One Reporter’s Life-Altering Psychedelic Trip

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This is the Daily on Sunday. Well, I'm glad I was coaching. I actually just, I had to share this with you guys. Last fall, as I was finishing up an interview with my colleague, the politics reporter Robert Draper.

He very casually mentioned. I spent Thanksgiving in T.O. on a Mexico undergoing Ivy Games psychedelic therapy. But he just returned from a marathon hallucinogenic drug trip. How long has it been? 10 hours.

“I felt nauseous, but they teach you these deep breathing exercises before you go in.”

And you use that to stay off, you know, and you kind of nausea. Now, I should just say, Robert isn't exactly the kind of guy I'd have expected to tell me something like this. He's a seemingly stayed veteran journalist who covers the American right and the magam movement. But he told me this drug was something he felt he had to try.

Yeah, it was really, really interesting. I mean, the whole, I have to find a way to write about it at some point. The drug in question is called Ibegan. And it's illegal in the United States. But early research suggests it could be a game-changing treatment for a range of conditions.

Things like PTSD, addiction, even cognitive decline. So today, Robert Draper and I talk at length about his experience on Ibegan. It's Sunday, April 12th. Robert, welcome to the Sunday Daily. It's great to have you here.

It's great to be here. Thanks Natalie. So, I just want to start by saying that I have so many questions for you about how you wound up having this experience. I am very excited to talk with you about it and I want to recognize that that might not

totally be the case for you. This might be something slightly uncomfortable for someone who has made a singular career for himself as a journalist in profiling others. You are a reporter, Robert, and I recognize that talking about yourself is not something that you may be used to or find the most fun in the world.

Is that fair to say? That's more than fair to say.

“Yes, I mean, I think that my interest in learning about others is an inverse proportion”

to the interest I have in disclosing things about myself. Okay, well, we are going to proceed with caution in that case.

I want to just start with how you first came to know about Ibegan.

Just talk about how this got onto your radar screen in the first place. Yeah, I first heard of Ibegan from a kind of unlikely source, a former United States Center, Kirsten Cinema of Arizona, who had become aware of its usage in treating military veterans for PTSD and traumatic brain injury. Cinema decided to try it herself.

She said, and these are her words, that it was the opposite of a pleasant experience, but it was a really transformative one for her. She had been working to produce legislation in the state of Arizona to fund clinical research for Ibegan, and someone who had done that right before her was, I think, even more unlikely political advocate.

And that's the arch-conservative former Secretary of Energy, former Presidential Candidate and former Governor of Texas Rick Perry. He was also into Ibegan. Yes, he was into it. In fact, he became interested for the same reason.

Cinema did that in his capacity as Governor, he had met a lot of combat afflicted veterans who were sort of at the end of their rope, and he saw what Ibegan had done for them. And so he decided to try it himself, and again, Perry likes Cinema emphasized to me that this was nobody's idea of a party drug.

It was a very, very powerful substance.

And I want to get into the power of that substance, tell me about Ibegan. What is it, and how does it work? Sure. It's a psychedelic, a drug that is derived from a natural source, actually from the bark of a West African shrub known as Tabernath Iboga, found principally in the country of Gabbon,

and used in initiation ceremonies in that and other African countries.

but particularly so roughly around 1970 when a heroin addict named Howard Lotzoff kind of chasing

the next high had an opportunity to try Ibegan and found that it cured him of his addiction to heroin. Wow. He began then to advocate for the drug to help underwrite studies into the drug. So it has continued to exist since then, Natalie, but in the underground, because it's

a schedule one drug, meaning that it's illegal. That's right. The controlled substance is actually stipulated that it, like LSD, has no accepted medical usage. And so you can't get it legally in the United States.

You have to go elsewhere to try it. And what do we know Robert about the way in which it actually functions, in which it

“has the impacts that Perry and cinema were telling you about?”

Yes. And I want to emphasize, Natalie, that there have been studies on this, but a lot more studying needs to be done, Stanford in particular, in January of 2024, produced this clinical research of 30 combat veterans. And it seemed to activate in them a type of brainwave known as Theta Rhythms, which in turn

promote neuroplasticity. There's also research indicating that eye-begame increases the signaling of particular molecules within the brain that have been linked to drug addiction, as well as to depression. So all of these on top of the fact that the study seemed to indicate that eye-begame treatment can reduce brain aging by 1.3 years per treatment.

So there's a lot of potential for eye-begame studies indicating that because it enhances neuroplasticity, that it could prove to be a cure for neurodegenerative diseases like dementia, ALS, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. But again, I want to stress that there has been no conclusive reporting on this. No, totally fair, caveats.

It sounds like a lot of these potential benefits center on the idea of neuroplasticity.

“Can you quickly say what that is and how this drug potentially impacts it?”

Yeah, neuroplasticity basically means, I mean, to put it in the rawst, crassist way,

it's sort of the opening and the flexibility making of the human brain. And where a brain may have shut down, owing to a particular trauma, it will, in effect, lubricate or open the molecules of a brain and allow it to become more receptive. And that has kind of been the elixir enhancing neuroplasticity that scientists have chased for a while in grappling with these neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's

and for that matter, traumatic brain injury. Fascinating. It's like the drug by affecting neuroplasticity kind of opens parts of your brain that were shut down up, allows you to work inside them. And Robert, is the current interest in eye again, part of the gradual uptake that we've seen

of psychedelics to treat mental illness. For example, I know about ketamine being used in therapeutic settings. I know people turn to Ayahuasca, another plant from South America that is used ritualistically for similar reasons to kind of break out of mental health problems.

“Yes, and I add to that, microdosing of psilocybin and MDMA and I think that what we're talking”

about here are not only an exploration of psychedelic, for therapeutic purposes, but an implicit skepticism, if not outright, rejection, of a lot of traditional medications. And a viewpoint that had been held for decades that whatever ales you go to the pharmacists and grab these pills, and that's your only hope. There have been intriguing studies done over the last decade, indicating real therapeutic usage

of the psychedelics, which of course, definitely then flies in the face of the notion that a drug like these should be scheduled one, which is kind of the conundrum that the Trump administration is supposedly grappling with. From what I understand though, this drug, I begin, is much more intense than some of these other ones.

I want you to just sketch out what's different about this drug from some of the others that we might be hearing of. Yeah, I mean, to put it candidly, I mean, this is, it's not a party drug.

You'd never go to the Burning Man festival, you know, and do it and dance around a fire.

It's in fact a drug that is so powerful that you run a real risk of cardiac arrest because it can cause arrhythmia, which is an irregular heartbeat. It can elongate the spacing between heartbeats. And so if you already have a heart condition, you absolutely should not be taking it.

You should have professionals nearby.

So there is nothing about this that says, you know, we're having fun on psychedelics. And in that sense, even before we get to what actually happens to you when you're on eye to gain, it sets itself apart from drugs like LSD or MDMA or psilocybin mushrooms. Okay, so given that, given the intensity of the experience that we're talking about here, what made you want to try it for yourself?

“What was it that made you say, like this could be of use for me?”

Sure, I admit this is not easy for me to talk about, but I had a very tormented relationship with a very tormented, older sibling Eli was his name and when he was 23, he was killed in a vehicular accident.

I was 22, we were 18 months apart, but he was kind of a human wrecking ball.

How so? Well, I mean, my younger brother, who's a psychologist, Billy, the Eli was a sociopath. Oh, wow. He was brilliant in many ways, but unfocused. He was this physically immense person, six foot five, and Missionthropic, alcoholic, prone

to violence, and generally a soul in person, and the household kind of trembled whenever he walked into it. And I was as the middle child, my parents weren't, you know, they were just doing the best they could to manage, you know, a household, but I was often used as the intermediary, the play cater.

The buffer. Yes. It sounds like he and I shared a bedroom so that he would stay away from my younger brother, who he was terribly abusive towards. And he was abusive towards me too, but, you know, his death and really even his life had

left me with not only survivors guilt, but just a kind of, in many ways, a low self-esteem, feelings of lingering joylessness, and I could see tangible ways in which those elements were showing up in my life, you know, that while they weren't, like, causing me to engage in destructive behavior, I do think that they were, in many ways, holding me back. They were deep thumb prints into my psyche that carried over, into my personal relationships.

And so I had not explored this in any really, really full-sum way and saw I began as an opportunity maybe to do so. Can I ask, what were your hopes, like, as you're going into this process, what are

“you thinking would be the best case scenario to come out of this?”

What are your kind of dreams about this? What I mainly hoped was that the drug would sort of kind of open emotional apertures in me and connect me more to whatever is pleasant about life, whatever is pleasant to others, would maybe cause me to look at myself in less of a self-lassurating way. And to be clear, even though you did end up writing about this for the Times Magazine,

it sounds like you weren't originally doing this for journalism, like that wasn't one of your motivations here. Maybe to be emphatic, I was not, and had no intention of writing about this. So when a person, you, decides they want to try eye-vagan, what is the process? Given that it's illegal in the US, what are the logistics of making that happen?

Well, I guess to begin with, you'd better be prepared to buy a ticket because as you

“say, you can't get it in the States, so you go elsewhere and I think most people go to Mexico.”

So there were places all over Asia, Europe, and parts of Africa, some of them vary kind of boutiquey, very spa-like, but the one that cinema and Perry had gone to, and a number of veterans that I interviewed, was this place called Ambio Life Science, located just south of Tijuana, Mexico, and it's not cheap, it costs $8,350 unless you're a veteran or

a first responder, in case they give you $1,000 discount.

Such as a group called Vets for veterans that can offer grants to allow military veterans to go there without having to pay so much money. So once I determined that Ambio was where I'd like to go, I reached out to the people there and learned that they have a very long waiting list, but that they're frequently cancellations if you're willing to be flexible.

And I then said, you know, any chance you've got anything in the month of November, this was in, I suppose, August that I reached out to them, and they said thanksgiving. Wow, you know, I didn't have any plans anyway, so I said, okay, sure, sign me up. All right, we're going to take a little break, and then we'll talk about your experience on, I begin. We'll be right back.

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OK, Robert. You've made the decision that you're going to go down to Mexico over Thanksgiving to take eye-begin.

“Where does the story of this trip begin?”

What happens first? I took a plane to San Diego Airport and spent the night in an airport hotel, as did the other 10 people who would be part of my group. And next morning, we all gathered in the lobby to SUVs, picked us up, and we were ferried across the border, passed Tijuana, and then took a ride down sort of a rubble-strone alleyway

that dead-ended into this compound that was looming over the Pacific Ocean. The place looks kind of like a southwest villa, with a very, very gracious outdoor patio, with a swimming pool, overlooking the ocean. It's like a very, very nice Airbnb. I'm imagine.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. With a large kitchen set up to cook dinners for a dozen or so, and you have a sense of professionalism and efficiency from the very beginning that people are friendly, but nonetheless with their

own agendas, the first thing they did after showing each of us to our rooms was to search

all of our belongings, to make sure we hadn't brought any drugs or alcohol. Our phones were eventually confiscated so that when you're on eye-be game, there's actually like a danger that you'll drunk dial, and-- Oh, wow. They're protecting you from yourself, isn't it?

That's right, exactly. Yes, yeah. Everyone is screened in advance, not only to make sure that they don't have some kind of heart or other condition that could endanger their welfare, but also just to make sure that they really kind of emotionally and psychologically know what they're doing.

Right, they're ensuring you're committed to it, it sounds like. Yeah. That's right. And so, 36 hours passed before we did the eye-be game. And in those 36 hours, there were documentaries we watched, there were Q&A, there were individual

sessions, and there were group sessions. All of them designed in totality just to make us understand fully what we're getting ourselves into, there was a welcome tutorial documentary that we saw that was hosted by the co-founder of Ambio Trevor Miller, and which he talked about what was likely to happen,

but no guarantees, with our eye-be game journey, and he said that maybe 75 to 80 percent

of you will experience nausea, and will end up vomiting. That's-- Yeah, yeah, no, I know, I mean, vomiting's not my thing, I don't enjoy it, but I also had figured, you know, if that's the price that I pay, then okay. And he equated, I began to a roller coaster, and he said, you know, there will be ups

and there will be downs. But the one thing that you don't want to do is try to get off the roller coaster. Okay, so, you're there, you're surrounded by these other people who have agreed based on the same premise, they are fully in. Can you just tell me about them if you're willing to talk about these other folks you

“were surrounded by, did you learn why they were there?”

The majority of them were combat veterans, and a number of those suffered from substance abuse and suicidal ideation in a couple of cases traumatic brain injury. There was an army-ranger named Rick who was really, really quiet, and it said that he had undertaken Ayahuasca and tried other things too, but the memories that he had in combat had really been bedevilling him for a long time.

There was a woman who was from Eritrea. She started talking about the war there and couldn't even finish her sentence and broke down in sobs. And so we were left to imagine whatever she had dealt with before she fled that country. There was a fellow Texan woman named Erin Acorpard, consultant who had experienced trauma

and talking about in most cases, and I should say that like you could see, they were wearing it in their physical posture, just this great weight, not only what it brought them there, but of all of the attempts that they had undertaken before to rid themselves of whatever demons, you know, possess them. I'm imagining people kind of hunched over inward.

“Yeah, it was a really, really somber first meeting, and I think that we were in essence”

saying to each other, you know, we're all kind of a mess, you know, and we're all here because we're pretty much at the end of our row. Okay, so when the process of actually taking the drug begins, what does that look like? Take me through that, start to finish. Yeah, the process really begins well before the drug is administered.

We had blood tests, heart tests, we were all fitted with intravenous ports, each got a

couple of IV bags filled with a proprietary blend of vitamins that basically just keeps

your body nourished in anticipation of a period when you're going to be fasting, and your body's going to be undergone this really, really rigorous experience. Got it. It's like you're about to run a marathon. Yeah, I mean, there, I will say that MBO does so much of this out of an abundance of caution

“and as sort of elaborate and even daunting as it is on a certain level, it's reassuring because”

they're leaving nothing to chance. So you have this intense 36-hour prep session now, it's time to take the I beggin. How do you actually consume it? So we were administered our first of four dosages of I beggin, it came in the form of the capsule, big fat capsule, and we were then led down to the treatment room, which is

in the basement, and is this long rectangular room where there were 11 mats on the floor. How close are you sitting to everybody else? About roughly four feet apart, something like that, and so where I was in a corner, the person to my right was the corporate consultants from Texas Aaron, and then directly behind me were two of the combat veterans.

And situated in front of each mattress is a mirror and a maraca. A mirror and a maraca?

Yeah, this is so you can like first sit and just kind of look at yourself, have a dialogue

with yourself. The maraca is actually just synchronized yourself with the music that will soon be coming up. After the right of your mattress, in addition to the blanket and the pillow, to the right of it is the bucket for nausea.

And so we all got on our respective mattresses and then income the heart monitors, and they put the patches on your chest.

“And so now you've got a machine that you're hooked up to, is the sound appetizing to you, Natalie?”

Yeah, I'm struggling to imagine wanting to be in a scenario where the first thing that happens is income the heart monitors, but I, I mean, I'm impressed. I'm impressed that you didn't run out of the room, Frank. Nobody did. Nobody did.

I mean, again, throughout the evening and early morning, there were people there about half a dozen or so, medics. And just to keep an eye on your heart monitor, any other difficulty you may have. And then at around 11 p.m. or so, the lights were dimmed and the music was turned on. What was the music?

It was the first couple of songs were music from the indigenous community where I

began as used and the one tell-tale feature of that music is the Buity mouth harp that's played in this very staccato fashion throughout. So I sat there and I started, you know, rattling the Morocco along to the music. I felt a little bit goofy doing this and so after maybe 45 seconds or so, I decided that I would stop. I also noticed I was beginning to get lightheaded. We're all equipped with these very heavy-duty eye masks.

So I lay back and slid on my eye mask and the moment I did so, the hallucinations began in earnest. This is your first inkling. It sounds like that. Okay, this trip is really underway. Yes, and as I even mentioned that, I'm actually getting goosebumps because it remains

so present to me the sensation of realizing this is not at all what my imagination or what any of the available information had told me it would be. What was it? I'm dying to know.

appeared to be tribal cheese and then those images dissolved and then they were replaced by

“new images and I don't remember all of them but I remember very distinctly that some”

of them were quite troubling. There was a battlefield and there were bodies strung across a battlefield. There was another one of what looked to be a lot of starving children and all of these were static images but then the next image that came up was the only one that was not static which was a pile of rocks and then these long black snakes slithering out of the rocks.

Terrifying. Now, you know, a good therapist will tell you Natalie that actually snakes symbolize transformation. Terrifying transformation. Yeah, right.

Right, but I did think, yeah, this could be unpleasant and while I was seeing these things, I was feeling something that again, no one had quite prepared me for that my whole body would feel like it was buzzing. You would feel like that I'd been strapped up to something that gave forth electrical currents and someone had just turned the knob a little bit.

It didn't hurt but it's just my whole body was beginning to feel like it's neurons were firing and I noticed my hands began to sweat and so I realized the intensity of this experience is like nothing I could imagine. Were you anxious at this point? I mean, first.

I was not. Not for a second. I actually had this kind of almost clinical fascination as I saw all of this stuff. It was more wondrous than it was terrifying and I actually welcomed the idea of just completely

surrendering to the drug when I realized how powerful it was.

I thought actually this makes the job of surrendering easy because this is not a drug I can defeat. You don't have a choice. You must surrender. That's right and the thing about it is that your mind is very aware of everything.

Nothing is muddled your mind is quite clear and so I was having a dialogue with myself as I was seeing all of this stuff you know and asking myself you know what does this mean? I remember one of the first things I saw that had obvious meaning to me was I saw a little piece of what looked like legal paper and on it was some handwriting and I instantly recognized that handwriting.

It was my handwriting when I was in second grade and when I was just deciding to become a writer.

“I remember saying to myself you have to remember this.”

The experience you're describing where you are aware it has the feeling to me of being awake during your own surgery. You know what I mean like you're watching the thing happen and maybe that also explains why you remember so many of these images so well well I tend to have a pretty good memory as it is but look this was a 10 hour journey and I probably remember two hours of it you

know so there's so a lot of it has been lost in the recesses but there were some things that were just unforgettable particularly when photographic images came up with members of my family and you know I saw my mother and I saw my father and I saw my younger brother and I saw my older brother and there would be images of each of them and of them together and some of them were of actual photographs and our family photo albums and some of them

were not and then they would kind of crumble and the faces themselves would crumble and then an image of my wife Kirsten came up and Kirsten's mother died recently and she's

“been going through a lot of grief over that so I remember actually having a dialogue with”

the eye-began saying please don't make her face crumble it's just too it's too painful to see that and it showed some clemency it did not instead just held her image there a really lovely image of her and then it was just replaced by another. Eventually I saw images of myself and those were striking to me because they were definitely not photographs that exist they were instead images of me in a state of almost preposterous self assurance I seemed so confident

not happy in a giddy way but just pleased with my place in the world and it was you know unquestionably me but on a certain level almost unrecognizable and I realized you know

and to me that was striking just as it was striking that when an image of my brother Eli came up it went quickly away and so so did you you you saw Eli you saw your brother I did but he was just one of one of many and so you know it was as if eye-began was saying that's actually not what we're going to talk about tonight we're not going to talk about your

“brother we're going to talk about you and what did you if you remember what were your feelings”

when you saw for example the images of your family or of you in this kind of confident state I remember I had the capacity to say that's that's an unmarred version of me that's that's a me I recognize and yet that I haven't seen before

I mean an image of me that I recognize but haven't seen before is a really powerful idea

yeah yeah it's a really sort of took my breath away and now while all this is going on I should say that there were these interruptions you know that I'd hear the two veterans behind me we're just like this sad Greek chorus of pukers they seem to seem like that the worst Greek chorus ever right but I also you know throughout it like heard things I heard Aaron next to me

“saying to the medics this bed is not comfortable at all I need to move it's not comfortable”

after later you know I'm so sorry about your discomfort was you know did they do anything about that and she said I don't know what you talked about I loved my bed it was so comfortable so I just I you know that was a hallucination yeah yeah and I was hearing I heard like another person scream the did not in my view detract from it they weren't so powerful as to make me think

you know I've never gonna remember this because all I remember is Derek behind me puking

but they were just sort of part of the whole ten-hour psychodrama so when does it end it ended at let's see I think at eight thirty in the morning when I heard a voice say it's time for your magnesium and I lifted up my I mask and saw a shaft of light coming through a window and I realized then you know okay it's behind us now and so there was certainly relief for me when it was over and so they they hooked us up with a couple of ivy bags of magnesium

and it took about two hours for them to drain and I was hoisted up to my feet and a person

“allowed me to lean heavily on them until I've made my way back to my room and that's how I began”

Thanksgiving all right well let's take another short break and then we'll hear about what stayed with you after all this will be right back okay Robert you had just gone on this trip for an entire night how did you feel like crap I really felt terrible I mean in fact I struggled to think of a day when I felt physically worse than the one I did on what they call with lovely understatement gray day a day of introspection gray day yeah it was actually the only introspection

I was undergoing was why the hell did I do this to myself because I mean you're um it felt as if you know I'd been kind of run through a shredder or something when I closed my eyes I was still seeing hallucinations I was still seeing the film strips of them and I could barely stand on my own power I could barely walk and I thought you know tomorrow evening you know it's going to be my last evening here and then the morning after that I head back and I if I'm like this I can't function

the New York Times is going to fire my wife is going to divorce me I mean I'm just going to be like this worthless pineapple of a human being and and you're basically in the midst of what sounds like the worst hangover ever you're struggling you're struggling I struggled and I ultimately after being unable to have dinner went to sleep Thanksgiving evening and woke up the

next morning it's 630 just feeling like a million dollars I mean I was I was stunned by how good I

was and and my body no longer ate there were no longer any hallucinations the drug had moved its way out of the system and really felt terrific and as did all of the others and so that afternoon we were given an opportunity on what would be our final day there to try yet another psychedelic

Sonoran desert toad and it's a very very intense but also short lived drug only lasts about 10 minutes or so

still right when you're feeling better they're they're offering you another opportunity

“well the truth is you know that I mean everyone felt better that day than they did on their gray”

day but a number of the people didn't feel so well they had a very very rickety to say the least I'd be gain experience and what five MEO DMT has been described as is it's almost a euphoria inducing drug that has the effect of sanding off the very rough edges of your I'd be gain experience and so and is that what it was what was it like? Well it comes the the drug does in the form of something you smoke someone gives you this long stem pipe and you breathe in deeply and then

you fall back and with an eye mask on and at first I didn't know what to make of the drug I was

still hyperconscious of the fact that I hadn't eaten much in the last day and a half my mind was

“just you know racing about and at a certain point I started rubbing my chest and it's something”

that I do right around my solar plexus almost as if I'm trying to kind of push away something or protect myself from something you do that generally you're saying yeah I do that generally but then I just then while lying there had this memory of a photograph that my younger brother had on earth recently which was a photo of me probably at the age of like at four or three and it was me and my brother Eli on the lawn of our house in Houston and he was lying on top of me well

my mother taken the photograph and it was clear that she wouldn't be taking a photograph of me if he was like beating the crap out of me but you can also see that my face looks

“alarmed and I look like I'm being suffocated. Well Robert but from there my mind suddenly jumped”

forward in time to my years as I say 12 or 13 year old when my older brother would have me on the ground his knees on my upper arms pinned to the ground and hitting me in a solar plexus with his fingers doing that repeatedly to me as hurting it done yes and I began to make this connection then this very physical connection to this thing that I often do and it was really a startling reminder of how present he was as a kind of physical and violent force in my life

when I had spent so much time more thinking about the tragedy of him dying so young rather than what he had inflicted on me on my younger brother. And suddenly you're on this trip and you're having this vision that leads you to another vision and you're realizing all of this like that motion that I do to myself is connected to this experience of what I mean you called it torture what sounds like trauma. Yeah and I can think about moments in the present day where I've rubbed my solar plexus and it's

usually in moments of stress or a moment where I'm feeling some discomfort I'm feeling him on me I'm now realizing. Wow and so that was a pretty sort of startling thing it felt very much like a kind of psychic book end had been presented before me. So I have to ask what was it like returning

home after all this. I did feel in the first few days in particular almost like walking around in

a space suit you know on the moon or something you know just still not quite sure how to relate the experience that I'd had to all the phenomena around me and did you feel heavy? No no I did not now I felt sort of more gravity defined but recognizing that gravity is there at some point I will have to succumb to it the drug stays in your system in terms of what it does to your neural pathways for a period you know for over a month and you're returning to invariably you know to real life

with all of that means and so I've just had to kind of let this integrate itself into the demands of my everyday existence. What about that neuroclasticity piece that we talked about like do you

able to see yourself differently I'm thinking of obviously the image of of you at your most confident

like did that remain did that unlock something? Yes but is what I would say I mean it

“like so many therapeutic treatments I think there's always the prospect of backsliding a moment where”

you you run into conflict and and feel the worst of yourself rising up in you what has happened

with me is that it has spurred a different kind of internal dialogue in me that I'm still at pains to describe how it differentiates itself from whatever the usual blah blah blah inside me is taking

“place but I but I do but I do have like you know more searching questions of why did I do that”

or how am I letting this affect my own self-regard and it has definitely added a kind of depth

to how I regard the outside world in my place in it there is you know a space a journey that connects you know the the kid on the grass with a brother on top of them to the sort of

“transfigured image of this other version of me that is out from under that earlier predicament that's”

three yeah and so that's I suppose you know the journey that I bet on but understanding both points the beginning point and the end point is a clarifying and useful experience for me well Robert thank you for letting us into your journey and for sharing everything you did we really appreciate it sure thing manly today's episode was produced by Tina Antelini with help from Alex Baron it was edited by Wendy Dore

an engineer by Rowan Nemistot it contains music by Marian lasano Rowan Nemistot Dan Powell and Diane Wong our production manager is Franny Kartoff that's it for the daily I'm Natalie Kitroff see you tomorrow