Surprise Me, Joel

What happens when your first psilocybin experience delivers pure joy – Beach Jesus moments, cosmic amplification with a lifelong friend, sun worship by Lake Superior – and then drops you into days of unexplained heaviness? Joel and his integration guide, Justin Baker, trace the path from post-journey fog through a guided session with Trish Blain that recovered something primordial and profound.

What is consciousness? How does intuition work – and can it be trained? What are the three disconnections quietly pulling modern humans apart from themselves, each other, and the natural world? Dr. Justin Baker joins Joel for a wide-ranging, grounded, and genuinely illuminating conversation about expanding awareness and coming back to what makes us whole.

Joel and Emilie Wapnick – champions of multipotentialites everywhere – wander through a conversation about trusting your intuition, designing an intentional life with a partner, and the tricky art of parenting without pushing too hard. From island life and quests sketched on craft paper to the fear of being discredited for believing in astrology or quantum biology, they explore what it means to sh...

Joel and Becca Campbell get into the deep end fast and swim without the backpack. They explore how building a life around your brain's actual design – not a borrowed one – unlocks honesty, evolving relationships, and joy in the smallest things. The goo in the meat sack has never been more relatable.

What if the handshake is a dominance ritual and the hug is the antidote? Joel breaks down the energetics, mechanics, and cultural context of giving truly great hugs in 15 surprisingly nuanced tips. From the five-second rule to the one last squeeze, this episode might just change how you wrap your arms around the world.

What if there are no objective truths, no real rules, and the most radical thing you can do is just stay open? Ryan Nicodemus joins Joel for a deeply personal conversation to explore forgiveness, the concept of formlessness, why everyone is doing the best they can, fear versus love, and why emotions – unlike apples – multiply when you give them away.

You're about to Learn: What happens when a "Do Epic Shit" yields to "Be Beautifully Boring." What thriving can look like in life’s liminal seasons. What to do about creative constipation and its relationship to seasonal productivity. Why ordinary, un-Instagrammable moments can be the most beautiful. How to hold both gratitude and global chaos at the same time … without denying either. How good of...

Imagine an unpredictable audio porch where I sling stories, facilitate connections, and whip up experiments to help you make friends with people, possibilities, and ideas. That's the lovely promise with Surprise Me, Joel. I'll teach you nifty stuff like how to bring people together, think differently about everyday life … and probably restore some faith in humanity in the process. We'll get unconv...