🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter that’s been training for this moment. We’ll spare you the Rocky montage. But you opened our email, and we’re ready. 🤜🤛

Jeremy Rudy has learned a lot about…well, learning. After 15 years building edtech, he burned out spectacularly. Then he drank ayahuasca and bounced right back. Now with his new company, he’s training psychedelic therapists to hold space without putting real patients at risk.

We asked Jeremy what gaps he saw in professional psychedelic education, why historically competitive universities are finally collaborating, and how AI can simulate the most extreme states of human consciousness.

Cacao’s gotta be the most versatile, overlooked entheogen.

It opens the heart, fits into a daily ritual, and keeps you in the driver’s seat. (You decide how deep to go.)

Then there’s our favorite part… Cacao’s natural MAOIs enhance the effects of psilocybin when you stack 'em.

We swear by Kokoleka Collective because they don’t cut corners.

They source wild cacao from Chiapas and process it the ancestral Mayan way, which results in 860% more flavanols, 300% more antioxidants, and 65% more theobromine than regular cacao.

All six blends are fair trade and organic.

My career background for about 15 years was in edtech and higher ed. I joined Pearson right out of college, then Noodle Partners where I helped universities launch online health degrees. During COVID I was recruited by Coursera and became Head of Product, Degrees six months before they went public.

The mission across companies was improving access to quality education through technology. At Coursera, we lowered degree prices dramatically while getting equal or better career outcomes. But as the market cooled from 2021 into 2023, all the pressure took a toll on my mental health. I worked way too much, took red-eyes around the world, and relied on stimulants to keep up.

So yes, the classic corporate burnout story. I took a sabbatical, and ended up at an ayahuasca retreat in so much physical pain they built me a throne of cushions. That weekend, I worked through what caused me to seek approval from the wrong people. At the end, my back pain was gone.

I worked with an integration therapist for 16 weeks blending Western psychology with somatic work. I became fascinated by the healing power of the medicines and the skilled therapeutic work that translated insights into sustainable improvement. With curiosity, I booked a ticket to Psychedelic Science ‘23. On my flight there, the thought hit me that the bottleneck to psychedelic access wouldn’t be the science or approvals, but training. And the idea for Sabba was born.

Like Coursera, Sabba is a platform, not a training provider. On Sabba, practitioners, clinic networks, and universities can find the best training and education offerings in one place—initially for psychedelic therapies, and then other areas of frontier mental health.

Those offerings come from partner organizations and master clinicians, supported by our capabilities like Sabba Praxis, and easily adopted through our team tools, learning communities, and integrations. We’re doing that by co-creating a training and education ecosystem with leading universities, organizations and experts. That includes our partnership with U-PEP, a variety of non-profits, and top training organizations.

Most of the educational resources on Sabba will be freely available, aligned to our PBC mission. You can find Albert Hofmann’s 100th birthday talk, read a summary of the latest academic paper, or join a community of peer practitioners. We’re now onboarding organizations and individuals to set up their pages and content, and will soon be opening to the public.

One distinction between education and training: there is a broad need for education about psychedelics in the mental health workforce. Many health professionals will be referring patients or answering questions, but not actually facilitating. Training is different: it’s about developing the skills, techniques and wisdom to actually do this work, whether you are a prescriber, clinician, or support staff. Sabba started with education, but we’re focused especially on training to meet this moment.

We are expecting potentially two FDA approvals of psychedelic medicine later this year, with multiple sponsors within striking distance. There’s tremendous urgency and responsibility to prepare. And sure, I get that folks might be jaded by what happened with Lykos in 2024. But there are plenty of signals this time is different, so let’s ensure we’re ready on day one.

Sabba is partnered with the University Psychedelic Education Program (U-PEP), founded by Sandy Samberg. Our platform provides the learning community, member library, expert directory and more. The first cohort of 33 universities includes schools of social work and nursing integrating psychedelic education into their degree programs. The 2026 cohort, which adds schools of medicine, psychology and public health, will be announced soon.

What’s blown me away is the ethos of community and sharing. Honestly, I expected more challenges around that. Across my whole career, universities have felt competitive. They usually don’t share curricula, believing their knowledge is proprietary. That’s not what I've seen here.

There’s a beautiful attitude that the rising tide lifts all boats, and that they’re pioneering new ground for the other 99 percent of universities soon to follow. And they’re right about that.

We started Sabba to solve the bottleneck of training. Together with my cofounders Juan and Jonathon, we created Praxis to solve the bottleneck within training: practice.

Today, practicing psychedelic therapy looks like roleplay sessions with fellow students on Zoom. If you’re lucky, you get some practicum hours with a few patients. But how does that scale post FDA approval? It doesn’t. Without sufficient practice, how do we ensure practitioners are ready? How do insurance companies decide who can deliver a protocol and get safe, effective results?

Thankfully, 2026 offers us a convergence: the arrival of technology that uniquely unlocks our ability to prepare for these powerful medicines. Other fields have used simulators for decades based on real-world physics: pilots, drivers, golfers, even surgeons. Now AI and voice models enable the simulation of consciousness, which can power soft-skills training with real-time interactivity and personalized feedback.

With Praxis, clinicians and students can practice techniques across any medicine, protocol, or modality. You can mix and match scenarios with patient personas, who respond to not just what you say, but how you say it. Praxis offers a safe space to learn with infinite reps: try something new, make mistakes, get feedback, try again.

The thing is, psychedelic therapy is arguably the most difficult type of simulation. We’re dealing with not just human consciousness but altered states of consciousness, with the most complex material and highest-stakes skills. We simulate everything from defusing paranoia to romantic transference to unfolding awe and gratitude. This is the full spectrum of human experience.

Many investors think AI should replace therapists. Slingshot AI raised $93 million building an AI therapy app. I believe entrepreneurs have a responsibility to be explicit about the future they’re building toward. Sabba is building Praxis as a bet on humans, not to replace them.

And how we build AI is equally or more important than what we build. That’s why we grounded Praxis in the wisdom of the field’s leading experts through our first psilocybin course with Mary Cosimano, Bill Richards, and Brian Richards.

We’ve also proactively published Sabba’s Human Data Governance Standard. We’re not using human-derived data today, and don’t think it’s necessary. If Sabba or partners ever see a valid reason to do so, it must align to our Standard’s commitments, especially explicit disclosure and informed consent. Our Standard closes with: “Human experience is not raw material by default. It is a gift that carries responsibility.”

It goes back to Sabba’s model of partnership, and our vision for a “grand unified field of training.” We’re co-creating a container, if I can borrow that phrase, to harness the collective intelligence of this wonderful and diverse community.

Yes, we’ll have training for FDA-approved medicines. Those with a purely psychopharmacology and materialist background will find what they're looking for. But perhaps they’ll also find something for when a patient experiences a spiritual crisis. Are you going to tell them what they’re experiencing is just serotonin mechanisms? Or can you support them with empathy and compassion?

Sabba started with the question: can we hold the paradoxes inherent in this work? The ancestral versus academic, the spiritual versus scientific. As a practitioner, you’ll work with different patients, backgrounds, and contexts. The more you're exposed to (and practice), the more you can “code switch with care,” as Joseph McCowan puts it. That ability deepens the therapeutic relationship, which ultimately determines whether we deliver the promise of these medicines.

Read his essay “Welcome to the Promethean Age,” watch the trailer for Sabba’s first course, and try out Sabba Praxis for free.

That’s all for today, Cyclists! Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.