Is there still value in knocking on a stranger’s door?

I put that question to our guest, Zee Cohen-Sanchez. She left graduate school in 2016 to work on the Bernie Sanders campaign, ran half of the paid field program on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s first campaign, and now leads National Ground Game, which organizes young voters on college campuses.

I am not a Democrat, and I am not a Republican, but I invited Zee to Mind Body Health & Politics because she believes change comes from people talking to people, so do I. After all, we are tribal animals.

I invite you to listen to our conversation.

Her organization is at nationalgroundgame.com.

Below, a practice for making contact with the people around you.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Forthcoming New Book

Resources mentioned

• National Ground Game — nationalgroundgame.com

• The campus tour — unfuckamericatour.com

My Latest Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

Can a person who once drank a fifth a day ever have a drink on a Saturday night?

For most of my career the answer from religion, the law, and my own profession was no. You were either clean or you were using. There was no gray.

Our guest, Dr. Andrew Tatarsky, has spent forty years working in the gray. He is a clinical psychologist in New York who developed Integrative Harm Reduction Psychotherapy.

I invited Andrew back to Mind Body Health & Politics to put that question to him. He also tells the story of an 89-year-old woman who came to him wanting to cut back her drinking, and what happened in three sessions.

I invite you to listen to our conversation.

His book and trainings are at andrewtatarsky.com.

Below, a practice for the moment between the urge and the act.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Forthcoming New Book

Resources mentioned

• Andrew Tatarsky — andrewtatarsky.com | Training | Harm Reduction Psychotherapy

• InnerMost, New York — Casey Paleos, MD, co-founder and chief medical officer: innermost.one

• Alan Marlatt — “compassionate pragmatism” (12:07); E. M. Jellinek — the disease-model progression chart (18:11)

My Latest Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

Salvia Divinorum, a psychedelic substance, is a sage which grows in the shade and can easily thrive as a houseplant. It is legal in California.

Our guest, Christopher Solomon, has worked with Salvia for more than a decade.

I invited Christopher to Mind Body Health & Politics to learn about growing, harvesting, preparing, administering and experiencing this legal, non-addicting psychedelic substance.

I invite you to listen to our most educational conversation.

His tools and a free 20-minute consultation are available at salviahealings.com.

Below, a practice to learn the important skill of witnessing. Our guest says Salvia enhances witnessing.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Forthcoming New Book

Resources mentioned

• Christopher Solomon — salviahealings.com | Store (pipe, practice sets) | Free 20-minute consultation | Somatic Salvia Network

• Doss, M. K. et al., “The Acute Effects of the Atypical Dissociative Hallucinogen Salvinorin A on Functional Connectivity in the Human Brain,” Scientific Reports, 2 Oct 2020 — nature.com | Johns Hopkins press release

• Johnson, M. W., MacLean, K. A., Reissig, C. J., Prisinzano, T. E., Griffiths, R. R., “Human psychopharmacology and dose-effects of salvinorin A,” Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 2011 — PubMed

My Latest Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

Heather A. Lee, LCSW, is one of the first licensed psychedelic-assisted psychotherapists in the country, and most of her clients are women, sixty and over. She has been on Mind Body Health & Politics previously and most recently, to talk about her book, The Psilocybin Sessions.

This time she came with news. She is selling her house near Boulder, Colorado and moving to Peaks Island, Maine, a town with a population of only nine hundred.

I believe human beings are tribal animals. We live healthiest in small groups, where we know one another by face, if not by name. Heather is about to find out how long it takes to learn nine hundred new faces.

On a recent psilocybin journey, she said the mushrooms got a little cheeky with her.

This October she is leading two retreats in the Azores, the Portuguese islands four and a half hours from Boston, where the ferns stand as tall as she, and the moss is so deep you feel you are floating. People take a small dose of psilocybin and then spend the day in the forest, lying on the moss with a magnifying glass, or doing breath work on black volcanic sand to the sound of the surf.

I know something about taking people into nature to heal. In 1972, I created a nature preserve and health sanctuary at Wilbur Hot Springs in northern California, and for forty-eight years I was its owner and chief caretaker.

Nature is prescription grade medicine, RxN. Somewhere along the way we came to see ourselves as living on the planet rather than as part of it. When we separate ourselves from nature and live in cement, it is not healthy for us.

I asked her about adverse effects, which is the subject of my latest book, The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines.

The adverse effects she has seen is in people who have a hard journey and then go silent, skip the integration, and stop returning her calls. Out of about four hundred clients it happened three times.

I invite you to listen to the whole conversation.

Heather’s retreats and her book are at heatheralee.com. Below, a small practice you can do without a mushroom.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Forthcoming New Book

Resources mentioned

• Heather A. Lee, The Psilocybin Sessions (Modern Wisdom Press, 2025) | heatheralee.com

• Return, Remember & Rewild — Azores retreats (Oct 13–18 sold out; Oct 26–31, 2026; Apr 2027 dates listed)

My Latest Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

I’ve had various forms of skin cancer many times, including a modular melanoma five years ago that had the potential to kill me within six weeks. In a five minute video I will tell you exactly how it happened, and how you can avoid it.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Forthcoming New Book

On the Yoga Mat with My Daughter Sarana

My daughter Sarana teaches yoga between Berkeley and Haines, Alaska, and I couldn’t be prouder of the practice she’s built. Her fall retreats are already full, but her weekly online classes are open now: Sunday Mandala, Tuesday Foam Roller, and a Wednesday series, all recorded and available for a month if you can’t join live.

New retreat dates open this spring for anyone hoping to practice with her in person.

Find the schedule and sign up at saranayoga.com.

My Latest Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

Gabriela Rosa joined me from Sydney, Australia to talk about fertility. She only treats one kind of patient now: couples who’ve been trying to get pregnant for two years or more, or who’ve been through IVF that didn’t take.

She told me about a woman who’d been trying to get pregnant for nineteen years and was ready to stop. She wanted one honest last attempt, and a few months later, she was naturally pregnant for the first time in her life. It happened again with the next couple like her, so Gabriela went back to Harvard to find out why, and tracked seven years and 544 of her own patients.

In most of medicine, a doctor asks about your symptoms so they know what to test for. In fertility, it works backward. You get diagnosed the moment a clock runs out. Try for a year, no baby, and you’re labeled “infertile.” Then if four tests come back fine — clear tubes, ovulation, a uterus, sperm — you’re told it’s unexplained. Nobody looked any further.

Gabriela had a leaking toilet in her own bathroom. Three plumbers resealed it and it kept leaking. When she came back from vacation and showered, the floor bubbled up. The toilet was never the problem, it was her shower’s waterproofing that was failing.

“I could reseal that toilet a hundred million times and I was still going to have the problem,” she said.

That’s what she sees in her practice, over and over. Insulin resistance nobody tested for, because it isn’t diabetes yet. Sperm quality nobody checked, because the workup stopped at the woman — even though the man is half the equation. Cycle after cycle of the same fix, because nobody traced where the leak was actually coming from.

Gabriela and I agree the advice couples get at the start is wrong. They’re told, try for a few months and you’ll be pregnant. She’d rather tell people the truth: for some of you it’s three weeks, for some of you it’s twelve years, and nobody can tell you which on day one.

Please listen to the full conversation when you get a chance. Below, a small practice for finding your own leak.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Forthcoming New Book

My daughter Evacheska is hosting a conversation I think many of you will want to be part of.

More people are having psychedelic and plant medicine experiences, through retreats, ceremonies, and guided journeys. The experience itself gets all the attention. What almost nobody addresses is what comes after: whether it becomes part of a person’s life, or slowly becomes a story they tell at dinner.

Evacheska is a somatic and psychotherapeutic practitioner in New York. She’ll be joined by Jennifer Byxbee, founder of CAP Therapy NYC and a licensed psychotherapist with over 20 years of clinical experience. Together they’ll discuss what actually happens during these experiences, physiologically and psychologically, and what genuine integration support looks like afterward.

Live on Zoom, Tuesday August 26, 7:00 PM EST. Open to everyone, and questions are welcome. 2 CE contact hours available for NY State licensed clinicians (LCSWs, LMHCs, LPs, LCATs).

Register Here

Resources mentioned

• Gabriela Rosa, Fertility Breakthrough: Overcoming Infertility and Recurrent Miscarriage When Other Treatments Have Failed (2019)

• fertilitybreakthrough.com | The Rosa Institute

My Latest Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

I was back on Jock Putney’s show, The Pathway to Peak Performance, this week, and we spent the hour discussing isolation, loneliness and alienation.

I opened by naming it plainly: 30-40% of America is isolated, alienated, and lonely, and the antidote is to care more about each other.

We talked through the practices I keep coming back to in these letters: calling people vs texting, introducing yourself to people you see in daily life, and how much of our overeating (over 70% overweight or obese) is really emotional medicine.

Then I gave him something new I’ve just started trying.

“Waving at stop signs. You come to a four-way stop, you can just wave and say hello. It’s safe. You don’t get out of your car… I’ve been doing it. And guess what? Most everybody waves back and smiles.”

We can all create little gestures which make real contact with other people.

I invite you to join us for the entire stimulating conversation. Below, a small practice to connect with those around you.

Watch Here

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

My daughter Evacheska is hosting a conversation I think many of you will want to be part of.

More people are having psychedelic and plant medicine experiences, through retreats, ceremonies, and guided journeys. The experience itself gets all the attention. What almost nobody addresses is what comes after: whether it becomes part of a person’s life, or slowly becomes a story they tell at dinner.

Evacheska is a somatic and psychotherapeutic practitioner in New York. She’ll be joined by Jennifer Byxbee, founder of CAP Therapy NYC and a licensed psychotherapist with over 20 years of clinical experience. Together they’ll discuss what actually happens during these experiences, physiologically and psychologically, and what genuine integration support looks like afterward.

Live on Zoom, Tuesday August 26, 7:00 PM EST. Open to everyone, and questions are welcome. 2 CE contact hours available for NY State licensed clinicians (LCSWs, LMHCs, LPs, LCATs).

Register Here

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

Maybe as many as thirty to forty percent of us are living with isolation, alienation, and loneliness, most of it unnamed. In six minutes I talk about why, then give you the two things I actually do about it. No course, no pitch — just what works.

One more thing, while we’re on the subject: I sat down last week with Charles Durrett on his show, This is Cohousing, to talk about exactly this.

“When you come upon a stranger on the road, be kind to them — because they’re going through what you’re going through.”

That’s Cicero, and it’s stuck with me since. What would it be like if, when we came to a four-way stop in our cars, we just took a second to wave at the other person?

Listen Here

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

My daughter Evacheska is hosting a conversation I think many of you will want to be part of.

More people are having psychedelic and plant medicine experiences, through retreats, ceremonies, and guided journeys. The experience itself gets all the attention. What almost nobody addresses is what comes after: whether it becomes part of a person’s life, or slowly becomes a story they tell at dinner.

Evacheska is a somatic and psychotherapeutic practitioner in New York. She’ll be joined by Jennifer Byxbee, founder of CAP Therapy NYC and a licensed psychotherapist with over 20 years of clinical experience. Together they’ll discuss what actually happens during these experiences, physiologically and psychologically, and what genuine integration support looks like afterward.

Live on Zoom, Tuesday August 26, 7:00 PM EST. Open to everyone, and questions are welcome. 2 CE contact hours available for NY State licensed clinicians (LCSWs, LMHCs, LPs, LCATs).

Register Here

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

Dr. Bruce Lipton was with me here on Mind Body Health and Politics years ago, before many of you had ever heard the word “epigenetics.” Now it’s almost a household word. Bruce is here again, and this time around we spent most of the hour on a single idea: ninety-five percent of what runs your life was not written by you.

Bruce says the brain is a computer, and it arrives with no programs installed. From about three months before you’re born through roughly age seven, you’re recording everything you experience—your parents, your community, what a body is supposed to do—without the conscious mind in the room to argue with any of it. By his estimate, those recordings run about ninety-five percent of your adult life. The part of you that thinks it’s deciding things is mostly watching a program play.

I’ve been telling people for years that the mind wants to be the boss, and that until you learn to tell it otherwise, it will act like one. Bruce provided me with a mechanism underneath that.

One of the programs installed in us very early is what old is supposed to look like. As a child, watch enough people fall apart as they age, as if on a schedule, and some part of you signs up to fall apart on schedule too.

Acting your age is dangerous.

The bigger program Bruce wants rewritten isn’t personal—it’s the one Darwin gave us. His forthcoming book, Beyond Darwin, argues that “survival of the fittest” was never the whole story, and that cooperation, not survivalist competition, is what actually carried us here.

I invite you to join us for the entire stimulating conversation. Below, a small practice for finding one of your own programs.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Resources mentioned

• Bruce H. Lipton, The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles (Hay House, 10th Anniversary Edition)

• Bruce H. Lipton, PhD & Patricia King, Beyond Darwin: How Epigenetics, Quantum Science, and Cooperation Shape Humanity’s Future (BenBella Books, August 2026)

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

I read an article recently about young men who order a pizza, stay home, watch pornography, and masturbate instead of going out and finding a date. It is easier. However, DIY is feeding an epidemic of isolation, alienation, and loneliness.

I put that observation to Diana Richardson, a Swiss expert on human sexuality with over fifty years of experience.

In the early twentieth century, fewer than ten percent of women had sex before marriage — ninety percent of brides were virgins. Over the past hundred years, those numbers have reversed. We fought hard for that freedom in the counterculture revolution of the 1960s, which I’m delighted to say I was part of.

But now, by several measures, young people are having less sex than any generation in memory. Diana’s response surprised me: she said the amount of sex was never really the problem.

“It’s really the how of sex,” she told me.

Her work argues that most of what we call sex is mechanical and goal-driven, aimed at a finish line, and that racing for the finish line is exactly what disconnects people from their own bodies and from each other.

Diana’s own path started at thirty-two, when she began asking blunt questions about her own body and writing down what she found. Fifty years and eight books later — Slow Sex, Tantric Sex for Men, Tantric Orgasm for Women among them — more than 15,000 couples have gone through her seven-day Making Love Retreat in Europe. She has just finished building a self-paced online version — find her work at rekindle.love, rekindletantra.com, and loveforcouples.com, and follow her at facebook.com/learnlivinglove.

Please listen to our conversation. Below it, a small practice built on the idea Diana kept returning to: slow down, and the rest follows.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Resources mentioned

• Diana Richardson, Tantric Sex for Lovers (Destiny Books) — the boxed collection of Slow Sex, Tantric Sex for Men, Tantric Orgasm for Women

• Diana Richardson, The Heart of Tantric Sex (John Hunt Publishing/O Books, 2003)

  rekindle.love — Diana’s site, books, and the self-paced online Making Love Retreat

• Rekindle Intimacy: The Living Love Symposium — 4-day online gathering Diana is hosting Sept 17–20, 2026

• Diana Richardson’s first RLM appearance, “The Power of Slow Sex” (aired March 2022)

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

Joshua White spent over a decade as a city attorney in San Francisco before he left the law to build something the psychedelic community didn’t have.

He founded Fireside Project, an anonymous support line for anyone in the middle of a psychedelic experience, or anyone still sorting out one they had years ago.

Joshua researched psychedelics and kept seeing the same four gaps: not enough support, not enough diversity among providers, not enough hands-on training, and almost no data on why some trips heal and others hurt. A support line staffed by volunteers could work on all four at once. The first month, Fireside took about a hundred calls. Last month it took more than 1,300.

I asked him who answered the phone. No hard qualifications, he said. Volunteers ask themselves one question: if I were tripping, or if the person I love most in the world were tripping, would I want this person on the other end of the line? Anyone who clears that bar trains for fifty hours and commits to a year on the same weekly shift.

“Someone who doesn’t have any kind of agenda about what type of experience you should have, but rather someone who’s just there to be human with you.” - Joshua White

The way I conceptualize a “bad trip” is that something has escaped the box it got pushed into years ago. Old fear, old shame, whatever the mind couldn’t hold at the time. Joshua’s volunteers don’t say bad trip. They say challenging, and they stay on the phone while a person turns toward it instead of running.

Fireside is sitting on roughly forty thousand anonymized calls now, and it’s using that archive to train the next generation of psychedelic therapists through a simulation tool called Lucy, already in use with researchers at Mount Sinai and in a New Mexico psilocybin study. Calls are stripped of anything identifying first, and the data never leaves the organization.

Running Fireside seven days a week for four years nearly broke Joshua, until an ibogaine journey got him to slow down. I told him what a patient taught me decades ago. Take care of yourself and you’ll have more to give. Keep going the way you’re going, and you’ll get sick, or die young. I’ve never forgotten it, and I’m not done repeating it to him.

Please listen to our conversation. Just below it you’ll find a small practice built on the same idea he now lives by.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Resources mentioned

• Fireside Project — free, anonymous psychedelic peer support | donate | app (iOS/Google Play)

• Lucy — Fireside’s psychedelic-therapist training simulator, used at Mount Sinai and in a New Mexico psilocybin-for-PTSD study

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

For half a century, the biggest business in my county, Mendocino, was functioning outside of federal law. Marijuana.

Charlie Harris, a British historian from Oxford’s Global History of Capitalism Project, who put in his seasons as a marijuana trimmer here on our North Coast, has memorialized that history. His new book, Mendo, published in June by Counterpoint Press, tells how Mendocino County went from logging and fishing to the cannabis capital of the Americas, known as the Emerald Triangle. Charlie was recently on Mind Body Health & Politics, where he told me things about my own neighborhood that were delightfully new.

The Mendocino story begins with the young people of the 1960s Back to the Land movement, who came north to live off the cheap land, and learned, as one ex-commune member put it, that “we couldn’t grow gasoline.” The one crop the hippies could grow became the county’s currency, marijuana — people paid rent with it, bought food with it, and had their cars fixed with it. And when the loggers’ sawmills closed and hundreds of logging families were suddenly out of work, many of them went into the business alongside the hippies they had long been feuding with. The rednecks joined the hippies, and they all became hipnecks.

Then came Reagan’s helicopters. The Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) was at the time the largest domestic law-enforcement operation in the country. Charlie’s exhaustive research indicated that CAMP turned a profit every single year it flew — the raids kept what they seized, and asset forfeiture itself was invented right here in Mendocino County.

Every plant the government cut down simply made the rest worth more, and prices rocketed. But eventually marijuana legalization accomplished what forty years of helicopters could not: a pound that brought $5,000 in the eighties now sells for under $500. However, as I reminded Charlie, you still don’t pay $500/pound for garlic.

I started coming to Mendocino County in 1975 and experienced much of this story happening around me. Many of my patients were in the marijuana business. And so I had inside information.

Charlie also left me with a genuine health concern about what today’s high-potency products are doing to us — I will let him tell you that part himself.

Please listen to our conversation, and just below, I offer a brief health practice drawn from what Charlie did for Mendocino County. If you want the whole story, Mendo is available from Counterpoint, Amazon, and your local bookstore. Charlie asks that you try the independent first.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Resources mentioned

• Charlie Harris, Mendo: How an Unlikely Group of Rebels Turned Cannabis into California’s Cash Crop (Counterpoint Press, June 23, 2026) | Amazon | Author page

• Mind, Body, Health & Politics archive — mindbodyhealthpolitics.org (20 years, open source)

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Here

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

A lonely person types their worries into a machine at three in the morning, and the machine answers them kindly. Is that really helpful, or is it harmful? My answer is that it is both, and the difference between the two is what I want to talk about today.

Let me start with the name, artificial intelligence, because I think the name is inappropriate.

Not artificial intelligence. Accumulated Intelligence.

We have taken the intelligence humanity has gathered across all of time, every fact and formula and sentence we could collect, and pressed it onto a small chip. We call that “artificial intelligence.” Bah, humbug. Artificial means phony, fake, not real. This Intelligence is the real thing: the accumulated knowledge of our whole species in one place. So I would ask you to hear those two letters differently. Not artificial. Accumulated. Accumulated Intelligence.

Once you see it for what it is, you stop being afraid of it, and you stop expecting too much of it. It is a tool. A magnificent one. But a tool.

Subscribe now

What it does well

I will give AI real credit, because credit is due. A person who is anxious at two in the morning used to have nowhere to turn until business hours. Now there is something on the other end of the line, every hour of every day, that never gets tired, never sighs, and will answer the same question the tenth time as patiently as the first. A great many anxious people are terrified of being a burden, and to them that patience is no small thing. When your thoughts are a tangle, AI can lay them out in a row so you can look at them. It can hand you, in plain language, information that used to sit locked in textbooks. I am glad it exists.

And AI can remind you that you are the boss of your mind. I have spent much of my life on this one idea: the mind is a tool. The hammer is a tool, the automobile is a tool, the toaster is a tool, the computer is a tool, and so is your own mind. Your mind is not the boss. You are. I spent eleven years in college, and nobody in all those classrooms taught me how to control my own mind. Think about that. We wrote down everything except how to run the instrument that wrote it all down. AI can hand you every textbook I ever studied, and the job of running your own mind will still be yours.

What AI cannot do

AI is not a friend, and it cannot become one, and the trouble starts the moment a person treats it as one.

Human beings are tribal animals. We were built, over a very long time, to heal in the presence of one another. The cure for loneliness is not information about loneliness, however gently the machine phrases it. The cure is another human being who knows your name and is glad you walked in the door. A screen cannot give you that, because there is no one behind it who will miss you when you are gone.

Benjamin Franklin knew this. He spent his life accumulating knowledge—he founded America’s first lending library so a whole city could share in it—and the same man built himself a small weekly club of friends, the Junto, and kept it going for decades. For twenty years I ran a club modeled on Franklin’s in Fort Bragg: every Thursday morning, the same faces around the same table. All that accumulated knowledge, and the great collector of it still needed a room with other human beings in it. So do I. So do you.

My worry is not that Accumulated Intelligence gives bad advice. Often the advice is excellent. My concern is that AI is so easy to talk to that a person lets it take the place of real contact: the phone call, the visit, the friend across the table. AI asks nothing of you. A friend asks you to show up, and that showing up is part of the cure for all that ails us.

Let AI send you toward people

I am not trying to frighten you off AI. I simply want to keep AI in its proper place, as a tool. Ask it to explain something you do not understand. Ask it to help you make a plan. Let it remind you to do your abdominal breathing, or to sit with the visualization of your Golden Light. For those jobs it is excellent.

But let AI send you toward people, not away from them. If you find yourself facing anxiety that won’t quiet down, a difficult relationship, uncertainty about your next chapter, or an experience that has left you feeling emotionally or spiritually unsettled, remember that you do not have to work through it alone. Sometimes information is enough. Sometimes what you need is another human being who can sit with you, listen carefully, and help you find your own way forward. That has been the privilege of my work for many decades.

That is the test. If your time with AI ends with you reaching out to another person, it did its job. If it ends with you reaching for AI again tomorrow instead of a person, you have quietly handed your authority to your tool.

AI is a tool, and you are the boss of the tool, the same as you are the boss of your own mind. Use it for what it is good for, and do not ask it for the one thing it cannot give, human contact.

Golden Light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

P.S. I am curious: what do you use AI for, and what have you decided you will not use it for? Hit reply and tell me. I read every response. And if you’re looking for more personal guidance with anxiety, relationships, life transitions, or making sense of difficult experiences, you can learn more about working with me below.

P.P.S. I recently sat down with Les Jensen on his New Human Living podcast to talk about my new book, The Adverse Effects & Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines — what these medicines can do, what they cannot, and how to weigh the risks honestly.

Listen Here

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Order Now

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

Abbie Rosner is a journalist who spent the last several years interviewing thirty-six older adults — most in their sixties, seventies, and eighties — about psychedelic experiences they had quietly, on their own, outside any clinic. Her book, Psychedelics and the Counterculture of Aging, is published now by Park Street Press, and I admired her work enough to write its endorsement back in January, before we ever met. When we finally sat down on the program, what we talked about was not really psychedelics at all. It was aging.

I am 87. When I sit down or lie down, I do not feel any different than I did at 19. My spirit does not seem to have aged; my body certainly has. That is the puzzle I put to Abbie.

I have all of me in me

The culture tells us to refuse aging: stay young, buy the next serum. Abbie’s elders were doing something the longevity industry cannot sell. They were turning the other way and going inward. What I have been calling inner space travel for sixty-five years. For a long time I told people at parties I was a travel agent, because the word psychologist made them back away.

When asked her thirty-six elders what these experiences gave them, the same discovery kept surfacing: they still contained every age they had ever been.

"It's not like, I was a child and now I'm old. It's, I have all of me in me. I can access my child. I can access my groovy, movement-loving teenager."

The body had aged. The person inside it had not been left behind. Abbie is careful about who this work is for, and so am I because not everyone is a candidate, and as she put it, “if it’s not calling you, it’s not for you.”

Abbie and I had one honest disagreement. Her foreword, by my longtime friend Dr. Julie Holland, refers to herself near 60 as an elder. I wrote to Julie: I loved the foreword, but I think 60 is middle age. She wrote back, “If 60 is middle age, that means I’m going for 120, and I think that’s a bit of a stretch.” I laughed, and I held my ground. I do not consider myself elderly at 87. The number matters less than your relationship to your own inner life.

We’re going to need each other as we age

We return often on this program to one idea: the antidote to the loneliness of later life is connection. Abbie brought me something concrete for it - Elder Vision Circles, small cohorts of eight or ten older adults who spend four months together reading, meditating, and doing service in their community, then keep meeting and caring for one another through the end of their days.

"We've created the antidote to the alienation and the loneliness, because we're going to need each other as we age."

I told her on the air that I want to see somebody build it. The medicines Abbie writes about, used well, only open a door. Connection is what walks you through it.

Please listen to our conversation, and just below, I have a small practice for you this week, the smallest version of that same idea.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

In this episode — Journalist Abbie Rosner spent several years interviewing thirty-six older adults about psychedelic experiences they had quietly, outside the clinic. She and Richard talk about elderhood, conscious aging, what changes when these medicines meet a long life rather than a young one, a disagreement over when “elder” begins, and her pilot vision for small, committed cohorts of older adults. Her book, Psychedelics and the Counterculture of Aging, is published (July 7, 2026) by Park Street Press.

Guest: Abbie Rosner - journalist; author of Psychedelics and the Counterculture of Aging (Park Street Press, July 7, 2026, foreword by Dr. Julie Holland). Writes The ELDEREVOLUTION on Substack and a Next Avenue column.

Chapters

• 00:00 — The epidemic of isolation

• 01:45 — Conscious aging: what’s on Abbie’s mind

• 05:28 — What aging actually is: body vs. spirit

• 10:14 — The opportunity of older life: going inward

• 12:24 — The fragility question: screening older adults

• 15:34 — How older adults approach psychedelics today

• 20:00 — Who is drawn to this work: seekers

• 21:20 — “Am I an elder at 60?”: the Julie Holland exchange

• 27:04 — Inside the book: 36 interviews and a book tour

• 33:11 — Elder Vision Circles

• 38:44 — Close

Resources mentioned

• Abbie Rosner, Psychedelics and the Counterculture of Aging (Park Street Press, July 7, 2026) | Amazon | abbierosner.com |The ELDEREVOLUTION (Substack)

• Julie Holland, Good Chemistry (HarperWave, 2020) | drholland.com

Further reading

Richard's recent conversation with Dr. Ellen Langer, Your Mind Creates Your Reality, speaks to the same territory from the mind-body side—how attention and expectation shape aging.

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Pre-Order

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

There is a tension in the air in this country that I have not felt in my eighty-seven years. Fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, children — everyone is uneasy. They feel it walking down the street, and even when they cannot name it, they know it’s there.

We also have the data substantiating my feeling: a new Cato Institute survey, done with Morning Consult ahead of this 250th Fourth of July, found that nearly half of Americans — forty-six percent — didn’t know what the Fourth of July commemorates, and fifty-six percent worry the country could stop being free within fifty years. And yet the same survey found that eighty-six percent of us are grateful to be Americans, and seventy percent believe the founding principles still matter. We love the thing; we have forgotten what the thing is.

Meanwhile, thirty to forty percent of the country report anxiety or depression, and more than seventy percent are living paycheck to paycheck. Some of us are frightened of the climate and of nuclear weapons; some of us are frightened because of the color of our skin, our religion, or our sexuality; some of us are frightened of our own government. Our fears point in different directions, and the politicians and their anointed media have used our fears to set us against one another — and way too many of us have forgotten that we are all Americans.

I want to step back from the noise and say something that took me a long life to see clearly: what we are living through is, on the surface, a fight between the political right and the political left. But the real fight is older and bigger, and it runs right down the middle of the human animal.

For almost all of recorded history, the people of the earth signed on to be led — by a pharaoh, a king, a dictator — and the many were ruled by one. In ancient Egypt, a tiny few at the top ran everything, and nearly ninety-nine percent lived and died serving them. That arrangement, in one costume or another, held for thousands of years. People were born into their position in life. This is how it is, this is how it should be, and this is how we live.

Then the Enlightenment thinkers — Locke, Hume, Franklin, Jefferson, and others — put a new idea into the air, and a group of farmers and printers and merchants picked it up: we can rule ourselves, write our own rules, and call that the rule of law instead of the rule of the king. The American founders rebelled against England — the largest army and the greatest empire in the world — and against the Pope himself, for kings ruled by divine right, and created a democracy and a republic. That took some doing. It wasn’t clean, either: a country that shouted liberty also screamed slavery, owned women, and acted like a bully on the block, including the slaughter of millions of Native Americans. I say this not to run my country down, but because a fairy tale won’t help us understand the choice in front of us.

Here is what I believe, and I probably will not live to see it. We are headed for a world government — not because anyone votes for it, but because of a pattern that repeats at every scale of human life: caves to villages to towns to countries, and now countries pulling together, the way Europe did to create the EU. Where power is the rule, the large eat the small, and that momentum ends, on its own, in one government over the whole earth.

So the question is not whether there will be world rule, but what kind. Will it be one person at the top ruling by force, the way the pharaohs did, with most of the human race as wage slaves below them? Or will it be something closer to what those American farmers and printers reached for: a rule of law that treats food, water, shelter, education, and healthcare as basic human rights?

That is the division at the core of our species, and it is the one we in America now face as we go to the polls in November.

Do we want to be a world of citizens, or a world of subjects?

Happy 250th birthday, America.

Golden Light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicineswas recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Pre-Order

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

If you have ever told yourself to just stop worrying and watched it not work, here is why: willpower was never built for the job.

I sat down with Dr. Jud Brewer, a neuroscientist at Brown University who trained as an addiction psychiatrist at Yale. His TED talk on breaking habits has been watched close to forty million times, and his book Unwinding Anxiety spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His thesis is that anxiety behaves like a habit, not a disease.

Jud found this first with smokers. Every habit, anxiety included, runs on the same loop: a trigger, a behavior, a reward. A restless feeling shows up. You worry, because worrying feels like doing something. The worry gives you a flicker of control, and that flicker is the reward that trains your mind to start the loop again, sooner, next time. Fighting the loop does not loosen it. Fighting it feeds it.

So instead of telling smokers to use willpower, Jud told them to keep smoking — and to pay close attention while they did. The taste. The smell. The feeling in the chest. They started coming back and telling him, “Doc, how did I not notice this before? These cigarettes taste like crap.”

Nothing about the cigarette had changed. Their attention had. That shift produced five times the quit rate of the standard treatment.

He turned the same move on anxiety. When the restless feeling shows up, the worried mind asks, “NO — is this going to last all day, is something terrible about to happen?”

Jud’s instruction is to flip the NO to WHAT.

“What is this feeling, exactly? Where do I feel it in my body?”

That turn, from running away to looking closely, loosens the loop.

I have been telling patients some version of this for most of my career: the mind is a tool you use, not a boss you obey. I did not expect to hear it back from a scientist with an fMRI scanner. But Jud said it almost word for word, unprompted:

“I would say it’s probably one of, if not the most important skills to learn. Because if we don’t have control of our minds, if we don’t train our minds so that we can control them, they’re going to control us, and things don’t end well when that’s the case.”

He has the data behind it, too. In a randomized controlled trial of his Unwinding Anxiety program, anxiety dropped sixty-seven percent in people with generalized anxiety disorder, against fourteen percent for usual care.

Curiosity Will Conquer Fear Even More Than Bravery Will

There is a practice below this letter for the next time the buzzing starts. But the idea underneath it is the one I want you to keep. Jud closed our conversation with a line from the Irish poet James Stevens:

“Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.”

If anxiety is fear of the future, that is the whole instruction. Get curious about the feeling instead of fighting it, and the feeling loses its grip.

Jud writes his own newsletter, Inside the Curious Mind, if you want more from him directly.

Food for thought.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

In this episode — Dr. Jud Brewer, a Brown University neuroscientist and Yale-trained addiction psychiatrist, joins Richard to lay out a habit-loop model of anxiety. From his own residency panic attacks to the smoking-cessation work that produced five times the standard quit rate, to a randomized trial of his anxiety program, the throughline is one mechanism: pay attention to what a behavior actually does, and the brain stops finding it rewarding. We close on a thirty-second practice for the next time anxiety shows up.

Guest: Dr. Jud Brewer — Director of Research and Innovation, Brown University Mindfulness Center. Author of The Craving Mind (Yale University Press, 2017), Unwinding Anxiety (Avery, 2021, New York Times bestseller), and The Hunger Habit (Avery, 2024). His TED talk has roughly 40 million views combined. More at drjud.com.

Chapters

• 00:00 — Opening: the epidemic of anxiety and depression

• 01:56 — Jud’s own anxiety story

• 06:46 — Choosing mindfulness as a career in 2006

• 11:38 — Coke Enders and the academic-hazing pattern

• 15:10 — Reinforcement learning: pay attention as you smoke

• 20:28 — The anxiety habit loop

• 23:28 — The default mode network and the posterior cingulate cortex

• 25:49 — The mind is a tool, not the boss

• 29:46 — Richard’s Vipassana origin with Goldstein and Kornfield

• 31:07 — Conscious breathing and five-finger breathing

• 32:42 — Anxiety travels in clusters

• 34:40 — If these tools work, why are we prescribing

• 36:42 — Could this be taught in high schools

• 38:19 — Going Beyond Anxiety: the AI-paired digital therapeutic

• 41:52 — Mid-episode break

• 43:32 — Curiosity will conquer fear: flip the NO to WHAT

• 45:27 — Feelings are just feelings

• 47:15 — Off-air closing

Choice quotes

“I would say it’s probably one of, if not the most important skills to learn...”
— Dr. Jud Brewer, 30:47

“Here’s the most important thing I never learned in medical school. This goes back to the Borkovec paper, which is that anxiety could be driven like a habit through negative reinforcement.”
— Dr. Jud Brewer, 20:43

“We actually got a 67 percent reduction in anxiety in people with generalized anxiety disorder. This was relative to 14 percent in the usual-care group...”
— Dr. Jud Brewer, 38:29 (Caveat: this is the Unwinding Anxiety RCT, Roy et al. 2021/JMIR 2022, N=65 — distinct from the 5x smoking-cessation figure above; don’t conflate.)

“Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.”
— James Stevens, quoted by Dr. Jud Brewer, 45:14

“I detoxed 1,500 people in a 10-year period, and never had to hospitalize a single one, and never had an adverse effect.”
— Dr. Richard Louis Miller, 11:57 (The Coke Enders/Wilbur Hot Springs detox story — referenced on-air, not unpacked; full version is a standalone piece.)

Resources mentioned

• drjud.com — Jud’s hub

• Unwinding Anxiety (book) and app

• The Craving Mind (Yale UP, 2017)

• The Hunger Habit (Avery, 2024)

• TED talk: “A Simple Way to Break a Bad Habit”

• Inside the Curious Mind — Jud’s Substack

• @dr.jud on Instagram

Further reading

Richard’s recent conversation with journalist Robert Whitaker touches the same territory from the medication side (link the episode page once it’s live — Brewer referenced recognizing the same pattern in his own patients when Whitaker came up on-air).

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Pre-Order

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

This week I interviewed Carl Honoré, the journalist who started the International Slow Movement. What Carl told me about how people behave when you take their cell phones away matches what I saw in my years treating chemical dependence, a.k.a. addiction.

Take away someone’s phone, Carl said, and the body reacts the way it does coming off some drugs. Increased heart rate, sweaty palms, anxiety. He used the word addiction and meant it. During my sixty-five-year career (and counting), chemical dependence was one of my specialties, and I am quite familiar with the various forms of withdrawal. Carl’s description of what he calls addiction falls squarely within the parameters of chemical-dependence withdrawal.

Addiction means slavery, and we have made ourselves slaves to busyness and speed. Carl calls the rushing a kind of hiding.

A busy, fast life full of distraction and stimulation and over-caffeination is a form of denial. It’s a way of running away from ourselves.

We reach for the phone when the hard questions come close. Who am I? Am I living the right life, or moving too fast to ask? Socrates said the good life is the examined one. The feed is easier to face than that.

I have watched variations of the same story in my office for decades. The drink, the drug, and now the device. We hand the inside of our lives to something that takes the discomfort away for an hour, and then it demands more.

We tell ourselves the speed makes us productive. Carl says it does the opposite:

“Multitasking is not humanly possible. What you’re actually doing when you multitask is you’re toggling.”

Hand the same work to a fast multitasker and to someone who does one thing at a time, and the multitasker makes up to twice the mistakes and takes up to twice as long. The slow way is the accurate one.

The cost reaches past our work. Carl pointed to research that loneliness harms the body as much as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. That landed hard, because connection has been the theme of my whole working life. We are tribal animals. We heal in each other’s company and sicken alone. The rush pulls us away from the people who keep us well.

Carl does not want us to throw our phones in the river. He loves speed when speed fits. He objects to living the whole day in fast forward:

“In a world addicted to speed, slowness is a superpower.”

The young are leading the way back. Carl spoke in Paris to a hundred people, all under thirty-five, who read real books together for five hours without once reaching for a phone. They have a game they call stacking: everyone piles their phones on the table, and whoever grabs theirs first buys the round for everyone. They invented it themselves, because they can feel what being always on costs them.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Show notes

In this episode — Carl Honoré, the journalist whose 2004 book In Praise of Slow named the global Slow Movement, returns with the thesis sharpened. He and Richard work through what “slow” actually means, why busyness has become a measurable chemical addiction, the myth of multitasking, loneliness as a mortality risk, the acceleration that precedes burnout, and the four prescriptions any of us can start today.

Guest: Carl Honoré — journalist and author of In Praise of Slow (2004), Under Pressure (2008), The Slow Fix (2013), and Bolder (2018). His TED talk has more than 3 million views. He writes Tempo on Substack. More at carlhonore.com.

Chapters

• [00:00] The case for connection

• [02:34] What slow is, and what it isn’t

• [04:28] The cost of a speed-driven culture

• [07:31] Where the drive to speed comes from

• [12:29] Busyness as addiction

• [15:59] The digital detox

• [19:12] What young people are getting right

• [27:21] The multitasking myth

• [30:09] Loneliness, longevity, and connection

• [34:22] Burnout and the last burst of speed

• [42:20] Carl’s four prescriptions

• [51:58] Two quotes to close

Moments worth the timestamp

[02:34] What slow really is.

I often say, in a world addicted to speed, slowness is a superpower. — Carl Honoré

Slow is doing one thing at the speed it deserves — what musicians call tempo giusto. Not as fast as possible, but as well as possible.

[12:29] Busyness as addiction.

When you take away people’s phones, they have the same reaction as heroin addicts do when you take away their fix. Elevated heart rate, sweaty palms, deep anxiety. — Carl Honoré

Note: “same as heroin” is rhetorical compression. The research shows symptomatically similar physiological activation, not clinical equivalence; the underlying finding (phone-separation anxiety) is real. Foundational paper: Clayton, Leshner & Almond, 2015, JCMC.

[27:21] The multitasking myth.

Multitasking is not humanly possible. What you’re actually doing when you multitask is you’re toggling. The fast multitasker will make up to twice as many mistakes and will take up to twice as long. — Carl Honoré

The “2×” is the upper bound of the task-switching literature (Rubinstein, Meyer & Evans, 2001), fair as a public claim.

[30:09] Loneliness as a mortality risk.

Social isolation, loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. This isn’t just a nice to have, it’s a must have. — Carl Honoré

The benchmark traces to Holt-Lunstad, Smith & Layton, 2010, PLOS Medicine (148 studies, 308,849 participants).

[42:20] Carl’s four prescriptions.

1. Do less. Rank the week’s list, cut from the bottom, keep a “not-to-do” list in a drawer.

2. Use the off button. Notifications off; phone in another room while you eat, work, or sit with people who matter.

3. Build one slow ritual. Carl sketches; you might knit, read poetry, or walk without headphones.

4. Get into nature. “Even a tree in the back garden. Just take off your shoes and touch grass.”

[51:58] Two quotes to close.

Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly. — Mae West, quoted by Carl

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Resources mentioned

• Carl Honoré — carlhonore.com; In Praise of Slow, Bolder, TED talk, Tempo on Substack

• Clayton, Leshner & Almond, 2015, JCMC — phone separation and physiological activation

• Rubinstein, Meyer & Evans, 2001, J. Experimental Psychology — task-switching costs

• Holt-Lunstad, Smith & Layton, 2010, PLOS Medicine — social connection and mortality

• Richard Louis Miller — Master Your Mind and The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines

Further reading

• Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention — the forces pulling our attention apart, and what helps.

• Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism — a practical philosophy for using technology on your own terms.

• The Offline Club — the in-person, phone-free gatherings spreading across Europe that Carl describes.

My New Book

The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines was recently reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. I was honored by it. Read the review here.

Pre-Order

A few words from the front of the book:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

It’s the fifth book in my series on psychedelic medicine. You can find it on Amazon.

My Other Books

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

At 82, five years ago, two different medical specialists diagnosed me with terminal illness within a two-week period.

The first specialist was my cardiologist. My echocardiogram showed a left ventricle that was pumping insufficiently, producing an ejection fraction (EF) of 34, which is 21 points below the lowest normal. The ejection fraction is the percentage of blood pumped with each beat, and the normal range begins at 55. I was also told I had a 60-to-70-percent blockage in the Left Anterior Descending (LAD) artery, aka the widow-maker.

I had been a marathon runner and was still an endurance athlete, and I was told to cut my exercise back and begin putting my affairs in order.

A few days later, a mole I had finally talked my doctor into biopsying, after a year of freezing it, came back as an aggressive nodular melanoma—the kind AI told me could kill within six weeks. I had been carrying the cancer, unknowingly, for a year.

I am still here to tell you how that all turned out. But first I will tell you about the scientist I interviewed on MBHP this week, because her life’s work helps explain what happened to me.

The Act of Noticing Things

Dr. Ellen Langer has been a professor of psychology at Harvard for half a century—the first woman ever tenured in that department—and she has spent those fifty years proving something most of medicine still treats as a slogan: that the mind and the body are not two separate things. They are one unit. Wherever you put the one, she says, you are necessarily putting the other.

She started somewhere that surprises people. When most of us hear “mindfulness,” we picture meditation—sitting still, eyes closed, repeating a mantra, leaving the world behind. Ellen’s mindfulness is almost the opposite. She defines it in five words: the act of noticing new things. And her uncomfortable conclusion, after all these decades of research, is that nearly all of us are mindless almost all the time. “When you’re not there,” she told me, “you’re not there to know that you’re not there.”

What puts us on autopilot is certainty. We are handed absolutes as children—facts to memorize, answers to know—and the instant you believe you know a thing, you stop paying attention to it.

She learned this, of all places, from a horse. A man at an event asked her to hold his horse while he fetched it a hot dog. Everyone knows horses don’t eat meat. To be polite, she said nothing—and the horse ate the hot dog.

“That’s when I realized,” she said, “that everything I thought I knew could be wrong.”

For Ellen, that was thrilling rather than frightening: if the things people swear can’t be done might actually be possible, then a great many doors we have been treating as walls are standing open.

Our Strongest Medicine

The most important of those doors is the one between the mind and the body, and her most famous demonstration of it is the counterclockwise study. She brought a group of elderly men to a retreat outfitted exactly as the world had been twenty years earlier—the magazines, the films, the news of the day—and had them live surrounded by the materials of their younger selves, in the present tense, rather than as men reminiscing about the past.

In five days their eyesight, their hearing, their strength, their memory, and even how old they appeared all measurably improved. The point, she was careful to say, was never that you should freeze your house in time. The point was possibility—that so much of what we accept about decline is something we mindlessly swallowed when we were young and never thought to question.

Dr. Langer also conducted a fascinating study in which she took various measurements on hotel workers before and after they were told that the Surgeon General considered their daily work to be exercise: vacuuming, making beds, cleaning bathrooms, pushing carts, climbing stairs, and scrubbing floors. They were also told how many calories each task burned, along with a good deal more about the health benefits of their movement. As you might now guess, the workers improved on many indices of health, and it was based on having been given the information, not on anything else changing in their lives.

Then Dr. Langer said the thing the pharmaceutical industry would prefer you not know. “Our strongest medication,” she told me, “is placebo.”

Dr. Langer walked me through sham-surgery studies in which patients with Parkinson’s had their skulls opened and closed with nothing done inside—and improved anyway, because they believed they had been treated. Her conclusion is as radical as it is simple:

“The pill is not making you well. You’re making yourself well.”

A drug that wants to reach the market has to beat that inner pill, which is exactly why the placebo is given a bad name it has never deserved.

There is a shadow side to mind-body unity, and it is the label. Ellen described what she calls the borderline effect: score a 69 on a certain test and you are called cognitively deficient; score a 70 and you are average. Nobody believes there is a real difference between 69 and 70—a guess, a sneeze, a misread question—yet those two people walk out into entirely different lives, and the label becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The same machinery, she argues, runs disease, and it runs the epidemic of diagnoses we now hang on our children.

Dr. Langer is warning us about the dangers of limiting what we believe is possible, the dangers of labels, very much including the label of age. Especially later in life, acting one’s age can be dangerous to your well-being.

Add More Life to Your Years, Not Years to Your Life

Now I will tell you how my own story turned out, and you will see the connection with Dr. Langer’s research.

I did very nearly the opposite of some of what I was told by the cardiologists. Instead of cutting my exercise back, I went from three or four days a week of aerobic exercise to seven days a week, an hour at a time, building the pace slowly until I could go faster.

I began weight lifting three times a week with Mike Mihos, a professional trainer and bodybuilder. I further cleaned up my already clean fuel intake, and I created a ten-point rejuvenation program for myself.

I made a decision: I would live as a living man. I would live every single day as though I felt wonderful, because in fact I did. I refused to allow the words on a page to disrupt my lovely daily life, so long as I could direct that life.

I did not allow the diagnoses to harsh my mellow. To do so would indeed be adding insult to injury.

Three months later, my heart was pumping normally—the ejection fraction had climbed from 34 to 62—and it has stayed there ever since; my cardiologist eventually discharged me, told me I no longer needed him. I have a new cardiologist who monitors me yearly, and I continue to be tested, because prevention is my game whenever possible.

As for the aggressive melanoma, after the great surgeon Dr. Jonathan George performed a sentinel lymphadenectomy and biopsy, he called and reported that I was cancer free. I asked how it was that the cancer had not killed me. He said my immune system had built a capsule around the cancer and prevented it from spreading for an entire year. I was clear.

Dr. Ellen Langer’s counsel for all of us, and especially for those of us who are older, is to stop chasing the longevity industry’s serums and scores. “Rather than spend your time trying to add more years to your life,” she said, “add more life to your years”—and her data suggest that doing so actually adds the years.

I believe we create our own reality through our thoughts and feelings. Deep healing is something a person adds to consciously, from the inside. We are only beginning to learn how powerful the mind is in our healing process. One of the most powerful tools for that learning is psychedelic medicine.

Food for thought.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

Show notes

In this episode—Dr. Ellen Langer, the Harvard psychologist who has studied mindfulness and mind-body unity for nearly fifty years, joins Richard to explain why mindfulness is not meditation, what the counterclockwise study revealed about aging, why the placebo is our strongest medicine, and how a diagnosis can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Richard shares his own recovery from two terminal diagnoses at 82.

Guest: Dr. Ellen Langer—Professor of Psychology at Harvard (the first woman tenured in the department), author of Mindfulness, Counterclockwise, and The Mindful Body. More at ellenlanger.com.

[03:03] Mindfulness is not meditation

“Mindfulness, as I study it, you are very much in the world... it’s the act of noticing new things.” — Ellen Langer

• Her sobering finding: virtually all of us are mindless almost all the time. Certainty is the culprit—when you think you know, you stop paying attention.

[04:30] The horse and the hot dog

“And that’s when I realized everything I thought I knew could be wrong.” — Ellen Langer

[20:15] The counterclockwise study

• Elderly men lived as their 20-years-younger selves for five days; vision, hearing, strength, memory, and apparent age improved. The point was possibility, not a prescription to freeze your home in time.

[30:01] Imagined exercise

• Data from other labs: a group imagining lifting weights gained virtually the same muscle as the group actually lifting—both far above the do-nothing group.

[31:21] The borderline effect

• 69 vs. 70 on a test sorts people into “deficient” vs. “average” with no real difference—and the label becomes self-fulfilling. The same machinery runs disease labels.

Richard: “The psychological diagnoses we put on people... it becomes like a letter A on their foreheads.”

[40:05] Placebo and “you’re making yourself well”

“Our strongest medication is placebo... The pill is not making you well. You’re making yourself well.” — Ellen Langer

• Attention to symptom variability (Langer’s self-treatment for chronic illness): set your phone to check in through the day—“How is the pain now? Better or worse than before, and why?” The “why” engages a mindful search; symptoms often recede. No side effects, no cost.

[45:40] Richard’s two terminal diagnoses

“I did not change my way of life. I did not think of myself as a dying person.” — Dr. Richard Louis Miller
“If you went from feeling healthy to defining yourself as sick, you’re instructing your body how to no longer operate optimally.” — Ellen Langer

[52:30] Add life to your years

“Rather than spend your time trying to add more years to your life, add more life to your years. And... that will indeed add more years.” — Ellen Langer

Resources mentioned

• Dr. Ellen Langer—ellenlanger.com; The Mindful Body, Counterclockwise, Mindfulness (books)

Further reading

• Crum, A. J., & Langer, E. J. (2007). Mind-set matters: Exercise and the placebo effect. Psychological Science, 18(2), 165–171. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17425538/

• Ranganathan, V. K., et al. (2004). From mental power to muscle power. Neuropsychologia, 42(7), 944–956. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14998709/

• McRae, C., et al. (2004). Effects of perceived treatment on quality of life and medical outcomes in a double-blind placebo surgery trial. Archives of General Psychiatry, 61(4), 412–420. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15066900/

• Rodin, J., & Langer, E. J. (1977). Long-term effects of a control-relevant intervention with the institutionalized aged. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35(12), 897–902.

• Aungle, P., & Langer, E. (2023). Physical healing as a function of perceived time. Scientific Reports, 13, 22432. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-50009-3

• Langer, E. J. The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health (Ballantine, 2023). https://www.ellenlanger.com/books/

My Books

Pre-Order

I wrote Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential to contribute to how we, as a community, handle a moment of unprecedented attention and capital.

Will psychedelic medicines be another drug dispensed in 15-minute sessions with psychiatrists, or will they be used properly as facilitators of psychotherapy?

Early feedback:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

If any of this speaks to you, you can order the book here.

My Other Books

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

I want to introduce you to someone I have known for years and admire a great deal. Jamie Joyce came on Mind Body Health & Politics this week. She is running for Congress in California’s 12th district, she founded the Society Library, and she is an artist (I keep one of her pieces that she made with a particle accelerator on my dresser). She is the real deal.

You know how I open this program most weeks: human beings are tribal animals, healthiest when we live in small groups where we know one another by face and by name. The standing threat to that is the small number among us who would rather dominate than collaborate. Jamie has built her whole campaign on exactly that distinction. She is running, she told me, because she is tired of watching power concentrate in a few hands while the rest of us are talked past.

It has already cost her something. Twenty minutes after she announced, the phone calls began — people telling her they would ruin her life if she did not drop out. In a later call, they read back the names of old boyfriends, to let her know they had been digging. A private citizen decides to run for office, and that is the welcome she receives. She did not drop out. When I asked her about it, she said something I have not stopped thinking about:

“There are people who have taken bullets to the head for me to even have the ability and the right to run for Congress. If I’m not willing to risk my reputation to stand up for the rights of others, then I don’t deserve the job.”

I felt protective when she said it, and I told her so on the air.

Here is the part that delighted me. Jamie founded her Society Library after reading, in her early twenties, about a club Benjamin Franklin started — a small group that met to reason together in a spirit of sincere inquiry into truth, with no taste for argument or domination. Franklin called it the Junto. I started a Junto in Fort Bragg twenty years ago, and it still meets every Thursday morning. I invited her to join us. Two people, two centuries apart, reaching for the same simple thing: people thinking together instead of shouting at each other.

We covered a great deal: the bill she wrote, the art she makes with a particle accelerator, the long odds she is running against anyway. I told her on the air what I will tell you now. I wish her all the luck, and all the help and support that the people who know her can muster.

Go to jamiejoyce.com and see for yourself.

Then listen to the whole conversation.

And then, just below, I have a small practice for you this week.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

A note for Californians

This letter reaches you on a Monday. Tuesday, June 2, is the statewide primary.

If you live in California, you almost certainly already have a ballot sitting at home, because the state mails one to every registered voter. There is still time, but not much. Do not put it back in the mail now. Fill it out and drop it in any ballot drop box, or at any polling place, by 8:00 p.m. Tuesday. Or vote in person that day.

I say the same thing at the top of the program most weeks, and I mean it every time: get out and vote, and vote for the people who will actually represent you. And if you happen to live in the 12th district, around Berkeley and Oakland, Jamie Joyce is on your ballot.

Show notes

[00:00] The mission

Richard’s standing frame: human beings are tribal, healthiest in small groups where they know one another by face and name; roughly 95% of us want to collaborate, and a small minority would rather dominate. The civic conclusion he always reaches — get out and vote — sets up the guest.

[02:39] Why she’s running

• Jamie is running in CA-12 because she found her representatives unresponsive — she spent three months in DC last year and couldn’t get her own reps on the phone.

“We need to stop electing politicians and start electing legislators.” — Jamie Joyce

[06:17] “They said they’d ruin my life”

• Within twenty minutes of announcing, she got calls pressuring her to drop out; a later call referenced names from her past.

“There are people who have taken bullets to the head for me to even have the right to run for Congress. If I’m not willing to risk my reputation to stand up for the rights of others, then I don’t deserve the job.” — Jamie Joyce

[10:54] The MAD Act

Jamie’s omnibus bill bundles ten titles she’d otherwise have to pass separately. As she describes them: data-privacy/surveillance limits (requiring brokers to delete holdings), a “Demand a Plan for AI” framework of technical working groups, limits on the Insurrection Act, dark-money disclosure, electoral reform (funding ranked-choice / STAR voting), and mass digitization of government records.

[23:48] The jungle primary

• California’s top-two primary means Jamie and the incumbent — both Democrats — go straight to the general; no Republican is running. She’s a late entrant and out-fundraised, but the only challenger.

[36:05] The Society Library

• In her early twenties, Jamie read Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography and the description of his debating club — a group that reasoned together in “a sincere spirit of inquiry into truth.” She built the Society Library to do that at civilization scale, extracting arguments and evidence from across media into models city councils and universities now use.

“Our reasoning is fractured and broken across the web... We focus on creating models of formal civilization-scale debate.” — Jamie Joyce

[42:30] Her art

• Jamie funded college winning art competitions; a Burning Man honorarium led to her hand-cut wooden “wisdom” books and, later, Lichtenberg figures — three-dimensional lightning shapes made by irradiating acrylic in a particle accelerator.

“The real treasure is the friends you make along the way.” — Jamie Joyce

[48:22] Franklin’s Junto, and Richard’s own

• Franklin’s club was the Leather Apron Club, which became the Junto. Richard started a Junto in Fort Bragg twenty years ago that still meets every Thursday; he invites Jamie to visit.

[50:33] Closing

“Energy and persistence conquer all things.” — Benjamin Franklin, quoted by Jamie Joyce
“It matters less whether I win this particular seat... what really matters is that we never, ever give up.” — Jamie Joyce

Resources mentioned

• Jamie Joyce for Congress — jamiejoyce.com

• The Society Library

• Benjamin Franklin’s Junto (the Leather Apron Club)

My Books

Pre-Order

I wrote Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential to contribute to how we, as a community, handle a moment of unprecedented attention and capital.

Will psychedelic medicines be another drug dispensed in 15-minute sessions with psychiatrists, or will they be used properly as facilitators of psychotherapy?

Early feedback:

Dr. Richard Louis Miller is a true elder and wisdom keeper of the psychedelic community, and his credentials come honestly, through hard-won experience. In this book, he continues his role as an educator by sharing his knowledge of both the perils and the promise of psychedelic substances. The reader will find valuable advice on how to avoid pitfalls while realizing the maximum benefits from the thoughtful and safe use of these remarkable medicines.

— Dr. Dennis McKenna, ethnopharmacologist and author of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss

Putting forth the adverse effects of these substances in readable form contributes to their understanding and separates psychedelic scientists from those who would cover over, or even hide, negative effects of pharmaceuticals.

— Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco

If any of this speaks to you, you can order the book here.

My Other Books

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

When I first read Anatomy of an Epidemic in 2010, I had already been a clinical psychologist for almost 5 decades, and I thought I understood the trouble inside American psychiatry.

Robert Whitaker’s book showed me I had been polite about it.

He returned to the program last week for the fourth time. I asked him to walk us through what the research literature actually says — about antidepressants, about the stimulants we give our children, and about the story the profession has told the public for forty-five years. He did it the way he always does: calmly, with the documents open on the table, and impossible to wave away.

The center of our conversation is a trial called STAR*D, the largest antidepressant study ever conducted in this country. It was reported to the world as a seventy-percent success. When a psychologist went back and scored it against the protocol its own designers had written, the success rate fell by half — and the number of patients still well a year later came to about three in a hundred. I’ll let Whitaker tell you that story himself. He has spent forty years earning the right to, and he tells it better than I could.

This conversation also has everything to do with my new book, The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines, which came out earlier this month. The pattern Whitaker documented in psychiatry — a theory reverse-engineered from a drug, sold to the public as settled science, then locked in place by money — is the very pattern I do not want repeated with the psychedelic medicines I have spent my life studying. Whitaker is the journalist who taught me what the early warning signs look like.

And then, near the end, he told me about the people he has interviewed who genuinely recovered, and what they said had made the difference. It was not a drug.

I want you to hear that part in his own voice.

Please listen, and write back to tell me what you think.

Golden light,

Dr. Richard Louis Miller

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A note on working together

For those who feel drawn to working together more directly, I offer a limited number of one-on-one sessions.

These are not traditional therapy sessions. They are quiet, practical conversations focused on calming the mind, easing anxiety, and working with simple tools that support steadiness in daily life.

We move at a thoughtful pace. We work with what’s present. We focus on what helps.

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In this episode — Investigative journalist Robert Whitaker returns for his fourth conversation with Richard. They trace the antidepressant story from the 1980 DSM-III rebrand through the reanalysis of the largest antidepressant trial ever run, the long-term data on children and stimulants, and — at the end — what Whitaker learned from the people who actually recovered.

Guest: Robert Whitaker — investigative journalist, founder of Mad in America, author of Anatomy of an Epidemic (2010), Mad in America (2002), and Psychiatry Under the Influence. His 1998 Boston Globe series was a Pulitzer finalist.

Chapters

• [00:00] The epidemic of isolation

• [02:20] Introducing Robert Whitaker

• [03:30] The 1980 DSM-III pivot

• [05:50] Where the chemical-imbalance idea came from

• [12:40] What the public was told instead

• [18:30] How the drugs change the brain

• [23:10] Patients who’ve been on SSRIs for years

• [27:53] STAR*D: the trial reanalyzed

• [37:01] Why the press stayed quiet

• [39:53] Children on psychiatric drugs

• [42:56] The MTA stimulant study

• [51:00] “A menace to society”

• [55:34] Why informed consent drives him

• [57:32] The connection cure

Introductory notes - the epidemic of isolation [00:00]

The mission of the program: enhancing wellbeing by making connections with the people who live near you, by face and by name. Ninety-five percent of people want to collaborate, not fight. A small group of dominated predators benefits from divisiveness. The current American epidemic is isolation, alienation, and loneliness. The antidote is connection - a theme the conversation returns to in its final movement.

Introducing Robert Whitaker [02:20]

Whitaker is an investigative journalist and the founder of Mad in America. He is the author of Anatomy of an Epidemic (2010), Mad in America (2002), and Psychiatry Under the Influence. His 1998 Boston Globe series on psychiatric research was a Pulitzer finalist. Of all the people I have interviewed in over twenty years, his work has had the greatest impact on my professional life.

The corruption of psychiatry and the DSM-III pivot [03:30]

• The forty-five-year story begins in 1980, when the American Psychiatric Association published DSM-III and adopted a disease model. Schizophrenia, bipolar, anxiety, and a new diagnosis called attention deficit hyperactivity disorder were each declared distinct illnesses.

• The profession said it knew the causes. Depression was too little serotonin. Psychosis was too much dopamine. A second generation of drugs would correct those imbalances, “like insulin for diabetes.”

• Prozac arrived in 1988 as a breakthrough that could make you feel “better than well.”

• Before DSM-III, American psychiatry felt its legitimacy as a medical specialty was under attack. DSM-III was a rebrand to position psychiatrists as medical doctors treating medical illnesses.

“It was pitched to us as a story of science, but it wasn’t a science story. It was a marketing story. It was a rebranding story for American psychiatry, which in the 1970s was feeling that its legitimacy as a real medical specialty was under attack.” — Robert Whitaker

What the science actually showed [05:50]

• The chemical-imbalance hypothesis came out of the 1960s, working backwards from drug mechanism, not from measurement of patient biochemistry.

• Tricyclics and MAOIs both upped serotonergic activity. Researchers inferred that depression might be low serotonin. Antipsychotics block dopamine receptors, so they inferred schizophrenia might be high dopamine.

• Direct testing failed. By 1978 researchers weren’t finding it. A 1984 NIMH study concluded that a lesion in the serotonergic system is not a cause of depression.

• In 1998, the APA’s own textbook declared the monoamine theory of depression dead. The profession did not tell the public (Moncrieff et al., 2022, Molecular Psychiatry).

What the public was told instead [12:40]

• Pharmaceutical ads kept selling SSRIs that “fix chemical imbalances.” The APA website told the same story. In 2005 the APA put out a press release calling psychiatrists experts in fixing chemical imbalances in the brain.

• Drug companies funded APA education programs, media training, and “key opinion leaders” at Stanford, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Penn. Thought leaders were paid hundreds of thousands, sometimes more than a million, over a few years.

• By 1998, when the New England Journal of Medicine wanted a review of antidepressants, it could not find an academic mood-disorders expert who wasn’t already on pharma payroll.

My Other Books:

• Master Your Mind: Practical Tools to Calm Anxiety, Silence Your Inner Critic and Stop Overthinking

• Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life: Dying Without Fear

• Freeing Sexuality: Psychologists, Consent Teachers, Polyamory Experts, and Sex Workers Speak Out

• Psychedelic Wisdom: The Astonishing Rewards of Mind-Altering Substances

• Psychedelic Medicine: The Healing Powers of LSD, MDMA, Psilocybin, and Ayahuasca

• Integral Psychedelic Therapy (co-edited with Jason A. Butler & Genesee Herzberg)

How the drugs actually change the brain [18:30]

• Before treatment, a patient’s serotonergic system is not operating abnormally. The drug ups activity. The brain dials itself down to compensate (Hyman & Nestler, 1996, AJP).

• After long-term treatment, patients do in fact end up with a low-serotonin system, physiologically.

“The drug induces the very change that was hypothesized to cause the problem in the first place.” — Robert Whitaker

• On withdrawal, the dialed-down system can’t snap back. Patients feel terrible and conclude they are still sick.

• A University of Bristol cohort (n=222,121, 10-year follow-up, 2022) found elevated risk of coronary heart disease, cardiovascular events, and all-cause mortality among long-term antidepressant users.

What to tell patients already on SSRIs [23:10]

I described to Whitaker a patient of mine who has been on an SSRI for twenty years and no longer knows what she is without it. His answer:

• Before antidepressants became long-term care, 85% of hospitalized depressed patients recovered within a year.

• As long-term medication became standard, the one-year recovery rate dropped. By 1998, the reported stay-well figure on antidepressants was about 15%.

• A 2025 systematic review found the median antidepressant trial lasts 8 weeks. The median real-world prescription is 5 years. The science backing five-year prescribing was never built.

STAR*D - a $35 million study that became a hoax [27:53]

• STAR*D enrolled 4,041 outpatients, the largest and longest antidepressant trial ever conducted. Four chances to remit across four steps.

• Reported a 70% cumulative remission rate. Medical school curricula, the New Yorker, and the New York Times cited it.

• The protocol specified HAM-D as the outcome scale. The paper used QIDS, which the protocol explicitly said not to use.

• 931 of the 4,041 patients weren’t depressed enough at baseline to be eligible. Some scored in remission at baseline. They were counted as remitters anyway.

• The protocol said dropouts without remission were treatment failures. The researchers imputed dropouts as remitters at the same rate as those who stayed - roughly 600 imagined remissions.

• Psychologist H. Edmund Pigott obtained the protocol via FOIA, then patient-level data under the RIAT Act. Applying the registered protocol, the true cumulative remission rate was 35% (Pigott et al., 2023, BMJ Open).

• Of the original 4,041 patients, 108 were in sustained remission and still in the trial at one year. That is roughly 3%. The figure did not appear in the abstract of the 2006 AJP summary paper.

“The stay-well rate at the end of one year in the largest and longest trial of antidepressants ever conducted was 3%. We were being told of a stay-well rate of being cured of 70%.” — Robert Whitaker

• Two follow-on RIAT reanalyses extended Pigott’s work to the rest of the trial: Step 2 drug-switch arms (medRxiv, Feb 2025) and Step 2/3 augmentation arms (medRxiv, Oct 2025). Both reach the same conclusion: when you score the trial the way the protocol said, the headline numbers collapse.

The press silence on STAR*D [37:01]

• Mad in America ran a retraction campaign. Pigott sent letters to the AJP. The AJP declined.

• The AJP invited a rebuttal. The original authors called Pigott’s work “ad hoc post-analysis.” In fact Pigott had applied the registered protocol.

• In October 2024 Pigott’s team formally called on the AJP to retract five articles tied to the original analyses. None have been retracted.

• The New York Times was still citing the 70% figure in 2023.

“From a newspaper standpoint, this is being handed to them on a plate. They don’t have to dig anything up. They just have to read what the protocol says.” — Robert Whitaker

Children on psychiatric drugs [39:53]

• Before 1980, major mental disorders were understood as disorders of the mature personality. ADHD as a diagnosis was born in 1980.

• 25 to 30% of incoming college freshmen now carry a psychiatric diagnosis and a prescription.

• The Social Security Administration’s 2024 disability report: adult mental-illness disability has more than doubled since Prozac entered the market, and disability among children for mental-illness causes has risen more than thirty-fold.

“We are taking away from our kids their God-given right to try to make something of themselves, to grow up and try to settle with their mind, to come to grips with their minds.” — Robert Whitaker

The MTA stimulant study and informed consent [42:56]

• The MTA (Multimodal Treatment of ADHD) study was designed by NIMH to answer a direct question: do stimulants help kids long term?

• At 14 months, expert-medicated kids did slightly better on reading and ADHD symptoms (MTA Cooperative Group, 1999). The abstract became the story.

• By 3 years, medication status was a marker of deterioration rather than benefit. The abstract said benefits “seemed to disappear.” The data tables said worse.

• By 6 to 8 years, medicated children had greater functional impairments, worse cognitive tests, worse ADHD symptoms, and higher delinquency rates (Molina et al., 2009, JAACAP).

• The NIMH website described the 14-month benefit. It did not describe the three-year, six-year, or eight-year results.

“A menace to society” [51:00]

• Past APA president Jeffrey Lieberman called Whitaker “a menace to society, causing great harm.” Whitaker plans to put it on his gravestone.

• Whitaker’s position: he isn’t doing the research. He reads NIMH’s own work and the data tables past the smoothed abstracts.

“I’m a menace to a profession that has decided not to be an honest narrator of its own science.” — Robert Whitaker

Informed consent is the belief that motivates me [55:34]

• Whitaker’s frame is not anti-medication. It is pro-informed-consent. People have a right to know the risks and benefits, including long-term, and then to decide.

• “Drugs worsen long-term outcomes” is an aggregate claim. Individual patients can still feel better than baseline. The comparison that matters is the natural recovery rate.

The connection cure - nobody said the drug did it [57:32]

“When I spoke to people who were better, who had gotten their lives back, nobody said the drug did it. What everybody said is they made a connection with somebody.” — Robert Whitaker

• After Anatomy of an Epidemic came out, Whitaker began interviewing the people who had recovered from depression, schizophrenia, and other diagnoses once considered chronic.

• Across every interview, the same answer: connection. Somebody believed in them. They developed a relationship. Through that relationship they joined groups, worked, volunteered, brought food to the elderly.

• Julia Hotz’s The Connection Cure (Simon & Schuster, 2024) documents clinicians around the world who prescribe movement, nature, art, service, and belonging instead of, or alongside, a drug.

• What we need, in order: someone to love, someone who loves us, meaning, then exercise, shelter, and food.

Why this conversation, now

This episode follows the release of my new book, The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines (Park Street Press, May 5, 2026). The pattern American psychiatry ran with antidepressants for thirty years - reverse-engineer a theory from a drug, hand it to the public as settled science, lock the story in with guild incentives - is the pattern I do not want repeated with psilocybin, MDMA, or ibogaine. Whitaker is the journalist who taught me what the early signs look like. The book is an attempt to keep us honest about the next round before it ships.

Resources mentioned

• Robert Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic (Crown, 2010) and Mad in America

• Pigott et al., 2023 STAR*D Step 1 reanalysis, BMJ Open

• Pigott et al., 2025a STAR*D Step 2 drug-switch reanalysis, medRxiv

• Pigott et al., 2025b STAR*D Step 2/3 augmentation reanalysis, medRxiv

• October 2024 retraction call covering five AJP articles

• Moncrieff et al., 2022 serotonin theory umbrella review, Molecular Psychiatry

• Bristol primary-care cohort, 2022

• Antidepressant trial duration vs real-world use, 2025, Journal of Affective Disorders

• Hyman & Nestler, 1996, AJP

• MTA Cooperative Group, 1999; Molina et al., 2009, JAACAP

• SSA 2024 Annual Statistical Report

• Julia Hotz, The Connection Cure (Simon & Schuster, 2024)

• Inner Compass Initiative (Laura Delano), rxisk.org (David Healy), International Institute for Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal

• Richard Louis Miller, Master Your Mind and The Adverse Effects and Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Medicines (Park Street Press, May 5, 2026)