Speaker 3
We drew on a breadth of philosophies and imagine how psychedelic perspectives can help illuminate the path forward and the complex and turbulent times that we live in. Okay, before we dive in, make sure to follow the psychedelic podcast on your favorite platform or subscribe to our YouTube channel. And if you haven't already, join our community platform at community.thethirdwave.co. There's educational resources, support, conversations, all of this around the safe and intentional use of psychedelics. All right, without further ado, let's dive into this enlightening conversation with Alexander Biner.
Speaker 2
Allie, it's great to have you back on the show. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 1
Yeah, thanks for having me, Paul. Good to be back.
Speaker 2
So before we recorded, we talked about the extended state DMT trials that you had been a part of through Imperial. I think I first heard about your work through Rebel Wisdom. You then helped to support retreats at a former company that I had started called Synthesis. You've been involved in clinical research trials. And I think what I love about your approach and your work is you understand the sort of necessity of research, the structure and container that that happens within, but you're also not afraid to talk about more of the, let's say, Wild West of psychedelic use and how that can impact culture at large. And this sense of sense making, this aspect of what can psychedelics teach us is something that you've explored extensively through that prior project, Rebel Wisdom, which I think has now closed down. So I'd love to start there talking a little bit about Rebel Wisdom. What was Rebel Wisdom? How did that come about? What was that project all about for you and your co-creator, David Ford? Yeah, so
Speaker 1
Rebel Wisdom was, it's often kind of difficult to define what it was, but I would say it was an alternative media platform. We also did a lot of in-person retreats and events. So we actually started out doing men's work, men's retreats, and then it evolved into a media brand after that. So we were, it started in 2017, like our conversations around it started a little bit earlier. And it was really the time of the election of Trump in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK and the sense that there were these kind of big political and social upsets and the kind of established order of what we thought would happen, didn't happen, and that was a very interesting time, culturally.
