Podcasts about navigating psychedelics

You think, you feel, you are—but what if your consciousness isn't just in your brain? What if reality itself is shaped by something beyond the physical? In this episode, Mark Gober—author, consciousness researcher, and former Silicon Valley banker—joins Dave Asprey to challenge everything you think you know about the mind, reality, and human potential. He explores groundbreaking research on near-death experiences, psychic phenomena, and why some scientists believe consciousness may exist beyond the body. Mark reveals how declassified CIA documents, quantum physics, and meditation practices point to a deeper, more interconnected world—one where perception creates reality. If you've ever questioned whether free will is an illusion, wondered about life after death, or wanted to tap into higher states of awareness, this episode will shift your perspective. What You'll Discover in This Episode: • Is consciousness non-local? Why your brain might not be the source of your thoughts • Near-death experiences & life after death—the science and firsthand accounts • Psychic phenomena & remote viewing—what the CIA doesn't want you to ignore • Float tanks, meditation & altered states—how to access expanded awareness • The AI consciousness debate—can machines ever become truly self-aware? • Protecting your energy—why spiritual safeguards matter when exploring altered states SPONSORS -Our Place | Head to https://fromourplace.com/ and use the code DAVE for 10% off your order. -fatty15 | Go to https://fatty15.com/dave and save an extra $15 when you subscribe with code DAVE. Resources: • A Day of Biohacking and Consciousness Event April 12th: https://daveasprey.com/biohacking-and-consciousness/ • Dave Asprey's New Book - Heavily Meditated: https://daveasprey.com/heavily-meditated/ • Mark's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markgober_author/ • Mark's Website: https://www.markgober.com/ • Danger Coffee: https://dangercoffee.com • Dave Asprey's Website: https://daveasprey.com • Dave Asprey's Linktree: https://linktr.ee/daveasprey • Upgrade Collective – Join The Human Upgrade Podcast Live: https://www.ourupgradecollective.com • Own an Upgrade Labs: https://ownanupgradelabs.com • Upgrade Labs: https://upgradelabs.com • 40 Years of Zen – Neurofeedback Training for Advanced Cognitive Enhancement: https://40yearsofzen.com Timestamps: 00:00 - Trailer 00:50 - Intro 03:11 - Meet Mark Gober 05:25 - From Banking to Awakening 10:16 - Float Tanks & Consciousness 12:35 - Psychic Phenomena 19:14 - Science & Skepticism 25:51 - Personal Experiences 40:51 - Spiritual Protection 42:58 - Parasitic Entities 44:59 - Psychedelics & Mindset 45:58 - Alien Abductions 47:04 - Navigating Psychedelics 51:58 - Intuition & Inner Knowing 58:41 - Telepathy & Remote Viewing 59:46 - Near-Death Experiences 01:04:54 - Consciousness Beyond the Brain 01:12:38 - Psychic Abilities & Ethics 01:24:11 - Consciousness & Reality 01:27:58 - Final Thoughts See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode...Matt Zemon shares his insights and practical tips to help you navigate the world of psychedelics for healing. Why are we talking about psychedelics? With depression, anxiety, and loneliness on the rise, people are looking for an alternative to traditional mental health therapies and psychedelic medicine is emerging as one possible solution. Matt's not here to convince you to take psychedelics- not everyone should. But he does believe that psychedelics are for everyone. For some, this does mean they will experience a psychedelic journey. For others, psychedelics will positively impact someone they love. In either case, it is important to get beyond the taboo and understand the transformative power of psychedelics.We dive into the following topics: The different substances that fall under 'psychedelics' and which Matt thinks are beneficial and why.  How people can stay risk-reduced and create safety with their use of psychedelicsHow psychedelics actually affect our brain, and how can we weed through the misinformationThe potential benefits of psychedelics for people with repetitive thinking patterns or mental health challengesHow often people typically use psychedelics and what a typical treatment plan usually looks likeA behind the scenes look of how Matt likes to personally use psychedelics and ways he integrates the medicine into his healing and up-leveling Mentioned in Show:Guest bio:  Matt Zemon, MSc - Author of two best-selling books: Psychedelics for Everyone: A Beginner's Guide to These Powerful Medicines for Anxiety,Depression, Addiction, PTSD, and Expanding Consciousness and Beyond the Trip, A Journal for Psychedelic Preparation and Integration, Matt holds a Master's degree from King's College London and combines academic insights with a passion for safe and sacred psychedelic use, focusing on broadening understanding and access to these transformative substances. Additionally, he consults with medical practitioners in psychedelic therapy, contributing his expertise to further the responsibleintegration of psychedelics in healthcare. MATT'S WEBSITE:https://www.mattzemon.com/MATT'S BOOK: https://www.mattzemon.com/bookMATT'S INSTAGRAM:https://www.instagram.com/matt.zemon/High Vibe links:https://www.soulea.co/podcastConnect with High Vibe Mindset on Instagram and Facebookhttps://www.buymeacoffee.com/highvibepod Here's how to subscribe + reviewWant to be the first to know when new episodes are released? Click here to subscribe! I've launched a new affirmation card deck designed with YOU, the listeners in mind! The Body Deck offers 77 beautiful cards that address the three high-vibe killers of disconnection, negative-self talk & lack of self-care/coping practices. Best of all, it's portable & affordable at $33. Benefit from the transformative practice of affirmations anywhere you go. Stop self-sabotage & start being the highest version of YOU: Visit soulea.coSupport the Show.

In this episode, Kyle and Johanna catch up, interviewing each other about psychedelic education and what they've learned, the biggest challenges, and what advice they would give to anyone looking to get involved in the psychedelic field. They discuss: How sometimes it's not about the substance: If you want to be a psychedelic therapist, do you see yourself doing therapy without the psychedelics? How no part of education is exempt, and becoming truly psychedelically-competent can involve studying psychology, neuroscience, somatics, religion, history, etc. How people's experiences are evidence – it doesn't have to come from a research study to be valid The importance of figuring out what your gifts are and how you could best contribute to progress, and then finding the job that matches it and more! The next round of our year-long training program, Vital, begins in September, but for those who feel that that may be too much of a commitment, our most popular course – the 9-week Navigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Wellness Practitioners, LIVE – begins on May 8. Head to the Psychedelic Education Center for more details! Click here to head to the show notes page.

Welcome to the Psychedelic Conversations Podcast! Episode 84: In this episode we discuss Ben's background, what brought him to this work, how psychedelics are becoming an alternative to SSRIs, understanding serotonin syndrome/toxicity, having the correct approach to microdosing, current observations on the psychedelic renaissance, the differences between ayahuasca and mescaline, Ben's offerings and so much more! 00:00 - Fire Moment 01:29 - Introduction 03:43 - Ben's Background 07:00 - Tapering Off SSRIs 12:00 - Serotonin Syndrome/Toxicity 21:54 - Replacing SSRIs With Psychedelics 36:02 - The Right Approach To Microdosing 46:01 - Thoughts On The Psychedelic Renaissance 50:49 - Ayahuasca And Mescaline 55:53 - LSD And Psilocybin 57:47 - Ben's Offerings 1:01:55 - Outro About Ben: Psychopharmacology Consultant and Psychedelic Educator. Psychiatric Pharmacist offering psychopharmacology consulting and education relating to psychedelic pharmacology and their potential for interaction with psychiatric medication. Connect With Ben: https://spiritpharmacist.com/ Free Guides, Webinars, and Resources: Blog Page: https://spiritpharmacist.com/blog/ Antidepressant and Psychedelic Drug Interaction and Tapering Guide: https://www.spiritpharmacist.com/ADpsychedelicGuide Breakthrough Psychedelics at a Glance: MDMA, Psilocybin, Ketamine https://www.spiritpharmacist.com/pl/2147604511 Navigating Psychedelics and Psychotropics: Bridging the Gap https://www.spiritpharmacist.com/pl/2147568032 Five Guide: Pharmacology and Drug Interactions of 5-MeO-DMT https://www.spiritpharmacist.com/opt-in-FiveGuide Thank you so much for joining us! Psychedelic Conversations Podcast is designed to educate, inform, and expand awareness. For more information, please head over to https://www.psychedelicconversations.com Please share with your friends or leave a review so that we can reach more people and feel free to join us in our private Facebook group to keep the conversation going. https://www.facebook.com/groups/psychedelicconversations This show is for information purposes only and is not intended to provide mental health or medical advice. About Susan Guner: Susan is a trained somatic, trauma-informed holistic psychotherapist with a mindfulness-based approach grounded in Transpersonal Psychology that focuses on holistic perspective through introspection, insight, and empathetic self-exploration to increase self-awareness, allowing the integration of the mind, body and spirit aspects of human experience in personal growth and development. Connect with Susan: Website: https://www.psychedelicconversations.com/ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/susan.guner LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susan-guner/ Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/susanguner Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/susanguner Blog: https://susanguner.medium.com/ Podcast: https://anchor.fm/susan-guner #PsychedelicConversations #SusanGuner #BenjaminMalcolm

In this week's Solidarity Fridays episode, a power outage keeps Michelle from joining in, but Joe and Kyle pick up the slack, going old-school SF style for the week.  They talk about new drugs: Cybin investigating using their proprietary psychedelic compound "CYB003" for alcohol use disorder, and scientists using a technology called psychLight to identify when a compound activates the brain's serotonin 2A receptor (in hopes of activating the biological benefits of psychedelics without their traditional hallucinogenic effects). They also give a legalization update, with new cannabis and psychedelic reform bills in Texas and legalization bills in Louisiana, talk about non-profit Porta Sophia's new Psychedelic Prior Art Library and the importance of establishing a public domain, and discuss Johns Hopkins' new study on psilocybin for Alzheimer's-related depression (and ways to possibly combat the effects of Alzheimer's). They also cover climate change, Leonard Pickard, the tragedy of the commons, 2C-B, the importance of looking at fringe cases, and the intelligence of millennials.  Notable Quotes “How could we shift to more cooperative actions vs. competition all the time?” -Kyle “Our map of reality is minimized inappropriately when we exclude these fringe cases. ...What does it mean that somebody can present as psychic, or present as a spirit, or meet these spirits, or go to the [afterlife] and come back (in your case) and then get set on an interesting trajectory via psychedelics? This is not what doctors can deal with, but this is what those of us outside of medicine can deal with, as a philosophical endeavor.” -Joe “Some of these new compounds- I guess it’s exciting, and you always say we need new drugs, but …why is there a race for new drugs when we’re not even using the ones to the full potential that are not even on the market right now? ..Just thinking about all the new companies coming online trying to find new drugs for patents and development, when it’s like, have we really explored the potential of the ones that have been around for a while?” -Kyle  Links Psychedelics Today: Mind Bending, Mind Mending - A Series Exploring How Psychedelics Affect the Brain: Serotonergic Psychedelics Businesswire.com: Cybin Selects Alcohol Use Disorder Indication for Psychedelic Molecule CYB003 Johns Hopkins’ study on psilocybin for Alzheimer’s-related depression Reversing Alzheimer's: How to Prevent Dementia and Revitalize Your Brain, by Timothy J. Smith, MD Nypost.com: Ayahuasca tea could be a breakthrough treatment for Alzheimer’s The Tim Ferriss Show: Dr. Adam Gazzaley, UCSF - Brain Optimization and the Future of Psychedelic Medicine (#507) Neuroscape’s “Neuroracer” game Portasophia.org (Psychedelic Prior Art Library) Wikipedia.org: Tragedy of the commons Psychedelic Salon: Podcast 667 - “A Conversation with Leonard Pickard” The Rose Of Paracelsus: On Secrets & Sacraments, by William Leonard Pickard Saving Normal: An Insider's Revolt Against Out-Of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, Dsm-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinar, by Allen Frances, M.D. Bluelight.org forums Marijuanamoment.net: Texas Lawmakers Approve Marijuana And Psychedelics Reform Bills Diaspora Psychedelic Society Marijuanamoment.net: Louisiana Lawmakers Approve Marijuana Legalization Bill In Committee Nypost.com: American faces years in Dubai prison after pot found in urine Scitechdaily.com: Scientists Discover a Psychedelic-Like Drug Without the Hallucinogenic Side Effects Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics

In this episode, Joe interviews Nick Meyers and Tyler Chandler, the makers of the documentary that has made a lot of waves over the last year (and been praised on this podcast): "Dosed." They first visited the podcast last year, a few months after the film's release, and are back to talk about the response it's received and their progress on "Dosed 2: Psilocybin and the Art Of Living," which will follow the journey of one of the patients granted legal palliative psilocybin therapy by TheraPsil last year. And although it's not mentioned, they're actually planning a "Dosed" trilogy. They talk about their early psychedelic experiences, the accusations that some of Adrianne's scenes in the film are fake, the risk profile of iboga and how age can be a factor in its efficacy, the strength and passion of the iboga community, the complications of methadone in our opioid crisis, "The Pharmacist" docuseries, pill mills, the absurdity of the drug war, and the argument for treating someone for a year vs. a lifetime. They also talk about how many people have been inspired to change their lives after watching "Dosed." If you haven't seen it yet, "Dosed" is now available on several streaming platforms. Notable Quotes “The way we did it was, as I said earlier, maybe not exactly correct, but she still had the profoundly beneficial experience, and I think that’s because her intentions were there. She was ready to make a change in her life. And anybody that’s looking to get past depression, anxiety, and/or addiction, you need to have that shift and realize it’s time to make a change and move forward.” -Tyler  On criticisms of the film: “I find it actually a little frustrating, but I can just go back just a few years in time and if I had heard about a film like this, not knowing what I know now, I would probably be like, ‘Yeah, right. That sounds hokey or kind of like, bullshit.’” -Tyler “A better judge of what it’s doing and the impact that it’s making is not a negative comment here or there; it’s the fact that we have emails in our inbox every single day from people that are expressing to us that the film changed their lives, [and] it set them on a different path, away from their struggles and towards potential solutions. It’s a very, very good feeling to be a part of something like that.” -Nick “Mental health is a problem that is actually getting worse and worse over the last few decades even though the pharmaceutical industry is supposed to have all the answers. But ‘Why is it still getting worse and worse?’ is the question.” -Tyler Links Dosedmovie.com Their last appearance on the podcast: Tyler Chandler, Nick Meyers and Adrianne – Dosed Movie: Psychedelics and Mental Health Contribute/donate to Dosed 2 Doubleblindmag.com: Vancouver Becomes First City in Canada to Decriminalize All Drugs Therapsil.ca: 4 Palliative Canadians approved for end of life psilocybin therapy through section 56(1); First legal medical exemptions for psilocybin in Canada since 1970s “The Pharmacist” docuseries on Netflix Apnews.com: Florida ‘pill mills’ were ‘gas on the fire’ of opioid crisis Vetsolutions.org About Nick Meyers and Tyler Chandler Nicholas Meyers is a Canadian producer, writer and cinematographer, known for the multi-award winning feature documentary, DOSED. He's currently in production on DOSED 2. Tyler Chandler is a Canadian documentary director, writer, and producer. His directorial debut is the award winning feature documentary, DOSED, about the therapeutic use of psychedelics like magic mushrooms and iboga to help people overcome mental health issues including depression, anxiety, and opioid addiction. Prior to DOSED Tyler produced two other features, winning three awards, and he's currently in production on DOSED 2. Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this episode, Michelle and Joe interview Ralph Blumenthal, 45-year New York Times contributor and author of The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack (which inspired one of our more popular recent blogs). They talk about John Mack: legendary Harvard professor who did breathwork with Stan Grof at Esalen and became interested in the mystery of alien abduction, which led him to write 2 bestselling books, appear on Oprah (who is probably an alien*), become a pioneer in the world of alien abductions, and die while immersed in afterlife studies, only to reportedly visit friends later on. Mack's notoriety came from trusting the stories he was hearing, trying to help people make sense of it all, and taking a big interest in how these experiences seemed to transform so many of the abductees. Sounds a lot like powerful psychedelic experiences and integration work leading towards growth, doesn't it? So sit back, pause that X-Files episode, light one up on this high holiday, and get really deep into the world of aliens. Learn about the government's secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, the Ariel school incident, Avi Loeb’s Oumuamua theory, out-of-body experiences, shapeshifters, and more! Ponder how Blumenthal "accidentally" leaves questions unanswered about the government experimenting with DMT as a way of communicating with aliens. Contemplate why the government is suddenly so forthcoming with UFO data. Think about how today is 420 and this is episode 240... The truth is out there, folks.  *This viewpoint is not that of Psychedelics Today, but merely of this high Show Notes writer. Notable Quotes On Mack doing breathwork with Stan Grof: “He was awakened to a different world, a spiritual world, a world of other realities than the one he was familiar with, and as I say in my book, he said, ‘Stan Grof opened up my psyche and the UFOs flew in.’”  “It’s no spoiler to say that my book does not provide the answer to the mystery of alien abduction, and I acknowledge that. I shed some light on it, perhaps, and what I like to say is that at least I’m comfortable saying that I know what it isn’t. It’s not mental illness, it’s not hoaxes (by and large), it’s not fabrication, it’s not the delusion of crowds. It’s something else. It’s something that is very real to a lot of people from different walks of life [and] different ages, and there really is no good explanation for what has happened to these people.”  “What do you say about the 2-year old children who tell these stories? You know, ‘Little man fly me up in the sky.’ ‘I go up in the sky.’ These 2-year-old kids: have they read UFO books? Are they influenced by UFO movies?” “Skeptics have not taken the time to read the literature. They don’t know the cases. So all they can do is say, ‘Ah, that’s ridiculous.’ Of course it’s ridiculous! We all agree it’s ridiculous. We all agree it’s not possible. ...We all agree that these stories that people are telling are not possible in our reality. They’re completely crazy. And yet, there’s no easy way to explain them away.” Links Ralphblumenthal.com The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack, by Ralph Blumenthal NYtimes.com: Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program NYtimes.com: 2 Navy Airmen and an Object That ‘Accelerated Like Nothing I’ve Ever Seen’ NYtimes.com: On the Trail of a Secret Pentagon U.F.O. Program NYtimes.com: Navy Reports Describe Encounters With Unexplained Flying Objects Psychedelics Today: What do Alien Abduction and Psychedelic Experiences have in Common? Let Dr. John E. Mack’s Work Explain Defense.gov: Establishment of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force UFOinsight.com: The Still Unexplained 1994 Ariel School UFO Alien Encounter Cnet.com: Harvard's Avi Loeb more sure than ever we were visited by alien spacecraft Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, by Avi Loeb Thephenomenonfilm.com Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland Podcast: The Stirring, Heartbreaking and Inspiring Story of Heroic Close Encounter Investigator Dr. John Mack Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, by Kary Mullis Marijuana Reconsidered, by Lester Grinspoon Seti.org About Ralph Blumenthal Ralph Blumenthal was a reporter for The New York Times from 1964 to 2009, and has written seven books based on investigative crime reporting and cultural history. His latest book The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack was published by High Road Books of the University of New Mexico Press on March 15, 2021. It’s the first biography of Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard Psychiatrist John E. Mack (1929-2004) who risked an esteemed career to investigate stupefying accounts of human abductions by aliens. Vanity Fair excerpted the work-in-progress in 2013. Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this week's Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle, Joe, and Michelle start out with what's turning out to be a weekly legalization update (what a time to be alive!), this week highlighting New Mexico and Virginia's recent legalization of cannabis and Maine representative Anne Perry filing a bill to decriminalize the possession of all drugs. Vacationland, indeed!  They then talk about a recent study that proved scientifically that psilocybin increases creativity, and another that analyzed changes in personality after ceremonial group ayahuasca use, which, based on self-report assessments filled out by both participants and informants alike, showed a reduction in neuroticism among participants. This leads to a conversation about the benefits of group work and the importance of more research being done on ceremonial ayahuasca use.  They then discuss Vice's recent recovering of the long-lost page 25 from the CIA's report on astral projection, why this was something conspiracy theorists have been clamoring for, and how the self-knowledge aspects of the report relate to psychedelics (other than astral projection being really freaking trippy, man). And they talk about Navigating Psychedelics (which has its next round coming up on May 20th) and remind us that although that’s the one they talk about the most, there are actually several other courses at psychedeliceducationcenter.com worth checking out. Maybe there’ll be one about astral projection soon? This guy sure hopes so. Notable Quotes “It’s nice to see that Virginia is authorizing home grow (up to 4 plants per household) beginning July 1st. I see all these other states being able to offer this besides New Jersey, so… F. U., New Jersey.” -Kyle, who lives in New Jersey “Human creativity kind of got us here. Human creativity can get us out, and psychedelics can play a huge role in that, if we figure out how to leverage it properly. Let’s not use this stuff to help us get more oil out of the ground or pump more freshwater into single-use plastic bottles. Let’s use it to solve this crisis.” -Joe “Our culture is set up in this weird way that it’s constantly making us feel bad and that we’re not doing enough. So when we can all be really vulnerable and honest and open in a group, whether it’s with psychedelics or not, it’s so important.” -Michelle“We can take an analytic approach and tear it apart and try to get to the core of ‘What is this?’  but all humans have this access to this other realm through breathwork, through meditation, through psychedelics, through near-death experiences. And if you’ve ever had that experience, how do you deny it?” -Kyle Links Marijuanamoment.net: Maine Lawmakers File Bill To Decriminalize Possession Of All Drugs Marijuanamoment.net: New Mexico Governor Signs Marijuana Legalization Bill, Making State Third To Enact Reform Within Days Marijuanamoment.net: Virginia Lawmakers Approve Governor’s Marijuana Amendment To Speed Up Legalization Shout out to Marijuana Moment! CBS New York: New Jersey Marijuana: Lawmakers Eye Bill Allowing Adults To Grow Pot At Home Nature.com: Spontaneous and deliberate creative cognition during and after psilocybin exposure Dni.gov: Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World Nature.com: Examining changes in personality following shamanic ceremonial use of ayahuasca The Exploration of Naturalistically used Ayahuasca and 5-MeO-DMT, by Malin Vedøy Uthaug Frontiersin.org: Psychedelic Communitas: Intersubjective Experience During Psychedelic Group Sessions Predicts Enduring Changes in Psychological Wellbeing and Social Connectedness Soltara.co: Announcing a New Ayahuasca Research Study Partnership Vice.com: Found: Page 25 of the CIA’s Gateway Report on Astral Projection Journeys Out of the Body: The Classic Work on Out-of-Body Experience, by Robert A. Monroe The Men Who Stare at Goats, by Jon Ronson Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this episode, Joe interviews returning guest Richie Ogulnick, a facilitator/guide who has been helping clients through ibogaine experiences for 26 years.  Ogulnick talks about how ibogaine works, why he prefers working with the whole plant (iboga), why the flood doses he used to recommend weren't as effective, and the importance of allowing his clients to spend as much time as they want on intention-setting before their session. And of course, he talks about the session itself, which usually tends to be a gradual slide into a 15 to 30-hour waking dream state of deep exploration, followed by the slow process of coming out of it, making sense of it, and starting to work towards integrating what was learned. He also talks about LSD, the work of Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh (Osho), an instance of someone who had no experience with iboga (and why), methodologies and experience, and tells a story of a time in NYC, watching someone shoot up heroin while explaining their experience to him as a way for him to better understand addiction and an addict's search for a feeling of peace. Notable Quotes “Very often, people ask me if they should bring a tape recorder with them, and I say, ‘Well, just make sure that it’s a voice-activated tape recorder, because you may say a few words and then 15 hours later, you may finish the sentence.’”“Unlike other psychoactives, it’s interesting- it’s almost like you’re introduced to a new language, and 6 months, 8 months later, people are sharing with me that their intentions have finally all been worked through and they’re maybe considering doing another session in 6 months or a year. Whereas, with other psychoactives, you can very comfortably do ayahuasca once a week, once a month, for months or years. People tend to do iboga maybe 2 to 4 times in a lifetime.”  “Psychedelics or iboga or meditation- methods won’t get us to that beneficence. What methods tend to do is allow us to crawl back to ourselves and say, ‘I’ve accumulated all of these experiences through this methodology, but I can’t go any further. I have to let go of this method’ and then the beneficence really happens. So it’s running at the arrogance of adulthood until you crawl back to yourself and you say, ‘I surrender.’”“The cool thing about setting intentions is not so much the content but the impetus. You create the pilgrimage to go deep within, irrespective of what you really explore.” Links Ibeginagain.org His last appearance on the podcast: Richie Ogulnick – Ibogaine Uses and Addiction-Interruption Therapy About Richie Ogulnick Richie Ogulnick is a long time Ibogaine provider and enthusiast Over the course of fifteen and a half years, he conducted about 750 sessions, including addiction-interruption treatments. He spent the next several years referring close to 1,000 more people to other ibogaine providers. During that time, he also trained doctors and ex-addicts who opened ibogaine centers throughout the world. Richie feels a pull to focus again on the more therapeutic and psycho-spiritual treatments where he is able to offer his expertise in ibogaine treatment along with his knowledge of reintegration with individuals who are looking to deepen and enrich their life experience. Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this week's Solidarity Fridays episode, everyone's back and so is the news. They cover California Senator Scott Wiener's SB 519 bill to decriminalize psychedelics statewide (which is the first time a decriminalize bill has been put through and passed by lawmakers instead of ballot initiatives), a 3rd Massachusetts city decriminalizing psychedelics, an article pointing out how the various flaws in our capitalistic world also thrive in the psychedelic world, and a TIME magazine article on ibogaine and Marcus and Amber Capone's VETS organization (that curiously didn't mention Marcus' 5-MeO-DMT use or iboga's endangered status). But there are 2 big articles that lead to the most discussion this week: first, Psymposia's article about Third Wave's Paul Austin stealing provider information (possibly including Kyle's) from Psychedelic.support and MAPS and the ethics of doing something like this, and second, Vice's article examining patents and ethics within the psychedelic world. How can companies be profitable while also being ethical? How can a company grow within a capitalistic society without falling into the greed traps of our Western ways? And although he doesn't call it out, this episode features the return of this show notes writer's favorite PT segment, Joe's Paranoid Update- this time about the chaos that could ensue if the Colorado River dries up. Notable Quotes “We can work on ourselves, but does that ultimately heal the society when these systemic issues are at play which continue to make us sick? It just feels like this endless feedback loop. ...If we’re just focused on our individuation and not actually engaging and participating in the community, in the society, then what are we doing the work for? Are we just doing it for our individual selves?” -Kyle  “Representation matters so much and it affects people’s self-esteem and self-worth when they don’t have it there, because they don’t think that that’s ever going to be a possibility for them. It just felt so good to be able to put that article out there and to represent some different types of people in this space and highlight their really important and often overlooked work. And we’re going to continue to do it.” -Michelle  “It really is just this cool new therapy for the affluent class [that] Compass [Pathways] wants, and that’s how you make the most money. But I think that if you were an ethical psychedelic company, that wouldn’t be the goal. That wouldn’t be the mission, and you wouldn’t dress it up all in this B.S. language.” -Michelle “I do feel like we’re in the middle of something really powerful and it can either really change everything or... not. I just hope that we, as a community, keep our eye on the prize, which is like- it’s more than psychedelics. It’s cultural change, societal change.” -Michelle Links Marijuanamoment.net: California Senators Approve Bill To Legalize Possession Of Psychedelics Like LSD, MDMA And Psilocybin Masslive.com: Northampton City Council votes in support of decriminalizing psychedelic drugs Psymposia.com: The Third Wave’s Paul Austin Has Been Accused of Stealing Information For His Psychedelic Provider Directory Womenonpsychedelics.org: Why Psychedelics (Alone) Won't Heal Us Theancestorproject.com: Psychedelic Anti-Racism: The Workbook How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi Time.com: Inside Ibogaine, One of the Most Promising and Perilous Psychedelics for Addiction Vetsolutions.org Psychedelicstoday.com: Comparing 18-MC vs. Ibogaine for the Treatment of Substance Use Disorder Vice.com: Is it Possible to Create an Ethical Psychedelics Company? The Water Knife, by Paolo Bacigalupi Wikipedia.org: Colorado River Compact Psychedelicstoday.com: PT221 – Bennet Zelner – The Pollination Approach Mt. Tam Psychedelic Integration Jam Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this episode, Joe and Kyle interview Palo Alto-based Ph.D., author, clinical psychologist, and "integration specialist," Kile Ortigo. From what he's learned at his time at the Grady Trauma Project, the National Center for PTSD, VA work, hospice work, and his own practice, he talks about the flaws of active intervention models of therapy and why what can be most healing for someone is often just letting them be and bearing witness to their experience. And he talks about burnout in healthcare, secondary trauma, common factors that help in all therapy techniques, Jung, "Altered States," and what we might derive from the popularity of Marvel movies. And he talks about his book, Beyond the Narrow Life: A Guide For Psychedelic Integration and Existential Exploration, and integration: what it actually means, the basics of how he works with clients, if it'd be possible to create some sort of integration measurement, the importance of being flexible when intention-setting, how the psychedelic journey relates to Campbells' idea of the hero's journey, and the importance of movies like "Joker." Notable Quotes “I think that’s one of the downsides of working in any sort of big, large, complex system- is that the metrics that you’re being evaluated on are how many patients you’re seeing a day or a week, not necessarily: are they improving?” “We need to loosen our attachments on active interventions sometimes and realize that just bearing witness- being present in a mental way can be what’s most healing.”  “Mythology is being created, I would say, at a very rapid pace these days, and it’s being communicated in a much higher scale. And that’s primarily through our science fiction, I think, because it’s previewing some of these challenges that are here right now and we knew they were coming, but we haven’t been paying attention to them and we need to. ‘Black Mirror’ is important.” “There have always been multiple stories that need to be told, including counter stories to our dominant narratives (our hero’s journey). And that’s why a film like ‘Joker’ from last year was so incredibly important. We needed to hear the story of the shadow and why we need to pay attention to the shadow, and not from a place of judgment or antagonism, but of compassion.” Links Existentialexploration.org Beyond the Narrow Life: A Guide For Psychedelic Integration and Existential Exploration, by Kile M. Ortigo, Ph.D. Psychedelic.support Project New Day Gradytraumaproject.com Psychedelics Today: PTSF 34 (with Craig Heacock) About Kile Ortigo Kile M. Ortigo, Ph.D., is an award-winning clinical psychologist and founder of the Center for Existential Exploration, which supports people exploring profound questions about identity, meaning, life transitions, and psychospiritual development. He also serves on advisory boards of Psychedelic Support, an online training and clinician directory for legal, psychedelic-informed care, and Project New Day, a non-profit organization providing harm reduction resources for people using psychedelics in their addiction recovery process. He received his PhD from Emory University and is a certified psychedelic therapist trained at CIIS and mentored by Dr. Bill Richards (who wrote the foreword to his second book, Beyond the Narrow Life). For several years, Dr. Ortigo worked at the National Center for PTSD (NC-PTSD) where he collaborated on technology development and implementation projects, ranging from apps like Mindfulness Coach to online programs like webSTAIR. With colleagues at NC-PTSD, NYU, and Harvard, Dr. Ortigo coauthored Treating Survivors of Child Abuse & Interpersonal Trauma: STAIR Narrative Therapy (2nd Edition), which was released in June 2020. Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this week's Solidarity Fridays episode, technical difficulties lead to a week off from the gang reviewing the news, and instead, Joe interviews microdose & mindset mentor, entrepreneur, author, public speaker, retreat leader, and voice of the Psychedelic Leadership podcast, Laura Dawn. Dawn talks about her path from Montreal to building a retreat center by a volcanic hot spring in Hawaii, only to see that dream end with the volcano's eruption. But due to an ayahuasca experience that fed her a song and the lyrics, "Trust in the great unknown," she did exactly that and followed her heart towards coming out of the psychedelic closet and beginning teaching people the ways of microdosing and ways to inspire creative thinking.  They talk a lot about creativity: how to define it, misconceptions about learning and practicing creativity, the 4 Ps of creativity, the concept of convergent/divergent thinking and cognitive fluidity, the 5 stages of creativity, flow state, peak performance, and her framework of preparation, practice, and psychedelics towards a more open and creative mind. Notable Quotes “When we think about creativity and creative thinking, we can start to understand this as a range of cognitive processes that can best be described as a dynamic fluid movement between multiple states of mind, and of course that’s where psychedelics really come in.” “By creating a conceptual framework, we can teach ourselves. It’s almost like uploading a neurological program in the mind, which then allows you to perceive reality differently, and you can train yourself how to perceive in that way by taking that framework and that understanding into the psychedelic space.”“Think about creativity and creating not for the thing in and of itself. ...It’s not about the thing. When people are afraid to create, take the leap for the act of flying through the air, not because you think you’re going to stick the landing.”“I think everything comes down to intention. There is very much so this quality of focusing on peak performance from a place of like, the drill sergeant and the whip, and ‘I’m not good enough, I need to get over there and be better,’ and I think it’s easy to fall down that road. But then there’s also another aspect that we can choose to relate to it differently, of like: how much can I expand what I believe is possible to create with my life on this planet while I’m alive?” Links Livefreelaurad.com Instagram Flowgenomeproject.com Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work, by Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, by Yuval Noah Harari The Neuroscience of Creativity, by Anna Abraham Researchgate.net: The 4P’s Creativity Model and its application in different fields Psychedelic Leadership podcast: This is Your brain on Psychedelics, with Psychedelic Neuroscientist Manesh Girn James Taylor’s Five Stages of the Creative Process Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life, by Alison Gopnik Pubmed.gov: Updating the dynamic framework of thought: Creativity and psychedelics Hopkinsmedicine.org: Single Dose of Hallucinogen May Create Lasting Personality Change Patañjali’s quote Unlimitedsciences.org Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this episode, Joe interviews Dena Justice, who uses her unprecedented 4th appearance on Psychedelics Today to not talk a whole lot about neuro-linguistic programming or ways to beat anxiety. Instead, she blasts out of the psychedelic closet and opens up like few guests have before, taking us on the harrowing and life-changing journey of the last 6 years of her growth. She talks about how her first MDMA experience made her realize how many limiting beliefs, insecurities, and issues with never feeling safe all came from childhood abuse and could be traced back to one specific morning. She discusses the "ages and stages of Dena," and getting to know her childhood self, Little Dena, and how Little Dena, her 15-year-old self, and her future self influence her today. And she talks about the breakthroughs and realizations from each subsequent experience (MDMA, LSD, and ayahuasca), and how each was just another step leading to her year of "energy and life cleanup," culminating in the most profound psychedelic experience of her life, where she found the frequency of safety she'd been seeking her whole life.  The first few minutes of this episode feel tense and you may be cautious to continue, but stick with it- like many beneficial psychedelic experiences, you may have to go through some rough stuff to get to the gold, but in the end, it's worth it. This one's pretty powerful.   Notable Quotes “This whole morning as a 4-year-old is ingrained in my memory. I remember what I was wearing, I remember the way my Mom looked, I remember the sunlight streaming into the living room through our front windows. ...And I’m standing at the top of the flight of the stairs, screaming at her and sobbing because she’s not hearing me. And in that moment, I created an entire set of beliefs that literally ran my show until 3 months ago.” “I look at what I’ve done since I started really utilizing psychedelics intentionally, and my whole life changed. In the last 5 years, my whole life is completely different than where I was in November of 2015, and I don’t look at the person in the mirror and recognize her anymore the way I was familiar with myself before. I’m like, ‘Where did this woman come from? She’s pretty amazing.’” “I literally saw all of this energy moving and I traveled up one thread of this energy to a point of light, and I articulated it so clearly- I said, 'Wow. I found the frequency of safety. I can see it and I can feel it in my entire being, and this is what I’ve been seeking my entire life.'" “Everybody who has trauma should be able to experience this kind of healing. Everybody should get to feel this free from the past that has tormented them.” Links Ecstaticcollective.com Spotify: Koan- When The Silence Is... (“When the Silence Is Speaking- Blue Mix” is her song) Her past Psychedelics Today appearances: PT218 – Dena Justice – How to Beat Anxiety Dena Justice – Using Neuro Linguistic Programming to Create Change in the Unconscious Mind Dena Justice – Neuro Linguistic Programming and Non-ordinary States of Consciousness About Dena Justice Dena’s training as a facilitator, educator, trainer, mentor, and coach started at age 7 when she took her first social-emotional training program. That started years of training in conflict management and mediation, leadership, communication, facilitation, and more. By 15, she was facilitating personal development courses. Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this week's Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle, Joe, and Michelle start out by reflecting on the awesome conversation with Dr. Carl Hart from earlier in the week and everything it made them think about concerning the drug war, society's framing of addiction, how different drugs have been vilified in different eras, privilege, and how greed is keeping the truth from us. They then launch into the articles, which really run the gamut: Nebraska's governor saying cannabis will kill your children, the Biden administration asking staffers to resign over past cannabis use (What? A politician LIED TO US?!), a study from 2008 showing no statistical difference between SSRI and placebo effects (notable because it mirrors findings from the recent microdosing study they keep discussing), and an opinion piece on the healing power of mushrooms. They then talk about an interesting study where researchers are looking to predict who will do best with psychedelic-assisted therapy, and who might have a really challenging experience. Could you always predict that? Or is it just about getting to know a patient, supporting them, and titrating the dose, hence the title? And since there aren't enough links on this page: If you've been looking to take the Navigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Therapists live course you keep hearing about, new dates are up, so now is the time! And if you want a free copy of Dr. Carl Hart's amazing book, Drug Use for Grown-Ups, we're giving away 5, thanks to Penguin Random House, so make sure to enter the giveaway! Notable Quotes "Why are we only concerned about someone’s psychological well-being when it has to do with drugs?” -Michelle “Heroin was killing a lot of Black men in the 70s and no one cared. And now that it’s killing all these white people with opioids and all this middle-class stuff, all of a sudden, we care. And we want harm-reduction and we want laws and we want drug-checking. But no one gave a fuck 40 years ago.” -Michelle “So we had the war on drugs and ‘drugs are bad.’ ‘Weed, psychedelics- they’ll make you go crazy.’ And now we have that part of the drug war sort of ending and we’re legalizing them and we’re making money off of them, so all of a sudden, we’ve gone from one untruth which is 'all drugs are bad’ to this kind of other untruth which is like, ‘Weed and psychedelics: they’ll save your life, they’re great, everyone should use them!’ It’s like, fuck, dude, where was the middle? Where was the neutral? Where was the actual truth?” -Michelle “How do we catch medicine up to the state of science? Medicine seems to be 10 to 30 years behind science, often. ...Sorry doctors- I don’t mean to insult you, but it’s your field, it’s not you as an individual. If you’re listening to this show, clearly you’re ahead of the curve.” -Joe “Just thinking about how transpersonal came out of the humanistic movement because they needed something new, we’re at a new point where like, how do we incorporate and integrate a lot of this neuroscience, the somatics, the transpersonal, the depth, and what could a new field look like? ...What would that look like to create a new branch of psychology that really incorporates and integrates a lot of this stuff, and the impact that psychedelics have had on this? What type of theories and frameworks do we need, moving forward, as psychedelics become more integrated into the culture and into the medical realm? Do we need to bring psyche back a little bit with the psychedelics, to really help give a framework or some context to some of these transpersonal and numinous experiences?” -Kyle  Links Hilary Agro’s tweet Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel, by Tom Wainwright Hightimes.com: Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts Says Marijuana Will ‘Kill Your Children’ Norml.org: Marijuana Regulation and Teen Use Rates Rollingstone.com: Evanston, Illinois Will Use Weed Tax to Fund Nation’s First Government Reparations Program Thedailybeast.com: Biden White House Sandbags Staffers, Sidelines Dozens for Pot Use Ncbi.nlm.nih.gov: Initial Severity and Antidepressant Benefits: A Meta-Analysis of Data Submitted to the Food and Drug Administration The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth, by Irving Kirsch, PhD Chemistryworld.com: LSD: cultural revolution and medical advances Bdnews24.com: Can magic mushrooms heal us? Talkbusiness.net: Alice Walton’s Whole Health Institute will build a new medical school in Bentonville Scienceblog.com: Predicting Who May Do Best With Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy Pubs.acs.org: Predicting Reactions to Psychedelic Drugs: A Systematic Review of States and Traits Related to Acute Drug Effects Psychedelics Today: Kyle Buller and Joe Moore – A Clinical Approach to Trauma Resolution Utilizing Breathwork Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

If you're a regular listener of Psychedelics Today, you know how much Joe loved Dr. Carl Hart's newest book and testament to responsible, out-of-the-closet drug use: Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear. In this episode, Joe and Kyle get to sit down and talk with the man himself for nearly 2 hours. This one's in the "can't miss" department, folks.  Hart's main points echo many of ours: that the drug war is doing exactly what those in power created it for, that drug exceptionalism is wrong and only seeing one path towards progress is limiting, that our job is to use facts and logic to battle inaccuracies and people clearly pushing a false narrative, and that drugs can be fun and coming out of the closet about responsible drug use only opens up the dialogue more (and in the interest of that, this show notes writer is high right now).  They also discuss how scientists rationalize their work within the drug war, the frustrating inaction from drug policy organizations around coming out of the drug closet, opinion-makers and their relationship to the rest of society, what needs to be done to help Brazil, how decriminalization doesn't stop problematic policy and police, the treatment industry's misaligned focus on drugs over environment, incorrect assumptions about heroin, and the importance of safe supplies and testing your drugs.   Notable Quotes “I’m always thinking that all I have to do is make this argument logically, and then people will fall in line. That’s naive as fuck, as I’m discovering. But that’s the world in which I live, and I love that world because I can’t live in an illogical world.” “If the treatment provider is focused on the so-called drug of the person who’s having a problem ...they’ve already lost.”“High Price was a book that was kind of comfortable for progressives and conservatives as well- it’s an up-from-slavery book, you know? A poor, Black boy from the hood done well, ‘We feel good about ourselves and our society. See? It can happen to you!’ kind of story. Whereas this book is like, ‘Fuck that. We want our rights.’” “When these people say that they are worried about drug addiction or what I’m saying might increase drug addiction, that’s some bullshit distraction. If you’re really worried about the negative effects of drug addiction, you would make sure everybody in your society is working. You’d make sure they all have health care. You’d make sure that basic needs were handled. Because if you did those things, you don’t have to worry about drug addiction.” “The way they portray heroin in the movies sometimes, it’s upsetting because they portray it like people are deadening their emotions and feelings. It’s like, no, shit, you take heroin to feel.” “When politicians or whoever are out here saying that they care about the opioid crises and they’re not talking about drug-checking, you can stop listening to them because those people are idiots or they think you are an idiot, but in any case, there’s no reason to listen to those people.” Links Drcarlhart.com Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear, by Dr. Carl L. Hart Nytimes.com: When Getting High Is a Hobby, Not a Habit Hightimes.com: Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts Says Marijuana Will ‘Kill Your Children’ About Dr. Carl Hart Dr. Carl L. Hart is the Ziff Professor of Psychology in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at Columbia University. He is also a Research Scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Professor Hart has published numerous scientific and popular articles in the area of neuropsychopharmacology and is co-author of the textbook Drugs, Society and Human Behavior (with Charles Ksir). His book High Price was the 2014 winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this week's Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle, Joe, and Michelle first discuss an article from Salon.com that illustrates the flaws behind psychedelics being continually hailed as a miracle cure: has everyone just replaced the oft-criticized model of selling a “miracle” pill with selling the narrative that a few psychedelic sessions can cure anything? And inspired by Lenny Gibson, they point out that this rabid focus on medicalization is a direct result of these substances being made illegal in the first place. What would things look like if that had never happened? They then cover the developing drama between Compass Pathways and seemingly anyone compassionate and not making money from Compass Pathways' seedy behavior, represented this week by Tim Ferriss and David Bronner. The latest update includes Compass co-founder Christian Angermayer calling Ferriss' millions in donations a "drop in the ocean" in an odd donations-measuring contest, an email sent to investors saying competitors will never be able to bring a product to market due to the (absurd) patents they've filed (which Angermayer actually defended), and co-founder and CEO George Goldsmith mobilizing opposition to Oregon's Measure 109. This, not surprisingly, leads to a discussion about the competition between corporations, the race for patents, the drug war, how companies overestimate costs of drug-research and potential loss, how so little of the money being made is going to the Indigenous cultures we got all of this knowledge from, and more fun stuff in the endless mire of bullshit we have to wade through as a result of the drug war and greed. Notable Quotes “The only reason why we need to get this medicalized is because we made it illegal and we put it on a scheduling system. So, to make it official and legit and to deschedule it to make it into a medicine, we have to go through FDA-approval. ...What if it was never made illegal to begin with?” -Kyle (inspired by Lenny Gibson) “I really don’t believe in the antibiotic of psychiatry. You really have to actively work on changing the way you think and behave and react and all these things, and it’s a lot of hard work. Mushrooms make it more fun, but it’s a lot of hard work.” -Michelle “We’re not trying to be the enemy, but please be open to critique and understand where we’re coming from. In the same way a white male in America needs to understand American history and Imperialism and the crazy shit we’ve done, medicine should also try to own that a little bit. Like, why don’t certain communities trust you? Why don’t you get the results that the data says you should?” -Joe“This is not just about decrim. This is about restoring our rights as citizens of the world, regaining autonomy over our bodies, [and] improving science.” -Joe Links Salon.com: Why mental health researchers are studying psychedelics all wrong Psychedelicstoday.com: Dimitri Mugianis- Iboga, Psychedelic gas-lighting, and Structural Criticism Drugged: The Science and Culture Behind Psychotropic Drugs, by Richard J. Miller Saving Normal: An Insider's Revolt against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life, by Allen Frances Vice.com: The Race to Patent Psychedelics Is Just Getting Started Drbronner.com: Sounding the Alarm on Compass’s Interference with Oregon’s Psilocybin Therapy Program Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, by Peter Thiel Tim Ferriss: Some Thoughts on For-Profit Psychedelic Startups and Companies Tim Ferriss’ tweet/Christian Angermayer’s reply Vice.com: Investors Are Debating Who Should Own the Future of Psychedelics Pubs.acs.org: Ethical Concerns about Psilocybin Intellectual Property Ohchr.org: Article 31 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the World Indigenous Nations (WIN) Games Narrative Medicine: The Use of History and Story in the Healing Process, by Lewis Mehl-Madrona Psychedelicstoday.com: Psychedelic Capitalism and Other Myths: Is the Joke On Us? Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this episode, Joe interviews the most guests he's ever had on at once- 5 people from the Entheo Society of Washington: Leo Russell (Executive Director), Monique Bridges (Head of the Female Battalion and Head Guardian of the Santo Daime Ayahuasca Church), Malika Lamont (Director of VOCAL Washington), Tatiana (a lot of day-to-day duties that sound like project management), and Solana Booth (promoter and teacher of traditional Native American healing techniques and modalities).   The Entheo Society of Washington is a 501c3 organization and sister agency to Decriminalize Nature Seattle that is working to create community and treatment centers and eventually a movie about the underground psychedelic culture in the Pacific Northwest (in addition to their obvious fight for the decriminalization of entheogens). Their larger, more socially-focused goals are to encourage people to reconnect to the earth, accept our emotions more, hold space for healing and encourage others to do the same, see the economy around legal cannabis and psychedelics become much fairer, and their biggest goals: to help the most marginalized people receive care without being criminalized, and to dismantle the very systems of power that keep marginalizing them. Notable Quotes “I consider the first wave of the psychedelic movement to be very masculine-oriented. So for me, just my personal opinion- the second wave just feels much more diverse, and I see a lot more women leading, and I’m excited about these women. I have lots of curiosity about them. ...how they’ve come up and how they found their voice. We’ve never seen women before lead in grassroots psychedelic political efforts. We’ve never seen that in human history. So I just want to celebrate these women. I want to help the ones that are behind a mountain and lift them up.” -Leo Russell “What is extremely attractive about decriminalization of psychedelics is that we know that the most potential is there to be able to help people heal from the issues that have impacted them through systemic violence. However, we can’t stop there, because just to heal somebody to throw them back into a harmful system is not enough. We need to dismantle the systems.” -Malika Lamont “I do believe that there’s also a shift in general towards not criminalizing people for any kind of substance use. I think that that is a very real, attainable goal. It’s coming, and I really believe that." -Tatiana “I really don’t like it when people say ‘use psychedelics’ when they’re talking about mushrooms or talking about plant medicines, because we don’t use people. Like, I’m not going to ‘use’ my sister Leo when I’m in a conversation with her. I’m going to partner with her and listen and look at her face (if I can see her) and be with her in that moment. So, I’m not going to use any plants; I’m going to go into the medicine, I’m going to ask permission.” -Solana Booth “With all of the talk of being gentle and reaching higher consciousness and being cognizant of the healing properties of these plants, I think that we also cannot lose focus that trauma out of context can look like culture. Trauma out of context can look like personality or be perceived as weakness.” -Malika Lamont Links Entheosocietywa.org Decrimnatureseattle.org Defender.org: VOCAL Washington About the Entheo Society of Washington Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In last week's Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle, Joe, and Michelle talked a lot about a landmark new trial to study microdosing and the placebo effect. And this week (the big SF50!), they're joined by 2 key members of that very trial, lead researcher Balázs Szigeti and principal investigator David Erritzoe.  Szigeti and Erritzoe explain all the factors of the trial in great detail: how participants blinded themselves and the complications with capsule weight (and burping?), what substances participants took, how they were able to track which participants were in which group, what "breaking blind" meant specific to this trial, how they essentially used cognitive performance tests as a control, how depression factored in (or didn't), why they specifically chose people with experience in psychedelics, and why this study mimics real-life microdosing so perfectly. And they talk about the fascinating results: that while across the board, people scored better and felt better after microdosing for 4 weeks, the people who thought they were microdosing did too, and nearly as much.  They're working on future editions of the trial- one that will likely be much longer in duration and work through the new psychedelic app, Mydelica, and one that will be more traditionally placed in a lab, where they can study the neuroscience present (or maybe not so present) in microdosing. Notable Quotes “If you really simplify it, you can say that ...in a way, the guess was [a] 10 times better predictor of some of these acute outcomes than was the actual condition- what they actually took.” -David Erritzoe   “I’m not trying to invalidate your experience by saying, “This is placebo,” but I’m saying it could be, because that’s what the trial actually came up with. But it doesn’t mean that those experiences are not real, it’s just that a lot of those effects come from a combination of hoping, believing, expecting things to become better, and then your mind [does] magical tricks. And that’s the beauty of placebo, in particular when it comes to mental health and well-being.” -David Erritzoe “Based on our data, there is no question that people do better after microdosing. It is just that people feel equally better after they have taken a placebo.” -Balázs Szigeti “I was in a panel recently about microdosing where the people kept asking, ‘Oh, but what are the mechanisms?’ ‘How is it that microdosing works?’ And I’m like, ‘Let’s maybe start by seeing whether it works.’ It’s only so interesting to find out how something works if it works.” -David Erritzoe Links Selfblinding-microdose.org Elifesciences.org: Self-blinding citizen science to explore psychedelic microdosing Szigeti and Erritzoe’s last appearance on Psychedelics Today Mydelica.com About Balázs Szigeti, PhD Dr. Balazs Szigeti has studied theoretical physics at Imperial College, but turned towards neuroscience for his PhD studies at the University of Edinburgh. His main work is about the behavioural neuroscience of invertebrates, but he has a diverse scientific portfolio that includes computational neuroscience and driving forward the OpenWorm open science initiative. Balazs is also the editor of the Dose of Science blog that is published in collaboration with the Drugreporter website. Dose of Science discusses and critically assesses scientific studies about recreational drugs. Recently Balazs has started a collaboration with the Global Drug Survey to quantitatively compare the dose of recreational users of various drugs with the scientific literature. About David Erritzoe, PhD Dr. David Erritzoe is qualified as a medical doctor from Copenhagen University Medical School and currently holds an Academic Clinical Lectureship in Psychiatry at Imperial College London. Alongside his clinical training in medicine/psychiatry, David has been involved in psychopharmacological research, using brain-imaging techniques such as PET and MRI. He has conducted post-doc imaging research in the neurobiology of addictions and major depression. Together with Prof Nutt and Dr Carhart-Harris he is also investigating the neurobiology and therapeutic potential of MDMA and classic psychedelics. Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this episode, with his recent salvia experience in mind, Kyle interviews creator of the salvia pipe, and somatic salvia guide working to bring mindfulness to salvia use, Christopher Solomon. To many of us, the word "salvia" conjures up images of one or both of the following: smoking salvia with friends and having a panicked, out-of-body experience that (rightfully) scared us away from ever doing it again, or watching Youtube videos of people filming themselves doing the same. Solomon's goal is to reframe salvia's reputation from one of confusion and panic back to how it's known to the Mazatec people who discovered its power: as a loving, empathetic healer.  He talks about his first time smoking salvia after meditating and meeting a female entity, the differences between smoking, chewing leaves, and drinking a tincture, virtual salvia sessions, why you should smoke tiny amounts of salvia repetitively rather than 50x bong hits, why so many people feel like they’re zippers while on salvia, and his thoughts (and salvia's) on if salvia should be smoked or not. And he lists out all the unique feelings that salvia can bring to the table if it's approached with mindfulness, trust, and respect. “The more respectfully and cautiously and mindfully one approaches salvia, the more rewards she gives.”    Notable Quotes “Aside from the fact that I was taken aback at seeing this entity, what was also amazing with it was the sense of emotion and love that was coming from this being. There was a very genuine, caring, telepathic connection that I had with this being that was made out of colorful, almost magnetic-looking lines.”  “When we think of transformation or transformative experiences, we think about these big, explosive, cathartic things, like, ‘Oh my gosh, my entire life flashed before my eyes and I could understand everything, and boom! I had this big transformation, and now I’m healed.' And that can happen, but the real transformations happen in small, bite-sized moments that can be integrated, like taking that small sip of air- getting that one deep breath in if you haven’t had a deep breath in a long time.” “Maybe we’re experiencing the zipper because we go so deep within our bodies that we’re actually getting taken into the felt experience of our DNA replicating.” “If you’re trying to make decisions in your life and you’re waffling back and forth and making lists of pros and cons and debating with yourself and then getting guidance from other people and you’re not sure where to go- you bring those questions to salvia, and she very quickly gets straight to the heart of the matter.” Links Salviahealings.com Salviapipe.com Psychedelics Today: Does Salvia Divinorum Have Therapeutic Potential? Psychedelics Today: Peter H. Addy PhD – Salvia: Research and Therapeutic Use Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, by Jeremy Narby About Christopher Solomon Christopher Solomon is a somatic Salvia guide, teacher, and inventor of a pipe that aids in the mindful exploration of Salvia Divinorum. Incorporating lessons learned directly from Salvia and as a student of somatic psychotherapy, Christopher is pioneering techniques to use Salvia as a therapeutic tool for guided self-healing, meditation, and introspection. Christopher lectures about the proper, intentional, and therapeutic use of Salvia, offering a blend of scientific, esoteric, and therapeutic perspectives. He also cultivates a medicinal Salvia garden for use in his therapeutic practice with clients. His main goal is to teach people how to use Salvia for themselves in a manner that is supportive, informative, and empowering. He has a B.A in Psychology from the University of Texas at Dallas, and received his training in somatic psychotherapy from the Hakomi Institute of California. Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle, Joe, and Michelle once again meet through the airwaves to discuss recent news articles and see where that takes them.  They first talk about a North Wales police boss who wants to give prisoners controlled amounts of cannabis as a way to combat violence and drug addiction and how that questions the notion of prisoners being expected to suffer. Then, they head to "Missurah," where a bill was just introduced to remove their established provision against Schedule I substances, expanding eligibility and getting them closer to how other states use 2018's federal Right to Try Act to help people with terminal and life-threatening illnesses. They then talk about a study that showed significant reduction in alcohol consumption after MDMA use and why the sense of connection that MDMA fosters could be the reason, a self-blinding microdosing study that proved the power of the placebo (and expectation) effect and what that might mean for regular microdosers, and a listener email highlighting the importance of establishing the idea that rituals and ceremonies don’t have to have a Shaman, healer, or some other person in an all-knowing, leadership role. Other topics covered: how to make therapy cheaper, whether or not a lot of letters after someone's name matters, learning survival skills, Paul Stamets, NASA, and astromycology, Zapatistas, Star Trek: Discovery, and Pauly Shore (but only a little- hopefully more next week). Notable Quotes “I feel like they’re getting a little out of hand sometimes with how we sell these treatments. In press releases or on websites for retreat centers, it’s like: 'Cure everything that’s ever been wrong with you in one week!' and 'Addiction no more!' -all this kind of stuff. ...It’s not as sexy to sell a mushroom retreat as like: 'Start this new relationship with mushrooms and work on it every day for the rest of your life!” That’s not going to sell.” -Michelle “How essential is it that the therapist is even in the room? Can’t you just be somewhere really safe with a volunteer sitter or somebody that doesn’t have a huge student debt to pay off? Is the conversation being steered in a particular direction because of incentives like graduate degrees, licensure, etc? ...If I can consume $30 of street MDMA and not have to pay 12 grand, and I can just go to my medicare-covered therapist a few times before and after, that’s a way cheaper proposition.” -Joe “There’s a lot of great healers in the world that would be really amazing at doing a lot of this stuff, but could they afford their degree? The answer is probably no, and so they don’t get to even be at the table to make any of these decisions.” -Kyle  “We can say microdosing is all a placebo effect, but I think there’s something more interesting here on the power of the expectation effect, and how we’re almost manifesting our own mood change.” -Michelle “You don’t need a Shaman there, I think, for a spiritual experience. ...You don’t need someone in a seat of power. I also feel like Shamans and healers- they’re fascinating and they’re a deep part of human history, but so is the desire for power. ...You don’t have to get stuck in that ‘I’m nobody, the Shaman has all the power, and I need you for learning' [narrative].” -Michelle Links Bbc.com: Police boss wants cannabis trial for prisoners Marijuanamoment.net: Missouri Bill Would Add MDMA, Psilocybin Mushrooms And LSD To Right-To-Try Law Independent.co.uk: Taking MDMA could help to treat alcoholism, study suggests Dr. Ben Sessa’s appearance on Psychedelics Today Elifesciences.org: Self-blinding citizen science to explore psychedelic microdosing Drweil.com: Is The Placebo Effect Real? Nature.com: Positive expectations predict improved mental-health outcomes linked to psychedelic microdosing Paulstamets.com: Astromycology funded by NASA, Science Fiction becomes Science Fact Nasa.gov: Making Soil for Space Habitats by Seeding Asteroids with Fungi Damer.com (Dr. Bruce Damer) Mehl-madrona.com (author Lewis Mehl-Madrona) Psychedelicstoday.com: Online Psychedelic Community Options to Ride Out the Rest of Covid-19 Free Psychedelics Today Event: On Dreams, the Feminine and the Practice of Psychotherapy: An Interview with Maria Papaspyrou (with Kyle and Johanna Hilla) Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this episode, Joe interviews the founder and CEO of MindMed, JR Rahn. This one's a bit different and plays out perhaps unsurprisingly, as Joe's well-established talking points against the drug war and DEA, legalize-everything stance, and all-inclusive focus on the many branches of drug-use (medical/therapeutic use, religious use, celebration/partying, inner work and exploration, and creative problem-solving) meet an addict businessman whose life was saved by psychedelics and who doesn't want to talk about the battle but instead wants to push forward, all-in on the method he thinks will get people in need the medicine that could save them the fastest: not putting so much effort towards state-by-state decriminalization and demonizing the DEA, but instead, working with them towards medicalization, and telling them what we want by passing measures that allocate more capital and resources towards infrastructure that will help people.  Rahn talks about what MindMed is working on: the first approved commercial drug trial studying the effects of microdosing LSD on adult ADHD, and their more long-term plan, developing a trip-neutralizing drug that would be a safer option than Xanax for ending a challenging trip and getting people back to stability. He also discusses the importance of scalability and lowering healthcare costs, changing anecdotal evidence into real science, and his life-saving (and cheaper) hope of patients being able to work with therapists in their homes rather than in expensive, anxiety-increasing medical environments.  Notable Quotes “As a society, we need to prioritize treatment and we don’t. ...It’s just completely illogical to me that, as a society, we stare it in its face every day and we blame the opioid crisis and we blame drug addiction for our crime and all these things, yet, as a society, we don’t allocate the resources necessary to solve it.”“I think there’s that Forbes article where I was like, ‘Oh, I want nothing to do with the decrim people.’ I definitely said that, but that’s not really what I meant. What I meant was: if we’re going to make psychedelics into a medicine, and we’re going to make it scalable and accessible, I think we should be having a federal conversation about it, and to me, the most efficient pathway to do that is the FDA. And I’m concerned that we’re going to go through this process of state-by-state legalization that happened in the cannabis days and we’re going to get some pretty unsavory people involved in this community ...and I’m just concerned that, if it happens in that manner, it becomes a political battle, and it doesn’t become: How do we help people? How do we get medicine to folks that are in need?” “If we’re going to get people willing to healing themselves and get over the stigma, I think it’s important to have the feature of: ‘Look, we have the emergency stop button. Your therapist can press it if they need to when they feel that you’ve reached a point that is not good anymore.’ And I think that, ultimately (and we’ll have to study this), it might make the experience even more therapeutic. ...They should be walking into a cocoon and we’re taking care of them. They should not be walking into [a room] or sitting on their couch, going, ‘Holy shit, am I going to die?’” “I’d love to get to the point where we have destigmatized these substances enough in society that people value them for what they are, and I think we will be a much better society when we get to that point, but I don’t think we can do it all at once. People tried that- didn’t work. I would just hate to watch the potential for so many people that are actually suffering from mental health and addiction [to] not get access to this treatment because we went too fast.”  “Psychedelicstoday.com: best podcast in psychedelics.” Links Mindmed.co Newswire.ca: MindMed Expands Psychedelic Microdosing Division, Adds Groundbreaking Study Evaluating LSD Microdosing Through Next-Gen Digital Clinical Markers Mindmed.co: MindMed Develops LSD Neutralizer Technology To Shorten and Stop LSD Trips Forbes.com: This New York City Pharma Startup Wants To Turn LSD Into An FDA-Approved Medicine For Anxiety Disorder (the notorious "Forbes article") Rahn’s Twitter follow-up (scroll up to read the full convo) ADHD Nation: Children, Doctors, Big Pharma, and the Making of an American Epidemic, by Alan Schwarz Psychcongress.com: Suicide Risk Elevated After Psychiatric Hospital Stay Drugabuse.gov: Benzodiazepines and Opioids (increased risk by combining them) About JR Rahn JR is a former Silicon Valley tech executive who realized that transformational solutions to mental illness and addiction might lie in psychedelic medicines. He spent 2 years researching and began personally investing in psychedelic research through his investment company. JR partnered with drug development veteran Stephen Hurst to start MindMed in 2019, assembling a leading clinical drug discovery and development team with vast experience conducting clinical trials and research on drug candidates derived from psychedelics. Before starting MindMed, JR worked in market expansion and operations at Uber. Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle and Joe are joined once again from Mexico by Michelle Janikian, and let's take a moment to do what wasn't done last week: welcome Michelle to the podcast, as she will be joining the guys on SFs for the foreseeable future, and possibly on other podcasts soon as well. Welcome to the revolution, Michelle! As you’d expect, they discuss the news: Norway's plan to decriminalize personal drug use based on recommendations from the U.N. and W.H.O. and why that may be related to Norway's high rate of drug-related deaths (or maybe even a high suicide rate), a new bill in California to not only decriminalize psychedelics (including MDMA and LSD, and excluding peyote) but expunge records as well, a new Massachusetts bill to decriminalize all drugs and study psychedelics, a study where researchers achieved real-time communication with lucid dreamers, and Alex Jones' (likely true) claim that government officials regularly use DMT to communicate with freaking aliens. The most-discussed articles though, are Vice's post about how psychedelic therapy needs to embrace the mystical side of things, and Tim Ferriss' recent blog, pleading people to follow more ethical, safer, and more environmentally-friendly paths in their explorations of different medicines. They also talk about Ferriss' concept of a minimum effective dose, the progress of cannabis legalization in Mexico, using caution with frameworks, Pascal's Wager, how the idea of a psychedelic community is becoming antiquated, and whether or not Kyle is regularly astral projecting without realizing it.  Notable Quotes “This concept of political capital- you only have so many ‘politics tokens’ to put in the machine, and being a politician, you kind of have to play the game of not only influencing what you and your constituency want but [also] ‘how do I get re-elected too?’ It’s not spending political capital to be anti-drug in most states. [To] be a really hardcore prohibitionist, you actually gain political capital in a lot of ways. But putting your neck on the line for something like this is quite risky for a politician, so, good on ya!” -Joe “It just doesn’t fit into that narrative where it’s like: ‘Can psychedelics revolutionize mental health?’ Yes, but not just help people and cure, heal- we have to change the way we think about the human experience and we have to let in so many other weird, unworldly experiences to really, fully-- like, yea, it’s going to revolutionize mental health. It’s going to revolutionize everything if we really integrate it and take all aspects of it into consideration. But that’s really hard for doctors and these psychiatrists in-training to really do- they just want a new medication to help their patients. Do they really want to like, rethink reality? [sarcastically:] That’s just for weirdos like us.” -Michelle “Sometimes when I’m in conversations with other clinicians and it’s so pathology-oriented, I’m like, do we need to keep continuing that language? Could there be other ways of viewing and seeing this? How [can] psychedelics- or not even psychedelics- just extraordinary experiences in general help shift our view of what it means to be human? What does it mean to be well in the world? Do I always need to be sick when I come to a mental health professional? Do I always need some sort of diagnosis? I think these are the questions that my exceptional experiences have made me think about- traditional systems and how they’ve really shifted over the years.” -Kyle “The dream world, to me, has always been so fascinating, because it’s like the natural psychedelic everyone has every night. Dreams are so weird. There’s no psychedelic that really touches how weird dreams are. And yet we go to that place every night.” -Michelle Links Bloomberg.com: Norway to Decriminalize Personal Drug Use in ‘Historic’ Shift Msn.com: New California bill would decriminalize psychedelics, expunge criminal records Marijuanamoment.net: New Massachusetts Bills Would Decriminalize All Drugs And Study Regulated Sales of Psychedelics Playboy.com Viva la Cannabis? Not so Fast (Michelle’s article) Tim Ferriss’ blog: An Urgent Plea to Users of Psychedelics: Let’s Consider a More Ethical Menu of Plants and Compounds Academia.edu: DMT Research From 1956 to the End of Time, by Andrew R. Gallimore and David P. Luke Wikipedia.org: Pascal’s Wager Vice.com: Psychedelic Therapy Needs to Confront the Mystical Psychologyconcepts.com: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness (Kyle was right, Joe had it wrong) Newatlas.com: Scientists establish freaky two-way communications with lucid dreamers Cell.com: Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep (the actual study) Youtube: Qualia Research Institute’s video (that’s causing debate in the facebook group) Matthew Segall’s appearance on Psychedelics Today Marijuanamoment.net: Alex Jones Says Secret Government Program Uses Psychedelics To Communicate With Aliens Alien Information Theory: Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game, by Andrew R. Gallimore Recursion, by Blake Crouch Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this episode, Kyle interviews clinical psychologist focusing on sexual trauma, health, and identity, and author of The Psychedelics Integration Handbook, Dr. Ryan Westrum. Westrums' biggest focus and conversation with clients right now in our age of Covid concerns who we are without medicine- how we fill the liminal states between our sessions or rituals. He talks a lot about the work people can do on their own now: learning to listen to our inner healers, honing and sharpening what we already know, stretching ourselves, listening to the different parts of our intuition (our physical bodies, emotional hearts, and cognitive thinking) and realigning when one is out of sync, and maybe the most important lesson: embracing the idea that self-work doesn't have to be built on trials and tribulations, and often, challenging ourselves to use our hands and practicing something we know we're good at or getting back into a long-forgotten hobby can be just as effective towards growth and feeling better about ourselves.  He also talks about solitude, how to use technology the right way and not fall into false engagement, what safety means to people in today's climate, the importance of tethering yourself to trustworthy allies, how psychedelics and his work with sexuality converge, and how to embrace the wonder and beauty of what we discover through psychedelics in everyday life. Notable Quotes “We have to consciously watch what we’re consuming, being prudently aware of this mindful consumption rather than this inappropriate consuming of information when we don’t even know why we just touched our phone or why we just engaged in learning more. Without sounding blasphemous (because I love the internet), what’s it for? What are we doing it for? ...How often are you getting lost in people you don’t even know? And how often are you reaching out to people that could actually be there for you? And it leads to psychedelic medicine work- are you leaning on the people that could actually support you?”  “What is the higher level of intention we’re living? If we are going to take the challenge to dive into medicine work by ourselves, we should still be constructing something that’s higher level, and to speak volumes of motivating the purpose of why we’re doing it. If you’re just doing it to do it because you think that’s the next thing, I’d ask you: what are you doing in your life away from the medicine?”  “Some of the most amazing transcendences are personal, and without being disrespectful to the medicine, do we need it to evoke that? Is that a state of being that we can find within ourselves through evocative breathing, through a great song, sexual pleasure with your partner, whatever? There’s other avenues. That’s what that leads me to, is the plethora of opportunity outside of taking psilocybin or doing an ayahuasca ceremony- [the] plethora of experiential experiences that are very evocative towards healing.”“Without going into hours of conversation, even in couples, people are unaware of what they can share, unaware of entering into what they want to ask for. And that’s where the intersection of psychedelics happens, is it gives them this embodied expression of: ‘This is genuinely who I am, sexually, emotionally, spiritually,’ and it’s quite beautiful.” Links Healingsoulsllc.com The Psychedelics Integration Handbook, by Ph.D. Ryan Westrum His last appearance on the podcast Thelightphone.com About Dr. Ryan Westrum Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle and Joe are joined from Mexico by freelance journalist (who has been featured here several times) and writer of Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion, Michelle Janikian. They first get into an email from a listener in Costa Rica highlighting a problem Michelle has seen in Mexico (and that mirrors last week's discussion about ayahuasca gatherings): expats' disregard for Covid safety protocols showing an egotistical disrespect for the communities that have welcomed them. The episode then shifts to a bit of a callback to the early days of solidarity, with fewer philosophical ponderings and a whole lot of articles (just scroll down to view the wall of links). From ketamine reducing suicidality (and is ketamine a cure-all silver bullet or just an overhyped respite?) to a Rick Strassman-backed study of DMT for stroke patients, to a college in Jamaica opening a Field-Trip backed psilocybin lab, to Vermont and New Jersey's progress on decriminalization bills, to a discussion on if drug laws violate human rights, to extremely mainstream Vogue and Rolling Stone both reporting on psychedelics, this episode has it all. And yes, it does also include anti-government and drug war rants from Joe, so it's truly a complete episode.  And if you forgot, the next round of Navigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Therapists goes live on 3/11, the new, cheaper, student-focused version of Navigating Psychedelics starts on March 2nd, and our giveaway to win 2 Sasha Shulgin books ends today, so smash that link to win!  Notable Quotes “If we are at home working with psychedelics because we can’t do group work, I think it’s still really important to be talking about it with other like-minded folks, because when we don’t have any community and we just are using psychedelics, it can get a little delusional. ...We can still take psychedelics, but we have to live in reality.” -Michelle  “Everybody’s saying psychedelic integration is important [and it] makes me roll my eyes. Like, yea, true, but how many times do we have to say it? I guess ‘until everyone’s doing it’ is the answer.” -Joe “A lot of my anxiety and depression stems from an existential, spiritual root, and a lot of my experiences with breathwork or psychedelics in the past would get me there and provide that deep level of insight of: ‘I have a choice here.’ And it allowed me to change my relationship (or at least provide insight on how I could change my relationship to that), but then coming back to do the work was the challenge. Like, ‘Oh shit, I need to actually change this. And how do I do that?’” -Kyle “Ok, Federal government: what can you do to win my trust back? And I don’t know what the answer is, honestly. I don’t think I will, at large, ever really trust the US Federal government. I don’t really hold out hope that I’ll trust them again in my lifetime because they’ve shown to be a corrupt, gross, crony, capitalist system that does not care about human well-being.” -Joe (big shock) Links Michellejanikian.com Michelle's last appearance on Psychedelics Today This Week in Virology podcast Esperanzamazateca.com: Donate to help the people of Huautla de Jimenez Newatlas.com: Regular oral doses of ketamine significantly reduce suicidal thoughts Notion.so: Contemplating the complexities of being in relationship with substances Proactiveinvestors.com: Algernon targeting psychedelic drug DMT for stroke program Iflscience.com: Psychedelic Drug DMT To Be Trialed On Stroke Victims Playboy.com: Can Microdosing Make You a Better Athlete? Iflscience.com: “Spirit Molecule” DMT Keeps Cells Alive When Oxygen Levels Are Low Vogue.com: Could the Embrace of Psychedelics Lead to a Mental-Health Revolution? Rollingstone.com: Will the Federal Government Finally Embrace the Psychedelic Revolution? Marijuanamoment.net: New Vermont Bill Would Decriminalize Psychedelics And Kratom (from last year) Vtdigger.org: Lawmakers, prosecutor say it’s time for Vermont to decriminalize drugs (update) Our.Today: UWI opens Caribbean’s first ‘magic mushroom’ lab in Jamaica Psych.prohibitionpartners.com: St. Vincent and the Grenadines Launch Psychedelics Initiative Theatlantic.com: Do Psychedelic Drug Laws Violate Human Rights? Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this episode, Kyle interviews board-certified heart and lung transplant surgeon and author, most recently of The Art of Human Care, Dr. Hassan Tetteh. Tetteh talks about his book, a "manifesto of sorts" about what human care is in relation to what we traditionally see in standard health care and how the model is rooted in empathy and listening, and was inspired greatly by both his near-death experience with bacterial meningitis (and seeing what it was like to be a helpless patient) and his work with transcendental meditation (which has helped him deal with past trauma and connect him more with the here and now). He talks about his Human Care "LEARN" framework, an amazing "Death Over Dinner" experience where he and randomly-assigned strangers contemplated 3 simple (but not so simple) questions over dinner, how he sees death as a doctor and as someone who came close to death himself, how to discover what a patient's purpose is, and why he's excited about psychedelics becoming medicines. Notable Quotes “I’ve told this to my colleagues- I said, ‘I think everyone in healthcare should have an experience where they feel like they almost died as part of their educational experience,’ because sometimes, it takes that empathy to really identify and relate to some of the patients that you’re taking care of, but more importantly, I think gives you this real deep sense ...of gratitude, and this longing desire to ask yourself, always: ‘Why did that happen?’” “I think death, in its natural form, is absolutely something that’s going to happen. It’s just the way we’re designed. We have a beginning, we have a middle, and we have an end. And I think it’s our duty and our responsibility, in my opinion, to make your life as meaningful as possible while you’re here, so that in your death, your music continues to play, so to speak. Bob Marley, to me, is never going to die.”  “A lot of patients will come to seek medical attention with a so-called complaint or an issue, and it turns out that if you do take that time (like you said) to listen and empathize and sort of understand what their now is, you’ll realize, ‘Hey wait a minute, they’re not really here for the problem they told me about. They’re seeking something else.’” “If you give someone a minute or two, they’ll tell you a lot. But you know what you have to do in that whole time? Don’t interrupt them.”  “We don’t have the monopoly on the best healthcare, because no, that’s been done for ages, well before we came into existence.”  Links Doctortetteh.com Twitter Facebook The Art of Human Care, by Hassan A. Tetteh Bluezones.com About Dr. Hassan Tetteh Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle and Joe cover several news stories, including the University of Wisconsin-Madison creating a Psychoactive Pharmaceutical Investigation masters program, a non-profit called the Healing Advocacy Fund being created to implement therapeutic-use psilocybin in Oregon, legislature in Hawaii filing a new bill to legalize therapeutic-use psilocybin and psilocin (and remove them from their Schedule I controlled substances list), Cambridge, Massachusetts joining its neighbor, Somerville, in decriminalizing entheogenic plants, and the biggest story: Compass Pathways attempting to patent such common aspects of psilocybin-assisted therapy as soft furniture, muted colors, and providing "reassuring physical contact." This leads to a discussion on patents and what companies are really trying to do with this behavior.  They then discuss why mescaline isn't researched more, why psychedelic exceptionalism is a problem, Dr. Carl Hart, The Weeknd, and one of everyone's favorite topics: the drug war and why it sucks. And they let us know that seats for the next round of Navigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Therapists (beginning March 11th) are about half full (so sign up!), the panel discussion on "Light Years" with director Colin Thompson is happening tonight (so hurry up and register for it!), Mind Bending, Mind Mending - A Series Exploring How Psychedelics Affect the Brain premieres on February 22nd with the first edition on Ketamine and featuring Kyle and Dr. Melanie Blair Pincus, and a new, cheaper, student-focused version of Navigating Psychedelics has been created and begins on March 2nd.  Notable Quotes “Are we in a little bit of a fantasy land when we’re trying to separate ourselves from the rest of drug culture? Big portions of psychedelic culture overlap with other portions of other drug cultures. And we’re not mutually exclusive. We’re prosecuted and surveilled by the same government agencies. Prohibition hits us all really hard.” -Joe “I think that’s how a lot of politicians win votes, is by being ‘tough on drugs’ when we should be tough on the drug war.” -Joe “What does it really cost to end the drug war? What do we save by ending the drug war? It’s probably actually better for culture to end the drug war than to medicalize psychedelics. It’s going to be cheaper, we’re going to have a lot of our citizenry back, we’re going to have less felons, ...much less racist culture, all of that. I know this is Psychedelics Today and once in a while, I feel like I’m going, “This is Drug War Today!’ but this is just a thing that keeps coming back to me, and I think it’s important that we examine our cultural baggage around our traditions. Should we really be demonizing people who use PCP? I don’t think so.” -Joe Links Vice.com: Can a Company Patent the Basic Components of Psychedelic Therapy? Psychedelicstoday.com: End of the Road - Navigating Psychedelics and Patent Law Dmtx.org University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Psychoactive Pharmaceutical Investigation, MS program Opb.org: New nonprofit aims to advise on creation of Oregon’s psilocybin-assisted therapy system Healingadvocacyfund.org Marijuanamoment.net: Hawaii Could Legalize Psychedelic Mushroom Therapy Under New Senate Bill Benzinga.com: Boston Suburb Votes To Decriminalize Natural Psychedelics Fieldtripping.fm podcast: #13: The Best Kind of Counter-Culture: Drug Using Criminal Rick Doblin, Pt. 1 Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic, by Mike Jay Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear, by Dr. Carl L. Hart Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, by Johann Hari Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this episode, Joe interviews Vancouver-based serial entrepreneur, co-founder, president, and CEO of Better Plant Sciences Inc., and founder and CEO of NeonMind Biosciences, Penny White.  White works to take companies public, and was running Better Plant Sciences before creating NeonMind as a subsidiary, largely inspired by Michael Pollan and research by scientists at the University of British Columbia who were looking to treat addiction with CBD.  Now that NeonMind has successfully gone public (which just happened at the end of December), her goals with the company are to develop a protocol around using psilocybin to tackle obesity (they're in pre-clinical trials now and have 5 patents filed), to work more with medicinal mushrooms and sell products with proven health claims (they sell mushroom coffees now), and eventually get into work involving drug addiction and preventing the effects of Alzheimer's- also likely with psilocybin.  This podcast feels like a meeting of 2 minds fully immersed in the psychedelic world having a bit of a check-in about where we find ourselves at the beginning of 2021. Among other topics, they talk about NeonMind's path, taking companies public, how cannabis and psilocybin are regulated in Canada, the benefits of being able to prescribe psilocybin, the worries of oversaturation in Oregon, and the complications of trying to make legal cannabis businesses work in federally-illegal land. Notable Quotes “It’s cool for younger people who are coming of age and having money for the first time and deciding what to do with it, and people that are just interested in promoting things they believe in. It’s an opportunity for people to say: ‘I love the idea of psychedelics becoming legal or becoming available as drugs to help humanity, and so I’m going to buy some of this stock.’ It’s empowering in a way.” “We may end up doing some compound work. We may end up looking at other mushrooms and maybe combining more than just one compound- psilocybin maybe being the key compound. So we’re still at the early stages of what we’re doing, but by no means would we ever have any kind of monopoly on the use of psilocybin. I mean, it’s a plant, right?”  “There’s a lot of people who really very religiously rely on the advice of their doctor, and for them, health is going to your doctor and doing what your doctor says. And so, a lot of people won’t have access to alternative medicines unless they’re prescribed by their doctor. I think those people are going to benefit the most from a drug that contains psilocybin that can be prescribed.”  “I’m still very, very interested in drug addiction and how psychedelics can help people get off drugs, and so, if I come across any companies that are focused on this, any clinical work- if I can get involved in that or help in any way, to be a co-sponsor, something like that- that would be something I’d be really interested in.”  Links NeonMind.com NeonMindbiosciences.com Betterplantsciences.com Finance.yahoo.com: NeonMind Announces Closing of Oversubscribed Initial Public Offering and Exercise in Full of the Agent's Over-Allotment Option Dosed About Penny White Penny is a serial entrepreneur with over two decades of experience building companies. She was recognized in PROFIT Magazine's W100 most successful entrepreneurs and her private company was included in PROFIT 500 Fastest-Growing companies in 2015 and 2016. She is also Co-founder, President and CEO of Better Plant Sciences Inc. (CSE: PLNT, OTCQB: VEGGF). She was an initial officer and director for 2 years at Merus Labs Inc. (TSX: MSL), a speciality pharmaceutical company focused on acquiring and optimizing legacy and growth products, which was acquired by Norgine B.V. for $342 million in 2017. Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle and Joe first talk about some great news stories pushing forward the psychedelic movement: Massachusetts General Hospital creating the Center for Neuroscience of Psychedelics with backing from Atai Life Sciences, Florida pushing forward a bill to establish a legal therapeutic-use psilocybin model similar to Oregon's (with a task force responsible for studying psilocybin), Connecticut pushing forward their own much simpler bill to establish their own psilocybin-studying task force, and a recent study using fMRI to examine brain connectivity that found that under the influence of LSD, the relationship between anatomy and brain structure on brain function (similar to phrenology) weakens, thereby allowing the brain to explore other functional connectivity patterns.  They then dive into the hot and oddly polarizing topic of ayahuasca centers continuing to hold ceremonies with as many as 80 people and 3 sessions a week during a time when people should be doing their best to avoid large groups for the hopeful eradication of the constant thorn in our side known as Covid-19. Even for centers testing people before allowing entry, tests aren't 100% accurate, and that only really addresses people's time at the center and not the travel and interactions afterward. When considering risk management and harm reduction, do people attending these events really need to do this now? Could talk therapy or breathwork over the internet (or taking LSD or psilocybin safely with a trusted friend) be a temporary tide over until gathering in large groups is safe again? What's ethical here? And they let us know about what's going on at Psychedelics Today: the next round of Navigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Therapists (beginning March 11th (yea, 311!)), a giveaway to win 2 Sasha Shulgin books, a "Light Years" panel discussion on February 12th with director, Colin Thompson, 2 new class offerings, a project to help religious leaders learn more about psychedelics, and a new, cheaper, student-focused version of Navigating Psychedelics, which begins on March 2nd.  Notable Quotes “A lot of people fear that folks like you and I and the psychedelic culture at large might destroy this whole medicalization thing by perhaps being too wreckless, making regulators nervous. But I think because a huge money company like Atai and Mass General are working on this (and there’s so many other big institutions), that this is the kind of ballast that would resist any kind of backslide into a deepening of the drug war. ...This is a nice way to say, ‘Ok, we can’t really go backwards from here.’” -Joe“Politics is regularly about gambling: ‘What is going to be politically popular, possibly make a big difference, or get me re-elected?’ And it’s kind of a weird political calculus that people have to make. The fact that politicians in these states are willing to put their name on the line and say, ‘Hey, I believe in this. I think you should too’- that’s a pretty big deal. They’re spending their political capital. Whereas years ago, it would have been maybe, ‘Let’s stop the Iraq war,’ now, it’s: ‘Let’s get these people treatment with psilocybin’ and that’s really cool progress.” -Joe “When you’re talking about magical thinking and ‘The spirit of ayahuasca’s going to protect me,’ well, I guess we have to look back into history- did shamanistic beliefs help protect a lot of Indigenous people that fell ill from a lot of the European sicknesses and disease that came over in the early years? ... A lot of people died from illness being transmitted within those communities.” -Kyle  “Does your organization have a contact tracing plan? Even if you have a contact tracing plan and testing, that doesn’t mean that people aren’t going to die as a result of you doing this” -Joe Links Bostonglobe.com: Mass General to conduct research on how psychedelics affect the brain Marijuanamoment.net: Psychedelic Mushroom Bills Filed In Florida And Connecticut As Movement Expands To Multiple States Psypost.org: Neuroscience study indicates that LSD “frees” brain activity from anatomical constraints Sciencedirect.com: LSD alters dynamic integration and segregation in the human brain Mindmatters.ai: Why Pioneer Neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield Said the Mind is More Than the Brain Brainpickings.org: William James on Consciousness and the Four Features of Transcendent Experiences Entheonation.com: What Are the Coronavirus Risks with Ayahuasca Ceremonies? Thedailybeast.com: Drug Ritual is ‘Biologically Explosive’ During COVID. Some Devotees Don't Care. Psychedelics Today giveaway: PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story and TiHKAL: The Continuation, by Sasha & Ann Shulgin Psychedelics Today: “Light Years” panel discussion with director, Colin Thompson Psychedelics Today: Connecting Clergy Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this episode, Kyle and Joe interview Dr. Matthew Johnson: Professor at Johns Hopkins, writer of the recent paper, "Consciousness, Religion, and Gurus: Pitfalls of Psychedelic Medicine," and researcher (with others) on several trials through Johns Hopkins involving psilocybin: for smoking cessation, anorexia, mood and effects of early-stage Alzheimer's, opioid addiction, post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, co-morbid alcoholism with depression, and soon, LSD for chronic pain.  Johnson talks about his paper, which largely deals with the ambiguity of the term "consciousness" and how it applies to David Chalmers' hard problem, and asks many philosophical questions: What is consciousness? What is phenomenal consciousness? Are things that seem like you actually similar? Do they have similar experiences or agency? How would you even know? If you built a robot that displays perfectly human-like qualities similar to yours and appears to have agency and experience, does it? Can you prove that it doesn't?  They also talk about how clinicians and investigators bringing their own religious and spiritual frameworks to psychedelic and breathwork sessions can create unnecessary expectations and narratives and make many people think the experience isn't for them, the theory that the default mode network decoupling just makes you feel not quite yourself and that this action can be observed with other non-psychedelic drugs, access consciousness, how it’s ok to feel things that can’t be proven scientifically, shamans, gurus, and the idea of enlightenment, the nuance in everything, and the beneficial sense of ownership people feel after getting through a challenging psychedelic session. Notable Quotes “It may very well be that the default mode network is a key or one of the keys that explains quintessential psychedelic effects, although it’s also possible that it’s not so special- that it explains maybe some of the effects sometimes, and that these aren’t so quintessentially psychedelic.”  “You don’t have to pretend like you have the answers. I don’t know, frankly, I think we’d all be better off if physicians had more humility. …There’s a whole lot about the human body we don’t know.”“Whether we’re talking about a Richard Dawkins style- you know, kind of a hard atheist who might be inclined to be of the spaghetti monster variety-appreciating person, or whether it be [a] Muslim- like, do we want a statue of a Buddha to tell either of those people that ‘this is not for you’ if they’re incredibly suffering from end-of-life anxiety, if they’re suffering from a decades-long addiction, if they’re depressed and are at risk of suicide? I don’t know, it just seems like we really need to think: how is this going to play out in the world and how are we really going to help people? Do we really want someone to think, ‘Oh no, this stuff is for hippies or new age folks’? They might be a political conservative, they might be a veteran, they might be someone who would never touch an illicit drug in their life. Do we want those types of people saying, ‘This is not for me’? I just see these as human experiences.” “One of the reasons why psychedelics and probably breathwork can be so effective is that people are doing their own heavy lifting. ...At least in the type of work that [I do in] clinical research with psychedelics, people come out feeling they have done (rightfully so) the heavy lifting. It’s not like, ‘Oh, I took some pill, and thanks to Pfizer, who was able to figure out a way to manipulate my serotonin system, I’m feeling better. Thanks to Doc So-and-so who knew that I needed Lexapro rather than Prozac.’ It’s like, ‘No, you faced your own demons, dude. You did the hard work. You cried your heart out about that thing you did you don’t feel good about and you came out with a laundry list of what you need to fix with your life, and with this renewed sense because you feel like you’ve earned it.’”   Links "Consciousness, Religion, and Gurus: Pitfalls of Psychedelic Medicine," by Matthew W. Johnson The Hard Problem of Consciousness explanation Hopkinspsychedelic.org Clinicaltrials.gov About Dr. Matthew Johnson Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle (or "Jimmy New Jersey")'s spot is taken by Vermont-based filmmaker Colin Thompson, and Joe interviews him about his newest movie, "Light Years," released in 2019 with help from Free Association (Channing Tatum's production company).  Thompson, a very sarcastic and down-to-earth writer and director, talks about his past films, the trials and tribulations of making a movie and trying to sell it, how Free Association got involved, Phish, Rickie Lee Jones, and the importance of good music to film, how a heroic dose of mushrooms and a sunrise hike helped him complete the movie, why there aren't more psychedelic films, and how it came to be that he ended up playing nearly every part in a movie that he originally didn't want to be in at all.  “Light Years” is summarized on imdb.com as: "A thirty-something man goes on an annual cosmic vision quest to visit a dead friend. But a stick gets stuck in the spokes of his psychedelia and in every face, friends and family alike, his own looks back at him. All but his dead friend." You can buy or rent Light Years on Amazon. Notable Quotes “I wanted to make 'Superbad,' but on mushrooms.”“There is a lot of hysteria, obviously, in tripping your nards off, but also, with the waves and the troughs of a trip, it’s a lot like the conflict resolution that you want with every scene in a movie that you’re just kind of bouncing in and out of. And anything that doesn’t have that kind of conflict gets left on the editing room floor. So you always want that push and pull.” “It was up on top of that mountain in Malibu where the line from the movie came to me, because it was my mantra of however many hours as I was walking and the sun was coming up and I was losing my fucking marbles. But in those peaceful valleys, I kept saying to myself- I was like: ‘When it’s not scary, it’s fun. When it’s not scary, it’s fun. When it’s not scary, it’s fun.’ As with life.”“We did this little kind of animated short. It’s longer than it feels. It’s on the lightyearsmovie.com page. If you scroll down a little bit, it’s called “I was not supposed to be in this movie.” And there you see me. And I do an explanation on how this all came to be. It’s like a lengthy trailer and a disclaimer, that is much like the last almost 38 years of my life: one lengthy disclaimer.” Links Lightyearsmovie.com Loser’s Crown Productions Buy or rent "Light Years" on Amazon Imdb.com: "Malibu Road" Imdb.com: "Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus" Tripintolove.com: Watch “Debbie & Doug Drop Acid in the Desert” Bandcamp.com: the range of light wilderness  Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this episode, Joe interviews Director of ecological think tank The Institute of Ecotechnics, and publisher and CEO of Synergetic Press, Deborah Snyder. Snyder talks about her past- meeting people from the Institute of Ecotechnics at a conference about the solar system, time working with Richard Evans Schultes, participating in a traveling theatre company, and the early days of the Heraclitus (a research ship built for a 2-year expedition through the Amazon, which is now being rebuilt to soon visit and chronicle remote coastal cultures). She also discusses Biosphere 2, ecotechnics (the discipline of relating the technosphere to the biosphere), regenerative agriculture, and the idea of natural capital- assigning economic (or other) value to an ecosystem as a way of both identifying keys to ecological longevity and increasing corporate or governmetal interest in the environment.  She talks about books she's published or work she's been inspired by from a veritable who's-who of names listeners of this podcast should be familiar with: Dennis McKenna, Wade Davis, William S. Burroughs, Mark Plotkin, Ralph Metzner, John Perry Barlow, and Claudio Naranjo. And she's very excited about a 2-day symposium Synergetic Press will be putting on in May to commemorate the launch of Volume 1 of Sasha Shulgin's course curriculum on the nature of drugs.  Notable Quotes “I’m from Illinois. I’m from the rural midwest. All my family are farmers. There is a gulf of understanding about plant medicines and the potential of these medicines in places where people are really desperate for these kinds of tools to help with youth health and mental well-being- good well-being. So, I’m interested in bridging that gulf with the work that we’re doing next, because I think that part of the divide is this physical divide between suburban city and rural country to some degree, which we’ve seen growing over a 50-year period of time.” “Many of our shoulders on which we stand- we’re losing them. So I feel more necessity, you might say, to capture these voices.” “In doing anything, it’s very hard to do anything by yourself. You need to find a group of other individuals that have some commonality or ally yourself with other organized groups already to get something of a coalescence of wills to make something happen.”  Links Synergeticpress.com Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Institute of Ecotechnics Changing Our Minds: Psychedelic Sacraments and the New Psychotherapy, by Don Lattin Where The Gods Reign: Plants and Peoples of the Colombian Amazon, by Richard Evans Schultes Imdb.com: Embrace of the Serpent White Gold: the Diary of a Rubber Cutter in the Amazon, by John C. Yungjohann Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the Amazon's Sacred Vine, by Luis Eduardo Luna & Steven F. White Kissthegroundmovie.com Birth of a Psychedelic Culture, by Ram Das and Ralph Metzner Wikipedia.org: John Perry Barlow Spaceshipearthmovie.com The Revolution We Expected: Cultivating a New Politics of Consciousness, by Claudio Naranjo Thefarmatsouthmountain.com About Deborah Snyder Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle and Joe cover a crazy story about a man who injected psilocybin tea, only to end up having fungi grow in his blood and put him into organ failure. They question the logistics of this and wonder if it’s ever happened before, but Joe has since found an article reporting that this did happen back in 1985. So as crazy as it seems, it is absolutely possible. Be careful out there, folks. They then talk about how the current psychedelic rush is diluting the existing culture, and how we should react to it, comparing it to "Eternal September," the Usenet term for when AOL started mailing out internet disks to millions, providing access to Usenet, and how that affected the long-established and tight-knit Usenet community. This leads to a discussion of what tends to happen in the black market when cannabis is legalized, what lawyers will likely be doing in this space, why outlaw behavior is so attractive to people, and how "plant medicines" is too broad of a term to be used for psychedelics.  They also talk about Dr. Carl Hart's new book, Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear (which you can win from Psychedelics Today), and let us know that seats are already selling quickly for the next round of Navigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Therapists, which begins on March 11th. Curious about what you're missing? Head to the page and view the growing collection of glowing testimonials to find out!  Notable Quotes “Say you have a small music club and you’re used to 20 people coming, or a social club of some kind, and all of a sudden, 20 people get added every day. At a certain point, culture can’t really persist. That original culture’s going to be so diluted that it’s not necessarily a substantial part of the thing anymore. And I was thinking about this in terms of psychedelics, because there’s so much money coming in. If you’ve come in because of Michael Pollan, you’re part of this new wave. There’s some resistance to it- we see a lot of hate directed at Michael Pollan [and] a lot of these businesses. And I kind of get it- the resentment towards newcomers, but how do we balance that? How do we not turn into vicious defenders of our culture, as opposed to emissaries pushing our values in a nice, positive way? ...There’s plenty of room for cultural dissemination. It’s just: how do we do it skillfully without becoming the thing we don’t want to become?” -Joe“There’s this whole tradition that has nothing to do with psychedelics, necessarily, and it’s quite multicultural. Plants were largely medicine for huge portions of our history- probably the majority of our history as a species. And now, in the last 60 years or whenever this whole trend started, people say ‘plant medicines’ and they really mean psychedelics, but they don’t want to sully their perception of their preferred plant allies by saying ‘psychedelic.’ They want to differentiate themselves because ‘those LSD users and those heroin users are dirty. But we’re clean.’ ...Carl Hart pointed out that calling yourself a psychonaut or any of these terms that we use in the psychedelic world- it’s sort of mental gymnastics that we use to justify our drug use and vilify other people for their drug use.” -Joe Links Insider.com: A man injected himself with 'magic' mushrooms and the fungi grew in his blood, which put him into organ failure Annals of Emergency Medicine: Intravenous mushroom poisoning Wikipedia.org: Eternal September Netflix: “Murder Mountain” Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear, by Dr. Carl L. Hart Win a copy of Drug Use for Grown-Ups from Psychedelics Today! Doubleblindmag.com: Somerville, Massachusetts Decriminalizes Naturally Occurring Psychedelics Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this episode, Joe interviews Dr. Anne Wagner: Toronto-based clinical psychologist, founder of Remedy (a mental health clinic combining therapy with research through their corresponding Remedy Institute), investigator on the MAPS-sponsored trial on cognitive behavioral conjoint therapy for PTSD, and current lead investigator on MAPS' trial of cognitive processing therapy + MDMA for PTSD.  She talks about working with Candice Monson in 2013, having her first MDMA therapy session with Michael and Annie Mithoefer a year later, her first couples study on PTSD using MDMA, her MAPS training (she's now a trainer in-training), her passion for relational healing, Remedy and what she hopes to accomplish there, and what she'd like to do next: a larger MDMA couples therapy study with hopes of proving its efficacy towards relationship satisfaction improvement to the point of running a study without PTSD being a factor, and a new protocol combining mindfulness-based work with psilocybin.  They also talk about the idea of personal optimization and how it relates to community, speaking at psychedelic conferences, behavioral accommodation, psychology's struggles with being accepted in a scientific data world, how to measure what makes a therapist good, and the importance of clinicians-in-training going through extremely in-depth training and doing their own work. Notable Quotes On trying MDMA with MAPS: “[I] went and had that therapeutic experience for myself, and was convinced in that moment that this is really, really worth pursuing. And it honestly shifted not only the course of my research, but of my career, my personal life, everything.” On MDMA being used in therapy: “We saw 6 couples go through this protocol, and it was very compelling. Really, as someone who works with PTSD all the time in my clinical practice and in many different trials over the years, it is the thing that’s excited me the most as a clinician and a researcher, and I feel so much hope for the potential future clients who might get to access this.” “The advice I really give to people is to try to be an expert in something, and it doesn’t have to be psychedelics. ...So, it could be that you are going to be a therapist. Fantastic. Become an amazing therapist. You could be a statistician. We’re going to need those. Become an amazing statistician. We’re going to need great lawyers, or great people who understand policy- all of these things. I really believe in this model of: become an expert in a skillset, and then apply it to psychedelics.” “Right now, everything’s focused on the drug- this pharma model of: ‘Is it the drug or the placebo? Which one has more effect?’ When really, I think the question needs to be: ‘Should it be the therapy, or the therapy plus the drug? ...Is it the process, or the process amplified?’” Links Remedycentre.ca Remedy Centre instagram MAPS: Anne Wagner MAPS: Overview of current CPT+MDMA Pilot Study About Dr. Anne Wagner     Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle and Joe talk about last week's incident at the US Capitol and point out that the most recognizable figure from the protest calls himself a shaman and promotes the use of psychedelics.  This leads to a discussion about how we in the psychedelic community like to believe that psychedelics lead to connection, self-actualization, and love, but they can also lead to crazy ideas, an openness to conspiracy theories, and other dark paths. They talk about how they both went down conspiracy rabbit holes for years, but ultimately came to the realization that while it was all interesting and aligned with their distrust of the government, they couldn't prove any of the conspiracies they were spending so much time looking into, and even if they could, would that really better their lives or the community around them?  They talk about where we’ve arrived as a culture in terms of trust in the government and other authoritarian institutions, how we're dealing with an unending stream of information constantly being thrown at us, how we decide what truth is, how people unintentionally project their own biases on others, how more people should read philosophy, how we're merging with technology and not using our brains like we should be (like critically thinking), and how we need to practice digital hygiene and really reflect on what we're getting out of our time with social media and the neverending cycle of news and opinions that surrounds us.  Notable Quotes “[Pyschedelics have] definitely put a lot of interesting ideas and beliefs in my head from time to time, and I’ll sit there and entertain them, but I feel like, at times, psychedelics have really shown me that I really don’t know much about anything.” -Kyle“The Tim Leary line- ‘Think for yourself and question authority.’ Totally. But, don’t just listen to what some maniacs are saying on the internet. Like, don’t believe what Kyle and I are saying. Verify. This is a cryptocurrency line- don’t trust, verify. ...One of the great things that psychedelics have baked in is that they work. You can have MDMA or DMT or ayahuasca and you can come back and report back. It’s the substance interacting with the psyche and the body- nothing to do with what Kyle and Joe say, hopefully.” -Joe “I hope everybody continues to do their thing [and] express however they want to express on the internet. But I think there is something about that [idea of] digital hygiene that we just should be aware of. Like, what are you consuming? And is it draining you? Is it motivating you? Is it inspiring you?” -Kyle “Psychedelics can be used in really whack ways. They can also be used in really amazing ways. So let’s try to be really intentional about how we can use them in amazing ways, and same thing with our standard other technologies.” -Joe Links Thesun.co.uk: QAnon ‘shaman’ Jake Angeli first got high aged 11, takes psychedelic cactus & used to go to school dressed as Brad Pitt Scientificamerican.com: There’s No Good Evidence That Psychedelics Can Change Your Politics or Religion Robert Forte’s appearance on Pyschedelics Today: The Hidden History of Psychedelics The Mass Psychology of Fascism, by Wilhelm Reich R. Buckminster Fuller’s concept of ephemeralization Principles: Life and Work, by Ray Dalio Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, by Cal Newport Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, by Douglas Rushkoff The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise, by Martín Prechtel Youtube: Adam Curtis’ documentary: “HyperNormalisation- A different experience of reality” Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this episode, Kyle interviews psychologist and licensed marriage and family therapist, Veronika Gold, and author and clinical psychologist, Harvey Schwartz. They are co-founders (and Gold is the CEO) of Polaris Insight Center in San Francisco, which offers ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. Together, they work as co-therapists, as trainers on ketamine-assisted psychotherapy through Polaris Insight Center, and as investigators in MAPS' Phase 3 MDMA-assisted psychotherapy clinical trial for the treatment of PTSD.  They talk about their training model, the benefits of co-therapy and how a leader/apprentice co-therapy model is likely the future of therapy training, the importance of doing your own work as a therapist, the arguments for therapists not taking drugs, the subtle hierarchal and approval-seeking games uncovered in training, how working with ketamine today is like raising a teenager, the "mystery and mastery" in therapy, medicine, and psychedelics, and the casualties of the mental health care system and the importance of de-programming patients from the effects of its abuses. Notable Quotes “We almost need to create a culture. That’s what we’re trying to do in our training- to create a culture of courage and [fearlessness], honesty about ourselves and about the work, and humility and vulnerability, and to have as much of an egalitarian approach to our patients and clients as possible- for many reasons, but one of the main ones is to, in a way, undo the damage that many of them have had by being in the mental health system for as long as they’ve been in the mental health system, because so much gets laid down in terms of programming about worthlessness or failure or ‘it’s their fault.’ So, I feel like a big part of this model is not just giving the medicine and doing the protocol, but kind of imbuing the person with a whole new worldview about what their struggle means and what their struggle is about. ...It’s almost like de-programming them from the mental health systems’ long-term effect on their sense of self and their identity.” -Harvey Schwartz “Mastery and mystery both have risks, both have shadows. And I think teaching that is really important so that everybody learns about humility by walking down the center path between these possible errors that we could all make- being too rigid, or being too loosey-goosey.” -Harvey Schwartz “The clients do report different experiences, even with the same doses of the medicine. And is it just the set and setting, or is it just the music, or is it really the space that we hold that allows the patient’s psyche to go deeper, to go to the inner-healing intelligence, to access things that will be safely held in that space? That maybe this inner-healing intelligence knows that if that something was not welcome or supported, it’s not going to bring it out because it would be re-traumatizing for them?” -Veronika Gold“Psilocybin’s been on the planet for thousands of years. Iboga, thousands of years. Ayahuasca. These medicines, I feel like, have thousands of interdimensional spiritual support systems between ancestors, and it’s been going on for a long time. Ketamine is like a teenager in the spirit world, I feel like. And so, in a sense, we are really having a chance to impact the morphogenetic field in a greater level than these other things which have been around so long. So all the things we do, every session we have, I think of this. And all of our trainings, we’re kind of adding into this, helping this teenage form of therapy grow up and steward it in the way that we think it should be stewarded from the point of view of serving in the best possible ways, the safest possible ways, and the most expansive possible ways. So it’s kind of existing to be raising a teenager.” -Harvey Schwartz Links Polarisinsight.com About VeronikaGold, LMFT Veronika Gold, a psychologist from the Czech Republic and a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California, has expertise in the treatment of anxiety, depression, and PTSD. She is a co-founder and CEO of Polaris Insight Center in San Francisco, clinic providing Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy treatment for depression, anxiety, PTSD, and other mental health issues. She is also a lead trainer in the Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy Training offered by Polaris Insight Center. She is a sub-investigator and a co-therapist at San Francisco Insight and Integration Center, site participating in Phase 3 MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy clinical trial for the treatment of PTSD sponsored by MAPS, and she is an associate supervisor for Phase 2 trial in Europe. Veronika Gold is as well EMDR therapist, consultant, and volunteer facilitator for the EMDR Humanitarian Assistance Program. She is a certified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner and a Realization Process Teacher. Veronika provides Psychedelic Integration Therapy and serves as an article writer, consultant, trainer, and presenter on Psychedelic Assisted Therapies.Dr. Harvey Schwartz About Dr. Harvey Schwartz Harvey Schwartz has worked as a licensed Clinical Psychologist in private practice in San Francisco since 1985, and is Co-founder of Polaris Insight Center. He received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Emory University, Atlanta, GA. in 1982. He has specialized in treating complex PTSD, severe dissociative disorders, survivors of organized abuse experiences, and individuals working on psycho-spiritual development. Harvey has undergone training in psychedelic psychotherapy with the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and the Ketamine Training Center (KTC), and served as a trainer in two KTC trainings, and currently served as a Sub-Investigator and co-therapist on the MAPS MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy Phase 2/3 Clinical Trials for treatment-resistant PTSD. Harvey is an associate supervisor for the MAPS sponsored clinical trials in Europe. Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle takes the week off and Joe jumps into the podcast backlog for his conversation with who he describes as "the world's foremost expert in music for psychedelic sessions," neuroscientist and founder and CEO of Wavepaths, Mendel Kaelen.  Kaelen talks about his first mushroom experience in a Meow Wolf-like house and his realization of the similarities between psychedelic and musical experiences leading to the creation of Wavepaths. He talks about what Wavepaths has done (experiments in facilitating psychedelic (and healing) experiences through environments specifically designed to create those experiences through music that changes based on the individual and by attending to all senses for a completely immersive experience), what they're doing next (an app that should be released soon to help people do this at home), and what they hope for the future (a mental healthcare system based less on drugs and more on experiences).  But they mostly talk about the power of music: how music is psychedelic, how listening to music can be an experience itself, and how music can be a healer. For anyone who has ever had a life-changing experience due to music, or has had a rush of overwhelming emotions just from hearing a familiar melody- for anyone who still turns their phone off, puts on headphones and truly listens to music they love rather than just throwing on a computer-generated playlist as background noise, this is the podcast for you. Notable Quotes “I always used to say that psychedelic mushrooms were my first introduction into altered states of consciousness, but then at some point, I realized that music actually was.” “When we project into the future and ask how mental healthcare can be (and maybe should be) revolutionized, in my opinion, it will become more and more experiential. Therapists and facilitators of all sorts will be more and more acknowledging and understanding [of] the importance of experience.”  “Music itself really can be a psychedelic, in the real meaning of the word ‘psychedelic,’ and this is really the vision of Wavepaths- that experiences can be medicine, and that we can, with the right music in the right moment and with the right framing of the music (it’s not only about the music itself, it’s also about the way the music is approached- the way one listens to the music), that music can become this mind-revealing, soul-revealing agent for change.”  “Music has this immense potential, but that potential, like the potential in psychedelics, is easily lost if those other variables are not taken seriously. And when it comes to music, it’s really comparable to psychedelic therapy. It really has to do with the same elements, like the capacity to be open to music, to be fully open, to be fully moved by the music itself, and on top of that, to be attentive, to be curious, to be engaged with the unfolding of the experience, the imagery, the thoughts, the feelings, the physical sensations- all of that, and how that is in constant flux and change with the musical experience. And if you attend to that, and are capable to surrender to that, you’re carried on a journey. You’re literally carried on a psychedelic journey inside of yourself in the same way as in a psychedelic therapy context.”  Links Wavepaths.com Meowwolf.com Simplypsychology.org: Carl Rogers About Mendel Mendel Kaelen is a musician and post-doctoral neuroscientist, specializing in the function of music in psychedelic therapy. Mendel’s work focuses on unifying contemporary arts, psychotherapies and intelligent technologies into new models of care-giving. Mendel is founder of Wavepaths, a social venture that revisions mental health care by building meaningful communities and creating accessible psychotherapeutic tools. Wavepaths centers around the concept of art works not as objects but as triggers for experiences, with new experiences posited as the most effective way to bring about positive change in identity. Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics

In this episode, Joe interviews author of Psychedelica Lex, general counsel to the Peyote Way Church of God, founder and president of the Arizona Cannabis Bar Association, and practicing attorney for nearly 30 years, Gary Michael Smith, Esq.  Smith talks about what he specializes in- the law and how it relates to psychedelics, and what's happening most in his world right now: people trying to create new religions, people fighting for their religions to be legally permitted to use entheogens, and investors rapidly trying to push psilocybin and MDMA through the FDA as prescribable medications. He also talks about the Peyote Way Church of God, the history of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (often referred to as RFRA), the problems with banks and dealing with money attached to illegalities, the complications of fighting for legal drug use and the importance of having established history with entheogens, the antihero aspects and deification of Timothy Leary, Nixon and the scheduling of cannabis, federal patent law, today's speed of knowledge and the youth’s resistance of what they’re being told, and how there's an argument to be made that many of today's existing religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam, of note) have a right to use entheogens due to their somewhat newly discovered historical use. Notable Quotes “The short story is, I went looking for this book and I couldn’t find it. It didn’t exist. So I figured well, heck, if I’m going to have to pull and do all this research, I might as well assemble it into a book and fill the void. So that’s how the book came about- written because nobody else wrote it.” “There aren’t really any psychedelic lawyers yet. I’m probably the first one to publicly come out and say that I am. And for good reason: there’s really not a lot of business right now that attracts this. But seeing cannabis unfold over the last decade, as I have- it doesn’t really take a genius to figure out that the law is way behind the curve on this, and lawmakers even more behind the curve, and there’s no shame in trying to catch up, or, Heaven forbid, get ahead.” “I’m advocating a middle ground position where I think that these companies absolutely have a place, I think that they absolutely can do good (it’s not the tool that’s bad, it’s how you use the tool), so what I’d like to see is both the fostering of this licit market where there are companies that can mass-produce and also give people in the West what they’re comfortable with, which is a Western model of medicine. ...I think as long as there is an across-the-board decriminalization so people can still do freely for themselves, let the medical model grow up next to it. There’s no contradiction as far as I’m concerned.”  Links Psychedelicalex.com Peyoteway.org (Peyote Way Church of God) Guidant.law/gary-smith Youtube: Interview with Brad Stoddard on Psychedelica Lex (part 1) Psychedelics Today: Uniform Model Law on Plants and Fungi Medicines: A Better Path to Reregulation, by Gary Michael Smith, Esq. Wikipedia.org: Religious Freedom Restoration Act The Sherbert Test info Wikipedia.org: Employment Division v. Smith Wikipedia.org: Federal Analogue Act Youtube: Nixon being a piece of trash The Most Dangerous Man in America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon and the Hunt for the Fugitive King of LSD, by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis Autobiography Of A Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross: A study of the nature and origins of Christianity within the fertility cults of the ancient Near East, by John M. Allegro The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity, by Jerry and Julie Brown About Gary Michael Smith, Esq.     Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle and Joe have a discussion about spirituality and spiritual development.  Joe was rubbed the wrong way by a podcast he recently listened to where a previously very psychedelic-oriented Qabalist said that psychedelics didn't really help with spiritual growth. This leads to a discussion built on many questions: what is spiritual development? What is enlightenment? Does drug-taking always need a set intention based on growth? Do "I need a break from bullshit" or "I want to have fun with my friends" count as intentions? And who are we worried will discredit or judge us for having those be our intentions or keys to spiritual development?  They also touch on religion and their embedded spiritual goals, the importance and power of the communal aspect of some of these experiences, the community that church brings to people and what's changing as more people move away from religion, hypnosis and the dangers of inaccurate or entirely fabricated "memories," the importance of diversifying your tools for growth, the trouble in trying to define shamanism, the problems with therapists and facilitators bringing their own frameworks into sessions rather than letting clients define their own experience, and the unfortunate passing of the Fungi Academy's Oliver Merivee (fundraiser link below).  Lastly, they remind us that there are only a few spots left for the upcoming Navigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Therapists class, which begins on January 8th. If you've been considering taking the class, what better time than the new year to take that step? Time to leave 2020 behind and step into 2021 with purpose! Happy New Year! Notable Quotes “The thing that had me keep coming back to breathwork is that sense of community. And I think a lot of people start to find their community in these medicine spaces and ayahuasca circles and whatnot, because you’re having an experience together and being able to explore and share that, and sometimes these are so vulnerable and so deep experiences- you’re together with a bunch of strangers and you feel like you just shared things or experienced things that you never really experienced with the closest people in your life. And somehow, that creates a sense of meaning or connection that is hard to find elsewhere. It’s interesting to really kind of view the community or community aspect as part of spirituality, in a sense.” -Kyle “It’s interesting to hear people have these experiences and then have a facilitator say, ‘Yes, that’s what happened to you.’ How do you know? I don’t know. I’ve had plenty of these past life experiences and I have no idea if that was actually real.” -Kyle“Of course this is a complicated topic, and really messy. We wouldn’t have this many episodes of the podcast if it wasn’t.” -Joe Links DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible, by Rick Strassman Shamanic Qabalah: A Mystical Path to Uniting the Tree of Life & the Great Work, by Daniel Moler Tantric Physics I & II (Vol.1: Cave of the Numinous, Vol.2: Sacred Body, Sacred Space), by Craig Williams Thevenusproject.com Psychologyconcepts.com: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness Oliver Merivee (founder of the Fungi Academy)’s Memorial Fundraiser Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this episode, Joe interviews Medical Director of the Kuya Institute for Transformational Medicine, consultant to Onnit Labs, consultant to several international treatment centers, and author of one of Joe's most referenced books, The Concussion Repair Manual, Dr. Dan Engle. Engle is quite knowledgeable when it comes to concussions and traumatic brain injuries and the brain’s ability to heal. He specializes in psychiatry, neurology, peak performance methods, and healing through regenerative and plant medicines. He talks about the sadly very different stories of his siblings, the factors that affect neurological resiliency, the need for establishing neurological performance baselines for athletes, the science behind CBD being a neuro-protectant, the safety and efficacy of psilocybin, how scaling research can dilute data, the importance of dipping one’s toes into non-ordinary states of consciousness before trying psychedelics, how we seem to have hit a new phase of learning more about preparation, and how not trying to achieve transcendence is suppressing a biological need. Engle will be opening a new center in the new year, and for now, is offering a free "Integration call" over Zoom every week at 4:30pm MST. You can learn more at fullspectrummedicine.com. Notable Quotes “It’s fascinating that, in the midst of this medical movement, we’re seeing both of these fields of medicine, in parallel, gain more and more traction- this being the psychedelic medical arena, which is more psychological-based in nature, and then you have the neurologic concussion repair arena [that's] more hardware, brain-tissue based. So you’ve got, now, software and hardware technologies in two parallel medical paths, both accelerating at the same time, with this intermediary bridge between those two fields, which is the psychedelics.” “There’s a lot of interest, there’s a huge demand, the data’s very good, and when done well, there can be a pretty significant profit margin. And so, it still comes down to: the primary focus has to be client care and client outcome, not a profit-driven model.”“When you prepare people well, for sure, you see this magnificent improvement in rates of response, recovery, whether you’re going for healing something like one of those epidemics I mentioned, or just optimization and fulfillment and the radical remembering of our awesomeness and what we’ve come to be a part of. At that point, the whole game has changed. The whole game of life just has changed from scarcity to abundance, from ‘what I have to’ to ‘what I get to,’ from the ‘me, mine and I,’ to the ‘us, the we, and the all.’ This is a shift in consciousness. It’s a shift at the level of the psyche, and psyche means soul, so this is a process where we reconnect with the deeper aspect of our inherent humanity, and no agent on the planet is as consistently predictive to support that process than psychedelics. Near-death experience can do that, but it’s not as easy to control that process.”“We’re always evolving, individually and collectively, and these psychedelic medicines, when done well- these are sparks. They’re ignitors. They’re catalysts of consciousness.” Links Drdanengle.com Fullspectrummedicine.com Concussionrepairmanual.com Revivecenters.com Spravato info Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, by Robert Whitaker The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit, by Joseph Chilton Pearce About Dr. Dan Engle     Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In today’s Christmas episode of Solidarity Friday, Kyle and Joe take a break from the news and instead sit down with Jonas Di Gregorio and Kristina Soriano of the Psychedelic Literacy Fund, a donor-advised fund working to raise money and co-finance the translation and publication of the most important books on psychedelic therapy into a variety of different languages.  Their first project is both volumes of Stan Grof's The Way of the Psychonaut, which they hope to have translated into German, French, and Italian by July (for Grof's 90th birthday), and they have started a list of future projects, with Christopher Bache's LSD and the Mind of The Universe likely next. They talk about early interactions with Rick Doblin, why they went with a donor-advised fund rather than a crowdfunding model, the synchronicities they saw at early steps in their path, what Grof's work has meant to them, and a possible future goal of setting up a Grof museum in Prague. Kyle and Joe also share stories of their interactions with Grof and how his work (and how little he was being discussed) led to the beginnings of Psychedelics Today 4 years ago.  If you're feeling some holiday generosity and want to help more people gain the knowledge Grof has brought to so many, please visit Psychedelicliteracy.org and make a donation (or volunteer translation services or suggest future projects). Lastly, if you celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas from Psychedelics Today! Notable Quotes “We have an inherently global mission. We’re an Italian and a Philippino living in America, trying to translate the work of a Czech psychiatrist.” -Kristina “For me, it’s his capacity to really connect different fields, from quantum physics to psychiatry, [to the] history of religion- it’s really remarkable. The depth of his knowledge is so wide, and I think it can speak to so many people coming from different fields. I remember as a teenager, sharing the content of the books by Grof with friends that were studying physics and friends who were studying philosophy and friends who were studying psychology, and all of them could find something they could really appreciate.” -Jonas “A book can be a harm reduction tool. ...Just having a book at the right time can really help you integrate a difficult experience and change the course of your life. Definitely, this has been the case for me. I didn’t know anyone in my community at the time that could really guide me, and these books played that role.” -Jonas “Especially now, there’s a lot of conversation about diversity- how to increase diversity in the psychedelic community. Maybe the way to do that is literally to speak their language.” -Jonas “I think the mental health crisis isn’t language-specific. I think it happens everywhere.” -Kristina Links Psychedelicliteracy.org Rsfsocialfinance.org The Secret Chief Revealed Paperback, by Myron J. Stolaroff LSD: Doorway to the Numinous: The Groundbreaking Psychedelic Research into Realms of the Human Unconscious, by Stanislav Grof A Course in Miracles: Foundation for Inner Peace The Six Pathways of Destiny, by Ralph Metzner Psychedelics Today: Susan Hess Logeais Thewayofthepsychonaut.com Oregonlive.com: One of the architects of Oregon’s bid to legalize psychedelic mushrooms, Sheri Eckert, has died Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics

In this episode, Joe interviews "Car Bomb"- the 9-year NHL veteran, 2-time Stanley Cup winner (as a member of the Chicago Blackhawks), founder of The Chapter Five Foundation (an organization helping athletes transition into post-sports life), and advocate for the healing power of psilocybin, Daniel Carcillo. Carcillo tells the story of his struggles and depression brought on from post-hockey life transition, 7 diagnosed concussions, and the death of his good friend and fellow player, Steve Montador, who struggled with similar issues before his sudden death in 2015. He talks about the stress of pro sports and the cult-like, team-first attitude in hockey, the hazing athletes experience coming up, the causes and effects of yelling coaches and a "be better" attitude, and how his post-hockey work and speaking out has ostracized him from the community while many people are reaching out to him for help behind the scenes.  His first hero dose of psilocybin forever changed his life, but it wasn't just psilocybin- he's done a lot in the 5 years since that first ceremony, from neurofeedback, acupuncture, deprivation tanks, and using a gyrostim, to regularly microdosing, taking medicinal mushrooms like lion's mane and reishi, meditating, starting a CBD and supplements company, and growing huge crops of cannabis. He talks about how this has all helped improve his life and his relationships with his family, and what he hopes to do with his Chapter Five Foundation and beyond- researching more into what worked for him and developing a protocol/regiment to help people affected by concussions, post-concussive syndrome, TBIs, CTE, or just those struggling with what to do after sports. Notable Quotes “I’m an advocate for everything, for all tiers. I’m an advocate for the Decrim Nature [model] because it’s a lower-tier model to get people this medicine, and then I’m an advocate for the clinical model that people are pushing forward in Oregon, and I’m an advocate for these big pharma/biotech companies coming out and researching. ...You really have to make sure that we’re doing it the right way, and I think a lot of the companies out there are, so I think there’s such an opportunity at the ground floor right now to really get in, and if you have something that’s proven, that’s worked (like we do), then I really, really just feel so passionately about furthering that type of research, to again, get millions of people this type of treatment and this type of option.” “It’s still kind of unbelievable when I begin to talk about it, kind of what I’ve set in motion, but I believe in it so much and I’m still really in awe of what this medicine has done for me. We have one life to live. How do I help the most people that I can?” “I just had to adjust my whole perspective and thinking and how I spoke to myself, changing the negative motivation to positive. But it’s constant work, because I’m just so used to being yelled at and then [being negative towards myself]. It’s definitely one of the biggest shifts that I’ve had, and I had that shift- that was at 2 and a half months after that big ceremony. That’s where I knew- that’s what really convinced me, and I’ll never forget this: I was driving out to my plants and they were about, I don’t know, 3 feet tall, and we were about 2 and a half months in, and I was like, ‘Wow Dan, really good job.’ I had this voice say that and I was like, ‘What the hell was that? Where did that come from?’ I’ve never done that, ever, and I was like ‘Ohhh man, something happened. Something shifted.’” Links Danielcarcillo.com Chapter5foundation.com Madeplanthealth.com (his CBD and supplement company) Twitter Instagram Psymposia.com: Chicago could become largest city to Decriminalize Entheogenic Plants Yahoo Sports: NHL pins Steve Montador's fatal brain injuries on his ‘own lack of due care’ US Patent 6630507: The US Government's Cannabis Patent Parkinsonsnewstoday.com: Silo Pharma Plans Phase 2B Trial Testing Low-dose Psychedelics in Parkinson’s Gyrostim.com Del Jolly’s Psychedelics Today episode (lots of concussion and TBI talk) About Daniel Carcillo Daniel Carcillo is a two time Stanley Cup Champion and played 9 seasons in the National Hockey League. Daniel experienced emotional, sexual and physical trauma within hockey's culture and battled mental health and addiction issues during and post career. When he retired in 2015, after sustaining 7 concussions and due to Post Concussion Syndrome, he founded Chapter 5 Foundation, a charitable organization that helps athletes transition into life after the game. Daniel struggled with PCS symptoms like light sensitivity, slurred speech, insomnia, headaches and head pressure, impulse control issues, anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts and traditional treatments did not work. Daniel brought forth the Decriminalize Nature resolution to the city of Chicago, sits on the Decriminalize Nature National Advisory Board & the board of the Heroic Hearts Project, a registered 501(c)(3) non profit that connects military veterans struggling with mental trauma to ayahuasca therapy retreats. Daniel has recently founded Made Therapeutics, a life sciences company that is researching loading and maintenance doses of psilocybin to treat traumatic brain injury, Post Concussion Syndrome, migraines and TBI related anxiety, depression and PTSD. Daniel and Made Therapeutics will be working towards validating the first novel care option for TBI survivors through Health Canada (IMPD) and FDA (IND) clinical trials, with Pre-IMPD & Pre-IND meetings set to establish a pathway forward to fast track status for traumatic brain injury. Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle and Joe talk about what they've been up to in the last few weeks: doing drugs! Kyle first tells us about his recent experiments with revisiting salvia (which is legal in his state) and how different the experiences were from his young-and-dumb experiments as a teenager- how smaller doses in more ceremonial settings with years of experience in breathwork-inspired non-ordinary states of consciousness helped him see salvia differently. He talks about feeling like he just met the spirit of salvia, and the first message was to "respect the plants." He may be seeing her again. And Joe talks in-depth about his experience last Friday with his first intermuscular ketamine injection- the setting, the music (Sigur Rós- good call, Joe), the dose and timing, and what he heard and felt (and didn't) in his ultimately anxiety-relieving, body-dissolving time in an empty void. Like Kyle, he's now even more open to and supportive of ketamine after the experience. And they also talk about a new ibogaine analog that was recently created called tabernanthalog (or TBG), of which a single injection helped against heroin use relapse in mice for 14 days and doesn't stimulate the brain's reward centers. And they talk about the good that could come from the drug-designing technique used to create it, called function-oriented synthesis.  Notable Quotes “Some people tell me they like 1.2 mg/kg. Some people even like to go as high as 2. I think 2 mg/kg is essentially like, they could harvest all your organs and you wouldn’t notice one bit. Based on how high and dissociated I was, they probably could have done it to me- if they made it quick, like 5 minutes. I probably would have been fine.” -Joe “The way I always framed it before going in was: this is an experience of consciousness without identity, without ego, without anything, really. And I didn’t really feel like there was anything there that was me. The idea of 'Joe' felt like a weird thing, a weird silly thing. There was just, like, I and ego and one consciousness, so it wasn’t like a Hindu, bliss consciousness thing; it was like me, as an entity, experiencing… something. Like empty void.” -Joe “This experience was really just fascinating, like how rapidly my consciousness changed. It wasn’t a hurried, frenetic thing like DMT. It was like, “Oh, nope. You’re just here. You’re chilling. You’re not going anywhere.” -Joe “The MAPs protocol is going to be very expensive. Psychedelic Therapy is already very expensive. So, if we could have a drug that would be safe for somebody to take at home, alone, I think of course we should do that. Not everything is cured through the psychedelic experience. Though a lot of things can be, it’s not the case that everything needs to be.” -Joe Links Sagewisdom.org (Dan Siebert’s site) Wikipedia: Legal status of Salvia divinorum in the United States Youtube: Twig Harper: Has anyone enjoyed smoking Salvia? Salviahealings.com (Christopher Solomon’s site) Psychedelics Today: Dr. Peter Addy- Salvia: Research and Therapeutic Use Naloxone info Ketamine Bladder Syndrome info Sigur Rós on Spotify (this guy thinks this is their best album) Sciencemag.org: Chemists re-engineer a psychedelic to treat depression and addiction in rodents Nature.com: A non-hallucinogenic psychedelic analogue with therapeutic potential Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this episode, Joe interviews Dr. Thomas of Clarity Psychiatry in Boulder, Colorado. Thomas first discusses what he initially looks for in patients (low-lying fruit like a vitamin D deficiency or poor diet) and what he recommends for boosting immunity and improving overall health, then this becomes a bit of an "everything you ever wanted to know about ketamine and ketamine-assisted therapy" podcast. He talks about the range in treatment methods across conventional models and what you could expect to experience in relation to dose, experience, and price, and how he likes to use ketamine in his practice. And he talks about the dependence that can come from more conventional "get dripped" methods, the variation of doses and subsequent effects on most people vs. more sensitive people, ways to calibrate a patient to give them the best (and safest) possible experience, the missed opportunities of models that don't spend as much time on the experience and integration, why he believes so strongly in the efficacy and safety of ketamine (especially when compared to other psychedelics), and why how he'd like to see breathwork be used more in conjunction with both psychedelic and traditional therapies. Notable Quotes “In the worldview of the way I was trained, the whole point of ketamine therapy is not to get somebody hooked on ketamine for the rest of their life. It’s to give them enough corrective expanded experiences of healing and of their own inherent wholeness that they don’t need the ketamine- that whatever was off-balance is coming right.” “I’d like to maybe reframe the word ‘dissociative.’ With ketamine, chemically, in the ketamine state, we are becoming less and less in tune with outside sensory input. We are dissociating with ourselves as a body, temporarily, to some degree. And we are associating with ourselves as something other than body. And there’s some real- I’m just going to go ahead and use the word- there’s some real magic in that possibly. There’s some real healing potential.” “One of the final common pathways, shall we say, of any medicine or technique that can induce a non-ordinary state is temporarily softening the ruminative negative self-narrative that’s so characteristic of human suffering and mental illness. And how you achieve that state, in some ways, is potentially not even that important. ...Holotropic breathwork, or what I call journey breathwork, in any of its forms, absolutely can soften that egoic function and give people access to the parts of themselves that are bigger than that negative self-narrative, and just to bask in the juiciness of what’s possible when that happens. ...And I think from a pragmatic standpoint, if we were to use breathwork as [an] interim integration tool between sessions, could we get away with maybe slightly decreasing the frequency of the more expensive psychedelic sessions? Might there be societal value in that while still retaining the efficacy and the self-learning and the insights and all the good stuff that goes along with that?” Links Claritypsychiatry.com About Dr. Thomas Dr. Thomas graduated from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.  He completed his medical school training at Emory University School of Medicine. He then went on to complete his post graduate psychiatric residency training at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle and Joe sit down and discuss several topics in the news.  First, they congratulate co-founder of Psymposia, President of Adelia, and friend of Psychedelics Today (and first podcast guest) Brett Greene, on Adelia being acquired by CYBIN, for the equivalent of about $15.75 million USD (!!). And they talk about Silo Pharma announcing an upcoming Phase 2B trial testing low-dose psilocybin and LSD on the effects of neurogenesis on patients with Parkinson's disease and how we often forget that psychedelics can help with physical ailments (and not just depression and anxiety), 17 healthcare professionals at TheraPsil being allowed to take psilocybin as part of a training program and the need for therapists and sitters working with psychedelics to have psychedelic experiences themselves before working with others, and rock art evidence of datura being ingested at Pinwheel Cave in California. And they also discuss a very important article about how to keep the psychedelic renaissance from going off the rails. With so much excitement surrounding psychedelics and so many underground groups and professional organizations doing so much without any centralized control, it's too easy for people to drain their bank accounts, jump ahead of science, and overcommit to an idea, forgetting the very real risks of these substances and everything surrounding them. And if we go too far, it just raises the risk of those in power shutting it all down. Notable Quotes “There’s a lot of nervousness around training, I think. Like, what constitutes good training? Not only is a ton of education, but it’s kind of a ton of time. The same way psychoanalysts have to go through psychoanalysis themselves, and therapists have to do therapy themselves, why is it not the case that psychedelic people need to do the same?” -Joe “I think we need to be having some of these honest conversations even if it goes against our mission here at times of wanting to help get these substances legalized, decriminalized, whatever that track is. And [talking about] the promise of it, sometimes maybe we do get idealistic and say ‘This is going to revolutionize and change the world!’ but I also have to think back to some of my past experiences and be like, ‘Do I want to go through that again? I don’t think so.’ I mean, it pushed me out on the other side and I think made me a stronger person to some degree, but going through what I went through in those early years, it was pretty terrifying.” -Kyle “Education and caution, I think is the point here, moving forward, and to be really honest with yourself too, especially if you’re in a place [where you’re] educating folks about psychedelics. How can you listen to other people’s stories and hear that maybe they’re not always light and magic- that people do experience a lot of fallout from it at times and things can get worse?” -Kyle  Links Businesswire.com: CYBIN Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Adelia Therapeutics as Part of its Commitment to Strategic Growth Brett Greene on Psychedelics Today (our first podcast!) Parkinsonsnewstoday.com: Silo Pharma Plans Phase 2B Trial Testing Low-dose Psychedelics in Parkinson’s Therapsil.ca: 17 Canadian Healthcare Professionals Approved to Use Psilocybin for Professional Training Researchgate.net: Psychedelics in Psychiatry– Keeping the Renaissance From Going Off the Rails Snopes.com: Death of Diane Linkletter Drugged: The Science and Culture Behind Psychotropic Drugs, by Richard J. Miller Pnas.org: Datura quids at Pinwheel Cave, California, provide unambiguous confirmation of the ingestion of hallucinogens at a rock art site Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this episode, Joe interviews Ph.D., Professor at the University of Maryland focusing on economics and global business studies, Advisory Board Member of the Usona Institute and Synthesis Institute, and co-founder of the Transformative Capital Institute, Bennet Zelner. Zelner discusses the problems with our current economic, healthcare, therapeutic, and community paradigms- that our prevailing model is one of hyper-individualistic, drug-first action, compounded by a crisis of connection (the epidemic of loneliness we're experiencing), a crisis of extraction (giant corporations replacing local businesses with the bulk of profit being sent outside the community), and a crisis of depletion (decisions about community resources being made by those outside the community). And he talks about how his Transformative Capital Institute aims to facilitate many small changes to lead to large paradigm shifts, centered on his pollination approach- recognizing and encouraging the intrinsic interdependence between individual and community well-being. He talks about the various projects the Transformative Capital Institute is working on, the way change happens and the complications of creating new paradigms from flawed ones, and how the pollination approach relates to psychedelics: using the newfound window of openness people experience after an experience to connect them with their community systems and surrounding environment- to help heal a person while revitalizing currently-broken systems at the same time. Notable Quotes “The pollination approach is rooted in a core, ecological principle, which is that the health of a system and of the elements in a system depends on the continual renewal and recirculation of resources within that system, and that’s the complete opposite of what we have right now.”“What you’re not seeing is the reduction in subsequent local economic activity that’s going to occur as a result of the few bucks you just saved at Walmart. One of the other projects that I’m working on with a few other folks attempts to quantify that so that people can see what the effects are of spending their money locally vs. spending it at outposts of giant corporations. And I think if we can make that information accessible and comprehensible to people, then we can change behavior without even having to build in some kind of strong form incentive.” “We’ve been taught by every institution in our society from the time that we are born that we’re not enough, that there’s not enough to go around, and in order to get ahead, we basically need to win at the expense of someone else, who loses. Even once we recognize how fallacious that is intellectually, there’s still a lot of work to be done to eliminate the deep, cognitive imprints in which that type of thinking is enshrined. ...I think that psychedelics-- as I said, they’re tools of personal transformation, so they can help people heal from trauma, etc. But I think they can also help people move into new paradigm ways of thinking and behaving.” “In terms of shifting to a new paradigm in the healthcare system, I think the key shift needs to be one from a system that is focused on managing disease or managing disease symptoms (which is what we currently have) ...toward a system that’s focused on producing well-being. And I think psychedelics have a big role to play in that type of system.” Links MAPS.org: “The Pollination Approach to Delivering Psychedelic-Assisted Mental Healthcare,” by Bennet A. Zelner About Bennet Zelner     Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, after a short and much-needed break, Kyle and Joe return, but don't really touch on any news. This time, they have a very open conversation largely focused on philosophy and capitalism. They dive into a lot of philosophical questions: are we reducing the mystical to the medical? Do we understand enough about spirit and somatic energies to measure them? How much are therapists and sitters interpreting mystical experience and assigning meaning to it for others vs. teaching people how to interpret it themselves? What makes a God? Is commodifying the sacred bad? And what makes something sacred other than it being significant? And the classic: What is good?  They also touch on Harvard School of World Religions' year-long series on psychedelics and the future of religion, the Divine Command Theory, James Kent's DoseNation podcast series, Charles Eisenstein and the concept of deflationary money, the billionaire pledge, triple bottom line thinking and other ways to incentivize employees to make businesses closer to co-ops, and why not all capitalism is bad. Lastly, Joe highly recommends Tom O'Neill and Dan Piepenbring's book, CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, which touches on MKUltra, the Phoenix Program, how the government used Charles Manson, and how the drug war was a logical consequence of the paranoia of the U.S.S.R. and communism toppling the USA and capitalism. Notable Quotes “Coming from the somatic world, our bodies- I think, sometimes we dismiss that and maybe might call that a little ‘woo woo,’ but how is your body an actual instrument that can help you understand maybe what’s going on? It’s firing a bunch of signals all the time, right? Information is just coming in and we have to try to make sense of it. Is it an appropriate instrument to try to learn how to discern the information that’s coming in? Could we finely tune that?” -Kyle “It’s helpful to have diagnostic categories, but I think we’re taking the diagnostic categories a little too seriously and making them a little too real. A diagnostic category is not as real as a glass of water in your hand. One’s real concrete, one’s real abstract. Both are helpful at times. Both could be harmful, depending on what you do with the glass.” -Joe“A lot of folks want to just use psychedelics and escape the world, like the ‘drop out’ thing. Like, ‘I’m just going to be with the spirit world.’ But it’s like, what good is you being with the spirit world if you’re not having any impact on the world world?” -Joe “Being hubristic enough to say that ‘I have an answer’- that’s where I see the problem. Being willing to engage in conversation with people with a lot more experience with this kind of thing is probably where it’s at. Like, ok, let’s talk to 4-5 economists and see what their opinion is. Maybe talk to some professional ethicists to see what their opinion is. I don’t think anybody is going to have the answer, but by hearing all of those perspectives, we can learn more.” -Joe Links Center for the Study of World Religions: Medicalizing Mysticism: Religion in Contemporary Psychedelic Trials (youtube) Divine Command Theory Psymposia.com: “Lucy In The Sky With Nazis: Psychedelics and the Right Wing” by Brian Pace, PhD Sage Journals: Increased nature relatedness and decreased authoritarian political views after psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression James Kent’s DoseNation podcast The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct, by Thomas S. Szasz The Giving Pledge turns 10: These billionaires pledged to give away half their wealth, but they soon ran into a problem CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties, by Tom O'Neill with Dan Piepenbring Support the show! Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this episode, Joe interviews writer, director, and producer of the recent documentary, "The Way of the Psychonaut: Stanislav Grof's Journey of Consciousness," Susan Hess Logeais.  The film, which we streamed and presented a panel for back in October, was co-produced by Stan Grof himself, and tells of his journey from his youth in Nazi-occupied Prague to Esalen to today, with much of Logeais and her theory-affirming life story mixed in. It features interviews with many big names, including Fritjof Capra and Rupert Sheldrake, and full-length interviews can now be found on the film's website; 2 of which are conversations between Grof and legends we've lost recently: Ralph Metzner and Michael Harner. It is Joe's favorite film on Grof and his work. Logeais talks about making the movie and meeting such big names in the field, wonders how differently children might grow up if quantum physics and a respectful agreement with nature were taught in school, discusses cesarian births and the differences they could create in fear or stress response in comparison to kids born traditionally, and talks about the power of breathwork and its enormous influence on psychedelic-assisted therapy. Notable Quotes “When I met Stan and heard him speak and heard what he spoke about- tantric science, mythology, Eastern spiritual traditions, even quantum physics, Shamanic journeywork- there were so many things that he spoke about that I had explored on my own before I met him. And then in the course of making the movie, I realized that he had introduced many of those concepts during his 14 years at Esalen. And so I was resonating with him on a level-- it’s like he was impacting my life before I met him.” On using MDMA with psychedelics: “Perhaps as an introduction to a psychedelic experience, especially for people who are older, it might not be a bad idea. I know the anxiety that I had occasionally when something was going really fast and very deep. But I agree with you in that the depth and that anxiety passes, and it’s in the learning to get past that anxiety that we develop capacity for reflection and to move away from reactivity. So I think maybe for the first trip, just to say, ‘Ok, this is what you’re in for, and next time we’re not going to do this.’” “I just want to say how valuable I think Stan’s contribution is, and how proud I am, or how, I guess, grateful I am to have worked with him in the creation of this film. And I’m so glad that you enjoyed it because I wanted to take his theories, his discoveries, his contributions, and make them accessible and interesting so that people could watch it and come away with an understanding that would hopefully inspire them to then go and do the deep work. And I hope people come to the website and visit the live stream archive page so that they can gain a deeper understanding of all these amazing concepts that Stan participated in sharing during his time at Esalen and his ITA conferences.”  Links Susanhesslogeais.com Thewayofthepsychonaut.com The Way of the Psychonaut facebook Blackfoot Physics: A Journey Into the Native American Worldview, by F. David Peat Stangrof.com Grof-legacy-training.com Holotropic.com: Grof Transpersonal Training About Susan Hess Logeais Susan holds a demonstrated history of working in the entertainment industry. She is skilled in Music Videos, Film, Documentaries, Commercials, and Theatre. She demonstrates strong entrepreneurship professional with a Interdisciplinary Degree focused in Transformational Entertainment and Human Consciousness from Marylhurst University. She is an actress and producer, known for Gone (2012), Not Dead Yet (2009) and The Way of the Psychonaut: Stanislav Grof's Journey of Consciousness (2020). Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In today’s Solidarity Fridays episode, the typical Solidarity Fridays format is switched up yet again, this time with Joe interviewing author of best-selling book, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name, and recent Joe Rogan Experience guest, Brian Muraresku. Because where do you go after Joe Rogan? Psychedelics Today, of course.  Muraresku discusses how his fascination with Latin and Greek and the 1978 book, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck) and its proposal of a psychedelic sacrament of sorts being imbibed at the Rites of Eleusis led him to spend about 12 years searching for evidence to prove it. From the idea of "graveyard beer," to Alcibiades and the profanation of mysteries, to wine parties to interact with the dead called refrigeriums, Muraresku dives deep into his findings: that the wine they drank was, at the least, spiked with herbs and spices to create something very different and likely hallucinogenic, that participants were seeking immortality, a euphoric ecstasy, and communion with both God and the dead, that both the Dionysian Gospel and Christianity are heavily related to the Rites of Eleusis, and that these ceremonies don't appear to have been isolated to Eleusis- that people took what they learned and practiced elsewhere, in what Denise Demetriou refers to as "open-access sanctuaries." Notable Quotes “Some of the legacies of this civilization, from democracy and the arts and sciences to literature and philosophy and the very concept of a university- all these inheritances are the things that we associate with the very literate Greeks. And there stands Euelisis at the center of it all. ...And they [the Rites] were seen as so important, so central, so integral to life at the time, that even Cicero, a Roman in the first century B.C.- he referred to Euelisis as ‘the most exceptional and divine thing that Athens ever produced.’ So it wasn’t democracy, the arts, sciences, etc. It was Eleusis.” “They saw something. The thinking for a long time was that maybe it was a theatrical performance- maybe there was something happening in this temple that has been lost to time. And then that book I mentioned in 1978, The Road to Eleusis, was saying as long as we’re talking about a vision, why can’t it be something that was produced internally? Why couldn’t it be one of these great epiphanic psychedelic visions? And so, as a hypothesis, it makes sense just based on the way people talked about this experience. It was a once in a lifetime experience that essentially erased the fear of death and made these initiates immortals. And weirdly, which is why I picked this up in the first place, it’s very, very similar to the testimony that comes from the volunteers in the Johns Hopkins experiments with psilocybin. It’s again, a once in a lifetime single dose of psilocybin [that] seems to result in these profound, mystical transformations in people; including atheists, who will describe it as among the most meaningful experiences of their lives.” “I think that there was a historical Jesus, and I think that we have these relatively conflicting accounts of what he was and what the message was in the canonical gospels that have come down to us. But we have these other gospels and this Gnostic literature that didn’t make it in The Bible, and the gospel of Mary Magdalene. And what comes across to me, time and again, are people trying to find ecstasy, people looking for communion with Jesus. And again, you don’t have to look off into all this esoteric stuff just to focus on the very simple proposition that the Eucharist is an immortality potion, plain and simple.” Links TheImmortalityKey.com The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck Wikipedia.org: Diagoras of Melos (additional Alcibiades/“profanation the mysteries” info R. Gordon Wasson’s 1957 Life magazine article The Dionysian Gospel: The Fourth Gospel and Euripides, by Dennis R. MacDonald Youtube: Joe Rogan Experience #1543 - Brian Muraresku & Graham Hancock Youtube: His recent appearance on CNN The Immortality Key on Audible About Brian Muraresku Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics  

In this episode, Kyle and Joe interview singer, speaker, social entrepreneur, and founder of numerous charities and organizations, Tania de Jong.  What brings de Jong to Psychedelics Today are her most recent and most psychedelically-inclined undertakings: co-finding Mind Medicine Australia and submitting an application to Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) to reschedule psilocybin from Schedule 9 ("prohibited substances") to Schedule 8 ("controlled medicines"), the results of which should be decided in February. She talks about her Tim Ferriss and Michael Pollan-inspired psychedelic journey, the healing power and science behind singing with other people, session playlist construction, and the numerous accomplishments of Mind Medicine Australia and their biggest goal: setting up a center of emerging mental health therapies to look at research and development, manufacturing, and economic modeling to ensure these medicines can be widely accepted and an industry can be correctly and efficiently built around them in Australia. And she talks a lot about the isolation and fear behind Covid-19 and the effects we're seeing now, the effects future generations will see, and why this could be the crisis we need to catalyze psychedelics more into the healing mainstream. Notable Quotes “It became really obvious that Australia didn’t really have an ecosystem to bring these medicines to the wider community. ...And so we thought, well, the best thing we could do to help the millions of people in Australia who were suffering (let alone the rest of the world) is to set up a charity that would make sure that these medicines became accessible, affordable, [and] available to people, no matter where they were, what their background was- if they were screened and screened to be appropriate, that they would have access to these medicines in medically-controlled environments. They wouldn’t get to take the medicines home, but they’d get to actually heal, and that would be the greatest gift we could possibly give.” “The only indicator here has been about Covid deaths and Covid cases- that’s what gets reported on. But an actual fact- the cure is proving to be far worse than the illness itself, and what we’re seeing is that there will be far more deaths of despair and deaths from mental illnesses and domestic violence and the trauma that our younger generations are going to face potentially for their whole lives that will lead to addiction and other mental illnesses, and no one’s counting those costs yet. But when they do, those figures are going to blow any Covid deaths and lasting illness out of the water.” “We had an epidemic of loneliness and social isolation well before this crisis, and what this has done is just made that far worse. ...People are experiencing [an] enormous sense of isolation and separateness and this is why these medicines are so important, because as we all know, they create this sense of connection and oneness, and a sense that we’re part of everything, [and] everything is part of us. That’s a wonderfully comforting understanding to have and it makes being alone easier to bear when you feel that sense of gratitude and unity and that sense of expanded consciousness.”  Links Taniadejong.com Mindmedicineaustralia.org Mind Medicine Australia: 2021 International Summit on Psychedelic Therapies for Mental Illness info Her TEDx Talk: “How singing together changes the brain” “The Trip Treatment,” by Michael Pollan Mindmedicineaustralia.org: Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies Their press release about submitting application for rescheduling of psilocybin and MDMA Mind Medicine Australia: Youtube Their animated video: “Everyone should have access to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy" About Tania de Jong     Support the show Patreon Leave us a review on Facebook or iTunes Share us with your friends Join our Facebook group - Psychedelics Today group – Find the others and create community. Navigating Psychedelics