S2 | E17 Neil Gehani

Neil Gehani is the founder of Mind Lumen, a nonprofit working to close the trust gap in psychedelic care by making ethics observable, measurable, and accountable. He's also a co-signatory of the Hopkins-Oxford HOPE consensus statement and author of "Ethics Without Borders" in The American Journal of Bioethics.

In this episode, I talk with Neil about:

• Growing up in a military-style boarding school in India, separated from his parents for years at a time
• Arriving in the U.S. alone at 16 with almost no cultural context
• His career in Silicon Valley tech and the personal crises along the way
• A life-changing unplanned psychedelic experience at the Oregon Eclipse festival in 2017
• The three-year search for a safe, ethical therapeutic guide that led him to found Mind Lumen
• How Mind Lumen certifies facilitators and retreats using a practical, weighted ethics scoring system
• The real difference between decriminalization, medicalization, and commercialization
• Drug-checking and harm reduction resources like DanceSafe and anonymized testing models (Portugal)
• The Asian Psychedelic Society, a community he built for Asian-American psychedelic users
• Living with ADHD as a "condition" rather than a disorder, and what it means to live a "blissful" life

Connect with Neil: mindlumen.org | mindlimen.substack.com | linkedin.com/in/gehanineil