PT 640 - Alexander Beiner - Psychedelics, Culture, and the Games We Play

Alexander Beiner joins Psychedelics Today to explore how psychedelics, culture, and power shape each other. A writer, facilitator, and co founder of the conference Breaking Convention and the media platform KAINOS, he has spent years thinking about how psychedelic experiences ripple into politics, economics, conflict, and community. In this episode, he and Joe trace the path from early internet forums to today's psychedelic renaissance, and ask what it would mean to bring a truly psychedelic perspective into our institutions.

Beiner is less interested in psychedelics as a niche medical tool and more interested in how they can help us see through destructive cultural "games," reconnect to our bodies, and relate across deep divides.

Early themes with Alexander Beiner

The conversation starts with Beiner's origin story. He describes formative psychedelic experiences as a teenager, and how early access to thinkers like Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, and the Shulgins led him onto the Grow Report forum and its associated podcasts. From there he launched his own visionary art podcast and eventually co founded Rebel Wisdom, where he focused more broadly on culture, systems, and meaning rather than only on psychedelics.

He explains that most of his writing has not been about psychedelic substances, but about a "psychedelic approach" to reality. That means paying attention to complexity, paradox, and relationship, and asking what a psychedelic form of education, politics, or media might look like. He also touches on his documentary "Leviathan," which looks at breakdowns of trust, disembodiment, and the social forces that pull us away from what is real and relational.

Core insights from this conversation

In the middle of the episode, the discussion moves into concrete tensions in the current psychedelic resurgence. Topics include:

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