(gentle music) - Hey everyone, welcome to Business Trip. I'm Greg Kubin, hosting solo today. My guest is Rick Perry. Yes, the former governor of Texas and former presidential candidate. In a twist, no one had on their bingo card. Rick has become a leading advocate for plant medicines, especially eyeball game. Ibo game comes from a West African shrub with roots in the WeeTee tradition. It's one of the most potent psychedelics and early research suggests it can break destructive patterns tied to addiction, trauma, and even traumatic brain injury. So in 2025, through Rick's influence, Texas committed $50 million to Ibo game research under a public private partnership signed by Governor Greg Abbott. He also started a nonprofit called Americans for Ibo game alongside Brian Hubbard to support their advocacy. In this episode, I sit down with Rick face to face at the real summit, a New York City conference at the intersection of finance and mental health. Rick shares his personal transformation, the promise he sees in plant medicine, and why he now dedicates himself to Ibo game research and access. Let's get to it. I was born in 1950. I grew up in the '60s. I saw hate ashberry, not physically, but I saw it on TV. What mainstream media was telling us was these drugs will do this to you. I saw the following war on drugs. This is your brain on drugs. Just say no. I grew up with all that. I absorbed all of that. So I was a pilot in the United States Air Force. We got drug tested on a regular basis. You want to finish your career very quickly? Smoke a marijuana cigarette and get pulled out to do a drug test. You're done. This evil bad stuff. Stay away from it. I'm still not a supporter of recreational drugs. I'm just not. But what I saw starting in 2006, with a just totally by the grace of God coincidental meeting, as it happens. As it happens, God's hands are all over this from my perspective. Marcus LaTrell came into our lives. He helped give us a tour at the Naval Special Warfare Center in San Diego in August of 2006. We took him to dinner. He and another Naval Aviator who was attached to CilTimp 5 at that time. And he was a year away from the events that occurred in Afghanistan that were the basis for the book Loan Survivor and the Movie Loan Survivor. This kids-- in the Cil teams, he was a pretty legendary person by the time he got out. I'm not sure the government knew how to handle him. The government's starting to go through a lot of introspection. How do we deal with these kids that have been at war now for these many years? And they were giving them sacks of opioids. And they didn't know how to handle at all. Huge failure, in my opinion, of the federal government dealing with these kids. Who they ask everything of. But they didn't know how to handle them physically. They didn't know how to handle them mentally, in particular. They didn't know how to handle what's happening to them. And you think about it. This is the first time maybe in the history of humankind that we had been at war. I'm a big believer now after having been involved with this for so long that you cannot go to combat where there's somebody trying to kill you and come back the same person you are. I just think, chemically, something happens in that brain. And when we do it over and over and over again, like we did with these kids, we know what we created. I'm not sure we understand why it's been created. But the idea that 20 plus of these kids in the mid 2000s were killing themselves every day. The caution lights were just glaring out there that we're handling this in a very, very poor way. So he comes and lives with us. And that starts us on this long interesting journey towards where I find myself today as being a very open advocate of Ivegan. I keep my blinders on pretty tight. I'll let the MDMA and the psilocybin and any other compounds go make their argument about why they need to be treated in a particular way. I'm focused on Ivegan and 5MEO DMT. Those are the two that I have personal experience with, professional experience with, and substantial history now of studying it, seeing how this has been. And just to back up and get you that middle part of this from Marcus O'Traill coming in and living with us. And I'm recognizing very quickly that this kid is addicted to opioids. He's masking it with alcohol. He's got suicidal ideations. He is a mess. He comes in May of '07, and he lives with us in the governor's mansion for the next two and a half years. It was a-- he becomes like our son. We become very protective of him. We send him to a lot of places. We take him to a lot of places. We try to figure out how do we heal this young man. And quite frankly, we didn't have much luck. But he had a safe place, and we took care of him. Finally ended up sending him to a facility in the panhandle of Florida. At that time, it was called Athletes Performance. I think the name of it now is Axios. High-end rehab facility for special operators, for professional athletes, for law enforcement, who have some issues. And that's where we addressed his opioid addiction. And so they got it behind him. But he still had a lot of stuff going on. And he got married to a fabulous woman, which probably, other than getting to come live with us, really changed his life in a good way. And he's got a twin brother. We met Morgan during this period of time. Morgan's a Navy SEAL. Morgan was working with the University of California, San Francisco, and a Dr. Jeffrey Manley, who was using DOE supercomputers to map the human brain so that we could see the effects that traumatic brain injury was having. They were making some great progress. And in a couple of side conversations, I picked up that Morgan was talking to somebody about a friend that they were sending down to Mexico to be treated with this plant medicine. And I'm kind of like, you need to be careful with that. My sensitivity to psychedelics was still pretty high. But I was curious, just like I was curious about criminal justice reform. But tell me about this stuff. What are you hearing? What are you seeing? And that was probably in late 2017. And that's when I started really seriously educating myself about I have a gain, about Ambo, the facility down in the Tijuana. And I was just absolutely fascinated and have not been disappointed. Now, what, eight years later, to the point of-- I've been to Ambo, been treated myself multiple times. And well, I got multiple avenues of interest here, obviously, with our veterans, with the PTSD, with the addiction side of this. But in a personal way, because I've been treated myself, and the reason I wanted to be treated was twofold. If I'm going to go out and literally tell people, you ought to consider doing this. I need to do it. Totally. I need to have gone through this myself. And what I learned during that period of time was that this medicine has a way of dealing with the regeneration of the brain. And that's what I'm really intrigued with. I'm 75 years old. So I had the IBA game treatment when I was 73. When I left college, Vietnam War was going on. I had a contract to go fly in the United States Air Force. School came pretty easy for me. I didn't spend a lot of time at the library. I go take the test and get along and do fine. When I got to the United States Air Force and pilot training, that was the first time in my life that I was kind of like, OK, dude, you got to go perform at a really, really high level. And it's when I started noticing that I had probably mild to moderate anxiety and mild to moderate insomnia. Really never put together until I started studying about IBA game that 1 and 1 equals 2 and that 1 and 1 is that cumulative concussions caused these issues in some people. And I was concussed multiple times as a young man, two times the athletic event. one.
time unloading horses knocked out for over a minute each time. So those are severe concussions. And we know now that those have a cumulative effect on the brain in a lot of cases. That's at the basis for CTE. That's one of the reasons I think that professional athletes and professional sports owners and the teams and the professional players association should be given great focus on IBegaine as a treatment for CTE. There's a real avenue for the regeneration or the protection of or at least stopping the deterioration and these people who have multiple concussions. Robert Gallery is one of our Americans for IBegaine ambassadors. He's got an extraordinary story. He is a great spokesperson for how IBegaine literally has saved his life and he had terrible brain injuries from all the concussions. No, it's amazing how it can reset the circuitry within the network in the brain. But here's what I anecdotally. I met Nolan Williams and Nolan and I became great friends and God rest his soul. He's been one of the real pioneers in this and we all owe it to him a great debt of gratitude but we also owe him our work, our focus, our reputations, our treasure to use those to honor him. He and I got to know each other and as he was starting the clinical trial for the 30 veterans that he was doing at Stanford, I call him and I said, "Hey, can I be a part of this clinical trial?" He went, "No." He said, "You can't because we've already got it started and the parameters just start." And he said, "Secondly, you're too old." I said, "Okay." But he said, "Here's what I will do." He said, "I'll put you through the same protocol." I said, "Perfect." I said, "It's great." And so I had the FMRI scan, the base scan. I went to Mexico, was treated and I asked them specific, this was at Ambo. I said, "I don't want to be treated with anything but I've gained." I just want to know, this is what we've seen in a 73-year-old fellow's brain and I get it, look, this is not a clinical trial. This is one guy, one person, but I was really intrigued with this from its regenerative standpoint and that's what we saw. So I had base scan done, went to Mexico within a week. I had another scan done, a week after the I began treatment and then I had a scan done in six months. When Nolan first saw the study, came back, he gave the data to the postdocs and said, "I don't know what you've done but you've fouled this up. This can't be correct. Go rerun all this." A postdocs were like, "Come on man, we know what we're doing." They rerun all the data and came back the same. 88% of those people who had PTSD did not have it. Of the 30 veterans, every one of them had measurable increase of the myelin, the teeth around the brain, the white matter, your superhighway, that moves thoughts around. This is a stunning study. But those same postdocs looked at my scan and in my prefrontal cortex, and my brain looked pretty good for a 73 year old. I had a little atrophy but look pretty good for a 70. I've taken care of myself. I'm an adult stem cell guy, exercise guy. I use nanoboules. There's some great technology out there today. But my point is my brain looked pretty good. My prefrontal cortex showed a 27% increase in the activity from the week before to the week after. The prefrontal cortex is where your concentration, where your focus, where your emotions rely, where they lie. Six months later, I had another scan done at Stanford. I had my neurosurgeon friend, a mine, who frankly was a skeptic about this. He's been practicing the neurosurgery as a spine specialist for 40 years. But he was really interested, curious. And he in October, which is about the same time of 23, but the same time I got treated. And he saw Nolan's data for the first time. Talked to Nolan Williams, talked to the vats, and he went from being a skeptic to going, it's pretty hard to argue with this data. And then the following, I'm going to say, may we went out and did the six-month scan. He went with me because he wanted to see some of the things that they were doing out there. He said, "I looked at your first brain scan, your base scan, a little atrophy." He said, "Your atrophy's gone. Literally gone." He said, "Your brain looks like a 40-year-old individual's brain." He says, "You have no atrophy in your brain now." And look, Greg, I get it. One person done a clinical trial make. But here is what I recognized. My insomnia had gone away, and I haven't had an anxious thought in two and a half years. With Ibo Gain, did you have a life review? Not particularly. Here's why I think my Ibo Gain experience was mild, because I'm having trauma in my life. I had about as buccalic a life as you could imagine. I grew up in a very rural part of 200 miles west of Fort Worth, Texas. 16 miles from a closest place had a post office in the mid-1950s. I'm five, six, seven years old, and I've got two loving parents. We weren't wealthy by any sense. Imagine we were just dry laying cotton farmers out in the middle of it. I grew up in a house that didn't have run and water. So I had as non-traumatic a life as you can imagine. I went to a small school. I never was traumatized in any farmer fashion. Just didn't happen. With the exception of those traumatic brain injuries. And again, listen, I'm not the expert here, but my instinct is people who have been traumatized. That Ibo Gain session is not going to be as pleasant. If you got to go back and review that life, if you got to go back and address some things that you've done or been done to you or you've seen to desolution of the ego and all of those different things that we hear about and talk about with the medicine. I didn't have that. My experience was one of curiosity. And again, I think it has to do with your mindset going into it for one thing. And mine was very much, I'm curious about this medicine. How this medicine is going to deal with me and what have you. I've talked to a lot of different people who have had these not particularly pleasant. Did I throw up? Did I have a taxi? Holy yes. My taxi was severe. My experience was one of space travel. And through the galaxy, through space, I have no sense of time or space other than I know I'm in it. And I'm going to then and I'm just curiously watching and there's all of these things coming behind. Mine were almost exclusively Mesoamerican and Hieroglyphics. And I have no idea. I'm not going to try to tell you have you been to Egypt before? Yes. But it was not reflective of that experience. This was like, this was information that is somewhere that you cannot put your finger on. I can't explain to you why Mesoamerican and Hieroglyphics and then they were just like a little dot and then it'd get bigger and bigger and bigger two times. And it was very apparent to me that when I first saw it, that it was safe. And he got closer. I had that look. I had the horns. I had the evil. There was an evil look in this guy and he came. Most of them just went behind me and I didn't get a really good chance to focus on him. That one came right up here. And when he got right up to me, I said, "Get behind me." Satan disappeared. Wow. What does it get behind me? I mean, it's very biblical where Peter, St. Peter was talking about, "Get behind me, Satan." Jesus was actually talking to it. And it's kept behind behind me. Get out of my face. Get out of my face. Yeah. He did. Wow. So in some ways, I guess it was a spiritual experience. Or was it? The spiritual experience for me was with the five MEO DMT, deeply spiritual. I was in the presence of God. How so? I knew I was in the presence of God. It was the brightest, quietest light I've ever seen in my life. Moses, when Moses was in the presence of God, God would not let him see his face. And I didn't get to see God's face. But I knew he was there. And I knew he loved me. And it was the most glorious, wonderful,
experience. Somebody asked me to explain to me what that experience was like. I said, "Well, I can't because I said I'm not sure my. " And that football is the word. You cannot describe it. I would agree. You just don't have the grasp of the human language to be able to explain. I said, "Here's the closest thing to it that I can tell you from my earthly experience. Having been the secretary of energy that I was at the epicenter of a nuclear reaction and I was blown right through the roof of the night. Quite bright, pure and it was fabulous." Can you come back to that feeling like even talking about it? I'm not sure that that's what it was done for. From my perspective as I'm here, you don't ever have to worry about, you know, Brian Hubbard. Brian's wife, when she was asked by that neurosurgeon that looked at my brain scans, we were having a dinner one night and he leaned across the table and he said, "Jo Alice, what your takeaway that quick?" She said, "I'm not afraid to die now." I think that's the root of a lot of fear and suffering. Yeah, we think about it. It's why a little child is afraid to turn the light off. It's why the boogie man goes in the door and when you know that there's going to be light and it's pure and it's there to protect you, then the fear is gone. So, I want to look at or explore a vision of what the world could look like in 10 years from now and then I want to back into how we get there and I know you have the Texas IboGain initiative and Americans for IboGain. So, let's just start with a vision and obviously the future there's a distribution of possibilities but you have this, I sort of vision of what the world could become with the influence of these types of plant medicines. After now, a thousand plus individuals that we sent down to Mexico and all of that basically data now, you know, it's not going to hold up to the type of trial that the FDA and our federal government will require us but there's a lot of data that you can look at that backs up what we're saying and that's one of the reasons we were successful in Texas is because the veteran community came out in grateful force. We had a lot of folks from the medical community that came and testified and all in Williams came a number of other very, very capable individuals who brought their medical professionalism and those veterans who came and testified or who really carried the day. The members of the legislature were very open to helping those individuals particularly when they came and looked at the data that backed it up. So, I'm quite confident that with Brian Hubbard's oversight and I completely trust Brian, his hearts in the right place, his, his minds in the right place from the standpoint of overseeing and making sure that we got to do this right. No errors can't have any issue that we had with the MDMA trial. You just can't have any of that. We're going to do everything we can to make sure that this is done with the highest of standards and then there are going to be other states that are going to be conducting trials. I also suggest to you there may be 15 to 20 other states that are not necessarily going down parallel tracks but doing clinical trials at the same time. We may see clinical trials for degenerative diseases like MS, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's. There's some great potential on the regeneration side of this thing as well as obviously the post-traumatic stress, traumatic brain injury, the addiction side of things. I think the big market here if you will is on the addiction side. There's a lot of different alkaloids that from the IboGA plant and there may be some that they can synthesize in the lab that we know there's a cardiac issue with IVGain. QT probably is the upper QT elongation but they knowlin and the folks that created the mystic I think is the name of that protocol that it's Stanford. It's worked very well. Adding magnesium. Magnesium drip and works. But my point is there may be some conditions, diseases that we don't even know about yet that IboGain is going to be successful at addressing. That's what I'm excited about. I'm excited about when Texas did this. Yeah. And did this being $50 million? The governor has signed off on it. It's already in the works now of being structured. There's another $50 million that's matched by drug development coming. So it's a hundred million dollars. I mean this is a substantial effort just in the state of Texas. In Texas in this sound a little bit like a Texas governor talking here but that's because you are. Texas. When we do something we're big enough. We're influential enough that we move the needle. So when this passed in the state of Texas there are a lot of people who went. Wait a minute. That's a big ORED Republican state. They just put 50 million of their tax money into finding out whether in this case a psychoactive plant medicine can address this issue of addictions PTSD traumatic brain injury. You know what and if they are doing that maybe we ought to take care of it. So we're going to be an Aspen first week in November actually doing a meeting there with probably 15 to 20 other states. And I actually reached out to governor Newsom and he's supportive of this and we're trying to get somebody from California to sit in on the meeting and listen. And this is really important from my perspective is that I hope nobody ever lets this become a partisan issue. This isn't red or blue. This is in Democratic Republican. This is about humankind. This is about our citizens. This is about our loved one who are addicted to some nasty damn compound. And how bad do you got to hate somebody that you don't make this compound available to them? Yeah. So when you think about let's call it more conservatively oriented people what is the way to get this message across to them? How have you done it? By and large is the data. When you look at what we've done and what we're going to do. I mean that's the beauty of what we're fixing to do in the state of Texas. We're fixing to duplicate in a broad array of areas what we saw out of the Stanford study. Let me just ask this. If we have results that track what we saw out of the Stanford study with the veterans which I have total confidence we're going to see that type of tracking for some of these other issues that we got addictions degenerative diseases like Parkinson's or MS. But you think about the addiction issue that we got in this country. And here's my again this reason we need to do these clinical trials. I think you're going to see results on non substance addictions gambling, pornography, overeating. These are some mental conditions that don't let 50 years of booger man stories Richard Nixon putting all these compounds on the schedule one for political purposes because he hated blacks and he hated hippies and we're going to go get them with this stuff. I began should not be on schedule one schedule one says that the compound has no medical purpose and that it is addictive. Well as my friend Brian Hubbard says you ain't never going to read about no rave parties with I began. It is not an addictive substance. It does have medical purposes. So the idea that it's on schedule one is just on its face. It just doesn't make a great example of how government can make this right. And hopefully this administration attorney general Bondi who oversees the DEA, the chief will go you know what this doesn't need to be on schedule one. Put it on schedule three so that these clinical trials can more easily be done and we find out whether or not this actually is what you say it is. On the medical side right like for instance with opioids we know that the opioid dependent brain cannot produce dopamine or serotonin but with iBogane within 36 to 48 hours. It's just to me that's the most stunning thing in the world. Here we have proof positive in my opinion that this compound for opioid addiction literally within Two days can take away the craving. Holy mackerel. With no
withdrawals into it. So what about risks? What about concerns? And that's the reason we need to do the clinical trials But like there's the magnies there's the cardiac challenge, but beyond that do you see other risk factors with all of us? Not that I've seen, but that's the reason we need to do the clinical trials. Ask the hard questions. I don't have a problem I'm not trying to I'm not trying to sugar code anything. I'm not trying to hide anything Let's do these clinical trials ask all the hard questions, but the idea that we continue to allow 60 plus years of false narrative to drive that these psychedelics properly diagnosed properly dose properly guided through the experience and properly followed up with why not find out whether or not this is a compound that God created you go through the Bible and there are Multiple places where he tells us that he created all of these things for our Good use. I know I've got friends that are very devout Christians and they Don't drink wine, but the Bible clearly tells you that listen I made this for you to make your heart joyful Use it wisely. That's the message here. These compounds were made by God and I will suggest to you For good don't abuse them Don't misuse them. Yeah Do a clinical trial do a clinical trial I'm curious so one is around like the commercial Rollout of these things because you come from politics, but you have Collaborated with industry over your career when I think about iBogan I think about it as a long duration treatment Right that is long duration in the sense of 14 to 18 hours correct you want it cardiac interval It's got to be in a very well seasoned practiced educated environment yes, and so I just wearing my investor hat. I just think about how do you scale this In a way that's sustainable that and what will the government need to Subsidize this do you envision this being purely in the commercial arena long-term How do we actually pay for this the same way that we pay for addictions today because I think that's where the big That's where the big population is in the tail in my opinion the addiction arena people who are addicted to alcohol cocaine heroin fentanyl that's and and we spend billions of dollars on treatment centers today and get pretty Less than admirable results. I think You'll have the insurance industry that Comes along and says here's what These people are costing us And I think the government will look at it in the same way. Here's what addictions cost us if we can treat this with This compound and get this result then why wouldn't we go pay for that? Tell him makes sense to me And one of the reasons I want to see these clinical trials going forward in a lot of different arenas Is there may be some Alkalides out there that do some things that take away some of the risk again America's always been good about innovation allowing these compounds to be clinically trial all across the country They're going to find a lot of answers to a lot of different if we were able to address 50% of the addictions that we see in this country today if we were able to address 35% of the degenerative conditions Parkinson's MS if we were able to potentially Have a way to keep people from Descending into dementia. What's that worth? I will suggest to you. It's invaluable and so Let's come together. Let's Try to do as many of these clinical trials across the country as we can let's put 60 years of misinformation and falsehood in the trash heap that it needs to be in and bring these medicines to The people that needed a lot of the initiative that you've mentioned are more or at least some of them are on the state level Are you talking about governors in november On the federal level. What are you seeing? What are you hearing and beyond rescheduling? What could this administration be doing? So I think the federal government is very very interested in what is happening at the states particularly in Texas It gives them a little cover if you will when you think about where we are With our veterans mental health and I know for a fact Pete Higgs Seth and Marcus Latrell and those guys are all personal friends. They Secretary of war Higgs Seth trust Marcus Latrell he trust Morgan he trust those individuals who have been war fighters and who've been treated and who are standing up and saying hey Mr. Secretary Let's go figure out a way to help our brothers our sisters who are suffering. I think there's a great amount of progress. It's going to be made again I'm so proud of the Texas legislature the Texas governor of the leadership of the state house for Having the courage because listen If you'd have told me six years ago that my name and psychedelic will be in the same sentence I would have laughed right in your face, but here I am and I make this statement that My reputation is not more important than their lives I'm happy to hear that because I feel like in politics you often hear about this concept of legacy you hear it with presidents always and I'm more of the take of just do the job that is authentically your Calling and what you cared to do versus how it's perceived there you go do you see a place for plant medicine in criminal justice? Well here's where I see plant medicine is We focused on veterans Because they were the easiest population to go sail to the public. We love our veterans these people have put it on their line For us they sacrificed up to and including their lives for our freedom So they were an obvious easy population to go sell to the general public There's also a population out there that needs our help. They're just not that easy to sell to them. It's the homeless it's the prisoners and I will suggest to you most of those people are in those conditions because of an addiction that mean there's a massive amount of addictions in the homeless in the prison population as a Ancillary role A spinoff of this Those populations which are their human beings just like those veterans are and I'm pleased hope nobody thinks I'm being cold-hearted here, but We needed to get this sold to members of the legislature and the veterans were The right population to go forward with had we started with a prison population we started with the homeless might not have been successful I'm interested in the result and at some point in time if we can empty out those prisons if we can clean up those streets Then we've done the Lord's work My last question is Knowing what you know now with the experiences you've had with plant medicine. Do you have any regrets? I don't not from my perspective not in a personal way and not in a professional way I'm convinced that have we made mistakes. Yeah, we probably have made some mistakes along the way But I've been doing that for 75 years making mistakes and get up and go back and Try not to make that mistake again, but I'm so thankful that God put this On me Opened a lot of doors. I'm not a big believer in coincidences and he's still making my life pretty interesting You know, I don't know how many years I got left, but I plan on continuing to Tell people about I have a game and the potential to Get their children's lives back get their friends lives back get their loved ones lives back with this extraordinary plant medicine This is Business Trip a podcast exploring the future of brain and mental health and the startups building it You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at sima adventures And if you're building a company in frontier brain and mental health hit us up at
[email protected] Which you can find in the show notes I'm Greg Kubin and my co-host is Matthias Serbrinsky production is led by Caitlin Nair Sound design and engineering came from Nico Ray our theme music is by Dorian Love and additional music credits are in the show notes This is Business Trip thanks for tripping with us. We'll see you next time You
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