Antidepressants are in the news. A federal announcement called for reducing overprescribing of psychiatric medications — and the conversation immediately became political. This episode goes somewhere the political coverage can't follow.

Dr. Fred Moss is a board-certified psychiatrist with over 45 years in practice and more than 30,000 patients across hospitals, nursing homes, correctional facilities, and private practice. He's also one of the rare psychiatrists openly questioning the system he trained in — particularly the reliance on diagnosis, labels, and medication as first-line treatment. His program Undoctor Reset and books Creative 8 and Find Your True Voice are built around a different premise: that many people labeled mentally ill are not ill so much as unheard.

Host Paula Lehman-Ewing brings a different experience to this conversation — one in which medication wasn't a shortcut but a rope. What emerged wasn't resolution. It was something more honest: a disagreement that runs deeper than treatment philosophy, all the way down to what depression actually is.

The tension doesn't resolve. That's the point.
Learn more about Dr. Moss' work:
drfred360.com
welcometohumanity.net
welcometohumanityretreat.com
Learn more about the strategy behind these conversations at COJAServices.com

Irish traditional music session etiquette has a reputation for being fluid, unspoken, and learnable — if you're let in long enough to learn it. But what happens when the people arriving at the door didn't grow up inside the culture that shaped the rules? Tara Connaghan, creator and host of In Tune with Tradition, has spent years trying to decode session behavior so more people can stop feeling anxious and start feeling welcome. Wendy Morgan has spent 20 years trying to get in — and recently realized she might never fully arrive. This conversation doesn't resolve that tension. It lives in it. What does tradition owe to newcomers? What do skilled players owe to learners? And when the gatekeeping is unconscious — when nobody's being deliberately exclusive, but the door still doesn't open — whose responsibility is it?

Prosecutorial accountability has become a flashpoint in American justice debates — but what does it actually look like from inside the office? District Attorney Alexis King of Jefferson and Gilpin Counties joins Paula Lehman-Ewing for a live conversation recorded at Denver Book Society. King is not a skeptic of prosecution — she believes in it, has reformed it from the inside, and built the largest prosecutorial data transparency project in the country. But this conversation doesn't stay in the realm of the achievable. It moves into the harder terrain: officer-involved shootings, the limits of the reasonable belief standard, the architecture that keeps some cases beyond accountability's reach — and what "accountability" even means when no charges are filed and the officer is still on the job. King holds her framework. Paula holds the tension. Neither resolves it. That's the point. Recorded live before a public audience.

When democracy and authoritarianism go to war, the easy story is about good guys and bad guys. Daniel Bookman doesn't tell that story — but he comes close, and that's where this conversation gets interesting. Bookman is the author of Beyond Power, a philosophical framework for understanding how ethical societies form, why authoritarian regimes can't tolerate democratic neighbors, and what that means for the conflicts in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and inside the United States right now. His argument is serious and principled. It's also the kind of framework that explains a great deal — maybe too much. Host Paula Lehman-Ewing pushes on the places it strains: what happens when democratic leaders start behaving like the authoritarians they oppose? How long can existential threat justify behavior that contradicts a society's own ethical claims? Bookman doesn't dismiss the questions. But his answers leave something unresolved. That's the point.

You can find Beyond Power: Israel & The Struggle for the Ethical State

on Amazon using this LINK.

Note: There will not be a new episode next week as we are preparing for our second LIVE show. If you're in the greater Denver metro area, we hope you'll join us at Denver Book Society Sunday, April 26 at 3pm. More information about the event can be found at tinyurl.com/COJA-live2.

Can you change policing from the inside — or does the system just absorb you? That's the question retired NYPD lieutenant and highest-ranking whistleblower in department history Edwin Raymond has been living inside for years. This episode 4 of Get Me to the Gray was originally recorded live at Tattered Cover in Denver — now released with a host intro and outro that weren't there the first time. The world has caught up to this conversation. When we recorded it, ICE enforcement was something Denver was bracing for. Now it's something people are living through. Edwin and host Paula Lehman-Ewing cover prosecutorial power, restorative justice, cosmetic diversity in police reform, broken windows policing, and what the numbers out of New York actually show when a DA decides to use that office differently. They don't land in the same place. Neither will you.

This episode sets the stage for those questions to be asked more directly. We'll be doing just that on Sunday, April 26 at Tattered Cover (Colfax) when Get Me to the Gray hosts its second live event of the season with District Attorney Alexis King. Ticket proceeds from the April 26th Alexis King event benefit GRASP Denver.

Come be in the room. Register on Eventbrite.

What does it take to stay friends with someone you've disagreed with politically for decades — and keep showing up anyway?

With host Paula Lehman-Ewing away on a reporting trip, COJA Marketing Director Jamie Konegni sits down with his longtime friend, Jimmy Panepinto. In this midseason palette cleanser, Jamie and Jimmy, who have clashed on politics, policy, and principle for as long as they've known each other, talk through why they're still in it. Still talking. Still laughing.

In a moment when political difference has become a reason to cut people off, this episode asks a quieter question: what do we lose when we stop having the hard conversations — and what do we gain when we don't?

Get Me to the Gray is a podcast about the space between certainty and complexity. New episodes drop weekly.

No guest this week — and that's the episode.

Get Me to the Gray is built on the belief that most hard conversations are worth having. That polarization is often performance, and that real dialogue — across genuine difference — is possible if both people are willing to stay in it.

This week tested that belief. And what it gave me wasn't a failure. It was clarity.

There are extremes with which certain conversations can't be had. That's not a reason to stop trying — it's a reason to be honest about where the line is, and why it exists. This episode is about where I found mine.

Get Me to the Gray is produced by COJA Services. Visit cojaservices.com to learn more.

In this episode of Get Me to the Gray, Paula speaks with researcher and decentralized technology advocate Wouter Constant about Nostr, an open protocol designed to move social media away from centralized platforms like Meta, Google, and X.

Instead of a single company controlling the platform, Nostr distributes communication across independent servers called relays, allowing anyone to build apps that connect to the same network.

Supporters argue this architecture reduces corporate control and protects free expression. But it also raises difficult questions: if no company is in charge, who is responsible when things go wrong?

What follows is a conversation about the trade-offs between freedom and accountability, the limits of corporate moderation, the risks of open systems, and what it might mean to rebuild the internet’s communication infrastructure from the ground up.
You can check out Wouter's Nostr page here.