Chatting with Candice
A long, personal conversation that keeps returning to discernment. Host Candice Horbacz and Matt dig into how to choose a facilitator wisely in a buyer-beware landscape, and the trap of psychedelic narcissism, the belief that one powerful experience hands you all the answers.
LISTEN
Episode summary
On Chatting with Candice, host Candice Horbacz and Matt settle into a long, personal conversation that keeps circling back to discernment. Much of it is about how to choose a facilitator wisely, since, as Matt points out, every route in the United States is buyer beware, whether legal ketamine or an underground ceremony, and he urges people to ask hard questions about a guide's experience, group size, preparation, and integration before committing. He and Candice also spend time on what she calls psychedelic narcissism, the way a powerful experience can leave someone convinced they have all the answers, and Matt offers a simple test, whether a guide carries themselves as a humble fellow traveler still learning, or as a figure who has arrived.
Matt shares his origin story, the guided psilocybin session that reconnected him with his late mother and included an ego death he describes as briefly believing he had crossed over. He is careful to correct a common misconception, that an ego death is a permanent fix, noting that the inner narrator returns and that living from that place is a practice rather than a one-time event. This leads into integration, the work of carrying an insight back into ordinary life, and his standard caution against making any major decisions in the first couple of weeks after a session.
Because Candice opens up about her own life, the two go deep on relationships and on a scarcity mindset they both recognize in themselves. Matt talks about MDMA as a medicine couples sometimes use to reconnect, and even as a gentler way to part when a relationship has run its course. He reflects candidly on his own history, the independence and drive he once celebrated, and how these medicines helped him see the cost of being gone too much when his children were young, and rethink what intimacy could mean beyond the narrow way he had understood it.
They also move through the medicines themselves, MDMA as a heart-opener, psilocybin as grounding, ayahuasca with its purge and vivid DMT visuals, and ibogaine for opioid dependence with its real cardiac risk. On who should be cautious, Matt notes that formal studies tend to screen out people with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, so the evidence is thin in those cases, and he points to citizen-scientist communities and to the pharmacist Ben Malcolm for a careful look at personal risk and medication interactions. Throughout, he returns to his central frame, that these medicines are catalysts rather than fixes, and that the lasting work belongs to the person.