Pascal: [00:00:00] Hi, welcome to One Degree Shifts. I'm your host, PascAl Tremblay. I'm the co founder of Nectara, and today we're having part two of a podcast. I say part two because It's the second time he's on the show, but I'm really happy to welcome you, Geronimo. Welcome back to the show.
Jeronimo ICEERS: It's great to be here.
Pascal: Thank you. And today we're talking about ayahuasca, and ayahuasca is a powerful plant teacher. My mentor Sarah would call it, uh, it's like going to plant university. It could show you a whole lot of different things. And, and in my case, it changed my life, really. It was my first experience with my grandmother.
It was life changing, um, and very blessed to have had experienced such a, a beautiful journey. I absolutely had zero clue about what safety was, harm reduction, what's that, I don't know.
And with its potency, of course, comes with, now I know years later, that it can also come with severe risks that are often misunderstood or simply Unknown. So in this podcast, we'll be illuminating the most important ones that participants and facilitators [00:01:00] should know about.
And first, we'll talk about the risk for participants, and then we'll talk about the risk for facilitators. And then we'll talk about an amazing harm reduction course that, uh, ICERS, uh, is relaunching this year called AYA Safety. And today we're talking and I'll, I'll do a brief introduction of you, Geronimo.
Uh, Geronimo has more than 20 years of experience in the world of ayahuasca. He is the Director of Social Innovation at ICEERS and a founding member of the platform for the defense of ayahuasca called Plantaforma. He has traveled extensively in South America researching a wide range of ayahuasca practices encompassing indigenous, mestizo, religious, and global north perspectives.
Um, before we dive into the risks, I'd love to hear what has ayahuasca taught you about yourself or the world over these last two decades? I'd be curious to hear more about that. It's a big question. I realize it's a loaded question. Do you have five hours to talk about it?
Jeronimo ICEERS: I'm going. Yes. I'm going to try to, I'm going to try to find the, [00:02:00] the short answer. I would say, um, what I have learned in this, um, uh, 20 years engaging with Iowaska is that, um, the world is a more interesting, um, uh, profound, a magical, interconnected thing, uh, that I had ever realized.
I discovered, endless things about myself, endless things about people, endless things about, um, because, because I didn't stay where I was and drunk vascular, but I went and tried to, you know, interact with people who have been doing this much longer than me and cultures.
The greatest gift that comes from, experiencing other cultures is not, of course, all that you learn about that diversity, but what that reflects back about you and about your own culture and the questions that it brings back. So, um, for me, and I think for many people, um, this has been very much sort of round.[00:03:00]
Trip where I begin being fascinated with the traditions of other people. And this eventually took me back to ask questions about what are the traditions of my people and who are my ancestors and what is my territory I think this is sort of a, a, a common and natural process, but it, but it's a process that takes time and it goes in a sort of circle.
So you start looking out and, uh, and at the end of this process, you, you end up finding yourself, looking back at, at yourself and your own environment, your own history, your own ancestors, your own people, your own traditions, your own culture. Um, it's always, it's always a bittersweet experience.
Home is always sort of fraught with ambiguity, you know, home in the, in the white sense. But, um, but I think it's a very, sort of, yeah, necessary, necessary part of, of becoming a, a better human being.
Pascal: Yeah, that's beautiful. Thanks for sharing that. [00:04:00] Appreciate that. And it reflects a lot of the, you know, the main themes that I've explored with grandmother as well. So it's, it's nice to hear those things back again. And, uh, some universal truths get reflected through the medicine, right? What has changed for you in the last 20 years in terms of how you're viewing this globalization of the medicine and its growth? And we will talk about the risks that have come with that and the dangers of scaling such a thing.
Jeronimo ICEERS: What, what I've noticed is that, you know, my sort of enthusiasm has tempered quite a bit, and I think this is also normal. One starts with, in a sort of under a sort of romance period where you think like, oh, well this is such a, like, tremendous potential to change so many things.
And if only so many more people were partaking on this and knew about this, the world would be a better place already, uh, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, with the years, with the decades, you realize [00:05:00] that, you know, if everybody drank ayahuasca, the world might be a pretty similar place. The culture might be different, but the world, you know, um, , there's a sort of tendency to think that, I don't know how to say that there's technological solutions for human folly.
And there aren't, you know, no amount of ayahuasca is going to make a full. He's gonna turn a fool into a, a wise person. , Krishna Murti used to say, uh, um, an idiot can meditate for 30 years and still be an idiot. Change, uh, uh, uh, at the personal level, at the community level, the social level is, is one of the most difficult tasks that you can sort of undertake.
It's incredibly difficult. These plans help, but they can do the work. So very often or often enough people take these plans, they expect change, they feel [00:06:00] change, but actually when you look and when you look at change, are is not, it's not really coming. So, you know that, that one, so, so my, I. Sort of enthusiasm has been tempered.
Uh, and, and I think this is good. I've come to understood, I, I can these plants more like, you know, flashlights that you can use to shed light on things that were formerly sort of the shades or unknown or dark rather than sort of like levers that you can use to push and move things.
You know, it's up to people to do the change and, and, and no amount ofs can, can, can do this, this work for you on these, I remain committed to this path, but I no longer believe that the world can be saved by giving everybody, uh, ayahuasca, uh, alone.
Pascal: Yeah, it really reflects my own journey as well of being a starry eyed younger person being like, Oh, I'm gonna do as much as I can, because obviously more is better. Right. Um,
and I'll just keep [00:07:00] diving in. And of course, I'll get better and better and. Eventually the medicine just shut me down and said, you know, you need to sit down and really integrate this stuff because it's going to take you many, many years to do that.
So Yeah. And please, please continue your thought there.
Jeronimo ICEERS: Yeah. And then in terms, in terms of sort of outside of my service, in terms of globally, sort of how psychedelics have become mainstream part of university, uh, research centers. I mean, sort of the, the, the, the boom, you know, the psychedelic renaissance, I think has caught me for sure by surprise.
I didn't expect things to move so fast. And so, um, and, and some parts of it have left me, you know, again, with a bittersweet taste. I think for me, what, what was interesting about this is how the introduction of psychedelics or plant medicines could bring, um, changes in our cultures, in our, and in and in our societies, not how we [00:08:00] could change psychedelic or plant medicine practices in order to make them fit into our society.
Um, so what I'm seeing with sort of some sadness is that. A lot of the relationship or of the focus seems to be backwards. How, how do we turn this thing into prescription medicines, uh, for example, without asking the questions, is prescription medicine the right box, the right context, the right category, even for these experiences?
Not that this, that they don't have therapeutic value, but is this really all they are? Um, that's not what we see, uh, in, in cultures and, and traditions who've had longer relationship to them than we have. So this is the other thing that I'm noticing this 20 years is this sort of like, you know, conscious and unconscious attempt to shoehorn, to reduce, to boil down, uh, to sanitize and to standardize, uh, uh, something that is, you know, much, much [00:09:00] bigger than.
Certainly our concept of prescription medicine, most likely our concept of medicine, largely speaking, what medicines are and what medicine is, and even what type of things are being treated by medicine. I think a lot of the best potential of psychedelics is not exactly what we call medicine in, in sort of strict terms, but comes closer to what will become prevention, you know, or sort of sort of life situations.
People who go to planned medicine circles, some of them have medical conditions, but many of them are simply dealing with things that you cannot call illness. They're difficult transitions, their life situations, they're people are making decisions. People have problems in relationships, people have, you know, all sorts of life difficulties.
But this is life. This is not illness. This is not the realm of pathology or medicine. Right? So this is the other thing. The other thing that I've sort of, you know, I would say witness in this 20 years is this sort of [00:10:00] like. , the attempt to develop psychedelic medicines, which of course is a great thing, and then the sort of follow up idea that that's all disease is medicine.
As, as we, as we narrowly understand it.
Pascal: That's a beautiful insight on prevention and medicine and the right context in the right box. Right. And part of safety is about informing people, um, who are. Facilitating and interfacing with these medicines in non native context, which is, in your view, where most modern contexts are from when they're outside of their, uh, original homes, right?
I'd love to kind of transport forward. Myself back into like nine years ago when I first had my first ceremony I thought I was going to yoga retreat and uh, the person told me no actually you're going to meet grandmother today And I said what then who's grandmother?
It's grandmother ayahuasca and You know, like I said earlier. I had a beautiful experience. it.
was very [00:11:00] connective and and very Life changing, but I also had no clue and these days with the advent of ICERS and Nectar and other platforms like this that help educate people, there's a lot more resources out there to help reduce harm.
And so, if I was new to this world and I'm about to have my first ceremony, what would you say are the five biggest risks that I might be, or may not, be exposing myself to?
Jeronimo ICEERS: The first risk, you know, and the main contraindication of psychedelics is not wanting to take them. You know, so mean You absolutely shouldn't take psychedelics if you don't want to take 'em or if you have doubts about taking them. and this is because this experience, I always say, um, it's like a kiss.
You know, if you want it, it is the most intimate, beautiful, uh, uh, profound thing you can have. If you don't want the kiss, [00:12:00] it's intrusive, sloppy. Blah. Right. The, the, the, the kiss is exactly the same, but it's something that is so close to your skin that if you, if there's not this, if you're not open to it, if you don't want it, it's really, it can be, you know, extremely unpleasant being the same feeling.
It can be very, very intrusive. I would say that's the first, that's the first, um, the, the, the first main counter counterindication and this, and this brings some interesting and important questions also back to prescription medicines, because usually the way we understand prescriptions is that your doctor tells you that you should take something for your condition.
Not asks you whether, uh, you don't go to your doctor saying, you know, I would like to try this medica, this antibiotic. Right? So there is, yeah, it, it, it, it touches on this, and it touches another, another important ethical point, which [00:13:00] is advertising. I. What is the role of advertising in an experience that can, you know, completely impact your life?
Um, and that it should very much come from the person itself that decide to try or to experience this. Uh, so what is the role of a prescriber? You know, whether it it's a doctor or, or, or a marketer, you know, in, in, in the, in the role of an experience that, you know, that requires so much consent on part of the person and that, and can, and whose impacts can be so.
Big, right? So, you know, what we see in advertising is that for things that can really screw your life up, you know, like, complicated financial products, uh, uh, you know, alcohol, uh, uh, tobacco, you know, there is still severe restrictions on advertising. Precisely because they can't really screw your life up,
so, you know, the, the usual advertising role is not allowed. And we also see this in the traditions, you know, I like, like to mention in the church, in the, in the Santa [00:14:00] Diamond. In Brazil. These are churches, they're in urban environments. The churches are always open. That means anybody can go to a church and say, I would like to participate in a ritual.
After some screening, you will, you will be allowed. So the, the, the doors of the temple are open to anybody, everybody, but by law. Members of the church are not allowed to invite anybody. So you can tell your neighbors, uh, I'm going to T Temple. I'm drinking, I scan. It doesn't good. But you cannot tell your neighbors and I think you should try to.
Yeah. Because when you do that, you are taking a certain power, a certain, a certain role over someone's life that you cannot, because this is not like, you know, I think you should try, you know, to cook rice this way, or I think you should try, you know, to do this exercise or this is something that could completely change your life.
So you cannot, that's the type of thing you cannot recommend, the [00:15:00] same thing the same way. You wouldn't recommend, I think you should have children, or I think you should get married, or I think you should get divorced. Or I think, you know, like this, you know, once we get to certain level of like, you know, implications, you know, recommendations take a d completely different role and should, and they, and, and, and, and, and recommender of every sort influencers, uh, uh, prescribers of every sort should take a step back.
The other, the other risks that we see, one of them is the, the, the runaway participant. This is the person who decides to leave the ceremony in the middle because they're uncomfortable or because whatever.
And they decide they just, they've hired with this and they want to go home and they're in no state to go home. Um, the other is the angry relative, and this is what happens not to the person who drinks ayahuasca, but what effect this has on their environment. And sometimes how this upsets others, uh, and, and how these, uh, these sort of changes.
But I, I, I would go into the last two, which I [00:16:00] think are the most, um, sort of, they're, they're more, more general, more, more interesting. One is Ayahuasca told me that, and the dangers of ayahuasca told me that, and this is, of course, this is just as good as it is. Bad people drink ayahuasca because ayahuasca.
It tells you things, you can mean it, or people speak this way. Ayahuasca told me this. You know, in reality you are sitting with your thoughts and you're having thoughts, but these thoughts don't quite seem to come from you. But this is all have, you're having a conversation in your head. And Ayahuasca tells people alsos of things.
And usually this very often, and this is why people go to these very often. These, these things are life changing for the better. Usually these things have to do with people noticing when they have, they are living in ways that are outside of their own value system. This is very, very common in Ayahuasca [00:17:00] where people realize the things that they are doing are not really aligned with themselves, with their own inner core.
And this sort of realigns people.
Pascal: And that can be that can be done gently, or it can be done with a bit of a sledgehammer. sometimes it feels like it can be quite intense to be reflected those things back.
Jeronimo ICEERS: yeah. And also, but also sometimes what people see in Ayahuasca is their own desires, their own fears, sort of presented to them just like this, you know, uh, uh, they're presented as an image and people take this image to be an image of their future, a prediction. So people say, ayahuasca told me to quit my job, uh, and move to the jungle, or Ayahuasca told me to, uh, get a divorce.
And, and, uh, or you know, this sort of like big, big life changing decisions. And people in Ayahuasca will get very sort of strong, can get very strong sort of feeling about this. I don't think Ayahuasca ever [00:18:00] tells people to get divorced. I think what Ayahuasca tells them is that they're very unhappy accordingly in their relationship.
I. That's the, now whether the person should get a divorce or not, that's something that the person has to think very hard about considering all the implications is their children. What about the rest? Who else is going to be affected? Is how is this going to be done? And then carefully make a personal decision and that a personal decision that they should act upon when they can say, I'm getting a divorce because I've decided it's the right thing for me.
I will be sort of the mature decision making process, the immature decision making process would be, I'm getting a divorce because ICA told me that I should get a divorce because then you're putting the responsibility out outside of yourself.
Pascal: You're
Jeronimo ICEERS: are creating ha, you're giving agency away. You are creating havoc.
Everybody else is going to be like, what do you mean? Especially your partner like you, [00:19:00] but somebody, but is like saying, you know, I'm getting a divorce because I run into someone on the street who, who look very wise and told me that I should get a divorce. And then, you know, your partner be like, what the hell are you talking about?
Somebody you just met, told you to and, and you're just gonna, you know. , there's many examples , and different situations that we go through in the course, but this is roughly the core of the issue the benefits and the wonders and the dangers and the risks of Ayahuasca told me that.
And it's about how to avoid, you know, the most common pitfalls, um, is, is what we deal with in the course.
Pascal: Yeah.
And of course the most common ayahuasca told me scenario I've heard about is Ayahuasca told me to open a retreat center. I mean, I was one of those people That, got the call to do that and so many people
Jeronimo ICEERS: That, that
Pascal: well. And, uh,
Jeronimo ICEERS: I,
Pascal: Mm-hmm
Jeronimo ICEERS: yeah. Told me that I'm going to be a shaman. And I think again, there is a sort of a, a [00:20:00] often a, a base misunderstanding there, which is the difference between, um, between, a talent and a profession. You know, people can have a musical ear, people can have the experience of singing along or, or, and that's one thing, you know, people, we can all, you know, pretty much universally experience the beauty of music and even the beauty of participating in music and producing music.
Now, this is very different from being a composer or a professional musician, which is, is something where you put this talent and this drive and this dislike together with many years of work and, and honing a craft, you know, that doesn't, you know, the, the, the, the musical affinity is natural. The musical ability is learned, right?
And it's the same for healing. You know, I think ayahuasca give will give most people an experience of healing spaces in themselves, in other people. Even the ability, the ability to help, the ability to experience. And people will get a [00:21:00] taste of that. And, and out of this taste, they will come, this desire. I want to be, do more than this and this desire will be manifested as a vision of themselves already doing this.
But the vision, what the vision is showing is the desire, first of all, but the person interprets it as their future. That I was told me that I'm already going to be this. I saw myself in the vision doing it, and there is no reason why this couldn't be true, but the ability part is missing. Okay? So, you know, to go from someone who has an experience of healing to someone who can, you know, effectively help other people, now there's a very long training and many years of, you know, person, personal, just, just, just like to become a musician or everything else.
And I think this is the part where people. Simply lose patience. They want to sell everything and move quickly and start working immediately and nowhere in history, in the traditions. When you look at people working with plants, you've seen people go from first [00:22:00] time to helping others in six months or in two years.
This process is very, very long because it's very delicate work.
Pascal: And so what I hear is a lot about discernment and understanding, you know, how to reflect these insights into wise decisions that, uh, you know, may not be carried away by the peak experience, which can, , like you said earlier, lead people to making really strange and weird decisions. When I started working with, with the medicines, it's, it was easy to get excited about things, you know, it felt so natural.
It felt so different, it felt so ethereal, it felt so intelligent, and it felt so Life changing that it would be very easy to get carried away with those things, especially when you've never felt something like, like, I think in our Western context, we don't have a lot of context for peak experiences, spiritual experiences, especially.
And so we don't have the training to know how to discern things when they're being offered to us as a [00:23:00] suggestion or an insider reflection. Um, and I want, before we go into the fifth risk for. For participants. I just wanted to give a little bit of context based on research. Uh, the number is around, uh, you know, safety and results for ayahuasca journeys, um, in the research, and I'll put the links in the, uh, in the show notes to show the source.
But 55 percent of journeyers describe mental health or emotional difficulties after an ayahuasca retreat. 55%. 39 percent of journeyers said it was the most difficult experience of their lives, 39%. And 44 percent of participants didn't think anything good came out of the experience. So I'm sharing this because yes, it can be very beautiful and powerful.
And also, it's not, there's no rose pink glasses here, this is serious. Experiences and it can seriously harm you and it's not it's not so easy all the time. I just met someone actually [00:24:00] About three weeks ago that's been dealing with defragmentation of our identities For the last three years from one single experience So
Jeronimo ICEERS: Mm.
Pascal: not to scare people but also just to show that the numbers are saying that people are having very challenging experiences and Things like eye safety and eye seers can help people reduce those and because of those harms can be quite serious.
I think it's something to take very seriously as well.
Jeronimo ICEERS: Yes. Thank you. It's true. And I, and I think unfortunately, those numbers will continue to go up because there's more and more people being drawn to it. And also because as it becomes popular, a number of people who have tried many, many things and everything has failed, will be drawn to it as a sort of last resort.
And while it's true that Ayahuasca can help, uh, and it does help many people with many difficult conditions. I would ge I would say generally speaking, psychedelics are [00:25:00] easiest to handle and easiest to contain. Uh, and, and most indicated for people before the real trouble begins. I.
So I, I think I, I was covered. The psychedelic could be most beneficial to people before you have, you know, treatment rece resistant PTSD, or treatment resistant depression before is when these things will be truly effective. Now, they can also be very effective after, but what changes is that the container that has to be built around these conditions when you're go handling psychedelics, it's much more, it needs to be much more elaborate and much more complex.
Right? Stan Gruff, you know, gave, uh, LSD. To, uh, in, in the fifties and sixties to people who, theoretically you should never give SDI two. You know, people with schizophrenia, with bipolar, with, you name it, the entire range of like acute mental health conditions.
He gave LDI two with some, with some very interesting results, [00:26:00] but Stan Grove had a mental health clinic that he was the director of. So he had 24 hour watch. He had people that were staying there for weeks, months, long-term patients, you know, he had security, security forces. He had like, okay, he had a container, you know, where you were able to give, you know, this very strong psychedelic to a person who was, and, and this person could become completely destabilized, but you had the container that could hold this person as long as necessary.
Until the person came back. Now, this is very, very different from the experience that we have in most retreats, where people get together for a weekend or for a week. A group of strangers get together for a week or a weekend. They go through some very intense experiences, and then they rejoin their daily lives, you know, um, um, which have continued going.
You know, this is a very different, it, it in, in a way, it makes things much more difficult for extreme conditions, or very serious or acute cases.[00:27:00]
Pascal: Mm hmm. Yeah, well said. Um, what is the fifth risk that people should be aware about?
Jeronimo ICEERS: , the fifth risk is the overwhelming experience and the overwhelming experience exists in a continuum. That goes from, difficult to, very difficult to very, very difficult. Uh, but this is still, um, and, and it becomes more and more disassociative so the person gets lost more and more lost in what is happening in their experience and less and less responsive to what is happening outside, less able to deal with what is happening inside here, what other people are telling them, et cetera, et cetera.
And this is a continuum because like this, you know, and then we are still within a range of experiences that will basically wear off with the effects of the plan. So as the experience, as the plans were off, as the aca worse off, this experience, this overwhelming experience sort of ties out.
And then, but then if the continuum continues and there's the most severe [00:28:00] experiences, which is as of. The most rare, they're very, very rare, but they do happens are experiences where the experience continues even after the effects of the plant have been have worn out, you know, 12, 24 hours afterwards.
That's when people go into break. They go into psychotic break, which again, it's very, very rare, but sometimes it happens. So a lot of this has to do with what the canal at this point, once you're in one of these situations, person is in the situation. What is the container like? What kind of care can has been built around it?
How can the person be cared for? How long can the person be cared for? What type of emergency protocols do the facilitators and the person who administer these plans have to take care of this person beyond the retreat? Um, and these are sort of bigger questions that are brought up in the course and where we deal with different situations in terms of the overwhelming experience of the quote unquote normal [00:29:00] type, which is people drink ayahuasca and they have a more or less difficult night, and then the next morning they're back into themselves.
This is basically the bread and butter of the facilitator. This is the work that facilitators do. This is the sort of, this is what separates the professionals from the hobbyists, right? Is the ability to deal precisely with this experience effectively to contain people and support people that are going through, you know, very strong experiences and how to turn this into, you know, as much as possible into something that is, if not contained, you know, if not meaningful and important to the person, which often is, often is in the sense of, you know, when the people, if, if, if the people.
Uh, people can usually, usually not always, usually find that what happens, what happened to them is not completely meaningless, and it's not completely unrelated to who they are [00:30:00] or their lives or the situation that they were in. Sometimes it is, sometimes people have really bad reactions and we don't know why, and it's hard to know.
And you know where this is, you know, the science is sort of still out on this and the professionals are still debating it, but I think this is, again, rare. Most times there is a sort of, uh, uh, there is a threat that can be pulled and followed. There's an information, there's an information, there's a message, there's an understanding there about what happened that will, with the right container, with the right integration, with the right support, help the person sort of, uh, place and understand what happened to them.
However, unpleasant. There's also. Experiences that are very pleasant and are not positive at all. You know, as you also also say this, so there's unpleasant experiences that have positive outcomes, and there's very pleasant experiences that have negative outcomes. You know, there's sort of like, people have people sort [00:31:00] narcissistic blooms, you know, messianic, all sorts of things that, you know, if you as the person, the person is super happy, they would never tell you this, that they're having adverse effects of any sort.
Quite the opposite. They don't want it to stop, but you can see in their lives, in the relationship to others in how they impact their environment. That actually the, the, the effect of the, this effect that the person very much likes is not, is not, uh, positive.
Pascal: Yeah, it's very well said as well. And I remember one of, uh, the people I met in my first ceremony was like, yeah, I've done ayahuasca like 200 times. And, you know, he, he was, didn't have a good reputation. And so I was like, you, you probably should stop doing medicine and do something else to, uh, to help support you.
And, um, yeah, one last question for participants. If someone was new what would you tell me to say, you know, these are ways that you can avoid some of these pitfalls. And what I'm hearing a lot of it, for [00:32:00] me, comes down to, you know, vetting the facilitator and finding the right place so that the right container, can be built.
And also really reflecting on if this is actually the right move in the next step for you. Is this the right medicine? Is this the right thing to do for yourself?
Jeronimo ICEERS: I mean this, this, this part is extremely also, uh, tricky and particular to psychics because usually in sort of bioethics, when you're dealing with a, with a pharmaceutical substance and people that people have never take, it's all about informed consent. That means that the person should know absolutely everything that can happen to them, good and bad.
And then from this knowledge, they make a choice to take this substance. And it's, this is an informed consent. This is the, the core of bioethics. The problem with psychedelics in this context is that they increase suggestibility. I. So that means that by informing the person of everything bad and good that can happen to them,
Pascal: Hmm.
Jeronimo ICEERS: sort of priming [00:33:00] the person and conditioning the type of experience that they will have later on.
This is especially salient if the person has sort of like a moderate to not very large experience. Then suddenly all the things that they read that they could happen, they begin to think that they, they're happening right now. So there is, there's a sort of, there's a sort of a, a kernel. There's a, there's something there that hasn't been fully solved for psychedelics in the sense that on the one hand you have to, especially for first timers, you have to fully inform the person and on the other hand, by fully inform the person in certain conditions, you might be increasing the harm instead of their, because they, they become so.
But I think the way this is compensated and the, the way we did it in the course where we talk about informed consents, and we have some forms and some examples, et cetera, is that, um, usually, um, informed consent works around, you know, this is all the bad things that could happen and you should know about this, but there's no mention about what are the [00:34:00] intended effects.
There has to be more of a balance between these two things. And then there's also certain information that, one, I will, I will give another example. Sometimes people take, uh, uh, psychedelics and they experience derealization, um, which is after the experience is over two, three days later, a week later. The feeling that this, that the world as you see it is not quite real and that the real world is somewhere else, and that this is somehow a matrix or an illusion or, I mean, there's many ways to, but it's called the realization in, in clinical practice.
You absolutely have to warn people that this might happen. But if you warn them that this might happen, that you might experience this world, not as the real world, then you can be priming certain people to have these feelings. So how do you avoid this for, you know, more people who have like a hypochondriac or sort of certain, you know, some people will sort of go into, you know, [00:35:00] how do you avoid this?
Well, you have to instruct people, you know, and this is the suggestion we give in the course, you know, after you take the plans, you know, a few days or weeks later, you might feel strange or very, very strange. You will know what I'm talking about. If you feel it. If you are feeling this way, you absolutely have to let me know because there's things we can do about it.
And you don't have to go through this alone. This is the harm reduction. This is the sort of healing intervention where you, where you sort of, uh, find a balance between the need to inform people. And the fact that some people will weaponize or sort of use any information you give them
um, um, so I think for people that are taking the first time, it's very important to, to tell them about everything that can happen. And I mean, you might feel called to be a shaman. You might feel called to get a divorce. You might feel called to sell everything and move to the jungle. You might at one point or another think that the person who gave you the ayahuasca [00:36:00] is sort of, you know, God-like, and super intelligent and incredibly wise and even very good looking.
None of this is true. None of this, none of this is necessarily true. You will and people. , when people go through these things, you know, you can tell them, remember we had this conversation and I told you this was going to happen. Now it's happening. It's a lot, it's a lot easier to do this before now.
The problem that facilitators have, of course, is that this conversation is very long. The number of warnings is very long, and it's always the same because every new person, you have to tell all the same things. And facilitators, of course, get bored of saying the same thing over and over, especially if it's very long and they tend to cut corners or they stop, they start to cut corners.
Um, which is also normal because nobody likes to give, you know, a two hour detailed speech, you know, 100,000 times, which is basically the same. Um, that's why [00:37:00] again, we have developing the course, a number of documents. There's a guide for first timers that we make sure that sort of includes, and it's a, and it's not a guide, it's a template.
So people can edit and add things about their own ritual. So, but, but the most important, I would say, the most important thing is, you know, people, people will go, people, you know what, when, when people don't know, something can happen to them. You know, this is where many problems begin. So if you're going to blow tobacco over people, people should know this because otherwise they might just, this might freak them out.
If you're
Pascal: hmm. Mm
Jeronimo ICEERS: you're gonna turn the lights off, people should know. If you're going to know people, uh, uh, if people, you know as, as long as they know, many people can remember, oh, I was told about this, and, and here it is. When they don't, that's where many problems arise because people didn't know this could happen.
Pascal: hmm. Yeah, Yeah.
Jeronimo ICEERS: Just to close, this is where, again, consent is super important. Um, if you go to someone and you say, [00:38:00] I want to drink ayahuasca, and then you drink ayahuasca and you have a difficult night, well, I mean, you can, you're going to have sooner or later to remember that I came, I came here and I asked for this.
You know, if your doctor, future facilitator says, I think you should, uh, try Ayahuasca. And the person says, okay, well you're the doctor and I'm going to try it, and then they go and they have a very difficult night. What they're going to do is they're going to blame the doctor and they're going to say, Hey, you told me to take this stuff and look at me now.
You make it, you make this go away.
Pascal: Yeah, and so much of what you're talking about in terms of, you know, of disclaimers and sharing what everything could happen and, uh, you know, the time it takes to explain all of that, like, so much of it is in contradiction sometimes with the business side of this, which is. You know, I want to put people in seats.
I'm promising them years of therapy. And, you know, I don't have the time and energy to [00:39:00] share all this over and over again. So, yes, if you're a facilitator out there and you're serving this powerful medicine, please take the course and get some training. Get some additional resources that can help you save time.
So you don't have to cut corners. And I think just the potency of the medicine is calling us to be extremely careful and detail oriented and very intentional on how we do everything because everything ends up impacting the safety of the participant. And so as facilitators, and let's talk about the risks that come with for facilitators, and there's many of them, but if you can share The top five risks for facilitators and you say really well on the website that good intentions alone do not ensure safety.
That's a really good, umbrella to, to start sharing about the risks for facilitators.
Jeronimo ICEERS: I mean, good, good intentions are very important, obviously. Um, but they're, but they're not enough now in the safety workshops that we do, and they're, and [00:40:00] also in this course, but they're oriented to people who are already working with grants, many of them for many years. So this is not, we don't teach people how to be co-facilitators.
We never will. We don't think you can do that online either. But mostly importantly, we don't have the knowledge of the authority to, to impart that type of knowledge. What we do is we help people who are working with plans improve their, their safety. And this is sort of down to earth stuff, physical safety, psychological safety, legal safety, but precisely because it's so down to earth, is often overlooked.
People are very concerned with the ritual practices, the lineage, the songs, the these and, and thetas. And of course this is super important. This is the, the, the main thing. This is the core. Um, but this course ca come, comes as a compliment of these things that, uh, um, come together with this.
Now, very often in these workshops , we ask participants, we, you know, often facilitators, organizers, assistants, you know, to make a list of dangers for participants. And, [00:41:00] usually the group by themselves will pull out most of the most common dangers, almost all of them. But then when you ask, okay, and what are the risks for the facilitators, then that's a question that often hasn't been asked, or they haven't asked themselves.
They haven't seen it in those terms. I mean, there's risks, there's legal risks and there's risks. This, it's a sort of a dark spot, a blind spot. But basically in, in the course we teach five, there's, there's others, but we teach the most important, the three, the first three are basic, and they're completely tied with each other, you know, is basically sex, money, and power.
You know, these, these in, in the traditions, often these plants are called plants, power planters de po. And there is a good reason for that because they are not just powerful plants, which they are, which bring powerful experiences. They are plants that give power to the person who administers them. While power will, the [00:42:00] power to heal, the power to benefit, the power to harm, and certainly the power to give people and experience the likes of which they've never had in their lives, which is a big power.
And then the question is, how do you. Handle that power. How do you handle that power and what sort of checks of balances do you build around you
Pascal: Mm
Jeronimo ICEERS: to make sure that the combination of your blind spots, your shadow and that power doesn't, doesn't turn, uh, into something else? And it, it basically fits on responsibility.
I think if people want to take mushrooms, psychedelics, ayahuasca by themselves. Well, it's them with their own body recreational uses of psychedelics. And you know, people are, people should be free to do whatever they want to do with themselves. But when you give somebody to somebody else and they pay you for it, and there's an agreement that you're gonna take care of it, this [00:43:00] is a very, very different agreement.
And then you are no longer free to do what you want to do in the same way. So if you are walking on the sidewalk by yourself, well, you can walk anywhere you want, you can road, you can do cartwheels, you can walk backwards or forwards because it's just you, you know? And you should be free to walk down the street anywhere you want.
You can walk like multi python if you want. Right? And a silly box. When you are on a bicycle, it is, is slightly different because you know you can, you are going faster and there's other vehicles. When you are on a bus and there's 40 people behind, then you are not so free anymore. You cannot do exactly what you want to do.
You cannot park where you want, you cannot drive. You know, you cannot because now you are responsible for all these other people. And this is sort of a basic understanding. You know, individually you're very free. The minute you take responsibility over others, the minute other people are depending on you, then you become less and [00:44:00] less free in what you can do and more and more responsible and, and this logic, sometimes it's sort of broken or not present, you know, in facilitating.
Facilitating is seen as a sort of like my freedom to express and of course it is, but your freedom and where the wellbeing. Of the people who put themselves in your hand begin? Um, I would say, you know, the most interesting and the least known and the one that sort of collects everything.
Because I think, how this plays into sort of, you know, romantic relationships, power, relationships, um, money, relationships is very obvious to everybody. People will be opened up by the plans. People become enchanted, people become, uh, grateful people become, and then they find they want to help the facilitator or they want to give them more money, or they want to become business partners with them, or they want to start a romantic relationship with them.
You know, and these [00:45:00] things, which in normal life and in normal relationships would be part of everyday life and totally okay in a relationship that is asymmetric because you people are in a position of power and they are giving this very powerful, psychedelic to person become questionable to very, very questionable.
And they should not be, uh, uh, done following the same rules of life, the same rules of three individuals, but. The le and that sort of boils down the money, money, sex, uh, uh, power issue. That to the short summary, the, the least, um, well known danger is what I call isolation. And isolation is a, is a danger that happens, becomes a danger for, uh, facilitators, usually late in their careers when they are very experienced, when they have an operation that also sort of maintains itself and runs itself when [00:46:00] they have gone through all the growing pains of becoming established facilitators and when it seems that everything is.
You know, they're there. They have, you know, 15, 20 years experience knowing this. They're comfortable in their work. They have a good team, they have a good, everything is in place, you know, and then isolation becomes a problem. And the problem of isolation is the problem of a pyramid where you have one person who's on top of a pyramid, and this person is surrounded by people.
Their assistance, the participants, they're not alone at all. They're surrounded by people, but they're isolated. They're isolated because they have no peers. They're the only ones who are ultimately responsible for everything. And they have no, they're isolated. Because also for clandestine, the way plants work, the way, they don't have many friends like them that do the same thing as they do with with whom they can talk shop
Pascal: Mm hmm.
Jeronimo ICEERS: Now you, when you have the situation where you have a person who was [00:47:00] in power and at the same time isolated, then a whole set of dynamics begin to play out in which basically the person loses around them. The group of peers that can be either people that do the same thing you do, or teachers, or it can be your partner or it can be a friend that has known you.
It has to be someone who can call you on your bullshit to speak very sort of bluntly.
Pascal: hmm.
Jeronimo ICEERS: who can, who can step out and say, Hey, I know you're a big he shaman, whatever, but you know, I've known you. I've known you since we were kids, or I've been married to you 20 years and you've always been full of Daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy, right?
These are the things that we don't like to see. These are the things that we. Build our personalities around not seeing, and these are the things that we can only see with the help of all the people. When you lose those other people that can make you see these things, then what happens is that these [00:48:00] things, these shadows, these aspects of your personality will manifest themselves in the work with plans as intuitions.
They will come as something that you should do or something, or a message that you receive or, but actually it's your shadow emerging. And without the help of somebody saying, no, no, no, but that's just, that sounds like the typical excuse that you always make when you want to get away with blah, blah, blah.
If you don't have that person, that role, you know, which, when you were, you know, training is your training, your therapist, your supervisor, whomever. If you don't have that person, then you fall into this danger, this danger of self ality, isolation. And then, and then you become, uh, so. , far from being, you know, people undergo a very difficult training and then they reach a high level of, uh, you know, accomplished work.
You know, [00:49:00] and then that's it. They're home free for the rest. No, there is a sort of last trap or last pitfall that comes late in life. And, and there is the most difficult of all because it's tied to the fact that westerners don't have community in the sense that indigenous people have with a community, with a proper community.
The danger of isolation is not a danger. There's always gonna be somebody who calls you on your crap, right. On a thrive. You know, there's, that's, you know, it's, it's, it's when you have this sort of western things, and even more Aya was now you're living in a remote country. You've been there many years, year by year.
You know that this trap appears, and then the last trap that we talk about in the course. It's intercultural relationships, and , this will be more, more, press present for some people than for others. This is also something that has changed a lot in the last 20 years.
, when I started it was inconceivable for somebody to serve, survive a wca without having done [00:50:00] extensive travel in South America and learn how to work with ayahuasca.
This has already changed and there's people now who are working with plans who have never been to South America or who or who feel no connection to the, to the traditions. But there's also a trap and, and and, and there's a number of difficulties that come from there that we, that we look at in the course.
Pascal: thanks for sharing all this and I think it highlights really well, the importance of, of. years of apprenticeship and training and mentorship and like you said so well, the community I think is so important to be able to do this work well. As the space is growing like we shared earlier and as things are growing and evolving and and more people are being served to serve medicine, you know, Um, the element of time and apprenticeship is so important.
I've heard some people say, you know, at least five years of deep shadow work, and then another five years of [00:51:00] apprenticeship with a mentor and maybe them together, of course, but how does the plant and the, you know, the impact of this work scale and does it have to scale and at the same time training people long enough to be able to meet Yeah.
The growing demand. There's a bit of a dissonance there. Is it about really supporting of community and supporting resources? What do you see as a good way forward for this? Hmm. Hmm.
Jeronimo ICEERS: a huge, that's a huge, uh,
Pascal: Hmm.
Jeronimo ICEERS: a huge question because there is, there is a, there is an aspect of this work facilitator that is, uh, sort of technique and there is an aspect of it that is closer to what we would call an art. Um, so we understand very well that there's a difference that people that go to art school.
Are not necessarily good artists, right? There's something that makes, and there's artists that never went to art [00:52:00] school, right? There's something that, that we understand in creativity, in art, that there's a, it's a certain sort of talent or a calling, and you can see, you seem to be able to see it in people early on, that they have this affinity and then they, they hone their art.
They learn the technique. And then they become this other thing. Now, in our culture, we have raised this with me with medicine. We believe that medicine is a technique that people want to be doctors and then they learn the techniques that are learning the school, and then they become doctors. What the ICA traditions remind us of, uh, that we have forgotten.
But God knows, you know, the vast majority of the world still understands, and certainly in the past, the entire humanity understood, was that there's a vocational aspect to medicine. That medicine is also something that people should be, seem to be called towards. And that you can see this [00:53:00] kind of early on, and that there's a certain abilities that go together with the technique.
And these abilities have to do with actually interpersonal relationships and their abilities around care. They're not abilities around anatomy, uh, uh, physiology, pharmacology, of course, these are the techniques, these are sort of the personal abilities, the personal affinities that, that draw people in towards medicine, towards the helping professions have to do with a sort of interpersonal abilities.
It have to do with certain, certain drive towards, um, care and caring for others. I always said if you never considered that, you could be a doctor. I mean a nurse or a social worker. If it never crossed your mind that this could be maybe, plant medicine facilitator is not exactly the job, you know, that you thought it was [00:54:00] because it, in, in many ways, it's closer to this, right?
It's closer to certain, you know, all the other, the other metaphor I use, it's a spiritual plumbing. If you, you know, you know, plumber comes and, you know, toilet is stuck and it smells like poo and you know it's gonna be dirty and you're gonna put, stick your hand there and like, pull out like, you know, uh, right.
This is not like, uh, you know, being a famous musician or a rock star that you go, you give your concert and everybody loves you and claps afterwards and, and they sing along to your songs. But there's certainly an aspect of this as well.
So how does one scale care. The answer is, uh, they're asking the wrong question. You know, care, care, care, first of all, care is already working at a scale,, at any given point. In, in, in the world, , half the population is not working and is being cared for either because they're too young or because they're too [00:55:00] old.
So literally half of the people are caring for the other half. And any point, any place in the world, anytime in history, care, care is already scaled. Uh, unfortunately, most of this role has fallen over women. Historically speaking, they've been the ones entrusted with this now. As people try to build training for this or standardized training, again, with the, with the best intentions, the intention is, you know, we want to make sure that people know enough to avoid harms and minimize, you know, what ends up happening or what I fear happens is that things get standardized and corners get cut,, and then it becomes about the certificate, which is the problem we even have in this course.
You know, people come, we don't give a certificate of safety. We give a certificate of attendance. It's an online course. All we can say is that you came to our course, we cannot say that your safety is good. [00:56:00] Or bad or better because, you know, it's an online course. We took, we met, you know, we, you learn as much as you could or, or as much as you wanted.
And we can say that you were there and you came to the videos and you made a final project. But we cannot certify your security or your safety or the safety of your, of your practice. But people want this. They want a certificate and that they can show I'm certified by, and then, and then this becomes, you know, so, so then it's like school, you know, it becomes about the grades, not about the learning.
Did you get the grades? Not, did you learn
the metrics. The metrics become the problem.
Pascal: Hmm.
Jeronimo ICEERS: How does something as delicate and as powerful as the experience with these plants or with psychedelics, you know, um, um, scale? You know, the answer is not very good. I mean, not very good , in the terms of how our, you know, markets like to operate.[00:57:00]
It. It doesn't scale like uber scaled, you know, it's not gonna scale like Airbnb. Like, you know, you're going to go in 15 years, it's going to go from no one to all the world knows what this is. No. And it will be probably a bad thing if it did. On the other hand, you know, and I go back to the first story I told, you know, sometime hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago, somebody put these two plans together for the first time, and it's been expanding and scaling ever since.
You know, it, it started in the Amazon. From one tribe. From one tribe to the neighbor tribe, from the neighbor tribes to other tribes. From there to the cities in, in the jungle, from the cities in the jungle, to to the cities in that country, from there to outside of that country, all the way here. And it moves from person to person because people find it useful.
It goes, it touches from one person to another person, one group to another group. And this is, this is a much lower process, a much more organic process. Um, [00:58:00] but I don't, I don't think this is, I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. Um, you know, again, especially with something as delicate as this, this is not like, you know, a new type of food or a new type of sunglasses or even a new type of, you know, this is like more like X-rays, you know, and it allows you to look inside the people, uh, which is wonderful.
But, you know, there's some, there's, there's something having to do with radiation and, you know, this has to be sort of managed with some care also. This is not, you know, uh, it, it might be wonderful to have an extreme machine in every school, you know, but maybe we're not, you know, we're, we're, we're not.
This is, this is, this is, this is not, uh, so I, I, I don't have, you know, this is, it's a, it's a big part of our, of our, of our thinking. Um, um, and. One of the, one of the places that I've gone to lately, and I will, I [00:59:00] will, I will close with this. Is that the, the, the prob the problem is not the, the problem is bad practices.
Uh, I, I'll put it like this. The problem is not that there's no, that there's no standardized training program. The problem is that some people, um, um, do bad practices and harm people, and this would happen with the standardized program or not. You know, there's also bad practice. So the question is, what do we do about bad practices?
And the place that I'm getting to is that, well, the thing is, we're not even aware that psychedelics also bring a new question that we didn't have before about suggestibility. And about working with suggestibility and working with people who are suggestible. So in our context, it's totally okay if you come to a, you know, I don't know, a professional development [01:00:00] workshop that halfway through the workshop I pitch to you an additional workshop that you can take, or another course, or some related program, or I take you to a restaurant of a friend that I really like, or I, or even I show you some apartments that are for sale nearby in this area.
This is totally part of, okay, you went to a workshop and there was some upselling score or whatever additional opportunities. However, in the context of psychedelics, this same thing, you know, is deeply questionable. That said, I give you ayahuasca, and then on day two I take you to see some apartments or I give you ayahuasca on day two.
I tell you what other programs that you can do, or I give you ayahuasca, so, so you know, a lot of the. And it's the same for romantic relationships and it's the same. So a lot of the sort of business as usual in our society, things that are not criminal, not problematic, not they're just sort of, I mean, it can be more and more, more or less ethically questionable or more or less appealing, you [01:01:00] know?
But it's certainly not an, a crime in the context of psychedelics and the increased suggestibility that comes with them. They become deeply questionable. And we have no tools in our society to address this yet. And these are not exactly training tools. This is not about the, the book, this is more about the stick.
You know, the question is, are we, maybe we need new laws to deal with increased suggestibility. Yeah. May maybe it's, maybe it's not about, maybe it's not about training, but it's about, I. Certain, uh, uh, abuses that are not contemplated yet as abuses. I think a lot about this, about all this, about better practices, about worst practices, about abuses, and about, you know, what type of changes would need to happen at the regulatory level or not in order to avoid situations like this in the future.
Again, my thoughts revolve around [01:02:00] how can we sort of make, you know, integrate these practices the best possible way in our society. And lately, and this is not a finished thought in any way, I've been thinking about this, I've been thinking that. You know, maybe this is the part that is not being contemplated.
The part that there is this, that, that together with, with this, with this, with, with these substances come new healing modalities and also new types of harm or even crime.
Pascal: Yeah, a lot of questions and a lot of opportunities, and we're all trying to figure it out together. And so I think these type of, of shares like you share today and the safety course that I series Is is relaunching and I'd love to hear, You know, a little bit about that as well, but all those things are contributing to something greater than ourselves and, and trying to answer these questions and surfacing new questions that we need to reflect on.
And so, [01:03:00] I think part of it is sort of like consciousness trying to reflect increasingly so on itself and trying to expand and deepen itself. So I'm grateful for, for these things. Yeah, I hope it inspired at least one person who listened and, uh, to seek better support systems, and I think that's a big part of it.
Um, really quickly, the, the iOS safety course could tell us a bit more about that. We talked a little bit about it, but how has it changed since last year, and what have you learned, uh, from the first iteration? Is this the second one, or is it the third one, or I think it's
Jeronimo ICEERS: Is is the con This, the, this, the fourth one? I think we do it
Pascal: fourth one
Jeronimo ICEERS: we do it with, with, we do it every year. It's in two. It's in two languages. We are always adding things, but basically the course is, a compilation, um, of, um, of all the interesting, uh, important, uh, tips and tricks and lessons that about increasing safety [01:04:00] that we have picked up from working and speaking and running workshops with hundreds of facilitators.
So what it is, is sort of like an, an attempt to put together in one place a sets a, a set of very, interesting, um, techniques that people have developed, but they have been developed in isolation and that were sort of atomized, that were not, that people, you know, people were not talking to each other enough or not, not communicating or not.
So we have basically. A lot of what I do in the, in, I mean, all I do in the course is quote, what very experienced facilitators told me about what to do here and here and here. Um, and I pull together all these into a series of stories, a series of fragment, a series of sort of situations, and give, um, with the idea of increasing the safety of ceremonial plant work for people that are already working with it.
I'd say the biggest it is now in its fourth year, [01:05:00] we've done more than 500 students, and the, the, the two sort of biggest compliments that we've gotten for me, you know, one has been a number of very experienced facilitators telling us, you know, to tell you the truth, you know, when I saw this, I thought, you know, I've been working with plants now for 15, 20 years.
I'm not gonna learn anything here.
Pascal: uh,
Jeronimo ICEERS: by how much they learned. Um, and that's for us very, very validating. And then the other one has been a number of people, smaller number of people who have said, you know, after taking the course, you know, I understood how serious this is. Um, and I'm going to stop.
I'm, I'm going to stop for a while. I'm going to look at it better. I'm going to get more training. I understood that this is not a game, that there's other people involved, that they can, that there's all, that there's, you know, real, uh, uh, dangers that have [01:06:00] to be assumed.
And this, I think is not, this again, is also something. Um, that is particular to facilitator or that people ignore, but that regular doctors know very well. If you are a doctor, I mean, a medical doctor harm will come to you for being a doctor. You will, you will catch, uh, viruses and diseases from your patients.
You will accidentally, you know, prickle yourself with needles. You will get cut. There is harms that come to doctors just for being a doctors and dealing with sick people all day. And these harms are harms that doctors accept as a, as an acknowledge, as part of the privilege of working with others and helping others and doing medicine.
Right? But if you haven't done this equation, if you haven't understood that they are not just, you know, beautiful, uh, beneficial things, but also harms that come directly to working with [01:07:00] these, um. I think, you know, and this is part to get back to the training, this is part of the shadow work and the long sort of self-inquiry and personal process that is most often or, or almost always skipped in the training programs that are offered.
A lot of the training programs go around. Uh, not all of them, but a a a lot of them go around the, the technical issues of facilitating and very few go into sort of like personal inquiry, self-inquiry of why are you doing this? Why do you want to do this? What got you here in the first place? What motivates you?
So actually that we are thinking of trying to introduce something in the course about this as well. Some sort of, um, some sort of in inquiry process that goes, that, that runs sort of parallel to the course. Because again, in traditional training, this is, this is unavoidable.
This is done by taking the plan. This is done. By taking the plans very [01:08:00] often, you're, you're in inevitably we will go through your own process first.
Pascal: Yeah. Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for putting the course together. I can't think of better people than nice years for delivering this kind of, uh, resource for this space. Yeah, Thank you, I mean, with 400 plus people or 500 plus people have taken the course, that's thousands and thousands of lives touched.
So, you know, kudos to the whole team for that. And the course looks amazing. So we'll put a link to into the notes. And yeah, if your facilitator and you're hosting these ceremonies or, you know, And even have years of experience like you owe it to yourself and to your clients to take a course like this because the ripple effect of even just learning one thing can greatly affect your practice and the people you're, you're working with.
So, yeah, thank you so much for doing this and for being here and for sharing and for all the work you're doing in the world. Really appreciate that.
Jeronimo ICEERS: Thank you, Ms. Card. Thank you for your work. And also thank you for, you know, putting up spaces like this where, you know, where this, where this, where these topics can be [01:09:00] discussed. You know, people can be made aware of this. Thank you so much.
Pascal: Thank you. Okay. See you soon in San Francisco.
Jeronimo ICEERS: Take care. See you.
Pascal: Bye. Bye.
