Mind Body Health & Politics

In this episode — Stem cell biologist Bruce Lipton, who brought the word “epigenetics” into the mainstream, returns for a second conversation with Richard. They open on a warning about civilizational collapse, then work through how the first seven years of life program roughly 95% of adult behavior — including the program for how you’re “supposed” to age, wh...

Diana Richardson, who has studied human sexuality, intimacy, and couples’ relationships with sex for fifty years, returns to the program (her first appearance, “The Power of Slow Sex,” aired March 2022). She and Richard trace how sexual mores have shifted over the last century — more premarital sex, then a modern pullback into isolation, pornography, and falling fertility rat...

Joshua White left a decade-long career as a San Francisco city attorney to found Fireside Project, a free, anonymous peer-support line for anyone in a psychedelic crisis or working through one from the past. He and Richard, an advisor to Fireside Project, talk about the four gaps Joshua set out to close in the field, what it takes to be a “loving rock” for a stranger mid-trip...

British historian Charlie Harris spent years living with his sources in Mendocino County to write Mendo, the first full history of how a logged-out fishing-and-timber county became the cannabis capital of the Americas. He and Richard — a Mendocino resident since 1975 who watched much of it happen — trace the whole arc: the Back to the Land migration, weed as currency, the hom...

Journalist Abbie Rosner spent several years interviewing thirty-six older adults, most in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, 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 ...