Culture Changes Consciousness | with Ken Jordan

Ken Jordan is the co-founder and editorial director of Lucid News. In 2007, he co-founded the consciousness network Evolver and it’s online journal, Reality Sandwich, which he edited until 2019. At Evolver, he produced podcasts, live events, and online courses with many of the leading figures of the psychedelic movement, and in 2016, Ken co-founded the companies botanical dispensary The Alchemist Kitchen in Manhattan.

Ken was a true child of the 60’s and his family was at the center of the counterculture movement. His father had a publishing company called Grove Press that served as the communication switchboard for the counterculture movement, and Ken spent a lot of time in that office getting to know these people.

Through family connections, Ken had the opportunity to be the office boy at Madison Square Garden and he got to spend time with incredible celebrities like Jackson Brown, Bonnie Raitt, and Bruce Springstein. Eventually, Ken dropped out of college because everything happening outside of it was far more interesting.

He spent his 20’s getting an extraordinary education from these fascinating people, but he didn’t have anything to do with it yet. The only thing he knew was book publishing, so he started doing that until he got his first whiff of the internet in 1994. He built a prototype for a music website that managed to get coverage in the New York Post, which gave him enough clout to build out what his actual fantasy was—and that ended up becoming SonicNet, the first multimedia music site to sell digital downloads.

Ken was always looking out for where culture was emerging, and he saw the energy coming out of psychedelics—and that they didn’t have a platform yet. Ken created Reality Sandwich as a magazine to document some of the history of psychedelics. Eventually, he realized that the world needed a fact-based news publication to help legitimize the movement, and so he co-founded Lucid News to be that source.

From a childhood steeped with political activism and culture to an adult life in business and politics, riding the waves of change, Ken has learned to devote his energy to the areas which see the most potential for radical, real world change. As we see some of those changes starting to take shape, Ken continues to be a source of news, information, and a channel for communication in the movements of today.

What Brett asks:

• [02:16] Tell me about your upbringing and your early days
• [08:18] What did it feel like having members of the counterculture movement in your home?
• [14:20] In your young adult life, how do you start engaging with that movement?
• [20:27] What was your work like?
• [29:20] What did you start doing with your desire for cultural change?
• [33:53] How did you continue to play in the media space while maintaining your voice?
• [47:50] Can you tell us about Lucid News?
• [55:50] How are you viewing this time and some of the similarities between other political movements?

Lessons for intentional living:

• Everything that happens in life is a teaching. The worst thing that could happen is that you die—and that’s not so bad. Everything else is fear. There’s only beauty and joy. Once you understand this for yourself, you can take everything in life as a lesson.

Resources:

• lucid.news
• instagram.com/lucidnewspsychedelics
• evolver.net
• realitysandwich.com