taught myself everything as far as you know identification of the right ones and how to prepare them you know how to dry them and grind them up to you know smooth out the variations of the potency from the different flushes and yeah I picked you know about 10 kilos of mushrooms about 10,000

Psilo Toad (29:59.53)
In other words, telling her really what she meant to me in a very specific and detailed way. And she was just loving this. was like I was massaging her soul. And then at the end of that, I remember collapsing on the ground and feeling this dark energy just completely take over me. And I was like, wow, I’m possessed. I’m literally possessed by a demon. And I remember telling my wife, because I didn’t want to freak her out, kind of getting up close.

Psilo Toad (30:29.237)
spring.

Psilo Toad (30:32.702)
scared but I’m possessed by a

Psilo Toad (30:36.884)
And she’s just got, you how do you say that without getting someone concerned and scared? and so at that point, I knew that I was possessed by a demon and I knew that it was never gonna leave. And that was the scary thing. I’d done, I was an experienced enough tripper, you know, I knew that you always come down, you know, and that the drugs always wear off and that you’ll be okay once that’s done. But at this time, I knew somehow that this was with me and never going to leave. And of course, that really was disconcerting.

Psilo Toad (31:06.798)
I we I called up a Catholic priest. I figured, well, they’ll know how to do sort of an exorcism. I told him what happened and what was going on. He’s like, it’s the drugs. And I’m just thinking, man, dude, that’s not the drugs. There’s something, it’s beyond that. The drugs have just opened this thing up. And of course, that didn’t go anywhere. And then I was telling my brother and his best friend, well, maybe if you go and get one of these wild dogs that lives in our neighborhood, I’ll kill the dog.

Psilo Toad (31:36.72)
a scapegoat, right? And I’ll direct the demon to that. And so my brother and my best friend, they just went outside to appease me and walked around like, wow, that dude’s really tripping balls to come up with that one. So eventually, eventually, I came down from that and reintegrated and got my stuff.

Psilo Toad (31:59.581)
myself back together but it was only in the past two years when I really dove back into this medicine path that I figured out what that was. That was just my shadow. It was just my shadow saying, where’s my soul massage? It was the little child inside of me. was the victim of this trauma that I’ve had going like, well, what about me? And so everything that I experienced about that was completely true. That it was a demon. It was gonna stay inside me forever. I just exposed that shadow.

Psilo Toad (32:29.685)
and in the past two years I’ve realized that that was just part of me and now I’ve been able to reintegrate that. So that, I was doing that kind of work not really knowing and I would say that most of the traumatic reintegration work that I’ve done has been in the past two years, not kind of coming full circle with that. So is that kind of…

Psilo Toad (32:52.745)
This time leads me into the inspiration for the Peru trip. Has that healing and that kind of understanding of this is me that I’m looking at here. It’s not necessarily something that’s inhabiting me, or it is, but has that been kind of the through line now to go pull all these guys together and do this stuff? Or tell me the inspiration. Yeah, so what happened is this, is that basically I got myself good enough to be a decent enough husband and father for the family we were about to raise.

Psilo Toad (33:22.669)
through those initial couple years work of the plant medicine where I did. And then my wife and I would maybe, know, MDMA once or twice a year, and psychedelics and we could fit it in as we were raising a family. And kids have been my medicine for the past 18 years. And then about two years ago, I reconnected with veterans. And I’d really never connected with veterans. I mean, I had friends that I’d gone to West Point with, that kind of thing, but never really kind of as a group. And two years ago, there was this normal,

Psilo Toad (33:52.589)
veterans conference here in Austin and I knew that veterans were coming back messed up from the war. knew they were being put on the pharmaceuticals. I knew that they were killing themselves but meeting veterans in person…

Psilo Toad (34:07.147)
just totally blew my heart wide open and I remember just spending the whole day with these other veterans crying. It was my head in my hands and just that personal reality, kind of like with these medicines where before it was just some kind of conception like, wow, this is totally real. And what it did was opened me up and made me realize that I had trauma. Because I just never see myself as a victim. I never…

Psilo Toad (34:35.625)
you know whatever things happen to you life and and that’s what i really got the sort of message that this veteran what is is the best medicine is that your love is something that can all these things up and then soon after that i remember i was with a good a goalkeeper for my soccer team he just joined us recently is a deaf guy group in hawaii and

Psilo Toad (35:03.083)
He was talking to me after a game, this was maybe, know, over…

Psilo Toad (35:08.043)
And he said, so I see you post stuff about Terrence McKenna on Facebook. He’s like, so have you ever done Iowaski? And I’m like, yeah, I did it now about 19 years ago, Terrence McKenna stuff. But only a couple times, never really any super deep work that I’ve done more recently. And he’s like, well, yeah, I said, yeah, as a matter of fact, I’m supposed to get hooked up with some of the people in this community who are doing it. And he’s like, I’m part of that. And I’m like, well, there you go. So yeah, so about a year ago.

Psilo Toad (35:38.057)
over a year ago, I drank ayahuasca for the first time in like 18 years with the community here and you know just opened myself up to all these things that were in me that I didn’t realize I needed to work on that I had trauma that I had you know all these things that I needed to address and

Psilo Toad (36:03.475)
Yeah, through that, besides working on myself, I got a lot of understanding and downloads about veterans. And basically what I saw in a nutshell is that veterans are the ones that need this healing more than anyone because we’re the outputs of the war machine. And so I saw how these plant medicines could…

Psilo Toad (36:29.385)
help with that and then I just saw the bigger picture that veterans are going to, as we’re going through this big transformation, worldwide transformation, like I said, we’re the output of this war machine that veterans need to get this plant medicine healing and then also be able to show people as exemplars or avatars of how we’re gonna be in this next phase of our existence. yeah, that’s what set me up. Well, that’s good and you’re right, especially looking at all the stats and a lot of this.

Psilo Toad (37:01.663)
BS, if you will, that’s been fed to why we’re doing what we’re doing abroad. And I know there are particular reasons and I don’t want to get into ins and outs of all that. But being part of that war machine and we have our young people coming back to this country that are completely traumatized. And how do we?

Psilo Toad (37:21.835)
get around those stigmas. know, because my father is a very conservative man, very much for the military, and he looks at drugs as drugs. It doesn’t matter if it’s marijuana or if it’s heroin. And so he doesn’t understand what the hell I’m doing. But it’s really interesting to in a conversation as you can imagine. But we have so many people that are affected by it, not just the individuals coming back, but all the family members, brother. talk a little bit about that and what sort of impacts

Psilo Toad (37:51.789)
either on a personal level or you’ve seen through some of the others and why that’s important, not just for the individual, but also for the collective and the family. Sure, and I’ll give a little bit more background, too, kind of on my story as I was at the film screening for New Understanding a little over a year ago, and that’s where I met this fellow veteran named Eric who literally stood up in the question and answer session and said, I’m a veteran, I have PTSD, how can I get these sacred plants?

Psilo Toad (38:21.709)
I started helping him and helped him with MDMA and then mushrooms he’d already been planning a trip to Peru where he did ayahuasca and wachuma and Didn’t have maybe the healing he was hoping for with ayahuasca And so I told him I said I don’t go around telling people I told you so I never knew that but you’re gonna get that and we I took him out to ceremony October of last year and that’s the first time like I took a

Psilo Toad (38:51.629)
veteran with war trauma to do ayahuasca as the kind of power plant medicine for his trauma. And he got all that first round, first level of healing that he was looking for. And I guess just that kind of momentum for me just kept me going to keep on doing more of that. from that ceremony is how I got connected with Carlos and his brothers.

Psilo Toad (39:21.592)
Basically, we met this guy named…

Psilo Toad (39:24.244)
As soon as I’d like to change okay battery and okay cards so briefly like From where you were before you started and then the next day because I know it’s like immediately and when I’m you know, it’s Less than 24 hours after I’ve taken it, but it’s past that 12 hour point We’re out of the beds and I’m like my whole fucking body my whole mind

Psilo Toad (39:46.196)
everything feels completely different. It’s a switch, more so than Ayahuasca. Yeah, totally, totally. So that next morning I kind of woke up, well I hadn’t gone to sleep, I was like okay, kind of a check in point here, I ate a little bit of the food that they had set up and I actually went back to bed for another, it’s like four o’clock in the afternoon. Some other people were already done up in the hot tub and hanging out and sort of comparing notes. But yeah, when I woke up the next Saturday,

Psilo Toad (40:16.23)
afternoon I yeah my brain totally felt different I felt totally

Psilo Toad (40:25.266)
I wasn’t in spaz mode. mean, I know it’s hard. was kind of hard for me. Sort of like there’s all this stuff of going to Peru and everything. How much of that was just sort of the environment and not me. it was like, you know, my frequency, the energy was just super high and it just went down to a whole nother calm level. So I really did feel that, that I got a lot of brain healing and I could feel it. I could really feel it the next day. So, and that was so different, you know, from Iowa Oscar or something else, which is

Psilo Toad (40:55.19)
much more emotional, spiritual. This was, yeah, I just had this tonic that had really gone in through my whole brain and given it an awesome reset, a reboot.

Psilo Toad (41:09.46)
and scrubs you out. Yeah, exactly. That’s the thing is you could really feel it working on your brain while you’re on it. It’s like, I’m having this experience, but I can feel it doing stuff in there. And with ayahuasca, it’s much more like I’m telling myself, maybe I’m having the difficulty of whatever. Dude, don’t worry. You’re getting healed. Whatever’s going on, you’re getting healed. But on the Ibogaine, you’re like, you can feel it. You can feel the healing going on.

Psilo Toad (41:39.38)
Should we do a quick break? Sure. Okay. Let’s change batteries.

Psilo Toad (41:45.364)
Cannabis, now iboga, and fight MEO. But maybe you could just talk a little bit about that trip and I guess you guys have another one coming up. But what was that like? Yeah, so that all kinda happened and I knew I was either completely crazy or this is all happening by Divine Providence invitation to participate and go to Crossroads and check out their therapy. It came up right before Peru.

Psilo Toad (42:11.466)
A couple weeks before Peru, I did a three day ceremony in the US with this first time war vet. Told you dealt into all those fears and then…

Psilo Toad (42:21.034)
was invited to Crossroads basically a week before Peru to do Ibogaine and 5-Meo DMT and I volunteered to kind of be a military guinea pig where they did brain scans on me on either side so I was fasting from any kind of substances even coffee any kind of even my normal daily supplements I was taking and yeah the Ibogaine and I mean I knew that the I knew Ibogaine could be used for addiction I knew that and I knew that a long time ago and

Psilo Toad (42:51.328)
And I’d never taken it until Crossroads, but I had no idea that it could be used for trauma that it could be Used for things as you know Eating disorder other you know a kind of compulsive compulsive disorders and that you could get the sort of brain healing from it

Psilo Toad (43:09.558)
And so I went down there and that’s how I hooked up with Charles Schar, a as he was filming a documentary for Crossroads. And we met and kind of hit it off and then I remember saying to him, he interviewed me little bit, checking each other through that method, and then when we were done, he said, we were just talking, chatting, and I said, so, do want to go to Peru?

Psilo Toad (43:39.431)
said, one of the dates and within a couple of minutes he decided to join us in Peru. but, so the Ibogaine itself…

Psilo Toad (43:50.633)
It’s just so different than any other visionary plant medicine I’ve taken. And those, you you feel them across your entire body. With this Ibogaine, it was really in my brain. I was really feeling it in my brain. And of course, just the, I remember coming up on it, you know, and like, did they give me enough? What’s this supposed to feel like? How come this isn’t as strong as I thought it was gonna be? And I remember when it finally kicked in and I was like, okay, the visions start. And I’m like, wow, and I feel the intent.

Psilo Toad (44:20.587)
and you’ve got this ataxia, right, where if you move, you just, you don’t feel good. You feel like you’re on a hangover or you have the flu. But if you don’t move, then you’re okay, which in a way, you have that in ayahuasca to certain point where you’re not, if you’re under the effects of medicine, you might not be wanting to move around a lot because you don’t feel that good.

Psilo Toad (44:44.521)
Yeah, I’m like, wow, when finally kicked in, I was like, wow, this is totally strong, this is totally real, and it’s totally different from anything I’ve ever done. And I was hearing conversations that weren’t there. I was seeing things that weren’t there with my eyes closed. And then the visions really started to take off. And then all of sudden, the first real vision I got was my father’s face, like right in front of me. And I’m thinking like, I’m thinking like, Bwiti, I’m like, this is why they take this. I mean, my dad’s still alive, but it’s like to talk with the ancestors, you know, to connect with your family. And then,

Psilo Toad (45:14.475)
He smiled at me and you know I’ve been working I’ve been having a lot of issues with my parents in the past couple years like well This is really this is really a good sign and then I I did bring a specific intention to the IVA game Which was this thing of my sister dying when I was four months old She was a year and a half It’s like the central family drama in my family that my parents haven’t yet resolved for I wanted to understand how to connect with her So I ended up you know it was my attention as well to work on family stuff, which I did a lot of that I worked on a lot of

Psilo Toad (45:44.445)
family issues with my sister. I looked up in the huge dome that we were in and I saw like a

Psilo Toad (45:52.509)
like the hatch for a submarine or a ship where like, know, the round hatch which was totally unlocked and I realized, okay, this is how I can connect with her. It’s a one-way ticket and I’m not, and I can go through that door if I want to, but I have a life, I have a wife and kids, I have friends, you know, I’m not looking to go through that door, but I got it. So I mean like that whole question mark of how do I relate to this person was answered for me and I remember looking back at it, it was still there. It was like, it’s there, it’s open for you,

Psilo Toad (46:22.453)
totally your choice and I’m like okay I’m not ready to do that and then the other big thing I worked on which I didn’t even know was I traumatized myself flying in Panama like doing this you know illegal maneuver in a Blackhawk property equipped you can do barrel rolls with a semi-rigid rotor and you can do an inside loop

Psilo Toad (46:47.113)
In our Blackhawks, said, you know, can’t, 60 degrees left to right, 60 degrees up and down. We’re flying down there in Panama with this guy I flew a lot with over by the jungle school, down this like beautiful river, having like Vietnam flashbacks, you know, 120 miles an hour right on top of the water. And this guy I was flying with, he’s like, do you want to do a 90 degree turn? And I’m like, sure, you know. Let’s do this, so.

Psilo Toad (47:14.665)
I fly at least 100 miles an hour, maybe 100 to 120, cruising down this river and it has this perfect left hand turn. And I remember just, you know, he was coach coaching me, he’d done this before, telling me, know, I went through that and pulled back, you know, on the cyclic and pulled all the power in and then just dumped that thing 90 degrees over. Unlike a jet where you get lift from, right, your thrust in a helicopter, when you turn a thing sideways, all of your lift is going this way. Yeah, exactly, so you’re falling. That’s why when you do this barrel roll, you actually kind

Psilo Toad (47:44.619)
fall or you do the inside loop you actually kind of fall so and I rolled that thing around got it you know lined up with the 90 and then pulled it back in and then pulled all the power on it was that there and all the lights are just you know going off and buzzers and sounds you know and I pull out of it and I was like wow so

Psilo Toad (48:08.295)
That was, know, glad I was at that time I was glad I did it and but I didn’t know that I’d actually traumatized myself and worked on that and some of the other trauma just from flying which is really every time you took off wartime or not.

Psilo Toad (48:24.263)
people could die. And then you’re flying with maybe eight other aircraft that are full of, you know, 10 other people and your information. just dealing with that intensity of that, the, the ibogaine really helped me. And, but it was just, you know, it lasts for a long time. The primary phase seems kind of more visual and then it goes to more of a contemplated meditative internal, you know, kind of self dialogue and

Psilo Toad (48:49.359)
Yeah, and then you sort of, the next morning you’re like, I’m still on this stuff, it’s still going. And then you have that slow integration, then yeah, then moving on to the toad, Well, yeah. Before we get to the toad, how, once you do come out of it the next day,

Psilo Toad (49:12.937)
Roberto there who Carlos had healed of these precancerous tumors, lesions that came up in ceremony in a 10 day plant diet and after Eric getting this positive result in this ayahuasca ceremony, Roberto called me up and said, hey, my shaman, he got his visa approved because his daughter lives here in the US with the mother and…

Psilo Toad (49:41.855)
You know, can you guys set up some ayahuasca ceremonies for him? So I’m like, of course. And then I called up Eric and said, guess what we’re gonna be doing? And Eric really took the ball and went with it and I think drank with Carlos 15 times in less than a year period and drank ayahuasca with other people. And so he was sort of my star pupil and he went down to Peru this past February and did a 10 day dieta with

Psilo Toad (50:11.849)
Carlos and his two brothers who had not met his brothers previously to kind of test out this model. It’s been a whole chain of custody the whole time. And so he did that and that was successful. And so then Carlos basically gave me the call and said, hey, how’s this? 10 veterans, you you bring them down with the three brothers, which have 70 years experience between them. And that’s how this whole thing happened.

Psilo Toad (50:37.759)
So did you guys, was it 10 vets that went down with you guys? Yeah, not 10, it’s one. It’s like wow. Yeah, but that was what was on offer, know, the 10 vets. And basically I learned a lot just through that whole process. So I, it ended up being just myself and five other veterans. So six veterans total with two filmmakers. But that was the plan. And of course I learned just the reality of trying to get people to do this.

Psilo Toad (51:05.959)
super scary and these people have a lot of trauma and issues and we ran into a couple issues with people on passports, know. A couple people just, even though they were called to, weren’t ready for it and they found a way to back out. And so yeah, we ended up though with six and that was good enough. Three the people had never done ayahuasca before. Three had.

Psilo Toad (51:32.857)
and people all over the place as far as their military experience and their medicine experience, but yeah. How was that collectively? Like looking back at it now, because this wasn’t that long ago. I’m sure putting it all together was a lot, but then going down there, going through the process. Can you tell me a little bit about that and maybe how you’re looking at it now? Yeah, yeah. And then the process itself turned out to be a lot easier than the prep work. Just when I started inviting everyone, I built this Facebook chat where it’s like…

Psilo Toad (51:59.807)
part logistics, part online group therapy, it was the craziest thing ever. And I took another veteran for his first time ayahuasca experience, he’d only, know, cannabis and mushrooms a couple times, a couple weeks before going to Peru. And that was really like the prep journey, the kind of test journey. And I dealt with all my fear of going to Peru there, and ceremony there.

Psilo Toad (52:28.159)
That was really difficult. I stepped into all the fear. I remember I stepped up to the shaman and he gave me the cup and I said, the name of God, then I said, salute to him, and then I said, whatever pops into my mind, which is for the veterans. And I drank that cup and it was this 100 year old vine ayahuasca that I’d had before. I knew it was gonna be super powerful. And it kicked my ass. It was just like, who are you? You’re nothing. I’m Mother Earth. I’m representing creation here. You’re this little insignificant.

Psilo Toad (52:56.827)
smart monkey, you know, who do you think you are? You’re gonna take veterans down to Peru and do this? And yeah, I stepped into all that fear, but was really good because I needed to do that before going. I remember I was, for an hour and a half, just getting my butt kicked and wanting to purge. I hadn’t purged a ton in Ayahuasca, and I was like, please let me purge. And you know, I let go of all that fear. And so…

Psilo Toad (53:21.555)
And then the veteran I took along had a really positive experience as far as doing the first round of work on his war trauma, which was just further reinforcement for me that I was on the right path, that this made sense. And he was scheduled to go, but had some passport issues. And yeah, so when I got down to Peru, amazingly, there wasn’t as much pressure. When we finally got down there and had the people, like, okay, this is it. We have the people that are gonna do this. We were fortunate enough to have someone, you know, capture it.

Psilo Toad (53:51.257)
so we could share this with the rest of humanity. the first ayahuasca experience was one of the nicest ones I ever had in my life. I was ready to be in Peru, in the place of this stuff, with the shopee-bo, with the brothers, with this powerful medicine, and just totally have my butt kicked. I was ready for it, but was respectfully nervous. And it turns out instead it was still super intense work, but that first night I was like…

Psilo Toad (54:19.998)
think I need more medicine. Well, you know, this is so nice. This is like my, it’s like a birthday present. This is all about going inside and meditative and contemplative and all those kind of things that totally was not what I expected. And the bottom line is that it was a success in my opinion from the standpoint of, I knew people would actually, I kind of expected that they would check.

Psilo Toad (54:49.906)
box in their war trauma. I didn’t know when I stepped into this sphere before, sort of like, if you kill 20 guys in Iraq, do you have to take ayahuasca 20 times? I don’t know the sort of math of how the traumas relate to the medicine. And what I learned was that people can get that first round, that first check box, kind of I say that there’s, you know, that there is an onion. They see that there’s an onion, they’re not afraid that there’s an onion, it’s okay that there is, and they peel back that first layer and go, okay.

Psilo Toad (55:19.166)
And now when they see the onion again, they’re like, it’s that onion. And then it’s just the continued work. it was really the thing that I kind of knew intuitively, it was validated by this, was the hope is what motivates them. It’s the hope of changing their lives for their family. Whether that’s a girlfriend or a boyfriend or a child or their parents or siblings or whatever, their military support system, their buddies.

Psilo Toad (55:47.964)
That’s what motivates them to change. That’s what motivates them to want to break the cycle of war violence. Like you said, PTSD, all these families have secondary PTSD. And then the biggest correlating factor for why you get PTSD is childhood trauma. So it’s a much bigger problem than just this war trauma. And so that hope is what motivated people to do the work. And so…

Psilo Toad (56:15.228)
It was just kind of funny to see once they checked the war trauma, the next sort of thematic step on the medicine path for them was, who do I want to be now? How do I want to live differently? And that’s what I was excited about. To take people down there, I knew they’d get the first step on the war trauma, the hope of changing their lives and breaking that cycle would be their motivation. But then what they would come up with.

Psilo Toad (56:43.332)
once they were starting that healing process, they really wanted to do with their lives, that was the exciting part. And did all of them, everybody that went down there have something that they got out of it and some new hope or some new, or at least some idea about what they needed to start doing? Absolutely, so think the first thing that happened for most people was survivors, guilt, shame, all the things that come out of war. So some people would, you have these black bracelets on that you would wear if like a,

Psilo Toad (57:12.126)
colleague of yours, a comrade of yours died, and you would wear it as like a memory of that person in memoriam. But of course it’s also a shackle, it’s also a chain, it’s also a collar, and what the medicine did for people was being able to take that thing off. They thought, I’ve been carrying this around as a way to remember this person. It’s like, actually it’s a survivor’s guilt, shame, you know, all those other kind of things that they’re carrying around, and to be able to…

Psilo Toad (57:42.014)
let go of that and still care about that person, love that person, but not be burdened by the negative emotional association with that. So… Constant reminders. Yeah, exactly. So I think people… That’s for the war trauma, because there was four of us with war trauma and then myself.

Psilo Toad (58:05.114)
I don’t really have service, maybe some service trauma from flying, but you another person who had really service trauma, they were in the coast guard and seeing the other side, the, from rescuing people and people dying on that kind of side. so for the four that had the war trauma, yeah, everyone had a chance to process and work on that and just make, you know, make forward progress.

Psilo Toad (58:27.87)
We’ll switch and we’ll jump over to Crossroads. You guys are looking at this from a broad perspective of not just Ayahuasca.

Psilo Toad (58:35.501)

Psilo Toad (58:35.771)
first ceremony which we didn’t know if Carlos was gonna be open that so we have all that footage and then the next two ceremonies they participated in so it was nice to get that whole you know yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

Psilo Toad (59:05.423)
that self-love.

Psilo Toad (59:06.843)
that forgiveness of what you kind of burden yourself with and just carry, but being able to let that go. Talk a little bit about that, maybe on a personal level, but even what you saw with the vets down there in general. Yeah, on a personal level, what I experienced was, you’re getting major thematic issues. Like was dealing with sexual trauma one night, then I was kind of like, I was kind of like, of I was of I was of was of of of was kind of

Psilo Toad (59:36.807)
Basically, is that you have the kingdom of God is inside you. God is inside of you. And hell is when you die, all the walls that you built up around that. The walls of shame and guilt and fear and trauma and lies and programming and all that stuff. And so, I realize that’s why I’m trying to do this work, which is to let go of that stuff so I can connect to the God inside of me that’s always there. And so for the veterans,

Psilo Toad (01:00:06.719)
Yeah, it was just amazing, especially Barry. He was literally over there like making out with himself. It was the most awesome thing because he was giving himself self-love and self-forgiveness and getting rid of self-judgment. I think that Ayahuasca can really do that. I remember being down there and just turning off that judgment.

Psilo Toad (01:00:31.332)
program that’s always on. You think of something that occurs to you out your subconscious, and then that ego wants to get in there and judge it, and the medicine can turn that off. it’s not that it can, for me, completely turn it off, but slowing it down, interrupting it, and then once you see what that’s like to have that happen, then you can tap into that more on a regular basis.

Psilo Toad (01:00:59.962)
Well, and seeing that and experiencing it firsthand, and this leads into kind of one of Charles’ last things, talk about the future, man. What do you see going forward with all this for yourself, but even for the project and for your brothers, your vets? Yeah, honestly, that’s what I’m trying to figure out, is how do I…

Psilo Toad (01:01:25.838)
What am I going to be when I grow up and how do I make all this happen? That’s really what I brought to the medicine while I was down there was show me the vision, show me the mission, show me the path and the way forward. That’s really where all the work is right now.

Psilo Toad (01:01:42.648)
you do this and you have these experiences but they’re only as valuable as your ability to integrate them into your life, you know. And Houston Smith said the goal of the mystical experience is altered traits, not altered states. So it’s great to have these experiences but how do you take what you’ve learned and make your life better? you know, make yourself better and therefore make the rest of planet better. And,

Psilo Toad (01:02:12.312)
Yeah, going forward, the big reason to me to do this was to prove out that it could work. Ryan Lecompt took, I think, four veterans down about two years ago to Peru with a totally legit, but a gringo shaman. And that was the beta test, and this was the demo. And we wanted to just show that people who had never had ayahuasca before, who had war trauma, could really get that first round of healing. And now it’s just the work is

Psilo Toad (01:02:42.236)
trying to figure out how to do that going forward. How to finish building out Carlos’ retreat center, how to get more veterans down there. But it’s just a bigger challenge of how do we fit these.

Psilo Toad (01:02:57.216)
archaic, you know, healing modalities into our modern world because I think we need to do that if we have any hope of, in a minimum, reintegrating veterans and then, reintegrating anyone who’s had trauma because, as I said before, childhood trauma is the highest correlator to getting PTSD. we have a, you know, childhood trauma problem, masquerading is a PTSD problem. So we’re going to have to find ways that

Psilo Toad (01:03:27.12)
don’t involve just giving people pharmaceuticals that make them want to kill themselves and shut them up and close them off whereas these other plant medicines open people up and so and it’s also just the realization that as these things become more mainstream

Psilo Toad (01:03:44.502)
How do we do this correctly where we respect the indigenous cultures, we don’t have this whole thing corrupted by money? And I think that’s where the real big challenge is, because it is gonna happen. Ayahuasca is getting, and all these bests are getting super popular for totally legit reasons, and how do we build these models where we, know, like the shipibo, they’re the warriors of the Amazon, so it’s kind of a closed loop system where you’ve got the warriors of the empire as it were.

Psilo Toad (01:04:14.236)
that are kind of destroying the planet, trying to make a closed loop connection system with these warriors of the Amazon who can bring us these plant medicines, from other outside of that as well, but these plant medicines to heal all of humanity. And yeah, that’s what I’m deep in trying to figure out. Yeah, and how do you feel, I guess, for the future of humanity, not even just for the vets and the personal thing, but like, what is this gonna do for our culture and our society at large? Yeah, well I’ve come to this

Psilo Toad (01:04:44.196)
and seen this out of the medicine is that from a political standpoint of course veterans are along with the

Psilo Toad (01:04:52.482)
parents of the children, say, of epilepsy, or autism, they’re the political front of all this. Politically, that’s how you’re to get these laws changed. But I’ve seen way deeper past that with the medicine that as veterans being the output of the war machine, and we’re going through this worldwide transformation where we’re moving to this new phase of existence, that veterans have to be the ones to show the rest of humanity how to transcend violence as a political tool. Because clearly,

Psilo Toad (01:05:23.036)
separate from what you think about war, it’s not getting us the results that we’re looking for from a political standpoint. so violence is a kind of political tool sort of outlasted itself. And this is an anti-war perspective. It’s an evolving past war. And so what I see is the veterans are the ones showing the rest of humanity how we’re going to live, how we’re going to live in harmony with the environment, how we’re going to tap into these plant medicines that they can help us, but also, you know.

Psilo Toad (01:05:52.316)
permaculture and other newer ways of living that use technology but are fully integrated into the biological matrix. And I think that’s what’s really exciting for me is that we can heal ourselves as veterans through these plant medicines and then show the rest of society how we can live. And that’s a far more exciting thing just beyond…

Psilo Toad (01:06:21.144)
getting people the healing and reintegrating them, you know, after war. So, let’s say you have the stage and you’re speaking to seven and half billion people on this planet, What would you want to say, if it’s be a simple little message or something a little bit more, or deeper, what would you want to just say to the rest of your brothers and sisters out there around the world? Wow, well.

Psilo Toad (01:06:46.786)
I’d say first what I’ve learned through this medicine work that I’ve been doing is it all boils down to let go. Like letting go is…

Psilo Toad (01:06:56.014)
the only solution and when you take these medicines, you have no choice but to surrender and when you do surrender, that’s when you find out what is really there. Whether God, higher power, the universe, whatever labels you put on it, you can only find out what’s there and who you truly are when you surrender and let go. And then that’s where all the magic happens and what I would wanna say to humanity is that

Psilo Toad (01:07:26.04)
This is our birthright. is our, before there was any agriculture and civilization and religion, there was this shamanic culture of using these plant medicines for the benefit of humanity. in our building out of this industrial revolution and postmodern society, we’ve put those things aside, but now we need them if we have any hope of making this transition to the next phase. And I think that’s what these medicines are here.

Psilo Toad (01:07:55.964)
to do for us is to allow us to make that transition. So there’s nothing to be afraid of. These things aren’t new, they’re old, and we need them now more than ever. So it’s my hope that the work we’re doing and the examples we’ve set for all of humanity can see how these plant medicines are not just helpful but a necessity to our survival.

Psilo Toad (01:08:26.683)
Did I know in the project better than me, but being a part of it, is there something that we…

Psilo Toad (01:08:33.237)
People can get access to the healing, the plant medicines.

Psilo Toad (01:08:36.981)
yoga, meditation, sensory tanks, know, light therapy, EMDR, all these different therapies, and you can teach them how to live, how to live healthily, how to use these newer technologies that are alignment with the planet, and I think that, these will be the sort of incubators, they’ll be the sort of test templates for how we’re gonna live for everybody. And yeah, veterans are gonna be at the forefront.

Psilo Toad (01:09:07.035)
of making that happen. Anything you want to say to your vets? To To your brothers that you’ve been hanging out with? Yeah. Wow. What do want to say to the vets?

Psilo Toad (01:09:23.84)
There’s hope, man. This stuff is hope to get your life back and to be all that you can be. That’s the reason a bunch of us signed up to begin with, is to reach our full potential. And these medicines can help us do that and we can show everyone on planet how to reach their full potential. cool. Thank you, dude. Awesome. Thank you, Jay. And cut, yeah.

Psilo Toad (01:09:52.641)

Psilo Toad (01:09:52.847)
kind of skimmed over that you want to touch on or that we’ve missed out on? That’s a great question. Should have started with that one. You know,

Psilo Toad (01:10:07.737)
Gosh. Well, I’ll say that the diet was a really unique experience beyond just the ayahuasca ceremonies. I’ve drank ayahuasca a number of times. To do it, you got the spiritual and the emotional healing, especially around the ayahuasca ceremonies, but these other plant medicines that we were taking really did kind of a lot of body and brain healing, kind like we were talking about the Ayahuasca game.

Psilo Toad (01:10:36.547)
That combination there together was amazingly powerful and I had never done that before. And so that was a big lesson to get the whole holistic approach in the healing, not just on the, like I said, on the…

Psilo Toad (01:10:54.127)
emotional and spiritual side, to combine it with these other plant medicines. So that you came out of there and you had worked on your trauma, processed your trauma, but your overall bodily systems were in a better state to be able to support that new person that you are. I think that we’ll see more of these kind of complete healing modalities where you’re doing the…

Psilo Toad (01:11:20.217)
pre-work, you’re doing the post-integration work, you’re combining different medicines together like they do Crossroads with the Ibogaine and the Toad Venom. so, yeah, I think that’s where we are now, just figuring out and testing these different models.

Psilo Toad (01:11:37.551)
Jay, do you have any questions in all of this? An answer, look at Mitch to answer. what’s the, the devil’s advocate, these are powerful medicines, these are powerful experiences. We shouldn’t allow people to take these freely and openly. What would you say against that?

Psilo Toad (01:12:05.903)
Yeah, I’d say first that these medicines are not for everybody. And for sure, if you’re a sociopath or a psychopath or a schizophrenic or have severe mental illness, they can definitely be contraindicated for those people. to me, it’s been really beautiful is that if you’re, to me, you have to be called to the medicine. And so that takes any kind of proselytization or anything away from my perspective on it. And…

Psilo Toad (01:12:33.801)
I think you have to be doing the work. That’s the key for the people that I brought is that they’re already doing the work on their own healing and when you combine that with the medicine and in a safe environment and a positive environment with people who are skilled at using it, it’s super powerful work and super powerful results but I think it’s very safe and that’s the military model right there. I kind of told people it’s like this is Ayahuasca Jump School. The shamans are basically the jump masters.

Psilo Toad (01:13:03.321)
Basically, we’re do something that could otherwise be very dangerous. It has a lot of risk and people could get hurt from it and bad things could happen. if we trust them and do what they tell us to do and do it correctly, we’ll get positive results. It could be hard, it could be difficult, but there won’t be any, no one will get left behind. And that’s exactly what happened. And so I think that, you know.

Psilo Toad (01:13:31.119)
You have to have a model that people can trust and the key thing for veterans in there is having other veterans that have gone before because they feel betrayed by their government, by their people, all that. That’s the sort of key ingredient you have to add in with veterans is this trust of other veterans who have been there who know their perspective. And that with the sort of ayahuasca jump masters or any other kind of plant medicines.

Psilo Toad (01:13:59.407)
seems to be the key. The indigenous experts along with the veteran connection is I think the template going forward. Well, that gets back to that camaraderie I was asking about earlier, you know, where you have to have your brothers around you, which you get broken down. Yeah. say, you know, I think same sort of thing now, right? mean, you just come back in and do these plain medicines. You need that connection there and trust of the people that have gone through it.

Psilo Toad (01:14:25.113)
Yeah, that’s a great point. This is like the new basic training, right? This is the basic training to go from you were in the military, now it’s the re-entry training to reintegrate yourself as, you know, not being a soldier but not fighting in war anymore, know, fighting for the greater good in society. yeah, there’s no current program to be able to do that and so you need…

Psilo Toad (01:14:52.015)
these powerful medicines along with that sort of support group of people going through with you can trust and that understand your experience and when you’re done with it or form your support group. And yeah, because without that I think that you could lose a good portion of not all of the work if you don’t have that reintegration pathway to make it stick.

Psilo Toad (01:15:17.775)
One last question, because we’re talking about the vets and the military, just like the LSD experiments with the military early on, do you think that the military and the government establishment, whatever you want to call it, is afraid of these plant medicines and afraid of the message and the understandings that are brought with that consciousness or the knowledge from psychedelics?

Psilo Toad (01:15:46.157)
because it’s very, in a way, I don’t think you could be completely pro-war after you take psychedelics. So do you think that the establishment of the military is afraid of these kind of plant medicines and that consciousness and that knowledge that’s gained from taking them? Question. Yeah, that’s a great question. think the government and the military, they are afraid of people

Psilo Toad (01:16:16.483)
taking any these kind of plant medicines and realizing that this whole war machine is a is a big folly and it’s not sustainable but i think today it’s a the bigger issue is that you’ve created this huge war machine sent all these people through it and more people you know died from suicide in combat in iraq and afghanistan and i think

Psilo Toad (01:16:42.957)
That fear may be, it’s real and it exists in the background, but I think it’s a greater fear, and almost like public relations disaster, if they don’t find a way to allow these people to reintegrate, there won’t be any military to send any other place, because it’ll be broken, and you won’t be able to…

Psilo Toad (01:17:06.669)
keep it together or get new people in it. So think that’s actually a bigger fear. And there’s this sort of deal with both where they know that.

Psilo Toad (01:17:14.841)
there’s a fear of greater acceptance of these things, some people will not want to fight to begin with, or who are fighting will say, I’m going to opt out, but I think it’s a bigger issue that there won’t be any military to have fight at all if we don’t heal these people that haven’t been reintegrated.

Psilo Toad (01:17:39.983)
That’s a question. Yeah, that’s a great question. Anything else? No, mean, just, know, maybe we could talk about what, well…

Psilo Toad (01:17:53.263)
Yeah, well, something I’d like to see from this as well is we’re gonna be sending some more veterans to crossroads to go through the ibogaine and the toad venom treatment, but also that we’re gonna capture this so that people can see this. And we’re gonna try to do this with some other plant medicines as well, whether that’s peyote or mushrooms. And I think…

Psilo Toad (01:18:20.589)
Veterans are really well situated besides getting the healing that they need to reintegrate from this war trauma to show the rest of society how these other plants used in those indigenous contexts with bringing this sort of military connection to this really can help heal humanity, not just veterans. And you see that beyond just the United States?

Psilo Toad (01:18:50.275)
Yeah, mean, this is crazy thing where I’ve run into.

Psilo Toad (01:18:54.191)
It’s been happening in the past two years where everyone is reading off this songbook, like this hymnal, where they have this vision of these psychedelic plant medicine healing retreat centers around the world. And it’s the craziest thing. I’ll meet somebody and they’ll spawn this thing out and just spontaneously, like, you know, they didn’t go on some website or read some book. It’s just, it’s this vision that’s occurred to them. And yeah, I see that’s something that the veterans that I…

Psilo Toad (01:19:23.329)
supported their healing want to do the same thing is how do we build these retreat centers where