The person selected to speak at Ohio State University’s commencement ceremony for its spring graduates didn’t mince details on how he made the controversial script.
Days before the Sunday ceremony, OSU’s chosen speaker Chris Pan said on LinkedIn that he had taken the psychedelic drug ayahuasca to write his first drafts.
“Got some help from AI (Ayahuasca Intelligence) this week to write my commencement speech for 60,000 grads and family members at Ohio State University next Sunday,” Pan wrote. “Tried ChatGPT but wasn’t that good.”
Pan was billed as a “social entrepreneur, musician and inspirational speaker” on the commencement’s program. But his speech and an on-stage demonstration with OSU President Ted Carter drew boos from the audience, audible in the university’s livestream, as Pan tried to encourage graduates and attendees to buy cryptocurrency.
It can be really helpful or harmful, depending on the context. I think there’s a ton of promise for psychedelics for mental health, but I get nervous about people taking them to self-medicate.
It’s one reason I’m more interested in psychedelic assisted therapy, because in my personal experience, while I did have some positive changes, I think I also didn’t interpret some of those new perspectives in an ultimately healthy way. In the end, I feel like I learned that I’m not mentally healthy enough to responsibly take psychedelics outside of a professional therapy program.
Fortunately I was able to do some genetic testing through my psychiatrist, and I was finally able to find an antidepressant that actually works with minimal side effects, after a lot of trial and error with stuff that I reacted really poorly to.