Today we're bringing you an episode of our sister Hub & Spoke show Rumble Strip, from producer Erica Heilman. It's a conversation with Jay Allison about public media—what it's for, why it's important, and what we stand to lose if the anti-intellectual MAGA right succeeds in killing it off.

Jay is an independent public radio producer who founded WCAI, a public radio station in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, as well as Transom, a resource and school for people learning how to make audio. He produces the Moth Radio Hour, he curated the recurrng feature "This I Believe" on NPR, and his work has won six Peabody awards, the highest awards in broadcasting. (Erica won a Peabody too, so these folks know whereof they speak!)

To me, Jay and Erica's conversation is a beautiful and elegant cri de coeur about public radio’s founding values, and it reminded me why I make audio and why I joined forces with the other folks at Hub & Spoke to try to create more space for indepencent voices in podcasting. At one point Erica asks Jay what’s so “public” about public radio and Jay answers that for him, it was about openness to all citizens who cared—he literally walked into NPR off the street and somebody gave him a recorder, showed him how to work it, and told him to go out and talk to people and bring back their stories. That dedication to public voices and public service persists, perhaps especially at stations in smaller or more remote markets—the same stations that might have to go off the air now that they're losing their federal funding. The big questions now are: How can we keep those stations alive? And what will public media look like after the current storm?

Thank you to Jay, who generously spent some time with me back in 2022 when I was looking for advice on how to raise money for Hub & Spoke, and thank you to Erica for making and sharing this episode. You can hear more Rumble Strip episodes at http://rumblestripvermont.com.

My guest this week, Adele Getty, is the author of A Sense of the Sacred and an educator in the field of assisted psychedelic therapy. Together with her husband Michael Williams, she started a non-profit here in Santa Fe called the Limina Foundation. Its mission is to support treatment for addiction and PTSD through both synthetic and plant-based psychedelic medicines.

On September 7, the foundation will host an event here in my adopted hometown of Santa Fe called The Enchanted State. That’s a play on New Mexico’s official nickname, which is the Land of Enchantment. But it’s also a nod to New Mexico’s growing role in the national conversation about whether and how substances like MDMA, mushrooms, and ibogaine should be legalized and regulated.

For thousands of years people have been ingesting compounds found in plants and fungi to facilitate religious ceremonies or help them access a kind of higher wisdom. In more modern times these substances have been used by people who want to explore their own inner psyches, or people who need help getting past addiction or deeply rooted psychological trauma. The US government criminalized the use and study of most psychedelics back in the 1960s. But in the last decade there’s been a major resurgence in interest in how they work and what they can teach us about consciousness or help us heal.

Michael Pollan’s books How to Change Your Mind and This Is Your Mind on Plants have both been huge bestsellers. And lawmakers in Oregon, Colorado, and now New Mexico have decriminalized certain psychedelics and begun to create frameworks for therapeutic use. Here in New Mexico, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed a bill earlier this year called SB 219, the Medical Psilocybin Act, that sets up a regulated system for people with PTSD and substance abuse disorders to use mushrooms under the guidance of a licensed healthcare provider.

That was a big step and it means New Mexico has the opportunity to help lead the country toward a future where psychedelics and their benefits are better understood and more widely available. That’s why The Enchanted State event feels so timely, and it’s why I wanted to interview Adele.

Learn more about this episode at http://www.soonishpodcast.org.

If you listened to my previous episode, you’ll remember that I described four "valleys" or scenarios for how the 2024 presidential election could unfold. The fourth scenario was one where Donald Trump wins both the electoral college and the popular vote, with a margin big enough to claim he has a mandate for change. I called that the Valley of Doom. And like it or not, that's the one we're in.

Now that we know which path we’re really on, it’s time to think through through what’s next. Plenty of other smart people are trying to dissect the Democrats’ mistakes; what feels much more urgent to me is figuring out how to understand the moment we’re in now and how to respond to it. How did civic conversations that used to be built around mutual respect and a shared sense of reality devolve into a free-for-all where lies are more powerful than truth? How did trust in government and institutions decay to the point that a majority of voters were willing to hand power to a disruptor who feeds on chaos and confusion? What options are open now for people who still care about values like community and compassion and equality and enlightened self-government?

To talk it through I reached out this week to two people who helped me think about those questions in two different ways that you could loosely call top-down and bottom-up. The top-down thinker is Jamais Cascio. He’s a futurist and scenario planner based in California, and he’s a familiar voice to listeners of this podcast. The last time Jamais joined us was during the pandemic, and we talked about a framework he’d come up with to help describe the historical forces at play in that crisis. The framework has an acronym, BANI, which stands for Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible. Those feel like pretty good adjectives for this moment too, and in our chat we dived into how a BANI framework helps describe our experience of the Trump era and how we can adapt and respond to the coming changes.

The bottom-up thinker featured in this episode is named Rose Friedman. She’s the co-founder and executive director of a nonprofit called The Civic Standard. And she spends every day thinking about how to support dialogue and togetherness and mutual aid in her rural corner of Vermont. I think it’s the kind of work that could help build a new foundation for democratic dialogue and get us past the fear, terror, and loneliness some politicians would like us to feel. In the second half of the episode, I explain how I learned about The Civic Standard—and why I think their mission is so important.

For notes, resources, and a full transcript of this episode, go to https://www.soonishpodcast.org/515-valley-of-doom