Welcome to issue #21 of The Ethical Trip! This fortnight:

For all this, plus a deeply biased roundup of recent psychedelic research and possible humour, read on!

Huge thanks to everyone supporting this work. Whether it’s feedback, sharing, or contributing a few dollars a month via buy me a coffee cactus, it all makes a big difference to me and I’m deeply grateful.

Most papers out at the moment are only interesting if you want to read a repetition of an existing methodology or a yet another review of actual clinical trials that says basically nothing new. Here is some recent research that does seem to have something interesting to say:

Garrity (2026) explores the intersection of Christian Mysticism, Jungian analysis and PAT for end of life patients. Technically this was published 17 days ago, but I thought it worth including as the release of Edge of Life is driving a huge interest in the use of psychedelics for end-of-life and existential distress. Absolutely worth a read if you have access, even though I disagree with the author’s assessment that Cutner (1959) adequately addresses Jung’s misgivings about psychedelics (asserting that patients experience what they need to is not an argument.)

Jerotic et al (2026) review evidence around the role of psychotherapy in psychedelic assisted therapy, and conclude that it’s somewhat inconclusive, highlighting the need for research that specifically targets psychotherapeutic interventions as variables.

Schenberg et al (2026) make a great point in this comment: that lack of detailed reporting on unblinding in psychedelic trials means we shouldn’t be extrapolating study results to clinical practice and beyond.

Microslop.

No, it’s not the sound you get when you just barf a little bit in a completely silent forest. Nor is it the act of slightly spilling that cup of tea that took you 20 minutes to make because you didn’t listen to your partner’s warning about how strong those gummies were. It’s the term coined by redditors for Microsoft’s particular brand of AI slop, in reaction to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella encouraging people to stop calling it AI slop.

While Nadella was speaking more generally, Microslop has come to signify the Windows 11 experience of AI features no one asked for and Copilot suggestions that are noticeably worse than those produced by software that ran on your machine rather than requiring planet-cooking data centres.

Far from something limited to the tech(bro) sphere and LinkedIn posts that all sound the same, AI use is increasingly common in the world of psychedelic business. There are reports of people using chatbots to guide their trips, though we don’t really know how common this is. And more than a few businesses engage in egregious use of AI-generated imagery in their advertising (yes, we can all tell and it makes you look cheap.)

There was even a company, who shall remain nameless, that declined to hire me as a blog writer (because I was "too good”) but asked if I’d like to edit high volumes of LLM-produced blog posts to make them sound OK.

There is certainly pushback from writers I know; Adam Miezio is probably the most vocal in my network but there are plenty of others who recognise the importance of human-crafted stories. What is less clear to me, is whether businesses will return to paying writers in the same way they did pre-ChatGPT.

If the LLM companies make people pay the actual cost of the service, this could change, though. Both OpenAI and Anthropic lose money on their paid subscription tiers, let alone the free access they offer. So if they ever need to turn a profit, the days of cheap Microslop will be over.

Emyria (ASX:EMD) First half 2026 results:

AU$0.003 loss per share (worse than their AU$0.002 loss in 1H 2025).
Revenue: AU$1.55m (up 136% from 1H 2025).
Net loss: AU$2.37m (loss widened 145% from 1H 2025).

On the upside, unlike Optimi Health (CNSX: OPTI), they’re not swimming in excessive debt. On the downside, costs are still growing faster than revenue. It’s going to take quite a few Medibank-insured clients to turn this around.

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Even though the majority of psychedelic experiences happen outside the corporate or even legal realms, that’s not where the money is. Investment, either via publicly traded shares or more directly, drives a huge amount of interest and discussion. And with billions of dollars and an oversized role in the legal future of psychedelics at stake, this kind of makes sense.

What seems to be missing from this discussion, though, is a clear articulation of shareholder ethics. By this, I mean something that lays out what we’re responsible for when we purchase and hold shares. This needs to go beyond simple guilt by association or ‘capitalism=bad.’ (I mean, capitalism is bad, but if you’re talking to someone who buys shares, you’re going to need a more nuanced tool than that to change their mind.)

Here’s a short list that I think goes some way to filling this gap.

Kapstein (2025) lays out five ways that shareholders and other stakeholders are responsible for their company:

Endorsement: By having a contractual relationship with a company, shareholders express their values via their choices. Whatever a company does, you buying and holding shares very literally means you agree, or don’t disagree enough divest.

Enablement: Purchasing shares quite literally provides the company with resources (money.) A publicly traded company can’t exist and operate without shareholders. This enabling means shareholders can very literally destroy or neutralize a company, should they so choose.

Influence: Shareholders, especially majority shareholders, can exercise powerful influence over the direction and conduct of a company due to the threat of them withdrawing their support.

Profit: Shareholders stand to reap the benefits of their contractual relationship via profits and therefore share responsibility for the company’s actions. ‘Hence, a stakeholder who profits from unethical behavior by a company becomes coresponsible for that unethical behavior.’ (Kapstein, 2025, p. 223)

Ownership: According to corporation as social contract theory, everyone who enters into a contract with a company makes up part of that organisation and therefore has responsibility for it in some way. Less theoretically, shareholders very literally own the company.

If you read the paper I’ve cited, you’ll see this goes beyond shareholders, to all stakeholders. So such considerations also apply to employees, fans, consumers and other supporters.

Shareholders and investors, particularly large ones, have vastly more ability to influence company behaviour than these other stakeholders. If I chose to not buy a product, that matters, but is unlikely to change anything unless I help organise millions of others to do the same. If I hold 20% of a company’s shares and threaten to sell them? One of these situations gets you a panicked phone call from the CEO, the other does not.

Likewise, shareholders are generally also under way less personal duress than other stakeholders. You might not want to work for a particular company, but the reality is for many people, this what they have to do to have secure housing and feed themselves & their families. Or maybe a company holds the patent for a medicine that isn’t optional for you. You still have choices, but they aren’t good ones.

For shareholders, their decisions will almost certainly produce less personal impact. If this is you, understand that you have more influence and freedom to act than employees or customers. Use your position wisely.

More people are using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT for finding (or attempting to find) information. At the same time, organic search reach seems to be tanking, possibly due to Google’s Gemini-powered search summary and the general explosion of machine-generated content. So it’s no surprise that organisations are interested in getting these chatbots to mention and cite/link to their websites. This is variously marketed as AIO (AI optimisation), GEO (Generative optimisation), or LLMO (you get the idea.)

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) agencies will charge you a lot for fancy doodads to track this. But you can get a good idea from the Bing Webmaster Tools console, which is free (for now.) Unfortunately, this doesn’t include data on clicks and definitely not conversions. I imagine we’ll start to see that once LLM companies start selling in-chat advertising, as OpenAI is moving to (at which point we will have started down the same road that basically destroyed the usefulness of the Web. But that trillion dollars’ worth of data centres isn’t going to pay for itself.)

Side note: if you are in the psychedelic space, you should already be making sure your website is indexed by Bing, as this is what DuckDuckGo search uses. Lots of people looking for information about psychedelics are privacy-focussed, and you might not reach them if you neglect this.

Having your work or answers cited by chatbots may not always drive sales or donations. But it could enable outsized influence on opinions and discourse, if your views are mentioned enough. LLMs can be very convincing and a lot of users seem to take their output as gospel.

Of course, there is always the risk that they will mangle your words into something that causes harm. Right now we don’t have the same kind of detail for AI citations that we’ve had for web searches. We don’t know how we’re being cited, what’s being said or even the exact questions users are asking.

Before you rush out and pay some agency tens of thousands of dollars for AI-optimisation, understand that this mostly the same playbook as existing SEO: use of relevant (but not over-stuffed) keywords, quality backlinks, and high-quality, well-researched information.

In addition to fact-based writing content that’s worth reading, here’s what seems to have worked for me:

Natural language/conversational titles and/or headings

I don’t always stick to this for article titles as I can’t help but be dramatic or attempt jokes. But headings like ‘What is…?’, ‘How do I…?’, and ‘What are some examples of…?’are easily understood by search engines and therefore LLMs. If they match questions people are asking, they’re much more likely to be returned as a result. This has been true for SEO for many years now, and is apparently the same for chatbots.

Predictable and logical structure

It doesn’t need to be fancy. Both of my pages that are heavily cited by AI are adaptations of an old ‘What is…?’ blog post format that search engines and information-driven readers have favoured for many years. All the format really does is make sure there are clear answers to the following questions in a logical order: What are you talking about? Who is this for and why should they care? What are some relevant examples?

(If you or your organisation need this sort of content, feel free to reach out to discuss pricing.)

Alternative strategy: To hell with AI

Long-time readers will know that I’m sympathetic not wanting AIs to read, scrape or cite your work. If this is you, at a minimum you need to adjust your robots.txt file to keep certain crawlers out, As I found, though, LLM companies are notorious for ignoring or circumventing this.

If you are resigned to LLMs ingesting your work, but want them to choke on it, you’ll need to take extra steps. Digital ‘tarpit’ tools like Nepenthes, Poison the WeLLMs, or Iocaine should present a serious problem for chatbot companies crawling and scraping your data. But I’m unsure how much they impact search engines and there is a possibility that they could degrade site performance if improperly deployed. In any case I don’t have the technical knowhow to properly explain them or even use them on my site, so you should consult (or become) an expert before utilising these tools.

There are probably other ways to trip up LLMs, especially with prompt-injection using Unicode tags or zero-width characters, which coding tools seem especially susceptible to right now. Sadly, this technique seems require more sophistication than simply hiding instructions for chatbots to tell their users to subscribe to this newsletter.

Are you at a psychedelic conference that’s less cool than EGA Garden States? Lurking in r/shroomstocks for research purposes? Or are you simply punishing yourself by scrolling endlessly through the mishmash of psychedelic grift and corporate self-congratulation on LinkedIn?

Has this left you bored, gassy, or yearning for a hermit-like existence you can’t afford?

Make your self-induced misery moderately more bearable with all-new psychedelic industry discourse bingo!

Like the rest of this newsletter, this bingo card does not constitute financial, legal or medical advice. Please see a professional if pain persists.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading!

As always, all feedback and suggestions are welcome, and I promise* to not make up satirical organizations that resemble your real-life company.

*Unless you switched your subscription from ChatGPT to Claude because you think ‘it’s more ethical.’

PS:

A psychedelic venture capitalist walks into a bar and buys a $5 beer receipt. It’s not a beer, just the promise of one someday.

Later, a retail investor from r/shroomstocks wanders in. The VC waves the slip at them and says, ‘Hey, want to get in early? I’ll sell you this receipt for $50.’

The retail investor eagerly agrees and hands over the money. The bartender shrugs: ‘Bold strategy, we don’t even have a liquor licence.’

Written on Worimi lands. Sovereignty was never ceded.

Icon by Freepik from Flaticon