Jackee talks about life during a pandemic as ‘strange and scary’ and how it has exposed the cracks in society – which is important to acknowledge (1:55)
Jackee describes using psychedelics and ketamine to help break the bubble of anxiety to create space between her default neuro-network. (6:10)
Jackee talks about how her anxiety is related to epigenetics, and her hope for psychedelics to study the phenomena (9:10)
Because the brain is powerful and stubborn psychedelics help Jackee explore her thoughts –while staying on top of her mental health (11:10)
Jackee talks about her first experience with ketamine as a club kid, and her rediscovery many years later with IV ketamine in a clinic. It was ‘legitimately impactful’ (13:00)
Ketamine is a life hack, that allows her to quiet the doubt monster and create a new neuropathway. Concepts of death and consciousness consume her thoughts while on ketamine (16:30)
In the psychedelic conversation, understanding your personal tether is important during exploration. It is what you want it to be, and you can play with it (20:00)
Jackee talks about her religious upbringing, and how it helped her realize that ‘Jesus is Psychedelic’ while on an ayahuasca journey; reconnecting and reconciling without shame (23:00)
Jackee describes working with Dave Asprey at Bulletproof during her early career as one of the most fun experiences of her professional life (27:20)
Jackee talks about creating and running Delic Corp – and how she’s comfortable in the driver’s seat after leaving ‘High Times’ (29:50)
How the pandemic has forced Jackee to confront what thought leadership actually looks like and what it’s really about. (33:30)
COLLAPSE
Jackee: [00:00:00] But to me, it’s more of, again, finding the substance that could take what I call the doubt monster, this anxiety stress inducing little voice that many of us have that’s relentless, taking that neural pathway or that little monster and shutting him in a corner for an hour. And that alone allows me to then be present. [00:00:25][25.5]
Ronan: [00:00:31] This is Field Tripping, a podcast dedicated to exploring psychedelic experiences and their ability to affect our lives. I’m your host, Ronan Levy. My guest today is Jackee Stang, president and founder of Delic Corp., a psychedelic wellness brand dedicated to public education and to destigmatizing the psychedelic conversation for a mainstream audience. Delic Corp. is the parent company to three evolving brands within the psychedelic space: reality sandwich, the Delic and Meat Delic. All three creative platforms are built to support civil discourse in a fun and safe environment and aim to gentrify psychedelics with accessible resources, complementary products and interactive events with visionary leaders. Before launching Delic, Jackie worked as a VP of Content at High Times, founded a few consumer cannabis brands and was an award winning producer for Bulletproof Radio. Clearly, Jackee is a super advocate for psychedelics and I am so pleased to welcome her to Field Tripping today. [00:01:39][67.9]
Ronan: [00:01:45] Hey, Jackee. [00:01:45][0.3]
Jackee: [00:01:46] Hey, Ronan. Glad to be here. [00:01:48][1.6]
Ronan: [00:01:49] Good to see you. Been a little while. How are things? [00:01:51][2.3]
Jackee: [00:01:52] Listen, I’m a privileged person, and so on paper and logistically speaking, things are just fine for me. But the world is a little strange. It’s a lot strange, actually, and it’s kind of scary. But I’m motivated to help out in any way I can push the needle back in the right direction. [00:02:13][20.9]
Ronan: [00:02:14] What do you mean? It’s strange and scary. I mean, there’s the obvious high things, but can you offer a little more color or commentary? [00:02:19][5.8]
Jackee: [00:02:20] So we’re in an election year yeah with President Trump hopefully leaving office next year. We are in a pandemic. And while people seem to be coming out of the pandemic or quarantine just now, I think that because people are just now coming out, we’re starting to see the cracks that were created during the deeper quarantine or since March, since this all sort of began and. I think it’s important to acknowledge that. That things aren’t always amazing and things are scary, and then that’s OK, because if we acknowledge it, then we can walk through it. But also, I’ve deleted I do not consume news digitally, at least I consume that through my partner, my husband, Matt, who gives me the rundown. But I found it to be a little bit more anxiety inducing than I thought. I thought it might be more relaxing to consume less. But if you don’t know what’s going on and you’re even slightly empathic person, you can feel what’s going on. But if you can’t logically register what’s happening, it’s like ahhh something’s going on. What is it? [00:03:32][71.8]
Ronan: [00:03:32] You’ve got all this anxiety, but you don’t know how to countenance it because you have no idea why you have this anxiety for everything that’s going on in the world. Right. What kind of cracks are you seeing? You mentioned all the cracks are starting to show up through the pandemic. What exactly did you mean? [00:03:46][13.7]
Jackee: [00:03:46] I think that depends on where you live. I live in Los Angeles, which was cracky to begin to begin with. [00:03:55][8.4]
Ronan: [00:03:55] On many levels over history, I suppose. But. [00:03:57][2.6]
Jackee: [00:03:59] Yeah, and I also live right next to Venice Beach, and it happens to be overrun with the homeless population that has expanded since covid. Your interactions with people on the daily in a city like this are often met with anger. You could just feel people’s energy bubbling up to the surface even more than you could before in a city like this. I’ve been robbed twice. [00:04:29][30.6]
Ronan: [00:04:31] Really? [00:04:31][0.0]
Jackee: [00:04:32] Bikes and stuff. But still, you feel that need the neediness that people have the want that’s coming up. And that and it’s palpable and and scary. But well, and also the fires come on. Like when you we just drove to the desert from Los Angeles to get away from the smoke and then there was a fire in the desert on the way. And to see that we saw it at night time into to drive in your Tesla in this very hopeful, amazing, wonderful new technology to be driving in your Tesla, let’s say, and looking to the right and seeing this big pronounced mountain burning on fire, much like the sun, it’s visceral. [00:05:16][43.5]
Ronan: [00:05:17] What is your practice to try and help process all of this kind of stuff? Because, like, I mean, I, I think I’m an empathetic person, but I don’t usually get caught up in the global tides. Like for me to get anxious about something. Maybe it’s my naive optimism. Hope springs eternal, but anxiety to me turns the tie of my personal experience. It doesn’t extend to a sort of global situations. But I’ve come to see that like there are a lot of people who get deeply affected by circumstances well outside of their realm. [00:05:49][32.7]
Jackee: [00:05:50] It’s a daily slog and a constant learning process. I have a lot of anxiety. I always have. It runs in my family, especially in the women, in my family. And so I’ve dealt with it a myriad of ways over the last 20, 20 years or so. Psychedelics being one of them. Lately Ketamine is done more for me and helping them manage my anxiety than 20 years of the traditional talk therapy or SSRIs, as did in my 20s. And so I use things like ketamine to help break the bubble of anxiety and create space between my default mode network and hope, let’s say. And that’s extremely healing. Just that separation allows for Jackee, the the conscious being Jackee, to rewire, get a lay of the land and assess what’s happening in my physical, immediate reality. But you can’t I can’t do ketamine every day. So it’s the traditional things. Well, I’m lucky enough to live and stare at the ocean. I’m a cancer sign. I definitely go with the flow, just like you mentioned. The feminine parts of me do that as well. And so I totally tap into the energy that is around me. And I think it’s useful for people to learn how to create especially deeply empathic people to learn how to create energy bubbles. What I what I call is energy bubbles around themselves to protect themselves from these Barbes, these things coming in at you from the external world, not because you’re cold and heartless and you don’t want to participate as a community member with the world around you. But just because it’s cool to protect yourself and if you want to maintain a level of performance and growth, it becomes too much to process. It’s like energy overload here and diet and exercise super clean with what we eat. And I sing and I write songs and I create things. [00:08:04][133.6]
Ronan: [00:08:05] You mentioned that like the anxiety runs, I guess, in your family. Where do you think that comes from? And for everybody listening, Jackee’s father in law, Robert, actually works for us at Field Trip. He’s our Director of Leasing and he’s a superb human being. And we’re super lucky to have him on the team. But he he mentioned that you’ve had, quote, life affirming success with ketamine therapy. A couple of questions in there, which is like, where do you think that anxiety comes from? Like epigenetics and a lot of that kind of stuff comes down and sometimes there’s clear roots of it. And sometimes, like people see it and then their psychedelic experiences, helps them understand it and start to heal it and process it. And then secondly, in some of your psychedelic experiences, like have you had any truly profound awakenings, awarenesses, insights or anything along those lines? Because ultimately this podcast is called Field Tripping: Epic Trips in Psychedelics. And it’s really about trying to get like those experiences and have people share them. Because the one thing that I’ve found is often when I share a personal experience, it resonates with someone else. Maybe they’re not going through the exact same thing, but the energy around it, the emotions around it really kind of touch the same way. [00:09:14][69.7]
Jackee: [00:09:15] So epigenetics, I hope that we can use psychedelics to study that more. I know that my friend, Dr. Dave Robin was working on a study with using psychedelics and epigenetics. I’m not a scientist. Full disclosure, I call myself a citizen scientist or even quite often a lazy scientist, because I have the seeking nature as a lot of people who like psychedelics or not, have. And so in terms of my anxiety and where it comes from, I can only really trace it back to generations. That’s pretty much as far back as I can go. I know genetically where my blood comes from and that’s mostly Irish. And I think that immediately my mother and my grandmother went through a lot. There’s a there’s, suicide in my family. There’s rape, there’s alcoholism, there’s pedophilia and all, of course, tying into the females, the modern day females experience in the last hundred and twenty years now. I think it’s ridiculous to assume that I wouldn’t have gotten some of my mother’s personal experiences and some of the anxiety that she’s felt in her life, especially when I was in her womb. I think it’s absurd to assume that that doesn’t get passed on when you’re physically connected to a person’s nervous system for that long and in that way. So my anxieties are generational. And then I have my own personal experiences growing up with an alcoholic father and typical things that happen to people and adolescents. Believe it or not, I was bullied a lot and I dealt with an eating disorder. So I think it comes from neural pathways that are really freaking hard to break. The brain is really magical and powerful and stubborn. And so I’ve always used psychedelics for the most part to understand these neural pathways, more tests my behavior out, test my capabilities out, push myself mentally to the limit. I’ve consumed psychedelics since I was 14, but not on a regular basis. But the first time I tripped was I was 14, trying to find ways to wrangle my anxiety. I was always motivated to stay on top of it and to not let it win and not sit in the soup of victim. Oh woe is me. Oh, you have this label as some sort of mental disorder. Like I’ve never been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, but I think that’s by design. I didn’t want the label. And when it comes to ketamine, the first time that I consumed ketamine, I’m ninety nine percent sure. Of course this is back in the day when we didn’t test things or know what we were consuming, but it was a large dose of ketamine mixed with probably other things back in the late nineties during rave culture in Austin, Texas. And those were my early psychedelic days. I consumed too much ketamine at one time. It was one of the most challenging trips I’ve ever experienced. I remember wanting to die. I was taken out of the rave, which to those of you who experienced raves, that’s unusual because it’s a big place for people that are eccentric or that want to let go, go and let loose. And so it’s not unusual to see weird things. And I was put in the back of my friend’s car and they left me there and to wait it off. So I was alone and the set and setting was not ideal. And so I left that experience and didn’t touch ketamine for almost 19 years. I started hearing about it again as we moved to here to California. And I would go to Burning Man and these things that people were consuming ketamine with other substances. And I just I had a big stigma attached to it. Still, for me in my head, I was very judgmental about it. I thought, oh, what? I don’t do ketamine. That’s for those people. Our network started to open up into opportunities with actual physicians and clinics who were distributing ketamine in a therapeutic way. And I had gotten to a point two years ago, we had sold High Times. For anyone who sold a company, it’s extremely taxing. With many shareholders involved. It was one of the most challenging sober periods of my life. And it was all coming to a head, my anxiety was presenting itself in new ways that started to become scary. I was my anger levels. I couldn’t bounce back or recuperate from being triggered as quickly as I’d like. I would go I would lose days at a time after being triggered by something. And in the world I’m in, we’re in, have our hands and a lot of business opportunities. That’s not useful. And so I was willing to try anything. And we have a very good friend named Dr. Matt Cook. You’ve heard him on our Delic radio podcast and other live events, and he runs a regenerative medicine practice up in San Jose, California. His medical practice was as an anesthesiologist. But anyway, so I had my first I.V. ketamine experience in 19 years or had my first experience of ketamine in 19 years. And it was wonderful. It was legitimately impactful in a way that so many things that we pass on the daily aren’t. And I was hooked from there. I thought, well, this is definitely for me. [00:15:22][366.9]
Ronan: [00:15:22] What did you experience it? Was there any profound realizations or was it just the feeling or did you have any insights? [00:15:28][5.5]
Jackee: [00:15:29] I always and I think other people share this, tend to have a lot of creative insights or clarity when you consume ketamine or a certain dose of ketamine in the same way that you can with cannabis. Those have a different meaning once the medicine is worn off. So, yeah, I’ve got a long list of things that felt profound in the moment, and some of them still carry that much weight after the fact. But to me, it’s more of, again, finding the substance that could take what I call the doubt monster, this anxiety, stress inducing little voice that many of us have that’s relentless, taking that neural pathway or that little monster and shutting him in a corner for an hour. And that alone allows me to then be present. So it’s really like it’s a hack into filtering out that noise so that I can be myself, and then the more that I experience that freedom or that sense of clarity and hope, the more I’m creating this, neural pathway memory that once the medicine’s worn off, I can with enough repetition. And I’m in the middle of working on that now. I can remember what I call that hope. The light at the end of the tunnel. I think about death a lot. [00:17:00][90.5]
Ronan: [00:17:00] While on ketamine? [00:17:01][0.5]
Jackee: [00:17:02] Yeah, I get very mindful of my own mortality and my loved ones and that can be scary. So that’s why I believe it’s very useful to have the right set and setting. I’m always deeply grateful when I come out of the experience because I go to things like death and fear and doubt, and then I come out and I’m so grateful to just be here in this body. [00:17:29][27.7]
Ronan: [00:17:30] It’s interesting you touched on mortality. Going there on psychedelics can be a profoundly altering experience, potentially very positive and potentially very negative. How do you handle it? Like what do you feel around it? What comes up? [00:17:44][13.8]
Jackee: [00:17:45] So on ketamine, it depends on the dose. Right. But if I have a, let’s say, an I.V. dose of 40 to 70, it comes in waves much like with LSD and so on let’s say an intense upswing. I’m ideating on consciousness and how that relates to death. So I’m thinking about me, Jackee, conscious, awake in this life and what’s beyond that? I’m reaching into the universe, into beyond the stars and trying so hard to connect to what that is, what is the genesis and what is the after. And because I’m curious and I want to connect to it so that in this life I can have less anxiety about the unknown of when I’m going to die, when my loved ones are going to die. And it feels a little bit like a flirtation with death, like, OK, I’m ready, like, show it to me. What? Can I deal with it? And because the other part of my brain that’s still conscious from not being fully under sedation knows that I’m still safe in this reality. So it’s like this tether I’m holding on to while leaping out into the Stratosphere of Ketamine. And it’s this balancing act of constantly reminding myself, I’m still tethered, I’m still tethered, so I can explore making sure that I always have that tether. I think this is so important with the psychedelic conversation. Especially when you’re consuming them often or in a more recreational sense? You can like the guy in the movie Up, like the old man who takes the blues and he’s just up, up, up, up, up. You can idolize the lift off experience so much that you forget about your humanity and how magical that is. You forget that being grounded in the sand or on the grass here on Earth in this present reality is also very cool. [00:20:06][141.4]
Ronan: [00:20:10] I’m super curious to know I have those flirtations with death changed your perspective towards it and I don’t know why, but like as you were talking, I got this, like, sense of true ecstasy, not in the way most people conceive of it, but like an extasis being outside of your body. And like, I was just like imagining almost death being like the edge of the universe and just like wondering what’s on the other side. But if you put your hand up against it and push against it, you know, you don’t know exactly what’s on the other side, but you start to get a sense and I’m just wondering, like, did you get any sense of that? What did it feel like? Can you translate that? And has it changed your perspective at all? [00:20:47][37.4]
Jackee: [00:20:48] I’m still very much at the beginning of my exploration in this department, and I’ve gotten little messages, whether that’s me creating the narrative as this like Irish storyteller or if it’s external information coming to me, I don’t know. And in a sense, I don’t think it matters, really. So I’ve gotten little messages to indicate that it is what you want it to be and. You can play with it and there is still hope for once the lights go out in this meat sack of the human body that we’re embodying now that I’m a body now, there is still hope to connect to that Jackee, to that energy after the fact. And that, to me, is very hopeful. I’ve seen things that indicate that much like much like a distant memory, a little something, something in the memory bank that comes up every now and then that you can recall if you want. I was raised with a Protestant mythology and my grandfather, my maternal grandfather was the patriarch who taught me, bought me the Bibles and showed me areas of the Bible and interpreted it even for me at times. He’d stand me on the pew at church. So all of that, I had I had a very strong connection to the idea of Jesus and God and the Holy Spirit and spirituality and the Ten Commandments and how you can live this life to earn your way into a fanciful Never Neverland afterlife. And that was all well and good, and it served me well and created manners in me that I still hopefully, I think, use to this day. But naturally, as I grew up in my late teens, started to question all of that. And my adoration for it really spun the other way so far in a direction where I refused to talk about it with my family. I spent about a decade feeling very neutral and not becoming anti God or anti spirituality, but just no longer feeding the mythos of Christianity. And whether you believe in that mythos or not, taking that spirituality out of my life was not super beneficial. And I had this moment on an Ayahausca mixture where I was looking at the fire, I was talking to the fire, or at least I, I felt like I was talking to the fire and it was talking to me and. I finally had a moment of reconnection to that Christian spiritual afterlife, God, energy, with no shame anymore, and that’s when I thought about this idea of Jesus is psychedelic, because that’s me saying, wait a second, psychedelics are so in the realm of religion and these stories that we’re telling ourselves and our children and our families that we’re living off of and the spirituality because they get you to that mythological, fanciful place that allows you to connect. And then I remember waking up the next day and I thought, OK, so consuming psychedelics sometimes to me I’m praying. And so when we can tear down these walls of conception, preconception, stigma and look at something from a different angle, even a word like prayer, then that allows us to bring more people and bring more of ourselves in and there’s less interference towards progress. Right. And so much of what’s happening now to this social justice culture. And the people are so anti what’s happening with Trump, let’s say, in America that there be complete other end of the spectrum and that breeds on both sides hate and misinformation, fear, which is a useful emotion when you’re running away from tigers or people with knives, but not a useful tool when you’re trying to evolve as a species and I don’t know, fix the planet. [00:25:36][289.0]
Ronan: [00:25:44] I do not fear death. I resent it. Everything must die, apparently, and I am no exception, but I want to be consulted, you know what I mean? Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something and it doesn’t bother to wipe its boots. I have a new passion, my darlings. A passion for being myself and for being more than previously has been manifested for a single lifetime. I am determined to die at my own convenience. These are the words that one of the characters in the book, Jitterbug Perfume, said in his quest to find immortality. And they kept coming back to me as Jackee and I spoke about how psychedelics have helped her develop what I’ll call a familiarity with death. But Jackie’s experience is not unique. Throughout history, psychedelics have been used to help people understand and in some cases even transcend death. In ancient Greece initiates to the mysteries of Eleusis, whereas believe they were provided with some psychedelic brew uniformly reported that after the experience, they no longer feared death because they saw that life continued long after our physical shells leave. This is one of the things I find so powerful and magical about psychedelics. They have the capacity to stretch and alter and mold our perceptions of ourselves, our lives and the world around us in deeply profound ways. And Jackee’s experience as it pertains to death is certainly a wonderful example of that. [00:27:12][88.2]
Ronan: [00:27:17] You used to work with Dave Asprey at Bulletproof. What was that experience like? I have a lot of respect for what Dave has accomplished. I’ve only met him a couple of times. And sometimes I’m like, man, you’re brilliant. And sometimes I think he’s batshit crazy. [00:27:31][13.8]
Jackee: [00:27:31] Dave has a ton of charisma and charisma works in my experience much like pheromones where not everybody is attracted to all charisma just because somebody is charismatic. And so honestly, working with Dave was one of the most fun experiences of my professional life. That team, to be involved in that fringe biotech industry from the beginning was amazing. And I think that- I know that to be successful commercially within the western capitalist structure or it’s not even just Western now I mean, just globally, you have to be a little cray cray because you have to take risks and you have to be a visionary and you have to reach beyond the wall of the box and not show the fear that you have in doing that. Because there’s there’s too many people there’s too much going on for just your regular average Joe person to be able to break through. Now, we glorify that in America as this thing to emulate. From my experience, I think it’s just another option. Succeeding in business is satisfying in some ways that I think most people who have experienced it would say, I didn’t really get what I thought I was going to get. [00:29:07][95.5]
Ronan: [00:29:08] Touching on the entrepreneurship stuff, like there’s so much in there. It’s like I don’t think it’s another cog in the journey. I think it’s just like another parable and energetic that people can work with. Like, if you think about it, it’s like being an entrepreneur, you have to be irrational. Fundamentally, the odds are stacked against you. Ninety nine point nine percent of the time you’re going to fail and anyone who embarks on that journey. You know, that’s inherently irrational. So so that’s built into part of it. And then you get into it and you realize that most entrepreneurs are fueled by anxiety. They’re so motivated to succeed because they’re so scared finding out who they are or they think that success will define them. Tell us more about where did the vision come from? Where did the idea come from? What is the future of Delic look like? [00:29:51][43.0]
Jackee: [00:29:51] It’s the first time that I’ve been solely at the helm and not sharing the burden with other people. And obviously there’s a lot of people involved helping me. The responsibility feels like it’s fully on my shoulders. And it was it’s been a major lesson on my journey to discovering how I can be in the driver’s seat of me most of the time and that means emotionally, physically, spiritually. And I was completing my tenure over at High Times. I had some creative disputes with some people over there, over this magazine cover I was doing to highlight women of weed. And so I left that situation and then I went to Burning Man in twenty eighteen simultaneously, psychedelics, as I’ve said here, always been they’re my friends. They’re always on my mind and I share that passion with my partner. This is like family discussion one on one. We’re always talking about mind states and how to reach beyond and it just became the right time. We had been talking about how this, psychedelics seem to be OK. There’s a lot of research being done. This is two years ago now. There’s a lot of research being done, more than there was in cannabis, at least in America. And yet I’m not going to consume a Maps bulletin and I’m not going to read a study abstract. That’s not the kind of student I am. That’s not the kind of consumer I am. And yet there’s a lot of people like me out there who are interested in even just talking about psychedelic substances and how they can help people live happier lives. But no one’s talking to them, really. And so I started with this idea of it’s always been a big circus tent for me because I get bored and I don’t want to do just one thing. So I’m thinking, well, let’s create this organism where smart people come together and we can help sometimes scale small ideas that need help commercially and then also help brand ideas that have the opportunity to help mainstream this conversation. Whether people are psychedelicly inclined as a mainstream is not up to me. But let’s at least have the conversation worldwide. And in order to do that, we have to get people with their eyes. We have to get people with their ears, with their hearts. We have to constantly shift and change things and create content about psychedelics, a very complex topic. We have to put the words in a way that someone like me can consume it and understand it and absorb it. So it’s been two years of fiddling around and working out how to do this. And we’re here to do what we can for civil discourse and to provide as many different opinions as possible. [00:32:55][183.2]
Ronan: [00:32:55] I’m a big fan of the work you’re doing with Delic. I was very disappointed that Meet Delic got canceled this year. But during the pandemic, it’s been described as the great pause and like forced everybody to confront their issues, whether it’s economic uncertainty or interpersonal uncertainty or anxiety or anything along those lines. And just curious if there’s been anything different for you during this time. Obviously, you touched on the heightened anxiety of all the global uncertainty, but has there been anything that’s kind of come up for you personally? Because one of the things everyone said is like everything’s coming up right now, like the universe is forcing you to confront your shit. So confront it. Don’t waste this opportunity. I’m just wondering if anything in particular has come up for you specific to Jackee. [00:33:37][41.8]
Jackee: [00:33:38] Well, I don’t know if I should be saying this or not, but whatever. A lot came up for me around Delic and how I wanted to lead it. I’ve been in this pursuit of sharing my knowledge in a way or some people create themselves as thought leaders in this very Markety kind of Pusher kind of way, and there was a moment with Delic where I thought, oh, well, we have to do that. I have to fit in that way and I have to market myself in this way, which means I can’t say certain things, which means I have to stick within this rubric and I have to take more photos and I have to look this way. And so I just was going with the flow, because when you’re creating this new idea, people tend to need something to hold on to. And the pandemic for me is really allowed me to realize that that’s not necessarily the case, not how I see Delic, not how I see any of the brands that I’ve fallen in love with or worked with over the years. And so I’m grateful and that it’s allowed me the space to look at. Jackee, and what I have to say and how I want to be creative as something different than the Jackee that’s leading Delic into look at Delic as this organism, this idea that I’ve started, that I’m currently the ring leader of, if you will, operationally. But really, that’s not what’s important to me. That’s, it’s not about me at all. It’s about creating this energy that I’m nurturing that will then pass to somebody else and then they will nurture it. And if we are lucky, the idea and concept lives over time. And I think that a great comparison is to, let’s say, the High Times story. Nobody knows that the founder of High Times was Tom Farcade and how complex and intense of a character this guy was. And he has this beautiful story that most people don’t know because what they know, what they love is the brand. And I got to get back to that place, which is so wonderful, because to make it all about you or one person is not great for business, but also it’s very stressful on the individual. So I’m grateful that I’ve had the chance to look at Delic in that new way. [00:36:06][147.7]
Ronan: [00:36:06] I mean, at the end of the day, like when you create a business, you’re creating a new life and it’s its own entity and you’re just kind of trying to shepherd it along as a parent. And eventually the parent’s got to get out of the way. And then the other question that I want to ask is, if there’s any one person that you could either go on a psychedelic journey with or sit down and say, you need to do this, who would it be? [00:36:29][23.4]
Jackee: [00:36:30] I would love to go on a psychedelic journey with Joseph Campbell. We actually have a very close family friend who got to do that, but he’s dead, so I can’t do that in this life. Joseph Campbell comes to mind first. I just adore his work and anybody I could bring along. And and that hasn’t experienced it yet and I think would be helpful would be my mom. [00:36:56][25.5]
Ronan: [00:36:56] And why’s that? [00:36:57][0.4]
Jackee: [00:36:57] Because she is a super powerful and talented witch that just hasn’t had the discipline that one might want. And I think that psychedelics can can, if used in a certain way, create that awareness in somebody. [00:37:14][16.9]
Ronan: [00:37:15] Awesome. Well, Jackee, I think I’ve taken up enough of your time. This has been super fascinating. It went in directions that were totally unexpected. And I love that. That’s really what I hope for in these conversations. So thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. [00:37:27][12.1]
Jackee: [00:37:28] Thank you so much. [00:37:29][0.6]
Ronan: [00:37:33] My conversation with Jackee can be distilled into three main themes. First, you can bring psychedelic experiences into your waking life. During one of our trips Jackee created a light at the end of a tunnel through clarity and hope. So even after the ketamine wore off, she could remember how to come back to that space in her mind, that experience acts as a tether. It’s an anchor she can always go back to. Even though it was generated through a psychedelic experience. She brought that energy, that emotion, that magic into her real world. And it’s a source of strength and power for her. Empathy is a wonderful characteristic, but it is a double edged sword. It can make you an incredible friend, lover and healer. But if you do not respect its power and leave it open all the time, it can become draining and damaging. As an empath, it’s important to take space or create energy bubbles, as Jackee calls them, to respect your own needs. This doesn’t mean to be cold or heartless, but simply to respect your own mental health and personal growth at various times. Finally, psychedelics have the capacity to change our relationships with some of the most powerful and profound aspects of our experience as humans, from our deep sense of self to our awareness, relationship and understandings of death. Jackee’s discussion around death in her psychedelic experiences were deeply powerful and moving, and even started to shift my relationship to how I think about death. And that’s only through a virtual contact high. Clearly, psychedelics have the capacity to shape and shift reality long after a psychedelic trip has ended. [00:39:16][103.1]
Ronan: [00:39:27] Thank you for listening to Field Tripping, a podcast dedicated to exploring psychedelic experiences and their ability to affect our lives. I’m your host, Ronan Levy. Until next time, stay curious. Breathe properly. And remember, every day is a field trip if you let it be one. Field Tripping is created by Ronan Levy and produced by Conrad Page. Our researcher is Sharon Bhella. Special thanks to Quill. And of course, many thanks to Jackee Stang for joining me today. Be sure to check out thedelic.com to upgrade your journey and visit meetdelic.com to learn more about the 2021 psychodelic wellness summit. [00:39:27][0.0]
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