Joshua White left a decade-long career as a San Francisco city attorney to found Fireside Project, a free, anonymous peer-support line for anyone in a psychedelic crisis or working through one from the past. He and Richard, an advisor to Fireside Project, talk about the four gaps Joshua set out to close in the field, what it takes to be a “loving rock” for a stranger mid-trip, reframing the bad trip as a challenging one, the burnout that nearly broke him, and Lucy, a training simulator built from tens of thousands of anonymized calls now used at Mount Sinai and in a New Mexico psilocybin study.

Guest: Joshua White — founder and executive director of Fireside Project; former Deputy City Attorney, San Francisco City Attorney’s Office. Volunteer alumnus of the Zendo Project and Safe & Sound’s parental stress line before founding Fireside in 2021. Fireside’s free peer-support app is available on iOS and Google Play; the training tool Lucy is at fireside.training; donate at firesideproject.org/donate.

Chapters

00:00 — Cold open: reach out and call somebody

02:25 — Welcome: Joshua White

02:48 — Green smoothies and egg whites

03:41 — From city attorney to psychedelic support

04:42 — Psychedelics, therapy, and the decision to leave the law

07:04 — Testing the waters: the Zendo Project and a parental stress line

08:01 — The four gaps in psychedelic support

10:10 — Fireside Project launches, April 2021

10:22 — Anonymity, legality, and why people call

12:43 — Who answers the phone: the “loving rock” question

17:20 — Reframing the bad trip

18:55 — From bad trip to challenging trip

20:34 — Finding volunteers, finding the public

22:43 — The nonprofit fundraising treadmill

25:34 — Burnout, Ibogaine, and “ten out of ten”

26:37 — Richard’s advisor disclosure: take a vacation

27:28 — The patient who taught Richard about self-care

30:31 — Introducing Lucy and how she trains therapists

35:08 — Forty thousand calls and counting

36:24 — Why there’s no AI avatar yet

37:40 — An ethical data model, by contrast

41:04 — The pitch: why Fireside needs your support

41:35 — How to donate, volunteer, and spread the word

41:55 — Close

British historian Charlie Harris spent years living with his sources in Mendocino County to write Mendo, the first full history of how a logged-out fishing-and-timber county became the cannabis capital of the Americas. He and Richard — a Mendocino resident since 1975 who watched much of it happen — trace the whole arc: the Back to the Land migration, weed as currency, the homestead wars that united hippies and loggers against the government, Reagan’s helicopter raids and the invention of asset forfeiture, the genetics that made California weed famous, and what legalization actually did to prices, potency, and the people who built the industry.

Guest: Charlie Harris — historian and writer; eight years with Oxford University’s Global History of Capitalism Project; author of Mendo: How an Unlikely Group of Rebels Turned Cannabis into California’s Cash Crop (Counterpoint Press, June 2026). Available from Counterpoint, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent bookstore — Charlie asks you to try the indie first.

Chapters

00:00 — Cold open: stories that were never written down

00:31 — Welcome: what happened in Mendocino County

02:24 — Picked up hitchhiking, dropped on a pot farm

06:33 — From trimmer to Oxford historian

08:47 — “Get these stories written down before they disappear”

11:42 — Logging, fishing, and the collapse that emptied the land

14:28 — Back to the Land: the largest urban-to-rural migration in history

17:47 — “We couldn’t grow gasoline”: weed becomes currency

20:21 — The homesteading wars: red tags and a common enemy

22:47 — Hippies, rednecks, and the hipnecks

27:46 — Reagan sends in the helicopters: CAMP, 1983

30:40 — Asset forfeiture is invented in Mendocino County

32:01 — “The campaign to aid marijuana prices”

33:19 — Indica genetics: California weed gets good

35:30 — Traffic reports for police convoys

37:30 — Medical marijuana, 1996: everything changes

40:27 — Overproduction and the price collapse

44:24 — Hedge funds, Flow Kana, and the economics of legalization

48:36 — “Nobody wants stronger weed”: the THC arms race

53:04 — What they smoke in England

56:44 — The book: Mendo

58:07 — “I have a lot of hope for America”: gratitude and close

Journalist Abbie Rosner spent several years interviewing thirty-six older adults, most in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, about psychedelic experiences they had quietly, outside the clinic. She and Richard talk about elderhood, conscious aging, what changes when these medicines meet a long life rather than a young one, a disagreement over when "elder" begins, and her pilot vision for small, committed cohorts of older adults growing old together on purpose.

Guest: Abbie Rosner, journalist. Author of Psychedelics and the Counterculture of Aging (Park Street Press, 2026, foreword by Dr. Julie Holland). Writes The ELDEREVOLUTION on Substack and a Next Avenue column. abbierosner.com

00:00 The epidemic of isolation

01:45 Conscious aging, what's on Abbie's mind

05:28 What aging actually is, body vs. spirit

10:14 The opportunity of older life, going inward

12:24 The fragility question, screening older adults

15:34 How older adults approach psychedelics today

20:00 Who is drawn to this work, seekers

21:20 Am I an elder at 60, the Julie Holland exchange

27:04 Inside the book, 36 interviews and a book tour

33:11 Elder Vision Circles

38:44 Close