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Well done. You've sorted through the embarrassment of riches that is the modern podcast landscape and found me Rob Briden on my podcast.

In this series of Briden and I talk to, among others, Harry Hill, Ben Elton, Charlotte Church, Steve Cougan and Dame Harriet Walter.

And that's just a few. We tend to chat for about 45 minutes to an hour never longer. It's terrific conversation, reminiscent, sweat appropriate and exchange of anecdotes.

So do join me, Rob Briden, wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes of Briden and are available early and ad-free on Amazon Music, or by subscribing to Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app.

You might have heard that certain psychedelic drugs, when taken in a controlled medical environment, can have positive benefits for people suffering from serious mental illnesses like PTSD and depression.

But what you might not know is that athletes have been at the forefront of a recent push for more research and treatment using these drugs.

Today, we're re-playing an episode the first aired back in June of 2021. I spoke with the Athletics Dan Robson about why a handful of former pro athletes have been taking up the psychedelics cause and how some of their lives have been transformed by these drugs. All right, here's the episode.

So Dan, you recently wrote this in-depth story about athletes who are sort of at the forefront of this movement to use psychedelics as a form of medical treatment.

First, how did you get interested in this topic? It actually came last year, right before the pandemic, I was meeting with a former NHL player, Daniel Carcilo, who was someone I'd spoken to many times before.

He's talked a lot about traumatic brain injuries that player suffer in hockey. This time, when we met in this restaurant in Toronto, things were just different.

He told me about his experiences with an ayahuasca ceremony that he'd done in the months earlier, and he started talking about psychedelics in a way that I'd never heard before.

I wasn't really educated about the topic at all, and I remember leaving this in the parking lot thinking that was out of a weird conversation.

But it was something that I just sort of, from that conversation, really started looking into it a bit more, and realizing that there were more athletes that were involved in this space as well.

All right, well, you spoke to a number of people for this story, and the first one I want to ask you about is a guy named Ryan Van Dumbush.

For those who might not have been following the NHL in the late 1990s and early 2000s, can you explain who is Ryan Van Dumbush?

So Ryan is a former NHL, I guess we'll call it an enforcer, a tough guy.

Van Dumbush will go with him here, and Rich here with a couple of short left. Now Van Dumbush tries to answer with a left.

Van Dumbush here wildly misses with a left.

He was the sort of guy that played a team with a boy to be the muscle on a team.

You know, a couple of good lefts there from Van Dumbush.

Van Dumbush in the red, Gavin Moore came to Hawaii.

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