We talk a lot on Keep Going about mental health. About reinvention. About trying again when everything feels broken. But this week, something deeper came through.
Justice Leak—an actor, a seeker, and now the founder of Therapod—joined the podcast to talk about his mother, her Alzheimer's, and the way psychedelics changed their lives. Not in theory. Not in some lab. In a small town in Georgia, on a hot afternoon, with a handful of mushrooms and a prayer.
Justice wasn’t a psychonaut. He wasn’t raised in a culture of altered states. His mother sure as hell wasn’t. She was a third-grade teacher, a Christian, a Southern woman who never drank, never did drugs, and certainly never imagined herself in a “non-ordinary state of consciousness.”
But life has a way of closing doors until the only way forward is through one you never expected.
When his mom started to lose her sense of self—first her words, then her visual awareness, then her memory—Justice saw something terrifying: her waking life began to look like his own worst trip. The kind where you can’t tell what’s real, where rooms distort and shapes dissolve, where your own mind becomes the enemy.
And that’s when he realized: maybe these states weren’t just for introspection or trauma work. Maybe, just maybe, psychedelics could help rebuild the brain. Not just to feel better, but to function better.
So he did the thing you’re not supposed to do. He gave his mom mushrooms. Two and a half grams of psilocybin, ground up and put in capsules. No trippy music. No festival. Just a prayer and a garden.
The next day, she woke up singing. The stutter was gone. She was dressed. She was moving. It was temporary, sure—but it happened. And it kept happening. Each time they did a session, something came back. Not forever. But enough to keep going.
And here’s where the story gets bigger.
Because Justice realized the biggest hurdle wasn’t the medicine. It was the setting. These experiences didn’t belong in sterile clinics or chaotic forests. His mom needed a safe, beautiful, responsive space—one that supported the brain during this window of growth. One without disorienting floor reflections, with sounds tuned to 40 Hz, with curves and colors instead of walls and edges.
So he built it. Therapod. A new kind of therapeutic environment. Bio-adaptive, sensory-rich, and designed specifically for non-ordinary states. Think immersive art meets neuroscience. Think DMT trip meets nature-inspired architecture. Think real-time emotional feedback—without a word spoken.
Justice is still developing the tech, working with wearables that track emotional states through the body, feeding back into the room in real-time. But the mission is clear: if this medicine is going to reach people like his mom, it has to be more than molecules. It has to be infrastructure.
You can’t just hand someone psilocybin and hope. You need a room. A ritual. A reason. And someone to sit with you.
This episode left me shaken. Not just because it was moving, but because it made me ask: what if we’re underbuilding for the future we claim to believe in?
Justice isn’t selling trips. He’s building rooms for people on the edge—of memory, of function, of life itself. He’s doing what no clinical trial can. He’s showing what love looks like when you’ve run out of options.
You can learn more at experiencetherapod.com. But the real story is this: the next frontier of healing isn’t just the brain. It’s where the brain meets the world. And maybe—if we get it right—where the brain meets the end.
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