Hello everybody, welcome to the Psychedatics Today podcast with your host David Drapkin,

having a conversation with Yoast Brexemal of the Open Foundation and ICPR. This was a conversation you almost never heard because at the very end of the chat when we clicked the button, it disappeared.

The recording vanished and I had a meltdown and disassociated completely for a few hours,

and then some wonderful person in tech support, wherever they were in the world, found in their secret cloud, their version of the recording, and they downloaded it and sent it to us.

And I was so grateful. So thank you very much, whoever you are.

So the chat revolves a lot around the conference, which is in September.

I'm going to hear a lot about that. I'm not sure I'm going to make it, but yeah, the whole team's going to be there. Joe and Kyle and Johanna especially going to be there. And just to say, Kyle is doing fine. He hasn't been on the podcast for a little while. He wanted to let everyone know he's doing fine. He's just super busy. And obviously we had all of my podcast recordings from the,

from Research Reality Conference to catch up on from Toronto. It was lovely chatting with Yost

about the conference, about the Netherlands and Amsterdam. And I do get a bit personal there, as I tend to do,

talking about my two experiences of being in Amsterdam. I got bus rides from Birmingham twice.

I think I was 17 the first time, 21 the second time. Both really amazing. The second one,

incredibly life-changing. Can I talk about my experiences of kind of madness? One of my earliest

experiences of that. I'm a bit of a veteran nowadays.

But that was one of my first tastes of kind of diving into that quagmire and kind of treasure chest as well.

Yeah, and the cultural and societal, political openness, pragmatism of the Netherlands and being kind of welcoming to new ideas and new people

and how that translates into on some levels a more progressive drug policy that incorporates

harm reduction kind of just as a natural part of all that's how people think around here

like we care about each other we want to help you to be safe. We want to kind of listen to

science and build systems and support structures just to look after each other. So good to hear,

but he does also have some sobering thoughts that it's not, you know, a kind of perfect country

where, you know, all policy is enlightened and follows, you know, what psychedelic research suggests. There's still

a lot of rigidity there. We also even talk about what it's like having kids and how hard that

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