ADDICT SENT HOME TO DIE — HE DIDN'T FIX THE ADDICTION, HE FIXED THIS!

And you're gonna hear that whole story and how something called true kava was born. But Cam, welcome to the Dr. Pompa podcast. This would be my favorite place to be, probably. Listen, y'all have to know that, you know, gosh, how many years ago was that where you were one of my first uh well, not even one of my first clients with dealing with uh some of the stuff that you maybe wouldn't be first guess?

word, but I wasn't like, you know, I wasn't, you know, it wasn't a complete disaster. Well, I mean, I probably would have said that I was thriving, right? But now my life resembles. So you still had a lot of addictions, right?

I'd go into spurts or getting in trouble, but I definitely had sort of um, you know, instabilities and um had, you know, definitely a high proclivity towards compulsivity, impulsivity, addictions, all that kind of stuff, which sometimes would come up looking really functionally great, right? You know, where I would like really shine.

And then the assumption comes that that's just who you are. Yeah, false. I'm ADHD, I'm depressed. Yeah, absolutely. That'd be like saying I'm chest pain, you know, or something. It's like there's like a hundred ways to arrive there. Yeah. And yeah, in some people it can be more deeply embedded than others, right? As we know now.

Um, and it may take a lot to sort of just excavate those patterns, but there's not almost there's there's almost not any functional or behavioral pattern that I've learned today that can't be changed with the right strategy if you're willing to go deep enough. Yeah, right. And so, but I I kind of had a lot of the things that kids have today, but I was probably on, you know, the more extreme side of you know, certain things. Um, knowing now I had a lot of deficits.

I had metabolic syndrome, right? I had neurotoxicity, I had a lot of these things, these stressors that we had. I mean, obviously, anyone who listens to this show has probably heard the bucket theory before, right? It was all the stressors.

I couldn't have like, you know, sat down and be like, oh well, I have low dopamine levels or my mitochondria or stressed or something. It's like you're just a kid and you're trying to self-soothe, you're trying to feel good.

It's not uh, you know, that out of the ordinary that someone with some pre-existing impulsivities and maybe some some some pre-sickly uh state like syndrome uh would end up in that sport because it's one that's that's highly addictive on the nervous system, and it's one that you can just like repeat and do the same thing rinse, repeat, get the feeling, rinse, repeat, get the feeling. Don't have to rely on anybody else. You know, it's an individual sport, you know.

So that became sort of like my drug of choice at an early age, right? So and then and I got really good at it and I was successful, and I ran in college at the University of Arkansas and was was you know you know very successful in that sport, um, both as a marathon runner and on the track and all that stuff. And so it was like my life, it was my identity, it was my world.

Um, but I got to a point where I was running uh in college, and you know, I was I was training excessively year-round, as as you know, someone who has a predisposition to addictive behavior does, right?

But um, but yeah, I started to just get very, very emotionally destabilized, chronically fatigued. And I was used to a level of chronic fatigue because I was just had a proclivity towards overdoing things or burning things out or whatever. Um, but it became excessive. It became to a point where I just wasn't able to recover. I wasn't able to adapt anymore.

So, you know, most of the time in the past, I would do these excessive, I would do, you know, 160 mile weeks for a whole semester, and then I would kind of crash for a few weeks, and then I would just naturally recover to a good degree to where I could hit it again. But this time I wasn't. It was like the spring of I think 2008 or 2009, where I just ended up on the couch and I just could not get off.

As as much as like I couldn't even get off the couch really to find the motivation or find the willpower to run to go to work. I went through like several jobs at the time because I just like could not find I ended up in a situation where I was just completely void of physical willpower, which was which was out of the ordinary for me because I'm not a lazy person at all, right?

But so I remember even my parents at the time, I I I came home from the house that I was living in and I just sort of like ended up like back at my parents' house, and I was just I wasn't really like expressing a lot of it because it was just sort of like, you know, whenever you're that age, it makes you feel like weak to do so, right? And there wasn't any place in which I thought that there was any real answers.

It was just like I'm not working hard enough or I worked too hard for a while and now something's going on. But uh I also got an injury around that time too. And I think that was actually what stuff was.

Well, it you know, to me anyways, now uh, you know, from this vantage point, but that's your whole life, that's your whole world at that point in your life, right? And that was where I got my sense of meaning, that's where I got my sense of purpose, um, my sense of strength, everything, right? Was sort of sort of tied into that thing, and uh, you know, had that was w what I wanted to do. So now it's it's gone. Yeah, exactly. Identity, uh, identity.

And so there was kind of all this stuff happened at once, but it was it was that that portion of it. But then also, you know, once I couldn't run anymore for a number of months, it was sort of like, you know, now what? Yeah, I became yeah, yeah, I became massively, massively actually like clinically depressed and everything. Um, but then I just wasn't recovering. It was like month after.

And I had people around me because I'm from Arkansas, which is, you know, a part of the country even to this day that's not like super progressive from a health or technology sense or anything. And so, like the only form of like medicine or care whenever you had a had a question, you know, questionable situation going on, especially back then, was the standard allopathic model, right? I was gonna make a joke.

But anyway, so I end up in in the only avenue that I had, you know, in a kind of at the time, what was I thought was a desperate situation, which was nothing compared to what I ended up in later on, but in a psychiatrist's office where I basically ended up prescribed on a slew, was was prescribed a slew of medications, the primary one being Adderall, with the amphetamine-based drug, which the overlap is with meth, right? Because chemically, I think, and this drives me crazy today.

It's like we just kind of need to call it what it is. It's a form of legal meth that's slightly less potent on the front end, but still ultimately leads you mentality-wise and physiologically to a similar place if you use it long enough.

They just say, it gives me this feeling, it gives me this chemical, maybe. But there's a deadline. Exactly, right? It doesn't give you any more dopamine, which would be the with the main chemical that, say, amphetamines work on. You get this flood dump of dopamine in the brain. So, you know, dopamine is the main, you know, chemical in the brain that elicits a state of energy, focus, uh, motivation, drive, and desire. So you feel like you're super focused and you're getting things done, right?

The problem is that it's not creating any more dopamine, it's just plugging into receptors and borrowing from tomorrow's stores to pay for today. Exactly. I call it a chemical credit card, right? Yeah, exactly. One day you gotta pay. Exactly. You gotta pay, right? And so it's not, not only is it not addressing the issue, it's actually bringing you in debt with your body's own energy and its own feel-good chemistry.

And so obviously not knowing that at all, but that's the system that was the only system that I had available to me was offering, basically. It's like I'm bankrupt, I'm out of money, and I have all the symptoms of being at least headed towards bankruptcy. And then the only person who can give me any advice has a has a white jacket and a name tag, and they just say, Here, here's this credit card, you know. So you took it how long did you take it for? So I took it for two and a half, three years.

Yeah, it worked while you're taking it, right? Yeah, exactly. And and it was it well, yeah, exactly. So till the debt built up and then you had to pay it back. Yeah, like so many people who go on psychotropic drugs, whether it be off the street or whether it be prescribed, you know, in a pill bottle, you know, from a physician and go on them regularly, right? You know, you can have this experience where it seems like a miracle at first.

Uh a lot of people even kind of ignorantly referred to a drug like Adderall or Ritalin as a miracle drug, right? Because, but yeah, it works. It's just like if I were to get my life back.

and his mitochondria than amphetamines, right? And it's a reason if you want to age faster than anyone, I mean, you say obviously spike your glucose more than anything. Yeah, exactly. But I would say, you know, sugar, steroids, stress, and stimulants, right? I would agree with that. Stimulants, yeah.

And you're looking for something that works and you have to function. And so many people are in situations where they can't afford not to function.

But if you sort of cut to a lot of times whenever you're in the midst of you know drug use or the altered state, especially, you know, Adderall and amphetamines are one of those interesting ones because at that controlled dose, they give the perceptual feeling that it's actually improving your life because it's a productive drug, right? It's not like heroin where you're zonked out on the couch or whatever. No, you do more, you have more focus. Exactly.

And to people, in you know, unfortunately, our culture, uh, you know, value in our culture a lot of times is judged by how much you can produce, right? It's just part of what, you know, sort of the Americanized value system has been. And even how good we feel about ourselves. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, you know, you get on it and your perception from the inside, you're only focusing, you know, Tony Robbins would say you don't experience life, you experience the life you focus on. Right.

And it's like when whenever you're trying to optimize for one metric, that is like your immediate productivity, then it sort of like blurs out everything else. And so all these things that are falling apart because you can't really create true homeostasis chemically in the brain with amphetamine, right? No, no more can you do it wrong.

Like there's a reason why there's whole books written on this, that's you know, like 90% of the entire, you know, Nazi German army were on amphetamines during World War II, is because it's been shown to suppress empathy, to make you feel like Superman, to give you the feeling of whatever you're doing in that moment is just because you're associating it with this big dopamine spike, right?

So it's a lot easier to control people and it it it it can lead to sort of narcissistic behavior, not that it does to that degree in everybody. What I'm saying is that it's it has a proclivity towards cutting you off from emotion and empathy. Yeah.

like there's monkeys hanging from the light fixtures. Well, see, this is coming, actually. This is coming.

And you could put antidepressants in that category too. You know, it's like short-term leverage, maybe in some emergency situations, obviously, when someone is completely out of sorts, but I mean, you're ultimately gonna end up in a worse place than you started, right? And I was like the extreme example because the way that I was wired, already hyper-impulsive, kind of had a proclivity towards the impulsive compulsive.

The worst thing that you could ever put in a person like that's brain is amphetamines. Because it's gonna take all of that eccentric sort of like and it's gonna put it on friggin' steroids.

And then you cut two, and I've got, you know, you know, basically I I had I, you know, I was only what, I was 19 at the time, and I ended up in a squ uh, you know, a 700 square foot apartment with um hundreds of thousands of dollars of like TV and stereo equipment because I worked at Best Buy and I was like buying TVs and flipping them and selling them, not illegal, like using their order management systems to like you know get me employee discounts and stuff.

I had, yeah, I would sit there like tweaked out on Adderall, like, you know, with a little metronome, like playing songs, and it was dancing and whatever. So I ended up then I end up with a macaw, blue and gold macaw, like a pirate parrot, like this big, right? So you put in there. Um, so I had those and I had iguanas. I had I and then I ended up like at one point I had a fish tank in my

living room full of piranhas. Exotic, yeah. Carnivorous fish. You feed them like hot dogs, right? You can stick your hand in there and it'll like freaking eat it. That's cool. It's like um my my landlord didn't think it was cool, but but that's another thing. But yeah, so then I ended up with monkeys at some point. I ended up with multiple. Did you actually try to purchase a giraffe? Well, no, so so I actually ended up the the places that I ended up going. Does this okay?

I would drive this, this, these drugs, you know, had me such in a state, and it was just like you can you can just tell. Because I wouldn't have done any of this stuff outside of drugs. I had regular levels of impulsivity, like I was addicted to running, you know. Yeah, yeah. Not not this, yeah. Cut to amphetamines, it's like ace ventura breaking bad, you know, overlap, disastrous, you know. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So I would I remember driving in the middle of the night and finding these exotic animal sort of like um uh operations that were it wasn't his, but whenever I first saw the the documentary during COVID, Tiger King, you know, Joe Exotic, that whole thing, like that those were the exact places that I was going to buy these things, right? I didn't end up at his, but people that were in that network, there's some in Tennessee, there's some in Oklahoma, some of that, like that.

So I was going around to these places and making deals and like buying stuff or whatever. And I didn't, I I got to the point where they were trying to sell me. I was a good customer, right? And then they knew uh that I would probably be interested. And they were trying to, they were offering me an amazing deal to sell me a giraffe, right? And I was just illusional enough that I like almost got it, right? Like that that was crazy. How big of a giraffe? How high do your ceilings have to be?

And mind you, you know, people that know me today don't believe this story sometimes because I'm actually very like rational, grounded, like sort of fact-based. Like everybody's like, we'll talk about how he beat all this. And I'm just telling you, it just is this is just this is where this is this is an anti-drug story. This is why. Yeah, exactly. But yes, no, it's just like you don't I wasn't thinking long term. I I was thinking, you know, I'm tweaking out, you want to sell me a giraffe?

Yes, I can afford it.

Whereas like, you know, this guy was like from Syria and he like and he was the manager of this apartment complex. His name was Ubob, you know, and uh and he hated me. He obviously knew, but he's like couldn't prove it. He couldn't come in there. Yeah, and I would like get there like really late at night and like take park in the back parking lot and like run up in there or whatever.

And you could hear because during the day, there's like there's there's monkeys like you know, screaming and and there's like parrots squawking, and there's like, you know, and the and and the neighbors are like, and I'm like, no, I just watch like I watch Animal Planet. I watch like, you know, like yeah, I've got some stereo equipment, maybe I should keep it turned down. And and he was it was one of those things he's like, I'm gonna I'm gonna freaking get you or whatever, you know.

He they do an intervention on you, right? And he comes in, he sees this. You said his face was just, you know, absolutely, you still see that face in your life. Exactly. Yeah. And then what what was the first thing that he said at that point? But I want you to tell the story about how you just avoided the landlord. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Literally dead monkey in the freezer.

So you can only imagine if we would have spec scanned my brain at the same time at the time and got Daniel Eymon to do it or whatnot, then um then we would have seen that. And why I eventually did when I got a brain scan, which made it extraordinarily interesting not too long after this. But after the intervention. But anyways, when my dad came in. But hold on a second.

And then the toxic compensatory behaviors,

these were about as toxic and compensatory as it gets, right? When you load it to where the system just explodes, the air quality in my apartment was so extraordinarily toxic. Because you can imagine, well, first of all, we found out that there was stackybottress in there later on, right? Which is a black deadly volume, right? Which you talk a lot about, right? It's just one of the major causes in and of itself. Yeah. If it were just there, it's just that. If it was just there.

But I ended up with all these exotic animals. Obviously, everything that I was doing at this point was biting off way more than I could even start to chew. So of course I wasn't thinking about how to clean up after them or anything like that when I covered it. I was about to get a giraffe. Yeah, actually. I wasn't in big picture mode, right? You weren't cleaning birdcage. It was day-to-day, exactly. It was like, you know, that let alone monkeys.

No, no, no. So you can imagine the amount of animal waste that builds up in a confined environment like this, right? Oh my gosh. Um, whether it be monkeys, you know, you know, fish, you know, uh dogs, um, parrots, all that stuff. And it would get to a point where the air wasn't even like breathable. And I was so out of sorts, like on these drugs every day. It took a while before it even affected me, uh, or before I was even aware of how I was feeling or anything like that.

But I was living in this. And um then it did get to a point where I had to clean aggressively, but I was cleaning like inefficiently, obviously. I then went and just bought as many chemicals as I possibly could and was just dumping them everywhere. Yeah. Because I was in mode where I was like, oh, I just gotta get this cleaned up, like in case the landlord, like sit. That's what I was thinking. I wasn't thinking. Because he was threatening at this point, busting in.

Yeah, I wasn't even I wasn't thinking my health or anything at the same time.

So the parrot dies, and I was at least at had my wits enough about me that was like, okay, I I gotta start cleaning up because and it was a horrible thing. Like the parrows just died, and it's like I spent all this time teaching them to dance and sing. You know, and sad reality. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But um, I don't know, it was a great animal.

But um, yeah, so then I I went and bought a bunch of cleaning products, and I remember just like taking the lid off of like canisters of like Lysol or Febreze and started just like dumping stuff everywhere. Like the like I can't even imagine a world in which I would do anything, like even in in somewhat proximity to that today. Like, I'm like, I live like clean organically.

Um, you know, to where the air almost became unbreathable just from the chemicals alone. And that was the point where the monkeys um started to die, or the you know, I had one monkey that died, and then I was able to get the other ones. I had enough wits about me to like get the other ones out of there and re-home them at that point.

Yeah, but but yeah, and I remember having that moment where um, you know, sort of kind of everything kind of came. There was it was kind of it was definitely a sobering moment where I'm like, well, first of all, what the hell do I do with a dead monkey? Because I didn't think about that. I wasn't thinking about it.

I call the the breeder, the person, I'm like chewing them out, whatever. You you sold me a faulty monkey or something, you know. I was kind of like blaming it on them or something, which was dumb. Uh and you know, they told me to put it in the refrigerator and then have it sent off, uh, and they were gonna do some testing on it or whatever.

And I put it in the refrigerator, and being on the drugs that I was on and the completely like amphetamine-induced psychosis I was in, I forgot about it somehow, which you you can't even imagine like forgetting about something like that. I can't imagine.

Okay. But anyways, I got to the point where I was gonna be like either the lease was was up or I was like getting evicted or something, or and I came back and I was trying to clean it up before Ubob, the landlord, came and comes in because he would have like forgetting. So literally rewarded me, like had me, or he would have like charged me like who knows how much for the damages, all that kind of stuff.

So I was trying to clean I knew there was I was gonna have to pay like you know, a few thousand dollars in damages, but I was like, you know, I was like, okay. Um so, anyways, I um I I I I I get like two of my friends, right, which are horrified and they're laughing as they're seeing it, right? Because they don't have full context, they just see some of the stuff that's in there like, what the hell is this?

And we we spend like a whole day cleaning this stuff up, and Ubob is supposed to come in supposedly sometime that day, and we're like racing against time. How we ended up down at the wire when we had God knows how long, who knows? But why did you do anything that you do in this story, right? Yeah, but um, so I we was like down to the wire or whatever when we finally cleaned up as as well as we put the entire apartment. It was hours and hours.

We just cleaned everything, vacuumed it the whole thing, um, got rid of as much of what was the remnants, and totally forgot about the dead monkey in the refrigerator, you know? And I'm so here Ubob's ready to show up. Uh Bob's ready to show up, and and we think uh like we I finally kind of sort of sat down on the couch and I was like, Oh my god, dead monkey in the refrigerator. Well, no, I didn't.

I was like, I told my friend, I was like, hey, can you go just check to make sure there's not anything left in the kitchen or whatever? And then they opened the refrigerator door and they like freaking screamed, like a very feminine scream. Oh my gosh. Very high pitched, right? And I'm like, and I knew it instantly whenever I heard it. Yeah. Like where a memory just comes back to you. Oh my god. Oh crap.

And like literally, right at that moment, or like maybe 10 seconds, but the craziest thing, the knock at the door, and it's Bob at the door, right? You know, and I'm just like, he's gonna come in, he's seeing this thing, and it's on the second level, too. There's not a back door or anything like that. Anyways, so we scrambled really quick, and I ended up taking this monkey, and I I hate this because I loved this monkey, but again, the drugs.

Um, and I ended up taking this and scrounging around and looking out the window, the bedroom window, and seeing a dumpster. And I remember I just did a jump shot, you know, into it, and it hit the bottom of the thing.

the tiptoe into illness, right? Like you slowly normalize layer upon layer of dysfunction where it becomes your new normal. It's like so many people like today who are sick, like a huge percentage of the culture, like before the whole, you know, before Bobby Kennedy came in and started raising awareness more for average people at some of this stuff.

It's like a lot of people didn't even understand that the that that the headaches that they have, the brain fog that they have, the anxiety that they have, the chronic fatigue that they have is them on the chronic illness spectrum. I'm sure. But just because they weren't like me, like on these and works.

So I don't want to make it sound like that it's like it was that bad at the start. It was a very slow and it was it was it was the fact that it all stemmed from a a faulty core philosophy, right? Which, look, no harm, no foul, because I was a kid, right? But still, yeah, the fact is the fact that because and my parents love me more than anything in the world. My parents are amazing. Hey, I love your parents. And they meant well, but they didn't have the answers.

Yeah. Because their culture, their environment had built this model of reality.

Because I was like, I have to think about taking this case on because I didn't want to, I didn't want to waste your money. Your your dad had already spent a lot of money looking for answers. I didn't want to waste anything. So for me to take it on, I I had I literally had to hear from the Lord, and I did. Yeah. You know, and I called your back dad back. I don't remember how long it was, maybe it was the next day or whatever, but and I said, All right, man, I'm gonna I'm gonna take your son on.

And the reason why we go into so much detail, it is relevant because it shows you like how far of a descent into complete madness like illness can become from someone who started off as a relatively like pretty normal functional kid with just some regular issues that if I had had the right core philosophy bestowed on me, the right advice, I could have easily prevented all of that.

A few dietary changes, yeah, you know, some you know, some detox, some some movement practices, some different things, the right a few supplements. You wouldn't have gone through it, and I would have gone in a completely different trajectory. Now I I have all of this education and I it's there's a there's a deep purpose in it. So we know that. So we're grateful for it.

However, of course, we want to, you know, definitely, you know, prevent that, you know, in any place that we obviously possibly can, because I I was also as an exception in the fact that I made it out of that situation because that was really just the start of it. That was the start of my illness. Right. Because then there is nothing funny about the story going from then on. Let's progress then.

Um, and but all at the same time, too, within weeks or months, I just had this kind of complete collapse physically, psychologically, emotionally, the whole thing. It was it was kind of weird how it all came to a head. I think just the intensity of it all, some emotional things that happened from just the dysfunction, from like the the never-ending like slew of like shady people that gravitated towards this dysfunctional thing.

Like I was telling you, the people eating pizza off the floor, like that was a real thing, right? Because dysfunction tends to attract dysfunction, right? It's a law of attraction type of thing. You connect with people that are on the same mentality level, whatever.

So, you know, so anyways, it's it was just this this this disastrous storm of dysfunction that all came to this head, where you know, eventually the bottom fell out a couple months after that whole thing, and I was actually physically dysfunctional again, even with the Adderall. So I was dysfunctional and a chronic fatigue standpoint, couldn't get off the couch. But still, if I really, really wanted to, you know, drink some caffeine or whatever.

No, I I I became to a level to where my brain was not functioning. I was starting to have memory lapses where I was wasn't recognizing faces of people in my family, where I ended up basically having to move back in with my parents because um well, basically, I mean, this is actually an important part of it too. I went off of the Adderall and everything cold turkey.

Because as I started to get dysfunctional past a certain point and I saw the just the destruction that was occurring, it was actually I this is uh you know kind of a hard part to describe, but um because I was sort of in the recreational drug use kind of um place, right, right, as far as you know, you know what I was doing to people I was around, I came across psilocybin mushrooms um, you know, for the first time with the intent of taking them recreationally.

But just like a lot of these these medicines, that of course, and I'll I'll reframe this as it's they can be a double-edged sword, but they also can integrate the mind to allow a person to temporarily get glimpses of dot connecting to get a larger perspective to connect dots and what they're doing. They can be beautiful in that in that sense, not that you know they're they're a very aggressive tool, obviously. But I did have a visual experience on that particular medicine.

Um, that I went into it with a recreational intent, came out of it with a completely different perspective and a sort of internal realization of what Adderall was doing to me. Because it gave me sort of a connected sense to the off the the authentic, like, you know, center of who I was before I sort of went into this altered state psychosis. And it gave it to me in five hours in this experience.

And so that was where I got the first, but that's just a vision, that's not integration, that doesn't change anything. Right. But you know, you know, coming out of it, I decided to go off of Adderall cold turkey, right?

And so whenever I went off Adderall, all of my dysfunction and all of my deterioration that was already coming to a point, all of the function that I did have in my brain just crashed completely because now you're taking away the credit card and all of the deep ditch that you've dug, right, from a deficit standpoint, all the toxins, all the things. You know, Adderall can mass it, mask it to some degree.

And I decided to go off cold turkey because I didn't think I could do it any other way, because I didn't trust the state that I was in on that drug enough. So I just I ended up like throwing it in the ocean as a long story there, just like a very cinematic way. But, anyways, so so that now I'm in this completely dysfunctional state and my life is in complete ruins. I can't, I have to move back in with my parents. Like I was saying, I was having insane cognitive deficit, like memory lapses.

So in my parents' house, where I grew up, I had spent you know, 20 years there. We moved in like in, you know, whenever I was a kid, and of course I moved away, but then moved back in during this time. Um I couldn't even go for a walk from my parents' house um for fear of getting lost, you know, in a neighborhood that I grew up in.

Um I was, you know, again, like I was, you know, starting to question just everything about my reality, my sense of time, my my you know, perception of time, of like actually knowing like when it was in the day, in the week, in the month. It was just kind of like a complete sort of like disassociative, like cognitive dysfunction, like crazy that uh that came from just like brain metabolism that was shot to hell, right?

But the good thing is, as I found out a little bit later on as I started to go into this, because I'm in this totally dysfunctional state. And if you were to just like spend, you know, two minutes inside of my body, like at that moment, it was like a torturous place to be. Because think about it, you have no reference point, you're you're totally I was

confused all of the time. I can't function on any level really, right? Because I'm just so in and out of everything. And um whenever I really, really put my attention on something, like like if I'm trying to read something that's like part of a solution or trying to figure out a solution, I could do it, but then I would crash, you know, for a you know, and it so, anyways, debilit it it got to a point where it was like, I mean, I thought I could barely get out of bed before amphetamines.

And I had this sort of reshift or sort of recalibration of my perspective to where I had this sort of renewed sense of this sort of holistic perspective of things and this sort of like wanting to sort of reintegrate like natural practices because understanding kind of what what this sort of like this this this you know this chemical subluxation like, you know, fiasco that I went on.

I just I wanted to go back and I started to become very obsessed with, you know, you know, living with natural principles and finding a way to possibly heal naturally. This is after lots of reading.

Because this started a stint of about like seven or eight years where I couldn't function barely on any level, but I used every bit of my of my energy every single day from the time I woke up, time I went to sleep, which I didn't leave the house for weeks, months, years at a time, um, on just scouring information, reading books, scouring, you know, medical, scientific literature, looking at the the thought leaders that were out there, the authors that were out there, which isn't nearly as

remote. I didn't have like a bunch of podcasts.

It's almost like a a guy in a movie who turns into a werewolf and barely remembers it, doesn't feel like it was him, but he destroyed everything the night before.

Actually, those things ended up getting me well collectively whenever I put them in a system. Yeah. But it was like it was having to go through and see the things not work and trying one-off things, hyperbaric oxygen, being stuff and all that.

The problem was is you were your immune system, your neuroimmune system was on you know, cellular danger response. Yeah, you were mass cell activation. So detoxing that out of you was very problematic.

You know, that what is that parable or that saying? My people perish for lack of knowledge. Exactly. And that's really what it was. It was like, you know, so I had this worldview now where it was like, okay, I'm hungry for answers, and there's there's there's nothing that I'm not willing to do to get well because I just felt that. And that you were that was you.

And it it can take a while for that to start to present into a total degenerative, like inflammatory process, where where my my body was so sick and toxic for so long that I developed a form basically of it's like PTSD, but except for the body is trying to protect itself because it's been so insulted every single day for so many years internally as PTSD.

Yeah, but it extends the picture of PTSD is post-traumatic stress, and that means all the stressors, right? And kind of like it's not a new stress, but a stress that has reached a level that it's actually like where the lid is like just sort of blown off culturally.

Yes. And and we're getting there, but we haven't quite got to the place where people really understand the the

bioaccumulation issue, right? That it's not just about what you're eating today, it's about what's accumulated over years of the city. People make that mistake.

And it's just like whenever you have something that is just toxic enough or that's fat-soluble that you eat it every single day, it's a death by a thousand cuts type of situation. So that's where I was. And of course, I had a couple big things like the Adderall, but that wasn't the reason why that situation blew up the way that it did was because the system was already fragile, it was already vulnerable. So I was like, it ended up in this horrifically disastrous circumstances situation.

But as far as the PTSD thing, whenever the bucket starts to fill up with all of these chemicals in the tissue and in the brain tissue and the hypothalamus, the pituitary affecting all your hormones, all of your emotions, the way that you see the world or don't see the world, how you interact with your relationships and your friendships and how you interact at work and can't focus, all this stuff, anything, anything that's like all this instability, right?

Um, then that creates more emotional stress and trauma because being unstable is the quickest way to be um, you know, to be highly vulnerable to uh you know anything that happens from an emotional trigger because the things in our life, you know, the stressors aren't the things that actually traumatize us. It's the impact that they have in a susceptible system, right? You know, the in PTSD, right? The, you know, the it's it's not about the trauma, it's it's about the impact that that trauma had.

It's why two different people, like you know, can be exposed to the same trauma in one thing. It's the ability to adapt or not adapt.

But the most severe form of PTSD, probably, where the bucket is so full, physically, chemically, emotionally, whatever the the um the equation is for you or combination of factors that fills up your little pie chart or whatever ratio it is, the body it's it can't adapt anymore, right?

Because it's defenses, it needs available energy, it needs resources, and it depletes everything to the point where it starts having the inability to be able to um adjust discernment on what is a friend and what is a foe. So it starts with you not being able to tolerate things that actually are inflammatory, that are bad for everybody, that cause maybe like like gluten or you know, you know, things that can cause inflammation in a large number of people.

Yeah, the perfumes, the column, exactly your body's going, uh, you know. But then it ends up in a situation where now there's such a loss of access to your body's intelligence and of its discernment where you can even start reacting and it starts rejecting things that are actually fundamentally good for you.

It's just like the, you know, the picture of how you reconstruct a person, get somebody well, or anti-age or anything like that, is like it's always systems that get people well, right? It's not any single thing, usually. It's lifestyles, it's systems. And, you know, each each strategy or each thing that you do, right, in in a protocol or you know, a lifestyle that actually gets you well is like a brick in a house.

If you're trying to build a new house, a house is made out of bricks, but a pile of bricks is not a house that you get, you have to like learn how to arrange these things in in a in a system and then continue that system for long enough to where you build a strong foundation and all that. But first, you actually you can't build a house in a junkyard either. So you have to clear the landscape to where you can actually build something.

Yeah. And so this whole I say all that because that's seven years where I was actually focused and I was getting these pieces, yeah, and they were just like swiveling around. And it was like, so by the time you and I met, like it had been eight solid years I'm reading every single day. And it wasn't until that I think it was I I saw some of your content, because I just I I got to a point where I pretty much knew everybody that was out there.

Yeah. And it was like, whenever I I watched the content you were making, which was some of your earlier content, but it was still like so far ahead of its time. Like it's still, it still is, right? And it's because you actually went through it yourself in the same way that I did. But but it was like it sort of you helped to sort of arrange all of these pieces that I already knew were relevant and like, oh, this is the system and sort of giving it a name.

So it's like you put a name on the brochure that I had already, you know, and I'm like, yes. Like I did, you just know, you know, sometimes you see something, it just it resonates with you on a cellular level. It's like this is this is true. Yeah. This is true. It's like I don't even need it, but I just knew it, you know, especially because I just been down the road. And it's like, I know that I have I have to approach detoxification in some way that's more comprehensive.

Because if I would I I could have just stopped the input of a lot of these things if I nipped it in the bud, let it early age. So much in your tissue. But now it takes a forensic strategy, yeah, you know, to do it. And it was like all those years of like having these pieces put together, and then finally, around the time that you and I met, they started to be arranged in an actual worldview, which was great.

Whenever you and I first met, it was like, okay, now I I know generally what I need to do. The problem was I had deteriorated to the point where my body wouldn't allow me to do it. Right. Yeah, we were stuck. Yes. And so my sensitivities, I had such an inability to adapt that it started with losing, you know, like earlier on in that seven years, it was like losing a food here and there.

Where I just noticed like my throat would like start to close up, and I had never had anything like that before. And then it was like my my foods were dwindling, and then it was like a sniff from a chemical or a perfume. And eventually I couldn't go anywhere.

And which would ultimately put you know to the same thing because the nervous system convulsions, I would get these my my throat would squeeze, my my trachea would squeeze, and I couldn't breathe. And it was like either way, like severe reactions led to me not being able to breathe. So it wasn't like it was just tolerable, like it was like that for years, but it got to a point where it was like life or death reactions.

Anytime someone does something to you, you react, you react, you react, you get to the point where you're ready to punch someone if they walk into the room with a with a uh perfume on that makes you react.

or flight moment. Well, you're living in a flight of fight. I was there too. Um, you know, and it it's a a point that you just want to die. I mean, I I said I'd rather die than live my life like this. I wasn't afraid of dying. I was afraid of living my life like this. Yeah. You know, you end up at what we call building seven. And because by the way, there there was back then, I mean, there was a a group of people with this.

Today there's a lot more people with this problem, but you know, you ended up going down to this place where these people pretty much checked in.

He's past now, brilliant guy, but he was from a different time where he did actually a great job at diagnosing the issue. Yeah, but he just he didn't really have a lot of strategies for fixing the issue because it had evolved past him. When he first started, it was like, we know you need to detox, we'll put you in the sauna. This yeah, yeah. And it was like, so I ended up with Bill Rays like thinking that you know this was the place because I heard about it and whatnot.

And um, I was there for about a year or so, getting worse and getting worse. And but I was still in this sort of like this clean housing, right? Which was sort of like, you know, basically like quarantined. This is which is which is kind of it's funny now because it was like quarantining before it became yeah, before it was a thing.

Yeah, no, I mean it it you become more and more, it perpetuates which I actually knew that I I couldn't heal there for that reason alone, not even just aside from the fact they didn't have like good.

And then, but without an actual solution or a sort of vision of hope for the future or blah blah, you meet people there at Building Seven that have been living in those quarantine housing for 20 years. Yeah. Like, like, and I'm like, hell no, no. Hell no.

They were actually all getting worse to the point where any little chemical would literally, I mean, even the smallest amount, like I said, a cell phone, they couldn't handle that stress. So I realized my, you know, what I needed to do is stay integrated, but get my body stronger and what that took. And so I had a different approach. Exactly.

Like, if you're like when your back's up against the wall, when you're dying or your family member is dying, it's like that is one way that people just like just freaking get focused and like, okay, all right. It kind of cuts through the bullshit, you know, and all of a sudden now you're you're you're actually like, okay, I just want to know what's true, what's real. That's the only thing that's gonna save me.

And that was the one of the big blessings in it, is just I was in a situation that I couldn't BS my way out of.

And that's why there's I always would say that there's a fine line in these illnesses between, and and and these are extremes, but even just mild things that are still on the same continuum, right? Like all the chronic stuff, the regular chronic stuff. It's like there's a fine line between awareness and paranoia, right? Awareness is super healthy, and paranoia is not, right?

And especially today when we start to realize it's so easy to kind of go into that place, well, everything's toxic and all that kind of stuff. And it's like it does get to a point where it's not helpful. It's like it's reframing it of like, okay, but this is an opportunity that I can like strategize my way and create some habits that don't actually cost me a lot of energy every day because they just become like brushing my teeth. Yeah, it's a different way of doing things.

And I stay in the level like, okay, I'm aware of this, but I'm not gonna freak out, right? If I'm doing 90% right, then I can take some hits and I can live in the world. And how do I take that pro-health approach instead of that anti-disease approach, right? Because it's like, it's like duality. It's like in any spiritual practice around the world, we, you know, we know this, right? It's just like darkness is the absence of light, right?

You know, disease, like how do you approach disease effectively, or how do you approach darkness? Do you get rid of darkness? Is there something that gets rid of dark? No, you shine a light on darkness and darkness disappears, right? So it's like it's bringing in health and you know, disease tends to disappear, right?

It's like, and that's really getting rid of the interference, yeah, and then amplifying the intelligence of the body through things in our natural environment, the foods, the therapies, the things that are God given, and it's restoring life into the system, which is what we realize.

But but being at Building Seven for all that time, and then whenever you and I met um, you know, after that, I think the the really important part of the story that sort of sets up all of this stuff was that I was kind of at the crux, you know, the crux of that uh, you know, total inability to adapt, but I had at least a perspective and an internal drive that I knew I wanted to get well, which was the most important ingredient, like we talked about.

Um, but I I had to have tools and I had to have strategies to get me over that hump to where I could tolerate all the things that I just named.

And at one point I said, Camp, I know it's the only way you're able to detox, the only way you've been able to do certain things, eat certain foods with that, but you have to find something natural that taps on the same receptors that has the same effect. And it may not be as dramatic, but it's what you're gonna have to find it. And I literally put that onus on you. I said, you're gonna have to find it.

Because I I knew, unlike you know, most clients or patients, you had the ability to research and you found a list of things, I remember. And a certain type of kava was on the list. And not all kava is created equal. You learned that. And after experimenting with diff all these different things, trying to find this uh replacement, this particular strain of kava seemed to work the best for you. And it's literally how this product right here came about. I said that in the beginning.

Yeah. You know, true kava, um, because it's those same strains that you discovered. Whoops, I dropped it. Oh, yes. And um, but you know, it's it's become more than that. I I'll let you talk more about it. But let's let's get through that because then fast forward, we were able, utilizing this, we're able to detox you, we're able to get down into it, and you got your life back. But I want to share one more part of the story that I briefly said in the beginning.

I remember there was a point before we got to this that you became so sensitive. I think you were trying to come off the clonapan. I I don't remember exactly, you probably do. But all I remember is you were able to only drink one water, and you were able to eat about four foods, and then it went down to one water, one food, then it went down to couldn't even drink that water, and you couldn't eat any food. You're they took you to the hospital. I think you almost went anaphylactic with an IV.

I your dad was telling me this story, and they basically said, Dr. Pompa, they don't know what to do. They're sending basically sending him home to die. What should we do? He can't drink water, can't eat. I said, Well, that means innate intelligence wants to do just that. I said, just let him go. And long story short, you went 12 days without food or water. And your dad said, Dan, how are we going to know when to you know try to give him water again because he's going to die?

I said, No, his body won't allow it. He'll get thirsty and it'll it'll accept it. And that's what happened. You got thirsty, you started being able to drink water. I think you went 21 days without food or something, 20 something.

yeah, so that that moment in time was probably the most intense and meaningful and um just absolutely insane like stretch of my life, however long it lasted, whether it was 12 days, whether it was a month or anything like that. Yeah, well with the without food, it was like I think most of my um my drive and my motivation and my um you know desire for this work.

Um it's not like that it was totally born there, but it went it it took it to a completely different level because it was like to a level because I had like two near-death experiences during this period of time, and it was just such a level of intense like in the trenches, yeah, full deprivation.

Like only people that have been s actually deprived of it know what it actually is. So you just know, you know, the deeper that you've been down in the trenches, you just know and appreciate and understand.

Like you automatically just come out of it with if you're lucky enough to come out of it with a sense of like of of empathy, you know, you just feel other people's pain more and it just makes you want to want to end it anywhere that you can, right? Or or help the solution.

Um but just deplete the minerals that I couldn't tolerate. Yeah, if it were only so simple to take Corella, right? You know, we did all that. We tried all that. You know, it is about upregulating that cell function, fixing what's broken the cell, getting your body to start its natural process of detoxing. That's what we're able to do. But the again, we hit that that wall because your body's neuroimmune system was so stressed, right?

And um, after the forced fast, we'll call it, yeah, um, your body definitely opened some doors and allowed it. But you know, why did Kava allow us to basically go deeper? You know, meaning you weren't able to tolerate high enough doses. I mean, you were still ultra sensitive uh to the point where we had to use such small, tiny doses, which works. I I teach microdosing today uh to my coaches on when someone's really sensitive, microdoses can work.

I I learned it ultimately from working with you and that. But the Kaaba was allowing us to dose higher.

But I mean, this situation that that we were in together, that I was in, was a um, it was just it's it was it was one of the more tedious like clinical situations that I've ever seen. And not just because like I was in the middle of it or something like that. It just was just very freaking difficult.

Yeah. It was and and you know, it just required a level of digging and strategy and you know, attention to detail and being super focused and like super driven to because I was in a state where my you had sap, you know, my physical willpower was being sapped from me like at an insane rate and and all that, and I was just my body was just barely staying together and holding on, and I'm reacting violently and having these 10 seizures a day.

And like you said, I was in the situation where I'm on these very high clinical levels of colonopin and had been for some time. Once the reactions got bad enough and I was just having seizures all the time, it was just beating the hell out of my body, and it got to a point where I had so few foods that I was having to take colonopin just to be able to eat food. And that was the situation, right?

Where it's like, okay, now the things that are good for me, my body won't even tolerate because it's so confused, disjointed, in a complete, you know, sporadic catastrophe. Um, and so being on that drug, another thing that's important to understand about that drug, even more so than a drug like Adderall and whatnot, is how dangerous the withdrawal symptoms can be from this drug.

One of the most, probably the most dangerous pharmaceutical drug in terms of habituation and withdrawal symptoms, because it activates and dumps the chemical that it dumps, unlike amphetamines with dopamine, is an inhibitory chemical that keeps the body stable. Um, it's it's GABA, is the main system that it works on, which is the main breaks of the nervous system, stands for gamma aminobutyric acid.

And basically anything that helps you to feel calm or any time that you do a practice or something that is is strengthening the parasympathetic nervous system and you're able to relax, GABA is being released, it's involved in that process. Yeah. So you know you have your amphetamines, stimulants, and then you have GABA the breaks. Yeah. And now that my body was in this insanely reactive state. And benzodiazepan types of drugs, they work on that GABA system.

They work on the GABA system in that same credit card type of analogy, type of um, you know, type of mechanism. And they plug into the GABA receptors, stimulate them to essentially dump the available accumulated stores of GABA, which works at first, right? Yeah. And then you get to a point where you're in debt with your body's own chemistry, but that's that's very dangerous to deplete that chemical because unlike whenever you deplete an excitatory chemical, your body just crashes.

And in a parasympathetic state is much safer than a sympathetic state, right? So if you're stuck in parasympathetic where you can't get off the couch, it's one thing. But your body ricochets in the opposite direction when you deplete your ability to inhibit, so your body just stays in sympathetic, becomes more primed, more reactive, more everything.

So classically and clinically, benzodiazepine drugs are a class of drugs: Xanex, clonopin, Valium, you know, you know, diazepam, anything with an AM is this kind of drug. Um, but that you can actually die from the withdrawal symptoms alone. So outside of how bad this situation was, just from my seizures alone or from the reactions becoming lethal because it would close up my throat.

Now I'm in a situation where I use that credit card for a while and it works in the short term, but eventually I deplete my body's own symptoms and I get into a place where the drug loses its effectiveness, right? Because you're borrowing from tomorrow to pay for today. Eventually that ends that ends up in a situation of dependency. Tolerance because you need more of the same substance to get the same effect because you're going down that road.

And then eventually the drug loses its effectiveness to be able to neutralize the reaction, which is what it was doing.

But then once you deplete the natural release thing, you get tolerance. Now you're still reacting to the drug. If you go off the drug, then your seizure threshold goes through the floor and seizures go 10 times worse. They already were lethal, right? So now I'm in this really, I can't even, it's hard to imagine a worse medical situation, you know, to do with habituation and nervous system stuff like this. Because it's like, I can't eat

food. I can't drink water now. The one drug that could neutralize I'm reacting to it and all that type of situation. I can't do that. So this is like it's checkmate kind of. That's what it looks like, right? You know, it's like, what moves do I possibly have here?

And I had spent years, right, you know, before you and I even met, like going through the litany of every single, you know, you know, adaptogenic or, you know, botanical agent or nutraceutical agent and trying all the basic ones that at least hit those same receptors, you know, like taking GABA, for example, which isn't the same.

It's very mild because it doesn't activate the kind of dumping that the drugs do, or taking theanine or taking magnesium, or taking, you know, valerian or a passion flower, limiting, all of those things. All those things. They're all good things. But in my situation, it was a little bit like trying to, you know, shoot a BB gun at a freight train and thinking that it was going to do anything from it.

And I had actually tried kava, this compound that we're talking about here, that ended up becoming a huge part of my destiny and trajectory in this way that I could have never predicted. You're talking about pain to purpose. Yeah, exactly.

What I ended up learning throughout this process was that kava extracts are actually, by therapeutic mechanism and composition alone, it's actually a completely different substance by classification standards than traditionally the traditionally prepared drink and you know ceremonial food that's made in these Polynesian countries where kava comes from.

Because kava is a it's a ceremonial plant beverage or a tea that's produced out of the roots of this really amazing highly medicinal plant that grows in specific climate and soil conditions only in this part of the world that we call Polynesia or Melanesia or Micronesia. It's it's the these island chains. Most people have heard of Fiji as a comp as a country. You know, Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, even Hawaii, um, it grows in that part of the world.

It's a it's a shrub that grows in that part of the world where they use the roots of it to produce this tea and they squeeze it in this very specific way with water and pressure and produce this full spectrum, like to get the full organism and all of the living constituents and enzymes that come straight out of the plant when it's alive. And it has this, it has this compatibility with human biology because of the way it adapts in the ecology.

It plays a very protective role in the ecology, it develops these characteristics energetically and through chemistry that's consistent across all of biology. So when people consume it, it transfers that adaptability to us. Um and it hits on every single neuro and tissue protective pathway that we know of, actually. The GABA system we know of, it hits on that one. And that was that's a key part of the story.

Is because you and I were very focused on that particular system because we knew that it had the potential to give me the leverage.

And because it's indirect, there's there's there's far more opportunities to react on the front end, and it didn't at all translate as a therapeutic effect for me. It made things worse. Yeah. Of course, I went the CBD route, of course, and that was like when CBD was not at all. Like that was like you had to go into the trenches for that one. But um, you know, and so I had been through this whole thing.

I had tried almost and experimented before I became so sensitive and and read extensively, you know, about you know, every therapeutic herb in traditional Chinese medicine going back 5,000 years, every therapeutic herb in Ayurvedic medicine in India going back at least as long, every therapeutic herb in um in you know Amazonian medicine or Native American folk medicine, all of these ancient systems that actually there's actually a good amount of literature on so many of these different major

herbs, the ginsengs, the rishi mushrooms, all these things that are starting to become popular today were not as popular back then at all. But the Chinese have studied them for so long and used them clinically because their practices over in China and a lot of these countries around the world integrate herbs, as we're the American system that we give kind of in this corporatocracy that's driven by pharmaceutical companies. If you follow Bobby Kennedy, you'll definitely know that.

But but our system evolved into this thing that was almost exclusively drugs and surgeries, right? Um, and they're very useful in therapeutic like emergencies, like they were for me for a short time. If you need a surgery, all that kind of stuff. But drugs aren't healing anybody, right? So because they're not part of the the intelligence of the body and whatnot. And there's intelligence in a medicine like this. But that pathway became so relevant in this situation.

Whenever it's like you and I had the conversation of like just kind of I I remember even had not having the conversation in a super like freaked out way. I kind of got to this place where I was just focused, where I was just like, you know, I was terrified because I knew that if I didn't do something, I was gonna die in a short, you know, in a short time. And when it finally crossed that threshold, it was after you and I met where I couldn't where like I couldn't drink water anymore.

Um the body became so reactive, it was like one day I couldn't drink the water. And so now here it was what it was.

I had like four foods that I could somewhat do um without going my nervous system exploding um and going to the hospital, um, even though I was already kind of in there. But um, but yeah, I I had the um I started reacting to water to where it was like a I would put a drop of water on my tongue after a couple days of this, and throat would close up, couldn't breathe completely like you know, that kind of a situation.

Um, and I was in the situation like clinically where um we just had to figure out a way out of it, and of course I had to fast and go without water for that period of time. And eventually we got to a point after that however many days that it was, it was that weeks without food, and then eventually that stint without water. It was a long enough stint without water that I should have died from dehydration for sure. Um, and I I actually went back in my notes and it I wrote down uh day 12.

But we had we were in this, it all came down to this one day where it was it was that day, right, that you're talking about, like in your notes, where I was still in Bill Ray's place as far as like because the they were the only people that knew how to handle me from an emergency standpoint without killing me. You you go into an ER, they'll just start doing stuff to you, and what they wouldn't understand it and everything.

But um, I was in an intensive care type of situation, and um they put IV fluids in me until my body started, you know, you know, rejecting those. And then and then it went to that. I think that's when your dad called me because he was like, that was it. You know, it's like he's gonna die now. And I'm like, no, he won't.

Well, it got to a point where I think the prolonged fast where my body sort of like broke, and I don't know, I was experiencing such delirium, and I had had a couple like near-death experiences and different things, and I had a kind

of like focused intention. Of course, we were all praying, and I had my whole family around me and all that kind of stuff or whatever. But there was one point where um I I was in Bill Ray's place, and they had this antigen skin testing program, which for most people would actually make them worse in a situation like this. It ends up doing that because it it involves uh you know provocation testing, which primes the immune system from the outside.

It's it's fine, it's kind of like souped-up allergy testing, it's like high-level allergy testing. But what they try to do is they try to find what's called an endpoint, which is almost based on kind of a level of like like homeopathy, where they they they take a substance and then they create a dilution of it like 10,000 times.

And then they create, and then they they, you know, you know, you know, provoke your skin, inject a little bit under the skin, and they get you get what's called a wheel if your immune and nervous system reacts to it. And then, okay, so you get a wheel still, so then they dilute it 10,000 more times, or they go somewhere and and you still get a wheel, and then they go somewhere in the middle. It's not necessarily like the more they dilute it that you'll find what they call an endpoint.

It's like just basically throwing darts at a dartboard, trying to find a dilution that your body won't freak out on. Yeah. And once you find that, theoretically, once it's in, and the the body's so intelligent, the nervous system sees that it's not a threat because it hasn't had that knee-jerk reaction, and it can theoretically neutralize reaction. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Okay. Yeah. So I was in this situation where, but skin testing was was lethal on this day because I was like, I was gonna be dead, like any like if it like in hours, if it was not. And the this last it's effort. I I remember kind of telling them I just kind of had this, whether it was, you know, I just felt it. We were praying the whole thing, whether it is it's God thing. I I remember just having it sort of put on my mind. I was like, I gotta bring the skin testing back, you know.

We if if we can just find it's like throw it's like a needle in a haystack, but finding an an endpoint that will work for the colonopin, then we could get enough colonopin in my system to where it can neutralize the rest of the way. But we had tried skin testing me a few days at the beginning of the fast, and oh hell no. I mean, my body just erupted the minute that we gave the first provocation injection. Yeah, but as the body fast, though, it was bringing, it was figuring things.

And that was the point, is that the fast in and of itself was able to stabilize the system to a point to where um Atoff G was happening. Some of this stuff was happening to where it was able to give me just enough leverage to where it was a risk, but I said, bring them back in. This is like our last ditch effort to do the skin tests. So first we had to hope that the first prick didn't freaking kill me.

Yeah. And then it and then and then I had to somehow get the right number in like three tries, maybe, or right? You don't know how many tries you have. And it was like they did one, boom, I reacted, but it was less, but it was still like, you know, I wasn't anywhere close near out of the woods. Um, but it was still like that, and just numbers were coming to my head, and I'm telling them like dilutions or whatever. I was like, try this one. It was like 10,000.

So I remember just like, you know, you know, try it in the middle or whatever. And somehow we spit out and they hit it with like the I think it was the third, maybe fourth try. And boom, and I was sitting there, and and I was just like, you know, because I was in a reaction, all that, because he was reacting more and more, whatever. And and you know, we looked down, he was measuring it, he was waiting, he was waiting, and there was no wheel there. I was like, holy shit, holy shit.

I was like, okay, you know, give me that dosage or whatever. So they gave me that dosage, and then they brought the colonopin because they had already made the the antigen injectables to do the skin test for the colonopin. So then I threw back what would normally be my effective dose of the colonopin because I had spent enough time off of it to where it would be effective again if I wouldn't react to it. Right.

But it the reaction was so overwhelming that even the highest dose of colonopin that wouldn't kill me would be overpowered by the reaction. So I was able to neutralize it just enough. You know, the fasting neutralized the skin test thing. Serendipitously, this numbers freaking came in and we did this, neutralized just enough, threw that back, boom, the drug kicked in. And I was like, give me the fucking water. You know what I mean?

And I freaking, as soon as that clumping kicked in, all of a sudden I knew the feeling of, you know, you know, whenever it actually was like where I had that buffer back, and I was like, give me, I started chugging this apple juice. It was like the best experience of my life.

Like, how does it affect the receptors? Is this is it prime? Does it increase sensitivity? Is it increased density? Receptors, what does it do? And and it's just like in knowing kind of how calm was okay, okay, I you know, you know, something. And it was funny because Kav was one of those that I looked over because I had tried the extracts before. Yeah, exactly.

So if I switch from clonapin, does it? So I had like this doctor writing me like prescriptions for all these benzos, and I was like, I had this whole system and antigens and stuff. And it worked because I just knew my brain was doing things I didn't think he was capable of, as far as like of calculations and and and pattern recognition. It's amazing what comes out of you in that situation.

But but so I was back to the drawing board, and like during this time, another serendipitous thing happened is that I got a call from an indigenous islander that I had met uh uh, you know, in our travels. It was just a random occurrence where we weren't even meet, we didn't meet over talking about Kava. He happened to be like from Vanuatu and whatnot. And it was it was during that time and he called me because he's asking me about like something else like totally unrelated.

And for some reason I picked it up. I don't know why, because I was like in the middle of this like dire situation, but I I did, you know, because I maybe I wanted to hear a familiar voice. I really liked him. I just felt that it is, you know. So I picked it up. I, you know, we talked from I told him, you know, the situation was I was like, actually, man, I'm in this like really bad situation and blah, blah, blah, and all that.

And and we've we've gotten over a little hump here, but I'm still trying to um, and you know, and I'm and he's like, Oh, you know, what are you trying? And I was like, I went the medical cannabis route and all this stuff. And he was like, Well, this should be obvious. I mean, I'm I'm sure you have, but I mean, have you tried Kava? And I'm like, Yeah, you know, like Kava Kava, like this and that. And and I know because I knew that he was from you know, you know, South Pacific.

I was like, So you guys are heavily involved. He's like, Yeah, my family like has farms and all this stuff. It's like it's everywhere here, whatever. It's like we all just we don't even have to talk about it because it's just a given thing. It's like you talking about coffee, right? Telling someone about it. It's like, of course you know about it. But anyways, he was like, Have you tried Kava? And I'm like, I'm like, yeah, and I told him what I tried.

And he he wasn't being like, you know, you know, facetious. He wasn't trying to be like, you know, trivialize what I was going through, but he couldn't help but laugh just because he's like, dude, that's not Kava, man. Like, yeah, that's like an Americanized sort of like, you know, like that's like that's bunk, you know. Like that's not the real stuff.

It's an Americanized like form of it that's like a diluted down form, but basically he's saying the Americans don't know what they're doing with it because they try to they try to apply cookie cutter like American industry the way they extract ingredients, yeah, using alcohol extraction. Exactly. And you're to get greater yields, and it's to and it's to because we tend to look at things of like trying to isolate the active ingredient and get the highest one, but kava's one of those.

Like I was talking about earlier, it's a living organism, right? That plays this amazing role and has evolved and you know, developed these characteristics that make it so compatible with human biology in this protective way. So it almost has this sort of kinship with with the humans and its ecology that have curated it and and cultivated strains and whatnot. Beautiful relationship.

There's a whole history on Polynesia and how they've cultivated that they see it as their sacred, most sacred substance. But uh, but but yeah, it's it's it's it's um it heavily relies on the entourage effect, right? Which we all probably know of by hearing it in relationship to conversations around like cannabis of like all these cannabinoids together.

It's not just like one active ingredient like a like a dumb, dead pharmaceutical is that just that's just a synthetic molecule that's not even one pathway. It's an override to the body, right? And it does it by plugging in and basically tricking a receptor to do something, so you get a payoff right now, and then but it's not part of the body, so the body doesn't recognize it. And so it doesn't, it doesn't work with the body, you know, because it's not intelligent enough to.

It doesn't have that capability. It's it's just a short-term call guy that comes in. But but so kava's one of those that heavily relies on entourage. There's some plant medicines like coffee, for example, that have really just a couple most active ingredients, you know, theobromine caffeine. So when you extract those, it's dirtier. The body doesn't modulate it off as well, so you can overdose on it way easier.

Like you can go into the ER from caffeine powder, but you almost never will from coffee. Um, so it is something different, but at least there's still that effect that's there. With kava, the active constituents are these lipid-like compounds called kava lactones. Yeah, kava lactone.

And lactones are like, they're these oil-like, it's this oil complex that whenever you extract it in heat and pressure, whenever they make it indigenously in these bowls, like in this, in the villages in these, in these South Pacific Island countries, this this kind of this shiny oil will sort of float to the top, and that's the the living lactone complex.

And embedded in the lactones are all different, you know, you know, flavonoids and alkaloids and and all different co-constituents and enzymatic complexes that it's like an ecosystem, just like our bodies are like a an ecosystem of hormones and neurotransmitters and there's all these things that you isolate them themselves, and it's it's like isolating one instrument in a musical orchestra. You get this, you get like something that poses the military.

of those things, but to your point, they work as a symphony, and then they bring the perfect, you know, literally energy to the body, you know, in these pathways, the very pathways that we needed to calm down. Exactly. Exactly.

And I'm like, dude, that makes so much sense to me because I read about the anthropological, like evidence of Kava's usage, its therapeutic use, and how sacred it was, and how whole countries in the South Pacific were built off of Kava. Like the social structure is built around them, it's their most sacred substance. They use it for ceremony, they use it for like, you know, deep connection, weddings, funerals, spiritual ceremonies, social gatherings.

Kind of gives people what they what they want out of alcohol, which is a relaxed, sort of present and engaged and yet desirable and desired uh state where you're you're you're driven, you're focused, you're relaxed, and you're inspired uh, you know, you know, to connect with other people, but um but in an authentic way where you feel like more of yourself instead of in a drunk way, right? Um and so it's like well it's like when you have like one glass of wine.

And they see it as a spiritual, mental, and emotional psychological medicine, more though so than they do a physiologic, because they don't have the physiologic ailments that we do because they don't live like we do. So, but it has other relevant applications as we've discovered over here for how it is. But but, anyways, whenever he, my my friend, had told me like it kind of all clicked for me.

It was like I had read all this and and I know that, and I felt stupid because I I know what what we we do in America with this kind of thing, you know? And but I'm like, yeah, that's that's why, because there's another form of it that I haven't tried. Did he source that for you then? Yes, yeah. So basically he he told me, I was like, dude, I'm in a dire situation. And honestly, it wasn't like I was totally sold, like that any natural compound would give me.

But give me a chance, but I was like, I'm desperate. And and he's like, okay, my family's got some farms, blah, blah. He harvested like one of these like 20-year-old ceremonial grade like kava plants, which is like super strong, and they they froze it. So fresh is like about as strong as kava gets like fresh frozen, and they shipped it to me as quickly as they could, right? From over from the islands.

And then he taught me how to prepare it, walk me through the whole process, which I couldn't do. I was so weak. My parents were like squeezing this shit for me in a in a uh in a bowl, you know, for like it takes like 30 to 45 minutes, and you take this, this, this, these raw roots, and then you squeeze them into a bowl of water, and then you end up with this bowl of mud, right? And man, is it a magical bowl of mud, but it's still mud, right?

As far as like the taste and it gets your whole kitchen gross. We did at one of my platinum events, remember we had that.

So, like, that's how you know if it doesn't numb the hell out of your mouth and it's not real kava, even if it does numb the mouth, doesn't mean that it is, it could still be an extract that's not going to give you a big effect or whatever. But that's basically that's basically the situation. But but when I was in this situation, he sent over that stuff and we finally made it. Long story short, um, I started drinking the stuff and literally just like chugging like huge amounts of this stuff.

They my parents were making it. It was like the kitchen was like a kava-producing factory, and it's just like this nasty stuff everywhere, right?

But what we found out was, I mean, you know, first of all, this was just a miracle, and it was just to be make you fall to your knees type of thing, right? Just like whenever I just sort of like in two weeks, it was like I remember like trying things that I was reactive to and eating like without colonapin present or something like that, and sort of sort of like wincing, you know, or whatever. It's like, you know, and then and then just just waiting. And just waiting.

And it's like, talk about it's like, what the hell? Like, how is a natural stuff like they were trying like phenobarbital, you know, and you know what I mean?

And it was just like it was one of those things that after two weeks, because there's a cumulative effect to it too, there's a reverse tolerance, which is which plays into it really um, you know, it it's an interesting component of it uh that makes it actually the the polar opposite of the habituation negative feedback loop we were talking about earlier, with the the the borrow from tomorrow to pay for today, you know, addiction dependency withdrawal cycle that comes from the depletatory nature

of the synthetics, right? Was that it actually has a reverse tolerance effect. And this has actually been well studied, and the mechanisms have actually been pretty well established and stuff too. But it's always been known by Indigenous Islanders, and even my friend told me this, couldn't explain it scientifically. I had to fill in the gaps there.

But he's like, Yeah, it has a reverse tolerance, and so you have to, there's a loading period, kind of like with creatine, you have to load, but that's for a different reason. That's actually building up your body stores. Something is happening whenever kava first comes into the body, and it's only the first time you take it, too. Like you don't have to like reload after you've loaded once. But that's why I tell people to kind of take the 30-day kava challenge, right?

To take it consistently for 30 days because there's a priming that happens in the dopamine system, in the GABA system, in the serotonin system to a lesser degree and in the cholinergic system, but mainly the dopamine and GABA-inergic systems, we know that there's an increase in GABA receptor density over a period of time. And so it's doing this through just unique plant pharmacology, it's intelligence. Yeah, and so it's working through multiple mechanisms to not only uh

naturally increase your body's natural production, like sort of turn on the factories, right, that help to produce and release the available stores of GABA, but it's actually making the receptors more sensitive to the signal as well, too, at the same time. And it's increasing the number of receptors over a period of time, is what we see, right? So it's like it's actually, I mean, GABA is sort of the foundation of the parasympathetic nervous system, right?

So what it's helping to do is it's helping to reset, integrate, and to help to rebuild the parasympathetic nervous system and to reset these people need right for multiple reasons.

And so the actual definition of true kava, which is why we named it such, is the water and pressure extraction from the whole full spectrum, yeah, properly curated roots of hypermethisticum. And piper methysticum is the kava plant. And and so if you deviate from that and break down that entourage effect, then you end up with something that's a fraction of that, which is difficult to figure out.

It took a long time to um to develop the the the extraction, the you know, the stabilizing and the filtration methodology that could actually produce traditional kava at scale and keep it stable. Yeah, right.

But if something is therapeutic at that level medically, then it has in its safe, especially as kava is like one of the safest medicines you can ingest that has an acute effect. Yeah. Because most medicines that you look at are in one of two categories. They either have acute power that you get a quick shift in the neurological system, and that would be drugs, alcohol, that stuff.

So you actually get an effect, recreational or or medicinal, or substances that are more nutritive that just like feed the body at its base, like adaptogens and whatnot, and that you don't really feel, yeah, but they build health over time, and so they help to strengthen the body, right?

But kava's kind of it's it's unique that it gives you an acute effect, but it also works underneath the hood at the same time, which is why over in Polynesia, it is it is their alcohol and it is their coffee at the same time. Yeah, so it really is nature's original social tonic. Like right now, we have the explosion of this sober curious movement, right?

Yeah. Along with all these other adjacent movements, you know, the rise of regenerative medicine, you know, you know, the rise of biohacking, the rise of personal development, conscious cap, you know, entrepreneurship. All these adjacent movements are sort of like, I think, that come from our underlying, sort of underpinning um hunger and desire for nature reintegration, because that's where intelligence is.

And we've we've strayed so far with synthetic chemicals, synthetic environments, you know, synthetic everything. And that's really where health is. And it's slowly find a way to where you don't have to go back into the jungle and live there, but how how we can integrate that into our lives, right? Yeah, exactly. Absolutely.

And in this, in this, in the sober curious movement is one of those things where the culture is starting to collectively sort of just be more introspective and sort of honest about the things that we're using, both recreationally and you know, for social bonding and all of that. And there's just a slew of rituals, therapies, strategies, and compounds that are slowly moving the culture away from our sole reliance on alcohol and on pharmaceuticals.

Not that they're going away, there's still time and a place and all that. But but it's one of those things that most of the time, whenever people are looking for something that they can use regularly as an alcohol turn. If you see all these non-alcoholic beverages and social, yeah, there's a lot. And it's most of the theanines, it's most of these ingredients that that are more just something that you can't. Exactly. And that's the point. It's a it's it's something that

you that actually has a function that you can feel good about using. Yeah, obviously, um, you know, has all these different applications to it, but just as a lifestyle thing that's that actually is good for your brain. Yeah. That allows people to connect. So, anyways, you can go visit the website and you can go on all of our other content.