Honoring Our Callers’ Trust: How and Why Fireside Project Records Anonymized Conversations on Our Support Line
By Joshua White
For nearly five years, the Psychedelic Support Line has served as a compassionate refuge for people navigating psychedelic journeys. It has grown into a pillar of the psychedelic ecosystem, built on warmth, humility, rigorous training, and above all, trust.
The trust of our callers and our community is the foundation for everything we do. In everything we do, the critical principle, the threshold question, and the north star is whether we are honoring that trust.
Why is that trust so important?
Our callers reach out to us during some of their most potentially healing, potentially traumatizing moments. Imagine, if you will, the radical leap of faith a person must take during or after a psychedelic experience to reach out to a stranger for emotional support.
Because trust guides every choice we make, we want to share how anonymized recordings help us protect callers and strengthen the support we provide.
At first blush, this may seem paradoxical. How can recording anonymized conversations actually further trust? Wouldn’t Fireside Project better honor our callers’ trust by not recording at all?
To be blunt, the answer is no.
Honoring our callers’ trust requires continuously assessing the support we’re providing, identifying what we’re doing well and where we can improve, and then committing to keep improving. This is true for our volunteers. It’s true for our supervisors and the rest of our staff. Recording anonymized conversations is essential for this process of continuous improvement.
Recording anonymized conversations also enables us to ensure that our policies and safety protocols are followed. For instance, if a caller reports a boundary issue or policy violation, anonymized recordings allow us to investigate and correct the issue accurately. In this way, recordings advance accountability.
And finally, our anonymized conversations are essential for training Lucy, an AI training platform that will provide the psychedelic field in the United States, and eventually the world, with an accessible, scalable tool that will fill a critical, and dangerous, gap: the dearth of experiential training for practitioners. When practitioners lack sufficient experiential training, clients are endangered. By offering Lucy to the world, generating support for the nonprofit from licensing fees, and using that revenue to keep the Psychedelic Support Line free for everyone, we create a safer psychedelic field and a more secure future for Fireside Project, which itself has become foundational for the psychedelic field.
So, let’s dive deeper into why Fireside Project records anonymized conversations and the process for anonymizing those calls.
One more point: transparency is a key part of trust. When our community understands what we’re doing and why, our hope is that trust is fostered. For this reason, Fireside Project has been upfront about recording anonymized conversations from the outset. Callers are informed of this before their conversation begins and given an opportunity to delete their anonymized conversation after it ends, and we put out a press release in May 2024 announcing these practices.
The Psychedelic Support Line: A Revolution in Psychedelic Care
The Psychedelic Support Line is the first service of its kind: a free, national, compassionate support line dedicated to helping people during and after psychedelic experiences. Since our launch, over 30,000 people have reached out from all walks of life: first-time experimenters, experienced psychonauts, military veterans, first responders, therapists, parents, spiritual seekers, and people simply longing for human presence during a moment of vulnerability.
Our volunteers offer grounding, attuned, non-directive support rooted in peer support principles and trauma-informed care. People call us during active psychedelic experiences, during integration, or when they are unpacking something from months or even years before. Others call simply because they don’t know who else to ask.
Over time, the Support Line has become a safety net for the psychedelic ecosystem, a harm-reduction resource trusted by callers, clinicians, universities, and community groups, and a living library of human experiences—expressed through tone, emotion, rhythm, and nuance—that helps illuminate how psychedelics impact real lives.
Many callers share that their conversation changed their entire experience and often the trajectory of their life. Others say they would have called 911, gone to the ER, or been physically or emotionally harmed but for the support we provided.
Through every call, Fireside Project works to honor one sacred truth:
People entrust us with their most vulnerable moments. Upholding that trust is our highest responsibility.
Why We Record Anonymized Conversations
We want to be clear about why we record anonymized conversations: It is a core part of how we honor the trust our callers have placed in us. But how can that be? How can recording anonymized conversations, as opposed to not doing so, actually further trust? For three key reasons:
1. To continuously improve the quality of support we provide our callers and training we provide our volunteers
Part of how we honor our callers’ trust is by dedicating ourselves to continuously improving the quality of support we provide. Anonymized recordings are an integral part of how we do that.
Every shift has three to five volunteers and one supervisor. Call volume often makes it impossible for supervisors to observe every conversation. Listening to anonymized recordings empowers us to do the following:
1-on-1 Feedback. Supervisors can offer high-quality feedback during one-on-ones with volunteers.
Alerts on certain calls. Our custom-built software platform that the support line runs on has a feature that connects post-call survey responses, call logs, and call recordings. If a caller’s feedback on a specific call falls below a certain level, the volunteer’s supervisor is automatically notified, and the supervisor can then review the call, meet with the volunteer, and provide tailored feedback.
New volunteer training. The recordings allow us to enhance our new-volunteer training with actual conversations. For instance, one category of call that can be extremely anxiety-provoking for new volunteers is when a caller may be considering suicide. Using anonymized conversations, we can play real-world examples for new volunteers in a range of situations: when we needed to call 911 or 988, when we didn’t, and a range of approaches to handling such calls. These real-world examples equip volunteers to be more present and effective when they’re supporting actual callers.
Supervisor training. Supervisors are more effective and more consistent when anonymized conversations can be incorporated into staff meetings. Supervisors can compare and contrast approaches to supporting volunteers and providing feedback. We have also required supervisors to do monthly “calibration calls,” where they all listen to the same call and assess the volunteer on a range of metrics. Based on the supervisors’ assessments, we can determine whether supervisors are all adhering to the same standards.
Ongoing trainings. We provide ongoing advanced trainings that deepen our volunteers’ skills in boundaries, integration, 911 transfers, cross-cultural care, and more.
Learning from patterns. We can learn from patterns across thousands of calls, expanding the field’s understanding of how people experience psychedelics.
All of this is essential to our responsibility to callers: we must be always improving.
2. To train Lucy, our emotionally intelligent, voice-to-voice AI designed to train psychedelic practitioners
Lucy—the world’s first emotionally intelligent voice-to-voice chatbot for psychedelic training—relies on anonymized recordings to learn how to emulate real emotional nuance and real psychedelic interactions.
To learn more about Lucy, visit firesideproject.org/lucy, where you’ll find an FAQ. You can also read our blog post about Lucy here.
How does Lucy further our central goal of honoring our callers’ and our community’s trust? In the following three ways:
First, Lucy will help train our volunteers. Currently, our training consists of a mix of presentations and demonstrations by staff, listening to anonymized conversations, and short role-plays. Those role plays are time-limited, usually lasting five minutes or less, and volunteers typically only have one opportunity to practice a particular skill, and we have no easy way of monitoring volunteers’ skill levels or keeping track of improvements. Lucy will change that. We will embed experiential role plays throughout our training, where Lucy plays the role of the caller, whether the caller is tripping, integrating, considering dying by suicide, experiencing a medical issue, and more. New volunteers will engage in role play, receive tailored feedback, and ultimately, receive an assessment of whether they have reached the skill level required to interact with real callers. In this way, Lucy is part of the bridge between classroom learning and real-world experience.
Second, Lucy will help train the entire psychedelic field. Fireside Project’s mission is to help minimize the risks of psychedelic experiences. A well-trained psychedelic field is a critical part of how we minimize risks. Well-trained practitioners meet journeyers where they are, remain attuned to the journeyer’s emotions and cultural differences, cultivate awareness of transference and countertransference, honor boundaries, and so much more. But currently, the field lacks sufficient experiential training. In other words, there just aren’t enough opportunities for practitioners to learn by doing. That dearth of opportunities creates serious risks for clients. Lucy is the first accessible, standardized training platform that can provide high-quality training at scale. The impact of this on the safety of the field cannot be overstated.
Third, Lucy bolsters the long-term viability of the Psychedelic Support Line. Fireside Project will license the use of Lucy (but never the anonymized recordings used to train Lucy—those never leave Fireside Project) to government agencies, universities, health systems, clinics, individual practitioners, and others. The revenue from that licensing will be used to help keep Fireside Project afloat, and wean us off of exclusive reliance on philanthropy. A more financially secure Fireside Project ensures that the Psychedelic Support Line can continue to exist and remain free for everyone, forever.
3. To protect callers, volunteers, and our organization
Call recordings help us confirm that policies and safety protocols are followed. For instance, if a caller reports a boundary issue or policy violation, anonymized recordings allow us to investigate and correct the issue accurately. They also allow us to decide whether and how our training needs to be improved, and then provide clear examples that can be featured in the trainings. In this way, anonymized recordings are about accountability.
The Multi-Step Process for Anonymizing Conversations
Having explained why we anonymize conversations, we turn to how we do so. We note that how we anonymize—in other words, the rigor of our process, the cutting-edge technology we use, and the diligence we apply to following our standards—is also part of how we honor our callers’ trust. Every step is designed to protect callers and uphold the trust they place in us. The process includes the following safeguards:
1. Callers are notified before the conversation begins
Before the call starts, every caller is informed:
“To help us improve the quality of support we provide our callers, we may record calls after removing all personal information.”
Some callers may choose to opt out by hanging up, something we fully support. Consent and choice are foundational.
And, we acknowledge that opt-out alone would not be sufficient, as many of our callers reach out to us in the midst of psychedelic experiences. For this reason, opt-out is the first of many layers of protection that we implement.
2. Anonymization happens in real time
Personal information is stripped during the conversation itself. No personally identifiable information is saved. We use sophisticated AI software to identify personal information. For example, the software can tell the difference between ‘grey sky,’ which would not be deleted, and the name ‘Martha Grey,’ which would.
3. Every caller receives a post-call survey the day after their conversation allowing them to delete their anonymized recording
The survey states, “Fireside Project is always working to improve the quality of our service and the training we provide. One way we do this is by saving anonymized conversations. Before a conversation is saved, all personal information, including names and locations, is permanently deleted. To opt out of Fireside saving your anonymized conversation, click the button below.”
That button states, “I would like to opt out of Fireside saving my anonymized call.”
This opt-out is real, respected, and honored promptly. When someone checks this box and submits their survey, their anonymized recording is deleted automatically by the system.
4. We decouple the phone number from the anonymized recording
During the short window when callers may share feedback or concerns about their experience, we retain the information needed to review the conversation. After that window closes, the phone number is permanently and irreversibly decoupled from the anonymized conversation. This ensures there is no way to tie an anonymized recording to any individual person.
5. Strict limits on sharing
Anonymized recordings never leave Fireside Project, with two tightly constrained exceptions:
Peer-reviewed collaborations with premier research institutions like UCSF or Mount Sinai. But even in these circumstances, we have never shared anonymized conversations, and if we ever did, it would only be after approval by the university’s ethics review board, after confidentiality and data use agreements had been signed.
Compliance with a valid subpoena. If we believed a subpoena was invalid, lacked legal basis, or was too broad, we would move to quash it, seek a protective order, and/or seek to have it narrowed and other protections imposed. As a practical matter, we may be unable to comply with a subpoena precisely because of the layers of protection discussed above—phone numbers are thrown out and personal information is deleted.
6. Voices used for Lucy are obfuscated
Voices used for Lucy are distorted beyond recognition using specialized AI that preserves emotionality and tone but erases identity. In other words, when you’re interacting with Lucy, the voice you’re hearing would be unidentifiable.
7. Clear, accessible privacy resources
Our Privacy Policy and FAQ are written in plain language and linked prominently on our website.
These practices are unusual in today’s world, and that’s the point. Too many companies treat user data as a commodity. At Fireside Project, we treat it as sacred.
Responding to Questions from Our Community During Lucy’s First Week
We’ve received glowing reviews and lots of excitement about Lucy in the week since her launch, and we’ve also received some pointed questions.
1. Do the anonymized conversations used to train Lucy leave Fireside Project?
No. Even if Fireside decides to license the use of Lucy to third parties, the anonymized data used to train Lucy won’t leave Fireside.
2. Will Lucy make money? If so, who gets the money?
Fireside Project is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization that has relied exclusively on philanthropy to subsidize our Psychedelic Support Line. As a nonprofit, Fireside Project does not have owners or shareholders. We have no VC firms, investors, or banks to which we are accountable. Our exclusive devotion is to our mission: to help people reduce the risks of their psychedelic experiences. But philanthropy alone is not a viable long-term strategy for a service as foundational to the psychedelic field as ours. Our hope is that we can license the use of Lucy to training programs, health systems, practitioners, and others. Funds earned from that licensing would then be used to keep the support line free.
3. Is it ethical to use anonymized support-line conversations to train Lucy?
We see three interrelated ethical duties at play here, all three of which lead to the conclusion that it is ethical to use support-line conversations to train Lucy. First, we have an ethical duty to keep improving the quality of training and support we provide. Second, we have an ethical duty to obtain consent from our callers to use their anonymized data to satisfy that first duty. Third, we have a duty to protect the identities of our callers.
Our duty to keep improving. Given that Fireside Project supports thousands of people during some of their most vulnerable, potentially healing, and potentially traumatizing moments, we have an ethical duty to keep improving the quality of support we provide our callers, and the quality of training we provide our volunteers. Closely connected to that duty, and central to our mission, is the duty to share what we’ve learned and equip the broader psychedelic field with the tools they need to best support their clients, leading to safer, more healing psychedelic experiences. Recording anonymized conversations is a critical part of how we satisfy that ethical duty, and Lucy is a central part of how we’ll train our own practitioners and those across the field.
Our duty to obtain our callers’ consent to use their anonymized conversation for training purposes, one of which is Lucy. To satisfy this duty, our callers receive a disclaimer informing them that their call may be recorded and anonymized for training purposes. Callers may opt out by hanging up, and many do. Callers are also informed a day after their call that their call has been recorded and it can be automatically deleted by checking a box. Many do.
Is more specific consent required? Should we list every training purpose for which anonymized conversations are used? We believe the answer is no. It would be impractical, overwhelming, and irrelevant for callers to be barraged with a list of training purposes while they are waiting to talk to a support-line volunteer.
Nor do we think Lucy should be called out specifically in our disclaimer. We suspect that people’s discomfort with using anonymized conversations to train Lucy has nothing to do with Lucy and everything to do with the unethical data practices of big data companies. Lucy represents something novel: a service that honors callers’ trust and uses their data for good.
Our duty to protect callers’ identities. We satisfy this duty by anonymizing and obfuscating our data.
We understand the knee-jerk reaction to want to believe it is unethical to use data to train an AI model. But we invite people to disentangle their views about how for-profit companies exploit consumers to create data models from the reality of how Lucy is being built and implemented.
Trust Is Our North Star
Everything we do begins with the trust our callers place in us. We honor that trust by being transparent, by building rigorous safety systems, and by using anonymized recordings only in ways that directly advance our mission: to help people minimize the risks of psychedelic experiences.
Thanks to our callers’ trust, our volunteers’ dedication, and the groundbreaking work of our staff, we are building something unprecedented:
A future in which safe, skillful, emotionally intelligent psychedelic support is accessible to everyone who needs it.
If you have questions, concerns, or ideas, we want to hear them.
Reach out anytime—or call the line. We’re here for you.
