April Pride on The Business Spotlight with Dori DeCarlo on WoMRadio

0:00 She is sure, she is sure, she is strong, she is true, is true, she is brave, she is she is you. She is you, she is you, she. Is sure, she is true, she is strong, she is strong, she is true, is true, she is brave, is bray, she is she is you. Hello, everyone, welcome to today's Word of Mom Radio. Here on the Word of Mom Media Network. I'm your host, Dori Di Carlo, and you know we are here week after week, show after show, breaking those myths that morepreneurs and business women, especially those of us building our businesses from home, that were just dabbling in between bake sales and getting our nails done. We're not. We are smart, we are savvy, and we are sharing the wisdom of women in business and in life. And I'm really looking forward to today's guests joining us. April Pride is a three times founder, podcast host, speaker, and mom with twenty plus years of experience. She founded setset, the world's first community platform built for women, providing accessible psychedelic education and integration with medical provider created resources. April has spoken to tens of thousands of women globally on topics including business, psychedelics, and the future of wellness.

1:28 She is also included in. The inaugural High Times Female fifty List, and in twenty twenty one was awarded most Creative Cannabis Entrepreneur in the US. I'm thrilled to be sharing you. Congratulations on that honor, because we have tried very hard here on Word of Mom Radio to bring people into the understanding of what cannabis can do and now the psychedelics and microdosing and how this really helps, especially in men's health. So with all that being said, April, welcome to Word of Mom Radio. Thank you so much for having me. I really I'm really excited to be here. I'm thrilled to have you, and I love sharing fellow podcasters.

2:12 I would love for you to take us on your journey the businesses that you have founded and everything that has led you to sex sept Yeah. So in the introduction you had said that I'm a three time founder. I'm actually I've founded like at least a dozen businesses, but I've exited three of them. Wow, So yeah, I've Yeah. So it's been quite a journey. And I think that for the purposes of your show, what your listeners will find the most interesting is what came about in my career ten years ago when I started working in cannabis. Up until that point, I went to architecture school. I went to Parsons School of Design, and I was a founder because all the moms I had a single working mom and all the moms that got to hang out at the country club all day, we're into your designers, and they got to pick their kids up at school.

3:03 I was like, Oh, I think that's what I want to be when they grow up. So that's what I was, And I found myself between projects and I launched a product and I loved that process. And so fast forward a few years later and one of my clients from one of my businesses mentioned that she had started working as an executive assistant for the CEO of a large holding company here in Seattle called Privateer that focused on cannabis brands. For instance, they owned, or they're the. Majority owner of Leaflee of Tilray Up in Canada, which is a licensed producer in Canada. They have the thirty year licensing agreement with the Marley family for Marley Naturals Marley Natural So I was really curious to hear what she was learning, and she said, well, I see all the decks, I see all the deals. I read all of his emails, and no one's creating anything that really is focused on design or women. I was like, oh, actually she did mention women, but we were really at that time, we were focused on the design part of things.

4:12 She and I in our conversation. So I took her out to dinner. I knew the guy that owned the restaurant, and so did she, and he asked us what we were talking about, and she said, I'm trying to convince her to launch a line of luxury cannabis Successories. And he said, if you do that, I'll give you your seed money. Okay, So that never happens. I'm sure listeners know that that never happened. So that happened to me one time. It was a basic and you know I so from there, yeah, I just put my I know how to design products hat. On and launched. Soft launched the end of twenty fifteen, and then January launched. But within six weeks my husband came my husband at the time came home and he said, you know, I get your emails. I think you think you're talking to me, but really you're talking to women. April, like, but half of our customers are men, and there was it's not this like you need to choose a side.

5:02 I don't know. That didn't Again, this is early twenty sixteen, twenty January, so we're a year before the Women's March, right, And I was like, but I'm learning this plant interacts with the woman's body in a way that I don't have any research around. No one's got any of this research. But I'm talking to women all day and they're telling me how they're using it, and I believe them, and so there's something here with hormones. So we pivoted. We really just started focusing on talking to women. And then I realized what we have is not a The name of the brand was Vanderpop and it was stylis Stash, good to Smoke, store and share weed. But really what we were doing was teaching people what they needed to know about the plant itself. Right, So from a commercialization.

5:54 Standpoint, I don't know. I didn't really have much of a business plan there, right, Like, how do you earn revenue on education? There's there are a lot more options today than there were ten years ago with courses and the rest of it. So fast forward one year, I'd sold my company into the Canadian market and within three years had sold to the largest Canadis company in the world. And so that really started my career, not just as you know, the entrepreneur part of things, the designer part of things, the brander, the branding person part of things. That all existed. But what didn't exist and what is I think, you know front and center now is the advocacy part of this.

6:34 Because I had never. Worked at a corporation before I sold my company to the largest cannabis company in the world, I had no idea what happened to consumer protection once your product and your messaging is in the hands of an entity that has really beholden to shareholders every three months, right, So that insight is what informed three and a half years ago. After I sold my company in twenty nineteen, I started a podcast about cannabis. And then three and a half years ago, after I had been at that podcast for a couple of years, I really wanted to start focusing on psychedelics because I saw that influencers who were in the cannabis space were starting to talk about psilocybin, mushrooms and again with the consumer protection hat on, the harm reduction hat on. I understand the critical place that we are in before a substance that's been a schedule one controlled substance becomes either decriminalized, legalized, rescheduled. Who knows where things are going to go with cannabis, psilocybin, all the rest of it. There's just this opportunity for so much to go wrong. You're reading headlines that say this will help your depression, but then you go on a Reddit feed to figure out how to do it, and those are not medical experts that are teaching you. You're going to websites where you don't know if they're going to take your money and actually.

7:57 Ship you the mushrooms. It's just it is the wild West. And so I think my goal when I came in three and a half years ago started a podcast which was called The High Guide. My podcast now is called Set Set Show, it was really like, okay, we know how that three out of four people that are doing psychedelics are doing it outside of a clinical environment. They're not working with the professional. They're doing this at home with their friends, with their loved ones, with their family. So if we can give them harm reduction advice to make sure that when they go about doing this thing. And granted, four years ago, there were less than a half a million people that lived in decriminalized municipalities. That means that they live in a city where city council has passed an ordinance that says that anything related to the persecution of possessing a controlled substance, it's just it's the lowest police enforcement. They just don't if it's not enough for distribution, if you're not trying to make money off of it, you know, like live and let live.

9:08 Right, So, we had half a million. People that lived in places where that was the attitude of law enforcement. Four years later it was over sixteen million people. So this is happening so quickly, and people aren't really paying attention because it's happening in these really small communities. Right, it's at the city level, it's at the county level. We now have two states that have decriminalized various substances. I live in Seattle, and psilocybin is decriminalized here. What my aim is has always been is to provide correct information. The difference between doing it in cannabis and doing it in psychedelics is we have so, and I knew this when I made the decision to start working in psychedelics because it was a pain point.

9:52 In cannabis, we didn't have any medical research. I had three doctors who were all related to mom and two daughters that were with the indocannabinoid system and could help people start to make sense of how cannabis could interact with their body. When it comes to psychedelics, we have so much more research right and we have so many more clinicians that are willing to raise their hand and be a part of the conversation. That's also fascinating, and I think that says a lot around the stigma of people who consume cannabis versus people who use psychedelics, And as a professional who works in both places, I am disappointed that cannabis continues to be looked down on as a tool that not only women, but so many people are using to address pain of all kinds. There is no bad drug, and I just really want to be very clear about that. So with psychedelics, I partnered with a licensed therapist I could do that. We worked together to create this twelve week microdosing protocol called micros psyched with ten women so we could like figure out the curriculum, what was connecting with them. We'd ran a pilot over three months, and then we put that curriculum out. And what I really have always wanted to do, aside from putting out evidence based, correct information for people to use, is make it accessible.

11:18 It's so expensive. If you want a micro dose with a group you're you know, it's like six hundred bucks. And so we have a do it yourself protocol written by a licensed therapist who has worked on the intake and integration side of things with her clients. It's ninety seven dollars and once you own it, it's evergreen. So yeah, I'm trying to do a lot of things, but really I'm just trying to like acknowledge what's actually happening, which is people are using this stuff and some of it sometimes it comes wrong, And for women, you have a challenging experience. As a general, as in the larger population, one out of five experiences with psychedelic is going to be challenging.

12:02 With women, the chances of that are much higher because of the way our hormones interact with these substances. There are specific times a month, the luteal phase of your cycle is the prime time of the month to work with mostly higher doses of psychedelics because your hormones are optimized at that time. They're on your side. When you start to have lower estrogen, whether it's in your monthly cycle or your lifetime cycle, that means that your tolerance is higher like a guy's. When your estrogen level is higher, it means that you're going to be more sensitive to any substance that you put in your body, and you are more likely to have a reaction to this medicine that is going going to be more extreme.

12:58 And women just don't know that. But once you start to talking about it with women, they're like, oh my god, that makes so much sense. I remember when I took mushrooms and I stopt you just like, yeah, it's all there. But yeah, if we just need a lot more conversation around it. We also still need more research. I think back to getting my period, and I actually had two D and C because I had polyps in my uterus. I would get horrendous cramps and my doctor tried everything, every pain medication, and he said to me, have you ever found anything that takes away your cramps? And I said, yeah, I'm smoking a joint. He goes, well, then my medical opinion is get a half ounce and stay stone. And this was in the seventies, and I remember my doctor saying, if we could only get the medical industry to understand the medicinal benefits of cannabis, Yeah, he said, but we're fighting an uphill battle because, let's face it, pharmaceutical companies fund medical schools. If they found out Parsley cured cancer tomorrow, there'd be a pill in a month instead of telling people grow Parsley, eat a lot of it, you know. But it's true, and it's amazing to me. And again, and I said it in the beginning, how we have tried with word of mom to make people understand, especially CBD. Your body produces this CBD to CBG, so it's it's triggering what your body already has. It's like taking melatonin. It's triggering what's already

14:29 in your body. And people really get hung up on the other side of things and don't understand the medicinal benefits behind it. How do we break those walls down, April? Well, it's education. I mean education first, but it's not just education at the consumer level, right, I was at I co sponsored a fundraiser here in Washington for the guy that ended up getting elected as our next governor, right, and he's going to be very very critical in legislation that we want to get past. And someone at so, what do you know about psilocybin? He didn't know anything. He's really nice about it, he's really really curious, but he doesn't know anything, right, And so we're asking people who are the decision makers to become experts at a very complicated topic. But if we don't educate them, and sometimes, unfortunately that education comes from a personal experience where someone.

15:31 They loved really really. Benefited or could have benefited, and they saw that retrospectively. So I feel like. I can't stand on a high enough soapbox or get a bullhorn that's loud enough right to reach the people who really have the power to move the needle. And right now we have. A legislature, whether it's at the state level or the federal level, that's just out of touch, frankly. And so I have such an unbelievable amount of gratitude to vets because they're really that's who, that's who these decision makers listen to, right, they have sacrificed so much for all of us, and they're coming home and they're not in great shape, and they're saying, hey, listen, the VA is making me addicted. They are giving me things that are have destroyed my marriage, my relationship with my kids. I can't work, whatever the case may be, but I can't do the thing that is actually giving me life. So we've got these this really large group of people in the US that are willing to be very honest about the illegal behavior that they're engaging in to manage their mental and physical health. And if without them, we would not be having this conversation, we would not have sixteen million people that live in deeper municipalities. There's just no way that that group of people first, and the second

17:04 group of people are people that are suffering from substance use disorder of all kinds, who have ironically found relief with substances that are scheduled. You know what. On that note, we're going to take a quick break. We're going to say thank you to our sponsors, and we'll be back here in just a moment. On Word of Mom Radio, she is brave, she is bold, she is you, and we want to tell your story. Are you ready to share your journey with us on Word of Mom Radio? Go to wordommradio dot com and register as a guest. We want to tell your story because when you win, we all win. In twenty seventeen, Unsilenced Voices was formed to help survivors of domestic abuse and gender based violence worldwide. The organization currently serves Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Gone, and the USA. In twenty twenty two, Unsilenced Voices gifted over thirty three thousand dollars to survivors in the USA and in Sire Leone.

18:10 There are over twenty six young girls who have been rescued from sex trafficking and domestic abuse and now going through vocational training school in order to better their lives. We need your help. Donations are critical in order for us to continue our work. We also need volunteers to help with research and development. Please visit Unsilenced Voices dot org for more information. We're back here on Word of Mom Radio. We're talking with April Pride, who is the founder of set set, the first community platform built for women providing access and accessible education to psychedelic integration with your medical provider. It is so important what you were talking about with the vets.

18:58 I actually saw a commercial and I couldn't believe it. A veteran talking about microdosing and how it has helped with his depression, his pain management. I was blown away, completely blown away that the VA has a commercial about this. I couldn't believe it. It was about a week or two after we had aired the first episode we've ever done about microdosing and how it helps with depression and all of these different things that they are finding these uses for. And it's not about huge quantities. It is microdosing.

19:38 It is learning, like you were saying, with women hormonally when the time of the month is, I would love for you to talk to us about the current studies and research talking about how psychedelics support menopause. When it comes to women's health, I feel like the two largest topics are menopause. Maybe that's because I'm pairing aposal and. Also micro dosing or psychedelics right for mental health and so the way, I'm so grateful to Jennifer Chessick, who I interviewed on my podcast. She's the author of the Psilocybin Handbook for Women, and she's working on another book that might be about menopause, and she was sharing with me what she's learned from clinicians and experts that's that she's spoken with in terms of how women are using psilocybin specifically for menopause, and Okay, the top.

20:35 Three are one. Psilocybin is a serotonin agonist, so as we antagonist, so as we lose estrogen, we lose serotonin. So we start reaching for alcohol, we start reaching for weed, we start reaching for other things that can help to replace the serotonin that's lost. We've tried to find half. It's not it's actually we're not doing anything wrong in middle age. It's biological that we're like, why am I I need the thing to make me happy? Why I didn't need the thing five years ago? And so we're seeing alarming rates of women with alcohol use disorder specifically because that's the most that's the easiest thing for them to get their hands on. And then benzos because women are prescribed xanax and the rest of it at a race that are much higher than men. Right, So that is one of the things that's happening when we microdose is we are helping to feed the serotonin receptors and so we don't have the need to find other things that can replace that happiness.

21:38 Right, that's been that's slowly being taken from us. And then the other big thing which tracks for me when she was sharing it is leading up to perimenopause. If you look at your monthly cycle women that have endometrios is seventy five percent of them have also had sexual trauma or abuse brought onto them, and so they think that that condition is a physical manififestation of the trauma that was induced upon them. Right. And so if you continue until perimenopause and menopause to have this trauma that has gone unaddressed, and you have had painful, terrible periods your whole life because of endometriosis, your experience in menopause and leading up to menopause will be equally as difficult. What they're finding is that women that choose to take a high dose psilocybin experience while they're in perimenopause or at some point in their forties and they start to address this underlying trauma, that it changes the trajectory of their menipase or perimenopausal experience because the trauma is, you know, it's not just something that's being buried, it's come into the light. You are starting

23:14 to integrate how you feel or feel about something that happened in the past and are looking to the future for things to be different. So there there is a book that I'm sure you've talked about on this on this podcast called The Body Keeps the Score by Vander Kulk, and. It's he does a very very good job. Like the physical manifestations of our pain are a lot of times the result of our emotional trauma of all kinds, right, and physical trauma. So so that micro dosing to help with the estrogen loss, macrodosing to help with resolving some trauma.

23:57 And then the third part of this is the amount of anxiety that comes along during perimenopause, again also because of our changing hormones. That too, I guess I should have said micro dosing to help us not reach for the bottle. But this third thing, the anxiety, micro dosing to not rely on benzos or other ways to deal with anxiety. It just helps to even out. It's our emotional regulation, the unpredictability that we sort of expect month to month, like oh, oh yeah, I guess I'm getting my period.

24:39 This is what's going on. But when you get into perimenopause, it's really hard to know what's going on because you don't get your period at the same time all the time, right, So it brings in this level of consistency that's not only for you but also the people around you that you love. Right. One of the hardest things that I can bring into my world is inconsistency because. The people around me here are like, whoa, what has happened? Where's the other April? You know? Like right, and so yeah, that is Those are just three of the ways that people are using psilocybin in middle age, which I hate that word, but I guess, I guess do I want to be one hundred and seventy years old, so I don't want to wait till I'm eighty five for middle agies, so you know, yeah, and I it all really really tracks with everything I've learned in the last decade.

25:30 Now, how you do it is totally up to. You, right, Like there are no rules for microdos, seeing there are certainly protocols that people have put out, but one of the things that Kendra and I worked on was making sure that you understand it's personal to you, And one of the biggest lessons for women is indigenous cultures. They ask women to work with micro do substances for three months so that they're working with it through three of their cycles, so they understand how it ebbs and flows during the month, so that you can adjust accordingly. And that has everything to do with your sensitivity to it right again, so you can be consistent and show up to your day in a way that feels good to you and the people around you.

26:12 I find this so fascinating. Are there any safety regulations out there? What do you mean by safety? You mean safety around the product, safety around the guidance? Yeah, no, I mean no. It is a it's again wild West. So there is an organization called Sillo Safe, which is a Indush underground, industry led elective organization that you, as like a manufacturer of a psilocybin product, can choose to join and then you put their like good housekeeping seal of approval. You put that on your packaging, and you also adopt their language and graph fixed for the potency of the product that's inside, so there's some consistency for the consumer. Now, it's really really hard to get companies to adopt that. But that is the answer. Right from a product standpoint, do not buy anything online unless you have a friend who bought it from them, got their package delivered and tried the product and everything's cool.

27:27 Right. So, like I part of my. Job right is to buy stuff from shady places. And I can tell you you're just. Waiting for a shakedown. So like, okay, I go on Instagram and I find this website or no, yeah, go on Instagram. Then I go to their website. Then I contact them on Telegram like they told me to, and then I give them a hundred bucks for five chocolate bars. And then within. Two or two weeks, I guess, I got a message that said that my package was you know, had been confiscated and if I didn't send seven hundred dollars, they were going to turn over to the DEA. So that's the. Type of stuff that you can fall trapped to. And if you're not like savvy and know that this is you know this was never going to You're never going to get your chocolate bars. But don't go all in on the seven hundred because you think you're going to get in trouble. Yeah, you just sort of walk away from the hundred bucks that this industry is rife with that because what are their choices?

28:21 Do you have? And so I was actually just talking. I did start a psilocybin brand that I don't distribute, but I created everything around it so that it could have the elements of what a consumer really is looking for when they're making this choice. And oh what was I going to do? Yeah? So I did start it, but the guy that's distributing it and taking all the risk, he's not doing it anymore. And the reason I started it was because people were asking me as a podcast host on psychedelics, where do I get mushrooms? And I told do that one the one story, there are more of them, and I just didn't have anywhere to send people. And so I found I think the best legacy manufacturer of products in Seattle and built a brand for her so they would have, you know, some I would have somewhere to send people that felt like totally legit.

29:22 I knew the product was good, but like it needed to be packaged and all of that. So the product is one hurdle, and then the second hurdle is the fact that you are paying somebody to sit with you and to guide you. Guide is a loose word, but one that we all can appreciate what that means. You're a facilitator and there's all levels of experience. I mean, people want me to guide them. I have never been trained as a facilitator. I just talked to experts all day. That doesn't make me one, nor does that make me want to be one. I understand the responsibility that comes with holding space for somebody when they're in an altered state, and that is you got to really be called to that. And so one of the things that we're not talking about enough is the sexual abuse that's rampant in this industry because you at a woman or a man that's in an altered state and can't make decisions for themselves, and that abuse of power happens.

30:21 It happens. So if you're working with somebody, there should always be two people there. It's like going into your obgi n's room. You know, the nurse needs to be there too, And so if you're working with somebody, it's more expensive and it's all that, but it is kind of the way to go. So again, what I'm trying to do is train people so they can work with their friends and do this together and they don't have to spend a lot of money, right, So there. Are there are. And then on top of that, I think it depending on where you live, right, you're going to have hesitation if something's going wrong, calling nine to one one right because you don't want to get in trouble for it.

31:01 So having someone who's sober, who can say you're gonna be okay, let's go for a walk safely, all of that before bringing the cops in it. Just like once you call the cops and they you've got these cops showing up at your house, your trip is now officially challenging. Because you have to, like, you know, engage with law enforcement. Yeah. So I think that the question around safety is very, very complicated. Wow, there's so much more we need to talk about. I can't believe that this time is over. April, let everyone know how they may reach out to you, and what would you like to leave our listeners with?

31:41 Oh yeah, thank you for that. So you can find me, I'm on LinkedIn at April Pride. Pride set set is at get set set g e T s E T s e T dot com and on Instagram. You can also find us at get Set Set and you can find me at April pri And I would say, you know, if you're listening to this and you're curious and you start to, you know, figure things out on your own, maybe it's not psilocybin that you're curious about. Maybe it's MDMA. Right, you have to test your drugs if you find some. I can tell you that the person that's testing MDMA for a lot of provider a lot of medicine keepers on the on the West Coast, twenty five percent have bentenol in it.

32:31 But every single one is not pure MDMA. There are other things in there. It's cut with all kinds of stuff, including cocaine. Right, So you may think you're getting it from a trusted source, but yeah, I was interviewed by it eleventh grader last week actually, and she was like, what would you tell eleventh graders might test your drugs? Right, I'm not going to be your mom and tell you don't do it, because we know you've got what you guys are up to. But you need to test your drugs. And I tell that to adults too, and they at me, Oh, I've got my guy. I've had the same guy forever. I'm like, if you just talked to the people that I talked to weekly, you would understand how important it is to not trust anybody when it comes to these things.

33:15 Right now, because it's not their fault, we have a poisoned drug supply. So that is what I would stress to your listeners. Really, to know that you're getting in bed with people who. Really don't have your best interest in mind. Yeah, knowing the efficacy of where you get things is very important. It's true, It really truly is. April. I thank you so much for coming on the show. I really do, because I think that this is a topic that is coming up more and more and more and people need to be aware what is going on. So all of April's links are going to be live on Bard of Mom Radio. Please, if you are curious, reach out, take a listen to the podcast, find out the information that will work for you.

33:56 Yes, you can find our podcast on YouTube at set set show anywhere you stream audio. Yeah. Absolutely, Like I said, all the links will be there, So I do encourage you to reach out. And again, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate you taking the time to come. Thanks, thank you. Thanks for my pleasure and for all of you out there, thanks for being here with us today. We're going to close out with our fabulous theme song from Smith's Sisters and the Sunday Drivers. So till next time, This is Dori di Carlo saying, go out and create a marvelous you. Bye for now. She is sure, she is sure, she is strong, she is strong, she is true, she is true, she is braz Bra, she is she is you, is you, she is you. She she is sure, she is sure, she is strong, she is strong, she is true, she is true, she is braz she is she is you. She is you, she is you. She is sure of ourself. Yeah, she takes care of it. Powerful and strong, yet she knows who she is, has integrity, woman, strong and true. You know where by name? See this woman is you. She is sure, she is strong, he is strong, she is true, is true, she is brave, she is she is you, she is she is she is sure, she is strong, is strong, she is true, is true, she is brave,

35:30 she is she is she is you, she is you. She is adds value and hope has proved to be brave. See it's never too late, never time to behave reaching for dreams doesn't matter. The age believes in herself, unleash from her cage. She is sure, she is sure, she is strong, is strong, she is true, is true, she is brave, she is bold. She is you. She is she is she is sure, she is she is strong, she is strong, she is true, is true, she is brave, is brave, she is she, she is you. Okay,