 So five years ago the idea that I'd be giving a talk on traditional Amazonian medicine and a proposed Amazonian clinic in the upper Amazon of Peru would have been to say the least unthinkable. I have no historical connection or familiarity with alternative medicine. I'm from New York City, specifically the Upper East Side. My parents were not yoga instructors or acupuncturists. For me medicine was amoxicillin and healers were general practitioners and I'm also by nature really quite skeptical. Now I say that to people now and in the context of some of the things that these days I'm heard saying they react a little bit skeptically to that but but it's the truth. I really am intellectually skeptical and otherwise by nature. I went down to the Amazon about five years ago for the first time to address some personal issues with which I long struggled and I went down skeptical but kind of willing to try anything and when I was there I saw people being treated reliably for things far more serious than anything that I was dealing with and things that I had previously thought completely untreatable. There was a woman on that first trip suffering from a rare autoimmune disorder. She had been to she was French kind of mid 40s had been to several different hospitals in France where of course they have universal care and they don't turn people away on the basis of pay and they all told her the same thing. They said you know we'd love to help you but we don't even we're not even able to properly diagnose what you have let alone treat it and so by the time she got to Peru she was and when I met her we got there around the same time she was shaking uncontrollably she had difficulty walking skin coming off of her place her body in places kind of her face was a you know pallid sunken gray and terrified and seemingly I don't mean to be this is really not hyperbolic seemingly kind of close to death and generally speaking Amazonian medicine takes or natural medicine in general takes quite a while there's something about autoimmune disorders it's a little bit different but I was only there for 10 days and in 10 days she was a completely and totally different person and I was shocked I was completely and totally blown away and forgive the cliche but it was for me in my belief system something of a paradigm shattering event and I became resolved to do something I you know I felt that M is based on what I'd seen Amazonian medicine should really become a central pillar of healing on the planet alongside not only Western medicine which obviously has lots to say for it also Chinese medicine and Ayurveda which have pretty well developed institutional existences on on the planet and in the idea which was fleshed out over the period of time that followed was to create a clinic in the in the Amazon which would practice study and aim to preserve traditional Amazonian plant medicine inside of a Western framework with medical doctors clinical psychologists nursing staff emergency care the whole the whole bit so of course I knew because of my own historic skepticism just how difficult this was going to be if somebody had suggested this to the me of five years ago had I not seen what I'd seen myself I would have regarded as completely crazy so just to sort of illustrate that an early fundraising meeting and when I really embarked upon this I had really no idea where to start so I just went to some well-off friends and family and and made my pitch and I remember in this one early meeting I made this impassioned plea I said you know I've just been back from the Amazon and you just cannot imagine what these plants can do and what I've seen with my own eyes and I went into the whole idea of the clinic and we're going to revolutionize medicine and and my feeling at the time was this was sort of the you know the greatest unkept secret around alternative medicine where grave and chronic illness were concerned and letting someone else in on that secret I couldn't imagine that they would respond to anything but you know how can I help we know what can I do and I remember the response was yeah really Luke so you want to build a shaman hospital in Peru so I knew that my work was really cut out for me and with the kind of you know if you build it they will come kind of an attitude I went back flushed out the vision further intellectually with some of the healers and coranderos in the region built the kind of intellectual foundation for it and then in the first stroke of serendipity for the project a company that some of you might be familiar with just in the impact investing space Runa on whose board I said and CEO's you know probably my closest friend and and unlike me he has just Tyler Gage has some clue how to build things in the Amazon which of course which of course I don't and unlike most people I talked to he was actually fairly easy to convince of the veracity of what I was saying which was refreshing so with Tyler on board which changed things pretty dramatically we set about building a team purchasing land putting together a medical advisory board which today includes Andrew Weil and doctors and medical professionals from Yale the VA Stanford among others and and then of course with the building of all that infrastructure came expenses which at that point in time I was largely footing myself and and getting kind of stressed out about it because it was pretty clear we were making progress but certainly I was not in a position to fund the totality of what needed funding and so someone else was really gonna have to step up and in the I'd say second big stroke of serendipity that befell the project someone known to us through kind of the Runa network with whom we build a lot of credibility and good will came forward with our our first really significant outside donation and that moment that day it was clear really for the first time that this kind of wacky vision was actually gonna manifest following that we and and just just to speak to that for one moment I have to say that the the giddiness and awe that that came that day really year and a half for almost two years later at this point really still remains subsequently we found support in Channing Tatum and his partner Reed Carolyn who also went to the Amazon saw some similar things to what I saw and reacted somewhat similar that in the form of a real call to action and a responsibility to to take this knowledge and and and share it and they teamed up we've created this kind of combined organization under the heading plant med which also involves crowd rise and all those organizations we intend were construction is slated to begin October 15th so just literally in eight days and we're beginning full-fledged crowd funding campaign events kind of across the country and you know we have we have funds to get through the first iteration of construction all this is a very long term project just I'd say the one takeaway for me in this whole process is I'm generally speaking quite easily discouraged I if something doesn't immediately go the way I want it to I'm often just inclined to kind of walk away and and this required a completely opposite approach and so really it's if you know you really believe in what you're doing you know speaking just for myself I need to give serendipity the time to work that makes any sense so I hope some of you this message will resonate with and will help us in some way to continue this streak of serendipity that we've been lucky enough to to have the fall this project and thank you very much for listening and thanks for your time