Good morning everybody, hope you're doing well after this party. I was in bed very early, so I'm very excited to have Gigi and Albert here. You already introduced them kindly. The reason why we also wanted to have this conversation is because they're married for a long time, have three grown-up children living in New York City, but at one point they decided to look into psychedelics. My first question would be: why is it important to you to talk about this here in front of an audience?
Yeah, well, I never thought I would be here talking about psychedelics or therapy-guided psychedelics for that matter, but I do believe it's important to talk about it because we can normalize it, and then so many more people around the world can benefit from it. Thank you.
And Albert, tell us a little bit about your personal background, why you eventually started to look into this thing.
Well, maybe start with I grew up in Germany in a fairly traditional German village just outside of Nuremberg, a couple hours north of here. When I was growing up there, born in '67, the prevailing attitude was there was not ever a mention of such a thing as a therapist. You were kind of expected to solve your own problems. Mental health was just not a topic that anybody talked about. So it was very traditional background for a lot of people our age.
But still, you probably didn't wake up one day and said, let's do psychedelics.
No, no, definitely not. What happened in the meantime? Well, it was a journey, so to speak. I was very fortunate to spend a year in the US when I was 16. I kind of fell in love with this sense of possibility and the sense that things can change, that you can change yourself. About a decade ago or so, I realized that I had a real problem that I had not addressed. The problem was that when I got frustrated, it would end up in anger. That rarely happened in the business context, but it happened a lot in the family context, and it was a real problem. So I started talk therapy, and I made progress, but the progress was slow, and sometimes it was elusive. Then we read Michael Pollan's book 'How to Change Your Mind', and I was like, that sounds really interesting. So that was kind of what really got me interested in whether there is a role for psychedelics to complement therapy. By the way, Michael Pollan's book is still a very good book for beginners. I also basically started with it.
But Gigi, how did you get interested in this, or how did you approach the psychedelic topic?
Yeah, so I've learned, thanks to you and others, that psychedelics really is the future of mental health, and so I wanted to invest in it. But before I invested, I figured, okay, I should really try it out. So thanks to you arranging a trip to Amsterdam, a psychedelic journey. We got to really appreciate the power of it. I mean, we should say at this moment that there is a whole structure now in the Netherlands where people can just make a decision and engage in these experiences with therapists who have a safe protocol, a safe set and setting. So it's no longer a wild card thing to do, because most people who would like to look into this are not necessarily psychonauts. They like to look into things or questions that they have, and you can engage already in this safe structure. It's a safe space in the meantime, I would say. But maybe you talk a little bit about how the journey was for you, how long, and how did you feel? Because that's the big question: how does it feel? Will I be a different person afterwards? So maybe you can talk about this.
Yeah, so my journey was actually I had a few journeys. There were five hours, but also the longest was nine hours. I got a really good tip from the therapist who guided us, which was to look for the oysters and you'll find the pearls. Not literally the oysters, right? But you look for things that may have meaning for you, things that you may or may not have faced, and you start to engage, and then you'll find the pearls or the meaning from them. What I also find interesting was that there was music that the therapist played during the journey, and with each song or tune that played, the scenes in my mind changed. So it was a really interesting way to kind of progress the journey forward. But you also saw certain things, like the parties, the flight of your family from Germany. Maybe you can address this a little.
Yeah, so I would say there were probably three kind of connections or aha moments that I had during my journey or journeys. The first happened in the 1930s in Berlin. My family had a house there, and my grandmother used to entertain folks like Einstein, I'd heard of these family stories. And there I was in a garden party wearing a frilly dress and a hat, engaging, and I made the connection that I too like to throw salons and parties, and I never really made that connection to my grandmother. The second scene, and it may have been connected, was a vision of my grandmother who was fleeing from the Nazis. She packed up her big leather suitcases, and I was in the hallway kind of following her out to where her four children were, including my mother. I remember then making the connection between her, what a powerful woman she must have been, strong to flee with four kids. Then I kind of realized that my mom raised us by herself, my father passed away when I was younger, had three kids, and so that strong maternal line really struck a chord with me that I hadn't ever focused on. Probably the last connection I want to talk about is the one about my father. I had forgotten that he had these eyes that sparked, you know, and they're the same eyes that my daughter actually inherited. I hadn't made this connection before, but we founded together this community learning hub in Hudson that's called The Spark of Hudson, and I realized, gosh, I must have named this learning center after my father.
Wow, that's interesting. I mean, I want to mention quickly that it's so interesting that even the flight of your grandmother, and you would think like, oh, that's so long ago, it still has an impact on a life, like maybe almost a hundred years later.
Yeah, never anything I really thought about. I mean, I obviously knew my family history, but that it had such a deep impact on me was quite striking.
And along the line, you changed your name. I met you as Susan Dana, but now you're called Gigi Dana. How did this come along?
Yeah, so my middle name is Virginia, so Gigi's short for Virginia. But actually, in my journey, my aunt Virginia, she was the one who actually sponsored the visas for my family so they could leave Berlin and come to the States. And there I was in my journey in her Park Avenue apartment, and she was on a big comfy chair and I was on the floor, remember looking up at her and thinking to myself, gosh, you know, I should be called Virginia or Gigi for short. So it didn't happen right away, but over the coming few months, I realized that Gigi is how I want to be known in my next chapter, which is starting now.
