In this episode — Dr. Andrew Tatarsky, developer of Integrative Harm Reduction Psychotherapy, returns for a second conversation. They take up the question that divides the field, whether a person who once drank a fifth a day can ever have a drink on a Saturday night. Andrew: some can, some can’t, we don’t yet have the science to tell which, and the therapist’s job is to help each person answer it for themselves. Also: the “submit–rebel bind” abstinence-first treatment sets up, an 89-year-old client who cut her drinking in three sessions, addiction as a continuum that includes junk food and the phone in your hand, and harm reduction as the container for psychedelic-assisted therapy.

Guest: Dr. Andrew Tatarsky — clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, New York; PhD in Clinical Psychology; postdoctoral certificate in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis (NYU); developer of Integrative Harm Reduction Psychotherapy (IHRP); more than 40 years in practice; author of Harm Reduction Psychotherapy: A New Treatment for Drug and Alcohol Problems. andrewtatarsky.com · About · Training · Book

Nothing in this conversation is medical advice.

Chapters

00:00 — Cold open: addiction as a universal human response to suffering

00:54 — Welcome: the case for community

02:20 — Two harm reduction stories: a call from the White House, and a two-page letter at NPR

05:41 — The acting drug czar who changed his mind

08:31 — What harm reduction is: the disease model, the drug war, and the AIDS crisis

11:15 — From public health to psychotherapy: compassionate pragmatism, start where people are

14:29 — Religion and the law: clean or using, no gray

16:27 — Can a person who drank a fifth a day ever have a drink on a Saturday night?

17:25 — Taught the disease model in the eighties, and in the sixties: Jellinek’s chart

19:09 — An alternative paradigm: addiction as a response to suffering

20:36 — Who can moderate and who can’t: we don’t have the science

22:46 — Why this is a courageous position: impulse control disorders

25:18 — Drinking, driving, skiing: the bad-driver analogy

27:13 — The submit–rebel bind

29:16 — An 89-year-old who wanted to cut back her drinking

31:43 — Alcohol at 87: the finest fuel

33:09 — Addiction on a continuum: junk food, phones, relational meaning

36:25 — Gambling, eating, shopping, sex

38:04 — Psychedelics and harm reduction: ketamine, ibogaine, a New York training

41:06 — Close

In this episode — Somatic Salvia guide Christopher Solomon, from Willits in Richard’s own Mendocino County, teaches Salvia divinorum from the ground up: what the plant is (a sage from the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca), its legal status (federally unscheduled and legal in California; banned in some states), how it is grown from cuttings, and the three ways it is taken — the Mazatec quid, the dried leaf, and a standardized extract in the five-bowl pipe Christopher invented. He explains how the gas-station “60x” extracts of the late nineties gave salvia its bad rap, why he built his practice around the smallest dose that does anything (“titrating and pendulating”), what the 2020 Johns Hopkins fMRI study he took part in found about the default mode network, a light dose as a door into meditation, and what he calls “the witness of an other.” For Richard’s book on adverse effects, they cover the ugly as well as the good: no addiction, no hangover, no measured rise in blood pressure or heart rate in the Hopkins safety work, and the one real danger at high dose, a dissociated person getting up and running, answered by a mature sitter and working in slowly.

Guest: Christopher Solomon — somatic Salvia guide and teacher; B.A. Psychology (UT Dallas); two-year somatic psychotherapy certification, Hakomi Institute of California; Body-Mind Centering training; inventor of the five-bowl Salvia pipe; founder of the Somatic Salvia Network. Participant in the Johns Hopkins salvinorin A fMRI study (2020). salviahealings.com · About · His Johns Hopkins experience report

Legal status of Salvia divinorum varies by state. Nothing in this conversation is medical advice.

Chapters

00:00 — Cold open: the perfect plant for beginners and seasoned psychonauts

00:46 — Welcome: community is the antidote to isolation

02:05 — A guest from Willits, Mendocino County

02:34 — The magic wand: education and pragmatic advice

04:20 — What is Salvia divinorum? A sage from the Sierra Mazateca

05:35 — Is it legal? Federal law vs. state law

06:50 — How to grow it: clones, shade, and nitrogen

09:07 — Harvest and the quid: how the curanderos use it

10:51 — Gas-station extracts and salvia’s bad rap

13:10 — Three ways in: the quid, the dried leaf, the standardized extract

14:37 — Reverse tolerance and the five-bowl pipe

18:37 — How long it lasts: stair-stepping and pendulating

20:33 — Therapeutic benefits: Johns Hopkins, the claustrum, and the default mode network

23:25 — A light dose: quieting the mind, dropping the story

26:02 — Enhancing the witness: “something else being there with you”

27:49 — The good, the bad, and the ugly: adverse effects

29:34 — Opioid withdrawal and the kappa opioid receptor

30:28 — The main risk: dissociation, and getting up to run

31:37 — A mature sitter

32:40 — No hangover, no fatigue

33:40 — How to reach Christopher: salviahealings.com

34:33 — Blood pressure, heart rate, and medications

37:16 — The break: the open-source archive and Richard’s books

40:10 — Closing: beginners and psychonauts, the Somatic Salvia Network, a sustainable plant

42:47 — Close: “I’m gonna do it myself”

In this episode — Psychedelic psychotherapist Heather A. Lee returns to the program with the message she received on a recent psilocybin journey. She and Richard cover psilocybin for women sixty and over, why she thinks the “hero’s dose” is male language, what a micro dose actually is, Colorado’s grow-gift-share model, and the psychedelic tourism they’ve produced.

Guest: Heather A. Lee, LCSW, LNMCF — one of the nation’s first licensed psychedelic-assisted psychotherapists (Licensed Natural Medicine Clinical Facilitator, Colorado); 30+ years in clinical practice; trained at the Harvard Mind/Body Medical Institute; former Coordinator of Women’s Mind/Body Wellness Education at UVA Medical Center’s Midlife Women’s Health Center; featured in Lisa Ling’s CBS special The Psychedelic Renaissance. Author of The Psilocybin Sessions: Real-Life Stories of Women’s Wisdom Awakening with Psychedelic Medicine (Modern Wisdom Press, 2025). heatheralee.com · Azores retreats

Chapters

00:00 — Cold open: “all the other plants have something to say”

00:55 — Welcome: living in community, and Peaks Island’s 900 people

02:41 — Breakfast, intermittent fasting, and watching your protein

04:28 — Fuel: air, water, and ingestibles

05:48 — The Psilocybin Sessions, and what’s new

06:31 — The mushrooms’ message: listen to the other plants

07:28 — The Azores: a retreat that sold out in two weeks

09:21 — Living on the planet vs. living as part of it

10:23 — Selling Boulder, buying Peaks Island

11:33 — The legend of the Azores: the healers being called back

13:49 — Psilocybin for women 60 and over: cumulative grief, reinvention, resilience

17:02 — Hero’s dose vs. heroine’s dose

19:27 — What a microdose actually is

19:58 — How do you know what’s in the mushroom? Testing and strains

22:19 — Colorado’s two models: unregulated (grow, gift, share) and regulated

24:23 — Psychedelic tourism: flying to Colorado to do it legally

27:31 — Many paths: the jungle, the hospital, or “a psychedelic broad like me”

29:02 — Will psychedelics change the culture?

30:54 — Forest bathing and clinical ecotherapy

31:53 — Adverse effects: screening, and the three who went silent

35:09 — The container: 12 to 15 hours of prep, journey, and integration

36:19 — Who Heather turns away

38:04 — The break, and the open-source archive

40:28 — Imagine the mossy forest: magnifying glasses, black sand, breath work to the surf

44:01 — Close: heatheralee.com

In this episode — Five minutes on sun exposure and skin cancer — three diagnoses, one melanoma that nearly didn’t end well, and the one habit that changes the odds.

Chapters

0:01 — Another entry in his “raining on your parade” series: this one’s about the sun

0:27 — The sun is fantastic, and it comes with adverse effects

0:56 — Hanging out in the sun through his teens, twenties, and thirties

1:24 — A teenage sunburn with his girlfriend Marguerite Davis, at a lake near Champaign, Illinois, that ended in the hospital

1:52 — Decades later, the first skin cancers: basal and squamous cell

2:19 — Five years ago: a nodular melanoma diagnosis

2:47 — How his immune system bought him the time to get it cut out

3:15 — The real tradeoff: sun now, or the dermatologist later

3:42 — Why SPF 50+ sunscreen is the compromise he’s landed on

4:11 — Closing thought and sign-off

In this episode — Fertility specialist Gabriela Rosa joins to talk about couples the healthcare system has given up on: two-plus years trying with multiple failed IVF cycles. They cover her seven-year study of 544 patients (78.8% took home a healthy baby), why infertility gets diagnosed by a stopwatch instead of an investigation, the real success rates behind IVF and egg freezing, and why male fertility is half the equation.

Guest: Gabriela Rosa, DrPH, MPH (Clinical Effectiveness, Harvard T.H. Chan School), MScM (Reproductive Medicine & Human Genetics, University of Sydney), BHSc (ND) — fertility specialist; founder and clinical director of The Rosa Institute; author of Fertility Breakthrough: Overcoming Infertility and Recurrent Miscarriage When Other Treatments Have Failed (2019) and Eat Your Way to Parenthood. @gabrielarosafertility on Instagram.

Chapters

00:00 — Who fertility treatment is really for (cold open)

01:11 — Welcome and introduction

02:47 — Gabriela’s path into fertility

07:00 — Two patients who changed everything

12:32 — The cohort study: 544 patients, seven years

17:17 — Trying, perseverance, and pleasure

19:08 — When trying to conceive kills your sex life

23:06 — Reframing the fertility timeline

24:16 — Population fertility and the egg-freezing pitch

29:11 — IVF’s real success rate

31:56 — Male fertility and age

38:30 — Sperm banking, and why men don’t think about it

40:08 — Life expectancy and deferred maintenance

42:01 — “What is new under the sun? Nothing.”

45:34 — Unexplained infertility: a diagnosis based on time

48:18 — The leaking toilet

52:19 — Richard’s hospital story

54:19 — Existence vs. non-existence

56:08 — Close

Dr. Richard Louis Miller discusses the causes of social isolation, alienation, and loneliness, especially in the context of socioeconomic stratification and the COVID pandemic. He offers practical solutions to foster human connection and combat these issues.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction: The epidemic of loneliness and its causes

02:10 The importance of human contact and the effects of social distancing

02:40 Solutions overview: universal access to anti-loneliness tools

03:05 Tool 1: Making weekly phone calls to friends and family

04:04 Tool 2: Initiating small contact in daily life with strangers

05:56 Closing remarks: collective action to rebuild connection

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, which is why Richard says “acting your age is dangerous.” They close on the argument at the heart of Bruce’s forthcoming book, Beyond Darwin — that cooperation, not competition, is evolution’s real survival strategy.

Guest: Bruce H. Lipton, PhD—stem cell biologist; author of The Biology of Belief (Hay House, 10th Anniversary Edition) and the forthcoming Beyond Darwin: How Epigenetics, Quantum Science, and Cooperation Shape Humanity’s Future (BenBella Books, August 2026, co-written with Patricia King).

Chapters

00:00 — The ten-to-twenty-year collapse warning

00:42 — Welcome back, and how “epigenetics” went mainstream

04:04 — What epigenetics actually means

06:53 — The mind as architect: thought into chemistry into genes

11:13 — The subconscious computer: programmed before birth through age seven

15:38 — Why the conscious mind loses the wheel

19:59 — “We are all Bill”: the programs you can’t see in yourself

24:43 — Two terminal diagnoses, five years later

27:05 — Bruce’s tongue cancer, and the book he’d been avoiding

31:59 — Beyond Darwin: what Darwin missed

34:53 — Placebo, belief, and Ellen Langer’s counterclockwise study

36:34 — Why acting your age is dangerous

40:44 — From the caves to civilization: how domination got wired in

50:16 — The garden is not a battleground

56:31 — Did humanity inherit a dysfunctional childhood?

59:12 — Close

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 rates — and why Diana thinks the real problem isn’t how much sex people are having but the mechanical, goal-driven way we’ve been taught to have it. They get into the language attached to sex (“achieving” an orgasm, “premature” orgasm) and what it does to performance pressure, especially for men, and Diana answers Richard’s question about pleasure and connection without an erection.

Guest: Diana Richardson — researcher and teacher of conscious sexuality; author of eight books including Tantric Sex for Lovers (the Slow Sex / Tantric Sex for Men / Tantric Orgasm for Women collection, Destiny Books) and The Heart of Tantric Sex (John Hunt Publishing/O Books, 2003). With her partner Michael Richardson, she has run the week-long Making Love Retreat in Europe for over 30 years, with more than 15,000 couples attending. Site and online course: rekindle.love.

Chapters

00:00 — Cold open: sensitivity vs. sensation

00:39 — Welcome to Mind Body Health and Politics

01:30 — Welcome back: Diana Richardson

02:17 — Fifty years of change in the sexual field

06:33 — A hundred years of premarital sex, and the 60s revolution

07:48 — Pizza, porn, and the retreat from dating

08:29 — The epidemic of isolation, alienation, and loneliness

09:42 — It’s not the amount of sex, it’s the how

11:23 — Falling fertility rates

12:55 — Writing The Heart of Tantric Sex

14:06 — What “tantra” actually means

15:03 — Conventional sex vs. tantric sex

19:40 — Words that hurt: “achieving” an orgasm

23:38 — Eight books, and how the Making Love Retreat began

26:11 — Thirty years, fifteen thousand couples

28:06 — Bringing the retreat online

28:44 — Pleasure and connection without an erection

32:34 — What could bring young people back to each other

33:34 — Where to find Diana: rekindle.love