Angela Skudin: How She Survived Lyme Disease, Sudden Tragic Loss, & Learned to Never Quit
Angela Skudin shares her journey through chronic Lyme disease and related illnesses, her recovery using plant medicines and psychedelics, and how the tragic loss of her firefighter husband Casey inspired her to create the 343 Fund, a program providing psychedelic-assisted healing for first responders. The conversation also features Marcus Luttrell sharing his own experience with Ibogaine treating PTSD and addiction. Together they advocate for integrating plant medicines with structured pre- and post-journey support programs.
Summary
The episode opens with host Marcus Luttrell welcoming Angela Skudin, who describes her background growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma before moving to Long Island, New York at age 23. There she met her husband Casey Skudin, a lifeguard who became a New York City firefighter. Angela built a life on Long Island, opening an apothecary shop and a coffee shop called Space Cowboy, and raising two sons who share the same birthday.
Angela recounts her health collapse beginning around 2018 after overtraining in CrossFit. Her symptoms were widespread and mysterious — full body pain, receding gums, fatigue, hair loss, and suicidal ideation — and Western medicine initially misdiagnosed her with fibromyalgia. Eventually she was diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease, Babesia, Bartonella, relapsing fever Borrelia, mold toxicity, and Morgellons disease. Multiple specialists called her the worst case they had ever seen, with her mold specialist warning that her immune system was primed for cancer.
Faced with a life sentence of daily antibiotics and a potential experimental treatment in Germany that would require her husband's retirement savings, Angela turned to alternative healing. Her recovery protocol included bee venom therapy, Kambo (secretion from the giant green monkey frog), plant medicines, psychedelics, Eastern and Ayurvedic medicine, breathwork, and sauna therapy. She credits her recovery most fundamentally to surrendering the 'overdoer' pattern in her lifestyle and accepting personal responsibility for her detox and healing discipline.
Angela's psychedelic journey began with Iboga root bark in her living room in January 2021, facilitated by a practitioner from California while her husband slept downstairs. Despite minimal visual experiences, she woke the next morning with her first full night of sleep in years and an end to her compulsive anxiety planning. She subsequently worked with Ayahuasca and 5-MeO-DMT (Bufo), finding distinct medicinal value in each compound when used in supported, intentional settings.
Angela's husband Casey died on June 17, 2022, when a tree fell on both of them while they were sitting together. Using his life insurance policy, Angela founded the Casey Skudin 343 Fund, a program providing first responders and veterans with psychedelic-assisted healing — primarily Ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT — combined with a minimum six-month pre- and post-journey integration program. The fund operates with over 95% of donations going directly to participant support, and currently serves 120 first responders, approximately 40% of whom are veterans.
Marcus Luttrell shares his own Ibogaine experience across four journeys over several years. His first journey eliminated his alcohol and opioid addiction; subsequent journeys addressed residual anger, established a disciplined daily routine (meditation, restricted coffee consumption, no food after 7pm, no sugar, daily rosary), and ultimately culminated in a fourth journey where the medicine put him through a 'graduation ceremony' and released him after confirming he had maintained his protocols. Marcus now studies philosophy and theology, maintains sobriety, and is developing a post-integration protocol combining elements from Ambio and Exos programs.
The conversation also features Mel Luttrell corroborating Marcus's transformation, noting she had never seen his anger when he was sober before Ibogaine, and that after treatment she witnessed a 'best version' of her husband emerge — one with deep faith, discipline, and self-regulation.
Angela and Marcus discuss the importance of structured pre- and post-journey integration, tribal reciprocity with Gabon (where Iboga originates), the legislative work being done in Oklahoma through the 343 Fund's volunteer CEO Nate Morgans, and their shared hope that these medicines become accessible to all people — not just veterans or extreme cases. They both prefer the term 'medicine' over 'psychedelic,' which they feel carries stigma from the war-on-drugs era. Angela also describes her father, at age 78, having his first psychedelic experience with Ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT, resulting in the first peaceful Christmas the family had experienced in 47 years.
Key Insights
- Angela Skudin argues that her chronic Lyme disease, mold toxicity, and Morgellons were significantly worsened by overtraining in CrossFit seven days a week, illustrating that perceived healthy habits can become destructive when taken to excess.
- Angela claims that Western medicine failed to diagnose her for years, and that it was a dentist — not a specialist — who first noticed immune system dysfunction through her receding gums, pointing to how systemic illness can present in unexpected ways.
- Angela states that her Iboga journey in her living room in January 2021 ended years of anxiety-driven compulsive planning and insomnia in a single session, and that she has not experienced a depressive episode since.
- Marcus Luttrell describes his Ibogaine experience as physically incapacitating in a way unlike any combat injury, stating the medicine 'snatched' his sense of physical control before he could resist, which he frames as a necessary surrender for a person whose identity was built around physical dominance.
- Marcus claims that across four Ibogaine journeys, each session addressed a distinct issue: the first removed addiction cravings, the second addressed anger, the third established a specific daily discipline protocol, and the fourth served as a 'graduation ceremony' confirming he had maintained his protocols.
- Mel Luttrell observes that Marcus's anger after his first Ibogaine journey — despite no longer drinking — initially frightened her, suggesting that alcohol had been masking underlying aggression rather than causing it, and that subsequent journeys were needed to address that layer.
- Angela argues that the most critical factor in psychedelic healing is not the medicine itself but the pre- and post-journey integration structure, and that people who expect the medicine alone to heal them without personal discipline and community accountability do not succeed.
- Angela founded the 343 Fund using Casey Skudin's life insurance policy after his death in a tree fall accident, and the fund now channels over 95% of donations directly to first responder healing grants, with a minimum six-month support program and lifetime access to weekly community support.
- Angela describes her 78-year-old father going through Ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT after initially calling her program a 'psychedelic cult,' and credits his healing with producing the first conflict-free Christmas her family had experienced in 47 years, demonstrating she believes these medicines are beneficial across all ages and demographics.
- Angela and Marcus both argue that 'psychedelic' as a term carries counterproductive stigma from the war-on-drugs era and prefer the term 'medicine,' noting that the original Greek etymology of the word actually means 'mind-manifesting' or something similar to mind healing.
- Angela contends that Ibogaine's ability to remove addictive cravings — as opposed to managing symptoms daily — represents an existential threat to the pharmaceutical industry's maintenance-drug business model, and that this partly explains institutional resistance to these treatments.
- Nate Morgans, the volunteer CEO of the 343 Fund, is cited as a case study where Ibogaine enabled lasting sobriety after two failed inpatient rehab attempts costing $75,000 each, while his Ibogaine treatment cost approximately $10,000 including integration support — a figure Angela uses to argue for the economic case for psychedelic medicine.
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