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The High Guide: a Woman-first Psychedelics Podcast

the homepage of the High Guide Podcast website

The High Guide is a podcast I’ve been enjoying hosted by my Seattle friend April Pride. April is super passionate about creating space for women who are curious to learn about entheogens and changing their lives with cannabis and psychedelics in particular.

Having read and consumed a lot of media on psychedelics in the last year I must say I’m struck by how male dominant the space can feel, I’m sure April’s approach will enhance empathy and understanding for women seeking voices of women in this space.

Her YouTube channel is a great place to grab the many podcast episodes on psychedelic mushroom types, microsdosing protocols, healing and mental health themes, etc.

I volunteered to help April improve the online presence for the 80+ episoides she had created from 2020-2023 and spent the last few weeks using a variety of fun tools to port the site, add a ton of rich meta-data, and do some SEO tuning to try to improve traffic and discovery.

I set out to enhance the visual appeal of the podcast series by creating all new episode covers/art to unify the look and feel of the series. I wanted accentuate the woman-first energy of the series and April’s vision for helping women learn and use these entheogens in their personal journeys. Using a combination of Adobe’s Firefly and Midjourney tools (AI image synthesis from text prompts) I iterated through several hundred prompts to generate really fun concept art.

airtable interface ui showing metadata we gathered for the project
Airtable was a fantastic tool to use as a collaborative space to gather meta-data for the podcast episodes and related art/episodes and URLs for Spotify and Youtube. I had been invited to use airtable dozens of times and always thought “what the heck, another collaboration app”–wow, so impressed–one of my new favorite tools! Will be using a lot in the future to collaborate and gather info and build project consensus with colleagues.

I primed the AI with a lot of variations to try to get more diverse and inclusive images out of the system. Midjourney was particularly problematic in giving me skinny, white, unhealthy looking “model” women that looked like they were straight out of a fashion shoot. To get more average/normal looking women of different ethnic/age/body types was a lot harder than it should be! I used yellow/green for Cannabis articles, purple/orange for Ketamine, and pink/red/blue for Shrooms. This color segmentation gave me groups of images that look great together on the landing pages.

screenshot of the High Guide podcast website showing images generated using AI for Ketamine podcast episodes
Notice the AI images for Ketamine themed podcast episodes use purple and orange themes. Adding words like “middle-aged”, “curvy” or “plump”, and lots of “in deep thought, reflecting on an important memory, processing therapeutic thoughts in a therapy session” allowed me to get images that felt on brand to The High Guide’s podcast content — women discussing and sharing their experience with Psychedelics in their own mental health and wellness journeys.
screenshot of the High Guide podcast website showing images generated using AI for Shroom podcast episodes
For the series of articles April has written on different psychedelic mushroom strains I generated variations on a illustrative theme that suggest mushrooms. This gave the group of articles a similar look/feel that works in the gallery control that groups these articles together. For each individual article the photography and more accurate depictions of each strain is important–which is within the body text on the page.
Screen shot of adobe's Firefly AI Image generation tool
Adobe’s Firefly AI tool was a great creative playground to generate on brand images for the podcast of women in “therapeutic introspection” or “reflecting on important thoughts”.
Screen shot of Midjourney's AI Image generation tool within Discord interface
Midjourney was another tool I used to create Podcast cover images for The High Guide podcast website. Midjourney’s UI was still chatbot based inside of Discord in Jan 2024 when I made the first batch of images–this is a HORRIBLE interface, i believe they are working on putting a proper UX/UI on the front end, more akin to Adobe’s already shipping Firefly. I think Adobe is super well positioned to get this right and to be the leading tool for creatives. 

I had a lot of fun porting the website from Squarespace over to a Elementor hosted WordPress installation. We used Airtable to organize the meta-data for the 80+ episodes, a WordPress plug-in called AirWPSync to sync fields from Airtable into ACF custom fields in WordPress, and Elementor’s data-binding to connect template blocks to the fields. The result is the site is now database rendered and we can add podcast episodes and manage all episode pages, from a single template. Yay.

This is the new podcast episode template, which uses new fields for SEO optimized titles and excerpt blocks (which i batch generated with ChatGPT), and AI generated images for featured graphics which i used midjourney and firefly (adobe) ai image generation.

I’ll now keep an eye on how Google crawls the new content to see if we can improve organic discovery to this rich content. Super enjoyed this project and excited to update this post as I have more results to share.

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