Hello everybody and welcome back to psychedelics today.

This is Joe Moore.

Today on the show we have Paul Gillis Smith, who I had the pleasure of bumping into a while back at Penn,

and we had the opportunity to record well in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

We went to his office at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School and got into some really fun conversations about Lisa Bieberman, who opened one of the first,

effectively kind of psychedelic information centers, which was kind of doing harm reduction and

much more. And she really became a pioneer there. So Paul's doing a lot of work on her,

her life. And we get into that quite a bit. And I'm excited to dig in. So I'm going to read you

Paul's biography from the Harvard page.

Paul Gilles Smith is a program lead on psychedelics in spirituality as part of the

Transcendence and Transformation Initiative.

He is a Harvard Divinity School alum M. Div in 2024, whose research has focused on the

history of psychiatry as it relates to psychedelic

medicine and chaplaincy. He has published on the philosophical underpinnings and genealogy

of the primary psychometric tool for qualifying mystical experience in psychedelic research,

the MEQ or mystical experience questionnaire, and his thesis presented

a historical triangulation between psychoanalysis, psychiatric chaplaincy, and critiques of

psychiatry as they emerged from R.D. Lang, DeLuse, and Felix Guatri. Grounding his research in hands-on practice, Paul was also the inaugural

student chaplain in the Office of Ministry Studies, Ketamine chaplaincy program at Brigham

and Women's Faulkner Hospital. Paul co-produced the Harvard Psychedelic Walking Tour, co-facilitated

the Center's first reading group on

psychedelics and religion, and he has co-organized the Center's conference on psychedelics since

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