Joshua White left a decade-long career as a San Francisco city attorney to found Fireside Project, a free, anonymous peer-support line for anyone in a psychedelic crisis or working through one from the past. He and Richard, an advisor to Fireside Project, talk about the four gaps Joshua set out to close in the field, what it takes to be a “loving rock” for a stranger mid-trip, reframing the bad trip as a challenging one, the burnout that nearly broke him, and Lucy, a training simulator built from tens of thousands of anonymized calls now used at Mount Sinai and in a New Mexico psilocybin study.

Guest: Joshua White — founder and executive director of Fireside Project; former Deputy City Attorney, San Francisco City Attorney’s Office. Volunteer alumnus of the Zendo Project and Safe & Sound’s parental stress line before founding Fireside in 2021. Fireside’s free peer-support app is available on iOS and Google Play; the training tool Lucy is at fireside.training; donate at firesideproject.org/donate.

Chapters

00:00 — Cold open: reach out and call somebody

02:25 — Welcome: Joshua White

02:48 — Green smoothies and egg whites

03:41 — From city attorney to psychedelic support

04:42 — Psychedelics, therapy, and the decision to leave the law

07:04 — Testing the waters: the Zendo Project and a parental stress line

08:01 — The four gaps in psychedelic support

10:10 — Fireside Project launches, April 2021

10:22 — Anonymity, legality, and why people call

12:43 — Who answers the phone: the “loving rock” question

17:20 — Reframing the bad trip

18:55 — From bad trip to challenging trip

20:34 — Finding volunteers, finding the public

22:43 — The nonprofit fundraising treadmill

25:34 — Burnout, Ibogaine, and “ten out of ten”

26:37 — Richard’s advisor disclosure: take a vacation

27:28 — The patient who taught Richard about self-care

30:31 — Introducing Lucy and how she trains therapists

35:08 — Forty thousand calls and counting

36:24 — Why there’s no AI avatar yet

37:40 — An ethical data model, by contrast

41:04 — The pitch: why Fireside needs your support

41:35 — How to donate, volunteer, and spread the word

41:55 — Close