I just lived through New York Psychedelic Climate Week, a collection of events curated by my new friend Marissa Feinberg, who is the first person in more than a decade who has managed to get me to train into New York City ten nights in a row. It was pretty remarkable to encounter such large groups of people not only openly committed to engaging with these plants, but also aware of the people and places impacted by their harvesting, dedicated to promoting life on earth, and the sanctity of nature.
Most people seemed interested in the process through which psychedelics tend to make many people aware of the interconnectedness of things, our dependence on the earth, and the planet’s limited capacity for extraction and abuse. Many people emerge from a psychedelic ceremony with newfound respect for nature, and a sense of urgency about responding to the climate. As Extinction Rebellion founder Gail Bradbrook likes to say, if you’ve done a psychedelic trip you have started on the path to climate activism.
I prefer to think of it more in terms of “set and setting.” Learning how to approach psychedelics may help us understand how to approach not just nature, but climate activism itself. Instead of using propaganda and marketing to “get people” to are about the climate, how can we engender the conditions for people to become more aware of our interconnectedness with nature?
This is where my work promoting human agency in the digital realm may prove relevant. Our digital media environment encourages to think of human beings as programmable. After all, this is what our tools and algorithms have been told to do: engineer human compliance. Where the original digital renaissance was about giving people tools that unleash the power of the collective human imagination, the subsequent waves of digital business activity were about using digital tools on people to monitor and direct their behavior.
Living, working, and even doing activism in the digital media environment has engendered an equally manipulative approach to activism, where we strive to get people to understand something, take action, or tell their friends. They all depend on a top-down, colonizing approach to change that mirrors the top-down, colonizing approach to the planet that has gotten us in all this trouble in the first place. My own contribution to psychedelic climate week was a short talk that applied the four interventions I wrote about in Program or Be Programmed (the new version was published TODAY by OR/Books!): denaturalize power, trigger agency, resocialize the people, cultivate awe.
And as luck would have it (or, more likely, the synchronicity that characterizes these spaces), the very next night I went to the NY premier of a new movie called Music for Mushrooms, about a musician who embodies and actualizes these same four principles in his work. East Forest is what we might call a ceremonial musician, who creates soundtracks for psychedelic ceremonies. The movie - as well as the people who gathered to see it - inspired me with new hope for our collective ability to carry one another through these strange times.
While watching the movie I quickly realized this was the very same music that had been used in my own recent and profoundly influential ceremonies. I introduced myself to East in the lobby to acknowledge the profound effect of his work on my life. And he let me know he’d been following my work and Team Human for some time, too, and had hoped to have me as a guest on his podcast.
So we recorded a conversation to use on both of our shows, Ten Laws with East Forest, and Team Human. Me, interviewing him about the movie Music for Mushrooms - and him, interviewing me about the release of my own new book, the “AI” edition of Program or be Programmed. Two works about how people can regain agency over their own programming.
I think you’ll get a lot out of the hour we spent together. One of the recurring themes in our discussion is the role of creativity and awe in reclaiming our humanity. We often find ourselves swept up in the currents of productivity and efficiency, forgetting the intrinsic value of just being. East emphasizes how creativity acts as a means of re-connecting to something larger than ourselves, beyond algorithms and market metrics. This conversation invites you to rethink those everyday moments when you might just 'knock on a neighbor's door or pet a cat'—acts that we've been conditioned to see as trivial but are actually pathways back to our authentic selves.
We also touch on the importance of community: whether through psychedelics, ceremonies, or just sheer human interaction, gathering and mutual support can act as a powerful antidotes to the feelings of disconnection that plague much of modern life. East shares poignant moments from his own experiences, emphasizing the authentic connections we make when people come together intentionally.
I love the idea of enchantment as a radical act. Become enchanted. Become enchanted with self. Disenchantment leads, eventually, to a reenchantment.