Catch up with Danny Forde on the Anagoge Podcast discussing Psychedelic Realism, Platonism & The Ground of Being

19 May 2026

Most philosophical work on psychedelics either reduces the experience to brain states or floats off into vague mysticism. Danny Forde carves a third path. 

Danny argues that psychedelics strip away the ego's narrative overlay and give you direct contact with reality as it actually is. The case is built on realist phenomenology, anti-psychologism, and a sober Platonism that treats essences as real but not otherworldly. The episode is a sustained, sometimes contentious dialogue about whether that claim holds up: whether perception can ever be "raw," whether the minimal self really persists through ego dissolution, whether all traditions point at the same truth or differ in ways that matter ontologically, and whether psychedelic experience tells us about consciousness or about reality itself.