This Week: Twin talks from psychedelics’ leading edge

Psylocybin branding + Public Secret trips, w/ April Pride & Stephanie Karzon Abrams

The plan had been to hold off on podcasts until a suitable replacement for the present way of making content revealed itself. Today I’m especially happy that I dumped those plans, because this week I’ll be sending out two conversations that are fire.

Two distinctly different sorts of hot. One’s a convection conversation and the other more of a radiated heat. You decide which is which.

Photo by Kenneth Reinhardt

Stephanie Karzon Abrams became a person of sustained interest when I happened upon the YouTube page for Public Secret, the native Canadian’s dance music label. That’s where I came across Secret Sessions. Onscreen, two dudes were spinning house upon a mountaintop. A sweeping drone shot revealed the DJs to be building the groove atop a Topanga mountain.

Around the DJs Liam Fitzgerald and Max Mignot, a small dance party forms. And you start to dance, acknowledging the FOMO hit; how does one get an invitation. Another session plays out on a Sayulita, Mexico deck, its lush backdrop the best kind of party favor.

There’s a point in our Zoom conversation where Karzon Abrams and I vibed hard over the line between recreational and medicinal use. I won’t blow that. But I will share her dope breakthrough story, in which Karzon Abrams connects her clinical training to a future in psychedelics.

This insightful episode hits on Tuesday. Tap in.

Thursday brings us April Pride.

Photo by Amber Fouts

As pointed out in WCS 59, Alex Halperin and I interviewed Pride a few months before the pandemic hit. We met in a Las Vegas hotel suite, and Pride was weed-famous for selling her young cannabis acccessories company to Canopy Growth. She’s the sort of creator whom you immediately sense comes from a design background.

What’s surprised me most about the Seattle creative entrepreneur over the past five years is the volume of “entrepreneur” in her professional moniker. Pride comes on Thursday.

West Coast Sojourn does not present nearly enough Washington voices on its podcasts. Consider our delightful conversation a big step toward remedying that. Both interviews feature the moments of genuine connection that help me treasure my job.

One last bit:

The Legend of Black Mexico is my most ambitious storytelling effort since Ghetto Celebrity. Here’s more about the development of that longform storytelling.