“Higher” Education with the Goodship Academy

If you’re the type who finds your mind wandering toward thoughts of the massive energy of quasars or the philosophical treatises of Immanuel Kant after a few tokes of some good green, the Goodship Academy of Higher Education might just be for you.

The Academy — a kind of TED Talks for the intellectual cannabis lover to discuss topics like art, technology, science and philosophy — is a lecture series put on in Seattle, where both lecturer and audience are encouraged to be as high as they wish.

Goodship founder Jody Hall had the idea in 2014 to “take big, exciting, heady conversations out of the basement and into a shared community experience” and discuss them while cerebrally heightened through cannabis.

“The series is about exploring the world through the lens of marijuana,” says Hall in a Forbes interview. “People are distracted by the list of things they need to do and the list of things they forgot to do. Marijuana can help them focus and be present — to really listen closely to the music they are listening to, taste the food they are eating or communicate with the person in front of them.”

Hall, also the owner of Seattle’s Cupcake Royale and a new edible company called “The Goodship,” seeks to offer a platform for cannabis enthusiasts to share compelling ideas regarding everything from “space travel to re-animation to modernist cuisine.”

The first lecture scheduled for September 16 of this year will feature Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Google’s head of Machine Intelligence, talking about how the company is using artificial intelligence technology around gender issues. The discussion will include recent developments and connections between those two seemingly disparate topics.

Says Hall, “Our intent is that both audience and speakers alike are on ‘the Goodship’ — aka stoned. We look at the world through a different lens when high and we think that it is a fun and enlightening experiment to partner altered states with big ideas.”

With an eye towards mind-bending, revolutionary, captivating topics, the Goodship Academy of Higher Education is the next logical step for the continued normalization of cannabis, following in the footsteps of pro-marijuana scholars like Carl Sagan, Timothy Leary and Lester Grinspoon.

“Pot will eventually be as commonplace as alcohol and cigarettes,” says Hall. “It can be a party experience, but there is also a place for marijuana in a more sophisticated setting.”

Currently limited to 75 attendees and taking place at Seattle’s Cloud Room, upcoming 2015 lecture dates are set for September 16, October 14, November 18 and December 9.

Would you attend a lecture series on cannabis? Tell us in the comments.