In Conversation: Zach Haigney

My relationship with Zach and the Beckley team started from a very personal place- right in the middle of my marriage. After nearly two years of pandemic life, with both Matt and me at home raising our babies, he was preparing to return to the demands of a full-time corporate job. I knew it was going to be a long time, if ever, before he got a significant reset like this in between work situations.

When a friend told us he was attending a retreat in Jamaica- one that included meditation, yoga, and psilocybin ceremonies- I immediately thought Matt deserved something like that, and the time to do it was now. I researched the logistics, figured out how to make it work, and then, more or less, told him he was going. He was excited but hesitant, unsure whether it was a “good” use of time and money, like the rational man he is. Meanwhile, I was stoked: I knew the retreat would be good for him, and, selfishly, for me too. Sure, some space would be healthy after two years of constant togetherness, but more than that, we needed something to help us transition into this next phase of our life. 

Long story short, he went- it changed his life, he made amazing friends, developed a deeper appreciation for nature, an understanding of the universe- all the things. Since it was Beckley  Retreats’ maiden voyage, several folks from the Beckley team attended the retreat themselves. Having undergone this transformative experience together, the friendships they formed were tight. Anyone that’s gone through a psychedelic experience in a group setting knows what I mean. Before long, many of these people ended up in my apartment :) Friendships grew, and the Beckley family (literally and figuratively) and their work became very important to us. And so, when Rock told us about The Trip Report, the newsletter they had acquired, and their desire to expand it to include a podcast, I offered my help in any way they needed. A few weeks later, I met with Zach and his colleague Katelin, and the rest is history. 

So there’s the backstory. Zach and I take it from here in the conversation I’m sharing with you today.

Before we jump in, I have to share my gratitude for Zach and the Beckley team one more time. What a wildly intelligent, compassionate, hard-working group of people. Their work has opened doors in my mind I didn’t know existed, shifting how I think, what I question, and how I move through the world. And what an honor it’s been to support the work of Amanda Feilding- the matriarch of the family, founder of the Beckley Foundation, co-founder of Beckley Retreats, and one of the bravest women in science. She’s an absolute force, and I’m lucky to know her. 

Okay, you get it, I’m proud- I hope you enjoy this conversation with Zach Haigney. 

The Beckley team at Psychedelic Science 2023

Erin: So I'm going to do this thing a la Zach Haigney, starting with, “Who are you and what do you do?” but, I'm going to start with myself because this might be shared with the people that are listening to The Trip Report..

My name is Erin Greenhouse, I’ve been working with Zach and the Beckley team, The Trip Report team, for the last two years or so. I think we can get into how we got to know each other and that whole story later, maybe.. But long story short, I've been editing The Trip Report for the last couple years. I have had a front row seat to some- I mean sometimes literally a front row seat- to these conversations. And even if I wasn't there, if you were just doing these remote interviews, I got to listen to these conversations like, three, four, times over word by word. I really, really got to know these people and not only learn so much about, I mean, I would say psychedelics, but we both know that it got so much bigger than that, right? And not only are these important conversations- just interesting, compelling, intellectual conversations- but sometimes very moving, very personal, very vulnerable, intimate conversations that you would have, I mean, you often talk about people's experiences with psychedelics, how that changed them..

So, I feel privileged that I got to share that just as a bystander. And with you too, Zach, you’ve shared so much, and I'm sure you witnessed yourself transform throughout this. So I want share what a privilege it's been to have that access, and to support this, in any way, has been really, really cool.

So that brings us to today- why are we here? First of all I’m building out my website- just professionally, there's a lot of things that I want to achieve, but, a big part of that is wanting to share the projects I've been working on, including The Trip Report. It's been a big part of my life. I'm a huge supporter of the mission of The Trip Report and everything that Beckley's been doing. So, I wanted to have conversations with the creators of the projects, the hosts, the people that are doing the writing, the people that are doing the real work, not only to share the story from their point of view and have a chance to talk about that, but also just as a nice way to reflect and catch up, check in on goals and where everybody's at.

So that brings me to Zach. I'm really excited to talk to you because this is actually coming at a really great time because if people are indeed listening, there's probably been an obvious pause, recently in The Trip Report.

So this is a great time to talk about that and where you are, where The Trip Report is, what's going on. I'm going to let you answer the question, but I was thinking about the, “Who are you and what do you do?” question, and I think you'd have a very different answer a few months ago versus now.. so maybe let's start with the one that you would've said a few months ago. Like if I asked you in, I don't know, December 2024 (by the way, it's March 2025 right now), but in December 2024, if I was like, “Zach, who are you? What do you do?” what would you have said?

Zach: It's a good question.

Erin: You can get as heady as you want.

Zach: So I, can I go a little bit further back than December 2024?

Erin: Oh, yeah. I mean, I was planning on talking about, like, high school.

Zach: Yeah. So, The Trip Report came about because I've been in the alternative medicine space for several years. Prior to that, I worked in drug development and pharmaceutical research.

And you know, this was at a time where Michael Pollan had written his book- that had just come out 2018- MAPS had garnered breakthrough therapy status, which is a designation from the FDA acknowledging that there's a “there” there for the field of psychedelic medicine. Johns Hopkins had instantiated their psychedelic research program, so did Imperial College.. So there was an obvious inflection point, and, I didn't have any marketable skills to the psychedelic world other than just my curiosity about what was happening, and it felt like a very momentous inflection point.

I've used the phrase “watershed moment in human history,” and I don't think that's hyperbole because these experiences- these compounds, these molecules- have been part of the human experience for millennia-  spiritual, healing, religious, cultural- for millennia across the world, and they're coming back into the limelight, so to speak. They're coming out of the so-called shadow or closet of prohibition, in a meaningful way. I thought that given my background in drug development and in the alternative healing space, it was actually like a symbiosis of those two domains, right?  Like conventional pharma is the furthest thing from healing spaces or somatic healing. And here with psychedelics, you have these compounds that.. it bridges those worlds. And, I thought, you know, I could have a unique lens onto this emerging field. And again, this was several years ago and it was nascent and it was emerging, and I was just innately, I was just like fascinated by it. And so I started blogging. I started a Substack newsletter.

Erin: You needed to get it out.

Zach: Yeah. And I thought it was really- I mean, I still do- it's just intellectually stimulating in a way that few things are. It is a nexus of, like I said, drug development and indigenous wisdom, healing practices, regulatory matters, drug policy.

And as it is emerging into getting closer and closer to the clinic, how do you deliver these things? How do you pay for them? How do you train people? So all of these questions were top of mind like six years ago, and that was the ethos of The The Trip Report: what is this field going to look like in the future, and what are the ingredients, so to speak, coming to bear?

And there was a few different waves of investment and interest and sell offs and company formation and company closure and ups and downs.. and just last August when the FDA turned down MDMA, it was like… that was a significant inflection point in this sort of epoch of the field. I don't think it's by any means, the end, obviously… but yeah, to answer your question, I just was fascinated by the field, wanted to contribute, wanted to be a part of it..

Erin: “Aggressively curious,” that's what you wrote- I brought up your first post, Zach. This was May 10th, 2019: “Welcome to The Trip Report. We are aggressively curious to see the industry's therapeutic uses and regulatory policies that will form our around psychedelics, and we'll report on them with humor, compassion, and insight.

Zach: Oh, that's pretty good.

Erin: Yeah, it's good. And then you had another one that was good, the fourth one was “The Trip Report's Big Ideas.” Have you looked back on any of your old stuff?

Zach: No, I don't. Not for a while should,

Erin: Yeah. “The Big Ideas is a list of topics that we believe will shape the future of the psychedelic impact..” Do you remember this?

Zach: No.

Erin: Well not to spend too much time on this.. So when did Dan and Rock and the Beckley team come along? You'd been writing just out of pure curiosity, then what? When did Beckley come in?

Zach: Yeah, so I met Dan and Rock, it must have been 2021 or so, and I'd been writing The Trip Report for two years or so at that point. That had been on and off. You know, COVID was a big instigator, and then had our second kid.. so it was touch and go for a while, but they were readers and then we got introduced by a mutual friend, Blake Mandell, who's a CEO of Transcend Therapeutics.

And we had a very simpatico vision and view of how we wanted to support this ecosystem, this space. You know, there is, again, all of the constraints therein of legality and access and scheduling and drug development.. And so what Beckley Waves has been pioneering in, and focused on, is the infrastructure layer of the psychedelic system.

So broadly speaking, you have a ton of investment.. you know, more than 95% of the investment went into drug development programs. And these are programs that are long time horizons: 6, 7, 8, 10 years of effort that go before a drug becomes approved. And yet, if you look at a curve of psychedelic use among adults in North America or globally, it's just exponentially going up.

And so, the things that needed to get put in place for this burgeoning space are things like clinics and trained therapists and safe and reliable and trustworthy places where people can access them. And so I felt like that was the most important part of this puzzle, and just by investment dollars, the market didn't necessarily see that and so I was like, wow, these guys are on it.

And Amanda Fielding, who is the matriarch of the Beckley family, has been a long time influence on me, and I really have respected her and admired her approach of this advancing the science of psychedelics. You go back to the nineties and Rick Strassman was doing research in New Mexico and that was basically it. The Heffter Institute was supporting research, but Amanda and the Beckley Foundation really supported the spearheading, supported Johns Hopkins and the work of Roland Griffiths in the early days, Robin Carhart-Harris, David Nutt.. and her position was also of drug policy reform. She was a champion of this two-headed approach of science and drug policy reform that really resonated with me.

And so, when the opportunity came to hitch my wagon to the Beckley family, I was like, ecstatic. I was like, holy shit, this is a dream come true. And so after a handful of conversations with Rock and Dan, we hit it off and they acquired The Trip Report.

And I was, you know, blogging in my living room at like three in the morning, so to be able to then turn my focus to this full time was a dream come true. And that's when I started publishing more and writing more and meeting more people, going to conferences..

Erin: 2021, right?

Zach: 2021, yeah. Then and then 2023 is when we started the podcast, I believe. Yeah. So in June 2023, I was just like- this is like the natural evolution to it, and I really wanted to bring in more voices.

I remember driving from New York to San Francisco when I was, like, 20, like right after college, and I didn't listen to any music. I just listened to podcasts. It was like a really nascent sort of thing. I had to download them onto an iPod, not a phone. I was listening to Radio Lab and Joe Rogan and, and Duncan Trussell,  and Christopher Ryan Guy who wrote Sex at Dawn… just thinking, this is such an incredible format of just.. people talking.

And obviously something like Radiolab was like really produced and unbelievable journalism and production. But the things that I liked the most were just long form conversations. That’s how I’d been immersing myself in this field before I started writing, listening to the guys at Psychedelics Today, and people like Tim Ferriss, Joe Rogan, Michael Pollan. So I was pretty excited to get that kind of project up and running.

Erin: Yeah, that's cool. So you got like two years of writing in with Beckley before we started.. because we started talking in the Spring. It took a while for us to talk through.

It did mark a shift for you because you had more of an introspective role where you were doing this research and writing on your own, and then doing the podcast meant you interviewing other people, opening up- there’s a big social change to your life too. So it took us a few months to think through how we wanted to do it and then we started with PS 23, which I want to talk about, because I was thinking about highlights.. and PS 23 was such an obvious one. Then there was that time when Horizons never happened and we had those cool interviews in the place that we cannot name..

Zach: Oh yeah, that's right.

Erin: And then I'm like, “oh, also we went to Rick Doblin's house.” So many cool things, but PS 23 was where it really started. I was like, “let's record for the first time at PS 23. We're all going, everybody we want to talk to will be there. We'll set up shop in a hotel room, it'll be great.” And we just interviewed a bunch of people and that's what we started the podcast with.

Zach: We did like eight in person interviews in a hotel room in Denver. That was fantastic. And that was so much fun. That was so much fun. It was like Amy Kruse, Josh Hardman.. Manish from Sunstone. Jonathan from Journey Clinical..

Erin: Talia.

Zach: Oh yeah, Talia. That was a good one.

Erin: Yeah. Amy, Josh, and Manish are what we started our first podcast with. But yeah, that experience of PS 23 was awesome. Wait, had you been to one before?

Zach: I hadn't been to a MAPS conference, no.

Erin: Okay. Looking back on that, how would you describe that experience?

Zach and Talia Eisenberg, Founder of Beond Ibogaine

Zach: Well, that was pretty overwhelming, frankly. Like that was 10,000 people, 12,000 people, whatever it was, in a pretty small area, and I didn't get to go to as much of the programming as I would've liked. I saw a handful of talks and panel discussions, but we had a big party, you know, Beckley hosted a party that was a lot of fun, and I felt like everybody was there. And then we started doing these podcasts.

So, for me, this medium, this format, I had never done it before. Manish Agrawal from Sunstone was the first person I interviewed. And it was in-person and I was like, “holy shit, this is so much fun. This is great.” And just, the aggressive curiosity.. it's the best format for that because you can just follow whatever branch of thinking, or there's a platonic space of ideas or places that we can go, and just see where it goes.. that’s the best part. And I felt like I have been doing my research for the last four years, you know, I would read about people, but the conversations were just emergent. They were sort of co-created with the guests, rather than a top-down questioning and answer kind of thing, which I really enjoyed and appreciated.

Erin: The word is that comes to mind, because I've been thinking about this too, the difference is that it's synchronous. A lot of the work that you had been doing was asynchronous, one-to-many.. and with podcast interviews, our phones are off, we're just having a conversation for an hour. When do you ever do that with anybody? You don't even do that with your partner.

Our hotel studio at PS 23

Zach: Totally. No. Exactly.

Erin: So just sit and to have a conversation with another person is really nice.

Zach: It is a forcing function for collectiveness, for concentration.. for just tuning into the moment that I didn't necessarily appreciate before then. But I knew I was having fun in these conversations because they were just like, locked in.

Erin: Yeah. Okay, so my next question, and just moving the timeline along, when did you feel… because I have a couple marks in the timeline where your interest either, I don't know if I want to say shifted or expanded.. I feel like there was a focus on psychedelics, and then over time things changed. I have even a few interviews that you did when I think that things changed for you. So describe if you feel that way, and when.

Zach: Absolutely. So, the inspiration for The Trip Report was a guy named Ben Thompson, who writes a newsletter called Stratechery, which is basically a daily email update for his readers of the news from the tech industry. He was sort of the breakout star of the paid newsletter format and medium, he's the inspiration for the entire company of Substack. Substack created a software tool to allow for people to do what he's doing, which is write for an audience, send it out by email, people can pay for more if they want.. and that was how it started.

And frankly, I burned out on that. I was publishing like three or four times a week. I was just scouring the news and Twitter and social media and trying to create a cohesive digest for people, and this is in the early days of 2020, 2021.

Erin: Also, you're a new parent. I don't want to dismiss that. That is actually a really big part of somebody that needs to do creative work- it requires head space, and that shifts a lot when you're a new parent. So I'm just going to give you credit for that too.

Zach: I appreciate that. So, I thought that that was going to be the path, and those were early days when that was like super exciting. I met so many people in those early days and so many readers and it was fantastic. Then I felt like when the Microdose, which is a newsletter from  UC Berkeley, Jane does such a fantastic job of a news roundup, I was like, “Okay, I don't need to do that anymore I hate doing that. It's driving me nuts. I don't want to do the news roundup and I want to start thinking about the meta ideas and the meta themes and the topics and the dynamics..” and you know, this is how I thought about what I was doing, is like building a mental model of this emergent space, and then trying to share that with people so that maybe it'd be useful for them, for their investments, for their job seeking, for their company formation, et cetera. Trying to articulate the terrain of this space, because I had been immersed in it for a couple years at this point.

So that was definitely a significant pivot point. And then, as I would say, 2023, 2024, I felt like I had turned over every rock I could in that space. And it was just updating it, whether it was legalization or drug development, the outcomes of studies, and frankly, it was getting boring, rehashing this similar themes over and over again.

And what occurred to me is that psychedelics had been the focus of The Trip Report, and what I realized was psychedelics is actually a subset of a larger paradigm shift, and I don't even quite yet still have the language to articulate what that is, except to say that it's at the intersection of neuroscience and our modeling of how perception, cognition, behavior, sensation, and affect all work.

There's a real exciting field of computational neuroscience- you know, I talked to Shamil Chandaria about this, that was a big interview for that field… and then more broadly, another parallel quote unquote “Renaissance “was the Contemplative Science renaissance. A researcher at Harvard named Matthew Sachett, who coins this as the “third wave of meditation research,” which is going into pretty deep and esoteric practices, the phenomenology of which is similar to psychedelic experiences when people report their experiences and the brain dynamics or the neurodynamics of these states, are equally as interesting as psychedelics.

So you have this computational neuroscience space and contemplative renaissance, and neurotech, the ability for technologies to interface with human physiology, is also ramping up. And this is all against a backdrop of a mental health crisis, of increasing spend in healthcare, and increasingly poor outcomes.

Erin: Administration changes.

Zach: Yeah. So the timing of this emergence in psychedelics is probably not, you know, coincident with this.. it's part of a larger package of how we understand human psychology, perception, and wellbeing, and against the backdrop, you could argue, of increasing perhaps material abundance, but a term that we've like thrown around Beckley as we think it about incubating companies is the “spiritual but not religious.” There's a God-shaped hole that is being filled with like politics and brands and celebrities and so.. Again, I don't know what to call this sort of larger thing, but another piece that I've written about kind of quite a bit is like this idea of metabolic psychiatry. We kind of have thought like everything is in the brain or in the psyche but no, the foods that we eat and the ways that we're exposed to our environment are part and parcel with how people do and how well people are doing.

Zach with Rick Doblin (and Fig), Spring 2023

Erin: Sorry, I'm only laughing because I brought up that exact post the other day when I was walking down the street with Matt. He listened to some podcast that was talking about mitochondria.. and I said, “You know who knows a lot about mitochondria?” And I'm like, running after him tripping on the New York sidewalk yelling, “Metabolic health is mitochondrial health!”

Zach: Yeah. I mean, that's another sub-paradigm shift that's happening, right? We all recognize the phrase “mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” but actually, they're like the information processing centers of the cell. And that's a radically different model of how life functions that is still in really early days, and it's not unrelated to psychedelics.

So it kind of got unwieldy. You're so right because I didn't know how to orient or focus, and I don't think that's a bad thing, but it just blossomed into more.. I'm just interested in all of these things.

Erin: Last summer, so much shifted too. What huge shifts happened between March when we saw Rick, and November really, but also August.. I will always remember those hot summer days of editing those conversations you had with Nick Gillespie and Matt Zorn- it was such a fascinating time. But yeah, there was so much to tackle.

I noticed a few different shifts in your interests, specifically, over the last couple years too, which has been cool. The Clinic of the Future thing has definitely been top of mind for you. You're getting your hands on bodies again, which I think is also something that you like talking about- somatic experiences- you know, there's so much conversation about the mind and yet there's also so much interest in the body itself, and how the body plays a role. Somatic experiences are just as important as these heady ones.

Zach: Totally.

Erin: Maybe talk a bit about where you're at now, what you're shifting toward, and what you're hoping to see.

Zach: Yeah, so you're right, the Clinic of the Future series was basically my attempt to try to tie all these domains together because they're all happening in different silos and they're all impinging upon human wellbeing and flourishing. And I really feel like there is a new model of how we understand, I don't want to say the human psyche, but there are emergent models that are coming out and if we just focus on mental health, the conventional tools have been talk therapy and psychopharmacology, right? And what I think the psychedelic field is early to and tapped into is the full human experience that impinges upon our wellbeing, our flourishing. The Body Keeps the Score, a book that I think was published in 2014 and has been a bestseller since then, it captures this idea that sensation drives behavior. There's so much anchoring it to our narrative, and our stories, and our self models, and everything that's old is new again.. or you know, what's coming back into the field in the west at least, is this idea that yeah, sensation drives behavior. And that is to say that emotions, affect, feelings that appear in the body, in the soma, are the center of the bullseye for a lot of therapeutic work. And again, that ties into psychedelics, it ties into this computational neuroscience view, it ties into the energy metabolic function. And I think that the models of the ancients, right, whether that's Buddhist or Daoist or Ayurvedic or indigenous Mesoamerican, all have had some inkling or understanding that like the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

And by that I mean the phenomenology of the system as a whole, not just the stories that we have. So that was really interesting. And I think it's interesting intellectually and scientifically, I think it’s interesting pragmatically, like how do you operationalize that?

Erin: Right, in practice.

Zach: In practice, right?

Erin: How do we actually implement this?

Zach: Yeah. And so that's what I'm focused on now and I refer to what I'm doing here- I live in Portland, Maine- and I have a little, I don't even want to say clinic, but a somatic studio where we're bringing together different forms of body-based therapies.

And I kind of oriented around two big pillars: clinical practice and a community of practice. Clinical practice looks like acupuncture, body work, ketamine assistance, psychotherapy, breath work. Then communities of practice is this term that I wrote about a little bit in the Clinic of the Future piece, where there is a sense in which we become atomized and isolated behind our screens and we're oriented to the devices that we carry, and not as much as in times past, to relational dynamics.

And so “Communities of Practice” is this term that was coined by an educational theorist in the sixties or seventies that describes groups that convene to co-create, develop, and get better at something. And so the communities of practice that I'm bringing in are: we have a meditation group, and we have a sauna group, we get together and sauna and cold plunge.

Erin: All in the same studio?

Zach: Yeah. All in the same facility.

Wild times recording in NYC. Can’t share whose studio this is here but ask if you’re curious ;)

Erin: That's so great.

Zach: Yeah, it's kind of a mom-and-pop shop type of setup right now where we're just exploring how to combine these different modalities that were really born out of the Clinic of the Future writing. So I think that there's a lot to be done in making these clinical interventions that are coming online, let's call it the metabolic, for example, like eating, right? Ketogenic diet, intermittent fasting, whatever that domain or the health practices of sauna, cold plunge, exercise, meditation, like instantiating groups and collectives and groups that are doing it together, I feel like kills proverbial two birds of one stone. What I hope we're doing is we're giving people the space to adopt new practices and develop new frameworks in community. But there’s nothing novel and nothing new, there's no IP there..

Erin:  I love that. I think you know this- the name of my company is Kula- do you know like the meaning of that word?

Zach: I don't, no.

Erin: It's everything you're saying; it’s just a Sanskrit word for it. It's people that practice together. Literally everything you said, I have written all of these words in my mission statement, but like you said, it's an ancient..

Zach: Oh yeah, intentional community, you're right, wow.

Erin: That’s all it is, and there's so much scientific evidence, first of all, about it being effective.

Zach: Yeah.

Erin: Everything you were saying, it was like, “yes, yes, yes, yes.” I totally buy into all of this- there's a need for both individual practice and collective effort. I totally understand.

What are the practices that you lead there? You do acupuncture.. is there anything else, do you lead any other groups?

Zach: I have a clinical acupuncture practice, and we also offer what's called community acupuncture, which is a group setting, so it brings the cost down and it's done in a group sort of format. That's been really rewarding and fun.

And then we have the Thermonaut Club, which is a sauna club that meets once a week, and that's great. Right now it's like six or eight people.

But what I'm starting to do is making this an offering for local businesses. So the yoga studios in the area, the gym, the CrossFit gyms.. we're starting to have their groups come in and use our facility as another tool for wellness and communities of practice. And then we started a small meditation group that's focused on body-oriented, somatic practice.

Erin: Do you lead meditations or no?

Zach: I guide a meditation that group. But I'm bringing in my friend, Judah Newman, who was the original head of instruction and education at Jhourney, which is a meditation education and startup. And he's going to do a three day retreat here in May. We’re going combine all these things: we're going do some jhana practice, some sauna, some Qigong.. it'll be fun.

Erin: Oh, that's cool. Zach, this sounds so fun.

Zach: Yeah, it is a lot of fun.

Erin: How much of this were you doing last year?

Zach: None of this.

Erin: Okay. Which brings us to where we are now: let’s talk about where we are with The Trip Report and the obvious shift. I know you're going to write about it too, but let's just talk about that.

Zach: Yeah. So I mean, Rock and Dan, the partners and leaders of Beckley Waves, have been my thought partners for the last couple of years, and towards the end of 2024, I was just getting an itch to get back into in-person work. I'm super excited about building small communities in local pockets that one, create a viable and sustainable business, and two, create communities of practice that are self-supportive and positive sum for our members.

I'm experimenting with what that looks like at the smallest possible scale, which is, you know, here in Portland, Maine, and building a community of people that are coming together and doing this kind of stuff. And so, I think it was, you're right, throughout the summer when I was writing the Clinic of the Future pieces, I was just seeding my mind for what I want to create, and what I want to build, and what I want bring into the world. And now I'm doing that.

And so, at some point in the fall, I talked with Dan and Rock and I was like, I am getting a real hankering to create something for my local community. And so just made the natural decision to step away from The Trip Report and focus on this full time.

Yeah. So the way that I think about it is, I am coming back to this world of wellness, alternative medicine, whatever you want to call it, with this experience of working in the psychedelic and the emergent frontier, of these domains, and trying to seed the local community here. Because it's not the Bay Area, it's not New York City where these kinds of things are all over the place, or at least more established. So I'm pretty excited about that. So wrapped up with The Trip Report and Beckley a few weeks ago and going full hog on the Clinic of the Future.

Erin: I think it's so great. You have spent the last let's say five, six years.. what you are bringing now, I mean, you've learned so much. You have so many tools now. You've been able to have some really incredible conversations with the most brilliant neuroscientists in the world, frankly. Philosophers.. you have gained so much knowledge. I feel like the time made so much sense for you to take that and be like, okay, let me get my hands to work.

Zach: Yeah. And you know, I'm a generalist. My default settings are like non-specialty. And so I felt like I could see the ways that these different things could come together in a positive some way. So that's what we're trying to do now.

Erin: Well, I hope I can see your writing again someday, somehow, because I really relied on The Trip Report to keep me up to date, so.. I do have, thankfully, other resources..

Well, Zach, I want to let you go get your hands back on bodies again, but I just want to say thanks. This has been such a fun conversation. I'm just glad to hopefully at least just give you the opportunity to reflect back on the time and on everything you've done the last few years.

Zach: Well, it wouldn't have been possible without you. The podcast and the next iteration, you built the foundation for it and set it up. So I learned a lot.

Erin: Good. I'm glad. Honestly, it's been so fun. And Katelin and Alec- I've just always loved our team. It's just been such a blessing. It's a good crew. I'm so excited to just continue to support you in whatever shape and form all of this takes.

Ah, I never got to sneak in my “land the ship, land the plane” line. It's “land the plane” but you'd fuck up sometimes and say, “land the ship..” there's a lot of really good B-roll that's on the floor that I have. I’m going to have to put together a compilation of all your shit and share it.  All right. I'll let you get back to it. We'll talk soon. It's been really good talking to you.

Zach: Thanks Erin.