S2 | E17 Neil Gehani

October 8th, 2026  |  Season 2  |  1 hr 20 mins

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Neil Gehani calls himself an "ethics sherpa" — and after hearing his story, I understand why he's earned that title. Neil grew up in a brutal British-style military boarding school in India, sent there by his parents at four and a half years old and seeing them only twice a year until he was 15. He came to the U.S. alone at 16, landed in Ohio not knowing what a hotel, Thanksgiving, or pizza was, and eventually built a long career in Silicon Valley tech — riding the dot-com bust, the 2008 recession, and a period near-homelessness before rebuilding.

In 2017, an unexpected dose at the Oregon Eclipse festival cracked something open, and Neil spent the next several years going deep into therapeutic and recreational psychedelic work — MDMA, mushrooms, ayahuasca, acid, ketamine — while searching for an ethical, safe guide. It took him three years to find one. That gap is what led him to found Mind Lumen, a nonprofit that doesn't provide psychedelic therapy itself but instead certifies facilitators, guides, and retreats on observable, measurable ethical practices (things like integration session counts, facilitator-to-participant ratios, and testimonial timing).

We get into the difference between "therapeutic" and "recreational" use, why decriminalization and commercialization are not the same thing, drug-testing advocacy (DanceSafe, anonymized testing), the Asian Psychedelic Society he founded in the Bay Area, and how psychedelics reshaped his relationship to his ADHD, his creativity, and what he calls living a "blissful" rather than "happy" life.