The Iboga Leadership Summit Podcast

In the 13th episode of the Iboga Leadership Summit podcast, Ros Stone speaks with Dr Andy Letcher; author of Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom, scholar of religion, folk musician, druid, and Programme Director of the MSc Psychedelics at EPIC (the Exeter Psychedelic Interdisciplinary Centre); for a conversation about the limits of translation, the politics of psychedelic knowledge, and how the Global North can get better at listening.Andy traces a path that began in ecology before crossing into the humanities: a third-year undergraduate confronted by the history and philosophy of science, a PhD candidate who set out to vindicate Druidry and emerged a reluctant atheist, and eventually a scholar who found himself having to reassemble his beliefs from the ground up. He speaks with precision about the intellectual habits that separate disciplines, and makes the case that psychedelic research needs both science and the humanities; but in the spirit of genuine, convivial conversation, with assumptions made visible and reality tunnels widened.Andy shares the story of his encounter with Iboga and relates the intrinsicality of the music to the resolution of his journey: field recordings of Bwiti music allowed him to experience a sense of the all-pervasive “wonder of song.”The conversation also approaches some of the thornier questions that he has has spent his career circling: what happens when a tradition is transplanted or extracted, and why the hunger for an ancient Indigenous tradition of one's own, however understandable, may be pointing in the wrong direction."Authenticity doesn't reside in the distant past. It doesn't necessarily reside in other parts of the world. The authenticity resides between us and the mushroom, or us and the plants that we use, and our relationship to the non-human."Andy reflects on the morphic resonance kindled by gathering, and on how this can be built when we come together in embodied practice rather than solely attempting to access spiritual ideas that are mediated through text (including our calendars). He also notes the particular urgency of hearing Gabonese and African voices more widely within the global psychedelic academic conversation, noting that this has long oriented its reality tunnel almost exclusively towards the Amazon and Mexico.On the question of Ibogaine's commercialisation and the sometimes wilful perception of the alkaloid in isolation, to the exclusion of its origin in the Bwiti tradition, Andy is candid about the limits of his own thinking, while naming his sense of the core questions plainly: Who does Ibogaine belong to, and what do we owe the people who have tended the knowledge of it for generations?"We need to give a lot more thought about how we acknowledge the Indigenous knowledge systems from which these drugs have ultimately been extracted."Taking part in the conversations stemming from the Iboga Leadership Summit, Andy looks forward to engaging with an eye to how the most holistic future possibilities may be discerned through more attuned, animist engagement with the natural world. The Iboga Leadership Summit is hosted by Moughenda and the Bwiti community in Gabon, bringing together physicians, pharmacists and providers, neuroscience researchers, farmers and agricultural technicians, students and community leaders, lawyers, policymakers, environmentalists, and all those called to Bwiti, Ibogaine and Iboga.22–28 June, Libreville, Gabon. Details and tickets: https://ibogaleadershipsummit.com/ Sacred harp: Papa Boussengue. Podcast producer: Ros Stone

In Episode 12 of the Iboga Leadership Summit podcast, host Ros Stone speaks with neuroscientist and psychedelic researcher Dr Manesh Girn for a conversation about the (psychedelic) nature of creativity; how plant medicines that are the subject of research can influence its design; the kinds of considerations that relatedly come into play when it comes to approaching the medicalisation of Iboga-ine; how the Iboga-ine experience differs from psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin and the implications this has when it comes to addiction-interruption and habit formation. Dr Manesh Girn is Co-Founder and CEO of Five Discovery, Scientific Director of The Center for MINDS, and creator of the psychedelic educational platform The Psychedelic Scientist. He opens by making a case for greater precision in how we talk about different substances: Iboga-ine "has very low affinity” for the serotonin 2A receptor that “defines classic psychedelics”. His preferred descriptor for Iboga-ine is oneirogen: often reportedly experienced as a dream-generator that produces a "cinematic narrative" life review. Where classic psychedelics may induce plasticity in regions related to "our self-model, our narrative, our conception of the world," Iboga-ine appears to act more powerfully on the reward system and basal ganglia; the circuits that govern habitual behaviour and addictive impulse.The result, Dr Girn suggests, is that ibogaine can "rewrite that script and recalibrate the system" at a motivational level, while the self-re-narrativising process simultaneously works on "a higher level interpretive meaning-making layer,” allowing a person to change not just their inclinations, but their felt-sense of how these relate to their story. The dexterity with which Dr Girn unpacks “tricky dance” that involves the many nuanced considerations related to the medicalisation of Iboga-ine befit the complexity of this topic. He carefully holds reflections on the unsuitability of ceremonial framing for certain treatment candidates together with considerations around how conceptualising Iboga-ine as purely an addiction treatment is “a total minimization of the full potential of it” which risks stripping away “the cosmological significance, the spiritual, the metaphysical” dimensions that Bwiti traditions have held for generations.The conversation closes with Dr Girn’s conviction that the psychedelic field will need to “get more granular” in its approach to different compounds as it matures; an appropriate intention with which to approach the upcoming Iboga Leadership Summit where the known neurobiological and psychological properties of Iboga will be explored in relationship to their interplay with its original Bwiti context. The Iboga Leadership Summit is hosted by Moughenda and the Bwiti community in Gabon, for physicians, pharmacists and providers, neuroscience researchers, farmers and agricultural technicians, students and community leaders, lawyers, policymakers and environmentalists. And everybody called to Bwiti, Ibogaine and Iboga.On 22-28 June, in Libreville, GabonDetails and tickets: www.ibogaleadershipsummit.com

In the fourth episode of the Iboga Leadership Summit podcast, harm reduction advocate Susan Ousterman offers insights into what speaking truth to power is like in a reality where it’s easier to access illicit substances than mental health care. Susan is the Executive Director of the Vilomah Foundation. Vilomah: A Sanskrit word meaning “out of natural order,” which relates to the experience of losing a child, or another loved one, in a tragic, unexpected, or premature way. After losing her son, Tyler, in 2020, Susan made a list of the issues that haunted her most; all the systemic intersections that had failed to save him. She wanted to address each one to prevent these tragedies from happening to others. The Villomah Foundation has formed resultantly over the last five years and includes policing personnel, harm reduction advocates, grief educators, and Iboga/ine treatment providers. In this conversation, Susan tells Ros Stone from the Iboga Leadership Summit team about how the nature of advocacy work changes when it’s done from a wellspring of love and grief; we explore working definitions of “addiction” within a policy landscape sculpted by social stigmas and racial prejudices, and how “hierarchies” of stigmatisation can affect treatment choices and availability. We also discuss the Vilomah Foundation’s commitment to the North Star Ethics Pledge, and the need for the Global North to avoid repeating “what we’ve done to tobacco, cannabis, and opium” in relation to Iboga and Ibogaine. This includes resisting the treatment of Ibogaine as just another commodity or molecule, and instead recognising its interrelation with Iboga and its cultural lineage, protecting its sustainability, and ensuring that the communities who steward it are neither erased nor exploited.Susan Ousterman will be joining the Iboga Leadership Summit, where she’s keen to understand “what responsible reciprocity really looks like.” The Iboga Leadership Summit is hosted by Moughenda and the Bwiti community in Gabon, for physicians, pharmacists and providers, neuroscience researchers, farmers and agricultural technicians, students and community leaders, lawyers, policymakers and environmentalists. And everybody called to Bwiti, Ibogaine and Iboga.On 22-28 June, in Libreville, GabonDetails and tickets: www.ibogaleadershipsummit.com

In this episode of the Iboga Leadership Summit podcast, Ryan Rich speaks with philosopher and international development consultant Jeremy Weate about what it means to bring the Bwiti tradition into contact with the mechanisms of modern medicine, policy, and commerce without losing its soul.Jeremy traces a journey that began on a London bus in 2004, when a chance conversation sparked a calling that led him to Bwiti and Iboga. Already living in Nigeria and immersed in Yoruba spiritual culture, with its trickster figures, its sacred groves, and its own plant medicine lineages, he found himself drawn inexorably toward Gabon. His Bwiti initiation in 2016 left him with humility and a deepening recognition that the knowledge stemming from Iboga is embodied, apprenticed, and unfolds over time.Jeremy speaks candidly about his experience on the board of a Vancouver-based Ibogaine company during the height of the psychedelic hype cycle; a lesson in what happens when commercial intent outpaces authentic grounding; and about the open letter, “A Practitioner Statement,” published by Psychedelics today, which he has helped catalyze in response to the recent AFI executive order, raising urgent questions about the risks of routing Ibogaine through a hyper-commercialised American medical model. Central to Jeremy's thinking in his current engagement with the Iboga-ine landscape is the question of reciprocity, understood as something that must begin in ceremony and in the unglamorous work of listening. Drawing on his professional background in mining, he argues that just as any significant project ought to begin with acknowledgment of the spirit of a place, meaningful engagement between the West and Gabon around Iboga must start from a clearly defined relationship, not revenue streams."Reciprocity begins with ceremony and storytelling in a circle. No levers of hierarchy, no ‘us and them’. We're all sitting around the fire together, just listening to each other."At the Iboga Leadership Summit, Jeremy is looking forward to continuing this conversation about how the field can hold its ambitions accountable to the spirit, the lineage, and the communities that have always been the true custodians of this medicine.The Iboga Leadership Summit is hosted by Moughenda and the Bwiti community in Gabon, bringing together physicians, pharmacists and providers, neuroscience researchers, farmers and agricultural technicians, students and community leaders, lawyers, policymakers, environmentalists, and all those called to Bwiti, Ibogaine and Iboga.22–28 June, Libreville, Gabon. Details and tickets: https://ibogaleadershipsummit.com/Sacred harp: Papa Boussengue. Podcast producer: Ros Stone

In the tenth episode of the Iboga Leadership Summit podcast, Ryan Rich speaks with Moth Storyteller and creator of Memory Motel Terrence Mickey: author, workshop facilitator, and Bwiti initiate, for a conversation about the deep relationship between narrative, self-knowledge, grief, and the transformative reordering of perception that can occur through Iboga ceremony.Terrence traces a life shaped by stories that started playing out long before he knew he was studying them: a curious teenager drawn to psychedelics but held back by fear, a facilitator working with people in addiction recovery to help them reclaim authorship of their own lives, and eventually a seeker who found himself in Gabon undergoing initiation that would fundamentally alter how he related to memory, loss, and identity.He speaks openly about the inherited weight of suicide in his family, and the slow accumulation of unresolved emotional material that he carried into adulthood, until ceremony offered not resolution in the abstract, but a radical widening of perspective.“You go in as a first-person narrator, and you come out as the omniscient narrator — you see the full three-sixty version of your story, not just the small myopic piece of the pie you've been holding.”From there, the conversation moves through storytelling as both craft and technology of integration: how vulnerability, accountability, and truth-telling form the scaffolding of any meaningful narrative, whether spoken around a fire or performed on a stage like The Moth (a nonprofit group in New York City, dedicated to the art of storytelling). Terrence explores how Bwiti philosophy, with its insistence on radical self-honesty and return to one’s true nature  maps unexpectedly cleanly onto the architecture of storytelling itself.He reflects on writing a book as an attempt to translate an oral tradition into a Western context hungry for meaning but often disconnected from the practices that generate it, and on what is lost when story moves from embodied transmission to fixed text.“In an oral tradition, things don’t die — they live in the minds and hearts of people and get transmitted, recreated. A book is a commodity. The oral tradition is embodied.”This conversation offers the beginnings of what promises to be a much deeper inquiry into how conscious choices around storytelling can modulate identity, perception, and self-responsibility: what it means to loosen identification with a single version of events, how compassion emerges when multiple perspectives become visible at once, and how integration is the process of beginning of a different relationship to lived experience.At the Iboga Leadership Summit, Terrence is looking forward to sharing what Bwiti has taught him about authorship and authenticity within a broader field of practitioners, researchers, and initiates exploring the intersection of Iboga, narrativity and healing.The Iboga Leadership Summit is hosted by Moughenda and the Bwiti community in Gabon, bringing together physicians, pharmacists and providers, neuroscience researchers, farmers and agricultural technicians, students and community leaders, lawyers, policymakers, environmentalists, and all those called to Bwiti, Ibogaine and Iboga.22-28 June, Libreville, GabonDetails and tickets: https://ibogaleadershipsummit.com/Sacred harp: Papa BoussengueProducer: Ros Stone

“What happens when we [label patterns] is often an individual's identity kind of metastasizes to that diagnosis. And then that can even reify the patterns.”In this searching conversation, Ros Stone speaks with Sarah Siegel of Waking Wisdom Within, Root Healing and Bassé Root. Sarah is a certified alcohol and drug counselor, recovery coach, IFS-trained therapist, chaplain, and co-founder of Bassé Root, for an exploration of trauma, addiction, dissociation, and the profound limitations of the Western mental health paradigm.Drawing from her own lived experience of recovery, Sarah reflects on the ways contemporary psychiatric frameworks can collapse complex human suffering into static identities, often stripping people of context, agency, and meaning in the process. Opening with the story of her own encounter with Ibogaine treatment, she describes both the life-changing clarity the medicine offered and the uncomfortable recognition that insight alone is not healing without a deeper shift in relationship to self, patterning, and truth.“All of my patterns were there. I hadn't shifted my relationship to them. And in the Bwiti tradition, how we're relating to whatever it is we're experiencing is the most important thing. Because that's where we have agency.”The conversation moves through the Bwiti understanding of Iboga as a force of radical self-honesty, the tension between Indigenous healing systems and their medicalization within Western clinical frameworks, and the ways dissociation functions both psychologically and culturally. Sarah draws a parallel between the mechanisms of colonialism and the mechanisms of trauma itself: both operating through erasure of context, community, land, ancestry, spirituality, and relationship.“Erasure is one of the main impulses of colonialism. Erasure of context, of language, of community, of spiritual tradition, of connection to the earth, to plants, to herbs. And erasure is also the main thing that creates dissociation.”Ros and Sarah also explore the staggering WEIRD bias underpinning modern psychological research, the increasingly institutional trajectory of modalities like Internal Family Systems (IFS), the outsourcing of primary human satisfactions into addictive substitutes, and the possibility that many symptoms currently pathologized by the mental health system may in fact be intelligent responses to conditions humans were never designed to endure. This is ultimately a conversation about learning to come home to yourself an ongoing practice of truth, relationship, and remembrance.“Primary human satisfactions are really like sitting around a fire together. That's what we're wired for as humans.”At the Iboga Leadership Summit, Sarah Siegel will join conversations exploring the future of Iboga and Ibogaine at the intersection of Indigenous knowledge, recovery work, spirituality, and mental health care.The Iboga Leadership Summit is hosted by Moughenda and the Bwiti community in Gabon, for physicians, pharmacists and providers, neuroscience researchers, farmers and agricultural technicians, students and community leaders, lawyers, policymakers, environmentalists, and everybody called to Bwiti, Ibogaine and Iboga.22–28 June, Libreville, GabonDetails and tickets: https://ibogaleadershipsummit.com/

"What was driving my addiction was to numb, to anesthetize myself to the reality that the world was this shallow, meaningless place with just a bunch of sock puppet theater going on for spiritual endeavors."This conversation makes the case for sound quality as an overlooked variable in the future of psychedelic medicine. Ryan Rich is joined by Jonathan Weiss, founder of high-end audio companies Oswalds Mill Audio and Fleetwood Sound, for a conversation spanning psychoacoustics, addiction recovery, sound production within Indigenous ceremonies, and the neurobiological reasons why contemporary music streaming, such as Spotify, can feel so profoundly inadequate (especially) in a spiritual setting."One could argue that the music is really the medicine, but our mindsets are so screwed up that it requires us to take psychedelics for the sound and music to really get through to us."Opening this discussion, Jonathan shares how participation in the NYU phase two FDA clinical trials for psilocybin-assisted treatment of alcohol use disorder not only ended a long battle with alcoholism but lit up his current pathway, an ongoing exploration into how sound and music function within the psychedelic experience. He explains why headphones create a neurologically unnatural listening environment, what happens to the brain when it is forced to reconstruct the 96% of musical information compressed out of an MP3, and how we’re designed to “hear” music through our whole bodies, not just our ears.Following Jonathan’s highly technical breakdown of where the spirit and energy of the original sound are bled out of commercial sound reproduction, Ryan draws on his learning within the Bwiti tradition to introduce the role of live music as active medicine in Iboga ceremony, which leads to a wider discussion of how Indigenous cultures across the world have always understood what Western therapeutic frameworks are only beginning to acknowledge: that sound is inseparable from the psychedelic experience itself. Jonathan and Ryan then explore the commercialization of audio and its consequences for how we listen, the neurological superpower of human hearing, the Tibetan Buddhist understanding of sound as the last sense to leave the body, and the differences between hearing and true listening. The episode closes with Jonathan's reflection on the nature of sound itself as energy vibrating at the human scale, and music as the structuring of that energy into a direct portal to the experience of universal interconnection.At the Iboga Leadership Summit, Jonathan Weiss will be in conversation and collaboration with the musicians creating the energetic field for the summit’s conversations. Together, they’ll be exploring what might make it possible to carry the sonic integrity of a traditional ceremony into a Western therapeutic or clinical context. More from Jonathan in the meantime in his bite-sized YouTube series On Listening.The Iboga Leadership Summit is hosted by Moughenda and the Bwiti community in Gabon, for physicians, pharmacists and providers, neuroscience researchers, farmers and agricultural technicians, students and community leaders, lawyers, policymakers, and environmentalists, and everybody called to Bwiti, Ibogaine and Iboga.22-28 June, Libreville, GabonDetails and tickets: www.ibogaleadershipsummit.com

In the seventh episode of the Iboga Leadership Summit Podcast, Tobias “Edzing Nzame” Erny shares details of his most recent research into Iboga/ine as a treatment for Parkinson’s Disease with summit co-organiser Ryan “Ghenigho” Rich. The latest paper, celebrated in this episode, is part of an ongoing study in which participants are microdosing to manage the condition, sometimes with miraculously effective symptom reduction. Tobias Erny began his career in the chemical-pharmaceutical industry of Basel, Switzerland, before his first encounter with Ibogaine in 2006 interrupted an addiction and opened a door to the spiritual, healing potentialities of Iboga/ine and lit up his pathway towards ethical, respectful clinical research of the Ibogaine molecule within the wider context of Bwiti and Iboga. In 2008, Tobias began working with the traditional plant medicine Iboga and went on to become initiated into the Dissoumba-Fang tradition of Bwiti, regularly returning to Gabon to deepen his understanding. Alongside the team at Nachtschattenverlag (publisher of Albert Hofmann and Stanislav Grof in the German-speaking world), he published the German standard reference on Iboga, organized conferences, and lectured at universities across Europe. As Co-Director of the Global Iboga Therapy Alliance (GITA), a non-profit dedicated to raising awareness about Iboga and its alkaloids through sustainability initiatives, scientific research, education, and knowledge transfer, Tobias sits at the centre of the global conversation around this medicine.Tobias describes the difference between Ibogaine and Iboga as the difference between exploring your own psychological bubble, and something outside of it arriving to guide you through yourself. Ryan and Tobias move between the nuances of conceptualistions of Iboga as a “hyperdimensional ally,” and a “teacher who gives homework and won't offer the next level of teaching until you've implemented the last.”The conversation holistically draws together spiritual and clinical perspectives, especially in its exploration of whole-plant Iboga, plant-derived Ibogaine and synthetic Ibogaine. Tobias shares details about the largely unmapped world of Iboga's 30 to 50 alkaloids and why he believes the healthiest future of all varieties of Iboga-related medicine depends on treating the experience not as a pharmacological intervention but as a spiritual awakening that can reconnect us to nature and ourselves."The honest wish to change is rewarded by the spirit."At the Iboga Leadership Summit, Tobias Erny will bring the rare perspective of a scientist, a provider, and an initiate. His contribution will focus on microdosing, Parkinson's research, and how Western medicine might begin to engage more effectively with the Bwiti tradition in researching its sacrament.The Iboga Leadership Summit is hosted by Moughenda and the Bwiti community in Gabon, for physicians, pharmacists and providers, researchers, farmers, students and community leaders, lawyers, policymakers, and everybody called to Bwiti, Ibogaine and Iboga.22-28 June, Libreville, GabonDetails and tickets:www.ibogaleadershipsummit.com

Quentin reflects on how his early fascination with reptiles, forests, and living systems shaped his understanding of cultivation as a dialogue rather than a domination. He explains why many industrial agricultural models fail: they prioritize yield, uniformity, and speed at the expense of resilience, diversity, and ecological balance.Together with Raphael Nicolle, the conversation explores how true genetic work requires patience, deep observation, and respect for time scales that exceed human timelines. Quentin shares why landrace preservation is not nostalgia, but a critical response to genetic erosion driven by globalized markets.The discussion also draws strong parallels between plant cultivation and traditional spiritual systems: both require lineage, transmission, and responsibility. Just as Bwiti cannot be reduced to a technique or product, living plants cannot be reduced to isolated molecules or traits without losing something essential.“When you reduce a plant to a molecule, you stop working with life. You start working against it.”At the Iboga Leadership Summit, Quentin Di Costanzo will bring a rare, grounded voice on cultivation, biodiversity, and ethics. His contribution will focus on how to protect living genetic heritage while navigating scientific research, modern agriculture, and global demand — without repeating extractive patterns that have already damaged countless plant lineages.The Iboga Leadership Summit is hosted by Moughenda and the Bwiti community in Gabon, for physicians, pharmacists and providers, neuroscience researchers, farmers and agricultural technicians, students and community leaders, lawyers, policymakers and environmentalists — and everybody called to Bwiti, Ibogaine and Iboga.22–28 June, Libreville, GabonDetails and tickets:www.ibogaleadershipsummit.com

This interview with entheogenic entrepreneur and philanthropist Simeon Schnapper celebrates the “apparent oxymoron” of introducing the wonder and awe of Bwiti and, more broadly, Indigenous sacred plant medicine traditions into a medical context. Simeon is the founding partner of JLS, a pioneering plant medicine venture fund, and is widely recognised as the first psychedelic venture capitalist. In conversation with Ros Stone from the Iboga Leadership Summit team, he explores how business and entrepreneurship can holistically be put into conversation with plant medicine. He shares the ethos of the JLS Fund, an early-stage venture fund focused on brain health, mental health, and neurodegenerative disease, guided as much by impact as by returns, and by the question: “What impact did you make to lives, and souls, and healing?”This conversation also discusses the complexities of defining “addiction,” and the interpolation of various ideas of what “recovery” can look like in relation to plant medicine, leading to reflections on the central role Bwiti ethics needs to play in all aspects of the potential medicalisation of Iboga and Ibogaine, and the need for genuine cross-pollination between Indigenous wisdom and clinical, psychiatric, and neurological perspectives. Simeon is already witnessing growing alignment between ancestral knowledge and biomedical research, and expresses cautious yet infectious optimism for the relational future of humanity (though not entirely extending to the potential impacts of AI). He also underscores the importance of engaging Bwiti intelligence and genuine reciprocity early in pharmaceutical and therapeutic development,  “not as a moral tax,” but as deep intelligence that could de-risk drug development if engaged from the beginning rather than as a neocolonial afterthought.At the Iboga Leadership Summit in June, Simeon looks forward to exploring whether clinical acknowledgement of traditional Bwiti practices as the original protocols for working with Iboga and Ibogaine could be a key next part of science’s journey towards respectful collaboration. The Iboga Leadership Summit is hosted by Moughenda and the Bwiti community in Gabon, for physicians, pharmacists and providers, neuroscience researchers, farmers and agricultural technicians, students and community leaders, lawyers, policymakers, and environmentalists. And everybody called to Bwiti, Ibogaine, and Iboga.On 22-28 June, in Libreville, Gabon.Details and tickets:www.ibogaleadershipsummit.com