[00:00:01] Luke: Man, looking at the world today, a lot of people are losing their goddamn minds. Where do you see mental health in the US right now, and where do you see it going?

[00:00:15] Cameron: Dude, first of all, it's great to be here again. This is--

[00:00:19] Luke: Great to have you back again.

[00:00:19] Cameron: This is one of my favorite places to come for sure. These conversations always go to some awesome places. So we can go places actually that we can't go on other podcasts. So I always appreciate that about you, for sure.

[00:00:29] Luke: I do too.

[00:00:31] Cameron: Okay. So state of mental health, mental and emotional framework. I'm actually really optimistic as to where we're at right now. I always kick it off with this. This is the best way to characterize or describe it. The Chinese, having such a long lineage in spirituality and herbal medicine and things obviously much older than what we have in the Western world, they have a symbol that means both danger and opportunity, or risk and opportunity, rather. It can mean either one.

[00:01:08] But I think that's where we're at right now. Whether you call it a singularity, whether you call it the great quickening, whether you call it an evolution in human consciousness, or just the natural progression of an intelligent species with a developed prefrontal cortex that can manipulate the environment that's created a level of temporary nature divorcement syndrome leading to a lot of ailments that we now have to reconnect with if we're going to survive the mother intelligence that we sprang out of, we're at that place, I think, right now where we've developed to a degree that we have a type of analytical intelligence that's given us tremendous power, and that power is bi directional.

[00:01:53] That power that we have, it's conscious entities, in my opinion, gives us the power of a scalpel, like a surgeon's scalpel. It can be used surgically if directed and concentrated correctly with intention to save someone's life. You can also easily kill somebody with it. Or a hammer. You can whack yourself over the head with it. You can build a house with it, but it takes a discipline and understanding as to what that tool is for it to be properly directed and grounded out with intention to where you can actually bring order out of the chaos default mode of reality.

[00:02:31] Because in this domain of reality, the default mode is chaos, it's entropy. If you do nothing, your life doesn't get more orderly and more synchronistic and more harmonious. It falls apart. If you don't believe that, then just stop cleaning your house, stop going to work, and see if things get more orderly and more chaotic.

[00:02:51] So there is really no standing still, obviously, in order to bring order into the chaotic baseline that is in this realm. Obviously, you have to dedicate yourself to a level of insight, development, personal responsibility, and be dedicated to the things that actually really bring meaning, and true human happiness, not just excitement or pleasure, and that is growing, progressing, progress, and contribution.

[00:03:22] Everything in the world, everything in the universe either grows or dies. If you're not growing, you're dying. As Tony Robbins would say, if your business isn't growing, it's dying. If your relationship isn't growing, it's dying. And everything in the universe also, if it doesn't eventually contribute to the collective whole in the process of life than it's selected for, and it dies as well, too.

[00:03:45] All that being said, it's an interesting thought process, but I think we're at this really unique place in time right now where we have tremendous danger, because we have the ability to kill ourselves in like a thousand different ways. But also, big time opportunity.

[00:04:04] And I think just like some of the recent events, we're just coming off of this election, and regardless of being stuck at the conscious level of politics and all that kind of thing, I think what is happening and what is starting to surface brings a level of optimism to me where you're starting to see higher levels of awareness and consciousness break through the cracks of what was a lower level, lower conscious.

[00:04:34] We were stuck in a previous level of consciousness, and the structures that housed and sustained that system were an outdated system, and there was this tug of war that's been going on and it's been creating this de-evolution or this degeneration of a growing number of people as more of this starts to come to a head.

[00:04:59] But one of my favorite quotes ever probably, I believe it was an Einstein quote, you can't solve problems with the same level of consciousness that created them, or the same mentality that created them. In other words, you can't continue to address a problem on the symptomatic level, just bringing the exact same mentality, the exact same mode of thinking, the same way that you relate to life, the environment, people around you, all of that and basically try to apply an outdated system, way of thinking to an existing framework to create change.

[00:05:34] You have to bring in a new mentality. So I'm really, really excited with what's going on with this. There are some breakthroughs here and there. I believe we still have a very long road ahead us as a species, and I think we'll have a lot of different challenges, but you are seeing an increase in awareness and things that actually matter. This increase in awareness of our health, our mental health, our physical bodies, how we relate to the environment around us, what is health both physically, mentally, emotionally, and we're starting to see the value of it because it's starting to break down and that's that duality thing.

[00:06:15] You go so far into the darkness and you start to realize the significance of the light, disease, health, truth, illusion, any of those areas. I think that right now, we're focusing on mental health, but really it's all one thing. But we definitely are in the midst of a massive epidemic of mental health.

[00:06:36] And even though I think that things are starting to expand and create opportunity for transformation and for us to get this under control so that we don't all go completely insane and collapse and end up on a billion medications that just make us a fraction of a human being, until we get various diseases and die from a number of different things, right now, just for example, over 100 and-- I believe it's 150,000 people a year alone just in the US die from the expected side effects of pharmaceuticals. That doesn't count abuses or misuses. That's drugs that are taken as prescribed.

[00:07:15] The number is probably, I believe, up in the millions if you're talking about abuses and misuses and everything together, which is really a byproduct of, you've got 40 million people in the US alone, each year that suffer from what would be considered generalized anxiety. That's a huge number. It's a really, really, really big number. And then you could go down the line.

[00:07:37] One in five people have a mental illness in this country that are actually diagnosable. That are diagnosable. Because it's a spectrum. You have people with low grade mental illnesses and imbalances and isolation syndromes and stuff like that that just are living at a suboptimal state of mind and state of existence that you would bring the number far above that. So I think depression now is the leading cause of disability worldwide as well too.

[00:08:07] You still have suicide rates are through the roof and all this stuff. And so you don't have to turn to your right or turn to your left or throw a stone without being able to hit someone who is either directly dealing with some level of mental illness or knows has been touched by the ramifications of mental illness. Like addiction, for example, is just a byproduct.

[00:08:29] Addiction is not a problem. Addiction is a response to a problem. Addiction and the epidemic of addiction that exists as a byproduct of the epidemic of mental illness is an individual's attempt to solve a problem, as Dr. Gabor Maté would put it elegantly, amazingly. So it really is a response to pain. It's a response to trauma, which comes, I believe, from a disconnection from self. And I think for people to understand this, one of my favorite concepts on-- because I actually believe too the whole Einstein quote, you can't solve problems with the same level of consciousness that created them.

[00:09:10] And there was another quote from the late, great Kobe Bryant, used to say that his trainer, Tim Grover, who's wrote a couple of famous books, one called Relentless, one other called, I think, Winning. But they both had this quote where they talk about whenever you fall, a lot of people would say, get up immediately. If you fall, if you fail.

[00:09:31] And they would say, well, no, stay down and figure out why you fail first. Because if you just get right back up, you're going to bring the same mentality, same level of consciousness, and you're going to perpetually fail. So I actually think it's really important to look at, okay, if we have to bring a new mentality into this culture, into our lives, into our domain, I think a lot of people are starting to wake up to understanding that you have to-- the way that we look at the world and the way that we relate to it is driving this trajectory towards pathology, collectively, as a species.

[00:10:08] So what I really think of it, one of my core philosophies that I live by that differentiates health from disease that's gotten me out of-- on past episodes, we've talked about how dark and horrific my personal disease process was, and I only talk about that not so people can know what I've been through, but so people can see what's possible for them.

[00:10:28] But this core philosophy is really the one that allowed me to get from sick and absolutely on death's door and suffering and being complete shell of a human being and being totally collapsed mentally and emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, to being the person that's right here today, that has the opportunities that I have today, that has the amazing network of people that I have and great friends and family and health and thriving and all that stuff.

[00:10:56] It's a completely different reality. And my base core philosophy, what I'm getting at that I think personally has driven us from where we were in a state of relative equilibrium back 200,000 years ago, and in that time period, we were hunter-gatherers and so on, to where we are today. Not that there weren't issues back whenever we were wild humans, but we didn't have the mental and psychological pathologies as far as we can tell in most cases. The types of pathologies that we have now.

[00:11:31] We're dependent on these exogenous medications, these molecules to make it through the day. We were more robust. We were more resilient. And I actually do believe that human beings are resilient by nature. I think that we create degrees of separation between us and our nature that start to decimate and that start to dilute and that start to dematerialize our resilience because we get separated from ourselves.

[00:11:58] When we talk about getting separated from ourselves, what I really mean is we're separated from nature, but whatever-- when I say nature, I really mean the foundational collective intelligence that's the underpinning of the entire process of life. You can use language and you can slap any number of different terms on it. You can call it guy. You can call it God. You can call it source. You can call it universe.

[00:12:25] From my perspective, it doesn't so much matter what we call it. To me personally, it matters that we call it, instead of what we call it kind of thing. But it's undeniable. We're at this period of time right now where we can't even seriously with a straight face, deny its existence because we're sentient beings and we're living here.

[00:12:46] If you took out a blade right now and cut my arm open, what would happen? It would start to seal up. It would heal on its own. And am I doing that? No. It just happens. We default to a place of health, and there's an intelligence that is constantly creating, recreating, and sustaining the process of life for us as a collective organism. And we're just individual units of that organism.

[00:13:10] The same way that neurons are individual units suspended in a human body, that this planet is a body as well too-- macrocosm, microcosm. So that intelligence, that baseline intelligence, let's just call it nature. It's responsible. It makes the grass grow without us doing anything. It makes the trees grow.

[00:13:31] It makes things go into a somewhat state of evolving balance and harmony and adaptation, and it's the process of life that's unfolding itself. It's like your heart beats on its own. We're not doing anything to make our heart beat. I don't have to sit there and tell it to do so. I've got a hole in my face that I just put living things in the environment in, and then all of a sudden, it just rebuilds and maintains my body, and I don't have to do anything.

[00:13:57] And these are things that we don't think about, but it comes from somewhere and it's the intelligence. So obviously, in the Christian religion, we call it God. In other religions we call it different things. This whole idea of nature divorcement syndrome is what I'm getting at.

[00:14:15] So a lot of people have probably either used some term like that or a term like it, but I actually believe that it is the fundamental pathology or syndrome that drives all of this imbalance, disequilibrium, illness, degeneration, and eventually death. Now, it plays out in a million different ways, but basically, whenever we start to create degrees of separation from us and our source that has created and sustained-- Alan Watts used to have this saying.

[00:14:46] He used to laugh when people would say, I came into the world. It's like, no, you came out of it. That's why we call it Mother Earth. You know what I mean? We come out like fruit on a tree, and we're part of this process, and we start to create these degrees of separation as we evolve and start to create-- we start to develop this level of egoic consciousness that makes us believe that we're just this individual.

[00:15:11] That's like a neuron or a cell in the body losing full communication, adaptation, ability to the clusters of cells around it and the inability to be able to jack into that base intelligence that is the thing that they're all resonating in and knowing what each other needs. And once that happens, I call that going rogue if you're a cell. And that's the path to cell senescence.

[00:15:34] And the path to cell senescence can only do two things. It can just sit there and rot and take up space and cause disease in the body, or it can start secreting compounds that then turn other cells rogue. And basically, it's a viral type of process. We call that cancer eventually. And then it grows.

[00:15:52] The same thing happens to humans. When we get in this lower vibrational state of being where we lose the conscious connection to our source intelligence that sustains us, call it what you will, degrees of that happening, we lose it consciously. We lose it because we're actually putting ourselves in artificial environments that we've created dead material that's not living anymore, encased ourselves in it, which there's application to that, and there's reason for that.

[00:16:21] But if we don't have those energies still in our life and have those practices that reintegrate us with that source process that sustains us, whether it be the energy of grounding outside or living food that we take into our bodies or sunlight or water, any of those elements-- those are all part of that intelligence-- if we do that, we start to actually dissipate our levels of that creative process that's actually taking place in our bodies and in our minds.

[00:16:46] And that can manifest in the case like we're talking about with mental health. We know this. There's tons of studies, and there's even new addiction treatment centers just dedicated to nature reintegration, just putting people in nature. And it's like, hey, this definitely starts to help, just absorbing those energies. It's a complicated process because you have to reintegrate yourself with thought processes and the type of community and connection that you'd get with a tribe of people that you'd have naturally as well too and so on and so forth.

[00:17:17] But that's basically what we're seeing in this whole world of biohacking. All we're doing, as Dave Asprey would say, he coined the term, change the environment in and around you to get control of your biology from more of a scientific standpoint. But just from a practical standpoint, what we're doing is we're really taking elements of this intelligence and we're concentrating them and directing them like that scalpel, and we're directing them to get more of a therapeutic effect to counteract something, a degree of separation that's significant enough that's brought us so far off balance.

[00:17:51] It's a leverage tool. So the best technologies that we use, whether it be the super foods, whether it be the tech devices, any of those things, these are all things that don't contradict or undermine that base intelligence of the body. In other words, they don't contradict or undermine our nature.

[00:18:12] They either feed or amplify the intelligence at its base so that it can open up its channels and flourish and open up that flow of energy and life back into you. So like what we're doing here with kava, we're facilitating something that in its base form still contains all of that intelligence.

[00:18:31] And the more that we process it, the more that we extract it or dry it or isolate compounds from it, it loses that intelligence and becomes less biologically compatible. So we can apply that nature divorcement syndrome to producing products. And that's a good proxy of what product is going to work better than others.

[00:18:48] The product that has the most intelligence in it realigns you more with nature, bringing more health. There's a time and a place for synthetic substances. The main time and place for synthetic substances-- there's time and place for an antibiotic, for example.

[00:19:05] There's time and a place for general anesthesia during a surgery. I think this whole thing with make America healthy again and Calley and Casey Means going around and doing their tour and all the amazing work that they're doing, they do a great job pointing this process in our history out that allopathic medicine as we have it today was really designed what came out of Rockefeller medicine. And that's a whole other thing.

[00:19:34] I'm sure you've talked about it many times. But basically, you've got synthetic molecules and synthetic interventions that were very, very useful and actually had a few breakthroughs at a time when acute emergency illnesses were the main threat, before we were so far divorced from our natural environments with all of these chronic diseases.

[00:19:55] And those interventions actually are good leverage tools to knock you back from dying so that you can then bring in things that are integrated with nature that can actually sustain you chronically. When it comes to chronic disease or chronic accumulative building of health, nature reintegration strategies.

[00:20:16] And the higher they are in the hierarchy, in other words, the closer they are, the more intelligence that they have infused into them, the more therapeutic they're going to be, and the more they're going to bring you long term, sustainable, permanent results, because they realign you with what you actually are at your base. They realign you with your home, your intelligence.

[00:20:35] And again, when you talk about life or anything that heals-- compounds, superfoods, biohacking techniques, anything like that, none of it's healing. It's just facilitating that reconnection to the intelligence to different degrees. All we're doing is removing interference and we're amplifying the body's natural intelligence, and it heals. So you could say God heals. It's the same thing, in my view. You could say the universe heals.

[00:21:01] But that's really what we're doing. And I guess answer to your first question, long roundabout way of saying, I guess. But I'm really optimistic on where we're at right now because we have this crazy, amazing opportunity, even though we're in a war zone. There's so much truth in some of the stories that have manifests in movies and music and in books that have resonated with the public that just won't go away.

[00:21:31] As humans, we live by the design of stories. Everything's storytelling. Right now we're telling story to some degree. Your name is Luke Storey. One of my favorite depictions is a story that won't go away. It's a pop culture story, is like, George Lucas, Star Wars. The reason why those movies won't go away is not because of special effects. There's tons of movies with special effects that are garbage. We see those just coming out all the time now.

[00:22:05] It's because he consulted Joseph Campbell, who drew from Carl Jung, who they had these ancient storytelling, timeless truths embedded in fiction of this duality, light, darkness, the seductive nature of the dark side, and coming back to the intelligence, which is light. And the force is the collective qi. It's the prana. It's the energy that you can tap into.

[00:22:27] And that's your real power, which is always the truth, which will eventually bring light to the darkness, even if the darkness becomes tyrannical and takes over, it's a beautiful, beautiful story. But I say that because I think that right now it's like, you can see patterns because everything's pattern recognition when we play out in reality. That's why you can mimic patterns.

[00:22:48] And timeless stories that contain truth manifest themselves in our world as well too because they tap into something that isn't an actual pattern. And I really think right now we're at a point where we probably are close. It's like the first Star Wars movie. We just blew up the Death Star. But it's like, then what happened? The empire strikes back. You know what I mean?

[00:23:11] I still think that we're in for it big time. This is getting started kind of thing, or it's been started, but it's so amazing and it's so encouraging to me just to watch the human spirit just start to emerge and break through the cracks in all of these ways. And things aren't so black and white. Each one of us contains light and darkness. We all have the ability to go evil.

[00:23:44] It's like Peterson would say. When you read history, hardly anyone reads it as a perpetrator, but you could have been that Nazi guard in Auschwitz. With the right conditioning and with the right circumstance, any of us could. And it's like, you don't feed that side of yourself, and you become more conscious, and you don't have to push the bad away over time.

[00:24:03] You consciously get drawn more towards the light. But things aren't so black and white. It's like you look at the landscape right now and it's not just the bad guys and the good guys. Like, this person is a good guy. This person is a bad guy.

[00:24:19] I think that there's some people that are slowly awakening to certain things and they still have their weaknesses in certain areas. And then some people that are completely compressed and completely in this choked off state of very low consciousness and the state of fear and dependency outside themselves and so on.

[00:24:39] But anyways, I'm really optimistic about it because of what's happening from a-- well, we have the opportunity to get done from a legislative standpoint. We have the opportunity to get done just with raising awareness and bringing people into a new mentality that they interface with health in a different way.

[00:24:55] And that's why we see this massive expansion. Here's a few more statistics. In the last 15 years, there's been a 10% global reduction in alcohol sales, which is a huge number. That's a huge number. And the rate at which it's decreasing, it's accelerating. And that's just one little proxy. But I think alcohol consumption is a decent proxy for consciousness as far as developed humans because, really, when you look at it-- I make the case for this all the time, even though I make it very clear I'm not anti alcohol.

[00:25:26] I'm really not anti anything. I'm just pro information and people knowing the pros and cons of the tools that they're using and the things that they're doing. But whenever you look at, say, alcohol as a tool, it's really, really not an efficient one at all. It's not efficient.

[00:25:45] And it really doesn't yield net positive outcome for most people, even though it gives you the feeling that it does in the moment, because there's a pleasure response that's associated with it. When you look at the productivity that it yields or the reduction in productivity, what it does to your consciousness, what it does to your biology, it's not a positive contributor, and it is a neurotoxin and a mitochondrial poison. It's not great in most categories.

[00:26:13] Does that mean that you should never have it? Well, that's up to the person consuming it, but it is really interesting to just see, even in the 18 to 24-year-old demographic, we're seeing a massive reduction in alcohol use, which that's the prime use of frat college, like this stuff that we all grew up with, where it's a given. It was a rite of passage.

[00:26:34] You got to be 18. You're already. It's where can I drink every Friday. It's how we connect with people, is like a ritual of some kind. That's breaking down among many other things. Our addiction to processed food, to GMO food, to pharmaceutical drugs. It's starting to become more seen.

[00:26:58] So even though we are in the midst of epidemic, it's the worst that it's ever been. We have more information. We have more conversations like this. We have more companies like ours that are dedicated to being a part of that solution and bringing in not just a product, but the education and a symbolism and a shift in mentality that people can take something and hold something like this can and be like, a lot of what I just described.

[00:27:23] Not that anyone would ever talk about all of those things, but it's like they feel that this is a shift in mentality. I'm doing something to build myself instead of detract from myself. And I'll share it. I'll share that story with other people. And it's like this thing that you can hold and drink is one of many things that you can do.

[00:27:39] Switching out some alcohol or whatever for taking this, something that expands your awareness and feeds your brain, that also gets you into that calm, connected state that we're really seeking. Because that's the promise that alcohol makes that doesn't actually deliver on even fully, but a lot of times not hardly at all.

[00:27:59] It promises all of these things, but it really makes you less conscious. And you connect with people, but the more you drink, the more animalistic you are, the less genuine your conversations tend to get. They tend to become more just recreational, and you end up in the situation where you have all these friends and they're really just recreational acquaintances in many cases, if they're your drinking buddies.

[00:28:22] If you have to drink with someone or a group of people for those people to seem interesting to you, it may be something that you might want to look at. You know what I mean?

[00:28:32] Luke: It's a funny way to put it.

[00:28:36] Cameron: I was watching somebody. I think it was Chris, maybe Chris Williamson. He was doing some interview because he's been talking about this a lot because he went sober and whatnot. And Andrew Huberman's talked about it quite a bit.

[00:28:48] He did a whole episode on alcohol. And so a lot of these people are going sober and being vocal about it and really credible, like an efficiency standpoint. I think one of those guys, he was on Piers Morgan's show or something and Piers was like, "But isn't life pretty boring to do that?"

[00:29:05] Because isn't there just a huge downside to this? Life's just not interesting and you don't have a social life and all this stuff. And he's like, "That's making the assumption that most people that drink a lot are interesting, and that hasn't been my experience at all."

[00:29:18] And to me, it all depends on what you're looking for in people. But in my experience, it's not even like as you get into some of this stuff and you really start to focus on taking care of yourself and really putting your priorities into like growth and contribution to things that make us happy and you're just on a growth trajectory as a human, even if you're not doing anything crazy or building some massive business or doing things with finances or money or doing something that's like extravagant, like you see people on social media doing, just in your own life, if you're progressing and you're contributing and you're taking care of yourself and you know the value of that, a lot of these things, these old habits that were part of this old collective mentality just start to fall away.

[00:30:07] I actually don't believe in pushing things away. I don't think it works. It's part of what I think is somewhat faulty in the AA model. I think that there's some good elements to it for sure, taking responsibility and such, but I just think that whenever you say, I want this, but I can't have it, that's a mentality. Versus I could have this, but I don't want it because I found something better.

[00:30:31] I found an adventure in my life. I've created an adventure in my life that has given me a sense of purpose and meaning and, as Jordan Peterson would say, there's no difference between the path of maximal responsibility and your wildest adventure. Those are the same thing.

[00:30:51] Read any story. What's the hero's journey? The hero, it's like Luke Skywalker on a farm, gets thrown into this massive, epic adventure, where he has to become a Jedi and save the galaxy, whatnot. That's the path of maximal responsibility.

[00:31:08] That's a difficult path. But that's the adventure, and that's where you find the meaning in your life, is doing that. You know what I mean? And I think so many people, most of what addiction is, is this disconnection from our real nature, which leads us to this imbalance of what the meaning in life actually is derived from.

[00:31:27] And what you end up with is a purpose and meaning deficiency. And that's why you have so many people that are in a perpetual state of escapism, entertaining themselves to death. There's that saying most men or people live lives of quiet desperation where you're working a job that you don't really like.

[00:31:50] You're just contributing to something that you don't really necessarily are passionate about or believe in. You feel like you're a number. You feel like you don't have any real significance. You're just part of some cog in some machine. Then you have an outlet to feel that sense of adventure because we all have a drive for it.

[00:32:04] So then on the weekends you get together with your buddies and you just drink and you just bathe yourselves in football or something where you're living vicariously through somebody else's adventure, through some level of escapism. So you're drowning yourself in something that mimics that dopamine that you would get if you were actually on your own adventure and you're watching someone else having their adventure.

[00:32:29] Whether you're someone who's a gamer in their parents basement or something. And I'm not denigrating anyone who likes video games or football. Those things are actually a lot of fun. But I'm saying if the kind of person or the kind of situation where someone is escaped and fully immersed in that as a crutch or a mode of being right where it's that level, it's like that's taking up a large point of the life.

[00:32:55] In other words, those things, like the guy that's sitting and playing the computer game, whatever it is, World of Warcraft, whatever they're playing, whatever the kids are playing these days, where they're out and slaying dragons, what they're doing is they've signed up and jumped aboard a simulator that's giving them the hit and the mode of being of them on an actual adventure, which is what they're actually-- so they're simulating taking on a heroic journey of responsibility that actually creates meaning, except for you're just in the simulator.

[00:33:30] You're the astronaut that never leaves the simulator and doesn't actually go to the moon. And it's a sad thing. It's a really sad thing when somebody lives their life in the simulator, because they're not actually getting the meaning, because they're not actually growing, and they're not contributing anything. They're just doping themselves up in the simulation, the escapist simulation feeling that they are.

[00:33:54] Luke: So you and I, that might have been the most impactful and deep first answer in eight and a half years of the show. There was a few points where I'm like, I feel like I should be interrupting at some point here, but this is good, so I'm just going to keep listening. Dude, that's really--

[00:34:13] Cameron: We went on for a little too long, I guess, but yeah.

[00:34:16] Luke: I'm like, okay, where are the points I could tease a thread out of there? There are many. A couple of things that really stood out is the overarching theme, these are the best of times and these are the worst times, going back to that duality that you mentioned.

[00:34:34] Cameron: To [Inaudible] two cities.

[00:34:35] Luke: Yeah, it's incredible. You can look at the world from one lens right now and be like, "Oh my God, it's so hopeful. So many people are waking up." And you can look at it from the other side and say, wow, so many people are still asleep and the Death Star is now getting its tentacles out and wanting to rest every last bit of freedom that we were creating for themselves and so on. But I think it really is up to perception.

[00:35:01] That's one thing I noticed in this last selection, was I and even Alyson noticed, without any horse in the race, just observing, I'm not someone who's politically active or even knowledgeable, but there was a lightness after that, a certain weight had lifted. And I think it's just because a lot of people's perception changed even though nothing actually changed yet.

[00:35:31] I was like, "Nothing even actually happened." During the plandemic, I noticed myself being more contracted and just, I don't know, having this internal anxiety. And I realized about a year into it that if I had no access to the media, social media, alternative media, whatever, if I was in a cabin somewhere, nothing objective had changed in my life whatsoever.

[00:35:57] The only thing that objectively changed is there were a few occasions on which I got on an airplane or walked into a store and had someone yell at me and tell me I needed to put this plastic thing on my face. Those were the only provable differences. And that was a great lesson for me, like, "Oh, wow. I'm all worked up about this."

[00:36:18] And granted, a lot of people's lives were devastated. I'm fortunate that I wasn't hurt by any of the medications personally, and I didn't lose my livelihood and so on. So obviously, a lot of people couldn't say that, but just happens to be my life was situated where there weren't really objective changes.

[00:36:38] And I've noticed the same thing right now. Of course, there are a lot of people that are very scared and disappointed. And then there's more people, obviously, that are stoked because that's how selections work supposedly. So that's really interesting to me. And I like to just err on the side of these are the best of times. At least we can say this: they are unprecedented.

[00:37:00] And then there was another thing, talking about the empirical evidence of a creator or of some force, some energy that we could just call nature that's doing things for us without us having to ask or earn it. And the one that always stands out to me in terms of just empirical evidence that there is a force of good and a force of healing in nature, that is going to sleep every night.

[00:37:31] And this is just something that's so personal to me, because surrender has been one f my most powerful spiritual tools. And I still have a will. There's things I want. I can still get control in. It's like the will isn't something in my experience that you can just turn over and then it's in God's hands forever. Because you still have that human part of you that's like, ah, I got this part.

[00:37:52] Cameron: Survival and insecurity.

[00:37:53] Luke: Yeah. But it's like anytime I've had trouble with surrender, I don't even realize I'm doing it every night. I'm literally turning my very life over to this creator every single time I close my eyes and willingly go to sleep. There's something that's doing the life thing for me while I'm laying there unconscious, going into these other realms.

[00:38:17] I'm not even in this reality, any of us, not even asleep. You're in a dream. The dream is as real as this dream. And in that dream world, which is totally real when you're in it, there's someone else running the whole thing. And then we open our eyes and we're like, "Yeah, I did that." No, I didn't do anything.

[00:38:34] So yeah, there's a lot of beautiful points you made in there. But I want to go back to a part where we were talking about, and we weren't there a couple hundred thousand years ago, but you can generally see the trends through agricultural revolution, the formation of the city state, kings and queens emerging, rulers, a ruling class, whereas when we were hunter-gatherer people, there were probably micro rulers perhaps.

[00:39:04] But when we started growing food and staying in one place, then we needed some sort of army to defend those resources. Now that we're not moving around, we can collect stuff. We start growing food. The food gets shittier. We're eating less wild food. We're disconnecting from nature over thousands of years. Leading us to where we are with this general neurosis of the population. But if we go back even a few thousand years, we can see that the cultures that were able to adapt and evolve before pharmaceuticals were using plant medicines.

[00:39:49] And you and I have got a plant medicine right here. It's called kava. Thanks to you. Which is one of my favorite and safest and just awesome plant medicines. And we can get into that. But being born in 1970, as I was, and having the life that I had, it was necessary for me to completely check out with drugs and alcohol.

[00:40:10] And I love the way you frame the addiction as a solution to a problem. To the person who has it, it seems like that's the problem. That's what I used to believe. And then got sober and realized like, wow, I have more problems now than I ever have because I feel everything.

[00:40:27] But it's like there were these underlying traumas, PTSD, that were unhealed through a bunch of drugs and alcohol at that. Then there's these mental health challenges and stuff that I experienced, and those were compounded by more issues with addiction. And I get sober and have nothing to work with until many, many years later, I discover things like kava and some other really beautiful, non-addictive safe plant medicines that have completely revolutionized my life.

[00:41:01] And I know we share a lot in common in terms our issues with addiction in the past and the mental health issues and things like that. So there's a lot of different medicines we could talk about, and a lot of them are valuable. But I think one thing that I always like talking to you about is obviously kava. You found your thing. You found your mission.

[00:41:23] But take us back for the people that didn't hear your prior episodes here. What role specifically did kava or any other plant medicines have in restoring your faculties, your mental health, your emotional wellbeing, and your ability to live without having to resort to other tools like alcohol or illicit drugs that have side effects, to say the least?

[00:41:51] Cameron: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. It was probably twofold. It wasn't just one single event with one single compound. But the ones that probably gave me the biggest breakthroughs or contributed the greatest to my just personal development, personal evolution, my healing process and whatnot, that acted as interventionists big time, it was the psychedelic medicines first.

[00:42:22] And I would actually put kava in that category in an interesting way, but it's in its own subcategory where it is a psychedelic substance, but it's a sober psychedelic substance in the sense that it doesn't take you into this altered, highly visual state.

[00:42:37] It gives you this background minded degration, almost like you get from microdosing. Your tryptamine based classic psychedelics like psilocybin, LSD, DMT, ayahuasca, Bufo, all those things. But it has a level of that mind integration that allows you to zoom out and put all the aspects of your mental and emotional framework on the table and you can see all of them as a picture instead of being zoomed in on your immediate reactionary day-to-day experience that comes to your day-to-day reactive stress induced consciousness.

[00:43:10] So that'd be like looking at a pixel, being zoomed in in a pixel on a screen. You can't see the whole picture. You can't see how it connects to all the other pixels to make the big picture. Therefore, it's hard to specify a path forward and to understand your place in time and space, to understand your place in the world, to understand how your decisions affect three steps down the line or affect all the other people around you.

[00:43:34] You just can't see the macro because the survival state, the fight or flight state that most of us are stuck in from being pushed into this rat race, egoic mentality that's been fueled and hyper developed in Western culture because of where we placed our values and our degrees of separation from nature and going back to reset us and to reintegrate us with that big picture vision-- there's an analogy. I think a few people have used it, but I really like it.

[00:44:06] It's like an astronaut who's walking on the moon and all he has in front of him are his five senses to say like, "Okay, there's this environment. I'm exploring it. I've never been here before." That's like you in average, day-to-day navigating the world.

[00:44:22] Luke: I don't think anyone's ever been to the moon, by the way. No one's ever been there before.

[00:44:27] Cameron: If someone had.

[00:44:28] Luke: Sorry, I couldn't resist. Listeners would give me shit if I didn't call that out.

[00:44:32] Cameron: I was thinking that too.

Because I talk shit about the moon landings all the time.

[00:44:35] Cameron: Say the moon or let's say Mars. Let's say any other world.

[00:44:38] Luke: No, go on.

[00:44:39] Cameron: And let's say all that you have that's giving you direction on where you're at in time and space as far as the big picture of you just not being in this cold, dark, desolate location you've ever seen before and trying to figure it out in the moment, like where's this green of sand going to lead to that one or what's that ravine over there, whatever it is, is your connection to mission control.

[00:45:00] They're the ones that have all the mathematics in front of them. They're the ones that can tell you, okay, this and that. And they have the big picture. They're zoomed out. They give you the big picture perspective. It's in your ear. And every once in a while when you get lost in what's right in front of you, you refer back to mission control to get the big picture.

[00:45:14] And that's what psychoactive medicines do to humans. That's the opportunity that's opened up in my view, one of the many things that happens. But that's what they tend to do, is just that, creating an opportunity for you to see the big picture and to reconnect with that macro intelligence of the whole body organism using the analogy from earlier, instead of just the micro intelligence of the single cell.

[00:45:40] Because the single cell, if you lose connection to the macro intelligence into the whole system, if you're stuck in that pixel mode, then you become dumb and stupid and all you can do is grow and split and then you become cancerous and pathological.

[00:45:51] When you jack into the big picture and you can see that and you can then make a contribution to the whole and grow in a way that contributes to the whole, then you become part of a harmonious collective organism. And that's what individuals are, I believe.

[00:46:05] So I say all that just to frame up the two plant medicine experiences, the conversation we had probably the first time we sat down together, where I talked about how I descended into hell through addiction and all these different things and was in this really dark place and all these toxic exposures. I was physically sick.

[00:46:24] I was mentally ill. I was highly impulsive. I was in this really, really crazy, bad, psychotic, dysfunctional state that was then fueled by taking the pharmaceutical model from my psychiatrist and getting on stuff like Adderall which then fueled me into an amphetamine-induced psychosis, which it's about as far as from the person you see in front of you right now.

[00:46:45] You couldn't even imagine. Most people don't believe me whenever I tell them the story, and I paint the picture of what life is like. It got pretty crazy. But I came across psilocybin, not through therapeutic context. It was just because I was hovering around the drug world and people using them recreationally, like it shows, and someone gave me some.

[00:47:04] And I wasn't at all intending to get anything of value from it, but it had something else in mind, obviously. It was one of those things the people talk about, like, what was it? It was Leary or someone who said they learned more in five hours than they did in all the 21 something years before that, more than they did through any collective form of formal education, just because I got this big picture view visually and right in my face.

[00:47:32] And it forced me to face the trajectory of collective decisions that I had made that were decimating everything that I knew and loved in my life, including my family, my friends, myself, and I was not contributing to the collective process of life, which is the highest calling that a person can do, is being and contributing to the flourishing, expanding process of this beautiful process that we get the opportunity to partake in we call life.

[00:48:00] Instead, I was doing the opposite. My decisions starting from my mentality were contracting, were destroying, were decimating. They were contributing to the wildfire that was burning everything to the ground around me.

[00:48:14] And I know that's a very visual type of thing because even if you don't think that that's what's happening, even if you're not in this massive meltdown where it's like you're a drug addict to this or that, like that, if you're not rising to the calling of what your highest potential is, it is a moral and ethical crime against yourself to let your potential as a human being and the gift of this life experience that you've been given go to waste.

[00:48:43] Because again, there's really no standing still. If you're not growing and contributing to the process of life, then you're either dead weight or detracting from it. If you're dead weight, you're rolling down the hill slowly and you're detracting from it.

[00:48:56] I say that because I came across psilocybin, and I do actually believe that medicines like psilocybin, and I believe kava-- and I'll get to why I think kava is one of the most important ones for our culture today. But my initial process was through psilocybin, where I had that reintegration in five hours.

[00:49:15] I didn't get everything. I did many more experiences after that. But it was that first kick the door open and be like-- it's like you walk in your house and you think you live in a one-bedroom apartment, and all of a sudden you push a wall and a compartment opens up and there's a whole other room.

[00:49:28] You're like, "Whoa. I can go up there? I thought I lived here. I thought this was my world." It's like there's a room up here that I didn't even know existed. And wait, that room leads to another room. How far does this go? And it was one of things-- I got off drugs pretty much immediately, went cold Turkey off amphetamines and stuff like that after that experience, which was a very rough thing.

[00:49:52] Because I could not, in good conscience, take it, because I felt like I was detracting from that every time. And that's a long explanation of exactly what that experience was like. But essentially, not everybody has something that powerful in their first plant medicine. But I think that my soul, whatever you would call it, my internal framework, my set, what you call your set, not as much your setting, but my set was ready for it. I was at rock bottom and I was ready for it and just needed the catalyst.

[00:50:20] And here's what I believe about plant medicines, being everything that we said before about collective intelligence of nature and that all living organisms are just extensions of that intelligence that manifests in different ways, in different roles, just like different cells in the body manifest in different ways to perform different roles.

[00:50:36] Neurons, obviously, perform the process of processing human thought and perception and so on, as where a heart cell does something slightly different and so on and so forth. I think that the organisms on this planet-- I do believe that the Earth is a collective living organism as well, too.

[00:50:51] It's a living, breathing organism. And we have all of these different microcells or organisms that contribute different things to the ecology. Some stay around for a period of time and then are extinguished because they're no longer necessary. Some are around and evolve to a certain point where they make a contribution.

[00:51:08] Some evolve to a certain point that can move the whole organism forward, but if it goes too far outside of that collective intelligence of the body, that starts turning into cancer and then eventually kills the whole body. But I actually believe that there are organisms within the plant and fungal kingdom that surface, and part of their "purpose"-- you could say purpose or part of their characteristic as far as an opportunity-- is to be able to communicate with other cell types or other organisms that are in the collective organism to get them reintegrated into the whole organism and to turn them back from being cancer cells essentially.

[00:51:51] And actually, this is a hypothesis, of course. It's interesting thought exercise. We can't prove it clearly from a scientific standpoint. But I think that it's very interesting. I think that, philosophically, cultures have articulated this same thought in different ways. And I believe psilocybin is in this category.

[00:52:09] I think kava is in it in a slightly different way, but I do think that these organisms have evolved to become biologically compatible with us. And taking it into your body is like forming a relationship with an organism, just like people. Some people are wired, developed, are co-evolved, wired, and developed to sync well with you, for example, to have a really good healthy relationship to where you learn from each other and then you can contribute to each other and contribute to the whole organism very, very well.

[00:52:44] And some are not compatible. It's like you're not compatible with some people, and some people you're compatible for periods of time, but you have to have a certain proximity. It's like there's a healthy dose or whatever. And so you're forming a relationship with a plant compound as I form a relationship with a person that way.

[00:53:00] Some people, it's a time and a place to get what that thing offers. But I do think just going back to what I think is partly how these organisms have adapted, let's just take psilocybin or a lot of these signals that are in these organisms. Just like in the human body, whenever a person, say, gets a brain injury, relating this to the sort of mass collective organism that we're talking about.

[00:53:29] When a person gets like a brain injury, what happens? You get hit in the head, there's a cluster of neurons or cells in the brain that gets damaged and inflamed, and then they stop being able to communicate so well. There's scar tissue that forms. There's all this chaos. And the sub-intelligence of the body, because it's all one system, there is no separation between those cells that are damaged and, say, stem cells produced by the bone marrow. They're all governed and residing in this field that is that collective intelligence.

[00:53:58] And so what happens is the whole organism senses it, then recruits other cells to develop and to go to that area, to respond to the injury site, to then secrete signals and compounds to communicate with those cells, to get those cells back in sync with the entire organism. I believe personally that that's possibly what these plant compounds are.

[00:54:18] I think that as we've started to evolve as individuals on this planet, as cells that have developed all these characteristics that could be dangerous, but also could be beneficial, we've started to veer in a direction that's pathological that could be cancerous, and that affects the entire ecosystem of the organism.

[00:54:40] So the organism senses that just like cells in the body, recruits certain organisms that can communicate, that open up that line of communication back to the foundational source that gets everything connected in that resonance field in the same place. And psychedelics, anyone who's taken psychedelics in an intentional context, a large number of people feel that immediate sense of, oh, I've been here before.

[00:55:08] And not only have I been here before, I've been here before infinitely. And, oh, I feel interconnected to everything. And there's that sense of oneness of all intelligence. Doesn't feel like me, like my ego. It feels like I'm reconnected to that mother source that we're talking about.

[00:55:23] Call it whatever you want to, but the intelligence is there, and you feel it, and it's undeniable. And in people's lives, whenever they take those therapeutic intervention seriously, oftentimes change dramatically because the first thing if you want to reintegrate back into nature and that intelligence is the perception, is the conscious awareness that you are disconnected from it.

[00:55:51] It's like the first step is admitting you have a problem. It's like Alcohol Anonymous, whatever. You have to surrender to that. And because the psychedelics would shout this message at you, they open up that line of communication, they create the opportunity for you then to do the work to become a healthy cell again, to use that analogy.

[00:56:10] And when you do, you become healthier because the whole system then moves around you and sustains you again, just like a cell that's dying and senescent becoming reconnected or a damaged cell healing. The whole system mobilizes behind you. In other words, through you, it summons the power of the entire system, just like I think Alan Watts used to say, that we're like a wave that the whole ocean is doing at the place we call here and now.

[00:56:43] You'll have the whole inertia and momentum of the entire ocean behind a single wave. And so it's not just like a wave is an individual wave. It's like the entire ocean behind it. And whenever you jack in and learn how to align yourself with that intelligence, it's like learning to be a surfer. It's like aligning a wave. And miracles start to happen in your life, which is actually one of the dangers that people run into whenever they start to improve their lives.

[00:57:10] If they're not fully integrated and humble into the fact that they're jacking into something that's bigger than them, then they start to think they are the wave and that they're controlling it. And that's whenever it can start to cave in on itself because that's when you suck at surfing. And then you get clobbered.

[00:57:27] Yeah, yeah. So it's just like one of those things. But anyways, all that being said, psilocybin came into my life and it changed everything. And the only reason I elaborate for so long is just to hammer the point that everything starts with perception.

[00:57:46] It's like you said. After this election, nothing has physically changed yet, but we feel a difference in perception because millions of people perception of what's possible just changed. In the sense of like, all these things are happening and we don't know if all of it's going to play out exactly the way we want it to. We hope that it will.

[00:58:04] And there's elements of the system that will back off against it. You've got Bobby out there doing his thing and it all seems really good on paper, or at least the intention behind it, or at least we know that if these things take place, then that they're generating a level of awareness and it creates an opportunity for us to start to dilute some of this regulatory capture and to create this massive level of awareness on these problems that people like you and I have been right in the middle of talking about for years, but the average person still is like, all their friends and family are dying from cancer, and they have no idea why, or mental illness.

[00:58:39] And they're literally just in that mode of just totally being disconnected from that. But because perception is everything, when I first took psilocybin, everything changed. I could no longer take drugs anymore. It was a slow process. Then my body was decimated because I had all these toxic exposures and mold and stuff.

[00:58:57] And I spent years getting my physical body back. But it followed the mind. You've interviewed Joe Dispenza on here. His work is brilliant, obviously. He's probably one of the biggest proponents of manifesting a reality that starts with you seeing what's possible in a reality that already exists and connecting to that reality and pulling it towards you.

[00:59:22] And he's got some amazing science. All that's being done, some research. I just went to one of his events and talked to his people. It's great. At the University of California, San Diego, there's so all these epigenetic effects from progressive meditation, getting people into a state of mind where they can get into the present moment and access and start to create a different future that's not the predictable past. That's the predictable future and not the reincarnated past.

[00:59:50] They become the consciousness that observes those programs, those patterns, and those old ways of thinking and your thoughts change, and then that changes your behavior, and that changes your action, which changes your experiences, which changes your emotions, and it changes your life.

[01:00:07] And it's this continuum that plays out. But out of all the different tools that we have that can bring us back to nature and reset our perception of reality and remind us that we are everything that we've just talked about, that we're so much more than this body, that we are the source of our-- we're not our thoughts.

[01:00:31] We have thoughts. We're not our emotions. We have emotions. We're not our bodies. We have bodies. But really, we're the source of all those things. And yes, we have limitation in this reality, and you are this series of learned identities. You're Luke Storey, and I'm Cameron and all these things.

[01:00:47] That's an experience. But behind that, we have this amazing power whenever we realign ourselves with that intelligence that we come from. It's our birthright, and it's our real power, and it only comes from learning to surf that wave and respect it and not think that we are that in the sense of like, I control it.

[01:01:07] That's my ego. But it's becoming part of it again. And these things happen. But the medicines like psilocybin, it took me on that trajectory and eventually got my health back because all these things fell into place over a number of years. I integrated all the biohacking things, the stem cells, the detoxification, and got my life back.

[01:01:27] And then in the middle of the process, what saved my life again, even though psilocybin started me on that journey was kava. And like you and I had talked about on a past episode, I was having 10 seizures a day at one point, and I was on these benzodiazepine drugs. I had the perspective, but my physical body was on this long road towards recovery from that severe autoimmune condition and found kava, was able to get off of benzodiazepines because it binds to the same receptors in the brain that benzos and alcohol do.

[01:02:00] It has this amazing therapeutic intelligence that's probably more relevant to the ailments of today of both mental illness, anxiety, but these nervous system eruptions, these hyper sympathetic nervous system stalemate situations where we're all stuck in this sympathetic because we've also traumatized by the turbulence that's going on in this disconnection process and the disease and stuff.

[01:02:27] Kava directly addresses that. So it's an organism that that I believe it has that intelligence. And it's funny because the Polynesian is where it comes from. So for those that are just now being exposed to kava, kava is the quintessential, mind-elevating social elixir, natural social elixir, plant based, from Polynesia.

[01:02:50] And it's a core part of the culture in Polynesian islands, islands like Fiji, Tonga, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, this chain of islands in the south, this whole part of the world, that it basically has built the social fabric and the social structure because it's a grounder, a mind-opener, and a connector.

[01:03:08] And they have seen it as primarily a mental and psychological and spiritual medicine that they use for weddings, funerals, spiritual ceremonies, social gatherings. The cultures down there use it just as much or more than we use coffee. It's used for that kind of proliferative use. Coffee and alcohol are secondary to kava.

[01:03:27] Luke: You talking about it is making me want to take some. I have my drink here, these sodas you guys make, but I don't want to have to stop and pee, so I'm moving on to the tincture.

[01:03:38] Cameron: It's some of the oil. Yeah.

[01:03:39] Luke: Yeah.

[01:03:40] Cameron: So whenever I came across kava, we've talked about this a little bit before, but it was basically like, I was at my worst. I was on all these benzos. I was having 10 seizures a day. So I came across it for more of a medical standpoint and this physiologic need, even though most people actually-- well, not most people in our culture, but in Polynesia, they didn't have the physical elements that we do because they don't have the total disconnection from nature. They don't have all the pesticides, the different things.

[01:04:07] So they use it as a mental and psychological, spiritual medicine for connecting and staying connected to the environment, to each other and so on, developing and bringing each other together and being relaxed, like we use alcohol. It's a thing that builds community. But I came across an indigenous islander when I was traveling around to all these places.

[01:04:25] We call it medical tourism. When I was sick and I was just desperate, I was handicapped. I basically had to move back in with my parents at age, whatever it was, in my early 20s, mid-20s, whatever it was. And was traveling around just doing every therapy you could think about under the sun.

[01:04:43] And over the course of a decade, I did nothing but scour medical and scientific literature to just try to save my own life, which is what got me where I'm at today. But I was in this really bad situation. I had all this knowledge that I had acquired of all these strategies, detoxification, how to get my life back.

[01:05:00] But because I had developed an autoimmune condition that got to a certain point, I was so reactive. I was in one of these syndromes where my body wasn't accepting anything. It's one of these PTSD, they call it environmental illness. It's a severe form of PTSD and autoimmunity where the immune system is fighting back, not just at one thing.

[01:05:18] It's not just one food reaction or one food intolerance. It's rejecting everything. It's something that if we keep going this road, I was a canary in the coal mine or people like me were, the place that I was. It was at a place in Dallas, Texas, where there's a whole community of people like me. We had to be quarantined. Before quarantining became cool during COVID, we were wearing masks, not for viruses. We were wearing masks, because if we got a whiff of a fragrance or a chemical, if we breathe something in, I go into a seizure.

[01:05:45] So I'd be confined to this room that was tile floors, tile ceilings. I just couldn't go anywhere. I was basically in prison. My own body was torturing me to death, giving me seizures ten times a day. Couldn't eat hardly anything, was wasting away, and eventually lost all my foods. So I was dying from dehydration and malnutrition, and the benzos, they were pumping those in my system, but they lost their effectiveness. And then if you take them away, then the seizures go up tenfold.

[01:06:09] So I was dying, for sure. So I'd come across this guy a couple of years prior, and he recontacted me when I was at my worst and just asked me how I was doing. I was like, "Man." And I was like, "I'm doing terrible." I don't even know why I took the call. I was just like, "Who knows?" Something made me. I was looking for ways to get off these benzos and stop the reaction because I was like, "If I can stop the reactions, I know I've got all these tools now, foods that I could do."

[01:06:36] And he's like, "Have you tried kava?" Because I tried medical cannabis. It didn't work. I was looking for anything that could hold my nervous system down without perpetuating addiction and bring me farther into toxicity and stuff. And he was like, "Have you tried kava?"

[01:06:48] I was like, "Yeah, I've tried what I thought was kava, which are these little capsules that you get in the United States." And he laughed. He's like, those are kava extracts. That's like a shade of kava. It's a kava-like product, but it's not this traditional brew with all the intelligence in it and stuff.

[01:07:02] It has the full entourage effect of everything. So I was like, "Great." Because I read a lot about kava in the anthropological literature, and was reading all the things I was describing to you. And then I tried the capsule, and I was like, that must be all hype. I was like, "Wow, over sensationalize that."

[01:07:16] Because it felt like chamomile tea. It was just very mild, a mild sedative like thing that you didn't feel much. So he sends me some of the fresh frozen batch of this stuff. 15-year-old strain or something of his family's farm and ships it to me as fast as he could to me and then taught me how to prepare it, and it was the crude process they do.

[01:07:37] If you go to Fiji and you take place in a kava ceremony, which they do for tourists or they do in the villages still, the chief will do it. And in fact, if there's a dispute amongst two parties in any village, the chief forces them to sit down and settled over kava in Vanuatu, country right next to Fiji where most of the kava comes from.

[01:07:56] And the reason is because it connects people like we were talking about people try to get from alcohol and it puts people into a state where they can receive a message from someone and brings out empathy, like MDMA, but just like a food. You can use it all the time. It's not a drug.

[01:08:11] So anyways, he sends me this stuff, teach me how to prepare it, did the crude process, ended up with a bowl of-- if people seen traditional kava before, like ayahuasca or some of these other things that you expect to be nasty, kind of is. It's not as nasty as aya, probably, but it's pretty gnarly in that state for the average person, to those of us, like you and I.

[01:08:32] We're perfectly happy drinking dirty stuff all the time. It's mud. It's peppery mud because it's made from the roots of a-- it's a root. It's just a lot of herbal roots. But the way you have to make it to get the full effects in that form, you're grinding this root down and you're macerating it with pressure and water in this very specific process.

[01:08:56] And you end up with this bowl of just muddy peppery water. Then you drink it and you're like, "Holy shit." Especially if you get the stuff that I was drinking and had the ailments that I did, you notice it more if you have the ailments.

[01:09:08] And within two weeks of drinking it regularly, I just wasn't having seizures anymore. I didn't even think that was possible. I was like, dude, the heavy drugs aren't doing it, but I'm going to try anything anyways. It was like dying. And all of a sudden, I would do something that I would normally react to, and I wouldn't react at all, and I'm like, "Holy shit. Are you serious?"

[01:09:28] And then I was able to eat food. I was dying from dehydration. I could drink water, and I'm waiting for the reaction. You know what I mean? It just didn't happen. And I was just like, "Holy shit." I was like, "Geez."

[01:09:41] And then after six weeks or so, I was able to get off benzodiazepines totally, which normally takes a year and a half to taper off these things safely, because there's a whole epidemic around benzo as a toxic coping response to trauma. That's why so many people are using benzos.

[01:09:57] Just like the opiate epidemic, it's really almost just as big and it kills a lot of people because you can die from the withdrawal symptoms. And I certainly could have died in that situation, but I was able to get off. And it's funny because I just became obsessed with kava immediately because it's changed my life.

[01:10:12] Psilocybin intervened on my perception and put me on the trajectory where I could find the right answers and I knew where I was going. And then kava came from this physiologic standpoint and an expansive standpoint that was similar to other psychedelics, but in a much more subtle way that I could do all the time, keep those doors open. It had all these other effects that were just better for, of course, daily use. Anybody could use it.

[01:10:36] And it saved my life physically in that situation. And then I started to recognize it had all these other effects on my mind and on my emotions. And I just delved and I read every piece of literature ever published on kava, connected with everyone in the South Pacific, the indigenous people, the tribes, et cetera.

[01:10:54] And then most of the other people in the industry that were in the industry and other parts of the world at that point, most of the scientists that had published most of the research and developed this framework for what would become Tru Kava, which was more of an educational and advocacy campaign for integrating Kava into modern culture, the way that it exists in this micro environment in Polynesia.

[01:11:16] Because everywhere where we see kava surface, it makes a positive contribution to the cultural value structure and the social structure, the social structure and the cultural value structure in the mental health framework. And you might say, that sounds grandiose, so you're just going to take this one thing and it's going to do this. It makes a contribution. I talk about this.

[01:11:41] So Michael Pollan, great author, a lot of people love him, I think he was talking to Rogan, Joe, or he was on a podcast run probably three, four years ago and he was talking-- he did a great job at articulating how coffee when introduced in the early 1900s at mass was able to shape the collective productivity driven mind of the United States and accentuate this whole productivity driven, like we're in this rat race, highly focused yet productive, which can be beneficial, but can become imbalanced, like you and I were talking about earlier before we started.

[01:12:17] So it made a huge contribution to contributing to the way we approach life. Because when you get millions of people all in an altered state of consciousness, the quality of that state of consciousness is going to dictate all the thoughts, the beliefs, the aspirations, the virtues, eventually. They're going to spring out of that consciousness.

[01:12:37] And if that consciousness is one that's more disconnected from what we talked about before, from ourselves, from the environment and whatnot, then it'll make a net pathological contribution. I actually believe alcohol is that. I don't want to totally demonize and say it's totally bad or anything like that. I don't want that to be misconstrued. But I do think that when you look at cultures that uphold-- because we all have our altered states, and there's a whole reason why we're drawn to altered states as humans that I believe.

[01:13:06] There's lots of reasons for it. But we are obsessed with altering our consciousness. Every culture has their altered states. I think when we're trying to find our way back to that state, we're trying to reset and find our way and center ourselves. We're trying to relax. We're trying to connect with other people.

[01:13:22] We're trying to meet all of our basic animalistic needs and our human needs. You could talk about all the human needs for certainty and uncertainty or a sense of adventure or significance, all these things that people like Tony Robbins talk about, or growth and contribution and love, all those things.

[01:13:36] We use altered states to get some of our needs. But those cultures that uphold altered states of consciousness or substances like, say, alcohol, it really reflects in the values of the culture. When you get millions of people every weekend that are putting themselves in, say, the alcohol fueled state of consciousness, don't think for a second that that doesn't have a net effect on our cultural values.

[01:14:03] Versus, you alluded to it earlier, you look at cultures in the Amazon, for example. Their main mode of altering consciousness are medicines like ayahuasca, which are mind and heart openers that are these intelligent medicines that I believe play more of this opportunity to reconnect instead of disconnect and numb.

[01:14:22] And their hierarchy of values are placing a high level of value on the ecology that we live on in a respect and reverence for that in the process of life and a sense of tribe or community, connection. And usually those cultures don't have anywhere near the mental health situation that we see in cultures that, say, uphold alcohol as their altered state.

[01:14:49] But it's not practical in today's modern culture to just pump ayahuasca into everybody's breakfast cereal or something. And of course that doesn't have the cultural context for it, and that requires a very specific kind of thing. But that's why I think there's a huge, amazing opportunity with a medicine like kava, because kava, to me, it's that perfect living organism that has that intelligence, like we talked about before, that, in my opinion, it's adapted as an organism that is very biologically compatible with humans in our current state of evolution for what we need.

[01:15:28] Just like the relationship thing, it's an organism that most people can form a relationship and a consistent relationship with. It's not abrasive. It's great at communicating. It's great at addressing and being a counselor or offering the right signals to the parts of us that give us the thing that we need most, which is groundedness, safety, expansion of the mind, and reconnection with our center, in a way that's soft enough to where it's like, if psilocybin or ayahuasca shouts a message at you, kava whispers it. You know what I mean?

[01:16:07] In other words, it's soft enough to where a grandma can tolerate it, to where almost anyone can use it, and you can use it in the forms that we've created at any time of day. But it still has that intelligence. And a lot of the indigenous people in the South Pacific woods actually, they have access to psilocybin, mushrooms, and stuff, many cultures that use kava. But kava is the most sacred substance, and a lot of people would say, "Why?"

[01:16:31] It doesn't have that same like, [Inaudible]. That's just all at once and everything is super psychedelic or something like that. And sometimes the best medicine is not the one that hits you over the head. And it's not to say anyone is better or worse, but just the best medicine for, of course, regular consistent use is not the one that hits you over the head, but the one that can be integrated regularly and consistently to where you can have it as a daily counselor and a daily tool to infuse intelligence into your life slowly so you can slowly build.

[01:17:03] And I think that there's a place for all of these organisms. But kava is one of those organisms that it came into my life at the perfect time. And it was just when I was the most sensitive. I couldn't even tolerate anything, food. But kava comes in and is able to speak to my nervous system in that way that I needed at that moment, which was to reset the whole thing.

[01:17:27] So that's all esoteric type of stuff. But then on the credibility side, of course, all of this are just things, thought exercises and hypotheses, of course, that I've formulated over time with my personal experience with it, which there are multiple forms of evidence.

[01:17:43] And I think direct experience is really the most powerful one. But the scientific method is very powerful, if it's not scientism, as I'd call it, or if it's not science. It's a bot, or something like that. But when I delved into the scientific literature on kava, after it changed my life in this amazing way, and I'm like, "Oh," I just saw it in my mind.

[01:18:03] I saw this reality where kava was everywhere. And I'm like, "No one is doing this." I haven't seen anyone that respects it in the way the indigenous people do, but then understands it enough to integrate it to the culture in this way and facilitate it in this way. As I've said, kava needs to be as common as a cup of coffee.

[01:18:21] And that's what we're doing, which your kava is creating a category, not just another supplement that's mixed in everything else. Just like there'll be coffee, there'll be tea, there'll be kombucha, there'll be kava. And people can use it and can choose that as an option, instead of alcohol and other substances, but to expand consciousness and feed the mind instead of detracting from it.

[01:18:43] So whenever I got into it and dove into the scientific literature on kava, I realized there are more published studies on kava. It's one of the most well-researched compounds, natural compounds, and the entire ethnobotanical literature outside of cannabis, ginseng, and reishi mushroom, is a lot of literature on, even though it's still fairly well unknown.

[01:19:12] But all these things that I just described, everything that we know about kava actually really almost fully supports it. Because it has this high affinity for these GABA A receptors in the brain, which are the main receptors, the biochemical system that creates and builds the parasympathetic response.

[01:19:34] It's the breaks of the nervous system that allows us to shut down into that surrender that allows that intelligence to come in. That's where you heal. That's why we call it rest and digest instead of fight or flight. It poses in it. But what it does though, instead of just pushing it down like benzos or alcohol would-- because benzos and alcohol hit those receptors too.

[01:19:53] But I always talk about synthetic drugs like this because they're these individual molecules that have usually been ripped off by nature or synthesized totally or a byproduct of metabolism or something like alcohol is, that's just really a toxic product that's made from fermentation, etc.

[01:20:11] It doesn't have that intelligence in it. It's empty calories and it's an empty substance. Substances like that, drugs and alcohol, they work because they don't have the intelligence to be biologically compatible. They borrow from tomorrow to pay for today. So the experience of that, what that means is, is that you take it, you get that effect, a tangible effect, there's no question. Drugs give you a tangible effect.

[01:20:35] Alcohol gives you a tangible effect, and they say, well, it works. It's like, well, define works. Because if you feel twice as bad the next day, or be 20% less productive from a pseudo hangover, or a full-blown hangover, it's like you set up the need. The need for the next cigarette or the next drink or the next pill is created and perpetuated by the last one because it's not creating any more of that chemistry that satiates your mind and that lifts you up and elevates and expands your emotional framework and builds it and builds you into this being that we can be.

[01:21:08] It's not stepping into anything that's cumulative. It's not building. You're not dictating your emotional state. You're chasing something that's acting, is what I call it, like a biochemical credit card. I don't have currency today because I've depleted myself. I have the wrong mentality. I'm disconnected from natural living.

[01:21:27] I've got toxins in my life. All these things that are creating chaos and disease and they're suppressing and giving me no currency to feel good, that feel good chemistry that comes from a sense of purpose, that comes from all the physical stuff we talked about. So what you do is you get a credit card and you borrow from tomorrow's stores and you just use a non-intelligent molecule that just binds to a receptor and dumps your stores of something so you can feel it now.

[01:21:52] Problem is, you're in debt. So then you do that enough times, and then you take the substance away, and you go into withdrawal because now you've just dipped into your regular stores that are just keeping you feeling even regular, not great. So that is really the difference between an intelligent medicine, like a kava, is that what we see in the scientific literature and what we see, direct experience and in the anthropological accounts, is that kava binds to the GABA receptors, dopamine receptors, all these main neurotransmission systems, the serotonergic system, and then the cholinergic system too.

[01:22:31] But primarily, with the GABA system, what it's doing is it's upregulating the system. So we see an increase in GABA receptor density. It's activating the receptors so you get the acute effect, but it's actually communicating with the full intelligence. It's syncing with that intelligence and bringing the system back to a state of balance or homeostasis so it can reset, which is what it did for me.

[01:22:54] So my experience with it, like with the benzos, I was taking it and it wasn't like I wasn't having seizures and then I stopped taking the kava and then the seizures would come back. They did it first, but after taking kava for a while, even when I took the kava away, my reactions would still be there but be less and be less and be less.

[01:23:12] And all of a sudden, they just weren't there anymore. And it's like, wow. And it's like, that's what's happening, is it's actually feeding the system. It's building mental health and restoring the chemistry and investing capital into the system instead of borrowing it on credit.

[01:23:27] Luke: Beautiful explanation.

[01:23:30] Cameron: So that's the differentiator between these medicines. So just like Michael Pollan's point about coffee, what we've always seen and predicted and what gets me so passionate about this one thing-- I do a lot of stuff in a lot of other areas and mental optimization, whatever, but this is my lead project because no one else is doing it and it's like a calling.

[01:23:54] And that was the communication that I got. I felt as though like, hey. I feel like it asked me to do it in a way. You know what I mean? I got that sense of like, okay, there's the vision of it. I know that it can be this. I see this reality, and it's not really even a choice. It's just like this is just a contribution that I can make, I think.

[01:24:12] But the whole thing is, is just like coffee helped to shape the collective productivity driven mind, a substance like this, everything I've just described, it's just such a great grounder, an integrator of consciousness and something that can expand consciousness like we're trying to get from psychedelics and meditation and things.

[01:24:31] In a way, kava is almost like, I don't want to say meditation in a can because I never want to tell people to do something instead of meditating or that just taking something is-- but it definitely is a supportive agent that helps push the chemistry in a place to where you can amplify any of those practices.

[01:24:48] So because it's so relevant, the way that I've described it, it's so relevant for the juncture that we're at right now, as far as giving us something that we can reach for to get us off this enslavement wheel that we're on. Everything that I just described, whether it's deliberate or non-deliberate, I think that there's some deliberate level to a certain percentage of these things that have happened with the habituation of us too to different forms of food or drugs from pharma.

[01:25:21] Obviously, we know that high fructose corn syrup was engineered to create addictions. Was it done for money? Was it done for some other purposes? There's, of course, that whole discussion, but it's still being done. It's a form of slavery. Whenever you become highly addicted to the food that you're eating and you go into withdrawals when you don't eat it, you are a much less sovereign individual. Let's put it that way.

[01:25:44] And layer on top of that, once you have ailments and you're depleting, it's like you've maxed out one credit card, so then you go over here to your psychiatrist and you're feeling like shit because you're depleting yourself.

[01:25:55] Everything you're doing is taking from your system. That's really the paradigm that we've been in, is just charge more, get another credit card. Maxed out this one, go to this company, which is pharma or my psychiatrist. Okay, give me the Adderall, the benzos, this and that. And that's an even deeper credit card because that's even another level.

[01:26:12] So then you'd start to deplete more and more. And then it's like, well, where do I go? And then I end up as the shell of a human being and I've got 30 different diseases, mental and physical, and I'm just pouring toxins into my system. And then the cures are just modulating symptoms with credit cards.

[01:26:28] It's like if you're bankrupt, you're diseased, you're bankrupt, and then I say, "Here. Here's a credit card as a solution." No adult thinks that that's real. You know what I mean? But that's how we look at our mental and emotional states with these things and in our health. But that's starting to change.

[01:26:45] But I think right now, substances like this and all the ideas that are linked to them, because it's not just about kava, it's about everything that we've talked about, what I've tried to do and what I saw in this, there's an opportunity, is that anytime you can anchor a set of ideas to something that's tangible, brand is good at doing this, if brand is used correctly-- branding things or substances, obviously, something that you can hold and whatnot.

[01:27:16] But kava already symbolizes so much of this because it holds in it that intelligence. And when you drink it, it's part of that. But it's like one personal development tool leads to another because when you start to become more reconnected to yourself and all the things we've been talking about, you start to become more conscious and then you're hungry for more.

[01:27:34] Because then you start to awaken. It's like Neo opening his eyes in the Matrix or whatever. He's like, "I'm alive now. Let's learn Kung Fu and whatnot. Give me some more." It's like, plug me in. And you just want to keep going. And so if you can give something to someone, if you can infuse a little bit of intelligence into their life, like intelligence in the form of something therapeutic, something natural and that's real, that they can get a tangible effect off of, then it almost can pique the spark of interest, and it's like, oh.

[01:28:05] And then if you realize that everything behind the organization is also supporting this self-sovereignty in this freedom, because that's really what it is. It's like, whenever you become habituated to pharmaceuticals, to processed food, to food additives, to thoughts and ideas, to addiction, to the mainstream media, any of those things, there are layers of slavery.

[01:28:30] You've lost your sovereignty, and that's why you have a large percentage of individuals that we see, and it's a horrifically tragic thing that don't think for themselves anymore at all. They don't live their own experience. They're not in the state of possibility in that present moment that people like Joe Dispenza have been phenomenal at articulating.

[01:28:53] They're in the state of the highly predictable future. They're living as a set of reduced programs that are all based on survival and need to let something outside themselves that doesn't have their best interest at heart give them just enough of a feeling like they're being led along, like you give a dog a treat to keep going.

[01:29:14] And whenever we become free and you bring in strategies into your life that start to free you physically, you switch the alcohol for some kava, and all of a sudden, it affects the way that you're not doing the alcohol, first of all, and then you're starting to expand instead of contract. That's a thing.

[01:29:30] You start to layer on superfoods instead of this. You start to do a sauna practice instead of doing this thing over here. You start to do meditation instead of that, or you start to read books that are really valuable instead of, I don't know, watching CNN or something.

[01:29:46] And these things lead to each other, but I think an underlying component of this whole thing that we're all about is definitely freedom, for sure. But it's freedom through nature realignment, through these really relevant medicines. And of course, it's facilitated through authentic human connection and our ability to just reconnect with ourselves, to reconnect with nature, which then allows us to then engage with the world around us as our highest self and to be able to progress and create in the world instead of destroy.

[01:30:28] Luke: Our relationship with different plants, whether they're medicines or drugs, I guess it's up to the individual to determine and how you use those tools. But one thing that I really like about kava is the safety profile. And you would know better than I, but as someone who can very easily get attachments, if not addictions to things like nicotine, for example, caffeine, I don't know.

[01:30:58] I've always been able to take it or leave it, but I definitely like my nicotine. I've never had even anything close to an attachment or addiction to kava. I literally just forget about it. You know what I mean? I had this one in my drawer and you came over and we're like, "Oh, let's grab a couple of sodas and a couple of your-- what do you call these ones? Shots?

[01:31:23] Cameron: Yeah, the shots.

[01:31:23] Luke: A couple of the shots and bring them upstairs. And I was like, "Oh, yeah, I have some of the oil." And I'm like, "Shit, I could have been using this every day and I literally forgot about it." Which is cool because it tells me I'm not dependent on it. I'm not outsourcing my wellbeing to something in a drawer somewhere in a bottle, which is positive.

[01:31:42] But also, I just forget to do it sometimes. This thing's full, and I've had it for months. I'm like, why didn't I use this already? But that brings me to the word freedom that you brought up reminded me of this-- and I'm not trying to disparage any other companies or brands, but a few years ago, a friend of mine turned me onto this drink called Feel Free. I'm sure you're familiar with it.

[01:32:07] I saw, ooh, it's got kava and kratom, and I've used kava from you. And even before I met you, I think tried to brew it up myself with varying degrees of success and so on. And kratom has been something that I was aware of many years ago, but really didn't ever try because I was concerned about the way your body recognizes it as an opiate.

[01:32:32] And I was addicted to opiates. It was very problematic. And eventually, I micro dosed a little kratom. No problem. I never really felt in danger in terms of relapsing or something like that, or it becoming habit forming at different times. Once I felt safe, I would push the envelope a little bit and take a bigger dose.

[01:32:52] And I felt a little bit of that opiate high, which I do not like, turns out, anymore which I used to live for. Anyway, so then this drink rolls along and I'm like", kratom, cool. No problem." I feel like I have a great relationship with that. It's never been problematic for me. Kava, certainly not problematic in any way.

[01:33:11] And to this day, I have with that feel free drink or kratom in anything, it's take it or leave it. Maybe it's around, maybe it's not. I don't think about it. There's no attachment to it. I'll drink every once in a while. A quarter of a feel free if I'm going to a social gathering or something. No problem for me. And I'm someone who has a history of becoming addicted to things.

[01:33:37] However, in the past few years, I've met a number of people, a shocking number of people personally, and second, third person who have had real problems with that particular combination, some of them to the point of full-blown addiction, eight, nine bottles a day, which I don't even know how you walk.

[01:34:01] Half of one of those drinks and I'm like, "I feel a little funny." I'm not going to drink anymore. I don't know how people get there, honestly. But I've known a couple people that have actually had to go to rehab because of withdrawals. I was talking to a friend of mine a couple of days ago about this. He didn't have to go to rehab, but he said, "Yeah, at one point I was doing a little too much."

[01:34:23] And he's a former heroin addict also. And he said, "Yeah, when I just cold turkey'd it, I had night sweats every night for four or five nights." And I'm like, "I remember that." I know what opiate withdrawal feels like. It is a nightmare, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally. It's just the worst thing ever.

[01:34:43] So for people listening that could possibly conflate kava with kratom, I think it would be helpful-- and you guys could obviously put kratom in your products, and you haven't. So maybe differentiate those two plant medicines. I know they work in a very different way.

[01:35:04] Kava being totally safe, no history of any problems, kratom being safe for some people some of the time, and really bad for some people other times. So I think it's really important for people to know this because I don't ever want to-- I feel a sense of responsibility. I don't want to ever promote something that could be possibly harmful to people.

[01:35:26] Yet, at the same time, if you drink too much water, it can be harmful to you. You know what I mean? So it's like where's the line between personal responsibility and someone advocating for something because it works for them? Is it the case for me but it might be problematic for other people?

[01:35:43] So I think we're all adults hopefully listening to the show and people need to be responsible for their own decisions. But this one in particular, because I've known so many people personally that have been very negatively impacted, I think it's important to just build awareness and create some framework of information so that people can make intelligent adult decisions.

[01:36:10] Cameron: It is really important. And honestly, it's a question that I get maybe not daily, but multiple times a week. It's one of those things it's become important mainly just because I think that there's parallels that are drawn just because they're both in this sort of pseudo psychoactive category where they're not like, hit you over the head, completely super strong, even in their own rights.

[01:36:37] Kratom, of course, can be very strong, as you know. Yes, but people are using them in some similar context, even though they are not at all the same. And also, they both start with a K. That doesn't help. And they're just people--

[01:36:53] Luke: I think a lot people probably think it's the thing.

[01:36:55] Cameron: They're both legal. It's one of those things. And this was one of my-- I don't know if fear is the right-- I really don't approach this with fear. It's not the state that I normally go into with any of this stuff. But one of my concerns in this landscape, one of the many things that is something that we always just need to bring clarity to is that people would conflate these different compounds and that kava could be drawn into the marketplace, into the American marketplace, and just placed within the hodgepodge of different head shop, natural high type of compounds.

[01:37:34] And not that it can't exist there. It's not like that's wrong or that should be outlawed or something. You know what I mean? Or anything like that. No, I believe in full freedom of sovereignty over your bodies to make your own choices and everything. I think that people should have the ability to put any molecule they want into their body, even poisons, if they want to, just so long as they're not doing harm to other people.

[01:37:56] And of course, we already have laws that govern human behavior. So if you do something stupid and harm somebody else, then you'll pay the price on that layer. But I do believe that people can find their own contradictory information. And if they take someone's word for it of someone who expresses an opinion, even if that person is wrong, in most cases, I would say the responsibility is on that person. It's on the person receiving it. They really have to make their own decisions, get multiple sources and so on and so forth, to a large and part degree.

[01:38:28] But as far as kava and kratom, I was concerned about it being pigeonholed into that. And kratom being present in the marketplace in the quantities that it is, not that I blame kratom for it, but the situation hasn't helped in some cases with kava because sometimes kava gets delineated as the same thing as kratom or kratom gets lumped in as the same thing as kava.

[01:38:52] People assume kratom is the same safety profile as kava, and people assume that kava has the same side effect profile as kratom, and they really couldn't be more different. I don't believe that kratom is a bad thing. I actually think that pretty much all of these medicines have their usage and have their scenario and have their time and place and have their application. But it's just very different.

[01:39:22] Kratom has a much more narrow spectrum of therapeutic use than kava does. Let's just put it that way. I would put it in the category of a more acute medicine. It is a plant medicine that does offer something that is needed, which is a natural, acutely psychoactive, and pretty aggressive plant compound that addresses the pain centers of the body that binds to these opiate receptors that obviously modulate pain, but also are very, very important for a number of different things.

[01:39:55] But primarily, in today's age, so many people addicted to opiates, kratom is an amazing tapering tool for stepping down from those horrifically addicted. Because we all know there's a hierarchy of these things. Kratom addiction doesn't hold a candle to oxycodone addiction. Now, it's a step down, and once you step down, then you can use other things. You can layer on the kavas and other things to then step down from the kratom.

[01:40:18] So as far as targeted therapeutic use in a clinical setting, coming from the medical side of things and working with hundreds of functional medicine doctors and developing protocol as far as for benzodiazepines withdrawal symptoms and alcohol withdrawal symptoms, working in the substance abuse area in that, I can just tell you my personal experience both clinically and what we know from the scientific literature and what I just know from my own direct experience with kratom.

[01:40:43] I actually think that it really belongs in that medical targeted therapeutic use. I'm not saying that it should be something that you can only get through your physician, but I think that it's best used whenever with the targeted sort of guidance of a physician or with someone who develops a level of education around that, that they can medicate themselves properly with the guidance of someone who understands how to target those things, if that makes sense. Because it is more of an acute medicine.

[01:41:14] If you use it every day, a large percentage of people will get physiologically dependent on it. It's very rare that I talk to someone who uses it every day that doesn't have, not only withdrawals, but pretty bad withdrawals whenever you stop. Again, it's not like OxyContin. It's not like you're about to commit suicide or something like that in most cases. But I've talked to some people where it's pretty darn bad.

[01:41:36] Luke: I like this idea when we're in the realm of opiates, an area of expertise for me, unfortunately, is the hierarchy of--

[01:41:46] Cameron: Pathology.

[01:41:47] Luke: Pathology and addiction. The funny thing is, I don't know if they still do this anymore, but when I was a user of heroin, your worst possible fate was to get on methadone. You go to the methadone clinic. And I was explaining this to Alyson a couple of days because we're getting some surgery on the dog. And I hadn't heard that word in, I don't know, decades.

[01:42:09] Cameron: They're still doing that?

[01:42:10] Luke: And the vet, we're talking about her anesthesia and I was like, "Man, put her on a ketamine journey." He's like, "No, no, we use methadone." I was like, "Oh, shit." And Alyson says, "What's methadone?" I said, "Man, it's the devil." You know what I mean?

[01:42:20] Cameron: I'll take heroin instead.

[01:42:21] Luke: Yeah. Any heroin addict knows.

[01:42:22] Cameron: At least it's from opium.

[01:42:23] Luke: It's hard to quit heroin, but it's really hard if not impossible to quit methadone, and it doesn't even get you high. But there definitely is a structure of severity there. And I would agree, if I had to choose something to get off of like a pharmaceutical or a street-based opiate, that kratom would be definitely an improvement over that.

[01:42:49] Cameron: It's an improvement and it's fantastic in that.

[01:42:53] Luke: I can say from my point of view, the difference between kava and kratom is-- a few years ago, you sent me a bunch of the Primo Kava root and told me how to cook it properly. And I was like, "Okay, I've taken kava. I've never felt high at all, not even close. Where I have a few times with kratom and took a pause, but you sent that to me and I was like, "I'm going to make it super, super strong to see if I can feel it."

[01:43:21] Dude, I don't care how much kava I take, how much I brew, how much I drink. I've never taken enough, and I've taken a lot just to test the threshold. I have never felt high. But if I have some kratom in my drawer there, if I went and took two tablespoons of kratom, just the leaf, not extract or anything, just ground up leaves from Southeast Asia, put them in some water, stir it up, drink it, I would be high as shit every time. And so there's a major difference there in terms of something being psychoactive and something being, as you've described, a modulator of your nervous system, mood. But I don't know. Can you get high on kava if you take enough of it?

[01:44:07] Cameron: It depends on how you characterize the term.

[01:44:11] Luke: Could drive a car or not? That's how I determine--

[01:44:13] Cameron: There's almost no dosage of kava from all the information that we have, anthropological, direct experience, scientific literature, kava's been shown time and time again to not impair faculties. In fact, it really improves them because it just enhances so many aspects of cognitive function.

[01:44:29] Now, actually, what's interesting, and you might not have experienced it, maybe we haven't-- we need to get on some stuff sometime. I need to start really push the envelope with some of the strongest stuff I can get ahold of, see if I can get you there. But there is a level that most people, I would say the vast majority of people will get a very euphoric effect from kava.

[01:44:53] But euphoric, I use that term begrudgingly to some degree because a lot of people think, well, that means high. But it's not the same thing. Anyone who's ever been high and getting a natural euphoria, it feels like an intense euphoria you would have from running a marathon or something where it's this natural high, but you just feel great.

[01:45:12] But it also can be like it's washing through your entire body and your body's pulsing. I'm talking about really high doses of kava and of the traditional. The ones that we've put into retail are more of that sort of run in the background. It's to get the general effects of like a functional beverage, all the effects of kava to get people that can take it anytime of the day without it being distracting at all.

[01:45:30] The worst thing that can happen with kava is that you have a super high amount of a super strong amount of traditionally prepared, fresh kava, and you can get to a place where it's very euphoric, and it could be distracting in the sense of you just want to have the kava experience. You know what I mean?

[01:45:47] And that's the only reason why you wouldn't take a dose like that of that kind of brew of ceremonial kava during the day because you still wouldn't be impaired. You would just be like, yeah, I just want to do this. I want to sit and do what you and I are doing instead of do other things.

[01:46:02] So in that sense it is, and then you could just be wanting to relax if you have so so much. But as far as actual impairment to all of the metrics that we use to constitute mental faculty or mental clarity, it doesn't impair cognitive function at all. And it doesn't take you into this sort of altered state where you feel like you're torched on something.

[01:46:27] And you can get that effect from kratom. You take enough of it where you feel high in a sense. It's just a different thing. There's a type of altered state that's somewhat out of control. It doesn't feel it's an optimizer to a great degree. It does feel like that it's pressing those opiate buttons.

[01:46:43] And that just makes it a very, very different thing. And again, there are many people that I know in the kratom industry that would disagree to some degree. Sometimes when people are having this conversation, I really don't think they thought about it to this depth.

[01:47:03] I think that they're trying to look at the surface, and there's some confirmation bias sometime too, of wanting to equate it to kava because it's natural and it's better than some of the things that they were on. They just try to make these leaps of how safe it actually is.

[01:47:16] But I try to be as honest and clear as humanly possible because I want people to know exactly what they're using. Because again, I didn't come into this world through sales. I came in through the medical side of things, through really needing something and the therapeutic effects of something.

[01:47:33] So with kratom, again, much more narrow therapeutic window. It's not a tonic substance. The Chinese use the term tonic herb if it's something that you can take daily that builds your health over time and increases your adaptation potential and feeds the system in the way that we talked about with feeding the receptors and waking them up instead of doing the credit card thing.

[01:47:56] Anything that's addictive is acting somewhat as that credit card. Some are more aggressive credit cards than others. But you go into withdrawal because you've emptied your bank account. You know what I mean? That's why you're in withdrawal, because you don't have those chemicals without the stimulation of the substance because you've borrowed from the stores to pay for today, and that's what you're in.

[01:48:14] It's a form of debt. So if something is giving you physiologic dependence, then at some level it is taking from you, not giving to you. So that is a massive distinction right there. Just the fact that that's the case.

[01:48:27] Luke: That makes perfect Now sense.

[01:48:29] Cameron: But I will say though, with kratom, it takes from you far less than other substances, like your methadones, or like your Suboxone, or like your oxys, or like your heroin, of course. So it's a great off ramp to get off that really high danger zone, but also, I don't want to make it sound like that the only time you use kratom is if you're an opiate or heroin addict.

[01:48:54] If you pulse it, if you use it when you have severe pain, or you pulse it, it's this regular, everyday use. I think the mistake is that sometimes if people are trying to use these things or give these things to people, like kratom, and this is my opinion to some degree, but I don't think that there's a good argument against it based on all the objective information and everything we know from the literature and experience, everything about kratom, is that when you try to give these things to people and just tell people, "Take this vitamin C, just like it's a wellness, nutritional supplement," and they don't really have any direction or understanding that is what we just described and then they just take it like it's kava, or they take it like it's coffee, you're going to get a lot of negative feedback.

[01:49:43] You're going to start to hurt kava's reputation if you're laying it with kava, because we were going to get confused. It's one of those things. And I've had disagreements with people in the industry about this, but I have a very clear position on it, is that I don't dog on kratom at all. It's a different substance.

[01:50:03] Everything that we just described with kava becoming a category and just like coffee, it has a much broader spectrum of use even than coffee because coffee is addictive. Coffee is not as addictive as kratom, in my opinion. I've never seen coffee withdrawal that really is like kratom withdrawal. You don't get the shakes and sweating and stuff like that. You get very tired. You can feel like shit off coffee. I've seen some bad coffee withdrawals. It's not like that doesn't happen.

[01:50:31] Luke: You're not going to have to go to rehab an espresso habit.

[01:50:35] Cameron: Anybody that tries to say or to equate kratom withdrawal with coffee withdrawal-- a lot of people sometimes will use the-- I just think that it's shoddy reasoning. It's an incomplete argument to say-- just because you want to use it or you want people to use it, for people to say something like we were talking about earlier.

[01:51:05] Oh, well, you can have too much water too. It's like, yeah, but if you use that line of thought all the way across the board, then you would be comparing water to heroin eventually. It's like, well, I could have too much heroin. I can have too much water. They're basically the same.

[01:51:19] It's like, no, they're not. That's not the case at all because you're not going to develop a physiologic dependence on a relatively small daily dose of water or kava or any tonic herb. So again, it's not demonic. It's not bad. It just has to be understood in the same way that-- psilocybin, for example, I'd put psilocybin in the category of-- it's like that risk opportunity thing. Psychedelics, because they're so powerful and they open your consciousness so fast with that sledgehammer thing, there's more risk with that.

[01:51:58] That's one thing I love about coffee. Anyone can take it, can get those channels open, but there's no risk because it grounds you at the same time, which distinguishes it from the other psychedelics. Psychedelics shoot the energy up, opens the crown chakra, like the Chinese would say.

[01:52:13] And you have access to all this information out here, and it's this expansion of awareness out here, then you can take that. Then you have to take it, ground it, and integrate it, and build structures in your life, otherwise, you're just like a hippie who is high all the time, telling everybody about conspiracies and doing nothing in your life. We all know those people, unfortunately, where it's like really sad, you have some of the most interesting conversations with them, but yet they can't pay for their food. You know what I mean? It's like, because integration.

[01:52:43] So anyways, with substance like psilocybin or aya or any of the tryptamines, they are fantastic medicines, some of the most beautiful tools that we have. You know that I believe that for sure. But they do have a much more narrow spectrum of therapeutic use and care and responsibility that's required to use that tool like a surgeon using a scalpel with those substances.

[01:53:07] Versus a substance like kava, it's the first and only available food grade psychedelic, meaning it's a food that you can put into the entire population that expands consciousness, like in a psychedelic in a much more subtle way, of course, but then also helps to contribute to that expansion, to that grounding, to that reset of the nervous system that feeds our mind and feeds our soul on a way that these heavier medicines do.

[01:53:33] But those require all this context, all these structures around to use them safely, as where kava is a good on ramp into the use of those substances or just an alternative that it's like if you want that more subtle thing. And that's why I like to make the distinguishing factor because first of all, kratom doesn't really have that mind integration entheogenic component to it.

[01:53:54] I would say, if you were to ask me-- I'm not saying that this is fact, but just my own personal opinion-- I think that it's not as developed of a form of intelligence as kava is. I think kava is more of a sophisticated. You know whenever you get that communication with an organism like a psilocybin or this, you can tell the level of sophistication that's embedded within that.

[01:54:14] I think that it's one that has more of a linear mechanism that's closer to a stupid molecule, like a synthetic. And because it's like that, it's less biologically compatible with the human framework. That's why it doesn't communicate with all the systems to maintain balance with its use. In other words, it hasn't formed a relationship with humans that's sustainable. It's more like the dude that's fun to hang out with every once in a while, but you hang out with him too much and he's not really compatible with you because--

[01:54:42] Luke: You can't take him to every party. He only--

[01:54:45] Cameron: Things start to unravel.

[01:54:46] Luke: He's only going to vibe with a certain subsect your friends.

[01:54:49] Cameron: Exactly. You both turn into quite the dim-witted little monsters if you--

[01:54:53] Luke: I think that's a really balanced perspective. And with these things, it's not a good or bad, right or wrong thing.

[01:55:02] Cameron: It's about context. Context matters.

[01:55:04] Luke: Like I said, I love kratom. I think it's very useful. The times I use it most consistently is when I fly. I love to take some kratom when I fly. It relaxes my body. My back doesn't hurt as much. It just chills me out. I don't feel high, but definitely relaxed. But I'd be concerned with myself if I was using something like that every day in terms of just my sobriety and sanity and wellbeing.

[01:55:37] Cameron: And it's not about building up just kava. I didn't come in this from a sales standpoint, like I said. I came in this from, I'm dying and I need real answers. And so I was in a situation in my life where the only thing that mattered was what was real.

[01:55:54] That was the difference between life and death. Either I find what's true and what's real, or I die. And then that extended to people around me. Whenever I was helping other people and coaching other people that were in similar circumstances. It's like, look. We find the truth, even as nuanced as it is, or people die, or people suffer kind of thing.

[01:56:13] And then I was in it from a clinical standpoint. And delivering this mechanism and this value through the medium of a company is just a byproduct of it. So I try to stay as balanced and in service of the medicine as possible, but that's why I can put so many eggs in this basket of kava, because it really is a phenomenal substance in the sense of like, it has the best-- I've used most of the adaptogens from traditional Chinese medicine, Tibetan medicine, Ayurveda, all the stuff that's your daily nutritive adaptogenic compounds in medicine.

[01:56:46] And I've used the heavy hitting psychedelics, the DMT containing, fly across the universe, the most powerful experience you can have probably in this life. I've used those. And then everything in between. And kava has the greatest therapeutic effect to drawback ratio, I always say. You've heard me say that before.

[01:57:05] Because it gives you this amazing acute effect that's tangible that starts to work right away, and for some people more than others that can really feel it and get up to those levels on all different levels, but without hardly any drawbacks. It's so compatible with human biology, and it interrupts-- to your point earlier, how you talked about it, of course, not being addictive and it doesn't call to you.

[01:57:30] It's funny because when people ask me-- I get this question a lot, is kava a drug? Well, it's psychoactive. I feel this effect. I switch out alcohol for it. Is it a drug? And actually, from everything we know about its chemistry, its pharmacological makeup, its intelligence, its structure, everything, I would actually classify it as not only not a drug, but as an anti drug. And the reason is, is because from the credit card analogy, it does the exact opposite.

[01:57:53] A drug plugs into a receptor, stimulates a series of catalytic processes, the dumping of chemicals, and you get this effect that basically just uses up or releases chemistry in your brain to some degree, to varying degrees. But kava, doing the complete opposite, it's actually a pathway. It's a tool and an off ramp from drug use because it interrupts and satiates the dopamine pathways, the GABAergic pathways, but specifically the dopamine pathways that are connected to addiction, repetitive use.

[01:58:26] It satiates those pathways without creating the addiction depletion negative feedback loop, creating the need for another drink of kava or another cigarette. So it's not like that you start to use kava and you just have less and less desire. You don't have to have more kava, but it's great whenever you want it. That is true. It's a beautiful thing. But it also satiates the desire for other dopaminergic stimulating substances across the board. So we use kava for interrupting the addictive process even to freaking things like scrolling. You know what I mean?

[01:58:58] Luke: I need to step up my kava then.

[01:59:02] Cameron: No, because it does help in that. The sugar addiction, people use it. It suppresses appetite. It stimulates dopamine in the brain without having to pump glucose in there to give that. Because glucose is another credit card type of thing, or high concentrated glucose especially, whenever you use it that way. So it's just a beautiful thing that is an off ramp from habituation to dopamine-stimulating, pleasure-inducing substances. In other words, it is the ultimate pro freedom, intelligent food.

[01:59:37] Because it's a food that actually helps you. It creates the opportunity for you to start harbingering freedom in your life because, again, every single one of these credit cards that we're using is a type of enslavement in reducing our spectrum of opportunities in our life because we become enslaved to this process that's depleting us and taking from us.

[01:59:59] And any medicine that can come in and help to open that up creates the ability to now we're more free to do all of these other things and to just step into our higher capacity as a human. You know that. You've lived the enslaved life and you've lived a sober life. Look at what you've got now. You get to talk to awesome people all the time and make money doing it, married and everything. You got a great life now.

[02:00:25] Luke: I have a blessed life. And I just had an idea. When I'm tempted in the morning, which is the worst time to ever do this, to open Twitter or X and start scrolling at all the insanity, I'll just take my dose of kava.

[02:00:39] Cameron: Yeah, no.

[02:00:39] Luke: And shut that shit down. That is the worst habit. I think if you say what's your very worst habit, it would be looking at social media in the morning. It's just insanely addictive. It's crazy. Because it's like I don't have my willpower, resilience built up or intact yet.

[02:01:01] Cameron: Half conscious and you're just, "Ugh."

[02:01:02] Luke: Yeah. It's like I'm not fortified where the higher, more intelligent part of me is like, what are you doing with this trash? Put your phone down and do something--

[02:01:11] Cameron: Your resistance mechanisms aren't online.

[02:01:12] Luke: Yeah. And it's always like, well, I'm just going to check real quick and then I'll meditate.

[02:01:16] Cameron: An hour later--

[02:01:18] Luke: Yeah, it's ridiculous. So I'm calling myself out on that because it's embarrassing.

[02:01:21] Cameron: I actually have people that do that though not just with kava, but a lot of people do a cold plunge right when they wake up, no negotiations, no nothing. Because you get that big dopamine spike, natural dopamine spike that lasts for hours on end afterwards and it's a pattern interrupt and you get to summon. You say, "When I say go, you go." And boom. And all of a sudden you're engaged and you don't have an opportunity to start scrolling.

[02:01:47] And kava is one of those things too that a lot of people use in the morning. I have people who use it in the morning to quell their anxiety, but to open them up and get them in that state that the meditation gives you, where you feel like you're dictating the day and creating it, co-creating it, instead of chasing it.

[02:02:03] Luke: Yeah. And not reacting to it.

[02:02:05] Cameron: Meditation does the same.

[02:02:06] Luke: Totally. I want to let people know, I usually mentioned this earlier, but I got caught up in this beautiful vortex we're in, the show notes for everything we've talked about today that's clickable, including your prior two episodes, number 219 and 341, which were also freaking awesome and long form can be found at lukestorey.com/kava, K-A-V-A.

[02:02:31] And for people that want to try your Tru Kava, they can go to lukestorey.com/trukava, that's T-R-U-K-A-V-A. We'll put all this in the show description on your podcast app. You can click it. And we'll also put there the code LUKE20 to get you 20%. off. I like the way you roll because you have a company, but you're not salesy at all.

[02:02:55] We have your products sitting right here and we haven't really talked about them, but to be fair, I haven't really seen any other viable kava products out there. So I think you guys have the market cornered anyway.

[02:03:08] You've got your sparkling drinks here, these sodas, which I love. I go through them way too fast. I'll buy a case of them. I drink probably two a day, especially when I'm writing, because I'll get amped up when I'm doing focused creative work like that. So I go through them too fast, but you also have the complex plan, the oil, and you have these shots. So just tell people what these are all about.

[02:03:34] Cameron: Yeah. I think we set it up great with this conversation. So we've got three forms of it available right now, trying to keep it as focused as possible, but the general effects of traditional kava, we don't use any solvent extraction or anything that turns into that crude chamomile tea-like extraction. It has more of that.

[02:03:56] Even if it's in the background for some people, some people feel it more prominently. Some people take it and feel it very prominently. And then some people, it runs more in the background. I always tell people to take the 30-day kava challenge because there's a cumulative effect as the receptors get primed because there's that reverse tolerance thing that happens, the opposite, because it's repleting instead of depleting, like we talked about.

[02:04:14] So with any of these, yeah. I think the most popular product in retail, we launched nationally in Sprouts, a farmer's market last year. It's supposed to launch in whole foods last year as well, too. That will be coming up here in not too distant future. And we've been holding it there for now and keeping the reins off because we're wanting to build the identity of kava in the marketplace as not what I talked about before, is becoming this headshot natural high, but as a whole food substance, a category.

[02:04:44] And the best place to do that is through the credibility of the national health food store chains, where you can go and get this thing and people can realize that it really is a therapeutic medicine. And again, that's one difference. You could never see kratom in that context. It would never be allowed in that [Inaudible]. So that's where they're different. You can actually pick this up at a health food store.

[02:05:03] More and more as time goes on we'll do that. But through our website, you can get all of the products as well, too. So we have the oil, which is like, if you want, as a daily tonic, to get the general background effects of kava, if you're using it to improve deep and REM sleep, which that's another great thing we didn't really touch on, is that unlike alcohol and THC, it does help you move into a good sleep and improves the recovery process during sleep, so the amount that you recover.

[02:05:30] Helps increase deep and REM sleep. If you wear an Oura ring or anything like that, we see that giving good results all the time. It's one of the most effective things for all the reasons we've described with the GABA system and stuff. As far as just like the tonic for the general health promoting benefits, the pain, the inflammation, the brain optimization, and just getting KAVA into your system, the tincture, the oil, the KAVAPLEX Oil, we have a KAVAPLEX and KAVAPLEX MIND oil.

[02:05:58] The KAVAPLEX Mind is a strain from Tonga that's a little bit more on the uplifting nootropic side because kava has both these components, the mind activating, mind expanding, focusing type of almost nootropic, that dopamine side. It also has the GABAergic, the relaxing side.

[02:06:16] And just like cannabis, there are all these strains. But we have really the same combination of strains in most of our products, which is right in the middle. So it's what a lot of people would expect from something like alcohol, but without the side effects, like calm, open, enhanced, focused, you could just engage better in almost anything that you're doing.

[02:06:33] So it's like this all-purpose type of social mind-enhancing elixir. So just a different experience. So if you go and pick up the drinks at Sprouts-- they're sold out in a lot of locations, but they should be back in soon. If you go and pick the drinks at Sprouts or through the website, then you can pick it up just like you would pick up a Suja drink or a probiotic beverage or something like that, or a coffee, but it has this very different function that we've described here that's super cool.

[02:07:01] So you can drink the drinks in any context. The drinks are probably the best for using as an alcohol alternative just because it's the mouthfeel, it's the look, it's the carbonation. You can share it with someone, and there's the psychological and emotional component to sharing a beverage with someone. Like you go get a coffee or a beer with somebody.

[02:07:20] So for the social component, we have people that carry the tincture with them and that have it and take a few doses and drink the drinks as well too and whatnot. The tinctures are so portable. So if you're looking for a daily supplement, the tinctures are the best. And the tinctures are great across the board as well too.

[02:07:35] The shots and the drinks are the exact same. The shots is just the drink concentrated with less liquid in a two-ounce shot. So you're getting the same serving as you are in a drink in a shot but it's not--

[02:07:44] Luke: Also good on the plane.

[02:07:45] Cameron: Yeah, exactly.

[02:07:46] Luke: Because you can get through TSA with this size bottle.

[02:07:49] Cameron: Yeah. And a lot of people take it before flights because it's a neuroprotective and it helps from the damaging effects of the radiation exposure.

[02:07:55] Luke: Oh, I didn't even know that.

[02:07:56] Cameron: Because it's a calcium channel blocker.

[02:07:58] Luke: What?

[02:07:58] Cameron: Yeah.

[02:07:59] Luke: Now you're speaking my language, bro. I didn't know we had an EMF angle here.

[02:08:02] Cameron: Yeah, yeah. It seems like sometimes it's like, oh, it does all these things. Is that really believable? But if you look at the organism that we've described as this, it plays a very protective role in the ecology where it grows. It produces compounds that protect the plants around. It has developed all these adaptive mechanisms for protection, and it's adapted, I think, to be biologically compatible for relationship with the human species, I believe.

[02:08:28] So when you take it into your bodies, it transfers those adaptive characteristics to you. And a biological organism doesn't just develop one mechanism of adaptation for biology, our bodies. If you were to capture the chemistry of a human, like go in and capture some compounds or an entourage of different compounds of a human who is in a parasympathetic state, you wouldn't just see one hormone that was related towards relaxation. You'd see all of them together.

[02:08:56] So the reason why it hits on so many different things related to stress and protection is because it's a biological organism that's a super adapter, and it protects from all these forms of stress. So one of the mechanisms is calcium channel blocking. In Martin Paul's work, calcium channel activation is one of the mechanisms that EMF produces damage. So I've noticed that people that are EMF sensitive, they'll tell me before they go on flights, they feel so much better when they use it.

[02:09:27] Luke: It's funny because I'm doing all kinds of things on flights for the EMF, drinking my hydrogen water.

[02:09:32] Cameron: NAD stuff, yeah, the whole thing.

[02:09:34] Luke: The whole thing. But I drink these on the flight too, and I didn't even know that that was part of it. I'm just like, I'm trying to be as relaxed as humanly possible so I can just put on my NuCalm meditation for two hours and go into la la land. So that's actually cool. I'm going to that into consideration. Over the years, because I've been using your stuff, I don't know, five, six years, a long time, since you first started--

[02:09:58] Cameron: Because I first had some of the first tinctures, like [Inaudible]. Yeah.

[02:10:01] Luke: Yeah, yeah. I remember that too. It was actually here in Austin that I first met you at Paleo f(x), and I was already hip to kava, but hadn't really figured it out how to source it and stuff. And I walked by your booth, you guys were over in the corner, and I was like, "What?"

[02:10:13] Cameron: Yeah, we were just getting rolling.

[02:10:14] Luke: I was like, "Kava?" So I started talking to you and you went on like you did today, dropping so much knowledge. I was like, "Oh, shit. I think I met the person on the planet that knows the most about kava." But one thing people have asked me because I think people that listen to the show are very attuned to quality and always looking for anything suspect in any different products, and I've gotten over the years, questions about your KAVAPLEX Oil of people freaking out because it has sunflower oil in it.

[02:10:46] And they're like, "This has seed oils." And I try to explain. I'm like, "No, dude. It's not the same. It's not like canola oil, seed oils. It's a different thing." So I don't have to explain it to people. Can you explain what is different about--

[02:10:59] Cameron: It's actually pretty simple. There's a misnomer. It's like context matters. The devil's in the details type of thing. It's like sometimes we get locked onto these talking points because in 99% of the cases seed oils are bad. So that is a good general recommendation to give people to stay away from them because most of them are bad.

[02:11:15] They're not bad because seeds are bad. They're not bad because, trapped in the structure of the seed, they're bad. There's argument for some of them, but I'm in the case of sunflower, pumpkin, coriander--

[02:11:30] Luke: I take black--

[02:11:31] Cameron: Black sesame.

[02:11:32] Luke: Cumin seed every day.

[02:11:34] Cameron: Black cumin seed is one of the most medicinal seed oils.

[02:11:36] Luke: Dude, it's like it's beautiful medicine when it's ultra cold-processed and not adulterated.

[02:11:40] Cameron: Some viral infections or in the COVID epidemics and stuff, there was studies in Pakistan that showed massive reduction in mortality with black cumin seed oil, mixed with certain types of raw honey. But the black cumin seed actually, we found actually, helped to dissolve the spike protein.

[02:11:55] It has all these thymus alkaloids in it that drastically stimulate white blood cell count and a bunch of things. Black cumin seed oil is amazing stuff, but as far as seed oils are concerned. And I've thought about even shifting away from the sunflower just because there's so much that connotation to it, but it's such a good delivery system.

[02:12:14] We developed a pressing method, co developed a special pressing method that is different from anything that you've had in the stores as far as pressing seeds. Most of the seed oils on the market are done with a standard industry expeller press, which involves grinding and mashing of the seeds.

[02:12:42] So during that process, it's done under high heat. And the grinding itself, if you use any type of grinding, it pulls oxygen into the structure of the oil. And the polyunsaturated fats, the PUFAs that are in those are so fragile that they oxidize so easily. And once those oxidize, it's not good. You know what I mean?

[02:13:03] That's where we get the holding the seed oils. Now canola and oils like that, and vegetables are the absolute worst. Your seed oils with standard expeller press are not quite as bad, but if they're oxidized, which normally they are, that's very bad. So we have a type of hydraulic press that uses no grinding that pulls the oil out and subject it to lipid peroxidation testing and it's undamaged.

[02:13:25] It's really, really amazing stuff. It's super therapeutic because the fats that are in seeds are actually the same fats, what we call, if you talk to people like Brian Peskin and others-- you should have him on the show.

[02:13:38] Luke: How do you, Brian Peskin? That's funny.

[02:13:39] Cameron: Yeah, yeah.

[02:13:39] Luke: I was into that dude's stuff years ago. He'll fuck you up when it comes to your understanding of the omega-3, 6, 9 ratios and stuff. Yeah.

[02:13:47] Cameron: And he talks about this exact thing.

[02:13:50] Luke: Yeah. He's a really--

[02:13:51] Cameron: Parent essential oil, right?

[02:13:52] Luke: Yes.

[02:13:53] Cameron: Parent essential oils and these oils that come from seeds, even though most of the time you get them damaged, are the exact same structure that's incorporated to build healthy cell membranes. So alpha linoleic acid, linoleic acid, and arachidonic acid, so those are the building blocks. That's what your membranes are made out of. They're not made out of omega-3.

[02:14:15] And it's the ratio of these things that creates this redox balance. It's not about one or the other. And I think today, good friends of mine, like Brian, years ago, we had this conversation, people like Pampa and others. Very few people have talked about it.

[02:14:32] But a lot of people today are starting to create this whole thing, like omega-3 dominance, where omega-3 is the anti-inflammatory component. We need the inflammatory component from omega-6 to fire up the immune system and to produce energy. There's a bunch of components for healing and maintaining health.

[02:14:47] It's the redox balance between those two. And when you start incorporating these omega-3 fats into your cell membranes, then you create a situation, especially if they're oxidized omega-3, like you get in most fish oil. It's a very nasty substance that just-- and again, these bad fats, if you put them into the body, the body incorporates them into the cell membranes.

[02:15:06] And if they're damaged or if they're the wrong fats, it shuts down oxygen transfer. Because once you damage an oil, it can't transfer oxygen and it can't transfer nutrients very well through it. Therefore, you can't get oxygen nutrients in the cell, can't get the good stuff in, can't get the toxins out. And that's where you have a problem.

[02:15:24] And same thing with the mitochondrial membrane, the cardiolipin that's in there. So anyways, seed oils actually have components that build and maintain healthy cell membranes if you can get them unoxidized. Most of the time they're not, so they're very bad.

[02:15:37] But if they aren't unoxidized and they actually are healthy, for these purposes, we press kava with it because the less than content in it, it acts as a carrier for the lactones, and we're using that as a solvent to bring the full spectrum out. And so you're getting the best of both worlds. You're getting the therapeutic effect of something that could normally be bad if it was oxidized with the lactone complex from the kava. So in this case--

[02:16:07] Luke: Great explanation.

[02:16:08] Cameron: I still get it. And some people, no matter what I say, they still don't believe me and they still just like, it's--

[02:16:12] Luke: You can't please everyone all the time.

[02:16:14] Cameron: They're just angry, whatever.

[02:16:15] Luke: The other thing too is like, I didn't even know that it was that chill as you just described. But you're talking about taking a dropper of this.

[02:16:25] Cameron: Yeah.

[02:16:25] Luke: And I probably--

[02:16:26] Cameron: It's mainly for the kava. There's very little. It's like a six to one ratio. It's very, very little of the even undamaged seed oil.

[02:16:32] Luke: If you eat a half a portion of French fries, you're getting a whole bottle of that.

[02:16:38] Cameron: If you just stand in McDonald's and breathe the vapor-- it's just one of those things. The seed oil in there is a delivery system for the kava.

[02:16:48] Luke: It makes sense with the lecithin because I've used lecithin extract at different times to make different concoctions and things like that. Because I want to use it as an emulsifier. Yeah.

[02:16:59] Cameron: And lactones, so the active constituents in kava that we've talked about in our past conversations, delve deep into that, the active compounds are a set of fats that we call kava lactones. Not that dissimilar from the cannabinoids in cannabis, but they're fats that suspend themselves in water.

[02:17:21] They're not water soluble, but they get absorbed through the gut pretty easily. But if you take them with certain fats, if you take them with certain even pseudo process fats like MCT, they get absorbed rapidly. They'll carry the lactone with it. And lecithin is a decent carrier theoretically.

[02:17:40] And I that think it's pretty clear that it does, but then also MCT does as well. So it's one of those things that we use it as a good carrier and it helps for it to absorb. It helps to pull it out of the kava plant material as well too.

[02:17:55] So it's just in there for function of a delivery system mainly. So there's that. So for any questions about that, you can always-- if you have any more questions, you can always email, and one of our customer service people will delve into that if you don't feel safe about it or whatnot.

[02:18:13] But then there's also the other products that don't even have any of that if you just don't want to do it. And then we do have the powder products too that are coming up. January, we're launching those, and those will be retail in DC. We've got a tub, a 12-ounce tub you get of amino acids that's all-purpose drink mix, mixing your shakes, smoothies. And then we've got sachets. You'll get those at the checkout counter or whatnot, a box of 30. So it's a way of having portable drinks where you can carry a whole box of sachets and just put it in water.

[02:18:44] Luke: I like that because that's the thing with these sody pops here. It's heavy. I'm not going to--

[02:18:49] Cameron: And shipping it. That's why--

[02:18:51] Luke: I'm not going to throw those in my suitcase.

[02:18:53] Cameron: The drinks, they're a high-volume, low-margin product from a company standpoint. They're mainly for brick and mortar. Most people want to buy their drinks. Most people don't want to buy cases of bottled water online.

[02:19:04] They'd like to pick them up at the store, pay for the shipping and the whole thing. So people drink these because the only place you can get them is at Sprouts and on our website right now. So people will do it because they want the kava. But long-term, we see the powders being in the powders and maybe even the shots and the oils, of course, being the lead for D to C, people ordering those.

[02:19:25] And then going to the store to get the drinks, pick up case at a time. Because with the powders, you'll be able to have a whole tub of this stuff, servings, and it'll be super strong too because we made some tweaks and improvements in this stuff [Inaudible].

[02:19:35] Luke: Let's do it. All right, folks. You go to lukestorey.com/trukava and get your hands on some of this. Thanks for joining me again, dude. It's always great to see you.

[02:19:44] Cameron: This was is much fun.

[02:19:44] Luke: The last time we did an episode in this house is when we had just bought the house and we were sitting down there and we hadn't started the horrific experience of the remodel yet.

[02:19:55] Cameron: Oh, we almost had to sit on the floor. I think you just set two chairs up just for the sake of the podcast.

[02:20:01] Luke: I took the chairs out of storage in the garage just to make a little set. So we've come a long way.

[02:20:05] Cameron: Oh, you were just setting up the camera by yourself. You had to start it and run over to the seat. This whole thing has just evolved into such a great-- I love everything. I love the--

[02:20:15] Luke: We've both come a long way, man. Thanks for joining me again. I can't wait to do it next time.

[02:20:19] Cameron: Absolutely, man. Anytime.