Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Kathleen Lakey
Today we feature an interview that Charles Lighthouse recently conducted with Kat Lakey. Besides talking about her latest project, which will be the world’s first Psychedelic Athenaum, they discussed the Psychedelic Assembly, which was a conference that Kat and her friends produced a few months ago.
Some highlights of this interview include a dicusssion of her work for the salon, including the production of an audio version of Leonard Pickard’s book The Rose of Paracelsis. Also, Kat tells talks about the harrowing experience of being deep in a Peruvian jungle when the pandemic hit and marshall law was declared in Peru.
The World’s First Psychedelic AthenæumThe Kat Lakey Archive on the Psychedelic SalonPsychedelic Salon Archives: The Rose of ParacelsusAthenaums: Where Greek Ideals Meet New England Charm2022 Psychedelic Assembly Speakers
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Transcript
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Three-dimensional, transforming, musical, linguistic objects.
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Alpha and Omega.
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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And today we get to hear from an old,
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or I should say a young old friend of ours, Kat Lakey. You’ll remember Kat from several
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podcasts over the past few years, one in which she and her sister Alexa interviewed their
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parents to talk about psychedelics. Well then I talked Kat and Alexa into taking on the
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massive project of creating an
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audiobook version of Leonard Picard’s masterpiece, The Rose of Paracelsus, and you’ll hear more about
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this in a few minutes. But I should point out that the primary purpose of this interview with Kat
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is to publicize her soon-to-close fundraiser for the opening of the world’s first psychedelic
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athenum in New York City. And I apologize for only getting this out just a short time before
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her fundraiser ends, but the request came in when I was in the final days of recovering from COVID,
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and well, it kind of slipped through the cracks. So here at the last minute, I recruited Charles
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Lighthouse to conduct the interview with Kat that we are about to listen to.
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As it turned out, I think Charles did a much better job than I could have,
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because, well, I already knew so much of Cat’s story about escaping from a Peruvian jungle during the early weeks of the pandemic lockdowns.
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It’s a really interesting and harrowing story, but Kat has done so many
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other things since then that I probably wouldn’t have remembered to even ask about the jungle
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escape. In fact, instead of me just talking about it, let’s go ahead and listen to this
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interview right now, and I’ll come back afterwards with a few final thoughts.
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Good afternoon. I’m Charles Lighthouse,
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the co-host of the twice-weekly
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Psychedelic Salon community meetings.
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You can join us by supporting
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the Psychedelic Salon Patreon.
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We meet every Monday evening
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at 6.30 Pacific time
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and every Thursday morning
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at 11.30 Pacific time.
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And you can be a part
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of the ongoing community
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talking about what’s happening in psychedelics,
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your integration experiences,
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and more with Lorenzo and folks from the Psychedelic Salon.
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And this year, the Salon is returning
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with a program of new talks,
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including from Palenque Norte and the Psychedelic Assembly,
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which our guest this afternoon was instrumental in shaping,
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as well as interviews like this one.
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We’re also open to submissions, especially of lectures by psychedelic elders and emerging elders.
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So if you have some archival tape of somebody amazing that you can share with us, please reach out.
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I am at charles at psychedelicsalon.com.
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I am at Charles at psychedelicsalon.com.
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Today we are talking to Kathleen Lakey of the Psychedelic Athenaeum in New York City,
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a new psychedelic library, event, and co-working space dedicated to psychedelic culture.
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I first met Kat at the Psychedelic Assembly in New York last fall,
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which was a small by design conference that gathered an extraordinary range of elders and emerging elders from Dennis McKenna and William Leonard Picard and Julie
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Holland to exciting newer voices in the community to be talking about the contours of the psychedelic
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environment.
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And it was within this space called the Blue Building in New York City, which is an island
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of psychedelic thought within the strange finance-oriented conflators of the east side
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of Manhattan.
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And I was really struck by the sincerity, skill in organization, thoughtfulness to the small details,
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and thoughtfulness to the big picture that Kat and her team brought into creating this environment and this conference.
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So it was with great excitement when we learned that they are working as a team with Kat leading the effort
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to use the blue building where the conference occurred as a springboard for a
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permanent space dedicated to psychedelic culture in New York. And it’s exciting. It’s rooted in
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a long history of athenums, which would certainly be something that tickles Terrence McKenna to no
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end to know that there’s something of this nature.
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And so to start, Kat, I would like to, and because it’s urgent, please bring us to date on what the vision for the Athena is, how people can get involved and what your immediate needs are for it.
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Yeah. So the vision is to have a brick and mortar home base for the psychedelic community in New York City where people can stop by five days a week, after hours, nights and weekends when there’s events.
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But a place where they can come by at any point to meet people, to connect, to grab a cup of coffee, to read psychedelic literature, because it’s going to be a library space as well as a bookstore,
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sort of a museum quality element to it. We have a thousand square foot storefront at this,
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like you said, the Blue Building in Manhattan. So the location is secured, but we’re currently
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running a crowdfunding campaign for the build out. So we need to buy a lot more books before
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we can call ourselves a library and some co-working desks and some other repairs to get it finalized.
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But the dream is that it’ll be sort of a place where all the different sides of the community can come together,
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you know, from the drug policy people to the people who are in the psychedelic industry and the pharmaceutical side or the medical side,
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the pharmaceutical side or the medical side, researchers, students, you know, even just recreational users or people who are curious about psychedelics, a place that welcomes everyone,
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where they can come and meet each other and share ideas and kind of cross-pollinate and make new
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friends. That’s sort of the goal. And something that I felt when I was within the space is how much care was put into just creating this welcoming environment through subtle details.
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Like the thing that I caught on the way out the door that totally blew my mind is that there was an IBM Selectric on top of a glass display case that had a stained sheet of paper in it. And I looked at it and typed on
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there was this letter. And maybe you can tell me a little bit about what I’m describing.
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Yeah. So the room that you’re describing is the room that’s going to become the Athenaeum. And
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my friend who owns the building has three different typewriters from various points in time.
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One’s from like the 80s, the one you’re describing, and then a couple are from like probably the 40s or 50s.
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So in preparing for the psychedelic assembly in September, I was trying to do all these little finishing touches.
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And one night I was up until I think two or three in the morning.
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I had printed off pages from True Hallucinations, one of Richard Evans Schulte’s books, and an Aldous Huxley
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Doors of Perception, and
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printed it off with a fake
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typewriter font, and then
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t-stained it and put it in there to make it look like
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the authors had typed them up.
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I’m glad someone noticed that
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little detail, because
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it took a little
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bit of effort, but I’m glad it didn’t
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go unnoticed.
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Well, that’s what was so cool to me about what you and your team were doing is that there were a lot of little details.
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There were a lot of little details.
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I mean, looking at the bookcases and you’re looking at my library right now, I’m obviously a book fetishist, but seeing all of these, even in its infancy,
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seeing all of these books that really represented a compendium of psychedelic thought. And that’s one of the things that’s really interesting to me about the Athenium is that in addition to being a
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networking and a co-working space, you’re attempting to compile the body of published information. Tell me a little bit about
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what that looks like, what the shape of the library is going to be. We’re currently accepting
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book donations and we’re working with Synergetic Press. They’re going to be one of our partners in
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this. So they just sent us like 16 or 17 of their titles. And we’re going to
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slowly build out our bookshelves with donations. And once the crowdfunding campaign ends,
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we’ll buy more books too. I mean, there’s thousands of books on psychedelics out now and
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a new one each day. So as far as how we’re going to organize it, I’m not entirely sure. I’ve been
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thinking maybe by substance or by subject matter. I mean, you could fill an entire bookshelf just with books on DMT
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or ayahuasca. So tell me about the contours of your current need. I understand that you’re
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working in a crowdfunding campaign right now and want some direct support from the community. So
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tell me a little bit about what your goals are and how people can get involved, both in terms of providing financially and providing otherwise.
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Yeah. So we have the space secured, but it’s essentially an empty thousand square foot
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storefront right now. We have some books, but we’re raising money essentially to buy
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furniture, bookshelves, a lot more books. We need doors to partition the space, some electrical
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rewiring, essentially just a little bit of money to get the place going and get everything started
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and initiated. But I mean, if anyone wants to contribute, we’re gladly accepting any book
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donations or furniture, volunteer assistance, any in-kind help is is also appreciated it doesn’t have to be any
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in a monetary donation so and and it’s a it’s a reasonably modest goal for that kind of build-out
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i think you’re looking for what fifteen thousand dollars yeah so it’s it’s a reasonably modest goal
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and that’s 15 to 30 people of means that will have some connection to the communities in new york
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giving a little bit deeply.
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So hopefully you’re able to reach that.
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And it’s a GoFundMe campaign.
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How can people find it?
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I mean, we’ll put it in the show notes for this show also, but what’s your base URL?
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It’s on Indiegogo.
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And you can also find it on our website, the psychedelicassembly.com.
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Okay, cool.
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So Kat, I’d like to get a little bit more into your origins
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because I think you are uniquely qualified to run a space like this. But I want to understand
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how you found your way into psychedelics from the lens of also how the athenium would have
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served your younger self. It’s kind of a long winding path. I guess I first got interested in
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psychedelics probably in my late teens. I took acid with my sister and we were both fascinated with it. But we lived in Arizona at the time and didn’t really have anyone else we knew who had had these experiences or we could talk to about it.
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So, this kind of space would have been incredibly useful to me as a young person, having a place viral video back in 2011 based off of those experiences, kind of a video montage of a Charlie Chaplin
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speech from the end of the film, The Great Dictator. After that, I kind of did some video
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editing for various organizations in the psychedelic scene, Copy, the Ayahuasca Hub,
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which I’m not sure is around anymore. Jason Silva, I made a video for him. I did one for the
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Thank You Plant Medicine campaign. That was a couple of years ago. Yeah. And then just through
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some personal points in my life, I ended up meeting Dr. Dennis McKenna in Hawaii after I had taken
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ayahuasca a few times. And I knew I wanted to work with it long-term. I needed to in a certain sense.
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And so I asked him for a recommendation for
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an ayahuasca who would take me on as an apprentice, preferably a woman, preferably someone who spoke
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English because I didn’t speak any Spanish and somewhere safe because I was traveling alone.
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And so he referred me to a woman named Jessica Bertram, who was working in Cusco at the time.
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She was German, but she’d been living in
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Peru for about 20, 25 years, living in the Amazon, really, really immersed in this stuff. And yeah,
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so he gave me her contact info. I wrote to her and ended up working with her in the Peruvian
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Amazon for about three years. So what was your path? So you began with LSD with your sister,
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which you don’t hear a lot of people talking about starting with LSD these days. So kudos to you for that one. And it then moves into ayahuasca. So could you give us
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a little bit of your psychedelic CV? And I always feel like different medicines do different things.
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What different medicines did for you as you matured into the medicine?
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Yeah. I mean, I guess my starting point would have been cannabis. I feel like that was my first
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quote unquote plant spirit. I started smoking when I was about 14 and I felt like I
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was communicating with the soul of the plant in a sense. And I was just fascinated by, you know,
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exploring my own mind and altered states of consciousness. And that sort of led me to the
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music of the sixties. Like I love the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd, and all of this culture
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and art and music that I loved seems to point to LSD and bright red arrow. So I tracked it down
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when I was in my late teens because I was just so curious, what were the Beatles singing about?
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What was all this hype? And as soon as I took it, it all clicked and it kind of changed the
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course of my life, I would say. And then from there? From there, experimented quite a bit with LSD,
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started taking psilocybin because it was a little bit easier to measure the dose, I would say.
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And also I was very fond of like the visual aspect of the experience too. And for me,
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mushrooms were always more visual. Around that time, I was listening to
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pretty much every Terrence McKenna and Dennis McKenna lecture I could get my hands on.
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Since I didn’t have any friends in high school, I could talk to this stuff about it. It was sort of
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like, I don’t know, sort of felt like I was actually connecting with someone who understood
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the things I’d experienced. That’s how I found the salon years and years ago. I was listening to
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pretty much every old lecture I could find.
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And yeah, I mean, I smoked DMT a handful of times around then and then moved to Berkeley out of Arizona, I guess, because for same reasons, we were trying to find our people and they didn’t
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seem to be in Phoenix. So we went to what seems like the hub of psychedelic culture at the time,
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which was the Bay Area. And then sort of, I guess, lost the hub of psychedelic culture at the time, which was the
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Bay Area. And then sort of, I guess, lost the thread of psychedelics for a while as I was
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coming into my own in my early 20s. And then just was struggling with some really intense
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personal issues, which led me to ayahuasca. It’s interesting that you hear you say,
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you know, lost the thread. And it’s intriguing in the psychedelic community right now. We’re building this kind of professional class of psychedelic people.
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And that’s good in a lot of ways.
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In other ways, there are times in one’s life where there seems to be a call to the medicines.
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And there’s times in one’s life where the medicines are always kind of in the periphery,
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but not necessarily calling you to share consciousness
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at that time. So I’m wondering if you can speak a little bit to how you knew when to answer the
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call to medicine, how you knew when not to, and specifically for people that are navigating this,
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why it’s okay to take a break? Well, in my early 20s, I think the break came just because I was
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sort of grappling with coming of age and moving to a new city and making new friends who weren’t
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particularly interested in psychedelics. And, you know, we’re much more into alcohol culture.
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So I sort of gravitated towards them. And I would say that’s sort of how I lost the thread at that period. Right now, I am on sort of a ayahuasca hiatus.
00:16:28 ►
You know, after having taken it so many times, I’m taking an intentional break from it, doing what my teacher always referred to as the homework, which is the part nobody likes to do.
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But it’s the after, you know, after the ceremony, it’s integrating all of the stuff you learned into your day-to-day life and making changes and applying the lessons you learned.
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The breaks are important, I think, especially when they’re needed and just taking some intentional time away from it to process and to apply the lessons.
00:17:00 ►
What does that look like for you? What are some long-term effects, integration strategies? Integration as a lifestyle seems to be what you’re talking about.
00:17:09 ►
Yeah. I mean, some of my biggest lessons down there were about learning how to communicate with people better, being less sort of what I’ve been focusing on with the
00:17:25 ►
Psychedelic Assembly and with the Athenaeum. It’s my own personal lesson, but it’s also something
00:17:29 ►
that I feel is really needed in the world. We all could use a little bit more human connection and
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love in our lives. So I’m doing it for myself as well as for other people, I guess.
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Well, and that’s something that we learn in the medicine that a lot of how we’re showing up to resource ourselves so that we can resource the collective.
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And, you know, certainly in my recent experiences with ayahuasca asking for help was like one of
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the hardest parts. Yeah. It’s, it’s super, super challenging, but you know, we can’t do it alone.
00:18:05 ►
super challenging. But, you know, we can’t do it alone. It’s, you know, it’s a collective effort.
00:18:13 ►
You know, we’ve all met that guy and I hate to say it, but it’s kind of usually a guy who sits with the medicine a couple of times and then decides that they’re going to be a shaman,
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you know, and that the medicines they’re calling and, and it’s okay to have that thought,
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like I’m not disparaging it, but then they start talking about it’s okay to have that thought like i’m not disparaging it but then they
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start talking about it really loudly to anybody that’s going to listen and that’s where you see
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like the the memes that were going around around halloween about the spirit halloween costumes for
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psychedelic people you know it’s it’s easy to say i’m gonna go serve the medicine, but to actually do it, to actually reach out to Dr.
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McKenna and say, you know, this is what I’m looking for. And to actually submit your resume
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to the plants. How’d you do it? How did you know that that call was a real call?
00:18:58 ►
I mean, I honestly, in my heart of heart, I’m not sure I ever really believed I was qualified to serve ayahuasca to other people. But I think I knew that I needed to learn those practices and walk that path in order to heal myself.
00:19:26 ►
had me go very slow and learn all the really like granular details about the different plants and the different, all their different applications and, and the whole web of life
00:19:31 ►
that surrounds ayahuasca and the Amazon, you know, it’s, it’s not just, it’s not just serving
00:19:35 ►
ayahuasca down there. It’s, it’s an entire, you know, biological pharmacy of, of other
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plants and practices that pull it all together. And it wasn’t, it was fun at times, but a lot of it
00:19:46 ►
wasn’t fun. And it was, it was a challenge, but I, yeah, I think I knew the entire time I was down
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there that it wasn’t gonna, that I wasn’t cut out to serve medicine to other people. And that the,
00:20:00 ►
why I, the real reason I was down there was to, I guess, find my own healing.
00:20:08 ►
How did that healing – I guess I want to know a little bit about your day-to-day and how your day-to-day down there helped reveal the things that you had to do for your healing. So I lived in Cusco and then about two or three weeks every month, we would go, we would drive up the Andes and then down into the Amazon in the upper Madrid de Dios region, which is sort of like south, southeast of Machu Picchu.
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And what ended up happening is I became sort of the retreat coordinator.
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So I would be the person that people would get in contact with when they wanted to go to the center, which was very small.
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We took like three or four people max once a month. And I would bring them from the airport in Cusco in a van down to
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the jungle and kind of prepare them for what they were going into both physically and psychologically.
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And then I would just sort of be the, I wouldn’t say the ayahuasca as apprentice. I was more like her secretary.
00:21:11 ►
So I would do a lot of odd jobs for kind of assist these people to be an ear for them to talk to whenever they needed help. I mean, I wasn’t an integration specialist at all, but like, I just,
00:21:15 ►
you know, I’d been through it enough on my own end that I could offer whatever advice I had.
00:21:20 ►
And so it was basically a lot of, a lot of just like helping people through the Amazonian climate
00:21:24 ►
and the ayahuasca experiences as much as I could, you know, trying to hold space with tobacco.
00:21:29 ►
It sounds like an extraordinary amount of empathy and compassion was demanded in that work.
00:21:36 ►
Did you ever experience compassion fatigue?
00:21:40 ►
How did you maintain the ability to hold space for people when they’re in such a
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porous and volatile state of mind? I think the fact that I would be drinking the ayahuasca
00:21:51 ►
every time I went down there or almost every time helps with the compassion fatigue because
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I don’t know how to explain it. It never seemed to run out. Every time I touched base with the
00:22:03 ►
ayahuasca, it always reminded me that we’re all how, how deeply connected we all are and how, you know, we’re all
00:22:09 ►
basically one consciousness and just to hold, to hold compassion for the people who are down there
00:22:15 ►
because every, every single person I met down there had some form of trauma they were working
00:22:19 ►
through. It was, it’s what I kept seeing time and time again, you know, something had happened to
00:22:24 ►
them in their childhood or young adulthood that they were processing and working through.
00:22:28 ►
And it’s, it was, it was hard, you know, it was, it was hard to hear these stories, but it also was beautiful because it’s, it shows sort of this commonality between people that we all, you know, we all have this, these similar experiences that we’re working through.
00:22:41 ►
And the only thing that helps us work through it is each
00:22:45 ►
other, really. And you had mentioned that this specific intention of working with a female
00:22:53 ►
ayahuasquera and concerns about safety as a woman in her 20s working in that region. Can you tell
00:23:00 ►
me a bit about what you experienced from the lens of gender while you were working in that space with those medicines in that part of the world?
00:23:10 ►
I mean, the region I went to, Cusco always seemed incredibly safe to me.
00:23:15 ►
I mean, I was nervous when I first went down there.
00:23:17 ►
I was about 26, I think, because I’d never traveled outside of the country alone or ever, period.
00:23:26 ►
traveled outside of the country alone or, or ever period. But after, after a few months, I got really used to it and it was, I don’t know, it was a very safe and welcoming environment for
00:23:32 ►
me. I’d walk alone at night, which is something that like, and I felt totally comfortable doing
00:23:36 ►
it, but like even at times in San Francisco, I would had felt less safe than in San Francisco,
00:23:41 ►
or sorry, than in Peru. So it was, I think it largely depends on where in South America you go. This particular
00:23:49 ►
region I was in and the part of the jungle always felt very safe, even as a woman.
00:23:55 ►
Advice for other women that are called to walk this path that you were walking?
00:24:00 ►
Yeah. I mean, I would say do your research as much as you can and figure out,
00:24:07 ►
you know, get recommendations for people to work with, really solid recommendations,
00:24:11 ►
personal ones from people you trust if you can, because there are places out there that aren’t
00:24:17 ►
safe. You know, we all hear stories about, you know, about issues that happen in other centers.
00:24:22 ►
So just do a lot of research and try to find a solid
00:24:25 ►
recommendation if you can from someone you trust, like I did. And what’s interesting to hear you
00:24:30 ►
talk about these experiences is that you knew that you were called to spend time in deep study with
00:24:38 ►
the medicine in the medicine’s home environment as part of your own healing, but you also felt that your calling was elsewhere.
00:24:47 ►
And that opens the door to asking for – there’s so many people right now, and I really saw
00:24:52 ►
this at the assembly, that are just looking for their purpose within the psychedelic environment.
00:24:59 ►
And our culture says, be an entrepreneur.
00:25:02 ►
But there’s so many ways to access purpose within the medicine rather than being that guy that decides he’s a shaman or being an influencer in the space.
00:25:13 ►
How did your experience open the door to really tune into, well, what is my call?
00:25:19 ►
Like if I’m not called to be a vegetalista, how can I still support the medicine? What do you do when your initial
00:25:26 ►
call isn’t actually what you’re called to, but you still want to stay involved?
00:25:31 ►
I mean, I don’t know how to give advice to other people. I mean, my own story was a little weird
00:25:37 ►
because I didn’t actually fully confront that or even acknowledge it to myself until the last retreat I ever went on, which was March,
00:25:46 ►
it started March 3rd, 2020 and ended on March. It was March, March 10th through the 17th. Sorry.
00:25:53 ►
It was basically the week from hell where everything shut down COVID wise. We were
00:25:58 ►
completely off the grid and we had no idea, you know, all the borders had closed, all the flights were grounded, Peru declared martial
00:26:06 ►
law. So that like I that week, I acknowledged my teacher actually confronted me. She said,
00:26:12 ►
I don’t think you’re cut out to do this. And I said, you know, you’re right. I am not. But I
00:26:16 ►
don’t know. I don’t know what to do next. And then a few days later, we tried leaving the center and
00:26:21 ►
we’re met by the military and people in hazmat suits. And we ended up getting
00:26:25 ►
stuck in the jungle for two and a half weeks in this very dramatic evacuation. The U.S. embassy
00:26:31 ►
was going to send a helicopter. It was a whole thing. But that was sort of like my send-off
00:26:36 ►
from the jungle. And at that point, I had no idea what I was doing. I felt like I’d completely lost
00:26:42 ►
my calling and any stability in my life. I
00:26:45 ►
mean, I loved living in Peru and I loved working at that center. And even if I wasn’t going to
00:26:49 ►
become an ayahuasquera, I was still planning on staying down there. But the pandemic sort of
00:26:54 ►
derailed that and forced me to leave. So yeah, for about a year after I was kind of just wandering
00:26:59 ►
a little lost, I went and lived with my sister in Santa Cruz in the Redwoods. And then there was a massive
00:27:05 ►
wildfire and we had to evacuate there too. And then it led me to New York, I guess, through
00:27:14 ►
Leonard Picard, who I’d been introduced to through Lorenzo and the project with the Rose,
00:27:20 ►
which is kind of another long story. Well, okay. And I want to talk about that,
00:27:24 ►
but I also want to go back because the highlights that you just gave us are harrowing. Can, can,
00:27:29 ►
can you unpack a little bit from us, like being forced into radical integration?
00:27:34 ►
Yeah. I mean, the, it was, it was, like I said, it was the last retreat. Like we,
00:27:39 ►
when we left, everything was still pretty normal. You know, people were joking about COVID,
00:27:44 ►
but nothing had really changed. And then because of where the center was situated, we had no communication with
00:27:51 ►
the outside world at all. We were in complete isolation. For like the worst possible eight
00:27:55 ►
days, we could have been out of contact. Peru had halted ground transportation the day before we
00:28:00 ►
were leaving. So like when we tried leaving the center, that’s, that’s when we were detained and yeah, like basically held under house arrest for about two and a half weeks at my
00:28:09 ►
teacher, Jessica’s house, um, in this, this town just outside of the center. We, I mean, everyone
00:28:14 ►
was, you know, flooding the embassy with, with phone calls at the time, but we were able to get
00:28:19 ►
through because, um, one of the, one of the participants with us was a veteran. So his parents contacted their congressman or senator or something, and they were able to get through to the embassy.
00:28:29 ►
But had we not had an ex-military with us, I’m not sure the U.S. government would have cared at all that we were all stuck there.
00:28:37 ►
But it was probably bad optics, so they wanted to come get this gentleman.
00:28:41 ►
But it was an interesting situation because there was a guy from France, a woman from Norway and a,
00:28:47 ►
and a guy from England with us.
00:28:48 ►
So we had to coordinate between four different embassies to get all of us out
00:28:51 ►
at the same time. And that was not an easy task.
00:28:55 ►
And were you running those logistics? Like, were you,
00:28:57 ►
were you in Jessica having to keep everybody else calm while you were
00:29:01 ►
managing this unprecedented situation?
00:29:04 ►
I, Jessica was, was the calmest I’d ever seen her. She’d been through hell before. I mean,
00:29:09 ►
she’d saved people from snake. She was a rainforest tour guide for about 10, 15 years.
00:29:14 ►
So she’d seen it all. She’d saved people from snake bites and all sorts of jungle trauma.
00:29:19 ►
I was the youngest person there and I was barely holding it together. I mean, I was crying a lot
00:29:23 ►
and they were actually probably better support systems than I was just because I was,
00:29:29 ►
I was freaking out, you know? Well, rightfully so. I mean, what, what a trauma at any age.
00:29:34 ►
Yeah. And so like, they were gonna, we, we ended up being the number one case at the U.S. embassy
00:29:38 ►
in Peru, just because of like the situation where we were, the fact that like there was one road in
00:29:43 ►
and out and the, and the landslides and
00:29:46 ►
the supply trucks weren’t getting through. Yeah, they were going to send a helicopter at one point
00:29:50 ►
to come get us, but we couldn’t get the necessary papers to clear that. So yeah, so that’s, that’s,
00:29:56 ►
that was my, my, my exit from Peru, but it was not how I was planning on going by any means.
00:30:02 ►
Are you comfortable talking about who you
00:30:05 ►
were when you arrived in Peru and what your relationship with the medicine showed you to
00:30:12 ►
become who you are now? Yeah. I mean, I was much less confident in myself when I went down there,
00:30:20 ►
but having spent all that time in the Amazon and in the throes of some wonderful and
00:30:28 ►
also horrible ayahuasca experiences, I feel like I’ve become a lot stronger, like a much more
00:30:34 ►
capable person that I can handle anything that’s thrown at me at this point, because there’s some
00:30:40 ►
unusual experiences under my belt to compare it to. No matter what happens in New York,
00:30:44 ►
so far it hasn’t compared to being held hostage in the jungle, basically.
00:30:49 ►
Right. And there’s a really beautiful thread in your story that’s so relevant to what’s happening in the world right now
00:30:55 ►
about finding that space of resilience and compassion through these traumatic events.
00:31:02 ►
Because at this point, I think everybody’s traumatized.
00:31:05 ►
Everybody’s traumatized. Some of us have better trauma stories than others. And yours is a pretty
00:31:09 ►
good COVID trauma story. But ultimately, everybody’s feeling some degree of trauma. And so there’s this
00:31:15 ►
invitation to post-traumatic growth and to finding ways to reinvent ourselves after this. So, you know, I can’t imagine more of a 180.
00:31:29 ►
And I say this as somebody that lived in New York for 11 years.
00:31:32 ►
I can’t imagine more of a 180 than going from living in the Peruvian Amazon and adjacent to it to living in New York.
00:31:39 ►
So can you tell me a bit about how you landed there and whether and how it embraced you and, and, and just what the scene is
00:31:46 ►
for you right now? Yeah. So, uh, I, I am in New York right now, largely in, in part because of
00:31:53 ►
Lorenzo and him introducing me to Leonard Picard, who I was, uh, was making a serial podcast for
00:31:59 ►
the salon for a while based off of the Rosicrucian cult. Leonard had connected me to the gentleman who
00:32:05 ►
owns the building where I held the psychedelic assembly. So when Leonard was released from
00:32:10 ►
prison in late summer 2020, it was a wild year. It was after, like I said, the fires nearly burned
00:32:17 ►
my sister’s house down and I had to evacuate there with her too. And once he was released,
00:32:22 ►
my friend Michael, who’s here in New York, he said, you know,
00:32:25 ►
like, Hey, let’s go visit Leonard. Like he’s, he’s out of prison. This was kind of a miracle
00:32:28 ►
and I really wanted to meet him. So we flew out to Santa Fe and met him in person. Yeah, it was,
00:32:35 ►
it was great actually connecting with him. I’d sent him tons and tons of emails, uh, over the
00:32:39 ►
years, you know, relating to the podcasts and just keeping, you know, keeping touch in touch
00:32:44 ►
with him. But I think my, my friend, Michael could kind of tell that I was sort of lost after,
00:32:49 ►
you know, after leaving Peru and, and not really having anywhere or anything I was passionate about
00:32:54 ►
during the pandemic. So he invited me to New York to this job that I work at now at the Blue
00:33:00 ►
Building. And yeah, it was a very different, very different environment going from,
00:33:05 ►
from the jungle to midtown Manhattan where you don’t see trees anywhere.
00:33:10 ►
Really.
00:33:11 ►
How’s that changing you?
00:33:13 ►
It was a hard adjustment period. I mean, the lack of nature,
00:33:16 ►
like all last year, it was really kind of up, up and down.
00:33:20 ►
I organized a few activists rallies,
00:33:24 ►
like surrounding the protection of the Amazon rainforest and got like about 20, 30 people to come out once in front of the Brazilian consulate and once in front of the UN.
00:33:32 ►
Most of them were children, but I still see that as a win because it’s their future.
00:33:36 ►
That was sort of what I was pouring my energy into last year was environmental activism.
00:33:40 ►
And then, yeah, and then this year it all just sort of took off with the conference
00:33:45 ►
and it’s, it, it feels like a new, I don’t know, a new breath of fresh air or something. It’s like,
00:33:52 ►
it’s, it’s, it almost feels like I was meant to leave the jungle when I did and that I was
00:33:57 ►
supposed to be here and doing this. It all feels kind of faded. It makes me happy to know that,
00:34:04 ►
that there’s aspects of your life that you
00:34:07 ►
got involved in that aren’t strictly psychedelic, because this is something that I struggle with
00:34:11 ►
and other people struggle with is how to have perspective beyond simply being steeped in the
00:34:16 ►
psychedelic world. So it’s nice to hear that you had that activism activity and that you were
00:34:21 ►
engaging the people that have to be native to the 21st century
00:34:25 ►
in it. That’s really good to hear. So let’s talk about Leonard. The Rosas Paracelsus is,
00:34:32 ►
nobody understands it yet. It’s one of the most important books, I think, to come out of the
00:34:38 ►
psychedelic humanities in this century. And you decided to create an audio experience of it, which I think you did a
00:34:49 ►
really creditable job on the pieces that you were able to produce. Tell me about your experiences
00:34:56 ►
with the text and what it was like to work with that text and bring it out into the world in this different shape it’s it’s
00:35:05 ►
it’s a very very big task yeah i i had made an episode of the the psychedelic salon with my
00:35:12 ►
sister alexa uh back in i think maybe like 2016 2017 where we we interviewed our parents and this
00:35:19 ►
this gentleman who had put an ayahuasca art exhibition up in the the small town my parents
00:35:24 ►
lived in, which
00:35:25 ►
normally was completely devoid of culture. So we did that one episode. And then like,
00:35:29 ►
I think it was like a few months later, Lorenzo approached us with this project for, for the Rose.
00:35:34 ►
And I had never heard of Leonard or I vaguely remembered hearing about him from that Hamilton
00:35:39 ►
Morris piece on Vice. But when, when he asked us if we wanted to take this on, it seemed like an incredible way
00:35:46 ►
of meeting people in the community and just connecting with a lot of really cool people.
00:35:50 ►
And it was a hard opportunity to pass up. I think we got copies of the book and just kind of dug
00:35:56 ►
into it. And it’s not an easy read, but it is a really fascinating story. And I think making the
00:36:03 ►
podcast in and of itself kind of helped me understand it because I was, you know, communicating with these people who would kind of deconstruct all the chapters and explain it, which was helpful to me as well.
00:36:13 ►
Because a lot of times there were parts that I didn’t understand or would miss until I had this commentary and, you know, was editing it and adding it in.
00:36:21 ►
And then it would kind of click.
00:36:22 ►
Tell me about connecting with Leonard both while he was incarcerated and afterwards. Leonard and I would write to each other when he
00:36:30 ►
was in prison, which was kind of wild. I used to tell people I had probably one of the most
00:36:36 ►
unusual pen pals in the world. It was while I was living in Peru and I lived alone and didn’t have a ton of friends out there. So at times it was, I know he
00:36:49 ►
really needed communication with the outside world and I would try to make my letters detailed and
00:36:55 ►
descriptive. So it felt like he had some glimpse of something outside of maximum security prison,
00:37:00 ►
but it was also really helpful for me to have a friend, someone to write to and to talk
00:37:06 ►
about what I was doing in the jungle and what all the weird experiences I was going through.
00:37:11 ►
So it felt like the relationship went both ways. What’s he like as a person?
00:37:16 ►
He’s a really, really cool guy. I mean, he’s incredibly intelligent. He’s very soft-spoken.
00:37:23 ►
He’s the kind of person who, when you meet him,
00:37:26 ►
you feel like he’s looking into your soul,
00:37:29 ►
which can be a little uncomfortable for people, I think, at times.
00:37:32 ►
But I don’t know.
00:37:33 ►
He sees people.
00:37:34 ►
And yeah, he’s got a really good sense of humor.
00:37:36 ►
A little dark, I would say.
00:37:38 ►
But how could it not be after what he’s gone through?
00:37:41 ►
He’s a really funny guy, too,
00:37:43 ►
which I’m not sure comes through in The Rose or any of his talks that he’s gone through. He’s a, he’s a really funny guy too, which I’m not sure it comes through in the Rose or like any of his talks that
00:37:47 ►
he’s done at like Horizons and stuff. He’s got a,
00:37:49 ►
he’s got a really, really good sense of humor.
00:37:51 ►
He does. And he, he, he’s got this almost priestly quality, but then,
00:37:56 ►
but then on a dime, he’ll like, you’ll,
00:37:58 ►
you’ll see the guy that ran a clandestine operation show up and he’ll just like
00:38:02 ►
oscillate between those dimensions.
00:38:06 ►
But what I’ve seen with him and the way he interacts with folks in the community is that
00:38:10 ►
he has a very expansive view of what we all can be. And I feel like he’s looking at the
00:38:16 ►
2080s all the time. So how has he been influential in your shift into this current project and just
00:38:23 ►
establishing a vision for you of what’s possible?
00:38:26 ►
The Psychedelic Assembly was largely influenced by him. I mean, I wouldn’t be living in New York
00:38:31 ►
if it weren’t for, like I said, him connecting me to my friend who owns this building. And when I
00:38:37 ►
decided to start the conference and to create it, he was the first person I reached out to.
00:38:42 ►
I asked him if he would speak at it and he agreed. And then I reached out to Dennis McKenna and Julie Holland, who I knew
00:38:50 ►
Julie through my friend who owns the building here. And basically once I had the three of them
00:38:54 ►
pinned down, everyone else kind of fell into place. Yeah. I mean, Leonard has come to visit
00:39:00 ►
us here quite a few times. He was a large inspiration for this project.
00:39:06 ►
And what’s interesting about Leonard in so many ways is that while there’s so much happening in
00:39:11 ►
the science and law part of psychedelics, and he’s really involved in it, he also wrote this
00:39:15 ►
literary masterpiece. And that points in a certain way to how the humanities are potentially going to
00:39:24 ►
be a bigger part of what the psychedelic culture is in this decade.
00:39:28 ►
And one of the things I loved about the assembly was how you recruited Sarah Rose Suskind and Adam Strauss to emcee.
00:39:36 ►
They both do a lot of comedy rooted in psychedelics and creative writing rooted in psychedelics.
00:39:41 ►
They are part of this very small, but in need of nurturing
00:39:45 ►
humanities trend. So to what extent do you see art and literature having a role in the psychedelic
00:39:52 ►
culture in this decade? And how can it have a bigger role? It’s a huge part of my life for me
00:39:56 ►
personally. I don’t know if you had much of a chance to talk to my parents who were walking
00:40:00 ►
around the conference. They’re kind of chatterboxes. So they talked to pretty much everyone they could, but they’re, they’re both artists. My dad’s a cartoonist and my mom’s
00:40:07 ►
a oil painter illustrator. And so like, I grew up with art and the humanities and it’s, it’s been a
00:40:13 ►
major part of my upbringing and, you know, something I just really care about. I think it’s,
00:40:18 ►
it’s should be a huge factor leading into this, call it new psychedelic renaissance, whatever you want to call it. I mean, the art and humor and literature and all these things can really, they connect us
00:40:33 ►
on a deeper level than even just like, you know, going to a talk and watching someone, a researcher
00:40:37 ►
explain their findings. You know, it’s watching a comedy show together or a beautiful dance or a
00:40:44 ►
musical performance is, those things I feel, can actually connect people on a different level than a lot of what’s offered in the psychedelic space right now, which is why during the conference, we tried bringing in as much of that as we could. All these different elements, you know, dancers and musicians and artists, because it’s an important part of what I believe in.
00:41:06 ►
Yeah, I agree with you.
00:41:07 ►
When we look at the history of psychedelic culture,
00:41:11 ►
you can see how what really helped people cope with big social changes
00:41:16 ►
was the music and the art and the film and to a certain extent,
00:41:22 ►
the theater of the 1960s and 70s that were directly trying to
00:41:26 ►
make sense of the culture. And it feels somewhat lopsided to me that right now so much of the
00:41:32 ►
literary output and cultural output around psychedelics is really rooted in this non-fiction,
00:41:41 ►
scientific, almost transactional bias. So it seems like we’re really in need of a wave
00:41:48 ►
of creativity to just help us make sense of it. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s sort of what I’m hoping
00:41:54 ►
this place will be is like sort of a hub where all of those things can kind of come together
00:41:58 ►
and just like pure creative expression and a way for people to, to access that, the psychedelic visionary art and music
00:42:06 ►
and, and comedy and all the creative side of it too.
00:42:09 ►
What can we do to encourage people to explore that side of themselves? What can we do to,
00:42:15 ►
basically what I’m saying is, hey, artists, writers, make psychedelics part of your subject
00:42:20 ►
matter. How, Kat, can we encourage that? I mean, I’m not sure you can encourage,
00:42:25 ►
I mean, you can encourage artists and writers to experiment with psychedelics. You could also
00:42:30 ►
encourage the people who are already experimenting with psychedelics to become artists. I mean,
00:42:35 ►
I feel like everyone’s got that inside them and having an outlet, it’s a good release,
00:42:40 ►
having somewhere to pour creative energy. So, you know, it might be a matter of inspiring
00:42:45 ►
existing authors, you know, like the way Michael Pollan was inspired to write books about
00:42:49 ►
psychedelics and to dabble in that. But I think it’s also good to encourage people who are already
00:42:54 ►
in, you know, already having those experiences to express themselves creatively as well.
00:42:59 ►
And how do you see the Athena and your future events playing a role in that?
00:43:03 ►
Yeah, I mean, what we’re planning to
00:43:05 ►
do is have it be uh sort of a library museum performance space hybrid where we’ll have events
00:43:11 ►
you know author events literary events book signings talks lectures and whatnot but we’d
00:43:16 ►
also like to have comedy shows and musical performances and rotating exhibitions of
00:43:21 ►
visual art performance art museumstyle exhibitions of historical artifacts or archival documents
00:43:29 ►
or all sorts of stuff like that based on various themes that we’re going to be doing month to month.
00:43:34 ►
So we really want to engage. There’s so many creative people in New York.
00:43:37 ►
I mean, there’s so many artists and musicians and performers. It’s concentrated here.
00:43:42 ►
So we really want to reach out and bring a lot of those people in.
00:43:52 ►
So you have a lot of good experiences. What is bubbling up in you creatively? When are we going to get to listen to your story or read your book or look at your art? What’s in there, Kat?
00:44:00 ►
There’s got to be something. So I did write a book about everything in Peru and the dramatic
00:44:05 ►
escape from it, but I’m honestly, I haven’t really shared it with anyone yet. I’m not sure if I wrote
00:44:10 ►
it for anyone but myself as sort of a way to integrate everything that happened. People keep
00:44:14 ►
asking me to like to share it and to try to get it published, but it’s, I’m not sure it’s meant for
00:44:20 ►
everyone or if it was just meant for me, if that makes sense. But yeah, other art. I mean,
00:44:25 ►
I make digital art. Last year, I was doing a bunch of large scale chalk drawings on the roof of this
00:44:30 ►
building relating to Amazonian rainforest conservation, Shipibo patterns and giant
00:44:36 ►
jaguars and anacondas in Manhattan. I kind of just follow my heart, you know, like whatever
00:44:40 ►
is inspiring me. I play guitar sometimes. Yeah, I don’t really share a whole lot of it publicly. How do you feel when you’re creative? It’s, it feels like a therapeutic outlet. Like
00:44:50 ►
I’ve, I’ve talked to artists, friends about this before, and they all kind of echo the same
00:44:54 ►
sentiment that like, if, if you’re not doing something creative, that creative energy can
00:44:59 ►
turn into self-destructive energy. So it’s like, you need to have something you’re passionate about
00:45:03 ►
to pour yourself into, or it can, doesn’t end up being good. It’s interesting that we’ve spent almost an hour
00:45:10 ►
talking and when I asked you to talk about your creativity, that’s when you started smiling and
00:45:14 ►
really lighting up. So there’s something in there that we would all love to read.
00:45:19 ►
Yeah, we’ll see. So you’re an impressive young leader. You work with the medicine.
00:45:26 ►
You’re cultivating events.
00:45:28 ►
You’re cultivating spaces.
00:45:29 ►
And I know how hard it is to hear people saying flattering things about you, so apologies.
00:45:34 ►
But we do need to acknowledge that you’re stepping up and making something.
00:45:39 ►
And you’re stepping up and making something in one of the hardest places in the United States to actually step up and make something.
00:45:45 ►
So what do you need from your elders?
00:45:48 ►
What do you want from your peers?
00:45:51 ►
And how do you want to make an impact on shaping the psychedelic culture of our decade?
00:45:57 ►
What I would ask from the elders is maybe advice and guidance because it’s all kind of new territory for me.
00:46:04 ►
So anyone who’s hearing
00:46:05 ►
this and has words of advice for opening a place like this, I mean, I’m not sure there’s ever been
00:46:11 ►
quite anything like this, but I know people have plenty of experience running library spaces or
00:46:18 ►
performance venues or whatever. So any sort of guidance in that domain would be incredible. As far as for my
00:46:26 ►
peers, support with the project. I’d love for people to just reach out and not even necessarily
00:46:32 ►
donate. I mean, ultimately what I care more about is just hearing that this idea actually resonates
00:46:38 ►
with people, that it’s something that people would want to exist. That’s what’s going to keep me
00:46:42 ►
going and keep me doing it is knowing that there is a need for it and that people want this to happen. So yeah, words of encouragement,
00:46:51 ►
I guess, from peers. And what was, sorry, what was the last one?
00:46:56 ►
And how do you want to help shape the psychedelic culture of the 20s and going into the 30s with
00:47:02 ►
this space and your other activities?
00:47:10 ►
I mean, I don’t know if there’s anything particularly conscious guiding it. My mentality is that by holding space for people from different walks of life and different perspectives to come
00:47:16 ►
together in an environment where they can relax and let their guard down and have fun together,
00:47:22 ►
people who don’t necessarily talk or wouldn’t even be in the same circle normally. I think that just like that, that
00:47:29 ►
formula alone will lead to good things. The cross-pollination of ideas and this multidisciplinary
00:47:35 ►
discussion that could happen from all these different, you know, all these different parts
00:47:38 ►
of our community that like aren’t necessarily communicating with each other right now,
00:47:42 ►
but probably should be because it’s all, it’s all interrelated.
00:47:43 ►
necessarily communicating with each other right now, but probably should be because it’s all interrelated. Well, thank you so much for sharing time with us today. Once more, your website is?
00:47:51 ►
Thepsychedelicassembly.com. So please go to psychedelicassembly.com. You’re having a launch
00:47:56 ►
event in the late winter? February 18th is the date that we’ve landed on with Dr. Dennis McKenna.
00:48:04 ►
He’s coming out for the re-release of his book, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.
00:48:09 ►
So he’ll be out in New York signing it when we open the space.
00:48:12 ►
So if you’re anywhere in relation to New York, please make the pilgrimage in February and catch this event and support Kat and her team and this amazing beacon for the psychedelic culture in our young century.
00:48:27 ►
Thank you so much for your time today, Kat.
00:48:28 ►
Thank you for having me.
00:48:30 ►
In this age of digital everything, it’s really refreshing to find a project that aims to bring back person-to-person gatherings.
00:48:39 ►
And I mean in person, not by way of email or Zoom, but in person conversations.
00:48:45 ►
I’m really anxious to see how this psychedelic community center moves ahead because, well, every city can use a space like this.
00:48:52 ►
And the model that Kat and her friends are developing is something that we can all learn from as we continue to congregate with more and more of the others.
00:49:01 ►
more and more of the others.
00:49:05 ►
It’s very comforting for me to see these young people moving ahead with some of the dreams that us older guys have been carrying around for much of our lives.
00:49:11 ►
It’s nice to know that the work not only goes on,
00:49:14 ►
but it continues to mature as the psychedelic community begins to come together.
00:49:20 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:49:24 ►
Namaste, my friends. Thank you.